MathEpic

Well, she slaughtered her folowers shortly after gaining her powers, so it seems likely that she accidentally revealed her weakness to them. Her primary character attribute seems to be judgementalism. I still maintain my theory that Epic weaknesses have a connection to something embarrassing or otherwise humbling to the Epic. In my experience judgemental people react poorly to reminders of their own mistakes. My theory: Regalia commited some small crime/sin as a child or teanager and her weakness is some detail related to what she did. For example, if her crime was shoplifting a bar of soap then her weakness would be bar soap.

I am not a lawyer so everything I am going to say is based on hasty internet research. If someone else can clarity my points I would welcome the correction. I am not so sure about the insanity plea. Steven Leeds has always maintained that he is sane in spite of his hallucinations. Even if he could prove it in court I don't think he would want to because it would mean admitting that he was not in control. Also the definition of legal insanity is given by the McNaughton rule: Steven knew exactly what he was doing as well as the consequences. He knew that he was depriving several of the stockholders of the company of valuable funds. He may hallucinate, but by the legal definition he was sane at the time. Furthermore, pleading insanity is a very unattractive option. It means instead of serving a fixed amount of time for your sentence you go to a mental health facility until the doctors there say you are no longer a danger to society. In many cases this ends up being twice as long as the proscribed prison time for an offender. In short, (if I may abuse the language for a moment) by taking an insanity defense he would go to not-jail for a million years. I would also like to point out that Steven is not a very sympathetic defendant. He is rich, and he does confidential "odd jobs". A prosecutor can use that to imply that Steven's job is to fix problems when the law gets in the way, and she would not be too far off the mark. That, combined with his recent press puts Steven in a very difficult situation.

He is not an aspect, so it may not count but was the security guard Moshe from the first book based on Brandon's editor? I guess I just assumed that he was, since Moshe said his job was "To watch for people doing stupid things and then stopping them." It just seemed to close to the job description of an editor.

A small update to the theory of the original post. In Skin Deep we learn that Steven has a "White Room", or a room as blank as possible for interacting with most/all of his aspects at once. (Sort of like a conference room, but with less personality.) Nothing that bad happened there, but the tone of the narrative suggested it could. In fact there were two instances where Steven had to correct behavior from one of the aspects. The first was when JC shot the ceiling in order to call the meeting to order. He rebuked JC saying "I will need to imagine the hole from now on." suggesting that there was something taxing about maintaining the illusion. The other time Audrey wrote in the air, and Leeds had to imagine that she was writing on a glass pane in order to keep up consistency. Bad things don't happen when too many aspects are gathered together, bad things happen when his brain cannot keep up with the illusion. The more aspects, the more complex the illusion and the more difficult it is to maintain.

This was already alluded to by Ookla the Infinite in this post, but Steven broke federal law in a very visible, and unsympathetic way. Lets summarize the events of Skin Deep from the perspective of the Securities Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. Steven Leeds (a professional odd-jobs man) is given a large share of I3 in exchange for a fairly small service. (2-3 days of private detecting) Leeds then spreads rumors about one of the rivals of I3 through his own personal rumor mill. Leeds buys the rival at a steep discount as a result of the rumors that were spread. After a few days the fears provoked by the rumors prove to be unjustified, and Leeds sells his stock to the primary holder of I3, making a huge profit along the way. If I were a federal investigator with these facts I would immediately suspect that the detective work was a smoke screen. I would suspect that Leeds was hired to acquire the rival company in a monopolizing move. As I looked into the issue I would see that the "crime" Leeds was hired to investigate was perpetrated by someone with close ties to I3 (the mother of one of its employees) and was committed in such a way as to leave nobody indicted for theft. I looked at the FTC webpage and found that and These crimes are punishable by I know that Leeds's life was on the line, and his actions were justified. However, as a federal investigator I do not have access to that information. I would be asking for a warrant within the hour.

I just saw it in an older post. It seems to have fixed itself now. Thanks.

As far as I can tell it still does http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/4263-legion-ii/?p=82185 Edit: The comment linked to did the auto-correct when I first made this post. Since then, the auto-correct no longer seems to happen.

So, the word was censored to deliberately make life difficult for the newcomer? What reason are you referencing here? I think I get the joke. However every joke has a cost. Sometimes the cost is small, (such as relieving the tension in the room) and sometimes the cost is larger (such as loosing the respect of all in attendance.) The point of my post was to illustrate the cost of this particular joke and add my voice to those that think that the entertainment is not worth the cost.

While I appreciate the effort to keep the forums clean, and respect the rights of the administrators to censor language in the forum that they host, I am concerned by the conversion of the word <Christian Underworld> to calamity. Suppose a new 17th Sharder read a post about the short story "Shadows for Silence in the Forests of calamity" and decided to find the story by doing an internet search on that phrase. They would not find a link a webpage discussing the Dangerous Women anthology, but instead would only get links to the 17th shard forum. Is there a way to get the filter to ignore the word if it is prefaced by the phrase "Shadows for Silence in the Forests of "? In the mean time, we need to find a way to prevent Brandon from naming any more of his works with swears in the titles. Otherwise we might end up with a forum thread discussing the new short story "Merciful Domi Shatters the Glass Storming Harmony"

I wouldn't worry about not liking the book. Nobody has ever written a book that everyone likes. Steelheart is probably just not your kind of book. Steelheart is a very different kind of book then the rest of Brandon's works. It is a 'big problem' story, and is probably the least character driven of all of Brandon's published works. Additionally the book is considerably less subtle in terms of plot and character. This felt intentional to me. The book is targeted at a younger audience that likes superhero stories. That kind of audience is generally accustomed to this style of writing. I loved Steelheart (hence my username) but I am sure you are not the only one that didn't like it, and there is nothing wrong with that.

I assumed that when Wane said "sleep it off" he didn't literally mean sleep as in unconscious, just that he planned on doing nothing but store Feruchemical gold and vedge out.

I assumed that aluminum always had the properties displayed in AoL, we just didn't see them because aluminum is so expensive in a pre industrial society. Let's take stock of the properties of aluminum: 1 Alomatic-Vin burns it near the end of TFE. 2 Feruchemy-This is never demonstrated, but every Alomatic metal is also Feruchemal. I suspect if Sazed know about this metal earlier he may have had a reserve of his old faith to draw on in HoA. 3 Blocking alomancy-I assume this is the property referred to in the original post. My feeling is that here is no reason to believe that this property did not exist in the first trilogy, and it does noyt seem to be the sort of thing Sazed would feel the need to do. Sazed feels enough compassion for people that I can see him changing the snapping rule out of a desire to eliminate the beatings, but I don't see the motivation for creating an alomancy blocking metal.

The shavings vs. beads thing seems to be an expedient the main characters use rather than an actual rule. If I remember correctly, Vin used a bunch of pewter beads in WoA. I see no reason any of the other metals cannot be cast into beads for Alomatic use. The primary advantage with shavings is that whoever prepares the vial has control over how much metal goes into a dose. With beads it is the metallurgist who decides how much steel a coinshot needs. Also I don't know if there are many people with the audacity to try to pick the pocket of a Mistborn. To paraphrase a movie I like: Let me see if understand. You believe that this noble, one of the wealthiest, most influential men in the final empire is secretly a wizard who spends his free time stabbing people with glass daggers, and your plan is to pickpocket this person? Good luck with that.

However TLR did his age trick it would need to be something that Marsh could do as well. This suggests it is not a case of TLR modifying his body so he doesn't need sleep. My money is on the theory that it is possible to tap youth while unconscious if not tapping it would kill you.

I know that I am theoretically the target audience for this sort of thing. Unfortunately, playing a game and watching "let's play" videos are two very different experiences. I feel that some essential context is lost in the transition. Specifically I lose one of my main reasons to care. When I play a game I want the main character to succeed because his/her/its goals are my goals as long as I am trying to win. (Except for those games that play with that expectation, but that is a whole different can of worms.) This is one of the greatest assets video games have as a storytelling medium. When I watch a video I only have the personalities ofthe characters to get me invested. I don't think I can experience the Infinity Blade story properly without actually playing the game. I thank you for your efforts, and I am sorry to have been so obstinate. I really do appreciate that you went out of your way to help me enjoy the story. (Upvote)

I would love to get into Infinity Blade. Unfortunately, my tablet is an Android device. I cannot play the game, so I am missing a lot of context for the written stories. I know I could watch a youtube video or something, but that is just not the same. Until the game is no longer an Apple exclusive, I will have to remain an outside observer.

I was under the impression that the Reckoners had an extensive and efficient bureaucracy. By necessity the Reckoners are compartmentalized, and bureaucratic information would be some of the most dangerous to have on hand in the event of capture. David on the other hand is not an administrator. His talents and interests revolve around his ability to take down Epics. He would not have been included in any discussion of administration. That sort of thing would have been left to Tia, Prof and the other Reckoners more suited to those tasks. There are several scenes in the book where the group focused on taking down Steelheart are able to get resources quickly and efficiently. Additionally, Tia makes references to a lore archive in the Reckoners. Someone must be managing the information that they collect on the Epics. I figure that this is the work of a good administrative branch of the Reckoners, i.e. a bureaucracy. Prof could be weak against some trapping of red tape, but his organization is a little too slick to be 'bureaucracy free'.

I doubt that his weakness is proximity to young children. It was never stated explicitly, but I think that it was implied that his powers were first manifest while he was at his job as a teacher. If his weakness was proximity to children he would not have been able to manifest his powers there. [pure speculation] His weakness may be that he looses his powers after harming a child. If this is the case there is a good reason we have not seen Prof loose his powers, and it would be consistent with my personal favorite theory of how Epic weaknesses work. [\speculation]

Assuming I understand the differences between the two words, Nightblood is sentient but not sapient. Sentience is the ability to feel and experience the world in a conscious way. Sapience is the ability to think and reason in abstract ways. Science fiction and fantasy has been really bad about mixing up the two terms. (I blame Star Trek for this.) When Brandon says that a shard needs to be sentient I have to wonder if he really means sapient, but is using the term more of his audience is familiar with.

The Reckoners cremated Firefight after she died, and she still reincarnated. Fire is definitely not her weakness.

Now there's a thought. For those Epics whose weaknesses are triggered by something they see or hear, why don't they remove that sense from themselves? For some reason this reminds me of Achilles. Why didn't he go into battle with inch thick iron boots welded to his feet? I know that not every Epic would be willing to part with one of their primary ways of interacting with the world just to eliminate their weakness, but some of them would if they could. Is this just something we have not seen yet? Or perhaps if they tried to remove their weakness with surgery their weakness would change to something they could still experience. For example, suppose that I were an Epic and that my weakness was hearing the John Williams Superman theme. (For the sake of this hypothetical my Epic power is the ability to prepare food perfectly.) If I were to surgically remove my hearing would my weakness still be the music, or would I suddenly develop a new weakness? Perhaps I would loose my powers near even the faintest trace of nitrous oxide. I hope this is something we find out more about in the next couple books.

It is my understanding that we humans don't see as much with our eyes as we think we do. Instead we see just a few details and our minds fill in the blanks. Hallucination is what happens when the mind gets too enthusiastic about filling in the details and the information that is filled in is simply incorrect. The same sort of thing applies to memory. We only really remember a handful of details and we fill in the blanks afterword. My guess is that Lightsong has gotten used to seeing all the colors in such detail that his mind might be interpreting the memory in terms of the senses he has been using since his Return.

As a mathematician I feel the need to point out that most of what they did in Numb3rs is also impossible. This never stopped me from enjoying the show because they did a fairly good job with the characters and personalities, but the math they claim to be able to do just gets more hilarious the more you know about what they are supposedly describing. Nevertheless, I am happy to know that I am not the only one that watched that silly show.

Thanks, I am never quite sure what books fall under what classification. Even so, I feel that even some of Brandon's shorter works feel more complete then Legion. Firstborn - Defending Elysium - Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell - In Legion the main character starts off wanting to find and talk to the woman that helped him control his powers and by the end he has a week lead that might eventually lead him where she is hiding.

I cannot speak for anyone else, but I thought that Legion did not feel like a complete story the way Alcatraz I, Steelheart, and The Rithmatist did. In each of the novellas with a dedicated subforum we are introduced to a new fantastical world, we get to know the main character and see him develop over the course of the novel. For Legion we are shown a world that is very much like ours (with a few fantastical elements) and Steven Leeds is the same person at the end of the story that he was at the beginning. Steven's primary desires and goals are hinted at, but never really developed. For example, we learn that things can get bad if he takes too many hallucinations on an excursion, but we only get a hint of what those bad things are. We learn that there is someone that may know more about what is going on with Steven's hallucinations, but we don't know who she is or what she knows or even if she does know anything unusual. Altogether, Legion to me feels more like a television series pilot than a novel.