Swimmingly

I call D!

Voluntarily, in circumstances exactly set up to make him a Returned, and probably a bit of under-the table dealing with Endowment on top of that?

Dramatic irony.

I think storing everything in a coppermind and retrieving it later would work, though - apart from the memory, they seem to keep everything significant about their personality. It's even possible Hoid figured out how to get a Divine Breath without Returning.

I can see it as a definite possibility, given that he has access to ridiculous amounts of Investiture, and so would not need the constant Breaths, and limited shapeshifting at will is dreadfully convenient.

My best posts were a 17 and two 15s.

How do you search by rep?

Ask Brandon/Team Sanderson. Nicely.

Congratulations!

Or just make moonshards arbitrarily unaffectable - they're more of magic than earth or something like that. Of course, that could also make them very handy for mage-assassination projectile weapons.

A misting is a term talking about magical capacity. Skaa and noble are racial/class dividers. It's like inventing two separate words for Mongolian and Andorran basketball players.

Eveor, some things are simply not discussed. This is one of those things. Suffice it to say that the conglomerate Renarin derived from every work written about him is probably traumatized on several psychological levels.

What about giving mages a certain amount of low-level magic permanently, like some kind of muscular reserve or something? Essentially, they can create small amounts of magic with their bodies, for things like minute telekinesis or just enhanced strength, but they can only use elemental magic when they have moonlight?

So, I've been noticing lots and lots and lots and lots of spambots spamming it up in here, and I was wondering if it would help if you needed to do a captcha every time you posted? I don't know how difficult that would be to set up, or if it would actually help, but spam is annoying.

I am an air mage. I keep sealed magically pressurized canisters of poison gas on my person - tiny ones, with only a hundred CCs or so of gas in them when at one atmosphere of pressure. I can smash these and guide the cloud of poison directly into someone's lungs, giving them the highest possible dose. If I can inflict a single injury on my opponent, they're done for because I can force air through the wound and into their bloodstream.

I'm a wood mage. I just made those watermelon seeds in my opponent's stomach send out feelers, clogging his gastrointestinal system and straining at the organ walls. In a moment, the melons will start to grow and ripen, spraying diluted hydrochloric acid into the inside of his torso, popping his abdominal muscles off their anchors like thick leeches, and ultimately growing delicious sugary melons in his bloody corpse. Is that cool with you? Cause it really shouldn't be. That is just sick.

Stupid similar-sounding character names and dysfunctional memory filing system. And, yeah, it's long. It took me a few months to read. But it's good stuff.

First of all, these books are REALLY creepy. Second, awesome. John is a real creep and I can see how it would be emotionally damaging to write him. On the other hand, he is an excellent character with a definite progression and probably the most gripping internal struggle I've ever seen (no offense, Kal). You get put in that mindspace with him when you're legitimately afraid FOR him when he does something that could tempt out his inner killer. The demons are scary. 'Nough said. Basically, I'm a fan. Also this subforum is quiet. Read Dan Wells. You won't regret it. Well, maybe you'll have nightmares. It's a good thing that's on purpose.

When you spend your free time idly wondering how to make two-way walkie-talkies using spanreeds.

I get that when I'm on a phone or tablet and attempt to push the "upvote" button again before the page refreshes and displays the upvote. Does it happen if you just tap it once?

I suggest reading Jim Butcher's Codex Alera for this kind of elemental manipulation, because it has just about everything we've been talking about - using air internally gives you superspeed, earth gives you strength, metal gives you mental discipline (to the point you can walk with no limp on a broken leg), water gives you superpowered empathy/borderline mind-reading, and I forget the others. Perhaps the Aether mage has a limitation to do with the limits on his own body? I imagine that, because he's using magic that much stronger than anyone else, it's putting a strain on his mind/body/spirit. Just a thought. The thing about only being able to create, but not control, is that that is still borderline manipulation. A good example is, if you read the Worm web serial (it's a superhero novel with an epic twist and incredibly original powers), Kaiser, who can make blades sprout from any solid, non-living surface. He can outfit himself in armour in a minute just by holding a piece of metal to his chest and making it grow from there, and he can make enormous knives leap out and cut people/block doorways. For air creation, you could create blasts of high pressure - basically point-source explosions. The thing I'm wondering about only being able to manipulate flame is: does that mean that, if you only have a candle, you can only use a candle's worth of flame, or does it mean that as long as you have any flame at all you can make it grow into a wall of fire and blast people with it?

What if you can only ever bind a single elemental, kind of like the Spiritshadows in the Seven Towers? That way, you could have specialized elementals with less power but more efficient how they use it, big, flashy yet stupid elementals that require tight control to do anything but bash things, etc.? Remember, magic should be good for more than bashing people especially hard. If magic allows you to hear everyone in a building, you're an excellent spy. If you can move at sixty miles an hour in water, you can be a great courier. Someone who's immune to the heat of fire and can direct, amplify, and control heat in a fire is going to be an excellent smith, likewise to someone who can feed air in to where ever it's needed.

What about a sixth element - shadow? If the aether is the sun, the mortal elements are the moon, then the final element could be derived derived from that between - what if you've got a power that can only be charged when both the sun and a moon are in the sky, or at dusk when the atmosphere has filtered the sun's power? Also, you could put something in there about how the moons filter the power of the aether so mortal mages can use it, but an aether mage can filter it himself, leaving open the possibility that things other than the moons and mages can filter the magic.

A god called Blue. Whenever he manifests, he is the colour of the sky above the clouds, with eyes like the dark on the edge of space. Looking at him gives a sense of vertigo and scale; he is still like the sun is still. He is not a god of weather, cloud, wind, or even air; his realm is simply the sky, unmarred and unbroken. Each night the hunter-gods of moon and star hunt him, and their shafts of moonlight and sunlight pierce his body, striking the earth. With dawn, the sun cauterizes and sews each of his wounds in exchange for a piece of his heart, and through that piece the sunlight shines down.

One way to do would be to have the gems represent discrete quanta of energy use - make fine and sustained use impossible by forcing every use of power to be a single big, impressive effect. So, no guiding arrow shafts or wooden power armour, but you can make a redwood tree sprout to full-size in a millisecond. An earth mage could rip a huge band of earth for a castle upwards with a single charge of moonlight, but he couldn't add crenelations or towers. That way, battling mages with huge power reserves would be launching bands of power back and forth, but as soon as they run out, they're screwed. This would make hiring mages essential for an army, as they could counteract the other by precisely cancelling it out, and joining a large organization essential for any mage that wanted to have access to charged moonlight crystals. It would put mages at a level above all others, as well, allowing you to answer the "why don't they use magic for everything?" question with, "the same reason we don't use explosives for everything".