Swimmingly

WHO DARES CALL MY NAME? ONCE YOU HAVE CALLED, AND SIX TIMES MORE UNTIL I AM FREE FROM THIS WRETCHED PRISON! RELEASE ME!

Running. Swimming. Biking. Basically, rationalize melancholy into anger, self-pity, and blame, then proceed to burn these feelings off by screaming like a banshee and sprinting for a hundred to a couple thousand metres, depending on the sport.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you're trying to say here...

Sell. "King" will be an outdated term by that point. The correct title for a planetary ruler will be "The Lopen". The mental expansion offered by Allomantic steel and Allomantic iron savantism is different.

The closet in the corner slid wide open, and Korb stepped out jauntily, grinning with triumph. "See, Captain? You can trust the fellow!" "Korb," Saluard began slowly, then corrected himself, "my lord, did this person, by any chance at all, show you their face before this?" Korb frowned. "Now that you mention it..." "And did they, in fact, do anything but take your money and go along with your... inadvisable plans simply because the alternative was to be left behind?" Korb's frown grew a touch petulant, and he shook his head. "But that's exactly what I hired him to do!" "You hired him to guard you," Saluard growled. He took a limping step towards Korb. "You got yourself attacked by the first damnation party of raiders out of that army, and I have no doubt that you almost got that man killed by proximity to your buffoonery. I know you, Shwartmeyer. Keeping you safe is like knocking a kitten away from a hot stove." He leaned in close, cane creaking. "You haven't been rotting burned! You think it's all valour and adventure out there!" Korb stepped back. The way that man loomed...it reminded Korb of his father, for some reason. The man had been twice the fool with half the guile of his son, by all accounts, and just because he'd painted his fool's mask with a permanent scowl hadn't made it any better. "I'm sorry," he said quietly. Nothing flippant bubbled out. Saluard nodded gravely, only a hint of surprise glinting in his eyes. He hobbled off towards the armoury. "Come with me. You'll need something better than that twig if you're to stay alive around those heroes." He hadn't spit the last word out, exactly. It just fell with a little more force. "That," he paused, "hairy person. He said he's a ranger. You saw him fight?" Korb nodded, glad to move the conversation along. "He took down a roof full of bowmen and half an orc, that I saw. That fellow is terrifying to watch, once he gets started." Dark slingstones flying with twice the force of a spell. Crimson daggers and the swirling, ragged cloak. Korb shivered. Saluard's little speech was having unpleasant effects on his memories of the past two hours. Saluard glanced at him. "Half an orc? Who got the other half?" "I had Bent jump the fellow. I think Vhalin finished him off after that. He held him off for two or three minutes." Saluard frowned again. "That brings me to my next problem." He took out a key and opened a scarred door, releasing a whiff of oil and iron. Saluard limped through, pausing for a moment, and Korb followed. "As far as I can tell, you hired a street thug and a serving girl on some whim. It's far from the most unusual thing you've done...my lord. However," and he turned, features glinting with reflected light, "it was an... a ...dangerous, risky decision, and they may yet be an issue." Korb raised his eyebrows. "You have the right to restrain or fire them if you think you'll need to, if that's what you're getting at. The same goes for anybody we're travelling with, assuming you can take them or talk them down." Saluard looked satisfied. "Thank you, my lord." There was not one whiff of irony in that last statement. There was so little, in fact, it was practically invisible. Saluard picked up a canvas sack from the floor, then stopped in front of a rack hung with daggers. They ranged from four-inch needles, to heavy knives, to gleaming blades two feet long. He reached out for a utilitarian number, about a foot in length and with a well-worn hilt, tossed it in his palm, then slid it into a sheath. He buckled the sheath onto a thick leather belt and handed it to Korb. Needless to say, it didn't go particularly well with the jacketless suit Korb was currently wearing. Bent still had the missing bit on as a vest, and fine silk shirts didn't go well with scarred leather belts. That didn't make the weight of blade on his hip any less comforting. Not that he knew how to use it, that was. Then something occured to him. "Saluard," Korb asked, "Why not give me a sword?" The wild-haired guard snorted. "You? Fight with a sword? No, you don't know how. You'd end up cutting yourself. A dagger's lighter, easier to use." He glanced at the sword-cane Korb carried in one hand. "You might want to learn to use that, though. The sword's probably useless, but it's metal. It's got some weight to it. You can use the cane as a club." "It's magic, actually," Korb mentioned. "Really, lord? What does it do, then? Poison wounds? Throw lightning? Talk?" "This little fellow lets you see in the dark. And, apparently, he blinds you if you try to draw him too far." Saluard sighed - a barely audible noise. "I should have guessed, knowing you. You would find the only useless magic sword in the city, wouldn't you?" Korb shrugged. "I wouldn't really say 'useless', friend. I saw through a shapeshifter with it, and I think it acts like a telescope." "Well, if it's not too delicate, you can hit things with it." Sometimes, Saluard was so pragmatic, you could nearly smell it. He turned back to the rack, then sheathed and took several more daggers - one of the ones nearly the size of a sword, and a few that resembled thick, slightly bent kitchen knives more than anything. One of these, he handed to Korb. "I already have one, Saluard." Korb said. "The first one was for fighting. This is for everything else. A bit of sharp steel is always useful." Saluard called over a servant, then dictated a list of things to bring to the pavillion, packed as tightly as possible. It was surprisingly short, considering - only a couple hundred pounds or so of food, clothing, and gear. Some of the food seemed odd - vegetables, raw meat. When Korb asked about it, Saluard smiled. "That dwarf dabbles in ice magic, doesn't he? We can use his arcane arts to keep some food fresh." He finished dictating the list, then told the man to gather all the staff on the estates as soon as possible in the pavilion. Yes, even in the winery. No, he didn't have to do everything himself. Yes, this was urgent, so go already you rotting fool. They walked back out of the house, Saluard limping gracefully. At the door, Vhalin, hood off, fell into step - he'd been waiting for his employer to exit, it seemed. He eyed the dagger at Korb's belt with narrow pupils. "You know how to use that, duke?" he asked. "Nope!" Korb said, lapsing back into his normal expression. "I'm sure I'll figure it out as we go along, though!" Saluard sighed again. "I'll be teaching him, mister Vhalin, unless you'd rather be the one responsible for beating some sense into him." "It seems that job would be a mighty task indeed, captain." Korb hurried ahead before he heard any more. The less he heard, the less he'd bruise his pride, and he had a feeling that particular part of him was going to be rather battered over the next few days. We're about ready to start the brainstorming for where we want to take this thing, in the black and the blue, so Come One, Come All, and quickly.

So do you need to add heat to the system to get anything heavier than iron? That would follow roughly the rules of stellar nuclear fusion, where it creates energy to make iron (with decreasing returns as you get closer) then the reaction doesn't perpetuate itself - it doesn't create more energy than it uses. Scaled down, it would mean that creating anything out of iron would take power, whether up or down. An iron suit of armour, for example, would take a source of power to change. Give them some kind of restriction about changing living things, and, on the tundra, without any heat besides what he can get by coaxing the nitrogen in the wind into oxygen, a manipulator would be powerless against a man wearing and wielding only cold iron. Ooh, and that would mean that a sealed vial of some dense iron-or-lighter metal could also be used as a battery, by spending hours pouring heat into it to transform it down to hydrogen - but still at the density of iron. Actually, now that I think of it, that sounds like it would just combust on its own. Maybe not that far down then. Perhaps to lithium.

Well, you don't have lifesense, for one thing. You don't get neck tinglies when someone stares at you, which in the Cosmere is a magic thing rather than a combination of subconscious clues. Nalthian human biology is adapted to having a Breath-boosted immune system, and without that, you basically get mild immunodeficiency symptoms, culminating in death in poor conditions. And remember that Denth treats Breath much more flippantly than most people, having held and lost thousands over centuries of life. I think that he was lying about the selling his Breath, though, as he needs at least one every week to survive. Selling it, unless he was to get an immediate return on his investment, would be flirting with death, though I suppose, should it become necessary, abduction, torture, imbibment of Breath, and then disposal of a random passers-by would work week-to-week.

Sell. I can't see Kal letting himself get that distracted as the world is ending. Shallan, sure, it fits right into the dual-nature biz she's got going on, but I don't think Kaladin.

Well, if you had a community of them in the middle of a frozen wasteland, with a rotation keeping the fields alive by draining heat from the ground below, you could reasonably expect them to do all right, depending on the effort required. Maybe if anything atomically heavier than iron requires heat to produce it from an equivalent mass, while anything lighter than iron produces heat when you transform it? Then you have an interesting limitation, tied into the cultural mythos around iron, and there's a driving image to it: the manipulator with his forge-fire and heat-eating water barrels, and in his hands the lump of matter as it changes, setting the water hissing as moves towards iron, then dimming the fire as it moves away from it, drawing power.

The ghostbloods would if anybody would. I can imagine the scene: The torturer gets out a big old tray of sharp and terrifying things, then calmly explains exactly how much pain they'll cause. He then takes out a single, innocent looking fabrial with only a single razor-sharp blade, and explains, in terms of the implements he just described, how much more it will hurt. It takes rather a long time.

You can use pepper spray for torture.

Depends on whether the Manipulators are of a societal class where they would stoop to putting in sustained effort to something so mundane as growing food. Are they lords? Hermits? Something all their own? Do they spend their days ensconced in dim rooms, shaping wondrous creations, or do they blow in walls and knock about enemies? Basically, why would they, and why wouldn't they?

"Flangria," Lopen said happily as Rock ran off to the street vendor to get himself some chouta too. "Which is?" Kaladin asked. "Meat." "What kind of meat?" "The meaty kind." "Soulcast," Kaladin said, looking at Sigzil.

Buy. Including every main character. All of them time-cloned lightwoven Hoids. Harmony modified Hemalurgy similarly to how he modified Allomancy, to make it more humane, by reducing the decay between uses of a spike and making it less likely that the victim would die.

Welcome to the 17th Shard!

A legion of suicidal Cadmium-burners, a few Hemalurgically boosted copperclouds, and a small group of Bendallomancers with aluminum-spitting machine guns. The cadmium bubbles would create an overlapping zone of slowed time, while the Bendallomancers would move through, taking turns making the bubble, and plugging tLR with aluminum. Not counting decreasing returns, he would burn through his steel at a 10x rate just to stay at the same speed as his attackers. I would then have a group of snipers go for aluminum headshots, and give the cadmium-burners wide-bore aluminim shotguns with aluminum shot to keep a constant pressure of cumulative, unhealable wounds. With enough fresh bodies coming in, we would get him eventually.

Szeth will go mad, pretend that he's Odium, and appear in Kaladin's dreams.

Unless Hoid felt the need to call in a favour on Roshar and borrow a Shardblade. Or find a big electromagnet - assuming that Innate Investiture doesn't affect purely physical phenomena. Hell, just go to Sel, where the tech level must have progressed to useful levels at this point, and have an aluminum gun forged.

It will turn out that Dalinar's wife was Odium.

I agree with that completely. It sucks when someone can produce great works, but still be a terrible human being.

Huh. I could have sworn Vasher mentioned in the book. I must be remembering wrong.

Now that has a number of purposes much more malicious than a magical can of pepper spray. And, really, we don't know anything about Longshadow. I'm going to assume he wasn't the equivalent of a mad scientist in this setting, because I like the idea of a da Vinci better.

Ill-tempered, guileless, and cold as frost.

Listening to Ashanti Floyd. Violin covers. Pure awesome. Listen to the Game of Thrones remix. Yes.

It's also possible that the events of novels tend to be the delicate culminations of Shardic plans, created meticulously. Interfering could screw things up royally. In addition, if Hoid went around saving the world for everyone, then you wouldn't have a few protagonists backed by allies inheriting control, you'd have a bunch of opportunistic power grabs by people powerful under the previous system - look at the fracture of the Final Empire.