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Three thoughts: Even if it's there for narrative structure reasons, it will feel authentic if it is actually the smartest thing for the characters to do given what they know. If they have flaws that keep them from doing the strictly smartest thing, make sure you point up the ways that they are being genuine to themselves. Make sure that a fail is worse than, "Well, that didn't work." There should be some additional, lasting cost. Maybe someone is injured, maybe they offend a person whose help they were counting on, but somehow the fail should introduce an additional obstacle. To use the terminology from Writing Excuses, the try-fail cycle doesn't have to just be fails. You can use a mix of "yes, but" with your "no, and". So, maybe what your characters try works perfectly and they accomplish their goal, but in doing so they (or just the readers) learn that there was more going on and/or some other goal that they should have tried for instead.

Brandon is happy to sign as many as you bring (though he will only personalize 3 per tonne through the queue). If you don't buy Shadows, it is good form to buy something else from the bookstore that is hosting the signing.

We've learned that Nightblood was an attempt to recreate shardblades using the Nalthian magic system. Would such copies be possible via the metallic arts? The Dor? In Way of Kings Prime, spren were not yet part of the worldbuilding for Roshar. In that version, where did shardblades come from?

Thanks for all the hard work on the transcript. This one is also exciting:

If a tree dies in the forest and there's nobody there to see it, does it still attract rotspren?

I look forward to reading through your post, but before I do I want to suggest a change to the thread title so that it's less spoilery. (For example, call her Paalm rather than Lessie-kandra.) Topic titles show up in other places through the site, not just here on the SoS board.

Thanks for sharing! Once again, you had a great Extras session full of good answers. The shade questions were particularly clever, with interesting answers, so props to whoever thought those ones up. Also some nice confirmations. (Glad to know that an infused gem will still glow even if it doesn't leak, for example.) It is worth noting that he RAFOd nearly all of the follow up questions, so planning things out in that format may not net as much information.

Wax's grandmother Elder Vwafendal has a lot of clout in the Terris community. She is a member of the Synod, and I would be surprised if she isn't a ferring of some sort. This quote from Wax's meeting with her stuck out to me. The tea seems like misdirection to me.Also, it is subtle but it seems important to me that she goes unnoticed by Wax or any of the bouncers who try to kick him out of the Village until she decides to speak. I am guessing that she is a Connector ferring. This particularly makes sense in light of the Ars Arcanum describing "heavy experimentation" of the Spiritual powers by the Terris community. If not a Connector, one of the other Spiritual metals is more likely. Did anyone pick up on other clues that might indicate her abilities?

I figured that he was only ten feet up, so nowhere near the pinnacle of a push. So there are probably little bits of metal around him in objects or being carried by people in the crowd. In my view he used tiny pushes in those to turn himself around, but is savant enough that he didn't have to think about it (and was focused on other things) so those little pushes weren't mentioned in the narrative. Edit: I thought the concern was that he only had one thing to push against, but I guess it is also problematic to turn by pushing on lots of things if the force has to be directed at your center of mass. I'm not fully sure now.

The point about splitting each spike to make multiple earrings is an important one that I had completely forgotten about. That would absolutely be a factor. You are also right that the remaining time would make a difference. However, getting Wax's earing down to zero isn't the part that makes the curve not fit well--the charge is almost completely gone by 100 years, even without accounting for the spike being fractured into pieces. The constraint that the model is having a hard time matching is letting the spike decay fast enough that a few minutes make a noticeable difference when you've just made the spike, but still having enough charge left after more than a year for Vin's earring to still be useful. (To address the timeline question specifically, I was also assuming that the spike wasn't just sitting around for the entirety of that time. Other Pathians probably wore the earring off and on, so I figured stopping at 200 years was good enough for these estimates. If we come up with a model we like where that end of the curve matters more, such as some of the ones in my second post, I would be very open to adjusting the Wax end of the timeline.)

That's a good list, Argent. I hope you get enough time to ask all of those. These are the questions I was planning to ask when I thought I could make it to Wednesday's event. If any of them are interesting to you, go ahead and add them to your list.

Actually, I would be prefer not to link to anything with new-release spoilers from the front page. If we want a Scadrial related article, maybe compounding, or Spook. My suggestion, though, would be something for Elantris, since we've had the anniversary edition come out. Hrathen could be a good one.

Thanks, Peter, that actually changes my reading of it quite a bit. I had thought before that the rest of Era 2 hadn't been outlined until after AoL publication. On an identity-related note, I remembered a discussion some time ago about Wayne possibly having a kandra horse, based on this quote from Alloy: According to the AoL annotations, Wayne's first test-scene was of him riding on a a kandra horse. After the events in this book, that possibility starts to look a lot less like a bored kandra playing a joke and a lot more like an on-a-mission kandra gathering information and scouting out personalities.

Okay, this is going to be math and graph heavy, but the short version is that there are two (relatively) simple parameters to change that can get the curve into a shape that looks close to what we want. One uses a very intuitive physical basis to derive the curve, but doesn't get quite as close as we want it to. The other is an adjustment to the equation that gets a much friendlier shape, but I don't know enough physics to postulate a real-world process to account for the math. (I'll put my guess at it below, but I have already spent a truly inordinate amount of time on this today, and I need to just post this and be done.) The post turned out super long, so I'll go ahead and spoiler each section as well. Version 1: Chemistry Version 2: Manipulating the exponents Conclusion: there are alternative ways to construct your math to give a curve with a fairly reasonable shape. (Certainly more than the two I've played with here.) I don't advocate any as being the right fit, but I think canvassing some of the space here shows that the right half life with the right decay model could possibly give a curve that fits the text and our assumptions. I still think the version in the books is a (fuzzy, no-math) logarithmic decay, but if it ever became important I could see Brandon having Peter devise an equation not unlike one of these to govern things going forward. EDIT: As Yata points out below, I had forgotten that Pathian earrings are reportedly made by splitting inquisitor spikes into pieces. Wax's earring can be assumed to have a fractional charge already, so if you see a workable scenario where his has too much charge for your liking, go ahead and divide by, oh, let's say 16. Yata also mentions that some of the time was unaccounted for--that will make a big difference to the first-order reaction rate, but the others will not be nearly as affected, since we are extending the time by less than half a log.

I guess we don't have an explicit answer to this, but these theoryland answers make that a pretty definitive yes in my mind.

Those are all reasonable assumptions.It's clear from the thread so far that people have varied opinions about the power differences we see, but I think it's important for this discussion to realize where the constraints are and where the numbers are allowed to be fuzzy (and even vary wildly). For example, my opinion is that for Wax's earring 1% charge would still be okay (versus the .01% you propose), but it turns out that parameter hardly matters at all, even over 2 orders of magnitude. Here are the numbers for various half lives, given as a percentage of original charge. I've color coded it for convenience, with >99%, >50%, >1%, and nearly 0. (spoiler for size) As you can see, any half life that gives appreciable decay in the first 10 minutes (box at upper left) results in basically zero charge after an accumulated year, or even month, outside the body. Going the other direction, anything that allows for more than 1% of the charge to remain after a year (box in lower middle) means at most a 1% loss of power in the first week. After centuries (box on right) practically all of the charge is gone if you assume a half life short enough to notice. The upshot is that a simple logarithmic decay can't possibly meet our requirements under our assumptions. No amount of adjusting relative power levels between Elend, Vin, and Rashek will get us to a scenario where it does. That means we need to rework our assumptions. Aside from changing the math to a new decay model completely, the assumptions from your list that can impact the result are the first few: There are some possible modifications to these. Most of them have problems aligning with the text, and for the most part they don't make enough of a difference to solve it completely. Some, such as different decay rates before and after first use, have been discussed quite a bit. (That scenario would basically let you mix and match rows on that chart, using a fast decay row before spiking the first recipient, then switching to a slow decay row if they take it out later.) The other most likely possibility in my view is that strength isn't simply additive, or that a portion of the power goes to making the spike/ability possible at all, with further supplementation being additive. As far as changing the model, my best suggestion is to treat it like real-world radioactive decay. While the decay of element X into element Y follows a simple half life formula, in many cases element Y is also radioactive and decays further into element Z. Element Y can have a dramatically different half life than its precursor did, either faster or slower (examples here). This means that the amount of radiation coming off the sample (now a mix of X, Y, and Z) does not curve-fit to a simple logarithmic decay. If a short-half-life X turns into longer-half-life Y, you get a natural transition between two different decay rates. I don't know if or how you would apply that model to fast-leak and slow-leak investiture, but I can think of several frameworks to justify it. It's early in the morning here, though, so I'm not sure how much I like the approach. Maybe after some sleep and seeing your feedback I will have a firmer opinion. Right now I'm thinking that Brandon was thinking of regular logarithmic decay and just hadn't done the math, so any model we come up with to explain the facts we have will be shoehorned.

I really love all of these characters--so glad that Bands is coming soon. And I don't just mean the leads. Steris? Impressive. MeLaan? So much fun. My favorite scene has to be Wayne in the "church of the common man." I was not planning to buy this for another week, since I have a lot of deadlines and can't spare the time, but it looks like my self control wasn't up to the task. And I thoroughly enjoyed the book, so hopefully the stress and no-sleep of the next 8 or 9 days won't make me regret getting it already.

Thanks for the input. I haven't completely abandoned this possibility, but it does seem a bit less likely. Here's my thought process: Someone with a hemalurgic spike can be influenced by an outside force, such as a shard or a soother. That influence only works when the spike is in place (e.g. Vin's earring, Spook's spike). Spiking has been described as stapling an exogenous piece of spiritweb onto your soul. There are two pieces here that could provide the route of influence: the spike itself, and the stolen piece of spiritweb. Specifically, the susceptibility to outside influence could be a direct result of the amalgamated nature of your spiritweb (I think of it as loose contacts in the grafted piece). Alternatively, the influence could get in via the spike itself (like an antenna). If the influence gets in via the spiritweb and just travels down the spike, then aluminum shouldn't make a difference at all. If it instead gets in via the spike, then there is a fair chance that aluminum would do something funky. Since a soother's normal abilities aren't dependent on a spike in their target, I suspect that their ability to take over a koloss (for example) is simply a case of overloading the system until some overflow through the modified spiritweb causes a loss of control. I don't know for sure, though.

Antarctic penguins: quite numb, spewing out vitriol. UBL! STTA

Incandescent heating and lighting products: imminent meltdown countermeasures. DDDDOL

Seeker

You can navigate to any of the ones you want by clicking on the "Library" tab and scrolling to the bottom.

Third gen wins it with a mouse. Third gen wins it in a house. And on a train, and in a tree, And in the rain he wins, you see!

The man who does not want the product is forced into a series of escalatingly complex situations as the salesman tries to find a scenario in which he will take it.

Nope