happyman

The party scene is one of the most difficult in Shadows of Self. Personally, I think it was a combination of two things that allowed it to go down as it did: Cooperation from the Set, as WayneSpren said. He was a deliberate decoy. The fact that the "governor" managed to quietly take off pretty much as soon as Wax left. Paalm knew what Wax was going to do, and was deliberately taunting him. It was all a very deliberate shell games designed to lead him in entirely the wrong direction. Think of it a magic trick, where Wax was completely distracted by the hand which had nothing in it.

Since somebody else hasn't mentioned it yet, I'm adding one more piece of evidence in favor of this theory, from Bands of Mourning.

In the Cosmere, it seems likely that emotional allomancy should work on most animals. If emotionally Allomancy is mostly physical, then human and other creatures brains are almost certainly similar enough to make them generally compatible. They certainly are in the real world. If it is cognitive or spiritual, I expect them to be even more similar in how they are effected, considering how much more abstract the other realms are.

I think that the key part of this is the word "a". If I'm reading it right, given any single person, there is at least one shard they can pick up. It's probably rare for a single person to be able to pick up two. In Kelsier's case, the Shard he could take up (without shenanigans) was almost certainly Ruin, In the case of the Elantrian's, it was probably Devotion. In either case, they needed the Connection sphere in order to take up Preservation, which is wildly different from both of them.

So it's an experienced Shard. Practically all the Shards have more experience than Harmony, so that's not a surprise.

I'd call it "shard-level" manipulation skills myself. Their enhanced mind and connection to the spiritual realm allows that kind of stunt.

It seems likely that when either atium is burned or the power at the well is used, it becomes diffused throughout the world so finely, even the shards themselves cannot easily extract it. It just naturally gathers again at the attuned perpendicularity, like dew naturally condensing out of gas, but takes time to do so. The nature of the prison is kind of complicated, and it comes from the subtle fact that Ruin and Preservation both oppose each other, and yet are part of the same power. In my opinion, although they constantly fight with each other, their underlying nature is to do so in a way which pushes the universe towards something which has a specific purpose (they are, after all, significant parts of god). This makes understanding how they interact kind of hard. Specifically, the power at the well "knew" that Ruin needed to be free for the balance to work properly. However, it still deferred to the mind that controlled it. When the mind that took the power specifically used it, it "knew" that it wasn't yet time to free Ruin, but rather to shore up the world and preserve things. When the power was "given" to Ruin, the power said "Ah, it's time to let go. Good!" and Ruin was effectively free.

Never would have guessed. You might want to be a bit less subtle about it.

Oh how I wish we knew. The epics began appearing almost exactly a single year after Calamity arrived, for reasons nobody understands. We have no idea what the rest of the things which happened were. Presumably some of that is waiting for the follow-up series when we discover more about what Calamity was and why he did was he was doing.

That's not a good catch---it's a great catch. The more I think about it, the more I think that there must be something odd going on with the translation between Hoid and the other characters. If they don't notice something odd, I can't help but feel that it's because they just don't look for it at all (and why should they?) He really doesn't fit in on Roshar, does he? I'm pretty sure that on Scandrial, he sounds a lot more normal. I'm guessing that we are seeing a form of magic here different from the other forms of translation which we have seen in other places. I'm pretty sure, for instance, that Vasher learned the local language the hard way. The only other case we have is from , which behaved different enough I'm pretty sure that it isn't the same.

I know that this issue has become kind of contentious recently, but there's good historical precedent that the word "man" can refer to any person, male or female. In fact, it's more a historical accident than anything else that one word for person (man) is also the common word for members of the male sex. So I tend towards the Kaladin/Shallan interpretation. If we use that "old" usage, it fits perfectly.

There's WOB. She's actually further along in her oaths (truths in her case) than Kaladin is, and she had been there already before she began "breaking her truths" by hiding her memories of killing her mother from herself.

As brightness Enna said, this is too general to be an actual product rather than a strategy you use with products specifically for Lurchers and Coinshots. Note, though, that Wax has custom guns which use exactly this kind of technology. It's customized just for him, by Ranette, and isn't particularly common.

"Wisdom of the Heralds" seems like as good an explanation as any. I'm pretty sure if they aren't worldhoppers, they know (and know they know) worldhoppers.

I'm afraid that's not the way it works. In the real world, if the interactions with the Higgs boson were changed, or even turned off, it would result in a person dying spectacularly as chemistry shifted unpredictably, but it wouldn't affect their mass much. Put more specifically, the bulk of the energy inside protons and neutrons comes from the kinetic energy of the quarks and gluons, minus the binding energy caused the the strong force. The gluons are massless, best we can tell, and the (up and down) quarks almost massless, by comparison with the proton. Even if both were perfectly massless, the proton would still have essentially the same total mass, due to its internal energy. I know that science popularizations claim that mass comes from the Higgs field interactions, but that's popular science for you. It 's dead wrong in this case.

No fear, and I didn't take it that way. I just wasn't sure that I knew which side you were taking, and I did want to consider what, exactly, it would imply for VenDell to actually be changing suits.

As far as I can tell you are in favor of the "subtle awakening" theory, so I don't think I'm really arguing against you. I'd say that while it is absolutely possible that VenDell is changing suits twice (so you can't rule it out on for logistical reasons) that kind of misses the point. Why would VenDell do this? What possible point would there be to it? Did he spill large amounts of ketchup on his suits off-screen and have to repeatedly change? It certainly didn't help him achieve his goals. I don't think "irritating Wayne" was that high of a priority. It's a waste of time, regardless of how he would have done it. It's quite pointless and doesn't fit his character in the slightest. It seems, oddly enough, more likely that he is using a subtle form of awakening than that he changed suits for no good reason. The first just requires that there be more to awakening than we have seen before (known to be true) and that VenDell could have accessed it (a bigger stretch, but we've seen plenty of Worldhoppers on Scadrial at this point; he could have just bought "awakening tech" from one of them, for instance.) The second requires some very odd, out-of-character and completely pointless behavior. It's strange that I weigh more strongly on the first one, than the second---but it's the kind of thing Brandon does.

It's pretty obvious from the Mistborn annotations that Preservation's color is White and Ruin's color is Black. This is why, in HoA, Vin wears black and Elend wears white-together, they were balanced. (This is while Vin is wearing the earring, so it is appropriate to consider her an emissary of Ruin at that point. Obviously it changed.) One of the annotations from FE mentions that TLR deliberately chose to wear Black and White to represent his connections with the two powers. The annotation goes on to say that this a lie, because TLR had only touched one of the powers, and only lightly at that. Sazed, the true hero, touched both equally.

It's probably relevant to this conversation to note that the spiritual realm is called a "timeless place" when described in the books. It's strongly implied that time is relevant only in the cognitive and physical realms. Since Spren are primarily cognitive, this means that they can change. I'm guessing, though, that part of them is anchored to the spiritual realm, due to being a small part of Adonalsium, and thus are at least partly timeless. Thus if words manage to completely flip meanings, I doubt that the Spren will go all the way.

I'm pretty sure that was mis-reported. Brandon certainly claims to have never said it.

Perhaps not, but people perceive it that way. It's not about what is, it's about what people think.

According to Allik, there is a little bit of Ettmetal in the primer. He also implies strongly that the Ettmetal is doing the Allomancy itself (once primed using an Allomancer), and that the Ettmetal will run out if it goes to long, at which point the equipment stops working. It looks to me like Ettmetal has, among other attributes, the ability to enhance or extend Allomancy once it has been exposed to it.

Oh, I like this. It explains why ripping out the bands defeated TLR so completely. He was probably in serious spiritual shock from the resulting damage, kind of like the most powerful Elantrian's were completely undone by the Reod. All it takes is one truly weak point.

Or, in the case of Axies, not really feeling like you're captive.