happyman

I've read Secret Histories and I don't think that's true.

SH spoilers:

Kelsier was preserved by Fuzz, long beforer he held the power of a shard.

Well the cost might not be super terrible, after all, allomancy only requires a few flakes of pure metal. Sure the initial cost of a large quantity of bendalloy and cadmium would be high, but if you used it right and sparingly, it would pay for itself in no time. Lets look at a restaurant scenario. It's a simple case of quantity over quality. My theoretical restaurant specializes in catering super big events. Get a Slider in the kitchen and presto! After the wedding party sits down, fresh, huge quantities, of food come out of the kitchen in 5 minutes. Meals that by all rights, should have taken hours to cook, and they did, in the bubble. Payed for itself right there. and I could feasibly do this multiple times in one day off of just a small pile of Bendalloy shavings.

I like this approach!  Rule one of business is that you need to spend money to make money.  It's money well spent if the ROI is good.  And at the high end of catering, you could probably pull exactly this kind of stunt.

As far as I can tell, the powers of AonDor are almost unlimited, given unlimited time.  The difficulty is with the knowledge of what you are doing, as well as getting the fine controls correct.

It's a lot like science, actually.

The problem with that scenario is that objects are either in a bubble or not, never halfway. The entire car will be in or out. It could still be very useful to slow them compared to the outside. The police could have time to set up spike strips, barriers, etc, that the fleeing car could never avoid in time once the bubble dropped.

jW

Yeah, this is an example of "getting the geometry right."  There's a good example of this kind of tactic in Bands of Mourning, and it makes sense that it would work.

After reading AofL, I wondered if there was actually a use for allomantic Chromium other than being a damsel in distress. So this post will be for discussing the use for things like gold and chromium, and theorizing about things like Bendalloy+Cadmium and Feruchemical necrosil.

We had a whole thread on this a while ago.  From what I remember, it's all about context.  Cadmium isn't as impressive in a fight as Bendalloy (but it does have its uses; it's very effective at neutralizing part or all of a threat if you get the geometry right), but in terms of, say, emergency response services, it could be very useful.  Somebody only has a couple of minutes to live if they don't get help?  Well, those "couple of minutes" can abruptly turn into "couple of hours".

In the civilian sector, Chromium is a fine metal.

Yes, if you remember, Vin at the start of the first book was burning metal's she got from food and water in the area without realizing it. She called it her "Luck" and used it to calm the gang boss.

To be fair, this was probably trace metallic forms of the metals---the human body can't really metabolize metallic iron.  The iron we do use has already been tied up in organic compounds from critters who do know how to get at it.  These are probably not easily burned by Allomancers, given that just alloying makes them unavailable.

From the McKinley Health Center website,

If your blood iron level is low, your health care provider may refer you to a dietitian to discuss dietary increase of iron-rich foods as well as a multivitamin pill or an iron supplement. Although iron is found in a variety of different foods and supplements, its availability to the body varies significantly. In general, iron is not readily absorbed by the body. Availability is partially determined by whether the iron is found in the form of HEME or NON-HEME iron.

Also, in the end, despite his Shard's Intent, Leras seems to have had the endgame to defeat Ruin rather than just continue preserving (and he has to act against that Intent, hence the awesome masterplan).

 

He creates humanity for this purpose, rather than not commiting extra Preservation to them, which would keep an eternal deadlock, and the implication is that he understand that he understand that his plan to stop Ruin will inevitably cost his life and his Shard's independent Intent.

 

Rashek was just a stop-gap and he fulfilled the Shard's Intent perfectly but Leras himself doesn't want that, so his plot actually HAS to sacrifice Rashek so that Vin gets the opprtunity to wield the full power of Preservation against a not-entire Ruin. For that to happen, not ony does Vin surviving Rashek take priority over the job Rashek did at delaying what he himself knew was inevitable, but Ruin getting out and thinking that he was going to win is also vital to its success, so the Mists HAVE to help Vin, all due to Leras' replanned programming.

 

Also,if Ruin hadn't also singled out Vin, reactive or not, then Leras' plan would have failed (though he must have known that Ruin would try to Ruin his plan and target the one he had chosen as his heir).

 

It's a brilliant plan, possibly the greatest bit of Chess Mastery (with a bit of hoping/great future sight and luck in Kel sticking around - yeah, right, Leras "accidentally" revealed to him how to stick around...) I've seen in any medium!

Basically the only diseases he doesn't seem to have included then are microbial ones

Destroying all microbial diseases is probably harder than it sounds.  We have a contingent of perfectly normal bacteria living in us.  If we had a truly infectious disease free world, it probably wouldn't take long for some of them to become pathogens again.

Besides, he's half Ruin.  I don't think he wanted to destroy all disease or opposition.

I agree with the general idea that the various Shards' Mandates have a strong effect on the worlds they create and dominate.  The powers which invest the worlds cannot help but generally push people in the directions they naturally flow.

Devotion and dominion dominate Sel, and its peoples, with either service or society dividing the world into natural pieces.

Ruin and Preservation, when reasonably balanced, result in a world with relatively stable changes, but still changes.  However, when Preservation ends up on top, like with TLR in charge, things stagnate, and nothing ever gets fixed, no matter how broken.  When Ruin escapes and gets more powerful, things go downhill very quickly.  It's only when the balance is restored that something like a sane society can emerge again.

Roshar is hard to say.  We just don't know enough about its history.  It's pretty clear, though, that the recent history of Roshar has been dominated by Odium, and you can see that from the way that people are constantly fighting petty wars across the entire world.  The effects of Honor are still there, but fading.  And Cultivation has apparently withdrawn after Honor's death.  But we really don't know enough about their history to say what happened.

The thing is, Rashek had no intention of his bracers being hemalurgic spikes when he made them. But they were.

Ruin can provide the intent.  Which means that TLR's wishes really have no bearing on the problem.

I think there is a very important point being missed in this entire discussion.

The Lord Ruler was very much playing the long game with Ruin.  And he won!  Importantly, he won by having Ruin look in all the wrong places for the Atium!  By using Atium the way the Lord Ruler did, he made it look like he was stock-piling the metal in Luthadel.  This resulted in Ruin looking in all the wrong places for the metal.  The last place Ruin looked was at the pits, giving the world the breathing room it needed to survive Ruin's escape.

In fact, in the third book, this careful con game was explicitly identified as what the Lord Ruler "did for the world."

This, more than anything, is the reason Rashek did what he did.  The economic benefits were just a very clever part of the smoke and mirrors.  It also very much kept the Lord Ruler on top, as a regular Mistborn, even with Atium, wouldn't really be a threat to him or his Inquisitors.  He could get as much* atium as he needed at any time.

As for copper---I agree that it was a clever scam on the Lord Ruler's part to give the people what they thought was a perfect defense against Seekers, only to rip the rug out from under them when it was truly important.  It's a classic misdirection con as well.  The Lord Ruler would have done well as a thief.

*As much means "More than anybody else."  Transporting too much of the stuff would have been a problem.

From what we can tell, all of the shards can see into the Spiritual Realm, where there is no time.  This is the source of what we called "Shardic Future Sight."  If Adonalsium didn't have access to the spiritual realm, and better access than any one of the shards of his power, then I am going to have to give up on sensible theories all-together.

Which is to say that I agree.  If Adonalsium couldn't manipulate his power to his own ends, even from the distant past, I will be very surprised.

On the subject, whatever happened to the part of their marriage agreement where infidelity was contractually allowed?

They have something more important than the marriage agreement now?  After all, they never did finish the "official" ceremony.  Surely the private one is more binding?

So there isnt some giant easter egg in them that i didnt pick up on ? 

There are several, and most have been noticed at different places on the forums.  You don't have to read them to understand the story, though.

The best description I've heard of his new power is:  he can see the matrix now.

I haven't felt the need to take it any further than that.

Granted...

 

You now have to fart every time you post something on the forum...

 

I wish for the ability to hear farts from miles away...

Granted.

You and everybody around you can also smell them from the same distance.  (Too easy.)

I wish for one good old-fashioned, fat-heavy, as healthy-as-is-physically-possible (except deliciously fatty), chocolate and peanut butter ice cream cone.

Making it rather ironic that it's granted by the physical manifestation of a shard that is notoriously bad at that.

Bad is a relative term.  I don't think it's a coincidence that it doesn't allow you to see very far.  Just enough to get an edge in battle, really.  Ruin does need to see the future, to some extent.  Just not as far as others.

Just chiming in to say I agree with the OP, that's been my understanding of Electrum-shadows and their interaction with Atium.

I dare say that Atium is a small version of what shardic future sight looks and acts like.

My guess is that Hoid is pretty much correct:  It involves sitting around in a climate-controlled room with no important deadlines, and nobody trying to kill you.

Hemamancer? Hematist? Hemalurgist? Hematologist? Hemalurgian? Hematician?

The one I've seen actually used is Hemalurgist.

I was one of those folks who was active online between the release of WoA and HoA, so we got to do all kinds of little nit-picky things with the books during the wait.  We knew that something very odd had happened with Vin's earring, and thought it might have something to do with Hemalurgy and her mother's little "present" for her daughter, but I didn't really put all the pieces together until it was laid out for me.

Although I did spot that she could only draw in the mists when the earring was gone.  So it didn't come as a complete surprise.

Yeah but if "civilization here [is] too dangerous" then not needing "the Set to have its full hierarchy" could mean different things. It is possible that the members are all from Scadrial and that the civilization the Immortal is speaking of is Elendel and its neighbors. If they are not from Scadrial then it may mean not needing any on planet members anymore because they plan to destroy it. We don't know how big the Set is or who controls them.

Which of these is true will determine what the other members decide to do.

If any of the Scandrian natives in the Set figure out what is going on, I bet that many of them would buck for promotion on another planet.  Not another Realm, mind.  That kind of a promotion is literally deadly.

"So... is no one curious about that time I showed up with all those bruises and cuts out of the blue? When I got pulled into an alternate universe and got beaten up by my dad's evil doppelganger?

 

"...no? Okay. I guess we'll just forget about the whole thing, then."

It was either in a quote or one of the table, can't quite remember though. I'll try to dig it up.

EDIT: Yeah it's in the table of allomantic metals. link. 

Note that this is an in-world document, and thus is allowed to be wrong.  It's probably right in general, but we can't take it as Word of Harmony.

I didn't see anything on Dawnslight recently, but I'd thought I'd add my take on him, since people seem to think he's more mysterious than he was meant to be.

One thing to notice is that when people say "Since Calamity," they really mean "Since a year after Calamity rose."  In the first book, Prof says that he was an Epic "since Calamity," but other people later talk about it in more detail and say it was a year later.  Because the events and side-effects of Calamity were so, well, big, it's not surprising that people talk that way.

With that little issue out of the way, it seems likely that Dawnlight is simply a very powerful Epic, one of the early few who avoided the darkness, either by facing his fear head on (perhaps as part of a dream or hallucination) or simply by virtue of being damaged in a way which made him less susceptible to fear.  Either way, I don't think he was meant to be the huge enigma people are thinking of him as.