happyman

No, I understood. I just suspect that the "base" no-Lerasium power level is high enough that it will always remain useful. Allomancy at the pre-ascension misting level is a completely natural part of Scandrial as it exists in Alloy of Law. Lerasium puts it, as it were, on steroids, but there is a level it never falls beneath no matter how long you wait. I simply feel that this level is still a useful one.

The main thing against the idea that all the humans were originally from the same place is that some of the shards explicitly claimed to have created humanity. Ruin goes so far as to claim that he and Preservation created humanity in the image of creatures they had already seen elsewhere! Honor also claims to have created humanity. Given that we have instances of Shards creating new species from scratch, this doesn't seem at all far-fetched. (Both TLR and Sazed did this with their powers. TLR created bacteria and Sazed repopulated the world with animals, many of which simply must have gone extinct.) The fact they all look the same would stem from the fact that most of the newly created sapient species were modeled after a species that already did exist, as evidenced by the fact that the Shardholders had human bodies. That there are species floating around that seem somewhat different (Parshendi, Aiman, even Koloss) suggests that this isn't a fixed requirement of Shardic power, but probably simply more difficult for the shards because they don't have an easy model to work from.

I'd feel better about this one if Dilaf hadn't once done exactly that just to show that he could.

Since real-world athletes enjoy a good contest, this lesser thrill may simply be the anticipation normal people feel when they work on something they like.

This is not a nonsensical way to view what happens, but probably not the best way. In modern physics, we avoid saying that mass of something moving near the speed of light is high; rather we say that its momentum and energy increase without bound as the velocity gets arbitrarily close to the speed of light. Thus you can continually add energy and momentum and not move faster than the speed of light. The word "mass" is nowadays usually treated as synonymous with "rest mass," or how much the thing of interest weighs when it is at rest relative to the observer. There are older usages which use the terms differently, but experience has taught us that they just tend to confuse people without actually helping them understand what is happening. Also, they don't fit well into the modern understanding of general relativity. It is also worth noting that in Special Relativity, the "speed limit" of light can be viewed very differently. It is possible to treat it as a geometric fact which comes from the (non-intuitive, non-obvious) relationship between space and time. With this approach, saying that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light contains no more information than saying that the triangle inequality from classical geometry is true. It's the shape of the universe, and the only way to mess with it would be to mess with the relationship between space and time. Somehow I suspect that it's this last point that Brandon had in mind with Allomancy. Just a thought.

Well, I know for a fact that the laws of light propagation are some of the ones he broke. There is no red/blueshift with relationship to the time bubbles, largely because these effects would be completely unmanageable in the real world. We had a thread discussing it on this very forum, and we convinced him that a realistic representation would rather destroy the magic system, so he dropped the idea of doing it realistically, which I think was the right choice.

This would be more true if Hero of Ages hadn't made it abundantly clear that the potential for Allomancy existed in the base population pre-ascension, even if at a lower level. Scadrial didn't need the infusion of Lerasium to get relatively weak Mistings of all sorts; it just needed the hint of preservations own soul in all humans, which is almost certainly as strong as ever post-HoA.

OK, Peter, you've had your fun. And completely ended this thread as well, I might add. Well, done, sir, well done!

Even better: Can you hear other people using the wrong spelling of homophones? Because I'm pretty sure that popped up, and yes, it is quite magical.

If people "know" things for long enough, it becomes a lot less likely that the exceptions will be discovered. I seriously doubt anybody but the ministry looked for Atium mistings---as others have said, that would be really, really expensive and most people probably never even thought of it. Those that did would have a really hard time making anybody else go along. If anybody did find out, doubtless TLR would come down hard. The secret probably would have gotten out eventually, but 1000 years is probably not too long for it to have been kept. Copper, on the other hand, forms the basis for the Misting underground. Clubs trained apprentice Smokers as part of his job. It's been actively used for the entire Final Empire, both by the nobility and the skaa. If Copperclouds interacted in any way besides stacking (which would not be noticed by most Mistborn/Seekers anyway, as they couldn't pierce a normal Coppercloud) or having no effect at all, it certainly would have been noticed.

Huh, lots of good questions being raised here. I think the biggest barrier to using armored bridge-men is the expense. They would require training and drilling, not to mention innovation in tactics. They would still be more exposed on runs, even with all of this, and thus more likely to die than the average soldier. For most of the Alethi, using slaves was an A-OK of getting around this. For Dalinar, I don't know. He may be experienced in normal tactics, but this really is a radically different situation. While we are managing to come up with better ideas here, for most of the Alethi, they didn't think they needed new ideas. Most likely, he either just never thought of it. If he did think of it, he probably wasn't able to get the substantial number of people to go along with it which would be needed. Kaladin, on the other hand, might be able to get such a thing working. But make no mistake. It would take motivation followed by lots of work to get all your ducks in a row before it would work.

I've said it before, but I think it deserves saying again: Atium enhances the mind. I suspect that it enhances the whole mind, even while leaving things like motivation, desire and emotion essentially unchanged. Thus, if you are in a fight and don't really want to die, Atium will help you achieve that goal. Since most of the time, most people have no intention of dieing and hang on to that belief with every action they take, Atium enhances your ability to do exactly that. It's quite natural, really. But if you decide that you don't want to kill, and if the folks you are fighting are no real threat to you anyway, Atium also enhances that understanding as well, and you survive with no trouble and no compulsion to kill. I don't really see a paradox. Nor do I see free will vs. determinism as relevant; enhancing the mind would not affect that relationship at all, if my understanding is correct. As for my statement about Atium vs. guns, I suspect that guns make it somewhat easier to corner a Seer or Atium-burning mistborn. As others have noted, the speed of the bullets isn't what would do it; dodging bullets is probably not harder than dodging arrows. It's the fire rate and training needed that shifts the balance. Even in conventional warfare, the big advantage guns have over arrows is that you can shoot 100 rounds without even thinking and with minimal training. Each bullet actually does much less damage than each arrow. The same goes against a Seer; they may be able to sense where all the bullets are going to hit, but it is much easier for the opposition to get a few trained goons who can completely saturate an area with bullets during an ambush. Knowing that all possible futures lead to your death is not a terribly useful bit of info.

Depends on how many bullets. A sufficiently large ambush armed with guns could probably get an Atium burner much more easily than, say, said ambush with swords would. One on one, though, they'd have a massive advantage, true.

Good answer! So in all likelihood, it is impossible to shoot at an Atium burner fast enough for them to not know in advance that they are being shot at and begin dodging. Whether they can physically dodge all the bullets is a different question entirely.

The other points about not stacking in these posts are possible, but this deserves special attention, mostly because I'm pretty sure that Clubs did exactly that with his apprentices. That was probably to cover more area because they thought that a single copperclouds was enough, but I don't think this argument flies even with that caveat in my objection.

Fair points all. Have fun, everybody.

Possible, but I'm guessing that the "natural" causes are as good an explanation as any and seem to fit better with Sazed's hands-off approach. The direct Lerasium infusion that made Mistborn remotely likely (even as rare as they already were) has been diluted to the point that most people are pre-ascension style Allomancers (e.g. weak mistings). The Terris legacy which made full Feruchemy the norm has also been weakened by strictly "natural" causes, with TLR's culling and then Ruin's creation of fully powered Inquisitors removing the strongest manifestations. Combine this with the mixing of the Terris genes with the broader, Allomantically enabled population, and statistically, having Ferrings and Mistings is much more common than having all of either power. They are probably wrong about this being a natural law. I suspect that Ferrings existed prior to the Ascension, but were underpowered compared to their peers and generally not important. I'm also quite certain that Mistborn can still come into existence; they are just very difficult to come by "naturally." It's probably a social understanding rather than a law of nature.

Yeah, that's a good summary. My contribution is that adding extra waves and frequencies doesn't really change that fact in most situations. So yeah. Don't forget that you can also get Copper Savants. In fact, Copper Savants are probably the most common ones (and easily the safest kind to be). This is yet another way to power up copper.

This discussion brought up a question: Are Atium shadows reserved for just sight, or is that just the way the mind interprets most of the information? In other words, what would a blind Seer experience when burning Atium? Because if it is really all possible sensation (under the covers, as it were), then the question is answered: The Atium burner would become aware that they were about to get a gunshot wound and would know to dodge, whether they can "see" the bullets or not.

The interactions of waves with multiple frequencies can become complicated very, very quickly. I should know; I did my dissertation on one small aspect of the problem. However, even in the most complicated of situations I am familiar with, unless you are very careful, you will get times and places where the waves cancel catastrophically, at least at one frequency, just by chance. That doesn't seem to fit the copper-cloud at all unless the wavelength is so short, it doesn't matter---at which point the wave nature of the copper-cloud is mostly irrelevant. A wave-like nature just doesn't fit with what has been observed with copper-clouds. It seems a lot more like pulling the fabric of the universe tight. Like the time bubbles, except in a different way.

This is an interesting bit of fan world-building, and could be fun in an RPG, but I suspect that Hemalurgy has things going on that Brandon isn't going to tell us about because they are far too spoilery. Just a fair warning. Also, note that it is canon that TLR and the Inquisitors spent 1000-ish years trying to create new Hemalurgic creatures, and failed. An abundance of such things created at whim just doesn't fit. I would think that in the "real" Mistborn world, creating new viable Hemalurgic creatures would have to be the result of years of research and a deep understanding of Realmantics.

Good points, Millennium. How wealth is actually used is a subtle question, and one that a lot of people really don't understand. For instance, in the final empire, like in real life, most wealth is not in the form of coinage or bullion in any form. It is in the possession of land, technology, and information, and most trade is conducted in these forms. Coinage of all forms just kind of floats on the surface to make this large pool available to the masses.

Since there are at least five orders of Knight's Radiant we know nothing about, and since Brandon has stated that many of the important characters in the saga have come on-stage already, I wouldn't read too much into that detail just yet. He may well be meant to give it to somebody else.

Er, I don't think that's quite right. In Alendi's day, all Mistings were at much lower power---they did not have the direct infusion of Lerasium that TLR added after he used the Well's power.

I don't think that building is the same as Preserving. In fact, it explicitly isn't. As for saving Spook---he had to kill a Thug in order for the scene to work out! It came out net-negative in terms of power or ability to preserve the city. (If the Thug could have been directed correctly, he could have preserved the city in its time of need.)