Timewaster's Guide Archive

Official Response:
"Thanks for your email. The domain for tineye.com was actually registered
by Idee back in 2001, several years before the first book in the
Mistborn series was published (which was 2006 I believe). It is quite a
coincidence, but the name TinEye was inspired by 'robot vision' and the
vintage tin robots from the 1950s! Thanks for checking out tineye.com."

Talk about coincidences...

I was rereading the book, and I found the whole #16 thing interesting...Apparently Preservation uses a base 10 system...16% and all...

Could be base 2/4/8/16, and still make sense....

I interpreted this thread as more of a "what other metals could be allomatic metals, if there were not a "16 metal cap" so to speak, and what powers haven't been covered yet?

I was thinking something along the lines of heat.  External = heat up something (at the expense of the energy contained in the metal).  Internal = cool something down (sinking it into your body).  Using both would more or less allow you to transfer heat from one source to another.  A skilled user could use this to destroy the structural integrity of something. 

Complement would probably be the ability to absorb or expel an electrical charge...?

Not sure if these were brought up before or not...

1) Since Mistborn can burn up pretty much any metal that enters their bodies, doesn't this inadvertently cause mineral deficiencies?  Maybe TRL changed humans enough so they didn't need the minerals to survive...?

2) Did I miss something, or was sand never mentioned once in the entire book?

3) If the Mist included all allomatic powers (besides atium), shouldn't Vin have had the abilities of the 15th/16th metals?  If not, would the last metals be outside the realm of preservation, like atium was?

4) If metal appears as a giant blind spot, wouldn't one be able to find metal caches simply by searching for giant blindspots?

Each pair always seems to have one pure, "base" metal, and one alloy that included the pure metal.

It's hard to think of any powers that haven't already been covered.

The only thing that I can think of that seems to be missing is telepathy and mind reading.  It would fit the internal/external pair, but I am unsure as to what metal would be appropriate...

Most likely, it would be something that is relatively uncommon,  otherwise it would have been discovered already by the Lord Ruler.  Or it was never recognized as a metal (i.e. Platinum, which was thought to be an impurity found in mining Silver for centuries before anyone realized its true value).

Or, the metal simply could not be properly mined with available technology due to an incredibly difficult refining procedure.  This seems rather unlikely simply because of Aluminum's availability.  Aluminum is one of the most difficult metals to refine in the world, and suggests that the ore refining and metallurgy capabilities of the Mistborn world are, at most, approximately 100 years junior to ours.

The fact that no platinum-group metals are mentioned in the books seems to support the first theory, but the wide-spread availability of aluminum seems to contradict this...

Conversely, it's possible that the last base metal, and consequently the paired alloy, was inadvertently wiped from the planet by the Lord Ruler.  This would explain why it was missing for the entirety of the series.

EDIT: Yeah, all this speculation is rather useless since the 16 metals are already known, but...

So I was wandering around the web and came upon a website called TinEye.

"TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where and how that image appears on the web, or to find modified or edited versions." - http://tineye.com

I can't help but think that the creator of the website is a reader of Mistborn...that, or it's an extreme case of coincidence.