Timewaster's Guide Archive

In Final Empire, Hoid was the fake-blind beggar informant that Kelsier used once.

In Well of Ascension, he was the unnamed guy leading the group of Terris people that Elend meets.

In Hero of Ages, he's the informant that Vin gets spooked about and doesn't meet.

Quote from: Fireborn on May 07, 2010, 11:25:45 PM

But wouldn't Vivenna be able to detect the Breaths in the object?

I don't recall any suggestion in the book that Breaths invested in objects are detectable.

I remember putting Breaths in objects being specifically called out as a way to avoid having them detected.  Vasher does it to sneak up on Vivenna.

Hmm. I wonder if Shards speak to anyone in Elantris or Warbreaker. Maybe Hrathen and .... Vivenna? I'll have to look at this some more.

Endowment speaks to the Returned as I recall, but only in that brief moment between death and Return when it's offering the dead person the opportunity to Return.  This is shown in flashback when Lightsong remembers that moment.

But they were already Seers, they just didn't know it yet.

The people who passed the test and turned out to be Seers, yes.  He's talking about all the other people who did not pass.  Those people were just ordinary non-Allomancers, and they consumed a small amount of Atium with no apparent effect.

"Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science."

If your primary criterion for "magic" is that it not be understood, then what qualifies as magic is highly subjective and depends very much on whether a magic user is a major viewpoint character and how much any such characters understand what they are doing.  Furthermore, it can change purely by in-world research or the addition of one scene containing a monologue about how it all works.  Shift around a few characters and insert monologues, and just about any fantasy series could be converted to scifi rather easily.  I think this is a rather poor and unsatisfying definition, as the definition of something should not in my opinion depend on how much of it is revealed to the reader.

I haven't really formalized the definition of what I consider magic, but I think the irreplaceable involvement of the magic-user is an important criterion, possibly the most important.  If it's something that is done by a particular person, and there are people who, regardless of mental capacity, real-world physical characteristics, and education, would be completely incapable of replacing that person even in theory in doing it, then it's probably magic.  Inventing a computer?  Get enough smarts and the right education, and anybody could do it.  Shooting coins around with Allomancy?  Sorry, if you're not a Mistborn or the right Misting, you can't do it.  Any exercise of Mind-Directly-over-Matter or similar usually qualifies too, even if everyone in the setting is technically capable of learning it.  By my definition, Allomancy and Feruchemy are most definitely magic systems.  Now that I think about it, Hemalurgy is more borderline, but I'd still call it magic due to how its interaction with the definite magic systems is such a major part of it.

That's odd, I seem to remember 11 spikes being the standard.

Atium mistings actually were known, just not by anyone outside The Lord Ruler, his Inquisitors, and a few trusted Obligators.  It's mentioned somewhere, maybe in one of the annotations, that the Inquisitors or their minions would secretly spike drinks at some of the balls with tiny amounts of Atium, then use their Seeker powers to watch for short pulses of Atium-burning as the unwitting Atium mistings unconsciously burned the Atium in a fraction of a second.

Only one solution I see for this is making Atium an automatic dodge/attack system. You won't really get to see the shadows, but your character will automatically avoid all incoming attacks while burning atium.
That seems like a good idea for me. Many online games give players some kind of "killing-machine-boost" to gain.

Apparently you missed the part I'll put in bold here:

Not really.  Actually showing the single Atium shadow of someone who's not burning Atium would be problematic, but I think just giving a best-guess display based on assuming the character would keep going at his same direction and speed would be a reasonable handwave, and the game-mechanical effect would simply be near (or actually) perfect dodging and accuracy.  For Atium vs Atium, the shadows don't actually show anything useful, so you could just show a ton of random shadows darting everywhere.