BoM/TWS Message Forum

To answer some of it at least best to my knowledge, 6-8 hours is massively overstating it. With a buffer I believe the actual time is maybe somewhere between 1-2 hours of polishing. Seuzz or someone else might have a better idea but that's generally how I've always thought of it and why people are able to start building up collections quickly once they figure out the trick.

It's maybe not the prettiest example (given the effect it ultimately had) but before the invention of the cotton gin a person could clean and produce roughly one pound of cotton per day. With the cotton gin that immediately jumped to around 50 pounds per day. So introducing a modern, mechanized tool (an electric car buffer) would likewise absurdly cut down the time needed to polish and allow someone to crank out masks much faster provided they have the material to make them.

For the cost, this is somewhat of a tease but there's a story I commissioned from Seuzz and in it Will asks for $60 to cover the costs of making a mask... but the narration states that he's also deliberately overcharging a bit. So I'd say $50 or $60 is the high end of making a mask. It's not exactly expensive but is if you don't have a job I suppose.

As far as hair, I don't think it's more than a small amount. And it doesn't have to be fresh either since I think there's a chapter somewhere that mentions Will using loose hair from around his room.

For the corpse golem, I believe in some extra material it's said that the spell uses the victim's own essentia to fuel it so I would assume that's why it's much faster. The difference between starting a fire with a pile of leaves and some matches vs. using a puddle of kerosene and a torch.

I want to say the memories deal has been brought up before either in extra material or BoM proper but my guess would have to be due to replacing two sets of imago (physical and mental) with the band and mask versus just one set (mental) with just the band. I would guess that there are definitely some people who adapt more quickly -- Maria in that one branch seemed to get it pretty fast -- but I'm not sure of the reasoning. I think in one branch it was said that everyone is governed by ousiarchs to some degree but only a very small amount are able to tap into their abilities. So Maria, for example, if she were a Stellae would probably be an Arbol-Sulva pairing.

I think. Seuzz, Nostrum, imaj and the more magically inclined would likely have a way better idea of it than I do.