Benedict Jacka

Matter is generally considered the second-most straightforward branch of drucraft (Light being the first).  Long associated with craft and industry, it is perhaps the best-understood of all the branches.

Capabilities

Matter drucraft is focused around altering matter by changing its physical properties.  The properties that Matter drucraft can alter include, but are not limited to:

• Hardness
• Mass
• Density
• Melting point
• Boiling point
• Strength
• Brittleness
• Plasticity
• Reactivity
• Conductivity
• Transparency

The more powerful the Matter sigl, the larger the volume of matter that it can affect, and the greater the magnitude of the change to the physical property that it can produce.  Some Matter sigls are designed to only affect a part of the object in question, but most are designed to be ‘conducted’, so that they spread their effect out over the entire object.

The change produced by a Matter effect is temporary.  A Matter sigl can’t truly double the mass of an object – to do so, it would have to create the mass out of essentia, which would take an absolutely enormous amount of energy.  Instead it ‘boosts’ the physical property in question – it doesn’t actually make the object heavier, it just makes it behave as though it’s heavier.  Some drucrafters describe this as ‘tricking’ the universe into thinking that a substance isn’t what it is;  others view it as more like creating a small localised field within which the laws of physics behave slightly differently.  Still others view it as like ‘lending’ or ‘borrowing’, where an aspect of an object is temporarily swapped out.  In any case, a Matter effect is best viewed as a sort of temporary aberration that is sustained only by the drucrafter continuing to pour essentia into it.  As soon as the supply of essentia ceases, the Matter effect fades.

Despite this limitation, Matter drucraft is enormously useful in industry.  There are many industrial processes that work after a fashion, but would work much better if only the material in question was just a little more malleable, or a little lighter, or conducted electricity more easily.  Matter drucraft can fix all of these problems – only temporarily, of course, but with a little ingenuity, a temporary change can go a long way.  As such, Matter drucraft is in great demand in industry, particularly in processes involving small amounts of high-value materials.

Although Matter and Life are separate branches, Matter drucraft can affect living matter – it just does so in a very different way than Life drucraft does.  Still, Matter drucraft does have some very useful medical applications (particularly in surgical procedures involving teeth and bones) and it’s common for medical drucrafters to have a few Matter sigls alongside their Life ones.

Strengths and Weaknesses

The main drawback of Matter essentia is its temporary nature.  Note however, that while a Matter effect may be temporary, its consequences aren’t.  A hardness-reduction effect may only last for a minute, but if that minute is used to sculpt the object into a different shape, the effective consequences last forever.

A less-well-known drawback to Matter effects is their speed.  Most Matter effects take a while to permeate through the matter in question, and the change that they produce is gradual rather than instant – less like a light switching on, more like a piece of metal heating up when thrust into a fire.  This can, however, be circumvented if the target is sufficiently suffused with the wielder’s personal essentia.  As such, while Matter effects targeted on objects or on other people are slow, Matter effects targeted on items carried or worn by the wielder are significantly faster, and effects targeting the wielder’s own body are fastest of all.

This slowness also applies to Matter shaping.  Crafting Matter sigls is a notoriously slow process, far more so than any other branch.  This is rarely a problem for an experienced Matter shaper, but does cause issues when drucrafters who learned to shape on other branches move to Matter, often leading to numerous botched sigls until they adapt.

Associations

Matter essentia is associated with craftsmanship, engineering, agriculture, the earth, metal (especially iron), industry, and war.  Its associated celestial body is Mars.

Distribution

The countries most known for Matter Wells are Germany and China – China produces by far the greater volume, but the very strongest Matter Wells are found in Germany.  Other countries with strong showings in Matter include Taiwan, the UK, the USA, Russia, Switzerland, and Mauritius.

A further overview of Light sigls.  This section concentrates on one of the most coveted and widely used powers of Light drucraft – invisibility.

Diffraction

Sub-branch:  Manipulation
Type:  Triggered
Appearance:  Blue, transparent
Rank:  C to B+

Bends visible light around the subject, creating a bubble that light cannot enter.  Some diffraction sigls do this by directly bending the light rays, while others temporarily alter the light’s wavelength for long enough for the wielder to hide in the ‘trough’ of the wave.  The second approach is usually considered more elegant, but the first is simpler to do.  Since the light is bent, rather than suppressed (as happens with negation sigls) anyone looking at the wielder sees whatever is behind them.  This allows for ‘true’ invisibility, rather than creating shadows or darkness.

Diffraction sigls are by far the cheapest of the true invisibility sigls, but they come with significant drawbacks.  First and most obviously, diffraction sigls stop ALL visible light from reaching the wielder . . . including the light that would have reached their eyes.  This means that a diffraction sigl, used on its own, blinds the wielder.  Some diffraction sigls attempt to remedy this by allowing a small amount of visible light to reach the area around the wielder’s face, but this still hampers vision, and also means anyone looking at the wielder will see what looks like a disembodied head hovering in mid-air.

A more effective solution is to have the diffraction sigl exclude visible light, but not other frequencies.  (This is normally going to be the case anyway, as the average diffraction sigl doesn’t have the power to screen out the entire electromagnetic spectrum.)  The diffraction sigl can then be paired up with some sort of vision-enhancing effect to let the wielder see in the ultraviolet or infrared range.  This is fairly reliable, but does mean that the wielder has to pay for two sigls instead of one, both in terms of money, and in terms of essentia capacity.  Sigl providers are notorious for selling diffraction sigls at what seem to be reasonable prices, then gouging customers on the vision sigl that goes with it.

Even once the vision problem is solved, diffraction sigls are by no means perfect.  Since the diffraction effect tries to bend light around the wielder, they run into problems when the light’s new course would take it through an opaque object, such as the ground – anyone looking closely at the feet of someone using a diffraction sigl will notice something odd.  For similar reasons, the diffraction field works poorly at close range – the closer a viewer comes, the more they’ll be able to make out a sort of ‘goldfish bowl’ distortion.  Both of these effects are much more noticeable in bright light or if the wielder is moving, and especially if the wielder is moving quickly.  Someone trying to run under a diffraction field in broad daylight may actually be more obvious than if they weren’t using a sigl at all.

Despite these drawbacks, diffraction sigls remain popular.  If you want to be invisible and can’t afford a transparency or active camouflage effect (which most people can’t), a diffraction sigl is usually the only practical option.

Transparency (Matter)

Sub-branch:  Transparency
Type:  Triggered
Appearance:  Pale to very pale pink, transparent
Rank:  B to A

Alters the transparency of the wielder, causing visible light to pass through them.  Often grouped with Light sigls, due to its effect, but this is a Matter sigl and as such is described more fully in the Matter Sigls category.

Active Camouflage

Sub-branch:  Duplication
Type:  Triggered
Appearance:  Almost perfectly clear, with a hint of blue
Rank:  A to S

This powerful sigl intercepts all outgoing light in a similar manner to the Shadowman sigl, but then replaces this light with a copy of the light approaching the wielder from the opposite direction.  So, if the wielder is standing facing north, any light radiating away from their body northwards is instead replaced by a copy of the light coming in from the south.  Thus, anyone looking at the wielder sees what they would have seen if the wielder hadn’t been there.

This sigl is generally considered to be the pinnacle of invisibility drucraft, providing perfect all-round concealment with no disruption to the wielder’s vision.  It is, however, extremely complex and power-intensive, and only the most powerful Light Wells are capable of producing one.

The sigl has no real weaknesses.  It can screen out both visible and invisible parts of the spectrum, and despite its power is only moderately demanding on the wielder’s channelling skill.  Some versions of the sigl struggle to maintain perfect camouflage while the wielder is moving, creating a faint visual distortion in the rough shape of a human body, but higher-quality versions eliminate even this flaw.  However, its price puts it out of range of all but the most wealthy.