Benedict Jacka

A brief overview of Matter sigls affecting the properties of transparency and hardness.

Transparency

Type:  Triggered/Continuous
Direction:  Conducted
Appearance:  Pale to very pale pink, transparent.
Rank:  B to A

Alters the transparency of the wearer, causing light to pass through him.  In the hierarchy of invisibility sigls, this is generally considered the ‘middle’ option:  better than diffraction, worse than active camouflage.  It produces less visual distortion than a diffraction sigl, but shares the same problem as gloom and diffraction sigls in that it blinds the wielder as well;  as such, transparency sigls are typically designed to exclude either infrared or ultraviolet light, with the aim of being paired with a vision sigl or other equipment allowing the wielder to see in that frequency.

Generally considered one of the hardest Matter sigls to shape due to how exacting the tolerances are.  If the sigl is not shaped correctly, it will make the wielder’s image misty or hazy instead of invisible.  The sigl also causes refraction, which can be a tell-tale to watchers – in theory a perfectly shaped transparency sigl could prevent this by making the refractive index exactly 1, but in practice most shapers find achieving this too difficult to be worth it.  The refraction is much more noticeable when the wielder is moving.

Like most Matter sigls, this produces a conducted effect rather than a field, spreading through the wielder and any clothes and equipment he’s wearing.  As such, there is no invisibility ‘bubble’ which can be expanded or contracted, which is both a negative and a positive – it means the sigl is unable to hide people or things that are nearby, but also prevents the sigl from accidentally affecting a chunk of whatever the wielder happens to be standing on.

Seethrough

Type:  Triggered
Direction:  Conducted
Appearance:  Pale to very pale pink, transparent
Rank:  C to C+

A weaker version of the Transparency sigl designed to work on small to medium objects at touch range.  As the name suggests, it’s intended to let a bearer look through solid objects, allowing him to see what’s on the other side of a wall or door, find out the contents of a locked container, study the internal components of a machine, etc.

Can be tricky to use since it doesn’t necessarily affect the exact parts of an object that you want it to.  For example, you might try to see through the casing of a machine to figure out which part of it is broken, only to discover that the sigl has made the broken part transparent too.  Figuring out how to reliably make this sigl affect ONLY the parts you want it to takes quite a bit of practice.

Commonly used by surveyors to study the interiors of buildings, by archaeologists to examine potential dig sites, and by technicians to diagnose mechanical problems without having to open up the machine in question.  Also used by various shady characters in order to find out what’s on the inside of locked rooms or safes, and as such is one of those sigls where possessing one without a good excuse may attract a certain amount of suspicion.  Finally, this sigl is popular among medical drucrafters due to how useful it is in diagnosis, though doctors that make a habit of doing this usually try to be sneaky about it – patients have been known to react very badly to seeing their own skin apparently disappear.

Iron Fist

Type:  Triggered
Direction:  Conducted
Appearance:  Opaque, dark red
Rank:  D to D+

Temporarily increases the hardness of a specific body part.  As the name suggests, this is typically the hand, but you do get versions designed to affect the foot, forearm, elbow, or knee.  This allows the wielder to hit a target far harder and more safely than they’d be able to do unaided, functioning as a sort of combination boxing glove and knuckleduster.

Bodies are not designed to be hard and rigid, and hardening any significant fraction of a body causes problems with blood flow.  To mitigate this, these sigls are typically designed to only affect a thin layer of skin and flesh on the outside of the body, creating a ‘shell’ of hard material around the vulnerable softer parts.  This doesn’t fully protect against impacts – the shock can still be transmitted to the bones and joints – but it’s a lot better than nothing.

Extended use of this sigl is not advised.  Even when specifically designed to affect as thin a layer as possible, the sigl causes blood to back up in the capillaries, eventually causing serious problems.  The warning sign of this is a tingling sensation, turning into a stinging one – unfortunately, since the sigl also numbs sensation, this warning sign is not always noticed.  As such, drucrafters are strongly advised not to use this sigl for more than a minute or so at a time, with an equal amount of time between uses to allow the affected body part to recover fully.

Can absolutely not be made continuous.  On the very rare occasions that continuous versions of this sigl have been tried, they’ve led to aneurisms and potentially lethal hematomas.

Sculpt

Type:  Triggered
Direction:  Conducted
Appearance:  Dark brown, opaque with faint bands/streaks
Rank:  C to A

Temporarily reduces the hardness of a small volume of matter.  The change is gradual, rather than sudden;  the more time spent channelling into the matter in question, the further its hardness can be reduced, up to a certain limit dependant on the sigl’s power.  When the sigl is deactivated, the change reverses itself over a similar length of time.

As the name suggests, the sigl is very popular among artists and artisans, allowing them to work with hard materials with a minimum of equipment – you can create pottery without a kiln, smithed metal without a forge, etc.  Note however that the sigl doesn’t duplicate the other effects of firing/forging, and quite a lot of artists/artisans view this sigl as something of an ‘easy mode’ that’s inferior to making something the normal way.

While the name suggests artwork, the sigl is used widely in other contexts.  It’s an effective (if clumsy) way to force open locks or sealed containers, and is very handy for making repairs – both quick rough fixes done in the field, and slower and more careful jobs done in a garage or workshop.  Factories who can afford it will often employ a Matter drucrafter whose job is to respond quickly when something goes wrong;  one skilled craftsman with a Sculpt sigl can usually fix a problem far quicker than any number of normal repairman.  In general, any job that requires breaking, bending, or reshaping things is much easier with this sigl around.

Like all tools, if misused, this sigl will cause more problems than it solves.  It’s important to note that while this sigl affects an object’s hardness, it does not affect plasticity/elasticity.  Most substances used in construction, such as rocks and metals, have high hardness (making them resistant to deformation) but low elasticity (meaning that if deformed, they don’t spring back to their original shape).  As such, it’s very easy for a user of this sigl to break things and then realise that they don’t have a good way to fix them.

Matter sigls work by temporarily altering one of the target’s physical properties.  Over the centuries, drucrafters have consistently found that one of the most useful properties to alter is mass.

Lightfoot

Type:  Triggered/Continuous
Direction:  Conducted (self)
Appearance:  Pale red, swirl pattern
Rank:  D to S

The Lightfoot sigl reduces the wearer’s effective mass by a fraction commensurate with the sigl’s strength.  D-class versions can reduce an adult man’s effective mass by around 20%;  for A-class, the figure is more like 90%, and this can be pushed even higher with A+ and S-class models (though in practice virtually no-one is willing to spend the resources it would take to make an S-class Lightfoot).

One of the most popular Matter sigls due to how widely useful it is.  It makes climbing and jumping vastly easier, and also reduces the impact of a fall.  You won’t get tired as fast while hiking or running (since you’ve got less weight to haul around), and it makes it almost impossible to drown – you’re so much lighter than water that you just bob around on the surface.  Of course, this comes with matching drawbacks – you can’t hit as hard, you can be pushed around easily, and at high levels you can literally be blown away by strong winds – but these can be mitigated by simply turning the sigl off when it’s not needed.

Can be made in either triggered or continuous forms.  The continuous version is generally more useful in challenging situations, but comes with an unusual drawback:  it makes the wielder’s life too easy.  An active Lightfoot sigl means that every movement or physical activity requires less effort from the wielder’s muscles.  If used day after day, this causes those muscles to degrade, similar to the effects of living in a low-gravity environment.  There have been cases of Lightfoot users becoming so dependent on their sigls that deactivating the sigl has resulted in a heart attack.

Lightfoot sigls are generally optimised for wielders of a specific weight.  The heavier the wielder, the larger a volume the sigl will have to affect and the more powerful it will need to be.

Stomp

Type:  Triggered
Direction:  Conducted (self)
Appearance:  Dark brown, swirl pattern
Rank:  D to S

The Stomp sigl is the mirror image of the Lightfoot sigl;  instead of decreasing the wielder’s effective mass, it increases it.  Generally less useful than its counterpart, since the situations where you’d want to be lighter greatly outnumber the ones where you’d want to be heavier.  Most people find the sensation of being heavier to be unpleasant, and prolonged use can place a great deal of stress on the wielder’s joints, especially their knees.  As a result, the sigl is far less popular than the Lightfoot.

There is, however, one situation where increased mass is very useful – when you want to hit someone.  As such, as its name suggests, the Stomp sigl is mainly used by drucrafters who expect to get into hand-to-hand fights.  By flipping the sigl on and off, a Stomp user can build up momentum at his natural weight, then activate the sigl to hit with far more force than he’d ever be able to do usually, and resist any attempts to push him around or trip him.  (Of course, if he does get tripped while the sigl’s active, it’s really going to hurt.)

The Stomp sigl is almost always shaped to be triggered and is virtually never made continuous, since no-one except for an astronaut or a real masochist would want to be heavier all the time.

Featherweight

Type:  Triggered
Direction:  Conducted
Appearance:  Pale red, swirl pattern
Rank:  D to S

A variation on the Lightfoot sigl designed to affect objects rather than the wielder.  Useful for carrying heavy loads or lifting large objects.

As with all Matter sigls, the change to the physical property fades rapidly (but not instantly) once the effect ceases, allowing for uses where the wielder throws an object which then reacquires its mass once it’s already in motion.  It also works perfectly well on people, though much more slowly – not much use if you want to move someone against their will, but very helpful for rescue situations where a responder needs to carry someone who’s hurt or unconscious.

Featherweight sigls see heavy use in the aerospace industry.  By reducing the effective mass of an airframe, an aircraft’s power-to-weight ratio can be dramatically altered, boosting its range and agility.  The sheer size of most aircraft acts as something of a limiter on this;  most Featherweight sigls are only capable of affecting ultralights and similarly small craft.  However, A- and S-rank Featherweight sigls can affect much larger targets, and the air forces of various nations use these sigls to enable aircraft to carry out a variety of interesting (and highly classified) missions.

Lighten

Type:  Continuous
Direction:  Conducted
Appearance:  Pale red, swirl pattern
Rank:  C to A

The continuous version of the Featherweight sigl, Lighten sigls are designed to interface with a specific object, usually something heavy that can be worn on the body.  The sigl reduces the object’s effective mass, allowing the wielder to carry it around much more easily.  The object that a Lighten sigl is intended to work with is generally purpose-built to be compatible with the sigl – the idea is to make it as idiot-proof and low-maintenance as possible.

Most commonly used by people expecting to operate with limited support in harsh or dangerous environments:  explorers, first responders, soldiers, etc.  Typical targets for this sigl are sets of body armour, heavy-duty backpacks, hand-held machinery, etc.  The cost of a Lighten sigl is usually many times greater than the equipment it affects, so it only makes sense to use this sigl in situations where you can’t just send along a second man to carry the equipment the normal way.

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.