A Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft #26: Matter Sigls (I)

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.