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.
Would a transparency sigl have a regulator, to spread the effect evenly through the body? You don’t want one part more visible than others. Or do only life sigls have regulators? Maybe Stephen could have used haywire against Vermillion. 😉
They do have regulators, but it doesn’t matter so much, since all the sigl does is set transparency to 100% – you can’t really make it more transparent than that.
Stephen’s haywire sigl would have done something, but a counter to invisibility that requires you to hold a beam on a target isn’t all that useful.
Is Stephen’s haywire a common sigl or something he invented?
It seems really powerful if it can counter every sigl do higher class sigls have defenses against it or do they need a specific sigl to act against it?
It’s one he invented.
I’m not sure why you think it would counter every sigl. It only does anything against ones that need a regulator (most don’t). In most situations it’s useless.
Doh! I overlooked the regulator part that the the matter sigl Vermillion had and thought somehow the haywire sigl could affect other sigls without them hence my confusion!
And I am guessing that they only overlap with regulators because Matter and Life both affect the body directly/more so than the other affinities?
Although in my defense I am sure Steven will eventually find a way to haywire other sigls once he learns more and gets access to better sigls.
(reply to Kevin) Regulators are used in sigls that affect the wielder’s body (or a patient’s body), so yes, they’re mainly used with Life sigls. A few sigls from other branches use them, but not many.
The regulator in the Strength sigls used by the House Ashford armsmen has a vulnerability that Stephen has discovered and he has made a (Primal?) sigl to exploit this, making wearing the strength sigl a liability.
Can sigls, once made, be modified (for example) to ‘fix’ the regulator fault? Also I’m assuming that the regulators in other sigls that need to spread the effect throughout the body (transparency, weight-reduction) can also be caused to fail (although with less disastrous results).
I don’t think, at the moment, that anyone else knows what Stephen is doing (although some may guess) and even those wouldn’t know exactly what his method is. I just hope that it doesn’t occur to them that a simple method of eliminating the risk is to eliminate Stephen!
It would be possible to redesign those sigls in such a way that Stephen’s haywire sigl wouldn’t work on them, yes. But it’s questionable how many people would consider it worth spending the resources to do that just to defend against an obscure attack that practically nobody uses.
Stephen’s haywire sigl is the equivalent of someone in the modern world attacking you with a crossbow. It’s not that it doesn’t work (it does) but it’s really not the kind of attack that anybody is going to expect.
That seems like a huge blindspot, that the Houses/corporations have especially seeing the effectiveness of the haywire sigl and the widespread use of life sigls regulators. They seem rather expensive to create/use and to have them be taken out by a sigl that can cost next to nothing (relatively in Drucraft terms) indicates flawed thinking. It’s like seeing cheap drones take out expensive tanks except it’s in theory easier to prevent the primal sigl with Drucraft which indicates to me bureaucratic inertia/arrogance going on.
Is this something we will see more as the series goes on the Houses/corporations not adapting to the times? It almost seems like the stage is set for a Drucraft revolution/spiritual awakening since all Drucraft is used for power and wealth for the elites and not something more like Stephen senses it could be used for but maybe I am too idealistic?
I think you’re seriously overestimating how powerful Stephen’s haywire sigl is. It’s only really effective against exactly one type of sigl (strength enhancers) which less than 0.1% of people even have, and even then it can be easily countered simply by turning the sigl in question off. No-one’s going to start a revolution with a tool that’s useless > 99.9% of the time.
Huh I thought the strength enhancers were quite common for the Houses and corporations to have their Armsman to use? He used it on Mark and that Russian Armsman during the raid in Book 2 so I assumed they were quite widespread?
And to clarify it’s not the specific effect of what the haywire sigl does but the potential of an anti sigl long range weapon that Stephen could later develop to affect other Drucraft sigls. I mean if he could find out a way with his essentia vision to take out Active Camouflage sigls that would be a game changer.
Perhaps that is why the Winged and Byron want him in their ranks so badly because of his potential to create new sigls no one else have thought of?
The Russian guy was using a reflex enhancer, not a strength enhancer. That was why Stephen’s sigl did something, but didn’t work as well.
Strength enhancers are quite common for House armsmen, but that’s only a tiny, tiny proportion of the population, and even then most of them don’t have one. Stephen’s just happened to run into ones that do (which is why he went to the trouble of creating a counter for them).
Interesting… I always wondered why Diesel and Scar got those high class sigls or for that matter was even associated with House Ashford, who are many things but hiring incompetent armsman isn’t one of them.
That being said I am sure if Charles ever discovered that Stephen used the haywire sigl on his armsman he would make sure there would be a counter/fix to it. I wonder if he would be impressed with Stephen albeit begrudgingly that he found a workaround to take out a powerful sigl?
Last question, I after doing a reread of scenes in Book 1 and 2 and I saw that Calhoun apparently used a reflex enhancer to move fast when I thought he was using a Motion Sigl like Lucella did when she ran from the raid. Was there a specific reason he used a Life Reflex enhancer over his strong Motion affinity to move quickly?
Thanks for doing these sigl articles by the way it’s been wonderful seeing these descriptions and finding out how they were used/who used them in the series!