This week for Magic Mondays we bring you something intricate, complex and hopefully as useful as it is pretty.

This week we bring you the Riptide Array

Notation: Float (within an area starting from ten times the array’s diameter to one hundred and ninety times the array’s diameter) Human and Push (within an area starting from ten times the array’s diameter to one hundred times the array’s diameter) Human at a speed of four metres per second, both only if a Human is within the boundary of the array.

Description: The notation is certainly a mouthful, but that is because it has to work around an inherent limitation of the rules of the runic arrays, namely that you can’t affect and not affect a target at the same time. You can’t say Push Human and Don’t Push Human. The arrays simply don’t work like that. What you can do, however, is limit the space in which the effects work and that is precisely what this array does.

In the simplest of terms, if you take away all the added bits and bobs in this array, the Riptide Floats and Pushes Humans. However, if you want to use this against your enemies in those simple terms, you will be floating and pushing yourself as well, and that defeats the purpose. What you have to do is find a way of having the arrays exclude you from this effect without Excluding you from this effect.

That is what this array does. Visualise the size and shape runes in this array as creating a containment field in the shape of a giant doughnut. Inside this doughnut, humans will be pushed and floated, but in the hole in the centre of the doughnut, humans won’t be. It is the Shell rune which is creating this doughnut by creating a wall at the edge of the containment field. The nine size runes modifying it stretches the thickness of that wall.

Imagine you have this array inscribed on a disk ten centimetres in diameter. That means the invisible doughnut containment field will start at one meter out from the array and go on until it hits the edge of the containment field ten metres out. That one metre diameter circle in the centre, which you should be standing on to activate the array, will be untouched by the effects. Everyone else inside that doughnut will be lifted up and flung outside it, and if they try and get back in all this will only happen again.

Safe to say the Riptide is a good array to use in combat when you are surrounded by enemies. It will give you a bit of breathing room and a few seconds of stunned enemies in which to clear your mind and get back in the fight.

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