A tad late, yes, but we hope to make it up to you with a death defying array.

This week we give you the Hope’s Fall Array

Notation: Float Human and apply the effect of Pulling Wood at a speed of 2 m/s to Human, both only if Humans are present.

Description: The Hope’s Fall may seem confusing at first (after all, why would you want to turn a human into a floating magnet for wood?), but the picture will become so much more clearer when you remember that there are not only ships on the water any more. No, since the advent of the Lightning rune and the runic batteries that followed, ships now fly through the air, even though they do make for quite cumbersome birds.

Airships provide a distinct challenge to sailing, and not for the reasons you may think. Yes, it is quite a feat to get a ship up into the air and keeping it there, but for once this is a occupational health and safety issue. You see, if someone falls overboard on a water-going ship, they fall into the water. Nice, safe, soft water. You fish them out, give them a shot of rum and they are back on the job. However, when someone falls overboard on an airship, no amount of rum will help them.

When the umpteenth sailor met their grizzly end going at terminal velocity, the airship companies decided enough was enough and something had to be done about it. What they ended up with, after much deliberation and dubious testing, was the Hope’s Fall array. This was to be carved and painted onto the outside of all airship hulls in order to stop the onslaught of accidental parachute-less parachuteers. The airship hulls are made of wood, and so when a human passes by this array, it would stop the effect of gravity on that person and turn them into a wood magnet, causing them to float towards the airship. If they are falling too quickly, there are more than enough of these arrays on the ships’ hulls to slow their descent.

The Hope’s Fall array can also be used for more malevolent purposes as well. The footmen in the dark alleys of Middelburg have often found use for making someone fly into a wall or straight into an ambush without their knowledge or consent. You can simply replace the Wood rune for Stone or Iron or anything really and this array suddenly becomes a person-mover array for you to use.

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