Even though we did give you something amazing for Magic Mondays this week, we do still owe you an array!
This Week we give you Bür’s Grace.
Notation: Create a Large Containment field that excludes Humans if Humans are present within a tenth of the array.
Description: Named after the legendary figure who gave humanity the runes and arrays, this array is the last mercy that many criminals will be given in this life. That is because this array is the preferred method of execution in most of the world of the Runed Age.
It is called merciful because it results in an instantaneous death and thus by all accounts painless. It takes an especially heinous crime or a particularly sadistic ruler to inflict any other method of execution. The traditional method of execution for traitors to the state is beheading followed by the head being kept alive with the arrays for a minimum of an hour. Similarly, the mad king Markus VI ordered that all executions be performed by burning the convicted alive.
The reason why this array is so merciful in comparison is because how it is set up. If you exclude anything within a containment field, that object is instantly disintegrated into nothingness. However, once that containment field has been set up, the object it is excluding cannot enter it. This is how defensive arrays work. So the trick is the have the target inside the array before setting up the containment field.
That is where the If-Then statement comes in. Only once a human has reached the centre of the array (a tenth of the array’s size across) does the array activate. The containment field of the Bür’s Grace array is also large enough that, once in the centre, it will take care of any human of any size and shape.
It may be a morbid array, but the in harsh world of the Runed Age, you take any small mercies that you can.
If you want to know how If-Then statements in array’s work (or how to create arrays in general) check out our video series on YouTube. Our most recent video covered If-Then statements.