The Ruined City adventure out in two days, we thought we’d help you prepare for what is to come with the only array that will save your life 100% of the time.
This week we give the Vanity’s Tomb array.
Notation: Stop Time, excluding Light, in a Domed area 100 times the array’s size and apply to this the effect of 1 lumen of Light Created per square metre.
Description: No other defensive array has a 100% success rate. No other defensive array can save you every single time. That is a title and award only the Vanity’s Tomb can claim. However, saying that this array “saves your life” is perhaps only correct in the technical sense. Should you ever use this array you will never (well, almost never) be able to do anything else. That is because this array stops time. It is intended to be an array of last resort, to be used only when you are sure you are going to die.
The Vanity’s Tomb is normally inscribed upon a small disk 10 cm in diameter so that the effect is 10 metres across. If you think you are about to die, simply touch stone to disk and you will be saved from death, only to be frozen. But they say it’s better to be trapped in a type of suspended animation for who knows how many decades or centuries with the slim hope that someone in the future will be able to save you, than to be killed.
There’s a few interesting features about the Vanity’s Tomb than simply stopping time. The first is that it stops time for everything, except light. This is very important, because if it didn’t exclude light from this effect (and thus light was stopped along with everything else) all you would see from the outside the effect is a black dome, since if light can’t move, it can’t enter our eyes and we can’t see where it came from. So if you ever want someone to find your unliving statue and hopefully make preparations for your now-quite-predictable-future, you want light to be able freely move throughout the array’s effect.
Other than the trigger for the array (which is fairly standard in order to save up enough energy to freeze all matter within 10 metres for decades if not centuries) the second interesting feature about this array is that is meant to glow. Unlike the ability to allow light to pass through the time frozen dome, this feature is for the good of others, not the one stuck inside. If you chose to freeze yourself for the foreseeable future, you don’t want some poor innocent bystander to walk past and unknowingly get a hand or foot stuck in the time-field and then be glued to your dome for the rest of their life, now do you? That is why this dome glows ever so softly and gently, to warn others not to come closer.