LL :: Volume 45 :: LR

The field can have a retarding effect on air currents. This creates a two-inch-thick layer of air, retained against the ground. The air becomes unusually cold due to ground conduction, which keeps it even more firmly contained.

When a water droplet falls into this layer, it cools rapidly -- it can in fact become supercooled. It is then shunted aside, off the road, where it can easily hit -- and thus freeze upon -- a curb, post, or building-edge. Over the course of an ice storm, this can produce a thin layer of ice, hovering two inches above the ground, which spreads out into the road until the entire surface is covered.

In most cases this layer cannot support its own weight, and "crashes out", leaving simply an icy road. But if the deflection field gets confused about the position of the road surface -- which this continuous icy sheet may do -- it can develop unstable spots. These melt the ice sheet at regular intervals (a hexagonal node grid), causing tiny stalactites, which descend to the roadway and thus support the sheet...

(The Ornae Street effect, in which up to five of these ice layers were seen stacked at two-inch intervals, was apparently caused by a very confused deflection field.)

Hair remains frozen, pending investigation into allegations of fraud.

Thermaze: The walls are invisible planes of heat-inducing field, about an inch thick. The core field controls to several degrees over human body temperature, so it's quite uncomfortable to walk through. (Of course it's limited to not penetrate solid objects, so it won't harm you unless you fall asleep in it.) And the fringes of the field extend out from the walls themselves to the center of each corridor, fading in strength, so that you can navigate by feel -- heat seems to radiate from the walls when you get close to them.

Lightmaze: You wear goggles or a horus. When you're near a wall, the world dims. Translucent and greyish, like fog. If you walk into a wall, everything goes black. There's no directionality -- you can't see which way the wall is, you can only move around and try to keep the air clear.

Windmaze: The maze tracks your position, and gas-only impeller fields blow air out from the walls nearest you. When you feel wind blasting in your face, you're trying to walk through a wall. (Or invert the setting, so that you're always walking into the wind! Very pleasant in autumn; but intersections are confusing.)

The concept is really the same as those twenty-foot-long "flowing scarves" that were popular a few years ago, but the mood is quite different. Hats, after all.