Driftway

A Driftway is a fast lift for any number of floors in one shaft: from the cellar to the tower, a hundred blocks in two seconds, with no ladders and no fall damage. Set a Driftway Landing into the floor of each story — one above another in one column — and leave the shaft between them open: Drift will flow along it.

Stand on a Landing. Jump — the next floor up; sneak — the next floor down. Use the Landing with an empty hand and a sheet of all the floors of the shaft opens: click a floor to ride straight there, passing through the other Landings. Drift sets you down facing the Landing's exit — the side it was placed from. A name tag names the floor; a Landing renamed on an anvil goes down already named.

Drift takes the flux of the ground under the Landing: one for a ride and one more for every 64 blocks of the way; when the ground is dry, the Driftway stands still. The shaft is one column: a block with a shape in it splits the shaft in two, lava and fire close the way, and you cannot stand on a Landing with less than two empty blocks above it. A lone Landing does not glow — you can see it has no pair. Everyone rides at once, each where they chose.

River towns had a steep road from the landing up to the town: goods were hauled up it from the barges. A fluxionist's Driftway goes straight up, and Drift itself does the hauling — Gale and Tide at once, a wind that flows like water. A Landing is a slab of deepslate with an opal eye in a bronze ring: Drift flows through the eye, and to the one riding, the slab is not a floor but a veil.