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Ok, so I just read Dawnshard (because I didn't realize it existed until last week) and my engineer brain has been percolating ideas for how to improve Rysn's mobility, and make her more self-sufficient. Here's an idea I've come up with. Take her chair, and affix a freely rotating crank approximately 7 inches in radius to the side of it at a height which makes reaching both the top and bottom edge of it comfortable for her. The handle of the crank will be about 6 inches out from the center, and will be -- for lack of a better term yet -- a spanreed. (We'll probably want to make this spanreed more like a belaying pin in size and shape, in reality.) Put another of these spanreed-belaying pins on a similar crank in Rysn's cabin. This crank is on an axle, but is rigidly affixed to a small diameter gear. The small diameter gear is meshed with a larger diameter gear (ratio TBD for Rysn's convenience) which is, in turn, rigidly affixed to a capstan. The capstan has a line which runs vertically, with a very small weight on the end (for stability) and a number of conjoined gemstones that match the ones in her chair. The weight and gemstone plumbob should be constrained in a tube. Yes, the selective dissociation of forces means she won't move side to side if the bob swings around, but she would bob up and down as the cosine of the arc it describes. Give the crank on Rysn's chair a setting brake so she doesn't have to worry about inadvertent vertical motion, and using the power of gear ratios and conjoined gemstones, she can crank herself both up and down. If the tube is the same height as the ship, she could go all the way from the hold to the top deck under her own power. It might even make sense to run this device from the top of the Eelsnest. It should be noted that we're not using the "opposed motion" principles of Navani's archery platform. The gemstones in Rysn's chair and on the capstan line move in the same direction, not opposite. So she's not using a counterweight to lift her, she's doing it herself with her own muscle power. -Hephaestus