There are three types of portals in Elgana; portal stations, edge portal, and rogue portals. But before we get into types, let me tell you some common features of the portals.

Common Features of Portals

Magick Soup

Portals are made out of various kinds magick. It’s like magick soup. This magick is known to magical creatures such as Native Elganians and the first generation of the Sorcerer race. Today, a lot of this magick is forbidden by law, however, some are privy to the information for maintenance.

Ugly Portal

Portals are not pretty. If you think about a portal, you might imagine something pretty and sparkly, but the portals of Elgana won’t meet your high expectations. Portals are made out of various kinds of magick, and so, that makes them look rather ugly.

Two-Sided

Portals are created with a end location in mind (destination), and anchored to the starting point (anchor). So, essentially, you can say one portal has two sides like a coin. A portal won’t work unless it has two sides. A portal for fast travel essentially is spitting you out from the destination so that the anchor can catch you.

Distorts Space and Time

Portals distort space and time in the location they exist. The further away you are, the less distortion there is.

Space distortion happens because of the nature of the magick used in portals. A portal must take something from the current location and shift its location, and so, roads and walls in the surrounding city go through shifts during certain times. Citizens have found a way to calculate the shifts and create maps that reflect the shifts. There might be a 10am map and a 12pm map, for example.

Time distortion is close to an illusion. Citizens will see the sun setting faster than normal, but if you look in from the outside, nothing unusual is going on in the cosmos.

Overall, doesn’t sound like a great place to live, but citizens in those areas make it work. I suppose their bodies because easily adaptable to time and space shifts. They probably wouldn’t experience jetlag if that was a thing on Elgana.

Portals Hum

Yes, they make noise. It’s basically the sound of powerful magicks crashing and bumping into each other in the magick soup. It’s a soft, low vibration that can sound like humming or white noise.

Portal Creation is Illegal Today

No one can create portals in Modern Elgana. The reason is that the magicks used to make it are illegal today. They’ve been deemed as overpowering and since banned.

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Types of Portals

Now that we’ve gone through the common features of portals, let me tell you about the three types of portals that exist in Elgana.

Edge Portal

The Edge Portal was the first portal to ever have been created. Before that, citizens had minimal contact with each other unless they traveled through space. The Edge Portal connects torus planet 4 with torus planet 6, skipping the torus plane 5 (the jail).

The Edge Portal is the most ancient in terms of portals of the rings. A lot of the magick used is forbidden by law today. Only the Sorcerer representative of the High Collection is privy to the information on what magick to use for maintenance such as upgrades or fixing any issues.

Torus planet 6 is only habitable for Ilvagis. There are constant volcanic eruptions, lava rivers, it’s excruciatingly hot, and the natural toxins in the air could kill you in a matter of minutes. Even if you are able to get passed the High Collection police, you would not want to be propelled into the torus planet 6 by mistake.

Portal Stations

Each portal station is humongous, as you can see with my very old mock-up of a portal station. Look at the ugly magick soup. It’s gray, yellow, greenish, and like you mixed all the wrong things together. Despite the color and the ominousness of a portal station, these are quite safe to travel through. If you’re a magical creature, you might feel a tingling feeling on your arms which the strong magick tickling you.

The destination and anchor connections are continuous throughout the portal stations so that you don’t end up getting spat out into breathable space or feel the tug of the destination. So, you won’t feel sick and it would feel as if you’re walking into a strange room to get to another torus planet.

Like any station, portal stations have opening and closing times. Those are regulated by security guards who are authorized to open and close the doors. The portals themselves will stay open forever but the doors to the portals will close at certain times.

Rogue Portals

Definition of “rogue”: “behaving in ways that are not expected or not normal, often in a way that causes damage” (Cambridge Dictionary: rogue)

Rogue portals are not made in the conventional way often disregarding safety, there is no telling where you will end up if you travel through one, they are never found in convenient places, and they cause damage to the surrounding environment and distort time greatly, and possibly could harm you if you travel through one.

The creators are Sorcerers. Often Human Sorcerers because they think they can do whatever they want. Human Sorcerers often forget that Sorcerer laws do exist. They usually make rogue portals to try to get to locations away from the public eye and to be sneaky, and so often these portals are small, hidden, and invisible. Makers of rogue portals usually abandon portals they don’t want to use anymore, so in some places, there’s a high density of rogue portals and the location might even be off limits to citizens to keep them safe.

Rogue portals aren’t stabilized so they tend to make you sick when you go through them, and there’s a possibility you might not end up in the same place every time. Maybe a greedy Sorcerer tried to make a portal have multiple destinations in odd locations. Rogue portals can spit you out into breathable space and the destination side could snatch you back into a torus planet if the connection is strong enough, or leave you stranded.