“Is the fugitive in sight?” you hear an officer’s walkie squak as you book it for the transport room. You slide in, slamming the door shut behind you, hearing the tell tale smacking sound emanating from it a second later. In front of you sits a mess of doorways and maps. A friend told you that the portals were finally safe to use, though you didn’t think there would be this many to choose from. “Get out of there!” Roars an officer as the door shakes with a loud bang. You rush to the large map, tracing the numbers to the location your friend told you to go, and step through the corresponding portal, hoping for the best.
The final method of teleportation that I will discuss. Portals. A doorway, gate, or other entrance, especially a large and imposing one, so saith google. Technically, your front door is a portal to your house, and a gate can be a portal to the outside or to the manor grounds. We don’t typically use the word for these, though in a literary sense the word refers more to a window, a way to look through to something else.
We are going to play with this concept from the sci-fi/fantasy viewpoint, where a portal takes you from one destination to another without crossing the space between. We do need some boundaries, and the video game Portal is a very good standard for what our rules should be. In the game, the main character holds a portal gun, capable of shooting a portal onto any white surface. When the player passes through, they maintain their motion and speed. This is a more scientific version of portals. In the television series Once Upon a Time, portals were created by magic beans. These portals took you to different worlds. (The show’s lore gets super complex, but it is a good show that I recommend.) The general effect seen of characters passing through is the same as in Portal to some extent. For this game, I’ll refer to portals in a general sense, regardless of how they were created.
I’m splitting this into two sections, one where portals already exist (similar to the intro) and one where you can create portals such as in the game Portal.
~ Preexisting Portals ~
In this scenario, every portal that will ever exist already exists. They claim lives as people wander into them by mistake, getting lost or destroyed on the other side. Unlike fantasy teleportation and matter relocation, it takes the action of stepping through the portal for the teleportation to work. With this action comes two additional questions.
- What if the portal closes before you reach the other side?
- What if you stop within the portal?
For the first question, imagine a motion detector door at most grocery stores. If you stay still in the doorway, it will begin to close on you. Obviously, we humans are typically stronger and smarter than the door. We’ll either stop the door, or move to reopen it. But, if the door were strong enough, it could crush you. The portal then could do the same if for some reason it shut down.
The second question only exists if the following is true: there is a small space within the portal to stop in. For this hypothetical, there isn’t, thus making this question meaningless to our game. But, for the sake of mentioning it, stopping could cause confusion and potentially getting you lost (forever).
In a world with portals everywhere, travelling through natural space could become more difficult. It would take one wrong step to pass through a portal, throwing you into another location. Luckily, you could just go back through the portal. The issues would only come if the portal let out over a volcano, or in the sky, or under the ocean… You get my point. If the portal let out in a dangerous situation, it may be impossible to get back through the portal.
Once scientists of this world get everything under control, portals would become mazes, mapped out but still confusing. We have maps and gps in our time for normal space and we still get lost. Imagine trying to figure out which of the hundreds of portals lead to the right location.
Patrick forgot to mention a crucial rule to today’s game. You cannot see through the portal under most circumstances.
~ Keeper
~ Portals that You Place ~
You have found a portal gun. While it may seem very cool at first, in comparison with the other methods, the portal gun is a very weak version of teleportation. You can only teleport to a place you were able to reach or see already, and the position is fixed, meaning you have to plan your teleports ahead. It would be more of a localized tool than a true ability or power, regardless of whether you need to have the gun or if you can just shoot portals from your hands.
The three things I’d do with a portal gun would be as follows:
- Get home quickly
- Get to out of reach locations
- Mess with friends
For the first, I’d set a portal at home, most likely in my room or in a closet so no one sees it. Then, whenever I decide I need to stop at home, I can set the other portal and go through, get what I need, and come back. I’d hate to accidentally shoot the wrong portal though (like I’ve raged over many times in Portal and Portal 2). That would dampen my mood dramatically.
For the second, it’s merely the simple use of the portal gun as a tool. Messing with friends on the other hand… I’d never send a friend through a portal for fear they’d get hurt, but I would place portals behind them and throw stuff through at them. Or jump through and spook them. All in good fun.
Do you think that portal guns would be produced as high level tools? Maybe to the point where they would be regulated and delegated to specific people for specific uses? That would be an interesting twist. Perhaps you got one by mistake, and now you must conceal the fact that you had it. (Maybe that’s why you’re a fugitive in the intro.)
~ Ranking ~
Now is the time I share with you my ranking of the four teleportation methods.
- Fantasy Teleportation
- Temporal Translocation
- Portals
- Matter Relocation
Here’s my reasoning for each. Fantasy teleportation is basically unrestrained. As long as you can control it before it controls you and you visit the places you want to teleport, your power is unlimited. Temporal Translocation, while not always possible or safe depending on the situation, is the most entertaining in my eyes. Walking around a frozen world seems like fun. Portals are third because of their limited range and use, as well as their stationary positions. Matter relocation is last due to the fact that it requires technology at both or one end, and is constrained to those specific locations.
I have a slightly different rating. Temporal relocation, because you don’t have to have been to the location you want to go, then Matter Relocation because they are powerful and safe at the same time. Third would be Fantasy Teleportation because it is powerful but very unsafe. Last would be portals, mainly because of their limitations.
~ Traveler
How would you rate the methods? What would you use a portal gun for? How often would you utilize portals?
This is the last part of this series. I’ll move onto another one in the next couple of posts. Leave suggestions in the comments with #THG and I’ll see what I can do.
Thanks for playing!
The Hypothetical Game 