Finally getting around to answering this one two weeks late:

Dear Dan or whoever may know

How do the portals to Thalonyka work? Ah, well make that two questions:

– How do they work “sciencemagically”? (or however you would call that)

– and how do they work in the sense of where can you go to with one: can you only go from Gaia to Thalonyka – and only to the same place or can you go from Gaia to any place in Thalonyka – or can you go from Thalonyka to any place in Gaia – or can you use them also to go from one place in Thalonyka to another? or is it you have to go to Gaia and then go to that other place in Thalonyka? Can you also go from one place in Gaia to another? etc… (I hope that makes sense?)

Well, I especially mean for you and your family (and humans that have access to Thalonyka) – but it would be interesting if others can also use the portals (without the help of humans) – what about Dragons?

Thank you

mjkj

The Dragon Lord replies:

I think the word you’re looking for is technomagical and when it comes to the other world I’m not sure it’s the right word. However that world does have a firm underpinning of consistent laws, but we’re still studying them and – despite the superficial similarities – it works nothing like our Earth.

We do know certain things though:

Firstly, there are permanent or at least semi-permanent portals that exist. These tend to exist at points of liminality like thresholds, the surfaces of pools, or cave entrances. Almost all of these entrances are one way and open inconsistently. Whatever force creates them – I thought it was the Core but now I’m not so sure – can make then at any liminal point. That seems to be how we ended up with one in the attic.

These gates go to one point and one point only. Where you have a cave or a lake with a reputation of being a dragon’s lair or an entrance to faerie it’s often a liminal gate.

Doctor Sarah Tyler interrupts:

And these sorts of liminal gates map consistently. That is not only do they always open to the same place, but if two gates are five miles apart on Earth they’ll be five miles apart in the other world as well.  Of course some liminal gates don’t lead to that world, which along with other suggestive evidence leads us to hypothesise that there are other worlds out there as well. We can’t say for sure because people who slip into then are never seen again, but we do know they have no exit in that place. Since the alternative is they are dropping people into the void we prefer not to think about that possibility.

The Dragon Lord nods and continues:

The second way of opening a gate to the other world is harder but more useful. A creature, be they human, speaker or dragon, of sufficient power can theoretically open a gate between any point on Earth and any point in the other world. Of course there are limitations. The most obvious is that while you can always open a gate to the eqivalent point in the other world as mapped by the liminal gates you can only open it to a different point if you know it well enough.

This is fortunate because it makes the points that dragons tend to break through at easily mappable and thus easily watched.

This means that, yes, you can use either world as a short cut in the other, as long as you know where you are going. That’s the difficult bit.

Oh and you can’t actually gate within a world, but you can certainly teleport if that’s one of your abilities. Though again you really need to know where you are going.

(author’s note: darn, I hope that made sense. It is rather complicated.)