“So where is everybody anyway?” I asked Sophia, after we finished up all of our various…activities. They’d ended up going on so long that by the time we were finished, it was morning again. I’d be staying up for the rest of the day in order to fix my sleep schedule, which I’m sure Mira will be sure to yell at me about. I’ll have to figure out a way to appease her, as well as reward her for basically resolving the whole Elemental deal by herself.
“The gnome is still with his adoptive parents, and is currently teaching them the concept of vectors, specifically how to calculate their changes. Meanwhile Ash…Has been completely absorbed for the past few days with her new hobby. I thought your enchanting was bad enough, but at least you manage to control yourself enough to put it down occasionally and not completely ignore everyone around you.”
I nodded, and sent out a message in the group channel to let Duke know that I’d be there soon. I then grabbed my clothes from the closet, and put them on while chatting with Sophia about our respective plans for the day. Once I was dressed, I made my way out of the house, and off towards the separate Corridor that I’d set up inside of the subspace.
About a year ago, I had a certain thought. When I made that Informational Battery that I had planned to use in the Capital, I had used the image of a book to represent Knowledge and Memory. And while yes, that does seem to be an obvious line to draw, I couldn’t help but be curious about something. In Mirage, I use books as a means of storing memories, whether my own, or my kids. I had to wonder…did developing that technique in any way affect the enchantment that I’d made? Could I develop technology in Mirage that accomplishes a certain task, and then use that technology to create an enchantment that causes the same effect?
The technology that I had tested this idea with are Doors. Basically, in our home in Mirage, the cave that houses each individual room technically isn’t connected to each other. Rather than one cohesive system of caverns, it’s more like…caves that are all sporadically placed in various parts of the same mountain. However, I connected all of these separate caves by making special doors that basically function as a mini-portal. Basically, I create one extremely large double door, then split it in half, and put one half in the hallway connected to my Living Room, and the other half connected to the room that I’m trying to go to. Then, when I walk through the half of the door that’s in the hallway, it connects to the door that I’ve placed in the room where I’m trying to go, creating the illusion that our home is inside of one singular cave system.
What I had attempted at first was purely an enchantment where I engraved a door into a stick, then engraved another door on a connected stick, then tried to use the two as a portal and warp from one to the other. However, this didn’t work. After several tries, when I was on the verge of giving up, I realized what I was doing wrong. With the doors in Mirage, I make one door then split it into two. This is what assists me in the visualization that the two doors are actually one and the same, and by walking through one, I also walk through the other. What I needed to do to make the enchantment work was the same thing.
The way I got it to work was by taking a stick, then engraving a large door, with handles on either side of it, then splitting the stick itself, thereby splitting the enchanted door in half as well. Now, whenever I run my mana through one, it opens up a gate in front of me that connects to the stick that it pairs with.
This is still in the experimental stages. After all, I’m obviously confident in its ability to transport from the subspace to any point on Earth or Hell, given that I’ve had Sophia take some of the other halves over to where she’s staying in Veronica’s place and test them out. Out of curiosity, I gave it my best shot to try to use the Door Enchantment to see if I could go to Hell, but…while the gate opens up correctly, I can’t manage to get through it. It’s almost like…there’s a kind of film…or veil? The best way that I can describe the sensation is like a ghost took a bunch of completely invisible and indestructible saran wrap, and covered up the gate with it. It’s cool and flexible, and you can’t really see it, but it prevents me from just walking through to a world that I’m not supposed to be on.
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Sophia called it ‘the protective veil’ that all worlds have, and while there are ways to kind of cheat your way around it, kinda like how Sophia sent a representation of herself to my original world when we met, it’s impossible for someone to completely pass through it without adjusting their Existence to the same ‘frequency’, if you will. I’m not quite certain that I fully believe that explanation though.
After all, if it was truly a case of incompatible states of Existence, wouldn’t it be a lot more solid? The Veil that prevents me from passing through the portal has a remarkable amount of give to it, but if there was no real ‘Veil’, and it was just the fact that the ‘Frequency’ at which things exist there is incompatible with me, then wouldn’t it feel more like a solid wall barring my entry?
It genuinely does feel more like a Veil of some kind, one that requires a certain ‘Password’ in order to get through, and because I don’t have that password, it stays lowered. If we assume this to be correct, then that just spawns a few new questions from me. What is the Veil? What is it made of? Why does it exist?
Whenever Sophia inspected the Veil surrounding either of the two Earths, she had hypothesized that it existed as some kind of defense mechanism from the planet, a way to keep someone as overpowered as her from coming in and destroying everything. However… if that is in fact the case, then why would it work both ways? Why would it prevent people from Earth from going over to Hell? Even the strongest human here wouldn’t really be able to do anything to truly affect life on Hell, and much less the world itself. Is the Veil something that naturally forms between dimensions? Or is it something that was intentionally placed there by whatever Gods created these worlds?
So many questions, and no real way to answer them. Sophia has a lot of practical experience in the realm of interacting with the Veil, but absolutely 0 theoretical knowledge about it. She’s kind of like one of those musicians who have never picked up a book of sheet music in their life, or undergone any sort of actual education in the use of their instrument, and instead just happened to pick up a guitar one day and played around with it for a long time until they figured out how to make it sound really good. So while she could absolutely manipulate her way around its existence, she can’t really teach anyone else how to, because she doesn’t really fully understand how she does the things she does.
Not that that’s necessarily a problem. After all, as far as I’m aware, the Veil only comes into play whenever you’re trying to cross dimensions, either from my old world to my new one, or from here to either Hell or Heaven. Traveling to the moon and back, on the other hand, while extremely far away, are all within the same dimension, so the Veil won’t really cause us any issues, hence, for the purposes of the doors that I already have planned, this design should be perfectly fine, assuming that there isn’t a problem with the range of the enchantment, which is one of the things that I’ll be testing out during my own trip to the moon.
The other potential issue that I’m facing with this enchantment has to do with the creation process itself. Specifically, the step involving splitting the base in half to separate the two parts of the ‘Door’. This step works extremely well currently, while I’m still using sticks, but what about when I start using a slightly more difficult material to work with? Specifically, my Dreamsilk. Yes, the division itself won’t be all that difficult, as my Spider enchantment on my hoodie allows me a certain level of innate control over the cloth that I create, however, that still leaves me with two new fraying edges that I have to somehow take care of. Can I simply fold and stitch those fraying edges, the same way that I do when I make clothes? Or will that generate its own problems, as I’m essentially rolling up and pinching shut the ‘connection’ between the two halves of the ‘Door’?
It would be easy enough to ignore this issue, and only use materials for the enchantment that are easily divisible, however…half of the Door is going to literally be in outer space. Subjected to the full and unprotected radiation emitted by the Sun, and potentially at risk of being struck by debris. I could put the stick inside of the Vessel that I plan on flying to the moon, however, the inside of the Vessel doesn’t actually have a means of accessing the outside. I’ve made it completely airtight, in order to protect the structural components of the vessel in question after all, so if I ended up teleporting inside of the Vessel, I’d end up getting trapped there, and would end up needing to use space magic to get outside. And while this act would be simple enough, I would rather not have to waste mana with an unnecessary extra teleportation, and would prefer to have the gate open up directly on the outside of the Vessel, and simply make the enchantment out of Dreamsilk.
However, it is somewhat comforting to know that I have a backup plan in place should my attempts at integrating my Door enchantment directly into the Dreamsilk coating the Vessel end in failure. All in all, the issues that I’m currently facing specifically with regards to the teleportation to the moon and back are a potential range limit that I’m unaware of, and an untested potential material issue for the enchantment itself, but all in all, I’m mostly set on that part of the journey, and can focus my attention on the parts that I’m significantly more worried about. Namely: The Vessel and the Spacesuits.