Worldbuilding Wednesday #11: Teleportation

Teleportation is the most common of the complex magicks, used as the primary means of transportation for most people.

There are many different forms of teleportation, but they all follow the same general concept. First, a destination is designated, either by choosing a predetermined signal or by transmitting a signal to the desired location. A pocket of magical space disconnected from physical space is created between those two locations, and the user or cargo passes through it. Sometimes the magical space is a tube connecting two locations, and sometimes it's a bubble passing between them.

The method most widely available to non-specialists is the Teleportal system that connects throughout and between major cities, which operates via linked gates that open up at set times, usually at increments of every quarter or half hour. It takes a lot of energy to maintain an active portal for any period of time, so users are required to transit quickly or pay a fine for keeping the portal open, and many stations only allow access through via trams in order to stay on schedule. The stations also have a strict 20km distance limitation in order to prevent interference and respect established boundaries between nations, meaning cross-country trips often require chaining teleportal usages, although there is technically no limit between the distance two portals can connect at once set up.

Someone with some magical know-how or a specific tool can also manually teleport, using a method called Directional Teleportation (or "warping"), in which they transmit their own signal in order to teleport themselves. While more convenient, this method is fleeting and only allows for one-way movement, unlike teleportals, which are gates with two entry/exit points that can be closed and re-opened freely . They can also easily be jammed with charms, and many locations require licenses and authorization to teleport within. Friedrich, as Queen Darling's head of security, for instance, has authority to teleport freely throughout Canopy and all state-owned Fenneclands property, but he can't just enter someone's private residence, and there are certain locations in the royal castle even he is barred from warping to.

Additionally, even though the actual transfer is instantaneous, directional teleportation cannot technically move faster than the speed of light in the way that a set portal theoretically could, as the signal itself needs to reach the intended destination before the user can warp. Of course, since Flora is the only habitable body in its observable universe, this is usually irrelevant and impossible to notice.

An interesting case can be made of the circumstances behind the voyage of Laika, a Floran astronaut sent to establish a connection between Flora and the Skyhenge structure at the edge of observable space. Her ship traveled via a combination of fuel propulsion and 20 bursts of long-distance teleportation, in effect, moving just shy of lightspeed on average. Once she reached Skyhenge, she was to activate a portal gate that would connect to Flora allowing other researchers to make contact and study the structure, at which point, travel between the two points would occur at a rate far exceeding lightspeed. As her instruments broke before reaching Skyhenge, and the mission ended in failure, this sort of extreme-distance teleporation still exists only within hypothetical realm.

It's believed that spending too much time in the space between locations, or teleporting too many times in a row, can make a person violently ill or even physically distort them, but this is most likely a superstition based on general discomfort and motion sickness from the sensation of passing through space. There's also cases of severe paranoia in which subjects will refuse to use teleportation, believing that it secretly destroys or displaces the original user and creates an identical copy at the destination, but there's no evidence to suggest that this is anything more than sci-fi fodder.

Next update will be about magical illnesses.