Word count: ~8,500 of ???
Twenty-five hundred words later, I’m feeling like I am slacking a bit, but still moving forward, so it’s all good.
I’m going to give away a little portal devices information this week.
Since I haven’t done it yet, I want to be more informative with how the four devices that create portals do their thing. I’ll work it in somewhere in this story.
Since the kids found these devices in the “mostly abandoned” city of Vahuuldyn in Book 2, Beyond the Portal, they’ve become the method of travel to and from the Empty World. Until then, the only portal was a natural one in Christy’s yard that we first encountered in Book 1, Portal Through the Pond. And Cory is searching for more devices to create portals to more worlds in hopes of curing his paralysis. Nothing like a good obsession to drive a plot forward.
Early in Book 4, I do have Sarynn, in the city of Vahuuldyn, explain to Christy something about fine-tuning where a portal sends someone when it’s enabled, but how they determine whether the portal is going to, or coming from the Empty World, begs for an explanation.
That’s the question people are asking–ok, so far it’s only my wife, Patti, asking me. How do the four linked devices know how to create a portal to or from the Empty World? In other words, if the four devices are linked to create a portal, will that portal go to the Empty World, or to another world from the Empty World?
Actually it is easy and is dependent on what order the four devices are linked together in. Since they’re linked in a straight line like four rectangular shoe boxes joined along their long edge, it matters what order they’re linked in.
One device of each set is always the portal creating one (has a series of star or planet etchings on it with lots of swirly etched lines) that must always be first in line on the left. Then if the portal-to-be-created is going to another world, such as Earth, that world’s solar system device is next, then the third device in order must be the device with the map of that other world and its portal locations. Then last or fourth in the linked chain of devices would come the device with the Empty World Portals etched on its surface.
If the portal needs to be created from a world, such as Earth, to the Empty World, then first comes the portal generating one as before, then second would be the device with the Empty World portal locations. Third would be the other world’s solar system device (such as Earth’s) and last or fourth would the actual device with the etchings of the portal locations on that world such as on Earth.
Don’t touch that dial.
—David K. Anderson
