Psionic Research Notes for Patashu Industries - Psionic Anomaly Type #13 - The Impossible Door

Assembled by Agrigah, Head Psionics Researcher for Patashu Industries

Basic details: Sprinkle powder of a psychoactive gem along the border of a doorway. Just the bottom seems to be enough. The tighter the seal and the opaquer the door, the better. The user must then think very hard about a destination in the universe, then open the door, and it will lead to that destination. Insufficiently directed thought or failing to imagine a valid destination can result in unexpected side-effects.

Researcher's notes:

Okay, so, like. I'm sorry for whichever kobold is upset at me for not making this a technical, rigorous, mathematical model of how this thing works or whatever. I really am, but you can't chuck it in the Apocalypse-o-Matic and measure its material strengths. It just kind of is what it is, and testing it gets pretty spooky. You can't just throw kobolds at it, someone with the right kind of brain (which I guess means the bad kind, hah) has to probe the shape and limitations of the thing. So, here's everything *I* know, and if you find out something exciting then come throw me an email! I'd love to say I'm dying to know, but I'm trying to not do that quite yet.

Ramble over. So, there's a few things you should know about the basic description. Specifically, failure modes! If you've never heard of an Atlantis Drive before, I can heavily recommend you go poke around the Grand Library and read some texts about it. Hell, even the fiction's pretty accurate to how it works. Now, I'm going to tell you that this *doesn't* work like that. In the best case scenario, where your psionic attunement is on point and you're envisioning an area that does exist in your universe? Then you actually *go* there. Hell, it might not even have to make up a door on the other side, it can just use an existing one. Least fucky outcome. Now, let's describe some slightly more fucky ones.

Let's say that, for example, you describe a place fluidly and with high willpower, but you stumble at the last step; you can't come up with a reason why there might be a door there, so there isn't. Right? Well... Here comes the crazy part. You're not using a teleporter. It doesn't have to take you to a physical location. When you stumble out that door, don't be fooled by how realistic it looks - it might be a mental construct simulating the destination, but that's just slightly off because you didn't cleanly finish the effect. If you try walking past the bounds of this place, you'll... Uhh, I'll get to that in a moment. Funnily enough, this can only happen if you fail *spectacularly* - if you're not trying hard enough or your willpower is low, then you either go where you're going or it doesn't work at all. But there's a really spectacular effect you can get if you fuck up in the *other* kind of direction, by having your mind be way too thoughtless.

Okay, I better get to the point - what kind of place *are* you going when you fail? I mean, short answer is 'I don't know', but I can speculate. It's like it's some 'default' mode of existence, like it took the physics from our local universe and opened up a CAD tool and slapped stuff on top of it. If you open an Impossible Door to 'nothing', then you can see it in its true form. Like, it's literal nothing. There's a flat plane made of nothing you can walk around on, you can breathe the air, your heart's still pumping and what not, but there's just nothing else here. Actually, now that makes me think that it's based on whatever physics you think you need to be alive - maybe an AI who hangs out in digital space would make a digital Nowhere and Li-GE-Ga or whatever her name is would make an endless below-freezing methane ocean or whatever. Usually I don't get perfect nothingness, though - I either get flecks of colour, half-formed and half-finished shapes and objects, like the remnants of what I was trying to not think about as a destination - or I get a whole immaculate setpiece that looks convincing at first, but starts lacking finer detail as I probe its limits. What I haven't checked yet is if it can have something true that I don't know about yet, like a really roundabout divination spell. I should check that sometime.

Oh yeah, one more thing. Don't venture too far into an Impossible Door-made mental construct. Eventually it runs out. I'm guessing you've made some kind of bubble of inhabitable space in a grander fabric of untuned cosmos, and everything decays. You'll see the warning signs quickly, so just have your self-preservation instinct well tuned. You'll have trouble breathing, the three dimensions of space and one of time might start fractalizing upwards or downwards or getting quantized and choppy unevenly, your heart might skip a beat, your skin might start getting very hot or very cold - something like that. I felt something grabbing and yanking at my shoulder once, and I don't wanna know if that was my imagination or not. Sorry, not being paid enough for that yet. And if you were thinking of taking stuff out with you, you can't. It just gets stopped at the door like it was a solid wall, so it'll slip out of your hands. Feels very trippy having conditional collision like a video game.

Probably a more important thing I should talk about is - how to get *back*. If you go into a mental construct, the door will be at the center of it and you can just take it back. But if you actually arrive at a place, then you're probably coming out of a similar looking door on the other side. Either way, it'll remain linked to the old door so long as the psychoactive gemstone dust is still in place, and it's got a good shelf-life. I had an assistant wipe it off while I was elsewhere in the base, and it did sever the connection - so at that point, sorry, you gotta do a second Impossible Door, so don't forget all about where you were. Another thing I tried was destroying my destination door - unsurprisingly, doors with a hole in them stop working. Something weird is that I can't destroy a mental construct destination door, though. I don't even think it's because I can't, I just... Don't want to? Like some external self-preservation instinct is overriding me. I dunno. One more thing... I tried a variety of doors. Anything that's opaque and solid seems to work. Airlocks work, for example. But if it's got glass, then it gets *really* weird as you open it. Like the psionic effect changing what's on the other side is leaking and melding in a flash of rainbow and scintillating colours. Sometimes it works anyway, but sometimes it leads to a mental construct that's just, rainbow nonsense. And yes, everyone else can see the effect too. Hell, it made a kobold in the lab fall over and reboot. Heh! Maybe you can use it as a makeshift Colour Spray if you're clever about it. Conversely, if it has a peephole or flap or something, don't use it while Impossible Dooring unless you *want* to trigger this effect on purpose.

That's everything I got for now, but honestly? I had a lot of fun studying this one, so I might pick it up again in the future. Or have an understudy continue in my step. It wouldn't surprise me if it works really differently for someone else's brain.

-Agrigah