//------------------------------//
// (Weiss Report) Aperture Magic [Homeward Portal] 
// Story: The Unique Properties of Dark Magic 
// by Shadestyle 
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Entry Number Twenty, Day Two-hundred-and-Thirty-five


Welcome, gentlecolts, to Aperture Horsemagic. Royal Guards, Wonderbolts, Cloned Dragons we keep in the basement, you're here because we needed the best, and you are it.

So, who is ready to learn foul arcane secrets? Now you already met one another on the minecart ride over so let me introduce myself.  I'm Weiss Noir.  I wrote this book.

Now that the obligatory jokes are out of the way, I've figured out how to make portals,  And, as is clear from my little joke up there, I'm a bit excited.  Previously, while I could use Avidus or Dragonfire to teleport objects to one of my homes or vaults, getting things out of my vaults was a real problem.  I simply had no choice but to actually go to the physical location of my possessions to obtain them when needed.

Now I can just snap my fingers and portal up some goodies at will.  By combining Greed, Excitement, Anxiety and Anticipation, I can create a portal in any location that is either near me, or near a place I've convinced myself qualifies as home.  By combining two sets of portals, I can also create short-range portals by simply daisy chaining a portal from my location to a hoard, then from that portal to another one right next to it, and out in another location near me.  Any objects thus sent through one portal on my end goes into my horde, through the other portal on that end, and then out the other portal on my end.

It's complicated, and a bit of an energy hog, but it's still combat portal usage, which is of course, a useful trick to have in combat.  I'll need to make sure I have some empty hordes explicitly for combat portal usage.  Unfortunately, this is yet another spell that I can't really teach to the public, due to it requiring mind-numbing levels of greed.  Some enchantments might be worth testing out, however, and of course, long term or permanent portals might be possible.

Now, I know what you're thinking.  "Can I cut people in half with my portals?" And the answer, and this is such a weird answer, is no.  In fact, you can quite literally jam a portal open by physically propping it open.  It's insane, and doesn't make any sense, but it's useful, I guess.  It's unique among spells in that you can make a portal spell as magically durable as whatever you can jam inside it to prop it open.  A portal spell quite literally cannot be aborted until whatever is blocking it is forced out.  One thing you can do, however is portal-cut something if you use a sufficiently strong dispelling charm.  The more you attempt to dispel a portal, the tighter it's grip becomes.  By exploiting this, you could pull some shenanigans, but the dispelling magic required is a bit steep for it to actually cut anything useful.

Though, a much more obvious use of this is as a restraint.  Albiet an awkward one, you could theoretically use portals as... rope?  Glue?  I'm not sure what to qualify this as, as it just comes across as so bizarre a concept to me.  You can use weak portals as durable bindings to hold objects together with.  The literal twisted fabric of space and magic, turned into a glorified rubber band.  What a world.

Well, whatever world I now live in as a result of this discovery, it's one that now has a useful toy to mess around with in it.  I've been doing some experimenting with Portal Ropes, two strands of portal strung tightly across a gap, and wound up until it becomes like a thread.  It's so confusing, and I swear I taste copper if I stare at one of them too long, but, again, nigh-indestructable "material".

I just can't get over the fact that, upon stress testing this portal magic, I've found more uses for it in structural engineering than in actual transportation.

Also, as a side note, it seems that objects passing through portals are briefly unaffected by gravity, based on some sort of complex equation my R&D Dudes tried to explain to me before I got bored.  Apparently, an object moving through a portal creates some sort of drag on the space around it.  The more mass is doing this in one place, the longer the effect lasts.  It kinda put the kibosh on just setting up portal-loops to turn gravity into infinite power, but honestly, I can see some far more interesting uses for that effect.





Portals don't like it when you break them forcibly, as I just now found out.  I also found out that they do have a limit, I just didn't reach it with my earlier tests.  By applying sufficient pressure to a sufficiently weak portal, you can indeed make the fabric of space snap.  And much like a rubber band, or a steel cable, when it snaps, it flips around.  I had been testing the possibility of making portal-weave armor to create even more indestructable armor plates, when one of the threads snapped.  Upon snapping, the entire area for roughly ten meters around the portal was swapped with ten meters of area from the other side of the portal.  I say roughly, because it seems once again, magic's merciful side wins out, to my detriment, and living things caught in this effect aren't moved along with it, save to be moved out of the way of incoming objects.

Of course, just because it's not lethal doesn't mean it isn't useful.  I've already got plans in the works for cage bombs, and methods by which I could instantly teleport one of my battle arenas to wherever I'm fighting someone.  It takes an extreme amount of energy to snap a portal large enough to make this quality useful, but it can be achieved, with the proper equipment, and since portals technically have no mass, I can wind up a portal inside a very tiny space, while giving it enough juice to move a theoretically vast chunk of the surrounding area.

If I could figure out a way to make this effect work on ponies, I could probably make a pretty fucking sweet bug-out capsule.  Maybe put it in a pony's teeth so they can escape capture or something.

I wonder if Equestria has air in space.  If not, then maybe I should look into getting a nice, Lunar Summer Home just in case I need to escalate a situation...

Nah.  Luna would probably be pissed if I used the moon as a glorified garbage dump for anyone I needed to get rid of badly.





Well, that would have been useful to know about when packing for overseas trips.  I'll have to see if Twilight would be willing to teach Spike this trick.  Face to face correspondence is so much more pleasant, wouldn't you agree, Sunset?