Teleportation

Teleportation is almost impossible. For the vast majority of people, human and otherwise, it is completely out of reach, impossible; it is among the most complex and difficult types of working there is, in this setting. The reason for this goes back to something that was mentioned in the Magical Mechanics note: Location is among the most fundamental and difficult-to-change parts of the world. Any time you want to screw with spatial dimensions and the concept of position, things get difficult fast.

Now, to start, let’s define teleportation. What people in-setting mean by this is that someone is in one spatial location, and is then in a different spatial location, without having moved and without having engaged with the space in between.

That’s a more narrow definition than it might seem at a glance, which is why Alice describes there being a ton of ways to fake this, to imitate it, tricks that get very close. Some of these are more accessible to people than others. Let’s start with the first example she uses, Otherside portals. Because you’re moving to another world entirely, you can move as far as you want, from any location in one to any location in the other (with all the limits that portals have, which will be explored much further later on, but still). These are still a difficult and very intricate type of working, but they’re one that people with no more power or skill than Saori or Capinera can make reliably.

This mechanism does not work within a single domain. But it is, in principle, possible to hold two portals open at once. Doing so requires immense mental discipline, since you’re trying to maintain two separate very complex workings completely steady at the same time. You’d need to be very skilled, but in this way you could make the limits on domain basically a nonissue. You have a portal to another domain, you have a portal in that domain, working on the second portal while you already have the first one open, as close as possible to the first one, and you step through both at once. You would technically be passing through a second domain in the process, but it would be so brief that from your perspective you’re only moving through a single portal, without conscious awareness of the time between the two.

But this is extremely difficult, high-risk, and usually completely unnecessary. A very skilled person could do it to show off, but failing that there’s just no reason to do so. And even then, it’s not true teleportation. You weren’t moving through the same spatial dimensions, but movement did happen, even if it was very brief and involved moving through another domain. Furthermore, you are not moving yourself with magic. You are creating a connection with magic, and then moving through it. The difference between the two is academic for the vast majority of purposes, but that’s why Alice says these are ways to fake teleportation.

Arbitrarily fast movement means that you’re starting to screw around with special relativity, which is also going to take astonishing skill to do. You can move so quickly with this that it might resemble teleportation to an outside observer, but it’s not. Even a normal physicist could tell you that. Even if you were to somehow limit onto the speed of light in vacuum, light can still be observed to move. Crossing a distance in an instant is not the same as being at the other end without having crossed it at all.

And, finally, the last example Alice gives, manipulations of space. This is the closest, and it is the most difficult, since it does start to involve using magic that affects concepts of location directly. It involves some extremely complex magic, and it involves extremely complex physics as well, because this requires you to interact with general relativity. To simplify greatly, it would involve manipulating spacetime itself to change the relative position of two points. This is something that might, barely, make sense under existing physics. It’s not something that physicists can do or even, to my knowledge, have a sense of how to do. But spacetime can be altered by gravity, and it’s impossible to fully prove a negative with inductive experiment, so it’s difficult to say that no other possible thing can change relative relationships in space.

This is the closest of these methods to true teleportation. But there are still some serious issues. The first is that by the time you’re directly manipulating spacetime and working with theoretical extensions of general relativity, well. Alice did specify that the awards are for people doing it on a human level of power. By the time you’re doing this, it is very dubious to claim that you’re still human. And, further, this still isn’t quite the same thing as truly teleporting. You are not moving from your location to the target location; you are moving the target location’s position relative to your own. It’s almost the inverse of teleporting.

That’s as close as anyone has gotten. It’s still not matching what Thorn does routinely.