Chương 200: Act 3, Chapter 52: Opening the doors

Day in the story: 18th January (Sunday) Alexandra May"You are doing it wrong," Maya said, hovering by my side. She was like me, but in a permanent silver dress and about cat-sized. She could fly unrestricted and without the use of wings. Probably on the same principle Liora did—which was not giving a single fuck about gravity and how it curved space to make objects fall.

It felt nice to tune in to her and experience that joy of being able to get anywhere within sight, but, good Reality, was she a pain in the ass with her know-it-all, see-it-all attitude.

"I know, Maya. I am trying my best to do something I'd never—""Done before?" she interrupted me.

"You know that's not true. I am here. Gertrude is somewhere. Elle is in Paris. You have sp-eye-ders on yourself and folded animals with eyes in all the wrong places. You've designed things that do not normally exist, given them Identity in your mind and—""Forced the Universe to accept it." This time I interrupted her. My voice, coming from her smaller frame, was higher-pitched and too cheerful, making me fucking nervous.

"I know. Doors that open a passage to another universe are a different thing."

"Are they, human?" Liora lounged on his invisible platform nearby, scales glistening in the morning sun of my Universe. He looked majestic and lazy as a fucking bum at the same time.

"Go do some work or something. Do you want to get to the hunting grounds again?"

"There is nothing that poses any challenge for someone like me in there anymore. I shall rest now, and you will send me to the Domain of Water after I am in prime condition again."

"There? You want to take a bath?"

"No. I will hunt the things that lurk in the depths in there."

"Can you focus on what's important right now?" Maya chimed in again, flying closer to my hands. I was finishing painting the frame. It, along with the main part of the door, was painted to show what was supposed to be on the other side—that is, the common area of my apartment, with its greenery walls, couches, and other stuff. In my mind, this was the anchor, and thus it had to be represented on the portal as I was creating it.

"We are done in here." Anansi's voice reached me. She, along with two dozen of her own paper spiders—each pair with its own spray paint can—had been painting another set of doors, just like this one, but showing the interior of The Nest, the building I designed as my own bed-and-no-breakfast kind of place. Beautiful Greco-Roman columns, polished floors, draped cloth hanging on the walls, and various paintings I made as decorations. A lovely place. Truly gorgeous. And, as Anansi declared, they had already finished.

She came closer to me with a few quick jumps, her little flock skittering along after her. She was using our powers more freely now, giving and taking Identity and Animation as she needed them. I liked that—especially here, since the Core provided her with the necessary energy and aura to do so.

"See? Spider is done. You'd be too if not for Lóng's unnecessary interruptions."

"My input is invaluable, sprite." He didn't even look at her, which made her comically angry. She put one of her hands on her hip and threatened him with a finger.

"This place is getting crowded," Anansi noted.

"And you are trying to make it even more so. Is that wise?"

"Being unwise is not something that's going to stop me, spidey."

"That's unfortunately true."

"So," I exhaled, trying to refocus myself on the task at literal hand.

"How am I doing it wrong, Maya?" I asked her, ignoring the comment from Anansi, who came closer to watch us work. We were outside, on the surface of my black lake, for all of this. I preferred to work on the portals under the clear sky rather than in the Art Palace.

"What you have in your head—the blueprints or the design of this thing's soul—is not good. You think of it as separate things, because your mind sees them that way. Two different doors with two different frames in two different places, in two—""—different worlds." Anansi finished for her. Liora actually opened his eyes to look at us and listen more closely.

"Yes. But as art, they are one and connected. They have to be to work like you envisioned it."

"Like the New York–Dublin portal." I reminded myself. It was an installation that live-streamed both ways, so people in those two cities could interact with each other across the ocean in real time. It had been done before, one piece of art, two sculptures in two places.

"Exactly," Maya replied.

"The magic you are asking it to do would be to open at the same time, creating a single plane of passage between those two points, with the Identity of a single door when they take notice of someone that is allowed to pass."

"I'd need to redesign it, though. We have the eyes at the top of the frame to look and check, but it would be better to serve as a surveillance method rather than a lock." I started thinking aloud.

"Adding ears, so those portals could listen, would be better."

"Password?" Anansi asked.

"Yes. A phrase that only those I trust know, that the doors would accept as a key to open both ways instead of working as a normal passage."

"Finally," Maya exclaimed, throwing both arms into the air.

"You'd need to infuse this creation with Identity, Animation, and Connection at the same time, though."

"True. Connection has to be active at all times, and Animation would intervene to obscure it if someone tried to go through without using the portal."

"Let's get to work," Anansi said, moving with her paper army to adjust both parts of my newest art.

I was back at the apartment, sipping an iced tea through a straw right next to Sophie, as we perched on the kitchen counter. Catansi—which was the name I decided to use for the feline version of my spider guardian angel—was sitting on said counter along with us, as Sophie scratched her behind the ears. Liora, who wanted to oversee the installation before his deep-sea hunting session, was there with us, and he wasn't very happy about the affection she'd been giving the cat instead of him.

He was visibly upset, as he decided to stand on the couch and ostensibly look in the other direction, remaining eerily silent. An army of paper spiders—at least forty, if I wasn't mistaken—was working under the guidance of Anansi's spider-bunny body to safely remove my old doors along with their frame and install the new ones in their place.

"This is simply incredible," Sophie mused, observing all of this.

"I didn't know you knew how to do all of this."

"You mean construction work? No, honey, I know jack shit about it. It's all the cat you're spoiling right now." Lio grumbled something under his… belly. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Yes," the cat replied.

"I spent the last few days browsing the internet, watching videos, and reading theoretical texts on such work. I possess the knowledge, while the spiders possess innate builders' skills. We make a good team." She purred in pleasure.

"Fucking mammals," Liora whispered.

"Can you do the same at the Hoppers? Being able to… hop between that place, home, and your Domain would be amazing."

"I might. I have to see first how big of a strain it puts on my soul. Knowing you, you would go back and forth, and I'd be lying on the ground soul-exhausted all the time if it's too much for me to bear." She shot me a wounded-animal stare.

"I would not do that." She took a sip of her coffee.

"Did you not try it first in your Domain?"

"I did, and it works in principle, but I wouldn't be able to tell for sure until it's installed here, where it's supposed to be."

"How exactly does this Authority of yours work? Is it like a fuel you spend on doing stuff? You run out and it doesn't work?"

"Not exactly," I answered, looking at the spiders removing the old doors from the hinges.

"It's more like a force most of the time. I have some limited capacity to exert it. Some things are simple and require less strength of Authority—like my muscles aren't strained when I lift the tea," I showed her the movement.

"But if I wanted to deadlift 400 pounds, I'd be much more tired. It's the same with Authority, which for the most part is like the soul's muscle system. Giving identity and animation to a small spider is easy, but if I wanted to make a statue of me move and behave like a human, it would drop me like a fly. I'd be totally exhausted."

"I get it."

"Partially, Soph, because it's not that simple. In the case of my personas, the amount of force I infuse them with is how much they get to use. So for them, besides being a muscle, it's also a fuel that won't replenish itself. I'd need to supply them again with Authority or my Domain's crystal. Well, I actually do it all the time over the links I've established with everything that works on my magic, but as long as they don't do anything crazy or energy-consuming, it's negligible in upkeep cost."

"So why are you so afraid of this portal draining you?"

"Because in my experience so far, asking the world to move for me through the power of Connection was the most straining thing I've done—besides creating personas. But it's not even that what I'm doing here."

"What is it?" She took another sip of her coffee, her eyes focused entirely on me, while I watched the spiders unscrew the frame from the hole in the wall it was slotted into.

"I'm forcing the world to think there's a physical passage between two places that normally aren't connected. It's the first time I'm doing that, so I don't know whether it will be a constant drain as long as the portal is open, whether it will cost me per pound of mass transferred, or something else."

"Oh."

"Exactly. Oh," I answered when the key turned in the lock of the main door. After a few seconds, Zoe came in with groceries. I moved in to take them from her and bring them to the kitchen, while she observed the work of my minions.

"This is pretty quickly becoming a nightmarish version of some Disney princess diary-type story," she commented, and despite the whole Peter's abandonment, she looked pretty joyful in that moment. Her eyes gleamed with a sense of wonder, and a smile found its place on her face, both on her lips and in the corners of her eyes.

"What's going on in here?"

"Alexandra is making a portal for you humans, so you can walk into our Domain as you please." Zee looked at Liora with reservation, but respect. He did the same toward her, despite his usual tone.

"You are? That's great," she replied, taking off her shoes.

"Is it as warm in there as… at your neighbor's Domain?"

"Not as much, but it's permanent late spring all the time, so far. I will think about whether I want some seasons in there in the future."

"No rain and no snow?" she kept asking.

"Nope," I replied, putting the last of the items inside the fridge.

"You are welcome to spend as much time in there as you want. But I need to establish the baseline of how difficult it would be for me to keep the portal open first."

"That's what this is all about right now," Sophie told her. Zoe put on her slippers and moved closer to her, taking the place I was previously occupying and observing my spiders putting a new frame in the proper place.

"It's a pretty big deal, isn't it?" Zoe asked.

"The Guild's Ideworld Gates are what make them powerful in the first place."

"It's not the same. I'm pretty sure that having it open all the time would make me drop unconscious," I started saying, when another freeze locked down my body on the left side. I wasn't sure whether this was the damage anymore. Yesterday's healing session at Leben's removed the last of my bruising and helped the regeneration that Pete unlocked in my body restore some of my leg's tissue, which resulted in me having to adjust the prosthesis.

But the freezes had not stopped appearing, which meant that the underlying cause was different.

"Are you okay?" Sophie asked, standing up. Liora was faster, though. He moved from his position and passed through me to take a place under my shoulder, helping me keep upright.

"Yeah, thank you, Lio," I answered and whispered to my dragon as my functions came back to me.

"Still the same shit. Now and then. I have no idea why they happen, and magical healing is not working. Ariana suggested yesterday that I should visit the Brothers of Mercy Guild's hospital in Ideworld so they could check what's wrong with me, but I am obviously not very entertained by the prospect."" Hospitals and the Guild, right?" Sophie asked.

"Can't get much better than that," I replied cheerfully, while the spiders finished installing the door on the hinges and Anansi ordered them aside. Right at that very moment, someone knocked on the door, resulting in all of the people, animals, and magical creatures turning their heads in that direction in surprise.

All except me—I constantly saw everything around myself from multiple points of view, pretty much all the time now, which resulted in me slowly losing the reflex to move my head toward the source of movement or sound. Something I'd have to remember to fake now and then, so people wouldn't take me for a freak.

"You guys expecting some—" I wanted to ask, but Zoe launched into the air like a rocket.

"Oh damn! I forgot," she added.

"I invited Peaches for some girl time today… before I knew that we would have a construction site in here, Lex."

"That's okay. Let her in," I replied. Zoe ran to the front door, opening it wide and letting Pam in. Her eyes widened instantly upon seeing the madness of paper spiders skittering on the walls, Spiderbunny on the floor, and Liora still under my arm.

"Is this the wrong time?" Peaches asked, slowly putting her bag aside on the shelf near the door.

"No, au contraire," I replied, using the fact that Elle was learning French for us.

"We were about to venture into my Domain of Magic. Me and Soph. You and Zee are more than welcome to come with us. I'd be honored to be your hostess."

"Are you serious!? Of course I'd love to see it!" Peaches clasped her hands into fists out of uninhibited joy. Zoe smiled at me.

"Only if you will let us do something dangerous in there. I feel like I should live my life a bit more before I am forced to be less wild," she told me, and I nodded.

"Sure. What do you think about exploration of the woods around my Plaza and then a motorcycle ride on the side of a building?"

"Fuck yes!" Zoe shouted.

"Wait, woods? What's dangerous about it?"

"Maybe less dangerous, but more whimsical. Apparently my soul started creating various animals and creatures that fit my nature, and they are starting to live in those woods. I'd like to show you a few."

"Sounds great," Peaches said.

"They are not combat-ready yet. They would pose no challenge to you, humans," Liora had to add his two cents, but I patted him on the head and scratched behind his ears anyway.

It took us around five minutes to prepare for the grand opening, and we all—including Liora and both Anansis—stood inside my room. The painted part of the portal was on the inside, to not stick out too much when someone unexpected entered our apartment. Catansi would stay behind, but I intended, if it was possible, to take all the rest of us into my world through that door.

"Do it," I told Sophie, pushing her slightly toward the frame.

"Why does it have to be me?" she asked.

"You were the one that wanted it to happen the most, just minutes ago."

"Yes, but I did not know the password back then. Does it have to be this phrase?"

"It's something no one will say by accident, like a safe phrase during a BDSM session."

"Can you elaborate on that?" Peaches asked.

"Not right now. People are listening."

"It's silly," Sophie continued.

"Oh, come on. I will do it," Zoe said, pushing to the front. She stopped in front of the door, took a deep breath, and proudly declared: "Hey Bunny. Show me the hole." As she did, she pulled the door handle toward herself, and the interior of The Nest spread in front of all of us. I felt as my soul was hit with fatigue, but it was manageable. [I'd say that is about 20% of your max capacity in the opening. The other end is supported by the Soul Core. It eases the burden.]"I am going in," Zoe said and crossed the threshold, but it did not feel like I was in any way, shape, or form hindered by her doing so. There was a constant spiritual strain, slowly wearing me down, like muscles during static exercise, but the act of passing did not make it any harder. It was the establishing and maintaining of the way that made it difficult.

"Let's go, everybody. It's easy on me," I confirmed.