Portal of Miomarto

" «Oh my God...» September touched the edges of the black hole, then put a hand into the chasm, shivered, still smiling happily, and pulled it out «... A Portal of Miomarto, a space-time gap. Technically it is not possible for something like this to exist, Miomarto has only demonstrated twice that it is possible to use the Portals, but the current ones, under the custody of the magicians, who are the same ones he used in public, do not seem to work. They are... legend. The formula to activate them is secret, the principle of operation is... impossible to understand» he swallowed twice, then ran a hand over his face, the same one he had previously put into the portal «But this... is already active, isn't it?» "

- From "Urban Legends"


Magic is nothing but an element of nature, like matter, light, combustion or time, but it can interact with each of them to manipulate it. While it is common among magicians around the world to use magic to create or channel light, start a combustion, or change the shape and consistency of matter, the manipulation of time is not as common, as it is considered very difficult and fundamentally dangerous.

To travel through time, very complicated formulas are needed, which must incorporate high-level mathematical notions, and these formulas must be updated through the drawing of incredibly complex magic circles, which can take from nine to forty-six hours of work just during the drawing process, and the energy of the magician who activates these magic circles is drained almost to death... or beyond.

Miomarto's Revolution

Alberico Ziomanno Miomarto (1919-2000), a brilliant Italian inventor, was the first and only magician capable of creating a system of travel in time (and space, even between different dimensions) that was safe for the traveler (obviously as long as he didn't get into trouble in another era), through a brilliant intuition: he incorporated magic circles into an electronic device.

No more wasting entire days drawing magic circles! No more being drained of energy and dying (or almost)!

In 1935, Miomarto created electrical circuits that had the shape of magic circles for time travel and that were activated simply by the passage of electricity. As for the magical energy, which was essential for activating the powers of space-time deformation, he used simple magic storage batteries (or aura batteries, invented almost two thousand years earlier by Saadaa of the Serpents) and made sure that these could release their energy to the circuits. And so he created devices, which he called "Analexichronothermogeographic Portals", capable of opening "holes" in reality through which one could pass, in an absolutely painless way and without any dangerous consequences for the organism, to other places or eras, in the present, in the past or in the future.

There were only two public demonstrations of use and none of them included a journey in time, but only in space; in any case they proved effective and amazed the magical community.

Despite the great demand, no other public experiments were ever carried out. The reason given was "recharging the aura batteries for such a use is too expensive, therefore the portals will be used again only in case of absolute necessity, for matters of life or death".

“ «This is pure idiocy…» Vlad approached the silver suitcase and started touching it, turning it, he even tried to open it, but he gave up, perhaps for fear that that thing, that apparently alien technology, could explode in his face «September, do you by any chance know how to recharge one of these?»
«Um…» the wizard approached the suitcase «This is an aura battery»
«An aura battery?»
«Yes» September seemed surprised, then chuckled softly, looking at Vlad from under his eyebrows and bangs, with his head a little lowered «You said you study black magic, you can't tell me you've never heard of aura batteries. How do you think Sauron's one ring worked?»
«But the one ring was this big» the vampire measured, between his index finger and thumb, a length of about three centimeters «And it had the power to destroy a land. This is as big as a bag!»
«That's why it's almost impossible to recharge. Wizards haven't managed it, it would require, at least in theory, the power of the aura of a million souls» ”

- From "Urban Legends"



Later, the magical community began to refer to the analessichronothermogeographic portals simply as "Miomarto's portals".

No public experiments were repeated, but legend has it that Miomarto used the portals to travel through time twice more before he died.

The limitations

Although extraordinary in their power and "convenient" for the traveler, the mechanics of how Miomarto's portals work reveal some important limitations.

The first is that once you arrive at your destination it is impossible to return to where you came from: the portal does not have two usable "faces", one at the place of departure and one at the place of arrival, but only one, the one powered by the equipment at the place of departure.

A hypothetical traveler who wanted to arrive, for example, at the North Pole, once they had passed through the portal and arrived in the ice, would find nothing behind him, no way to go back. While this may not seem particularly dramatic for space travel, it is instead a terrible consequence in the case of time travel, because the hypothetical traveler would have no way to return to their own time.

It was thought to nullify this unpleasant effect by connecting two portals of Mymarto together in order to have an entrance and an exit, but after the death of their inventor no one was ever capable of applying such a modification or even of fully understanding how the equipment worked.

Another limitation is, of course, the amount of energy needed to open a portal and keep it open for a certain amount of time. A popular myth claims that the power of "the auras of a million souls" is needed to fully recharge the batteries of Miomarto's portals, but this is a completely false notion: no one, in that case, would have been able to operate these complex magical devices.

It is true, however, that the life force of a single person is not enough to recharge the batteries and that Miomarto used a portion of the magical energy of seven hundred volunteers, as well as himself, for a single recharge.

The volunteers were then rested and fed abundantly and none of them suffered the slightest side effect. Five portals It is common knowledge that Miomarto created four portals.

Nowadays, two of them belong to the Ministry of Light, one belongs to Lilith and one is considered by most to be missing, but was actually kept secret by Alberico's grandchildren, Mack and Jack. Almost no one knows that the portals created by Miomarto were actually five: a low-consumption prototype, which however risks killing its user with each activation, plus the four known portals. The prototype is currently preserved by the Ministry of Darkness and its use, considered too dangerous, is not accessible to anyone except the Black Warden, who in any case has never turned it on.



Trivia

• Even aurolupus lycans, creatures immune to magic, can pass through Miomarto's portals: this is because the portals act on the surrounding world and not directly on the traveler.
• The most used portal of all is the one belonging to Lilith, the only person in the world able to regularly collect enough energy to make it work even once a month.
• The portals, during the creation phase, have never been tested on animals, but only on human beings.