... but Merriam-Webster's thesaurus isn't giving me enough of them. I can't keep alternating the terms "portal" and "gate" over and over - the readers would get bored.
Are there at least three more terms for the thingy that is used by stepping into or through it here so that you appear over there?
aperture
breach
interstice
Hole in the (relevant barrier)
Door/doorway
Rift
Opening
E/Ingress
Entrance
I should have been more clear in what I needed...
(08-16-2021, 05:47 PM)hazard Wrote: [ -> ]Hole in the (relevant barrier)
The "relevant barrier" is a few hundred, or a few thousand, kilometres of terrain that the people don't have time to cross the usual way.
(08-16-2021, 05:47 PM)hazard Wrote: [ -> ]Rift
This one works! Thanks.
I still need more...
I don't have any more to add as such, but I call your attention to a famous piece of writing advice: just call a door a door. Once you've described it in detail once, the reader is not going to want to focus on it every time your character uses one, any more than they want to spend time reading about how a science fiction character taps a glowing button on the wall to activate a dozen curved leaves arranged like the iris of a camera to retract out of the ovoid frame before stepping through more than the first time. In this case, just call a portal a portal - it's not like it's any more foreign as a concept to most modern audiences thanks to D&D, Stargate, decades of comics, and countless video games, including the eponymous Portal series itself.
"Jaunt" has been used for these kind of stuff.
Othe possibiities:
"Link"
"Joint"
"Junction"
"Nexus"
"Hitch"
"Tether"
"Splice"
(08-16-2021, 07:17 PM)classicdrogn Wrote: [ -> ]I don't have any more to add as such, but I call your attention to a famous piece of writing advice: just call a door a door. Once you've described it in detail once, the reader is not going to want to focus on it every time your character uses one, any more than they want to spend time reading about how a science fiction character taps a glowing button on the wall to activate a dozen curved leaves arranged like the iris of a camera to retract out of the ovoid frame before stepping through more than the first time. In this case, just call a portal a portal - it's not like it's any more foreign as a concept to most modern audiences thanks to D&D, Stargate, decades of comics, and countless video games, including the eponymous Portal series itself.
Normally good advice.
In this particular case, the question "What are
you doing here?" is being asked and a half-dozen groups are answering it at once. So they're
all calling it a door. So, I still need the synonyms.
Keep 'em coming, folks... please.
Threshold
Cable (the Marvel mutant) used 'bodyslide' to refer to his teleport mechanism
Rob, if some of the people speaking have non-english native tongues, you can use foreign versions of 'door'/etc too
I see. Well, with more time to think about it, how about Transit (shape) and Tesseract? The latter is not technically accurate, but still commonly used in media. Discontinuity and Congruence (possibly +shape or point) as well, despite being roughly speaking antonyms.
Terminus or Coterminous (volume/shape)
There's also your Space Folds and Hyper- or Sub-space Windows, adding the name or initials of a mage, researcher, or engineer who discovered the theory and/or made it practically usable, and any number of variations on Dimension Door or Step/Slice/Slash/Tear/etc.
I recall one book that called it "Duckson's Dumper" having originally been intended as a way to dispose of trash without landfills. This gave earthlings an understandably bad reputation in wider society as it meant loads of garbage kept appearing until they managed to make contact back and tell that Earth to knock it off. I can't remember the title and Google doesn't find anything searching for the phrase, but it may have been by
Somtow Sucharitkul/S. P. Somtow - I know I read it around the same time as I discovered
Mallworld and a couple of others by him at the then-local used book shop, and at least in memory the style was similar. Obviously without more details it's probably better to avoid a direct use of that, but there are a few HP fics that have played with the idea of "what happens to Vanished items?" as well, so the theme is certainly available to work with to give you another direction to look for inspiration.
edit: There's also Dark, High, Low, or Elven Path, and The Place Between
‘Shunt’ - I’ve always liked that word. It sounds slightly unpleasant in the way what I think you’re describing should be, being unceremoniously booted from one place and coming into another in an attosecond.
And one of the cases being described is implied to be quite unpleasant... Thanks!
Unpleasant like in The One where they apparently get torn apart into chunks and reassembled at the destination, with all of the shock and pain tthe first part would normally imply? I don't remember what they called their portals, though.
(11-02-2021, 08:13 AM)classicdrogn Wrote: [ -> ]Unpleasant like in The One where they apparently get torn apart into chunks and reassembled at the destination, with all of the shock and pain tthe first part would normally imply? I don't remember what they called their portals, though.
No, it isn't a teraport. (That's what it's called in Schlock Mercenary.)
Unpleasant as in "this is the very first time I've
ever cast this spell".