Teleportation – the vanishing few ways a writer can control it
A friend of mine is writing a book that features magic for teleportation and dimensional travel. Me being a student of “FantasTactics” (aka a “magic guru”), I couldn’t resist a chance to lay out a few of the ways that kind of power can complicate a story.
And it’s one serious complication. In fact it’s a removal of so many complications we take for granted, it could strip a story down to almost nothing, if we don’t keep a grip on it.
Location Location Location!
The whole idea of teleporting goes against basic drama more than it goes with it. We call stories “the Hero’s Journey” rather than “the Hero’s Instant Arrival” because setting and travel are basic measurements of our lives. Story requires conflict, and each setting contains its own conflicts, so skipping past locations short-circuits what the experience would normally be. That’s triply true for classic fantasy, that wants the medieval feel where a few miles’ travel is a life-changing event. (Like Sam said, “If I take one more step, it’ll be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been.”)
And yet, what if? And reading today, we glance over at the Expedia shortcut on our web browsers (which obsoleted most of travel in itself) and add, why shouldn’t they?
Even Tolkien saw that one coming, being a World War I trench veteran writing around World War II’s mobile war era. He let a flock of helpful eagles into a book he subtitled “There and back again”—and then he kept them grounded until they wouldn’t break the story.
(Lord of the Rings minus Nazgul air supremacy equals two-page book about smug eagles.)
So how does a story keep its suspense from poofing away?
If you don’t know where you’re going, you end up Somewhere Else
Probably the most common words ever spoken about teleportation are: “I can’t go somewhere I haven’t seen.”
It’s a rule of thumb, for how teleporters have to “aim” their travel. Not every convenient corner that’s within their range (we’ll get to range later) is actually open to them—and if they push their luck, things get dangerous.
I’d say the key is: how long does a certain teleporter have to study a location to “find” it again? If he has to see it right then, the magic’s limited to jumping across battlefields (or canyons, or down streets, or through windows…). If it takes minutes of study, he might only need to sneak up nearby and observe, to be ready to slip in any time later. If it requires months, the magic’s only useful for reaching a few well-known “home bases”—and of course for getting out of anywhere else.
But then, aside from those clear points, how much can teleporters “feel” their way to a safe spot? A rough rule some characters use is that a map can let them find an open space outside a city or location, but they can’t risk anything more precise, and so have to go the rest of the way on foot. Meanwhile the cleverest—and most dangerous—casters are the ones who actually do put themselves right at your back, any time they want.
One related point: how well can a teleporter orient himself if he doesn’t know where he’s starting? If they wake up in a strange prison cell, some can simply locate their favorite destination out of the ether; others are lost until they learn where they’ve been moved to, or work out shorter hops relative to where they are now.
The strictest form of this are fixed gates, where someone has to build a portal at the departure point, the arrival, or more often both. These are simple ways to open up just the transits the story wants, and keep it out of anywhere else. (As long as nobody secretly builds an arrival gate on someone’s doorstep, or forces an invasion down through their own favorite gate.)
(As a gamer, I also see gate and magic in most computer games these days, even if it’s just called “fast travel.” Nobody wants to lose play time going back out along roads they’ve already cleared.)
And if a teleporter doesn’t have a clear enough “aim”? In some stories the spell would put them somewhere else, either picked because it was nearby or because it seems similar to the target—or they might be lost somewhere between worlds. In others they’d appear where they actually aimed, and the magic might give anyone standing in that spot a small shove out of the way, or give the teleporter an instant to dodge to a safer spot as they’re taking form. Both problems tend to magnify themselves with an extra cost in magic; what’s the fun in putting the caster off course—or making an emergency landing shift in hostile territory—if he has all his usual power reserves to blink out again?
—That’s not counting the most perilous versions of the magic. In those, you land where your aim actually put you, and if that puts you half an inch below the floor, you lose your feet. These are the teleporters that get very careful what they do.
As you might guess, a teleporter’s best friend is knowledge. Some use scrying powers to get a safe view of a target, others use cunning and thorough descriptions from witnesses, or sneak a “beacon” out onto it. Many teleporters’ enemies find their best defence is not just to hide their home layout but to completely go into hiding, and hope the wizard can’t find them at all.
For a skilled enough teleporter, knowing might be a lot more than half the battle.
Locking the Door
The descriptions above ought to make it clear how powerful teleporting can be. So one extra wrinkle in stories might be designing defenses for it.
This might be an extra limit of the magic itself. Roger Zelazy famously limited Shadowjack to traveling only between shadows, and his Princes of Amber could travel between worlds as long as they could physically travel as well. If you see teleportation as an extension of sailing across the world, it might only work in water; if all magic is drawn from sunlight, there’ll be no teleporting (or anything else) at night.
Or teleportation might be something any fast travel is: conspicuous. It could be the one magic that enemy magicians—or creatures between the worlds—are most likely to sense, something that’s used only to trade certain difficulty for near-certain doom.
(Maybe the strictest limit I’ve seen is in the Basil Broketail series: gates could only be opened into and out of a variation of Hell itself, so the greatest danger was of racing to your exit gate and finding its wardens in the mortal world had not shut it ahead of you. If something primally nasty was on your tail.)
Or even if the magic has no blind spots, other magicians might make some. The more common the magic is, the more obsessed anyone with enemies might be with putting anti-teleport wards on any significant spot… meaning magic can only bring you to the edge of the house or fort or even that whole city that’s important enough to the enemy.
A defender might have other kinds of wards besides barriers. The simplest defenses might only detect a teleporter sneaking in—or they might sense it and then raise barriers to stop him escaping. More powerful wards might pull a teleporter straight into a trap to begin with. Failing that, a defender might be able to trace where someone had teleported from. The movie version of Jumper had one innovation: the villains couldn’t block travel, but their machines did let them open portals to follow the trail of any teleport.
It all depends on how teleporting is positioned in the story’s drama, and in the hierarchy of magic. If it’s an exotic use of higher dimensions of existence, it might be too fundamental a force to ward off, and would have to be controlled through its conspicuousness, or its other limits. Or the more familiar the magic is, the better it might be warded against—at least unless the intruder knows a “deeper route in” or has the power to smash through anyway. (And there’s always good old sabotage from the inside that might lower those wards.)
“People come and go so quickly here!”
We’ve talked about what kinds of places a teleporter could reach, and which might be barred to him. Now, let’s see how he uses those spots.
Any time I see some kind of ability or resource, my first question is how much power does that need? Which is really two questions:
- who’s powerful enough to do it?
- how much does it take out of them?
Teleporting seems tailor-made to be a mark of advanced power. A master villain or a helpful but “complicated” mentor can zip in and out in ways the heroes simply can’t. At best a hero might get an occasional ride or access to a fixed gate, and that means every long road and ambush he still has to slog through feels even grimmer by comparison. If a hero masters teleportation or wins the full-time help of someone who has, it can be a sign that the story’s almost over.
But that in itself probably won’t keep a story together. It’s too easy to ask, “Why does that vanishing villain need to build his Ultimate Weapon if he could just appear where the hero’s asleep?”
That second side of the power question might answer that. More precisely, how much of the caster’s fighting and working energy does a teleport use up? If it drains:
- very little of it: if you truly make the magic so easy, he’s got a free pass to flit around anytime he wants, at least within the range and other limits he has.
- a third of it: he might teleport in on a whim—but limit what he does then so he still has the final third of his strength to duck out again. (And suddenly a lot of villains’ probing, tentative raids make more sense, don’t they?)
- most of his power: he’d be less eager to jaunt around, and might resist using enough power on anything else that he’d endanger his escape option. And he’d want to be keep a destination he was sure was safe.
- days, or years, of saved up power? choices get all the more careful…
- specialized stored power: he has as many teleports as he can store up for, and can still use his full arsenal of fighting magic between those jumps. If you want a combat wizard who includes powerful teleports as part of his assaults, this extra wrinkle might be needed.
You see how the basics change how the power’s used. And there are a few related limits in that:
Distance: How far a teleport does the above apply to? If teleporting actually can cross the world, all its story-breaking risks are multiplied by the number of safe targets and escapable spots within its reach—pretty much infinite, until the other limits set in. Crossing a mile or two is still a massive advantage, but that one transit mostly affects a single battle, or provides an incomplete “we’re not out of the woods yet” escape. Even a five-foot teleport can get a trickster behind an enemy or through a wall, if it’s fast or just well planned.
Passengers: Does a teleporter have to travel alone? That can be a reason for a villain or a meddler to always send other people to do his work. Or the more allies he can take along, the more he can get done—even if reaching his target wipes out all his own strength. And if he can hold a gate open to march an army through—let alone create a permanent portal system—he pretty much remakes the world’s map every time.
Passenger Exhaustion: Besides the purely magical cost to the caster, are he and the people he carries too weakened to function for a while? This limit can keep a teleporter from dropping a strike team into a fight, but let him still pull them out of it or cut down on travel time.
And, are all a person’s teleports at the same cost? How quickly does nearing his maximum range or weight drive it up?
Blink and you’ll miss it
One other issue with teleportation: speed.
No matter how blind or short-range a teleport is, being able to vanish in an instant is still the perfect defense, as long as there’s any landing place that’s safer than where you were. And it doesn’t stop with defense.
Fast-vanishing to even a spot in plain view ten or thirty feet away (say behind an enemy’s back) is all it takes for a fearsome combat advantage. Add enough more power to make five more teleports like it or the control to land safely out of sight in a closet and… if this starts to sound more like a mischievous but unstoppable imp than a character, it’s because that character would be almost unbeatable.
So fast-activated teleportation ought to be the most limited type of all. It could be an emergency escape, so powerful the character only uses it once—and that character might be the one who’s removed from the story soon after. It could be the talent of a powerful but sheltered wizard who has a real struggle choosing his moment in the confusion of a fight, or a scheming villain who always puts his own survival first. And a teleport that takes ten or even sixty seconds to cast still has plenty of chances to turn a crisis on its head, if they plan any time to cast it.
Roughly speaking, a teleporter’s power might be measured as
aim (reduced by warded areas) x range x number of teleports x number of people x speed
but I expect any two factors can do more than simply multiply each other if they aren’t limited. Just which ones the magic is strongest at might define huge parts of your story. For instance:
- A master of safely aimed teleporting could be an unstoppable spy or assassin.
- A world-ranging teleporter might be a master diplomat, or explorer.
- A heavy-lifting teleporter would be drawn to support an elite team of some kind—or be a merchant who ferried in goods by the cartload.
- A fast-vanishing “speed demon” would be among the deadliest fighters known, or a fugitive nobody could pin down.
Just which teleporting types and combinations a story’s magic allows are up to each writer. And then all that’s left is to keep up with all the ways different characters are going to use it.
And with that said—
I’m out of here.
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