the 91st of Ymiden 718
Oberan’s progress with Graeslin’s Orb had been stagnating for about fifteen or sixteen trials now. That many trials back, he’d successfully managed to figure out how to open a portal to a specific location –which happened to be his house. Why there of all places? Apparently, because he had given the orb a command to remember that particular location.
Attempting to recreate that command had prompted a lot of trial and error, but eventually his experimentation had yielded results; he knew how to make the orb remember a location, and he could consistently open a portal to it. However, it seemed that each time he did so, he also erased the previously registered location.
Also, he hadn’t figured out how to close the portals.
In essence, this meant that the tear in space would remain open indefinitely, but, like with all things, it required effort. Oberan likened it to opening one of those fancy doors with a system attached to it that shut the door by applying a pushing force to it. Sure, a normal person could easily open the door, and even keep it open, but the device was always trying to close it. Even if it didn’t take that much effort to hold the door open, eventually your arms would tire and the door would close.
That seemed to have happened to the portals he’d opened as well. After a while, they had simply petered out and vanished. By ‘a while’, Oberan meant approximately eight breaks and fifteen bits for the first portal, and the second –which he’d only been able to open about five breaks after the first had closed—had closed after only five bits. The third portal had been opened five breaks after that, again because he couldn’t open one sooner. Just like with portal number two, this one vanished after five bits.
However, the portal Oberan had opened the next trial, after a good night’s rest, had remained open for fifteen bits. As such, it became clear that the artefact needed some time to recuperate as well. Any uses after the closing of that and any subsequent portals still required a rest period of five breaks though, so Oberan surmised that the Orb couldn’t be used in quick succession.
It didn’t seem right though. Graeslin had opened several in a small amount of time. Hell, even the portal Oberan had opened during the jailbreak hadn’t been very long after the closing of the portal Graeslin had created. His hypothesis had to be false.
Yet, the fact that he simply couldn’t open another portal sooner than five breaks after the closing of the first remained.
What was also true, though, was that he hadn’t actively closed any of those portals himself. In fact that was where his door analogy came in once more. An exhausted person drained to the point that they couldn’t hold a door open also couldn’t open that door anymore. Not until they had rested a bit to recover their strength. This might very well be how the orb functioned as well. It needed some time to recharge, and only when it had gathered sufficient energy it could open another portal.
Extending that train of thought, the minimum length of time needed would then be five breaks. Additionally, the more the orb was allowed to rest and recuperate, the longer it could hold a portal open, as evidenced not only by the use after a full night, but also by the first portal Oberan had opened, which hadn’t vanished for several breaks. Before that portal, the orb had been resting for more than a season.
He hadn’t done the math, but he was fairly sure that eight breaks was too brief for the time spent charging the orb. After all, when he’d let the orb rest for about ten breaks, double the minimum rest time, it had created a portal that lasted fifteen bits. Which was trice that of a portal spawned from minimum charge. Oberan couldn’t be sure if doubling the charge time tripled the output however, so he had tested it again, this time waiting twenty breaks before he opened a new portal. Unfortunately, the time it stayed in existence was not forty-five bits, but thirty-five instead. While it served well enough to debunk the tripling of the output, thirty-five was an odd number. Usually doubling the charging time doubled the energy stored, but the portal stayed open for five bits longer than what the double amount would have been.
To make sense of it all, Oberan opened another portal after waiting fifteen breaks, which told him all he needed to know. It only closed after twenty-five bits, and the pattern in the duration of the portal became visible. For every five breaks, the orb could keep a portal open for ten bits longer. He also found out that after letting the crystal ball recharge for seven and a half breaks, a portal could be opened for ten bits, which meant that he did not have to wait five breaks to upgrade the time the portal could stay open. However, if the orb was charged for more than five breaks, but less than seven and a half, it only existed for five bits. Likewise, if the charge sat between seven and a half, and ten breaks, the portal disappeared after ten bits. Which led Oberan to believe that even though the Orb needed five breaks after full discharge to open a portal, it didn’t need to be spent in chunks of five breaks. However, the smallest amount spent to extend the longevity of a portal seemed to be two and a half breaks of charge, which always lengthened the lifespan of the portal by five bits. Doing the math had taken quite a bit of time, because the conversion of bits and breaks and such, and then calculating things with those was, well, not his forte. He wasn’t a mathematician, after all, let alone the Mortalborn of it.
So all that had eaten up quite a bit of time to figure out, not helped in the slightest by his inability to close the portals he created, so ideally he’d find a way to do so soon. Likewise, being able to open portals to different locations would greatly boost the functionality of the object, but also widen the scope of the experiments he would have to conduct. Kind of annoying, but that was the objective, it was why he was here, outside the Outer Perimeter, far enough away from the ears and eyes of curious people, but close enough that Oberan wouldn’t have to walk that far back home. Not to mention, the different location would allow him to try and make the orb remember more than one location.
With a sigh, the Mortalborn fished the sphere out of his coat, and prepared himself for failure.
