Gules' Notes

Gules Dragon's Interpretation of Persifal's Feat, After Researching Her Notes. (Written Down to the Level of the Black Rose Company)

Notebook 3

The bulk of the research in this book revolves around the creation of instantaneous teleportals, gates that the author (clearly Persifal - come now, you thought I wouldn't recognize her handwriting?) believes tap across through Illume or Adumbra to the metaplane of time and back, thus permitting "instantaneous" travel across time and/or space or - in some cases - across planes. As an aside, there is a school of thought that maintains that the metaplane of time cannot in fact be used to travel from one spatial destination to another, but I'm not entirely clear what the rationale for that argument is - I believe it has something to do with time exerting a differential force across planes that prohibits interplanar travel using time as an element of locomotion, but the physics are beyond me.
Although first interested in the mechanics of flickergates, which are opened and closed quickly, Persifal later became fascinated by stillgates, which are held open by active or passive spell channels. You might be interested to learn that most stillgates made of crafted objects (doorways, for example) access Illume, whereas most stillgates made of natural objects (pools of water or living bodies, for example) access Adumbra. Persifal suggests this has something to do with akasic frequencies being higher as the matrix is bent into equilibrium - for the record, the undead are much closer to equilibrium than the living, so at least you needn't worry overmuch about being turned into a bloodgate by someone with a penchant to visit, say, Acheron. There's a paradox (or at least an unexplained mystery) embedded in her suggestion, but I'll leave it to you to figure out. At any rate, crafted gates are more likely to toss you to some place in Initiment, and natural gates to some place in Attrament - although to the best of my knowledge a gate from any part of Attrahent to another can take either form, so all in all it seems to me that you'd be better off spending a bit more time on research before leaping blindly.
The embedded paradox aside, her hypothesis makes sense. Pardon me for a moment while I enter into some illegal speculation. If living systems have affinity for the hypofield, then they provide a more accessible channel for exoplanar manipulation. Thus, living beings are more open to act as channels or carriers for denizens of Attrament - which may explain why some people (now safely dead, I presume) were capable of channeling un/holy energies. This also lends slightly more credence to the Iron Autocracy's prohibition against such channeling, since it's feasible that a channel could become a gate, I suppose. We'll leave the speculation at that, shall we?
Now, all this aside, Persifal and somebody else whose handwriting is cramped and repressed began outlining what boil down to magical blueprints for creating both active and passive stillgates. They seem to have been most effective in the creation of passive stillgates, if I'm reading the notes correctly (and believe me, this is not my specialty, and I wouldn't dream of trying to build one myself from their plans). Her notes indicate that her favorite passive stillgate materials included mirrors, some sort of seal made out of worked metals, and mosaic designs worked into floors. She apparently had some success opening at least one active stillgate, although it only opened from one point in Cislunar to another - she called it the "Sungate" and it seems to be part of a larger project she called "The Wood." I hope that means more to you than it does to me. There really ought to be formal protocols for recording one's magical investigations.
Most of Persifal's gates pierce space. However, toward the end of the notebook she began considering creating a gate that would pierce time - she seemed to have wanted to work that into her Sungate, but it appears she didn't get around to it before opening the gate. There's some detail here that I won't go into concerning gating and time, but suffice to say her later intent was to gate through and into time along a field rather than point pattern.
The notes on temporal gating involve formulae to create a resonance pattern or type of "interplanar noise" that raises the akasic frequency of an area to a catastrophe point where it abandons its old dynamic and moves into a new one. The area begins to vibrate in time with, well, Time. Dear me, this is so difficult to put into terms a playwright would understand. I don't suppose any of you play a musical instrument? Imagine differently tuned strings set side-by-side on an instrument. Pluck one, and the vibrations can start the other strings moving. That's the way planes work, each one tuned slightly differently, vibrating on a different energy field yet still affecting each other. By changing the "note" one resonates to, one transfers oneself from one frequency (or plane) to another. This is easily done for a person or some other small object(s), but it is more difficult to do for a large area consisting of many objects, especially if you merely want to keep the conduit open and not transfer the entire area directly to the next plane - after all, interplanar slippage is relatively easy once a large enough gate is open, being only a modification of the flickergate protocols.
However, Persifal wanted to take an area and tune it so it stood precisely between this plane and the Chronoscape, and then keep it there, vibrating at precisely the right frequency. That is to say, she wanted to reach a balance precisely at the cusp catastrophe, where the area would vibrate indeterminately between two potential endstates. Let me point out the obvious: Such a feat would require delineating the area to be affected and anchoring that area into the new (higher) frequency range using both a central anchor and a series of anchor-points or "pegs" that could take a variety of forms as long as all anchoring were active rather than passive. Moreover, the anchors and pegs would have to be able to dampen any disturbances that might cause fluctuations in the delicate balance so achieved.
Well, Persifal decided to anchor the frequency with an active stillgate. Most of the notes (both by her and this mysterious stranger) broke down and analyzed the Entropy Gate from Candor, in which the anchor was a series of bloodgates, valiant young souls who sacrificed themselves to seal a planar wormhole to Shadow. There are easier ways to close a gate, but it was a good idea for such backwards times, and the poor things were a bit rushed so we must make allowances. However, I fear Persifal took their example to heart. Toward the end of the notebook there are pages and pages of scribbled notes, and about two-thirds of the formulae the two were using are quite beyond me. If this weren't all terribly forbidden, I'd suggest you run the equations past Guildmistress Carel, but the poor dear doesn't need the trouble. Anyway, it appears that Persifal and M. Mysterious were working on a bloodgate that would tap through Adumbra to the Chronoscape and hold a rather extensive area frozen in time by creating a temporal loop. Her anchor points would be a series of previously established gates.
Now, this endeavour would normally be impossible, given the gate structure she was proposing - and believe me, the details of why that's so aren't likely to interest you at all but feel free to come by some time for tea if you really must know the secret - but she was relying on outside help from somebody who, if memory serves me, really oughtn't be named, at least not in any document in my handwriting. If she did get that help, then the gate structure would in fact be opened on two ends (here and There) and the loop would be feasible - the destabilized system would be drawn into and held within the new boundary conditions set by the outside attractor. If. Yes, in fact, these formulae do break in the center with the equivalent of, "and then a miracle occurs."
That's the synopsis of her notebook; now let's get down to the critique. Persifal, despite being the grande dame of Cislunar and a brilliant mind in her own right, simply didn't know as much about magic as we do now. I see several problems with her research - but again, you must remember that I am not an expert in this area.
First, we know much more about the relationship between Attrahent and the IAM fusion (that's Illume/Adumbra/Metaplanar, for the playwrights in the audience). When multiple gates are opened too close to each other, they begin to affect the harmonic (the planar arrangement or field, so to speak) and can cause that integral field to fray and even unravel. In essence, the "noise" of the gates causes oscillations that begin to push the radiant magical energies to a catastrophe point (remember, the planes themselves are normally an orderly, self-organizing closed system), pushing the planar system into a potential state of iterative growth. In other words, chaos occurs.
When the field begins to fray, it affects energy manifestations within that area. Things begin to spontaneously combust, objects shift from plane to plane, magic goes awry, and so forth. When the field begins to rift, the damage is somewhat greater. The best example of that would be the rift from the Icewind Mountains to Bahr al'Raml in Candor. We've learned that it was caused by two rather large and powerful stillgates being open at the same time - one to a lower frequency plane and one to a higher. The frequencies became dissonant and tore themselves apart. Fortunately, this result usually destroys the gates in question, stopping the effect (the frequencies drop back into stability) before something truly terrible occurs, such as the entire world's energy field tearing apart. This was the case for the Great Rift, which destroyed both gates and thus saved the continent, if not the world. People really ought to be more careful where they open gates!
Speaking of careful, Persifal's penchant for creating gates undoubtedly endangered Cislunar - unaware of the potential results of her actions, she must have worn the planar fabric nearly threadbare in places. Fortunately, as far as I can tell, all of her gates are gone now. I'm worried enough by this "matrixgate" Shrike installed, and the Tarin Tor's extradimensional barracks - the last thing we need are any more permanent teleportals in the area.
Second, the area she was trying to anchor in time was simply too large for her to manage it with a simple bloodgate as anchor. She expected to use some of her already existing gates to act as pegs. Unfortunately, her existing gates usually tapped through Illume, while she, as bloodgate, was tapping through Adumbra. The two planes very seldom meet, and there's a reason for it - they're polar opposites, high and low frequencies respectively, and to bring the two near each other almost inevitably lead to dissonance. Her anchoring mechanism isn't likely to be reliable, and what's worse, it has the potential of creating any number of unpleasant planar side-effects, like opening vortices and wormholes that could cause who-knows-what kind of mischief! As far as I know, such an attempt has never been made, and it would probably be for the best if it is never made at all. Hopefully, she realized that and abandoned this area of research.
Third, I'm a bit concerned by the nature of "and then a miracle occurs." I don't know anything about miracles and I don't want to know anything about miracles, but if any single person could trap herself in the middle of a miracle for a virtually eternal span of time and emerge unchanged, it would be, well, a miracle. I can only assume that miraculous forces are akin to true magic, and extended exposure to true magic has all sorts of unpredictable effects. What if her mind or body should finally snap? The gate would shatter, the loop would close, some rather large area would snap back into time, the anchor "pegs" would be ripped out, and Cislunar would have an interesting time ahead.
Fourth, how would one close her gate? I suppose the Stranger Who Scrawls might have had some idea, but I've never seen that particular handwriting in the Chantry archives, so I'm not certain if those records survived the war. I suppose, if I were to guess - and I'm no expert at this, remember - the best way would be to disassemble it from gate of lesser importance to gate of greater importance. That is, pull out the "pegs" (the Illume stillgates) and then pull out the anchoring pole (the Adumbra bloodgate). This would still be likely to have severely unbalancing effects - the best idea would be to do them near-simultaneously. The stillgates can probably be closed by destroying them, dropping an extradimensional mine into them (not an option I suggest, however, unless you're interested in precipitating rather major civic renovation), dispelling them, and so forth. The bloodgate is another matter. Of course, the usual method of closing a bloodgate is to walk into it, sacrificing one's own life. Heroic, tragic, and final. Whether the undead can do that is, however, unknown - and, I predict, unlikely. Besides, there's the temporal factor - how do you avoid the time loop from freezing you in place? - and the miracle factor - what, exactly, is the Big Someone going to do to you when you try to close the gate? Finally, there's the life factor - Persifal's notes indicated the presence of a willing and intact bloodgate anchor, as in Entropy Square. That's a bit different from the usual necromantic bloodgate through an eviscerated body - no holes to step through. (Ghastly thought, anyway.) Attempting to dispel the magic might work, but it doesn't seem likely to me, especially if the miracle factor is a consideration. There was some discussion once that physically pulling the bloodgates out of position in Entropy Square might break the gate, but nobody ever tried it - for one thing, they're more or less time-stopped, and for the other, who wants to re-open that horrid gate, anyhow? The difference, of course, is that the Entropy Square bloodgates were used to shut the gate, whereas Persifal's hypothesized bloodgate would be used to open the gate. That might be significant.
I do hope that helps - if you want further help, say, to actually build one of her gates, I suggest you inquire at the Chantry. However, I suspect our occupying government would frown upon unlicensed teleportals, so do be sure to fill out the requisite paperwork.