by Dryus Doost, Mage

‘Tis beyond the scope of this small monograph to discuss the details of moongates, and the manners in which they distort the fabric of reality in such a manner as to permit the passage of living flesh from place to place, world to world, or indeed from dimension to dimension.

Instead, allow me to bring thy attention, Gentle Reader, to the curious characteristics that are shared by certain individuals within our realm.

Long has it been known that the blue moongate permits travel from place to place, and none have trouble in taking this path. Yet ’tis also known, albeit only to a few, that certain individuals are unable to traverse the black moongates that permit travel from one dimension to another.

The noted mage and peer of our realm, Lord Blackthorn, once told me in conversation that his arcane research had indicated that the issue was one of conservation of ether. To wit, given the postulate that matter within a given dimension may be but a cros-section of ethereal matter that exists in multiple dimensions, it becomes obvious that said ethereal structure cannot enter dimensions in which it is already present.

Imagine an individual (and the Lord Blackthorn hinted that he was one such) who exist already in some form in multiple dimensions: said individual would not be able to cross into another dimension because HE IS ALREADY THERE.

The implications of this are staggering, and merit further study. ‘Tis well known by theorists in the field that divisions in the ethereal structure of an individual are already implicit at the temporal level, as causality forces divisions upon the ether. This is the basic operating mechanism by which white moongates function, permitting time travel.

As time travel is not barred by the presence of an earlier self (though encountering said earlier self can prove arcanely perilous), there must be some rigidity to the ethereal structure that bars multiple instantiations of structures from manifesting within the same context.

If one regards time and causal bifurcation as a web, perhaps the appropriate analogy for dimensional matrices is that of a crystalline structure with rigid linkages.

The only way in which an individual such as Lord Blackthorn, who exists in multiple dimensional matrices, can cross worlds via a black moongate, would be for the entire crystalline structure of the dimension to perfectly match the ethereal resonance of the destination dimension.

The problem of why certain individuals are already replicated in multiple crystalline matrices is one that I fail to provide any schema for in these poor theories. It is my fondest hope that someday someone shall conquer that thorny problem and enlighten the world.