You’ve never seen them before. They insist your parents lied to you. They weren’t trying to hurt you—just keep a secret until you were old enough. Now your time has come. There’s another world within reach, and your real family is waiting.

It isn’t Middara waiting on the other side, not yet. Once through the opening, you arrive at a strange, incredible place, somewhere between the material and the mental. You’ve entered a Room.

Barring a terrible disaster, every Harbinger to help humans through a Portal is always the first to touch the opening, and holds the door open until every passenger is through. Why do they do this? Why is it so important that immigrants always end up in the Harbingers’ room, instead of their own?

Lives depend on it. Rooms aren’t just hallways—they’re predators, waiting to devour you and your sanity alive.

Every single person who steps through a portal ends up in a room. It doesn’t matter their background, beliefs, or situation. No two rooms are alike, but they do follow a few basic rules. Without this common behavior, portal travel would probably be too dangerous to attempt.

When a person or animal contacts a Portal, there is a Room waiting for them on the other side. Should they pass through and someone else follow, they will not be in the same Room as their friend, unless the one leading them left a limb in the portal to hold the door open or maintained physical contact. When a Harbinger leads someone through a portal, it is to guarantee the destination will be the Harbinger’s own Room.

What waits through the portal is itself as impossible to predict as the Advancement. Every Room is distinct and reflects the personality and character of the one who stepped through. Yet it is always a physical place, one that follows the same laws of physics that bind on Earth. Almost.

The manifestations of Rooms are as varied as the people who cross through them into Middara. Some may appear as real place: a forgotten childhood home, a cherished workplace, or the vacation spot someone met their lover. Others are more abstract: places they imagined, locations taken from fiction, a place that existed only in their daydreams.

Rooms aren’t empty, but staffed by background populations that seem to really live, and sometimes even people who directly interact.

These people may take the form of real individuals a person knows, fictional creations, spirit guides, or the dead.

No matter how strange Rooms appear, a few realities are consistent across all Rooms:

Rooms are created from the mind of the first person to enter, the Room’s “Owner.” From that Owner’s point of view, the Room is not a confined space, but a single position in an infinite universe no different from our own. If their mansion is atop a cliff, they will see the village below, with people and animals and plants as they expect. If they walk down to the village, they can reach it and interact with its inhabitants. To the Owner, everyone and everything they encounter will match their expectations exactly.

No matter how strange or bizarre visitors might think they look, a Room is never unexpected to the Owner. Even if you’ve never seen it before, your Room will feel like a place you belong. If you didn’t know better, you might think the Room was the real Otherworld that your Harbinger was promising you.

That doesn’t mean the Room is perfect, comfortable, or welcoming. Rather, your Room reflects a place you feel you belong on some level. Someone taken from a violent background who views every other person in the world with suspicion might end up on a bloodsoaked battlefield, with torrential storms raging overhead. A thief would probably be surrounded by tempting targets, and rivals wishing to steal from each other. A parent who lost a child and feels like a failure could end up surrounded by people they respect, confirming they have never been good for anything.

Rooms invite you to take the load off, linger a little longer. There’s no need for you to keep going, there’s nothing important enough on either side. You belong! For the first few hours or days of your visit, this may be true. Yet as time progresses, the horrifying reality underneath emerges.

Rooms always feel like the most comfortable place you’ve ever been, somewhere you never want to leave. Yet those who linger for more than a few hours soon discover the truth: Rooms are hungry. The longer you remain, the more twisted the Room’s vision becomes. What was once a perfect mansion in the mountains eventually grows to impossible proportions, with endless rooms that threaten to swallow you alive. Dead relatives wait for you in each one, demanding you repent for imagined sins.

The longer you stay, the more frightening a Room becomes, warping as your own sanity fades. Remain too long, and you may forget your Room isn’t a real place.

No matter the manifestation of your Room, there will always be two openings, opposite each other. In a small Room, these might literally take the shape of household doors, while larger Rooms may have carved marble archways, swirling vortexes of magical energy, or enormous escalators vanishing down into a black abyss.

Regardless of the form they take, these doors will be distinct to every visitor who witnesses them, standing out from the other material of the Room. To approach one is to feel with certainty that traveling further leads to somewhere else. The wise traveler will seek out this other opening as quickly as possible and escape before it’s too late.

No matter how far the room’s Owner may travel, there will always be two doorways. Someone with a Room shaped like an airport could even board one of the planes and fly somewhere—while airborne, one of the lavatory doors might lead to Middara, while the way to Earth is waiting through the door to the cockpit.

Rooms cannot physically trap their occupants, and escape is never out of reach. When someone becomes trapped in a Room, it is always a prison of their own making. The real question is: can they recognize a false world for what it is?

Rooms connect between two realms, Middara and Earth. Anyone can walk into one and bring as much material as they desire. Carry your suitcase nuke inside, and you can bring it all the way to the opposite door. There it stops, however.

Doorways on either side will only permit inanimate matter from their side to cross. Clothing from Earth can’t come with you to Middara, and catches on the air with irresistible force. No number of winches or pumps can force something through, nor any spell know on Middara. The veil is immutable, and only the living can pierce it.

Material can be left in Rooms, however. This technique is often employed by Harbingers, who bring racks of Middaran clothing into their Room, ready to offer to any guests they bring along. As painful as it may be to leave your Earth outfit behind, knowing it will be waiting in the Room for your return does make it easier to make a trip back.

Of course, not everything left behind in a Room will be in the same condition when you return…

Most who visit rooms will not be traveling into their own. What happens when the Room isn’t yours?

Rooms center on their Owner. The doorways, the constructed characters, the nature of their reality—all focus on the perspective of their owner. This can become very dangerous for visitors, if those visitors aren’t aware of the consequences of these constraints.

Put simply, a Room does not exist at a distance beyond one mile of its Owner. The closer to this boundary one travels, the more the material of the room reveals its unreality. Vast cities are obvious constructs of false perspective, an unending ocean trails off to pits of nothing. Traffic on highways simply fade to mist and vanish as soon as they’re out of view of the room’s Owner. Their visiting dead continues a short distance, then dissolves into smoke.

The closer a visitor comes to this boundary, the more unreal it becomes, until all matter is tenuous. The air is hard to breathe, the ground can barely support your weight, and deep shadow engulfs you. This is the uttermost abyss of creation, beyond which nothing exists. Here the true unreality of the Room becomes terrifyingly clear.

Yet some push further or are restrained and unable to follow the Room’s owner. Eventually, reality blurs, and nothing concrete exists. At some point the Room is not real enough to contain them, and an unfortunate explorer will plummet through the edge out into—nothing.

This awful fate is not unknown, particularly among Harbingers who kidnap their targets. Some of these victims escape and flee into the Room. Without understanding where they are, they may not even understand that reaching the doorway back to Earth would take them home. Instead, they try to get as far away as possible, ignoring the warning signs until they plummet to their deaths.

Not one person who has ever vanished off the edge of a Room has ever returned. Scholars sometimes argue if they suffer instant death or are condemned to an eternity of torment in the unreality of that between-space. More optimistic souls suggest they might end up in their own rooms, yet without an entrance or exit since they didn’t enter the proper way. Either way, they’re gone forever.

The same waits for anyone who is inside a Room when its owner dies. In that case, the Room itself ceases to exist, plunging all occupants instantly down into that same frothing, half-realized abyss.

Not every aspect of Rooms is clearly understood, even though they’re used every day to bring thousands of people between Middara and Earth. Some questions have less sure answers, with experts divided on the truth. Here are just a few:

No. Rooms are made of a material that only seems real in its native domain. Unlike with matter from Earth or Middara, the Exit does not stop travel at its boundary. You can dress up in an outfit of gold and jewels from inside your Room and stride out with pride. However, you’ll arrive in your birthday suit.

The same is more tragically true about people met inside Rooms. As the Room’s characters are a reflection of what a person believes, someone who does not know how Rooms work may encounter a dead loved one who is eager to “leave” with them. A single step outside, and the visitor will discover they’re holding empty air. This trauma is another reason Harbingers try to bring people into their own rooms, instead of traveling into someone else’s.

As clear cut as this seems, there are cases of objects found already waiting in Room. These items typically feel strange and out of place to the Owner, as they are not a creation of their own mind. In these rare cases, these items can always travel out of the Room in exactly one direction. Usually they can be brought Middara, but sometimes the other way.

It is not clear where these items came from, as conventional wisdom suggests a Room shouldn’t exist until the Owner steps inside. How could someone visit to leave a gift? What kind of creature has the power to open a Room that isn’t there?

No answer is reassuring.

Rooms are a reflective space, where the unreality of the native domain mirrors a visitor’s mind back on themselves. Every person inside should only say things a visitor already knows. Yet even here, there is room for interpretation.

Consider the experience of many individuals while indulging in psychedelics. These substances interact with a user’s own mind, yet often do so in a way that reveals buried or subconscious thoughts. The human mind is vast, and no better understood on Middara than on Earth.

As a result, many visitors to Rooms report significant growth experiences as a result. A single encounter with a dead loved one can offer a chance for closure and a proper farewell, so long as the individual is mentally stable enough to leave at the end. Similar revelations may take place about other buried desires, repressed aspects of Identity, and more.

This is the explanation most often repeated about “revelations” learned from Rooms. Even when they prove true, they were things the Owner already knew. Yet even here, there are whispers of frightening exceptions.

Rare travelers report other creatures waiting in their Rooms. Like lingering objects, these seem out of place, not matching the setting and emotion of the Room in any way.

These beings did not seem to use the portals on either side. They are typically not hostile to the Room’s owner (likely understanding that their death would doom themselves as well), but that doesn’t mean they’re friendly. They might make demands, reveal painful new information, or deliver scathing abuse. They may also be friendly, offering help that could not be obtained from any conventional Esper.

These cases are vanishingly rare—so rare that scholars doubt their authenticity. 

Generally, the same as it does on Earth or Middara, one second per second. Yet even this question can’t be universally answered. Many Rooms exist that violate this rule.

What does seem true, at least to those who study the subject, is that every individual’s Room will always follow the same rate of relative time. Whatever happens to you on one visit will happen again on the next, at least where this aspect is concerned.

Some Rooms move fast, others move slow. From the viewpoint of someone walking inside a Room, time moves normally. They age one second for every second they experience, and any timekeeping devices they are using will function correctly.

The reality only becomes clear when you leave through a portal on either side. In some cases, visitors may step through a portal only to emerge a decade after they entered. Others may spend days resting and recovering from whatever happened on the other side, only to emerge a secondafter they left.

Rooms this extreme are rare and coveted by governments across Middara. Whether greatly compressed or stretched, strange time has its uses. In the same way, Harbingers will never be chosen if they have a Room like this. 

All these factors unite to the common view of Rooms across Middara: your Room is a dangerous passageway between two realms. Just as one would not linger in a shady part of town on your way to visit a friend, so all who must travel should speed their footsteps. To linger too long is to invite the destruction of one’s sanity, and eventual imprisonment in a realm of agonizing reflection.

The Wise do not inquire into what a Room is, or why it might exist. Rather, they leave it as quickly as they can and forget everything they saw inside.