Portal

Portals are holes in reality, and are a foundational element to the multiverse.

Notable Examples

 * Professor Haywire's Portal
 * Unspecified portal in Europe
 * Cauldron's portal network
 * Smugglers Portal in White Rock
 * Brockton Bay Portal
 * Post-Gold Morning portal network
 * Gimel-Earth N portal train station near the Norwalk-Fairfield span
 * Gimel-Earth Bet portal train station where Crystalclear worked
 * Fenway station, a + shaped train station made of red stone
 * Norwalk station (in Kenzie's neighbourhood)
 * Eastern Gimel-Bet portal
 * Northeastern Bet-Gimel portal
 * Prison portal
 * The second Wardens HQ, the Bunker. was accessed via portal & used them to allow rapid deployment to different parts of the City.

Description
Portals are "holes" in reality. They allow travel across the multiverse lattice, allowing people travel to other worlds.

Portal appearances are dictated by their creation: Palanquin ones are three dimensional regions of translucent overlaid space; Warden tech creates temporary tears in reality, Teacher's students construct similar tears, but opaque, cruder and more dangerous to the traveler, with later versions improved somewhat. Cauldron's method creates near seamless portals, however they are not necessarily permanent by themselves either.

They can function as a useful power source with interactions in several parahuman effects, useful is not the same as safe however.

Creation

 * Doormaker
 * Tinkers
 * Professor Haywire
 * Tinker group (including Lookout) working in conjunction
 * Teacher through his students and appropriated tech
 * Combos
 * Dimension manipulators
 * Labyrinth
 * Myrddin
 * All-or-nothings
 * Scrub
 * Foil
 * Ashley Stillons
 * Trigger events by design create an interdimensional connection inside each parahuman brain to their shard. This is known as the Corona Pollentia.
 * Endbringer cores are specialized portals that allow for their manifestation.

Background
With the fall of Eden at Cote D'Ivorie, several portals were opened throughout the multiversal worlds. Later, Cauldron gained access to a parahuman that was able to close most of these doors.

The hole between realities that Professor Haywire created led Earth Bet to discover Earth Aleph. This almost sparked a war. Thankfully, several agreements between the governmental entities of the earth's prevented this.

The Aleph-Bet portal was restricted to relaying the transmission of data through radio waves. The portal itself was filled in with concrete and surrounded by guarded facilities that stopped anyone from going in or out. The only concession was communication devices fed through the concrete, which allowed for digital exchanges. Besides research, media was one of the few things that could be traded back and forth through the portal, leading to the trade of books, movies and DVDs of TV shows.

A portal created by smugglers in what was probably Canada caused a heap of trouble, including making the cluster possible in the first place.

In December 2009, the Simurgh accessed a vault containing Professor Haywire's technology to create a functional, large-scale version of his interdimensional door. The Simurgh used this technology to create two gateways - one leading to Earth Aleph, and one leading to a part of Cauldron's research facility. The portal dumped the buildings, soil, plant life and the residents from both locations into Madison, Wisconsin.

Story Start
At this point, the cultural exchange that the Aleph-Bet portal allows has become a fact of life for both Earth Aleph and Earth Bet.

Post-Echidna
A new kind of portal conceptualized by Tattletale was created during a collaboration between Labyrinth and Scrub. Labyrinth temporarily shifted the portal to lead to Earth Aleph to let the Travelers return home, before shifting it to an uninhabited earth later known as Earth Gimel. This portal would eventually become the Brockton Bay Portal.

With this knowledge in hand, Palanquin created five more portals publicly and three more in secret. Later events incentivized them to make many more escape routes leading to Earth Gimel, similar to the Brockton Bay Portal.

Timeskip
The Simurgh likely accessed Earth Shin and brought several of the local capes into Paris during her attack on the city. This could have been through Professor Haywire's technology, or a usurpation of an existing portal, such as one created by Palanquin.

Post-Timeskip
Two years after the fight with Khonsu, portals existed throughout the world.

Gold Morning
Cauldron began mass-evacuating what was left of the Earth Bet population to multiple other Earths, closing portals as they went.

Khepri used Doormaker to make thousands upon thousands of portals to move and extend her range during the fight with Scion.

Post-Gold Morning
The City used their portals to uninhabited worlds in order to extract resources from them.

Earth N was settled by people from Gimel, 90% of them within 25 miles of the portal leading from Gimel. A train station was constructed to transport resources and people between the worlds. A train station was also constructed at a portal between Earth Bet and Gimel, patrolled by Thinkers. Other train stations with portals included Fenway Station.

Victoria Dallon often visited Bet via a portal at the east end of The City. Refugees from Bet waited at the Northeastern Bet-Gimel portal.

The City government established a prison for parahumans on an isolated Earth, accessible only via a single portal from an empty Earth, itself connected to Gimel by a single portal.

Post-Fallen fall
The Portals in the megalopolis were attacked by various groups. They used tinker devices to expand them outwards, trapping many people in alternate worlds and cutting parts of the city off from each other.

Post-Goddess' Takeover
The parahuman prison had its portals cut off.

Post-Time Bubble Pop
Teacher was able to open the portal to previously quarantined sub-dimension containing shards.

Post-Attack on Teacher
The Portal to the Earth Cheit became a catalyst for The Breaking of Ice.