Personal System Calendar: Year 00015, Day 1-28, Month VIII: The Imperium
Imperial Calendar: Year 6859, 1st to 28th day of the 8th Month
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The Warp Portal Network: Information, Rules and Guidelines
The Warp Portals themselves date back to the Empire's earliest days, ancient constructions allowing instant travel between fixed points.
The Empire holds exclusive control over the technology outright. Allied and free kingdoms may host a portal facility on their own land, but they never own or operate one directly.
What actually powers them remains known only to the Empire's highest authorities; it isn't simply fueled by Mana Battery Cells alone. There's more to it than what the Empire has ever shared with the public.
The scale of what they solve is hard to overstate. The three subcontinents together span roughly 2.1 billion km², a distance that could take months, sometimes years, to cross conventionally. A portal cuts a half-year journey down to a matter of days.
The original frames themselves stand fifty feet high and twenty feet wide, built from a material that seems to absorb light rather than reflect it, covered edge to edge in intricate runic patterns that pulse with a soft blue glow, almost like a heartbeat. Dormant, the surface shows a slow swirl of dark blue and black; active, it erupts into brilliant light. Every installation carries its own invisible mana bubble shield, a dome that only becomes visible the moment it actually absorbs an attack.
Travelers are expected to rest a minimum of three days between consecutive jumps. Master Rank users can push that to four jumps in a row before real symptoms set in. Ignoring the rest requirement entirely brings consequences that aren't minor: weeks of lost balance, constant vomiting, migraines, and in severe cases, temporary paralysis. Even a single jump comes with some baseline discomfort, nausea, dizziness, disorientation, and a strange disruption to the inner ear, stomach, and sense of time. A specialized Imperial medicine exists to suppress most of it, used routinely for rapid troop deployment, cutting what would normally be days of recovery down to almost nothing.
Portals stay heavily guarded, with strict limits on daily entries and exits, and every traveler who passes through walks away with signed authentication papers from the garrison commander, requiring identification for anyone continuing on through Imperial territory afterward.
The Imperial Gatekeepers, the specialized personnel who manage the portal's magical machinery and handle emergency shutdowns, are a distinct role from the civilian gatekeepers who run day-to-day screening and normal gate operations within the Imperial Garrison Complex. The two roles can be evacuated separately during a crisis, as most recently seen at the Fort Aulexus incident, where civilian gatekeepers were pulled out while emergency-authorized personnel stayed behind, including the Imperial Warp Portal Gatekeepers, or the Imperial Gatekeepers, who initiate the shutdown of the warp portals.
Portal garrisons themselves are run by military officers, General Roger among them, commanding dedicated legions; one garrison alone held 25,000 combat troops and 50,000 civilian support staff. The portal core stays under Imperial technician control even on allied soil, though the surrounding facility can be staffed by the host kingdom's own people, as seen in Perlah.
The sole exception to the strict standards enforced across these platforms is the Dragonguard, who alone are permitted to skip standard security screening entirely, wherever they go.
Portal Coverage: Established Central, and Proposed Eastern Subcontinent
Eighteen Imperial-controlled regions across the Central Subcontinent host 56 Imperial portals between them: two each across Central-West North (Regions 1 through 4) and Central-West South (Regions 21 through 24), and four each across Central-East North (Regions 1 through 5) and Central-East South (Regions 26 through 30).
Six more portals sit on Free-Reigning Kingdom soil, built and maintained by the Empire but hosted by allies: two in the Central-West, including The Gentle Giants' Rest in Ogind's Region 11, and four more across the Central-East, in Rolin's Region 17 and three other yet-unnamed stations. A handful of regions, five through seven and eighteen through twenty in the Central-West, don't get a station of their own at all, routing instead to whichever Imperial portal sits closest.
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Historical Data
(The Gentle Giants' Rest, the very first station August's group ever used, sits near the Town of Bob and doubles as both a Central-Western military transport hub and a full Imperial garrison. Fort Aulexus, further east in the Western Subcontinent, guards the portal near Perlah, and was the site of the Fresco Revenge-backed rebel siege that nearly overran it.
That siege remains the single largest portal-related incident of the current era. A coordinated, multi-angle magical explosion struck the garrison's western perimeter, absorbed at first by the mana bubble shield before Imperial Gatekeepers shut the portal down entirely, sealing both ends at once, this station and its linked garrison at Bob, so the enemy couldn't use it to bring in reinforcements or slip away. The fort lost roughly 3% of its 75,000 personnel, 2,250 dead, before 500 soldiers of the 20th Dragonguard Cohort arrived through the reactivated portal at the Capital City of Perlah, with another thousand already in pursuit of the fleeing rebels.
It was Head Master Kaizer who used a special authorization key to push August's group through ahead of schedule at the Town of Bob, bypassing the civilians and merchants still waiting in line.)
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For the Helmas SAR specifically, each region will actually receive four portals rather than one. One of those four will always sit in the region's own capital city, publicly known and openly used. The remaining three will be spread out and kept as closely guarded secrets, accessible only to military personnel within that region. Officially, those other three won't exist on any paper trail at all. They're meant to serve as rapid-response stations, capable of moving reinforcements quickly should a region come under attack, since a single portal alone would be far too slow, and potentially costly, if that region were captured before a proper defense could be mounted. The remaining three are kept as black sites that officially don't exist. On paper, each Helmas region shows only one portal.
Beyond the portals themselves, road networks, additional manpower, and resource surveys, the Empire is also working to build proper trade networks between Helmas and its neighbors, a responsibility that falls to each region's governor to see through.
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Meanwhile, Back in Maya Village
While the east, now formally declared Imperial land, slowly rebuilt itself under the Empire's watch, life continued much closer to home, back in the forest, where the pace of things looked nothing like it did across the great rivers and oceans that divided them.
Back in the Village of Maya, growth continued at its own steady pace, especially now with fall settling in. The last of summer's heat still lingered, though it would soon give way to the cooler months. The leaves had already begun turning from green to other hues, a quiet signal that autumn was close.
Normal work schedules were returning too, at least for those working outside the fields. Summer's sun ran hot enough that the Governing Administrative Body of Maya had shifted work schedules for anyone especially exposed to the heat and the sweltering summer sun, pushing more activity into the cooler nighttime hours. Those working indoors were exempt from the shift, since every building in the village was already required to run passive cooling systems, part of the same seasonal design work Sibus had built into every structure, for summer and winter alike.
It was one of the things that made the village genuinely different. Most other villages, towns, and cities simply pushed through the summer heat without adjusting anything. Maya didn't, and that level of care showed to every villager and even to visiting merchants and travelers. It showed that there were still people in this world who cared for such things even if the world outside never bothered to begin with.
Despite the shifted schedules, trade and travel hadn't really slowed either; merchants kept coming regardless, conducting whatever business had brought them to the village in the first place.
Between the shaded avenues, the public parks, and the trees planted throughout, many of them fruit-bearing and free for anyone to pick from, there was no shortage of places to escape the sun. Where most cities were built as endless stretches of stone and timber, Maya had built itself around its ancient-growth trees from the very start, as if its planners had understood, long before construction ever began, exactly what a place without them would cost its people.
The village kept actively planting more besides, a combination of newly planted trees now supplementing roughly 30% of what had grown there naturally, alongside another 20% planted outright.
Where ancient trees had to come down to make room for new buildings in Zone 4, nothing went to waste. That same wood would be cut and processed into usable timber, and it usually ended up back in the very buildings or furniture replacing it on that land, cutting down on both waste and cost.
A Green Belt initiative kept the major roads and public spaces lined with greenery too, work that had visibly helped lower the village's summer temperatures by a full 5°C compared to areas without trees, alongside pockets of old-growth forest that were deliberately left standing throughout. Altogether, roughly 40% of the village's occupied land stayed forested, trees, shrubs, and undergrowth all carefully balanced against the remaining 60%, which held the village's actual infrastructure and zones.
The same workers who maintained these public spaces also kept fire risk down, clearing dry leaves before they became a hazard. They made sure the fruit trees and other plants stayed watered too, fed in part by streams redirected down from the mountains into ponds built into the village's own design. The water was kept moving deliberately, so it would never sit still and breed harmful insects or disease instead of helping cool the air.
These same workers made up part of the broader manpower reduction already in place across the village during the summer months, reduced down to a skeletal daytime crew, just enough to keep the plants from shriveling in the heat. Those still working under these conditions received hazard pay, 150% of their normal daily wage. The remaining 80% of the workforce shifted to nighttime hours instead, unpaid extra for the schedule change itself, rotating between morning and evening shifts so no one stayed locked into the same hours for too long.
On a different note entirely, it was only recently that the village properly noticed something else living among all that greenery: bees. They'd always been elusive, rarely seen, leaving people to wonder for a long while how exactly their crops and fruit trees were getting pollinated at all.
August's system likely played some role, though reading carefully through his passive skills that acted as buffs, it acted more as an amplifier keeping things healthy than as the actual source of it. Nature, as it turned out, was doing most of the real work, just not where anyone had thought to look. The bees, it seemed, were mostly active at night, while the village slept.
Terrence was the one who finally proved the mystery. He'd made contact with the first bee colony they'd found, and the queen told him, telepathically, that her bee colony wasn't the only kind living in the forest. Some were nocturnal by nature. Others simply moved with such a low presence that they could go entirely unnoticed. A few, she said, could activate a skill and camouflage themselves completely.
Terrence brought what he'd learned back to the Agriculture Department, who took the discovery seriously enough to launch their own investigation, unwilling to accept it as fact without solid qualitative and quantitative data to back the claim first. The department's already-flipped night schedule made the research easier to run. Teams were assigned to specific trees and areas, watching quietly after dark for any sign of these creatures.
Only 20% of the Agriculture Department's workforce stayed on during the day now, mostly to manage water flow through the fields, since the automated watering system handled most of the heavy lifting but still needed someone to adjust or shut it off when required. Leaving the water running constantly risked rotting the crops rather than helping them, so the manpower stayed necessary. The remaining 80% worked nights instead, tending the fields and continuing the search for these elusive pollinators. After two or three months of watching, the research finally paid off. They had enough data now to confirm the pollinators were real, easy to miss if you never looked up from your work, but unmistakable once you did.
Tagkarit, meanwhile, kept growing steadily in its own right. Its fish farms had expanded, and new size and weight limits now kept overfishing in check, throwing back anything too young while letting only fully matured fish reach the markets of Tagkarit and Maya alike.
With migration into the village resuming, a number of newcomers had started choosing to settle in Tagkarit directly rather than Maya itself, though the same vetting process applied there too, capped at only 50 to 100 new residents a year. What used to run entirely through Maya's own migration department now had its own dedicated branch in Tagkarit, and it likely wouldn't be long before the settlement had its own security force to match.
Elsewhere, far from either settlement, the original clans continued their journey up the great river aboard the GMV. With any luck, they'd likely reach Maya within the following month or two.