Where would you expect to find Portals?

[whitelaughter]

Denis Arilan needs help to create a Transfer Portal, but is able to do so swiftly when needed. Camber probably roped in some humans for raw power, but otherwise didn't seem to need help. Granted that their abilities are the best of their respective generations - there still must be quite a few deryni with the power and motive to create portals.
And they've been at it for over a thousand years.

The Deryni we meet are either nobles or clergy. Would most religious establishments in the Festillic era have portals? It would save a bishop a huge amount of effort, allowing him to tour his lands in a fraction of the time.

Castles are trickier - the convenience needs to be balanced against the threat of invasion. (I imagine that creating a portal in someone else's castle would be an act of war!) Rather than place a portal in a castle, it might make more sense to have them nearby, but outside the walls - Ian Howell might have jumped to one of these on his way to Clarissa after raiding Brion's tomb.
Of course, portals could be included to ensure Deryni domination. Human nobles can safely be left in positions of power if they know that their Deryni overlords can enter their fortifications at will. The Festils in both Torenth and Gwynedd could have established a chain of portals to ensure their control. Doesn't 'Rhydon' enter another character's home uninvited, disrupting a spell the victim was trying to master? That could be a standard tactic.
Another possibility would be to add a portal during construction - deryni seem to be able to move as much through a portal as they can carry, so a sealed portal in a wall that can be opened by teleporting the stones out with you would allow a completely concealed invasion point.

Stranger places to find them would be reefs and mines. Shipwrecked deryni could create a portal to escape the rocks that wrecked then;  stranded deryni might even wreck a ship to get access to stone on which they could create a portal! Benevolent deryni might journey to known shipping hazards to create portals there to be used by others.
Placing a portal in a mine could be both thoughtful and profitable. The risk of cave in threatens both the miners and the mine itself; a portal near the seam would allow rescues, work during a cave in and even to get workers in more efficiently: something that a minor noble might care about if the mine is their main source of income.

What have I missed?

[Bynw]

There is the Ecclesiastical network of portals throughout Gwynedd during the Festilic era. These were used by the Deryni priests and bishops to rapidly communicate cross great distances.

Most Deryni Lord had a private Portal at home somewhere, it was usually guarded to prevent unwanted entry by uninvited guests that might have learned the Portal location. Just like the Portal at Rhemuth Castle allowed the Camberian Council to use the Library there but they couldn't go wandering about the castle as the door was warded.

[DesertRose]

I would assume that an awful lot of the Festillic-era ecclesiastical Portals are dead or unstable from lack of use by Kelson's time, since in Deryni Magic, KK says that Portals seem to require charging, which seems easily enough done by using the Portals regularly (I guess sort of like a car battery?  You let a car sit without being driven long enough, and the battery charge will slowly deplete).  That leads me to believe that after the Council of Ramos and the barring of Deryni from the priesthood, the Portals in churches and cathedrals and bishop's palaces, etc. fell into disuse for quite a while.

Such Deryni lords as managed to hold on to their lands after the Council of Ramos might have managed to keep Portals in usable condition in their houses/castles, though, but that seems to have been a markedly low number of people and thus Portals.

It seems clear by KKB that Torenth has an extensive Portal network, some in private homes, some in royal/governmental buildings, and some in houses of worship. Also in KKB, Létald, Hort of Orsal, has at least one Portal each in his summer home and his winter home (IIRC, anyway).  I would imagine that other areas under his rule/management might also have Portals (possibly houses of worship outside Gwynedd still have an ecclesiastical Portal network at this time?).

The Portal Denis Arilan constructs at Llyndruth Meadows is never meant to be a permanent Portal.  He is building it so the real Camberian Councillors can show up, throw Wencit for a loop, and thwart his plans to cheat at the Duel Arcane, and then the Portal is to allow the Council mediators to return to their home or the Council chamber or wherever after the Duel ends, at which point Denis destroys the temporary Portal, as was the plan from the time he decided to build the Portal in the first place.  So I wonder if it wasn't as difficult to construct as one intended to be a permanent structure, sort of how pitching a tent isn't nearly as difficult as building a house. 

ETA:  To answer the question, I would expect to find Portals in the homes of reasonably well-off Deryni, governmental buildings in places and times where/when Deryni are, if not in power, at least able to be openly Deryni without fear of punishment, and houses of worship, likewise in places and times where/when Deryni can be themselves.

[Laurna]

Portal construction is part of the Vermilion Protocol of Orin. I am going to assume that such technique requires much study, up to the Mastery level. It may take only a few tries to learn to use a portal, however, to build one, such expertise would only be taught to the most learned students of the arts. Going back to DR's analogy, most people can put up a tent just by looking at the instructions, but how many can build a solid home, and then how many of them can build a bridge over a running river to get to that home. And just because you are one of the construction workers on that home does not mean you have seen and fully understand all the blueprints involved. Meaning that Alaric and Duncan may have helped Denis create that portal, but that does not mean they understood all that went into its creation.

It is an interesting notion about being shipwrecked on an island and building a portal to get off of it. Let us just hope that one of the surviving people has studied the arts to a mastery level.

I do agree there would be many Festillic-era Portals, and that they would have been unused and forgotten by Kelson's time. Many may have been destroyed to keep a families Deryni inheritance secret.

[whitelaughter]

Thanks!

Portals fading with time seems a bit odd though. Doesn't the Camberian Council *get* their nifty hiding place by teleporting blind to a portal that hasn't been used in centuries? And Morgan hopes to find a portal in the ruins of the Gabrielite order.

It would be fairly easy for the church to destroy portals; either tear up the floor to break them, or worse, lay a new floor over the top so that anyone using it loses their feet.

Would deryni need to destroy the portals to hide their identity? Humans can't detect them.

Aren't the Protocols of Orin the advanced stuff that Camber was doing? So his portal that shifted around the room needed special training: but ordinary portals not so, surely...

thanks again 

[Bynw]

I run a role playing game and have for over 30 years. It's been played face2face and online as well. They Deryni are part of that game and available for anyone to play a member of the Deryni race. But they are not like the Deryni in the 11 Kingdoms. They are far more numerous, they are not the minority. Deryni powers are not feared by most, only some areas don't like the Deryni and arcane powers. And Transfer Portals are everywhere. There is a ecclesiastical network linking Churches together. There are government networks linking various places of government together. Multiple private portals in homes. Public portals in large cities and even at businesses.

The major cities all have a public use Transfer Portal in the square. Here people come and go at their leisure. Teleporting to other Portals that may be public or private. Transferring from one city to another. There is a tradition that everytime one uses a public portal to drop of a few coins before transporting in or out.

[DesertRose]

Thanks!

Portals fading with time seems a bit odd though. Doesn't the Camberian Council *get* their nifty hiding place by teleporting blind to a portal that hasn't been used in centuries? And Morgan hopes to find a portal in the ruins of the Gabrielite order.

It would be fairly easy for the church to destroy portals; either tear up the floor to break them, or worse, lay a new floor over the top so that anyone using it loses their feet.

Would deryni need to destroy the portals to hide their identity? Humans can't detect them.

Aren't the Protocols of Orin the advanced stuff that Camber was doing? So his portal that shifted around the room needed special training: but ordinary portals not so, surely...

thanks again 

The Portals fading with time does seem to contradict the finding of the Council chamber, good point.  KK said something once about the story of who had the courage to brave that blind Portal trip and discover the site that became the Council's meeting place being worth telling.

Morgan fails to find the old Gabrilite Portal at St. Neot's because Dom Emrys destroyed it when the Regents more or less wiped out the Gabrilites; he does find where it once was, though.  Morgan can still perceive that there was once a Portal there, and he can still, two hundred plus years later, Read/sense Dom Emrys' warning that the abbot imprinted on the Portal site as he destroyed the Portal itself.  ("Beware, Deryni, here lies danger. . .")

But remember, Morgan is about half-trained at best.  He might genuinely not know that even had the St. Neot's Portal still been intact, it might not have been usable at all or at least not safely after a couple of centuries of neglect. 

Also, St. Neot's was a place of very high-level specialized Deryni training.  I cannot imagine that the Portal, even in the times when Gabrilites, Healers, and Deryni in general were mostly respected, didn't have some sort of security measures in place to keep unauthorized people out or at least keep them at the Portal site until released by someone who could vouch for them having a reason to visit the abbey.

Regarding Deryni destroying civil (as opposed to ecclesiastical) Portals to avoid detection, it is true that humans can't feel a Portal's energy.  But they'd damn sure notice if someone stood on a certain stone in the floor (or whatever) and just vanished!  Perhaps some Deryni destroyed their home Portals to avoid the temptation to use them and betray themselves in a moment of panic?

And yes, the Protocols of Orin were a series of manuscripts that Camber seems to have found or acquired (perhaps inherited?) at some point.  I would think that Portal construction would not be highly advanced training but certainly wouldn't be something that Deryni would learn before the late-intermediate or early-advanced stage of training.  It seems to require several people with one leading/directing the procedure, and it seems to be a fairly serious energy expenditure both to create and to destroy a Portal, so it's not like you'd want, say, fifteen-year-old children running around playing with that sort of knowledge and power.  (See Tieg's Blocking talent manifesting at the ripe old age of three.  Good thing for Evaine that Blocking can be undone by someone other than the person who did it in the first place!  Although I imagine she [and they all] would rather not have found that out the hard way!)