Essence of the12 Doors

This essence looks like yellow, glowing pineapple juice, and has a taste that is so ridiculously sweet most people would expect a massive sugar-high to follow, and potential diabetes in the future, but the taste does not linger, nor does it have any energizing effect similar to sugar, just a brief overly-sweet sensation during consumption.

• You gain the ability to summon a doorway, either free-standing or pressed up against a wall, or even manifesting in an already existing door-frame, leading into a round chamber with twelve doors arranged in a clockwise fashion, with Roman Numerals marked onto each door. The door you pass through to enter bears the mark XII, or twelve.

• This chamber exists outside of time, and no time will pass outside while you stand within it, nor will you feel any effects of time. You will not grow hungry or tired, but neither can you really heal or feel more well rested even if you attempted to sleep. You and the world beyond are on hold, even if you can still move around in this chamber.

• 10 of the 12 doors in this chamber lead to different pocket-dimensions, with different boons to offer to you should you pass through. In each such world, you are able to summon the doorway to return to this chamber once more, exiting through the door you entered that pocket-dimension through.

  • These boons tend to be something fitting the setting, but certainly useful. Entering a world of Bioshock and Rapture before its fall, with a boon to not have any drawbacks or side-effects from the use of Plasmids and Gene-Tonics. Entering Call of Cthulhu or Cthulhutech, and gaining a strong sanity capable of resisting corrupting effects, and even regaining sanity over time if some of it is ever eroded temporarily by particular powers or acts. Entering an X-Men setting, and gaining an X-Gene and a power of your choice.

    • Exact boons can be chosen by you, but should reflect the setting and what would be useful for it in some way, and preferably at a sane level of benefit. Getting greedy with this may result there being some additional hidden dark sides to the pocket-dimension that will persist until the setting is reset, and the granted boons from it discarded.

  • These settings in the pocket-dimensions will have access to a variety of goods, that will likely prove useful in various forms. More advanced medicine will work perfectly fine in other settings, as well as your original world. Magical items will function as intended, but may, depending on their original setting, run out of power and require to be brought back to be recharged, or may replenish their charge on their own or through some steps that you will be able to figure out relatively easily when first holding a so depleted magic object outside of its original setting.

  • Entering a Post-Scarcity level setting (such as Eclipse Phase, or Star Trek) will allow you to acquire a variety of goods relatively easily as your identity will appear entirely legal and normal, but drawing too much attention by repeatedly requesting large amounts of materials can lead to investigation into your identity and a talk about where you may be spending all those resources, and why.

• While XII leads you back to your original world, XI refuses to budge, and will not open to you no matter what you try. The only way to make use of this door, is through dying.

  • Should something kill you, whether in your original world or one of the pocket-dimensions, you will be pushed out through the XI door, after which the door while close behind you once more. You will retain no memories of what happened between your death and being returned to your chamber of doors, but some signs may remain.

    • Black lipstick marks on your cheek, collar, or other places.

    • Scratch-marks from sharp nails, on your back or on your arms and legs.

    • State of serious dehydration, exhaustion, and some chaffing in private places.

    • Black business card with a golden ankh on it along with a phone-number tucked into your pocket, with red lipstick mark, and ‘see you again’ written on it.

      • Calling this number will connect your call to a mortuary and a cheerful goth girl who will instruct you that they are busy, and cannot take your call, and that they will be available again in so and so many days. If you call them after this time has ended, the voice will simply inform they’re ready to assist you whenever you may need them. They appear to be a recording, since they don’t respond to any questions or queries. You can receive both audio, and in case of a video-call, visual image of the cheerful girl wearing goth fashion with a grin on her lips.

        • Any resemblance to Death of the Endless is possibly coincidental, and possibly intentional touch of humor from the being.

        • Your business card may or may not contain a pun about helping you at 11th hour when you receive a new one following a need to use the XI door.

      • This period of time they mention is also the period of time during which you will not be able to return to life again if you die before the time has passed, and it varies based on how bad shape your body was in when you last died, ranging from 1 day to 2 weeks at most. If you die again before this time is up, you best hope you have an alternative means of resurrection if you want to keep living.

• The 10 different pocket-worlds that the doors connect to may be inspired by a variety of worlds you know and like, whether comic books, worlds from books, worlds from video-games, worlds from manga, worlds from television-shows, worlds from movies, almost any media you have come across and enjoyed. The exceptions tend to be few and far between, but generally consist of immediately hostile settings that would kill anyone on entry, and are thus regarded too hazardous to ever explore.

  • Entering these pocket-worlds, you will find a maybe city-sized area where a lot of that setting’s characters will show up and interact with folks, where a lot of the goods available in that setting may be up for sale, and where laws of nature and physics may be vastly altered and different.

  • You will always possess a valid identity, and your currency will be directly converted to whatever currency is available and accepted in this world, along with the means to access it, cybernetic implants or smart-device for futuristic settings with electronic credits, metal coins of valuable metals in some, and paper and coin currency appropriate to the setting in others, all the way to more exotic ones like vials of spice, bottlecaps, or even berries depending on the setting. You retain approximately the same amount of purchasing power as you had on entry.

  • You cannot bring anyone with you, but you can move things between the settings, and any changes brought to you by visiting one of these worlds can be retained when traveling to other worlds. These effects can be voluntarily concealed in other worlds, a cybernetic arm may receive real-skin™ covering in a fantasy setting, or be altered to look like magical golem arm if one would be appropriate in the setting.

    • This concealment does not work in your original world, you will need to acquire whatever means you want to use to conceal it by yourself, when visiting these worlds.

  • You may generally choose the 10 worlds that the pocket-worlds are based upon when you first enter them, but once they are set, they cannot be changed again easily.

    • It is possible to ‘reset’ a door by waiting 10 years since your last visit to open the door again, at which point you have a choice of entering the world you used to visit before, or change it to a new world.

    • If you ‘abandon’ a pocket-world like this, you will be unable to abandon the same door’s connected pocket-world again for a century, if you live more than 100 years, the reset counter will start to tick again after your next visit to that pocket-dimension.

      • Doing this repeatedly within a millennium may result in a door becoming locked, and denying you access to any place for 1,000 years. Any further abuse of this system beyond that point will see you locked out from the XII door, and lock the XI door permanently as well.

      • If you allow the 100 year period to reset, and eventually change worlds but choose a world you previously abandoned, you will receive a ‘fresh instance’ of such a world, an abandoned pocket-world is gone, that dimension is no longer reachable, and possibly no longer exists at all.

        • Your Essence anchors these pocket-worlds and provides them with stability, helping create them from lost time-lines, creating some parts ex-nihilo. It can only hold tethers to anchor down ten of these pocket-worlds at once, and a snapped tether will take some time to heal from having to reattach itself to another such pocket-world in a torn shape, from which its healing period begins.