Of Portals and Powers

Jude had picked up a lot of weird powers. Some of them were his own. Some of them were the gifts from Regalia he'd bonded with. Some were easy to work out. He'd mastered summoning his guns inside a day or two. He'd figured out memory tampering. Some of his other stuff? Less so.

He still hadn't gotten the hang of his... what, super speed? He knew what it did--sped up simple tasks--but not what specifically triggered it. It seemed to pop up entirely at random. But he was making progress, writing things down and using the honest-to-god scientific method to figure out what he was dealing with.

But it was his portal that was proving the most irritating at the moment.

The three of them had sprawled out on a grassy section of the academy grounds, enjoying a last bit of sun before heading inside, and Jude was doing his best to demonstrate. The portal he'd made was approximately three feet by three feet, shimmering slightly and otherwise not being super obvious unless you were looking for it.

It was also stubbornly resisting Jude's attempts to insert his hand into it.

"My question is how anyone who isn't me could be expected to use this," he grumbled under his breath.

"That's because you already have a whole castlevania toolkit under your belt. When I came here all I had was my memory."

More or less. He'd kind of had some other stuff, but that was the big one. "And I only realized after the fact that the bracelet is practically a necessity if you ever do dinner with my dad." Meeting your boyfriend's father was bad enough. Meeting your boyfriend's ex-mafia father was worse.

Meeting your boyfriend's ex-mafia father with a fear aura was a whole other level.

"No organic matter. Or no living matter. So..."

Jude reached up with his robotic arm, slipping his hand into the portal. It carried on normally until it reached a seemingly arbitrary point (which both would likely recognize as the point where his stump was), at which point his progress screeched to a halt.

"Robotic arm yes. Flesh and blood arm no. I don't know if your... plant... uh, scout, would be able to see in. Cell phone probably could? I didn't think to check."

"Eyeballs," Jude said, squinting at the plants. They didn't look any different, but if Iggy could see them... Or see through them anyway.

"I did talk to them," Jude said. "It was Aria. But powers manifest differently in different people. Just because something works one way for the Regalia doesn't mean that it works that way for anyone else."

As for going into the portal itself.

"My arm goes in just fine. So does inorganic stuff. Cell phone... maybe? What if we hold the phone half in, half out? Or just have the camera part in..."

He considered that for a moment before flipping out his own phone, holding it up before reconsidering.

"Who wants to do the honors? Or does Iggy want to slide one of his... eyes... in?"

Jude left the phone in the portal for only a few moments before reaching in with his robotic arm, groping around until he found the phone and pulled it back out. It looked fine, which was consistent with what he'd observed, and he flipped it around before replaying the video.

"...From what I've tested, it reacts the same as reality, so there's that much. And it recorded, so... time's still flowing. But..."

Jude squinted for a moment.

"Why's the video so long?"

There didn't even seem to be anything on it. Nothing changing.