The World Building of The Secret Portal

Origins of TSP: https://kaylinrosealexande.wixsite.com/kaylinalexanderbooks/post/origins-of-the-secret-portal

Draft One of TSP: https://kaylinrosealexande.wixsite.com/kaylinalexanderbooks/post/draft-one-of-the-secret-portal

Draft Two Book One: https://kaylinrosealexande.wixsite.com/kaylinalexanderbooks/post/draft-two-book-one-of-the-secret-portal

Draft Two Book Two: https://kaylinrosealexande.wixsite.com/kaylinalexanderbooks/post/draft-two-book-two-of-the-secret-portal

Draft Two Book Three: https://kaylinrosealexande.wixsite.com/kaylinalexanderbooks/post/draft-two-book-three-of-the-secret-portal

Draft Two Book Four: https://kaylinrosealexande.wixsite.com/kaylinalexanderbooks/post/draft-two-book-four-of-the-secret-portal

Draft Three: https://kaylinrosealexande.wixsite.com/kaylinalexanderbooks/post/draft-three-of-the-secret-portal

Beginnings of Draft Four: https://kaylinrosealexande.wixsite.com/kaylinalexanderbooks/post/the-beginnings-of-draft-four-of-the-secret-portal

The First Valid Draft: https://kaylinrosealexande.wixsite.com/kaylinalexanderbooks/post/draft-four-of-the-secret-portal-the-first-valid-draft

The first order of business I had was outlining each of the basic categories of powers to give myself a finite number.

Class One had the most common types of powers: flight, superspeed, superstength, and invisibility. Class Two had uncommon powers: intangibility, pyrokinesis, hydrokinesis, cryokinesis, elasticity, healing, and empathy. Class Three had relatively rare powers: teleportation, shapeshifting, telepathy, metallokinesis, telekinesis, photokinesis, and umbrakinesis. Then Class Four had extremely rare powers: dimensiokinesis, energy conversion, and chronokinesis.

I gave each power around 4-6 Levels, each Level building off each other for an additional subpower. Because my freshman self was a little bit messy when it came to this, I have to rework the subpowers quite a bit, and plan on doing that soon. It won't have a huge effect on the story at large, but it will help with the background world building.

I have also revised the list of powers since I first made the list. Cryokinesis was absorbed as a subpower of hydrokinesis, elasticity was made a subpower of shapeshifting, and empathy a subpower of telepathy. I just didn't see the point of separating them when they were so hard to distinguish from each other. This left Class Two relatively empty, so I replaced the spaces with terrakinesis and aerokinesis to complete the elemental set.

I also took a significant amount of brain power to research the science behind each of these powers. That was quite annoying if I'm gonna be honest. I wanted The Secret Portal to be more of a science fiction than a fantasy because so many characters ended up being scientists, so figuring out how they would work was fascinating, but exhausting. Some people online easily explained how it would happen, but other times I just found a bunch of scientists "um, actually-ing" each other. However, I got it done, and it sounds like BS because it is, but thankfully I already have a scientific multiverse theory backing me up: if we have an infinite or near-infinite multiverse, they will have their own set of physics in an infinite amount of possibilities. So that's fun and convenient for me!

Speaking of an alternate dimension, my friends did inform me that constantly saying "The Other Side" or "Over There" or "This Side" or "Your Side" or any variant of that was confusing, and it was honestly hard to keep up for me as well. So I thought it would be more convenient to have names for both sides of the portal. The Alii lived in Alium, while "our side" of the portal the Alii called Ceteri (chay-tair-ee), and the people that lived there were Ceters.

I always had ten Sectors in Alium, but I didn't really have anything special about each of them, not even a gimmick. I just kinda vaguely imagined them in a line 1-10 but I knew that was lame. Instead, I decided to look up ways to divide the world into ten different "sectors." If the multiverse says infinite possibilities, who's to say that Alium wasn't just a rearranged Earth with similar cultures in each of the ten Sectors? Sector One became the Australia, New Zealand, Oceania area; Sector Two was Japan/South Korea; Sector Three was the Middle East and Northern Africa; Sector Four was middle Asia; Sector Five was Eastern Europe/Western Asia; Sector Six was sub-Saharan Africa; Sector Seven was south Asia; Sector Eight was the rest of Europe; Sector Nine was America/Canada/Greenland; and Sector Ten was Latin America.

Of course within each Sector there are sub-cultures to account for Earth not being only ten cultures or whatever, and I also tried to base things of indigenous populations. It's significantly better than it used to be, but I spent far too much of my senior year researching each portion of the world in order to give myself a foundation for building my own world based off real-life cultures. Of course there would be some differences--it's an alternate universe--but I didn't want it to be overly Western.

Figuring out how the magic system would affect the world is a work in progress as always, and as soon as I'm done brushing up on the characters, I'm gonna crack down on world building yet again.

After I'd done the basic research for the world building of Alium, I realized one thing: I had to restart yet again. Now, I could easily keep most of Draft Four, but I knew that necessary changes would be much easier on a new document.

So, on January 19, 2021, I opened a new document for Draft Five of The Secret Portal.

Next:

Draft Five: https://kaylinrosealexande.wixsite.com/kaylinalexanderbooks/post/draft-five-of-the-secret-portal