**A Lesson in Portal Security**
The height of summer meant that Ophelia and Prosper were both spending less time at school and more time working in the little painting studio. It could get sweltering in there in the day, so they cracked the windows open for cross ventilation. Because the room looked out at the sea, this brought the salt air in. Unconsciously, Ophelia found herself painting mostly oceanic worlds.
“Painter magic is more than just painting worlds,” said Prosper offhandedly, in a way that told her this was the start of one of his lessons.
“Oh?” asked Ophelia, looking up from her seascape. She’d been practicing, trying to summon Ruceana again like she had in her exam. It was harder than she remembered it being.
“Different World Painters have different skills,” said Prosper. “Some of them have to do with painting. Some of them don’t. You and I,” he explained, “Are what some people call Pioneers and some people call Namers.”
Ophelia nodded. “What’s that mean?”
“We have a gift for finding worlds,” he said. “Many painters find it taxing to summon worlds they have never heard of. Pioneers like us are gifted in finding the names of worlds we are otherwise unfamiliar with.”
“I thought you needed the name, the appearance, or the mood – two of the three?” asked Ophelia.
“Most painters need the name and the appearance,” explained Prosper. “Anyone with basic empathy can find the mood of a world.”
“Oh,” said Ophelia. “Okay.”
“But I meant to teach you something else,” said Prosper. “You got me distracted.”
“Sorry.”
“Finish what you’re painting and then I’ll show you.”
Ophelia turned back to the painting and after struggling with the shadows for a bit felt comfortable to pronounce it “Ruceana.” The image sharpened.
“Alright,” said Prosper. He hoisted her backpack onto his shoulders. “This is stocked, right?” he asked. Ophelia nodded. She always kept her backpack stocked. “You first, then. I’ll follow in a second.”
Ophelia pressed her palm to the portal. A second later she was standing on a pebbly beach, staring out to a glassy gray ocean. The light was strange. There was a storm rolling in from off the water. The bones of some huge animal, maybe the tusks of a mammoth or the ribs of a whale, emerged spire like from the sand. Her father appeared next to her. He motioned for her to turn around and look at the portal from whence they came.
“You might not be able to do this well at first,” he said. “Now, naturally a portal will remain open for as long as it takes the paint to dry,” he continued, and Ophelia nodded. She’d known that for as long as she’d been his student. “But there are ways to close one before that.”
He nudged her towards the portal. “Reach out towards it,” he explained, “But don’t touch it. Both hands. One at the top and one at the bottom.”
He guided her reach like a tennis coach revising a stroke.
“Do you feel the disturbance in the air?” he asked.
Ophelia nodded. She could feel little ripples of wind circling her fingers.
“Push down, as slightly as you can, until you feel resistance, like an air pocket,” he instructed.
Ophelia moved her fingers down until she hit a disturbance that wouldn’t let her move them any further easily. She couldn’t see anything there, but she could certainly feel it. “Got it,” she said.
“Push down,” said Prosper. “Bring your hands towards each other.”
Ophelia did as she was told, curiously watching the effect it was having on the portal. As she forced her hands up and down on the air pockets on either side of the portal, the image of the study shrank inwards, like a window closing. Once she passed the halfway point, it snapped the rest of the way shut.
“Woah!” she exclaimed. Prosper laughed.
“It has a bit of a spring-loaded effect,” he nodded.
“No kidding,” said Ophelia.
“You should get in the habit of doing that whenever you’re on a world where you don’t want anyone following you in or don’t want anything from that world crawling into the one you came from.”
“Okay,” said Ophelia. She was beginning to feel a headache coming on.
“All in all, a good showing for your first try,” said Prosper, lowering the backback to the ground. He opened it, pulled out a piece of paper and the set of paints, followed by a bottle of muddy-looking old paint water. He frowned at the bottle for a moment before opening it and the pains and beginning a to work on a picture to take them back to tidewater.
