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Sadde's running.
Not for any particular reason, just because it's faster. He's been meaning to go to one of the capitals for a bit and now, he supposes, is as good a time as any.
And eventually he's not running anymore, because he's close enough to civilisation that someone might spot him. Not that he wouldn't be able to notice them by scent before they saw him, but still. And as he makes his way to the Norway capital at this more leisurely pace, he notices the tiny, shiny key. He walks towards it and picks it up and immediately notices just how magic it is. He can tell by the way the key feels like things, and different things depending on where it is.
He verifies that what the key feels like is consistent in absolute location by waving it around a bit and seeing that the same place always feels the same. "Huh," he murmurs to himself.
He straightens up and thinks. The first obvious thing to try is seeing whether it opens any doors—a universal skeleton key sounds like the kind of thing a magical key could be—but the second obvious thing can be tested right there and then. He pushes the key into thin air with some purpose, as if he wanted to unlock an invisible door, and then turns it, et voilà, the faintest of door-shaped outlines appears before him.
He locks the door, and it disappears. Unlocks it again, and there it is. So he pulls it open and sees—
Presently, he lands in the park.
—there's nothing there.
"Okay, so either this is very promising and your key does not leave portals standing open or someone else has already closed it in a way that hopefully didn't include wandering through."
"When I opened it—I think it's easier for me to show you, let's go back to your shuttle."
"Okay. ...And back to my house, in case the portals are absolute in space, or something."
"Yeah, sure. I just wanted to show you how I made one disappear when I was testing, that only takes a few seconds."
So she uses the key, chooses a random spot to open a door, and unlocks. There's the door, shimmering. She locks it again, and it's gone.
"Okay. So maybe they wear off after an amount of time or something."
"Or maybe someone else found another key and locked it? That sounds improbable. We should test the wearing-off part, though."
"Yeah. Put one in the swimming pool room or something where we won't accidentally blunder into it."
"I'm not sure. The key feels like stuff, depending on where it is, but it's a really vague feeling—I'm not sure if it's vaguer for non-vampires or just the same for everyone—and I haven't tested what this feeling means but my hunch is that it somehow correlates with what world the door will open to. Like I said, I didn't really test it much." She offers it to him.
It's fairly obvious that the key is magic the instant Cam takes it, and even moving it from Sadde's hand to a spot closer to his eyes is enough to trigger the "feeling," as impossible to explain as sight to one born blind. It's golden, small enough to fit in a child's hand, and, other than the ineffable feeling, completely ordinary.
"This thing is weird," he murmurs. He moves it around to various points in the air.
Some points don't feel like anything, but most points do. The feeling is very vague, and while apparently completely random, there are places where it's similar enough to other places that it might actually be the same. And any given location always feels the same no matter how many times he moves the location there or how long he waits to return to it.
He tries to find two same-feeling points against the wall so he can mark them for superior vampire senses to confirm.
There are a few candidates, but the first pair he finds that are completely indistinguishable as far as he can tell are about four feet apart, the one on the left a couple of inches higher than the other one.
Cam marks each with a little red dot. "Can you check if these two feel alike to you?"
"Yeah." She takes the key and checks. "Mmhm. Identical as far as I can tell. Want me to try to open them?"
"How sure are you this key doesn't lead to - lava pits or Cthuloid horrors or anything?"