"Huh, cool. I'm not quite sure if that actually makes the - implied superpowers? - of whatever created this significantly more impressive." (James was never particularly a "SPAAACE!" kid.)

Shirley suggests they should do the two-person opening trials before they hide the door and wait for the end of the talk.

(Theo has found the correct building and the hotel's internal map, and is making his way around to the location. He does not have anything marking him as allowed in the convention, but he is a young man in a nice suit, moving purposefully, and so no one has bothered him about it.)

"I dunno, I'm pretty impressed even ignoring the possibility of FTL!"

Two-person opening trials is a good idea. Ideally they should do it with two people with different "default" rooms, both aiming for their own default.

They do ten more trials of opening the door with two different aims. Four get the galaxy room, six the lecture hall, shuffled around.

"I mostly meant that I haven't wrapped my head around what the one door two rooms thing does, and that still seems like, already probably FTL and plausibly harder. FTL versus some kind of parallel universe travel is, IMO, on the same level."

"Yeah, that tracks. Man, if there's one of these there's got to be more somewhere."

Someone new has approached while they were experimenting. He is... boggling, mostly, at the door that can open two different places. But he manages to stop woolgathering, after the question. "And yet, if there are, why hasn't anyone noticed?"

"This could be the first one accessible from Earth. This could be the first one accessible from somewhere public, either as a deliberate public demo or for some other reason. It could be extremely unlikely to get the door to open to this room without knowing it was there. Actually I think that last one was just true; that only happened once in the whole talk worth of people and there could be tons of these that nobody but the creators has ever opened. Also if this wasn't a deliberate public demo whoever made it might be annoyed at having their room invaded so I'm glad we've been holding off on anything destructive."

"Have you all planned what you're going to do beyond testing opening conditions?"

"Get some more people in here with better instruments, point various sensors at the galaxy window and the closed door, check if the food is normal food and go from there."

"That makes sense. However. It is actually very important that you don't publicize this widely."

He sighs a bit.

"I am - not happy to have to squash this. Honestly, I'm pretty curious myself, I've never seen this particular kind of thing before. But I already knew supernatural phenomena existed, and there is a very good reason why those are not public knowledge. If this goes public, the body count will be... large. And it won't be people like me, who already know about it, doing the dying."

"Oh shit. What's the danger? Is it that people can hurt themselves on accident, or that it has destabilizing military applications or something?" She can kind of see how it would have destabilizing military applications and expects someone experienced in seeing things from that angle could think of more, especially if 'this kind of thing' isn't the only form that 'supernatural phenomena' can take, but she doesn't know enough international relations to say whether keeping it secret forever is the best policy.

"I'll start with the warning: Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to cast magic spells blind. My family passes down one spell, because it's the only one where the spell is less risky than the alternative. All spell development is done by senior citizens who have lived a long, fruitful life free of regrets."

"So, magic spells exist. If you have the components of a spell assembled correctly, but they don't correspond to an actual effect - and most combinations don't - you get backlash. Crippling, and fatal nine times out of ten. Fortunately for humanity, it is impossible to assemble the components correctly without a mental component which requires that you really believe it will work. And very few people actually believe that when they try to do Wiccan rituals or whatever, so very few of them die. We keep it a secret so that it will stay that way."

"That really sucks! Are you working on systematizing it so you can tell what components will work without trying? Or trying to develop computer systems capable of belief without themselves being people?" Also she really wants to know what the spell is and what it's marginally less risky than, but asking would potentially be taken the wrong way.

"We're seriously inhibited in any systematization by the thing where almost any attempt to innovate is lethal. And there are less than a hundred thousand people in the know worldwide. There are a couple variants of the one standard spell by slightly varying the gesture, but the sample size is one, goodness knows whether that would even be similar for a different base spell."

"Wait, everyone you know about only knows one working spell between them? Woah."

"Other groups I don't know well might know others. I suspect that there have been others discovered, that we forgot because they weren't that useful and teaching spells is not entirely safe.  It's possible everything else supernatural is a result of spells cast long ago, even. But we haven't done much study of it; there really aren't many of us."

"And you can't tell everyone because some of them are morons and you can't tell governments because they'd start wars and they're morons . . . there's got to be a way to get to a better state than this, though, probably by figuring out the laws it all runs on and using that to derive spells from first principles." She's possibly being very arrogant, thinking she has a hope of being able to change this situation, but it sounds like it's had a lot fewer person-hours going into it than most fields, so maybe there's some fruit an additional person could help pick.

"It's less the morons and more the people who accidentally learn just enough to be dangerous. There are plenty of ways for morons to get themselves killed already. It looks like you three have been experimenting pretty usefully on this place, which is definitely much safer and productive than the other things I'm familiar with. I really don't know why we've never found something like it before."

Shirley suggests that if they're going to try to keep the secret, they should probably discuss this inside the galaxy-box.

"Oh, yes, that would probably be wiser."

Brenda goes in as well and sets her doc of notes to private, since the guy does have a good argument and doesn't seem inclined to immediately disappear them all. Unless he's lying about not understanding how this room works and planning to disappear them all through it.

He sends a text back to Tess on the guess that he might not get signal inside, and follows.

"I think it probably doesn't do any harm to tell you the other types of supernatural I know of. The more important one is that some human deaths leave ghosts. It's very rare, maybe three or four in a million. Ghosts look like translucent humans who float a little, and drain all the heat out of a room. But they're like dumb dogs and not usually dangerous, and usually they burn themselves out quickly. But a fifth of them or so are what we call 'vampires'; they're hungrier, smarter, drain more heat, and can kill quickly. They gravitate toward population centers but there's still probably only a dozen in the five boroughs. They live till they starve, which has only been possible to do proactively in the last century, and it still is tricky."

"Do the vampires have continuity of identity and memory with their biological lives? And they drain heat? To what eventual temperature? Can they be convinced to be power plants?"

"I'm... not sure. I doubt vampires are, they're really predatory, aggressive, and undiscriminating; you don't see vampires that, I don't know, avoid children, which you'd think you would, right? I don't think we'd be able to pin one down to ask it questions, though. I've spoken with ghosts once or twice and they seemed a little bit human, but one with, like, severely impaired memory and cognition. You might be able to get a ghost to cooperate with a power plant scheme, unlikely a vampire. The trick would be getting one docile enough to just sit and 'eat'. I don't know if the temperature is consistent but it's definitely well below freezing, maybe minus 30, minus 40. And it's well above absolute zero, they can die - if that's the right word - in winter cold because there's not enough heat to drain. Not here, but if one shows up in, say, Labrador, in December, it'll die young. Dry ice barriers slow them down but do not starve them as far as I know, for that we need liquid nitrogen."

"Dry ice freezes at like minus 80, though, so doesn't that mean they can go below that? I realize that's not the main point. The main point is that it's very annoying that you can't do it on purpose and keep your brain in one piece. Do animals ever leave ghosts?"

"I'm pretty sure they don't. If they do, it must be a lot less frequent than humans. Factory farms would have seen it by now, there's, what, hundreds of millions of chickens killed a year?
I think the problem with dry ice is that it dissipates too quickly, they don't willingly go right up close to it but they can just stand a foot back and be apparently fine. I'm not a chemist, though, and I haven't gone hunting them myself."

"I had been thinking more about apes and elephants but yeah. Do you know anything about what causes them?"