"Tsi-imbi.  Any time someone says 'just' I start to worry about the actual task complexity.  How long do we have to stabilize this portal?"

She has absolutely no shitting idea whatsoever what's going on, besides the general fact of isekai, but they don't pick pilots in dath ilan for being slow.

Also no shitting idea. He's slightly slower to react, as he's busy being a crumpled body for the first couple seconds, but once he gets his bearings he guesses that the four things Red-Robes is trying to capture are him, the Yellow Sparkly Person, and the other two crumpled bodies.

"No need for hostility; fully willing to cooperate with mutually beneficial portal-closing and worth-proving plans," his mouth automatically supplies.

Reverberations shake your body, as if a drum was hit with such a deep tone as to only be felt and not heard. The shock waves come from behind the gaggle of new arrivals, where anyone who might have been glancing that way would see a portal identical to the one behind the cultists wobble.

As heads turn to the destabilizing portal, the purple ichor in the stone is sucked toward it. The rocky platform you stand on is starting to crumble where ever the ichor is drained completely. It's slowly sanding away like dust from the edges, disappearing faster if the edge is closer to the disintegrating portal.

"No!", he shouts, "I was so close ... so close!"

He whirls around to his disciples.

"Grab one of the sacri... guests. The guests! Each of you grab a guest and teleport back to the temple!", he shrieks, his voice breaking two or three times as he tries to make himself understood.

Mordi lies in a crumpled heap, trying to get a grasp on his new surroundings. It's been a long day already and beneath the exhaustion and bruises he feels a certain bitter sense of unfairness. When you attempt magic you barely understand without tools in a tearing hurry it should have the decency to either give you the miracle or blow you to pieces. Not save you but also drop you with some cultists who are also being irresponsible with magic!

Oh, the fancily dressed noble(?) half-elf(?) lady wants to help them fix their portal. That's probably wise? Mordi does not know anything about portals but one being unstabe is probably bad?? If he thought he had some way to pay a ransom, like she clearly can, Mordi would probably stay to help. As it is, he just tries to unobtrusively roll over and get ready to spring up and run. 

He reconsiders when the second man offers to help too. Maybe they should be presenting a united front here.

But then the collapsing platform makes his decision for him. "Oh gods," he scrables to his feet, picks a direction, and runs.

(it is not a very impressive run. Mordi limps hurridly away, right hand pressed firmly to his chest.)

That guy in the red doompunk robe, who appears to think that he's in charge, is obviously not at ALL following anything resembling good procedure NOR is he staying calm in emergencies.  The Captain has a bad feeling about where she has landed inside the great competence/incompetence spectrum of the multiverse.

She will nonetheless leap off the platform in the direction of the people this guy just tried to give orders to, so she can be instant-moved back to whatever a 'temple' is.  It sounds vaguely organized.

A muscular man in rough grey robe, previously lying on a rock, jumps to his feet and looks around. He doesn't need to stand upright to fight or move, but it's not yet time to reveal his abilities.

That is the second time in two days he is finding himself in this exact situation - desperate cultists, trying to prove themselves; summoning people from another universe, immediate threat, down to referring to summon victims as "guests". The first time he was among the cultists, so he probably deserves that.

Yan considers dropping his robe - it is unpleasant and has no use outside the cave he was summoned from, but decides against. Everyone will see that he is covered in bruises, burns from mostly blocked fireball and a couple of incompetently healed stab wounds. Also, maybe he can get a better deal from the cultists as a fellow asshole moron summoner.

The two fellow victims who talked just seemed so reasonable, each in their own right, that Yan is already desperately missing Mikaela. He doesn't want to make a deal with cultists. He wants to team up with other summoned, beat up the cultists and then go on a nice adventure without cults or crazy knife-wielding witches for a change.

Yan jumps closer to the sparkly golden woman.

The four disciples fan out with a surprising appearance of efficiency. Two of them calmly step toward the lady in yellow and the grey robed man approaching them. They touch their left hand to the inside of their right palm where the same four-sided circle pattern is engraved on a metal armband. A thread of lightning runs from their hand to the brace, except the lightning seems almost frozen in time, moving like molasses up and down, but stretching and stretching as their hand moves away.

One tap, two tap, and a thread is strung from each of the the disciples and the two new guests.

A third disciple jogs up to the man who just got up, proclaimed he would cooperate, and then didn't move. Tap tap, and he is also tethered with slow lightning.

Meanwhile, a fourth disciple sets off in a headlong sprint for the runner who is dashing off in the entirely wrong direction! He slaps his bracer midsprint and reaches out to touch the man before he reaches the edge of the platform...

He slams down his staff on the platform and starts chanting in an unfamiliar language. The ichor starts glowing from where his staff touches the platform, slowly fanning out.

The moment you hear the old man's words reach your ears, you start feeling a slight numbness building where the slow-moving lightning is touching your body. It's not unpleasant. More like a lullaby and a local anesthetic are intertwining to make you feel a little more at peace, a little more removed from the world. Just the barest little bit, ever so slowly...

Caught in a magic thread and now entering some sort of dreamlike state... yep, it's drugs. Eric has zero prior experience being on drugs and doesn't really have many hypotheses for how he somehow ended up taking a hallucinogen. Someone on campus had been doing something with rohypnol recently, but when Eric looked it up he didn't see anything about hallucinations.

He FIRMLY ATTEMPTS TO WAKE UP. Does this ATTEMPT happen to SUCCEED?

...nope.

What surrounds them, exactly, other than two portals, one (hopefully only one) of which is unstable?

More floating platforms among the stars. Each platform seems to have more portals on it, four to your best guess. They are suspended in a stable configuration all around, some higher and some lower. The distance between them varies, but none are within a 100 feet.

Also off above you and behind the stable portal is a huge and imposing building with something like a landing strip extending in front of it. 

Light is leaking from both the purple ichor and a diffuse constellation of unusually bright stars that seem to envelop the space you exist in now.

(One more portal opens, spitting out a spindly blue body that ragdolls for a few feet before coming to a stop. One may find odd that, though his eyes are open, he makes no sounds from this abuse nor does his muscle reflexes activate in any way)

His first thought was that the sun went out

Impossible? No, though maybe improbable, but now he's blind and deaf and the threads connecting him to his assistants' senses-

Are gone

Wait, no, the lab-

Turn all senses back on: Ground, hard, rough, Vestibular Sense malfunctioning (shut off nociceptors), terrible endocorporeal vision, he sees a badly lit room, humanoid blurs, the gentle bluish neon glow of his lab behind him, the ground turning to dust between them-

Threads, thoughts, tickling at the edge of his senses, panic, inefficiency-derived-frustration, confusion. He searches for directives, common threads, what's he supposed to do, he's a Shard of Research, not a Shard of Decisions-

Run. Everyone must to the chanting Red Blur, good, he gets up, he tries to run, he stumbles, this body is made for slow precision, he still follows the directive, he gets in front of the red humanoid, he feels his stress, his anxiety, the way it causes marginal inefficiencies in his focus (there's a cultural gap when translating this word. Suffice to say, there's a failing of moral nature when he says this in his mind) and with a move practiced more than 20,000 times, he cuts off the disturbance at the root. Free of emotional disturbances, he will be able to do whatever he wishes to do in a flow state that, unless there are expert mind mages in this world, he has never experienced before for more than moments, let alone minutes.

He will then wait for further directives from the collective unconscious, pointedly not trying to synchronize with the red blur and the people around him at a time of obvious emergency

Were there previously five sacri-guests? He only remembers there being four sacri-guests, most if not all of which were human. Surroundings in dreams change all the time, though.

Rather than waking up, he seems to be growing more tired. He'll dig his fingernails into his hand to wake himself up, remember that his fingernails are too short to do that, bite his tongue (but not quite hard enough to actually draw blood), and then say "Is there any particular way I can help fix this portal that doesn't involve being sacrificed? Also, what the hell is going on here?"

"If everyone wants to ditch our hosts, I can get you to other platforms", sleepily says Yan, not really expecting any takers.

"I'm very new here.  Does anyone have additional information about why we should or shouldn't ditch them, besides pessimistic inferences from the apparent soporific effect?"

She's feeling a little more sleepy, yes.  She's also quite trained to operate while sleepy.

"They are obviously evil. Good guys don't wear ominous robes and don't rip people from their lives. No idea if we can find anyone better around here." - only after saying all that Yan realized she asked for a very specific, different thing. Well, maybe she didn't put together that red cultists planned their kidnapping, that would be additional information. 

Three threads flutter outwards, trying to synchronize but... don't. Was their emitter damaged in the transport like Shard of Research's eyes? It doesn't seem like a good time to prioritize synchronization even despite the emergency, the threads seem dim, lacking in willpower?

Still, Shard of Research wasn't upgraded to Shard of Decisions (how can such a directive even arrive, he's disconnected, how is this even possible, there are intelligent life forms in this room- emotions outside nominal parameters, suppressed back) so following the collective is what the algorithm demands of him

He tags gently at the three threads from Inefficiency Optimizer, Determined Rebel and the third thread (trying strongly to fight against a sensation- what is that, it feels like something blanket dividing preference quotients by so much (filed for later)) and gathers them together. When that doesn't do anything because they are still not connecting together, Shard of Research will start getting worried that the damage done is much more thorough than just the emitter being damaged.

Grief-Loss-Pain-Avoidance beyond nominal values. Complete suppression for an hour.

The Algorithm made clear demands. He shall then, carefully, with dexterity cultivated over countless hours in his lab, starts connecting them manually unless someone stops him

Mordi stumbles to a stop, having run out of platform.

Leap into the void or face the cultists??

He picks.

"AAAAAAH!" The wizard turns with his best battle yell, meeing the cultist charging at him head on. He drags the man down into a wrestle, punching and kicking and flailing, adrenaline and surprise bearing him for the first frantic moments. The pain and mundane exhaustion and whatever that spell was catch up with him though, his untrained strikes growing even clumsier.

"Let go!" he howls elbowing the man in the neck and grunting in pain when the strike is returned with a knee to the stomach.

Mordi is too busy to talk right now, but it sure looks like he wants to leave, if someone is planning that!

Unless that cultist was primed to teleport on contact, in which case Mordi is having this fight on the floor of the cult temple's teleport room! He's also too busy to be looking around!

Ehh, Yan likes the other two better. He is fresh out of minions and two non-screamy potential minions are better than one screamy.

If the cultist uses unreasonable force in return, Yan will restrain him, but for now he'll wait and try not to fall asleep.

"Ditching them sounds wonderful," he says to Grey-Robes and Sparkly, "but I don't particularly know of any way to do so. If either of you - or you," he points to the oddly still blue alien, "have magic powers that can get us out of these... glowing threads... then I would strongly advise using them."

"You." He points to the cultist holding him. "What the hell is going on here, and if you do not present me with a better alternative than 'run at you with my fists like that guy' then that is what I will do."

She starts to run towards the violence and will then stop, shocked in several ways, if nobody else is running toward the violence.  Some of her foundational assumptions must be terribly mistaken in this place, and so may be her reflexes.

Oh, so that's what we are doing.

Yan raises his left hand. Five yellow runic circles form around his arm, five thin black tendrils extend from his sleeve and wrap themselves around cultists' throats. Then lightly squeeze.

"First, stop magic. Then, answer."

Another set of tendrils, from his right, are snaking their way to a non-crumbling platform somewhere below, forming a ladder.

"Argh, you all insane!", he chokes out. He taps his bracer, the lightning winking out. His fellows follow suit dejectedly

"Silence!", another shouts, apparently shutting up his comrade.

He tries to keep chanting with his throat lightly closed off, but the moment the lightning threads winked out, the purple glow pulsing through the ichor also faded.

He screeches in frustration and swipes at the tendril ineffectually.

'You don't understand!", he finally stammers, looking around wide-eyed at the now quickly disintegrating platform.

As the edges of the platform crumble, the rock under Mordi gives way, and he tumbles through space. The cultist he was fighting with whips his arm up and grabs on to the tendril around his throat. Supporting both his own weight and that of a clinging Mordi. He uses his other arm to hold on to the man with considerable effort, especially with the additional pressure on his wind pipe.

The cultist closer to the lady in yellow lifts her cowl ever so slightly. Below is the face of a very young girl, 15 at most, eyes wide with terror.

"help", she whispers with the little air she can manage. She rolls her eyes toward the white portal behind the elder. "He won't ... move us. Need to tether to teleport ... Soqol blocking ... I'm not allowed to talk ... please... He's insane ... I ... please..."

"Sure would like to understand. What are you doing and how do we get to safety with as little sacrificing people as possible? Answer quickly, any of you."

- and there's some falling people. "Someone get them back up here! Ideally you - don't know names - " he points to the man in grey robes.

The man in front of you grunts in annoyance at first, then growls "Silence" again, this time at you. When you look more closely under his cowl, you see a middle aged man with an eye grafted into his forehead. He glowers at you. His hands come up slowly, pulling at the tendril around his neck, testing it.

Then a moment of silence... and he taps his wrist, applies the tether to the tendril around his neck, and yells:

"Soqol, NOW"

"Argh" he grunts in annoyance, then slips his brace off his arm and throws it through the portal behind him.

The moment the brace makes contact with the portal, the tendrils disappear in a haze of light, teleported far away to a location behind and above the stable portal.

How does this effect the tendril-emitting persona?

Mordi and his new acquaintance find themselves falling through endless space. It is remarkably easy to breathe at this speed. Especially when one is not getting choked.

The cultist struggles to orient himself in free fall, and keep ahold of Mordi and ... finally touch his bracer and extend the little bit of lightning to Mordi.

They reappear at a random spot on the platform that entirely coincides with the arrival location of their blue guest. Luckily their teleportation did not involve preservation of momentum. However, it did involve preservation of configuration, such that you are now a tangle of three bodies.

Cultists: not all bad actually, who would have thought.

After his tendrils disappear, Yan rushes new ones to grab two falling people only to notice them wink out - hopefully to safety.

Ladder did not disappear, being made from another hand, and is now finished, people who aren't afraid of heights can start climbing down. Yan gets ready to catch everyone when the last part crumbles - it's going to be wild for several seconds, but he is confident he can compensate for the falling momentum with a calculated swing.

"Name's Yan".

He doesn't regrab the rest of the cultists by the throat - the point has been made, hopefully some explanations are soon to follow. Yan is not showing it, but he is quite lost.

Imagine a surgeon.

The humanoid body is not aptly made to be standing for hours and hours while doing very slow, very precise work on very delicate squishy bits that are most definitely not meant to be seen let alone touched and yet the surgeon must take a knife and gut the person just so in order to come out the other side better for it.

To do that perfectly, it's helpful to remove distractions like itchiness, fatigue, pain, disgust, fear, empathy and awareness of one's surroundings. They do not serve a purpose when the purpose is to cut just so and then sew it back together as well.

Now, that is good protocol taught within the algorithm but only when THE OPERATING ROOM IS NOT A BATTLEFIELD.

Thankfully, the attempted manual mind merger was still in its early phases when 300 pounds crushed onto Shard of Research but the effect is still that of a surgeon body slamming into the exposed guts of a patient he just opened.

In effect, the three would-be members Eric, Yan and Captain Cost-Avoidance, Determined Rebel and Efficient Problem Solver of the hive Mind will get a skull-splitting headache that will blind them with white, and if anyone was concentrating on anything like spellcasting, and if that someone can't manually turn off pain, they are definitely gonna forget all about it for 20 seconds of agony or so.

Shard of Research will remain on the floor and emit abject horror at the two bodies on top of him, making them feel exactly how dangerous what they just did was and how horrible the consequences could have been according to Shard of Research's own valuation. That, unless they have experience with Telepathy, will cause a more minor headache along with the intended emotional intensity.

When they seem sufficiently contrite, he will stop the emission and try to do damage control on the rapidly "bruising" ends of the three would-be hive Mind members

Mordi has a little experience with a lot of kinds of magic, and telepathy is one of them. He can even manage to block out mental effects sometimes, when he's focused.

Mordi is super not focusing right now, and winces at the sudden unnatural emotions and headache. Let's just crawl a few feet from the ??blue?? man who does not want to be laid on and collapse a little bit, shall we?

WHAT KIND OF DRUG IS THIS

he can manually turn off pain! ...does it count as "manually turn off pain" if he grits his teeth and sternly repeats to himself that he is ignoring the pain while blindly stumbling around? come on he should be better at this!

When his head stops pounding enough for him to see straight, Eric turns around and starts climbing down the ladder towards the faraway platform, where there are hopefully fewer people and therefore fewer headaches. "If anyone has the slightest clue what they are doing and doesn't happen to be bashing people's heads in at the moment," he snarls back to them, "then would you very kindly fix this. All of this. Mostly the rampant destruction and attacking people."

She's not particularly oriented enough to trust herself with actions, right now, but her probability of being immersively insane did just go way up.  She says "Tsi-imbi" again, in case it didn't take the first time, and devotes more of her attention to consistency checks on her apparent thoughts and environment.

There... was very little counter-emiting. Is this a test? Is this how Shards of Decisions are made and decided upon?

This Shard of Research has always wondered how they choose to slot people into positions but he assumed it was an ever evolving valuation of qualia and results produced, not a test but... it would make sense, in that case, how it would be possible to be among people yet disconnected, if this was a test, if he was supposed to be the central Hive instead of a nodule. Is that what is happening?

He will think about that later. First of all he will stand up and go to his patients and start fixing the quarter-formed psion-bridges that were violently jostled, just as carefully as before, gathering the Fraying edges and spinning them back into thread and weaving them back into cloth and sewing the cloths together into one. 10 seconds later the pain will have been considerably alleviated to only a slightly pounding headache. In a minute it will only hurt if they try to emit strong emotions to anyone other than their hivemates.

One crisis at a time. Each member only has to deal with one crisis at a time because there are others for the rest because multitasking just has you do multiple things badly.

Mordi, when he catches his breath, looks at the cultist who he brawled with and offers shallow nod and a slightly awkward "err.. thanks". He's not offering his parole or anything, but the cultist did just save him from falling into the void around this platform. If the red robed man isn't going to pick up the fight, Mordi wont either.

He glances at the blue man, and visibly bites back some residual horror. "Please... Don't do that again," He says, then adds "and do you have any idea what's going on?" Probably at least one person here knows what's going on, and it follows that the powerful mind mage probably also knows what's going on.

(How strong are your emotions of inquiry? Specifically, would you say they match or outclass a my-patient-is-bleeding-and-I-need-to-cauterize-his-blood-vessels intensity of emotion?)

(Mordi is pretty confused, but has way too many other emotions going on right now for his confusion to be that focused and strong)

You know that emotion that waiting lines wish could make you feel? The thing they try to make you feel with the calming music, the pleasant call center operative etc?

You get that feeling projected onto you for a second or two, something in it reminiscent of a surprised reflexive twitch, then it subsides.

Sure, if a powerful mage tells you to wait, you wait.

He sits and recovers and eyes the cultists (and his fellow victims) warily. The red robed guys seem to have definitely bit off more than they can chew with this summoning/kidnapping. Are they going to acknowledge a stalemate here or double down?

If no one is taking further drastic action, he'll just... pull some oily bandages out of his pack and start wrapping his hand.

Why isn't anyone taking further drastic action yet? "I would recommend moving from the disintegrating platform and onto one with less disintegration," he calls back up. "Unless this ladder is even less stable - Yan, is this ladder the sort that suddenly disappears when one's climbing on it?" Now there's a question he should have asked before getting onto the ladder.

He keeps trying to wake up or change his surroundings, but keeps failing. It doesn't feel at all like any dream he's ever had before, and he wonders if he's actually moving around in real life but just having fully realistic hallucinations. Well, in that case, moving his hands and feet as if he's climbing down a nonexistent ladder is probably a lot safer than moving as if he's getting into a fight with nonexistent people.

Yan can actually turn off pain! He is not even thinking about that as a special ability - to him, this is what pain is: it's a strong signal that something is wrong with your body. It's very unpleasant for a moment. Аnd then you tell it that you are working on the problem and it shuts off. If it didn't shut off, it would impede you in fixing yourself! That would be horrible design! Yan knew that magic works differently in other worlds, but he didn't expect other people's pain to not have an off switch any more than he expected lamps not to have it.

And yet sparkly woman and smart guy are in pain and do not stop being in pain. Using drugs and unbelievably messed up procedures to take away someone's natural ability to pause pain is a legal definition of torture. His friends potential minions are being tortured and he can do nothing. Two bearded cultists would be hitting the floor with their faces about now but Yan saw that their magic requires visible action and they have done nothing visible to cause this.

Ability to pause pain doesn't mean ability to escape all the side effects of psychic shock. Yan can barely see and can't concentrate. He doesn't need concentration to maintain his tendrils - they are almost mundane objects, not active spells. He doesn't need concentration to summon new ones... for reasons. He still needs it to be able to perform complex aerial maneuvers with nine bodies on a moment's notice.

Yan is in PANIC.

Some people are seemingly engaging in complex mental actions. For good reasons, he assumes. Even in panic and shock, Yan can still grab people from the crumbling edge and move them closer to the ladder (upper part of the ladder is fused with a large stretch of stone, it's not gonna detach until the whole platform disappears). He grabs women a bit slower, looking for signs of discomfort, in case they are from a culture where if a man touches their waist they have to marry him else commit suicide. Or something.

Oh, look, two fallen guys are here, landed on the blue one. They are not dead. Good.

Why did they portal back to danger? Did someone said something about not being able to leave? Man, it would be much easier to think about without that psychic shock.

Smart guy seems to have recovered! "It's going to last for hours! Everyone - either climb down right now, or stick near me, I can't catch you if you are in the middle part when the platform fully crumbles!"

There's a very specific range of tunnel vision that is optimal when operating.

That range excludes out a lot of things, like being aware of getting stabbed in a non-vital area, being aware people are dying all around you, being aware how long you have before you pass out of fatigue or hunger, but one thing it does not exclude is the patient's innards that you are tampering with.

Determined Rebel's thoughts are specific, and repeated, and have attached to them a wish to be transmitted, but they are not transmitting even when this Shard of Research has brought all the threads together and Quarter merged them. Like having opened a man's chest and seeing his heart beat with desperate effort but be devoid of blood to give so it just keeps twitching, it speaks to something primal within him that says this is Wrong.

If he wasn't suppressed right now, he would be paralyzed with grief. If he was suppressed but not focusing right now, he would feel a familiar spasm on his shoulders he's learned is a side effect of the suppression system working overtime.

As it stands, he takes it as an opportunity to experimentally open a psion channel and see what gets transmitted.

This is, to anyone born in Shard of Research's homeland, a diagnostic tool. To call it telepathy would be like calling a diabetes test a blood donation, and it roughly volumetrically tracks when Considering the difference in psion channels.

To anyone not so familiar though, congratulations, you have voices in your head. Strictly one word voices, and barely not monosyllabic, this is a single psion channel people. But should someone be thinking something specific and simple enough for a 2 year old and tagged as "transmit this" then the rest of your Hive mates will feel like doing so. 

in this case, Determined Rebel wants them to "Come" so Cost-Avoidance and Efficient Problem Solver will get an emotion of wishing to reposition closer to Determined Rebel. Should one be inclined to track their emotions, see where they're coming from, how they were formed, why they feel like doing something, then trying to do so here will cause some mild vertigo, like looking down at a completely straight drop from a 50 story building, and notice the glaringly obvious fact that it didn't track from anything inside their skull, it wasn't born out of a conscious or subconscious thought and the qualia of the feeling is different in a way no emotion they've felt before is different. It's recognizable as what it is, it's legible, but it's like two different handwritings writing the same word.

Should one be inclined instead to trust their well-honed Instincts and gut feelings in times of crisis, this emission's effect becomes less that of communication and more that of a hypnotic suggestion, as the feeling is salient, and it's clear, and it's simple, and it's repeating, and thus has the rare directness of instinct that separates it from careful meticulous thought. This is famously very easily confusable with instinct to the inexperienced, where Shard of Research is from.

(Also, this Shard of Research will, of course, also get closer to Determined Rebel. The concept of personal space isn't a thing where Shard of Research comes from so Yan now has a tall spindly blue man literally rubbing shoulders with him while very intensely looking at a point of empty space triangulated between him and his hivemates)

The concept of personal space is a thing for Yan, but very low in priority now. It's only going to be a problem if they all start touching him and restrict his field of vision ("near me" meant "where I can see you", not "where I can smell you").

"And just to be clear, climbing on your own is vastly safer if you can do it and not fall!"

The ladder is made from thin, bendy black tendrils, and goes down at an angle for more stories than they ever build where he is from. It wobbles. It's a challenge not everyone can do. Yan would be improvising safety harnesses if he had any spare attention.

Nuance is a thing in this Shard of Research's culture. Nuance in thought emission is very very important!

One psion channel is not enough for Nuance. One psion channel isn't really enough for a full word of command but receiving brains have been proven to work overtime to fill in the gaps. The signal transmitted will be something to the effect of "Come", hopefully with a directional sense pointing to Determined Rebel. 

This Shard of Research acknowledges and would-be-deeply-sorry (a special tense, indicating suppression) for the low fidelity on offer right now but he is really trying to fix that as fast as he safely can.

That said, anyone listening will probably fill in the gap much better as they already had a frame for the emotion they get after

The lack of Nuance means that Eric, who is already several dozen feet down the ladder, doesn't hear "For those of you who are on the edges of the platform where you might fall as it disintegrates, you should come closer to Yan and possibly start climbing down the ladder!" but simply "Come." Eric obediently stops climbing down and starts climbing back up towards Yan.

Shouldn't he be going down the ladder? Well, Yan said something about safety, and it's kind of wobbly; that's probably why he's climbing up.

"I'd still like an explanation as to how I arrived here!" he says as he makes his way back up. "Or how any of us arrived here. Would the people in the red robes - does anyone here other than Yan have a name, I'm Eric - like to tell us anything?"

All right, not a smart guy. Eric.

"Why would you come back?!" he screeches, getting more and more desperate at solving this without casualties.

Wait, this is way too stupid even for the slowest in class. Psychic shock.

 "Something is messing with our thinking! With agony and in more subtle ways!"

There is a checklist he is supposed to run. Children learn it in school. One problem - the checklist is made for situations like "the person you are selling you house to is too charismatic and you don't remember deciding to sign and yet you are holding a pen", not whatever he's in. It takes minutes to get useful results.

Suspects: sparkly woman who is concentrating on something - why? Cultists - how, if their magic is visible? Blue guy, who was accused of something by Screamy - but it's weird that he wants everyone here and in pain - but he is himself weird.

Yan takes several steps away.

"It's probably weird blue guy else cultists. Anyone competent to resolve that?"

Yosh gives up. She just lost all chances of ever being a functional member of the community by this point.

She sighs.

"It's the blue guy. We don't have psychic powers. We have a bunch of rules, that Soqol there has broken, and doomed us all to never opening any portal AGAIN.", by this point she is clearly very angry.

She pauses a moment, collecting herself as best an angry teenager can manage. She balls her fists with the effort.

"Sorry for botching this ... I really thought we were doing something important here. Uncle, can we plea-ease just teleport back to the temple?"

She is very annoyed but not particularly bothered by the disintegrating platform.

"Oh, you... you can't actually fall to your death. One of us can always teleport in and save you. Just takes longer the farther you fall..."

Well, she's heading down the ladder, once that other guy came back up, and then the other other guy said that something was messing with their thinking to prevent them from going down the ladder.  Heading down ladders isn't complicated, she can do it while running a lot of self-checks.

oh come on he was almost back to the top of the ladder he will get back to going down.

Oh. Wait, never mind, it is a good idea to come back up! ...stoppit brain, no it isn't. Ignore that and keep going down.

"bwah, let them take a long walk off a short platform. We are not going to get another chance at this portal! Just tether them on the way down."

He plants his staff on the ground again and looks around expectantly.

"They are sentient, uncle!"

He looks at her with pity and some measure of condescension...

"You seem a step lost on the summoning process, child."

He then proceeds to mutter a few words and a portal appears before him, while a second portal covers the entire midway point of the tendril ladder.

"If everyone could please return. You won't die. You won't fall. Apologies for the rocky experience so far. Normally guests arrive in stasis. And normally summoning a new portal does not destabilize the entire platform, nor does it allow for more guests to arrive. I will need some steps of your life force to reinforce the portal. This WILL NOT hurt ... honestly you should very much be asleep right now. All this talking and moving is very upsetting. We will fix this now or Lady Ustari will crush us."

He looks around again.

"Now approach an Isheki and let them tether you so we can begin."

About a quarter of the platform has fallen away by now. The wobbling portal is now floating out in space, a few feet from the remainder of the rocky ground you stand on. The tendril ladder still holds, though there is no obvious way to traverse it without touching the portal that covers its entirety and seems to be anchored to it in some manner. The other side of the portal opens up right in front of Soqol.

In the mean while, a blue light like a frozen sun is slowly brightening the sky in the presumed direction of the temple.

The cultist who was previously holding Mordi starts to extend his lightning thread towards Mordi again, thinks better of it, and decides to tether the blue person instead.

"Do not resist," he says in a voice that sounds like it could hurt his throat.

This Shard of Research will not feel the sleepiness and fatigue. He will keep working, same as before, on the procedure handed off to him and then forgotten because that's how this works, that much is obvious.

That is not to say, though, that he's unaffected. The lightning spell has its grip on him, sapping his energy, reducing his tactile acuity, and if and when he runs out of energy he will turn off like a lightbulb and gracelessly collapse in a heap without warning.

How long would you think he has for that to happen, given that he hasn't exercised a single day in his life but has been through maximally rigorous mental stamina training since the day he was born?

In Yan's world they also have a kind of energy that exist in any human and can fuel powerful magic. It's called soul, and that is how "life force" is translated to him by whatever is doing translation.

Don't let cultists consume their soul and someone called Lady Ustari will crush them. Got it.

Yan jumps off the platform, not in the direction of the ladder. Hopefully cultists will look over the edge to try to spot him and teleport him back and that time would be enough to get out of their range.

In freefall, Yan stabs several tendrils in the underside of the platform, shortens them to lift himself and crawls, upside down, to the opposite edge, then slides down the ladder (not recommended for people who do not control said ladder).

The blue psychic torture guy is now cultists' problem.

Upon reaching the obstacle Yan starts weaving a new ladder that goes to a different part of the same lower platform, bypassing a portal.

Maybe they can't open a lot of portals? If they do, there will have to be more violence ending with cultists disarmed, bound and gagged. But for now, the plan is just to get to safe ground there they will not have time pressure, cultists will, and then start negotiations.

The original directive was a will to synchronize, and his job thus to facilitate it. That's priority 1.

Secondary directive was stay close to Determined Rebel, obviously as long as it doesn't contradict with priority 1. That's priority 2.

All three of the syncing operatives are going down the ladder so the triangulation point is getting further away from him and his priority 2 is getting violated, both of which can be solved by the same action, which is to follow the three operatives.

Is the ladder still unstable? Bodies made for Shards of Research are made for slow and precise motions, ergo they have balance enough to tightrope walk without ever swinging side to side, but they can most definitely not keep up with 3 bodies creating violent oscillations on an unstable rope that he will have to rebalance on. Additionally, his limbs are being even less responsive than usual and his sense of touch is losing fidelity.

He will follow anyway, survival is not in his directives, has never been one of his directives, and very soon they will be out of his range if this keeps up. How unstable of a bridge are we talking?

Not that unstable. It won't throw off a reasonably fit person. The main challenges are to keep a tight grip on finger-thin rungs long enough and to resist a normal human urge to panic when the only thing between you and the abyss feels so flimsy.

Besides occular malfunction that would qualify for blindness, this Shard of Research's spatial awareness is concentrated on a narrow enough circle that you could hug it. The Abyss might as well be in another continent.

He follows, still connected to the numbing lightning, until he passes out, his limbs give out and he falls, or his priority 1 is complete and he goes into reorientation mode

The cultist Iranik will keep hanging on and drawing energy from him! It'll take several minutes before he'll actually pass out. Also, after he's climbed down about a dozen feet the rope will pull taut and he won't be able to go further down unless he's strong enough to win a tug-of-war with Iranik.

"So," says Eric to the others as they climb down, "I seem to have gotten here by teleporting from my very nonmagical homeworld, where teleportation doesn't exist - has never been previously confirmed to exist. Not sure what the premise of this dream is, with regard to your species and planets - are any of you from Earth? Big blue and green almost-spherical planet, revolves around one sun and has one gray natural satellite, has about eight billion people of my species, surface is mostly water with a few large landmasses... geography's hard to describe without a map. How about I say enough famous names that people from anywhere on Earth will recognize some. Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Albert Einstein, Jesus, Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, Adolf Hitler, it's depressing that last one's even on the list. Any of those names sound familiar?"

A dozen feet down then he'll get stuck! Despite his height, he's unlikely to win a tug-of-war against a particularly athletic preteen human, and more importantly "Solve your problems through physical force" is not in first-order solution flowchart.

Recounting: His patients are getting out of his range. He's physically being stopped from following.

Widening awareness to troubleshoot: He notices a thread that of thought trying to convey to him to stay back. 

Imagine the emotion a person would feel hearing the heart-wrenching cry of a mother trying to grab her baby out of the way from a charging truck. Imagine how rotten you would feel if you had to grab hold of the mother and stop her from saving her baby as she watched it. This Shard of Research will grab hold of the thread trying to emit to him to stay and transmit back this rotten self-loathing emotion at full force.

This, to be clear, is not an attack from Shard of Research's perspective. This is efficient communication, conveying indelible nuance about severity to a another well intentioned agent who has misunderstood the priority of operations, as he views it.

Unless the Binder though has experience with telepathic communication, that intensity will still hit like a punch to the nose.

[to be replaced, but for plot posterity, platform is destroyed in the process]

The blue glow in the distance swells further.

He doubles over from the pain and crumples to the ground in shock. Three breaths later he simply disappears, without any noticeable effects before or after his departure. Even if you were staring straight at him at the moment of disappearance, it would have seemed that you must have imagined him.

His eyes go wide when he sees Ko'rish crumple to the ground. Abandoning his attempts to stabilize the platform, he makes a split second decision.

Lifting his staff, he slams it in to platform. A shock wave spreads out from the point of impact, dulling all the remaining ichor at once. The portals at either end wink out, and the platform crumbles all at once, falling into the endless space below.

Everyone who isn't attached to a different platform in some form, or otherwise lacks ways of resisting gravity (whatever that may mean in this place) will start tumbling downward. The space between platforms is over a 100 feet, and none of them are directly below you while falling.

The cultists will now fall! One of them manages to grab onto the ladder after a few seconds, but neglects to account for having already fallen for a few seconds, and is now falling again with a broken hand.

That's not fair! She spent a lot of time making sure her fingers looked realistic.

Aaaand this particular very sad cultist is also falling, while still being tied to someone.

Yan pays attention to Eric as they climb down.

Words "very nonmagical homeworld" fail to compute for a while. It's a bit like saying "a world without any highest mountain" or "a world where nobody ever said a palindromic word". Why would they not designate anything as magic? How do they know that gyroscopes are not magic if nobody has any magic sight, which itself would be magic? Or, if they have magic as a specific concept, taken from popular fiction for example, how can they be sure that no one has it? If Yan was the only person in the world with a magicka, he would exploit it in total secrecy. Like he is already It doesn't even matter anymore, nobody here can tell the difference.

For now Yan just rounds it to "nobody gets magickas". Seems depressing.

"I'm from Earth! Blue and green and two ice caps, one Moon. I'm from the largest landmass called Eurasia. Less than one billion people for now but we are working on it. I recognize Albert Einstein and Jesus, I think. Albert Einstein is a researcher who found out something important about space travel and Jesus walked on water and started a cult. They are both fictional, are the rest of them supposed to be fictional? Or maybe the translation is messing with me, mapping to the closest concept. Everyone has magic - you've seen pretty much everything I can do, other people can do much more. We have teleportation, but it doesn't work on people and kills fish. Right now we need to coordinate strategy..."

The ladder started falling when they are almost to the safe platform. Some of the ladder's tendrils come alive and tightly grab Sparkly and Eric. This a very bad solution because now they are screwed if Yan falls or is teleported away, but it's the only one he could think of in a split second.

They swing under the platform, now upside down, not being able to reorient because of tendrils. Also their circulation might be cut off.

On a swing back Yan shoots upwards, anchors himself on the new platform with more tendrils and starts pulling up and untangling people on the ladder, however many there are.

He sees more people falling - one breaks some bones, judging by the sound. He can't save them.

Well, that's not true. He can save one of them - jump after them, grab, try to find a good angle to cancel momentum with a swing. Probably die in the process.

He doesn't want to pay the cost of saving them. Cultists can portal teleport, they will be fine.

Shard of Research will then be yanked into the void, making his patients feel I-want-to-help-him-he-was-in-the-middle-of-helping-me onto his three patients for all of two seconds before he is out of range and ever accelerating further away.

The platform had seemed to be collapsing slowly enough to make worth it to wait out the chaos near the ladder and for the several people on it to finish the climb before going himself. A terrible mistake, in retrospect!

Mordi plunges into the void with a yell, flailing and battered by crumbling remains of platform and arcane forces. His hands work rapidly through a spell, trying desperately to slow the fall. It works, he feels the spell biting deep into his remaining mana, and the mage slows down to "maybe still break a bone" speed instead of "go splat" speed. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anything to land on down here. Just endless inky black all around him as the bright portals and luckier victims far above shrink smaller and smaller. 

Gods, I'd take the high pass over this! he thinks.

And almost as soon as he thinks the thought, he lands in a snowbank with a thump.

The shock of cold jolts Mordi and he kicks and flails against the snow, taking a few long seconds to pop his head up into the air.

When he does he stares around in stunned silence, trying to comprehend what he's looking at. How is this possible? Were there more portals below and he hit one? He glaces up and sees no sky, just endless black unmarked by stars. Just the distant portals and platforms. He looks down again and to all appearances he's right back where he started from, in the high pass through the Yellow Peaks. Or at least, on one of the actual mountains overlooking the pass. He thinks he can see the remains of the cabin he took shelter in earlier today, far down below. 

"What the hells??"

If those who were lucky enough to find a place to hang on or get caught by someone else look down, it will seem like a slice of mountain range has appeared in the void far below. Two lines of mountains flanking a narrow valley through which a road runs. The valley is clear and could be called passable, if it was running to or from anywhere rather than trailing off into void. The mountains are dotted with trees and towards their peaks covered in late fall snow. 

"I think we might be from... different Earths?" Is Yan from... an alternate universe where magic exists? How the hell would Albert Einstein be a fictional character there, though? Earth's future, where Einstein is only a legend? A secret magical society of a billion people who know very little about the Muggle world?

Aaand now he's tied to a ladder and swinging below the platform. Oh, good, Yan's bringing him back up.

The moment the platform crumbles, Soqol and Yosh both tap their braces. It's a reflex really, drilled into them through a rather perverse schedule of being repeatedly dropped into endless space, till the sensation of your stomach rising into your throat corresponds to your hand crossing toward your opposite wrist.

They appear on the nearest platform, coincidentally the one with three people dangling from it.

In the mean time, the blue glow in the distance winked out the second people started accelerating into the abyss.

[Blink]

Shard of Research appears on the platform.

[Blink]

So does Iranik.

[Blink]

And Sidh'ne.

A second later, she appears in the snow in front of Mordi. Her face is an impassive mask, eyes glazed over, empty. Staring.

Her movements are elegant, fingers lithe as she draws a small oval in the air between them. A larger portal appears between you, as a mirror to it open up in the middle of the platform above.

"Your choice", she says in a slow whisper.

Then she vanishes.

Soqol looks very unhappy ...

if only I had a good facecast of this XD

"You've broken Eshik...", she says softly. "All the portals are falling. Those farther away from the temple fall first."

She removes five overlapping braces from her arms and places them at her feet.

"Take these and fix Eshik. Or come back to the temple and give your life to stabilize the portal that broke it -- Your choice."

Then she disappears again.

Soqol and Yosh had their heads bowed in shame the entire time. As Lady Ustari disappears, so do they.

Five braces lay on the platform. They seem to be made of a dull metal, though surprisingly light when lifted. On the inside (wrist-side) of each brace, one can see the four-sided circle of Eshik.

Additionally, there are two portals on this platform, on either end. They are nice and stable portals. Apart from this fact - and it being an entirely solid piece of stone  without any crumbling, rumbling, or dropping you in to an endless abyss - this platform is remarkably similar to the last one.

Attention, readers (and writers?): if you have been keeping up with this story so far, there have been / will be retcons, mostly of the "removing earlier tags" variety. Discussion of said retcons was in part in Dark's channel on the glowfic Discord.