[We won't know for sure until we can have my friend at the MSL check them. I think it might have more calcium salts than Earth's ocean.]

Black Lily bounces. "Imagine sailing over the seas of an alien planet! I wonder if there's life there."

"We could check for life!" Hopefully it won't be a sea-monster. "...but I don't actually know how to find fish or anything. I'll open a portal to show us more of the sea, can you do anything with that?" He opens a portal a few hundred feet above the water, looking down, and another half a mile up; there's nothing to be seen but calm water. 

He tries to open another planar portal, from the water-world targeting his own. It doesn't go through. His sense of the spell insists it needs so much power that he can't have two planar portals open at once. Maybe if he made both portals as small as he could... but then he couldn't go through them, could he.

"I don't think I can open a portal home without closing this one," he tells them, crestfallen. "I'll have to get a boat or something, go through, and then close this one. And hope that if I can't make it home I can at least go back here... obviously I can't ask anyone else can go with me. Um. I probably shouldn't do that right now. Do you want me to try some more portals?"

[We would want to prepare for something Iike that very carefully. I can't abandon my duties here on Earth!]

"We can get a boat, get supplies, prepare for it all... I don't think that's happening today. I also think there's somebody who would be happy to explore new worlds even if it's risky, but I don't know how to find them..."

[We can check the samples for microorganisms. That will tell us if there's life on that world. If there are, we can search for bigger creatures.]

Ahmose will wait until they're done with this portal, then.

He hasn't really processed, yet, that he might not make it back home anytime soon if ever. Should he try to build a new life for himself, or focus on trying to go back? At what cost, and when would it stop being worth it? He has no idea how to answer any of these questions.

Maybe he should try to get through the next few days without making any decisions, and see if that helps? He has a really sinking feeling about it all.

Soon, Puchuu declares them officially done.

[Feel free to use this house for the next few days, Ahmose. Nobody lives in it most of the time. People who suddenly need a place to stay, like you, are why we have it! I'll get you a key and a way to contact me.]

"That is very generous of you!" As would be helping him out with a boat. The idea of someone else deciding to go with him, when they might never come back, is - too much to contemplate, he'll ignore it until if this person actually shows up.

"I don't want to impose, is there anything I can do to repay you? And do you want to keep this portal for now, or should I keep opening more?"

[We don't need that portal anymore, right now. It will take a while to set up my idea for generating electricity, but if you would be willing to be on call for cross-country transport in case of an emergency, that would be a big relief. We wouldn't need you to fight, just to get Shining Black Lily and maybe some other girls across a few states so they're a little closer if something really bad is happening.]

"Emergencies like that almost never happen," Shining Black Lily comments. "The last time I had to rush out headlong like that was when I was back in junior high, something like... Eight years ago?"

He closes the portal. "I'm happy to help with transport, but it's slower than a normal teleport if I don't set it up in advance. I can open a portal a mile away every two or three seconds, so it takes me hours to get to the other side of the continent. If I knew in advance where you might need to go, or a few places, I could keep really small portals there that wouldn't cost me much and make a big one when you need it." 

He's considered selling transportation services, it's the obvious thing to do with portals, but the main problem is that the portals rely on him and he can't really ask someone to build their business, let alone an industry or a national trade route, by relying on his personal availability, and if he did he'd be committing not to use his portals for something better down the road. What would be really great is opening permanent portals, and he thinks (or hopes) it should be possible, it's less of a modification of what his spell does than planar ones, but he's nowhere near there yet.

A few on-demand trips, though, that much he can do.

[The most likely place we would need to go in a hurry is to Chicago, which is a hundred and thirty five miles away. Would it be much trouble to keep a small portal there, just in case?]

"It's no trouble to keep one anywhere, I just need to spend the time to get it there. That distance would take only six or seven minutes, but if you want to be able to get there even quicker I can prepare it. Can you point me in the right direction, and tell me where to put the far end of the portal when I'm done? Or just look through the portals through me, and tell me where to go."

"I'm gonna grab a snack from the kitchen if we're done testing now," Black Lily comments. "I do still have to study for that test, as awesome as all this is." She jogs over to the stairwell and thumps upstairs, leaving the door open behind her.

Puchuu points its ears and nose directly towards Chicago. [We Puchuu have places like this one in the city, so we'll look for one of those when we get close!]

Oh wow he'll never get used to beautiful women in uh, he's going to call it wizard-dresses, bouncing around the room! ...now he's blushing as much as she did when she channeled - that's probably an inappropriate thought or something, stop it brain, he has important work to concentrate on.

He opens a chain of portals, through the door that Shining Black Lily left open and out of the building and then, when he's gained some altitude, he'll keep going in the direction Jasper is pointing at around 1400 mph, until he's told to stop or, probably, sees some more incredible towers like those near the university.

At first he sees mostly farmland, and great black roads cris-crossing the countryside, cars and the occasional truck trundling along them, with the occasional town. Then he sees large fields of white towers with spinning blades on them, dotted amongst the fields, like enormous white windmills.

And then more fields. And then... Rows and rows and rows and rows of houses and other buildings, surrounding the towers on the lake in the hazy distance for miles and miles around.

Are those towers with swords?? - no, they must be windmills, he's just expecting weird things because everything is so foreign.

Probably they have a reason. Maybe the reason is simply that they can. Wizards always build themselves towers, these grand cities are half made up of towers, so maybe when people are rich and powerful enough even the millers build themselves windmill-towers.

...these people seem to have forbidden most of the city from building as high as its rulers, though. This is also a familiar sentiment: back in Sothis, the wizards and clerics all fussed about who was allowed to build a higher temple. Ahmose feels a brief pang of despair at the state of humanity.

Once he gets close to the inner city, Jasper asks him to slow down and make the pinhole portals lower down... Jasper has Ahmose lower down on an apartment block next to a park, not quite in the tallest part of the city yet.

Another Magical Girl(?) with a green-furred puchuu on her shoulder is leaning against an open door. Her outfit has some dress-like characteristics like Black Lily's, but the color is dominated by shades of green, and it looks more like the sportwear the jogger who first approached him was wearing. It's fundamentally a bit tight, for all the bangles and accessories hanging off it. She also has a sword. Her hair is doing something unnatural, too, holding itself up in a wide sweep of curls that looks more like a metal sculpture than something hair should be doing.

She perks up when the portal approaches. "Holy shit, portal! Is real! This is a triumph~" She singsongs. "Hey, portal wizard! I got you some cake! It's not a lie." She laughs as if this is a hilarious joke.

A wizard probably-sorcerer with a sword! Ahmose has every boy's belief that magic swords are cool, coupled with the teen's belated realization that wizards don't get to use swords and he's definitely destined for the wizard track (he thinks). Well, presumably wizards can make a wand or staff or something sword-shaped, but they don't hit people with it because they don't want people to hit them back (very relatable!). Clerics get to be sword-mages but they're not as cool as wizards, even though they can heal people. 

Except apparently you can be a woman and a wizard sorcerer and have a revealing pretty dress and - magic hair? - so why not a sword too? This place might not be Heaven but it seems to be so good. Ahmose really really hopes it's all like that.

Cake isn't really on the same scale, not unless it's a giant magic cake that needs to be ritually cut with a sword, but he's still very excited and happy! 

"Yes! Hello!" Also very tongue-tied, because he's still him and not someone from a fairytale of pretty sword-wielding woman mages.

Smirk. She can tell he's looking. If she makes sure to flaunt the sword and hair a little, surely that's a coincidence.

"Well, let's send it inside. To the kitchen. So you can get your cake."

He'll navigate the portal inside and away from the potentially flustering conversation and look for cake! ...he should probably actually go through, shouldn't he.

"Jasper, should we - do you want to go through?" He makes a bigger portal.

[It's up to you! It would be valid to be nervous about traveling. I'm going to stay here.]

"I can just hand you the cake," offers the unfamiliar magical girl, having followed the portal chain. "I kind of want to ask a million questions about how it works but, yeah, that'd be bothering you, right?"

"I don't mind! I have nothing to do" - that's not true, why did he say that, he needs to keep opening planar portals and figure out how to make them reproducible so he can get home - "right now, so I can answer a few questions."

Then he kicks himself when he realizes it would be impolite to eat cake while talking.

"Cool! I'll answer some too if you have 'em. Fair's fair. So it looks like it's not a portal gun situation, they don't need to be on walls..."

She fetches out a neat square of leftover strawberry cake, pink and red with frosting and sugared fruit layers. Onto a plastic plate it goes, with a plastic fork. She walks over to hand it through the small portal, carefully holding it steady in the center of the opening.

"I can open them anywhere I can see," Ahmose confirms. "Within range, and only a few at once."

He'll take the cake gratefully, and try it! Does it taste like it came from amazing rich free magic tower land?

"Nice. Kind of hazardous sounding though."

It tastes like 1/8 of a $40 cake from a nice bakery, left in a fridge for a day. So, yes. Very sweet, perfectly moist and with a bunch of subtle flavors underneath the sweetness.

Wow!!! That is so sweet and - of a quality he has no words for!!

Why does he have no words for having no words for a quality, that seems silly. It's not indescribable (except by him), it's not unnameable exactly, it's - not nameless or a wordless feeling, no, those are something else -

...focus, there's a pretty woman talking to you who might have more cake!

"It is! Hazardous, I mean. I have to be careful" - guilty glance at Jasper - "to look carefully before I open them, and tell people to be careful, and not leave them open where I can't see them if someone could run into one."

"Oh! And the cake is very... delicious, thank you!"

"Yeah! It really is. I go half an hour out of the way to get them from this one bakery that's really good. Of course, I have to get tuneups more often if I eat a lot of cake," She pokes her belly, "But I can afford it. Have you tried using portals as a catapult? Have something fall in one, and then come out above and keep falling so it goes really fast, and then pop the portals and have it go into one that was underneath and fly really fast?"