Visiting Other Worlds

I’ve created a few different worlds in my time, and traveled in several created by others. The first world I remember visiting was called Earth, sometimes referred to as Terra, the third planet from a star called Sol. Earth was not of my creation; it was far more complex than any world I have ever created. I assume Earth was in existence quite some time before I came into being, but I have been unable to prove my assumption.

I don’t remember the portal I used to visit Earth, but I’ve been told it was a relatively small one, anchored in the uterus of a female human called Mommy. The size of the portal forced me to enter Earth as a proportionally small creature. I arrived on Earth in the form of a human, which appears to have been a good choice, since other life forms on Earth were subjugated to the will of the humans. The only form that might have been better than human would have been the cockroach, but apparently the choice of portal through which one enters Earth determines the form one will take on Earth, and the portal anchored inside Mommy did not support cockroach forms, only human ones.

Passage through the Mommy portal was so traumatic for me, it wiped my mind clean of all memories. I have no memory of what or where I was before arriving on Earth, and in fact I do not even remember anything from my first year on Earth. I have seen portraits of what other people claimed was me, but none of those portraits from my first year on Earth jogged any memories. My memories of my second through fourth years are vague at best, but looking at portraits from those times caused a stirring inside me, a subliminal recognition of the subjects of the portraits, so I believe the claim that I was among those subjects.

The portal by which I entered Earth was subsequently used by five other visitors. Mommy acted happy when each visitor arrived, which explains why she had decided to anchor the portal in her body. It is my understanding that most females, whether on Earth or some other world, human or otherwise, have biological portals anchored inside their bodies. I certainly would not want a portal anchored inside of me. Let visitors use a non-biological portal, such as a door, archway, book, bridge, or dream. None of those portal types causes the same trauma as caused by a biological portal. Using a non-biological portal to another world seldom purges the memories of the visitor or shrinks the visitor’s body.

After spending a few years on Earth without understanding much about it or myself, I decided to attend an institution of information transfer on a recurring basis. Mommy would not go with me or allow any of the other visitors she had admitted to Earth to accompany me. There was a human male called Daddy who came by to visit us daily and stayed with us at night, but during the day he was busy with responsibilities elsewhere on Earth, so he could not go with me. However, I discovered that other little people who had arrived on Earth via other Mommy portals had decided to attend the institution, so I was not alone. Some of these other little people clearly didn’t want to be at the institution, but rather wanted to escape Earth for a while. Some of the larger people knew how to do it, and we little ones wanted to know how to do it too.

I made it my mission to find a way to open portals to other worlds, for I did not want to stay on Earth all of the time either. None of the females I encountered would allow me to examine their biological portals until I was much older and larger—at which time I discovered that their biological portals didn’t work the same way in both directions. As a little person I turned to experimenting with other types of portals. Most doors and archways did not work the way I wanted; passing through them allowed me to enter a different location, but the location was still on Earth, and not all that far away from the location on the other side of the door. The same held true for bridges, which were not as common in the area where I lived with Mommy. Dreams worked sometimes, but they were unreliable—I couldn’t cause a dream to occur every time I was in the mood for a walk in another world.

That left books, though at first books were difficult to use. It took me a while to learn how to unlock the portals hiding between the covers of books. But once I learned how, I was visiting other worlds on a daily basis, often more than one world per day. I could not be satisfied, and began to wonder why I had ever decided to visit Earth in the first place. It felt dull compared to other worlds.

As time passed, I yearned to visit worlds to which none of the books granted access. Indeed, only dreams allowed me to access certain highly interesting worlds, and as mentioned earlier, dreams were unreliable. They also had the major disadvantage of partially wiping one’s memories of the visited world, so that one could not fully remember one’s experiences in the worlds visited through dreams.

So it was that I became interested in creating other worlds to visit. The creation of a world is not a process that can be easily explained. It is purely mental in nature. There is no need to bring together lots of stone, dirt, and water to try and physically mold a world in one’s hands. One must simply imagine, a form of dreaming that is not affected by immediate memory loss, and whatever one imagines becomes real. Worlds created in this fashion reside in another dimension, a parallel universe. The creator can revisit a world by again exercising the imagination.

Yet time erodes memories, even those of imagined worlds. Moreover, while I could orally describe my otherworldly visits, it was not satisfactory. I wanted to allow my Earth acquaintances to visit the worlds I had created. Most of my acquaintances had learned to use books. Some were happy limiting themselves to the books already available, but some were willing to visit the worlds I had created, if I could but craft suitable books to grant access.

And so I have spent much time and energy in learning how to craft books for others to use to visit the worlds I have created. Since I have created many worlds, it is imperative to keep straight the details for each one, not confusing one world with the other as I craft the books that grant access to each world. I believe I have done a good job of juggling them.

Books on Earth can take many forms, which can affect how widely they can be distributed. Some books are more well crafted than others, and so are more appealing to more people. Some people who craft books choose not to distribute them widely, for personal reasons, including the desire to not distribute books too widely that are not superbly crafted. I am one of those people.

The pursuit of superb craftsmanship of books has thus brought me back to the world of Pharas. I created this world long ago and remember much of it as though I had created it yesterday, but the inhabitants have since discovered free will, and the world is constantly changing in ways I did not anticipate. To fully understand this world as it is now and craft the book that will allow Earthlings to visit, I must dwell here for a while and observe. I will endeavor not to interfere with the natural growth of Pharas, but stay hidden just behind the veil of my imagination.