Nerf Portals [Script]

Teleportation is the most broken superpower to ever exist. That's what I believe.

Now, as much as I'd love to have an entire discussion over why teleportation trumps every other superpower. I'm here for one thing and one thing only, ruining it. I say ruining it, but really I'm just making it less convenient.

Teleportation has taken many forms throughout the ages. We had teleportation devices, where your body is atomised and reconstructed, which started a conversation among philosophers on whether the person on the other side is the same person. This dilemma didn't last long, however, thanks to the contributions of "Extremely Moral Inventions LLC".

Another form of teleportation was that of the portal gun. Which created two portals that lead to one another. You go into the blue rift and pop out of the orange. Simple; easy to use, and almost definitely not dangerous. No really! don't worry about it. Just don't place them above each other and accelerate infinitely. 

These are just two from many examples, some of them I don't even know about. Aside from each methods advantages and catches. All have one thing in common, convenience.

I can break down this convenience into 3 main factors. Energy expense, money and time.

Soooooooo, in order to nerf teleportation, we'll have to mess with the conveniences to make things slightly more challenging for our fellow teleporters. 

For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that our teleportation is as simple as thinking of the place you want to be, and snapping your fingers. You're immediately teleported to the closest free space where you wished to be. Meaning no teleporting into walls and noclipping into the backrooms.

Mess with the Initial cost

The first thing we could do is make it so you can only teleport to places you've been to before. Meaning you can't teleport to your long distance partner's location unless you've been to their location before. The initial costs of the power may suck, but at the very least you're not completely lazy.

This is realistically not that bad of a nerf, considering that you can now stop the overthinkers from accidentally teleporting to the sun. 

You may thank me later, aaaand I only accept cash.

Expense relative to distance

Another thing we could do, is make it so teleportation expends the same amount of energy it would take to normally get to the place you wish to teleport to. Meaning, that cheating a marathon is just as exhausting as running it. Except your muscles get nothing out of it.

"But Salman, what if I'm teleporting across countries? Won't I just die of exhaustion?" 

Jetlag babyyyyy. The idea behind the nerf is, the exhaustion is equivalent to that of whatever is the most common method to get from point A to point B. At least, across countries it is. I haven't really gone into the nitty gritty details of what it's like to teleport to a park that's 30 minutes away from where I live. Mostly, because there is no park, but I digress.

This alone makes for a good character. An always exhausted character who's always on time, or even early so he can catch some rest before anyone gets down to business.

We could also make it so the expense is actually monetary. Meaning teleporting across the globe just deducts from the money that you have and you won't be able to teleport if you don't have the equivalent amount of a flight ticket to wherever you want to go.

A combination I like for the last two nerfs, would be monetary cuts for long distance teleportation and energy cuts for short ones.

Tempura 

I remembered a half-life 2 reference. Wherein Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance are gone for a week after the teleporter they use to escape from the combine forces blows up right after they use it. This inspired nerf numero quadro. Depending on how far the distance you teleport is, you're gone for that amount of time. So, assume you wanna visit your spouse in a different country cause working abroad is driving you insane... Weeeeeell, you might have to take a month long leave. And also let your wife know you'll be gone for a while. You don't want her thinking you're dead now, do you? This nerf isn't that bad for short distances, in fact it probably benefits close combat a lot! Do with that information what you will.

The video should have ended here. Except I relied on external forces beyond my comprehension to give the nerfing process one final push.. I called the one person who knows more about portals than I do.

Meet Haitham! Haitham is a really good dungeon master, with a track record of zero completed campaigns according to my friends. (Misinformation) 

After a solid rant on the logic and balance behind superpowers, we effectively managed to squeeze in two more nerfs.

<This lasted a good half an hour>

Not so discreet now, are we?

According to Haitham, when you teleport, the space you left is now vacuum that has to be filled with something and fast. This would mean that every time you teleport, the air rushing in causes a shockwave. I thought it would be an explosion, essentially making teleporters into weapons of mass destruction, but ehhh [15:00]

If this is a nerf at all, the worst it could do is make you somewhat trackable since you now have a signature sound tied to your every move. That being said though, I find it very difficult to believe that anyone could follow a breadcrumb trail of crimes in their area of jurisdiction leading towards an international criminal. You'd have to piss a looot of people off in order to get tracked.

O-o-or have a mandela effect adjacent invented because of you. The Popper effect is what I'm going with for now.

Stub Your Toes

The final nerf, and in my opinion, the worst one we remove the safeguard where you don't exactly teleport to your destination if an object is there. So, if you teleport home, and there's a table where you usually teleport. Congrats, you now recieved the same pain you'd get from bumping into the table. Oooor having it thrown at you with full force.

This obviously isn't limited to tables, but the bottom line is, while it is not always going to be inconvenient, it sure as hell would be very concussive.

So yeah, this was my take on nerfing teleportation with little to no research done. I'm aware that I haven't covered all forms of teleportation. I'm also aware that I haven't covered other utilities of teleportation like the number of people you can teleport with you. But eh, It's too much work. thank you for watching. Now, you must excuse me, I have another thing I should be writing 

<Better Done than Perfect>