Transport Gates

The ancient world was a distant place, connected loosely by threads made of sailing ships or Groundless convoys. Crossing the world was the work of years, and vast amounts of money. Then there came the Transport Gates. Folding the corners of the map until they touched.
Maruk An'Dara, 'What The Symposium Gave Us'


And if I could, I would, I should, build a Gate from your backdoor to mine.
Sheer Edges, 'The Distance Between Us'

Inventor(s)

The Symposiasts created these gates as part of the construction of The Symposium itself. Not a great deal is know about these individuals, barring a few more famous members. The specific individuals who discovered how to make Transport Gates have been lost to history.

Access & Availability

Access to the Transport Gates to travel to the central hub of The Symposium is difficult to the lay person. Gaining access to move yourself or your goods takes several request forms and a large amount of patience as the case is reviewed and considered. Access is unlikely to be granted unless it is felt there is no other manner in which one could make the journey.
However, if one is a student of the Symposium, access is relatively simple. Bringing your student identification to the guard desk inside the building which houses the gate will allow you to travel. However, the guards are known to be strict about the state of the individual, and can declare them unfit for travel as they see fit. Given the main users of these gates are students, this happens fairly regularly.
Due to the way the gates work, if one has no magical energy at all, they become difficult to use. A focus instrument may suffice, and have been known to be produced for political leaders, but it is known to be preferable to create the energy yourself.

Complexity

Using the Transport Gate is relatively simple. Energy must be channelled into the gate itself, allowing it to open and access the greater pool of magic - a spark to start a fire, as it were. If the traveller has no magical energy of their own, a focus can do the job. Once the energy is activated, the user just steps through and appears in the hub in the centre of the Symposium. From there further travel is possible, though at the end of scheduled lecture times queues often form.
How the gates function is complex in a way that cannot be recreated even by modern Magi. There is study every year into how to create new gates, and in recent years some success has been made in transporting inorganic matter from one point in space to another, but unfortunately at the cost of the molecular stability of the object.

Discovery

The Transport Gates were created in the years following the founding of The Symposium. The Symposiasts felt they wished to expand their discussions and debates to cultures further away than their own.
The concept of teleportation magic was known, but only so far as to move to another physical location one could see. How the ability to bend space to make two distant points meet was discovered has been lost to time, and the technology has never been replicated successfully.
What is known is that the original gates were opened from both locations, as recorded by the Mukasi royal records: "Today, a Magi from the discussion hub to the South is to perform a great magical ritual that may be felt by all who live in the city. Afterwards there will be a constant magical energy, which we are to account for in future calculations of city wide magical effects.