Opening a Portal to a target on my Map didn’t mean the Portal literally formed where that person was and cut them in half. That would be an extremely foolish design. They formed about two or three feet in front of the target. That meant that if the target wasn’t paying too much attention while walking forward, they may walk right into the Portal and end up on the other side without realizing it. Portals also didn’t understand height.
If I selected a target that was underground or flying through the air, the Map would automatically place it on the ground. This was basically because the Map I used was two-dimensional and only existed on a two-dimensional plane. If I picked anywhere, it was as close to the ground as possible at whatever elevation that might be. It could be used in some interesting ways, like teleporting to the top of a tower or mountain with ease, but it naturally had limitations.
For example, stepping through the Portal felt a bit like stepping through the water. It also had a similar resistive effect. That meant, you couldn’t create a Portal behind an enemy, and then shoot them with an arrow. The arrow’s momentum would be all but lost when it came out on the other side. We tried various degrees of strength, but no matter how powerful the blow, it didn’t pass through the Portal.
This led me to another idea. Could you create a Portal in extreme environments and use them as an attack? My first thought was to create a Portal underwater. I could create a tsunami that could wipe out an entire army. If I got it deep enough, the high pressure would be like a water canon with enough force that I wondered if it could hurt bosses.
This naturally led me to other thoughts. I could see space. What would happen if I opened a Portal in space? Everything would be explosively sucked out into its vacuum. How about the inside of a volcano? Sending molten earth racing down at an enemy would be a powerful weapon. Plus, I could make a lava moat.
In the end, while all of these ideas were great, they had one fundamental flaw. The Portal I created always formed a few feet in front of me, facing me. The first person to be struck with water, lava, or the vacuum of space would be me. Since realizing this reality, I naturally gave up on the idea of weaponizing Portals. The only way I could use it would be if I got close to the edge of a cliff, and then hoped an idiot walking forward would walk through the Portal and off the cliff before realizing what they were doing.
The reason I felt the need to explain all of this at that moment, was as it so happened, the man I selected to Portal to had been at the edge of a cliff, taking a piss off the side. When my Portal appeared, he naturally stopped peeing and leaped back, but I was about three feet out over the ledge of a cliff when I stepped across. I let out a cry as I plunged off the cliff and into the depths below. In this case, I was the idiot.