Wind Gate
"To travel as the wind" was a saying for a long time, meaning that you made a great distance in a good amount of time. Now, it's the norm with wind gates propping up in city after city, now town after town.
Travel on the Wind
The high concept of the wind gate is quite simple. Enter one gate, have your person and belongings change state to be fully gasious, then be sent on your way to another gate where you will exit your gaseous form. This may sound dangerous, but the chances of losing a part of oneself while on travel is highly unlikely. A body wants to stay together, and a soul moreso. So, as long as the user is not sick or weak in spirit, they will make it from gate to gate without issue. The alternative for fast travel, and definitely faster, would be blinking. However, blinking, or instantaneously changing one's physical location, is less controllable, more costly energy-wise, and more destructive to the user if something goes awry. Blinking could not have a limb travel quite right; a wind gate may not assemble a limb, but it will come back to the traveler eventually (faster with immediate aid by wind gate security.Roads
Wind gates, like any good mass transportation system, need roads. But these wind roads, or the paths windgates are enchanted to send users along, are not bound to land, sea, or sky. Older wind gate roads do travel along the ground, walls erected to keep wanderers from accidentally crossing paths with someone traveling on the wind. This does not present much danger as the wind-bound one will simply be blown around a past any obstruction on the road. However, some wind gates use torrential speeds exceeding 100 npk. These speeds may bring debris in a harmonious way with a wanderer, to put it lightly. But, these faster wind gate roads are also more modern, which comes with advancements in placement and awareness. These roads tend to be completely encased in underground tunnels or shoot high into the sky before plateauing high above where any sane-being would fly.Danger People were skeptical of it at first as transmogrifying their bodies is dangerous when the gates were brought to the public. Some either elderly or susceptible to conspiracy refuse to take wind gates, much to their relatives chagrin at the family get-together. New safety precautions that will instantly solidify a body if something goes wrong.
Creation
Wind gates brought with them the same ground-shaking change that trains and Ships had previously done for mass movement. It, like many modern wonders, found its genesis in the The Great Drake Humi War. And, like many modern wonders, came from a need for gruesome effectiveness of the mass transportation of soldiers to more readily shed blood.Wind gates met their original need with great efficiency. However, the first iteration of the technology had one gate connected to only one other gate. While this was easily translated to large cities having wind gate corridors that connected to other large cities, it did mean making travel plans to make sure one takes the correct gate to get to the destination that is connected to their destination. But newer wind-gates use networks of gates that can all connect to one another. So now, one simply puts in where they would like to travel, pay their fee, and be on their way. The issue with wind gates is that to ensure that things reassemble properly on the other end, a soul is nearly required. That means the transportation of goods over wind gates isn't feasible, so they are left to slower means of transportation like ships and caravans.
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