On the space between and circumstances relating.

There are two ways of thinking about trans-universal travel.  The first way is about how it works, and it goes like this.  You open a door into a giant maze.  Doors fill the halls and the stairways, some clustered in twos or threes in the rooms that spring up throughout.  You can walk around the maze, sneaking around "traps" and "monsters" that might end your trip prematurely until you come at last to what you think is the right doorway.  You open it up and are sucked through.  If it was where you wanted to end up, well, that was an exceedingly lucky trip.  Most times, however, you come to the conclusion that you had in fact made a left turn somewhere where you should have had the sense to take the stairs down a level before taking a left.  Then you puzzle out how to get the door open again, because the handle on this side is missing since nobody set one up.  If you get back in, you have the choice of going back home to relative safety, or to try once more to find your way to your destination.  Either way, depending on how long you were out of the maze, you may expect subtle to drastic changes in the layout of the whole intersections of corridors, staircases, and doorways.  To go into too much detail on the subject of the perils of the maze besides the layout would take a lengthy and baffling catalog of metaphors and references, many of which would be better described in terms of the raw physics than in a roundabout fashion, at least with my personal talent with words.

That said, the other way of thinking is the immersive picture painted by actually experiencing a travel.  Unlike any metaphorical glitter that gets written on the subject, you either go with the flow or you don't.  If you do, you feel a sort of greasy wave pushing you along while soaking into you, feeling your very being invaded and replaced.  This is not to say that you are overwhelmed by it, taken over entirely.  Instead, you feel it wash over you and through you, then slosh over to your other half, leaving your solidifying self tingling.  All this happens in the blink of an eye, all right before you start to see things.  Maybe you see a particular color of yellow that draws you in, falling deeper into that before all at once you aren't just experiencing a certain shade of color, but instead are having a wordless heart-to-heart with a yellow color you instinctively call James, even though you also know clearly that it's name is Marge.  And then you're out, sitting, standing, laying, or embedded on or in a new world.

If you don't go with the flow, you have a much more painful time of things, but some say a much easier time of finding what you want.  You push up against a solid wall of nothingness, feel the slimy bits of it harden into knives, cutting you as you try to slip through them.  The same dots and colors and memories that you might see regularly are still there, but this time they run away, not content to let you slip down into them.  The harder you chase, the faster they run.  After you end up exhausted or dead, your body is pushed back into the flow to drift into whatever universe lays on its path.  Once you start out one way, it takes real mental effort to reverse your method and get to the other state of mind.  The best of us who travel can do it in an instant, less walking through the void and more swaying like a drunk all while carefully placing our destination in front of us.

These two explanations on the subject tend to say that the people who are most successful are not the fastest, the brightest, or the best equipped to enter into the gap between worlds.  It is not an ability that you hone outside of the place, at least not consciously.  The ones who walk without fear are the ones who were ripped to shreds and survived, baring their teeth to go back in again.  The ones who step unerringly are the ones who have visited countless places, more than they even remember, before they finally find their way to a place on purpose.  It is no wonder then that in societies built around commonality, those that spring up and flourish in the multiverse, there are very few places that claim allegiance with them or even bear their presence for too long.  Life as a traveler creates rifts in the same way that the first wish to separate oneself from others does at the start.

This is not to say that on the whole people who claim no one universe home are not upstanding and beneficial to society.  They only walk by their own choice to the places they go, learning from their constraint to go where they can when they want instead of hesitating behind social norms or trends.  Stories of saviors coming into being before leaving in a flash of light number many, and tales of terrors who spring up from out of the darkness to wreck havoc, never to be seen again but in nightmares, those tales match them.  Even more are the unexplainable events that find themselves as perplexing aggravations for any scientist-type who runs across them, defying all expectations of reality.

All of this would define me as some sort of classical enigma, ready to do as I please and achieve legendary status through a multitude of known worlds.  The fact that I have tripped head-first into a portal in this between-space makes it all the more embarrassing with these high expectations.  It is a common problem, that of opening doors where they were closed but moments before, sucking you towards them to steal you inside.  I was aware of these and usually avoided getting caught.  When I did, just now, I came across something even I wasn't sure actually existed.  A room with no door.  Rather, a universe that had a door in, which opened as if something were coming out, and no door out from the inside.  Perplexing doesn't even begin to cover it.