Portal

Portals are the main way PPC Agents travel through the multiverse. They are generated by consoles, and can be opened using a remote activator. It is generally considered impossible to portal into HQ without PPC technology, but there have been exceptions; in 2006 the Black Cats deactivated the shields that prevent outside portalling, and the Sue invaders in 2003 and 2008 somehow bypassed the shields as well.

Appearance
In most cases, portals appear as blue doorways in space and time. When an agent opens one, a glowing dot appears in the air. This lengthens into a horizontal line generally 1-2 meters long, which then stretches vertically in both directions to form the door effect.

However, this imagery is not an intrinsic part of the portal. Rather, it was added to the technology by Makes-Things early on, to deal with the issues arising from invisible portals, particularly the danger of half a person passing through while the other half remains behind. Thus, some portals have different activation effects: some show the view on the far side, some do not; some are rectangular, some are oval or round; some have different colors, such as Logan and Entropy's grey one; and in one case, Nyx Nightingale used a portal with no visible manifestation whatsoever. The links between the many sections of HQ are similarly non-visible portals, their sides matching up with the corridor walls.

Nature
Portals are, at their hearts, simply stabilised plotholes. They followed naturally from the Flowers' research into plotholes, which progressed from simple detection, to stabilisation, to generation. Indeed, this fact was the original reason for the Flowers' antipathy towards Mary Sues -- their generation of rogue plotholes threatened to interfere with the Organisation's portals.