piratekitten declared February world-building month.
And now it is March and I am finishing up the questions!
The question post is here
The eighteenth question comes from clare_dragonfly and is for Facets of Dusk
Who discovered the portal thingies? How did it start out?

In the universe the team calls Prime, in our era, Alexa discovered the Doors by accident.

She was – or had been – dating Aerich, and they got into yet another fight, as they were prone to doing. She stormed out of his study and into his library, through a door that was older than the family house in which he lived.

[Aerich’s family consist of a long and esteemed lineage of scholarly mages who discovered the Doors centuries ago, but had never figured out how to make them properly function. As only a few people in any given billion have the ability, nobody in Aerich’s family, nor their associates, had ever managed to spark the doors. Alexa did.]

She traveled from universe to universe for three years; there was a murder investigation back on Earth Prime, and she was officially declared missing: presumed dead.

While Aerich was being charged with her murder, Alexa was discovering by trial and error how the Doors work and how to find them. They do not always lead to the same place multiple times in a row and, unlike a Stargate, they don’t come with a coordinate system. Each universe has several, although the specific number varies with world.

When she returned – not into Aerich’s family library, but into a storeroom in the basement of a famous university – she was immediately snagged by a shadow branch of the U.S. Government, working with an unwilling but competent Aerich and several of his associates.

Once they determined that Alexa could, indeed, open the Doors, they put together an exploration team, and the Facets team was born.

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