Linking room

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A linking room is a concept in multiverse and metafiction stories. Linking rooms are usually visualized as vast, sometimes infinite, hallways with doors running the entire length. They often appear in dream sequences and cartoons. Each door is actually a portal to a different place.

[edit] Books

The most famous example is probably the "long, low hall" at the bottom of the rabbit hole in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which is described as having doors all around it, two of which are opened in the book, each leading to a different location.

Linking rooms do not need to be hallways, and linking room portals do not need to be doors. The Wood between the Worlds in C. S. Lewis' Magician's Nephew is a vast wooded area with many small, deceptively shallow pools of water, each of which leads to an individual world or universe.

Jasper Fforde's metafictional The Well of Lost Plots features a vast library, 52 stories tall (26 floors up, 26 floors down) with all books ever written or attempted, each a portal accessible to brave or foolish souls.

In a certain way, both the Kingdom of Amber and Courts of Chaos in Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber may be seen as a linking room between the Worlds of Shadow.

The Tower in the Dark Tower series from Stephen King can be considered a kind of linking room in the form of a Tower, forming the hub of the universe, with all possible worlds revolving around it as spokes on a wheel.

In The Neverending Story, the protagonist Bastian Balthazar Bux enters the Temple of a Thousand Doors, which helps him find Atreyu.

In Isaac Asimov's Robot City series, the main character Derec, discovers the key to a non-place called Perihelion, which is like a bridge realm outside of reality. Upon using the key and entering this gray-colored emptiness, people can travel instantaneously almost anywhere in the entire universe.

In Raymond E. Feist's Midkemia novels, the Hall of Worlds connects various different realities.

[edit] Movies

The Tim Burton film The Nightmare Before Christmas features an area similar to the Wood between the Worlds where Jack gains entrance to Christmas Town.

The Matrix Reloaded features a classic hallway-style linking room, which is described as an access passageway for the programmers who maintain the Matrix.

One of the most recent is the factory where Sullivan and Wazowski work in Monsters, Inc.. It is the starting point from the Monster universe to millions of children's bedrooms in our world. New doors are constantly brought to this hall from a huge storage area.

In the Doctor Who episode Doomsday, all parallel universes are linked together by "The Void", which could be considered a kind of linking room (the Doctor describes it as "the space between universes")

[edit] Games

The Myst series of computer games uses linking books to jump from one Age to another.

In the Planescape campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons, the city of Sigil contains portals to every world and plane in the D&D multiverse. In addition, planar paths such as the River Styx and the Infinite Staircase allow travel to many different planes.

In the Super Mario video games, linking rooms are often called "warp zones". In Super Mario 64, the main hallways of the castle are de-facto linking halls, with rooms having paintings that provide access to the different worlds. Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy continue in this tradition with linking rooms called Delfino Plaza and the Comet Observatory, respectively.

Similarly, in Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin and the other games of the Castlevania series, the castle itself serves as a giant linking room, capable of appearing anywhere on Earth. In Portrait of Ruin, there are also various portraits throughout the castle that link to other locations contained within them.

In the Kingdom Hearts series, there is a linking room known as the World Map. The World Map can only be traveled by Gummi Ship, and is similar in appearance to outer space. It contains many planet-like objects known as Worlds, most of which are based on Disney's animated films Notable exceptions are Port Royal and Space Paranoids (which are based on Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and Tron, respectively), as well as original worlds such as Traverse Town, Hollow Bastion, Twilight Town, and The World that Never Was. The World Map cannot be traversed freely; travel is restricted to specific pathways between the Worlds.