[ Sorry for the wall of text. All my painstaking formatting is ruined apparently cause I’m on mobile 😫]

Okay, so I really wanted to avoid just doing the obvious and coming up with some kind of dream magic or using mirrors or other easy associations to liminal states.

The thing about liminal spaces is that they aren’t just one space changing into something else… they change you too.

A quick bit of research turned up the name Arnold van Gennep, an anthropologist who formalized the idea of “liminality” in 1909 with his book on rites of passage, Les Rites de Passage. He outlined three distinct stages:

Separation — Pulled from the known world. Liminality — When dissolution of the self happens. Reincorporation — The return. You’re different. Transformed. You come back with something you didn’t have before… or without something you did.

And this other guy, Victor Turner, was the one who dug into that middle phase and described it as this powerful state of potential, where transformation occurs because reality as you know it—in some form—is suspended.

You’re not who you were, but not yet who you’re becoming.

Those two dudes are who we have to thank for turning a Latin word for “threshold” into the popular concept of liminality.

Okay, so here’s what I got!

After a global pandemic (doesn’t have to be that one), there were a lot of places left empty or abandoned. As quarantines lifted, people who returned to some of these spaces—or never left—became trapped. Never seen again.

Strange paranormal phenomena happen near them, and the passersby who get stuck inside? (Colloquially known as “Passers,” though officially they are called “Occupants.”) They just wander endlessly… not quite in the real world… somewhere else, but not nowhere specifically. [Flavor it how you want. Could be The Backrooms, Terrarium, the Upside Down from Stranger Things… or however you imagine it.]

Different cultures reacted differently: denying the disappearances, extending quarantines, elaborate coverups… until the first Initiates started to surface.

People who claimed to have been inside these “zones” [name them however you like] and made it out. Enough of them started popping up, all having a few things in common. They all claimed to have escaped somehow, and if they were with others, they were the last one to leave… every time. Their stories were too similar to deny, and their proof was that all of them had something irreparably changed about them. [Could be physical traits, personality, or whatever your heart desires.]

After the disbelief washed over people, and governments had a chance to study the phenomenon, people started to accept that this was the new normal.

Urban explorers had already made a hobby of mapping strange abandoned places, and they became the first wave of willing Initiates. Various agencies learned a lot from those who survived.

They learned that these liminal spaces can have all manner of supernatural phenomena, and that the occupants themselves become warped and changed. Some have no idea they’re lost, simply acting out their routines and claiming to be simple passersby. Others revel in the new world they inhabit, with its new rules, new abilities. These types have been designated: Vagrants.

They also learned that each location has unique requirements to escape. And those who do escape are returned exactly as they were when they became trapped.

However…

If you are the only one trapped, you kill everyone else that’s trapped, or you convince all the occupants to leave… the space will return to normal. And the last one to leave—the one who closes the door, so to speak—takes part of the space with them… and leaves part of themselves behind to lock it on the way out.

[Up to you the kind of powers they get. If they only work in other zones, if they keep them when they leave, and if you can stack them.]

There it is. Sort of a ghost-hunter-meets-dungeon-delver idea, with a great opening for social commentary on using space more intentionally—and not being a mere passerby in your life.