Portal Cut

Ed: You put something inside the cylinder of wormholes, turn them on for a fraction of a second, turn them off again... what have you got?
Sam: ...The world's most ludicrously advanced bread-slicer?

— Ed stories

Classically and simply, teleportation is done on an object basis. Distinct items are sent through in their entirety. However, it is more realistic, and easier to calculate, to just send through anything within a certain area, or use a portal through which anything on one side is in one place and anything through is in another.

However, these can lead to subversions of the classic teleportation concept: if only an area is teleported, it's possible for this area to not contain an object in its entirety. And if a portal that leads to one place suddenly collapses or deactivates, anything currently in the portal will need to be acted upon. One solution is to distinguish distinct objects and then handle where they stay or go on an individual basis. The most common result, however, is that only the portion of the object that was in the teleport area will teleport, while the rest stays put, resulting in a portal cut. If the edges of a portal are not guarded, a similar effect can be reached if only part of the object goes through the portal.

The opposite of a Tele-Frag (but no less deadly). See also Teleporter Accident, for more general mishaps. A No-Flow Portal may be designed to have this sort of effect on the unwary. For creating portals by physically cutting the fabric of space, see Dimensional Cutter.

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Examples:

Advertising

• An oddly harmless example comes from the Discovery Channel's Know More Than You Should series of advertisements. It starts with several scenes of the bottom half of a woman running blindly through a city bumping into things. Then it cuts to the top half of the same woman stuck in a home-made teleporter while her husband tries in vain to fix it. As much a subversion as an example, as she hasn't been "cut" by the portal, she's just stuck in a still-open one.
  Husband: I'm gonna have to run out to the hardware store.

Anime & Manga

• Astra Lost in Space: Kanata loses his arm below the elbow when he dives in front of Charce to stop him from sending himself through a wormhole as a form of suicide. Charce closes the wormhole before it can take Kanata, just not fast enough to save his arm.
• Black Clover: Langris Vaude's offensive Spatial Magic teleports and erases matter altogether. Its destructive capabilities made his parents favor him over older half-brother Finral, who is unable to use this because of his kind, cowardly personality.
• Bleach: Hachigen Ushouda uses barriers to behead several Menos Grandes during the fight for Karakura when Aizen and his troops invade the Living World. He later uses one of his barriers to amputate his own arm after it had been hit with Baraggan's rotting power and teleport it into Baraggan, turning the rotting attack back on him.
• In Bokurano, Koemushi does this when a character points a gun at him. He retaliates teleporting him away, leaving the gun with the guy's hand still holding it. "Have a nice trip", indeed.
• Two Contractors with different kinds of teleportation powers in Darker than Black use them offensively:
  • The first could Swap Teleport two objects, and would often switch an opponent's vital organs with some random object.
  • The second could teleport things covered by his blood, so he would take a knife and fling bits of his blood all over people before teleporting the sections of their body the blood covers... somewhere else.
• In Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Gluttony's mouth does this to Envy's upper torso (accidentally) and Alphonse's hand while attempting to "eat" Roy Mustang. Since the upper torso contained the philosopher's stone, it was the part that regenerated inside Gluttony's Stomach of Holding.
  • This also happens to Frank Archer in the 2003 anime, who just happens to be standing on the border of the philosopher's stone's transmutation circle when it activates. He has a large part of his body, including half of his face, become part of the stone and has it replaced with automail.
• Guyver:
  • The Zoalord Yentsui, who can cut holes in space and close them at will, uses this as his main offensive tactic.
  • Either this or Tele-Frag happens every time Sho and Agito bioboost, as the Guyver armor crossing dimensions brings up a "blast field" destroying everything within a certain radius of them.
• Hunter × Hunter: Knov could create portals and use his ability to make a Portal Cut on one of the ant soldiers.
• Inuyasha's Meidou Zangetsu and, even more explicitly, his Cutting Meidou do this all the time. In the latter's case, even to things that are outright immune to the former.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Stardust Crusaders: Vanilla Ice's Stand; Cream is capable of this — and indeed does wind up doing this to Avdol, leaving only his hands. He attempts this on Polnareff as well, managing to get his heels but ultimately failing to land the killshot. It pretty much kills Iggy in the 1993 OVA, though.
  • Diamond is Unbreakable: Okuyasu has a similar power, but localized in his Stand's right hand, allowing him to tear scoop-shaped holes in anything around him, and can even erase the distance between him and something else. The only reason it's not the single most powerful ability in a series already replete with Story-Breaker Powers is because it's being used by Okuyasu.
  • Golden Wind: Illuso ends up doing this. Specifically, he gets infected by Purple Haze. So, he escapes through a mirror but orders his Stand to leave the virus behind. This causes his infected hand to be forcibly removed.
• Macross:
  • In Super Dimension Fortress Macross, this is what happens to South Ataria Island and a good amount of the '' environment'' around it. The Fold Engines on the Macross generate a spherical field around the ship, engulfing part of the island and neatly cutting it off the Earth. The other end of the Fold gate, on the orbit of Pluto, shows a perfect sphere of land, sea, air, clouds, and sunlight, instants before dissipating.... which flash-freezes the teleported mass.
  • Weaponized by the time of Macross Frontier with Fold Bombs — overloaded Fold reactors which, when detonated, create spherical portals that take everything within range into Fold space, which annihilates any unprotected target. They also have a bonus: matter teleported away by a Fold Bomb will leave a vacuum when it's gone, so activating one of these within an atmosphere will wreak further destruction on whatever is left behind.
• An early plot in My Hero Academia features villains attempting to kill All Might by having their strongest member pull him halfway through a portal while a team-mate closes it. It fails when Bakugo pounces on the one controlling the portal and breaks his concentration while Todoroki freezes the other, giving All Might a chance to escape.
• Naruto:
  • Hatake Kakashi's Mangekyou Sharingan puts up a barrier the contents of which are sucked into another dimension, and will just do this to whatever isn't all the way in. It's not as neat as most examples though, as it's more like whatever is ripped off by force.
  • Danzo's "Reverse Four Symbols Sealing Technique" forms a Sphere of Destruction sealing anything within range inside the user's body, Portal Cutting anything only partway in.
• A man in O-Parts Hunter has an O-Part that consists of two rings which can become portals between each other, and he can close the portal while something is going through to cut it apart (he does this to Jio's boomerang).
• Space☆Dandy has a teleporter flashlight that portal cut anything only partially covered by the light, but didn't harm them. More strangely, an object was completely covered by the light but it ran out of in the middle of the teleportation: the object's mass was split into two translucent, less dense pieces that were the same size and shape as the original and were perfectly combined back into one by pushing them together.

Audio Plays

• In the Big Finish Doctor Who audio Colditz, one of the remaining antagonists manages to stop the TARDIS doors from fully closing as the Doctor starts to leave, but is unable to fully enter as it dematerializes and leaves his lower half behind. (This contradicts the main show as of the episode "The Husbands of River Song", see below, which specifies the TARDIS has a safeguard to avoid precisely this.)

Comic Books

• The original scene for Booster Gold's death in 52 was supposed to appear as if Booster tried to time travel to escape his fight with Supernova. Because of Supernova's interference with Booster's attempt to travel, Booster shows up a minute later... as a pair of legs. His torso shows up a bit later. In the end, they went with Booster's death in an explosion.
• Qubit did this on a massive scale to an invading Vespan fleet in Irredeemable when he shut down a warp gate based on his designs while a gigantic spaceship was half way through it.

• Robin (1993): When Mr. Baptiste orders Dodge to prove himself in order to get backing Doge uses his teleporting portal ability to cut off the hand of one of the goons attacking him, and open a portal in the way of the other that drops him several stories to his death.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics): Referenced by Doctor Finitevus when a character jumps at him, only to be redirected by a portal created by Doctor Finitevus. While that character is going through, Doctor Finitevus "wonders" what would happen if the portal were closed while someone were in it.
• Stormwatch defeated superpowered Nietzsche Wannabe killing machine "Father" with this technique.
• Superman:
  • Superman kills Mr. Mxyzptlk with the Phantom Zone projector like this in Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?. Normally the Phantom Zone projector can't do this, but it was a special case since at the same time, Mr. Mxyzptlk panics and tries to teleport away himself, so that half of him ends up in his own dimension and half in the Phantom Zone.
  • In The Killers of Krypton, Empress Gandelo teleports Harry Hokum into her lair when he is defeated, but her dimensional portal deliberately slices up and leaves behind Hokum's left arm, since it had been grabbed by Supergirl.
  • The Dominator War: As the war against the machines rages in Earth, the Legion of Super-Heroes try to teleport the United Planets delegates to a safer world. Unfortunately, the techno-virus takes over the dimensional portal right when the diplomats are being herded through it, and several of them are torn into pieces.
• The Transformers: Requiem of the Wreckers has the few surviving Wreckers finally defeat Overlord by taking advantage of the fact that he transforms into two separate vehicles. Springer and Verity manage to trick one half of him into a portal to the distant past (described as 'primordial,' as in not even stars had formed yet) while the other half was cast through another portal into the distant future at the heat death of the universe. They then shut both time portals off, 'cutting' Overlord's experience of the time stream from a single experience into two separate ones. This leaves his body parts stranded across hundreds of billions of years in time. Without both his halves, Overlord cannot return to his robot form and full mind, and must essentially Go Mad from the Isolation from himself.
• X-Men:
  • This is the power of the X-Men member Blink. She (well, an Alternate Universe version of her) later refines this into actual full-body teleportation. The AU version is quite capable of slicing up what she teleports too, but the mainstream version could only do that because of her limited of control of her powers.
  • Another X-Men mutant, Locus (this one a villain) likes to do this, or at least threatens to do it a lot (not sure if she's ever done so "onscreen").
  • In Marvel's Age of Apocalypse storyline the alternate-reality version of Nightcrawler teleports a villain's head off.
  • Villain Fitzroy met his end this way, as he tried to head through one of his portals to merge with time itself. He got halfway in, but a shot from Bishop distracted him long enough that the other half didn't before it closed.
  • During Liefeld's tenure on X-Factor, the Mutant Liberation Front's member Reaper had his leg cut off that way when teammate Zero closes his portal a second too soon.
• This led to the demise of the obscure '90s heroine and Young Justice ally Anima. She chased after Prometheus through his escape portal, only for it to close while she was only halfway through it. The next time we see her, it's as a severed torso floating aimlessly in the void.

Fan Works

• Constants and Variables: When Elizabeth opens up a tear to cushion Harry’s fall at the quidditch match, Harry accidentally loses one of his fingers much like Elizabeth. Due to the nature of the wound, medical witches were unable to grow it back and it applies his budding tear-powers.
• It doesn't actually occur anywhere in the fic, but Count Bleck threatens a pickpocket with this in The Count's World.
  Count Bleck: If you try it, I will send your head to a different dimension than your body.
  Pickpocket: I was just passin' by.
  Count Bleck: That's right, you were.
• A Crown of Stars: When the Avalon army is transporting troops from their homeworld to the "Evangelion" Earth through a dimensional portal, Rei collapses the gate just when an Humongous Mecha was stepping through it, cutting it in two.
  There was simultaneously a tremendous CRACK and rumble like thunder in the air over their heads and seconds later a chunk of shallow-curved metal the size of a garage door slammed to the earth near them, every line on the inside of the slice glowing orange-red with heat. Asuka didn’t jump too badly at the impact; it was too much like things she’d seen before involving chunks of Angel or buildings in her past battles. But she knew instantly something was very much not right. That was the front two meters of the Black Knight that had been coming through the portal. ‘Where is the rest of it?!’
• In Juxtapose, Izuku's Quirk, "Minor Banishment", is this. It lets him "banish" any kind of matter that he's touching up to a maximum of 10 g at a time. Going up to 2 kg without rest will give him a splitting headache. At first, everyone from his classmates to his teachers to All Might himself tells him that it's unsuited for heroics, which crushes his self-esteem. But in a moment of desperation, he realizes that he can also delete people's vital organs, destroying Tsuchigumo's eyes, spinnerets, spinal cord, and tendons, effectively crippling the villain.
• In Monkey D Haru and the Philosophers Stone, Haru (Harry) uses his Portal Portal Fruit powers in this way to cut off the club hand of the troll that was attacking Hermione.
• RWBY Zero: When Hercules lunges at Gilgamesh, Gil opens a portal to the Gate of Babylon in his path, then closes it when he is halfway across, slicing him in half at the waist and killing him. Gil says he recently thought of that technique to stop thieves who try to steal his treasury.
• In Sleeping with the Girls the MC is repeatedly warned about this happening with his Hammerspace device. That big of a Chekhov's Gun hasn't fired quite yet but it eventually will. He also takes great pain to not hit anything or anyone important with it.

Films — Live-Action

• Part of Pinky's backstory in the Doom movie is that he was caught in an accident like this when the Ark to Mars was first discovered, leaving him as a torso on wheels.
  "He went to one galaxy, his ass went to another."'
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Thor: The Dark World:
    • When Thor takes Jane to Asgard, the Bifröst clips the front end of a nearby police car. The bumper tumbles out the other end a few seconds before Thor and Jane arrive, narrowly avoiding Heimdall.
    • Later on, Malekith loses a couple of limbs to Selvig's gravitational spikes, which have been reconfigured to open rifts.
  • Thor: Ragnarok: Thor tries to summon a ride on the Bifröst while he's being chased across Muspelheim by a jet-powered dragon. Just as the dragon is about to eat him, Skurge (who was distracted entertaining two women by showing off the various Earth artifacts he's pillaged) finally beams him up. The dragon's head comes along for the ride too, causing Skurge and his guests to get covered in its gunk.
    Skurge: [annoyed] Well, well, look who decided to pop in. Thanks for scaring away my company and drenching my workplace in brains.
  • Avengers: Infinity War:
    • When Doctor Strange sends Bruce Banner to safety through a magic portal, he inadvertently sends half of a nearby taxi along for the ride. It nearly lands on top of Bruce, much to his alarm.
    • Wong gets rid of Cull Obsidian by sending him through a magic portal to the Arctic. When The Brute tries to reach back to him, Wong closes the portal, severing Cull Obsidian's arm in the process.
    • A variant happens with the first Outriders attempting to break through the force field that surrounds Wakanda. The barrier closes on them partway through their intrusion, cutting them up.
• When they activate the magic key in Masters of the Universe, a good portion of earth gets teleported into the throne room. Along with a car and a part of the adjacent wall.
• Pacific Rim: Uprising: One Kaiju gets cut in half when the Breach it is crawling through shuts off.
• This happens to the Tall Man in Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead, but he's still able to lend a hand afterwards.
• The Stargate film had this happen to Ra's Dragon when his head is inside the ring teleporter, but the rest of his body isn't.
  O'Neil: Give my regards to King Tut, asshole!
• The time travel machine in the Terminator franchise creates a perfectly spherical bubble for the traveler, cutting out any matter that happens to be in the way of the destination.
• Time travel in the movie Timeline causes an odd variation. It's described as being, essentially, a fax machine in 3D. Send a person through enough times and the copy distorts. This results in one unfortunate traveler not only being dumped in the desert, but his organs/veins/bones/etc. being joined together about a 1/2 inch off, causing massive hemorrhages and most likely a painful death.
• In X-Men: Days of Future Past, Blink takes off a Sentinel's arm when one of her portals closes on it. Unfortunately, it closed because said arm had just stabbed her.

Gamebooks

• One of the possible endings of Inside UFO 54-40 in the Choose Your Own Adventure series of books.

Literature

• Henry does this accidentally in 100 Cupboards when he switches the locks to the main cupboard as a wizard is reaching through it after him, cutting off the man's hand. He and Richard decide to return the appendage, and part of Richard's shoe is sliced off as he kicks the hand back through the cupboard.
• This happens to the landscape as a side effect of the Ring of Fire event in 1632.
• Accelerando: Vorpal swords in Glasshouse work this way; they use millimetres-across T-Gates situated around the edge of a dull strip of steel to simply send the matter within the kerf to wherever the gates lead, while the rest of the person or object on each side of the "edge" gets left behind. T-gates used for travel are usually built into a frame or tunnel to prevent things like this happening.
• In Vernor Vinge's Across Realtime series, the "bobbles", spherical fields that place anyone and anything within in temporal stasis, cut through anything intersecting the field's boundary when they activate.
  • The Peace War: When Vandenberg Air Force Base was bobbled during the War, an aircraft was on the edge of the volume of effect and one wing was sliced off by the boundary. Later in the book, one of the protagonists is trying to escape a secret hideout before the villains bobble it, and nearly makes it; his friends, searching for him, find the tips of two of his fingers, the only part of him that was outside the bobble when it formed.
  • Marooned in Realtime: Marta Korolev's robot bodyguard Fred is sliced in half when a bobble unexpectedly forms; it's likely, though not explicitly confirmed, that the villain of the novel deliberately timed the formation of the bobble so that its boundary would cut through Fred. In another incident, the protagonist is bobbled as an emergency protective measure while he's inside his house, then the bobble is removed from the house; when he returns later, he finds a curved slice taken out of the walls (those that weren't demolished to get the bobble out) and floor.
• In Isaac Asimov's stories:
  • It's Such a Beautiful Day: Richard Hanshaw's reluctance to use the Door to teleport to school is briefly attributed to the fear that the Door could break down when he was half-way through, prompted by the actual breakdown of the door. The real reason is that, after being forced to walk to school when the portal was out of order, he prefers to go outside.
  • Pebble in the Sky: Joseph Schwartz is suddenly transported into the far-future. He loses the toe of a shoe and only half of a doll that was lying on the ground is carried along with him.
• In John Birmingham's Axis of Time trilogy, the Transition only takes a part of a British helicopter carrier to 1942. The rest remains in 2021. The ship's reactor promptly blows up. There are also cases of Tele-Frag as the USS Leyte Gulf from 2021 gets "spliced" with USS Astoria from 1942.
• In the Robert A. Heinlein short story "By His Bootstraps", the time gate has an unusual form of this. The edge of the portal has no physical solidity, so if an object won't fit through the gate, the part that fits through the time gate does so, while the rest of it just keeps on moving in its original space-time and gets left behind. The result is something like being sheared with an infinitely sharp knife. Fortunately, nothing more important than a printing of Adolf Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf is destroyed due to this.
• In ConSentiency, temporary portals are the main transportation method, so these accidents happen, especially in hasty action (Whipping Star weaponises this, with the villains deliberately covering just the victim's head with a portal, then switching it off).
• The Conrad Stargard series employs Portal Cuts for many purposes, including embedding a super-thin layer of diamond in the center of a sword to make the edge.
• Dungeon Crawler Carl exploits this when Donut is granted a "Hole" spell to make a temporary hole in an object. With a high enough level, the Hole can extend all the way through a door or wall, allowing you to reach through and drag part of the target back (eg their head) before ending the spell.
• In Dan Simmons' The Fall of Hyperion, a Portal Network links hundreds of worlds. At the end of the book, the network was shut off without warning, and thousands of people simultaneously die in this manner.
• Harry Potter calls it "splinching" when pieces get left behind during Apparation, and it is caused by a lack of concentration on the entire object to be apparated (most often, oneself). Although magic healing is easily available most of the time, a particularly bad splinch could cause you to bleed to death.
• Forgotten Realms novel Elfshadow shows a strike team trying to jump through an opened portal while a mage tries to move it into a more defended location to prevent such attacks. By the end of the spell, one of attackers is about halfway through.
• Joel Suzuki: In Mystery of the Moonfire, Fireflower is about to take Joel and Felicity through the rift to Spectraland when Joel realizes that he left his tablet on. He reaches to turn it off, resulting in all the fingers on his right hand being cut off as the rest of his body is transported. Fireflower rushes him to the Wavemaker temple, where Auravine's magic is powerful enough to regenerate his fingers.
• In the Kroniki Drugiego Kręgu series a mage caste called Wanderers has teleportation abilities and can use them to cut objects in half. This power was widely used to kill enemy soldiers during the last war and made Wanderers one of the most feared mage castes.
• In Aleksandr Zarevin's Lonely Gods Of The Universe, the protagonist invents a device that allows him to open a portal to anywhere at any time. He uses it to go see his long-dead mentor and set off yet another in a series of Stable Time Loops. After spending several hours in the past, he starts climbing into the portal "window", only for the diesel-powered generator to fail, causing the portal to close and cut off the guy's legs. Luckily, his friend is nearby, and he survives the shock and massive blood loss. He gets better, though. They also use a more reliable power source in the future. (Strangely, his mentor never mentioned a bloodied pair of legs he must have found outside his place.)
• In the Magic: The Gathering novel of the "Invasion" set, the Weatherlight manages to cut an attacking Phyrexian warship in half using this tactic. Notably, rather than doing something as simple as cutting the juice, they blew up one of the Phyrexian ships maintaining the portal, taking out the whole mess with one volley. (And trapping them on the wrong side of the portal, but that's exactly where they need to be.)
• In Terry Bisson's Numbers Dont Lie, a lunar rover is cut in half when it stays part-way through the portal too long.
• In Mercedes Lackey's Owl trilogy, the protagonist Darian loses his parents to Wild Magic. Years later, he tracks down their campsite and finds a nearly perfect granite sphere, with the buried bones of a foot pressed against it. Using the bones in a Sympathetic Magic spell, he finds that the magic Swap Teleported his parents' campsite with a mountainside to the far north, with his father's foot outside the area of effect.
• In Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, the temporal displacement field forms a perfect sphere, cutting off anything that crosses it. They deliberately avert this trope by placing the travelers in a metal vessel just slightly smaller than the field. That means the inner layer of the vessel is transported with them, but it's thin enough to tear through pretty easily.
• The climax of the novel The Prestige by Christopher Priest features a version of this: Borden turns off Tesla's copy/teleportation machine in the middle of its cycle while Angier's in it. This splits Angier's total body mass between the two locations. One ends up being a sort of ghost who can push through walls and the other simply deteriorates through a series of unnatural afflictions before dying some months later.
• In Shadow Ops, protagonist Britton discovers that this is one of the deadlier applications of his inherent gate magic. The gates he can create instantly slice through any material when opening or closing, and Britton puts it to devastating use once he learns how to rapidly open and close them.
• In Donald Wismer's Starluck, the Matter Transmitter a.k.a. "M.T." (and colloquially "empty", as they appeared) is any matched pair of gray screens which were eventually perfected by the protagonists and made into shields for starships and personal assault equipment. During a revolt, the Emperor was assassinated this way by the main character, Paul.
• In The Tomorrow War setting by Alexander Zorich the volume moved by an FTL drive is effectively limited (the cost becomes prohibitive), so big ships have to use several. When some malfunction causes them to jump ever so slightly out of sync, this can't end well.
• In The Wheel of Time series, gateways cause Portal Cuts when they open and close. This is weaponized in the "Deathgate" weave, which sends fluctuating gateways zooming through the battlefield^* And, more importantly, killing any Shadowspawn that pass through the gates.. Meanwhile, one character particularly adept with Gateways uses tiny ones as perfectly precise knives for leathercrafting.
• In The Witcher books, one reason why Geralt dislikes using portals is his memory of the time he saw one half of a man fall out of one.
• In Philip José Farmer's World of Tiers novels, one kind of interdimensional teleport trap used this method to dismember intruders. At another point the protagonist uses a portal as an Absurdly Sharp Blade — to slice platinum slabs, among other things.
• Present in Zero Sight, and used as explanation for the death of one of the secondary characters.
• Something similar happens to a wizard wearing seven-league boots in The Light Fantastic, who carelessly activates the magic that lets him put one foot 21 miles in front of the other, but not the magic that arranges matters for the rest of him.
• Oree Shoth from Inheritance Trilogy does this accidentally to several people with her Portal Picture street chalking.

Live-Action TV

• A couple of variations on this show up in Babylon 5 regarding their jump points, portals to hyperspace:
  • Opening a jump point inside another jump point is so absurdly dangerous and explosive that it's referred to as "The Bonehead Manoeuvre". Sheridan manages to pull it off a couple of times, but nobody's happy about doing it.
  • The Shadows have a weapon that can destabilize a jump point as a ship is emerging. We are thankfully spared seeing what this does to the crews of the emerging ships, but it's definitely fatal.
  • Used offensively by the Minbari in the backstory during their war with humans. Being a Higher-Tech Species, they can open their jump points with a surgical precision, especially if they lay an ambush. An EarthForce task force is obliterated when the humans are lured into an ambush, followed by jump points slicing open ships. The Minbari complete the destruction with their weapons, although Sheridan's ship survives.
• Doctor Who:
  • In "The Three Doctors", a green blob teleports the Doctor and part of the building he's in through a black hole, and later the rest of the building. The two parts of the building arrive in different locations. At the end, when everything is sent back to "where it came from", the two parts of the building are re-assembled, apparently without any permanent damage.
  • In "Time Heist", the bomb left for the team is a dimensional shift bomb, displacing a roughly cube-shaped section of floor for the team to escape through, which then returns to normal space about a minute later, leaving no trace behind.
  • "The Husbands of River Song" reveals that the TARDIS has a safeguard in place to avert this by preventing the doors from engaging and the TARDIS dematerializing if it detects a lifeform as being inside the TARDIS and outside at the same time. This prevents River and the Doctor's immediate getaway until Hydroflax's body enters the TARDIS.
• One Body of the Week in The Dresden Files got cut in half when a hole made through a bank wall with a Hand of Glory snapped shut prematurely.
• Eureka:
  • One has spheres of matter being transported through time, causing this effect.
  • A later episode has intersecting wormholes that send anything or anyone passing through them to two different locations. Luckily, it only happens to Deputy Andy. Being an android, he can be quickly put back together.
  • A non-portal example in another episode involves a device which lets its wearer pass through solid matter. It works by changing the quantum frequency, but the prototype never worked properly and subjects would start phasing randomly. The unfortunate person trying to use the stolen prototype has a finger phase back into normal while he's passing through a wall and it gets left behind.
• In Fringe:
  • The first season finale has this in several instances as Mr. Jones tries to cut his way through to the parallel universe where William Bell is hiding. First time he takes the rear axle off a truck that's passing through the gate; second time, he cuts a soccer player in half as the gate collapses. He gets his comeuppance when Peter shuts down the portal as he's trying to pass through it.
  • This trope is also the real reason Nina lost her arm.
  • This happens again in season four when Olivia tries to follow a fugitive through a portal. She is fine but the car she is driving has a large chunk of its front cut off.
• Primeval features this when an anomaly closes on a Raptor that had been sent back to its time by it after a fight with the protagonists, and severs its head when it attempts to attack the protagonists by surprise.
• The Sandman (2022): In "Dream a Little Dream of Me", Johanna Constantine has a Flashback Nightmare of a past case that ended badly when her friend Astra ignored her warnings and came too close while Johanna was trying to close a portal to Hell. Astra was dragged into the closing portal; Johanna caught her hand and tried to pull her out, and was left holding just her hand when the portal closed on her arm, neatly severing it and leaving the rest of Astra trapped in Hell.
• Zig-zagged in the Stargate-verse:
  • The Stargates have safety systems built in and for this very reason won't transmit anything or shut down while an object is only partway through the event horizon, but can only maintain their wormhole for thirty eight minutes (and change), so when that limit is reached, the gate is shutting down, partial object or no.
  • In an early episode of Stargate SG-1, a person is partially decapitated after having their head held part-way through Earth's gate while it's deliberately shut down. It's worth noting that Earth's Stargate was jury-rigged with local computer hardware and software in place of a vital component, which is explicitly stated to lack some of the safety features in a later episode.
  • Alluded to in the Stargate Atlantis episode "Thirty-Eight Minutes" wherein the team's jumper is stuck halfway through a Stargate, as their engine pods wouldn't retract. McKay shuts the hatch to the forward section, and explains why:
    McKay: So that when the Stargate shuts down and the forward section is severed, we're not directly exposed to space.
    Ford: Will it hold?
    McKay: Like a screen door on a submarine. I just prefer hypoxia to explosive decompression. It's a, it's a personal thing.
  • In Stargate Universe, Eli Wallace has to stick his hand into the event horizon of a gate to deliberately hold it open, so that the rest of the team can escape. From the look on his face and his hesitance to perform the act, he is clearly aware of what might happen if the safety feature doesn't work as promised.
  • Jack O'Neill does the same thing at least once in Stargate SG-1, but he holds the gate open by keeping his gun in the gate, not his hand. In "Shades of Grey", however, O'Neill holds the gate open with his arm up inserted up to the elbow.
  • The "kawoosh" when the Stargate opens is actually the matter/energy/whatever of the gate in an unstable form, meaning if you enter it, no two of your atoms end up attached to each other. Portal cut? Try portal disintegrate. Actually used as a funeral ceremony by the Tok'ra (since it has the advantage of leaving nothing for the Goa'uld to revive and/or interrogate).
  • Narrowly averted in the Stargate SG-1 episode "Bad Guys". Mitchell is helping Vala manually dial the gate, standing smack in the middle of it. Once they hit the final chevron, Vala yanks him out of the way moments before the wormhole forms right on top of him.
  • In one strange but relatively harmless SG-1 example, a group of Jaffa are retreating through a Stargate in a panic, and the gate shuts down just as the last one runs through; the end of the staff weapon he was carrying then clatters to the floor, having been severed by the portal as it disengaged. There was no reason for the gate to shut down so suddenly — as discussed, safeguards exist to prevent just that — but it underscored just how much of a rush the Jaffa were in to get out of there; the equivalent of dropping something as you run out a door and then not even bothering to notice or pick it up.
  • Then there's the ring transporters. What's in the rings on one side is exchanged with what's in the rings on the other. The only time we see this used to cause bodily harm is in the original movie (trapped partially under the rings by O'Neill, Ra's Dragon gets relieved of his head) but there's one awesome scene where Jonas Quinn teleports from underwater. When the effect finishes, there's a nice cylindrical column of water surrounding him as he arrives at the destination teleporter, which immediately falls away once nothing's holding it together.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: The episode "Contagion" has the Enterprise crew discover a Portal Network created by the Iconians. The away team observes the portals cycling through various target destinations. At one point Data decides to stick his arm through a portal only for Captain Picard to pull his arm back and chastise him for doing that, as his arm could have been severed if he had it in there when another destination change happened.
• In the Tales from the Darkside episode "Ring Around the Ringhead", though it's not shown on screen, it's mentioned that an inter-dimensional portal tore off somebody's arm when a greedy jeweler tried to exploit it.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In the episode "Little Girl Lost", after pulling everyone out of the other dimension with moments to spare, someone observes, "Another few seconds, and half of you would've been here, and the other half..."

Podcasts

• At the end of the fourth arc of The Fallen Gods, Janna's foot gets cut off after they get shoved through a portal to another city. When Solvin tries to give it back through another portal (one which has been explicitly stated to be communications-only), it gets turned into platinum.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • An issue of Dragon with Shadow-powered artifacts relates how this happened to the thief who previously owned them. He'd crafted a bodysuit out of Shadow-matter, and used it to slip in and out of treasuries all over the various kingdoms. One King set up lots of lights, leaving only a single shadowed area large enough for him to step through, with several guards at the ready. When said Thief popped out, the guards cut off his hands and head, causing the rest of him to fall back into the Plane of Shadows. The artifacts were basically the hood and gloves of his suit.
  • A common tactic in earlier editions was to use the Dimensional Door spell in this manner until it was nerfed in 3E. Essentially it allowed a relatively low-level spell to cut almost anything in half vertically...
  • In 4e the Warlock gets an ability that causes physical damage to an enemy while it teleports them, presumably via this method or Tele-Frag.
  • Very specifically averted in Planescape with Sigil's numerous interdemensional portals. It's made explicit that if a portal closes when somebody is walking through it, they just get shunted to one side or the other depending on how far through the portal they were when it closed.
• In Traveller, the only means of traveling faster than light is with a jump drive, a device that surrounds a starship with a "jump bubble" 1-2 metres from the skin of the ship, and then sends it through an alternate dimension for a few parsecs. In addition to potentially driving a person mad if they look at it directly, any object which passes through the bubble is gone and the edge touching the event horizon is cut perfectly between atoms. The parts which passed through are presumably spread out in a thin mist stretching across a good portion of a light year of empty space.
• One of many potential mishaps involving Pandora Gates in Eclipse Phase
• In Warhammer 40,000:
  • Vortex grenades essentially create a wormhole into the Warp which does this to anything it touches if they fail a fixed save to dodge. Armour and special equipment offers no protection, making them one of the most dangerous weapons in the game. Despite being extremely expensive one-shot weapons only available to very few characters, they have been removed in more recent editions.
  • Oddly enough, despite the nature of the Warhammer 40K universe, this appears to be one of the few horrible things that actually can't happen to you as a result of something going wrong during normal warp travel. You may get eaten by demons or stuck travelling for thousands of years, but at least you'll be in one piece when it happens.
  • The ork "Tellyport Blasta" weaponizes this concept by forming a small bubble to warpspace and then displacing it somewhere nearby to destroy vehicles and extremely tough characters with ease. Consequently it is a very high strength weapon with an excellent AP value that is quite short ranged.

Toys

• In LEGO's BIONICLE storyline, portals made by a Mask of Dimensional Gates close after a person enters them. An alternate "Empress" version of Toa Tuyet, attempting to escape her dimension where La Résistance was closing in on her, tried to be number two. She was sliced in half and died instantly.

Video Games

• In Another World, this happens to Lester's lab in the intro. The particle experiment goes awry, taking Lester and a sphere of space around him to a distant planet. This leaves exposed piping and missing wall and floor in his lab.
• In BioShock Infinite:
  • This can happen when traveling through a Tear (a portal to an Alternate Universe), which is how Elizabeth lost her pinky finger, which is what gave her the power to open even more Tears: since a part of her (the pinky) remained in another world, she eventually grew up into a Liminal Being stretched across all possible timelines and universes.
  • In Burial at Sea, you see the portal scene from an alternate universe Comstock's point of view, where he was unable to bring Elizabeth all the way through... but instead of her pinky, she loses her head. This breaks his ambitions for Columbia and he sought escape by going to Rapture, leading to the DLC story.
• In Colony Wars, one possible ending for the Gallonigher levels is for this to happen to a Navy Titan as you close the warp hole.
• In Corpse Party: Tortured Souls, this happens to Satoshi Mochida as the main characters escape the Heavenly Host Elementary School. The procedure requires them to have correct pieces of scrapped paper to invoke a teleportation chant. The guy doesn't, and only his arms make it back to the real world as they have been locked by two friends who have the correct paper. His body is nowhere to be found.
• The manual for Final Doom says this happens to a cyberdemon after a portal from hell is shut down with a "quantum accelerator."
• In one end of Eternal Darkness the Cosmic Horror Ulyaoth fights Chattur'gha using these.
• The space simulator FreeSpace essentially ends with this: the Lucifer's last reactor is destroyed just as it emerges out of hyperspace near Earth. As a result, only the first half of the ship passes the portal's event horizon before it collapses. This also provides for some unforeseen consequences in the sequel.
• Averted in Genshin Impact when the Traveler attempts to run through a closing portal in the We Will Be Reunited quest, as the portal's closure obviously leaves them unharmed.
• This is revealed to be what happened with the drydock around Aperture Science's ship (the Borealis) at some point before Half-Life 2: Episode Two.
• Halo:
  • This occurs to the part of the ship Master Chief and Cortana are escaping on at the end of Halo 3.
  • It's also done deliberately in Halo: Reach to a Covenant Supercarrier. Noble Team converts the slipspace drive from a UNSC Frigate into a "slipspace bomb" and sets it off inside the supercarrier. The circular portal leaves the severed nose and tail of the ship drifting dead in space while most of the ship — and Jorge — is portal'd out and presumably annihilated.
• Honkai Impact 3rd: Kiana does this to a mech's arm in Meteoric Salvation.
• In the Mortal Kombat games:
  • A variant occurs in one of the stages in Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero: the monks in that particular stage teleport around and attack Sub-Zero, and are invulnerable to attacks unless they are actively teleporting.
  • Noob Saibot uses this in Mortal Kombat 9 as his second fatality ("As One"). He summons his shadow (Saibot) that drags his opponent through a portal then he closes it halfway, causing the top of their body to be stuck above the portal.
  • Quan Chi explores this for his second fatality in Mortal Kombat X. He pushes his opponent into a portal behind them and opens the other end behind himself. He grabs his opponent's leg and arm and they are gradually torn apart by the portal until he closes them and finishes the deed.
  • One of the Terminator's fatalities in Mortal Kombat 11 sees him kneecap his opponent with a shotgun. While they're on the ground, he activates the Time Sphere and sends them to the future... minus their lower legs. They're left to painfully crawl for a few seconds before a T-800 finds them and finishes the job.
• In Obduction, the seeds teleport spherical chunks of matter. The player always stands next to the seed at the center of the sphere, and so is never threatened by a cut at the edges. However the bisected corpse of a Mofang demonstrates that it is possible.
• Specifically averted in Portal. According to the developer commentary, they wanted players to feel safe when standing in portals, so they made sure that if a portal ever closed while the player, or an object, was inside of it, said player or object would be pushed or teleported out of the portal unharmed. The player can only harm themself with a closing portal by exploiting a glitch^* Shortly after GLaDOS tries to kill you in the incinerator, there's a large block-shaped piece of equipment with a small gap you can only get under by crouching. Crawl under it, make a portal on the bottom, make a second somewhere else, stand up while below the first portal, and move the first portal somewhere else. However, it doesn't kill you, as the game engine is not capable of slicing the player, your legs are transported inside the wall (or floor), and you're stuck until you load a new save., although they can open portals on surfaces with cameras or ladder steps attached to sever them.
• In the unofficial Quake expansion/conversion Travail, this is how Azoth dies: after you do enough damage to him he tries to flee by opening a portal in the sky and flying through it only for it to close when he's midway through and cuts him in half.
• Robotech: Battlecry sees this happen on a massive scale, not unlike the beginning of the series, in the lead-up to the Final Boss: the villainous Zeraal finds himself cornered in Zen City, within an old Zentradi battleship. Just as Jack Archer makes his final approach to the battleship, Zeraal activates its Space Fold system, sending himself, Archer, and a massive swath of Zen City into deep space.
• In Runescape, This is the fate of one of the boss creatures in Dungeoneering. The boss, simply called Stomp, is a behemoth, much like the other ones... except for that it's too large to get through, so only its head sticks out of a portal... that calls down rocks in the fight. After the portal gets weakened several times, at the end of the fight the portal snaps shut, resulting in a surprisingly graphic death - The wall where the portal was gets rather bloodstained, and the monster flails, then shudders to its death. It would be almost sympathetic if the boss weren't so irritating due to a huge amount of Fake Difficulty.
• In Starlancer, destroying an enemy cruiser in this manner is a bonus objective in one mission. You have to watch your timing to accomplish it, though.
• Sargeras, the Big Bad of Warcraft, lost his physical body in The War of the Ancients when the portal bringing him into Azeroth closed shut. But he isn't gone, and has created Avatars and possessed Medivh since then.
• Used in concept in Wolfenstein (2009). There are certain walls with a specific symbol on them indicating that you can pass through them by entering the Veil. Exit the Veil halfway through one of these walls and you instantly die. The game does have a hint warning you of this, but decides the right time to tell you so is right as you have already deliberately killed yourself in this manner trying to determine what happens.

Visual Novels

• In Loren: The Amazon Princess, the goblin Grob is ultimately killed in this manner. An attempt to escape via teleportation is interrupted by the Player Character, causing only half of his body to be teleported.

Webcomics

• Drowtales: A rather unusual example can occur with nether gates. They act as portals to Another Dimension for Mana, the substance of demons and Life Energy of Fae, but not for physical objects. As such, if a Fae passes through a large enough nether gate, it can rip their "soul" from their body.
• In Erfworld:
  • Jack uses this to screw with a bunch of spellcasters; he's looking through the portal when suddenly it fizzles out, decapitating him instantly. Two panels later he drops the illusion spell to show both he and the portal are perfectly fine.
  • Normally, if someone stands in a spot where a portal is opening, they are simply sucked in, which Marie takes advantage of to enter Faq's new capital.
  • Played straight when a Dirtamancer remembers messing with how the portals actually work and nearly croaked himself when he splattered a portal all over the bedrock.
• Averted in Fite!, where it's a slam rather than a cut.
• In Hitmen for Destiny, an otherwise apparently invulnerable assassin is killed by portal-cutting his lower body off. His dead upper body shows up at several points later on, apparently still invulnerable as it shows no signs of decay.
• Late in Homestuck, Dirk purposefully sticks his own head in a microwave-sized sendificator, sending his head to the destination and leaving his decapitated corpse behind as part of his plan.
• Happens to a Golden Sand Dragon in this page of Looking for Group ++ specifically, the one Cale was riding, resulting in the Dragon being cleanly split in half, which is so gross that even one of the Portal Mages has to remark "Dude. Sick."
• In one Nodwick comic, the author is showing fans at a con that he got his ideas from simply looking through an interdimensional portal by pulling Nodwick halfway through. Then guest of honor William Shatner insists they "divert all power to the deflector shields" and the con staff decided to humor him.
• In Paranatural, a variation on this is how Forge is defeated: his opponent turns the shadow he was walking on into a Bottomless Pit, and then removes the shadow.
• This is what happens if you unplug a window while halfway through it in Problem Sleuth. It is the method of attack used to slay Flthulu.
• Mentioned in Schlock Mercenary, where a new teleportation device is first tested on Schlock, who can survive dismemberment since he is an amorphous blob of carbosilicate.
• In Sluggy Freelance, Riff tries to use this to pull off the Saw a Woman in Half trick. There are a couple complications. It also cuts chains.

Web Original

• Happens to Tagino once in Metafictionized Phlebotinum Poisoning.

• Scrub of Worm has this as a superpower; he can deposit the contents of a spherical volume into another reality.

Web Videos

• Critical Role: Exandria Unlimited: Calamity: When a panicked crowd tries to escape the city, one group forces a large teleportation platform to activate when it's well over its maximum load. A lot of body parts are left behind.

Western Animation

• An episode of DuckTales (2017) has Scrooge and the gang teleported to another dimension by a druid circle similar to Stonehenge during a game of golf. Launchpad and Huey are in a golf cart which is stuck between two of the stones at the time the portal (outlined by the stone circle) activates. The back half of the cart still outside the circle is severed and they spend most of the rest of the episode comically carrying around the front half as if nothing happened.
• Generator Rex: Played literally with Breach, who can throw portals she creates vertically like round Fuuma Shuriken.
• In an episode of Johnny Test, Bling Bling Boy's teleporter delivers him without one of his legs, causing him to fall over. This is only because that teleporter isn't quite perfected yet, however; he explains to Johnny that the teleporter has done this before, and sure enough, the leg reappears a few seconds later.
• Hotwheels Acceleracers: Vert Wheeler finishes the Storm Realm by the time the portal closes after the time is up, resulting the Deora II being cut in half and destroyed. This also happens with Taro, after he accidentally gets into the Racing Drones HQ and has to start the Water Realm over, finishing nearly at the same time but with the very back of the Riveted cut off and the car surviving for the next Realm.
• Legion of Super Heroes (2006) has an odd example. In "Brain Drain", an unstable transmatter gate nicknamed "Old Chompy" apparently has a tendency to not only short out, but to randomly switch destinations, sending Brainiac 5's head to one planet and his body to another. Incidentally, the gates had a very strong resemblance to Stargates. However, in the Live-Action TV section, you'll see that the real thing has safeguards that make it better at avoiding such things.
• In an episode of Martin Mystery, the Sandman tries to get into to the waking world through a portal in a computer screen, managing to get an arm through before Martin turns off the power. Instead of acting like a guillotine, though, the closed portal is more along the lines of a slammed window, pinning the Sandman's arm and trapping him.
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • A Running Gag with the Picture Teleporter in the episode "Picture This". In their first demonstration of the device, Phineas and Ferb teleport an apple off of Buford's head, taking off a bit of his hair with it and giving him an impromptu buzzcut. When they teleport Ferb's skateboard back from their grandparents' place, they accidentally take their grandfather's feet with it. It's played for laughs, though, so there's no blood, and the boys immediately send the feet back... backwards.
  • A more serious (yet still bloodless) version happens in the movie, when the protagonists escape from a Goozim by opening a portal to another dimension. The portal is too small for the Goozim to fall through, so as a result his limbs are cut off.
• This happens in ReBoot when one of Bob's time-locked portals closed when a guardian ship was passing through it.
• Combined with a Tele-Frag in the second season of Rick and Morty. When Morty is being threatened by a hostile alien, Rick comes to his rescue, arriving via portal. The portal opens up inside the alien, cleanly slicing it in half, before Rick steps out of the portal.
• Implied to have happened in a Robot Chicken clip, in which a magician pulls a rabbit's decapitated head out of a hat. To judge by his reaction, he'd been expecting a whole rabbit.
• Played for Laughs in an episode of Scooby-Doo, where the bumbling apprentice genie Babu tries to make himself disappear in response to the Monster of the Week appearing. Only his top half does so, causing his lower half to run off without him. It doesn't hurt him, but it's rather embarrassing.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: This gets referenced when Glimmer comments that she doesn’t have enough energy to teleport herself, Adora, and Entrapta without leaving some of their legs behind.
• The Simpsons: In the Couch Gag for "Waiting for Duffman", the family sit on the couch and keep getting sucked into a portal above them. Eventually, one of the Barts gets off the couch and uses a nearby remote to close the portal, then notices that one of the Homers lost his head.
• In Spider-Man: The Animated Series, the Hobgoblin acquires the portal-opening Time Dilation Accelerator and goes on a crime spree. Then he loses a part of his cape this way, making him realize that he really needs to find a battery for the device that's about to go dead.
• In ThunderCats (2011), Grune is being sucked into Another Dimension and grabs onto Panthro's arms, telling him pulling him out is the only way either can survive. Panthro decides to take his chances, and Grune is sucked in, taking both of Panthro's arms with him. For the sake of Bloodless Carnage, the ends of the arm stumps are glowing the same color as the portal but were still bandaged up afterwards as if they were bleeding.
• The Venture Brothers:
  • After hastily trying to get a teleporter to work, Dr. Venture ends up teleporting his body into various places, including an arm that appeared outside of a prison miles away. The body parts still function as if they were attached, as evident when Venture observes that when one of his nipples feels cold, they both shrivel (which Brock really didn't want to hear about).
  • In the Season 7 episode "The Unicorn in Captivity", one-shot villain Ramburglar gets on the bad end of one of these when, after being injured in a fight with Brock, falls on top of an experimental teleporter that Rusty had recently invented. Unfortunately for him, only his head lands on it and is teleported away from his body, decapitating him.
• In What If…? (2021), Zombie Wong gets decapitated this way early in episode 5.

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