The faces of all the six were drawn out as the import of the descriptor Jonas had just reported when crossing the Gate settled in. He thought it obvious they were still missing a lot of the Labyrinth basic rules, and this one, particularly, bit hard. Hopes, dashed in an instant.

 “You’re sure we can’t use that Gate?” Jonathan asked.

“Go ahead. All of you, if you want,” Jonas countered.

“What if one of us end up stuck on the other side?”

To cut the argument short, Ira walked in. And immediately out, coming back the other way. This time, Jonas could see that it was quick and immediate, without anything happening visibly. His friend had entered the Gate’s lighted surface, vanished abruptly once he’d almost entirely crossed the surface, and reappeared immediately, facing outward.

“Jonas is right. It says I need to complete two lairs, and I got none,” he said as he strolled down the ramp.

Encouraged, the other four all tried the Gate, being turned back immediately. Jonas could see the disappointment in Jonathan’s eyes.

The six gathered around to figure out their options.

“What do we do now?” Jonathan asked.

“Well, we now have two possibilities. We find what those lairs are and then come back to the Gate. Or we look for a Gate that we can use without completing those,” Jonas said.

“Is there one?” Laura asked.

“There must be,” Jonathan said.

“Guss?” Jonas asked their proxy guide.

“Cousin Luther said his company held ‘licenses’ for lairs, and he completed some regularly. But he never explained what those things are or why they would work with Gates. Just said, Gates were what you used to go around the Labyrinth.”

“It might also be that this tier-two is too high for us. Seeing as we have tier one Professions,” Alton offered.

“We found one Gate quickly. Just over two days’ walk, just following the river. There’s bound to be more, I think. The river seems a good guide, it led us to this one after all,” Jonas said.

Seeing that no one had any better idea, Jonas went around the Gate. Keeping the snaking book in view to his right, he and the team kept onward.

 

 

Two relatively uneventful encounters with solitary boars later, the river ended. It had been meandering for a while in the marshy ground, but this time, there were a lot of puddles, and the small river spread out before it became impossible to distinguish from the omnipresent marsh.

“End of the river. We’ve lost our guide,” Ira commented.

“I can keep looking at the sun’s position,” Jonathan said.

“You can guide us?” Laura asked.

“I can try to. Not much foliage to hide it. Let’s keep going.”

They did not go far. Ira, who was walking in the front, was the first to stop. When the team caught up with him, they immediately understood the problem. There was a kind of unseen demarcation separating the landscape in two. On the side they came from, there was the marsh, multiple small puddles of water here and there, with tiny saplings and bushes over low grasses and ferns. Then, the vegetation ended, the terrain smoothed and there was nothing but the bare ground and a kind of green-grey mossy patches starting in the distance.

What had stopped Ira however wasn’t the end of the vegetation. It was a kind of invisible barrier. Jonas placed his hands in the “air” in front of him. It felt slightly soft, like a padded leather holder. His hand sank maybe half an inch into something that became increasingly harder and resistant. He could move his hand sideways a bit against the spongy quasi-material, but no deeper.

“So. We can’t go any further. The Labyrinth ends here,” Ira noted, before correcting himself. “At least the zone does.”

Guss was feeling around the invisible wall, then backed away, taking the sight of the desolate ground further out.

“Cousin Luther was saying the truth when he said that Gates were the way to go. The only way out is crossing a Gate. You can’t walk your way across zones to Grailburg.”

“And the one we found leads to a different place – zone? – anyway,” Jonathan sighed.

“So, how do we find another?” Laura asked.

Jonas squinted backwards. If you knew where to look, you could find the top of the Gate far in the distance, but it was quite hard to spot.

“We can try to follow this ‘wall’. But if the other Gates are a bit too far from it, we won’t find them. Or we go back to the Plaza and try a different direction. Maybe there’s another simple path leading somewhere like the Virman river did,” Jonas offered.

“Two days wasted,” Laura said.

“We learned a lot. And got better at this,” Jonas countered.

“For all the good it did to us,” she complained bitterly.

Jonas was a bit startled by her obvious disappointment, but it was understandable in its way. Alton, Ira and himself had little to go back to in London, but the other three had families, friends, and people waiting for them. Oh, in the abstract, he wanted to go back as well. But not as urgently as the others.

Yet, fights like the elite boar told him they needed to stay united if they wanted to survive in the harsh environment of the Labyrinth. They needed hope, and to believe the Labyrinth would sustain them until they found their way back.

“About that wasted time…” said Jonas, drawing the team’s looks.

“If you look at the descriptor for our location, you see that we have something that says Recall to the Plaza. Which is now available.”

 

 

“You think that’s something we can do?” Ira asked.

“Probably. I mean, it has an empty list of Gates, but the Zone’s Plaza is clearly labelled. I think it’s a hint to what we can do.”

Laura frowned, then gasped.

“What?”

Motes of light were suddenly swirling all around her. Jonas goggled. It looked like miniature rainbows forming and twisting, increasing in numbers and speed until they all but covered her.

“What’s happening? Laura?”

Before she could answer, she became transparent, a luminous outline of her shape, and then that silhouette vanished suddenly, leaving no trace of her nor the rainbow lights. Jonas nearly panicked, then checked his team descriptor for her health, fearing the worst.

 

 

She apparently was unharmed by whatever happened. But her status was… somewhat dimmed. Then he realized what the difference felt like, in a way that the words themselves didn’t convey. It was like she was far away.

“Ok, I think I know what happened. She tried that Recall thing I was talking about, and went back to the plaza.”

“Oh?”

“Really?”

Jonas mentally tried to feel for the Recall part on the location descriptor, the way the team gathering prompt worked, and immediately got a notice appearing in his mind’s view.

Recall to Ovildian, The Plaza is in progress. 10sec.

The notice stayed, and the time started going down to 9 seconds. Then 8. As the same lights that had swirled around Laura started around him, he yelled.

“Focus on the Recall from the descriptor, that’s how it works. It’s fast too.”

 

The marsh faded. For what felt like a fraction of a second, Jonas thought of that empty space as he had during those strange moments when the London Gate had seized him. He almost freaked out, remembering the way they’d been ripped from London across the Labyrinth, but the marble plaza appeared quickly, this time without that terrible pain. He breathed in relief.

Laura’s gaze turned to him, and she started running toward him. Then, a pillar of rainbow light dropped from the sky next to her position, and Guss’s robed form suddenly appeared. Then, one by one, the other three team members landed all over the plaza.

 

 

“Okay. We can use that when we want, at most once a day,” he said once they’d all gathered.

“Well, so much for Gates being the way to travel around. Thanks for nothing, cousin Luther,” Guss said in a mocking tone.

Jonas then realized something.

“It’s a bit limited, but we can come back at any time and follow the river again. So, we can get to that tier-two Gate anytime we want.”

Laura acquiesced.

“That means we can really explore all we want, no matter how far. Cannot get truly lost,” she said.

Then she sobered. “At least in this zone.”

Ira laughed.

“It's fine, but for now, we only have cats around. No more boar ribs, berries or tasty roots.”

Most of the team grimaced, while Alton grumbled, “Come on, cat’s not that bad. And these do taste a lot nicer than London’s.”

“There might be other beasts around. Maybe if we go up in the hills this time?” Jonas offered.

 

 

As they came out of the Plaza’s archway, Laura spotted the pair of cats lounging next to the brook. Two level 4 minions. They all looked at each other and laughed. Then Ira raised his sword, yelled, and charged before the cats even noticed them.