Chapter 2 Part 1: Measuring the Gate
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Chapter 2 Part 1: Measuring the Gate
Morning came quietly for Abigail.
Sunlight filtered through the thin curtains of her bedroom, catching dust motes in the air and warming the edge of her desk. She was already dressed, backpack resting against the chair, phone in hand as she sat cross-legged on the bed and waited for Ethan to text that he was on the way. Mondays were simple for them. They had chosen their classes together as much as possible, and it paid off in small, practical ways: one pickup, one commute, one shared rhythm to start the week.
She scrolled through her phone absently, glancing at the responses to her Huntress posts she had finally made late last night, sitting on her bed after getting home and cleaned up, too wired to sleep and annoyed with herself for letting the entire day get away from her. She had gone back through her gallery then, lingering on the photos of Ethan with his sleeves rolled up and Chairman laid out cleanly, and spent longer than usual cropping them down to safe angles. Only after scheduling the post, late and half out of habit, had she finally set the phone aside and let herself breathe. The quiet lasted less than a minute before she picked it back up again, habit winning out over intention. Saturday’s teaser still sat unfinished in her drafts, so she updated the weekly custom shirt post she had already teased, added the final image, and pushed it live. The routine steadied her in a way nothing else quite did.
Only then did she open the folder she had labeled simply Frame.
The images filled her screen, tight shots of the crystalline structure taken from careful angles. She zoomed in on the inscriptions one section at a time, her expression sharpening as she worked through them. English was obvious, and the Japanese stood out immediately thanks to the katakana, familiar to anyone who spent time around the culture. She cropped tighter on the next script, isolating a word, and ran it through an AI language tool. The result came back as Chinese, which earned a small nod. The next crop returned Latin, which made her pause, eyebrows lifting despite herself. The one after that came back Arabic.
She stopped there. When she tried isolating characters from the next script, the tool returned nothing useful, even after a second attempt. After a moment’s consideration, she locked her phone and set it aside. Putting out too much information too quickly was how you lost control of a narrative, and she had no intention of doing that.
A familiar engine sound rolled up outside a few minutes later, followed almost immediately by Ethan’s text. She grabbed her bag and headed out without replying.
The drive to SWIC was uneventful. They talked briefly about their Monday classes, about who had which lecture and how annoying the early start was, and shared a mutual relief that everything wrapped up by one. After that, the conversation shifted naturally to the thing neither of them had been able to stop thinking about.
“So,” Abigail said, staring out the windshield as the road rolled past, “today we actually start figuring out the dungeon portal.”
Ethan nodded, eyes still on the road, and agreed quietly. They talked around the plan rather than through it, keeping things general. What they would do, not how, with the unspoken understanding that the details would solidify once they were standing in front of it again.
Campus felt almost unreal. They sat through lectures, took notes, answered questions when called on. Abigail laughed at the right moments, and Ethan kept his head down and focused. From the outside, it was an entirely normal Monday. From the inside, every mundane detail felt slightly misaligned, like the world had shifted a fraction of a degree and never corrected.
By early afternoon they were back in the car and heading home. They loaded up their ATVs and headed out, parking just above the drop into the ravine and stopping first to check the tarps from above. Everything was still in place, weighed down properly, with no loose edges, no footprints, and no sign that anyone else had been near it. Only then did they climb down into the ravine and slip underneath the tarps together, staying deliberately well clear of the crystalline frame at first.
They took a few minutes to confirm distances before moving any closer, pacing and double-checking until they were satisfied they were still outside the frame’s influence. When they advanced again, they did it slowly and together. Right where their earlier estimate said it should be, the air thickened around them, sound dulling as pressure settled in as if the space itself were being gently compressed.
Abigail slowed, glancing back toward the tarp line before looking at Ethan. “There,” she said quietly. “That’s it.” Ethan nodded and stopped without taking another step, eyes on the frame. “About ten feet,” he said. “Same as before.”
They moved quickly after that. The Geiger counter came out first, old and scratched from years in a forgotten box in the garage. Ethan powered it on and swept it slowly across the area, watching the needle with a practiced eye. Nothing registered. He wasn’t surprised, noting aloud that it matched what they had already seen with the manacite, and Abigail agreed that at least it ruled out one obvious problem.
They set up the camera just inside the edge of the tarp, angled toward the frame but well outside the boundary that caused the pressure reaction. None of Abigail’s photos or video from the day before had shown any distortion, even from closer in, but it felt better to have something watching from as far back as possible.
Ethan gathered a few fallen sticks and started with the simplest test. He tossed one forward so it landed just short of the portal, watching for any reaction and seeing none. The next went straight into the black void, and the moment it crossed the threshold it vanished without sound or ripple, simply gone. With Abigail’s phone recording, they stepped forward together. Ethan held the third stick and pushed it slowly into the void, then pulled it back out again. The stick returned intact, unchanged, and gave them a small but noticeable release of tension.
Abigail let out a breath that was half laugh, half nerves, and shook her head. “Okay,” she said, glancing between the frame and the sticks on the ground. “If anything else was going to happen just from being close, it would have done it by now.” She looked back at Ethan and gestured toward his gear. “We can be this close without anything else happening, so let’s take some measurements.”
They used a small laser range finder from Ethan’s gear bag, checking distances carefully instead of relying on pacing. The numbers were immediately strange in a familiar way. The portal frame came back as just under ten feet tall and a little over sixteen feet wide, and the pressure boundary showed up at just under ten feet from the frame as well. Abigail frowned at the screen, did a rough conversion in her head, and then checked again in metric. The results snapped cleanly into place. Five meters wide. Three meters tall. The reaction beginning at three meters out from the frame. The frame itself was fifty centimeters wide and deep on all sides, leaving the void exactly nine meters wide and two and a half meters high.
Once they switched fully to metric, everything about it measured evenly, which prompted Abigail to quip that it clearly was not American. Ethan only rolled his eyes and took temperature readings as well, sticking with Celsius now that they were measuring properly. The crystalline frame itself read a steady twenty-five degrees, even though the surrounding air was noticeably cooler. The void inside the frame refused to return any reading at all, the sensor failing to register anything meaningful.
With the measurements recorded, they moved on to their next idea: getting video from inside. The phone they used was an old model, factory reset and already recording, tied securely to a length of rope. Abigail held the rope while Ethan used a stick to guide the phone forward, camera facing up. As soon as it crossed the frame, he pulled the stick free and waited several seconds before easing it back in above where the phone should be. After another pause, he pulled the stick out again and tossed it through the space where the phone was hanging. After waiting a few more seconds, Abigail carefully drew the phone back out by the rope.
They crouched together to watch the footage immediately. Nearly a full minute of it showed nothing but darkness, until it ended with them picking up the phone again. Abigail frowned as the clip ended, her thoughts racing. “Maybe it was because I was holding the rope?” she asked, glancing up at Ethan.
He shrugged slightly. “Doesn’t hurt to try again,” he said. “I’d rather try everything we can to learn what’s in there before we go in.”
They repeated the test, this time not holding the rope. Thankfully, the rope did not suddenly disappear, and when they reviewed the footage again the result was completely different. The camera showed a faceted stone ceiling rising to a peak formed by three adjoining planes, with the portal embedded in one wall. Its crystalline frame matched the one on Earth exactly, the black interior facing inward. A moment later, a stick arced across the camera’s view before disappearing out of sight, confirming that the entrance location was fixed relative to the chamber.
Abigail was the first to speak, pointing at the screen. “We never saw the stick you pushed in and pulled back out,” she said slowly. “Only the one you let go of showed up on the other side.” She leaned back slightly, processing it as she spoke. “So if someone’s holding something, it never actually crosses through.” They sat with that realization for a long moment, the implications settling in without either of them needing to say more.
Eventually, Abigail reached for Ethan’s hand and held it firmly. She told him there were no more tests she wanted to run, her tone calm and steady, as if the decision had already finished forming.
Ethan squeezed her fingers once before standing. With Abigail’s phone held up and recording, they stepped forward, crossed the threshold, and vanished into the portal holding hands.
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did they geiger counter the marble ? i dont remember 'em doing that.
and when did they name it Manacite ? -
@dwarf said in Chapter 2 Part 1: Measuring the Gate:
did they geiger counter the marble ? i dont remember 'em doing that.
They did it off screen, i didn’t feel the need to it multiple times. I knew i was going to use it here, so I skipped that bit in the garage in chapter 1.
and when did they name it Manacite ?
Abigail assumed the drop was manacite after reading the text in chapter 1 part 4
