This is the story of how I set out to figure out what was going on. I haven't posted in a while, and you'll see why in a bit.

I made up my mind that this thing has gone on long enough. I was OK with it when it was just things that Ariel was imagining, but when she said she went back things were going way too far for me to believe it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so I decided to see if I could disprove the whole thing. Now, the existence of a doorway to another world is tough to falsify if that doorway only exists some of the time. Lacking a theory as to why it would disappear and reappear, I decided the first step was observation.

I put together a kit, a survival kit. I told Ariel that she ought to do the same thing, but she only took her flashlight. Maybe next time she'll listen to me. The most important part of it was the notebook: recording the evidence is vital when you're figuring out a pattern.

Watching the tree turned out to be a complete bust for the first week. That was pretty much exactly what I expected. If this stuff is real, which was a big if, it wasn't going to be easy to find. The breakthrough came when Robert posted his story. If there were gates other than the tree then maybe they could work under slightly different conditions. So that was the start of my search.

I started from the tree and worked my way out in a grid. I didn't have a lot to go on, but that symbol was the one common point in both stories. Maybe someone was marking the places for me. I wasn't really expecting to find any other places, but while I was at it I thought that I should be thorough. And it turned out to be a good things that I was.