Cillean snorted. "That's a great idea, kid, but I doubt a few feet of string is going to help us crisscross this entire region. That area is huge. We'd need miles and miles of the stuff before it started to be very helpful."
Darien cast daggers at him with his eyes. "I am not a child," he said. "Back to the point, though, the old mazes weren't a string of a few hedges. They were set up as a way to torture a lot of people all at once. Mazes are miles long, even the size of a city. Besides, we're not going to just use a single little ball of yarn. You put the spell on a ball, yes, but once the spell has been set, it continues to lay the magical thread. You don't actually use the physical thread you base the spell on at all. You obviously have not studied different spelling methods very much. You should probably take care of that problem, old man," he jabbed back.
Jackie waved it away. "None of that matters really. What's important is that we get to where we need to be. Now," she pulled her sister forward to the gate, "we have places to go, things to do, and a way to get where we need to be, so I think we've done quite enough talking about this and that. It is time to actually go," she said.
They didn't go right away, but they all set to work getting ready for it. If they'd decided they would have to travel through Russia in the cold season manually, then carts had to be gathered. Thankfully, they were at least self-propelled and had no risk of running out of fuel along the way or freezing up in cold temperatures, but bringing them also meant another day would have to be spent creating a new gate that would be big enough to fit them through. When they'd originally built the gates they'd only compensated for the space needed for one person to walk through with some extra wiggle room to fit the unwieldy dimensions of their packs, but this new addition would need much more room than they'd allowed for.
Then they realized the small packs themselves that were filled with enough supplies for a week or two's journey would not be enough for a long trip. So then they had to stop and go back into town and pick up more food. They ordered cured meats and smoked cheeses and vegetables and as many crackers as they could fit around people in the carts.
Then again Cillean pointed out that Priscilla was the only one with a method to keep warm in even the coldest winters. The rest had fall supplies, which were warm enough even for autumn in Wisconsin but were completely insufficient capes and tunics to be wandering around in snow fields. None of them would freeze to death in any temperature of weather, but they would be slowed down a lot by frostbite. Even if that weren't a concern, actually freezing was very uncomfortable and not an experience any of them wanted to have.
Eventually, all the new supplies were gathered to be properly outfitted for the trip ahead of them. Another day wasted away making a brand new gate that could fit their carts and they were ready to set off.
Still they stood before the gate, hesitating to go in.
"You guys do realize that we can't get to work until we actually walk over and get there, right," Darien said. He too did not move forward yet.
"More than that, you all realize what will happen if we don't go forward," Cillean muttered.
It was all good and well to realize you had to go forward, but none of them were willing to take the leap yet. They were all weighed down, not by fear of their destination, but of the failure they knew they were likely to face with such a large area to search and such a small chance of actually succeeding.
Priscilla looked at the older people around her, standing still, holding off on taking the leap; and she stepped forward through the gate alone.
The older ones looked on at the child and then quickly scrambled to follow after and save whatever dignity they had left after the shame of being proven less brave than a child.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Chemistry and Alchemy
The dimensional gate dumped them out in a place packed with Mundanes walking in a solid wall of humanity that looked and sounded very different from the Mundanes Darien and Jackie had seen in their time at Tybolt Hall. The camouflage spells on their charmed carts guaranteed they'd blend in to any environment as much as possible, and they crawled through this crowd in their vehicles which now looked like mid-size sedans. Still the people gawked and yelled at them for daring to take up more space when it was already close to nonexistent there. The gate had placed them in the closest destination that had some trail of the Alchemist's magical essence, but now their carts would have to take the long, slow journey onwards to follow that path until they eventually came to the end of it and found their quarry.
There was an hours-long traffic jam in a city that called itself Beijing, but most of the other delays in their journey were of a more endurable duration. After a few days of slogging through these obstacles, they finally came to a point where the carts could go
