]Faye came puffing back to where Jade and Jasmine were waiting. "I don't like this," she said, "but letting that girl wander off by herself I like even less. Besides, the Tsuirakuan gates are as reliable as they can get, so here goes nothing..."
They stepped forward, and the distinctive WHSSSHHH of a warp gate echoed again through the woods.
When the magic dazzle cleared, however, they weren't looking at the expected landscape of Tsuiraku-town. Instead, they were in a clearing in a thicker, denser forest than where they'd started. Judging from the position of the sun, they might have been somewhere south of where they'd started. A low east-west mountain ridge rose behind them, and the forest sloped away to the north, with a path running through it.
One of the interesting features, Faye noted, was that they'd ported into a gate that wasn't disguised in any way, as the one at the shack had been, or even the second one in the clearing near it. If anybody found the presence of a gate like this in the wilds incongruous, the people who'd put it there didn't seem to care. Most likely that meant that anyone who actually used the thing would be on the same side as the people who installed it.
Faye took just a moment to digest the significance of that, then got back to the task at hand. "Well, let's get going," she said, angling for the path.
