To each Their Own

"It's still not too late to turn back, guys," Suzy suggested.

"Heh. What happened to not freaking out?" Mark remarked.

"You still want to joke at a time like this? Don't you feel it — that sickening aura coming off the gate? Why are we even doing this? Let's go back and just enjoy Japan like normal tourists for once."

"Can't do that, Suzy. We have to go in." Mark's voice left no room for negotiation.

"Eeyaa! Fine — go without me. I'll stay back and guard the gate."

"There's no need for that," Gwen said flatly.

Grix had already stopped listening. He stood apart from the argument, eyes fixed on the gate itself — ancient carvings worn smooth by time, and characters etched deep into the stone that felt less like decoration and more like warning.

"It says 'Keep Out,'" Kate translated, deadpan.

"See? Even the gate is telling us something!" Suzy pleaded. "Let's just go back—"

Gwen didn't answer. She walked straight up to the gate and pushed.

Grix sighed, fell in beside her, and pushed too. Kate joined next, then Mark, until finally Suzy — muttering the entire time — gave up resisting and added her weight to the rest.

The gate gave way slowly at first, then all at once — and the moment it cracked open, something on the other side pulled. The world yanked them forward and swallowed them whole before the stone slammed shut behind them, sealing out the light.

Grix opened his eyes to a wonder no science, no scripture, no story passed down through generations could have prepared him for.

Gravity had broken.

Mark stood untouched, upright, like gravity had simply forgotten to claim him. Suzy was pinned sideways against one wall, her own private down pulling her flat against stone. Across from her, Kate clung to the opposite wall, her down pointing the exact opposite way. And Grix — his stomach dropped as he understood why the world felt wrong: for him and Gwen, gravity had flipped entirely. The cave's true floor stretched somewhere impossibly far below now, and above them — where the sky should have been a ceiling, a limit, something — there was only open air, falling away forever, a bottomless well made of nothing but light.

There was no wall to catch them, no floor to break a fall — only that vast inverted sky, pulling them up and away from everything solid. For one weightless second, both of them began to drift toward it, before Mark lunged and caught their wrists, one in each fist, anchoring them to the only fixed point in a room that had abandoned every rule they knew.

He didn't let go. Not as Grix's shoulder screamed from the strain, not as Gwen's fingers slipped and her eyes went wide with panic. Mark hauled them down, hand over hand, away from that endless bright drop, until solid stone was finally beneath their feet instead of impossibly far above.

"That was frightening," Gwen said. Her face gave away nothing, emotionless, the way it always did — but with Gwen, the words themselves were the feeling. If she said it, she meant it.

"So, let's move on," Grix said. "I'm not turning back after coming all this way."