Not for too long, though. "Sorry, I should go now. See you tomorrow?"

"Yeah. Bye now," she sighs, and plants a goodbye peck on his lips then saunters off.

Terry starts walking home.

And look, there's Sadde again, coming from the direction he's going! Hi, Sadde!

"Uh."

"-the Loop!" He opens his backpack and gets out a notebook. He remembers 'look for the crossing point' but what else did they strategize?

They mostly didn't! One had to break the Loop's crossing point but that was pretty hard to do without magic and they didn't exactly have loads of it.

"How inconvenient," Sadde airs, looking a bit annoyed.

"It's like it was waiting for us to need to be somewhere. I wouldn't put it past the cards from what I've seen so far. Anyway, crossing point. I know this park, I'm going to run around the loop a few times, try to figure out which section of it we're stuck in."

"Should I go after you or the other way around?"

"Uh. Probably follow. Easier to tell each other something that might be it if we're next to each other."

"Okay, then."

So he starts prowling around, not in straight lines, not trying to find the way out yet, just trying to get a mental map of the looped area.

It's... not obvious. Either the Loop chose particularly similar-looking spots in the park or it has some sort of subtle space alteration that makes the edges look similar. Whatever the case, Terry will find that they cannot leave the park, and they'll soon be back to the spot where they started.

Well, since he was trying to map what parts of the park he can visit and start applying spatial reasoning, that's okay.

He sketches out a map showing the places they are 'allowed' to go and shows it to Sadde to see if their impressions of the space agree.

"That looks about right."

"So we know roughly where the edges might be. That line of bushes to that tree, maybe fifty feet either way... That bench to the pond... Let's get searchin'."

"Do you know the usual layout of the park?" she asks, going after him. "It all looks the same to me."

"Yeah, I hang out here a lot. And I have a good memory for - layouts and arrangements of things."

"Cool. You'll have to point me at stuff. It'll probably not be obvious."

"I wonder if meditating would help. Probably not."

"You could try? ...is Kero around?"

"Kero is not around or he probably would have rambled out a lot of advice on finding the edge already." He starts walking again, indicated an area to check for the crossover line.

Sadde follows and squints!

There is nowhere obviously crossovery without closer inspection.

Well, they'll just have to do the closer inspection themselves.

Do his notes-from-quizzing-Kero contain an answer as to whether the 'crossing line' wraps around the whole looped area or just part of it?

Whole. It's impossible to escape a looped area without actually getting the Loop to make it stop.

"...So I think if we can be confident we're walking in a straight line we have to find it sooner or later. Have you got a ball of string or something?"