“Collected Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, volume 1 (1800-)”

Gatepost is the Borough of London that should not exist.

In the wake of the unexpected, impossible appearance of the Great Gilded Gate in the middle of the park of the Royal Residence of his Majesty’s Queen, the necessary existence of a Gatepost was not immediately obvious. For months after the opening, the number of Professionals discovered was low. It reached barely 40 within a year.

As the number of Professionals grew though, so did the economic activity. Treasures found in the Labyrinth have properties detailed by Society members in various articles collected in these Proceedings, and the most useful and numerous have been the Power Crystals. Their value was recognized quickly, and it became commonplace to have every Professional heading back to London bring back a volume of materials to sell to recyclers and purchasers.

As the numbers of professionals and the volume of merchandise grew, however, the crown recognised the worth of the income and managed to establish a Royal Monopoly on it, leading to the founding of the Royal Labyrinth Company, owned by a consortium of prominent merchantmen and operated under the auspices of the Crown at the time. This created a massive expansion of the operations of the British empire in the Labyrinth, as regular testing sessions started to be organised, bringing any individual who seemed as it might have a disposition – a high Potential, in Labyrinth parlance – for the Professional status. The percentage of Professionals found among those so tested remained low, but still over 1 in 100 of those tested qualified, which was well above the random chance. A hundred new Professionals started in 1802, and nearly twice as many in 1803, and the population of Professionals ballooned.

However, that population and the need to have storage for the irregular inflow of materials immediately caused major problems. The Great Gilded Gate’s location in the middle of the Queen’s Gardens meant that constructions around it would certainly disrupt massively the park. His Majesty George III was fiercely opposed to that. As he was no longer reluctant to occupy again the Queen’s Residence of Buckingham, ravaging the surrounding park to replace it with warehouses and housing was definitively a no. While the Gate could not be moved, its location had to remain as pleasant as possible.

However, the Great Gilded Gate itself offers a simple solution to that dilemma.

While the Gate is at the edge of urbanized London, its counterpart is located in the wilderness of the Labyrinth’s first explored zone, Grailburg. There was a lot of free room around the Gate proper, as the zone’s border was two miles away from the Gate emplacement. Thus, the Royal Labyrinth Company decided to construct its first warehouses and barracks, next to the Labyrinth side of the Gate. That outpost was quickly referred to as “Gatepost”, and the name stuck for the next fifteen years.

This is not the only solution for this problem, though. The United States of America, having its Gate located in the countryside on the island of Manhattan, built their functional equivalent to Gatepost on Earth’s side. This afforded them more flexibility, as they could use non-Professional workers, builders and carpenters. To this day, the site of their Gate in the Labyrinth remains relatively pristine and untouched, as they’ve kept their construction on Manhattan Island proper.

The French Dominion has adopted a similar concept to the American one. The Tyrant of France, Buonaparte, having little respect for the gardens of Versailles, did not hesitate to convert the area with barracks and many more, shifting the focus of the French power from Paris to Versailles, which is, these days, the real centre of the Dominion.

Little is known about the Chinese’s dispositions, but the position of their Great Gilded Gate in the middle of their Emperor’s Forbidden City lets one assume that they probably have adopted a model similar to Gatepost, with an expansion in the free space provided by the Labyrinth.

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