>Have Maribel furnish her Perfectly Normal Rock as the focus of the gap. It is an inert and well-behaved stone, material and still. Instead of depth and affection, let us instead go for the depth (or shallowness) it was found in the shrine, and the apathy one feels towards a Perfectly Normal Rock.
>You ask for the rock, which Maribel has no problems handing to you, and then consider a few new aspects of it and apply them to untangling this mess of a gap.
>Many of the aspects of this rock neatly wedge themselves into the snares. The apathy aspect is a little difficult, rocks are not met with apathy so much as they tend not to register at all for most people, even youkai are often guilty of this, but you manage to make it work with a little effort.
>As you untangle the snares the ground begins to shift underneath you. Maribel yelps and scurries some yards away, but you can feel that there is little to worry about. The land rises around you, stretching and twisting. As you watch, even the plants twist and distort themselves, lengthening and folding back upon themselves. The whole mass reaches upward in several places, raising several yards above your head, then begins to draw closer and spiral into each other, creating a sort of hollowed out hill some yards across and a twelve feet high. The land has blended together into kind of a loose latticework of earth, stone, and flora, as though someone had warped it like clay. As near as you can tell, the plants and boulders are still in their previous places, but they have been warped and distorted into elongated parodies of themselves, behind held in place by nothing more than defiance of space. In the middle of this, you can sense the gap, its elements scattered through the inside of the mass. It should be trivially easy to gather and open them now; you doubt you would even need any tools to do it.
>Maribel sidles back to your side, looking at the twisted land with wide-eyed curiosity.
>_
