Better not linger in her starting place too much longer. Yellow's faster than her and may have already come home to a wreck. Thorn might have a habit of checking up on the place, even, just in case. She's invisible, inaudible, unsmellable - that won't help if he sends someone thorough. Or comes in person.
She sets out.
She's been flying for about thirty minutes after her shopping trip when she falls through a tear and squeaks inaudibly and lands in the middle of -
She isn't instantly the most popular hero in the world or anything, but she does get to watch her online presence's numbers tick up.
Well, that's gratifying. She goes and eats something - she's been online for a while, she likes to eat twice a day - and takes a picture of her dinner, maybe that's also interesting, and then goes and takes pictures of other gated locations, too, from various altitudes and angles. She doesn't include any shots that show her trees from the outside, even the barely-rooted new cuttings, but she does take a picture of her house from the inside. She puts some of them up and holds others in reserve for later, since it seems to be customary on the internet to update often rather than in large bursts.
The delay is normal enough that the mortals don't notice she picked up on their customs surprisingly quickly. Of course, with pictures as unearthly as some of what can be found in Fairyland, it won't be long before people start asking if she can take (fully informed and risk-accepting) passengers.
She could, but all these gates are very high up and mortals mostly can't fly, and she would feel obliged to try to rescue anyone who got got by a mean fairy, and all things considered she thinks she'd rather do other things than be a tour guide.
Oh well, it's not completely unheard of for capes to have better things to do than pander to fans.
Meanwhile: isn't it curious that both gates settled instantly when she made them for Canary to run an errand? And a couple in the chain, too, although only a couple.
She wants a gate from her current tree to her address. She leaves a flattener in her tree, turned on, and uses one in the house -
Instant settle. That's interesting. A few more tiny test gates later and -
She emails Armsmaster. I think I can instant settle gates. Which would be useful against Endbringers if there were anywhere in particular you wanted to put them. I don't suppose the Birdcage is designed to contain them.
"No, the Birdcage could not contain an Endbringer. Could not survive an Endbringer, even. You could try throwing it into the Sun, but I'm not sure which one would be destroyed. Send it to interstellar space, maybe. How far away can you make a gate?"
"From myself? Not far. I need to see the area, and ideally have looked at it sort of like I had to look at the mouse. From the other end of it? Arbitrarily, I just need a sufficient specification based on geographical sorts of things. What's interstellar space?"
"You know Earth is round? Space is everything else. If you put the other end of the gate straight up, enough distance that it would take light ten billion years to cross, nothing is coming back from that very easily."
"Normally no. It's far enough away that Earth's gravity isn't a concern. And if it did, it'd take long enough to be a victory for all intents and purposes anyway. Of course, given that it's an Endbringer, it might have some other trick up its sleeve."
"Okay, well, if you can be really really specific about where in space you want me to put the next one to show its face, I can make the Fairyland-to-space half of a box of six gatepairs... I might want a flying cape to put me up too high in Fairyland for wingbeats to move enough air, in Fairyland. I'll have to leave them open for them to work instantly on demand, because I have to be near a gate to open or close it. I don't want to strand some innocent fairy in space, so up past the region where it's possible for fairies to fly is best."
How wide can a gate be? The largest Endbringer is about fifty feet tall."
"Relative to stars should be fine. And I can make gates that big. If you can make sure the entire place is harmonically flat."
"Can do. I already knew you'd need a flat battlefield for the radiation shielding, the scaled-up version will be done in plenty of time."
"You need someone who can fly with a passenger and handle low air pressure, any other requirements? If not, you could go now. Aegis is on console duty, I'll have another Ward replace him."
"That and the sense not to go haring off into Fairyland. And they have to be able to carry me."
"Yes, it is still Fairyland. I don't like the idea of asking a Ward I'm responsible for to go into danger unnecessarily. Opposing Endbringers isn't unnecessarily, but can you at least ensure no other fairies nearby?"
"I can look first, as when Alexandria came to carry the haws. Or I can just wait for someone else to be available. I don't fully understand either how children work or how people expect them to work so I'll have to defer to your judgment about whether it's appropriate to ask one. Oh, also, the Fairyland area will need to have a flattener that can hover in place long enough to keep the area flat until the attack has been and gone."
Kid Win probably does have something lying around that can enable hovering, I'll ask."
"Hovering in low air pressure. For a longish time. ...Also, I'm not sure I have the reaction time to close the Earth ends of the gatebox as quickly as I'll have to if it turns out any of them can turn around from space. I just googled 'stars' and apparently they're like suns? Are there any stars you don't care about as much as you care about the sun? That might be more effective. Unless it just means they turn around and are very much on fire."
The reaction time is more of a problem. Endbringers are faster than they look, sometimes much faster. If we pair you with Velocity he can speed yours up ten times or so."
"The name of the star is not enough. Can I get a picture or at least an artist's rendering of it? A map of nearby other stars? I have okay reaction time to start with; ten times might or might not make me capable of shutting Endbringers out."
It's a black hole, not a star. Enough matter close enough together that, due to physics Fairyland almost definitely doesn't have, space bends and nothing can leave.
I can give you a map of the nearby stars" one projects from his helmet, and simultaneously appears in her email, "but 'nearby' is measured in distances that dwarf continents. The same applies to an artist's rendering." And one of those.