Okay. Working. Images. Had some good ideas for defending their camp, your siblings might find them useful, too - I should at least tell them how things are set up so they know what's going on if they're called on to help. They might not even need to go, that tent setup they came up with would work just as well at a distance - cover the inside of a tent with portals to someplace and it's like you're there, for ranged weapons, but you can't be attacked; I could do the same thing with a room.

That's a great idea. We can besiege Angband while actually being located somewhere far away and safer.

If the Enemy can't see the other sides of portals, yeah. Or even if they can, if they don't come up with anything to do about it.

And otherwise we'd be besieging Angband in person so this is at least safer.

Yup, definitely that.

I'm still optimistic we can figure out something very clever to do with your magic and end this all in the next Year.

Nod. If teleporting them to another world works it probably won't even take that long.

I really hope it does. That'd be - a satisfying resolution to this scenario.

I hope so too.

It's probably worth not checking immediately in case it ends up somehow killing you.

Whether I can do spells to other worlds? I know I can, if I couldn't I wouldn't've been able to get here. The problem is finding a really empty one, I assume if the one we send them to turns out to have teleportation magic they'll just come back and then we'll really have a problem.

I mean whether you can do it on him without him somehow retaliating through the magic.

Ah. Yeah, that's a good question. And getting close enough - I don't have to be all the way through a portal to cast through it, but that still seems risky. Worth it, but risky.

So we should have someone do it once there are multiple mages.

Sigh. Yeah.

I don't like people taking risks for me but we're only going to have the one really good mage, any time soon.

And he doesn't know how to get to your dimension right now and if you were captured that could change. Definitely should be someone else.

...yes.

Shouldn't be someone who's been in your dimension, so unless it can be done by someone who's not a mage you'll need more than just FIndekáno eventually.

Yup. And hopefully loading everybody up with spells to bring them home means being captured isn't actually a risk anyway, but I don't want to bet on any one thing with a whole world to worry about.

Exactly.

Yeah. So, a couple years, probably, until we have a real shot at that - new mages start out very slow to cast spells but get faster pretty quickly, I think we'd want someone to get to the point of taking less than fifteen or twenty minutes at very least. We can test things before then, maybe, I'm not sure how much of a problem it is to risk giving them warning about what we're doing.

They'll never get as fast as you?

Eventually, if it works like regular Gifts - fifty years, about, at a normal-to-fast pace. Close much sooner, but still on something like that timescale, twenty-five or thirty years.

We probably do not want to wait that long, though we can at need.

Yeah. I think it'll be at least worth trying, after a couple years; I don't think it'll be too risky, and if they can't defend against it it should work, and if they can, we'll hopefully find out what we need to work on - there's different things that mages can practice and get better at, speed is just one of them.