It's true, they're not. She was vaguely aware it was three representatives from a very broad category, quite as broad as 'plants', but she didn't realize coral counted.

Coral counts. Dinosaurs count. He'd love to take her to meet some but they're all in Valinor.

She's never even heard of dinosaurs. Are they more like coral or squirrels or snails or frogs or sparrows or horses?

"...horses. Or sparrows. Depending what kind of 'like' you're thinking."

"Which ways are they like those?"

"If you looked at their skeleton it'd be more like a sparrows. But they're very large and if you saw them you wouldn't think of much commonality with sparrows. And the ones I've seen eat grass like horses. And you can ride them if you are very immortal or very reckless."

"...what happens if you try to ride them?"

"They might run very fast, or throw you off, or the bigger ones that eat the ones who eat grass might eat you."

"Isn't running very fast the point of riding a thing?"

"If you can hold on - oh, Fairyland has normal momentum, right?" This is how momentum should work.

"That sounds about right."

"Aww. There'd be some awesome tricks we could pull if it didn't work that way. And we could use gates for ridiculous energy weapons."

"How?"

"Depends on what specifically the difference was. But imagine if in your world, a small thing coming loose from a big thing didn't maintain its momentum the way I explained. Then we could build a gun at the gate which - actually, you tell me." He grabs some paper. "How could we shoot things out of gates at absurd velocities, if the world worked like that?"

"...I mean, the obvious exploit on gates now that there's someplace other than Fairyland where they'll work is to make horizontal ones and drop things through them until they get very fast and then gate them wherever you want to throw the fast thing, but I think that works even with momentum behaving like you're used to."

"You can do horizontal gates? And gates in the air?" He grins. "Okay, we already have super fast smash weapons, we don't need multiple strategies for getting them."

"Sure, they can point any direction and be wherever you like."

"Can you open them in the middle of people? Or deep underground?"

"Well," she says, "yes, but they won't automatically do anything in particular to things they begin by intersecting. And they can take up to a week to settle and stay put by space, not by adjacent items, so I don't think you could aim things inside a person very well that way."

He nods. "Outer space?"

Blink.

"How high in the sky can you put a gate?"

"I can't fly arbitrarily high because the air thins out too much but as high as I like, if I'm there, I think."

"As soon as we figure out how to gate," he says, "let's go up in the sky, I think we'd both like that. If you go high enough there's no air at all; that's what we call outer space."

"...I do not see what there is to like about being somewhere with no air."