"Explaining what good they'll do. I mean, the use of them seems pretty straightforward to me, but I'm almost certainly not going to have to play in the Hunger Games even if for some reason you can't take over the world so I may not have much extraordinary reason to expect to need them. I don't even get harassed by police as much as most people because my dad used to be a Peacekeeper, although there've been a couple of times it would have been nice to know someone was coming when I was poaching clams. I'm not sure anyone would listen to me if I told them they were in danger. I have a little audio recorder I use to remember anything I really need, especially stuff I learn here... I do have to memorize how to direct it to the recordings I want, though."

"The reason doesn't necessarily have to be extraordinary. But I find that in general, asking people to explain what good they expect to get from a blessing makes them more likely to pay attention to the ways it can benefit them and take that into account once they have it, so the amount of good they get from it increases. And the requirement is not so onerous that I have ever felt moved to waive it." He shrugs slightly. "There are the rest of your blessings."

"Thanks!"

He smiles.

"Anyway, as far as I can tell no one with any kind of ability to publish their opinions on your continent or off it has anything worrisome to say about you. Which describes either staggering control over the global press, or you being exactly what you say you are. I am more than happy to open the door for you."

"Thank you," he says. He produces a small stack of four wooden disks roughly identical to the one she already has and hands them over. "Keep at least one in case you want to talk to me, and bury at least one so that I can get started overtaking your continent, and the rest can be spares in case of unforeseen circumstances."

"Okay. ...Usually I stay in Milliways until I'm out of ways to get food. I guess I'll have to decide when to leave some other way."

"Yes."

"This is a good problem to have," she giggles. "I've only been here a week and it usually takes months and months to get a new door and I've got things I want to read, I think I'll stay a while longer, but time's not passing at home in the meantime."

"The non-passage of time sounds like a convenience of being mortal," Kirovalin remarks. "If it's possible at all for time to pass differently between different parts of myself, the bar at least doesn't cause it."

"Huh, maybe being distributed helps, sort of like I never see something moving too fast or too slow. You have some of you here and some of you back on your continent and that's like having the door open, I guess."

"That's what I think is happening, yes."

"Makes sense." She pockets the extra disks. "Do you want some books on how Panem is organized now? Are you going to - promote from within, or do you want to hold the door for each other next time I'm in here so you can march some people you already know from your continent in to run the place?"

"I'd appreciate the books. I hope to be able to find capable governors who already live there, but if I have to send people over from home and translate for them while they learn your language, I'll do that."

Shell Bell nips over to Bar for some books and comes back. "These are all blatantly censored and/or propaganda, unfortunately, but they're different kinds of it. This is the standard textbook for District students, this is a Capitol-written history, this is historical fiction, this is an autobiography by one of the first Hunger Games winners."

"Thank you." He collects the books and makes them disappear.

"...If you're going to keep them you should pay Bar for them, I usually only borrow books."

"I want to read them as soon as possible, so I'm distributing them among my manifestations. I can bring them back just as easily when I'm done. If I want to keep them, I will pay Bar when I decide to."

"Oh, that makes sense. You can only move stuff that way, not people?"

"Only plants and inanimate objects, not animals or people, and only things that belong to me in some sense. Even if I am only borrowing them, as in this case."

"Huh. Still, that means there could be trade. I'm now positive that we have more technology - even if it's really badly distributed - so this will probably be useful to your people back home once we're stable enough to produce exports. Wrecking the Capitol will interfere some with our tech production capacity but as long as District Three's okay we'll probably be able to recover most of it."

"I am definitely looking forward to those opportunities."

"It'll be great. ...Creepy question: I assume you can do food, like, meat, in principle can you do corpses? Because we have medical technology too, and sometimes if somebody is only recently, not too messily dead, they can be brought back."

"...That's... possible. But transporting the recently dead doesn't work. So it may depend on whether or not there is a gap between the respective definitions of 'recently'."

"Yeah. It'll just take a while to train people on the far end to use the medical equipment even if we can spit out enough of it to meet demand. I think it helps if the dead person has been kept cold, especially underwater? One time when I was four the Hunger Games wound up with the last two kids fighting on a frozen lake and they both fell in. They had to fish them both out, wake them up, and put them back."