"Yep. Blood and ash. It's usually sheep blood, can't make a habit of using your own. Vacuum is useful too but hard to make."

"Can't make a habit of using your own because...? Not enough of it for all the painting you want to do?"

"Yeah. People who do only really casual magic and don't want to pay for sheep access will use their own - well, did, everybody's trying to cut out nonessentials now - and I would have used it in this case so I didn't have to bring anything but myself and some ash to reapply if mine got smudged, but if you do lots of magic you'd be in pretty bad shape trying to run it on your own blood."

"Huh. ...and what do you mean, 'vacuum'—?"

"Nothingness-not-even-air. We have it around our planet above the air if you go high enough and can produce it in small amounts in containers on the surface."

"Oh, weird. Either we don't have that around Suranse or nobody's ever flown far enough to find it. Seems like it'd be kind of hard to paint with, though."

"Yeah, you don't paint with it, you place containers among blood and ash markings."

He nods.

"What's next for you?"

"Seeing if I can bully the wasteland into growing plants, probably."

"With your thing or the paint thing? What can the paint thing do?"

"My thing. Although apparently the paint thing's good for plants? It, like... makes stuff, as far as I can tell. You paint your magic lines and a thing appears. It might do other stuff, I didn't read far enough to tell."

"Pity the fiends got 'em. This does make me think there might be somebody ungotten by fiends who may have managed to restart somewhere, though."

"Eh, I can probably check that without too much trouble."

"I'd appreciate that very much. Imagine how pleased they'd be to find that they weren't the last people alive anywhere at all."

He laughs. "No kidding, wow."

"And anyone who's still alive is probably good at painting without exploding or whatever!"

"You'd think!"

"Or they just live on an island, I guess. A butte. I don't know how good fiends are or were at swimming or climbing."

"You'd think if an island was all it took then more people would've lived, but maybe this is the shit continent with no good islands, or something."

"It's very dry, some islands might have been isthmused to death."

He giggles.

So does Cor. "A painting to appear stuff magic system is basically the opposite of mine."

"Yeah, it's kinda funny, isn't it? Learn to do both and you're all set. Except for the disappearing planets part, I guess."

"It doesn't have to disappear planets in particular, I think if you dumped enough stuff into a disappearance point it'd stop growing. The problem is they grow faster as they get bigger and/or used more - not sure which on current data."