"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."

"...huh. And they don't get bigger when you put more stuff in, they get—full?"

"I guess you could say they get full. Small enough points, if you try hard, you can pile things into fast enough that they can't keep up. If you know what you're doing you can use that to fine-tune gates, which are made from disappearance points that are peeled apart from themselves and installed in separate locations. The peeling calls for precise timing relative to the growth of the point."

"Weird. Kinda cool though. Probably a good thing I started out in Suranse and not your world, I'd have way too much fun painting blood on things."

"If you get carried away you lose toes!"

"Like I said, good thing I didn't grow up around your magic!"

"You'd be toeless! It'd ruin your symmetry."

"Can't have that! Luckily I have different magic, and so far it seems like it wants me to keep my toes."

"Good for it."

"Speaking of which, I think I'll go back outside and argue with the desert some more."

He puts the textbook down with the other two books and heads for the entrance tunnel.