Promise takes about two weeks remaining comfortably in her tree at the Electrically Conductive Metals family's lake house before she remarks that she is getting a little bored.

"Well, what would you like to do about that?"

"Well, you could just give me the sum total of all human media but I was thinking I could make you a gate or two."

"Eleven's got some people working on erasing all the names out of books and so on, so you can have the sum total of all human media pretty soon, but in the meantime, yes, some gates would be nice. What are the parameters here? Both in terms of the actual constraints on gatemaking and in terms of how much traipsing around nearby solar systems you'd like to do for testing purposes?"

"The gates will have to go through Fairyland. I can't make them point to point. So it will actually be two gates per. I have to be near both ends, and they'll take random amounts of time to settle. I'll make the Fairyland ends right next to each other and someplace it would be extremely unlikely for anyone to come through by accident. What kind of testing do you mean?"

"Well, for example: locations in the mortal world are not always fixed relative to one another. Locations in Fairyland mostly seem to be. So do you know how the stability of gate locations will be affected by the fact that this planet is constantly rotating and orbiting its star, which is moving relative to other stars, whose own planets also rotate and orbit them? If gate locations are straightforwardly stable relative to planets but not relative to smaller objects, how small can a planet get before it stops capturing gates? That sort of thing is best tested in some out-of-the-way system where if you lose hold of a gate it won't have sunk halfway through an inhabited planet before you can get back to Fairyland and close it from the other side."

"Oh. I don't have any idea at all. The one I made to my tree hasn't moved..."

"Yeah. I really should've thought of this earlier, but it's hard to think on a cosmic scale. What seems likeliest to me is that planets capture gates in a straightforward way, and then I have no idea what happens if you open a gate on a moon or a jumpship. But since it's conceivable that all gates in this world are now anchored to the rotation of this particular planet, or something similarly inconvenient, the first gate you open not on this planet should probably be in an uninhabited system just in case."

"Gates have been opened to the mortal world before. I don't know what planet they were to, but I would've maybe heard of it if the mortal world had a lot of red plants?"

"It's possible that different planets or solar systems have different harmonic properties and this one in particular just happens to have the property of convenient flatness, but it's also possible that there are multiple mortal worlds in this picture, and if that's so, maybe there has never been a gate to a different planet in this - galaxy, universe, what have you. I suppose if you like you could make a test gate to Earth and test its harmonic properties - Earth is definitely the strongest candidate for 'planet in this galaxy that fairies have been to before' - but I'd still prefer to soothe my worries about gate locations relative to planets-in-general first."

"Doing tests sounds reasonable."

"Yeah. So. What sort of information do you need in order to make a gate? Would I have to show you pictures of a suitable test location, or actually take you there, or what?"

"You mean if you want me to make the gate from the Fairyland end? I was planning on having the Fairyland ends all be too high up to fly to prevent accidents, as long as I can make them from here at all."

"Travel time to the nearest other inhabited planet we might want to gate to is a week. Making the Fairyland ends all too high to fly to is a good idea, but if you can make a gate from Fairyland to a desired location with some amount of information, it'll be a whole lot faster to make the gates from the Fairyland side anyway, perhaps by taking a lightflyer or small shuttle through to Fairyland so you have somewhere to sit while you construct them. For testing purposes, though, I can probably take you to an uninhabited planet that's as close as a few hours' travel away."

"Lightflyers don't need much air to fly in?"

"They need some air, but I could look for one that didn't need as much. Or use a shuttle, which is bigger but has no air-related requirements."

"I don't know exactly how much air there is at various altitudes so a shuttle's probably better."

"Logical. And... hm. Making gates across pressure differentials seems like it might lead to things like my planet losing a lot of air. Maybe we should be testing that in a nearby uninhabited system, unless you happens to know for sure that air doesn't cross gates by itself...?"

"...I don't think it does. I can check. My tree is airtight. If you have a candle I can leave it in there and go check on it later."

"...because they're leaves?"

"Yes."

"Well, that... makes sense."