"I'll need to be around you for a bit longer before I can cast anything on you. Maybe another ten minutes."

"I could hang around here for another ten minutes."

Nod. "I could also go through my gate into my old tree, if that would be helpful."

"That and the healing would be a comprehensive demonstration that you have magic of the described kinds, I think."

Promise flutters over to her gate, opens it, steps through, steps back, and closes it.

Copper observes this sequence of events and nods thoughtfully.

Promise flies back over to her tree, makes it give her a few more little fenceposts, and resumes placing them, looking at Copper periodically.

Well, this activity sure does strongly resemble magic. Copper continues to watch.

"Yes please."

Heal!

"Thanks."

"I'll get out of your hair. If you tire of Silver's company and want someone else to talk to, he can summon me anytime and I'll be visiting now and then to see how you're doing."

"Okay. No need to check in on me very frequently."

Promise draws and writes and thinks. She sings and sews and grows crops. She sleeps and eats and drinks.

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..."