"It's very pretty."

"Yeah. There's more pretty places I know about, I can put other pairs there."

"That would be nice. I'm also wondering if it's possible to go a hundred times this high and set up a station with air onboard - if all the paired gates go through areas of thin atmosphere, then it seems like it would be uncomfortable to pass through them, and it's worth thinking about that sort of thing if you plan on selling lots and lots of gates. The obvious downside of course is that you'd need people to maintain the station, and I have no idea how easy it is to actually keep a station afloat above an infinite plane of ground... I suppose going a very long distance down from the surface is also an option. Do you know what's underneath Fairyland, if anything?"

"If you put something that can't fly very high up it will... fall, I imagine. And I'm putting the gates right next to each other. Under the ground is more ground."

"We can test the discomfort thing, I suppose. ...If it's, er, ground all the way down, I'm now wondering what would happen if you opened a gate to a hundred light-years below the surface, or something like that. What if anything does happen when one end of a gate opens into the middle of a solid object?"

"Well, you can't go through it because there's solid object on the other side."

"I can think of some ways around that, depending exactly how it works. ...There admittedly might not be a huge practical gain from carving out a tunnel complex a hundred light-years under the surface of Fairyland, but it would be really cool."

"I'm willing to open a gate like that if you really want one. I guess if you can burrow you can do it through a gate."

"If the tunnels are geographically distinctive than anyone who wanders into the mortal world and finds they can cast there can find the place. Gates alone are never geographically distinctive. What I should probably do anyway is make endcap gates so that if someone approaches them from the Fairyland side they don't even notice, they just proceed through to the other side."

"Yeah, if that works then it eliminates the concern about fairies stumbling through the gates and the only thing left is the convenience of not having to quadruple-layer every gate. If someone wanders into the mortal world and finds that they can cast there, that's a pretty big problem all by itself and I wouldn't be particularly worried about them gating into the hub in particular... to be honest, if someone wanders in the mortal world my two main worries are that they might take a fancy to conquer the galaxy and end up starting a huge war, or that they might end up under the control of a mortal who, in turn, takes a fancy to conquer the galaxy and ends up starting a huge war. Our gate hub wouldn't have much effect on either scenario."

"Yeah. If you're really worried about that helping me get the Queen would let me address anything like that which came up."

"Would it?"

"...She's Queen because her kind magic is to know every fairy's name."

"...well. That... would definitely change things, yes. But - once you have the Queen, how do you propose to keep her?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, if having control of the Queen confers control over every fairy, then the sort of people who think conquering the galaxy is a good idea are going to want to get their hands on the Queen, and if they can't do that, some might be motivated to try to destroy her instead. This seems like an inherently fragile situation."

"Well, they can't destroy her, although I suppose they could make it prohibitively difficult to get her to recite names. Anyway, there's a first mover advantage. The first person to conquer Queenscourt with mortal assistance can then shore it up against repeats of the same tactic in a way it is currently - probably - weak."

"I have actually no idea how that sort of thing would interact with a sorcery ward. Maybe the Queen can't be stably held, but in that case she can't stably hold herself and the best bet is to put her somewhere sufficiently anonymous."

"Yeah. We do have the first-mover advantage, and that's not to be discounted, but... I'm torn between wanting everyone to know about the names problem so they can protect future generations of mortals, and wanting no one to know about the names problem so I don't wake up one morning to find some paranoid individual has gotten hold of a gate-capable fairy and started invading every planet they can find a holo of. I hadn't realized until just now how much of the stability of human relations is maintained by the inability of people to travel from point to arbitrary point without passing through the intervening space... but I know how much it would benefit people to be able to stroll casually between star systems, so denying everyone gates forever seems like the wrong answer. I don't know."

"I certainly know less about how mortals and their planets work than you do."

"Anything we do, including 'nothing', might conceivably lead to the wrong person getting their hands on the wrong magical or technological advantage and starting one or more huge wars," he sighs. "This is not a good situation to be in."

"Yeah."

"Looking at things from as unbiased a perspective as I can manage... my planet is probably one of the better ones you could have landed on, and I'm probably one of the better people," he says. "The second-best place I can think of... has a historical problem with trying to conquer other planets to add to their eight-planet empire, but I've met their Empress and she's as sensible and levelheaded a person as you could ask for; if you got in with her you'd be all right. I'm thinking about this because with the stakes as high as they are, I want to be sure you have access to the best possible resources even if that means recommending you set up shop with a rival political entity."