"Yeah, I know the feeling."

"Anyway, the plan is to spread the word around all over?"

"Yes. That, and all the technological advances, which are honestly much better at doing large-scale good but require more specialisation."

"Technological advances?"

"Oooh yes, so many of those. And scientific ones, too. It's amazing."

"On the level of this magic? Or just in general? I shouldn't be skeptical, but I kinda am."

So he explains germ theory and vaccines.

Temperance listen attentively. "Nice. And that is done without magic?"

"...yes. Nice? Do you know how many thousand people are going to be saved by this? How many hundred thousand, even?"

"Ah, it didn't sound like something that would work at that scale? I was sort of picturing it would be used in places where we wouldn't be able to spare the magic."

"Well, magic doesn't scale at all, you'd need to teach people for them to do it themselves and spend lifeforce otherwise, whereas vaccines don't spend finite and necessary resources like that, they can just be mass-produced and distributed. Mana and lifeforce are way scarcer and should be used more sparingly."

"Huh, I guess I was just failing to realize how fast one could make vaccines. I was sort of... parsing them as too complicated. Do they have other stuff like that?"

Printing press?

"Okay... how secret is that supposed to be? Because I have half-siblings and they and their mother are going to be like all over that."

"This should also be as public as possible!"

"Great! Do you have like," she waves, "plans?"

"Yes. Approximately. I'm sorta being held hostage at the High Consulate of Bezanab."

She looks him up and down. "I get the sense that that is a volunteer hostage situation. Unless I'm miscalculating your power level by... three orders of magnitude. Minimum."

"It is, in a sense. It's politically and practically expedient to be held hostage, it will be much harder to do what I need to do if I run away."

"Yikes. At least they can't actually hurt you. Still, I would feel very cooped up like that."

"I can cope. I'm doing useful, meaningful work and keeping my brain busy most of the time. One of my boyfriends... came with me, and he's trapped away from his triplets and our other boyfriend who was their boyfriend first, and... He's not doing well. He tries to pretend to be doing better than he is and I let him but..."

"Gods, the poor guy. Uh, what are the prospects of finding the way back?"

"After we resolve our situation with the High Consulate we'll dedicate our time fully to reverse-engineering the portal ritual, and he can serve as a focus for his world. I've been trying to do it but it's slow going and we only remember a few bits of it. We'll manage eventually but—time passes differently between worlds, if they're not connected by a portal."

"Ah. How differently? I feel like offering my help, but I am not entirely sure how much I can do that you can't..."

"That's part of the problem, it can do anything. It's possible no more than two minutes have passed there, but maybe it's been two years or longer. Anyone's guess. And... you could probably help, yeah."