Which, as it happens, he does. Both for the practical purpose of possibly providing portal based advice, and because it seems like the sort of thing that would be fun to attend.

"If you were to accept, I think she is also willing to listen to input on which cities are next added to the hub, though any actual additions will be up to her discretion alone," Adarin adds.

Adarin tries very hard not to laugh. He manages, but he can't help but smile a little. "If you would not like to give her the loan, we can always go to another bank. I'm sure she will not be offended if you find the venture unlikely for success and don't want to risk your company. It's hard to offend a witch."

Up Adarin goes, as well. He's so incredibly pleased with his witch.

When they have portaled to Wyoming the final time, Isabella beats him to the maniacal cackling.

"Absolutely absurd amounts of money," agrees Adarin, giggling. "We'll have the resources necessary to house thousands of people and give them comfortable lives. We can go planet shopping for superior Mars alternatives and not have to worry about anyone interfering and messing up what will be a delightfully well-structured system. Hell, we will be able to colonize Mars or a superior alternative with people from here that need it and just not deal with governments that don't meet human rights standards. I have the resources required to study magic and science combinations in order to improve lives in general."

"I do think we should deal a little with the unpleasant governments. Some people get attached to geographical locations. But yes. All of those things. Planet shopping tomorrow, what do you say?"

"Oh, fine," teases Adarin. "Dealing a little with unpleasant governments. To stranglehold them into sanity. Planet shopping tomorrow sounds lovely!"

"Yaaaaaay," she giggles, hugging him and flopping her head onto his shoulder. "Have I mentioned lately that I love you? I love you."

"Hmmmm, I don't know, have you? Oh, there it is, yes, you've mentioned it. I love you, too. You're amazing and the greatest partner in diabolically nice take-overs, ever."

"I am so glad that this is your favorite thing about me, have I mentioned that?"

"I bet so too. I am pretty sure the alethiometer agrees with me even though I ran out of ways to phrase the question before it gave me a really clear reply. It will be complicated at a minimum but I am going to do it anyway."

Mmmmmmmkisses. "Especially us." Kiss!

"Yes. At some point I may completely give into affectation and start wearing a crown." Kiss.

"I was thinking," (kiss) "circlet, permanent ice," (kiss) "undecided on exact details." (Kiss kiss kiss.)

"I can add some," (Kiss.) "illusions to it," (Kiss.) "So it can do cool things, too." (Kiss.) "Want it to look like it defies gravity and floats?" (Kiss!)

"That might be tacky." (She has started nibbling on his neck.)

He giggles, partially at the tacky comment and partially at the nibbles. "Then I'll leave the designs entirely to you and," (Kiss.) "give opinions at the end result?"

"Sure." (Om nom nom delicious boyfriend.)

Copious delight. They have made a Reasonable Amount Of Progress today. It is time for... relaxing.

"Do about it? It seems sensible to leave it there for efficiently moving people out of New Kystle if we ever want to."

"Eeeh, well. Yes, but if someone ever does a scry for a portal they could find it. Then that could ruin our plans of secrecy before we're ready."

"I could ward it. Witch wards work and don't cost precious precious mana."

"True. But it also makes me a little nervous," he admits.

"Is there an amount of warding you could put on it that would make you not nervous and still cost less than busting and, if necessary later, re-making it?"

"Breaking it's absurdly easy to do. Technically I could do it right now, but I didn't want to blindside you with that. As for - an amount of warding to make me not nervous, I'm not sure. I don't like having an... Open door from those people to here."

Isabella pets him. "I suppose we're not leaning in favor of putting them on Earth anyway. If you'd really rather break it, I won't fuss, though it seems like a bit of a waste."

"Didn't you say they could do it if they teamed up?"

He shivers, a little. "There's that. If that happens then we will have a problem. But it was more likely that they find the portal than teaming up."

Hugs. "I'm sorry you're scared."

"It's okay, I'm improving," he says, snuggling. "Sorry, this was probably bad timing on my part."

"It's all right." Snuggles.

"I love you," Adarin adds. Snuggles with Isabella helps. There's lots of reasons why he loves her, he can just think about those and not about anything involving daemons and touching, and why he's extra, special nervous about anyone from there showing up here.

"So am I. Fear not."

"Good!" Little affectionate kiss. "So for your assumed future all-powerful kingdom on either Mars or a better alternative, is there a color scheme I should stick to?"

"Black, ice-blue, and forest green."

"Yours can be made out of evergreen. I came up with the color scheme on the spot, I feel I should mention, but I stick by it."

"Pfff. You know what, I will roll with it, will they be literal evergreens as in the plant, or just something that is green and is generally evergreen like?"

"Live evergreen branches. Maybe holly, but that might be gaudy."

He snickers. "Oh heavens, I'm going to need to design my own crown, now. Holly would be incredibly gaudy, and the berries would be off of the color scheme."

"Okay, not holly. Hmmmm... yew has the same berries problem... we'll find you a circular from a tree nursery and you can pick something sufficiently understated. Or just get you cloudpine twigs."

"It could be illusion or reshaped and recolored stone," he says with amusement. "Or there is my sister, who specializes in plants."

"Somehow I think Zeviana would rather laugh at you than coax a cypress spray into being crown-shaped for you. And no, no tacky artificial crowns. Real permanent ice and real live evergreen."

"The illusions themselves aren't, but using them for regalia totally is, sorry. I am the arbiter of taste, what I say goes."

More laughter. "Okay, okay," (Snicker.) "very well. Then should I get lessons for plants from Ana? So I can properly shape my own crown?"

"Sure, that sounds like a plan."

"Pff, okay. Then I'll start planning out crowns. Made of evergreens. If I make illusions to show you what it would look like, does that fall under the realm of 'tacky'?"

"Illusions for design tweaking are acceptable," says Isabella loftily.

"You are a kind and generous megalomaniac ruler."

"The most of all three things," agrees Isabella. Nuzzles.

Giggling, then return nuzzles. "If you do turn out to be entirely serious about this like you were about Mars you get to explain it to your parents."

"If we start running a colony on Mars-or-superior-alternative do you really think the crowns will need much explanation?"

"True. Though I'll have to think of an explanation that makes sense for New Kystle refugees, they might be nervous about moving from one mage-oligarchy to a mage-witch monarchy-or-whatever-we-call-it-where-crowns-are-required. So you get your parents. Fairness, my dear."

"I'm happy to postpone the crowns till people are used to us, at any rate."

"How delightfully reasonable of you! You continue to be the woman I love, please keep it up," he giggles.

"I have every intention of doing so." Snuzzle.

"If you didn't I would be concerned. Also worried." Snuzzle! "So - on the practical note. For Mars-superior-alternatives, what sorts of things are we looking for?"

"Requiring less terraforming. If we can find a breathable atmosphere and normal gravity, without any diseases that will be very interested in humans and domestic animals, which has plenty of fresh water, that's probably the best we can hope for - although I guess the fact that both Kystle and Earth have humans suggests that we might be able to hit the convergent evolution jackpot and find someplace that comes with edible wildlife."

"Right. I'll also try something that's stable, not a young planet that'll lose its breathable atmosphere to time or large amounts of volcanoes. Some instability can be allowed for, though, I think. We do have magic, we can probably keep something reasonably the same as it was when we got there if we're creative and careful."

"Oh, and let's not irradiate the population, either, don't put them near any astronomical phenomena that bathe the planet in this or that sort of ray."

He snickers. "Right, that too. Let's not accidentally kill everyone, and all that."

"And I bet everybody would appreciate a day/night cycle loosely compatible with sleeping at night and being awake during the day, too."

"Probably. Though I think that might be cosmetically solvable with magic lights or something. Because that was a solution to the New Kystle problem I thought of."

"Yes, but the better the day/night cycle is, the less direct intervention they need from us to do ordinary things like 'build a new house slightly away from the twilight band'."

"Agreed. I don't want to spend all of my time making magic lights. It's a thing I'm happy to do, but not to the exclusion of other things entirely. It's kind of boring."

"Exactly. So we want a planet that obviates the need for lots of tedious magic."

He snickers. "Yeah. If at all possible, anyway."

"Mars isn't terrible, really. But it could use more atmosphere and water."

"It's an option, too! But I don't know a spell that forms an atmosphere and creates water."

"Me either. Can you run water through a portal or will that wreck it? I can desalinate if I have to, we can just steal some of the Pacific Ocean, mwahahaha."

He laughs. "I can run water through a portal. I'm worried about screwing up an ecosystem with that method, though. We might find a water planet with a terrible atmosphere and no ecosystem that's a better option to steal water from."

"Yeah, that's fair. We'd have to steal really a lot of water from the Pacific to wreck anything, though, as long as we strained out the fish. Water levels have been rising lately because the ice caps keep melting."

"Oh, well in that case we might be all right. Though I'd prefer to talk to some people that specialize in the Pacific specifically and ask, 'Hey, if we steal a lot of water will it not screw up the ecosystem?'"

"That is reasonable."

"I try! On a practical note, ice is probably easier to find in the galaxy than water. If we have no other options, that's one, though transporting it might be a pain."

"Yeah, that's the problem is moving the stuff. With water you can gain energy from it, just put a water wheel attached to a battery or whatever under the receiving end's waterfall." She adjusts snuggle, humming with thoughtful contentment. "Mana doesn't go in batteries, right? I'd imagine you'd have mentioned."

"If you want to get technical it can, but it's so hilariously inefficient that no one does. It doesn't like to stay where it's put and sort of - leaks. And the mana that leaks is just gone, no going back to the person it came from or anything."

"And you can't put it into people, I imagine?"

"You can, but there are a few more problems with that besides just the leaking problem. It has some... effects? I'm going to go with effects. If it's a long term thing the person becomes sort of addicted to it and go into withdrawals when it's gone, or possibly worse and it just kills them. If you're wondering why I know this it's because a few centuries ago there were some horrific and unethical tests done."

"Oh dear. With a track record like that I'm almost reluctant to wonder aloud what would happen if you tried storing it in your own daemon."

"Hm," he says. Then he tilts his head. "That... Might work? Maybe? It has to go into something that's alive, which obviously she is. I don't know how she'd do with the vaguely addictive quality or whether it would even be worth it with the power loss. It might help that she's part of me, I'm not sure. I'm kind of curious about testing it, but I worry about some of the effects."

"The extent to which daemons are alive as opposed to, like, natural magical constructs of some kind, is actually kind of controversial. They don't eat, for instance, and aren't born, and spend years of their lives without fixed physical forms at all. But they count for most purposes."

"I'll have to look into it. Extremely carefully and with excessive amounts of caution, considering. She is my soul-in-animal-form, and all. It's a good idea, though."

"Yeah. Little tiny tests if there's ever a compelling reason to have some mana stored in her."

"With permission and lots of safety protocols too," Adarin adds with a smile. "I don't want to be mean to my magic talking bird, I like her."

"Yes, that too."

"It would be great. We'll work with what we've got, though, it just takes a bit more creativity and conservatism."

He snickers. "Yup, and we'll use it to fix the world."

"You seem very fond of repeating that phrase."

"I am incredibly fond of the concept in general, the phrase is just an easy way to say it."

"It's cute."

He laughs. "Thanks. I don't even know what I'll do if we manage it and I get the rest of eternity to live however I like with everything nice and neatly fixed. Maintenance, I suppose."

"Maintenance, enjoying the interesting hobbies and art on offer from our lovely fixed-up society, lots of sex..."

"With one person in particular on that last one," says Adarin, snuggling. "It'll be nice."

"I think so."

Snuggle, snuggle. "You realize that if all goes as planned this plane will end up being the all powerful utopia that you joked about. It'll be a self-fulfilling prophecy."

"Ooh, and you know what we get to do then? We get to be ludicrously helpful finds for interplanar travelers who were only looking for chamomile."

Adarin snickers. "Yes, and then they will make us helpful things to read our alethiometer and they'll end up teaming up with us for utopia purposes. It will spread, like a plague. Helpful utopias, as far as the eye can see."

"An infinity of helpful utopias full of helpful utopians. It'll be glorious."

"Indeed. Anyone looking for chamomile will get a pleasant and completely expected surprise. Which is kind of an oxymoron, but that's okay!"

Isabella giggles. Snuggles. "I'm glad you went looking for chamomile."

Snuggles. "As am I. This is the best plane. It has you, it has magic, it has Wikipedia..."

"It even has chamomile! As a distant runner-up."

"Waaaay in the back of this list of best things, somewhere, the actual thing I came here for. Yeah, that's appropriate."

"You got it where it needed to go, right?"

"First thing I did when I got back."

"Good. Wouldn't want anyone suffering from - remind me what it was to treat, again?"

"It was a kind of sleep disorder thing. I could have spelled up some lights, but only so many at a time and with expansion only with my magic, or - I could find means for alleviating it by helping people grow chamomile themselves. Guess which I chose."

"Ha. So it's for making sleepytime tea blends."

He giggles. "Yes. I mean it wasn't quite that trivial, there were some bad effects from lack of sleep, but - yeah. Sleepytime tea blends."

"Yeah, I don't mean to minimize it really, sleep's important - it just sounds funny."

"Bent reality to travel to another plane of existence and wind up sparking, as a side effect, what is likely to be the greatest economic and social upheaval two worlds have seen in years."

"Because of sleepytime tea blends. No one will ever speak badly of tea again."

"Tea can be the official imperial beverage when we've graduated to crowns!"

He laughs. "Alright! We'll drink it at all imperial functions and be really prissy about our tea types."

"Good thing I like chamomile all right, it'd be really inconvenient if I couldn't stand the stuff."

"We would just politely ignore it and pretend I came here for some other reason."

"Yes. We would pretend you came here for... the antidepressant effects of chocolate?"

"Yeah, that. I needed chocolate to save my former home. Chocolate is now the official imperial food."

"Mmmm, chocolate."

"Also, sour gummy worms. I needed them, too. Second official imperial food."

"We're accumulating quite a list."

"Three things isn't 'quite a list,' dear. It's a teensy part of a list. If we're going to make a kingdom or empire or something, we need to have an absurd list of necessities. It's Kystle tradition."

"We're not having our empire on Kystle, now, are we?"

"Ooo, true. Okay then, three is now a large list. Obviously something has to go. Should it be the tea, the chocolate, or the gummy worms?"

"I'm personally not a fan of the gummy worms, and the first candy I got you was Milk Duds, so the gummy worms don't have the symbolic importance of the chamomile."

"I thought I made you deliriously happy."

"Well, that too. But think of the gummy worms! Their loss will hurt our whatever-it-is-that-requires-crowns as a whole! I'm thinking about the future."

"You can still have gummy worms in an unofficial capacity."

"Aw, if I have to. For you, though."

"You will have to suffer through unofficial gummy worms, I'm so mean to you."

He giggles. Snuggle, snuggle. "Yes you are. It's okay, I love you anyway. Altruism wins versus unofficial gummy worms."

"But how many of these slights can you tolerate before something snaps?"

"Hmmm. Hmmmmmmm. Lots. I'm going to go with lots."

"I have lots of credit, huh?"

"Yeah. Do try not to abuse it," he says affectionately.

"Of course." Nuzzle.

Nuzzle! "Thank you. I love you."

She is on the phone with her new insurance company! She is done with them soon enough and he gets a good-morning kiss.

"I'd like to see, if that doesn't render the mana cost ludicrous!"

"It doesn't! It's about the same, I just tell it to show in the mirror rather than in my eyes. I can just tweak the mirror to reflect something else, and it's pretty easy since that's what they already do. It's better for long-term scrying, but a pain for little things."

"Then let's see some planets."

"Ooh, a moon, good not specifying we wanted planets only. This place is pretty. Water's drinkable?"

"Pity..." She has her notebook out; she identifies the planet in her notes and marks down the undrinkability. "It's certainly attractive, but I bet we can do better."

"Oh damn, this is also pretty. Any reason taking pictures of the pretty ones would interfere with the scrying? I should've thought of that at the last pretty one."

Adarin snickers. "No, it won't interfere. You can take pictures. Want me to go back to the other pretty one so you can take pictures of it, too?"

"Yes. Yes I do. I can send NASA a present, maybe publish a photobook."

Isabella takes pictures, and then kisses him on the cheek, and then asks about the water on this one.

He grins at the kiss. Some more scrying occurs, then - "This one's drinkable, though some parts have some salinity. Not as much as Earth's oceans, but some."

"I can desalinate, and it must rain some or there must be aquifers to feed those rivers. Okay, what's wrong with it? Continent-sized polonium deposits, constant meteor showers, dinosaurs roaming around looking for tasty human snacks?"

"Were a thing, they're extinct. Maybe after we've utopianized everything we can play Jurassic Park. How many earthquakes? Like, more or fewer than California?"

He snickers. "My spell didn't catch that, was that a movie? I only know Harry Potter and Star Trek. It has more earthquakes than California, I think, but not by too large of a factor."

"It was a movie. Some people cloned dinosaurs from mosquitoes in amber and made a zoo that was not up to code and problems resulted. Anyway, California's quite habitable, this is a solid maybe..." She writes notes.

"Salty, fishy, or Water Stealin' Place?" asks Isabella, snapping a picture.

"Surprisingly not salty," he pronounces. "It's got some fish, but otherwise might be a good Water Stealin' Place."

"Awesome." Note note.

"Wow, what stuff. This one I almost expect to be inhabited by people, it's so full of life, is there a way to filter for that?"

"...Not butterflies, huh? Can I see?"

"Yeah. We can make a portal someday - a small portal - and people can go there for risky big game hunting trips or something," shudders Isabella, noting this problem in her notebook. "Yeaugh."

"This one looks like an art project. Wow. Are these planty things not water based or are they getting it all out of the air or what?"

"This doesn't scream 'human-compatible ecosystem' to me. Huh."

"No, it doesn't. It's cool, though."

"Scrying won't let you check out what the plant things are doing? I'm curious."

"Topsoil Stealin' Planet?"

He snickers. "Possibly! At this rate we'll pick one of the boring ones and steal things we like from the others."

"Maybe we can find a mostly boring one with rings or aurorae or something, though." Note note.

"Well, that looks like the mining industry's weird Nyquil dreams. Doesn't look very habitable, though."

"Around the equator I think it might be, but for the most part - no. Weird Nyquil dreams?"

"I have never actually taken Nyquil, so I can't vouch, but my mom has a friend who says it gives her weird dreams. Nyquil is an over the counter drug," Isabella clarifies.

"Aha," he says, snickering. "I suppose starting a 'weird Nyquil dreams' based mining company is another option for making ludicrous amounts of money if portal-transportation dries up."

"We are not short on opportunities to make ludicrous amounts of money, certainly." Note note note.

"Well, this might work if we set up some kind of netting around any settlement, but can you imagine trying to leave your house and breathe at the same time even if you didn't have hay fever? Wow."

Adarin laughs. "You'd open the door, then bam, face full of - whatever those are. It's pretty, though."

"I think the giant sun would get old after a while."

"I would have a ton of trouble waking up in the morning. If we pick this planet, everyone will need to invest in thick curtains. For the plants, and for the sun."

"I think the best option we've seen so far is the one with the earthquakes. California has taught Earthlings much about earthquake-safe construction, and there might be relatively stable parts anyway. I don't suppose you can make actually floating cities?"

Pause. He tilts his head. "Hmm... maybe? I mean, it would be kind of a headache, but... I can make something way lighter than it should be. So I could make a rock or something be as light as, say, helium, and then it's just - like a blimp, but made out of rock."

"Blimps have to be huge to carry relatively small amounts of stuff. Does this get harder in quantity?"

"Kind of. I'd probably need a while to get everything, but there's nothing stopping me from doing part of it one day and then part of it another. Or having lots of smaller parts that float and connect to each other through bridges or something."

"Yeah, small parts sound good. Like midair houseboats. Things can be built piecemeal on the ground on - I'm not sure what material would be best for small neighborhood sized floaters but we can hire somebody to figure it out - so if a quake hits it's relatively low stakes, and floated when ready. And they can rearrange the bits if that's ever a good idea. And if everything's up high enough they won't shadow the underlying farmland with the imported topsoil and water too much."

Adarin nods, grinning. "Yeah. I worry about anyone falling off, but we can put up fences and such to prevent that kind of thing. But this is interesting, and useful."

"Fences, yes, obviously. I don't know, maybe it's structurally impossible to make a contiguous object that will support one house, let alone a handful, without collapsing - let's not commit to a planet yet. It might be easier to surround a city with a net to hedge out the floaty plants or a wall to keep out the giant bugs. Either one is a lesser challenge than a dome city on Mars, at any rate."

"Certainly. Boring lifeless planets also remain an option, but even the problems those bring are better than Mars. I'm sorry, Isabella, but it seems like colonizing Mars is no longer viable."

"Oh well. I'll struggle on somehow."

"Agreed," says Adarin faintly, staring at the buildings.

"Whoever built them is - dead? Gone? Naturally invisible and not very tidy?"

"Robots?" guesses Isabella. They're not humanoid at all - they're more like round Rubix-Cube-like things with protruding tools and wheels and objects of unclear function from half their panels, no two configured quite alike - but it looks like they aren't attached to anything and could have moved autonomously before they ran down.

"I suppose? I'm just - confused, are they just in disrepair and effectively dead, or...? I don't know how to check that with scrying."

"Can you tell if they have - charged batteries, I guess? Or an equivalent?"

He tries to check, then pronounces, "I have no idea what I'm looking at. I couldn't tell you if they even have batteries, not without long-term and in-depth scrying. It's just - extremely foreign."

"Well, I don't see a lot of alien skeletons, carapcaces, or chitin around, and the cities are really, really overgrown - so I'm inclined to think it's not likely they're still working."

"Yeah. I'm intensely curious about what happened there, but I'm a little hesitant to just - go visit and see."

"If it was some kind of biological problem - I'm really not getting the impression that humans lived here, however improbably similar you and I are. If it was a disaster or a war, it looks pretty thoroughly over at this point."

"True. I don't know if there's a way to check for biological problems - the air's breathable, the ground isn't toxic to the touch, but if it's some kind of germ I haven't figured out how to get a scry to get that in-depth yet."

"How can your scry tell what particles are in the air and not look at the microorganisms?"

"Mostly because I didn't know they existed a few months ago and I haven't figured how to make it do that yet," says Adarin wryly.

"Oh. Yes, I suppose that makes sense. Well, we might have a problem with diseases on any planet with an ecology. We have here strong evidence that one species went suddenly extinct here, a long time ago, but any complicated set of evolved life is going to have a history of extinctions that just don't leave artifacts lying around. This one at least has the benefit of plausible explanations like 'they had a war' on top of the unlikelihood that we're susceptible to extraplanetary germs anyway."

"Fair enough. It's sounding like you'd like to go visit."

"I'm seriously tempted. If you want to wait a while trying to make your scrying work on viruses and monocellular life I won't fight you on it."

"It would make me feel better. I'd also like to prod my sister for a return teleportation if something goes horrifically wrong, so we're not stranded there if it turns out people do live there and they like to collect scalps."

"That's a sensible precaution, I support it."

He smiles a little. "Thanks. I guess I'll get to work on how to make scrying work on germs. We do have time, it's not like the planet's going anywhere."

"Except around its sun."

He snorts with laughter. "Well, yes. But it's not going to get up and walk away."

"It will not. Since we're being conservative about germs and most planets that are interesting have this concern, I guess we can call it a day on planet-shopping?"

"I think so, yeah. We got basically all of the planets that meet the requirements within one teleportation of Earth - there are probably others further out, but if we want to get to those we'll have to find a planet to stay at during the interim. Which has its own problems."

Isabella nods.

Adarin gives Isabella a quick kiss, then says, "Alright, I'll go mutter to myself about germ theory and scrying combinations. Wish me luck!"