"Contain them? That'd - well, it'd buy us time - there's a lot of them -"

He's thinking that they're considering evacuation, but he doesn't know how urgent it is.

:Is the situation urgent on the order of hours or days? I don't know what's happening except I heard that the world is ending. I don't know if my power would work but I'd want to try it.:

"We're not sure. We think - maybe some people will be able to hang on for months. Depending."

:I see. I would be pleased to buy you time if I'm able to do so. Before that...:

He has a bunch of questions. What's the legal situation in Gatesnest? He would love to be given books on governance and law and precedent in Gatesnest. Where is its territory and jurisdiction? Does he need to have a visa or permission to enter — he can leave and then do what is necessary first, if so. Although...he's assuming it's an international problem in which case is there international government he should direct requests to? He was told, or he implied from another's words, that murder is illegal but he doesn't know what criteria constitute murder. Is there legislation regarding the appropriate use of magic — he used his flight ability before but maybe that's actually prohibited, because no one flies here. Not to mention telepathy...

The questions stop abruptly. :Is there anyone you know that would be willing to act as legal liaison for me? Or, actually, has martial law been declared? If so, I would like to speak to whoever is in command of Gatesnest.:

Ranary shares the random café-goer's opinion that this is not really the time to be worrying about the legal situation in Gatesnest. If he is super hung up on it she knows where the hall of justice is but has no way to verify that it hasn't been looted for containing burnable paper and/or symbols of the institutions that failed to prevent this so it might not currently contain a complete written code. There is not an international government what would that even mean. Is he planning to kill anyone, she can source him a volunteer if he needs to kill people to make his evacuation magic work?? They are trying to minimize magic use right now because it makes the disappearance problem worse but if he doesn't have that issue that doesn't apply to him. They can't fly or do telepathy so they don't have laws about it. There is OBVIOUSLY no single identifiable person in charge of Gatesnest? There wasn't even before? Having single identifiable people in charge of things is how you get them assassinated?? She was going to recommend he talk to Cor but she really, really doesn't understand why he seems to want some kind of lawyer and Cor is not a lawyer.

Well Lawrence cares about knowing the law! He wouldn't want to inadvertently break the law in Gatesnest. He thinks of it as being a basic thing you want to do when you enter a place, like knowing whether a house is a shoes-on or shoes-off house. But if they're in a state of apocalyptic anarchy...oh well.

Lawrence is not intending to kill anyone and it's not necessary for his magic to work. He also isn't intending to steal or attack people without provocation or destroy other people's property — he sends his conceptions of the definition of these words which basically correspond to their Earth definitions.

:Am I currently at risk of assassination? Why are people in Gatesnest being assassinated?: (He has immortality but like. Dying is painful. And maybe their world's magic can truekill him...he doesn't know the reason why all the old Conduits seem to have disappeared...)

Yeah they're in a state of apocalyptic anarchy. People are mostly doing what they've always done with apocalyptic anarchy on top. "I don't think you're very much at risk - it's mages who can do it and if mages wanted the world to end faster we'd notice that. It's just major politicians get blamed for things and there's often someone who thinks it'd be better if they were dead."

He sighs telepathically.

:I'm going to give you a bit more context about the powers I have which seem relevant to the situation.:

Lawrence has the ability to generate and shape Prison marble, which is incredibly durable. He thinks it might be indestructible, actually, not that he has good destructive powers. He's rammed huge blocks of it against another at Mach speeds but they just plinked off of each other with nary a scratch. It also seems to have magically abjuring or blocking powers, because it's opaque to Spatial Sense — he explains Spatial Sense and how it allows him to notice the shape and density of things, including their interiors. But with Prison marble, even if he knows that the marble is hollow, he can't tell that it is so with Spatial Sense unless he breaks into it.

He can also Imprison things by totally enclosing them in Prison marble. As far as he knows, it's impossible for the imprisoned thing to break itself out, or really, to have any further causal effect on the world.

His current experiment plans are to try to drop Prison marble on a disappearance point, try to partially insert a Prison marble object in one, and entirely enclose one. Does she know where they could find a small disappearance point to try these things? Does she think any of these things would have some obvious horrible backfire such that he should not do them?

"Most disappearance points aren't very skinny and most of them have punched through the globe by now I think. ...we can make you a tiny new one if the first experiments seem promising."

Nonskinniness is fine!...wow okay, so that's what's causing the apocalypse. That might be a problem because, while Lawrence doesn't need to breathe, he isn't immune to high heat. But maybe he'll figure something out still.

Does she have any recommendations on where to do the tests at? She can convey an image and a location for them. He can bring other people along to fly — he is comfortable bringing two. Alternatively they can walk, or he can put her in his pocket dimension while he flies there and let her out at the destination. The pocket dimension is anchored to his body.

"I think maybe you should talk to Cor, and I should go tell everyone else what's up."

:Okay! Oh, right, I forgot to introduce myself. I am the Lawgiver Lawrence.: 'Lawgiver' is a title and 'Lawrence' is the name. He is fine being referred to by either or both.

It turns out that social skills are a thing that can rust and when the only social interaction you have for fifteen years are your slave, a zoologist monster hunter, and a shut-in who writes weird erotica, all of whom are magic...you lose the instincts for social interaction with normal people.

He can be led to Cor.

Ranary will take him through the necessary series of gates to get to Cor's neighborhood and the necessary series of streets from there to get to Cor's house.

"I'm working!" comes a voice at the knock.

"Well, stop that and come out!"

Cor answers the door; he's got blood painted on his left arm. "Ranary, this is not especially the time - hello, who's this -"

Passing through gates continues to make his Spatial Sense freak out but he is ignoring it.

That is certainly a bloody arm. Hm, maybe they do animal sacrifice here for their magic, including human ones? The woman, who did not offer her name back, did come to the hypothesis that Lawrence's magic might require it rather quickly.

He will tell Cor about telepathy telepathically. And a summary of the earlier conversation.

"Ranary, you are forgiven everything," he says, grabbing a sponge out of a bucket of water to rinse his arm off before he puts on a shirt.

"I'd better be," she agrees.

Before launching deeper into conversation about magic, Lawrence will remember his manners this time and introduce himself.

:Hello. I am the Lawgiver Lawrence. You must be Cor?:

"That's me. Welcome to our world, it's dying. If you can lock up the disappearance points - or even if you can generate enough of your marble stuff to feed them so they stop eating other stuff - that buys us time to get out of here - are there more of you, can we recruit extras to improve bandwidth even if they all have the same abilities you do - come on inside -"

He enters.

:Thank you for your welcome. I would be extremely shocked if they could eat the marble and it would obviate the locking up plan.:

Regarding the question of other Conduits, he gives the same answer he did earlier.

:Aside from locking up the disappearance points or conjuring additional matter to feed them...could I get an explanation of how they work, etc.? Maybe there's something else that would be better that I could do.: (It's kind of cruelly funny. Their world will last, apparently, months. Not even a full year to gain a point to spend something on. Not that he could use it for anything — he hasn't connected to this world yet.)

"Are Conduits the only people you're aware of with remotely possibly applicable abilities or resources of any kind, or could you help us reach non-Conduits who might have something? I can give you the background on how disappearance points behave but mind that we have recently learned some new things about them and our extrapolations from that might not all be right."

:Possibly no. But trying to meet some and ask them for help...I don't know how long that would take. Possibly decades, maybe more. I could go into more detail later.

Thank you for your warning, please do.:

"Magic - our magic - is based on destroying things. The three basic forms of destruction are death, burning, and annihilation. Mages use representations of those things in our spells - usually the first two, easier to work with - to identify what we want to destroy and how, plus some chanting to focus the effect. The way someone becomes a mage is by connecting to a disappearance point. Every time we do any magic, the disappearance point eats a little more. I say 'eats a little more' and not 'gets a little bigger' because they don't have fixed sizes, exactly; they warp space.

"We were aware that some had gotten deep enough to be eating magma under the surface of the planet, but - it all looks about the same. We didn't know how deep they were. The new things we have learned recently are that they accelerate their destruction on their own, not exclusively when they are used, and that they were quite a bit deeper than we'd guessed. We found this out when one punched through to the opposite side of the world and swallowed half a city. But since that was a novel phenomenon it looked like an act of war and we had a war about it for a while before we realized it was happening all over. Most of them don't have cities on the other side but we're losing ocean. The planet's getting lighter and we're bleeding air into space, too."