"...the food you're sending mental concepts of all sounds both of edible and way better than it's currently feasible to get, but if it might kill me I should give my notes to Ranary first."

:Right.: Now he wants to try to see if their biologies are similar enough that the food will transfer but this isn't very relevant. :Which travel method would you prefer?: He loves flying and thinks more people should get to experience it but this is not true of all people.

"Flying is good, I am also curious about your pocket dimension but as long as we're worried about things maybe killing me I'd rather hand off my notes first."

No problem. Fly fly fly back to Cor's house.

He gathers up his notes into a bundle to hand over to the other mages Just In Case.

:If you are ready to enter, I can bring you there now.:

"I'd like to hand off the notes in case Ranary has any questions about anything on there!"

Oops. Also, he's assuming Ranary is the name of the woman, now.

Lawrence is fine with flying the two of them to wherever she is, if he knows.

If they're going to wait, then Lawrence might just take out furniture and dining ware and the food out of the Bevin and eat it here. Is that fine? He's assuming Cor's house is not set up to entertain visitors right now.

She's presumably gone back to the mages' guildhall and Cor would appreciate the flight and he is welcome to eat at the guildhall while Cor catches Ranary et al up on things.

Lawrence has already visited the mages' guildhall and can take them there!

He doesn't really know where's appropriate but he's going to pick a seemingly unused corner and cause a a marble block to appear in his hands and make a chair and a small table from it, and then he causes food to appear on marble plates, along with cutlery. There's eggs and sausages, creamy rice pudding, garlic fried rice, and pound cake. The pound cake is from yesterday but it's not stale because he imprisoned the leftovers. There is also a tea pot, a tea cup, and saucers, and a bowl of sugar and milk.

He's a slow eater so unless Cor finishes in more than an hour, he'll still be at it.

Cor takes about half an hour to turn over his notes, take questions thereupon, and make a copy of the key parts he'll need if he winds up wanting to try his spell himself in the future, and then he swings by to rejoin Lawrence. "- I smell garlic," he remarks.

:Yes, it's garlic fried rice.: It's actually jarlic — he's recently been able to coax his Bevin into providing vegetables but they're all non-fresh ones. He guesses he'll have to spend on the Bevin garden perk if he actually wants fresh stuff.

He, and anyone else there, is totally welcome to eat with him and he will even produce additional chairs and cutlery and expand the table, with the understanding that it might be poisonous because of subtle but vital biological differences. He thinks it ought not to be but all the books he's read about the different worlds were written by Conduits (or at least, it seemed to him that they were) and Conduits have magic biology and immortality, so.

"Garlic's been impossible to get for a while, there were only a handful of places best for growing it and they were all hard-hit." He will take a seat and some rice.

That is so sad!!! Anyway, they can eat together in silence for a bit.

:I just realized that I've been very dumb.: Embarrassment.

:I forgot that I gave my slave, Rendon, some of my magic and that he can traverse bridges too. And transport others across them, etc.: He didn't think of this before because he was thinking only of Conduits and also because he normally doesn't have the Calling perk.

:So it turns out I don't need to choose between evacuation and trying to imprison the disappearance points. Which I still need to test, if it works or not. He can do the former and I can do the latter — he doesn't have the ranged sculpting ability. If imprisoning the points doesn't work, then I can help with evacuation.

How many people live on this planet?:

"...it was about a," his mouth is full, he'll choose this moment to dispense with the talking-aloud crutch, billion before the war. Less now. I don't know by how much. Slavery is illegal in Gatesnest but under the circumstances you can probably get a pass.:

No, him talking aloud is actually helpful in picking up the language! But yes, it is not necessary for him to do it, and he may choose not to do so.

(Hm, a billion. Less than his Earth. But they have a lower tech level...did the Earth population reach a billion in the 1800s? He's not sure.)

:That makes me very reluctant to let him out of my Bevin to do work. I would accept it if there was someone with authority here who could make representations that it was permitted to me but there but she, Ranary, I think, said that there wasn't one. I don't want to help and then be punished for it. Does it matter legally if the slavery was entered into with mutual consent? It was actually me that was the reluctant one...: Amusement.

:Do you know the specific wording of the relevant laws prohibiting it?:

:No one has the authority to punish you, you're not from this planet and don't live here! Please do not either make me figure out how to legalize slavery or do half as much to help my dying planet when you can simply do neither of those things! I don't know the full text of the law, just snippets like, all persons shall self-represent to the public except where they are minor children or definitive incompetents, something like that?:

:I'm not making you do anything. It's just —: Exasperation. Annoyance. Frustration.

:I'm just going to operate under the assumption that law has been suspended in the meantime, I guess. Maybe. I don't feel good about it because I feel like I'm wronging him, by interacting with a society that refuses to legitimize his existence as a slave...nevermind. Let's talk logistics and magic. Can you procure a map of the planet?:

:I can go see if the one in the basement is still there.: He gets up and heads down the stairs.

:Do you want me to follow you or wait here?:

"Waiting here is fine."

He's back in two minutes with a big map rolled up under one arm.

In the meantime, he will imprison all the leftovers and put them back in his Bevin. And expand the table so that it fits the map, and make or move a chair for Cor.

:Thank you. I want to know where we are right now. And where the bridge to Prison is, where I came in: He can give an impression of the location to Cor.

:I also want to know the location of major settlements, and the locations of...you mentioned earlier there are people whose situation is much more urgent because of the planet losing atmosphere thus making high altitude regions uninhabitable? If I understood or remembered correctly.:

"This neighborhood is here," Cor points. "But my house is here," on this other continent. "What do you have that you'd be able to do about people who live in the mountains?"

The gates are truly a wonderful working! He creates a marble token with a relief pattern of concentric circles and places it at the neighborhood, and another token for Cor's house with a house design.

:I can make a large platform out of prison marble and have people go on it, then use my acceleration power on it. At full utilization I can accelerate 1600kg of material, myself included, at 4g acceleration — I can accelerate more material at the cost of lower maximum acceleration, but obviously I'm not going to accelerate the platform with people at 4gs anyway — they would be hurt by it. This should be enough to transport thousands of people from those places to safer places — I don't know which places would be able to take in refugees, here, though.

The alternative would be imprisoning them but the time stasis situation is...:

The books he's read say that imprisonment keeps people who are in it aware. There were several mentions of it. But it also like, puts them in stasis. When he imprisoned a watch and released it, the watch was as if time was stopped while it was inside. He's tested imprisoning Rendon and when he was released he said that he didn't feel anything inside, didn't feel time passing. So his best guess is either that the books are wrong, or that they are aware but they're put in a kind of time loop, or that they are aware but there's an effect that reverts things back to how they were at the moment of imprisonment when they are released. So it's kind of like. Fraught.

:I interpreted the situation as them dying from lack of air such that it's urgent on the level of hours, so I think this is the best use of my time right now but maybe not. Both me and Rendon can do this but he'd be slower. And it's best to give them advance notice of the evacuation so we don't wait so long for stragglers.

I'll need to make an outpost here: he gestures at the portal location, :to generate a lot of marble with which to make the platforms. It will take an hour and maybe another hour to make the large platforms.: