"Yeah, I'm telling everyone to bring all the food they can carry and anything they'll need to rebuild. There isn't anything to eat in the Sea, is there? Oh, and you're going to have to stash all the gates - will you be able to put them back where you got them without memorizing them individually?"

"Nnnot really on the things to eat in the Sea, no, though I think people also generally just kind of don't starve? But that's - wibbly, especially given we're pulling nonsense with boats, and food is definitely a good idea. As for the gates, I'm not sure, I may or may not be able to do that - how disastrous is it if I can't?"

"A gate is a disappearance point. You make one of the size you want on a couple big sheets of wood glued together, and do magic in small increments till it eats through the glue layer. Then you peel the frame apart with a solvent, and the two sides are still the same disappearance point, with no space between them, and you can ship the halves wherever you want them and switch to being associated with a new disappearance point so you don't grow it more like that. But when they eventually eat enough of the frame that if they get any worse they'll be impossible to transport, we replace them and put the originals in a big point in the ground. If the storming and quaking is bad, they'll fall over, their frames will break, et cetera, more disappearance points when you'll have just cleaned up."

"Oh huh. How do you get them to move things instead of disappear things?"

"But that makes sense. My actual question was - if I scoop up all the gates and then I cannot in fact reliably put them approximately back where I got them from, how many problems does this cause?"

"They do disappear the edges of the frame gradually, same as the planet punctures are doing, but nobody uses them to keep doing magic with; once they're usable we disconnect from them. So they do that only very slowly. Can you keep track of... ten big ones? There are a lot more than that but if ten were in the right places we could match up all the others and get them where they were going eventually."

"Yeah, I can keep track of ten. And I feel like that didn't answer my question about how you get them to move things? But that's probably not important to answer right now."

"The disappearance points eat the space between them. There isn't any and keeps not being any if you split them in half."

"But does touching a disappearance point not make you disappear? Instead of being somewhere else? I remain confused about this, sorry."

"You've been through a portal, right? The part that is still consuming and vanishing matter is a ring around the edge, in the frame. But inside that ring, it's just non-distance."

"Ahh, okay, cool. I had misunderstood how disappearance points worked, that makes sense, thank you - and yeah, I've been through a portal, the first bit of Gatesnest I was pointed to wasn't a bit where I could find a mage and the directions to where I could went through one."

"And Ranary would've taken one to get you here, surely. But if they fall over or the frames break, they're a problem."

"Makes sense. Yeah, I'll definitely want to scoop them all up and put them in the Sea, and yeah I'm pretty sure I can keep track of ten big ones."

"Of course they can only go back after the aftermath is settled down. But ten's enough to restore the network."

"Makes sense."

"Is that all the big logistics things for the moment? What are - the next actions we should be taking - was Ranary going to come back with more people to hook up to the Sea disappearance point?"

"...also, I'm not sure if I ever got your name, but if I did I've forgotten, sorry. I'm Crow."

"I'm Cor. Welcome to our world, long may it live. I think she's got a lot of running around to do because most of our friends are trying to be inconvenient to find, I'm very lucky that random angry people mostly don't know where I live because I'm not the house party type."

"Ah. This very much makes sense! Is the next step 'wait for Ranary,' then?"

Actually. 

"Also -" she takes off one of her necklaces, a spiral seashell pendant on a string, and takes the shell off it, putting the empty string back on and offering Cor the shell " - if you ever end up in a situation where you'd rather be in the Sea than wherever you are, listening into this will send you and everything you're holding to the Sea, and I will come get you and we can deal with whatever the situation was."

"You’ll automatically notice I'm there?" he asks, taking it. "Does it do anything else?" He has a pendulum on a chain and the shell can have it instead.

"I will notice you're there, yes. And no, it should do nothing else - it is the simplest little droplet of a Vast Artifact, just sometimes useful as a contingency."

"Thank you."

Crow smiles.

"Of course."

"Now, are our next actions to wait for Ranary?"

"Pretty much. If you need to sleep or anything this might be a good time."