"Okay. Uh, some people will do it for the world-saving, I'm sure, they would even if you were going to kill them. How much can you put out before we have to start chucking people into the ocean?"

"I can in fact Feed nonfatally, they're just not going to have a good time of it. Ah - you can have probably one-ish flashy expensive thing before I need to Feed about it - that won't help. Point me at the place where there should be lots of water and I will make there be lots and lots of water, maybe tsunami-ish amounts of water? And then you are going to need to Feed me. Alternatively you can have less all-at-once water than that and therefore more time but you had still better find me someone in the next day or two even if I don't make any tsunamis and it sort of sounds like you would rather the tsunami."

"I want air first. People will notice if the air goes back to normal even if they don't live by the sea, and it sounds like if they live by the sea they had better stop. Then they'll believe that there's something going on."

"Alright. That's slightly trickier just because I'm Sea aspect primary but I expect I can still do it. It'll almost certainly make one hell of a windstorm, though, is there somewhere that'll be minimally disastrous?"

"......it has to be from a single point?" she muses.

"I mean I can try for not if you want me to? I in fact specialize in finicky environmental control exercises, in a certain sense, it's just - the thing I am doing here is calling on Infinity, Nature Who Is Bigger Than You Are, to do big flashy expensive things that substantially affect the atmosphere of an entire planet, and that doesn't always lend itself well to tidy. Even if I'm trying for minimum disruptive, it's... probably wise to find me somewhere you won't mind a windstorm in advance."

"The thing is that if you could get it so it wasn't going to knock down buildings and put tree branches through people's ribcages the best point would be in Gatesnest so it could go through the portals and spread all over the world. But it's a city, you can't do that if it'll flatten the city and especially not if it'll wreck the gates."

"Ah. I see the problem. I don't know how sturdy your gates are, but - 'enough air to seriously affect the planet' and 'not flattening anything' are a little at odds?"

"Well, you can teleport, can you do a few spots so it's not all coming from a single one? I can show you a globe."

"That I can definitely do. Globe'd be good, thank you, I can blind-teleport to 'the other side of the world' or whatever but if I didn't want to be standing wherever that ends me up that's a me problem so globe is good."

"This way." The way is downstairs into a basement. "My name is Ranary, by the way."

Crow will follow her!

"Ah! Introductions, that's. A good idea. I'm Crow."

"Are you like, a crow that was transformed by magic mostly into a human, or something?"

Crow laughs.

"No, I actually started human before I was empowered, and I took the name Crow before I got the wings."

"They're really nice wings," says Ranary. "Here's the globe."

The world has a bit more land than Earth, nine continents mostly connected to their neighbors by Panamas and Suezes and archipelagos.

"I'm tempted to suggest the poles," Ranary says. "But that'll blow specifically cold air everywhere, which seems worse, weather-wise."

Crow smiles at the compliment. "Thank you!"

"And yeah, that sounds like it might mess with your weather even more and I - can't imagine your weather is the very most stable already. You know more about your planet than I do, though, it's your choice."

"The places where we know we're losing water are here, here, here, and here," Ranary adds, pointing out bright red tacks stuck into the globe. "Those would be good places to add water, I think, I'm not an expert in how oceans work. But air... well, over here is the biggest ocean, and here's the second biggest, that might give it more space to spread out and calm down? Or does that make it worse?"

"Iiii am not actually sure? More space to calm down feels probably like a good thing? And I can try for Not Windstorm it's just that I suspect you get some Windstorm anyway."

"It's space to calm down but maybe it won't calm down and will be a hurricane, those start over the ocean..."

"That is true. I... miiiiight be able to do something about it if it did but I wouldn't want to count on it - again, your choice."

"Do what about it?"

"Depends on what exactly it's doing. In the most extreme case - again, I don't guarantee this would work, but I might well be able to send the whole storm back somewhere else. Of course, then you don't have the air that was in it anymore and I've done approximately zero helpful things for the price of two."

Ranary sighs. "I should maybe run this by more people."

"Might not be a bad idea. I can bring us somewhere, if there's somewhere we should be? Or if it wouldn't be much faster for me to bring us I can follow you somewhere if that's easier."

"Everyone I know is in Gatesnest somewhere or other. We can see if Cor's home."