The air is thin, the gravity is a bit less than 1g. The location: a stone bridge over a dry creekbed.

Oh huh, what's going on with the air? Maybe it's a mountaintop or something? Crow is Categorically Not A Thing That Suffocates anyway, it's fine - okay stone bridge means there's people of some kind somewhere, let's find them.

Crow takes off flying, looking for anything interesting.

It's not a mountaintop. It looks like a pretty low-lying area, insofar as one can tell without immediate visual access to the sea level comparison. The bridge connects a road that leads to a village, downstream (when there's a stream) where the creek switches back, in the one direction, to a slightly larger town. There are farms, not doing so hot. There are buildings. Pastures. Windmills. Barns. People, though fewer people than it looks like might be usual.

Aaaaare we being remotely responsible about what passes for a Masquerade today... no we are not, this is an adventure.

Also huh. Maybe wherever this is is just like this? 

Crow flies down to land in the village near some of the people. 

Some scream and scatter! An eight year old boy gawks at her! An old lady takes off her glasses to clean them on her scarf! It seems descending winged humanoids are not an everyday occurrence.

Yeah she was not particularly expecting them to be, they aren't at home either. She lands and Does Not do anything more purposely threatening than exist. 

"Hello. Where is this?"

(One of her necklaces, a glass eye the same color as her own, does translation. Or rather - she Understands and Is Understood.)

"Rechher," says the old lady, putting her glasses back on and then removing them again when she finds the result unsatisfactory.

"Is that the name of the village or the country or the world? - I don't think this is my any of those, the air's thinner than it should be this not being a mountain."

"The village," says the old woman suspiciously. "The air's been doing that. If you weren't paying attention for the last couple of months it might come as a shock."

"I'm fairly sure I'm from really deeply somewhere else and the air at home is not in fact doing that."

"...why is the air doing that?"

"World's ending."

Crow blinks. Adventure indeed! 

"Ookay. Why is the world ending and is anybody doing anything about it?"

"Nothing to do, I don't think. Mages did some dumb-as-sheep mage thing."

"Mages?"

This is not someone's successful Ritual, the world would be ended, not ending - and also there is nobody Crow knows who would call avatars mages.

"The dumb-as-sheep ones, yes."

"What did they do? And do you know where I could find one to talk to?"

"They did too much magic, of course. If they've got even as much sense as a sheep they're hiding!"

"What do you mean by too much magic. Why does this make the world be ending. I am not from here, my magic clearly does not work at all like yours, 'too much magic' is way less explanation than you want it to be."

"The world is getting disappeared because that's what magic does, whatever fancy targeting you do there's only less and less until there's nothing left to live on."

"Wow. Congratulations, your magic might be less natively helpful than mine and mine Feeds on fear!"

"...this is sounding like I should definitely find a mage to talk to. You don't know where any are, it sounded like? If you do but they're far away, tell me anyway, distance is not a thing I care much about."

"They usually live in cities. Like Gatesnest, if that's a city. But if they have any sense they're hiding from a lot of people who might like them to live a little less long than the world."

"Which direction from here is Gatesnest, can you point?"

"I think there's like three of it in various directions."

"Well, can you point to any of them?"

She points vaguely east-southeast.

Crow nods. "Thank you."

And she will take off flying in that direction until she sees something plausibly interesting! 

Crow, at genuine all-out top speed, is fast. Airplane may not win that race fast. She's not flying at anything close to her top speed right now, of course - it's expensively tiring and she doesn't have a good reason to - but she is nonetheless faster than any ordinary bird. 

Crow flies, and the Sky is hers.

As the Crow flies, the south-southeasterly Gatesnest bit is half an hour away.

Gatesnest is a distributed city, something like a hundred towns all beside one another in an almost four-dimensional way. The weather is a little odd near all of its pieces - only a little, but if you're sensitive to it you might notice that it's kind of got the humidifier and the dehumidifier and the heat and the aircon all on at once. It also is under no constraint to have a normal distribution of businesses in physical proximity and this particular physical proximity happens to have a lot of slaughterhouses and leatherworkers and butchers and such. There are pastures in the surrounds.

Crow will in fact notice that something is Weird with the weather. Huh. Wonder if that's part of whatever's making the air thin...

She flies above the towns, looking for something vaguely official-looking or otherwise specifically interesting.

She cannot get out of the dead animal district on the wing.

Huh. Well okay then!

Crow picks a leatherworker-type shop and flies down to land in front of it. 

The shop door is closed; the windows show saddles and bags and piles of variously dyed leather sheets for sale but it is not obviously doing much business right now.

Does it seem open and just not busy or does it seem closed? Also are there any random people around on the street? 

There is a person inside the shop. A few walking around, mostly looking pretty glum.

If any of the ambient people are obviously interesting, Crow approaches them. Otherwise, she will go into the shop. 

This guy has a zither, is that interesting? Once she stands in the guy's path he looks up from his shoes and blinks at the wings. "What?" he says.

"Hello! I'm looking for a mage to talk to and was told to look in Gatesnest and pointed in this direction."

"Oh. Yeah. This is Gatesnest. Wrong neighborhood though. If you want to go punch a mage's teeth in, that way." He gestures in a direction; a couple blocks away the close between a butcher shop (boarded up) and a raw wool shop (not boarded up but not lively either) next to it has a gate across it that leads into another part of the world.

"Not looking to punch one's teeth in, just talk to one. But thank you."

Crow flies fairly low over to the gate and steps through. 

He lets out a bit of a yelp when she takes off.

It's autumn here! The trees lining the streets are pines, not deciduous, and it's raining, and there are more people around, and the neighborhood character appears to be more "old stone buildings" than "butcher shops and allies".

Yayyyyy rain, Vastling likes the rain! 

Are any of the people interesting, especially noticeable-magic type interesting? If so, Crow will approach and talk to them.

They're mostly heads-down under umbrellas. What might make one interesting?

If they're obviously fancier than other people, or - shiny, in the social-presence way of people with mantles, or otherwise obviously have some kind of mantle, or actually also if they're shiny in the social-presence way of people who are just high-charisma, or failing any of those she will pick someone who doesn't look exceptionally grumpy or in a hurry at approximate random and approach them. 

That one over there is wearing what might constitute locally fancy clothes!

Great, we'll take it! Crow approaches them. 

She doesn't notice right away because she's weaving between puddles trying not to get water in her fancy socks.

The water is going to refuse to get in her fancy socks, thank you! Water is belong to Crow. She may not notice this if she is being sufficiently careful, though. 

"Hello?"

"Hello, what's - oh, your cloak, is it waterproof?"

Crow flutters her wings slightly, just enough to make the point that Nope Those Are Wings.

"Not actually a cloak!"

"...ah-hm."

"I'm looking for a mage to talk to, do you know where I could find one?"

"They used to meet over there -" Point. "Portal in the blue frame on the right, then it's the building with the most stairs that you can see from where it lets out."

"Thank you!"

Crow follows the given directions!

The building is obvious, has been recently vandalized, and does not have a reception desk or anything for her.

Aaaaare there any people who seem obviously in relation to the building around?

It looks like being obviously related to this building might be a bad plan, but she could try going in.

She will in fact go into the building!

Somebody is in here, pulling a coat off a hook to hunt through the pockets. She drops it in a puddle it dripped onto the floor when Crow comes in, startled.

Puddle can vanish into the Void and the things are dry now again!

"Hello! I'm looking for a mage to talk to, I was told to come here?"

"O-oh, what do you want with a mage?"

"I'm told the world is ending, and I'm told it's some mage thing, and I'm told your magic is even less helpful than mine, and I wanted to talk to someone who might know more about any of these things."

"Ah - I'm reasonably certain I'm from really deeply somewhere else, 'not this planet and likely not this universe' quantities of somewhere else, hence the different magic and the not knowing anything that's going on." 

"Different? Different how?"

"My magic - my world's magic - Feeds on Fear. There are various Dread Powers, each with a collection of domains and kinds of Fear they Feed on, and there are empowered things and places- and people" clearly meaning herself "- that do things depending on what they're empowered by. Everything empowered must in some way Feed its Patron, though."

"I am a servant of Infinity or the Vast - the Fear of heights and depths, the Sea, the Sky, the Void, anything that is simply Bigger Than You Are." There is a noticeable touch of reverence in her voice as she speaks of her Power. 

"You know, our magic was fine before the byproduct started exponentiating, actually," huffs the woman.

"The fact that your magic makes world ending byproduct at all I think makes it even less natively helpful than mine. But - can you tell me more about this byproduct? What exactly is your magic doing?"

"- well, a mage has to be connected to a disappearance point, and whenever they cast a spell, they destroy what they were aiming at but also - enhance, I hesitate to say 'increase' - the disappearance point. And it was impossible to tell how deep they were... and some have now punched through the planet."

"I see. And your magic only destroys, and never creates, and so a bunch of stuff having been wrecked you have no good way to fix it."

"Why's the world actively ending more, though? Can you not - stop using magic and then only have wrecked as much stuff as is already wrecked?"

She shakes her head. "They eat more matter on their own. Whatever's near. Faster over time."

"...ah. Is this meaningfully helped by feeding them or will that only make them grow extra faster?"

"We think it helps - the ones that punched through to ocean are growing slower on their land sides, water pours in. But the thing that's going to kill us first is the planet not holding atmosphere, you can't fix that by shoveling rocks around."

Oh wonderful, a problem she can in fact help with.

Crow smiles widely, and then there is a puddle on the floor. A much bigger puddle than the one she stuck elsewhere earlier, in case there was any doubt. She leaves it for a few moments before putting the water back in the Sea and leaving the floor dry again.

"I am a servant of Infinity. I am so, so, so not about to run out of large quantities of air and water. This is what Infinity does."

"...planet-scale amounts?" says Ranary suspiciously. "That's - that'd buy us years, I think, I'd want to recheck the math -"

"You'd have to Feed me, every Power has a Price... but Fear is sustainable, if you have either of volunteers or people you don't like much and I wouldn't either, and Infinity means it."

"...may I show you the Sea? Just as - a demonstration of the meaning it."

"Let me leave a note first."

"Of course."

Crow will wait for her to leave a note!

She runs off to do that. She's back in five minutes.

Crow is waiting! She smiles at the lady. 

"Shall I show you the Sea now?"

Gulp. "Yes please."

Crow smiles slightly at the lady's Fear. She is what she is. 

And then they are floating near each other in the Endless Sea. It is calm, and blue, and the lady cannot see any land and she knows in her heart that there is no land here. She cannot see a bottom, either, looking down - only more Endless blue into the darkness. It is impossible not to feel at least a little Small, here. The Ocean Is Bigger Than You Are. 

Crow shifts slightly, gaining patches of silver scales and webbed hands and feet and almost penguiny wings. She looks at the lady with too-reflective eyes, and there is reverence in her voice as she speaks. 

"Welcome to the Endless Sea."

"It’s kind of beautiful... does it have fish?"

"Some parts. Here doesn't, though."

"I don't know if you should put fish in our oceans or not... they're probably different kinds..."

"We could see. Mostly it sounds as though what you need is lots and lots and lots of water?"

"Yes. We're probably losing fish and stuff to the disappearances too but water solves the most immediate issue."

"Makes sense."

"Shall we return to the world now?"

"Sure. Thank you for showing me."

Crow smiles. "Of course."

And they are standing back in the room they left, perfectly dry. Crow reaches to steady the lady from the inevitable stumble.

Whoa yep there is a floor again! "You were saying about a price?"

"I told you my magic Feeds on Fear, did I not? I would need to Feed any anyway, to survive, but - much moreso if you want me doing big flashy expensive things all the time, which from the sound of it this most certainly would be."

"It eats fear, so then people can't be scared any more and might walk off cliffs or something?"

"No people can absolutely still be scared after, moreso from the experience like any bad experience if anything, I just scare them very badly in the process of Feeding on them."

"Like you have to almost drown them or something?"

"What exactly I do varies, the important thing is that they be Afraid. I could show you something fairly abstractly harmless, if you wouldn't mind, but you can't say I didn't warn you if you take it badly."

"I kind of need to be in a mentally stable condition if I'm going to be introducing you to people, can you j- how do you speak Gatetalk, anyway?"

Crow holds up one of the necklaces she wears, the one that's an eye the same color as hers.

"It's an artifact, it does translation. Or more precisely - I Understand and am Understood. I've used it to talk to corvids in the past, very simply, but mostly it means that I don't have to worry about language barrier nonsense. - I got tired of language barrier nonsense extremely quickly, given that the same power I just showed you essentially lets me teleport."

"Oh, that'll come in handy, probably putting a lot of water all right here would be bad so it'd be better to replace it closer to the point and there's not much Gatesnest in the ocean. Can you just describe what a volunteer would be signing up for?"

"Put simply, Fear. The Sky, falling, the Sea, the feeling of not being able to breathe - though I wouldn't in either case actually do them any real lasting harm - the unavoidable imposed awareness of their own insignificance. That's not necessarily an exhaustive list but I think it's representative of my normal Feeding methods? Ah, as regards Infinity, that is, and I mostly serve Infinity and that's what I'd be doing flashy expensive things with. I am technically also empowered very slightly of the Web - Connection and Control, my spider hairclip can be used to puppet people as a Feeding tool - and will in fact run into problems eventually if I don't Feed as Web at all, but that's - much less of an all the time thing."

(One of the pieces of jewelry she wears is a hairclip in the shape of a spider, the body of which is a glass gem. There's a place where another glass gem should be but isn't, and if you look closely one of her necklaces is the one that would go there, wirewrapped.)

"But if someone just isn't scared of heights or something you can't use them?"

Crow smiles. This smile has teeth in it.

"They do not necessarily need to have already been scared of heights. - There are in fact people who are genuinely not Vast Food. But it's not most of them, if one pushes enough."

"People who volunteer for this, what usually do they say about it afterwards?"

"...uh. People do not usually volunteer for this."

"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."

"Alright. Lead the way?"

"Mm-hm." Ranary peeks out through the curtains to see if there's anyone lying in wait outside. It's still raining, so would-be attackers are not lurking. Out she sweeps, pulling her coat on.

And Crow follows her!

It's a wet walk with a few gate shortcuts and then they are in a non-raining neighborhood with sheep fields visible up in the hills behind the houses. Ranary knocks sharply on a house's door.

"Who's there?"

"It's Ranary with a decent lead!"

"Hello! I'm from very very very not here and your magic is even worse than mine but we think I can maybe help!"

"Don't be sure your magic doesn't have a nasty surprise for you," says the occupant of the house, opening the door. "But we have short term problems, as you have apparently been told. What do you do?"

"You are having surprisingly little trouble believing the not here thing."

"She's got wings and my project has been clawing a way open between universes to fall through, so I was already hoping really hard that there were some."

"Oh I am perfectly aware that every Power has a Price, but my magic's tends to be upfront - there's a reason I phrased it as 'even worse,' my world's magic isn't super natively wanting to be helpful it's just that wow your world's magic is something."

"My world's magic Feeds on Fear. There are Powers of Fear, with various domains and kinds of Fear they Feed on, and empowered things and places and people, of which I am one, that do things depending on what they're empowered by. Everything empowered, though, must in some way Feed its Patron."

"I am a servant of Infinity or the Vast - the Fear of heights and depths, the Sea, the Sky, the Void, anything that is Bigger Than You Are." There is reverence in her voice here.

"And I do a whole collection of things, but I suspect most relevantly to you Infinity means Infinity and I can, if you Feed me, get you air and water to feed your unhelping disappearance nonsense, because I am not going to run out of Sky or Sea. I do mean it about the Feeding me, though, especially if you want me doing big flashy expensive things all the time which it seems like you do - I've been talking about that with Ranary."

"What does that... mean."

"She's got an infinite ocean dimension she can teleport people into and out of and maybe also other ones - the ocean had air above it, I don't know if they're separate dimensions? - and she has to scare people by putting them in the dimensions, I think? I visited the sea but it wasn't too scary, so I think maybe usually people will be drowning a little bit or something?"

"Some people are more scared of the Sea than you are and also I was being gentle. And I have ways of Feeding other than taking people to a Vast Domain but yes, the general summary suffices."

"And yes, there's - okay four but in three categories - dimensions I can access. The Sea, which is as you saw it. The Sky, which is Endless falling with no ground - that's where I'd get your maybe-windstorm. The Void, which is floaty like space and is both of the last two - comes in 'starless black (mysteriously lighted enough to see)' and 'has impossibly faraway stars' - both of these usually come with the ability to breathe unless I want to revoke it, as a conceit of the Domain, despite the fact that in actual space you couldn't."

"In actual space, can you breathe?"

"I am categorically not a thing that has breathing problems unless something that can beat me in a powers fight imposes them on me - which is to say yes, I can go safely to space if I have some good reason to, and that category of things - breathing-and-radiation-shielding-and-generally-not-being-inconvenienced-by-being-in-space - is something I can extend other people if I want, I brought a whole group to my world's Moon just because we wanted to go once, though that sort of thing is expensive. That trip actually paid for itself, because the most Food person in the group insisted on being shown the Stars when I was showing everyone else and singlehandedly made it energy-positive, but I'd've otherwise had to Feed after."

Crow is clearly somewhat proud of having done this. She in fact specializes somewhat in finicky environmental control, and while most any full-Become Vastling could trivially, like, bring someone underwater and not drown them, having a whole group safely on the Moon for a while is not as easy as she can make it look.

"Does the air have to come from where you are or just where you can see?"

"Where I can see, I think."

"So you could go up in space, hit the whole half of the planet with air, and go around to add more everywhere else before the pressure differential gets very far."

"...I could try this but that seems like far enough away that control will be difficult and I'm worried I'll make problems and not be nearby enough to know well enough what I would even need to fix."

"I don't know exactly what knowhow and magical limitations you're working with. .......can we put a disappearance point in your dimensions, so that we can do magic without making it worse?"

"Maybe! If I understand correctly you won't wreck anything by trying it. What do you need in order to put a disappearance point somewhere?"

"A mage needs to go there and create one in a place they can see. I don’t know know if it’s possible in midair but it is on water. It will destroy things on contact. Mages trying to connect to it have to see it."

"Alright. Shall I bring you to the Sea and see if you can create a disappearance point there and still be able to access it once I bring you back? If it works it sounds like I'll need to bring anyone new who wants to connect to it there but that should be fairly trivial."

"In a minute. I want to make really sure we're clear on everything since in spite of your excellent Gatetalk or translation magic you are from another dimension. You seem very nice but the emphasized Feeding on Fear is really a little concerning - can people relate to this like, uh, sledding, where they have a thrilling time that technically includes being scared, or what?"

Crow wobbles her hand.

"Technically yes, in practice nope, people generally experience suffering from being Fed on and especially Fed on to any great extent. And in particular - mmmm 'please Feed really shallowly on a bunch of people so they'll be really mostly fine' and 'please do a bunch of flashy expensive nonsense' are kind of contradictory requests?"

"Okay. You should be aware that if you are clearly identifiable as an individual to - a mage, but anyone can become a mage, it's dangerous and moreso without help but sometimes people are willing to die for things they want enough - then you can be pretty trivially assassinated. Our magic is really good at that. An untrained person doing it probably dies in the process but that just means this is especially a thing to worry about if anyone is suicidally upset. The only reason there are mages still alive is that the anti-mage sentiment regarding the end of the world happens to have nucleated around an existing subculture of remarkable non-hypocrites. Your thing would likely be worth it even if you had to kill people because we will otherwise all die, but people are not uniformly rational, so in addition to filtering for volunteers you will need some attention to, if not their well-being, at least their non-murderousness."

"...right. Yeah, that makes sense, I'm hard to kill with mortal methods but I get the sense your magic is really good at that. Uh - we can Bind my Food to a Webcontract not to do that or cause that to be done as an extra precaution, should still definitely try to filter for not wanting to cause my death but that seems probably worth doing anyway, would probably want you as a second set of eyes and local expert on a proposed wording if you'd be willing."

"Uh, I have no idea what that is."

"I'm Vast and a touch of Web, and one of the things I get from Web is the ability to make Binding Deals."

"Reminder: this is not your planet and we don't know what that implies."

"Right, sorry. Uh, Web is - Connection and Control, Manipulation, Plots and Plans and Schemes, also spiders but that's mostly an aesthetic. Web Deals are Binding, as in you cannot break them, usually also as in and there are terrible supernaturally imposed consequences if you try or somehow manage it anyway. I'm mostly Vast, I just have a touch of Web, but one of the things I get from that touch of Web is the ability to Bind mutually-agreed-to Deals - the other main one is that I can stick a Thread on a person or thing and then be able to find it again later by following my Thread."

"This is still a really high ratio of capital letters to explanations but I maybe follow most of that! What happens instead of people breaking deals, exactly, at what step is that process interrupted and how?"

Crow laughs slightly at that phrasing and looks a little sheepish.

"It depends on the exact terms of the Deal but the thing I'm thinking of as 'just can't' is kind of - 'nope that's not an available action you can take actually' shaped - Web is among other things Control, it can depending on the Bindings just compel actions or the lack of actions."

"Can you draw some kind of analogy to some naturally occurring sort of inability?"

"Uh? Not - easily - if it's just can't then nope you just can't. That is not an action you can take. If it's a penalty that prevents you then it's like for example I've seen a Web NDA where you would start coughing spiders instead if you tried to say the confidential information, that kind of thing. Often it's sort of hybrid? Like, you can't do this and also if you try anyway or somehow manage to these are the terrible consequences that result, with said consequences often crafted with an eye towards not only deterrence but also making you less able to in fact do the thing."

"Cor is trying to figure out if it's mind control or not, probably."

"I mean, I also want would-be volunteers to have a more complete understanding on other axes as well."

"Web Bindings tend strongly to be mind control in the constraining-actions sense, yeah - I've never heard of a Binding constraining possible thoughts and wouldn't write one if I had because what the fuck."

"I mean, I agree that what the fuck, but I'm trying to figure out what it is like to be able to think anything you please and do any unrelated thing you please but not do a specific prohibited thing, if there is nothing that I already cannot-do in anything resembling that way to compare it to."

"Fair enough. I'm not sure I'm thinking of any better ways to explain it? You just can't. Or if it's a positive compelled action you just have to, you can't not. I could Bind you to something little and stupid and time bounded, if you like, if you can think of something that'd be a good demonstration? I will say that a Deal like I'm thinking shouldn't be intrusive, as long as they in fact don't start trying to cause my death."

"I'll try one - how do you feed this power -?"

"All the Powers are Powers of Fear - the Web is, put simply, the Fear of being manipulated or controlled and also of spiders. My hairclip does puppeteering, I don't Feed purposefully as Web very often but when I do I use it as a Feeding tool, people often get very very afraid of their actions not being their own even if I don't make them hurt themselves with it."

"I'm not actually sure we should make you require more terrorizing people in order to soften the requirement that you not make people want to kill you."

"It wouldn't really make me have to Feed more? Bindings like that, one, aren't expensive, and two, tend to pay for themselves in passive worrying."

"Hey, this is a long shot, but does your world know of any additional worlds?"

Crow wobbles her hand. 

"There's a very little known alternate world that came through as a work of fiction that either leaked or got a lot of things right or something into mine, but it's the same kind of magic that runs on Fear and it's more like an alternate version of mine than like an entirely separate world like this one seems to be. Other than that and various Powers' Domains - like the Sea - no." 

"The thing is - the disappearance points will probably not stop continuing what they are doing forever, even if you expensively feed them water I expect them to also eat more land, and I want to know what we're doing with that time you could buy us with storms and traumatizing people, because if it's nothing, if we all die anyway inside a couple years, I don't think I love this trade. But if we can put a disappearance point in the infinite sea, and there are places we could go, we can evacuate."

"We could probably get you to my universe. I would want some assurance about - what you're planning to do once there and that you're not going to wreck things or place any disappearance points not in Infinity where they can't hurt people?"

"I am not a king. Centralized authorities have the assassination problem. I cannot guarantee you that every bad neighbor has already been conveniently murdered in the chaos, nor can I screen every survivor for a standard of good citizenship before evac on the scale we're talking about. If you are asking about my personal conduct that is different but getting me out does not solve the problem."

"Is there anything that would theoretically get rid of a disappearance point, even if you don't know what it is? Given that they move with the planet they must be movable somehow - do you know how that works, do they attach to something or what? - ah, I'm trying to figure out, among other things, if sticking existing disappearance points in the Sea is viable, because if it is that makes me much less jumpy about the possibility that your people are going to wreck things in my world."

"...I'll do my best to help you evacuate anyway, to be clear, and hope your people have learned their lesson about destroying the world when we have alternatives, I still want to know all the things relevant to how is a good idea to go about this first but this is absolutely not a situation I am going to leave you people in if we have the option to do otherwise."

"Also I would in fact value the assurance of any systems or authorities you want to bring over about what they'd be planning to intentionally do, even if I understand that this is in no way a guarantee of the behavior of every member of their populace."

"You can move a disappearance point, and you can chuck such a moved point into another one. The gates, for instance, are all disappearance points manufactured in a specific way. You have to cut out the entire surroundings so I'm not actually sure how you will do it with anything that's punched through to ocean. What kind of assurance would you want from governments and such?"

"What do you mean by cut out the entire surroundings exactly?"

"Ah, and I want - mostly to know what kinds of things it is they'd be planning to do, how they'd want to interact with my world, I'd want system-authority type things to promise me they weren't going to intentionally make disappearance points be created in wrecking-things places - and magic isn't widely known on my world though I'm not sure whether that'd even theoretically be maintainable or not, there's a lot of you and none of you will have any idea how to interact with mundane society. - I apologize for not having - better examples - I mostly just feel like I want more information about what people or at least systems are planning to do with access to my world."

"If you make a disappearance point in a plank of wood, you can carry the plank of wood around, so long as the disappearance point hasn't gotten to its edges, and the point will come with. In principle the same holds for a chunk of the ground. Cut out the chunk of ground with plenty of margin and you can put it anywhere. The remaining mage population is - small, after the war and subsequent unrest - and I think I am personally confident in all living mages today that they won't make disappearance points where they are not wanted, though I don't know what you mean by wrecking-things places. The worldwide population is - less than a billion now. I don't know how much less. Most of them just want somewhere to live."

"By wrecking-things places I mostly mean anywhere other than someone's Domain who's letting you, we are not having my world have this same problem a few centuries from now. And okay, that sounds like I can probably send a disappearance point to the Sea fine as long as I grab everything around it, wonderful, that makes me a lot less nervous that any one person doing the wrong thing eventually dooms the world."

"Yeah. We've historically made them pretty broad in places nobody needed - deserts mostly - but they can be any width."

"What do you mean by width? - sorry, I think I'm failing to parse how that's relevant."

"Well, it's easier to dig one out if you can fit the whole thing in a wheelbarrow, right? So even if someone has some kind of hideous emergency, not that I can think of one best handled this way, they can make a small point, easy to pick up and throw in the sea."

"Ah. Yes, that's true and sensible, though also yeah I would really prefer people not when possible."

"Uh, one small note - a thing to be aware of if your people are going to move to my world, I would expect being in my world to mean being subject to my world's magic, meaning some of your people may become empowered the same way people in my world occasionally do, if they have the temperament and the circumstances and the luck. Just so you won't be terribly surprised if a decade later one of your people turns up as a fledgling something, it's not really probably an immediate concern and if it turns out to be it's not like I've never met fledglings before, it should still likely be fine, but it occurs to me to say."

"Now, shall we visit the Sea and test you sticking a point there?"

"Sure. I'm ready."

Crow smiles. 

And then Crow and Cor are floating near each other in the Endless Sea. It is calm, and blue, and Cor cannot see any land and he knows in his heart that there is no land here. He cannot see a bottom, either, looking down - only more Endless blue into the darkness. It is impossible not to feel at least a little Small, here. The Ocean Is Bigger Than You Are. 

Crow decides not to shift, this time. There is reverence in her voice as she speaks. 

"Welcome to the Endless Sea."

"...most seas do not implant information about themselves in my head," he says mildly.

Crow laughs slightly. "This is the Endless Sea! And - whatever else I use it for, it is a Fear Domain. People don't get false hope about being able to find land by swimming, here, unless they're very set on having it. I'm not sure most people would describe it as an information effect, though, it's really barely anything at all - you're very noticing."

"Uh-huh. Anyway. Seems pretty calm here but water might start pouring in at quite a clip once there's a point, are you ready to get us out rather than go waterfalling into nothingness?"

"Of course - though obviously I'd appreciate it if you made the exercise easier by not putting it right directly next to us."

Crow stands - well, swims - ready and nods.

"I am limited by my vantage point but will put it as far as I can."

He fixes his attention on a distant spot.

"There is nothing there, and so begins my destruction; there is nothing there, I destroy, I destroy, I destroy," he murmurs.

Crow can feel what is in the Sea, and what is not, and if someone is making large changes she will notice. What if anything is happening that she can tell, as he chants?

A little water has been deleted. And again as more pours to fill the space, and more, and more, one-way osmosis into nothing.

"Right, that's working."

And they are standing back where they left, perfectly dry. Crow reaches to steady Cor from the inevitable stumble.

"Test if you can do magic connecting to it from here?"

And Crow is going to pay attention to what exactly happens with that bit of the Sea while he does.

Cor is going to actually do his best to fall completely onto the floor but if Crow catches him he will be caught.

"Yeah. One second." He recovers his feet and heads into his kitchen.

Crow indeed catches him! (Even people who are not Bell amounts of clumsy pretty much always stumble at least their first time or two back from the Sea.)

Crow will wait for him to return from the kitchen.

His kitchen has a stone slab for a countertop. On it he places a scrap of paper, makes a doodle with a charcoal pencil, and then murmurs. It goes up in flames.

"Seems like that works!"

"Wonderful. If you have any others of your people who would like to put disappearance points in the Sea - or hook up to that one? I'm a little unclear on whether multiple of you can use the same one - and therefore do magic without further wrecking the world, I'd be willing to bring them to do so."

Crow is smiling, that was one of the most important things to confirm worked and it did.

Did the point in the Sea do anything noticeable when he did the magic?

"We can all use the same one and probably should."

A few more molecules of water were eaten for a moment. At this stage of the lifecycle of a disappearance point it would really be hard to tell if you weren't pinching molecules and even if you are looking at molecules individually you might need a graph and a statistics education to be sure that they're going any faster in the steady state after than before.

At that level Crow absolutely cannot tell.

"Wonderful. Is there anyone else it is particularly a good idea to get hooked up to the thing now?"

"Ranary, and a few other people she'll be able to find while you and me talk refugee logistics."

Ranary makes a gesture that here means "ready".

And Crow and Ranary are in the Sea, a hopefully-safe distance from the disappearance point's edges but where Ranary will be able to see it to hook up to it.

Ranary has a bit of a time getting a clear enough view, but then she's got it.

And Crow and Ranary are standing back where they left, impossibly dry. Crow smiles. 

"Feel free to be unstingy about eating the Sea with magic, it really really really is not going to run out."

"Oh, I'm not worried about that, I got that loud and clear. But if I do it in front of people maybe they will murder me, so."

Crow smiles briefly at "got that loud and clear," then inclines her head.

"Yeah, okay, fair."

"I'll go spread the word." She waves cheerily to Cor and traipses out.

And Crow turns to Cor.

"You wanted to talk logistics?"

"Yep. What's your world like? You said they mostly don't know about magic?"

"The mundane parts of my world are - a much higher tech level than this seems to be. Fast vehicles that aren't powered by animals and anyway go much faster than ones that are can, pretty-much-instant communication around the world with the help of devices, a whole bunch of other conveniences, I'm not going to be able to list every invention of the modern world and I'm not going to try - all powered mostly by harnessed electricity, though some of it runs on burning fuel instead."

"How do they feel about immigrant populations from other planets? They're, uh, going to notice the magic."

"Yeahhhh that's the problem. I have no idea how they'll take - otherworldly visitors, but also I expect the public reveal of our native magic. Still, while I'd really rather not reveal everything - not as much rather not as leaving your whole world to die about it, so hopefully it'll be okay."

"What has kept your magic private so long?"

"I'm not sure exactly? I think likely - some combination of significant incentive towards stealth - remember that our magic runs on Fear - and people not wanting to look crazy talking about things that are obviously impossible and so on - that general kind of thing where people will just not acknowledge things - ah, and also knowing about the Powers and so on makes you somewhat more of a target which I think makes a selection effect towards secrecy in some cases. But mind that these are - my best guesses and I'm only actually the age I look, the truthful answer is I don't know."

"...it runs on Fear, and... most people are not as amenable as you appear to be about seeking volunteers?"

"Exactly. It's - even most of my close allies would say I'm unusually ethical in various tones of fond through bemused for going out of my way to eat rapists and so on under ordinary circumstances. Most empowered just take either whoever happens to be convenient or whoever'll be tastiest or annoys them or whatever."

"Should we be considering assassinations?"

"One you may not assassinate every empowered you can find including all my friends and two it wouldn't even actually help, it's way more a feature of the magic system than the specific people - my friends are actually mostly better than empowered-average and even the ones who wouldn't be do... sometimes... listen if I insist we filter victims at all - it's just that empowered-average is more or less as I have described it."

"Should we be assassinating the fears?"

"Iiiiii do not think they're in general people enough for that? It's - we say Entities but they're not even all that actually separate and only the Web is generally held to actually be sapient and, like - new ones are 'born,' or maybe more we recognize them as sufficiently split off to have names, when there're new kinds of Fear - I don't think you can really kill the Fears because it's less - individual powerful beings - and more - Fear is power, that's just how the magic of my world works."

"Also again with the I would probably die and so would most of my friends but I expect that to be strongly secondary to how I'm pretty sure you can't anyway."

"...magic isn't limited to destroying people but the rest of your point is well taken."

"Fair enough. Anyway, yeah, gonna have to somehow deal with all the nonsense your arrival will cause, given that there's enough of you that I doubt we can get it to not cause nonsense. That'll be... interesting... buuuut I currently see no plans other than that and leaving you all to die and it doesn't sound like you do either, so. We'll deal with the interesting somehow."

"Do you have a geographical destination in mind?"

"Assuming we get to pick a destination, I'm going to say we should probably be near my Archives since, uh, my involvement is going to make this an us problem anyway. What would be nice would be if there were some not-paid-much-attention-to island to put you all on, because that would genuinely give us as good a chance at actually avoiding a massive flaming pile of nonsense as anything I can think of, but I'm not sure there is."

"Well, you wouldn't be, if it's not paid much attention. Is there... anywhere that would be habitable if we sliced the tops off some mountains to flatten it out, but is not presently in use, because of the mountains? We can be really very profligate with an infinite sea."

"I'm going to go ahead and say that you should not destroy any of the big mountain ranges, and that this seems like it would get us in more trouble rather than less, and also you would probably mess up the weather or something and let's not or at least let's not have that as our first plan."

"Understandable. I do think my spell will let me aim, if it works, and I expect that it will work, if other universes exist, which you have demonstrated."

"Wonderful."

"...it occurs to me, actually - could your people actually stay here fine, if I scooped up and sent to the Sea all the disappearance points you currently have?"

"I'm, uh, not sure what a nonmagical planet puncture would do to anything."

"Hmmm. Collapse maybe? Not sure... I wonder if I could fill it with water or something...?"

"The inside of the planet is full of magma, I don't know if you have that? We could see it, through the disappearance points - it all looks about the same, which is why we couldn't tell how deep they were past a certain point. Without them, uh, do you have volcanoes?"

"We do have that, yeah, and we have volcanoes, and also - there's technology, at our tech level, that lets us know things about the inside of the planet."

"And you're right, water would be a poor replacement and I didn't think of that. I wonder if it would just collapse and whether - if we got your people somewhere they wouldn't be in danger from that, maybe if I stuck them all in the Sea for a little bit or something, I wonder how fast it would do whatever it's doing and whether there would be something habitable - or makeable-habitable-with-enough-air-and-water - for you to return to, because if there would be that seems probably better?"

"And contact my world, still, if you like, I'm sure we have much to learn from each other, but - do it on your own time and with a first impression that isn't 'hello it's thousands of refugees.'"

"If it works to have this place be somewhere again, of course. If it doesn't turn out to be somewhere livable afterwards for whatever reason then we're back to plan: evacuate you all."

"I think there would be heinous earthquakes at minimum."

"As long as it's heinous earthquakes that then stop and there's a functioning planet afterwards, I can put all your people briefly in the Sea to wait them out and that should be fine."

"...you're able to aim at everyone on the planet but not to spread the air out evenly?"

"To clarify, I could go around with you or someone and get your people and put them in the Sea and then cause heinous earthquakes after we had already done that, I could not in fact instantly grab everyone on the planet blind and put them in the Sea."

"Do... you know where everyone on your own planet is at any given time?"

"...no but given that you had a plan to evacuate them all in the first place I was figuring you could modify whatever you were going to do about finding them to do that to find them all to do this instead."

"Evacuation doesn't have to be simultaneous and probably works better if it's not, so it gives stragglers time to tell their loved ones and pack and so on."

"Ahh, fair. Technically this doesn't have to be instantaneous either but, unless we did it as a gathering point before being sent to the Sea instead of sending people to the Sea bit by bit, the first people would end up staying in the Sea for... long enough to be something of a Feeding exercise."

"And it's not like people aren't dying already, now, but it's worth taking the time to do this in a way that doesn't, say, drown every baby while their parents fail to keep them above water if the earthquakes take fifteen minutes longer than we bargained for, etcetera. - how did you get here?"

"They wouldn't drown, what do you take me for -"

"...sorry, you aren't being purposely insulting you just haven't met my world's magic before. Uh, going I Don't Care Whether You're Underwater You Are Not Drowning Actually is a trivial control exercise, especially for people already in the Sea."

"And I got here through being offered an adventure by - a friendly Spiral entity that does doors, called the Distortion - ah, the Spiral is the Power of, simplified, madness and lies and things making no sense."

"Do they have more of that on tap if some people are willing to be tortuously confused for a while? Find us more options to evac to?"

"Not really, sorry. Laur - that's the friendly Distortion - isn't actually here, they just put me here, and I'm not thinking of a way to contact them unless they spontaneously decide to turn up themself and I don't think they're very likely to although you never really know with the Distortion."

"I thought you could get back to your world whenever?"

Crow wobbles her hand. 

"I expect to probably be able to get there through the Sea. If I can't I think I'm on my own - bar actions of yours - until and unless Laur decides to come get me which I have no idea if they will. But given that I can reach the Sea at all here, which we've already proven I can, and that there isn't anything wrong with it, which there isn't that I noticed and I'd expect to notice, I expect I'll be able to."

"Uh, I suppose in theory I could try going to my world through the Sea, myself, and then coming back possibly with friends? But honestly I'm not sure whether I'd be able to do that or whether I'd lose this place and I don't really want to risk it without a very very very good reason, if I lose this place and your people are on your own again that's dramatically worse."

"It matters a lot that me and Ranary can now do magic without making things worse and that we know there's somewhere else out there. You'll still have made a big difference if you vanish with that being all you did. But yes, there's better to be had. ...Does your world have space for most of a billion people? Without reference to whether anyone would be happy about having to."

"Without reference to whether anyone would be happy about having to, I believe we do, yes, though I'm not entirely certain. I do still think it would be better if this place could be made a functional place again instead, if at all possible, but - yes, I do think my world should technically have space for you."

"The Sea itself is I assume intractably opposed to having islands in it?"