She nods. "Even if there's nowhere else we could live is there somewhere else we could stay for a couple of days while the quaking dies down?"

"I don't know any. Normally I have a decent galactic map but this isn't my home galaxy. The plan for hiding in the Moon might be useful here?"

"Especially if you can fill the pocket with air that isn't stolen from here."

"Not as easy as it sounds; air is complicated, and it's already going to be kind of fucky since I'm only replacing two kinds and they're not in the same ratios that are being lost. It will be helpful short-term, but would be a big problem if we kept doing this for years. But I can probably manage."

"Thank you. We'll get started on logistics for staying a couple of days in a moon pocket."

"Thanks. Time to go lasso some comets."

"Have fun. Or, uh, anger."

"I'll take what I can get."

And he is up into the sky and zeroing in on the comets he located last time. They're going to have less interesting skies and that sucks for them but their lives suck more now, not breathing properly because the air's gotten thin, and he is going to damn well get some more air.

He transitions next to them and then ropes the comets with constructs, and he hates orbital mechanics but that gets the ring to plot him courses to bring them to the back of the moon as a staging area, frequently grabbing other comets along the way.

Whenever he gets up to a couple dozen, he switches to grabbing them, bringing them down to the surface over a big disappearance point, and doing science to them forcing them to chemically convert from H20 and NH4 to O2, N2, and lots of hydrogen outgassing. Everything that doesn't convert to air and probably some of it that does he lets fall into the disappearance point below - this won't help much but it won't not help.

It doesn't take him long to get bored, but it still needs doing and boredom makes him more frustrated with it, so as long as he can stay on task it actually goes faster.

After about six hours he's grabbed about five hundred comets and replaced about five percent of the volume of air that was lost - something like half a percent of what it was this morning. He grabbed most of the big comets so it will take more trips when he keeps doing this, but it's solid progress.

He takes a break in a pretty valley and pulls some food out of subspace - he ought to ask Panj about using his kitchen - and contemplates his next move.

Cor was right, calling for help takes priority, but what does he want to call for? He'll have to relay it through the Butcher; even if he can reach the Font of Rage, which he's never done reliably, no one else has been able to and they rarely try. And what does he call for? Lots of other Red Lanterns? That wouldn't be useless, but they're not good at this kind of thing.

Can he formulate a request for a Blue Lantern in terms the Butcher will understand? Maybe. There's the particular kind of anger of being injured and unable to treat the wounds. That would probably be interpreted correctly on the other end. He also needs to provide his own location - between his ring and getting a gestalt sense of the angers of the planet beneath him, though, he can probably do that.

...Ring, don't go running away if he dies. He is not fucking having a signal disrupted by the ring running off and deserting them. Stay a decade, or until there's no anger detected in the solar system, whichever is longer.

Successor protocol updated.

Okay. Go time.

He heads to the back of the moon, where he's been putting the comets. And then it's time to charge up. His Lantern appears out of subspace and the symbol on his chest glows to meet it.

"For those laid low in darkest night,
There shines avenging crimson light.
Justice be done though heavens fall;
My scarlet rage engulfs them all."

Ring charge at 100%

He doesn't pause. This next part never gets any easier but right after suffusing himself in the red light, flavored to match his own convictions, is the best way.

There's a massive problem, and despite his strength he can't fucking fix it. All he can do is nibble away at the edges and hope to buy time to find a better angle of attack, and he hates leaving problems unfixed, no matter how long he has to get used to them, and he hasn't gotten used to this one at all. Hundreds of millions at least are waiting for a miracle and he can't give them one. But there's someone who, sometimes, can, and can come when he calls.

"Butcher! Get over here!"

His aura flares, and flares, and he rises into the sky without a command.

It warps, and twists, and the great sigil of the Red Lanterns floats in the air flanking him on each side as the aura takes the shape of an enormous bull, stamping the ground as though about to charge.

(He's not exactly a bull. But he doesn't appear precisely the same for each Lantern, and he was something like a bull. Supposedly the first beast to feel anger. He's far too angry to answer any detailed questions about whether that is strictly true or not.)

The world is attacking these people, he says to the Butcher, and they have no way to fight back. It eats the ground they stand on, and all they can blame is their cousins who didn't understand the forces they had called up, and those who fought a war using those forces before they realized it was pure error. Even those know their rage is impotent, and doing nothing to solve their problems, lashing out with spite and desperation because they are caged with bars they can't attack. See their anger. Remember it.

The Butcher is not very good with words. Well, none of the six embodiments are, really, but it's probably the worst. But, still:

ALL GRUDGES REMEMBERED.

(For the Butcher, that's positively somber.)

Good. If we can't fix this together, take those grudges to the others. To the sharp razor mind. This is an open wound, staying unhealed, pain and rage until death in ten thousand thousand minds. She can follow the grudge and my anchor, and bring the tools to attack it properly.

He just committed to trying to attack it directly. Fuck, he didn't mean to do that. Well, he can't really back out once the Butcher gets his horns on a course, which...

YES! WE FIGHT! AND IF IT LIVES, THE HERD FIGHTS! WE DESTROY!

...he obviously was going to do immediately. He trusts his Illustres enough to let him steer, not enough to let him win if they outright disagree.

Aaaand he doesn't have a small test point to attack. Okay, he can finagle this...

This foe bites. It is made of destruction, like us. We should attack, but first the smallest and weakest of them, so their claws do not pierce us. We must find where that runt hides.

The ones that cause strange space are not real enemies to these minds. We seek the smallest disappearance point on the planet's surface.

THIS ONE, THEN!

And the vast mind does indeed look over the whole strange-shaped planet and finds something. Now the vast red bull is floating above it.

The smallest disappearance point on the surface is a little point someone must have made a few decades ago and then abandoned or died before using. It has grown since then, but not much: it's just a little pothole-sized absence in a playa.

Okay, that's good, actually, because he doubts this will backfire but he really is not sure. He'd probably be afraid if he wasn't marinating in an ocean of rage.

It shouldn't exist. Even the thing itself agrees, it offends every mind that sees it, it is a nothing in the universe that isn't nothing enough. The Illustres alone couldn't map it, but that won't stop us!

They reach out with the full force of planet's worth of anger and demand that this obscenity be scanned. They are mostly beyond rings, but here they need the computer, even charged at well beyond what it could possibly hold ordinarily. What is it?

Error.

What the fuck do you mean, 'error'.

Spatial warping effect is present with boundaries error.

We can see the boundaries perfectly well.

Tolerances around the edge of the effect can be established but details error.

Classify relevant properties of enemy which can be established.

Spatial warping is error. Destruction of spacetime and matter is error.

Can we attack it separate from all the others? Is it a local phenomenon?

Comparison to other sites is possible and produces match but correlations are error,

Provide plausible weapons which might interfere with the target.

Weapons require existent target. Existence of phenomenon is error.

Oh, fuck this fucking magic and whatever created it.

Contempt for phenomenon is affirmative.

Well, there's one weapon that they always have available. The Clarissi once analyzed the power output involved and said it had consumed 1000% of a normal ring charge per second, but the Illustres is mainlining the Butcher, they have limitless power to burn. They look firmly at the obscenity, and shout,

"BE NOT!"

And a cone of focused, angry power, barely visible as red, tries to attack the point and demand of the fabric of the universe that it cease to exist.

The disappearance point punches violently through the planet. He can see some of the moon, on the other side.

Fuck. We're done, we can't fight this directly. Tell the sharp one, as soon as you can.

And he drops to the ground, the aura momentarily entirely gone. The Butcher is back to the Font, or wherever he is when he isn't localized in the material universe.

And Theo will reactivate his environmental shield and being angry at himself for not avoiding this attempt gets him to the other end of the point in seconds.

It's not big enough to go through without hitting the edges kind of a lot but he can swing around the planet to the other side no problem. It is merrily and horribly eating some ocean.