Okay, at least it's not near people, and this is, actually, a problem he can do something about. He creates barriers holding back the sea in a cylinder a couple meters back, does the familiar chemical transformation to turn the water inside to gas, and then shoves around the stone on the sea floor to lower much of it but assemble a tall, narrow cylinder a couple meters thick that stretches fifty feet into the air above the ocean.

Goddammit. Well, could have been worse. Back to Gatesnest to report failure.

The mages are waiting for him.

"Well, message sent. And, unfortunately, I couldn't avoid testing whether I could destroy a point - it got bigger, punched another small hole through the planet."

"Well, you know, what's one more," says Cor bitterly.

"Wasn't my plan to try, but having the embodiment of rage come and go without trying to attack the enemy I was showing him... I should have predicted that wasn't going to happen. I'm sorry."

"I don't think it will take long for the message to get back to my boss. How long it takes for them to find us and respond is another story, I really have no idea."

"And there's some more atmosphere now. That part's good, at least."

"Yeah. My neighbor looked a little less dizzy this morning. Your boss - has different powers or just more ability to find people who do?"

"She runs the whole Corps of hundreds of Red Lanterns, and she's at home so she's in contact with the other colors and can ask for help. Also she's smarter than me and has the thing that sent me here available to analyze, so she has a better chance to find a way to travel back and forth."

"Other colors?"

"Did I not explain? So, six fundamental emotions, each of them associated with a color, make up the emotional spectrum, which is what powers Lanterns. Red anger, orange avarice, yellow fear, green stubbornness, blue hope, purple love. If I was at home and it was someone else here, I'd call in favors with Orange to help me analyze what happened to send them here - Orange doesn't have to do their own detail work, it just does what they want - and with Blue to solve the problem, because they're great at travel."

"Why is hope good at travel?"

"You know, that's hard to explain. They're dispositionally medics - they go where they're needed and heal people, and travel helps them do that. There's something about hope being the least personal of the emotions - my anger is my anger, but hope is usually about everyone - but it's fuzzy."

"Well. I... hope... they can be here soon."

"Yeah. Me too."

"Anything you need from us in the interim?"

"Dinner? Nah, just checking in to let you know where things stand, and see if anyone has clever new ideas."

"I can get you dinner."

"I'd appreciate it. After that I'll go back to scouting comets, probably - I think it'll probably be a month of that work before it's back to how it was, so I'll need to switch up what I'm doing some days, most likely."

"There are probably people to evacuate. Also food shortages, it's spring in the north and fall in the south but winter's going to be a nightmare in the south when it hits."

"I can do some of that. Not much I can do for short-term food shortages - maybe make chemical fertilizer, but that's still most of a year before it pays off. I should probably find some people who can try to take stock of this kind of thing, anywhere there's damaged infrastructure, so I can look at it and do at least whatever's fast."

"If you could move food from areas that have been evacuated but aren't disappeared yet that would go a long way. Or if you could... kill a lot of fish and bring them to Gatesnest be butchered and distributed, that seems maybe like something you could do. If fertilizer can make crops mature faster or yield sooner it might be worth handing it out in the spring hemisphere."

"Yield more, often with less work put in. Not so much faster. I can probably do those other things. How thoroughly is Gatesnest wrapped around the planet - or the safe parts of it, at least? Are there places far enough away from it that you wouldn't hear about them for weeks or months, if something went badly wrong?"

"It's almost everywhere. Not Shendria, not the Cabincuelmi Steppe, none of the Gaash states, there could easily be some uncontacted islands somewhere with people on them. But most everywhere else with settlement, eventually, somebody wants to haul a gate there, and then if they keep connecting more places, it's going to be a neighborhood of Gatesnest."

"About what I expected, but I wasn't going to rule out people being angry at mages and taking it out on the gates or something. I should probably check those places at some point when I've done more comet-wrangling, see if there's any low-hanging fruit."

"Probably somebody's wrecked a gate, none I'm used to using. Usually there are several."

"People have done more for less reason - I'll be the first to admit that anger can make you pretty stupid."