"Pleasure to do business." He zoops his part of the flour into subspace. He will look for other people who want stuff done and get some barter (which also gets zooped) and some cash money of whatever kind Gatesnest uses.

Gatesnest has scales and displacement measuring cups for metal currency from a zillion mints around the world.

Wow, that's obnoxiously inconvenient. He's tempted to pulverize some coinage about it but resists the urge.

He will buy some things and have a decent spread of ingredients in timeless not-quite-real space for his future meals.

And then he will go 'home' and sleep; any day where he calls the Butcher qualifies as a long day.

Morning comes and he snacks on a salady thing before heading over to the mage hangout to check in before he heads off to grab comets.

The mages aren't in their hangout because somebody has organized some kind of protest against mages... existing... but at least it doesn't look like it came to violence?

Ugh. He should probably just walk away and do useful things, but he's never been any good at that. Environmental shield down to minimum and he's going to walk over.

"I don't get you guys. What do you actually want?"

Most of them are not really interested in having a calm and reasoned discussion of their views.

"They should fucking jump in and see if that helps!" somebody says.

"It really fucking won't. You realize this group you're scaring off here, these are the ones who are trying to save everyone, right?"

"They're fucking mages! They wrecked everything!"

"My kids are all dead!"

"If they were giving up being mages they wouldn't come here!"

"It would have been better if no one was mages but it's too fucking late for that, isn't it? Someone's got to try and fix things and it's not you!"

They are ignoring him now.

Yeah now he's just pissed at these idiots. Fuck it, Lantern mode, environmental shield back up and glowing and hovering and glaring at them. The glowing red field is spurting and sparking a little, and he's encouraging it to keep doing that.

"Look, you hayseeds, we have a chance to deal with this problem but I'm not going to manage it alone and these guys would be helping me out if you weren't pointlessly scaring them off. If you insist on wasting your time yelling at mages, go find some others unless you'd rather all die together rather than have some chill."

"We're dying anyway! More destruction isn't going to fix it!"

"Magic stopped being possible tonight, you'd all be doomed for certain. As long as there's mages or me breaking physics, there's a chance we can still salvage this. Destruction can be amazingly constructive if you aim it right."

"Seriously, go home and get out of the way of people trying to fix things, goddamit."

Some of the periphery start edging away. The guy whose kids are all dead spits at the Red Lantern and says, "Kill me if you want! It's all mages and mage-lovers are good for!"

He drops down right in that guy's face, speaking calmly and more quietly, though somehow everyone nearby can hear it fine anyway.

"Killing's the easiest thing in the world. Any idiot can do it, mage or not. But it's the most pointless thing in the world, too. What you're doing here, though? Close second. If any of these mages were willing to kill, you'd be dead. You're not, because they're not idiots. They didn't break the world, and they didn't give up on it when the world decided it hated them."

He pauses, looks the guy right in the eye. "You want to say something to convince me you're not an idiot?"

"I don't care what you think."

He's never actually done this before. The motivation to do it and the circumstances generally are prohibitive, with anger; you have to be angry with someone and want to inflict this on them as a punishment. Also you have to be an Illustres who has hosted the Butcher enough times to call on him fractionally.

The environmental shield momentarily flares, and horns extend upward for a moment.

He cannot use our light.

And then it shrinks inward again.

"Congratulations. You will never again feel anger."

He feels, apparently, confusion??

Theo will do something (else?) inadvisable if he sticks around. He flies straight up, leaving a bright trail of red, and goes back to comet-catching.

The comets are not nearly as inclined to piss him off.

So when he returns after several hours of this, there will be a little more atmosphere and he will be calmer. Enough to have noticed that he escalated that unreasonably. Not enough to regret doing that, but.

Anyone back by the clocktower now?

The protestors are gone. Ranary is inside but she's the only one.

"Hey. Everyone who's usually here alright? I, ah, got into a shouting match with some obnoxious protestors earlier."