"- I don't know, this is where we usually meet, I've just been waiting."

"Well, then I guess I can clear up why you've been waiting longer than usual. There were some anti-mage protestors earlier. Angry yelling, no sense of nuance or acknowledgment that the group here have been doing their best to save the planet. I tried to reason with them a little, then got angry and... well, no one was hurt. One's going to have a somewhat strange life, though."

"I did see them, that's why I wasn't here earlier... I thought they'd gotten bored and dispersed. What happened?"

"After trying to lecture them on how without y'all and me they'd be doomed for sure, I took away his ability to feel anger. It's immediate, and permanent. He'll still have the grief that fed the anger, but it just - won't. It was not really proportionate but ignorant anger always has pissed me off."

"...wow. Don't tell Cor you did that."

"Strong opinions? Good to know. I mean, I'm not going to lie, but good to know."

"Yeah no don't lie but if you bring it up he's going to like. Have a hard time working with you probably."

"Oof. Well, that's on me for doing it, I guess."

Could it be reversed? Under the right circumstances, probably, if that could be arranged. If Cor's dislike for it is mostly anger he could probably manage it.

"Hopefully it's nobody we know and the rumor mill is slow. I won't tell him if you don't, this is too important."

"It'll go fine without him, if need be. He's clever but so are the rest of you, all I really want is people who understand your magic and can propose ideas."

"That we can do. How is it going so far?"

"Progressing alright. I was hoping for a way to safely fix this planet - take the points out - but the default fallback of patching the air for long enough to survey other stars is going fine."

"At least the points didn't eat you when you tried, I guess..."

"They tried. It didn't take. Slicing the points out of the ground still might work if we accepted some nasty earthquakes as the price."

"Did kinda risk Panj getting eaten, though. He was fine, but - not the smartest thing I ever did."

"Panj? Was he with you?"

"He created the point and did the magic that tested it. I sliced down the wood around it a lot, so it could have backfired on him. Instead it reached out to things it wasn't touching and tried to eat me. And I was fine in a couple hours. Still more of a risk than I meant him to run, though."

"Oof. Yeah, if you need another one I'm sure we can dig up a gate that was made by someone already dead, or something."

"It's almost surely fine - it went for me, near the point, not him like it would if the magic failed and backfired. But we didn't know that yet and I'm angry at myself for not seeing the possibility in advance."

"Well, that's... useful, right?"

"The result we got? A bit. It means we could toss points into the big gas planets and they'd stay usable for a few thousand years."

The anger at himself... well, it's not like he'd stop if it wasn't useful.

She did actually mean the anger but okay! "That's cool, should we be... doing that?"

"I don't really know. Cutting out the big ones people are already using is probably dangerous. Making new ones and throwing them into - whatever you call the big planet - doesn't scale too well. I guess it would probably make sense for the group here if anyone's trying something else ambitious."

"Nothing we had going was such a good idea that it looked better than helping you with whatever you're doing."

"Fair enough. Maybe not worth using, then. I guess it would enable routine magic like the disease-busting. That's probably good, though explaining to the angry protestors would probably be... risky."