"Yeah. Being able to do any would help a lot though... Are you sure, thousands of years? Given that we think it's speeding up?"

"Not sure, but - how long have you been using it here, before a point burst through the planet?"

"Hard to say exactly but thousands isn't the wrong order of magnitude, I think."

"The total masses of those gassy planets are a few hundred times as much as this planet. Even adjusting for the mass lost to the holes, they're at least a hundred times the old mass each. I can't say how much longer they'd last for sure without knowing way more about how the points grow, but I'd guess ten times or more."

"But that's if the speed at which point growth accelerates is independent between points."

"As opposed to... linked to ones nearby?"

"No, as opposed to just - all of them. The second point punched through not too long after the first, and it wasn't like the first provoked the only ever war that used a lot of magic."

"Ah. Yeah, in that case I have no idea."

"We're not sure about this but it's definitely a strong hypothesis."

"How many more have there been since the second? Or did everyone stop then?"

"Everyone at least slowed way down after the second. We can't be positive if there are any more since most of their antipodes are in the sea."

"Sounds like something I can check. And should, we don't want any of them draining the ocean."

"The sea level is definitely dropping but that could be indirect somehow."

"...Yeah, I should definitely deal with that. If you can notice the sea level dropping, there are big problems. Lower air pressure will make it boil off a little but not fast enough to be noticeable. There's a hole in the bottom of the sea. Or several." And now he has a campfire song stuck in his head. Great.

"It seemed less urgent than the air. Is there water in space you can get?"

"I have been. And then breaking it apart to turn it into air. But it's scarce. And no, honestly it's probably more urgent, if not necessarily more important. Because it's getting lost much faster, and if you lose a lot of water the atmosphere gets fucky and unhealthy for life. Probably survivable up to a lot of loss? Not sure. Should be much easier to make the loss stop, though."

"Okay. So, I guess water is the next priority. No extra bonus help to be had yet, I gather."

"It'll take a while, if it arrives. Can't rely on that being soon enough."

"Yeah." Sigh. "Uh, let's see, if the sea was news what else might be news... most points are in the desert. I don't know if that matters, but if it does. We've got graphs of how much wider they get over time once they punch through." She fetches the graphs.

"Deserts should be fine. Any big forests could be a problem, but you'd probably have noticed."

"Why would forests be a problem?"

"There's more than one type of air and the kind you need to breathe gets cycled through plants. Lose a lot of forest and the air gets thinner to breathe, and also more full of the type of air you breathe out which among other things can make it hard to think clearly if there's too much of it. That's not that fast of an effect though."

"Oh, I think that's known at least by some people but I wouldn't have expected it to be a big deal because forests don't naturally fall into the space left by a tree that gets disappeared the way water does."

"Yeah, sounds right. Well, I should probably go spend the afternoon plugging holes in the ocean."

"Thank you. Thank you very much."