He will be very annoyed if this is trapped somehow... It isn't. He goes down into the basement complex and looks around.

There are a bunch of stressed looking people in there. Two are missing a leg each. They're working in small groups, hushed and sketching and whispering.

Either they're worried they'll be attacked, or they're working, and on a deadline.

"I'm from another planet and extremely powerful," he announces, still glowing, "And I want to help. Someone please explain the situation to me."

They look at each other and then one gets up and heads over to him. "The disappearance points were growing faster than anybody thought," she says. "One punched through the planet. The people who lived where it went through thought it was an attack. The war used a lot of magic and now it's getting worse. We have a few months, maybe, before we don't have the atmosphere enough to breathe any more, and people are dying all the time over war-related problems and disappearance-related disasters in the meanwhile."

"Too fast for evacuation for certain, then. You free to tell me more about disappearance points and how magic works, about which I know literally nothing? I have the most powerful tool in the universe but it's finicky and I really need context."

"- magic is about destroying things. Setting it on fire, killing it, annihilating it altogether. It destroys extra stuff, in prepared spots called disappearance points. They - once they got down to the mantle of the planet, we couldn't tell, any more, how deep they were - so we assumed they kept going at the same rate. They... don't."

"Ah. I see how that could happen. Say I poured a moon's worth of rock into one, would that help? Make it worse?"

"It'd buy us time. I'd need to do some math to guess how much and my guess might be wildly off."

The ring got a system map when he asked for the stars... Yeah, there's outer-system moons and asteroids.

"I can do that. It'll take me a day or two. What else are you trying?"

"My team is trying to get to the moon. We wouldn't be able to save many people that way even if it worked - moon doesn't have its own air - and it's not looking likely, though. There's a team working on making more air chemically somehow out of stuff we can live without. There's a team on trying to destroy the disappearance points but that's been tried before and they've already lost six people. I think Cor had some idea but he's working alone."

"Getting you to the moon's easy. Ten minutes tops. What were you going to do there?"

"I can definitely destroy anything that's ontologically possible to destroy, that's arguably what I'm best at, but there's often serious collateral damage so I try to leave that for last."

"It might not be ontologically possible, is the problem, since it's already nothing. The idea was we'd make a moon disappearance point, and in a place that wasn't on the path to be wrecked by it hollow out a cave to keep air in, and get air up there through a gate, and it'd - buy time. We don't have anything that isn't buying time."

"I can do that. Make the pocket, extend the environmental shield to a few people, bring them there. I don't know about the disappearance point but probably it would work fine from within the shield. You'd get people to the pocket by gate as well?"

"Yes. We've got a gate almost ready to be peeled."

"Okay, I should probably talk to the destruction people and the solo guy, but assume I'm good for creating a pocket inside the moon, or a bunch, and getting you all transported. I'll get back within an hour and we can probably just go and do it then."

"- I'll get packed."

"Lanterns can do crazy things."

And then he looks for either the destruction people or the solo guy, whichever he finds first.

The destruction people are in this same room. They've been eavesdropping, though one is still resolutely paging through what claims to be a visual dictionary of artistic motifs.

"So," he says with a slightly savage grin, "You have something extremely hard to destroy and I have limitless capacity for destruction. Please explain its properties and after that we can get into what didn't work."

"- the disappearance point isn't anything. It's - a location, but there's nothing there - have you looked at one?"

"I saw the hole in the world, and the gates. That's not the same?"

"Hole in the world isn't the same, no, you see through that one and the disappearance is on the, the lining."

"Right. Where's the closest one you can give me a distance and direction for? I'll be back in a minute or two."

"- we have one here, the gate near ready to peel." He can lead him into an adjacent room, where there's a big wooden board, screwed onto another one, and a - hole - a nothing - it's horrible to look at, it shouldn't exist, it doesn't -

Wow, fuck this thing. Ring: What is it? Or isn't it?

"And this will... punch through, and then it's a gate? What happens to the board around it? What would happen if you cut the boards away?"