"When it punches through we unscrew the boards from each other and move each one very carefully to where it's supposed to be installed. If you tried to cut it - well, uh, you'd lose your knife?"

"Hmm."

Ring declares that nothing is present, but it can map the edges of the nothing and detect the affected area growing. Space is warped within it, in a way that is recognizably leading to a situation like what he saw with the first gate he scanned. There's no obvious association between the 'hole' and the boards it's embedded in.

"Like, if you cut the boundary a half-inch away from where the edge currently is? It's not growing that fast. You'd lose the knife if you weren't careful but I can be molecularly careful."

"When this punches through, it's no longer a disappearance point and the space warping travels with the gates, even if you turn them or move them to the other side of the planet?"

There's obviously some association with the substrate, which means it's subtle and his ring can't immediately distinguish it. Maybe he'll have to scan the gate being moved. Not understanding it is frustrating, so that won't be hard.

"It's still a point - it'll still eat away at the edges," he says, pointing, "it just won't go deeper after that. But yes, the space warping travels with. That's how - how Gatesnest works."

"Right. I've been on this planet less than an hour, I haven't learned lots of things you'd probably assume everyone knows, like Gatesnest. Also I'm very far from home so my ring-" he waves an arm slightly, there's a red band on his upper arm that spirals and crosses itself, not hiding the arm - "can't immediately tell if I crossed the planet to get here."

"I probably want to go find a point that's not being used for something productive like this one and do some quick experiments, but I think we can move on to 'what didn't work'."

"This one was supposed to have half go to the Moon if we could figure out how to get there, you can take it if you can bring us to the moon."

"If I'm not likely to break it in transit, I'd rather bring it to the Moon. My transport capacity is pretty limited - actually, I should explain the limitations of a Lantern."

"So, every Lantern is powered by one of the six basic emotions that all sapients feel. Mine, red, is anger.* I am probably the best currently alive in stretching anger to constructive things like building infrastructure and digging out pockets of the Moon rather than just destruction and violence, and I can do it, but I have to be angry about - the injustice that these people don't already have infrastructure, or that your whole planet is going to be wiped out and that's such a fucking waste - to do it. Transporting people I'd probably have to lean on getting very annoyed that this is necessary, and it's doable but sustaining it long enough to bring lots of people would be difficult, so best if I can just move the gate."

*generally when he's speaking or thinking in red, his eyes temporarily flash with brighter red. He can suppress that if he works at it but he usually doesn't.

"Oh. Then, yeah, we can peel it now and you can bring half up." He gets a screwdriver and some thick gloves and starts detaching the halves of the gate.

"That's probably not step one, of that plan. I should create the pocket before I bring the gate up."

"That's okay, this will take a while."

"Alright. So, destroying them. What's been tried and failed?"

"- you don't know anything about how magic is done, right?"

"Only what people have told me," he confirms.

"Magic is an art. You draw and paint the concepts you're trying to specify, and then you chant, and you destroy something. If you mess it up - if you don't specify well enough - the magic takes some of you instead. Or all of you, if it's a big spell."

"Trying to destroy a point took all of the person who tried it?"

"Six of them and that's this try, it's been tried many times."

"Well. When a Red Lantern fails to destroy something, that only makes us angrier. And I can probably do something smarter, failing to understand what I can and can't do is not, in principle, a problem I have."

"Do you want me to make you another point, on some portable object, to experiment with?"

"Yeah, that seems like a good idea. Will you be able to put more destruction into it if I ask you? Eventually I'm going to throw it out into the nothing of space, and hopefully see how it responds."

"Yes, once I make it that's the one I'll be connected to and I can go cure someone's cholera or something."

"Excellent plan. Let me hand you a communication device so I can be in space when you do it."

He has a simple CB radio in his subspace pocket and it would be really annoying if he had to zip up and down over and over and now it is in his hand. (Some evidence he's in the same universe, since the pocket didn't get left behind. Good.)

"You probably haven't invented these yet, it's a two-way 'radio', we'll get you a century and you'll get to them. This bit makes noise and my voice will come out of it. Press this button and speak into this bit and it will send the message to me. Don't do that while I'm also talking, if you do neither of us will hear the messages properly."

"...testing testing," he says, pressing the button.

...testing testing goes the ring. Silently, but Theo hears it.

"Worked on my end. Let me just..." zip over to outside the building. Send to the radio... "This better be working."

"This better be working", goes the radio

He zips back. "You get that?"

"- yeah. Weird."

"It's basically turning sound vibrations into vibrations of weird light and back, though the physics to explain why and how that works is complicated. After we have the crisis handled maybe I'll give lessons."

"Give me a point?"