"That... probably would be a better idea. Try to cut it out and store it, use it as a plug for a hole later," he says, and sighs slightly. "Ehh, it wouldn't be that relaxing anyway."

"The moon matters for the tides, we just sort of figured nobody's going to be able to care about the tides next year."

"Oh, is that all? No, it'll barely matter. If I carved out a space large enough for all billion people to live approximately as densely as the city I live in on Earth, it would be..." Ring, why doesn't he know this yet? "...yeah, less than one percent of the mass of the moon. It probably couldn't be quite that dense but you'd still need to farm and bring food through the gate so it wouldn't be nearly all of you either."

"Oh. In that case I guess having a moon pocket won't hurt anything but it still doesn't seem like the best use of your time."

"Maybe not. What else is there? Everything I've thought of myself so far would take days or longer."

"Can you just make stuff? I don't know what you can do."

"Yes, more or less. But most things are difficult. ...In general, assume I can do anything you'd have been able to invent a machine to do any time in the next century. What's in urgent need?"

"...some places need water, food... I don't know what we'd have invented."

"Like, make a faster plow or a tool that you roll through a field and pull all the seeds off the grain, you can't see how to make it but probably someone could. Make grain from nothing, probably not. Dig deeper, cleaner wells, yes, create water from nothing, probably not. And sometimes I can do things like that, but they're always way more difficult and often I can't."

"Though actually I can condense water from the air pretty easily, that's something you probably wouldn't have predicted you'd invent soon but you would've. Is there a good central place to distribute that from?"

"Uh - I know Zibaran used to use magic to purify their water and stopped. Little country around the Lowlands neighborhood."

"I can probably make that not need purifying pretty quickly."

"It'd help." Yawn.

"Are there, like, maps of Gatesnest? I don't know how to recognize neighborhoods when I find them, and you're probably not up for playing guide."

"It's pretty hard to map. Because of all the gates. If I get lost I get back to the mages' hangout with the tower, the one you saw, and go from there. If you start there Lowlands is through the gate with the brick arch across the square, forward two blocks, hang a left, gate backed up on the cliff face, gate straight across from that one, and you're there."

"Okay. You going to be headed to sleep soon? You look tired."

"I haven't slept well for months. But yeah, if you don't need me for anything."

"I'll find someone else if I do, go and sleep. I promise not to wake you up on my way in."

"Thanks." Off he shuffles.

And he will zip off to the tower, then the Lowlands, and then go up a ways and look for infrastructure that's failing them for no fault of theirs. There are wells and they didn't know how to clean them without eating the planet, but that's not their fucking fault, they deserve clean water like everyone else.

(He's very good at this mental motion. He's done it thousands of times now, and it's why he's considered the greatest Red Lantern alive.)

So, where are the wells that need fixing?

It's actually not wells; they have a spring that produces water that's fine except for all the poisonous minerals in it and usually have an aqueduct system that a mage periodically purged of those minerals.

Oh, that's even easier.

This isn't going to stand. He is going to get them what they deserve, because it offends him for people to have broken infrastructure. He is sending red tendrils down into that well and they are finding the sources of the heavy metals and making them not.  -Wait. These people are humanoid and actually damn-near human, and heavy metal contamination is a safe bet, but he really needs to check.

Fortunately feeling like an idiot is adequately motivating to find some local nearby to do a scan on. Look for someone who appears young and in approximately good health and drop out of the sky in front of them.

"Hello, I'm from space and working on saving your planet. Right now I want to purify the aqueduct. Mind if I do a medical scan on you to check how similar you are to other humanoid species I know about?"

"- a - what -? - if it will save the planet I guess!! I didn't think the aqueduct had to do with it at all!!"

"It will not directly save the planet, no."

"But in between buying you all time, I'm doing this kind of thing, because everyone's been planning like there isn't going to be a future, and there will be, and local infrastructure is something I can definitely fix quickly."

"It would be nice if the water was not poison, do what you need to do!"

"Thank you," he says, and then glares - up, mostly, because it's at himself for not doing this sooner and it's stopping him from fixing this and - scan. How human are these humanoids? Any weirdly high or low trace elements?