"What did you test?"

"Took a small disappearance point and cut away everything around it, closer and closer until the slicing constructs hit the point itself and vanished. I was still able to manipulate it and accelerate it at ludicrous speed out of the solar system. Of course, then Panj used it and it went straight through the stuff in physical contact to the space dust around it and, since I wasn't far enough away, me. So it won't be safe to use any points that I throw out of the galaxy. But cut it out and throw it away, as long as no one's using it - and probably a little use would be fine - that part works, and it's not hard."

"Uh, has Panj since connected to a different one?"

"No," says his friend.

"It'll be fine for tiny amounts of use, I expect. The problem is that it's invisible, out in space, and it's traveling pretty far but dust is pretty thin, and it'll eventually get back here with no warning, if people used it much. I checked while I was recovering, the amount of dust it's traveling through probably has one millionth the mass of the moon; it's not small, just not large enough to be reassuring."

"Okay, but, uh, as we recently discovered, points grow even when not in use and do so exponentially."

"I had not heard the 'when not in use' part. Or else misinterpreted it. Exponential as a function of current size?"

"Hard to get great data on this but that is what it looks like."

"Right, of course. Better have him switch off when he wakes up. That means I'd need to leave much more safety margin when slicing them down and throw points away at much higher speeds - which I can do, I can accelerate things to relativistic speeds if necessary - but that makes my mentioned plan to beat maybe 20% slower and 10% less good in terms of side effects, maybe more."

"Wait. Uh, not really time travel but - light has a speed. By default rules of physics, nothing can move faster than that speed, and for things that get close, time slows down. We throw a big javelin and see it as taking 100 years to reach the next star, but if you were riding along on the javelin you'd only experience five years before you arrived. Is that relevantly time travel for your earlier question?"

"Doesn't get us to before the war so I don't think so."

"Yeah, the universe doesn't seem to allow reversing causality." Even when you use exotic physics to do things that ought to be equivalent to it, but he was once advised not to mention that to anyone who doesn't specifically ask, it's not good for anyone's mental health. It is his experience that this advice is wise, and indeed he doesn't like thinking about it.

"Is there a way you can turn things that are not air into air?"

"Some things. Nothing I've ever tried at scale, let alone planetary scale. There's ways of recycling air other than plants, and that can make thin air breathable. I could grab water and ammonia from comets and apply chemical processes to turn them back into pure gases. That... might work, actually, it's possibly simple enough. --Ultimately the main restriction on what I can do, for nonviolent things, is that I have to maintain most of the complexities in my head, while angry. And the bigger the scale, the angrier, which makes complexity harder."

"Has to be in your head, can't outsource to a record or another person for that?"

"Person, definitely not; object, only in the sense that writing down a speech saves you from remembering it all at once."

"Okay. But if making air is doable, that would be good, there are some high-altitude places that people are having to evacuate and that's only getting worse."

"Legit. I'll take a look into the sky tonight, then grab some water comets tomorrow and make some oxygen."

"And you're calling for help?"

"In some order. I'm inclined to do the comets first since it is much more likely to work and buys a lot more time than it takes. Then trying to call backup and trying to destroy a point outright."

"You should... make, uh, end-of-life-arrangements, or something, before trying to destroy a point outright, that being known to kill people pretty reliably."

"That seems more like a property of the magic means by which you've tried than a property of the target. Isn't that what happens when a spell backfires badly doing anything else?"

"Yyyyes but the amount of effort that has been put toward destroying disappearance points would by now have worked on basically anything else."

He pauses to think for a while.

"It's not that I'm discounting how destructive your magic is, it's that I think you're underestimating mine. ...It's generally said that Red Lanterns don't lose fights. It's just a matter of how much gets destroyed along the way. We might get our bodies ripped to shreds and crack the planet beneath us, but we'll keep fighting furiously and the opponent will be obliterated before we let ourselves fall. Even if that's a terrible idea; doing our best to train that impulse out of people is one of the things that makes basic training slow."

"This is the first thing I've heard of that has a solid chance of being more destructive than the red light in full war-fighting form. It's just that mine's just as scary and easier to steer. And, especially if I take one of the more unusual precautions, protective of its users."

"Well. I can hardly stop you. But call for help first."

"Yeah. And I'll think about whether it's worth it. Also, obviously, I'll get far from any planets that I don't want to crack before trying it, I would have done that anyway."