Nod, nod. "I'll keep brainstorming, but - a summary of your abilities that doesn't rely on references to inventions our grandchildren might have cooked up would be helpful."

"I get that, but it's hard, because they're stupidly general, limited almost entirely by me having to motivate it with anger. Anything that can be done with technology you have that doesn't use disappearance points, I can do without other tools, almost always in industrial scale. I can do telekinesis at massive scale and with extremely fine precision, though not so much both at once. I can generate basically any weapon systems I can imagine and, in extremis, many that I can't, as long as they can in principle work, and that's one of the few things I don't need to hold in my head. Another two are my environmental shield, which shrugs off temperature, pressure, and vacuum, and the translation effect, which lets me understand and be understood in any sapient language, even ones Lanterns have never encountered."

"I can fly at ludicrous speed. I can travel between nearby stars in hours and cross a galaxy in days, and the speed would be faster except that running that on anger is difficult. I can make another ring with a few hours of effort. I can do a huge range of exotic sensor scans which can cover a decent chunk of the planet easily, and extend that to the whole planet within an hour or the whole solar system within a day. More mundane things like visible light, heat, sound, and radio waves, make that a minute and an hour instead. I can sense people's anger and get the gist of what they're angry at. I can inspire anger across a lot of people, and I can't entirely turn that off, there's always a slight tendency around me for people to get angry at less provocation, and a stronger tendency for me myself."

"I can amplify most of that by calling on the Embodiment of Rage to possess me, though I get harder to keep focused and it increases the 'easy to anger' thing - and it's alarming to watch - so I don't call him lightly. ...I'm sure I'm missing something significant but that's everything I can think of."

Cor takes a step back at the part about inspiring anger. "That's such a lot of things to be able to do and I guess none of them are evacuating us. I really hope you can find another planet to bring a gate to soon but I think your current order of operations is probably reasonable."

"I appreciate your assessment. Mostly for curiosity, what is the project you've been working on independently?"

"Oh, I was going to inevitably get myself killed trying to rip a little hole in between universes. I may keep working on the spell but I'm certainly not going to cast it with you around unless you neglected to mention that you can raise the dead or see the future."

"As desperation plays go, sounds like a decent one. I cannot do either of those things. The very strongest Blues sometimes can raise the recently dead. ...They're also the backup I'll be calling for. Red's specialties are violence plus a certain inviolability - Blue's are healing and transportation."

"Transportation would be awesome. Do they need remains, to raise the recently dead?"

"I don't actually know. It wouldn't hurt, but if they were standing by... maybe. They help us out - they help everyone - but they don't like us much. I know what ordinary Blues can do because it's strategically and tactically relevant; not so much for the details of what their heroes can manage."

"They sound like lovely folks. I hope we get to meet some. I shouldn't keep you any longer, I don't think - I'll hang out in the mage meetinghall if you want me."

"Yeah, I should go productively stargaze for an hour and then crash at Panj's. Nice to meet you - I think it was Cor?"

"That's right. Welcome to our extremely busted planet, Red Lantern."

"Thanks," he says, only a little sardonically, then he's off into the sky to do long-range scans of the solar system.

This is hard. Much harder than actually fetching the comets will be.

He traded advice with an Orange Lantern once on how to deal with little steps far removed from your actual goal. 'Want the ends, want the means', was her philosophy - keeping in mind how every goal needs steps, and if you Want the goal, that implies wanting the path to it.

That wasn't useless advice, but it doesn't work very well with anger. There's plenty to be mad about. Right now people are asphyxiating and being left too exhausted to help themselves through no fault of their own and he wants to do something about it goddamnit. But framing looking through the solar system as that something isn't easy, even as he focuses on how that's what he needs to fix the problem.

But after a while he finds some frustration at how the universe just keeps making his job hard. Dumping him somewhere without any map or path home, where he doesn't know anything and has to improvise short-term crisis management rather than call someone who could do this easily, is fucking perverse and he doesn't have to stand for it, he will assemble a map of his surroundings the hard way if he damn well has to.

And there we go. Detailed light refraction scans of every isolated object withinn the planet's orbit, and save those readings and check them against water and carbon dioxide. Then move away from the solar plane and look futher outward for mid-period comets out by the gas giants and scan them...

It's slow going, but he puts in a couple hours and he has most of the space out to the outer planets scanned and noted. And he's getting too tired to sustain this. Getting back to the right emotional state will be easier next time, at least.

He drops back toward the ecliptic and then the planet, and zips a transition in through the open window of Panj's house to sleep, deeply.

He wakes up poorly - that's pretty common when he's been doing a lot of ring-slinging - and goes to check in with the mage club. He has gotten the sense that Gatenest is a 24-hour city (or however many hours this planet has) and someone might have a new idea.

"My next plan was to grab some comets that can be turned into more atmosphere. Should take a few hours. Anyone have an idea they think should take precedence?"

"You can turn comets into air?" asks Ranary.

"How much air?"

"Water can become air, if you strike it with lightning in small quantities or do some chemistry to it. The average icy comet will get you something like three thousand cubic kilometers of oxygen, which is the part of air we need to breathe, and half that in nitrogen, which is the most common gas in the atmosphere. Giving you an atmosphere from nothing would be about a million of them, but you don't need nearly that much, it's just thinning, not gone. I think I'll get a few hundred today and that should be enough for a noticeable improvement."

"That's - fast. Thank you."

"Maybe not today, here - but somewhere in Gatesnest, probably - but it'll get really windy within a week and that's when you should start breathing easier. I think it'd be a couple weeks to fix it entirely and that won't be permanent, but I can help pretty fast. Lanterns are kind of bullshit."

"Will it add enough mass to the planet to also keep the new air?"

"No, that's why it won't be permanent. But it'll help a little, and it won't be lost quickly. I can add more mass to the planet but the best idea I have there will probably cause a lot of earthquakes so I'm not executing it yet."

"What's the idea?"

"Cutting the disappearance points out of the ground and replacing them with space rock."

"That does sound... quaky."

"It needs to be done, if we can't evacuate the planet. But there is probably a way to mitigate the damage or, alternatively, to buy enough time that I can actually scout a new planet you could move to. So I'm not doing it yet. And in the short term, a week adding atmosphere probably buys a couple months of losing it."