The surface indeed doesn't look healthy! Actually, from this angle you can actually see through the planet, and not in a fashionable shapely toroidal way.

Is anyone even left after whatever did this? Ring says yes. Plenty of life signs, signs of industry in some places. Well, they didn't deserve this shit, let's go down and see what's up.

So, there descends a bright red streak near one of the larger cities. When it reaches slightly-over-ground level, it materializes as: a human in a smooth one-piece leotard, mostly in the same red as the light but with some very dark blue as contrast, such as his gloves and collar. There's a thin film of red light surrounding him, and his eyes glow with slightly brighter light.

Anyone look more interested than terrified?

Yes! A lot of people do look terrified but he has chosen a crowded place and there are a few people still sticking around.

"What are YOU?" asks a teenage girl.

"I'm a Red Lantern. Where the hell am I, and what the hell happened to this planet?"

"You're in Whitepeaks and there was a magic war. What's a Red Lantern?"

"Lanterns wield the six fundamental lights of the emotional spectrum through 'rings' which are usually called the most powerful tool in the universe. Red Lanterns wield the light of Anger. Is there still a war and would it be stopped by someone displaying overwhelming force? Also, what does magic mean to you and how did it cut such a neatly small hole through the planet?"

"The war's over now, I think. Magic is destroying stuff... what do you mean the lights of the emotional spectrum, what even is that."

"Long story, short version is that I can do just about anything as long as I can frame it to myself as an anger response. I'm very good at it. Is the planet safe? Usually when you puncture the core it starts breaking apart into fragments and losing its atmosphere."

"...no, we're all gonna die, mister."

"Good news, pointless death pisses me off. So I can do something about it. Where should I find someone to talk to about details?"

"...I think a lot of mages live in Gatesnest."

"Point me there, then?"

"Uh, the nearest gate is in Finch Heights that way."

"I should go there, then. Thank you." And he is annoyed that he's lost and - there, Finch Heights. Zoom.

Is that an ordinary mundane gate?

No, absolutely not, it's a portal thing. There's a robust arch built out around the edges, maybe due to that sign saying (if he's pissed off enough about not being able to read it) that compromised protective arches should be reported immediately to the Gatesnest Maintenance Authority as exposed gate edges are extremely dangerous.

(Fortunately, translation is one thing he doesn't need to be specifically angry about, as long as he's angry in a general sense. Which he was even before he got a ring that relied on him being angry to function.)

Huh, teleport portals, usually that's much more advanced than this world looks. Where's the power source? Come on, ring, he hates being left in the dark. ...None visible to scans, and as far as his ring cares that's just some normal space that isn't obeying normal topology. Okay, maybe magic that isn't sufficiently advanced technology does exist. Given how magic-like Lanterns are he's not actually that surprised.

He will... float through, visibly glowing and hovering, and look for 'mages', or just someone who he can ask about it.

There are plenty of people out and about. Somebody's advertising that they found some garlic in their cellar and they're selling it for astronomical prices while customers argue with them about whether that makes any damn sense when the world is ending and others are paying most of their life savings for a bulb of garlic.

He will pick someone who is neither trading garlic nor arguing about it and ask them questions.

"Hi. I'm from another planet and I can maybe help you with the thing where yours has holes through it. Can you show me to some mages who can explain what in the hell happened?"

"- you're from another planet? Shit, why do you need to talk to anybody, just get us out of here!"

"How long do you have to evacuate? And how many people? Because I got here by accident and getting back, especially with more than a couple passengers, would be slow."

"I don't know, not that long! I don't know how many people the war killed, before that it was about a billion I heard once?"

"That'd be... a decade, probably. Assuming that finding the initial path back home went smoothly. But this is the most powerful tool in the universe, there's going to be something I can do. I'm not going to just let this pointless fucking waste happen without doing what I can."

"Well, if you need mages, some of them hang out through that gate and then in the place with the big tower and the basement complex, but fuck them, they got us into this," sniffs the local.

"Usually the best people to ask about how to get out of a problem, though. Thanks." And he probably needs to chew them out for causing the problem, so he can zip through the gate and look for the big tower.

There is a gate, and a big tower, with stairs leading into its cavernous underneath.

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?"

"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?"

"Let me find a piece of scrap." He goes and finds a chunk of wood. "I'm going to make it really small, and it shouldn't punch through, but don't stick anything you like anywhere near it, okay?"

"I will not put any matter anywhere nearby, don't worry."

"...or any, uh, non-matter, that you like, probably."

He considers trying to explain but settles for. "Sure. Don't worry about it."

The guy nods and sets the chunk of wood down and chants over it INCREDIBLY OMINOUSLY.

When Theo gets into a fight, if the opponent can throw enough power around to actually hurt him, his glowing aura turns into burning holographic blood, which also fills up his wounds to keep him patched up and fighting. Also, if he can't beat someone (overlapping but not the same problem), he first sprouts massive glowing horns, and if that doesn't help enough he is surrounded by a giant furious red bull several stories tall.

He is not going to be the one to judge anyone for being ominous.

And then there is one of those horrible-to-look-upon spots in the chunk of wood, very small, not deep enough to see through.

"Right. Let's see what this does in the void of space." This thing is ugly and annoying and destructive and he is going to get fucking rid of it, and he extends a bubble from his shield and catches the wood, floating it alongside him.

"Might as well go find someone who needs their disease killed now, the radio isn't heavy. I'll tell you when I'm ready for you."

And then he'll give a little salute and go back to space.

"I'll go looking." He jogs out of the building.

Well, he left the bubble tight around the wood but loose around the disappearance point itself until he got out into space. And outside the planet's orbit, clearing a little ways beyond where the moon could hit, holding the point perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic in case he wants to suddenly shove it at a few thousand miles an hour when something goes wrong.

The first thing he does is to cut away everything except a cone in the point's path with razors made of red light, then slicing closer and closer until he's made it nearly a slightly-rounded disc.

...okay. Safe part over.

What happens when he cuts even closer, hard-light construct cutting right up to the boundary of the disappearance point? It's not matter, but it can be disrupted, and that seems very plausible.

Yeah, it fizzles away when it hits disappearance.

Okay. He half-expected that. But it didn't fizzle away before that. He can cut a disappearance point out of its surroundings and throw it. That doesn't solve the problem, but it can prevent it getting worse.

Assuming, of course, that this next thing doesn't blow up in his face.

Ring, I don't want to go back down for this, contact the radio.

"Red Lantern to - fuck, I forgot to ask your name. Tell me when you're ready and I'll give you the cue. Don't go before I tell you."

Fortunately on this scale he can ignore lightspeed delay easily. Lantern rings are bullshit.

"It's Panj. Uh - if the blood paint dries the spell won't work, when I'm ready will you be ready within, like, a minute?"

"That'll be fine, Panj. I'll need - ten seconds, probably less."

"Okay, getting underway, give me ten."

He has, actually, deliberately cultivated impatience to a degree. But ten-twenty seconds is fine.

"How long's the incantation take, about the same as the other one?"

Ten minutes, actually. "The incantation is shorter but that doesn't need a design and this does."

Okay, then he'll be getting a little annoyed. He's okay, he can try to orient himself to the galaxy he's in or whatever.

"Sounds good," is all he says

Then: "Ready."

"Start in five... four... three..." He starts accelerating nearly perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic, having already checked (because it was easy) that he isn't aiming anywhere near a star. "Two... one... go."

If this goes wrong, it will be heading way out of the solar system, but for the next minute or five he'll be keeping pace with it. There might be a lightspeed lag but it'll be ten seconds at most.

The chant begins. The disappearance point spears through the wood.

And when there's no more wood?

It balloons through the available space, consuming interstellar debris until it's eaten a fair chunk of space and is satisfied with that.

FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK!*

Theo was not right next to the point in absolute terms. But if you make a radius based on how much distance you'd need to cover to include the mass of the block before he started to shave it down? Then you are in astronomical terms, and he was very close in astronomical terms.

He is no longer keeping pace with it. He is miles away within a second...

*Note: Lanterns who are currently feeling an intense concentration of an emotion other than their fuel, such as fear for anything but a Yellow Lantern, either completely lose their active effects or, if they're as skilled as an Illustres, lose control of most things and have drastically reduced strength for everything else.

...But he also has bites taken out of him. His environmental shield is burning and bubbling.

FUCK, he was an idiot.

Self-healing with red light isn't categorically impossible. Which is good, because SOP if you know you're going to be sustaining yourself with Butcher's Blood is to call in a Blue Lantern to be on call for the minute your fight finishes so they can heal you before your rage fades too much to keep you going. And he can't contact anyone from her as far as he knows.

He's going to have to stop experimenting for the moment. Fortunately, self-hatred works fine.

"Right, uh, not entirely a failure, Panj, but I fucked that up. Edges of the point expanded when they ran out of wood and I was closer than stellar dust. I'll explain later, fixing myself up is going to take a few hours."

Hopefully. It'll serve him fucking right and his girlfriend local coordinator will never stop giving him shit for it.

He's descending back toward the planet as it is, he doesn't want to reserve any power for the environmental shield right now.

"Shit, that wasn't even a big spell!"

"I shaved pretty much the entire piece of wood away, to check that I could. That was my main test, and it's possibly pretty helpful for getting all the other points dug out of the planet and thrown away where they can't hurt you all anymore. But it turns out that it just extends to the nearest matter nearby if it doesn't have anything in physical contact. Probably they're sucking air in at a slow rate and always have been."

"I should have fucking predicted this. And, come to think of it, that it might eat you, which I guess it didn't, but fuck, I'm sorry, man, should have warned you."

"Anyway I'm landing in the wilderness now and will take a while to patch myself up as much as I can. I'll find you when I'm done."

"O-okay. Uh. Thank you."

He has landed. This will, as he said, fucking take a while.

He is angry at himself. He is angry at the world - and this magic which manages to be even more hostile than the one he's spent his life mastering.

He was doing his best to save a world and he doesn't fucking deserve to have these gaping rents in his flesh.

And he will, very slowly, demand that the flesh grow back.

It hurts like a bitch. So does the Butcher's Blood filling all the other space.

But

he

can

fucking

fix

it!

The wounds were fairly superficial, not far below the skin anywhere and less than a square foot of area. It still takes him four grueling hours and leaves him exhausted and a little light-headed - probably lost some actual blood while the Blood was sustaining him.

His suit patched itself up pretty much instantly when the wounds were closed. When he gets back to Gatesnest he'll look good as new, except for looking dead tired.

He'll find the destruction team again. "Hey. That could have gone worse. Any thoughts you had while I was out of contact?"

"Uh, I talked to some people and they think that if you take the disappearance points out of the planet it will all collapse to fill the resulting space and we will all die of earthquakes."

"Hmm. I'm replacing nothing with nothing - but they do behave weirdly, so that makes some sense. ...I'd have to bring a lot of rock down to fill it in, and couldn't do it all at once. But that's doable. Every solar system has a lot of asteroids, and this one's no exception. Bring a plug for each hole."

"He thinks that will still probably do some earthquaking but it might well be better than not doing it."

"Yeah, it's maybe not a whole solution. And as I discovered, it wouldn't be entirely safe to keep using the points I threw away - they'd just keep reaching outward, and no one except maybe a Lantern would be able to see if they were reaching back toward the planet, and people might use them too heavily since the cost was invisible. But it's a tool we have, now."

"I didn't end up having the chance to put my full power behind trying to destroy it. I'm not going to try today, healing wiped me out. Also I'm a little more pessimistic it's possible than I was."

"Yeah. They're... they're like that. Is there somewhere else you could put them - not the moon, if you can get farther than that, but -"

"Other planets in the system, yeah. The biggest ones aren't really made of rock - it's atmosphere pretty much all the way in - but as we learned today that doesn't matter. The sun's even bigger, but that would be bloody fucking stupid so we won't do anything remotely like that."

"- yeah."

"If you don't have any other urgent questions or suggestions, I should check with the Moon team, I disappeared on them."

"They packed up some things but they're less enthusiastic about the plan to spend a while failing to think of anything on the moon instead of here. I think Ranary left to see if Cor wanted any help."

"It would probably be a bit dull, and you're probably not going to enjoy the gravity much, considering. Well, less urgency, then. I did want to ask what Cor was working on, earlier... where are they?"

"His house, probably. Up in the hills. I've never been myself or I'd show you there."

"I'll wait until he gets back, then. But speaking of a house... I should find somewhere to sleep tonight. I'm going to do some more, make a pocket in the moon, but I will need to crash in a few hours."

"You can sleep over at my place. My - there's an empty room."

"Right. Thank you. Maybe best you show me there now, and I'll go - do errands - after?"

"Yeah." He leads him through a couple of gates - here it's summer and there it's winter, then here it's pouring rain, here it's summer again but a cool one by a lake. House. Spare room.

He cracks a window open, looks out it up at the sky and musters a little annoyance to get the ring to record it well enough he'll be able to find it from space.

"Thanks. I think I'll go tear a piece out of the moon now. This, at least, is too simple to go wrong."

"What's the moon pocket for now that they don't think it's a high leverage idea?"

"They might change their mind, and setting it up for them is easy. Also, my ring is - fundamentally mostly good at destruction, and so it'll be kind of relaxing to do it."

"Oh, I was thinking maybe you could do it in a way that leaves the same amount of moon..."

"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?

They are humans! This one has been drinking the poisonous water!

"Wow, you're as far as I can tell exactly the same species as my home planet. That's inexplicable but makes this easier for me. Thank you. Aqueduct should be flowing clean water in an hour."

Healing subtle damage for someone other than himself is unfortunately well beyond his capabilities. Most colors of Lantern need a full medical degree per species to do healing.

"Thank you. Thank you so much."

"Happy to. No one deserves this."

And then he's zipping off, back to hang in the sky extending tendrils of red light into the aquifer to make it one that produces water healthy for humans.

This might be very visible, if the sky isn't too bright here. On purpose - he may not be powered by hope but he has sure as hell practiced inspiring it. Big magic-according-to-Clarke displays tend to help.

It looks like the person he scanned is spreading the word. A ragged cheer arises.

Nobody cheers like people who have been beaten down - by other people or by circumstance - and just got a real sign of hope.

As it often does, it makes his constructs falter a little.

But this still happened and it isn't fixed and he will not accept that - and they're back and working. And soon, it's done.

He can't go infinitely far, and the ground shifts slowly. But they're good for at least a decade, probably two or three before it gets to dangerous levels again.

He should go warn them of that. Let's zip over to a big concentration.

"Water's pure at the spring now. Should be flowing safe soon."

Applause!

"I will warn you, it's going to be pure for years - at least a decade - but not forever. The earth moves and cracks open up, so in a generation or two, you'll need to be careful again."

"And if there aren't any questions, I should probably go back to Gatesnest to work on how to make sure you get those decades."

Whooping and cheering and weeping!

He lifts into the air and waves, then zips off.

He's flagging, but not too tired yet... He'll stop at the tower hangout, see if anyone wants to get his attention.

The first mage woman he spoke to is there now, with

a friend.

"Hey, are you the space alien?"

"Yeah, that's me, just took a break fixing Zibaran's spring. I mostly go by Red Lantern."

"Good to meet you, Red Lantern. I hear you can do a lot of things but not directly get rid of the disappearance points or whisk us all to wherever you came from?"

"I haven't gone all-out trying to destroy one and my last test backfired kind of bad so I'm putting off that test a bit. I'm not that optimistic. And I am very thoroughly lost - I didn't get here entirely under my own power, and I have star charts good across my entire home galaxy and we're definitely not in it. So no, no easy whisking."

"Is there anywhere you can get to in the next, say, week, which has breathable air."

"Nowhere I know about. Given time I can map the stars nearby and find the ones with rocky planets and distinguishing the ones with air composition mostly like here isn't much harder, but... I'd have to get very lucky for it to be within a week. In a month, probably fifty-fifty."

"Can you give powers like yours to anyone else?"

"Yes, but unfortunately they will all also be powered by the pure element of anger and it's really hard to find people who can channel that productively. Training for promising candidates usually is six months. Crash course just for scouting planets would be faster, but... I'm not sure how much faster."

"Can you do anything in the vein of time travel. Can you call for help. Can you create matter ex nihilo."

"Not that I know of; not by any of my usual methods, but I should make an all-out attempt; yes, though very slowly, and I can do a reasonable facsimile for some types of matter by grabbing massive amounts from the outer solar system or another solar system."

"Okay. Short term problems are that we have stopped using magic including for lifesaving applications and recent war fallout has disrupted global trade and production and also there has been a fair amount of vengeful violence against mages though you have arrived during an ebb. Medium term problems are that we are losing air pressure and the gravity to keep it in place and the stability of the ground beneath our feet. Feeding the disappearance points should slow this problem down; adding matter to the world in places where it won't be instantly eaten should also help. Long term problems are that the magic system underlying our way of life apparently does this so if we could import some other magic that would be super awesome."

"If we can solve the crisis, I have - enough of a library to cover a planet - stored in my ring, and can get you technological uplift of - a couple centuries within this generation. Also train more Red Lanterns, and assuming it's possible to get home and back under my own power, the other five types of Lantern which are mostly much friendlier magic. Technically advanced technology, but as my homeworld says, get it sufficiently advanced and it's indistinguishable, and we can't make them except by using them, almost no one can."

"Short term - lifesaving and stopping violence without inflicting further violence are weak points. If people are willing to use gates given said violence I could get them spread around the planet rapidly, which might help for trade, and I can also do - road and canal repair, that kind of thing - very quickly."

"Trade is disrupted not only by the routes being wrecked - though there are roads and bridges and canals that could use fixing - but also lingering bad feeling over the war, people giving up on bothering because they expect to die, and various participants being dead of earthquakes or the war or whatever else."

"I'm no diplomat, or healer. For general fatalism - best I can do is be very showy about fixing things and give people reason for hope. I think it worked in Zibaran, but they're probably not the ones hit worst by the war. I do think it's justified hope - Lantern rings are called the most powerful tool in the universe, and I have the one that's mostly a weapon but I'm - bragging a little - the best Red Lantern alive at using it constructively, so I think buying lots of time is very possible."

"My plan to beat is to grab tons of rock cores from the asteroids, cut out the disappearance points and throw them away, and stick the masses of rock in their places. Someone said it would cause lots of big earthquakes, and they're probably right, but from my tests today I'm confident it would work."

"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."

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."

She nods. "Even if there's nowhere else we could live is there somewhere else we could stay for a couple of days while the quaking dies down?"

"I don't know any. Normally I have a decent galactic map but this isn't my home galaxy. The plan for hiding in the Moon might be useful here?"

"Especially if you can fill the pocket with air that isn't stolen from here."

"Not as easy as it sounds; air is complicated, and it's already going to be kind of fucky since I'm only replacing two kinds and they're not in the same ratios that are being lost. It will be helpful short-term, but would be a big problem if we kept doing this for years. But I can probably manage."

"Thank you. We'll get started on logistics for staying a couple of days in a moon pocket."

"Thanks. Time to go lasso some comets."

"Have fun. Or, uh, anger."

"I'll take what I can get."

And he is up into the sky and zeroing in on the comets he located last time. They're going to have less interesting skies and that sucks for them but their lives suck more now, not breathing properly because the air's gotten thin, and he is going to damn well get some more air.

He transitions next to them and then ropes the comets with constructs, and he hates orbital mechanics but that gets the ring to plot him courses to bring them to the back of the moon as a staging area, frequently grabbing other comets along the way.

Whenever he gets up to a couple dozen, he switches to grabbing them, bringing them down to the surface over a big disappearance point, and doing science to them forcing them to chemically convert from H20 and NH4 to O2, N2, and lots of hydrogen outgassing. Everything that doesn't convert to air and probably some of it that does he lets fall into the disappearance point below - this won't help much but it won't not help.

It doesn't take him long to get bored, but it still needs doing and boredom makes him more frustrated with it, so as long as he can stay on task it actually goes faster.

After about six hours he's grabbed about five hundred comets and replaced about five percent of the volume of air that was lost - something like half a percent of what it was this morning. He grabbed most of the big comets so it will take more trips when he keeps doing this, but it's solid progress.

He takes a break in a pretty valley and pulls some food out of subspace - he ought to ask Panj about using his kitchen - and contemplates his next move.

Cor was right, calling for help takes priority, but what does he want to call for? He'll have to relay it through the Butcher; even if he can reach the Font of Rage, which he's never done reliably, no one else has been able to and they rarely try. And what does he call for? Lots of other Red Lanterns? That wouldn't be useless, but they're not good at this kind of thing.

Can he formulate a request for a Blue Lantern in terms the Butcher will understand? Maybe. There's the particular kind of anger of being injured and unable to treat the wounds. That would probably be interpreted correctly on the other end. He also needs to provide his own location - between his ring and getting a gestalt sense of the angers of the planet beneath him, though, he can probably do that.

...Ring, don't go running away if he dies. He is not fucking having a signal disrupted by the ring running off and deserting them. Stay a decade, or until there's no anger detected in the solar system, whichever is longer.

Successor protocol updated.

Okay. Go time.

He heads to the back of the moon, where he's been putting the comets. And then it's time to charge up. His Lantern appears out of subspace and the symbol on his chest glows to meet it.

"For those laid low in darkest night,
There shines avenging crimson light.
Justice be done though heavens fall;
My scarlet rage engulfs them all."

Ring charge at 100%

He doesn't pause. This next part never gets any easier but right after suffusing himself in the red light, flavored to match his own convictions, is the best way.

There's a massive problem, and despite his strength he can't fucking fix it. All he can do is nibble away at the edges and hope to buy time to find a better angle of attack, and he hates leaving problems unfixed, no matter how long he has to get used to them, and he hasn't gotten used to this one at all. Hundreds of millions at least are waiting for a miracle and he can't give them one. But there's someone who, sometimes, can, and can come when he calls.

"Butcher! Get over here!"

His aura flares, and flares, and he rises into the sky without a command.

It warps, and twists, and the great sigil of the Red Lanterns floats in the air flanking him on each side as the aura takes the shape of an enormous bull, stamping the ground as though about to charge.

(He's not exactly a bull. But he doesn't appear precisely the same for each Lantern, and he was something like a bull. Supposedly the first beast to feel anger. He's far too angry to answer any detailed questions about whether that is strictly true or not.)

The world is attacking these people, he says to the Butcher, and they have no way to fight back. It eats the ground they stand on, and all they can blame is their cousins who didn't understand the forces they had called up, and those who fought a war using those forces before they realized it was pure error. Even those know their rage is impotent, and doing nothing to solve their problems, lashing out with spite and desperation because they are caged with bars they can't attack. See their anger. Remember it.

The Butcher is not very good with words. Well, none of the six embodiments are, really, but it's probably the worst. But, still:

ALL GRUDGES REMEMBERED.

(For the Butcher, that's positively somber.)

Good. If we can't fix this together, take those grudges to the others. To the sharp razor mind. This is an open wound, staying unhealed, pain and rage until death in ten thousand thousand minds. She can follow the grudge and my anchor, and bring the tools to attack it properly.

He just committed to trying to attack it directly. Fuck, he didn't mean to do that. Well, he can't really back out once the Butcher gets his horns on a course, which...

YES! WE FIGHT! AND IF IT LIVES, THE HERD FIGHTS! WE DESTROY!

...he obviously was going to do immediately. He trusts his Illustres enough to let him steer, not enough to let him win if they outright disagree.

Aaaand he doesn't have a small test point to attack. Okay, he can finagle this...

This foe bites. It is made of destruction, like us. We should attack, but first the smallest and weakest of them, so their claws do not pierce us. We must find where that runt hides.

The ones that cause strange space are not real enemies to these minds. We seek the smallest disappearance point on the planet's surface.

THIS ONE, THEN!

And the vast mind does indeed look over the whole strange-shaped planet and finds something. Now the vast red bull is floating above it.

The smallest disappearance point on the surface is a little point someone must have made a few decades ago and then abandoned or died before using. It has grown since then, but not much: it's just a little pothole-sized absence in a playa.

Okay, that's good, actually, because he doubts this will backfire but he really is not sure. He'd probably be afraid if he wasn't marinating in an ocean of rage.

It shouldn't exist. Even the thing itself agrees, it offends every mind that sees it, it is a nothing in the universe that isn't nothing enough. The Illustres alone couldn't map it, but that won't stop us!

They reach out with the full force of planet's worth of anger and demand that this obscenity be scanned. They are mostly beyond rings, but here they need the computer, even charged at well beyond what it could possibly hold ordinarily. What is it?

Error.

What the fuck do you mean, 'error'.

Spatial warping effect is present with boundaries error.

We can see the boundaries perfectly well.

Tolerances around the edge of the effect can be established but details error.

Classify relevant properties of enemy which can be established.

Spatial warping is error. Destruction of spacetime and matter is error.

Can we attack it separate from all the others? Is it a local phenomenon?

Comparison to other sites is possible and produces match but correlations are error,

Provide plausible weapons which might interfere with the target.

Weapons require existent target. Existence of phenomenon is error.

Oh, fuck this fucking magic and whatever created it.

Contempt for phenomenon is affirmative.

Well, there's one weapon that they always have available. The Clarissi once analyzed the power output involved and said it had consumed 1000% of a normal ring charge per second, but the Illustres is mainlining the Butcher, they have limitless power to burn. They look firmly at the obscenity, and shout,

"BE NOT!"

And a cone of focused, angry power, barely visible as red, tries to attack the point and demand of the fabric of the universe that it cease to exist.

The disappearance point punches violently through the planet. He can see some of the moon, on the other side.

Fuck. We're done, we can't fight this directly. Tell the sharp one, as soon as you can.

And he drops to the ground, the aura momentarily entirely gone. The Butcher is back to the Font, or wherever he is when he isn't localized in the material universe.

And Theo will reactivate his environmental shield and being angry at himself for not avoiding this attempt gets him to the other end of the point in seconds.

It's not big enough to go through without hitting the edges kind of a lot but he can swing around the planet to the other side no problem. It is merrily and horribly eating some ocean.

Okay, at least it's not near people, and this is, actually, a problem he can do something about. He creates barriers holding back the sea in a cylinder a couple meters back, does the familiar chemical transformation to turn the water inside to gas, and then shoves around the stone on the sea floor to lower much of it but assemble a tall, narrow cylinder a couple meters thick that stretches fifty feet into the air above the ocean.

Goddammit. Well, could have been worse. Back to Gatesnest to report failure.

The mages are waiting for him.

"Well, message sent. And, unfortunately, I couldn't avoid testing whether I could destroy a point - it got bigger, punched another small hole through the planet."

"Well, you know, what's one more," says Cor bitterly.

"Wasn't my plan to try, but having the embodiment of rage come and go without trying to attack the enemy I was showing him... I should have predicted that wasn't going to happen. I'm sorry."

"I don't think it will take long for the message to get back to my boss. How long it takes for them to find us and respond is another story, I really have no idea."

"And there's some more atmosphere now. That part's good, at least."

"Yeah. My neighbor looked a little less dizzy this morning. Your boss - has different powers or just more ability to find people who do?"

"She runs the whole Corps of hundreds of Red Lanterns, and she's at home so she's in contact with the other colors and can ask for help. Also she's smarter than me and has the thing that sent me here available to analyze, so she has a better chance to find a way to travel back and forth."

"Other colors?"

"Did I not explain? So, six fundamental emotions, each of them associated with a color, make up the emotional spectrum, which is what powers Lanterns. Red anger, orange avarice, yellow fear, green stubbornness, blue hope, purple love. If I was at home and it was someone else here, I'd call in favors with Orange to help me analyze what happened to send them here - Orange doesn't have to do their own detail work, it just does what they want - and with Blue to solve the problem, because they're great at travel."

"Why is hope good at travel?"

"You know, that's hard to explain. They're dispositionally medics - they go where they're needed and heal people, and travel helps them do that. There's something about hope being the least personal of the emotions - my anger is my anger, but hope is usually about everyone - but it's fuzzy."

"Well. I... hope... they can be here soon."

"Yeah. Me too."

"Anything you need from us in the interim?"

"Dinner? Nah, just checking in to let you know where things stand, and see if anyone has clever new ideas."

"I can get you dinner."

"I'd appreciate it. After that I'll go back to scouting comets, probably - I think it'll probably be a month of that work before it's back to how it was, so I'll need to switch up what I'm doing some days, most likely."

"There are probably people to evacuate. Also food shortages, it's spring in the north and fall in the south but winter's going to be a nightmare in the south when it hits."

"I can do some of that. Not much I can do for short-term food shortages - maybe make chemical fertilizer, but that's still most of a year before it pays off. I should probably find some people who can try to take stock of this kind of thing, anywhere there's damaged infrastructure, so I can look at it and do at least whatever's fast."

"If you could move food from areas that have been evacuated but aren't disappeared yet that would go a long way. Or if you could... kill a lot of fish and bring them to Gatesnest be butchered and distributed, that seems maybe like something you could do. If fertilizer can make crops mature faster or yield sooner it might be worth handing it out in the spring hemisphere."

"Yield more, often with less work put in. Not so much faster. I can probably do those other things. How thoroughly is Gatesnest wrapped around the planet - or the safe parts of it, at least? Are there places far enough away from it that you wouldn't hear about them for weeks or months, if something went badly wrong?"

"It's almost everywhere. Not Shendria, not the Cabincuelmi Steppe, none of the Gaash states, there could easily be some uncontacted islands somewhere with people on them. But most everywhere else with settlement, eventually, somebody wants to haul a gate there, and then if they keep connecting more places, it's going to be a neighborhood of Gatesnest."

"About what I expected, but I wasn't going to rule out people being angry at mages and taking it out on the gates or something. I should probably check those places at some point when I've done more comet-wrangling, see if there's any low-hanging fruit."

"Probably somebody's wrecked a gate, none I'm used to using. Usually there are several."

"People have done more for less reason - I'll be the first to admit that anger can make you pretty stupid."

"Liability in your line of work?"

"I've mostly gotten over it, but it took some doing. And I still get some tunnel vision if I'm actually in a fight."

"Well, not too much of that here."

"Yeah. This is harder, but - I'd rather be doing it anyway."

"We're all very glad you're here. I just hope it's enough."

"I'll do what I can."

Cor has him over for dinner. It's mutton stew with a lot of barley and no garlic.

Given how expensive it was, he will not complain about lack of spice. He will idly wonder how food was different before this all happened but not out loud, that seems rude.

Cor eats efficiently and without relish. "I have been eating so much mutton," he remarks. "The sheep are my usual source of blood, see, but."

"Ah, the wonders of demand shocks. It seems fine, but I see how you'd get sick of it."

"It tastes like having destroyed the world." He collects the dishes to get them cleaned.

"Eugh. Yeah, I - see the feeling."

"Destroyed any worlds?"

"No, but- I had to take apart an empire once. It worked, but there was a lot of damage to innocent people along the way. Rebuilding kept reminding me of what I'd gotten wrong. Not the same, but close enough."

"Might be interested to hear about that sometime when there's not more important priorities."

"I doubt it," he says, finishing his stew. "It was ugly, from beginning to end. I was lucky not to get nightmares."

"Okay."

"Just warning you what you'll get, if you ask."

"I understand."

And dinner is finished. "I should go get some rest, probably."

And check with Panj about using his kitchen and buying ingredients. He's a Lantern, taking charity when literally everyone else needs it more than him offends him.

Panj is fine with sharing the kitchen and has been getting groceries from over there but probably Red Lantern can get a good deal by going and doing magic till people give him things.

As expected but he did want to check, thanks. He will go sell some technically-not-magic for local currency.

Do local currency-havers want things chopped at ludicrous speed, or heavy objects moved quickly, or things destroyed or cooked by means that are not at all their local magic but can do a pretty decent approximation?

Does the chopping do milling? This guy has a lot of unmilled wheat and would prefer to have flour and would give him some for his trouble.

Huh, that's interesting, actually, he's not sure; his sorta-magic has this mindset thing. He'll try it.

This wheat is inedible nonsense and in the proper course of things it would be easy to have it all milled and sold and properly infrastructured and it hasn't been and that's fucking annoying. And there it goes, all pulverized straight to flour with no stone bits. The bags might not be the greatest for it.

"Looks like I can. I keep a twentieth?"

"With my compliments!"

"Pleasure to do business." He zoops his part of the flour into subspace. He will look for other people who want stuff done and get some barter (which also gets zooped) and some cash money of whatever kind Gatesnest uses.

Gatesnest has scales and displacement measuring cups for metal currency from a zillion mints around the world.

Wow, that's obnoxiously inconvenient. He's tempted to pulverize some coinage about it but resists the urge.

He will buy some things and have a decent spread of ingredients in timeless not-quite-real space for his future meals.

And then he will go 'home' and sleep; any day where he calls the Butcher qualifies as a long day.

Morning comes and he snacks on a salady thing before heading over to the mage hangout to check in before he heads off to grab comets.

The mages aren't in their hangout because somebody has organized some kind of protest against mages... existing... but at least it doesn't look like it came to violence?

Ugh. He should probably just walk away and do useful things, but he's never been any good at that. Environmental shield down to minimum and he's going to walk over.

"I don't get you guys. What do you actually want?"

Most of them are not really interested in having a calm and reasoned discussion of their views.

"They should fucking jump in and see if that helps!" somebody says.

"It really fucking won't. You realize this group you're scaring off here, these are the ones who are trying to save everyone, right?"

"They're fucking mages! They wrecked everything!"

"My kids are all dead!"

"If they were giving up being mages they wouldn't come here!"

"It would have been better if no one was mages but it's too fucking late for that, isn't it? Someone's got to try and fix things and it's not you!"

They are ignoring him now.

Yeah now he's just pissed at these idiots. Fuck it, Lantern mode, environmental shield back up and glowing and hovering and glaring at them. The glowing red field is spurting and sparking a little, and he's encouraging it to keep doing that.

"Look, you hayseeds, we have a chance to deal with this problem but I'm not going to manage it alone and these guys would be helping me out if you weren't pointlessly scaring them off. If you insist on wasting your time yelling at mages, go find some others unless you'd rather all die together rather than have some chill."

"We're dying anyway! More destruction isn't going to fix it!"

"Magic stopped being possible tonight, you'd all be doomed for certain. As long as there's mages or me breaking physics, there's a chance we can still salvage this. Destruction can be amazingly constructive if you aim it right."

"Seriously, go home and get out of the way of people trying to fix things, goddamit."

Some of the periphery start edging away. The guy whose kids are all dead spits at the Red Lantern and says, "Kill me if you want! It's all mages and mage-lovers are good for!"

He drops down right in that guy's face, speaking calmly and more quietly, though somehow everyone nearby can hear it fine anyway.

"Killing's the easiest thing in the world. Any idiot can do it, mage or not. But it's the most pointless thing in the world, too. What you're doing here, though? Close second. If any of these mages were willing to kill, you'd be dead. You're not, because they're not idiots. They didn't break the world, and they didn't give up on it when the world decided it hated them."

He pauses, looks the guy right in the eye. "You want to say something to convince me you're not an idiot?"

"I don't care what you think."

He's never actually done this before. The motivation to do it and the circumstances generally are prohibitive, with anger; you have to be angry with someone and want to inflict this on them as a punishment. Also you have to be an Illustres who has hosted the Butcher enough times to call on him fractionally.

The environmental shield momentarily flares, and horns extend upward for a moment.

He cannot use our light.

And then it shrinks inward again.

"Congratulations. You will never again feel anger."

He feels, apparently, confusion??

Theo will do something (else?) inadvisable if he sticks around. He flies straight up, leaving a bright trail of red, and goes back to comet-catching.

The comets are not nearly as inclined to piss him off.

So when he returns after several hours of this, there will be a little more atmosphere and he will be calmer. Enough to have noticed that he escalated that unreasonably. Not enough to regret doing that, but.

Anyone back by the clocktower now?

The protestors are gone. Ranary is inside but she's the only one.

"Hey. Everyone who's usually here alright? I, ah, got into a shouting match with some obnoxious protestors earlier."

"- I don't know, this is where we usually meet, I've just been waiting."

"Well, then I guess I can clear up why you've been waiting longer than usual. There were some anti-mage protestors earlier. Angry yelling, no sense of nuance or acknowledgment that the group here have been doing their best to save the planet. I tried to reason with them a little, then got angry and... well, no one was hurt. One's going to have a somewhat strange life, though."

"I did see them, that's why I wasn't here earlier... I thought they'd gotten bored and dispersed. What happened?"

"After trying to lecture them on how without y'all and me they'd be doomed for sure, I took away his ability to feel anger. It's immediate, and permanent. He'll still have the grief that fed the anger, but it just - won't. It was not really proportionate but ignorant anger always has pissed me off."

"...wow. Don't tell Cor you did that."

"Strong opinions? Good to know. I mean, I'm not going to lie, but good to know."

"Yeah no don't lie but if you bring it up he's going to like. Have a hard time working with you probably."

"Oof. Well, that's on me for doing it, I guess."

Could it be reversed? Under the right circumstances, probably, if that could be arranged. If Cor's dislike for it is mostly anger he could probably manage it.

"Hopefully it's nobody we know and the rumor mill is slow. I won't tell him if you don't, this is too important."

"It'll go fine without him, if need be. He's clever but so are the rest of you, all I really want is people who understand your magic and can propose ideas."

"That we can do. How is it going so far?"

"Progressing alright. I was hoping for a way to safely fix this planet - take the points out - but the default fallback of patching the air for long enough to survey other stars is going fine."

"At least the points didn't eat you when you tried, I guess..."

"They tried. It didn't take. Slicing the points out of the ground still might work if we accepted some nasty earthquakes as the price."

"Did kinda risk Panj getting eaten, though. He was fine, but - not the smartest thing I ever did."

"Panj? Was he with you?"

"He created the point and did the magic that tested it. I sliced down the wood around it a lot, so it could have backfired on him. Instead it reached out to things it wasn't touching and tried to eat me. And I was fine in a couple hours. Still more of a risk than I meant him to run, though."

"Oof. Yeah, if you need another one I'm sure we can dig up a gate that was made by someone already dead, or something."

"It's almost surely fine - it went for me, near the point, not him like it would if the magic failed and backfired. But we didn't know that yet and I'm angry at myself for not seeing the possibility in advance."

"Well, that's... useful, right?"

"The result we got? A bit. It means we could toss points into the big gas planets and they'd stay usable for a few thousand years."

The anger at himself... well, it's not like he'd stop if it wasn't useful.

She did actually mean the anger but okay! "That's cool, should we be... doing that?"

"I don't really know. Cutting out the big ones people are already using is probably dangerous. Making new ones and throwing them into - whatever you call the big planet - doesn't scale too well. I guess it would probably make sense for the group here if anyone's trying something else ambitious."

"Nothing we had going was such a good idea that it looked better than helping you with whatever you're doing."

"Fair enough. Maybe not worth using, then. I guess it would enable routine magic like the disease-busting. That's probably good, though explaining to the angry protestors would probably be... risky."

"Yeah. Being able to do any would help a lot though... Are you sure, thousands of years? Given that we think it's speeding up?"

"Not sure, but - how long have you been using it here, before a point burst through the planet?"

"Hard to say exactly but thousands isn't the wrong order of magnitude, I think."

"The total masses of those gassy planets are a few hundred times as much as this planet. Even adjusting for the mass lost to the holes, they're at least a hundred times the old mass each. I can't say how much longer they'd last for sure without knowing way more about how the points grow, but I'd guess ten times or more."

"But that's if the speed at which point growth accelerates is independent between points."