" - okay. And you're here, and - doing small-scale do-gooding?"

"I'm here and learning things. I've been sitting on classes and studying history and trying to understand how you work and tonight I was going to go visit those reds in that mining city so I could both help them and learn more about them and then I'd—I'm not sure yet about that part, there is so much and nothing that's solvable with a flick of magic so eventually I think I was going to do something like," she gestures around the room and them, "this."

" - how were you going to get to Olvala tonight -"

"Well I'd probably take a few days but I was gonna run there."

" -okay. So the thing Olvala is doing is potentially good - it'd be better for everyone if reds were replaced with some alternative for handling their work - if only there was something to do with the reds afterwards. I take it you do not have access, or have only intermittent access, to other, ah, dimensions?"

"I do not have targeted access. The way it works is that I can open a door to another world but which world depends exclusively on the specific spatial location I pick to open the door from. Allow me to demonstrate—"

She closes her right hand into a fist and then opens it to reveal a small golden key. She sticks it into a random patch of nothing, turns it—

—and the glowing outline of a door appears there.

"- okay so then all we need are more worlds - are any of them empty -"

"Several—most—but the problem is—" and she opens the door. The other side contains the vacuum of space, with a few stars visible in the distance. The air of the room is mysteriously not sucked through it. "It's really not targeted. I've learnt to—feel—for certain characteristics, like 'contains magic' or 'opens to a rocky planet' but habitable planets are vanishingly rare."

Nod. "Vanishingly rare as in you might try for days before you got one, or years, or - centuries -"

"Potentially years—I got a string of successes when I first found the key but less and less since, I'm not sure why but I have a few hypotheses—but that's not the whole problem. While the door is open, time between this universe and that one is synced. When I close it—" which she does, although the outline of the door is still there "—it's not, and a few years here may be a few seconds there or vice-versa. Plus this door is not visible from the other side while it's closed, so even if both sides notice it got closed immediately that may still mean the other side will experience untold lengths of time before the door is reopened."

"Oh, I doubt the reds would want the slightest thing to do with us once they got set up."

"And be justified in it," she says, turning the key as if to lock the door, which causes the outline to disappear. "But my shareable resources are not limited to 'transportation' and it would be suboptimal for me to merely provide reds with a way to go somewhere else and be done with it."

"I think you might be underestimating how many problems it would solve if everyone had a way to go somewhere else. Most of Anitam's unpleasant tradeoffs are a consequence one way or another of the population pressure."

"I want to solve death entirely, or at least give you the means to do so. I'm aware of how many problems are caused by your population pressure but I'm not convinced giving you access to one new planet or twenty—and that's if we can even find twenty habitable ones—will be sufficient. And that's not to mention the fact that if we even find doors to habitable planets they are extremely unlikely to be equally distributed between all countries here and I'm hesitant to give any strict subset of all countries here access to other worlds like that."

"I would rather our biggest geopolitical rival have a planet than not. And curing death until we've somewhere to go would just be a disaster."

"I know, I'm completely on board with giving you planets, it's just still not obvious to me this is the first large-scale thing I should do, and if so where, and what I'll do to fix the longer-term problems then and how to announce it and how to ensure there are no undesired side effects like the deaths of a million people."

" - I can arrange that part but I can see why you'd have no reason to take my word for it. Okay. What's the picture on - everything else you can do -"

"Okay, so, first thing is that my species is inherently magical and extremely overengineered—it's how I'm inexplicably fast and strong and all that. People from the nonmagical species in my world can be turned into my species via an extremely painful but completely harmless process. I'm disinclined to experiment much with that, though, because I don't know of a safe way to test whether it's possible to turn your species and because amongst the perks is extreme immortality but amongst the downsides is infertility amongst females and an unquenchable and overwhelming thirst for blood."

" - those are some drawbacks, yes. Are you - drinking peoples' blood?"

"No, I have a form of personal magic that allows me to generate biological matter endlessly and costlessly, so I'm covered. And animal blood works, too, I would never drink a person's blood."

"I am sure all the people appreciate it. All right, so infertile immortality with blood-related drawbacks - it'd be popular with people too old for children anyway, for what that's worth -"

"Yes. And the males are not infertile, and they can have hybrid children with mortal females—the females need to be turned after the pregnancy, though, or they die—and hybrid children of both sexes are fertile with mortals and—vampires," she explains, borrowing the word from English.

"Even when they're past twenty the male ones are fertile?"

"My species' males are fertile until death so I don't know how it would work, and I think this may all be academic anyway because there's no guarantee the process would work at all for yours, not to mention that building the necessary infrastructure to support a population of vampires would be extremely costly and I have other methods of making people immortal."

"What are those?"