"How so?"

"He probably has sources on what our scouts and boats and shipping is up to, and if we were sending things to the south continent he'd look around there sooner. As it stands we might just squeeze these things by him and win before he's finished figuring out how to react."

"If they're ever really desperate you could send it through the empty world, but they should be okay. Except for direct war damage and the first city on the far side of the puncture - the points were always out of the way, people don't like to live that close to lava for the most part, so they've had time to get out of the way as they grow."

"What does war damage look like in a world where wars are presumably fought with magic?"

"Stuff goes - missing. Or is on fire, there's also 'on fire'. Occasionally someone goes after the food supply, kills it all, but that's less common, widely considered a war crime."

Nod. "I'm not clear why anyone went to war over the catastrophe with the hole in the planet -"

"Took a while to be sure it was a puncture. It just looked like the city disappearing, there wasn't even lava left, it was just gone. It would have been a hell of an act of magic, but it could've been done. And they were having some problems with a neighbor."

"Ah." Sigh.

"And then everybody else was up in arms over that neighbor's supposed willingness and ability to do that, and some people allied with them because they were scared of that level of power - that's insane, you would have to paint so fast and know so much about the city or have incredible abstracting skill and at that scale you'd probably need a vacuum pump too - and so there was some internal division about whether to even deny it, because their enemies wouldn't believe them but their allies might -"

"Uh huh." Deeper sigh. 

"And the war used a ton of magic. And another point broke through, not even at a city, just some forest, half a dozen casualties in travelers. And then they finally explained that it wasn't them. And a ceasefire was called while everyone tried to redirect their attention to solving that."

"Is that still in place?"

"The ceasefire? There's an actual peace treaty now."

"Good for them." He frowns and rubs his eyes. "Our magic can't do human resurrection unless it turns out able to do time travel."

"That would have its own troubling implications." Sigh. "Maybe somewhere can."

"Yeah. Maitimo's optimistic and I wouldn't call him an optimist by nature."

"If anything ought to make one optimistic, 'worldsful of potentially unlimited kinds of magic' is such a thing."

"Indeed." He smiles.

"Once things are a little more settled - refugees refuged, evil god deleted from existence, couple backup planets found - oh, aside, it just occurred to me to ask if you have a good way to create vacuum here, soot and blood are easy but adding vacuum helps a lot - what was I saying - once things are more settled it'll be incredible even just to see what exploits we can get between songs and destruction, or magic items and destruction, but it seems like that might require exhaustive attention of experts who can't so much be spared right this minute."

"I'm really excited about that, but yeah, don't want to pull teams off war stuff until the war is actually over and on your end I imagine it's the same with evacuation efforts."

"Yeah. They're spreading people between as many different points on the empty planet as possible, so they don't start accelerating their growth from overuse soon, and they still think they're going to all hit lava over the course of evacuating people."

"And how long between lava and puncture, or do we not really know -"

"Lava isn't actually that far down. There's places where it surfaces naturally, volcanoes and stuff. It's just the point after which we can't keep track."

Nod. "I have no idea if we can make vacuum with our magic."

"It's doable with nonmagical apparatus, but it's dangerous to do that because if there's a flaw in it and the vacuum isn't as perfect as you think it is it's the same as dried blood, doesn't work, lost toes is best case scenario. You can also do it by making a very strong container and destroying what's in it, but the spell for that requires you to have vacuum available in the first place."