"Makes sense. I'm glad I can leave my dying world."

"Yeah."

Sigh.

"So - tell me about your world, I guess. Spheres? How's that work?"

"There's a universal principle according to which everything trends towards everything else in proportion to closeness and size. There's a lot of emptiness and the stuff in the emptiness tends spherical and things on sufficiently large spheres experience down pointing toward the center. Sphere's got oceans and continents and stuff."

"...huh. That's... I kind of like it. It's got style."

"Alas, I can't take credit for it."

Giggle.

"There are a lot of different languages - the, uh, blade of the void, gave me this one, I didn't speak it yesterday morning - and a lot of different countries, usually with more decentralized government structures because it's only difficult, not impossible, to assassinate people remotely by magic. I lived in a distributed city called Gatesnest with neighborhoods all over the globe, connected by a lot of gates."

"Gates?"

"My magic can with some finesse use the nothingness byproduct to make there be no distance between separated points."

"Ooh."

"Yeah. They're cool."

"Pity about the, uh, world-eatingness."

"Yes."

"I'd suggest you could bring local magic home eventually, but I don't know if it works in other worlds..."

"In each iteration the magic of Kitaloei is primarily designed by the previous creator. There are - underlying themes - but the details can vary widely. I don't know what that suggests about its portability, but it does seem relevant to the question."

"What are the themes?"

"Difficult to describe. But I've seen enough to have an idea of what is ordinary and what is surprising. The magic of this world, from what I've seen so far, is admirably well-constructed but otherwise not strikingly unusual. If I woke up to a world in which your magic was in common use I'd be very surprised indeed; it... occupies a different region of possible effects. Someone could design a world here with a magic system that was good at destroying things, but it would not be limited to only that, it would not destroy more than it was asked to, and I don't think it could be used to do more - abstract - things like move between worlds by destroying whatever is in the way."

"When you put it that way," says Ravkesial, "I'm a little concerned about what mass transit in and out of Kitaloei using that magic would do."

"I didn't notice any effects directly related to my arrival here but I'd definitely be leery of locating a disappearance point here."

"If there is such a thing as a barrier between worlds, and you're doing damage to it every time you travel... there is a barrier around Kitaloei and it is crucially important to the world's survival," she says, gesturing at the faceted sky. "We are... like a bottle in the ocean, afloat on the boundary between air and water. If the shell cracks, we drown."

"...okay, I can see that being a problem. I was trying to work on a more abstract level than that but it's possible I did not succeed or that success is impossible. But on the other hand I didn't come through one of those ...visible, flat, located things. Those things are still in places and I didn't move."

Nod. "So it's likely that there isn't a problem, but - not entirely certain."

"Now here's a cheering thought," muses Telarin. "Inside the shell of the world, we're safe from what lies outside it. But your world has no shell. So if there were a barrier that could be weakened between here and there, and you weakened it too far, would your world be overrun by floods of Void and Chaos?"

"That's the least cheering thought I've ever heard, and it has some competition," says Riale.

"Conveniently I landed indoors, so to speak?"