"You could fit a world in a pyramid. Although I guess you might wind up with some thematic lopsidedness if you did multiples that way."

"I don't know if they would need to be the same elements. Or if each face would need to be exactly one spirit..."

"You could fit a world in a sphere," says Riale. "And I feel like if that worked at all, the only sensible result would be for it to have exactly one spirit. And it would be so geometrically tidy! The sun would travel in an actual circle! I was so upset the day I did the math and realized that the sun has to go faster or slower on different segments of its journey in order to look like it's always going about the same speed and reach dawn and noon and dusk and midnight at the right times."

"Oh, I was imagining spirits preferred to be, uh, flat. But yes! Spheres are great! Our sun is fantastically far away though, you'd have to do it differently or alter the size cap on the world a whole lot."

"Having a bigger world sounds convenient but having most of that be empty space between sun and continents sounds a bit terrible. I do not know if spirits prefer to be flat. Do they?" he asks the spirits.

"I'm not sure. We don't have much - feedback - from our faces of the world, I wouldn't notice if mine changed shape except by looking. But I don't know whether or not a spherical worldshell is the sort of thing we can be."

"How do you know that what's outside is void and chaos, anyway?"

"We see it when the cycle turns. And - we know - what kind of spirits we are. Chaos or Balance or Void. I think... you might need elements of the right kinds to be facing in the right directions, if you built a new world with more than one spirit. Void facing Void, Chaos facing Chaos, Balance in the middle. But I don't know what other kinds of worldshells are possible. Maybe you can manage one with no spirits at all."

"Now I'm trying to imagine a shell-less world with just gates, all around, each one leading back to somewhere in the middle."

Ravkesial also tries to imagine this.

"...but what would be - outside of them? Or is that the sort of question I'm only asking because I've never seen a gate?"

"Gates are - imagine you have two door-sized planks of wood. You glue them together. You do a magic thing that causes a hole in the middle to be eaten away, and at the right moment, you pry them apart again and take one far away. You don't touch the glue side, whatever you touch it with won't thank you for it - usually we put them on some kind of backing so people don't do it by mistake, or against another gate. The other sides just - keep being one hole. In one out the other. The door part is because we have to do the magic thing on a surface, but if you were designing a world from scratch..."

"So outside of the gate-shell would be - glue-sides? Hole-stuff? Or - other gates, maybe, each mirrored on another face... that might actually work, if you could somehow manage to set it up."

"Yeah."

"You have good ideas."

"Maybe it's a superpower. No, I shouldn't even joke. I am certain it's all you and the alternative would be kinda unsettling."

"I have had good ideas before getting weird void powers."

"I get that impression!"

"At some point you might want to check out the place I got it. Lower priority than messages home and waking spirits though."

"Yeah, I agree. Both that I should check it out and about where it falls on the priority list."

"Oh good."

"I'm going to end up being so disappointed if I can't make new worlds when I'm done saving this one."

"It'd be a great power!"

"If that weren't so, I would be much less tempted to indulge in wildly unrealistic expectations!"

"And it would go so well with your existing power set."

"Yes! If you were the one who ended up with world-creation powers it would be so much less thematic. Although still pretty great."