"Ah. Yeah. ...the one about the front steps rings a little oddly to me, I'll admit, homelessness isn't illegal here either but you'd be within your rights to demand that somebody leave your own actual house even if they were just on and not in it, or sleeping in your garden or whatever."

"A lot of places in my world have that too but sleep deprivation exacerbates a lot of mental problems and in Gatesnest you are basically not allowed to wake up anyone who felt the need to sleep in public if they aren't in danger or trapping you in your house outright or something, nor evict one from where they habitually sleep unless you have a counteroffer they accept."

"Huh. Makes sense. People don't often feel the need to sleep on other people's front steps around here, I guess the law would have to adjust if they did."

"One thing the Gatesnest law did was make homeless shelters a really popular policy item!"

He laughs.

"So you don't often find people on your doorstep, and if you do, you catch them when they're awake and say hey there is a shelter over there it's got space and free food."

"That's about what happens here but I guess we didn't need to first outlaw the awakening of doorstep-sleepers to get there."

"My dad lived in a little town where there wasn't much homelessness at all, everyone knew each other, but it was near a city where you could get people in trouble for sleeping on park benches and so basically the homeless people lived in jail."

"—wow that sounds awful."

"Yep."

"It is so much farther down my priority list than, like, world-saving, but wow."

"How does it shake out here?"

"Homelessness? There's shelters for people who don't have anywhere to stay, and you can get directions to them from any public office, and I've never heard of them running out of space. It's the sort of thing I would hear about, if it started to be a serious problem, there'd be budget requests on Kanero's desk and he'd talk it over with me..." He sighs. "I really fucking hope I manage to come up with resurrection somehow."

"That'd be good."

"Yeah."

"With one world saved, maybe I could hope for more," murmurs Ravkesial. "With two, maybe I could hope for all of them..."

"I deliberately didn't wait until my planet was slated to vanish the subsequent week so we'd have the leeway to evacuate, if my spell worked and we had somewhere to go."

"You seem to have planned this very well."

"Thank you."

"Out of people who could've dropped into my attempt to save the world with a whole extra world in need of saving, I think you're among the best I could've hoped for."

"Thanks!"

"Most people, even if they could probably handle a situation like this, would need - help. And while I admittedly thrive on helping people, for something this high-stakes I do appreciate someone who - can keep up? That sounds so egotistical but there it is."

"I don't mind egotism, I have some too."

"I mind my own egotism a little. Other people's only if I think it's more than the evidence supports."