Cor checks the blood for wet shine, checks the charcoal marks for gaps, looks in the mirror too, makes sure he has his knife and his little bag of ash.
He chants, he gambles, he - destroys, he destroys, he destroys -
Cor checks the blood for wet shine, checks the charcoal marks for gaps, looks in the mirror too, makes sure he has his knife and his little bag of ash.
He chants, he gambles, he - destroys, he destroys, he destroys -
"I have never heard it before! Welcome to Earth. Why were you trying to go to another universe?"
Her focus sharpens immediately; she straightens out of her half-slouch against the doorframe. "--Oh, that's not good. How fast? How long will it take you to be able to jump back--or teach someone else to--we can probably help, with evacuation if nothing else, if there's time to evacuate--"
"We think we have a few months before the place can't hold atmosphere. I can jump back, takes maybe fifteen minutes to draw out my spell diagram, but I can't teach people here, requires access to a magical byproduct location. Also every time I do the spell it makes it worse. A place to evacuate to is good but before we scale that up it may be more important to find a planet we can breathe on but that nobody's using."
"Okay. How much does doing the spell accelerate byproduct buildup? Is the spell guaranteed to land you somewhere with atmosphere? It might be more efficient to terraform a planet in this universe than to try to find one in another one that's already habitable, I am confident in my ability to terraform a planet one way or another but it hasn't been a priority yet so I don't have a good estimate on how long it'll take, but if I call in enough favors it should be doable in less than two months I think. What's your planet's population?"
"I'm very magic. But doing it myself might not be the best idea, the fairies have been working on the project of interplanetary colonization for years. They haven't done any yet but there's this neat dome habitat somewhere very inhospitable on this planet. This planet ish. Recreating their project to create an adjacent pocket dimension with a duplicate of this planet on it miiiiiight be faster, if it can be done."
"You got very lucky landing on me! Uh, also, probably shouldn't surprise you with this only after we've sunk a ton of costs, this universe has an afterlife situation."
"I wouldn't trade it in. But, uh, it is not perfect. There are two afterlives, and one of them catches the overwhelming majority of people, and the other one catches one every couple of years and is, uh. It is, strictly speaking, my reason for existence to solve it."
"Oh! Remember how I said I was extra magic? We have a God. She set up the main afterlife on purpose and the other one not on purpose. She managed to empty it out a couple thousand years ago but she made me to fix it for real. She found a," she waves a hand, "a place, sort of, that had--patterns, stories and people, that happen over and over again in different universes. That's how I knew other universes would exist. She found my pattern and decided I would be good at it. So she made me."
"O....kay. Nice work if you can get it. Uh, what do you need from me to get on the terraforming thing - we ideally want separate planets, here, one to put refugees on since it'd be a lot to dump on an inhabited planet and one to put more magical byproduct on."
"No, just needs people to be able to visit for short periods safely to establish byproduct dump sites and visit them when they want to become mages."
"Nothingness like vacuum, nothingness like magical annihilation juice, nothingness like something weirder?"