"As far as we know using an existing gate does not cost anything at all."

"Okay, that's probably going to be an angel just in case, you know, things go extra catastrophically wrong and it becomes advantageous not to care about oxygen."

"The whole planet is sort of high-altitude these days, the air's thinning out."

"--Yeah that won't require things to go catastrophically wrong then. Definitely an angel."

Cor nods. "Should I meet some angels now?"

"Yes, that seems like a good idea." 

She closes her eyes and does something that mundane instruments would pick up as an infrasonic high-amplitude humming noise.

A second after she stops, the people begin to appear. 

They represent a variety of apparent ethnicities and ages, and tend to fall somewhere on a spectrum from normal levels of expressiveness to oddly blank. 

"Hello, everyone," says Cor.

"Hello," says one of the more expressive angels. "I'm sorry to hear about your world, that must be incredibly stressful at best."

"Yeah, I'm not a fan. How much did Lucy tell you?"

"She said your world's magic system was eating it and she needed volunteers to help with the evacuation."

"Yeah. The magic produces nothingness, in specific locations, as a byproduct. We knew that - places to put that - were finite but we thought we had a lot of it. It has instead turned out that large enough disappearance points grow on their own. One punctured the planet, looked like an attack, started a war. We only figured out that it wasn't an attack and we had a much bigger problem on our hands relatively recently."

"Yikes. Okay. Besides you, what steps have people taken to solve this very large problem? Are there people we should be coordinating with?"

"The next most promising projects are one that's trying to get to the moon in a hurry so we can use that for magic while figuring something else out, and one that's trying to, uh, destroy the disappearance points, even though that's never worked before and it's been tried. I think they should drop what they're doing and help with my thing since my thing works, though."

"How likely do you think they are to actually do that?"

"...very, they're sensible people. The insensible people are looting and carrying out obsolete war-era revenge."