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I know everyone wanted a thread where Leareth fixed all of the Survivorverse's problems, but this is not that thread.
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Awwwww. Sandor is kind of cute when he's happy. 

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Leareth takes a deep breath. 

"- I think that I will need some time alone to - figure out how to function while my mind is like this. Nayoki can make a start on explaining Gates to you." 

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Nayoki can do that, sure!

She absolutely does not trust this man! She is going to make sure that when Leareth figures out a Gate back to his world, at least half a dozen of their elite mages will be Gated to random locations before Sandor finds out about it. But, in the meantime, she is happy to lead Sandor off and explain whatever she can to him! 

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And Sandor can learn more about Gates! Most of what he's thinking about is the uses for rapid transport, particularly at interstellar distances, but he's also worried about and - trying to not ask about or think about because he's a little worried just on general principles that the people reading his mind might find destroying worlds acceptable under circumstances where he wouldn't? - the prospect of opening Gates to sufficiently hostile environments that a brief connection to them would be massively destructive. He would like to learn how to make sure they do not do that, if he quietly can.

He's also curious if Nayoki knows if permanent Gate-transit makes it easier for gods to spread their influence; in particular, he's worried about the gods leaking into his universe if there's a permanent gate between Earth and Velgarth.

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Nayoki has no idea! She's unsure of the answers to quite a lot of his questions, unfortunately; Leareth is the real expert, here. She can explain how basic Gates work, though: a threshold, a search-spell, a link through the Void between one place and another. It's one of the more challenging techniques in common usage; many other techniques are either high power or high complexity, but Gates are both. 

She also knows quite a lot about Gate-work that isn't generally considered possible, but that Leareth can nonetheless pull off. Gates built on thin air. Horizontal Gates to drop through. Gates to places he's never been, aiming the search using someone else's memory, or a map, or dead reckoning. Gates to underwater. Leareth can even manage Gates to underground, though this is rarely especially useful unless there's an inaccessible seam of some very rare substance that he wants to mine. 

Most of what she knows about Gating to hostile environments applies to other planes. You can Gate to the elemental planes, though you really shouldn't -  none of them are safe for humans, and you can operate there by sending a mental projection with your magic - but she doesn't think any but Fire is instantly destructive to whoever's in range on the material-plane side of the Gate. If you Gate to the deep ocean, you do get a lot of high-pressure water coming through, but not for very long; taking anything across a Gate slightly destabilizes it, which pulls more energy from the mage in order to keep the threshold together, and large amounts of mass are going to quickly drain a mage unconscious. You could flood an enclosed space that way, but not a city. 

You can, technically, raise a one-sided Gate directly to the Void. This very rapidly drains all the ambient mage-energies from an area, is almost certainly going to be fatal to the mage casting it, and is only useful as a weapon. Leareth thought you could design an artifact to do it, but hasn't actually attempted this. 

(Nayoki is totally reading Sandor's mind, but he's successfully avoiding thinking about whatever details he doesn't want to give them ideas on. Not that she expects them to be inclined to.) 

She has absolutely no idea on the gods question and apologetically says it'll have to wait for Leareth. 

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He is grateful and impressed! If they want a ridiculous technological advantage over everyone else in their world he'd also be happy to provide; he thinks this is probably less time-dependent than his own issues but it is definitely worth doing at some point. How are Gates maintained long-term, does she know? If they can appear as a legal organization in his world instead of a criminal one, long-distance long-term Gates would be extremely useful for commercial transport and movement of goods, as well as their various military uses; they could rapidly accumulate quite a lot of money to use bribing and hiring people and advancing the industrial state of affairs of their own world (and fighting the gods). If people other than Leareth can Gate to other worlds (or Leareth can build permanent Gates to other worlds) it would also be much more efficient than any of his planet's existing means of interworld travel, which require building very expensive machines that either use humongous amounts of power and require superpower maintenance, or need to be largely rebuilt every time they're used. Making his civilization multiplanetary would do a lot to reduce the odds of it destroying itself in the near future.

(Also, though this is in the back of his mind, once interworld Gating becomes reliable, they're going to get that anyway, so situations in which it isn't worth it for him to immediately get them up to the 1993 standard will be very unlikely.)

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Nayoki wants to do a lot more thinking, and not with Sandor in the room, before making a decision on how exactly they're going to approach his world. She probably doesn't want him to be in charge of it, and ideally wants him kept in the dark about at least some of their planning, so he has fewer opportunities to interfere, or just...steer in a direction that serves him and doesn't necessarily serve Leareth. 

(She's carefully not dwelling on that right now, including with the help of a couple of quick redirects on herself. Sandor is terrifyingly good at reading people, and while he's not stupid and can certainly guess what their incentives are here, Nayoki doesn't want to come across as hostile, not when there isn't yet a reason for it other than habitual paranoia. She does make a very quiet mental note to herself that this possibly means they should keep Leareth in the dark about some of their strategic planning, assuming he's functional enough for that to matter, and maybe keep him separated from Sandor...) 

It seems simpler in a lot of ways if they can pull off interfacing with his world as a legal organization! Though, of course, more constraining in other ways, and she needs to know more about what the actual constraints would be of operating within the law. Rapidly accumulating a lot of money seems like a good first step for a lot of plans; their current organization does have substantial resources, but ones accumulated over many centuries, Velgarth doesn't offer many routes for getting rich fast. 

(It's uncomfortable that, right now, she can't actually guess at what Leareth is going to want to do.) 

She doesn't have the slightest idea if it would be possible to Gate between other planets in the same material plane; his world probably isn't, and so it's more like a Gate to, say, the Elemental Plane of Air than one over a vast distance. Certainly no one alive in Velgarth right now, including Leareth, can Gate more than maybe a few thousand miles, if that. It would require inventing a new technique entirely. But, of course, Leareth is very good at that; it just might be delayed if it takes a long time to sort out the aftereffects of whatever attack hit him. 

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He has a variety of suggestions for tests to do with Gating, once it's explained how it works, and possible ways to improve it; ninety-five percent of them are either impractical, flawed, or things that were brilliant insights six hundred years ago and standard training for everyone in Leareth's organization, but once he grasps it he theoretically that clearly provide shim with a working model of how it functions he can start testing.

As for the law - he's happy to begin explaining. Getting things done in comparatively functional nations requires either fitting neatly into an established category they already have rules for and following all the rules for that category, or exhaustively proving to several panels of both domain experts and non-domain-experts that the things you're doing can't hurt anyone no matter what, or proving that you qualify for exemptions to these tests (for which you want a team of highly expensive legal professionals); the other options are doing things in nonfunctional nations (which requires lots of bribes, but they might decide to seize everything you own instead, even after you bribe them), or doing everything in territory unclaimed by any nation, which means either frozen wastes that can't grow food or stretches of ocean near no coastline. There were legal changes in the largest and most important country a little over a decade ago that made getting exemptions easier and turned the penalties for not having them into a metaphorical slap on the wrist for the first offense, but you'd still have to stop until you got classified as safe. They might, however, be able to claim to be a sovereign nation; international law as it is enforced imposes very few limits on what nations can do inside their own territory (theoretically "attack other nations," "build doomsday devices," "work with famous international outlaws" and "massacre large parts of their population," but countries can often get away with them anyway if they have the right connections or it's impractical for their rivals to invade), and so they could get away with a lot if they could pull that off, plausibly even working with him.

His world doesn't offer routes for getting rich fast either, usually, unless you have valuable and unique powers. Then they sky's the limit.

He hopes Leareth recovers quickly. He wants to see his family again

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Leareth may not be actually listening in on this conversation, but he, too, wants to recover quickly. He's not unaware of how much this will have disrupted Sandor's life, whether or not he knows the details, and - well, accident or not, it is his fault, and thus his responsibility. 

However, his well-meaning intention to sit down and properly think about what he needs to sort out in his head, in order to meet the bare minimum threshold of concentration he needs to re-derive his Gate-route - obviously the first priority, and a prerequisite for any further plans - is derailed by the fact that he is, at this point, utterly exhausted

He sits at his writing desk for a couple of minutes, staring blearily at a blank page, before admitting defeat and relocating to his bed. He'll just...sit here. For a few minutes. And think. He can take notes on his thoughts later, once he's rested a bit. 

 

 

...In about three minutes Leareth is, instead, fast asleep on top of the covers. 

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- and, in hindsight rather predictably, after a few candlemarks of dreamless sleep he finds himself somewhere else entirely. In an icy wasteland, in fact, with an army at his back, and ahead, a passage with impossibly smooth, glassy walls - a place that really exists, even now, though in reality carefully hidden behind illusions. He chose to do it far in advance, so that any potential suspicion within Valdemar would have plenty of time to subside. Even though the signature of blood-magic, however unmistakeable, can be contained much more locally than drawing on node-energies from the web of magic that permeates everything. 

He did it more than twenty years before he would need it. Twenty years during which his plans could have entirely changed - and have, now, but it's still too late to retrieve the hundred or so lives that went into that construction effort. 

Leareth feels like throwing up. 

 

...And he's not alone here. He really should have thought through what to say, but he didn't, and he doesn't have the faintest idea where to start. An apology is owed, obviously, but - whatever's changed in his internal state and motivations, it doesn't interfere with remembering his past relationship with Herald-Mage Vanyel Ashkevron. He's given the man no reason to trust him, and every reason to be suspicious, to see hidden motives in Leareth's words and actions... 

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