Carlos responded to Purple's discovery of a viable method of aether transportation by immediately coming up with ideas for improving or extending it, or investigating various details of its limits, of course. [So you can pack aether 1 level above you into a denser concentration. Does that mean you can directly prevent aether of that level from decompressing, or was it dependent on the environment? What level of aether, if any, can you directly hold intact despite being surrounded by lower-level aether? And what about forcing lower-level aether to compress to a higher level, can you do that? It would still be terribly inefficient for large level gaps, with the exponential scaling of quantity, but it could still be a gamechanger in the right circumstances. Oh, and speaking of level gaps, what about the other direction? Could you use multiple layers of tightly-packed insulation to extend this technique to keep aether of even higher levels from decompressing? Oh yeah, the really critical question: how well can you conceal this from detection by the guardian? Um, what else…]Purple seized the pause in Carlos's torrent of questions to interject, [I don't know! For any of that. All of that. Um. Whichever!]Carlos reined himself in sheepishly. [Ah, right. Sorry, that was a lot of questions at once, wasn't it? Anyway, I didn't expect you to just know any of those answers. My point is that these are important questions to investigate, and I believe you should easily be able to find out the answers. So go and experiment, please? Oh, and do you need me to repeat any of them?]Purple echoed a bit of sheepishness back at him. [Oh. Yes, I can experiment to find out. And no need to repeat; I have the log. I'll let you know the results when I'm done.][Okay, thanks.] Carlos started turning his attention—well, this part of his attention—back to what he'd been doing, but paused as he realized the significance (...)