Yes, the coal plant conversion makes the news. Barely. I find a recorded interview with some of the plant employees about the takeover and conversion on a news website. I guess most folks don’t pay much attention to where their power comes from… there’s also an article beneath with a few choice quotes:

"The new owner isn't firing anyone, nice of her."

"It sits there and spins. I don't know how it works, or why it works, but we have brakes for when we need to stop it for cleaning. BRAKES. We don't turn it off, we stop it from spinning."

"We haven't had to fuel it since she put it in. Which was frighteningly fast. She had the whole place converted over in a couple of hours.  'Magic', she says. Gives me the willies. Where's all that power actually coming from?" Yeah, I'd like to know too.

Yeah, blue collar workers are like that. No, I'm not going to fire them for just that.

There is a note questioning what will happen to the coal miners (coal has been a shrinking market for QUITE some time, this is nothing new), and whether or not other power plants will follow suit (I expect so).

I get inquiries from power plant owners almost immediately. Capitalism is frighteningly fast at monetizing things. And not only does the 'no coal' thing save around $17 per megawatt hour, it also saves on related expenses - water, freight charges, environmental mitigations, and so on - and when you're talking power plants that have a capacity of 380 megawatts that are at 50% load on average for an entire year… well, it saves over thirty million dollars annually. So if I lease the setup at such a plant at three million a year, they're giving me 10% of the cost savings. Curiously, it's not just the coal plant operators that contact me: The natural gas folks do too, as does a diesel place and a few others. I give them all the same answer: I can convert over anything that works by way of a turning crank and has enough space for me to install the hardware.

I install a couple hundred of them over the course of a few weeks. I stick with comparatively low-cost lease agreements. I … might have a little contingency of threatening to not renew leases for the energy sector as a means for diplomatic pressure later... because it's not just US companies that take notice. I end up applying for visas to a lot of countries. Turns out most places don't actually like coal power, it's just what they have available. As I'm not particularly worried about folks figuring out how magic works from leaving one of my Reverse Gravity not-spells in place, I'm not particularly concerned with letting them out of my sight. The most anyone’s going to be able to do is drop more steel cylinders into the existing fields.

It takes a couple of months, but my Reverse Gravity engines end up running the generators for about half the world's energy grid. And as it's handled without changes of ownership of the businesses or buildings, most governments don't realize the problem I gave them at all, and the few that do? Other than James in Afghanistan, they don't figure it out until I'm actually deeply entrenched. And James knows I have a lot more over him than that if I choose to flex, so he's not worried.

Not that I actually plan to leave anyone in the dark, mind. But it's nice to be required by enough of the world economy that I have a credible threat that's not just a variation on extreme violence. Threatening to turn someone's lights off may not sound that bad, but when that same circuit is running their heating, cooling, production, and communications… well, that pretty much cripples a nation.

… which is how Arcana finally become an official UN member. I pointed out the problem to the holdouts against me.

Well, OK, I had my official representatives do it - buffed-up Conjuration Companions. Because Jessica and I are very pregnant. Most of the symptoms don't bother us. Not eating means bloating and frequent urination aren't problems, magic suppresses symptoms like pain, nausea, and fatigue trivially. Meanwhile flight, Telekinesis, summons, and free clothing takes care of most of the awkwardness of having giant bellies on small frames. But there's some we can't safely fix.

We both end up salivating a lot. Chewing gum mostly solves that. Jessica’s chest grows a few cup sizes… hmmm…. unfortunately, so does mine, and I was already absurd. The Acne is annoying, as are the totally-not-diapers we end up wearing for our love tunnels.  The extra friskiness is fun, and there's nothing quite like feeling my babies move for the first time. I get stretch marks, Jessica doesn't. Our belly buttons pop out, which is just funny. Jessica gets to find out what it feels like to leak from her chest, and my production picks up: I ship out bottles every six hours.

And I do, eventually, admit to having mood swings. Which mostly makes for a nice excuse to cocoon up with Jessica in a citadel, and only take visits from family and close friends. After all, they'll survive one of my tantrums. I had to fix up the Alaska guy a little. He had some pretty bad frostbite.

I also level up in the interim. Level sixteen gives me native access to 8th level spells, and my tricks get that to 9th level spells - as at-will swift actions,from the entire Sorcerer,  Wizard, Cleric, and Druid lists. Which means I can do a very effective Q impression.

Oh yes. And the non-flying airport takes off too. The "developed" countries invite me in to meet their carbon goals. Poor countries invite me in because it's cheap and comes with health care. War-like nations invite me in because they think it will make a good invasion path.

That last group finds they are VERY sorely mistaken.  Yes, my Conjuration Companions look like they’re cute little women… but I buff them to the nines.  They get Regeneration, all the stat boosts, and Spheres mid casting from the Conjuration Sphere (also an absurd number of feats, which means they get all the Spheres talents they qualify to have, plus metamagic, a boatload of spell points, and even some item crafting feats), and most of my buffs as well.  So a hail of bullets on them turns into a whole bunch of flashes of light.  Meanwhile, they fire back at pretty extreme range (it’s part of the Destruction sphere), and what they hit simply vanishes (Disintegrate is handy).  Non-magical objects, such as tanks, don’t get saves, and the DC is high enough that the people inside are very squishy, comparatively (they don’t use Disintegrate for that - fire works fine).  The invasion doesn’t get even five feet into my territory.

And my minions raise the dead soldiers according to my standing orders.  As a punitive measure (also per my standing orders for what to do with a military invasion), they apply Unwilling Shapeshift and Permanent Transformation, strip them, then let them go back to their homes as physical females.  No, it’s not that being a girl is bad - it’s that it’s a massive disruption to their lives, as now they’re not recognized by their friends, family, and employers.  Of course, given that the invaders were soldiers for an underdeveloped nation engaging in an act of war… well, I could have just left them dead.  So they’re in better shape than if I didn’t leave those standing orders.  Well, except that most of these third world countries aren’t very nice to their women… often mostly due to how the soldiers act… some of whom are now the ones on the receiving end.  So it works.

As for the airport itself, after a little chat with various government representatives, ends up working fairly smoothly.  Each region of a country has a demiplane, each country has a demiplane connecting to the regions (although smaller countries with few airports end up with just a country demiplane).  There’s also a separate system for international travel; a world demiplane, which connects to region demiplanes (basically continents, but not quite), which then connects to select airports within different countries.  And the host countries for those portals get to set up whatever border control they like on their side of the portal.

Oh yes, and there is life on Mars… now.  NASA took me up on the portal thing, and used it to start a colony. They have a giant facility with a ninety foot airlock around one of my portals, which lands at a carefully-selected spot on Mars.  And August Allard gives me QUITE the talking to when his men point out to him that there isn’t a pressure difference anywhere near what they'd expect at the airlock. He stops cold when I point out that simple observation at the airports could have told him that, as air pressure differences are very common on Earth, and there aren't tornado-force winds going through them. Not even a gentle breeze, for that matter.  However, a facility around the gate is needed to prevent folks from wandering in to an area where the air isn't breathable, "which is why I mentioned it" - but the airlock does tickle my funnybone.

Of course, eventually my water breaks…