Peter & Miko’s Part:

Obviously you can get between worlds without a gate that’s activated on both sides like the kind that the IDS uses, as someone had to cross over to set up the gate in the first place (or send data across to have someone set it up on the otherside). There’s actually a few ways to do it; Peter is referring to someone that could manually calibrate a gate, which isn’t really done anymore as computers can do it far better, as it is very complicated (in that there is an enormous data volume and a very tight timing window).

This is, of course, why the gates were vulnerable to Mium getting control of them. The gate itself is still perfectly functional as Mium didn’t go around destroying them all, he’s just locked out their ability to sync to the Central side and calibrate the transit. How he was able to do that, well, while these gates do not seem to have a centralized control on the Malsan side… you may be able to guess where he could have found something like that given the timing of the situation

There are other ways to cross over without a traditional gate though, which would typically be what the IDS would use when trying to cross over to a new world and set up a gate. We’ll probably see more about that later.

As to why Resh matters, Resh is the country to the north of Malsa & Arpon. Biana is currently speculated to be in Orin, which is north of Resh (and currently in an escalating conflict with Resh), meaning deploying forces from there would be complicated. This is almost certainly part of why Mium dumped Kokato in Resh leading the pile up that created a diplomatic pileup between the IDS, Arpon, and Resh, ultimately leading to placing Resh at odds with the IDS and Arpon. Arpon still has local forces and PACT forces, but isn’t really capable of launching a strike deep in Malsa right now; despite some setbacks that we saw, they are largely outmatched without IDS support against Malsa, and are suffering some internal conflicts right now due to increasingly politically devastating revelations that keep being spread about for some reason; some of it’s military seem to be in the process of negotiating directly with Malsa, having increasing concerns about Kokato and his ties to foreign influence (potentially via Ryn, as we briefly heard him mention something like that).

Naomi & Kally’s Part:

This guy’s uniform and car is something that Naomi and Kally would recognize, that we’ve actually seen before (old art warning there…) they are essentially traffic cops. I realize we’ve seen them a bit more recently here too actually. Unlike the black uniformed Bureau agents, these are generally not combat mages, or really expected to engage in combat, they are more for herding civilians and issuing citations, though they do respond to various emergencies.

One may remember that while Kally was reading the news this morning, she was reading the news as reported by Mium, which is probably not what is on the news channel. How much the curfew concerns Mium is probably evidenced by the fact that we’ve already seen him walking out about himself.