She appears in a blaze of light and spins to take in her surroundings, booted heel digging into the sand. Then, she does a quick inventory of what preparations are working and which are necessary.

Is her forb working? The air looks breathable, with a survivable pressure and temperature. Are her armor's integrated electronics working?

And, perhaps most importantly, is there anyone reaching out to her for help yet?

Forb: working, reporting normal interactions with normal physics. Electronics: functioning normally. Atmosphere: about what you'd expect from the look of the place, though the humidity is on the low side even for a desert.

Signs of sapient habitation of any sort: totally absent from her immediate sensorium. Nothing in sight that looks like it could be a mark of civilization or even of barbarism, no communications traffic detectable by any means, and no prayers.

Her forb working is an excellent sign! She takes a deep breath to center herself, and then forms a new body from the sand at the same moment as pulling a new mental lever.

She looks at herself, waving her arms and curling and uncurling all twenty of her fingers. She is overcome with laughter, and spends a moment hugging herself before she separates.

One of her sits cross-legged on the sand, using the moment to herself to switch to a fully-charged version of her armor, using it to flash-fabricate a small fixity crystal from the sand, and then repeating.

The other of her crouches and leaps into the air, her forb grabbing the air around her and shoving it down, propelling her higher and higher.

She switches into a hover, about a mile up. Her forb grabs incoming light, turning itself into an omnidirectional telescope. What more can she see from up here?

Plenty!

She appears to be on a big island or small continent, divided into approximately four quadrants (though the boundaries are imprecise). Here in the southeast, it's dunes for days, with an occasional landmark in the form of an ancient crumbling ruin. Up north, there's a tangled warren of rocky canyons, filled with a concerning purplish fog; over to the west, there's a salt-crusted maze of narrow gorges, like someone took a dried-up seabed and tried to carve it into an aimlessly doodled rock garden with a trowel the size of a house; and in the northwest, kitty-corner to the dunes, there's a geologically improbable cluster of mountains.

As for what lies outside the island: well, since it's on the outsides of an island, you could be forgiven for calling it an ocean, but since it's purplish-black and its gently writhing surface seems not to have got the memo about fluid dynamics, perhaps it's in need of its own special word.

Also, it becomes increasingly clear the farther she looks that this is not a spherical planet arranged in a familiar structure of celestial bodies. Maybe it's just the Squiggling Sea playing some kind of visual trick, but it sure seems like this world might be flat, and though there may be an edge somewhere out there, it's not anywhere in sight. The sun ascends nevertheless, radiating Earth-normal sunlight through the Earth-normal atmosphere.

Huh. This whole place has a planned look that she doesn't really normally expect in her geography.

If she spends some time looking more closely at the sheltered places -- spots in the mountains or the canyons that look slightly more hospitable than the open desert around her -- are there any signs of habitation? Fires, cultivated plants, paths or roads? If not, she should probably go check out the sea, since it looks like it might be important.

(With another thread of her attention, she sends a description of where she's landed and what she's seen back to the rest of her self-tree)

So, there are definitely signs of former habitation. A handful of high plateaus among the salt flats bear weather-beaten edifices that may once have been lighthouses. The dunes are peppered with the crumbling remnants of ancient villages. The canyons seem to be blocked off from the dunes with big walls of artificial stone wherever the walls of natural stone weren't enough, and behind that there are a few places where it looks like a big building was carved directly into a cliff face. The mountains have some old buildings, too, which are in better shape than the rest of the ruins but whose purposes are harder to identify.

Separately from all that, there are also a few places scattered around the island where a handful of plants cling to life around a dirty spring. These mostly seem to not be anywhere near the ruins, and there's no sign of those plants being harvested or even bug-bitten.

(A closer look at all the plausibly-man-made things in view will also reveal that there are on the order of a dozen cairns of stacked rocks scattered all over the island. Maybe more like two or three dozen. It's hard to say why they were built, but 'graves' is certainly a plausible explanation.)

The sole source of clean water on this whole entire island seems to be a small pool huddled amid the roots of that huge tree, southwest of her initial landing place. The tree, on closer inspection, is multiple different unfamiliar species of tree all growing together in a swirling braid, and four of the five of them are dead but the fifth has a green leaf or two remaining and isn't afraid to use them.

Also, it isn't quite what she's looking for, but she might like to know about the terrifying orbs of crackling red-violet energy that seem to congregate in loose clusters scattered all over the island, each one surrounded by formations of a scaly black rock that looks sort of like unusually feisty basalt. The orbs are about two feet across, range in height from about three to twelve feet off the ground, and occasionally strike their surroundings with flashes of red-violet lightning, which kicks up puffs of dust from the not-basalt and draws answering glimmers of light from nearby spars of a red-violet crystal that seems to exclusively grow in the orbs' presence. So, you know, there's that.

She's not sure what she was expecting, but this sure wasn't it. The fact that she expected people probably means her anthropocentric bias is probably showing. And the mysterious orbs make the lack of prayer a good deal more concerning than it was.

The tree is probably good to investigate in more detail -- sources of water are important -- but probably getting a better idea of what the mysterious orbs are is more important.

She jets through the air towards the nearest orb, and lands outside its ring of black rock. She will approach just close enough to sample the rock and see if there's anything weird going on with it.

While she does that, she also calls out "Hello! I'm Amethyst -- are you a person?" in the orb's direction. Her forb repeats her call in several different radio spectra, and tries some modulated neutrino pulses for good measure.

The orb ignores her initial approach.

When she samples the rock, two things become apparent:

1. Oh boy yep that rock sure is weird! It's kind of like rock and kind of like bone and kind of not physically possible and definitely made partly of something that isn't normal matter.

2. An orb-generated lightning bolt crackling directly toward her face, moving significantly slower than an ordinary lightning bolt but still, in the grand scheme of things, pretty darn fast.

A new world with weird physics going on is probably not the time to try and tank a lightning bolt to the face. She drops to the ground, her forb yanking her down.

As the lightning bolt goes over her, she tries to grab onto a fragment of that, too, for analysis. What is it made of?

It is made of PURE CONCENTRATED HAUNTEDNESS and as the bolt flashes over her head the background rates of cell death and of precancerous cell division errors in her body both tick briefly but sharply upward. Holding the little flickering morsel of BAD THING within her forb's range prolongs the effect, though with such a small morsel it's a much weaker effect, barely there at all in the parts of her body farthest from the grabbed fragment. Also, fun fact, any part of her that directly touches the black rock experiences a similar phenomenon (though even more attenuated) extending inward partway through the dermis before it fades out. (None of this rises to the level of being perceptible directly to her personal senses, except for the HAUNTEDNESS, which is VERY APPARENT for as long as she holds onto that lightningbit.)

Her forb is still watching for physics anomalies in her area. Among other checks, it's simulating a backup copy of her body and checking it for consistency with what is actually happening several million times a second.

Unexpected physical changes, it tells her. The routines that would normally correct this are turned off, because nobody was sure how that would interact with magic. The anti-senescence routines are still running, though, and repeatedly reset failed cells back to a known-good state. After a moment, they exceed their expected number of activations and log a warning.

High levels of cell death, the forb continues.

She throws herself backwards, away from the orb. She stays low to the ground, so that her forb has more stuff to grab onto if it needs to, and turns her attention to the fragment of HAUNTEDNESS. Is it made up of any simpler parts, or is it one uniform substance? Is it causing the cell death via an apparent mechanism of any kind, or is it just happening?

What happens if she wraps it in a shield of lead? (Or osmium, or gold, or living wood?)

Her self in the desert takes a moment to reflect, and decide that she really wants some answers, and she feels pretty comfortable as is.

She splits herself again, one of her soaring towards the nearest ruins to see if they contain any answers, and the other returning to enlarging the fixity crystal.

The BAD THING in her grasp seems to have an imperceptible aura that increases rates of cell death and mitosis transcription errors, more and more the closer you get to the HAUNTEDNESS. It doesn't seem to be divisible or heterogenous in any detectable way.

Also, the longer she keeps it trapped without allowing it to dissipate as the lightning bolts usually do, the more it starts trying to disintegrate, and then when that doesn't work, starts trying to grow instead, and then when that doesn't work, starts trying harder.

Oh! Yikes, okay. She wants to study it more, but strange physics that grows stronger over time sounds much less safe to hold this close to her. She lobs it back towards the orb, and then reads through the collected diagnostics to see what exactly it was doing to her cells.

When that fails to provide additional insights, she starts circling the area looking for clues. Is there any obvious reason that the orb is here in particular? Are there patterns or regularities in the area around it, or in its behavior? She can try testing it with some little quadcopters, to see how it reacts to something not alive.

Lightningbit tossed back at the orb grows into a little golf ball of doom before it bashes into the orb with a horrendous noise that goes something like *skrshprkttakt*. The orb wobbles slightly.

Quadcopters inside the orb's active range get zapped and keel over fizzing and sparking like all their parts just stopped working for no reason.

Meanwhile, at The Nearest Ruin: it's a round building made mostly of wood and sandstone, or at least those are the parts that are still intact after who knows how long. There's one of those rock cairns out back and a human skeleton buried in the ground beneath. Looks like this used to be a house, from the layout and the remaining fragments of furniture. A stand of dry grain stalks huddle against a side wall, surrounded by the fallen sticks of a wooden fence.

Archeology is not something that she's really trained on, but she'll do her best. Based on the furniture having worn away, she's not expecting to find any written material, but she searches carefully anyway.

Are there any tools or similar, that have been preserved? How old is the skeleton?

No written material. The bones are very old, brittle and fleshless. There doesn't appear to be any carbon-14 on this non-planet, so it's hard to get a solid date on anything.

As for tools, there's definitely some ambiguous rocks! One of them is in the garden and next to part of a stick buried in the sand, and might be the remains of a gardening implement. The rest are more ambiguous than that.

Right. Well, that doesn't really give her a better idea of what's going on here.

She makes sure to save a thorough scan of the area, for more experienced people to look at. She debates watering the grain -- seeing everything dying because of mysterious orbs really makes her want to put some life back. But she can do that at any point.

The one of her at the ruin flies off to the next nearest ruin to see if it's more of the same. If she doesn't find anything helpful, she'll go check on the sea.

The one of her at her landing spot in the desert has gotten fixity crystal covering a several meter area. She starts to turn it into an oasis, transmuting sand into soil and stone, and air into water, when ...

In the very same moment that she transmutes her first molecule of water, there is a sleepy stirring from a sense she's never used before. Something very old and very tired and... tiger-shaped? Water-flavoured, with a hint of banked embers? An entity matching this description, sort of, probably, is experiencing unprecedented hope in her direction. The hope is mingled with confusion and some nervousness. The entity wants her to help, and is afraid that instead of helping she will do something different and worse, and stubbornly intends to ask for her help anyway.

Oh! A person!

She doesn't know whether this sensation has come to her via her power to hear calls for help, or if it is some more local magic, but she does her best to push a feeling of I'm here to help, I want to help, show me how back to the entity, just in case.

And she transmutes more fresh, clean water than she had been planning, letting it overflow the stone bowl of her start-of-an-oasis and spill out onto the sand beyond the bubble of her fixity crystal, soaking into the dry sand.

She walks to the edge of the bubble, turning to call out into the desert. "Hello? I'm Amethyst! I'm here to help, but I don't know what happened here. Can you hear me?"

For a few seconds there's nothing, and then there's a different alien form of communication. By process of elimination, the previous thing was probably her prayer-sense, because this one is just somehow ineffably not aesthetically congruent with the Spirit's power, and also has different functionality. This one carries a vast sense of weight with it, a feeling that the being doing the communicating is huge and old and strange and powerful, and the contents of the message go something like this:

{...I am... Naia... cannot... see clearly... the wraiths... my temple... help me...}

There is also, helpfully, a sense of direction! Naia is thataway, north of the original landing spot.

...the closest major landmark thataway is a big old ruin so wreathed in Bad Orbs and their Slightly Haunted Basalt that it wasn't previously clear whether there was a ruin there or whether the orbs had just coincidentally splashed their basalt into unusually symmetrical and architecture-like configurations.

She gets the feeling that she's going to need a lot of power to help Naia, so she grabs her large fixity crystal and takes to the air. "I'm coming!" she calls. "I can do a lot, but I don't know anything about wraiths. What will help?"

The one of her poking at one of the orbs -- a wraith? -- tries splashing it with water, in case that helps narrow down how the orbs and the dryness are connected.

The one of her flying between ruins circles around to approach Naia's temple from a slightly different direction.

{...free... my temple...}

The orb attempts to shoot the splash of water with lightning, which heavily disrupts the splash of water. Some of the pseudo-basalt is now wet. It's unclear what subtle effects this may have had, but there aren't any obvious ones.

As Amethyst nears the temple, several things become clearer. For one, that's definitely Naia in there, probably somewhere under that big lump of Slightly Haunted Basalt in the back. The sense of power and strangeness is starting to pick up notes of what is clearly a different angle on the same tiger-water-ember profile that her prayer-sense showed her, plus some gender (feminine) and mood (yearning, wistful, slightly anxious).

However, the other major thing being clarified is the scope and nature of the problem: with this many orbs in one place, seven of them crowded so close around the ruined temple that their patchy entourages of haunted basalt have enveloped it completely, she begins to feel Haunted (directly via magical hauntedness broadcast) and also Slightly Cancerous (indirectly via forb report) before she even gets within lightning-lobbing range of the closest one.