This is going to be tricky. Naia doesn't seem to be in a good state to give advice, and she doesn't know anything about how to manipulate the orbs.

On the other hand, the orbs are clearly invasive, and have shown no particular evidence of being people. Hopefully if they're people, they'll pray for her to stop if she starts hurting them.

She also doesn't want to mess up the temple too badly, in case that hurts Naia.

The one of her closing in on the temple hovers for a moment, while the one of her at what she has now decided is the Testing Orb tries a series of escalating weaponry.

How does the orb react to high pressure water? Cold iron hypersonic railgun rounds? Lasers? Real electrical discharges? Packets of superheated plasma?

High-pressure water gets disrupted by lightning. Railgun rounds do not, and the first time she hits the orb with one it wobbles like crazy, ripples cascading over its surface. Lasers don't seem to do much, at least not at sane intensities. Real electrical charges, at least at significant scale, make it wobble even harder, and a few fragments of that red-violet crystal stuff fall out.

As soon as that happens, a ghostly figure in a tattered cloak erupts from the ground. It looks vaguely humanoid, in that it has a head-shaped silhouette under its hood, and two glowing red pits just where a human's eyes would be, and two five-fingered hands made of shadow and hauntedness stretching forward from beneath its tattered sleeves. It stabilizes at altitude that puts its head at about normal human head height, which leaves its cloak trailing several feet off the ground since there don't seem to be any legs involved in this situation, and begins circling the orb in what might be a patrol pattern, on the lookout for suspicious activity like, perhaps, lightning-flinging aliens.

... shoot. She supposes that the fact they're called wraiths was suggestive.

She shouts at the wraith. "Hey! Over here! If you're sentient, please indicate that now before I keep shooting." If it's not sentient, she's going to see if she can lure it away from the orb so that she can replicate that at Naia's temple.

She starts synthesizing a tiny fragment of anti-tungsten, to see if that has a larger effect on the orb.

She wants to act fast, though, because Naia's plight sounds time-sensitive. The one of her hovering over the temple fires large lasers at each of the visible orbs, to create conductive channels, and then creates a large enough charge differential across the surface of her fixity crystal's affected volume to cause simultaneous lightning strikes through all the orbs.

Lightning-struck orbs wobble like crazy, but don't drop crystals or summon friends just yet.

The wraith turns toward the sound of her voice and lunges for her, claws outstretched and flailing.

Huh! Well, repeated lightning-strikes are a bit tricky because there's charge imbalance issues to address.

The one of her over the temple shifts so that she's outside the ring of orbs (such that appearing wraiths will chase her away from the temple) and starts hitting them with streams of railgun rounds and loud taunts. If she times it right, can she hit the orb's resonant frequencies?

The one of her at the Testing Orb drops to the ground and yanks herself sideways out of the wraith's path. She fires a tungsten flechette and the anti-tungsten flechette at the orb, timed such that the leading tungsten will get the air out of the way, and the anti-tungsten will catch up to it approximately at the center of the orb.

She tries leading the wraith away from the orb with repeated dodges and taunts, trying to see if there's a limit to how far they'll go, or anything like that.

The third one of her is approaching the temple now. She's a bit worried that hitting things with lightning was not immediately decisive -- she thinks that if a problem can be solved with any amount of lightning, the first bolt usually suffices. Naia showed hope when she started acting to restore the environment, though.

She splits her attention, again. One of her falls to earth a little way short of the temple and starts transmuting air into water and sand into soil and grass.

The other one of her becomes invisible -- although her method of flight makes becoming inaudible impossible -- and tries to see if she can sneak between the wraiths and into the temple.

The wraith is pretty determined to chase her down and claw her, but not particularly competent at accomplishing this goal.

The paired projectiles certainly do cause some kind of detonation, but probably the extremely loud and upsetting flash of BAD HAUNTEDNESS that washes the surrounding area in red-violet light and jars the local Amethyst's body with enough cell death and cancer for her to actually physically feel it is not the outcome she was going for. On the other hand, the Testing Orb sure is gone, and the wraith also seems briefly stunned by the shockwave.

Meanwhile at the temple, repeated strikes with railgun rounds do a fine job at getting orbs to dispense showers of crystal and summon flocks of angry wraiths. Apparently the little guy with the plain hooded cloak is the basic model, and there's also Guy With Smoldering Cloak Who Throws Fireballs, Guy With Grey Cloak Who Throws Force Blasts, and Guy With Blue-Trimmed Cloak Whose Unholy Sucking Vortex Gradually Deletes The Water Out Of Your Body.

On the plus side though, enough plain railgun rounds (about six or seven per) will get an orb to shatter without setting off a horrible shockwave about it. This does nothing about the flocks of wraiths, but hey, it's progress!

Invisibly-but-audibly sneaking past wraiths proves to be a poor strategic choice that gets water deleted out of one's body by the vortex guys.

That's where the water went! Mystery solved.

And it probably means that, like, the orbs are not directly feeding on water, so re-hydrating things aren't going to directly empower the orbs.

Her invisible self drops the invisibility and retreats to help taunt the wraiths away from the temple. Once all the orbs are destroyed, do new wraiths continue popping out of the ground?

Meanwhile, the one of her at the testing location turns her attention to the wraith. How does it like railgun rounds?

It does not like railgun rounds at all! Just one is enough to make it lightly explode in a shower of little black fragments that resemble the not-basalt and little red fragments that resemble the crystals. Its cloak disintegrates, leaving nothing but a heap of mixed fragments on the ground.

Destroying all the orbs does stop new wraiths from happening; it seems like wraiths happen specifically when an orb is harmed enough to knock a few crystal fragments loose, but not harmed enough to shatter completely. Also, with the orbs destroyed, the basalt-like stuff is beginning to slough off the temple and partially disintegrate; the same thing is happening over by the Testing Orb, but at the temple it's happening much faster, perhaps helped along by Naia.

With the basalt clearing up, it's possible to see more of the architecture. A circle of massive pillars support a partial dome over an open courtyard, with a broad, shallow mound of rich soil in its center; some of the pillars have fallen, taking sections of roof with them, but there are enough left to preserve the overall effect. The courtyard is raised about six feet above ground level, curtained by a stone retaining wall, with a set of broad shallow steps connecting it to the ground on one side. On the far side, the basalt is still in the process of receding from an enormous statue of a tiger, easily twenty feet tall, that stands between two pillars overlooking the courtyard.

{Thank you,} says Naia, her voice much clearer and stronger now. {Can you find an acorn? With a living acorn, I should be able to finish restoring my temple.}

The one of her that no longer has any wraiths to deal with scoops up some red and black fragments to examine, and then starts making her way towards the big living tree, in case Naia needs a local acorn specifically.

The one of her with the large fixity crystal continues kiting wraiths away from Naia's temple. Now that Naia seems relatively fine, she should probably check if there's a better way to deal with wraiths than shooting them.

The other one of her at the temple lands lightly in front of the tiger statue.

"You're most welcome!" she replies. "Does it need to be a living acorn from this island, or would one from my world do?"

Keeping the whole crowd of wraiths occupied and away from the temple is a harder job than it looks; they keep peeling off in ones and twos from the edge of the mob to head back. Also the water-deleting vortexes are still pretty annoying.

{Your world? I don't know... I have never heard of another world before.}

She can do her best with taunts and then shoot stragglers that turn back. She might be reading too much into the name 'wraiths', but she really hopes that the ones she shoots aren't going to just come back because they haven't been properly laid to rest.

"Entirely reasonable -- I just got here," she replies. She generates an acorn and lays it at the feet of her statue. "Here, try this. If that doesn't work, I spotted a living tree a bit north of here. Is there anything better to do with wraiths than just shoot them? As I said, I have no idea what's going on here, and if shooting them is going to cause worse problems later."

{This is... what is this?} says Naia, fascinated. {It makes the motions of life, but it is not alive! It has no essence! I cannot use it. Do you mean the tree at the Life Spring, to the south? It will not yield acorns, but you may be able to find a living one buried nearby...}

There is a sense of a great tiger shaking herself slightly, though the statue does not move.

{There is not much to be done about the wraiths besides killing them. They are... fragments of life. Not whole souls, but pieces, remnants. They cannot be healed, only ended. At least, not by any power I know...}

She so called it on the local acorn thing.

The one of her distracting the wraiths hits them all with railgun shots and then starts methodically seeking out and destroying the orbs.

The one of her that was putting down grass stops that in case non-'living' grass will be a problem and decides to just focus on re-hydrating things. She takes to the air and starts trying to seed a cloud.

The one of her headed towards the tree lands near it and starts doing a spiral search pattern for acorns.

"Okay, I'm searching the area near what I think is the life spring," she tells Naia. "Would you be willing to tell me a little more about what happened here? And do you know if there are any other survivors?"

{I can still hear my sisters, faintly. Stryge, in what was the Marsh, and Meli in the poisoned Canyons. I do not know what has become of our brothers.}

There's a stand of dead oaks not far west of the Life Spring, and although some of the acorns scattered between their roots are too dessicated to be any use, a handful of the more deeply-buried ones are merely dormant.

Seeding clouds... might be working? Putting water in the air does make the air have more water in it, at least.

(Regarding the fragments she's collected from downed wraiths: the black fragments seem to be similar to Haunted Basalt but less haunted and significantly more bone-like. The red fragments seem to be the same stuff that falls out of damaged orbs, just in smaller pieces. Both of them have a tiny amount of the mysterious harmful aura, not enough to make carrying them around a problem but enough that you wouldn't want to dive into a heap of them.)

{As for what happened... It was the humans, that much I know. I do not know what they did. It took us by surprise, my sisters and I... They stole from us and tore at us, and choked the life from our lands and from themselves. Until all that remained was the wraiths and their places of power. I do not know why.}

She turns to look out over the desiccated landscape.

"Well, it doesn't seem to have ended well for them. Hopefully you and your sisters can be healed, at least," she remarks. "I'll go clear the wraiths off of Stryge and Meli. What are your brothers like, so that I might know them if I find them?"

The one of her at the grove of oaks unearths a handful of promising-looking acorns, and flies back towards Naia's temple.

The one of her picking off orbs swings around to head into the marshes, looking for another dense cluster of orbs.

{Oros is Time. His temples stand in the mountains. He is... difficult to talk to at the best of times, and I have heard nothing from him since the attack. Arx... Arx is Change, and his temples can be found in unexpected places. I... must advise caution in approaching him.}

Naia hesitates, then adds, {My sight is clouded. Is it you who creates water in many places?}

The densest cluster of orbs in the salt-encrusted wasteland of the southwest quarter is definitely this probably-a-temple up here on the biggest, highest plateau of them all. It's bigger than Naia's, and accordingly colonized by even more orbs, some of which are so sheltered by their own rock formations and/or the remnants of the temple's architecture (the difference, as before, is not fully clear) that even someone who can fly and has railguns would probably have an easier time hitting them from within the temple's three-lobed courtyard than sniping them from a distance.

The sense of presence here is weaker and moodier than Naia's; perhaps Stryge is asleep?

"I've created water at a few places out in the desert, in my bodies to help repair them after the wraiths tried to desiccate them, and right now I'm trying to seed a cloud to see if we can get some rainfall," she tells her.

"As I mentioned, I'm from another place where things work differently, so I'm not really sure what will help. Is making rain to help things be less dry the right kind of thing? I can also try turning things into healthy soil, although since an acorn from my world didn't work I'm not sure whether soil from my world would be good for plants here."

The one of her with the acorns lands with a thump and a plume of dust, before walking over to lay them between the paws of Naia's statue.

The one of her approaching Stryge's temple circles around to find an approach that she can mostly clear from the air, and then swoops down to land in the courtyard and hit the remaining ones from there.

{Ah! Thank you!} Naia exclaims gratefully. The acorns spin gently in place, glow with an ethereal light, and vanish; shortly, the basalt rapidly finishes sloughing off her architecture and collapsing into puffs of dust, and a massive oak tree grows up out of the middle of the courtyard, spreading its branches to meet the remnants of the encircling roof.

{—oh, I forgot to warn Stryge you're—}

As soon as Amethyst lands in Stryge's courtyard, there is an unearthly screech of {HUMAN!!! VILE LYING BETRAYING LITTLE PEST!!!!} and an entire meteorological lightning bolt slamming down out of a clear blue sky.