Ow! And she was doing so well with the acorn prediction.

Her armor is electrically shielded and her forb is quite capable of redirecting conventional electricity, but that much charge being dumped into her immediate environment still makes her fingers tingle painfully and her hair stand on end.

"I'm not here to hurt you!" she calls. "Ask Naia! I'm from another world, and I have nothing to do with the humans who did this."

Perhaps the fact that she's still sniping orbs and wraiths, her forb handling most of the target selection and aiming, will help encourage Stryge to believe this.

Actually, that gives her an idea. She switches to using strongly negatively-charged railgun rounds, on the basis that this makes it easier for Stryge to hit other people with lightning instead of her.

"Well, the good news is that I'm at least somewhat resistant to lightning," she tells Naia. "But if you can talk Stryge down, that would probably be helpful."

The her who delivered the acorns takes off towards the poisoned canyons to search for Meli. She is so enjoying being able to multitask.

{Stryge. Sister, please, listen to me—}

{You are a FOOL and you're going to get us all KILLED! AGAIN!!!} More lightning bolts for Amethyst.

{Stryge...}

An impression of a sigh.

Privately to the nearest Amethyst, Naia sheepishly suggests, {It might be best to wait and try again another time.}

"If you think that's best," she agrees.

The her in Stryge's temple takes to the air and makes haste towards the mountains, sniping the remaining awakened wraiths on her way out. "Let me know if there's anything I can do to prove my good intentions!" she calls out behind herself.

"Is there anything that Stryge is going to need the way that you needed an acorn?" she asks Naia. "Also, will Meli have a similar reaction? I'm also on my way over to her temple."

{Meli is much slower to anger; Stryge has always been more volatile. I think you will be all right. Though I do apologize for not warning you about Stryge in time... I had forgotten how quickly mortals can act.}

The weird thing about Meli's temple is how orb-infested it isn't, actually. It's nestled in the depths of the canyons and has a few orbs perched nearby, but the central statue of a bee is mostly clear. Nevertheless, the sense of presence from it is even fainter than Stryge's, just a hint of ancient weariness hanging in the air like strands of depressed cobweb.

"There's no need to apologize -- it was my own recklessness and I was not much hurt," she reassures her. "I'm sorry if I'm moving too fast for you. I'm a bit loathe to leave the wraiths in place for any longer than necessary, however."

"Meli seems less overrun with wraiths, but her presence is even fainter than Stryge's," she remarks. "Is there anything that you and your sisters need to recover other than clearing wraiths off of you?"

The one of her near Meli's temple takes the time to take out the orbs she can see from the air, then lands near the bee statue and calls out.

"Hello, Meli! I'm Amethyst, a traveler from another world. Naia asked for my aid, and now I'm working to clear up the wraiths. Is there anything I can do for you?"

{Clearing away the wraiths does help, but I did need that acorn to restore myself fully, and I am still weak... I might be able to create morsels of power you could bring to my sisters to help revive them, but I will need time and essence. If you find living seeds in the world, and plant and water them, they may grow to create more seeds, and the plants will release essence... do you have the life-sense? I know not all mortals cultivate it, and you are a very strange mortal.}

Meanwhile in the canyons, there is a sense of great effort and exhaustion as Meli says, {...flee, child...}

Not just from the damaged orbs, but also independently from the ground nearby, a new form of wraith is appearing. At first it looks like they're just glaring at her, but then the ground underneath her cracks and punches upward in a move that would, if unopposed, launch her body twenty feet into the air.

Also, being in the canyons just kind of sucks; even if she keeps the air around her clear using her forb, the nasty purple fog still radiates the same ambient death-and-cancer effect as all of the other messed-up magic stuff in this world. The temple, situated at the bottom of a canyon, is full of it.

She could try to resist being thrown, but getting airborne again sounds great. Her forb automatically smooths out the big spike of acceleration across her body, so she isn't hurt by being thrown so suddenly. She starts swooping in hopefully evasive patterns.

She'll try hitting this new wraith with railgun rounds, since that's worked pretty effectively on everything else. She also grabs a little bit of the fog to see if it behaves like the other fragments of hauntedness, or whether some combination of a big rainstorm to wash the air and plenty of heat to boil the fog off looks promising as a way to get rid of it.

"I don't think I have anything like life-sense. It's not a skill known to my people," she tells Naia. "Is it something that you would be willing to teach?"

She turns to gauge her growing attempt at a cloud.

"Once I have made a good start on getting some rain, I can go and put down fertilizer and move any seeds I find to good growing locations, though."

The rock-throwing wraiths are pretty much helpless against an airborne opponent, and go down to railguns just as easily as their fellows.

When she grabs a bit of fog, a new bit swirls up in its place. It's definitely related to the other haunted things.

Meli, very effortfully, pleads, {...go... not safe here...}

{Life-sense is a great boon to any gardener; with it, you can know where to plant a seed for best effect, and how to care for plants so that they thrive. If you do not wish to cultivate it the slow way, I can grant it to you, but I will need another acorn and some water from the Life Spring.}

"I'm fairly sure I would survive the death of this body," she tells Meli. But creepy purple fog plus something new going wrong at every temple so far equals a cause for concern. "But I'll heed your warning."

She flies up out of the canyon, and hovers in the clear air above it. She's not really sure how to deal with fog using her established hauntedness reducing techniques. (Very tiny railguns?)

Is her downdraft causing noticeable movement in the fog? Perhaps she can set up a strong wind to try and disperse the fog.

"Normally, I would be quite content to try and cultivate it," she tells Naia. "But it sounds like getting a source of essence is perhaps time sensitive. I'll fetch an acorn and the water."

She's all busy at the moment, though, and she is trying to go slowly. She told the notebook she would, and taking your time adjusting to mental modifications is only good sense.

A drop of rain falls to the ground between her feet, and she smiles up at the cloud. It won't be much rain, but hopefully it will help. Her self in the cloud pumps a last few cubic meters of cold water into the cloud, and then turns to go fetch some water from the life spring.

"Do you know what's going on with the fog in Meli's canyons?" she asks. "I'm not sure how to combat it, the way that I can take out orbs and wraiths."

{I think the poison is bound there by magic, and will take magic to loose. Meli was always our expert in the arcane ways, though, and the betrayal hit her hard... It might be some time before she's ready to discuss magic with mortals again.}

Her downdraft stirs the fog, but doesn't seem to be reducing it; in fact, it might be making it locally denser?

Well. That is probably bad.

She leaves the canyons for now, since she's going to need to figure out a different approach to the fog, sniping any orb she sees on the way out.

The rain, which had barely started, seems to have petered out on its own. Her cloud is noticeably shrinking, too, as it dissolves into the dry air. She contemplates reinforcing it, but she now has specific concrete things that Naia says will help to try.

She sets all of her forbs to just keep raising the local humidity level until it sticks, and starts running a search pattern across the landscape to find orbs and plants. Orbs get dispatched mostly on autopilot, and plants get gently watered, fertilized, and marked on a map for possible re-planting once she gets life-sense.

"Thank you for explaining all this to me. It's been really helpful," she tells Naia. "If I should stop asking questions once you grant me life-sense so that you can rest and recover, please let me know. I think I've asked most of the urgent ones, although I have some less urgent ones about the history of this island, and the sea that surrounds it."

{I have been glad to speak to a mortal again. Your perspective is refreshing.}

The plants she waters perk up surprisingly quickly, if they've got any life left in them at all—a lot of them are just plain dead and won't respond to any amount of water. Even those ones often have living seeds buried in the sand nearby, dormant and waiting for a little help to regrow, but she may wish to hold off on watering those in place in case life-sense offers better suggestions for where to put them.

When she arrives with the water, Naia directs her to place it on the circle of slightly raised stone just in front of her statue, and then that specific Amethyst experiences a feeling like having warm water poured gently over her head, if the water were somehow dry and smelled faintly of oak leaves, and that specific Amethyst acquires an extra sense.

The most obvious thing, to this extra sense, is the sun. It seems to fill her new awareness almost to overflowing, big and bright and warm and comforting-but-scary. The enormous oak tree that Naia planted in the middle of the courtyard is of strictly secondary importance, but it's there too, and now Amethyst—again, just that specific one—can tell how happy it is with the rich soil packed around its roots, and how its leaves are drinking up the sun, and how it feels dry and withery in the hot dessicated air and really wants a slightly cooler, significantly wetter climate.

She's already working on wetting the climate as much as she can. Hang in there, oak tree.

The fact that only one of her got life-sense is inconvenient but surmountable. The skill is theoretically a learnable one, so she should be able to teach it to the rest of her. She begins mulling over the sensations, trying to figure out how to describe them, as a prelude for teaching.

She takes off again, heading for the places where the one of her exploring the island and picking off orbs has marked down seeds that need tending.

"It's been pleasant to speak with you as well!" she reassures her. "If you don't mind answering more questions, I'd like to know what's up with the sea."

She conjures an image of the sea, as seen via telescope from above the island, although she's not sure whether Naia has the appropriate senses to perceive it.

"The seas on my planet are liquid water, so I'm not sure what to think of the one that surrounds this island. Has it always been like that?"