{Planting dunegrass should stabilize the soil enough to help other plants thrive,} Naia suggests helpfully as the life-sense-enabled Amethyst zooms off; and indeed there seems to be a grass that grows in scraggly tufts matching the implicit description, and everywhere she's found a living example to water, it has already caused visible improvements in the handful of minutes since she watered it. Life-sense confirms that the dunegrass-assisted soil is a hot commodity among other local plants, though some are more eager for it than others—the little round cacti could take or leave it, whereas the short shrubby trees with the starburst-shaped seeds are pretty keen on it and the oaks can barely grow without it at all.

In answer to Amethyst's question, Naia gives the impression of a sigh. {That ocean is tainted. It was water, once. I don't know what happened exactly—it was around the time of the mortals' betrayal, and I had other things on my mind. We all did. When I thought to turn my senses outward again, the shores were as you see them, washed by that blighted muck.}

"Oh dear! Well, perhaps getting rid of the wraiths and nursing the land back to health will help. If it doesn't, I'll go take a look and see if it's possible to turn back into plain water. I wonder if the sea being like that is a secondary cause of the dryness -- less evaporation, and therefore less rain," she muses.

The one of her tending to plants prioritizes dunegrass. She tries seeing if a healthy clump can be separated into many smaller clumps and therefore spread farther. She also sees what the plants think of Earth fertilizers.

"The dunegrass seems to perk up really quickly!" she informs Naia. "Are there any other plants that are basic to the ecosystem here, and therefore should be introduced first? My initial plan if you don't have any advice is to mostly focus on ground-cover like grasses, to help stop soil erosion and improve water retention, and on nitrogen-fixers like beans or clover -- if I can find any -- to help nourish the other plants. Once those are well established, I can find and work on the trees."

{I don't think I know this 'clover'. Or 'nitrogen'. Do plants grow more slowly in your world?} asks Naia curiously.

Meanwhile: Dunegrass clumps dislike being cut apart, but a healthy one will tolerate one or two subdivisions before her life-sense starts reading it as in critical condition. Life-sense also suggests that the ones watered earliest are already starting to think about making seeds, though, so she might be able to just coax them all into germinating and get lots of dunegrass that way.

As for Earth fertilizers, the plants seem... confused? With some experimentation, a consensus emerges that the fertilized soil is only somewhat better than dry sand, but after the dunegrass has had a go at it, the resulting rich soil is an all-around favourite except among the cacti, who find it a little too rich for their sand-adapted tastes. So as long as she lets the dunegrass process things so the other plants can take advantage of it, her fertilizer should work pretty nicely.

An issue emerges, though, as she continues gardening: the accelerated life cycle of these plants means that once she's got enough of them in her rotation they'll suck up water faster than she can fly around delivering it, and she still hasn't cracked the problem of getting rain to fall unsupervised.

... shoot. Well, she'll stop expanding to more plants, and start putting up ice sculptures near them, to deliver a continuous trickle of water as they melt until she can think of something better.

"Plants on my world grow much more slowly, yes," she replies. "Actually, I'm starting to have trouble providing enough water to all of these plants, because they're growing so quickly. I can build up more ability to turn things into water, but it will take a while. Are there any places that are normally rivers that I could maybe start restoring the headwaters of?"

Meanwhile, she directs the one of her that was retreating from the canyons out to look at the sea. Converting air into water works fine, but it would be more efficient if she could just set up a pump and pull purified water out of the sea.

{The rivers I once knew have mostly filled up with sand,} she says, a note of melancholy in her not-voice. {Why not restore the old springs, instead? Planting a garden around the Life Spring should help encourage it, and if you can learn to channel essence, you can encourage it further and perhaps begin restoring the others.}

The sea: is not water. Does not even contain any water. Where the orbs' lightning blasts are pure violent hauntedness fighting to wreck everything in their path, and the poison fog in the canyons is a sullen miasma of hauntedness passively choking the life from whatever it can reach, the sea is a nasty sludge of hauntedness heavily diluted with what might be a liquid form of the not-basalt, and it doesn't have much range on its death aura but it's thick and sticky and it writhes very unpleasantly and a baseline human who fell into it would probably die of sourceless magical cancer before they figured out how to unstick from the doom gloop.

Darn it! That is significantly less helpful than she was hoping. And she still doesn't really know how to get rid of non-orb-shaped hauntedness.

... what happens if she tries picking up some of the sea and holding it in the shape of an orb? She's not really expecting that to work, but if it does it might tell her more about what hauntedness is.

Her gardening self starts specifically replanting the things that look like they want it most around the border of the life spring. Consolidating the plants like that (and putting them near an existing source of water) also means she can get a few more started before running into water issues. She also puts in some winding gravel paths and stone benches, on the basis that Naia said 'garden' and not just 'plants'.

Once she has a large-ish circular area around the life spring planned out, although not filled with plants, she spends a few minutes using her magic wardrobe powers to make some new fixity crystal. She embeds some larger crystals into stone pillars circling the garden, placed so that their fixity fields just touch. These are set to pump up the local humidity. The arid wind strips away collections of moisture fairly fast, but by encircling the whole garden like this she's hoping she can get the internal humidity high enough to reduce respiration from all the plants, and therefore their water needs.

She will eventually need to figure out how much air this place has, and whether turning large quantities of it into water is going to cause any problems. But she certainly won't hit the point of causing problems anytime soon, and when she does she can start liquidating rocks (as it were), and the only problem becomes not dipping below sea level.

"Would adding more water to the life spring directly be helpful, or would that dilute the existing essence?" she asks Naia. "And what else specifically will help the life spring, if there is anything besides just surrounding it with plants?"

A glob of the sea held in the shape of an orb gloops restlessly, trying and failing to writhe, and doesn't do much else.

Her life-sense has... different things to say about the Life Spring's huge tree than about most trees. It seems like the huge tree is... in some important sense, not really a plant, although in some other senses it is? And instead of having normal plant attributes like preferences about soil and temperature and humidity and density of neighbours, it has a sense of how much water it's producing and how many plants are around it and where they all are, out to a range of some sixty-odd feet. She might be better able to interpret some of the other things she's seeing if she had more context.

{Given time and the essence the plants feed it, the Life Spring will heal on its own. I would normally say that mingling waters does nothing any harm, but the water you make carries no essence, and I do not know what effect that might have. If you want to heal the Life Spring faster, or restore the other springs, then you must learn to channel essence. Wait for nightfall; the plants you tend will release their essence then. I am no great teacher, but I can do my best to instruct you in manipulating it.}

She drops the sea-goop and goes to help continue to clear the land of orbs.

"I would love to learn," she reassures her. "In that case, I'll get the garden around the life spring squared away as best I can, and then just focus on clearing wraiths until then. Is there any kind of explanation of essence that you could give before nightfall, in order to prepare me, or is it one of those things where you have to see it to understand it?"

{Essence is the energy that carries the flow of life. Plants draw essence from water, sun, and soil, and release it at night the way lungs release breath; animals that eat plants are nourished by the essence that lingers in them, and if a plant is rich enough in essence it can fuel the working of magic. Animals and spirits can only work simple, straightforward magic, but the things that a human can accomplish with enough power and cleverness were beginning to astonish even the gods, before they turned that power to our destruction.}

... huh. Actually, can she just fly to the sun and grab some essence? Probably she should try that later when she has a better idea of the local cosmology.

"I see. How does one go about drawing on or manipulating it?" she asks.

{The first step is just to perceive it, and after perceiving it, to let it filter into your body. You'll find that easier the more personal a hand you took in growing the plant that releases the essence. Once you've managed that, we can try to get an idea of the size of your essence pool... I'm not sure what to expect, with you being from another world with no natural essence of your own. But it will grow with time and use regardless, even if you start with so little that all you can do with it is release it back into the spring.}

"I see, thank you."

She thinks for a moment.

"How does essence relate to what I can see with life-sense? I noticed the sun is prominent in life-sense -- is that because it contains essence itself, or because it contains the prerequisites that the plants will use to make essence, or is that a bad distinction?"

{The sun is prominent in life-sense because it's overwhelming to the essence-based senses of plants and life-sense is in many ways related to the essence-based senses of plants. You could say that that's because it contains the prerequisites that the plants will use to make essence, but from the plants' perspective I think it's more likely about the sun as a source of life.}

"Interesting!"

She thinks for a moment.

"I don't think I have any other important preparatory questions," she says, glancing up at the sun to see how much time she has before nightfall. "I'll work on tending the garden. But I do want to keep talking. I know this has all been a little fast -- do you have any questions about me or about my world that I could answer for you? If not, would you be willing to tell me about how your sisters and brothers came to be?"

{I am very curious about who you are and where you came from,} Naia admits.

"'Who are you' is one of those questions that's always tricky to answer," she responds. She makes herself a chair and sits. "I think perhaps hearing my story chronologically is the best answer to those questions."

"I was born in a world with no magic, no essence, and no non-human sapients. The world was a sphere of rock spinning through space, warmed from within by rocks still glowing and liquid from its formation, warmed from without by the light of a giant burning ball of gas that was its sun. We had plants, animals, mountains, sand, and many things that seem at least somewhat similar to here. It was ... okay. We had environmental problems too, actually, but they hadn't reached the same dire point they had here. And there were other problems -- wars, death, food insecurity, petty tyranny."

"And so I grew up and dreamed of a better future, and worked to help in ways that I could, but never really accomplished much. Until one day, I figured out how to build a machine that perfectly and completely controls the location of things within a given radius. It took me years to scrape together a prototype -- it filled a whole room of my house, and had to be powered off of an external generator to avoid browning out the neighborhood -- but it let me assemble extremely accurate parts, which let me assemble more miniaturized (and precise) components, which compounded, until I was able to create this."

She summons a pale purple fixity crystal and floats it above her hand.

"I call it fixity crystal. It does the same thing my initial machine did -- let you control the location of things within a given radius -- but it's self-contained and self-sustaining, needing no external power."

"Once I had this, I knew I had what it would take to fix my world's problems. Controlling location also lets you turn things into other things, for example. The way that I make water is by taking the tiny constituents that make up the air, and rearranging them into the pattern for water. And this would eventually let me give people everything that they needed -- food, land, healing -- without needing to deplete any external resource."

"So I used my initial flakes of fixity crystal to build larger fixity crystal, and so on. I moved to the center of the ocean, to be sure that I could do so uninterrupted. I also shared the news with everyone, and talked about how it should work when I eventually had a large enough crystal. Eventually, I did. I built a crystal that covered the whole world, and used it to provide people with what they needed. I made some mistakes, at first. I think with the wisdom of hindsight I could do better a second time. But I solved the problems that had bothered me as a child, and ushered my people into an era of plenty."

"With time and plenty to spare, we turned our attention to the stars. We established cities on the moon, and built castles that soared high above the surface of the world, beyond the air. We were reaching out to build homes around our closest star -- we would have gotten there in another 10 years or so -- when I was suddenly visited by a traveler from another world."

She takes a sip of water.

"She took the form of a notebook, and said that she was a messenger from the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed. She offered me powers unlike any I could replicate myself. Instead of running on understanding the smallest forms and patterns of the universe, they run on stories. And they let me do things I had only dreamed of. It's one of her powers that lets me have multiple bodies in different places while still remaining one person."

"And although she couldn't give me the power to travel between worlds directly, she could send me to another world, possibly one where I could learn to travel further on my own. One where I could help another world in dire need. One where my story could continue."

"So here I am! In a world of strange magics unlike anything I have ever known, with some powers forged by my own hand and some powers granted to me by a being beyond my comprehension, trying to leverage both to help people who desperately need it."

"You asked who I am: I am the small child who saw her world was unacceptable. I am the lucky scientist who found a way to fix it. I am the passionate dreamer who wanted to build a paradise in the stars. I am the fortunate woman who caught the eye of something greater. And I am the person who chose to step away from all that to become someone else's traveler from beyond, not knowing how or when I may return."

And then, because Amethyst has specific habits built up by a lifetime of not being able to tell when her explanations have hit the mark, she asks "Did that answer your question? I got a bit poetic. I should probably give a more concrete description as well."

{There are many parts of that story I didn't fully understand, but I think I can understand the sense of the story without them. You come from a strange world, where you invented a miraculous tool. A strange power met you there and offered you magic beyond what your tool could accomplish, and when you accepted her offer, she sent you here.}

"Yup! That's a perfectly reasonable summary," she agrees.

"Honestly, I think the biggest difference I've noticed so far between this world and my world is the way plants work. Without essence, I'm used to plants taking days to grow any noticeable amount. But here, plants seem pretty fundamentally tied in to the magic, and they respond much faster to care and attention. I think it will definitely be interesting to see what they're like when they've grown back a bit more."

{Days does sound slow, for noticeable plant growth,} Naia agrees. {Depending what you mean by 'noticeable'. Later, when our work is not so urgent, I would be very interested to see how plants from your world grow and what they are like.}

"That would be interesting! I have no idea whether they would ... eventually pick up essence from their surroundings, or whether they would never really integrate," she replies.

"As for what I mean about noticeable growth -- the very fastest growing plants in the world can grow about a meter in a day with enough water, nutrients, and sunlight. It would be more normal for a plant to grow a few millimeters per day during its growing season. Depending on the exact variety of plant, it would be pretty normal for a seed to take a week to sprout, grow quickly for a few weeks or months, and then settle in to its slower adult growth."

{I see. It would be very unusual to see a plant grow that slowly here. If I'm understanding you correctly, I think your world's fastest-growing plants would still seem unusually energetic here, but your world's ordinary plants are slower than this world's slowest-growing ones. And the very fastest-growing plants here are much faster than anything in your world.}

"I think that matches with what I've seen!" she agrees. "What are the fastest growing plants here? If we get enough water and essence circulating, will a forest spring up overnight?"

{Not overnight, but the right kind of tree, correctly tended, could grow to its full height in as little as eight days even without my active intervention. If I had to guess what the fastest-growing plant in the world is, measured by length, I would suspect some variant of the moon glory vine, which can cover such a tree much faster than the tree itself can grow.}

"Wow! Eight days is still really fast for a forest," she remarks.

A thought flits 'sideways' from one of her that is clearing out the orbs.

"Oh -- I just had a thought! I'm making pretty good progress clearing out wraiths on the surface, but I don't know whether they're limited to the surface. Can you tell whether there are any underground?"

{I can only sense them directly in my own domain. I am confident there are no buried wraiths here besides the ones attached to the outposts you're destroying, but whether there might be any lurking in my siblings' territories under better concealment, I couldn't say. Meli would certainly know if there are any in her territory, but may be too grieved to answer if asked. Stryge is best left to calm down for a while after your earlier visit—I apologize again for not warning you in time.}