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.

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.

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?"

{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.}

"Really, it's okay. I think it's pretty understandable that she would be so spooked and that I moved faster than you could warn me," Amethyst attempts to reassure her.

"But if there aren't any buried ones in your territory, that at least makes me a bit more optimistic that there won't be buried ones elsewhere!"