calling_logs | What girl doesn't need a good axe?

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What girl doesn't need a good axe?

WHO: Garnet and anyone who wants to drop by!
WHAT: Weapon shopping.
WHEN: Around midday.
WHERE: The Mid-Summer Festival in the Lost City of Amazonia
NOTES/WARNINGS: Dem thighs always need a warning. /ahem. Nothing as yet.

She had taken her arrival with her usual aplomb. The City of Tomorrow had been interesting, but she saw more things that she might need to take a closer look at when she thought about attending the Festival that everyone was talking about.

So that was where Garnet had gone. It was rather nice to be amongst fellow warrior women - not that she wasn't always, or almost always, but the attitude here was different. Pearl fought because Rose fought. Amethyst fought because, in her words, she was 'scrappy.' Garnet's reasoning was different. She fought because the battle needed to be fought, and she was able to fight it.

The reason she was looking intently at a weapons booth, though, was because...

Well...

Her giant axe looked a little lonely, and this place was, currently, a little closer (and definitely less laden with memory) than the strawberry fields.

Her lips tugged to one side, a hand at her chin, Garnet eyed a particularly well-made polearm. Reach, and a blade. Both of those were positives in her book.

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The blow rocks the golem - glittering, crystalline green all through, the veins of olivine thick around it, allowing it to move like some fluid, the grinding sound coming from that movement, as it shifts and moves to strike back at Garnet--

Only to whirl as Loki comes at its back, blade as sharp as thought as she strikes, and dodges, and strikes again, blade flickering in and out of sight as she does.

This.

This was more certain.

She tapped into her future vision, everything having coalesced into currents she could easily follow toward the correct outcome. She watched them, saw how they flowed, and she moved with them - anticipating each of the golem's moves and, perhaps more importantly, each of Loki's. In this sort of battle, it was utterly necessary to know where one's partner would strike, to both stay out of their way and position the opponent so both of you would score the necessary hits.

And that was how it was that Garnet dropped to the ground and, with a strong kick, started the golem wavering, almost like a pendulum. If she could get it to the floor, then it would be an easy win.

Unfortunately, it wasn't a future she could absolutely guarantee.

Fortunately, Loki is very heavy, and likewise very used to using whatever tactics are necessary to win the day - in this case, vanishing her sword back where it came from, and conjuring a great mass, in the form of ice, to herself as she latches onto the golem's head, and tips it to the ground.

Maybe magic would roll right off the golem, but Loki herself is another story.

"Good tactic!"

This wasn't someone she's fought with for millenia. This wasn't someone who knows how she moves, how she fights. This wasn't someone who can read the future, like she could. So encouragement, affirmation, and, she reminded herself, shouting her own intents would only be good things.

It was thanks to Loki that the construct was fully down. And with the construct down, it became clear to Garnet that, though this olivine was somehow making it function, this was not a corrupted gem to poof and bubble.

Which put it firmly in the category of the young centipeetles: things to put down without remorse.

Garnet could do that.

Leaping onto its chest, she began to punch at its core. Not just singular heavy strikes but a multitude all focused on the same place, as fast as a jackhammer. When one large, grinding arm moved to try to sweep her away, she leapt and, from on high, she shouted, "Rocket fists!"

Confusing? Maybe. But her gauntlets shot from her arms with plumes of flame following them, propelled at exactly the same location she'd been punching while Garnet--

While Garnet seemed to hang in midair. Handless.

Loki has seen stranger. Done stranger. It still gets a blink, though she doesn't hesitate to get out of the way, by which we mean she teleports, a flicker of green in one place, and then another, out of range of Garnet's attack.

With the golem down, and structurally weakened by the cold generated by Loki, the impact of the rocket fists cracks the it in half, and--

Some faint light in it sinks into one of the veins of olivine, and flickers as it moves away from the now-inert mass of yellow-green rock-crystal.

Garnet was a powerhouse. It was one of the benefits of being Garnet. But when she saw the light leaving the golem and going into the olivine, she knew that wasn't her department.

"Loki! Can you stop that glow?" She pointed, her hands having rematerialised as her gauntlets disappeared. That force, that light, that magic -- no, that was not her specialty. But she had a feeling it was Loki's.

"Already on it," she replies, and she is, green flickering around her fingers, before lancing out in a fine net of power, catching the glow, and, for the moment, holding it in place for a moment, before she starts drawing it back.

"Nice catch." Because it was. And Loki was a good teammate. She'd taken the initiative and had gotten it done.

Garnet approved.

With that done, she descended to the floor, catching herself with knees healthily bent - no superhero pose for her. Just a settling onto the ground once more.

"It isn't what I feared."

"Thank you," Loki replies simply. She forms a shimmering emerald barrier around the flickering energy in her hands.

"What had you feared?" she asks.

"That this was a corrupted gem."

It... ached in an odd way that it wasn't. But she still reached down and, with a surprisingly delicate touch, picked up a glimmering shard of olivine, lifting it to her eye level. "That somehow, gems had once colonised this place as well, and the Diamonds had corrupted the ones that were left behind."

Just as had happened on Earth. Only this place wouldn't have had Crystal Gems to mop up the Diamonds' mess.

Loki turns the flicker of energy around in her hands, regarding it thoughtfully, before looking at Garnet.

"It may yet be," she says. "This is just a small piece of the life in this place."

But Garnet shook her head. "Gem energy doesn't move that way. Gem energy is contained. Unless Homeworld discovered something new."

Which was possible, but...

Only possible. Not very likely. But with this place, who knew.

"Well I suppose that's a relief. Unless this entire structure is somehow the gem...?"

Is that possible? goes implied, but not said.

"It could be a gem powered structure, but not one gem." Most gem constructs build upward instead of dig inward, unless it's a kindergarten." And this was not a kindergarten.

"Let's find out where it was going," Loki suggests, and without waiting for a reply, breathes a thread of her own power into the yellow-green energy, and releases it again.

Garnet nodded and, when the energy was released, she formed one gauntlet - just in case she'd have to punch through a wall.

As you do.

As it happens, they do need to go through a wall after a while; the energy pauses and waits for them, rather than zipping along as it had before Loki 'talked' to it.

"Interesting. ...And polite." But Garnet still focused a bit more will into her gauntlet, after having glanced forward to make certain this wouldn't cave in the ceiling, and grew it by quite a few degrees before punching into the wall, first cracking it, and then shattering it, leaving them a nicely-large doorway into the next area.

"I asked it to be," Loki replies.

The little flicker of yellow-green light speeds up again, and zips up to the ceiling, and over to a pillar of olivine in the centre of the chamber Garnet had opened the way to - a roughly spherical room, almost like the interior of an olivine geode, if such a thing were possible. The light joins a brighter core of the same in the heart of the pillar, and it pulses, once, ever-so-briefly outlining the shapes of several individual crystals there, suspended in some kind of fluid.

The flicker of emerald that went with it returns to Loki's outstretched fingers.

And that...

made her stare.

It wasn't how gems worked. Not in her experience, not ever in her experience. No Homeworld Gem functioned in that way. Not even Peridot.

But... But Homeworld had had thousands of years to change. Thousands of years to learn and colonise. Were these...

Her gauntlet faded as she stared. Considered. Hoped that Homeworld wasn't using gems in this way.

"What do you make of this?" Loki asks softly, looking askance at Garnet.

Her mind was back in the control room of the kindergarten, watching a forced fusion grow and form out of a pillar Peridot had removed from the ceiling. She was looking at the beast made of hands and feet, beings that should never be--

Were these...

"Shards..."

"How can we know for sure?" Loki asks, voice still soft as she glances from the... maybe-shards? To Garnet.

If Steven were here, he'd know. He'd spoken with them before. He knew their voices and could reach them. But Garnet wasn't Steven. Garnet wasn't a Quartz. So she had only one method.

"We remove them from the liquid. If they scream, we'll know."

For once, her voice sounded distant. Still certain, but certain in a way she didn't want to be. Homeworld... How could they have become this barbaric?

"I can pull them out without touching them," Loki offers. "Telekinetically."

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