calling_logs | 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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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."

"If this thing is using gem power, it would be better to see it destroyed." But Garnet paused and allowed, "After the shards are... seen to."

If they screamed--

If they screamed, she couldn't tell Steven. Not ever.

"I'll start with one then," Loki replies, fingers glowing a soft emerald green as she makes a beckoning gesture... and then pauses, frowning at the sudden resistance-- Lines of connection flare up between the jagged points and edges of the shards, nothing visible, but Loki can feel it.

"...or not. Hm. It's all or nothing, I'm afraid."

What girl doesn't need a good axe?

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