A desert, very dead; dead in name, dead to anyone or anything. For the first time in the longest time, a wind whistled over the sand, jostled the dunes, and led a bubble on its path. Suspended at its center, a trigonal gem caught the light and glinted back, green and pink, in its persistent drift to the center of the desert.

The wind had died and the sun was unrepentant so she shook off the hood of her poncho, stifling a twinge of fear. Hieroglyphics crowded the monolith, giving off a faint white iridescence where they passed over panels popped, conspicuously, out of place. And she couldn’t possibly read all of them, all them that hadn’t left a first impression. The meaning of four border-sharing quadrilaterals turned onto their sharpest points — the diamond shapes — was the intergalactic symbol of imminent destruction. Forcibly engraved into every planet at the cost of everything there.

Cat’s Eye Tourmaline thought, Long live Her Clarity, and the spite hardened her resolve and her hope, enough to enter this ruined, rotting place at her own risk.

The gem has a dramatic turnaround, an instantaneous halt in motion before she doubles back from the entrance. She wears a blank, gaping expression. Her lips part and, contrary to offering a direct answer -- "What... are you?"

Tourmaline floated above the sand, her strawberry bob touseled in still air, and who, considering her broad face and eyes like a Keane painting, was far less expressive than she ought to have been; to that extent, she was much like a marionette. Of all that was dainty was, overall, herself, and her other facial features -- her lips; they parted again in a self-involved murmur and her eyes ogled the acquaintance in her mask and her robes, contemplating a mystery.

In a voice delicate and deliberate, she finally concluded, "A Quartz of some design," out loud. "You must be."

Tourmaline approaches the gem, still obsessively studying, still absurdly expressionless. "So tall," she purrs, nonetheless.

She blurts out, "I wish to convene with the Crystal Gems! If you've of any counsel, please." The final plea hung, her gaze gone soft and round, on a gossamer string. It appeared she was almost sorry to tear her attention away.

Beneath the cloak, a shape hung from her right socket, materialized without drawing attention to itself: a long, tapered prism. It rises at her volition. Circling a "palm," indicated by a deep turquoise, are sharp, disembodied claws that perform a scraggly-finger wave in an act that is silent, and to the acquaintance, unexplained.

"Oh!" The gem's false hand erupts with a sputtering sound like a water-doused device -- Tourmaline's face is incandescent, the first displayed emotion of the exchange. Her brows knit and she appears to mutter something unsavory to herself. Her acquaintance might catch "antiquated" under her breath before Tourmaline turns back, salvaging an extremely exaggerated look of satisfaction.

"Delightful! I commenced a scan on the unidentified structure and it came back 'safe!' The wonders of technology, where would we be without them!?"

She laughed -- she laughed in the cadence of a human infant, with the pitch of the high-class, not that they mattered anymore. "There is a certain significance to this building -- do you feel it too, mystery Quartz? Without any determinable risk, I believe our next course of action should be... entering!"

“Ahh…” Tourmaline peeked from behind her companion, bad news reverberating from the corridor; the price of lying. “Whoopsies.”

Maybe it was intentional, “a trap” after all, against all odds and the course of history — those troubling implications sat aside, for now, as Tourmaline figured the voice they were hearing was engaging another… gem? Gems, if she could afford to be optimistic?

“If you’re liable to the request,” the manikin said, gently gripping the Quartz’s shoulder with crystalline claw to catch her attention, “maybe you should do something about that? With your sword?” Gesturing to the blade rested confidently on one shoulder.

“I can support you! Effectively, this time.” Figuring she should offer something in-exchange. Although there was a curious quality about this place…

Lips puckered and eyes flitting, pensive; Tourmaline couldn't gravitate to that sense of soldierly stoicism. It's hardly 'investigating' when the threat's already determinable, for you're aware the war's concluded— she ceased. It was superfluous, as her Quartz companion stalked towards that voluminous light down the hall.

Tourmaline stalled in the chamber. A low hum of activity was, internally, obstructive to the voices within the temple. The technician registered only a suffusion of solid hue, a radiant color of which both walls and floors consisted. The result was an open room that felt claustrophobic. A vacant space with a single module, just off-center, betraying that sotto voce of underlying technical working. Betraying what she knew about Homeworld infrastructural tech.

A pundit overwhelmed with fresh wonder and a terrific anxiety, Tourmaline hovered to the control panel jutting from the floor. "As usual." She matched the palm profile with her own, Hand Robonoid suspended over top, a few-inches distance retained with care. "Do you require authorization, little one?" in a soft, goading voice.

To attempt a scan so soon after the first had failed — it took no part of wisdom to be an intellectual. But Tourmaline knew to brace, all the same, unprepared for how whichever iteration of engineering she had would react in the midst.

All the same, she had an inkling there was fortune to reap from risking.