“Don’t you use magic? I saw you manifest out of a rock,” Barry says, though it’s half rhetorical at this point – he’s hardly expecting a productive conversation.
“Nice save.” He rolls his eyes, but then his expression softens into something more resigned. “Look, we both want the same thing. You clearly know the situation better than I– than I do, so I’m gonna keep followin’ you for now.”
He finds the quickest path he can to go around the destroyed machinery, and takes a moment to catch up with her long stride again. “Alright, new direction, why not. Think there’ll be more down this way?”
"You really don’t shut up, huh.”
There’s a hint of resignation in her tone. She doesn’t have it in her to get angry every time he talks. Well, maybe she does, but she doesn’t want to.
She leads on, ignoring his questions. Obviously she knows where she’s going. It’s all as familiar as if she’d lived her whole life here.
There: one of the holes in the sandstone is clearly different. While they’ve all varied in size and shape with the defective Gems they belonged to, they were still obviously exit holes. And they were millennia old, their distinct outlines only preserved by the metamorphic heat with which the figures had taken form. This, here, is a new excavation: the rock scratched away from the original opening until it left an ugly, gaping wound in the wall.
It wasn’t really an improvement.
The canyon winds in a tight corner here, and beyond it a dead end—and here, every hole has been dug out, bearing the same coarse claw-marks. Metal spikes made from destroyed injectors’ legs have been driven through the stone in front of each one, forming makeshift prison bars.
This is where... yeah, that’s right. Some of the cells are empty, the bars having fallen loose over time. But the occupied ones belong to the dreaded Cluster prototypes: writhing masses of mismatched body parts, resulting from the shards of different Gems being forced together. She holds back a shudder at the thought.
“These ones aren’t going anywhere.” Jasper can already sense the new wave of questions on the way, and she turns preemptively to give Barry a little (big) push toward the closest cell on the left. “So, get to work. I don’t care how you dispatch them. Just bring the gems to me before they can reform.”
She takes the one across, bending back the metal she’d straightened in the first place to reach in and grab the wretch by what is trying to be their head.
