Statement of, er, Garnet? What the - ahem. No last name given. Regarding a scroll briefly in her possession. Original statement given November 14, 2013. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

There are plenty of dangerous things on this planet, you don't even know. My friends and I, the Crystal Gems, we handle a lot of stuff most people on Earth couldn't. But this last one, it was too much. I can't tell my friends. They shouldn't have to hear this.

The temple where we live is ours. We don't have a lot to do with people, they don't have a lot to do with us. Did you even know there are gemstones on this planet that have a soul? Or what's left of one, most of the time.

Anyway, I found out about a ruin that sounded...different enough. So I warped off to get a look. I didn't think I needed the others. It was a ruin, no signs of active technology or power sources or anything. But it had a reputation for people disappearing trying to reach it, and of ghosts, or of people - humans - going to look for it and a lot of the time what that actually means is there are...fragments left behind. Shards of something very old reaching out. And that's dangerous.

The others were busy, so I went on my own. And I knew our little Steven was keen on coming on our missions lately, and I thought this one might be too much for him late.

It was in a valley surrounded by mountains. From the hillsides, it looked like a colonnade. Just a roof over a courtyard with columns around the edges. But even from there, I could tell there were stairs within the columns, and they led down.

This was weird. I don't know if you know from Gem architecture, but it's into round shapes and big, tall monuments. This was like the opposite of all of that.

I went in. I thought maybe it'd be a big pit or shaft with stairs round the rides, like those big reservoirs in India. It was kind of like that, but it wasn't just one shaft. It was a network of stairs, some hugging the walls, others crossing over the open pit, and every time there was a landing, a change of direction, there was a doorway, tunneling into the rock. This was going to be a longer job than I thought.

I started down the stairs, until the first landing down the shaft wall. It led into a passage, cut into the rock. It was dark inside of course, but I've got really good eyesight. So I followed it. It went into the rock a ways and then turned right. Then a staircase going both up and down inside the bedrock. At the bottom, the passage turned right again, and I came out on another landing, overlooking the shaft. It was the first time I'd really looked into the shaft. I couldn't even see the bottom! But the odd thing was, it wasn't a straight shaft, like I'd thought. The stairways that went across the pit had looked like they were all at right angles, the landings connecting them in the middle of the walls, instead of at the corners. But I was wrong. Or maybe it changed further down. Anyway, the square shaft started to spiral. Like I was standing inside a screw, I suppose, or a drill bit. The stairs built across the shaft didn't curve though. They just met the walls where they were. Corners, sides, didn't matter. But the twisting walls combined with the straight stairs was...hard to look at.

I crossed the stairs I found in front of me, and arrived at another doorway, another corridor, another stairwell, emerging back to a landing on the edge of the shaft. I assumed that whatever I was looking for was at the bottom, so I kept taking every downward stair I could find.

The deeper I got, the warmer it got, and the darker it got. Even out in the shaft, I was so deep now that the crisscrossing stairs made it gloomy. I thought it would be cold. Had it been drilled all the way down to the mantle?

And I started finding signs of others who'd got there before me. Obviously, the stories about other visitors were how I knew the place was there.

Mostly it was things carved into the stone - arrows. I guess some people needed to remind themselves which way was up? Some of them were names, written in different languages. The odd one with a date. Must've been a couple thousand years between some of them.

Then I started finding other things. Old rags, a knife, things like that. And the things carved on the walls started to change. Not just 'I was here, at this time.' Some of them said things like 'there's no way out,' or 'get out of here' and some of them were just nonsense.

After...I don't know how long it was. After however long, I realized I wasn't getting anywhere. Just walking down these stairs. I came out on the latest landing. I'd reached the twisted part of the shaft. And I still couldn't see a bottom. I stopped for a second, then found a loose chip of stone, picked it up, and threw it into the pit. I did hear it hit the bottom, so I was getting there.

I kept going. The inscriptions kept showing up. They made less and less sense, the further I went. Some of them looked like someone had tried to chisel a map of this place. I looked at it but I didn't see anything that looked familiar, so I kept going.

It seemed like days since I'd started going down. But I finally seemed to have reached the bottom. The last door, the one that led to the bottom of the shaft? It had a big, heavy frame with inscriptions around it. I couldn't believe it when I saw those. The writing wasn't Gem glyphs. It was a human script. I don't know the name of it, or what it said. I think it was one of the really old ones. Did that mean humans built this? Could they do that?

Then I finally came out on the floor of the shaft. Looking up, I could barely see any light at all.

I don't know if you know much about Gems. Our gems are our soul, they have everything that we are. So when I came out of that door, I...it was awful. Our Steven talks about how scary movies make him feel sick. I didn't know quite how that worked, until right then.

The bottom of the shaft was a workshop. I think that's the best description for it. Stone benches and counters and vats were all over the big floor surrounded by the weird-angled walls.

We...we spend a lot of time, my people and me, dealing with the wreckage of Gems. It's awful. Gems who were shattered or twisted beyond recognition, because they were different, because they loved Earth and humanity and wanted to protect them.

So I'm used to feeling upset about these places, the things in them. But...but this was different. The benches were covered in bowls, palettes, and grindstones. And they were all covered in glittering, multicoloured dust.

There wasn't any advanced technology, no crystal computers or lasers or anything like that. This was human technology. Humans, maybe thousands of years ago, had taken shattered Gems, and ground them up! As if they hadn't been defiled enough! Why? Why'd they do it?

I looked around. It wasn't just a workshop. It was a studio. There was an easel, or draughting table, made of wood so old and dry, it was as hard as the rock around me. And laid out on it was a scroll. I don't know paper from parchment, but it was brown, dry and old. And it had been drawn - or painted - in iridescent colours.

It was an image of a face and hands, except that everything was out of position, scrambled up. At first, it made me think of what our Steven would have drawn when he was a baby. But there was something about it. The colours were bright like poison. The eyes seemed crazed and mindless, the hands like they were trying to grasp at us.

I...I almost came undone at that moment. Two halves of my heart, one ached for the Gems destroyed to make this, by the harm it had done to humans. The other was enraged, furious at the stupid, senseless humans who'd moved into this old shaft and ground up good Gems' remains to make a finger painting!

We - I - grabbed the scroll, rolled it up, and headed for the door.

Before, I'd always aimed for the downward stairs. Now I started focusing on the upward stairs in the tunnels and across the shaft. Right away, there was something wrong. I got up one flight of tunnel-stairs, and came out to find the shaft getting darker. I didn't think I'd been down there long enough to lose the daylight. But it was getting hotter anyway.

I thought it was straightforward. After all, I'd taken downward stairs until I reached the bottom. So if I take upward stairs, I should reach the top. Except...maybe I got absentminded and turned the wrong way in one of the tunnels. Because I ended up coming out of one of the tunnels at a staircase going down.

I tried to look at the graffiti cut into the tunnel walls, try and get a sense of how far I'd gone. But no part of the shaft and the tunnels looked or felt any different from others. I kept looking for every chance to go up, looking for anything I recognized from the way down. After a while, I found one of the ones that looked like an attempt at a map. Someone had scrawled over it, into the wall, 'it doesn't make any sense!'

It was right, it didn't. I kept trying and trying, I even went up a lot, until I realized that I hadn't reached the part of the shaft where its walls didn't twist. But the walls only twisted near the bottom. I had to have gotten higher than that!

After a while I started getting unfocused. I kept just walking, climbing. Except I kept finding downward stairs in places that made no sense! I was just...on autopilot. So it was a long time before I realized I'd been walking down the same tunnel for way longer than it should have gone. I doubled back, looking for stairs. I found them. And they went down.

I finally stopped, trying not to panic, not to come undone. How could this place have changed since I came down?

I unrolled the scroll and stared at it, trying to understand what it had done to this place, or to us - to me, that is. It just made my head spin even more. I screamed at it, 'What do you want?'

That was when I heard the laughter. I turned and looked up the side passage. But...there hadn't been a side passage here before! Now I was looking at a tall human, with long fingers and long curly hair, standing in a lit hallway that made me feel even more in the dark! And he said, "It knows what you're planning. It won't let you out of here."

He reached out, and his arm seemed a lot longer than a human arm should be able to get. "Give it to me, and you can go."

For a moment, it seemed like the obvious thing to do. Just hand it off, and everything would be fine. But I've got strong voices in me, and they said, 'No, too much suffering has been caused by this...thing to hand it over to anyone!'

I'm not proud. I ran away from him, and his beautiful bright passageway. I went back to the shaft and its stairways. I kept going, up, every chance I could, up. And it didn't change a thing. And I could hear...him, laughing.

I tried to look for the inscriptions again, try to remember the ones I'd seen on the way down. Was it this one? Or that one? I was coming apart, nothing made sense.

And then, I nearly walked blindy off a landing over the shaft. I accidentally kicked a stone off the edge, and stared as it dropped into the dark. Just as I thought I'd come apart, I said, "No, no. Up is still up, down is still down. Think: we know what we saw before, on the way down. We have to do this. For the Crystal Gems, for Steven, we're getting out!"

And I kept moving. Every 'up' I saw, I took, every well-lit passageway, I ignored. I knew up was up and down was down.

There was no warning when I finally reached the colonnade at the top. Just, suddenly the air went from hot and stuffy to cold and crisp. It was night - dawn had broken but the sun wasn't going to be up for a long time yet. I ran away from that place as fast as I could. I warped out, but the last thing I think I saw was that man, standing between the columns. He didn't look happy.

I made it back, and destroyed the scroll. It didn't go easily. But I had the others with me to help with that. But the people, the human beings who made it, what they left behind. It needs to be watched for, but I'm not ready to share it.

I have to go. It'll be morning in Beach City. I want to get home before Steven wakes up. I don't want him to worry.

Statement Ends.

This statement doesn't offer much in the way of followup opportunities. Apart from the mysterious 'Garnet' apparently being based out of the USA, she fails to provide contact information or to make clear where this shaft structure is or how she got there. Her colourful term 'warp' being thoroughly unhelpful. According to the Institute library, the drearily-named Beach City is the home of a well-documented prehistoric complex inhabited by these...beings called the 'Crystal Gems,' who have been associated with a number of crypto-archaeological locations.

However, although her shifting between singular and plural pronouns and her references to 'humans' suggest someone dissociated enough to throw their testimony into doubt, her description of long, inexplicable hallways is consistent with the Spiral. If I were in any further doubt, the man she describes encountering trying to confiscate this scroll is clearly Michael. If there is anything to her assertion about gemstones with any sort of spirit to them, grinding them up and making, well, art, with them would certainly engender insanity.

From what Martin and the others have been able to find out about the sites associated with these Crystal Gems, this spiralling shaft and the materials left there fall outside their usual pattern. There's no indication that the Crystal Gems have had previous interactions with the Powers that the Magnus Institute documents. If the Powers have taken notice of them at any point in history, it may represent an escalation that bears serious attention.

End recording.