"C'mere."
The whisper ushered Galena to follow it around the bend of the mineshaft. Resonance gauge in hand, he complied, the voice familiar but the cause uncertain. He hadn't been having all that much luck locating a fresh enough signature anyway. Upon rounding the corner, Torbernite lunged to pin him to the shaft wall, managing to grab the hand which held the device and hold it over Galena's head.
"I wanna try something," Torbernite muttered with a characteristic petty playfulness. Everything about this desolate asteroid wrought a cynicism, a fatigue, and one could hear it in any gem sequestered there.
The shorter gem glanced up at the other with an uncertainty salted equally with curiosity and trust, the look in his eyes suggesting a further explanation was expected.
"What've you heard about the Amalgamation?"
Galena instantly understood what Torbernite was getting at, his grey face flushing blue.
"She… she's a monstrosity, an abomination." Galena poorly feigned a slow shake of his head, an attempt at batting away his chartreuse comrade's very suggestion. "Blue Diamond decreed they were traitors to the Empire, and defectors of her Court. …There… there's a reason… that's forbidden, Torbernite…"
"Isn't that what we are, though?" He let go of Galena's thin wrists, then put his own hands flush to the wall behind Galena's head to keep him looking at him. "Abominations? To use your own words…"
"This is an Instability Colony. It's… different… We're… different."
"The Amalgamation isn't so different from us. The fact that… heterogeneous fusion happened, it proves that it can and does happen. And we, we're living proof that instability can and does happen. We aren't supposed to happen. But we do. And she wasn't supposed to happen, and she does." He looked Galena in the eye with a wry smirk, his birth-marked chin quivering slightly. "I've overheard Orpiments up top talking about how to fuse. We should try it."
"How? How is it even possible…?" Galena had heard of the chaotic event where a Sapphire and one of her Rubies had somehow managed to fuse, but it neither sat well with him nor felt like a complete picture of the whole story. Everything he knew of Homeworld proved it was impossible. Yet…
"Different gems have different resonant signatures, and the only way it could have happened was if those signatures were capable of harmonizing. An overlay of the two crystalline matrices… Different gems have different resonant signatures. You resonate with Galenas, and I'd resonate with other Torbernites. The only way the heterogeneous fusion could have happened was if those different signatures were capable of harmonizing. An overlay of the two crystalline matrices… A new gem out of two, instead of an iteration through uniformity." Galena's face fell slack, and Torbernite stepped back from him with a chuckle and an outreached hand. "A demonstration'll do better."
Rather than take Torbernite's hand, Galena hesitantly held the resonance gauge up to it, and Torbernite smirked at the scientific, cautious approach. It chirped to an erratic rhythm, but a rhythm nonetheless. Somewhere between eight and fifteen patterns, and after a moment of trying to understand it, he held it up to his own hand, finding a similar irregularity to the results, a mere two to five range. Torbernite's had been a single octave higher, more like clicking than Galena's dull thrumming. To each a pulse, nonetheless. Not only were they two different types of gem–they were also two different types of unstable. And yet, Galena knew: Torbernite understood this but desired to try anyway. A Ruby and Sapphire, they were at least related, both types of Corundum. If any unlike gem were to be capable of doing it, they would have to be of the same crystalline category, and Torbernite was a phosphate, while Galena was a sulfide. Yet despite this, theoretically, an overlay as the explanation Torbernite had proposed seemed plausible if not unlikely. He set down the diagnostic device and took Torbernite's hand. But he could neither resist his elder's instruction nor resist the desire to humor him.
"What now?" He knew the answer, but couldn't resist the rhetoric either.
"We get to know one another even more intimately than before."