i am posting this story out of unmitigated spite
I. Dance of the Knights — Sergei Prokofiev
The sun never set on Crystal System 33 Ferrade. It was an imperfect planet in a perfect orbit, in its sunny hemisphere with mild winters and pleasurable summers, but weather didn't matter much when, except for its few intelligent inhabitants, all native life forms were silicon based. They came in strange shades of greyish-white if they lived on the sunny side, in inky black on the shadowed side. That was just the way of things — adaptation to something greater.
This "something greater" was Ferrade's core, because Ferrade was a unique planet. In its formation (however THAT happened, do I look like a nesosilicate?), the planet's normal mantle and crust had formed around a teardrop- or hourglass-shaped core of 90% pure hematite, 9% carbon, and 1%...other. Because of this abnormally shaped magnetic core, the larger portion of hematite always pulled towards the local star (which was theorized to also be magnetic). Thus the planet revolved without rotation. The bigger bulb of the teardrop protruded from the crust of the sunny side of Ferrade as a very wide shieldlike hill, though if you were to walk on top of it, the only way you could tell it from any other ground protrusion was if the sun was directly above you and, forty feet below the surface, you found a curiously smooth surface in place of a planet's normal bedrock.
It was theorized by an olivine that Ferrade's core would one day break free of its crust, field, and orbit and rocket towards the sun where it would burn up and destroy all inhabitants. Since it had somehow stayed around for five thousand years without doing anything of the like, but also since nothing said that it wouldn't , 33 Ferrade became an obscure recreational hub for retired citizens, a correction facility for Stage I corrupted gems, and a tourist trap for people who didn't understand physics.
There was no one who hated Ferrade more than one of these residents, the first of my constituents, an aventurine strategist on a well-earned but much too long break.
It wasn't as if she could do anything about it, however, because all furloughs were prearranged and a gem would be taken there kicking and screaming if she had to be. And it wasn't that Aventurine was ungrateful. The war on Crystal System Earth had taken its toll on everyone, including her; in fact, the second she had knelt before her Diamond, her physical form involuntarily collapsed into her gem. The indignity. Nevertheless, in honor of her service, Yellow Diamond had assigned her to a furlough on Crystal System 33 Ferrade, in a solitary pod between a gem settlement and the core's hill, and with the prospect of a hundred years' rest stretching before her.
A hundred years on an unstable planet where the sun never set. Anyone would hate it after a while, in my opinion, and that makes sense, because a large part of me learned it firsthand.
That large part of me — our Aventurine — had been on Ferrade just a common day and a half before her dislike took root.
It wasn't like she had anything to do, anyway. The nearby gem settlement was a money vortex for the unlucky and a money torrent for the lucky, and being an aventurine, she had both luck and money already. Because of this she couldn't care. As a general rule, Aventurine didn't care about many things at all, which was part of the reason why she was such a successful tactician. With no emotional instability to rock her calculations, her end goals consisted of literally two things: success and then being able to go home and sleep. That aside, Aventurine was on holiday and unless something promised immediate gratification, she was reluctant to expound the energy to partake in it.
Long story short: the reason Aventurine did not leave her assigned vacation pod for six weeks was because she couldn't care enough to do literally anything else. No wonder she was bored.
I have just realized that to call her temporary residence a pod does a disservice to the spectacular architecture of the place. A pod wasn't what it was, just what it was called. In reality, Aventurine's holiday residence was a private expanse of about ten acres, with the pod itself in the very center looming over the uncultivated lands as a stone temple to no Ferrade had no precipitation besides fist-sized hail once every three years, the only doors were gauzy curtains between the white pillars, allowing for eternal golden sunlight to filter into the building's open spaces. In her time on Earth, Aventurine had grown fond of its twenty four-hour days, so whenever she felt like it should be night, she could simply press a button and dark glass panes would roll down over the windows. Open courtyards within the house offered places to relax, eat, practice sparring, or swim in round pools with water clearer than the Diamonds' sacred cores.
It was a beautiful place, but to a gem straight out of a war, it might as well have been a bubble.
On her sixth "week" in her pod, Aventurine decided wisely to spend an entire three days asleep. She couldn't remember when she decided to like sleeping; it had just happened, and she happened to enjoy it too. Already she had dedicated a certain room of her residence just to sleep — it had a quartz-sized couch, a great number of gold-tasseled pillows, and Ferradian potted shade palms bent lazily over the place of reclining. (The shade palms were a blessing and a curse. Once she woke up with a leaf in her mouth.) Initially it was actually rather aesthetically pleasing, but as she became attached to the couch, the room became more disheveled until a dozen pieces of dinnerware teetered on the small table and certain pillows claimed permanent ownership of floor space.
After the aforementioned nap (I do get very distracted, don't I?), Aventurine awoke to a beautiful, sunny morning. That was a joke because it is always sunny on Ferrade. Ha, ha. Aventurine had certainly not been laughing. She could sleep for a very long time but something had awoken her — a something which she would normally try to avoid at all costs, but which now had the effect of food for a starving man. A communicator call. How long had it been since she had partaken in social conversation? Ah, right. Six weeks. By stars it was boring here.
Before doing anything, Aventurine always made sure to be properly groomed — you could hardly be respected while looking like a Kindergarten runt — and as she swung her bare feet off the side of her couch, she closed her eyes and did a quick cosmetic onceover. Her thick pale hair glowed as she removed the knots and tangles, leaving it to fall over her muscular shoulders; while hardly thinking, she exchanged her loose tunic for the snug, aqua-green uniform of a quartz soldier under the command of Yellow Diamond. Using a piece of soft cloth she kept by her bedside, Aventurine reached down to her left foot and gently rubbed the smooth surface of her gem, before allowing stiff combat boots to appear on her feet. There was no real point to the uniform. But it felt nice to look nice, even if she was off-duty, especially if someone would be talking to her.
Her sole connection with Homeworld rested in the room adjacent to her sleeping chambers, the control room, where Aventurine could manipulate all the functions of this minimalist vacation home (one of which could form a spherical shield and lift the entire ten acres of grounds into space). It was too bad that she didn't know how half of them worked. Pushing past a decorative plant that the moron architects had placed halfway in front of the door, Aventurine strode into the room and dropped herself into the high backed office chair.
The common communicator was round, unlike the direct Diamond lines, and when it blinked, it was a neutral green-grey. She twisted it to activate it, idly letting it fall out of her hands and levitate above the control panel, where a white screen expanded and washed the room with a colder, harsher glow. A single figure stood in its light.
She was tall and thin with a prominent nose, like a pearl, but her wavy, iridescent hair flowed long and trailed behind her with the trains of her rich silken robes. Her pale face possessed none of the softness of a pearl's; her skin was strained and marked with mortal signs of old age. When her voluminous white sleeve fell back, Aventurine saw that the nails of her skeletal hand were adorned with something that shimmered in the light.
"Aventurine...Facet 1S7K, Cut 3YA," said the iridescent figure. Her lidded, luminous eyes traveled once down Aventurine's muscled body and in response, the quartz felt herself instinctively stiffen. After a pause the figure added, "General."
"Mother of Pearl," Aventurine responded, allowing herself into a more relaxed pose on the chair. "What do you want? This is my time."
With a flick of her sharp wrist, the Mother pulled up a screen from her own control panel and looked disinterestedly at it. "Your time unconscious in a tropic wasteland," she responded. "I forgot that your duties could be so momentous."
"Sarcasm's the lowest form of wit."
"That quote originated from sarcasm and I can't care less about your time. If you wanted a quick transaction, I could have redirected you to a common cultivator's."
Aventurine rubbed her head. "What in the blazing blue stars are you talking about?"
The Mother's gaze snapped back towards her, the judgment in it just as acid across seventeen light-years. "I've told you before and I'll say it only once more: your order is almost ready. If you wish to take her home fresh from the batch, you need to leave Ferrade within the standard date. I will not be held accountable for any actions of your order after her pick up date has expired."
The torrent of official-sounding words finally knocked the memory back into Aventurine's head — she owned a pearl now, didn't she? In addition to the amazing vacation, Yellow Diamond had gifted her with a pearl of her choice, paid in part by government funds. In all honesty, Aventurine wondered if those funds could have gone somewhere else rather than a tailored personal servant, but peer pressure and apathy won over and she must have agreed somewhere along the line. That was just a thing with Aventurine I guess — she wouldn't like something, then she would see that nothing bad was really meant by it, get too tired of fighting it, and cave in favor of pursuing more important things. Then she'd forget.
"Right, right…" She wondered what kind of pearl she had chosen. A green one, probably — to match her own smooth, deep green gem and skin. But had she settled on a regular hand servant or...a special type? How long ago had she agreed to this? A year or so? "Where am I...going again?"
With a drawn-out sigh, the Mother sent the coordinates over the line and rubbed her temples. "I have worked with quartzes, corundums, even Diamonds for thousands of years," she stated, "and I have never found a more socially inept gem than an aventurine."
"I like you too, Nacre," Aventurine scowled. She wondered if she could ask for her order form, just to check what she had gotten, but that would just reinforce the idea that she was socially inept. A pearl was a status symbol and a quartz with any sense at all would keep track of her status symbol, because her place on the social hierarchy could be at stake.
The less interested part of Aventurine provided a constant internal dialogue about punching things.
"That's fine then. I'll be there," she said instead. The Mother of Pearls stuck up her sharp nose in response.
"I hope you will." At that she closed the connection.
For a while, Aventurine just sat without moving, without a sound in her barren palace other than the distant, constant bubbling of a courtyard fountain. Maybe it really was for the best that she would have a pearl. Nacre was right, she was socially inept; she'd never keep this up for a century alone. She hadn't left her pod for...stars knew how long. Her sleeping quarters were a mess. Her yard was a wasteland. As much as Aventurine disliked work, she liked being busy, most of all in the military, with their concrete schedules and formations to follow. When she was on duty, she would remember to take care of her physical form and do productive things.
But vacation was vegetation. If there was someone in the house with her, then maybe she might be better about herself. Yes...yes, a pearl was good. Even the thought of one made her feel as if she should do something beneficial to society — now when had the Mother said she should leave again?
After a quick bite to eat (gem vessels normally did not have culinary services unless they were privately tailored for a gem who would pay for them), Aventurine shapeshifted a traveling cloak and went outside. In a wing of her residence there was a garage of sorts, housing a fast little cruiser whose matte silver surface glowed in Ferrade's sun. She'd never used it, didn't know how mostly. At least it wasn't unlike a military-grade speeder, same basic controls and calibration that was just a bit less fine tuned. One attempt ended with her on the ground and the cruiser magnetically sealed to the ceiling, but we're not supposed to talk about that.
In time, Aventurine had somehow handled the cruiser and she was off, gliding across Ferrade's nondescript terrain as its sun glared down from an eternal zenith. No true plant life grew here because of the nitrogen atmosphere, but a few inorganic accumulations of fine fibers made tangled, mile-wide white mats on the wavy grey stone ground. Behind her, the protruding core of the planet grew only vaguely smaller as she traveled, but never took back its unsettling omnipresence. In general, Ferrade was a pretty depressing place and Aventurine wondered, not for the first or last time, why anyone would consider this a vacation option, and how did the core do that anyway, and what were those fibrous mats made out of. The climate wasn't bad though. The warm wind, especially as she crossed the plains at high speeds, did nice things to her hair.
The lights of the town bobbed inside the transparent domelike walls, patrolled by extremely bored rubies on spherical patrol vehicles. Maybe they were just excited to have something to do other than stare at grey hills all day but they demanded identification, statement of purpose, and an autograph before their supervisor called in a monotone to please let the poor quartz on her way already, and they allowed her to pass through the gates.
Upon dismounting her cruiser, Aventurine guided it by her side as she took to the walkways. Like most Homeworld-issued establishments, the Prime Settlement was well-kept and prismatic in design, with symmetric silver architecture and the now three-sided emblem of the Diamond Authority on the door of anyone with respect. But unlike Homeworld, this small community grew horizontally. Less skyscrapers and wider walkways, courtyards, and squares. The atmosphere was clearer, quieter, calmer. None of the tensed crowds of Homeworld's cities clotted these streets, just small groups of tourists or nobility, the occasional quartz also on furlough. Aventurine recognized a jasper as she passed and nodded a greeting.
"Long time no see," the jasper remarked, disrupting her own journey to walk alongside Aventurine. "How's the headache?"
"It's hardly been long," Aventurine responded. Her own cultured voice, that of the core planets, juxtaposed quite uniquely with the harsher accent of the colonies where Jasper had been made. "And I'm fine, thank you. Nothing a nap couldn't fix."
"What's with you and sleeping?"
"You can hardly judge until you've tried it."
Jasper huffed and changed the subject: "So what brings you here?"
"A transaction." She shrugged. "I'm just going to pick up a pearl from Nacre. I'd completely forgotten."
The orange gem — a handspan shorter, just a tad wider, with longer hair than Aventurine — raised her chin. Her gem, placed squarely where her nose would be, was a bit dusty from perhaps her last brawl. "Nacre, hmm. When she called you...did she sound half as pathetic as always, or more?"
Aventurine frowned. "She did seem to want my order off her hands awful fast. Why?"
"I've just been called back to investigate her case as a witness." With all the money she'd had, Jasper had purchased a cheap but cute peach pearl on a whim from the Mother of Pearls right before the Earth conflict and had recently returned her for behavior modification. "Apparently the shortage of business during the war caused her to do some pretty risky things, and she ended up losing more money than she'd planned to make. A lot of her pearls came out defective like mine, she used stolen tech, she tacked on illicit costs, all of this fraud and only now she's been caught."
"Ouch."
"No kidding. But yeah, just a heads up. You might just be her last customer. Watch your back while down there. Don't pick up strange bubbles or anything."
A gemling's advice, really, nothing she'd never heard before. Aventurine raised her eyebrows. "Obviously. Oh — and, Jasper?"
"Yeah?"
They reached an intersection and Aventurine stopped to look at the younger quartz. "Wipe your gem after fights. You can't command respect while looking like a clod."
With the faintest of smiles, or at least, something that she considered a smile, she clapped her hand on Jasper's shoulder and went her own way. Only time and luck would tell if they ever met again, Aventurine knew, but she couldn't ever ignore the thought that with a bit of maturity, this one jasper was destined for something incredible. If she found the chance, she would give anything to see it.
On foot, it didn't take Aventurine long to reach her destination. It was a dual purpose port for both warp pads and larger-scale industrial ships, on one side with barracks for military and industrial workers, and on the other side with an elegant little hotel and casino. Out of idle curiosity she hit the casino first. The first thing she saw was Paz Calipha, a newer chance game involving a forty-two-sided die and three spun wheels, where a cocky citrine was showing off for a trio of tourmalines. With a smart nod and a flick of her wrist, Aventurine made a competing bet and got a value of spice — full set on the wheels, two rolls of one, and one roll of seven. With a two-fingered salute she collected the citrine's bet, and in the port she used the money to purchase a cheap ticket to K8 Amphitri.
There was a reason Aventurines were discouraged from gambling and encouraged towards military strategy, and that reason is what some would call a Midas' touch, a supernatural tilt towards lucky outcomes. It was a Midas' touch that, in my opinion, only ever worked when she didn't think too hard about it, because the only times when she really needed it were the times it didn't work.
This would be one of those times.
The transport was a small ship off an assembly line, a one-size-fits-all ship for errand gems with a variety of duties. It was divided into three, distinctive sections, the back for cargo, the middle as the passenger section, and the cockpit. Hard to say that it was well-kept, but the streaks on the windows told her that someone had at least tried. The pilot was a chubby turquoise who had cheap colorful baubles on her dashboard; the copilot a scarlet gem of indecipherable type who glared murderously from behind a clear visor.
The passenger section was remodeled as an imitation cafeteria complete with tables and weird puffy seats that were snug for her size, no food, but with a smoky, vaguely greasy aura that suggested the ghosts of good meals. The passengers were no less weird. A pair of olivines hunched over a frightening tangle of wires and screws. A ragged, feline alien with bejeweled ears and a respiratory mask, a native of Crystal System Khaoi if she wasn't mistaken, held a small bundle to her chest. In the darkest corner, a rutilated quartz watched the whole room with her one rough eye. When Aventurine squeezed herself into an empty booth, no one cared except for the khao native, who eyed her in fear. Big deal. Those people were scared of everyone.
Although that'd make sense, considering that not three hundred years ago, Aventurine herself had led a million gems across that little native's planet, burning, stealing, or killing everything they saw.
After routine ship checks led mostly by the unknown copilot, the pilot patched in a shipwide announcement via a hundred-year-old intercom. "This is your pilot, Turquoise, speaking. Our copilot today is...uh...what's your name again?"
"Synth subject 44X3G."
"Uh...she's your copilot. We'll be departing shortly."
It wasn't exactly a comforting message and Aventurine briefly reconsidered her choice of transportation, but this was cheap and safer than the galaxy warps, many of which had been hijacked during the war and were currently under reconstruction. She'd have extra money for later or emergencies, and anyway, the aristocracy who rode on the higher class transports could be shiftier than any hitchhikers she'd meet here. They'd desecrate your reputation, your type, your cut, your facet, and your basic dignity with a single high pitched laugh. These guys would just steal your wallet. Well, perhaps also your physical form in order to sell you on a black market as ground-up gem dust, but that was avoidable — you were allowed to crush someone for physically assaulting you, but that generally wasn't an accepted response to gossip.
This was why quartzes were soldiers, not socialites.
With a deep hum and a crash from the front, some cursing in three languages, and a sputter of the primary engines that sent all passengers jerking to the left, the ship lifted into the air and blasted off into space. According to the holographic schedule next to the airlock, the ship would stop first at the colony on Crystal System Khaoi and then at K8 Amphitri within a standard Homeworld rotation, at least if she held any faith in the preprogrammed hyperlight speed course. She didn't. Aventurine was an old soul — could still remember the days when all screens were handheld and propulsion-based space travel was the big thing. Never once in the eons had she truly trusted a piece of tech.
"As good as you get," she murmured to herself, idly pushing a spilt bit of water around the table with her callused finger, "something will always break."
After about half a military hour, during which the khao native's bundle had begun screaming and Aventurine officially decided to reconsider cheap rides in the future, she let herself drift into a fuzzy half-sleep. She didn't often dream when she slept but she did this time. Noises from reality danced with noises from her mind; the flickering colors of hyperlight speed in the ship windows morphed into figures that waved and winked in the shadows. A faceless, gemless pearl sat demurely in the corner of her dream vision.
A ringing noise bounced across the floor and the pearl ran away, but the ringing persisted, fading in and out with static at times but soon becoming so sharp and high that it seemed to rip from the dreamscape and into the real world. Except that it didn't, because the noise was doing the exact opposite.
And when Aventurine opened her eyes, her reality was red lights and chaos.
On an unrelated note, do you remember what I said about luck?
