The yellow Zircon cleared her throat and straightened out the vestments neither of which, really, were real and her clothes were always perfectly straight besides. "If you would please tell the court how you first encountered the fusion matter?"

All eyes were on Dexter. This had been weighing on him for some time, and neither the Providence, nor Earth government athorities knew this. Plumbers only knew it because he'd let it slip the first time they showed him the fusion matter under a telescope, binding to normal matter as it does. This was an old shame. He replied, "It all started six years ago. I had hoped to become the first human to encounter extraterrestrial life. I didn't know most of the things I do now about secret organizations and the dominion of your lustrousnesses over Earth. So I sent out a homing beacon in hopes of being the first to discover extraterrestrial life."

"Are we to take it that your hopes were answered?"

"Yes, well, a funny thing happened one night, after looking at the stars for hours, I decided to pray to anyone who would listen, to deliver me proof of alien life. Almost magically, a meteor landed directly in front of me. The impactor was only a few centimeters across, but the impact had cracked it and a green slime filled its interior. In Cosmos, Neil de Grasse Tyson says the first life we find might be unicellular, and to be honest, that was even more than I expected. I thought it might be amino acids or nucleic acids, but after running analysis after analysis on it, I discovered that the strange green balls looked a bit like the first phospholipids that might have given rise to organic life on Earth. I wasn't sure it was even alive until I noticed the tissue sample had the strange ability to assimilate other organisms. As I began another tissue sample for DNA analysis, the, I called it, gooey alien escaped its confinement.

"Trying to subdue it, it split and the pieces ducked into a nearby pipe. As I searched for it, it sought out other organisms to possess. I'm not entirely certain how it managed to infect my family, but very soon they were creating a transceiver with parts in my own lab, carved from blueprints carved in a wooden table. I fought my own family, rendering them unconscious, and killing the gooey aliens as they tried to escape once more. Then I destroyed the transceiver. At the time, I was almost positive I had destroyed the transceiver before it was activated."

"It was a few years later when the first terrafusers fell to earth. I was abducted by a group called the Plumbers and carried to a secret laboratory where, under a microscope I analyzed the fusion matter and, much to my horror, it behaved the exact same way the gooey aliens had. I believed that somehow I'd called attention to Earth."

Yellow Diamond, the second most senior, and most serious looking of the diamonds, spoke, "Is it still your belief that you called Lord Fuse's attention to Earth?"

All the sweat and fear, the preparation and studying, this was really one question he'd hoped he could avoid, "It is no longer my belief that I called Lord Fuse's attention to Earth."

Gem courts were quite a bit more lowkey than Earth courts. The background noise was minimal, because no one wanted to anger the judge. Contempt could mean poofing and bubbling, maybe shattering if it were a bad day, but the building's ambiance had gotten noticably louder.

"If I may, your brilliances," Dexter asked, "I'd like to speak with my counsel."

Dexter knew that, right now, they could say no and he'd have to continue until they were satisfied with the information. "Proceed."

Rather than leaving, a room grew around Dexter and Ben, sealing them off from the rest of the court.

"Well," said Ben, "there goes you being able to take credit for the whole thing. Guess you gotta come clean, huh?"

"I'm not going to risk an intergalactic war if I can help it, Benjamin."