Lamp Entertainment presents…

Chapter 11: The Trap

On Homeworld, beneath the surface…

December 10th.

Peridot N07-H3R was making her way back home after work. Her home was a small apartment that had been hastily built alongside a few million identical modules stacked together wherever you could fit them. After Era 3 introduced such concepts as "individuality" and "worker's rights," a lot of gems found that they wanted a "home," a place to call their own. However, since the surface of Homeworld was already so jam-packed, the living modules had to be built wherever they could fit. Which was mostly beneath the surface, in the old kindergartens.

It wasn't ideal, but it worked. Most gems were ecstatic just to have a home, even if it basically amounted to slightly fancier student apartments.

Peridot N07-H3R loved her home. It was small but comfy. Some gems liked to try out sleeping and eating, so they kept beds and kitchens, but Peridot N07-H3R wasn't really into that stuff. Instead, she had taken to keeping plants. She especially liked grass from Earth. She had managed to grow a small lawn inside her apartment, as well as install a sprinkler system that simulated rain. Few things were as satisfying to her as feeling the rain hit her face or feel the grass between her toes.

She arrived at her apartment. A small scanner on the door flashed and identified her gem on her shoulder. The door slid aside and she entered. She stopped right on the doorstep.

The back wall of her apartment was missing. Instead of the wall, there were three pairs of giant eyes staring at her. They looked very angry.

"Eep!" Peridot N07-H3R yelped and stumbled backward. Before she could turn around and bolt away, an enormous white hand with sharp nails reached out for her. The hand grabbed her by the scruff of her neck, pinching hard.

She was lifted outside of her apartment and hoisted high up into the air. Outside stood three ladies she recognized immediately. What gem wouldn't? It was the Diamonds. She noticed there was a smaller green gem standing on Yellow Diamond's shoulder, but she was too busy panicking to care.

"Uahh!" Peridot howled and tried to grab ahold of White Diamond's fingers with her hands. The ground far below her was hard and unforgiving. Would she survive if she fell? Maybe. Would it hurt? Definitely.

"Ha! Not so cocky now, are we?" White Diamond said triumphantly. She shook the terrified Peridot a little. "Now, where are they?"

"Wh-what is going on!?" Peridot N07-H3R yelled. "What are you talking about!?"

"Oh, don't play dumb!" White Diamond snarled. "It's over, Winter Shadow! You've been caught! Now, where are the explosives?"

"I-I… What?" The overwhelming panic and fear within Peridot N07-H3R were replaced with a stunned confusion. "The Winter Shadow? But-but… I'm not the Winter Shadow?"

"Is that so?" said a very smug voice. It was the green gem standing on Yellow Diamond's shoulder. Peridot N07-H3R's eyes narrowed when she recognized that gem type. She still wasn't sure what was going on, but it somehow made more sense once she knew there was a Herderite behind this.

In case you didn't know, Peridot's and Herderites absolutely hate each other. They are bitter enemies and have been for as long as anyone can remember. The only thing they ever agree on is their mutual hatred of Demantoids and that's it. Put two of them in the same room, and the best-case scenario is that they'll just shout insults at each other until you break them up. Worst case scenario… well, we don't have time to go into that right now. Ask me about the Green Machine Incident sometime.

The Herderite brought up a holographic screen and enlarged it so Peridot N07-H3R could see it.

"Then how come you were both crime scenes as they happened?" she asked rhetorically. Well, the question was rhetoric from her perspective, as she thought she knew the answer already.

"I was not!" Peridot N07-H3R exclaimed. "That's not me!"

"It is too!" Herderite yelled back. "It's your name here, and the Archives don't lie! Unlike certain gems."

"That's not me," Peridot N07-H3R insisted. "Those are my limb enhancers!"

"Well, duh!" Herderite said. "Of course, that's how we were… able to… track you…" he sentence trailed off as she noticed something. Peridot N07-H3R was making a very rude gesture with her fingers. Her fingers on her hand. Not the floating fingers of a pair of limb enhancers.

Because she wasn't wearing her limb enhancers.

Now it was Peridot N07-H3R's turn to smile smugly.

"That's right," she said. "My limb enhancers were stolen almost two weeks ago. I even reported it to the Law Enforcement."

Herderite was sweating nervously. She had never been wrong before. Much less made a fool out of herself in front of the Diamonds. She quickly hacked into the Law Enforcement's servers. Indeed, there was a report of a theft thirteen days ago.

"And check the warp records," Peridot N07-H3R said. "I think you'll find that I was nowhere near the site of the first attack on N1V-25. I was on the other side of the planet, visiting a friend."

Herderite checked the warp records again. It was true. There were two conflicting records. One showed that Peridot N07-H3R had arrived at one warp pad far away from the docks. The other showed that she, or rather, her limb enhancers had arrived at the docks where the first attack took place.

"B-but…" Herderite stammered, desperately trying to figure out some way that she could still be right. "H-how could your limb enhancers be stolen? How could anyone steal something you're wearing?"

Peridot N07-H3R shrugged.

"I wasn't wearing them," she said. "I haven't worn them for almost two years now." She wiggled her legs and toes. "Never liked them. They were like a prison for your hands and feet. I still had them lying around in my apartment in case I ever needed them. Someone broke in and stole them."

White Diamond starred at the gem she was holding between her thumb and index finger. She closed her eyes and brought the gem closer to her head, pressing the Peridot's head against her gem.

"Tell me you're not the Winter Shadow," White commanded, her gem glowing faintly.

"I am not the Winter Shadow," Peridot N07-H3R said sincerely. "And I don't know who really is."

A few tense moments passed by before White sighed and gently set the innocent gem down on the roof of the apartment building.

"She's telling the truth," she said.

Heerderite's eyes twitched madly and she nearly fell off Yellow's shoulder. Yellow grabbed the tech gem and set her down on top of the apartment building as well.

Peridot N07-H3R strutted over to the depressed pile of long limbs and patted her on the shoulder.

"Aw, there, there," she said. "You tried your best, and that's all that matters." She turned to the Diamonds and whispered theatrically. "This is what happens when you trust a Herderite to track something. They couldn't find a Diamond in the rough."

A rough, for those of you unaware, was slang for a group of rowdy Quartzes.

"Now, if you just give me that…" Peridot N07-H3R said and grabbed one of Herderite's wrist computers. She brought up a screen and a keyboard and started typing away at something. "And I'll find the Winter Shadow for you."

"And how are you going to do that?" Yellow said while massaging the bridge of her nose. She was having a flashback to some of the arguments she had witnessed between Herderites and Peridots in the past.

"Simple," Peridot N07-H3R said confidently. "My limb enhancers were turned off when they were stolen, so I wasn't able to track them. But if the Winter Shadow turned then on again, then I should be able to…" A map of Homeworld came up and marker blinked on the screen. "There! Would you look at that? It seems the Winter Shadow is at the Disarmament Unit! She must've used them to gain entrance with under my name!"

Yellow scooped up the two smaller gems in her hand.

"Let's go!" she said.

xxXXxx

The Disarmament Unit…

The Disarmament Units were facilities where old weaponry was disposed of. Destabilizers and canons were dismantled, swords melted down and explosives detonated in safe chambers. The large factories worked around the clock to disarm the gem empire. Even so, the process would take at least a hundred more years.

The enormous Disarmament Unit on Homeworld was a repurposed forge. It was a gigantic building about twenty kilometers beneath the surface of Homeworld, embedded within ancient rock. The building itself was about seven hundred meters tall and vaguely egg-shaped, with a hollow middle. The bottom floor held several smelting stations filled with red hot molten metal. In the center stood The Bomb Chamber, a large dome of hardened metal where the explosives were disposed of. Around the inside of the thick walls of the building were several storage rooms and working stations where weapons were dismantled.

The staff currently in the unit had all been gathered at the bottom floor, where managers were trying to get a headcount. Easier said than done since it was absolute chaos. Scared and confused yells and shouts echoed in the enormous chamber and dozens upon dozens of gems were trying to get the Diamonds' attention to get an explanation.

Meanwhile, the facility's security guards were searching the forge from bottom to top, trying to find a gem with a pair of limb enhancers that didn't belong to her. The three Diamonds stood at the bottom floor, trying the help as best as they could by scanning what little they could see from their vantage point.

Herderite and Peridot N07-H3R had found themselves among the chaos down on the floor among gems screaming and pushing each other.

"Hey," Peridot N07-H3R said nervously. "I just thought of something."

"What's that?" Herderite muttered, still sore from being wrong in front of the Diamonds and then outdone by a Peridot. "A thought? Congratulations, I hope you didn't hurt your poor gem."

"Shut it and listen!" Peridot N07-H3R hissed. "I'm serious. The explosives. Why couldn't anyone track them?"

Herderite shrugged.

"The Winter Shadow probably washed the tracker off or something. I don't know anything about your trackers."

"I can tell," Peridot N07-H3R muttered. "You can't just wash the tracker off. You'd have to dip the explosives in acid for that. And if you did that, they'd go off.

Herderite stood silent, her hatred for all Peridots forgotten for the moment. She understood where this was going.

"Then the only way to get around the tracker…" she said slowly. Peridot N07-H3R finished the sentence.

"…would be if they were where they were supposed to be…"

"…in this building…"

The realization made the two tech gems freeze in place. They heard the commotion around them, but it seemed almost muted to them. They could only turn in silence to look up at where every single gem in the building was pointing.

High up in the air, hovered something.

It was the Winter Shadow.

She was standing on top of a small hover tray. She was clad entirely in black, a crude hood and cape sowed together from pieces of scrap cloth. The green arm of a Peridot limb enhancer was poking out of a hole in the cloth.

"There you are!" White Diamond roared and stomped towards the figure, Yellow and Blue right behind her.

Without a word, the Winter Shadow leaned backward and the hover tray floated into a large alcove in the wall. She held up the limb enhancer arm and four fingers formed a screen with a single large button on it. The fifth finger hovered above the button.

"I won't let you escape!" White Diamond yelled and reached towards the figure…

The Winter Shadow pressed the button.

KA-BOOM!

To be continued…

AUTHOR'S NOTES

You know, there are a lot of really good Christmas stories out there, but I really think some of them could use more explosions.

Oh, and just in case: If you wanna use a Herderite, based on my specific descriptions here, in one of your fanworks, feel free to. I'd just appreciate a shoutout.