And now it is time for something completely different: Original gem characters! Enjoy the fruits of my incredibly nerdy labor!
Miles past the borders of Beach City there was a lone red figure dashing through the forests of Delmarva. Some may have thought it was a child frightened by a fierce predator and was hopelessly lost from her family on a camping trip. That observer would be technically right, but if they actually heard the specifics they would likely raise an eyebrow hearing this was an alien warrior on the run after being stranded on a planet with her entire crew captured by a band of rebels.
This, as you may have guessed, was that lone ruby who managed to evade the Crystal Gems during their skirmish and hightailed it as soon as that flying gem made her presence known. She was one of the two pilots of the now demolished vessels and had been running for several days without rest. The firebrand captain was at a complete loss of what to do other than avoid capture at all costs.
She came to a large clearing in the trees before finally stopping to regain her composure. She was sure no one was pursuing her, but the thought of seeing her entire crew and half a dozen others being wrangled up sent chills down her usually hot-blooded spine. As she stood still for the first time in days, she also felt a surge of anger well up in her. Here she was with no way to leave this useless rock. The best she could hope for was for Homeworld to send a rescue party, but she knew for sure that would never happen. After all, why wait for one ruby to come home when there are thousands still available?
The lone ruby, senses still heightened by the fear of abduction, went on alert when the sound of a twig snapping somewhere in the trees around her.
"Who's there?" she yelled into the distance. A small flame was alight in her right hand. No response came, but she could pick up footsteps among the noises of nature.
"Come out here or I will attack!" Still no reply, the flame in the ruby's hand grew to a fireball the size of a tennis ball.
"Alright then, you asked for it!" She chucked the sphere right between the trees where she last picked up the sound. It detonated, scorching the nearby pines and charring the grass. Within the light, the paranoid could make out a tall shadow begin fleeing away from the impact site. The ruby breathed a sigh of relief, only to hear a bizarre sound coming from somewhere behind her.
The sound… of someone laughing.
"What's so funny?!" screamed the now enraged ruby, already igniting another fireball in her hand.
A piping yet drawling voice answered from the behind the line of trees. "That little flame… it's adorable."
The ruby, now too angry for words, responded by flinging her projectile as hard as possible in the vicinity of the voice. Another small explosion rang out and the figure seemed to dash away, its paces clearly audible to the pint-sized captain.
"Is that really all you have?" asked the voice, now clearly amused yet with a detectable note of boredom in her words, "You can't go any bigger?"
"Why don't you show yourself and say that?!"
In a surprising twist, the owner of the voice emerged. It was another gem, but far and away from any the captain recognized. She was near the height of a pearl, but her physique was bulkier than that of a servant. Her skin was a violent scarlet, with a foot of orange hair standing straight up on her head like the flame of a candle. Her arms and legs were well-toned would remind a person like a marathon runner. Her outfit, in human terms, would be a tank-top that left her arms and stomach exposed to the elements and a pair of shorts that stopped at her knees with nothing on her feet. Her revealed midriff also held her gem, a bright red stone in the shape of perfect circle. Unlike the rest of her, her coverings were all pitch-black like charcoal except for a pale-yellow diamond on the neckline of her top and the waistline of her shorts.
What worried the ruby most was her expression. This new gem looked down on her, not just from the height difference. She literally saw her as beneath her. And her face seemed uncannily familiar…
"There. I'm here. Do you have anything better to show me now?" she piqued, a detached smile forming on her face.
The ruby fumed and snarled as she charged a third fireball, pushing it to the size of a baseball, and shoved it right into the new gem's core. The ball of flame met its mark and burst right on her gemstone, but the unknown gem did not flinch. In fact, she began laughing even harder as if it tickled her.
"STOP LAUGHING AT ME!" roared the now thoroughly-enraged captain, the grass underneath smoking to prove her point.
This new eem only laughed harder at this display before suddenly silencing herself and raising one of her arms in front of her. She pointed straight ahead of her before lowering her finger down towards the ruby's hair.
"Let me show you what real fire looks like…"
A fireball of her own, already larger than any the captain conjured up, shot out of her finger. The captain ruby dodged with a yelp but already there were more heading her direction. She frantically ran in circles and zig-zags, now screaming in terror as this incendiary gem torched everything in sight with the same smug smile on her face.
In only seconds the entire clearing was an inferno as the trees around them were set ablaze. Thankfully neither of them were susceptible to smoke inhalation or fatal burning or else they would have been swallowed by the flames. The taller gem turned her balls of fire into a continuous stream of flame, still using only her pointer finger, and began torching every tree as the rub fled into the thick of the woods in a panic. The sky was concealed by a blanket of smoke as the wildfire raged on, the ruby blindly dashing as far away from the psychotic gem she encountered. She could barely see past the choking smokescreen and ran headlong into a tree. Despite being relatively safe from the fire, the ruby was terrified as the unknown gem strolled up to her with her stream of fire still erupting from her finger pointing behind her. She was not even aiming at her anymore.
"Do you like it?" she asked, sounding as peaceful as could be among the flames.
Before the captain could stutter a retort or a plea to stop this madness, a rumbling suddenly stopped her train of thought. The sound grew louder, discernable amongst the roaring blaze around them, and another gem erupted from the burning earth.
This new gem has an air of authority around her with a physique that added to her intimidation factor. She was the exact same height as the fire-starter, but far more muscular. She almost had the same thickness of a quartz soldier but lacked the bulk or height. Her skin was a sickly chartreuse in color with pale yellow hair draped halfway to down her back, somehow perfectly straight. She wore what humans would describe as a jacket, one that matched her skin tone at the collar before fading into a murky brown by the ends at her waist that clung to her beefy arms with no apparent way to remove it. Her thick legs were covered by long pants that stopped at her ankles revealing her bare feet. Her gemstone was not visible since it was a pentagon-shaped green stone found on the back of her neck and obscured by her hair.
She did not seem to notice the ruby and was simply glaring at the scarlet arsonist, looking more irritated than frightened.
"Cinnabar, what are you doing?" she spoke with a deeper voice than her flame-happy counterpart but seemed equally bored. "Since when did I say you could set forests on fire whenever you felt like it?"
"Oh, relax Adamite," she scoffed while rolling her eyes like this was humorous, "I was just having fun."
Cinnabar held out her hand and the masses of flames seemed to fly right into her palm where they collected and vanished into her being with seemingly no consequences to the gem. While the fire itself was gone, the one called Adamite shook her head at seeing the massive burns left on everything with some of the trees bearing scorch marks reaching stories up from their roots.
"There. Better?"
"No, not better. You cannot just go around burning whatever suits your interests. It doesn't accomplish anything." She crossed her arms, apparently used to her compatriot making some excuse, but Cinnabar gestured to the ruby still rooted to her spot.
"But I was trying to accomplish something! I was showing this gem what real fire looks like. You should have seen her puny little…" Before she could start taunting the slightly traumatized gem, Adamite rushed over and grabbed the captain by the arm and dangled her in front of her face.
"A ruby, huh? What's a sorry little soldier like you doing so far off of Homeworld?" she asked, looking even more condescending than Cinnabar.
"I'm stuck on this planet because those Crystal Gems wrecked my ship and abducted my crew!" she screamed, her patience long gone after today's chase.
Both of the elemental Gems looked puzzled by this statement. They seemed to vaguely remember hearing the term, but neither of them could put a touch stub on where. The ruby still in Adamite's arm was not amused.
"Let go of me right now! I need to find some way to get to Homeworld and let them know about Rose Quartz…"
That got Adamite's attention. The green gem dropped the ruby on the ground only for a ring of rock tall enough to trap her body sprung up around her in a flash. The captain tried to break free, but the ring was too thick and she could not build up enough momentum for her gauntlet to mean anything.
"Did you say 'Rose Quartz'? The traitorous gem who rebelled against her diamond?" she asked, looking genuinely excited for the first time. Cinnabar seemed to be catching along as she finally appeared to acknowledge what was happening.
"Yes! That Rose Quartz got captured and sent to Homeworld to face punishment for her crimes, but then she escaped so I and another ship of rubies were sent to scout for her. We were going to apprehend her and the rest of her allies when some freaky flying gem demolished our ships!"
"Flying gem?" yelped Cinnabar, now fully alert and actually sounding concerned, "What were her wings like?"
The ruby was thrown off by the statement. "I don't remember! All I remember was she was blue, could fly and used water to move things. Now get this rock off of me!"
The two new Gems stared at each other for some time, mulling over the same thought. It was then that the ruby noticed one bizarre similarity between the two otherwise polarized Gems; their faces were identical. Their eyes, nose and mouth were in the exact same positions. A person may have guessed they were twin sisters with radically different fashion tastes. As she was processing this, a sudden detail come to mind.
"Wait, you want to know about that flying gem?!" she blurted out, seeing a potential way to escape. They both stared at her, clearly interested in her information. "If I tell you what I know, you have to let me go! Deal?"
Cinnabar looked ready to hand her whatever she wanted, but Adamite held her back and simply nodded.
"She looked exactly like you two! Her face was just like yours! Does that help?" Both of the Gems looked stunned by the answer, even Adamite's apparent boredom faded upon hearing it. Even still, the ring of rock did not lower to let the ruby free.
"Adamite, do you think it could be…" tempted Cinnabar, looking half ready to cry. The earthen gem stood up and turned away from her prisoner.
"Where did you see this flying gem?"
"I don't know the name, but it was some open space near a really tiny colony of organic lifeforms!"
"Come on, Cinnabar. We finally have something to do now." The chartreuse gem finally cracked a smile at this news with her pyromaniac partner following behind her.
"Hey!" shouted the still trapped ruby, "What about me?! You said you'd let me go!"
Adamite stopped and, without even looking, caused a massive boulder to rise out of the ground as if by pure thought. It moved without a sound and levitated right over the ruby. She quickly put the pieces together and starting squirming with the hope there was some fault in the rock that would set her free. The huge stone moved higher and higher, Adamite never turning her head while Cinnabar watched with the same detached smile she had when setting the forest ablaze.
"What are you doing?! I thought you'd let me go!"
The boulder stopped near the treetops, nearly a hundred feet in the air. Her expression was as jaded as when she first arrived.
"I am letting you go. You're going into pieces. On the ground."
"WHAT?!" the ruby screamed, the boulder beginning to fall as Adamite's control over it fell and gravity pulled it down.
"You should have been more specific. Homeworld wants Gems to follow orders to the letter, right?"
The stone's velocity grew as it plummeted, the ruby looking ready to bite her way out before fear finally overtook her and screamed as loud as possible before the boulder hit her. The resounding impact and her scream covered up the harsh crackling her gem made as it splintered into shards before being pulverized under thousands of pounds of rock. Adamite and Cinnabar simply walked through the incinerated forest, excited by the prospect of having a mission of their own. It was on their walk that Adamite remembered the term "Crystal Gem" and that only excited her more.
To paraphrase a comment left for this chapter on AO3: "Now that's how you introduce an OC - Cold-blooded murder!" What will happen with these two rogue gems on the loose? What's happening back at the temple? Find out next time!
Thank you all so much for reading! Please feel free to leave a review!