7. The Crash.
"I spy, with my singular visionsphere, something beginning with… hmmm, S," said Padparadscha, still hugging Lars' head in the cramped conditions of the shuttle.
"Space," groaned everyone else, super bored.
"It could also be star," the little orange gem complained quietly. "Or shuttle."
"But it wasn't, was it?" moaned Rhodonite. "Don't tumble my rocks! It was 'space' and you know it. Like last time. And the time before that, which was exactly like the previous four hundred rounds of this horrible 'game'."
"Hey, it wasn't like I had time to nip away and grab Checkers Travel out of the games cupboard before being kidnapped." Lars glared uselessly out of the window that he was still slightly squished against. Again, he had to quietly shove down the homesickness that reared up whenever he spoke about his life.
"Nobody knows what you mean!" snapped Rhodonite, both sets of arms folded, herself glaring out the opposite window, fully ticked off.
Cramped conditions over time does horrible things to both man and gem alike, but not Fluorite. Never Fluorite. "Calm down, everyone," she intoned, incredibly patient to a fault. "We've taken the wonderful 'game' that Lars has shared with us from Earth, and mutated it into something hostile and terrible. We should apologize."
"Ugh, no. Trust me, this is exactly how every game of 'I Spy' ends. Just wait 'til you play Monopoly. How long has it been?" Desperate to change the topic, Lars tried to look over at the Twin's control panel.
"You won't like to know, but we are almost there." "See? You can nearly make out the red dwarf star it orbits," came the Rutile's responses.
With a renewed interest, Lars squinted out the window and it wasn't long before he noticed the tiny red dot that he figured the Rutile Twins were referring to.
"Wow, a real red dwarf? That's so cool. Yeah, I think I speak for all of us if I said we'd like a bigger ship this time. With more chairs, maybe a whole second room at least," said Lars. "Do gem ships even have cabins? Do you think they'll have anything like that for us to, ah, borrow?"
"Upsilon IX.. should have something we can use," Rhodonite said without much conviction. "It's one of Blue Diamond's most ancient colonies that no longer boasts any strategic value, so not much of a military presence, which can be a good and bad thing for us. But a lot of important gems spend time there - there might be something. Honestly, though, even a Roaming Eye will be better than this."
Lars rolled his eyes. "Ugh, great. More 'important gems' to get yelled at by."
"At least we're off Homeworld, guys," a Rutile chimed in optimistically, and the other joined in, "That's a step in the right direction."
Hours later (by Lars' rough estimation) Upsilon IX, as it came into view, seemed to resemble patches of planetary crust being held together by what looked like a number of gargantuan linear rock formations overlapping one another at irregular intervals and all kinds of angles. Completely hollow except for a very visible core which was held in place by more gigantic pillars, it looked even less like a planet than Homeworld did. Its outside surface shimmered in all manner of pastel blue and purple tones under the red star that it orbited quite closely. There was a faint visible trace of an asteroid field floating around it. Lars had definitely started to notice a theme with these gem colonies - it was darkly fascinating in a way that made him more eager to get home as swiftly as possible.
"This stop is unavoidable," "Unless we want to be stranded floating in space until the end of time," said the Rutiles as if reading Lars' mind.
"Cool! Land this sardine can!" commanded Lars, the incomprehensible Earth language causing Rhodonite to laugh this time, now that an end was in sight.
"Yes Captain!" "Right away, Captain!"
The asteroid belt quickly came into better view and the Rutiles frowned. "The orbiting debris is a lot more dense than we expected." "We're going to have to perform evasive maneuvers."
Worried visionspheres gazed out the window, watching the space debris become gradually bigger with their approach. Every so often, one space rock would silently hit another space rock, sending both parties in different, unpredictable directions..
Suddenly, a crash. One that produced noise. Which meant that the ship was involved. The Rutiles gasped as a warning popped up on the screen in front of them.
"W-what's going on?" cried Lars, alarmed.
"Hold on everyone," said a Twin. "We're going down!"
The small shuttle was now careening in the direction of Upsilon IX. Somehow, the stripped-back planet still maintained an atmosphere of sorts, and the friction as they entered the atmosphere caused massive amounts of turbulence, which in turn caused more damage to the shuttle. Fluorite yelled out in pain, realizing that a hole had appeared in the back somewhere where the bulk of her mass was contained.
"The hull's been breached," cried a Rutile as the other tried her best with the controls.
"I.. know," Fluorite groaned. "I'm plugging it with.. my side."
"WHAT" "NO"
"I'm fine, for now." Fluorite and her incessant calmness.
"Twins! Land this thing!" Rhodonite cried, pulling on her hair out of stress.
Sweating, the twins focused all their attention on the scene in front of them. Deep in crisis, the shuttle couldn't pull up in time to hit the surface and instead scraped across one of the massive connecting stone threads holding the husk of a planet together, lost a wing, and entered into a tailspin.
The Rutiles, still at the helm, fought against the ship for some kind of control. Seeing how close they were to crashing, Fluorite grabbed her friends and held them close to her protectively, but the Twins struggled to remain at the controls. From her arms, they managed to correct the ship's trajectory enough so that instead of a full on catastrophic crash, it jolted hard but skimmed and bounced a few times, slowing down gradually from friction before sliding to a stop in a hole of its own making in the side of a stable rock formation cropping out of another of the gargantuan pillars holding the planet's surfaces together.
Just when it looked like things were settled, to Lars' absolute horror, Fluorite exploded into fine puff of air which quickly evaporated into nothing, and everyone remaining fell to the floor of the cockpit from where she'd up until recently held them all protectively into her.
The cockpit window swung wide open. Lars climbed his way out and proceeded to attempt to vomit on the ground next to the ship, but of course, nothing came up. Rhodonite hurried over to check up on him, and after a few moments he shakily stood up to find her standing over him on some strange angle.
"Lars? What were you doing just now?"
"W-what happened?!" Lars asked, having trouble with his footing now that he was standing. "Where-where's Fluorite?"
"I think she took the brunt of the ship's damage while we were still in the atmosphere," she frowned. "Aaaand when we were crashing."
"She's been SHATTERED?" Lars' mind was reeling. "But, but, she was just-"
"Shattered? No, no! She poofed. Lars," she grabbed him by the shoulders with her dominant set of hands, and spread her lower arms wide. "She'll be fine."
She directed him to look back down into the cockpit of the shuttle. The thing was wrecked - it actually looked as though Fluorite's mass had been the main reason the rest of them hadn't been sucked out into the upper atmosphere back in the early moments of the emergency. The Twins and Padparadscha were foraging around inside it, picking up gems from the floor.
"That's four," said a Twin. "Here's five!"
"Oh, here's three!" called Padparadscha, picking up a loose gem triumphantly.
"You mean six, Padparadscha." "Six gems - Fluorite's all here!"
The Rutiles and Padparadscha climbed out of the wreckage and showed the gems in their arms to the remaining two.
"See? Not a scratch," confirmed Rhodonite. "But her physical form took way too much damage to simply unfuse. She protected us, we just need to give her gems time to regenerate."
"Oh," replied Lars with a relieved sadness, reaching out to touch the dormant gems lightly. "Thanks, Fluorite."
"It happens." Rhodonite seemed okay with it. "Give her here, I'll stow them so she's together."
The Twins and Padparadscha carefully obliged and soon the components of Fluorite were stowed safely in Rhodonite's pearl.
"Feels weird without her," admitted a Twin. "But we need to find a safe place for when she reforms."
"Yeah, uhh, we should get our bearings." Rhodonite glanced around anxiously. "We're still deep in hostile territory, after all."
"Speaking of bearings," started Lars, trying to take a step and landing it wrong, somehow. "Why are you guys standing so easily? Balancing, uhh... I can't... do it."
The Twins and Rhodonite looked at him oddly.
"I'm having a vision it's uncomfortable for Lars because she's organic and has soft insides, and we crashed into one of the crooked subterranean pillars instead of the surface," explained Padparadscha.
"Yeah, this whole area feels like it's a mountainside, but it's - like, there's no frame of reference." He pointed over towards where the pillar they were standing on stopped being flat and turned up into some unnerving angle, presumably the surface, probably miles away. "Except that. Which I just find alarming more than anything."
"Oh," Rhodonite got it. "It must be because gravitational pull on us is exerted by the core of the planet, which is on a different angle to us here relative to the ground than it would be on the surface. You'd get a similar feeling at some points on Homeworld too I think. We're gems, though. Our physical forms just adjust naturally to these things."
"Huh, lucky," said Lars, trying to practice his walking with this explanation in mind - he soon found that it helped to imagine 'down' as relative to the planet's core instead of what appeared to be the 'ground'.
"We are lucky," a Rutile realised, frowning. "We could have just as easily missed, and kept flying out into space." "Where we would have drifted. Forever."
"Twins, you can't blame yourselves," replied Rhodonite.
"Yes we can! Lars tried to warn us that we didn't know what we were doing back in the kindergarten." "She was right about us! We should have gone to 'space camp'," the Twins despaired.
"Huh? But, you two saved everyone." Lars tried to reason.
"Captain, no disrespect, but-" "Tell that to Fluorite!"
Rhodonite sighed. "Yes, Fluorite is poofed, but you can't help that we were given a bad ship, and you can't stop space rocks from hitting us. Why don't you both just calm down and let me do the panicking for you."
The Twins looked as though they were having a hard time buying their words, but Lars continued. "You did everything right. You guys are natural pilots, you proved that."
The Twins stood awkwardly, avoiding visionsphere contact with any of their friends by glancing away into space, where something unwelcome caught their attention.
"Guys," warned a twin, staring down the barrel of a Roaming Eye in the distance that appeared to be approaching quickly. "We didn't go unnoticed!"
"Rhodonite, unfuse!" yelled Lars, and she did, instantly. He turned to the Rutiles. "Twins-"
A light immediately shone out over the crashed ship, the four apparent gems, the scared defective.
"Hide-" Lars faltered as he stood wide eyed, knowing it was too late, his heart performing extremely slow backflips while his mind raced. Options flickered through his terrified mind, each one more ridiculous than the last, each one ending disastrously.
Everyone stood still in shock and fear.
"I'm having a vision that we're about to be caught!" cried Padparadscha, and then, belatedly, "Oh no - the Twins will have no time to hide!"