A/N: Thanks for all the views/likes/follows from chapter 1! And thank you for your review, toonfreak. I try my best. Sometimes. Humor is pretty hit or miss, so everyone should feel free to leave critique so I can improve! As a fun fact, I revised the opening section of this at least 3 times.
It was taking way too long to get to this stupid destination. According to the PDA, it was "a lot" of miles (What were miles?) left to go before Amblygonite would catch sight of whatever her objective was. One time, during the night, the PDA seemed to stop working for a while. The destination totally disappeared! Fortunately it came back in an hour or so. Which was good, because during that mysterious hour with no destination, Amblygonite had managed to wander around in circles in the same forest she started in, getting completely lost. When it started working again, she couldn't remember where she left her pod at all. This definitely wouldn't come back to bite her in the rear.
After some time, Amblygonite managed to at least reach a strange flat surface covered in painted lines that led to her destination. Sort of. It veered all over the place but at least it mostly pointed the right way. What a strange planet! Did these grow naturally? She really had to wonder. She wondered about a lot of things lately. Sometimes strange metal boxes rumbled past her at very high speeds, but they never slowed down long enough for her to jump on top of one. She tried to flag some down, but most of them seemed to speed up when she started waving and shouting at them.
After the fourth one passed her, Amblygonite groaned in frustration and tried to vent her frustration by wiggling her arms to and fro in a bizarre frustration dance. Her fingers, mid-wiggle, obediently sank into the sleeves from which they protruded and massive saw blades formed on edges of her synthetic hands instead. Fortunately, she had left her PDA conveniently stored in her try hard permanently popped collar so it wasn't shredded instantly.
"Oh stars!" yelped Amblygonite, now sweating furiously as the blades began to spin violently in place. This was both incredibly dangerous and incredibly cool. To her, anyway. Most people see something like this and run away, usually because of a phobia called "common sense." One of the strange creatures from the boxes, this one actually outside of one and rolling along with weird plastic wheels on its feet, yelped and rapidly ran/roll/tripped away. Amblygonite spared them a glance, but only that much, she was really busy experimentally waving her arms around and listening to the saw blades running. While these would be useful for looking "cool" or threatening someone in exchange for money, they didn't really help her much.
However...
She glanced back in the direction that the rolling creature had fled in. Then down at the road. A monumentally dumb idea was forming in her head, but no one was there to stop her from doing it.
Slowly, carefully, she slid down to reach eye level with the road. Then she extended one of her whirling hands of death towards the road. Tongue between her teeth, she touched the blade to the asphalt, resulting in her arm flying in the opposite direction and a shower of sparks falling in her hair. She almost noticed the burning sensation telling her this was a bad idea. But almost doesn't win you Darwin awards. Plus, she was an experimenter at heart and walking was taking way too long.
Amblygonite stood up, cricked her neck, then strode into the middle of the road. "Okay, this should definitely probably work. Just don't saw my own legs off, yeah, that'd be not good..." she murmured to herself, squinting at the road. In one movement, she jumped up, curled her legs up, and touched her blades onto the road.
A cascade of sparks shot out from the road, spinning Amblygonite forwards like a top thrown by a particularly angry toddler. "CRAP! DOUBLE CRAP! TRIPLE CRAP!" she hollered, shifting wildly from one arm to another in an effort to avoid falling painfully on the asphalt below her. Deep gouges were scored into the pavement as she swerved crazily along the road, jumping and bouncing along as Newton's Third Law made her its plaything.
"SLOW DOWN! SLOW DOWN! OUTTA THE WAY FLESHY THING!" she continued to bellow, swerving crazily past the distraught creature who had fled from her earlier. It stared, mouth agape, as the alien shot forwards along the road. In a last ditch effort to keep herself from getting dashed by a tree, Amblygonite jerked her arms in the direction of the grass on the side of the road. When her hands touched grass, the sudden loss in proper traction combined with the softness of the earth sent the gem skittering along the ground, collecting tons of fun new grass stains.
After about ten minutes spent laying on the ground, she levered herself back onto her feet, glancing at the blades to see if they had been dulled by their adventure on the road. Aside from looking a little muddy from hitting the grass, the blades actually looked as sharp as ever. Satisfied, she nodded, then whooped. "That was wicked awesome!" she cheered.
Now that she had some idea of what to expect, she repeated her earlier process on the road again. This time she was able to control her path a little better, but still ended up toppling over after a while and skidding back onto the grass. Not about to be told what to do by physics, she got back up and tried for a third time.
This time, she managed to maintain her balance. By constantly and carefully making slight adjustments in the hitches of her arms, she was able to destroy decade old infrastructure for a moderate gain in speed on her mission to rescue a Periwinkle. She was also laughing the whole way down the road, looking like the world's most insane skater punk ever born.
Incidentally, "Insane Skater Punk" would make a decent name for a band.
Now armed with a speedier method of travel that looked incredibly stupid, Amblygonite's rate of travel tripled in speed. She chewed up the distance between her and her objective at ludicrous speed, while also scaring the daylights out of 10 different motorists and requiring thousands in tax dollars to repair her damage.
After a few hours of traveling like this, she abruptly ran out of road to destroy and toppled face first into the dirt, roller blades (Ba-zing) fruitlessly chewing into the soft earth and getting absolutely no traction once more. She had to spend a painful few minutes trying to pull her arms free from the dirt, then another few trying to pretend she still had fingers until her gloves obligingly gave them back. Then she spent a half hour with crippling pain in her arms from how sore they were from being stuck in the same position for hours at a time. Fortunately this didn't stop her from walking, so she made pretty good time, despite complaining the whole time.
At some point during the day, her PDA had lost the signal to her objective again, but it seemed to be back now. Plus there were a lot less of these 'mile' things between her and the blip now! She let out a celebratory whoop, happy that she'd probably get some answers much sooner rather than later. She wished her legs had the same funny gloves her arms did, in a way. Her legs were incredibly normal! It was frustrating. Maybe if she could remember how to be a "technican ass" she'd figure out how to build rocket boots or something.
With that thought to cheer her up, she continued on her merry way, passing through one town and a whole lotta forest. She paid the local inhabitants no mind, however, which caused some consternation when she blundered through a family reunion, nose buried in her PDA as it screeched about how close she was getting to her goal. Feet covered in cake, she continued right past the confused and angry uncle So-and-so's and nephew What's-their-names until she hit the edge of a cliff. From there, she could actually see what her goal was.
It was a bunch of pillars being smashed by a giant purple thingy.
Large beads of sweat broke out under Amblygonite's visor as she jumped behind a bush despite there being no chance of the thing actually seeing her. Not only was it on an island miles away from where she stood, it was also gigantic and therefore unlikely to notice barely reaching 5'8" alien creatures with saw blades for hands. She watched in frustration for a while as it destroyed the pillars until it eventually left, along with two other smaller shapes trailing behind it. She hoped no one expected her to fight that thing! Maybe talk to it. From a distance. With a megaphone. And heavy artillery.
Once they were gone, Amblygonite walked forwards and fell off the cliff leading down to the water below.
Ker-splash!
From there, she walked along the seabed until she reached the island. Traveling was very easy when you don't need to breathe or care about water pressure as much as most people do. As she climbed up and over onto the sandy, desert-like area, she shook herself off from head to toe. She walked towards the ruins of the ruins, noting that many of the pillars seemed to now be reduced to sand and tiny little bits.
"Huh. Well, I hope that this wasn't some sort of secret project named Periwinkle. I definitely can't fix dust," she mused, scratching her chin and narrowly taking the finger away just in time as it changed into a screwdriver. A few moments of wiggling and it returned to normal.
"I really hope I kept more notes on this thing," she murmured, taking out her PDA and flicking through a few of the menus on it. Most of its systems seem to have been fried by its initial landing on the planet. There was one last saved log entry on it, however, noting that a distress call had been heard coming from Earth. Which was what she already knew.
Amblygonite sighed and sat down, hands holding her up from behind.
"What to do now? I guess I can hope Periwinkle isn't the ruins and is a person, but I'm pretty sure I can't check the whole planet on my own!" she groaned, giving up and collapsing on the sand underneath her, staring up at the stars above. "Ugh, I'm still talking to myself too. Pretty sure that's the first sign I'm going insane. Like having no memory, using saw blades as skates, and seeing giant purple...giants isn't a textbook definition of psychosis."
She lay like that for some time, just staring up at the stars above her. They twinkled merrily. Amblygonite shook her fist at them for a while but that got boring.
"Oh no...OH YOU MINERAL HUFFING CLODS!"screeched a whiny voice into the night, causing Amblygonite to flip out. Literally. She flipped over on the sand and had to spend a few seconds spitting the gritty substance out. She stood up, peering around for the source of the noise. There appeared to be a dancing figure by the freshly sand-ified ruins! And it was screaming vulgarities about the Crystal Clods! Whatever those were!
"Oooh! Oooh!" called Amblygonite, sprinting for the dancing person by the fresh sand. She only tripped once or twice, but managed to just barely keep her balance, right up until she slammed into the person screaming about clods. The pair of them went down in a tangle of confusion and limbs. Confusing limbs. It took a few minutes for them to pull apart.
"What the- Are you some other member of the Crystal Clods?" asked the green stranger (She looked like a Peridot to Amblygonite, so maybe her memory was getting better) as she pointed her digits at Amblygonite in what looked a lot like a cannon.
This was confirmed when electricity began surging through it.
Amblygonite smiled and held up her hands, wiggling her digits in what she hoped was a friendly manner. One of the fingers turned into a tiny drill again. The other gem's lips tightened.
"Me? I don't know what you're talking about! I don't even know what a Crystal Clod is!" she said in as cheerful a tone as possible. If she just pretended she wasn't about to get shattered, maybe that would end up becoming reality.
"Are you with Yellow Diamond?" Peridot asked, squinting at Amblygonite. "I'll know if you're lying! D-don't take me for a fool!"
"Is that what this thing is?" Amblygonite asked, pointing her drill finger at the diamond on her front.
Peridot hesitated for a moment, then lowered her weapon cautiously. "You're the backup I requested from Yellow Diamond?" she asked, sounding surprised. "Where's the rest of your unit?"
"What unit?" Amblygonite asked. "I came here by myself! I had a pretty hard landing too, really knocked my head around. My memory's been pretty bad lately, are you the Periwinkle I was told to find?"
"Peridot," Peridot corrected tersely. "I see you're an Amblygonite. Why did they send a technician construction assistant?"
"Is that what my title is?" Amblygonite wondered. "That sounds pretty cool! I guess that explains these weird arms I got! Uh, I dunno. I had some notes in my pod telling me to find you, but my PDA was too trashed to tell me anything else," she explained, holding up her damaged digital assistant for Peridot to expect.
Peridot collapsed her arm cannon and grasped the object. Then, after fiddling with it for a few moments and doing some truly amazing work with those weird digits of hers, the PDA sparked and thrummed just loud enough to be heard. She dug through some of the files on it, then blanched. "Oh...Oh no..." she said.
Amblygonite walked over and peered over her shoulder.
"Mission: Investigate strange distress call signed by a Peridot on planet known as "Earth." Signal too garbled for us to understand what she needs help with. Report back using pod communication array once circumstances are known."
"Huh," Amblygonite mused. "I guess those pillars were the last bits of a communication hub! And it was in really bad shape! So your message got totally lost in translation. Wow, I guess all those spills earlier really helped my memory!"
Peridot nodded dumbly, still staring at the personal digital assistant's message. Then, in a fit of inarticulate rage, she screeched and snapped the device over her knee. Amblygonite took a step backwards. Apparently they made the things waterproof but not Angry Peridot proof.
"That's okay, we can just head back to my shuttle and..."
She snapped her fingers. A small welding torch flicked open out of her thumb.
"Riiiiight, yeah that's not going to work."
"Why not!?" asked Peridot, sounding close to panic.
"Because I left it in the middle of some woods and I don't remember how to get back there. Also, I broke it. And the printer. Ooh, that's gonna be a pain to fix."
"Perrrrrrfect," hissed Peridot. She stalked off into the night. Amblygonite hesitated, then followed after her.
"Wait up! I can still help you!" she called, jogging up to just behind Peridot. "Since, you know, we're both stuck here now."
Peridot groaned loudly.