Thanks for all the awesome reviews, I'm so glad you guys are liking this!
Anyway, here's chapter 2!
Jasper had seen fusions before, had been a part of one. She'd seen fusions that were just bigger versions of the Gems that made them, like Ruby fusions, and fusions that smashed together aspects of the Gems involved, like Malachite.
She'd hoped this fusion would be more like the first kind. The corrupted Gems she'd found were Jaspers, albeit different varieties than Jasper was, but the same Gem type.
The other Gems were corrupted, though.
The fusion that resulted from the three of them strongly resembled the two corrupted Gems. Together, they had eight legs—well, not quite legs. They were thick appendages on which the fusion stood, but most had paws instead of feet, and three of the legs in front had hands with claws at the fingertips instead. Their body was striped and spotted a confusion of colors, oranges and greens smashed to fragments without ever blending. They had the beginnings of an upper body rising perpendicular from the ground, but no arms from the stumpy torso to make it useful. Down the fusion's back was a thick and wild tangle of white hair. The two corrupted Gems were nestled right against each other on the fusion's underbelly, positioned so similarly on their original bodies that now their edges were rubbing together where they met.
And then there was the head.
Jasper's Gem was still positioned where a nose would be, if the face of the fusion had been anything approaching human. It was the only familiar aspect.
The mouth hadn't been unexpected. It was wider than Jasper's own mouth, splitting the entire width of the fusion's face and filled with several rows of incredibly sharp teeth.
But the corrupted Gems had not had eyes, or at least not any that Jasper could see. Maybe that was the reason why the left half of the fusion's face had blankness where an eye should have been. What it couldn't explain, though, is why on the right half of the face, the eye that Jasper had brought to the fusion had fragmented, split into a half-dozen smaller eyes clustered in the position one bigger eye should be.
As they formed, Jasper could feel the confusion of the other Gems, faint and muddled, like it was hidden at the ocean floor while she floated in the clear waters near the surface. She quickly buried their emotions, forcing them under as she took control of the fusion.
She tested their new limbs, stretching them and taking a few steps. She used one of the front limbs, the ones with hands, and grabbed the trunk of a tree. With the slightest squeeze, the trunk shattered into tiny fragments, and the top of the tree fell, making a huge noise as it knocked into other trees on its way down.
Jasper grinned with a mouthful of fangs and imagined squeezing Rose the same way, shattering the leader of Earth's tiny resistance with hardly any effort. With a body like this at her disposal, she was unstoppable.