Archive of Our Own ^beta

Somewhere in deep space, there's a ship. Let's rewind a bit to make sure you understand; this is deep space. Deep enough that Earth's light takes millenia to reach it. Deep enough that, once the light makes the trip, it's in such a distorted state it's as recognizable as the eleventh century Earth that sent it as eleventh century Earth is to modern day. In a few hundred years, humans are going to develop a way to unscramble that light. That's going to give them a fright, especially once they zoom out, but eventually someone is going to notice a little yellow blip on the supertelescope, just behind the massive galaxy-spanning empire that should probably be their major concern. 

That little yellow blip is called the Sun Incinerator. The humans won't know that, as about three hundred years before they unscrambled the image, the last ship named Sun Incinerator piloted by this crew will have been... incinerated in a crash into the local... sun. Don't worry; it will be unmanned. Its crew will be fighting on the bridge of the enemy mothership. You see, this was all part of the climactic final skirmish with - well. It doesn't really matter right now.

Inside of the Sun Incinerator, Lars banged his head against the bathroom cupboard.

"Fuck!" He yelled.

Lars fixed his hair - it had the texture and (as of a few months ago) the shade of sheep's wool, and was about as easily ruffled. Lars' carefully backed out of the broom closet he called a bathroom (Gems did not build bathrooms into their ships for hopefully obvious reasons) and his eyes widened as he saw something behind his reflection. Oh no. They'd heard him.
"Fuck!" Two chittering voices echoed excitedly, one slightly after the other, punctuated by the insistent scribbling of pen on paper. 

It was a rare sound to a gem. Paper documents had been phased out millenia ago and were only used to keep very archaic and usually very illegal information. In that respect, humans weren't far behind gem society. Still, "Archaic and Usually Illegal" was the off-color survival motto, along with "No Gem Left Behind" and "Libido Omnibus*", and the sound of writing had always been common in the Sun Incinerator. Too common, Lars was beginning to believe, as the Rutile twins had not put their pen down for about two days. The low thrum of deep space and the occasional dropped tool were the only ambient noise besides the scribbling. It was maddening. 

* That was meant to be "Justitia Omnibus" but Lars failed Latin.

"Fuck!" Padparadscha repeated finally, pushing her gloved hands against her cheeks and leaning between the twins' shoulders.
"Oh, Padparadscha-" Lars spun around, one hand on his mirror and another on his forehead. "Don't use that word."
She pressed her finger to her bottom lip. "Um. What does it mean?"
"It means 'to inseminate'" The left twin clarified.
Lars reached out weakly. "Guys, it doesn't-"
"To copulate with the intent of insemination." The right twin also clarified.
Lars scowled. "Not in my experience."

The two gasped as they felt their notebook pulled from their hands. Lars' scowl held as he flipped through the floral print paper, seeing pages upon pages of very choice words plucked from his vocabulary. Steven really needed to buy less flowery supplies from whatever Dollar store he got them from, and - Lars quietly acknowledged - he himself needed to use less 'flowery' language. The last thing he wanted was for Steven to pick it up from one of the others repeating them without knowing what they meant.

"We wanted to get better at understanding Human!" The twins said, pre-empting a question they knew was coming, which would perhaps (if Lars was in the wrong mood) contain some new words they wouldn't be able to write down before they forgot them.
"First thing you gotta understand? There's no 'Human' - You're only ever gonna hear English and Spanish from me. A little Latin too." 'A little' was doing a lot of lifting. One Rutile nodded solemnly and the other wilted. Lars' lip twitched. "... When we get to Earth, I can get someone to teach you French or whatever." The Rutile's both drew up from their seat, as if their upper bodies had become lighter. Lars hid a smile. "But uh. Yeah. Second thing? There's some words only I'm allowed to say."

The ship suddenly jerked to the side as if it had been yanked by an inconsiderate solar wind. On the other end of the bridge, Rhodonite - doing her best to fix her shoddy piloting with only one set of arms - stood up from her seat and banged her head against the ceiling.

"Fuck!" The twins said in unison, pointing a finger. Lars grabbed it out of the air and wrestled it back to Left's chest, giving them a disapproving look.
"Sorry for (ow) the turbulence. Is it-" Rhodonite fixed her hair into its usual unusual shape and looked at Lars. Her voice was as drawn out and hysterical as always, sounding like she was calling out in the dark of a haunted house to see if anyone was there. It was a silly thing to do; if nothing answered she'd be afraid, and if something did she'd be terrified. "- Is it dangerous to say those words? I mean. Is something... bad, going to happen if we say it?"
"Yeah." Lars swept his hand against his forehead, the black leather of his glove contrasting his bright skin in a way that might've been cool if he wasn't a cotton candy shade of pink. "Crystal Babes're gonna hear about it and kick our a- ... Butts. They're gonna come and kick our butts."
"Like Garnet?" Rhodonite asked, bottom set of eyes drawing into a worry wrinkle for the top set. "I'm not sure what to think about that..."
"Oh?" Lars gave a cocky smile. "If it's Garnet you only have to think about what you're gonna put on your gravestone." Lars' spun around - feeling very cool - and bent back down, tracing his hand carefully along his face. "So... I think we got lost. Um. Don't say it. You got it?" He suddenly felt very not cool.
"Won't we be landing soon, Captain?" The right rutile twin asked, looking inquisitively at one of the displays. It was in Gem Glyph - illegible to humans - but you could tell what they read by how hard a gem focused on them. Right now, Right looked like they were about twenty minutes away.
"Right's r- uh. Correct. Sit down Rhodonite; this might get rocky." There was a moment of silence and Lars dared to reach for his shaving cream, but stopped when the ship rocked again.
"Sorry! Sorry! I just sat down. Rhutile - ah, could you... get that. No, no, not that-"

Lars didn't like to think about what a shake like that would do to his grip on a razor. The universe had decided it for him; he'd go see Her before they landed rather than after. Either that or it was conspiring to make him grow a beard. He didn't like the thought of either. The iron-drowned atmosphere of the planet below - close only by astronomical standards but still tens of thousands of miles away - cast the bridge in a maroon light, like watching a star die and desperately hoping you were doing so from a safe distance. The star behind the planet did the light no favors; it was one of these near-dying stars, older than the gem empire by eras and still likely to outlast it, as its death was again close only by astronomical standards. Even immortal beings knew when to feel small. The Off-Colors had made a living out of it.

"I'll be in The Kitchen." Lars announced, earning the immediate side-eye of the crew at the helm. They looked back to one another, then stared straight ahead at the red-dyed blackness of space. The doors closed quietly behind him but the soft sound seemed so harsh against the soft hum of space.
Padparadscha nodded. "Mhm! Mhm! And what's 'copulate' and 'insemination'?"

The Sun Incinerator did not have a kitchen. Neither did the Sun Incinerator have a little cupboard mirror to fail to shave in, nor cupboards in general. In fact it lacked the luxuries you'd expect even for the most basic ship, because comfort is expensive and Rubies are not. He hadn't told Steven this, but Sun Incinerator was the name of every vessel the off-colors commandeered, whether it be a briefly hijacked cruise ship full of screaming socialites*, a beaten-up transport freighter, or the function-first jet fighter Steven knew best. He'd taken quite a liking to that ship. Lars mentally prepared himself every morning to explain how the "real" Sun Incinerator was last seen in a hangar being inspected by an Onyx, a dozen rubies, and a Peridot swearing she had nothing to do with the stolen ship parked in her bay.

* The pearls screamed on the sapphires' behalf, a rare case of a Pearl being told to do what she was already intending to. The sapphires had seen this coming, of course, but all silently agreed harmless piracy would be better entertainment than the drab murdery mystery theater** the venue had planned.
**The pearl did it; one didn't need future vision to see that.

Though that Sun Incinerator didn't have any luxuries, this one at least spared a few; chiefly, it wasn't two circles stacked on top of one another. This ship was a long, slender corvette, with separate quarters that could almost be called bedrooms and a small chamber near the back that served as Lar's makeshift kitchen. It was not The Kitchen though; that was closer to the engine, past the escape pods*, and Lars hadn't eaten in it for weeks. He dug his hands into his pockets (old habits die hard) and fixed his cloak, throwing it around his back and filling out his otherwise roguish silhouette with an intimidating black... triangle. He thought it looked menacing, at least. As he descended the steps and the neon green light of the engine room cast on him, he might've been right. Lars looked most intimidating in low light, in the way a switchblade looks dangerous until you're stabbed with it, the blade slides back into the hilt, and your would-be assassin realizes she's trying to murder you with a movie prop.

* Gems keep engines near escape pods for the same reason canaries are kept near coal mines

"A l l   s y s t e m s ,   f u l l y   f u n c t i o n a l ."

Fluorite said, speaking as strongly, surely, and slowly as a tree grows. If Lars listened closely over the thrum of the ship, he could hear the birds making their nest in her voice. They were particularly close to that thrum now. The spinning of the turbine-like engine encased in thick glass rose through the ground and into his boots, visibly warping the light as it traveled through the pane. Were the glass to break while he was near it, Lars suspected he'd be deafened for the rest of his life, which, in fairness, wouldn't be very long. Fluorite didn't seem worried; she'd taken naturally to the spacious, catwalk-filled engine room. Her segments always had something to rest on, her body always something to coil around, and she didn't so much walk or crawl through the space as slither. She was usually working in three dimensions and it seemed to suit her. Lars looked over his shoulder and met her head - big as his body - twisting out from around the pipe.

"Great. Clear it for landing, we'll be breaking the atmosphere in-" Lars rolled his eyes and considered Rutile's expression carefully. "Twenty minutes. Maybe twenty five."
Flourite's eyes turned up to the ceiling as she did some mental math. All of her came to a consensus - one of her parts briefly confused the human symbols for four and six but was soon corrected - and she went to prepare the engines. "W e ' l l   b e   r e a d y ."

Lars nodded and turned around, waving her off with the back of his hand and only stopping halfway up the stairs to stare at his reflection in a nearby turbine. No sooner had he flattened the corners of his collar then had Fluorite begun crawling around the pipes overhead like a snake. It was a very fat snake.

"Y o u ' r e   g o i n g   t o   s e e   h e r ,   a r e n ' t   y o u ?"

There was a moment where Lars considered asking how Flourite knew. He glanced at his reflection, saw his "About to explain how he reversed the polarity of the flux capacitors and the villain's plan was foiled" outfit, and then looked at Flourite's sage expression. Between that and his desire to be out of the room in under ten minutes, he decided against it.

"Yep. Wish me luck."
"Y o u   w o n ' t   n e e d   l u c k." Her voice warped into something much faster, but just as powerful, in the way it did when no part of her was in doubt. It was a great thing to hear - so long as she was agreeing with you. "You'll need trust. Her trust."
Except now. Lars was agreeing with her, and he hated that. He tried very hard not to roll his eyes, instead settling for pinching the bridge of his nose behind his cowl. "Yeah, tell her that. Listen, I'll uh... I'll catch up with you a couple minutes before we land."

Fluorite had really taught him the difference between knowing what to do, and being able to do it.

Two heavy doors split apart and drew into the walls with an impressive sounding hiss. From the floors to the ceiling, the whole room was made of tarnished gray metal, as if it'd once been silver but a horde of many, many boot-clad feet had trampled over it. Directly beneath the fluorescent lights of the bedroom-sized cupboard was a rather sad looking steel table surrounded by stools. Gems did not have much of a concept of fine dining. Eating wasn't strictly prohibited (this bears specifying in gem society), but the only dining halls a gem would know were usually great halls designed for literally anything else and happened to have a sufficiently large table. Or a Quartz's barracks. The less said about those the better.

Lars hit his head softly on the table once he was done peeking under it, appreciated the lack of cameras, and moved to the walls. He felt alongside the metal until he found a thin, square slot he could just about fit his fingers between. With a strong yank like he was throwing open a storage locker, the wall slid aside, folding neatly into layered plates and letting what was inside swing free. He swept his arm by the long stock of a gun hanging from the ceiling and checked beneath it. And then checked under the one beside it. And then beside that. And beside that. The gun on the very end was missing, so he began counting the other way. He continued all the way down the length of the room, brushing by weapons of all sizes and generally analogous shape in the way you'd search a cupboard for a lost shirt. He didn't find what he was looking for, but just as he approached the end, he realized something was very wrong.

Gems generally have little need for weapons and even less need for guns. Up close, it's very expensive to make a weapon that hits harder than a soldier's bare fists can, and it'd likely be cheaper to just replace a shattered gem. Serves them right (so it goes) for getting into a fist fight with something they - a Quartz - couldn't beat hand-to-hand; that's what the heavy artillery is for. Gem society equally has no need for self defense weapons; an upper crust should never be in combat, and even if she was, she'd do so behind the backs of her security detail. In a society so rigidly structured, there is little consideration for what ifs or just-in-cases, and certainly no budget for it. Still, there's the occasional batch produced for hunting on freshly colonized planets or to entrust to especially clandestine operatives. The kind that are allowed to break all the hierarchy's rules so it doesn't come tumbling down under the weight of them. 

There's stories too. Stories of rebels crashing through ballroom windows only for their leader to get blasted into shards in the carefully prepared sightline of a sapphire. A jasper mounting a doomed last stand with two automatic rifles looted from a crashed supply ship. A lone peridot, trapped in an abandoned outpost under siege by an enemy army, grabbing an automatic and not stopping until her feet were surrounded by empty casings and dead soldiers. It only took one.

The gun on the very end was missing.

The doors hissed shut behind Lars, and something cold and hard pressed against his back. Its end was shaking slightly but steadied as it was jammed between his shoulder blades.

"Elm." Lars raised his hands beside his head. His tone was unreadable.
"Peridot 5LCL H4N4" A voice behind and a bit below him said, pushing the rifle deeper into his back.
"Yeah, catchy. How d'you remember all that stuff?" He responded with the ravenous curiosity of a man on vacation hearing an obviously scripted sales pitch.
"This is loaded! Now, what are you doing in this room?" Peridot said. "As per our agreement; you do not enter this room. That's it! There were no other conditions! You. Do. Not. Enter. This. Room."
"Hey, listen-" He made a motion like he was about to turn, and Peridot made a motion like she was about to spray him across the wall. It would've been more threatening if it was perhaps, a topaz, a morganite, an onyx (of course). But anyone can seem threatening if they're holding a gun to you.
"I'll shatter you where you stand! You... you..." Pure, petulant rage balanced on the edge of her tongue, so heavy she couldn't form the words to sate it. "You!"
"You don't wanna do that." His voice briefly gained decades of experience and his eyes - visible just barely behind the white roil of his hair - seemed to sink deeper into his cheeks.

Lars reached for something around his belt. It was a subtle motion and would've been invisible if not for the slight bulge of his elbow in his cape. But this Peridot was - as most are - attentive by nature, and paranoid by nurture.

"So, it's like a kindergarten, but, it can move?!" Padparadscha clutched her gloved hands before her chest. She imagined massive, mobile valleys scraping the skies, as if a slice of the Earth* had been cut from the planet and began to walk. "That's incredible!"
"It's apparently quite beautiful" Right Rutile responded, quickly flipping through her note book. "But from my limited data, it's a different kind of beauty."
"It's very small." Left added. "Human reproduction apparently takes nine Earth months."

* Padparadscha had seen a chocolate cake once and imagined Earth essentially as one, with rivers the color of whipped cream and mud the texture of cocoa. She couldn't account for the giant spoon, but Lars talked about God every now and then, and she figured He had something like that.

Padparadscha would take a while to catch up. The Rutile Twins took the time to monitor the bridge's navigation, only to notice the pilot was currently on the other end of the room anxiously fixing her gloves over one of her hands. Their eyes met, all eight of them.

"What? The Ship'll be going into reentry soon." It was called re-entry even though it had never entered that planet's atmosphere. Apparently a hold-over from a very distant era when what came up then came down, an idea that seemed absurd to any modern Gem logistician. "There's nothing I can do!"
"Nine Earth months?!" Padparadscha started, causing Rhodonite's glove to snap against her wrist and her to have to start all over again. "But Captain Lars said his record is forty five Earth minutes!"
The twins looked at one another. Now that they couldn't explain.

There was a sudden BANG. It bounced weakly through the halls, as if it had been trapped behind thick walls and had only just now managed to escape, clutching its shoulder and stumbling into the bridge. The four shared conspiratorial glances as they realized - some sooner than others - that the sound came from inside.

Lars lay facing the ceiling with a hole in his chest. The bottle of water he'd grabbed from his belt spilled beside him as it rolled out of his limp hand. 

Thick algae was spreading around the puddle as if it were some dangerous chemical weapon; Peridot didn't know much about what water was, but it was obviously dangerous. Things don't just suddenly sprout from puddles unless they carry enough disease to crack a gem through sheer poor hygiene.

Peridot had more experience with nature than the typical gem of her kind - water not withstanding - but even then, she didn't need much to know organics died. Their body didn't disappear nor their core split into many pieces, and despite some stains on the wall to the contrary, neither did this 'Human' creature. She'd done it. She'd been pacing back and forth for a few minutes now, but it finally hit her.

"I did it." She said, dark glee on her face like a teenager sneaking out past curfew for the first time. "I shattered - no. I killed their Captain." She clutched her weapon close to her chest and stamped her feet. "I killed their captain. I killed their captain! I killed their captain!"

The sound of her boots tapping on the metal slowed. Peridot slid down the wall until her weapon was cradled limply on her thighs.

"I killed their captain." She said with dawning horror. The corners of her eyes drew together, she looked grimly at her rifle, and then meaningfully to the door.

Meanwhile, Lars had a killer headache and a throbbing in his chest that couldn't have been good for his heart, disregarding that he no longer had one. Of all the things bothering him most right now, it wasn't his lack of a chest cavity, but the damn taste in his mouth. It wasn't blood; you needed lungs to cough up blood, and even then, he didn't have much to cough that wasn't now decorating the ceiling. It was sparkling water. It wasn't bad, but he knew what was in it, and the thought disgusted him even if it didn't change the taste a bit. He weakly lifted his arms but stopped as his slowly-focusing vision saw the Peridot stalking above him. He tried to take a deep breath, remembered, and then just lay back. Just observe, Lars. Let your body do its thing.

Homeworld gems are by-and-large made the same. Built the same, taught the same, and certainly treated the same, but they're not the same. There's an acceptable amount of deviation from the "perfect" body plan Homeworld has laid out for each caste, which some gems are created specifically to measure with special tools and murderous eyes. They have different hues, often different personalities, occasionally different builds, and rarely, privately, they go by different names. From Lars' position on the ground, he saw this Peridot, creeping over his apparent corpse, whole body shaking with the gem equivalent of adrenaline. Call her Elm. Elm was slender even for her kind, with a perpetually hunched form and a general aversion to moving any way but sideways against a wall. Her color was dimmer than the usual vibrant green, a shade of rich honeydew, and her eyes were far earthier.

Typically Elm was very attentive, but at the moment she was fighting many mental battles; they involved other gems on the ship she'd only glanced and had turned into terrifying things in her head. She was losing all of them. Because of this internal struggle, and the logical part of her brain that assumed dead organics stayed dead, she didn't notice Lars lifting himself off his back as it grew back into place. His freshly-reformed heart sagged in his open chest cavity like a puppet with strings made of ventricles. It beat once before it was swallowed under a layer of lung.

Elm couldn't be blamed for her nerves. Days before, she'd only just escaped a burning satellite as it crashed into the atmosphere. Facing the collapsing ceilings, the ingeniously disabled security (Apparently someone had reversed the polarity of the flux capacitors), and the screaming of "I'll get you Off Colors!" by some deranged Emerald, Elm just put herself first. It was a very unperidot thing to do - certainly against regulation - but she'd say herself and whoever else was with her followed orders, survived through luck, and no one would ask any questions. Recklessly, she dove for the nearest ship as it flew out the hangar, nearly cracking her gem on the closing bay. But she made it.

Then she'd looked up and saw herself surrounded by a bunch of rebellious defectives, one of whom was still smoldering in the tell-tale afterglow of reversing polarity without proper training. Elm nodded smartly, excused herself, darted towards the barracks, and slammed the doors behind her. The rest of the night was spent with both sides at the door. They negotiated, failed to negotiate, threatened one another in inventive ways, cowered from the others' vivid imaginations, and eventually agreed it was all too much bother and that they were best off being scared of one another at a safe distance.

Currently, those same defectives were standing outside that same door. Elm jumped as she realized all her plans of sneaking around and picking them off one-by-one wouldn't work (they wouldn't have worked anyway) and pressed herself against the barrier between them. There was an old two-part phrase about those who didn't learn from history, but Lars never got to the second.

"We heard a discharge!" The left Rhutile began, creeping warily past the metal ribs of the ship. "What did you do with our Captain?
"Open this door and you'll find out!" Elm replied, attempting to cock her rifle, failing as it was entirely the wrong make, and instead banging it against the metal.
"Yes, because we'll see what you did to our Captain?" Right innocently asked.
"Wha- No! Because I'll do it to you!"
"She shot Lars." Padparadscha evenly added.

As one very strange unit, all of the other Off Colors - including Flourite who'd resigned herself to being half-stuck down the hallway - stared at Padparadscha.

Behind the door, Elm was going through the memorized floor plans of this make and model of ship and trying to find some potential out she'd overlooked. So deep in thought, it took her a while to notice a very large shadow slowly creeping over her. The slouched figure of Lars responded to being noticed with an awful gurgling noise as something inside of him finally sewed itself together. His body was unharmed, even down to his coat having sewn itself back together and his cape's torn shreds having flown back into their proper place. He struck the back of his hand across his chin.

"Lars is back." Padparadscha smiled.

Elm's brows squeezed against her hairline as she scrambled off the ground, immediately leveling her gun in her grasp like a stack of unevenly balanced books and pointing it to Lars' head. Her brilliant mind worked over time - all peridots had brilliant minds, but most had the kind of brilliance that a human would have to get diagnosed, while Elm's was the kind that let a gazelle know which sounds were the wind and which sounds were cause for sprinting. Humans regenerate, apparently, but mammalian cells are controlled by glands in their brains. Kill the brain, Kill the human. With renewed confidence, she pressed herself against a corner and squeezed the trigger, unleashing a blinding burst of light and a sound like an explosive striking a church bell.

If she hadn't been both defeaned and blinded by the horrible things guns did to the air when fired in metal cupboards, Elm's sharp senses would've noticed the purple glow swallowing the flash.

All hands congregated in that tiny wing of the Sun Incinerator, no one would ever notice the little blip on the bridge's radar. There were no homeworld ships in range, and even if there had been, their idea of "small but worth detecting" extended to missiles, space debris, and the Sun Incinerator, and their radars were calibrated appropriately. The story of that blip would never be known, which is a shame, because it lived quite an interesting life. Let's talk about it.

A few dozen feet from the outside of the ship, suddenly, a bright pink portal tore through space. Had a diamond been there, they'd have lost their mind, not having seen one of Pink's portals since before she was shattered. For now, the laws of physics just reeled at the impossibility of the whole thing as the portal spewed a hail of shrapnel. They broke apart and showered down on the red planet below, most burning up harmlessly in the atmosphere. The largest and densest one - however - managed to survive re-entry as a thimble-sized meteor.

In a rocky flatland near the planet's equator, what once had been a thriving forest stood destroyed. An agate clacked her decisively against her log stage, decrying the dozen or so rubies before her for taking so long to construct it. The rubies stood shoulder-to-shoulder and looked forward desperately. They knew this was the preamble to a longer orientation - which would surely be barked - about how to properly act within gem controlled areas, proper etiquette, how deeply to bow to each class of superior gem, and so on. They had already heard these kinds of speeches before, but Homeworld had as much faith in a ruby's ability to retain pieces of information as to follow orders, which was to say, they thought it best if they were repeated and used very simple words. The agate drew herself up and noticed that - just for a moment - one of the rubies was staring at the sky.

A dust cloud about the size of a football suddenly exploded from the wood, the shrapnel meteorite having finally struck the ground. Agate - a consummate professional - didn't change her expression as she felt around the hole blasted through her, noticed the missing quarter of her head, and poofed on the spot. The rubies rushed on stage, checked her gem, and saw - for better or worse - that it was intact. They exchanged worried glances; agates took a long time to reform, and surely once she woke up she'd leave the colony and make an in-person report about attempted assassination, a trip that could leave them without a supervisor for weeks or months. One after another, joy dawned on their faces.

"We got the day off!" One cried and ran in no particular direction. The rest followed.

Back on the ship, a peridot was yelling.

"Captain-" Rhodonite began, before almost tripping when Elm kicked her shin. With the type of anger that only rises because of insignificant but sharp pain - like a child slapping their parent across the face - Rhodonite wrestled Elm to the engine room's sloped walls. "Rhutile! Please tell me you've been writing this down? I can't keep it all together by myself..."
"Of course. That's... one bottle of water." Left flipped through her other notebook, one that looked mildly more professional, and scribbled dutifully.
"Three portals used." Right added.
"And four discharges of the..." One began. "Is that a 'B'?" The other finished.
"It's an R." Lars said, gripping his chest and leaning harshly forward in his chair as pain racked his body. "Rifle! It's with an R!"
"N o w   n o w,  b e   e a s i e r   o n   y o u r s e l f." Fluorite knitted her first set of arms together with measured concern.

When the Off Colors learned about the frail nature of human biology - imagine their surprise when humans did not simply shrink into their still-beating heart then came back out a few days later with a new arm - they took it upon themselves to take very careful track of every bit of exertion Lars put himself through. That was all well and good until they tried analyzing his stool, which forced them to set up some groud rules.

Lars glanced at the two bottles of water affixed to his belt. The one beside him was almost entirely empty, him having drank some of it but the rest leaking out wastefully over the deck, jump-starting generations of bacteria and birthing a few species of moss. Even in such a literally watered down form (Lars didn't dare to "drink" the stuff at more than 5% density) Steven's spit could stitch him together just fine. The problem was when those stitches started to scar.

"W h y   n o t   h a v e   a n o t h e r ?"
"I can take it. Saving the other two in case I need them. I mean, who knows when Steven's gonna come around?" Lars settled against the wall and shrugged. Near-death experiences - as many times as he'd had them - tended to knock the 'cool caped space pirate' out of him for a while. "He can only fill a couple every time."
"Is human saliva limited?" Left's ears twitched. Right reached for their little notebook.
"Eh... not really." Lars' eyes narrowed as he heard paper scribbling. "Steven's powers are. They barely work half the time."
"Don't write that down!" Rhodonite loosed one of her four arms from behind Elm's back and pointed across the room to the twins. "That's not something all humans can do. 'Steven' -" she rolled the word in her mouth like it was local slang she didn't entirely understand "- is some sort of... mix."
"A   f u s i-"
Rhodonite furrowed her brow. "Maybe like a fusion. I'm not a human." She bit her bottom lip. "Captain?"
Lars - who understood fusion as well as Padparadscha understood human insemination and was exactly as interested in trying it - shrugged. "Maybe like a fusion. I'm... not a... gem."

One by one, all of the eyes in the room were on Lars, his trailing off not having gone unnoticed. All eyes, starting with Elm, who'd been staring daggers at him from beneath Rhodonite's biceps long before he'd noticed. He was used to getting murderous looks from gems, but usually from hulking quartzes or imperious upper-crusts. Peridots were accusatory, sure, but usually only behind a thick glass wall while they bragged about how some higher up would hear about this and "it'd all be over for you defectives!" and all the brutal methods they'd use. Elm - on the other hand - seemed willing to carry them out herself.

"Why couldn't we just-" Rhodonite pulled Elm up, earning a sound from the peridot's throat that could melt metal were it any more dense. "Poof her?"
"Ephemerate her, you undereducated-" Elm began, instead struggling against Rhodonites hand as it covered her mouth.
"Oooough, I don't like this." The words bubbled from her throat like bones from a bog. "Peridots aren't supposed to be so... caustic."
Lars sighed. "Is she biting your hand?"
"No! That's why I'm worried..."
"I was hoping we could get something out of her."
"Well we won't! Not like this. I say we just get it over with."
"Peridots can act any way they want." Padparadscha added looking meaningfully - no one could see it, but they knew it was meaningful - to Rhodonite. The room grew a little cold.

The ship suddenly rocked, Rhodonite slammed her head quite hard against the wall, and mentally thanked the ringing in her ears for breaking the awkward silence. All of the crew jumped to their feet and held the nearest solid surface. A rogue agent on board, an unknown attacker, an empty bridge, all while the crew's only ship was deep in atmosphere and unable to escape. Perhaps, some distant, leader-like quality in Lars' brain said, this wasn't a big deal. Whatever it was they were up against, they'd been up against worse - as evidenced by the fact they'd been attacked and hadn't been instantly turned to ash - and they could easily pull together with the right orders. Lars would've given these orders, but Lars felt a sharp pain like a needle being driven into his heart, and speaking was suddenly very difficult. He folded against a wall and looked at his crew through blurry vision.

"It's an attack!" Rhodonite yelled, looking to the four corners of the ceiling before settling on Elm. Ephemerate, was it?
"Could be landing trouble." Rhutile reasoned, Fluorite mouthing similar concerns but - deciding they didn't have the time - staying quiet and moving to check the engines.
Elm - taking the confused moment to slip out of Rhodonite's fingers - yelled "This is embarrassing! Who's piloting this ship?"
Rhodonite put her hand back in place with enough force to bend the peridot's head back. "Gravity."
"Give her to us!" The twins grabbed Elm by the shoulder with all of their arms and briefly wrestled with the fusion. "You go to the bridge. We'll handle it."
"We're under attack!" Padparadscha cried.

That brief moment of chaos was enough. Violently stomping her boot down on Rhodonite's foot with as much force as her little body could manage, Elm pushed out of one red set of arms and into another. Falling back on that rat-like instinct inherent to everything skinny and under four feet tall, she bit down on the twins' wrist, sending them reeling back. Rhodonite's chest smashed against Left's as they both tried to close the gap, the two bouncing away from another as a lithe peridot slipped between them like a rat between two truck wheels. The two (three (four)) scrambled around on the ground before looking at one another. The twins nodded to Rhodonite. Rhodonite got onto her feet and took off out the door.

The engine room was not particularly large - as far as the bowels of hyper-advanced space faring ships went - but it was full of obstacles, and Elm was able to put every one of them in front of the Off Colors. She slipped between metal railings, ducked under carts, thrust her arm against its underside and sent tools toppling like caltrops on the ground behind her. The twins - on hands and knees and still clutching a bruise from a tossed wrench - managed to trap Elm against a wall. They swung, finding only hard metal as somewhere above her, Elm swung on a pipe, fell onto their backs, and used their many shoulders as a step ladder over a turbine. No sooner had she hit the ground than had she collapsed into a ball on top of Padparadscha. The sapphire was warning the others that Elm was going to knock over some tools, and Elm realized she'd gone in a big circle. Fortunately for her, Padparadshca and herself were further ahead of the circle than the rest, and it'd take a while for one of them to realize that.

Unfortunately for her, circles could only constrain two dimensions, and Fluorite could move in three. Elm realized this only once she grabbed a screwdriver and looked up.

Rhodonite flung open the bridge door to the sight of the room flooded with harsh white light. Projected as a flat screen before the viewing deck, an incoming message waited impatiently, baring the insignia of the White Diamond Authority. Rhodonite ran her eyes up and down the communications console and ducked to a low crouch as she saw what surrounded the ship. She hazarded peeking out just above the desk to get a better count. Three... four... the Sun Incinerator was currently surrounded by five drop ships, the teardrop shaped red kind usually filled with some half a dozen rubies. She considered splitting; they'd want to talk to someone higher ranking than a Ruby, and they'd laugh if answered by a Pearl. And besides, Rhodonite really didn't want to fall apart right now. She was doing that plenty well on her own. 

As if swallowing something unpleasant, Rhodonite kept her head down and answered the call.

Gems didn't age anything like mammals. They were something like trees; they grew "rings" that were imperceptible unless you opened them up, and sometimes, you could see the marks left from people who'd tried. The main difference being that gems weren't nearly so pacifistic as trees, and tended to give harder than they took. With that said, the Amethyst that appeared on screen was the kind of tree you'd find ancient religions worshiping and would need a bulldozer to uproot.

"A'right." The Amethyst spoke with a voice like ashy dirt. She fiddled with some records out of view. "This is a restricted area and-" She muttered a few swears that didn't translate well into English "- Why is your video feed off?"
Rhodonite's throat bounced up and down. "Um. Technical issues. Isn't that just the way? Ah, we weren't told this area was-"
"Yeah, just happened. See, there was-" Her voice turned stiff, like a bailiff reading out court instructions verbatim. "- An attempted assassination of a high ranking agate. Unknown assailant. No one gets in. No one gets out."
Rhodonite laughed, wordlessly checking the status of the escape pods.
"But, analysis says here, you're one of the ships that escaped that burning space station over Colony A29-" The Amethyst's lip twitched as she saw what she was reading. "... Uh. You get the idea. If you're survivors from that ship, we'll let you land for an inspection."
Rhodonite folded her hands over one another. It'd be so much easier if Lars were here instead of... wherever he was now. "We have a few on board. A peridot, a-"
The Amethyst waved her hand, which was excellent, because Rhodonite was about to say many lies that'd come back to bite her. "Don't need to know. Just get their facets and cuts and I'll uh..." She looked down at the table with eyes like trench crenels. "Cross-reference and all that."
"Oh! Of... of course. I'll just go write them down; can we land in the mea-."
"Try to land and we open fire. You got five minutes."

Rhodonite nodded - to herself, as the cameras were still very thankfully off - and closed the call. She looked again to the escape pods and noticed with a manic smile that several of them were preparing to launch.

Elm smashed against the reactor's shell and rolled onto her stomach. Padparadscha swung through the air where Elm had been with a fallen clamp, only to stop when she felt a soft hand about the size of her body settle on her shoulder. Patting her gently, Flourite's head swung up and disappeared into the darkness of the engine room, above all the catwalks and between the many pipes. Elm - now managing a brisk crawl across the top of the reactor - barely managed to toss her body out of the way of another crushing swoop from the lower half of Flourite's segmented body. The briefest amount of the fusion's weight brushed the metal and left a permanent dent like the head of a hammer being mushed into butter.

The twins kneeled beside Padparadscha, pulling her up in their lap and making sure she hadn't been hurt. Elm scoffed; if she'd wanted her hurt, they'd know it. The thought didn't spend much time in her head as it - along with most of her autonomic functions - were knocked out with a hard slam against the metal. Elm mewled in the crater, the force having stretched the metal beneath so thin she could feel the thrumming energy in her gem. A noodly digit large enough to crush her torso grabbed her by her hair and pulled her out, her mouth open and limp. Flourite's head hung beside the peridot's as the rest of her gigantic body slowly crept out from the rafters, across the wall, over the ground, and encircled around Elm like a predatory caterpillar.

"N o w   n o w,   n o   n e e d   t o   f i g h t . W e   c a n   a l l   g e t   a l o n g ." Fluorite waggled one of her many fingers.

Elm's face suddenly gained murderous sharpness and she clenched the screwdriver tight in her fist. She thrust her right hand forward, going to plunge it into Flourite's forehead. Fluorite reached out a barrel-sized hand and simply grabbed Elm by the length of her arm. They exchanged a brief stare. 

"O h,   w a s   t h a t   c o n d e s c e n d i n g ?" She smiled brightly. "Good."

Elm dropped her screwdriver and caught it with her left hand. There was no time to move away before Elm dug the head of the screwdriver into one of Flourite's eyes, sending her reeling back for just a moment. Just a moment. By the time her vision had fully cleared and she bore down on Elm again, Elm had turned the screwdriver down and - with force that was impressive for a human but not so for a gem - stabbed it through the damaged shell beneath her feet and tore open the side of the reactor.

Fluorite recoiled from the most sensitive parts of the machinery, worried that one tiny knock, one misplaced ounce of weight could snap some rods or break some glass and have the whole core melt down. Elm took the time to slip between her legs and - on her way out - tossed the screwdriver as hard as she could into the reactor's core.

"Have to get there, have to get there, have to get there..."

Rhodonite repeated feverishly as she dashed down the corridor. Gems didn't have adrenaline - they had no glands in which to release hormones whenever they panicked, though they certainly did panic - but the pulses of energy running through her gems now were as close as it came. Her vision was blurred, her breathing was labored and severe, her focus was singular. She had to find that peridot, and then get her to spit the numbers out, and then deliver it, and, and, and, it'd all be fine. She should've been with the twins, and the twins were in the engine room, and she could explain that the ship would be blown to bits if she didn't give her identification numbers, and-

"Have to get there, have to get there, have to get there..."

Elm repeated feverishly as she dashed up the corridor. Gems didn't have a need to breathe - they had no blood to fill with oxygen, let alone lungs - but the intense desire to move your chest up and down when doing something strenuous is universal, like love or sadness or biting your open palm when you can't quite find where the itch you needed to scratch is. Even still, she definitely couldn't stop for breath; the ship would explode in minutes, if not less, and no gem is durable enough to survive that that isn't usually sitting on a throne the size of the Sun Incinerator. All of this was made worse by the fact the escape pods closest to the engine room were sealed as if recently prepared to abandon ship. She didn't know the code to re-open them; she just had to find an open one.

Perhaps because these two were in such stressful circumstance - Rhodonite far more used to but far less equipped to handle it and Elm still reeling from light head trauma - that they saw one another coming at them on the opposite ends of the halls, subconsciously stepped to the sides, and passed one another by without stopping.

It wouldn't be until Rhodonite reached the engine room that she'd realize what'd happened, and by then, she had significantly bigger problems in the form of Fluorite rushing out of the room and taking everyone else with her. It wouldn't be until Elm sealed herself inside the very last and only open pod that she realized what'd happened, and by then, she had significantly bigger problems in the form of Lars sitting there and staring knowingly.

At the top of a white tower - tied second for the shortest of seven, next to one that was tied second for the shortest, all part of an arrangement that formed a neat symmetrical bar chart in the middle of the desert - was an Amethyst. She drummed her fingers over her knuckles and stared at a clock very patiently. It was in Gem Glyph - illegible to humans - but you could tell what they read by how hard a gem focused on them. Right now, Amethyst looked like they were about five seconds away... four... three... two... one.

"Attention all units." She said with barely restrained glee - the kind reserved for dirty jokes at the end of board room meetings - as she yanked her radio close to herself. "Unidentified Ship Number One has been in the air without providing appropriate credentials for beyond the allotted time. There is probable cause that it's breaching space traffic control regulations." She waited, knowing that almost everything she said had went unheard by the audience of almost entirely pilots with very active thumbs. She liked to make it climactic. "Smoke 'em."

As the barrage of fire came down, every single escape pod on the Sun Incinerator fired, one after another, in a seemingly random pattern. It was more than that though; every single thing that could be generously considered an "escape pod" dropped from the ship, if you were the kind of generous that could call a cardboard box "affordable housing." Large metal crates, bits of the hull, storage barrels, everything and anything that could fit a gem inside it (Which was almost anything and almost everything, as that described the shape of a gem): all were jettisoned out of cargo bays. Some slid from windows. Others dropped out of the holes rapidly being torn in the ship by the hail of fire. All the while, the ship moved mindlessly forward, listing and losing altitude as its internal structure failed.

Of course, what exactly they shot didn't matter to the various ships now encircling the Sun Incinerator. They were all having an excellent time.

"Look at the smoke!" One Ruby called from inside a dropship, shrinking slightly as her commanding officer eyed her. Their dispositions both softened as a particularly hard hit caused a fresh plume of bright green smog to burst from the ship's hull.
"The smoke!" They both yelled.
"Hey, wait -" Another Ruby - much younger, had fewer rings - meekly added. "Why is it green?"
"Oh. Well, when reactor cores get really damaged-" The captain explained, showing her experience. "- It can dye the gas, you know? Sorta like opening a... bag of... a bag of red stuff into a river. Turns the river red. But we make sure only to hit reactors with discombobs; you know, turns 'em off, doesn't blow 'em up. If they did that we'd be in big trouble."
"Oooh, I get it. You're so smart, Captain." The new recruit blushed slightly, hiding it best she could; it wasn't hard, it was red on red.
There was a pause.
"Then why's it green now?"

There was an ear splitting noise as if the laws of conservation of energy suddenly remembered they applied to everyone, including to gems, and had come to give them a stern talking-to. A massive green disk, as thin as paper and hotter than the surface of most stars, briefly expanded outward at great speeds, and vanished into a burning white singularity. Silently, but with the force of a small nuclear explosion, the drop ships were sent careening towards the ground in pieces. The aftermath report would confirm zero casualties due to the hulls taking most of the force; this came much to the chagrin of the agate which received the report, still nursing a head wound, as those hulls were worth more than every ruby inside of them put together.

Hundreds of feet away, inside of an escape pod hurtling towards the horizon at alarming speeds, a peridot was yelling.

"Why are you here?! How did you-" She stopped abruptly as she was tossed onto the floor, which was currently acting as the ceiling.
Lars - locked safely if roughly in a harness - looked up (down) at her with a very smug expression. "Know? Because I knew you'd go for an escape pod." He crossed his arm over his stomach. "I can't chase you like this. But I sure as hell can cut you off."
"But why THIS escape pod?" Elm screamed, now floating somewhere in the middle of the ship.
"I locked all the other ones. The others know the password."
"How?! Did you plan for this?!"
His smug air faltered briefly as legitimate astonishment crossed his face. "Plan?! Rhodonite's gonna type in 1-2-3-4-5 first try."
Inches before his face - something permitted via the current zero-G environment - Elm's expression span. "1-2-3-4-5? Are you insane?! That's so incredibly... stupid!"
The smugness had returned in full. It was "reversed the polarity of the flux capacitor" tier smugness. "So stupid, you'd never try it."
Breathlessly, her feet briefly on the ground, Elm pointed in every direction as if looking for an angle where this made sense to her. "How. How. How. How are you so calm? How is this nothing to you?"
"It's like this every day. Couldn't ask for better."
She pulled her hair. "How are you so sure of your crew?! They're a pathetic bunch of-"

Lars undid his harness and stood up proudly. He was in a speech giving mood; you always needed to end on a speech.

"The best crewmates a captain could ask for, that's who. Yeah, they're strange. Yeah, they may not fit within your idea of what's acceptable; they might not be pleasing to you. But they don't care! We aren't here to make you happy; we're here to see those we love happy."

Somewhere, out there in the chaos, Rhodonite was curled up in a ball and screaming bloody murder as she careened towards the planet's surface in a two-man escape pod.

"We can't be who you expect us to be; so we'll be who we expect us to be."

The Rutile twins struggled to fit in their ill-equipped harnesses. Left simply stretched hers as far along her twin's shoulder as it would go, and they both broke into giggles.

"We aren't here to live up to your expectations; we're the ones who've set our own!"

Inside of a tiny shipping container, Padparadscha marvelled at what had just-a-few-minutes-ago happened.

"We aren't here to live within your boundaries; we're the ones who've set our boundaries!"

In the largest pod they could find, six gems all huddled together, assuaging one another's fears and sharing their hopes, eager to reunite as one soon.

"WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT"
"We're here to take what we want from you, like it or not! We are the Off Colors!" Lars laughed roguishly - he'd been practicing - but bit his tongue as his head was tossed back and banged against the wall. "Fuck!" He yelled.
Elm looked at him. "WHAT IS FUCK?"

In the aftermath report, the high magistrate Onyx - the highest investigative authority on the colony - would be informed the infamous Off Color crew were all killed in their ship's reactor explosion, though no gem shards were ever recovered. This would surely surprise the Off Colors themselves, as minus some joint pain, they would all land safely and be off the planet within the month. Elm would never speak of this incident again, even though her new assignment would greatly appreciate if she did. But that's a story for another day.

Stories never really end. The people telling them just find a place to stop.