Diffraction 2.1
"Who's a sweet little baby?" I cooed at the Coral, patting their squishy head as she flew on shimmering water wings. Corals were a rather general purpose type of AI workhorse, they had a number of powers that helped them with their jobs as tools and companion pets.
Being cute as a button is one of them.
Shapeshifting, hologram projection, Gemsong-based universal translation, hydrokinesis, they are also very good at guarding and watching, as well as being a good therapy animal. Well Gem-entity really. They can also control small particles, though it's quite limited. Sand and dirt.
They weren't uniquely powerful, but they were versatile, and unique powers were certainly not uncommon among them depending on the ratio of ichor. Yellow Court Corals often were faster, or had potent electrical powers. Blue Court Corals can sense emotions, and will go to their friend to help them. White Court Corals can sense foreign influences against the mind, again protecting others.
Pink Court Corals had modified hydrokinesis, imbued with weak healing essence, and capable of forming their holograms into shields, and creating bigger bubbles. An idea had been to put them in a long metal barrel, so they could fire bubbles like bullets.
I wonder whether the Corals of my court would have some unique power, or if they would be derivative, since I was the same type of Gem as Steven Universe. A shudder went up and down my spine at the name…
He had an ominous name in Gemsong, in it I heard the meaning of his name, what he represented, what he was in truth. It was strange and alien, it was wonderful, it was incredible and yet frightening.
I could sense the presence of magic in the air, the song of Corals only a hop and a skip away. Pretty little things, dancing among the trees and the grass and old buildings echoing of those lost. They were happy, and they told everyone in range.
But they were quiet when they needed to be, broadcasting back and forth, or exchanging code patches when one learned something new. Even then that gave way for other sounds to enter the air. The rustle of leaves under my feet, the groan of trees and tired rotten wood. The hum and hiss of some of my equipment, and of rusted radio sets and telephone poles.
Sometimes I could even hear the crack of joints of nearby animals, and the high pitched calls of bats on the breeze.
The four Corals flew over my head, and leapt from tree to tree, using their fine claws to cling onto sheer surfaces. I felt the possibilities, my mind of Diamond doing what came naturally. There was a clearing, and I looked up at a sheer face of solid rock, solid pegmatite conspicuously sticking out, half a hundred meters high and four hundred meters long.
Something had uplifted the stone from the earth, and at the top of the hill I could see verdant soil, holding grass and trees and bushes, beech and pine and poison ivy and bushes of blueberry.
I stepped carefully, and my longer hair tickled my ears. I was still in my female form, more or less still testing it out for my own amusement and to satisfy my insistent curiosity. Conifers made up a lot of the trees, and I could see a few leaking resin, likely from injuries caused by pests of larger animals.
This was a good place to start a Kindergarten, or I suppose it would be called a Nursery for a small scale operation like this. I was about to whisper a command to my little friends when my danger sense ran mad and wild.
I felt the light within me recoil, and I straightened my back and squared my shoulders. I swept out my micro-Composer, and it let out a high pitched ping. There was something distorting reality, though my sensors were crude and didn't tell me much.
I felt something, something wrong, something strong, smothering someone else's tune, and my hackles raised. Whatever was here, I didn't like it and if it didn't go away I was going to break something.
I broke out into a fast run, and stopped just short of where I was getting the bad feeling. Most of the forest was untouched, but for an area about thirty meters in diameter, a rough uneven sphere of influence. It was a quilted landscape that seemed to shine to my eyes, flashes of light blinking in and out of existence.
My perusal of a passage on Gem vision called such things fly-by-nights, beams of high energy light, those few that made it past the dense air of the world. There was something in the air, a steady tone, a hiss of something that didn't belong.
I hissed back, teeth clicking in frustration when I couldn't find what was making me manic. The only evidence was how the forest had been replaced by small tiny worlds, forcefully planted into this reality, and folding on top of each other like a house of cards.
One world was a pond of water, with long spires of obsidian, another was a field of statues, demonic faces staring at me. A third world looked like a hospital, covered in needles, and shredded by an unknown force. Each and every world here seemed painful, terrible memories, striking at the mind, a mind in pain and fear and confusion.
I scowled, hands tightening into fists, and something shifted in my mouth, a snarl coming from my throat. I tried not to let that damn drone get to me, and instead pushed it back away from me.
The first Coral to emerge circled down, wings flapping around sharp and dangerous objects. I followed the same path, though a bubble popped in a few times when a long blade of dark metal almost stabbed me in the chest. In the center of the chaos, I went still when I saw the heart of the madness.
It was a kid…no, a teenager if a malnourished one. She was dressed in all greys, dull colors devoid of life. A shirt, a pair of pants, and no shoes or socks. The once pristine clothing was caked with mud, flecks of dried blood and there was a sharp scent in the air. Long platinum hair curtained over the back and face of the person, of the girl.
She looked in the range of fourteen to sixteen years old, but I couldn't tell at a glance, and with how thin she was I could be wrong. I moved closer, putting down the bubble despite the danger, despite what my senses were telling me. She looked too small, her breathing was so weak, she was too small, she was too…
I lightly turned the girl on her back. I looked at a heart shaped face, platinum hair draping over her left eye. Foggy light blue eyes bordering on grey stared back at me, and I kept my expression neutral. I crouched down, words stuck in my throat.
"It's…singing, were you…singing?" The younger girl let out a cough, eyes wide and fearful, with the puny light of hope in them.
I…nodded hesitantly, it wasn't impossible that my Gemsong was reaching farther than I thought. I didn't know enough about my power to say otherwise. And this girl wasn't completely normal, there was something in her, projecting this field of altered reality.
That grating noise…that damn scream, right at the edge of my sight, thinking it could hide from me, thinking it can hide from its sins.
My song burst outwards, and there was a shiver, and the power bringing other worlds into this one pulled back, in confusion, in fear, and the eyes of the girl cleared just a bit, eyes of blue leaning towards grey staring back at me.
I gripped her hand, and I heard her heart beating in her chest, the light wheezes from exhaustion. I wasn't sure what to do…so I panicked.
"I-I what's your name?" I spoke softly, for her, for the girl who had been hurt so badly, for the person I wanted to help.
"Elle…Burton."
My name is divine-promised-foreign-girl-of-the-fortified-citadel.
I heard the meaning behind her name, the words and the truth behind them, it was inherent, some part of me that was now Gem taking it in. I chewed on my lip, thinking.
I know I have the ability to excrete essence, so I should be able to heal, I should be able to help this girl. I lightly moved the girl, and after a moment of deliberation, I stuck my index finger in my mouth.
I pressed it against her cheek, and hoped for the best. I breathed outwards, and she coughed as she lit up in cerise. I had exhaled some of my essence, not on purpose but…
A few open wounds sealed, and I could hear her body adjusting to the healing energies surging into her system. She shuddered, releasing a soft cry.
I gestured to one of the Corals, fingers curling, my nails clicking against each other. One approached, a cotton candy pink one, with two pairs of water wings. She softly cried, a quiet melodious and soothing tune that echoed.
Hush little child don't say a word…
I picked the girl up, taking care of not letting any liquids drip onto me. She was lulled into sleep, and my shoulders dropped as the Corals sang a lullaby.
I was going to have to start looking for food if we now had a mouth to feed, and I don't think I can live on light alone.
Probably, I haven't checked.
I guess being here for fifteen days was the sign that I need to deal with new problems. I'll figure something out…at least I know humans are a thing here, and that they had superpowers.
I hummed quietly as I returned to my residence.
Elle Burton hadn't woken up even after a few hours, and since I had found her at five in the afternoon. She would wake up either at midnight, or very early in the morning. I expected the latter more than the former, and the Corals had thankfully taken up the task of bathing her and giving her a change of clothes.
Regardless if I took the form of a man or woman I wasn't going to change a minor I didn't know. That was both weird and gross and a task I would fail at, not like I have experience in changing unconscious people and I don't think I want the experience either.
There was no identification on her, nothing besides a torn sheet of paper with the words Asylum East on it. Nothing indicated where it was or what it meant or what kind of place it was. Though if one of their patients was in a state like this, I'm not sure I want to know.
Though the other scenario was that I had just housed someone very dangerous.
But I couldn't leave her to die in the middle of the woods, my heart wasn't that cold, could never be that cold. Even then I had left two Corals to protect and watch her, and two of them were helping me with preparing the Gem Nursery. Which was why I was kissing a conifer tree leaking resin.
The Injector could compress the resin into Amber, incubating the Gem within the tree and feeding off it's life. Normally this would kill the tree, but using the healing powers of some of the new Gem types could slow the decay, and the external introduction of resources would further slow it down.
Era 3 used new organic healing Gems, and astral deconstruction of asteroids and planetoids for long term harvests, cycling in minerals and organic detritus and so on and so forth. They had also had a wider number of Gem species implanted to move around soil and ore composition.
For example with pegmatite, optimum species would include Feldspar and Quartz, with a tertiary source of Mica. One harvest would drain and absorb Quartz, and Kindergartner workers would move deposits of Feldspar rich soil and earth to become a more optimum environment for Feldspar.
Depending on the crystal composition of the pegmatite, following harvests would optimize for Spodumene, Beryl or Tourmaline. Though we would need to be careful to prevent the incidences of crystal twins for Feldspars, weird mixes of them with Quartz and so on. Garnets were a possibility too, and possibly Topaz due to it being similar to Granite from a certain standpoint.
If I went to Australia instead, I'd be able to find Lepidolite. Doing this kind of cycle reduced the strain on local energies, and seeding with outside minerals and life would make Kindergartens easily recoverable with time.
Scanning sweeps of the pegmatite rock indicated we could make Quartz, Feldspars, Mica, Tourmalines, and Garnets. The right distributions of essence would let us color the gemstones, so I could get a wide variety of specific subspecies as needed.
I was aiming for Rose Quartz, Amethysts and Carnelians. For Feldspars, Sunstone and Labradorites sounded like a good choice. Plus some Muscovite Mica. For Garnets, Almandine and Rhodolite. Though I didn't expect more than a handful of Garnets from a rock of this size. For the more common rocks, maybe a hundred plus Gems. For a low impact area anyhow.
Opals might also be possible in some other areas of the forest, they were an administrative type of Gem with limited long range combat abilities. I glanced, and found myself looking at a skittish deer.
Before I could blink, dark shapes burst out from the underbrush. At first I thought they were wolves, but their yips and cries and looks…they were coyotes. Big ones too, almost the size of wolves, and they were attacking in groups of three.
I jumped over them, and collided with a tree, clinging onto it as I watched them do their thing. They were sly and agile, and the solitary deer fled with the predators on her heels. They weren't the first oddities I had seen here or the last, there were several packs of wolves, big hundred pounders at times, hunting the deer and elk, while the big coyotes took up other niches or pushed them out.
It was my best guess with the dead wolves I had found around mutant coyote territory. Plus…I had seen some passages from that time guy's journal. From what was intact at least. There were about twenty journals, and a lot of them were damaged or just scribbles I couldn't read.
My nails scratched furrows in the bark, and I saw they had grown longer since two days ago. I gave it another week or less before they became outright claws, and when I felt my hand…there was something about the bone, knobbly additions that shouldn't be there…
Gems had retractable claws, so as an organic…I'd need an extra finger bone, perhaps something hollow, to allow the claws to telescope in and out as needed. Gems of course were made of light and didn't need to follow those kinds of rules but I did as a flesh bag holding in a vast amount of light and magic.
I used to bite my nails when I was nervous, so my habit had changed up to chewing on a few clean pens I had, taking care not to tear them apart.
No. Back to work.
I slid down from the tree, and hurried over to the chunk of pegmatite. I tapped my fist against the hard stone, and had a good feeling about this one. This was good quality rock, highly fertile soil, and a lot of life to absorb and heal. And it was surrounded by conifer trees that would serve to incubate Ambers.
"Alright, this should serve nicely." I cocked a hip, flipping my hair back for dramatic effect.
And I was talking to myself again. I wasn't doing any favors to my sanity with how weird I was acting…
I wasn't sure if I should start with Gem production now…no a solid lump of rock wasn't what was needed for a Kindergarten. The rock needed to be broken up into canyons and corridors, but I had no Gems except for Corals. I would need to build equipment, and I wasn't exactly an expert on Gemtronics.
That I had managed to make stuff so easily was probably because I had a computer brain now and could cheat the system. Plus very detailed instructions on how Gemforges are supposed to work. I've managed to build a larger cold forge, various hydrothermal methods mixed with magic to catalyze and speed up reactions. Now I was trying to rebuild the house with Gem tech, I just needed to build a Crystal Heart to generate a pocket dimension.
Which brought forth the questions on magic itself because no matter what you think, they are magic. While advanced technology can be indistinguishable from magic, sufficiently advanced magic can also be indistinguishable from technology. The best description I had received was that magic was a vast and immense force, coming up from below, above, and between realities.
It was a form of energy, primordial and fundamental negentropic force. With a seed of magic, almost anything was possible, bending reality and all it's higher dimensions to change the laws of physics.
It was the substrate upon which all worlds rest, and Gems required an initial seed by draining the energies of life, and were compressed from the soil and earth into their gemstones. After that, light would continue to be absorbed by the Gem, believed to be used either as a secondary power source to magic or possibly along the lines of a power MOSFET. Merely powering the circuitry, and throttling the vast space where magic exists.
There were a few names for these layers of reality, Subspace, Hyperspace, the Ephemeral Planes, the Spirit World…the realm of magic was vast and unknowable, secrets buried within magical arcane crystal circuitry, secrets even the Diamonds didn't know about their nature, about the true reality of their existence. There were a lot of missing pieces to how they had come to be. Plus…
Gem civilization is old, the Diamonds began civilization about five hundred thousand years ago, in the time of Homo heidelbergensis. Though they didn't really start being a big old galactic empire until Era 1. I think that was when they developed true FTL ships, though they had Warp Pads before then.
Gems were powerful but they were slow to change, and it took their civilization much longer to reach equivalent populations and technological levels. Though perhaps it would be more accurate to say they stayed at the same level for centuries on end.
From what I knew, the Diamonds had been alone for a very long time, and it had taken vast stretches for them to figure out their powers, and they were limited by their lack of knowledge, and with only four people they didn't have the manpower to make use of their lifespans.
But five hundred thousand years is five hundred thousand years…so they were still far more advanced than humans.
"My Corals." I gestured to the two cuties, and they flew over, while I pointed to the thousand ton rocks "Can the two of you start cutting up the pegmatite into canyons and corridors, or get started on the beginnings of them?" Went unsaid was what I needed them for.
They knew, they understood subtext in the buzzing tip-tapping sound of my Gemsong. I was going to spend time practicing more with my Gem powers, there was so much left to unlock for myself. It was going to take a while, and keeping an eye on our guest was a good idea.
I brushed off dust from my shorts, and moved.
I kissed a blueberry bush, and berries and leaves grew back from nothing. Was I breaking conservation of mass doing this, or was it somehow grabbing surrounding mass and converting it straight into plant matter with magic?
So many questions.
I had been growing quite a few plants, mainly the edible ones and had been practicing with watering and trimming them. Taking care of something alive really helped provide a distraction from being stuck in the middle of the woods for sixteen days. Even if I chose this, I had my doubts this was the plan…no something had gone wrong on one of the ends of this…deal.
Nothing I could change then, but I would have words with my benefactor, hopefully as equals. If not in experience or power but in simple respect for one another. At least my aura was growing stronger, my gemstone's magic seeping deeper and deeper into my body.
I knew quite a bit about my power, they were tied in part to my emotions and my own will. For example I could reduce or increase my mass at will, propelling myself with the energies Gems used to move. But I wasn't very good at it, and I hadn't figured out floating.
Slowing my falls sure…but stopping in the air not so much. I knew floating involved positive emotions, joy, happiness, delight, while falling would involve negative emotions, or at least cancellation of the happy emotions.
If I wanted to describe how using magic felt, there was an…aura, a song, a sensation of wading in cool liquid fire, and pulling and twisting it like dough. Within that aura, there were a number of subsets, programs I could activate on the fly.
For my bubble shield, it was a sensation of fear, of wanting to be safe, pushing out the energy from my skin, prickling pins and needles for a millisecond before it became a giant bubble.
This aura had to be my Gem power, a veritable sea of limitless potential and life. I was bobbing for apples, with each apple being a different power, or a new application of a known power.
I clicked my tongue and reached for my shapeshifting. I pulled my aura like taffy, and thought of what I wanted. The skin on my arm began to…shift, as I formed plates of keratin, like pangolin scales hardened by concentrations of iron and hardened light.
Hardening was an interesting aspect, Gems inherently shifted the texture of their skin depending on what they needed. They had natural silky smooth skin, but during a fight they would harden into statues of marble, and I had figured out how to do the same.
The pangolin skin was just for fun though…iron wasn't shit against magical light, unless I fortified it of course. The scales spread up and down and stopped when I told them to do so. I breathed and spikes formed from them, sharp crystalline things that I tested by puncturing a sheet of stray paper.
I pulled back the power, and the scales folded back into my body, I pulled back more, and I felt my body return to its original shape. Hips less wide, waist wider, body hairier, and chest lacking in mammaries.
I immediately reached for that female form again in my head, and fat and muscle shifted around as needed. I prodded my chest to make sure everything was in order, and nodded.
Elle Burton had seen this look rather than my old one, giving her a friendly and known face to look at… Definitely a good idea. When she was more lucid, it'd be best to tell her the truth. I wasn't sure what the best option with her was, I wasn't exactly a good caretaker of children and teenagers.
In fact I was kind of an asshole sometimes, and was a bit too impatient to deal with people in general. That I had been given a Gem that was all about compassion and healing and love…I won't say it feels wrong, but it's weird.
But then this entire situation was weird, and I had been doing chores and assignments just to keep my sanity intact.
"More power testing." I shook my head, no distractions again. The aura surged like fire burning inside of me, and I sang quietly, words turning into static and waving undulations of power.
My aura escaped the confines of my skin, and plants bloomed around me, surging with the life I radiated. Roses and amaranths and posies, and larger blueberries.
I grabbed a blueberry and ate it, tasting sweet for a bit as I followed the tune of my Aura. So I didn't even need to use spit, I could send out my Aura, my power in roiling waves of life giving energies.
I could imagine grabbing a hold of the energy field, of reducing my mass and inducing a directional field to propel me forward. To send me flying like Superman.
I could dive deep into my Gem, into the new core of my being, the Aura to my Heart, the Spirit to my Soul. If I felt like it I could dive down to work on my own code, altering the programs.
Instead of that, my vision picked up on dust hanging in sunlight, I saw the sunlight broken up into a rainbow spectrum, and then I didn't. I could sense the auras of other beings, I could sense the Corals, I could sense the plants which had partaken of my essence, I could hear the calls of animals in the forest, their true meaning.
When I was paying attention anyway.
My shoulders stiffened, and the angle of possibilities shifted, something hissing, almost imperceptible, and it became louder. And louder, and louder…
The sound was followed by a rumble in the air, I cursed as the ground shivered and it was followed by a thin slash in the air, flickering from the deepest red to the lightest blue-purple-white ultraviolet, and fly-by-nights flew out in abundance. Something bounced off my head, and I reached for the object with cat-like reflexes.
Huh?
It was a large pink-purple gemstone, cut into a square with rounded corners, a cushion-cut from the looks of it. I could sense her aura, her Gemsong pulsing within arcane crystal. I was holding a Sapphire in my hand, a Gem doing all they needed to take form.
I flipped over the gemstone, and I thought back to how he had mentioned the plan to send more Gems to help me. I suppose someone with future vision would be very useful for helping in planning out a colony.
I gently held the core of another person's being in my hand, and I knew the current of discomfort was there. If I gripped hard enough I could crack her, shatter her, if I didn't keep her safe she could be broken into pieces.
I suppose they trusted me to take care of them…to keep them safe and sound. It was oddly…touching how much trust that implied. They had entrusted me with this Gem and others, and those Gems in turn trusted me as well.
I moved, my strides lengthening as I pulled up a small folded up blanket, and placed the Sapphire on it along with a pillow the Corals had made. I clasped my hands together and went to check up on another guest.
A guest room, equally as sparse as the larger master bedroom held a sleeping girl, a teenager really, but a thin and malnourished one. She was still sleeping deeply, even after new doses of my healing magic. I had fixed up the single bathroom, and collected the essence after turning the heat to broiling.
Fortunately while my ichor is partially organic, the rest was ichor made of light and magic. Accidentally dehydrating myself would be rather annoying. Though the Corals could purify water on their own. Mainly by holding it, and then boiling it on a fire and waiting for it to condense.
I could still feel a presence, a mind that was both vast and so small, and one I denied entry. I had taken in the girl, but I didn't know what to do and was going to have to wing it.
The platinum blonde's skin had taken a more natural hue, and I would probably be preparing food for her. She was obviously hungry, and I was going to have to go out hunting, I couldn't live off leftover food, nuts and berries forever. Neither could this kid, and I wasn't going to be privy to the death of someone the same age as one of my cousins.
It was past six PM, and I had no idea when she was going to wake up. But I was certain she would…just a feeling, and not one I could describe with the time I had on hand.
There was a pulse, a growing song like soft chimes and a smooth hum, like the tones from a sleep music stream. I turned back, and flashed a smile and a thumb's up at the guard Corals. They echoed back their joy, and I dove back into the messy living room. Right on the couch, the pink Sapphire was glowing in a regular pattern.
It floated upwards, defying gravity, glowing in fuschia and pink, and in colors only I could see. The colors bathed the room in light, drowning out the dim lights of the barely functional mess of a house.
A body formed around the gemstone, featureless and broken up into sections like a doll or a mannequin. A person formed onto it, a burst of aura and magic and tonal sounds. She emerged about a head shorter than me, definitely below five feet.
Her frame was slim, though her hips were wider than I would have expected from a Gem. Bare feet a shade or two darker than bubblegum pink, with a slim waist and a wider chest in turn. More notable because of her lighter clothing, wearing a side slit tunic colored primrose pink with a ribbony top and straps shaded maroon, her cushion-cut gemstone peeking out. She wore a loose pair of dark fuschia sweatpants, and I glanced up to her face.
The Gem…the Sapphire had a round face with prominent lips, a single large eye the color of deep pink, and dark fuschia hair pulled into a wild ponytail. There was a dark pink/light red triangle on her chest, and her large eye honed in on me in a matter of moments.
She slowly dropped to the ground, her tunic fluttering on a sudden breeze. She looked around, blinking rapidly as she tapped at herself, as if checking for ticks or wounds. She nodded, lips pulling into a small almost uncertain smirk. "It worked perfectly. I knew it would." There was strain in her song, a discordant note.
Are you sure about that?
The Gem patted herself down, and stretched her sweater pants, checking and murmuring to herself.
"Umm…?" I chirped, and the Gem jumped as if struck. She glanced over to me, brushing back a curling bang.
"You must be…" She shut her mouth, as if shaken, but pushed ahead. "You must be the new Diamond His Radiance told us about." There was a hint of something, awe maybe? No…not worship, it was excitement, curiosity, relief even…I didn't know why that was though.
"Y-Yes?" I felt a little exposed, suddenly embarrassed, heat rising to my face.
She smiled easily, looking me in the eye with only a single twitch and soft pitch of discomfort. "I am Fuschia Sapphire Facet-AD16 Cushion-X7, and I am happy to say that I See you."
O-Oh.
Okay.
I rubbed my hands together, trying not to fidget under the curious gaze of Fuschia Sapphire. She had given me a moment to think, simply softly humming, letting her sweet Gemsong out into the air with the chime of bells and the natural shifting of her voice.
She had a pretty voice, a pretty song, and my shoulders dropped at the realization that I wasn't alone anymore. I had somebody to talk to, someone to communicate with that wasn't my own thoughts and Gem VI puppy-kitten-worms. So…I was a little nervous, and I couldn't help but feel less alone and miserable.
"She will wake up in 14 hours, two minutes and thirty two seconds." She commented out of nowhere, and I jumped. She was gentle, speaking softly, and I smiled.
Her Gemsong was soothing, like silk weaved into a psychic language. I could see her aura of magic, the colors and charged ichors of the beings that formed her. Almost entirely pink, with some amount of blue, the auras of the Diamonds that made her what she was.
There was a visible inhumanity when I let my eyes roam. Her skin was just a little too perfect, with not even a single blemish, and a closer look found a lack of pores, kind of freaky but neat. Her eye was much larger than a human's, like the mass of two eyes had been merged into just one. She had no bump on her face between her mouth and eye, nostrils flaring.
Not quite a nose, but not quite a lack of chemical sense either. Physically she looked quite human, but there was a hint that it was a purposeful change, and there was a line between her chest and waist that gave the impression of insectile segmentation. Then there are other traits, like the pointed clicks her steps made on the hardwood floor, of scratching against the solid surface. The curl of her claws as she gestured, or the four fangs where canines would be in humans.
Then there was the Gemsong, the weaving of language into my brain and into my gemstone. It was clear to me, and I…
"Umm…?" There was an uncomfortable aura from Fuschia Sapphire, and I leaned and stepped back.
"S-Sorry!" I apologized, wrapping my arm around my bust, face flushing. "I just, I've been alone for quite a while…and the Corals have only been around two days and they're not…the same…" I trailed off at her expression, one of confusion and perhaps even a little horror.
"I…Aster Diamond said I was supposed to arrive right before you were to be sent off to this world." Something chilled inside me, and I hesitantly grasped her arm.
"I…wasn't supposed to be sent immediately?" She shook her head.
"No. He said that while you had less supplies, you were still given two weeks to settle your affairs. Did that not happen?" She sounded concerned and now I was too.
"I was given a psychic message in my dreams, chose to take on the mantle of a Diamond and woke up in the middle of the woods…which I'm pretty sure used to a city." Irritation colored my timbre. "I managed to pull out a few things from my Gem and learn the basics but…I've been distracted." I shrugged.
"It seems there's been quite a few problems with the Pink Sunrise Project." I perked up, that was a factoid I hadn't gotten to yet.
"The Pink Sunrise Project?" I asked expectantly.
Fuschia Sapphire let out a soft laugh. "You." She pointed out, and I nodded. "It's taken Aster Diamond a long time to piece together how his mother did the impossible. Most Gem production dropped to mere replacement level, and with the reduction of the mortality rate…"
"It wasn't as much a problem as it could be." I guessed, sitting down on the couch to rest my feet.
"There are over three hundred trillion Gems within the Empire, so I would say so." I almost choked…that was tens of thousands of times the population of my Earth. Fuschia(it was a mouthful…) she was bemused at my expression. "Even so, when Aster Diamond made his second tour of the colonies, he expressed an interest in more sustainable production. Reducing our impact and keeping our population steady if nothing else."
"Second tour?" I asked, I'm not sure I was given anything in recent history.
"His first tour was in the first year and a half of Era 3, and he returned to his home of Earth for some time before…simply popping up in a colony as part of a road trip." I thought about a traumatized sixteen year old leaving his home, to try and figure out what to do with his life. "He traversed the colonies for several months before returning back again."
"And where does the Pink Sunrise Project come in?" This seemed a fair amount in the past now.
"Aster Diamond has been working on bringing organics and Gems for a long time, many human scientists contributed to the creation of the first true healing Gems." She sounded nervous but not a lot. "With the creativity of humans and the power of Gems we terraformed several worlds, Venus, Mars, and Ceres." That was either a very long term project or Gems are frighteningly efficient. "We've succeeded in creating Gems…but creating hybrids was much harder without needing to kill a Gem. And when the war started…quite a few projects were started up."
"Dangerous ones?" She blinked.
"Not ethically or physically, the issue was keeping it secret, away from the tendrils of the Black Wyrm. And it didn't meet any success until we came upon a source of energy to fuel one Gem. A very special type of Gem."
"A Diamond…but why waste energy on one Gem, what else is so special about a Diamond?"
"Do you know how a Diamond is made, your Illumination?" She was quiet, her chimes out of tune, a haunting cry.
"No." I hadn't found anything on the topic, whether it was omitted or in a different book I couldn't be sure. Getting things out of my gem could still be an erratic project.
"A Diamond is forged within the heart of a dying star, the vast heat and energy acting as a nursery for its power, empowering the seed of magic within its core." I went still, something buzzing at the back of my mind. "And when a Diamond is ready to be completed…it will eat it's parent alive, from the core to the plasma crust, the mass-energy of a giant star compressed into a single point." She pointed to the gem on my stomach.
That is absolutely terrifying.
"But…the cores of the Diamonds took millions of years to develop true driving minds, until at one point all the power was united within their Starhearts. Making new Diamonds is a rather difficult prospect in this era."
"So where did he get the power to power a Diamond?"
"He didn't."
"Huh?"
Fuschia sat down next to me with a twinkle in her eye. "The Black Wyrm should have been the death of our species," I nodded warily at her weary song. "Made of hundreds of billions of shards, some the size of planets and moons. But…when it came, it had already been unknowingly crippled, drained of power. Aster Diamond found that power, and sent forth the seed of magic into a dying star, colored with some of his Aura."
"How the hell did he do that?" I asked in bewilderment, because what the flying fuck?
"The Black Wyrm feeds on stars himself, and Aster Diamond's Peridot forced a fragment of His flesh to direct the energy into a selected star."
"Is it a specific star?"
"I believe your world calls it NML Cygni?" I nearly swallowed my tongue. That was a fifty solar mass red hypergiant, and she was saying my gem ate it.
"I'm guessing that this wasn't easily replicable, and it was more or less a divine miracle it worked to begin with?"
"The energy they found…it almost directed itself, as if using the shard as a jumping off point, and completed by the addition of His Aura." She sounded disturbed. "He didn't tell me why he let it do so…but it happened, and the Diamond is now a part of you, and you are a part of it."
"I'm not going to get a full explanation today." A statement rather than a question.
"Tomorrow is more likely."
"I'm going to take some time to rethink my entire life…do you mind?"
"Not at all…"
I'm already getting sick of this bullshit.
…
But at least I'm not alone. Not today.
