Diffraction 2.6
- Location
- Chula Vista
Diffraction 2.6
I hit the ground with a resounding thud, letting out a cry from the impact of a green fist on my face. I rolled, and dodged on all fours before jumping back into a combative position.
I followed the motions, heard the click of violins and chiptunes turn against me, and turned on a dime. Aventurine leapt over where I had been standing, her fist shattering a boulder as large as I am. Which meant she was hitting like a truck with every one of her strikes.
Then again she was a Quartz, even if a more specialized and sneaky type. They were built with power in mind, an enduring strength, a weight of stone that matched my own power more effectively. I could have learned from other Gems but they didn't offer the same experiences.
Someone like a Pearl or a Lapis Lazuli training themselves to fight…their movements would be more precise, more elegant and focused and while the second had power it was in aqueous waves and spikes and walls. It wasn't the same. A non-fusion Garnet would work but their power was again just different in how it was applied.
I kicked the ground, and leapt out of the way of another strike, Aventurine's fists crackling with green lightning. Her hands glowed and became enclosed within heavy gauntlets, and with a flick enormous blades radiated from the knuckles.
A hexagonal red-pink barrier placed itself in the path of her wild slash, and Aventurine laughed, a song radiating joy-battle-lust-peach-apple-lemon. "THAT'S MORE LIKE IT! SHOW ME WHAT YA GOT!"
I grit my teeth, biting back an angry retort. I charged, the world blurring around me as I hit my new top speed. I threw a series of jabs and punches, Aventurine blocking them with her forearms. She charged her bladed-gauntlets and I was rewarded with an electric blast to the face.
Shit!
The fight continued despite the setback, and I formed a bubble, and I extended spikes from the surface. I rolled the ball, crashing into Aventurine. She unleashed a long slashing motion, electric plasma exploding and breaking the bubble into shards of decaying energy.
I rolled around blows I could barely even see, the wind parting with the sheer speed Aventurine imparted into each and every snapping strike. And she was clearly still holding back, because I had heard the crack of air when she charged at full speed.
I spun behind Aventurine, bashing her with another hexagonal barrier and knocking her off her balance. But instead as she fell, she did a handstand, spinning and kicking me in the chin. I was sent flying into a tree and I scrambled up it, flexing my claws out to climb up a ninety degree angle surface.
I hardened my arms, human skin becoming rough, tough and dense scales. The tree began to fall, severed in half by a casual swipe from Aventurine. I jumped and reversed my floating, that energy field holding me aloft. I dropped like a brick, and my arms exploded into long jagged crystalline spikes. My opponent let out a pained burst, and she slid the claws of her gauntlet back into place.
I was grabbed by the collar, and without further notice, smashed into the ground, with a foot stomped down on my chest becoming the final blow.
"A lot of improvement for only three days of training." She offered to lift me up and I took it without hesitation. Her hand engulfed mine, her inch and a half long claws grazing my arm with a precise, careful ease. I was pulled up to my feet, and I cleared my throat at the damage to the woodland.
She rolled her eyes, and pushed me forward and I kissed a tree because at this point I didn't give much of a fuck anymore. I did the same for the other trees and the ground and before too long, it was like nothing had happened. Leaving a trail of broken trees and boulders sounded like a bad idea for remaining discreet.
I wiped my hands, clearing away the accumulated dust on them. "I'm still not as strong as I could be."
Aventurine chuckled. "It's been twenty seven days, you're not going to go from a squishy human to unyielding Diamond just like that." She cracked her knuckles, sauntering towards the tiny base. "Code patching should at least help clear up some of your rough spots though."
Being around Gems had started to very slowly numb me to how they were very free with their kisses. It was oddly conversational, not much of a big deal for the species. And with how they freely pass data, from memory to even certain perception powers it made sense.
Luckily none of them did something weird like kissing me on the mouth, a kiss on the cheek was one thing, a kiss on my virgin lips was another. But that didn't seem to be a common thing outside of very close friends or romantic relationships.
Now…I needed a nice hot shower.
I pulled at my shirt, still feeling some of the heat from the steam of my hot shower. Shifting to a girl had been an easy magic tweak, and I was comfortably wearing a red shirt and white gym shorts. Olly was busy, popping through the Galaxy Warp again and again, and bringing in materials and Robonoids, caked in red dust.
She had created a whole lot of gem alloy cables, and was more or less producing hundreds of tons of the stuff, if not thousands, along with some type of plasticine membrane. It still felt kind of weird to realize it was using my own ichor to make them, since they didn't want to waste what had been brought with them.
Each and every Gem sent had a store of ichor from all four Diamonds, literal tens of gallons of the stuff as needed. And when a single milliliter was all that was needed to create a single Gem…there was a lot of room to grow. Olly was busy with studying the properties of my ichor, while it was mostly like Steven's there were small tweaks to it…aspects shared more with Yellow oddly enough.
Olly's made over over a hundred Robonoids, including several about the size of small cars. Construction robots rapidly assembled the structure for what would eventually become a colony, my colony. She had enough cabling to suspend a few kilometers square worth of area, and the current plan was to cover about five hundred square kilometers beneath a protective layer of supremely tough membrane.
While it would have been easy to put up an energy field to protect the colony, it was costly and prone to power failure. This was basically a high tech, ultra strong tent held up by cable a thousand times stronger than steel. Cables set from a hundred meters to two hundred meters apart, a grand space for buildings and soil and life.
Some of those cables would be within buildings and towers at least a hundred meters high, because while Gems didn't need air, the life they needed did. Of course terraforming with only a handful of Gems wasn't exactly going to be…
I was smacked in the face multiple times by blunt objects, dropping out of my bed. A few Pebbles scurried about, poking me with worry.
"You okay?" I patted one on the head and nodded, and they ducked away into cute little mouse holes. Their cute little songs echoed in the walls and I held myself on my knees. I found the blunt object easily enough and stared.
A total of six Gems had come in this new burst, and my eyes focused to see what types had come through this time. The first gem was a pentagonal one with a medium dark yellow color, Legrandite from the looks of it. The gem next to it was a teardrop shaped specimen of Labradorite, three Rubies and a cabochon cut of Ammolite.
Before I could even think, the three Rubies began to glow with light and song and I scrambled back, falling on my ass. Two of the Gems emerged fairly normally, and stood at about the same height as Sapphire. My Sapphire I mean, though stockier and more heavily muscled.
Their uniform was more or less the standard one, with the Diamond insignia colored rose red, straddling the line between red and pink. Though one Gem had a frilly Kama cape thing and her squarish hair ended in curls. She showed her belly, where a hexagonal gemstone sat firmly at the center.
The second Ruby was very slightly taller, and had a slightly more robust frame and hair design, with a gem on her dorsal side of her right hand. Her color was a deeper shade, more rusty if you would. The remaining Ruby ended up being more unusual, continuing to form past where her fellow Rubies stopped.
I blinked and I looked up at the six foot tall Ruby with crimson skin and a different uniform from either Ruby. Her pants were looser, more like work-out clothing or a martial arts uniform, a dull red versus black while her shoulders were colored with a brown-red darkening to almost black around her gloved hands. She had her gem on her chest, and her dark crimson eyes had a sign of age on them.
She was an old rock, and I wasn't sure how I knew that.
All three made a quick salute, one gruff of song, another more casual and a third was a tad on the hard side, like rumbling pebbles. The big one went first.
"Blood Pigeon Ruby Facet-A11 Tetragon-27." The big one reported, with a designation unused by Rubies since before the advent of Era 1. More proof of her old age. The next Rubies followed up on their own designations.
The bellybutton Ruby smiled, her song just this side of seductive. "Ruby Facet-U27 Tetragon-4KY." Was said sweetly and easily.
The rusty skinned gem followed up. "Ruby Facet-B21 Trilliant-4ZZ." And at that moment I noted the cut of her stone was different. Here I had three perfectly nice Gems being all orderly and eager to talk to me…and I was on the ground like a common idiot.
"Umm…hello?" I picked myself up, grabbing the remaining Gems and placing them on my bed for the time being. "It's nice to meet the three of you." I actually was, still fascinated by Gems as a species. Plus two of them were small and adorable despite being able to beat the shit out of most humans on Earth.
Blood Pigeon was the first to respond, amusement dancing between gruff notes. "I thought you'd be taller."
I slumped. "Why do people keep saying that?" I whined, growling under my breath.
"Because it's funny." The chipper of the three Rubies confirmed my fear with a carefree expression. "Oh and we've been assigned as guards, it's what we wanted to do." The bellybutton Ruby preempted Blood Pigeon, her smile looking more like a mischievous smirk.
The giant Ruby rolled her eyes. "There's a lot of Gems who are going to need someone a little tougher to keep them safe. It might be Era 3 now, but this world is a lot more dangerous than most colonies. It's why we've got a few chunks of Quartzes on their way along with our commander."
"Commander?" That was actually interesting information, I doubt it's a Garnet since those tend to lead hundreds of Gems at the lower end and millions at the higher end. From what I knew, out of about twenty seven Gems as an initial party we had four Quartzes including Aventurine, five Rubies and an Orthoclase along with a Pearl trained in combat.
"Well she's a—" There was a howling roar outside, like the bark of dogs scaled up tenfold.
Fight.
"It might be time to show me what you can do." I stood up, looking back at the gems. The three Rubies shared smiles of varying emotional capacity. Their songs ring loud and clear and warm.
"RUBIES OUT!" Blood Pigeon gave out the orders, and the three Gems marched through my wall, leaving imprints of their bodies. I stepped out of my room, and ran towards the entrance to the thousands of square feet within this pocket dimension.
I made it out right as the three Rubies opened and shut the door behind them. I stepped out but stayed on the porch since I was still terrible at fighting. I blinked as I stared at the two massive monsters Aventurine was holding off.
They were monstrous, massive beasts of flesh and bone and spurs, jaws snapping to crush at Aventurine's arms. She moved like molasses to my eyes, clearly holding back against them. There was a grating sound, and I scowled, snapping my jaw in anger.
SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!
The three Rubies and Aventurine slowed before speeding back up again, with the group of three new Gems piling up on a single dog monster. They carefully crashed the beast into the ground, holding it down with their superior strength. Aventurine did the same, her gauntlets forming solid bands of electrical energy to hold down the dog.
I glanced over to a gruff faced auburn girl, her hard expression shifting to something closer to fear, an animal panic that left me just a tad concerned. I recognize Bitch easily enough, monstrous dogs with bony angular bodies and a rough looking auburn teenager were a rather obvious clue.
I stepped down from the porch, and sauntered over to the girl. Her eyes widened when she found me approaching her.
"Brutus h—" I lifted an eyebrow, and she growled. I approached further, and she attacked, throwing a punch. I took the hit and she let out a hiss of pain at my iron jaw.
"Stop that." I gently pointed out, my aura pressing outwards. Not against her but against her shard. "Stop empowering your dogs and we can…talk." I didn't smile, but there was a brief flash of my teeth regardless of what I wanted.
There was a glower on her face, wary and aggressive, lips pulled into a very small snarl. I narrowed my eyes, tilted my head. She wanted to attack, she was angry, scared, frustrated.
"Why did you attack my Gems?" Something possessive entered my voice, not in the sense of owning them…no this was a different kind of greed, a different kind of protective instinct.
"They got too close to my dogs." There was something else, it wasn't just her own inability to read people that had gotten her in trouble. I could feel the biting, grating tonal howls of her shard, physical projections of information and energy into the area around us.
I blasted my Aura, and the shard cowered, and I could feel it's feelings, that burst of terror-error-disconnection-confusion. The shards were powerful, complex and yet simple, vastly intellectual and yet bestial and instinctual. Their ability to manipulate dimensions and physical energies was vast. But they weren't magic, and we had stacked the dice in our favor.
The Empire had years of combating shards which meant they had means of messing with them, and the shards themselves could. With Mantellum being a good proof of concept. I was a Diamond, and all five of us possessed vast psychic power, our Auras proof of them.
And those of Cerise specifically had excellent means of deflecting, of stopping mind control, mind manipulation,we were reflections of Her after all…the cerise shadow of Light Given Mind.
I stared down the younger Rachel, she was of course younger, and she had bulk to her frame, but she hadn't built up the muscle her future self would one day earn.
A future self anyway.
"Get your dogs to back down and I'll let you all leave, I'm not interested in a fight." Rachel scowled but after a moment, she reached out with her power and the dogs stopped growing under her powe. Stopped supplyingthe pound by pound of mass entering through a method of dimensional transference.
I gestured, and she went to her dogs, looking mere moments away from attacking the Rubies, though they flashed their tusks with almost cruel smiles. The two dogs went from half ton monstrosities to husks, and she expertly cut away the rotting flesh with a knife on her person.
After a minute she had cut her dogs free, revealing a large and excited Rottweiler, black fur slick with ichor, and a slim but strong German Shepherd, fur matted by the wetness of the giant meat suit it had been piloting.
Ruby Facet-U27 Tetragon-4KY's eyes sparkled, and her song rippled with the smashing of sparks and hot metal.
"Doggy!" She cried out, making her approach, one made with careful analysis, the flash of fangs held back, music muted and softened to something sweet. Rachel stiffened, knuckles turning white with her grip.
She went for the Rottweiler, moving carefully, slowly, glancing back at the auburn teenager with wide puppy dog eyes. But not looking her directly in the eyes."I won't hurt him…he's a sweet boy isn't? Well trained too…may I?"
Rachel chuffed. "Fine. I can't stop you anyway." Ruby tsked, and pressed her hand against Brutus' fur, fingers gliding and petting him with experienced ease. He panted, his nub of a tail quivering back and forth in an approximation of a tail wag.
The bellybutton Ruby's song was sickeningly sweet, and I crossed my arms, keeping my temper in check as I stared Rachel down. She bared her teeth, attempting some type of dominance display.
We couldn't have that now can we?
I squared my shoulders, followed those strange foreign alien instincts, that Diamond brain with the backlogs of millions of years of contests and natural selection, that mechanical instinct honed across generations.
"How exactly did you end up here?" I asked, measured in tone, keeping my song from leaking too much. Her rewired brain might react badly to the frequencies of Gemsong.
"Needed a place to lay low, but I can't stay here. Not a lot we can eat out here, and if my dogs get sick…" She trailed off, as if waiting for me to ask more questions.
I didn't, it wasn't complicated. She was hiding from the Protectorate, and decided a big old forest was a good place to hide for a while.
"Food huh…?" Aventurine cut in, her voice plucking at the air with an electric crackle. "We've got some food to share if you need any, enough to get you back to wherever you're from." The Quartz pointed back to the Home Pyramid, and the small greenhouses and tree covered buildings built along a small grid on the stream.
Rachel grunted, and Aventurine replied back with a deep trill, rumbling in my chest.
"Alright." The cape acceded.
I watched from the corner of my vision as Rachel scarfed down her food, some type of magic cooked fish along with rice. Her dogs ate a helpful mix made by one of the Rubies. Who obviously had a lot of experience with canines with how expertly prepared they had been made.
Fuschia was watching over the remaining gemstones waiting to regenerate, kneeling on the sofa with an intense one eyed expression. Three Gems, of varying former castes and experiences.
It would obviously take them longer to emerge than the Rubies, unless one of them decided to prove me wrong and— there it goes.
The Labradorite was the Gem floating up into the air, their gem ringing with sound, and burning with light. Rachel went still, gaze sharpening. The mannequin frame of all Gems came to form, and clothing and personality was injected and layered over the mass of light.
In no time at all, another Gem floated down onto the ground. She's a more typical height, not as tiny as modern Corundum and not as bulky as lumps of Quartz, about the height of Lapis.
Her frame is slightly wider than the delicate elegant frames of a Lapis Lazuli, a little more curvaceous, especially around the hips. She wears a strapless dress, a light blue around the bust, with the exception of a black Diamond shape from her bust down to her lower stomach. The dress was a light blue directly below the symbol, and a deeper shade along the sides. Her smooth cut gem was right above her bust, below her neck. Her skin was cerulean, and her face was oval, with bags under dark blue eyes. Her baby blue hair was straight and had a dark blue hair band, and split at the ends as it curtained below her back.
I noted the lines on her skin, black color along a pristine blue surface. A magnetite inclusion from the looks of both her gems and her markings. Her tired expression was more wired than Olly's, and her soft smile reveals pointed teeth like that of piranha's, the facsimile of humanity broken.
"Is this a bad time?" Her song was even in beat, soft spoken, with a light accent to it. Just a little humor, buried in a quiet song, dry and casual. I nodded. Her eyes squinted, and she curtsied with her notes trailing amusement. "I'll make my leave then."
Rachel was staring at me, her natural glare sharpening, becoming more focused on me. I didn't look away, while I should have felt nervous, getting glared at by a superpowered fourteen year old wasn't very impressive. Her dogs weren't even all that scary when Aventurine could just rip them in half.
The meat suits rather than the dogs I mean. Killing dogs isn't really one of my goals here.
"What are you?" Her eyes were narrowed, hackles raised and her dogs followed her lead, light growls hitting the air.
"We're Gems." I replied with a chipper lilt.
"Don't be cute." She growled, and I nodded firmly.
"I'm not lying, we're Gems, beings of light and crystal with powers and abilities." I gestured to the several Gems in the room. Two Rubies, a Sapphire and an Amber. "You stumbled on our…home, territory, temporary base of operations?" I shrugged. "We offered you food, and you're probably planning on leaving and going back to civilization."
"You're like the monster capes?" I blinked at her blase and slightly offensive response, I guess Rachel wouldn't know they were called Case 53s.
"If you mean our biology is really different from humans yes," I rubbed my chin, folding one leg over the other. "But it's a bit of a simplification, and I don't think you want to sit through a long explanation."
"No I don't…" Rachel was tilting her head, like she was trying to figure out a puzzle and couldn't work it out. "What do you want from me?" She accused, expression pinched and agitated.
"Want?" I blinked. "Why would I want anything from you?" While having another parahuman might be nice, that wasn't why I had let Aventurine offer her food.
She sounded confused, paranoid, angry even. "Then why give me food?"
"Because we could? Only two of us need to eat, and we have a surplus." I had no means of helping a half-feral teenager, I had no context and couldn't use the experiences of my parents for this. "I suppose we could house you, but that doesn't seem like something you would want." I shrugged, there were options but going our separate ways was a good possibility.
"Hmm…" She grunted, continuing to eat and there was a terrible silence. "You don't seem to want anything, but she does." She pointed to Aventurine entering the rooms "She should get to the point."
The Quartz grinned, tusks as sharp as a lion's killing fangs clicking. "Hah! You're a bit of a brute aren't ya? I'll keep it simple…I just wanted to give ya food, but then I thought…why not make a deal, a trade."
"For what?" Rachel gruffly responded.
"We give you food and shelter, and you help us with information, we're not locals ya see."
"I don't talk to people." Which was true from Rachel.
"Nothing like that," Aventurine reassured. "We just need eyes and ears, and someone to deliver equipment so we can pull it off." She shifted her huge shoulders. "You scratch our backs, we scratch yours…that's the saying right?" I gave a thumbs up. "We might even give you back up if you want it."
"That all?" Rachel said it with the dryness of the Sahara desert.
"Or we can give you a three day's supply of food and send you on your way back, we're not exactly desperate here." We weren't, we could find other ways to get what we needed.
Rachel narrowed her eyes, though her expression softened when she saw how my bellybutton Ruby was careful with her dogs.
"You'll help me with my dogs?" There was something, not calculating, more measuring.
"I'd do that free of charge, I have a lot of history with them…so does Ruby over there," Something soft entered Aventurine's song, a melancholic melody. "It's your choice to make, we'll pack you supplies either way."
Rachel was still. "Later." She stood up, and I expected not to get an answer until tomorrow.
Just a guess.
I suppose the future is going to be pretty eventful.
I floated within a landscape of clouds under a cerise sky, golden tinged masses of fluff twisting around me. This time I knew I was in a Dream, my own pocket of a vast Realm of Dreams. A place that was nowhere and everywhere, in every when and yet not in any one place, in one space, in one time.
I jumped, and broke the sound barrier a hundred times over, bursting out from the cloud line and into the void of space. It was full of stars, and my eyes saw them as a barrage of energy, spikes of color in all the spectrums of the light. I could see the cracks, thousands upon thousands of them, perhaps even a million across a scarred and frightened world.
A few cracks were familiar, and I drifted along the currents of the Dream Realm, following after them. The Earth below me changed, and my eyebrows furrowed in realization.
This was his Earth, I could hear the songs of a million Gems, the rumbling cacophony of eight billion organic lives. I looked up at the Moon and saw great cities of crystal and light, spire across a grid of a terraformed natural satellite, Luna under azure skies.
I could talk with him here, in this Dream Realm shared by all living things, by humans, by Gems, and by countless other beings. What was out there?
I veered away from Earth, and I spun in the emptiness of space, the stars melting into beacons of light. Images came to me, memories, anchors, places that could exist but probably didn't.
The stars melted away and I was suddenly shooting across a vast star system, hundreds of light years from Earth if not thousands. Twenty one worlds orbited around a bright white star, so many of them bearing life of one stripe or another, a calculated dance of gravity and mass shifting keeping them from falling apart.
I drifted towards one world, and I let out a strangled scream as I slammed into a planet, a verdant world covered in red vegetation and with striking cerise and azure seas. I fell into the mindscape of the planet, sliding between a hundred million dreams, essence sparking with gold and amber.
I walked on cracked desert soil, and looked up at a series of towers and round cylindrical buildings topped by domes of stained glass. A desert palace sparkling with the unreal aura of dreams and nightmares both.
I stepped back, where two figures collided, both burning inside and out with ultraviolet fire, energy and power given form and purpose. Two golden tanned beings moving with grace and martial strength.
I caught the shine of black and red hair, flaring with fire and heat, and fists lighting with violet and green energy respectively. There were screams, raw in their emotion, rage and betrayal, jealousy and hatred burning against my mind.
"You can't win sister! " The raven haired alien screamed, and I understood her perfectly. Because I was a Gem, because I was a Diamond. "The Citadel will be here soon, it's time for you to…end!" Both were woman, female, almost human, and yet there were subtle differences.
They drifted and hopped on long digitigrade legs, golden glittering skin exposed to the sun. Their skin was covered in faint patterns, small spots and long weaving stripes. Glowing emerald eyes radiated with power, in a nightmare memory, a battle between sisters.
Between royal kin.
There was a scream in the air, a shift in the wind, a burst of enormous power. Both sisters stopped, and the raven haired sister paused, an elongated ear twitching and swiveling, an earpiece visible in the scene.
"What…where is the armada, I've given you the plans, now carry them out—" The earpiece releases a piercing scream and the traitorous sister rips it away from a now bleeding ear. There was something in the sky, a rippling in reality, across the light of a distant world.
I scrambled back, and the vision focused away from the scene and onto a world surrounded by a great defenses, orbital rings carrying fortresses, vessels of gleaming silver and shadowy titanium in the thousands, emplacements spitting nuclear fire and tendrils of dark energies against an unseen foe.
Something emerges from the abyss, and I saw something vast. It wasn't big in the way trees or even the mountains were, it cast a shadow on the planet itself, black crystalline flesh obscured under optical distortions as light itself was warped around the vast thing, like a worm, like a whale, like a divine serpent casting down judgment.
It turned and ten thousand cannons blasted with a force to sunder a continent, flesh burned away, pieces the size of islands broken and shattered and melted. It was larger than the moon, the serpentine thing wrapping around the world in panic and terror.
Guns fired, ships the length of towns were sundered, asteroid fields were scattered and stellar beasts died. In a single battle, an empire was broken, armies ruined, weapons exhausted, rings twenty thousand kilometers long breaking into a million pieces. The panicked Wyrm died in terror and confusion, it's flesh falling into the yellow-white star, a moon sized dragon slain.
I retracted back to the planet I had seen first, falling down onto my knees. One of the golden skinned humanoids remained, The one dreaming this terrible Dream.
She was taller than Blood Pigeon Ruby, her glimmering skin a burnt orange hue with lighter patterns, spots along her legs, whirling stripes on her bare stomach and arms. She had a face of classical beauty with a touch of the alien, just a tad longer than normal, eyes like a cat's with an emerald glow. Her legs were shapely, and she stood on the balls of her feet, built more for sprinting than any human should be. Her hair was a shade of red deeper than humanly possible, and she wore only a purple skirt and top, arms crossed over her bust, a single clawed index finger tapping against them.
"S-Sorry." She shrugged, and with a gentle tap on my nose sent me out of her dream, flying into the void.
I flew faster than light, outpacing the laws of physics. I flew away from that star system which had known so much loss and pain, and towards another star, towards another world. It was a large dark planet, tidally locked to its parent star, with a narrow terminus where life could survive.
I looked at the dark side of the planet, and there was a sensation like I was being watched, like fingers were crawling along my skin. I dropped down like a rock, and crashed into another dream, one that was deeper and larger than most.
I found myself in a hot spring, steam rising from golden waters lapping against dark stone. Strange leaves and branches hung overhead, blending into the soft gold-cerise light of the room. I looked around at the ornate architecture, like something out of a fairy tale, pillars holding up the dark stone.
I was sitting on a metal bench and felt oddly rejuvenated, like all the energy I spent projecting my mind across space and time was being recovered second by second. There was another presence, someone humming a tune, plucking at the strings of the Dream.
I stepped off the bench, and the world shifted around me, leaving me in front of a statue of a massive moth, carved in stone and lined with white gold. There was a whisper, of something dead, forgotten, consumed.
The light went out, and I shrunk in on myself, trying to project a bubble even though I was astral projecting. It failed, and the shrine was consumed by shadows, countless white orbs emerging from the shadows. My Aura pushed the darkness back, and I swallowed nervously.
Where the hell had I gone?
Something large emerged from the shadows, a figure with eight eyes and two sets of branching horns, four arms and countless tendrils moving back and forth, like a living glitch made of void and shadows and darkness.
I felt cold, and the shadows retracted at the bidding of the fifty foot tall lord of darkness, and it didn't speak in direct words, nor in the lyrical quality of Gemsong.
Think.
Feel.
Live.
My anxieties retreated at the passiveness of the entity, even as it's voice felt like a chorus of madness, void made manifest, potential and primordial energy warping around me.
"I…what are you?"
Void. Regrets. Shadow. I flinched, as the shadows parted for thousands, maybe millions of specters, countless regrets gathered within this void within a dream. The being chuffed, and I blinked as it poked me with a clawed hand, reflecting thoughts and feelings back at me.
Light Of Life. It gestured to myself, to my form, eight eyes crinkling while it's body shifted with a chittering crack. It gestured and images emerged in the black.
I saw a radiant figure, white light shining like a star, the face of a Diamond.
Light Of Mind.
Yellow followed.
Light Of Body.
Blue rose from the void, clouds of light azure vaporizing in the dream realm.
Light Of Will.
Is…is that what this being, this Void Given Focus calls the Diamonds, so I'm the Light Of Life then?
The entity shook its head, gesturing that I was similar but there were small disparities, clicks of tonal chitters translated by my Diamond brain into something barely coherent.
"Could I leave? I'm feeling a little lost." I asked and it responded, a massive blade made of golden light folding the Dream Realm with pure power. I was launched from this strange place between worlds, and flew.
I was back on Earth, his Earth and I slipped through the cracks without meaning to. I spun, and collided with dull and muted dreams, the disparate processes of something enormous in scope and scale. I walked along crystalline circuitry sparking with energies, thousands of red crystals melded together into a single unit.
I LISTENED, I HEARD, I EXPERIENCED.
I drifted among the dregs of thoughts and dreams and impressions of something as large as a planet, a labyrinthine machine, broadcasting, intuiting, connecting, draining, activating, drawing upon. It was the pedestal, the church, the false idol, made to draw upon the powers of others of its kind. It connected to ten thousand lesser pieces, broken in body and spirit, in a broken network. It drew upon the sleeping desires of its host, creating truly grand and worth—
I was ripped away from the mind of the beast, a claw curling to pull me by my collar. My eyes were wide when I looked back at Diamond pupils that weren't my own.
Aster Diamond smiled.
It's time for you to wake up…
I let out a scream as I woke up from that tangle of dreams, gripping onto my pillow for comfort I breathed, in and out and named items in the room to further delay my panic and anxiety.
I had been subconsciously using my astral projection, and had entered the dreams of several entities. The first was humanoid, almost too human even and yet there were subtle differences, enough to unnerve a person. It was a flashback, a distorted nightmare, and I noted the imagery of a vast shard of an Entity. The second world was one of darkness, the home of something huge and powerful.
Then I had slid into the assorted thoughts of a shard, and was pulled out of the madness by Steven. My astral projection had sent me across space and time, and he had saved me. I laid back down on my bed with a groan.
I'm not going to sleep much tonight am I?
I hit the ground with a resounding thud, letting out a cry from the impact of a green fist on my face. I rolled, and dodged on all fours before jumping back into a combative position.
I followed the motions, heard the click of violins and chiptunes turn against me, and turned on a dime. Aventurine leapt over where I had been standing, her fist shattering a boulder as large as I am. Which meant she was hitting like a truck with every one of her strikes.
Then again she was a Quartz, even if a more specialized and sneaky type. They were built with power in mind, an enduring strength, a weight of stone that matched my own power more effectively. I could have learned from other Gems but they didn't offer the same experiences.
Someone like a Pearl or a Lapis Lazuli training themselves to fight…their movements would be more precise, more elegant and focused and while the second had power it was in aqueous waves and spikes and walls. It wasn't the same. A non-fusion Garnet would work but their power was again just different in how it was applied.
I kicked the ground, and leapt out of the way of another strike, Aventurine's fists crackling with green lightning. Her hands glowed and became enclosed within heavy gauntlets, and with a flick enormous blades radiated from the knuckles.
A hexagonal red-pink barrier placed itself in the path of her wild slash, and Aventurine laughed, a song radiating joy-battle-lust-peach-apple-lemon. "THAT'S MORE LIKE IT! SHOW ME WHAT YA GOT!"
I grit my teeth, biting back an angry retort. I charged, the world blurring around me as I hit my new top speed. I threw a series of jabs and punches, Aventurine blocking them with her forearms. She charged her bladed-gauntlets and I was rewarded with an electric blast to the face.
Shit!
The fight continued despite the setback, and I formed a bubble, and I extended spikes from the surface. I rolled the ball, crashing into Aventurine. She unleashed a long slashing motion, electric plasma exploding and breaking the bubble into shards of decaying energy.
I rolled around blows I could barely even see, the wind parting with the sheer speed Aventurine imparted into each and every snapping strike. And she was clearly still holding back, because I had heard the crack of air when she charged at full speed.
I spun behind Aventurine, bashing her with another hexagonal barrier and knocking her off her balance. But instead as she fell, she did a handstand, spinning and kicking me in the chin. I was sent flying into a tree and I scrambled up it, flexing my claws out to climb up a ninety degree angle surface.
I hardened my arms, human skin becoming rough, tough and dense scales. The tree began to fall, severed in half by a casual swipe from Aventurine. I jumped and reversed my floating, that energy field holding me aloft. I dropped like a brick, and my arms exploded into long jagged crystalline spikes. My opponent let out a pained burst, and she slid the claws of her gauntlet back into place.
I was grabbed by the collar, and without further notice, smashed into the ground, with a foot stomped down on my chest becoming the final blow.
"A lot of improvement for only three days of training." She offered to lift me up and I took it without hesitation. Her hand engulfed mine, her inch and a half long claws grazing my arm with a precise, careful ease. I was pulled up to my feet, and I cleared my throat at the damage to the woodland.
She rolled her eyes, and pushed me forward and I kissed a tree because at this point I didn't give much of a fuck anymore. I did the same for the other trees and the ground and before too long, it was like nothing had happened. Leaving a trail of broken trees and boulders sounded like a bad idea for remaining discreet.
I wiped my hands, clearing away the accumulated dust on them. "I'm still not as strong as I could be."
Aventurine chuckled. "It's been twenty seven days, you're not going to go from a squishy human to unyielding Diamond just like that." She cracked her knuckles, sauntering towards the tiny base. "Code patching should at least help clear up some of your rough spots though."
Being around Gems had started to very slowly numb me to how they were very free with their kisses. It was oddly conversational, not much of a big deal for the species. And with how they freely pass data, from memory to even certain perception powers it made sense.
Luckily none of them did something weird like kissing me on the mouth, a kiss on the cheek was one thing, a kiss on my virgin lips was another. But that didn't seem to be a common thing outside of very close friends or romantic relationships.
Now…I needed a nice hot shower.
I pulled at my shirt, still feeling some of the heat from the steam of my hot shower. Shifting to a girl had been an easy magic tweak, and I was comfortably wearing a red shirt and white gym shorts. Olly was busy, popping through the Galaxy Warp again and again, and bringing in materials and Robonoids, caked in red dust.
She had created a whole lot of gem alloy cables, and was more or less producing hundreds of tons of the stuff, if not thousands, along with some type of plasticine membrane. It still felt kind of weird to realize it was using my own ichor to make them, since they didn't want to waste what had been brought with them.
Each and every Gem sent had a store of ichor from all four Diamonds, literal tens of gallons of the stuff as needed. And when a single milliliter was all that was needed to create a single Gem…there was a lot of room to grow. Olly was busy with studying the properties of my ichor, while it was mostly like Steven's there were small tweaks to it…aspects shared more with Yellow oddly enough.
Olly's made over over a hundred Robonoids, including several about the size of small cars. Construction robots rapidly assembled the structure for what would eventually become a colony, my colony. She had enough cabling to suspend a few kilometers square worth of area, and the current plan was to cover about five hundred square kilometers beneath a protective layer of supremely tough membrane.
While it would have been easy to put up an energy field to protect the colony, it was costly and prone to power failure. This was basically a high tech, ultra strong tent held up by cable a thousand times stronger than steel. Cables set from a hundred meters to two hundred meters apart, a grand space for buildings and soil and life.
Some of those cables would be within buildings and towers at least a hundred meters high, because while Gems didn't need air, the life they needed did. Of course terraforming with only a handful of Gems wasn't exactly going to be…
I was smacked in the face multiple times by blunt objects, dropping out of my bed. A few Pebbles scurried about, poking me with worry.
"You okay?" I patted one on the head and nodded, and they ducked away into cute little mouse holes. Their cute little songs echoed in the walls and I held myself on my knees. I found the blunt object easily enough and stared.
A total of six Gems had come in this new burst, and my eyes focused to see what types had come through this time. The first gem was a pentagonal one with a medium dark yellow color, Legrandite from the looks of it. The gem next to it was a teardrop shaped specimen of Labradorite, three Rubies and a cabochon cut of Ammolite.
Before I could even think, the three Rubies began to glow with light and song and I scrambled back, falling on my ass. Two of the Gems emerged fairly normally, and stood at about the same height as Sapphire. My Sapphire I mean, though stockier and more heavily muscled.
Their uniform was more or less the standard one, with the Diamond insignia colored rose red, straddling the line between red and pink. Though one Gem had a frilly Kama cape thing and her squarish hair ended in curls. She showed her belly, where a hexagonal gemstone sat firmly at the center.
The second Ruby was very slightly taller, and had a slightly more robust frame and hair design, with a gem on her dorsal side of her right hand. Her color was a deeper shade, more rusty if you would. The remaining Ruby ended up being more unusual, continuing to form past where her fellow Rubies stopped.
I blinked and I looked up at the six foot tall Ruby with crimson skin and a different uniform from either Ruby. Her pants were looser, more like work-out clothing or a martial arts uniform, a dull red versus black while her shoulders were colored with a brown-red darkening to almost black around her gloved hands. She had her gem on her chest, and her dark crimson eyes had a sign of age on them.
She was an old rock, and I wasn't sure how I knew that.
All three made a quick salute, one gruff of song, another more casual and a third was a tad on the hard side, like rumbling pebbles. The big one went first.
"Blood Pigeon Ruby Facet-A11 Tetragon-27." The big one reported, with a designation unused by Rubies since before the advent of Era 1. More proof of her old age. The next Rubies followed up on their own designations.
The bellybutton Ruby smiled, her song just this side of seductive. "Ruby Facet-U27 Tetragon-4KY." Was said sweetly and easily.
The rusty skinned gem followed up. "Ruby Facet-B21 Trilliant-4ZZ." And at that moment I noted the cut of her stone was different. Here I had three perfectly nice Gems being all orderly and eager to talk to me…and I was on the ground like a common idiot.
"Umm…hello?" I picked myself up, grabbing the remaining Gems and placing them on my bed for the time being. "It's nice to meet the three of you." I actually was, still fascinated by Gems as a species. Plus two of them were small and adorable despite being able to beat the shit out of most humans on Earth.
Blood Pigeon was the first to respond, amusement dancing between gruff notes. "I thought you'd be taller."
I slumped. "Why do people keep saying that?" I whined, growling under my breath.
"Because it's funny." The chipper of the three Rubies confirmed my fear with a carefree expression. "Oh and we've been assigned as guards, it's what we wanted to do." The bellybutton Ruby preempted Blood Pigeon, her smile looking more like a mischievous smirk.
The giant Ruby rolled her eyes. "There's a lot of Gems who are going to need someone a little tougher to keep them safe. It might be Era 3 now, but this world is a lot more dangerous than most colonies. It's why we've got a few chunks of Quartzes on their way along with our commander."
"Commander?" That was actually interesting information, I doubt it's a Garnet since those tend to lead hundreds of Gems at the lower end and millions at the higher end. From what I knew, out of about twenty seven Gems as an initial party we had four Quartzes including Aventurine, five Rubies and an Orthoclase along with a Pearl trained in combat.
"Well she's a—" There was a howling roar outside, like the bark of dogs scaled up tenfold.
Fight.
"It might be time to show me what you can do." I stood up, looking back at the gems. The three Rubies shared smiles of varying emotional capacity. Their songs ring loud and clear and warm.
"RUBIES OUT!" Blood Pigeon gave out the orders, and the three Gems marched through my wall, leaving imprints of their bodies. I stepped out of my room, and ran towards the entrance to the thousands of square feet within this pocket dimension.
I made it out right as the three Rubies opened and shut the door behind them. I stepped out but stayed on the porch since I was still terrible at fighting. I blinked as I stared at the two massive monsters Aventurine was holding off.
They were monstrous, massive beasts of flesh and bone and spurs, jaws snapping to crush at Aventurine's arms. She moved like molasses to my eyes, clearly holding back against them. There was a grating sound, and I scowled, snapping my jaw in anger.
SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!
The three Rubies and Aventurine slowed before speeding back up again, with the group of three new Gems piling up on a single dog monster. They carefully crashed the beast into the ground, holding it down with their superior strength. Aventurine did the same, her gauntlets forming solid bands of electrical energy to hold down the dog.
I glanced over to a gruff faced auburn girl, her hard expression shifting to something closer to fear, an animal panic that left me just a tad concerned. I recognize Bitch easily enough, monstrous dogs with bony angular bodies and a rough looking auburn teenager were a rather obvious clue.
I stepped down from the porch, and sauntered over to the girl. Her eyes widened when she found me approaching her.
"Brutus h—" I lifted an eyebrow, and she growled. I approached further, and she attacked, throwing a punch. I took the hit and she let out a hiss of pain at my iron jaw.
"Stop that." I gently pointed out, my aura pressing outwards. Not against her but against her shard. "Stop empowering your dogs and we can…talk." I didn't smile, but there was a brief flash of my teeth regardless of what I wanted.
There was a glower on her face, wary and aggressive, lips pulled into a very small snarl. I narrowed my eyes, tilted my head. She wanted to attack, she was angry, scared, frustrated.
"Why did you attack my Gems?" Something possessive entered my voice, not in the sense of owning them…no this was a different kind of greed, a different kind of protective instinct.
"They got too close to my dogs." There was something else, it wasn't just her own inability to read people that had gotten her in trouble. I could feel the biting, grating tonal howls of her shard, physical projections of information and energy into the area around us.
I blasted my Aura, and the shard cowered, and I could feel it's feelings, that burst of terror-error-disconnection-confusion. The shards were powerful, complex and yet simple, vastly intellectual and yet bestial and instinctual. Their ability to manipulate dimensions and physical energies was vast. But they weren't magic, and we had stacked the dice in our favor.
The Empire had years of combating shards which meant they had means of messing with them, and the shards themselves could. With Mantellum being a good proof of concept. I was a Diamond, and all five of us possessed vast psychic power, our Auras proof of them.
And those of Cerise specifically had excellent means of deflecting, of stopping mind control, mind manipulation,
I stared down the younger Rachel, she was of course younger, and she had bulk to her frame, but she hadn't built up the muscle her future self would one day earn.
A future self anyway.
"Get your dogs to back down and I'll let you all leave, I'm not interested in a fight." Rachel scowled but after a moment, she reached out with her power and the dogs stopped growing under her powe. Stopped supplyingthe pound by pound of mass entering through a method of dimensional transference.
I gestured, and she went to her dogs, looking mere moments away from attacking the Rubies, though they flashed their tusks with almost cruel smiles. The two dogs went from half ton monstrosities to husks, and she expertly cut away the rotting flesh with a knife on her person.
After a minute she had cut her dogs free, revealing a large and excited Rottweiler, black fur slick with ichor, and a slim but strong German Shepherd, fur matted by the wetness of the giant meat suit it had been piloting.
Ruby Facet-U27 Tetragon-4KY's eyes sparkled, and her song rippled with the smashing of sparks and hot metal.
"Doggy!" She cried out, making her approach, one made with careful analysis, the flash of fangs held back, music muted and softened to something sweet. Rachel stiffened, knuckles turning white with her grip.
She went for the Rottweiler, moving carefully, slowly, glancing back at the auburn teenager with wide puppy dog eyes. But not looking her directly in the eyes."I won't hurt him…he's a sweet boy isn't? Well trained too…may I?"
Rachel chuffed. "Fine. I can't stop you anyway." Ruby tsked, and pressed her hand against Brutus' fur, fingers gliding and petting him with experienced ease. He panted, his nub of a tail quivering back and forth in an approximation of a tail wag.
The bellybutton Ruby's song was sickeningly sweet, and I crossed my arms, keeping my temper in check as I stared Rachel down. She bared her teeth, attempting some type of dominance display.
We couldn't have that now can we?
I squared my shoulders, followed those strange foreign alien instincts, that Diamond brain with the backlogs of millions of years of contests and natural selection, that mechanical instinct honed across generations.
"How exactly did you end up here?" I asked, measured in tone, keeping my song from leaking too much. Her rewired brain might react badly to the frequencies of Gemsong.
"Needed a place to lay low, but I can't stay here. Not a lot we can eat out here, and if my dogs get sick…" She trailed off, as if waiting for me to ask more questions.
I didn't, it wasn't complicated. She was hiding from the Protectorate, and decided a big old forest was a good place to hide for a while.
"Food huh…?" Aventurine cut in, her voice plucking at the air with an electric crackle. "We've got some food to share if you need any, enough to get you back to wherever you're from." The Quartz pointed back to the Home Pyramid, and the small greenhouses and tree covered buildings built along a small grid on the stream.
Rachel grunted, and Aventurine replied back with a deep trill, rumbling in my chest.
"Alright." The cape acceded.
I watched from the corner of my vision as Rachel scarfed down her food, some type of magic cooked fish along with rice. Her dogs ate a helpful mix made by one of the Rubies. Who obviously had a lot of experience with canines with how expertly prepared they had been made.
Fuschia was watching over the remaining gemstones waiting to regenerate, kneeling on the sofa with an intense one eyed expression. Three Gems, of varying former castes and experiences.
It would obviously take them longer to emerge than the Rubies, unless one of them decided to prove me wrong and— there it goes.
The Labradorite was the Gem floating up into the air, their gem ringing with sound, and burning with light. Rachel went still, gaze sharpening. The mannequin frame of all Gems came to form, and clothing and personality was injected and layered over the mass of light.
In no time at all, another Gem floated down onto the ground. She's a more typical height, not as tiny as modern Corundum and not as bulky as lumps of Quartz, about the height of Lapis.
Her frame is slightly wider than the delicate elegant frames of a Lapis Lazuli, a little more curvaceous, especially around the hips. She wears a strapless dress, a light blue around the bust, with the exception of a black Diamond shape from her bust down to her lower stomach. The dress was a light blue directly below the symbol, and a deeper shade along the sides. Her smooth cut gem was right above her bust, below her neck. Her skin was cerulean, and her face was oval, with bags under dark blue eyes. Her baby blue hair was straight and had a dark blue hair band, and split at the ends as it curtained below her back.
I noted the lines on her skin, black color along a pristine blue surface. A magnetite inclusion from the looks of both her gems and her markings. Her tired expression was more wired than Olly's, and her soft smile reveals pointed teeth like that of piranha's, the facsimile of humanity broken.
"Is this a bad time?" Her song was even in beat, soft spoken, with a light accent to it. Just a little humor, buried in a quiet song, dry and casual. I nodded. Her eyes squinted, and she curtsied with her notes trailing amusement. "I'll make my leave then."
Rachel was staring at me, her natural glare sharpening, becoming more focused on me. I didn't look away, while I should have felt nervous, getting glared at by a superpowered fourteen year old wasn't very impressive. Her dogs weren't even all that scary when Aventurine could just rip them in half.
The meat suits rather than the dogs I mean. Killing dogs isn't really one of my goals here.
"What are you?" Her eyes were narrowed, hackles raised and her dogs followed her lead, light growls hitting the air.
"We're Gems." I replied with a chipper lilt.
"Don't be cute." She growled, and I nodded firmly.
"I'm not lying, we're Gems, beings of light and crystal with powers and abilities." I gestured to the several Gems in the room. Two Rubies, a Sapphire and an Amber. "You stumbled on our…home, territory, temporary base of operations?" I shrugged. "We offered you food, and you're probably planning on leaving and going back to civilization."
"You're like the monster capes?" I blinked at her blase and slightly offensive response, I guess Rachel wouldn't know they were called Case 53s.
"If you mean our biology is really different from humans yes," I rubbed my chin, folding one leg over the other. "But it's a bit of a simplification, and I don't think you want to sit through a long explanation."
"No I don't…" Rachel was tilting her head, like she was trying to figure out a puzzle and couldn't work it out. "What do you want from me?" She accused, expression pinched and agitated.
"Want?" I blinked. "Why would I want anything from you?" While having another parahuman might be nice, that wasn't why I had let Aventurine offer her food.
She sounded confused, paranoid, angry even. "Then why give me food?"
"Because we could? Only two of us need to eat, and we have a surplus." I had no means of helping a half-feral teenager, I had no context and couldn't use the experiences of my parents for this. "I suppose we could house you, but that doesn't seem like something you would want." I shrugged, there were options but going our separate ways was a good possibility.
"Hmm…" She grunted, continuing to eat and there was a terrible silence. "You don't seem to want anything, but she does." She pointed to Aventurine entering the rooms "She should get to the point."
The Quartz grinned, tusks as sharp as a lion's killing fangs clicking. "Hah! You're a bit of a brute aren't ya? I'll keep it simple…I just wanted to give ya food, but then I thought…why not make a deal, a trade."
"For what?" Rachel gruffly responded.
"We give you food and shelter, and you help us with information, we're not locals ya see."
"I don't talk to people." Which was true from Rachel.
"Nothing like that," Aventurine reassured. "We just need eyes and ears, and someone to deliver equipment so we can pull it off." She shifted her huge shoulders. "You scratch our backs, we scratch yours…that's the saying right?" I gave a thumbs up. "We might even give you back up if you want it."
"That all?" Rachel said it with the dryness of the Sahara desert.
"Or we can give you a three day's supply of food and send you on your way back, we're not exactly desperate here." We weren't, we could find other ways to get what we needed.
Rachel narrowed her eyes, though her expression softened when she saw how my bellybutton Ruby was careful with her dogs.
"You'll help me with my dogs?" There was something, not calculating, more measuring.
"I'd do that free of charge, I have a lot of history with them…so does Ruby over there," Something soft entered Aventurine's song, a melancholic melody. "It's your choice to make, we'll pack you supplies either way."
Rachel was still. "Later." She stood up, and I expected not to get an answer until tomorrow.
Just a guess.
I suppose the future is going to be pretty eventful.
I floated within a landscape of clouds under a cerise sky, golden tinged masses of fluff twisting around me. This time I knew I was in a Dream, my own pocket of a vast Realm of Dreams. A place that was nowhere and everywhere, in every when and yet not in any one place, in one space, in one time.
I jumped, and broke the sound barrier a hundred times over, bursting out from the cloud line and into the void of space. It was full of stars, and my eyes saw them as a barrage of energy, spikes of color in all the spectrums of the light. I could see the cracks, thousands upon thousands of them, perhaps even a million across a scarred and frightened world.
A few cracks were familiar, and I drifted along the currents of the Dream Realm, following after them. The Earth below me changed, and my eyebrows furrowed in realization.
This was his Earth, I could hear the songs of a million Gems, the rumbling cacophony of eight billion organic lives. I looked up at the Moon and saw great cities of crystal and light, spire across a grid of a terraformed natural satellite, Luna under azure skies.
I could talk with him here, in this Dream Realm shared by all living things, by humans, by Gems, and by countless other beings. What was out there?
I veered away from Earth, and I spun in the emptiness of space, the stars melting into beacons of light. Images came to me, memories, anchors, places that could exist but probably didn't.
The stars melted away and I was suddenly shooting across a vast star system, hundreds of light years from Earth if not thousands. Twenty one worlds orbited around a bright white star, so many of them bearing life of one stripe or another, a calculated dance of gravity and mass shifting keeping them from falling apart.
I drifted towards one world, and I let out a strangled scream as I slammed into a planet, a verdant world covered in red vegetation and with striking cerise and azure seas. I fell into the mindscape of the planet, sliding between a hundred million dreams, essence sparking with gold and amber.
I walked on cracked desert soil, and looked up at a series of towers and round cylindrical buildings topped by domes of stained glass. A desert palace sparkling with the unreal aura of dreams and nightmares both.
I stepped back, where two figures collided, both burning inside and out with ultraviolet fire, energy and power given form and purpose. Two golden tanned beings moving with grace and martial strength.
I caught the shine of black and red hair, flaring with fire and heat, and fists lighting with violet and green energy respectively. There were screams, raw in their emotion, rage and betrayal, jealousy and hatred burning against my mind.
"You can't win sister! " The raven haired alien screamed, and I understood her perfectly. Because I was a Gem, because I was a Diamond. "The Citadel will be here soon, it's time for you to…end!" Both were woman, female, almost human, and yet there were subtle differences.
They drifted and hopped on long digitigrade legs, golden glittering skin exposed to the sun. Their skin was covered in faint patterns, small spots and long weaving stripes. Glowing emerald eyes radiated with power, in a nightmare memory, a battle between sisters.
Between royal kin.
There was a scream in the air, a shift in the wind, a burst of enormous power. Both sisters stopped, and the raven haired sister paused, an elongated ear twitching and swiveling, an earpiece visible in the scene.
"What…where is the armada, I've given you the plans, now carry them out—" The earpiece releases a piercing scream and the traitorous sister rips it away from a now bleeding ear. There was something in the sky, a rippling in reality, across the light of a distant world.
I scrambled back, and the vision focused away from the scene and onto a world surrounded by a great defenses, orbital rings carrying fortresses, vessels of gleaming silver and shadowy titanium in the thousands, emplacements spitting nuclear fire and tendrils of dark energies against an unseen foe.
Something emerges from the abyss, and I saw something vast. It wasn't big in the way trees or even the mountains were, it cast a shadow on the planet itself, black crystalline flesh obscured under optical distortions as light itself was warped around the vast thing, like a worm, like a whale, like a divine serpent casting down judgment.
It turned and ten thousand cannons blasted with a force to sunder a continent, flesh burned away, pieces the size of islands broken and shattered and melted. It was larger than the moon, the serpentine thing wrapping around the world in panic and terror.
Guns fired, ships the length of towns were sundered, asteroid fields were scattered and stellar beasts died. In a single battle, an empire was broken, armies ruined, weapons exhausted, rings twenty thousand kilometers long breaking into a million pieces. The panicked Wyrm died in terror and confusion, it's flesh falling into the yellow-white star, a moon sized dragon slain.
I retracted back to the planet I had seen first, falling down onto my knees. One of the golden skinned humanoids remained, The one dreaming this terrible Dream.
She was taller than Blood Pigeon Ruby, her glimmering skin a burnt orange hue with lighter patterns, spots along her legs, whirling stripes on her bare stomach and arms. She had a face of classical beauty with a touch of the alien, just a tad longer than normal, eyes like a cat's with an emerald glow. Her legs were shapely, and she stood on the balls of her feet, built more for sprinting than any human should be. Her hair was a shade of red deeper than humanly possible, and she wore only a purple skirt and top, arms crossed over her bust, a single clawed index finger tapping against them.
"S-Sorry." She shrugged, and with a gentle tap on my nose sent me out of her dream, flying into the void.
I flew faster than light, outpacing the laws of physics. I flew away from that star system which had known so much loss and pain, and towards another star, towards another world. It was a large dark planet, tidally locked to its parent star, with a narrow terminus where life could survive.
I looked at the dark side of the planet, and there was a sensation like I was being watched, like fingers were crawling along my skin. I dropped down like a rock, and crashed into another dream, one that was deeper and larger than most.
I found myself in a hot spring, steam rising from golden waters lapping against dark stone. Strange leaves and branches hung overhead, blending into the soft gold-cerise light of the room. I looked around at the ornate architecture, like something out of a fairy tale, pillars holding up the dark stone.
I was sitting on a metal bench and felt oddly rejuvenated, like all the energy I spent projecting my mind across space and time was being recovered second by second. There was another presence, someone humming a tune, plucking at the strings of the Dream.
I stepped off the bench, and the world shifted around me, leaving me in front of a statue of a massive moth, carved in stone and lined with white gold. There was a whisper, of something dead, forgotten, consumed.
The light went out, and I shrunk in on myself, trying to project a bubble even though I was astral projecting. It failed, and the shrine was consumed by shadows, countless white orbs emerging from the shadows. My Aura pushed the darkness back, and I swallowed nervously.
Where the hell had I gone?
Something large emerged from the shadows, a figure with eight eyes and two sets of branching horns, four arms and countless tendrils moving back and forth, like a living glitch made of void and shadows and darkness.
I felt cold, and the shadows retracted at the bidding of the fifty foot tall lord of darkness, and it didn't speak in direct words, nor in the lyrical quality of Gemsong.
Think.
Feel.
Live.
My anxieties retreated at the passiveness of the entity, even as it's voice felt like a chorus of madness, void made manifest, potential and primordial energy warping around me.
"I…what are you?"
Void. Regrets. Shadow. I flinched, as the shadows parted for thousands, maybe millions of specters, countless regrets gathered within this void within a dream. The being chuffed, and I blinked as it poked me with a clawed hand, reflecting thoughts and feelings back at me.
Light Of Life. It gestured to myself, to my form, eight eyes crinkling while it's body shifted with a chittering crack. It gestured and images emerged in the black.
I saw a radiant figure, white light shining like a star, the face of a Diamond.
Light Of Mind.
Yellow followed.
Light Of Body.
Blue rose from the void, clouds of light azure vaporizing in the dream realm.
Light Of Will.
Is…is that what this being, this Void Given Focus calls the Diamonds, so I'm the Light Of Life then?
The entity shook its head, gesturing that I was similar but there were small disparities, clicks of tonal chitters translated by my Diamond brain into something barely coherent.
"Could I leave? I'm feeling a little lost." I asked and it responded, a massive blade made of golden light folding the Dream Realm with pure power. I was launched from this strange place between worlds, and flew.
I was back on Earth, his Earth and I slipped through the cracks without meaning to. I spun, and collided with dull and muted dreams, the disparate processes of something enormous in scope and scale. I walked along crystalline circuitry sparking with energies, thousands of red crystals melded together into a single unit.
I drifted among the dregs of thoughts and dreams and impressions of something as large as a planet, a labyrinthine machine, broadcasting, intuiting, connecting, draining, activating, drawing upon. It was the pedestal, the church, the false idol, made to draw upon the powers of others of its kind. It connected to ten thousand lesser pieces, broken in body and spirit, in a broken network. It drew upon the sleeping desires of its host, creating truly grand and worth—
I was ripped away from the mind of the beast, a claw curling to pull me by my collar. My eyes were wide when I looked back at Diamond pupils that weren't my own.
Aster Diamond smiled.
It's time for you to wake up…
I let out a scream as I woke up from that tangle of dreams, gripping onto my pillow for comfort I breathed, in and out and named items in the room to further delay my panic and anxiety.
I had been subconsciously using my astral projection, and had entered the dreams of several entities. The first was humanoid, almost too human even and yet there were subtle differences, enough to unnerve a person. It was a flashback, a distorted nightmare, and I noted the imagery of a vast shard of an Entity. The second world was one of darkness, the home of something huge and powerful.
Then I had slid into the assorted thoughts of a shard, and was pulled out of the madness by Steven. My astral projection had sent me across space and time, and he had saved me. I laid back down on my bed with a groan.
I'm not going to sleep much tonight am I?