Scintillation 4.4
- Location
- Chula Vista
Scintillation 4.4
I swept past the swirling auras of humans, the dynamic pulses becoming so much more clear after training with Steven. They were dynamic, shifting, shrinking, weaving and pulsing. It was becoming instinct to know what those shifts meant, my empathetic senses growing in power and range.
My Aura had been kept close to my skin, muted, smothered by my own inexperience. Now it extended for two miles in every direction, my radiance set free. Even then it paled in comparison to the vast radiance of the other Diamonds when I paid attention.
Being a Master was however a rather dangerous prospect in a world like this. All I needed to do was extend my Aura to read surface thoughts and feelings, and part of that was automatic.
And mind control wasn't exactly hard, though I suspected I was limited to a single person like Steven. Reading intentions and emotions was going to be the bulk of my use of psychic powers, with perhaps periodic Dream walking. But there was a reasonable fear of Masters with people like Heartbreaker and literal monsters like the Simurgh.
I had gotten stronger based on my sparring sessions, overpowering Starry by accident. Which was rather impressive when taking into account she was a quarter ton Euhedral Quartz. Kind of frightening in retrospect when I had seen her lift a literal thousand tons with little strain. But then the strength of a Diamond was effectively unlimited. Steven could lift a Terraformer Injector as a teenager, and I was a grown adult with a gem tailored to my biology.
I ignored the storm of emotions, grimacing when I saw a flash of lust-interest in my direction. I hadn't made this form in the interest of being ogled by anyone other than myself. It was more for obscurity, and because I liked the aesthetic of black and red. Also the soft shoulder length hair, and the additional… cushioning to my body.
Also because I could. That was a big part of it.
I adjusted my choker, keeping a grip on the Transporter Jewel, a device capable of teleportation across both normal space and the greater spacetime structure of the multiverse. I had another in my gem that could activate in case of a threat, along with a Time Hourglass. Which was there the whole time and I never even knew it.
It was to anchor myself against dangerous time effects, like time looping, time acceleration and time deceleration, and deleterious alterations of the arrow of time. Not that time acceleration would kill me when I didn't have to age.
But trapping me was much easier than killing me, and a time loop or a time slowing field would be the best means. But that was not a weakness anyone with a Time Hourglass had. It was just unfortunate they were so expensive to create, since Time can be a real bitch.
I brushed back my dark wavy puffy hair with a huff, ignoring the other auras. Though there was something…something off about a very small number of them, aura tainted with ash, a sulphurous taste in my mouth.
That…that was more concerning than it should be. I was going to have to deal with it… later. Well…I had already broadcast a message on automatic so nevermind, I did it.
People really were so loud when you were a Gem, and it was hard to get used to the click of their phones, the sound of their bones cracking and their muscles tensing. Then there were their natural stripes in UV, a limitless pattern unique to each and every person.
I was walking towards a food court to feed my belly, though I technically didn't need to eat like I used to. Aster, or Steven I suppose could act like a plant and eat ambient energy. Sunlight, radioactive energies, as well as energy fields in general. It was apparently how Steven…uhh, destroyed Bill Cipher's memories due to his infiltration of the Dream Realm.
There was a good chance killing Bill with the Zodiac would have caused severe damage to people in the Dream. So he was cannibalized and reduced to a shade that would one day be reborn.
But not as himself, he was gone.
And of course us Gems could sense strange energies, we'd be dead if we couldn't. Homeworld was a very different place before White Diamond, a world of magic and strange primordial energies, of beasts chasing future negentropy, and warped senses of What Simply Is.
Which is why I caught the whiff of magic, so small, tiny flames being stoked by sparks bursting from cracks between the worlds. The fault of the Black Wyrm, of his shards and the reckless use of magic. Failures which created more questions than answers.
Magic wasn't some incomprehensible thing, the Loner should have been able to use his sight to steal it from the Gems. Then again, all Gems were seers, their crystal mechanisms could be inscrutable to the precognition of one another.
Why not to the Entities? But that wasn't right, once his war was spread out across hundreds of races, many of them organic, it should have been the shards using magic to destroy the galaxy. Abaddon had been made up of some two hundred billion shards, and he had apparently recently merged a number of shards.
He had some sixty solar masses to his flesh, which ignored the energy shifted into an exotic state by his reality warping abilities. From his memories they guessed that Zion and Eden were around four hundred solar masses in mass each.
Which was frankly terrifying no matter how it was put or described. Giant star sized creatures with billions if not trillions of powers, from precognition to time manipulation to faster than light travel and an immense toolset of energy and force manipulating powers.
I remember…eating half of his shards, absorbing the energies of countless beings in the darkness between stars, energy encoded into the fabric of spacetime. I remember feeling so incomplete, and being directed towards a source of shining light, a star, a nursery, now burning beneath my skin.
I looked up at the sun, easily ignoring the radiance of Bet's star.
And let it live, to feed the furnace within my soul.
I yawned, snapping my jaws as I went over to Charlie's. I loved their chicken cheri— teriyaki cheesesteak though without the disgusting pickles. Pickles were gross, and my one time trying watermelon had been a mistake. It was solid water, and bland. I liked water better.
Ten minutes later I was biting into my meal, mumbling under my breath as I also took in the sunlight. Very literally in fact, using the light to bring forth magic into this reality.
Again…there was a mystery to solve here, on how the Entity had effectively lost, crippled into uselessness to send his data to others of his kind. What had happened to the other half of the shards? They were dead, the galaxies knew that much. But their energy wasn't in my Heart and Aura, so what had become of it?
The energy of an entity taken and used to form a primal seed of magic, that Steven had found and directed into a massive red star. I didn't know the full story though, only that at some point, the Gems of the Diamonds emerged from the heart of dying stars.
They were sent across the void, and fell into the core of a distant heavy planet. From their Dreams there came a world of magic and light and esoteric energies. White Diamond was the first, coming from an enormous white star.
There was a mythology there, but there were missing pieces, a gigantic and unfathomable backlog some seven hundred million years old, caused by something older than that, older than almost all life in the galaxy. There was a connection, but I couldn't find it, I couldn't…
I felt a burst of entitled interest, a subtle oily taste to the air, and my attention was returned to the person who was invading my space. I looked up and lifted an eyebrow.
The man had greasy, greasy hair, a flirtatious look, almost handsome if it wasn't for his gaze. It was wrong and gross, and I didn't like it, I didn't like it at all. His aura was sharp and arrogant, less like thorns and more like clinging venomous vines.
I gave him an unimpressed look, my heart beating faster, something like disgust and disquiet piling up at the way he was looking at me.
"Hey, names Mike Samson, looked a little lonely there, thought I'd join you." I shied away, his aura proving to be a turn off in every possible way. "And with the way you're dressed, I imagine you wouldn't mind a little company." His look was positively lecherous.
"I'm wearing a black dress shirt and blue jeans." I was both confused and grossed out, and was keeping my Aura from trying to send him flying with a telekinetic energy field.
"Let me buy you dinner, maybe that'll change your mind." I stared at him, and repeated it to myself several times.
Was he trying to buy me? Was this really happening?
"No." I said quite firmly, a mix of disgust, anger and pride coming to the surface of my aura.
His expression shifted slightly, but his aura became dark, a low violent insistence, one that made me want to react defensively. If that meant crushing him into a fine paste. Then so be it. His emotions were awful and I felt my breath hitch, and I narrowly kept it from ever leaving my lips.
HOW DARE HE!
His facade was gone. "Let's not pretend you're some type of high class woman. Not with a body like that." I was going to murder a man tonight. "A little fun won't hurt anybody, and I'm sure—"
"Is this seat taken?" The man got bumped out of the way and not too gently, and I realized my breathing was hitching again. A woman with a pronounced sharp chin, straight dark hair and eyebrows with piercing green eyes. She was as tall as the man, but she looked as built as Connie though shorter.
"Oh. Hi…"
"Basilia! It's been a while hasn't it? This chump bothering you?" She sat down, giving the man a beatific smile that promised torment and horror. The man stepped back, or Crook for his messed up nose.
"He's a little bitch Samantha." I nodded, finally letting out my seething rage. "I'd like him to leave."
'Samantha' smiled, and Crook ran away with his tail between his legs.
"You alright?" Her concern became more obvious when he left, and I nodded with a shudder of revulsion.
"Yeah. Just…stick around for a bit would you?" I felt gross, and I was now going to pay an order of magnitude more attention to my surroundings.
There was silence between us, as the people passed by us without a second glance.
"So what is your name?" She broke up the quiet.
"Brenda." I answered, she offered her hand to shake, smiling.
"Marion." I shook her hand, grinning.
I guess Challenger was a hero both in and out of uniform.
I could hear Elle muttering under her breath, looking through a few books like the Magic of The Boiling Isles, and Glyphs: Gifts of the Titan as well as Doctor P's Extraordinary Guide To Magic and Mystery.
I remembered Amphibia well enough, it had become some of my go-to shows after well…SU and SU Future met their conclusion for the foreseeable future. As did Owl House, which ahh…was a little concerning. It meant those universes were real, and connected in some way to Steven's Earth.
Not that I was ignorant anymore to how different this Earth was from my own and from the 'canon' world line. I had looked up a lot of the shakers and movers of the Earth of dimension 460'/ and there were many.
From Wayne Enterprises to LexCorp and Dayton Labs, to the Pines Institute of Weirdness. There were a lot of notable differences of course, the number of superheroes was…well frankly barely there at all in comparison to Bet or at least not in a form I recognized from cursory readings. Though there were rumblings of a global superhero team, with Wonderwoman as one of the largest movers and shakers.
The war had caused a number of problems for it, and at the point in history I had checked it had the tentative name of the League of Heroes. Terrible name really. But there were a lot of different things I hadn't read up on yet. Superheroes weren't new, but they had stayed localized until a couple of years ago.
Whatever this weird freaky elseworld was, it had diverged long ago. That there was anything recognizable at all was likely due to some form of cosmic constant. Even so the Green Lanterns(and the Guardians) didn't seem to even exist. It was like pieces of one world had been plucked into another, reinterpreted through a new and foreign history.
For example in this reality many Gods manifested from belief, and most of the ones on Earth were dead, forgotten by humanity. But at least Diana of Themyscira existed in some weird way. The Amazonians were effectively the final torch of power for the Greek Gods.
And apparently they were okay with that, their Godhome was all they needed.
There may or may not be Martians, I really hadn't checked. There were stories about heroic speedsters, and there was a Flash among the League of Heroes. Though there was no evidence of the Speed Force. But then I guessed the fundamental laws of physics were simply different.
No Darkseid, but the Reach was a thing though their ten thousand world empire had collapsed over the past few centuries. Species 26 were the Tamaraneans, and the Psions had gone extinct when a few dozen shards ate them and then died screaming.
The Citadel had suffered the same treatment, and I knew there were a number of other powerful forces both on Earth and beyond. Like the Incarnation of Kur, and the Nanite Heir.
The Demon Realm, the reality the Boiling Isles exists in is linked to Earth Wicce and is closer to my reality than it is theirs. In a metaphorical sense. And literal but I didn't fully understand dimensional science yet.
Elle was absorbing knowledge like a sponge, from mathematics to the science of arcane study to the arts. Architectural design was one of her best subjects, though she had gone with Artificer as a name rather than Architect. I guess she wanted something more magic themed.
I was doing the same, and had picked up an interesting(frightening) read. Theogony: On The Nature of Higher Beings was not an expected thing. But I read on regardless.
The topic of Higher Beings is a contentious topic across the galaxy, as their existence can be…fuzzy and up to interpretation. There is no one way they can manifest or ascend. From the many dead deities of humanity to the X'Hal of Tamaranean fame.
The most common characteristic they share is that they possess a level of power beyond most mortals, and great control over aspects of reality. Some require worship, while others are more simple, naturally powerful, paragons of their species. The Dreamer, Bill Cipher is one such entity, crippled and reduced to a shadow by the Zodiac and His Radiance. Unn, one of many Life gods is another type, a spirit born from the essence of life itself.
Higher Beings are not necessarily gods, but they are beyond mortals, power passed down by chance, by belief, or by bloodline. They—
I heard crumpling paper and a fwoosh of wind, and noted the magical energy. There was a look of wonder on Elle's face as she prepared her first spell. A little ball of yellow light floated in the air, magic reacting to her plea, to the geometry of wild power.
I grabbed the light without thinking, and put it in my mouth, absorbing the solar radiation.
"…" Elle's look was unreadable, but her aura pulsed angrily, turning dark.
"I'm sorry, I just…Gems eat light and I'm still kind of new at this so, so…"
"Pfft…hahaha!" She laughed, slamming her hand against the desk she was practicing magic on. "No, it's okay! I—" She cut herself off, eyes widening. "I did magic? I did magic! I did it!" She stood up from her swivel chair, and hugged me, lifting me for a moment before dropping me back down.
Oh right she's been exercising with Brass Pearl, and has been cheating using my healing powers. Kind of gross when you think about it, but it didn't matter. Any strain on her muscles was healed in an instant, and her body took to the healing magic quite well.
It was how Aster's First Knight had gotten so buff, Diamond essence is an effective boost. The magic was positively infused with the essence of Life, an aura of magic and higher energies given form and purpose.
"Now you try!" I was pulled back to reality by Elle as she dragged me, offering me a pencil and a sheet of paper.
"Okay?" I indulged her, easily copying the light Glyph onto paper. As I expected the spell worked, creating an orb of light. I could feel the magic respond, and if I had been more active…
I could have created a number of light based magic, light projections, and flashbangs. Instead I consumed the magic gathered by the spell, and nodded. So that had proved I could learn spells, though certain types weren't possible.
Like certain types of necromancy, anything involving blood and flesh wouldn't work due to my odd physicality. Though it worked better for me than it did for Steven due to being born human. So it might be possible.
"Now this one." I obliged the girl, narrowing my eyes at the plant glyph. I decided to be a little more attentive with this one as I tapped the paper. I could feel the aura of magic twisting into the paper, and held my breath as I tapped a nail to trigger the spell.
A flower bloomed from nothing, magical energy taking shape into matter. Universal energy turned to almost mundane substance. I could hear the aura of the magic, the foundation it was based upon was almost unique, alien and yet compatible, coloring the native magic with its weight.
This was magic belonging to another world, magic born of a Titan the size of an island. There was power in the symbols born of the Titan, and while it was foreign it was also interesting. Gems were mostly self contained aside from ambient energy absorption. They sort of drew their energy from the universe itself, but Gem magic was in a way a school, a foundation of magic carved into the fabric of reality.
It meant they weren't always compatible with certain types of magic, though they could learn with some time, or learn how to copy it with their own magic.
"I…I can use magic, I'm a witch!" She sounded so happy, Elle…no Artificer's aura soared.
"That begs the question, who is teaching you magic?"
"Stripes. Err…Labradorite. She's a practiced magic user with a few different systems." Of course for Gems, learning wasn't always easy. Most Era 2 Gems had a hard time with it though due to the reduced amounts of Pink ichor. Glyph magic was easy enough, all you needed was ambient magic, intent and knowledge and you were on your way.
Some were more fundamentally incompatible though.
"What schools of magic has she learned? I'm sure you've asked." I flicked away a lock of her platinum blonde hair with a sardonic grin.
Elle grinned. "Yeah. She's learned magic from the Boiling Isles, Alchemy from Shambala, and magic from the Kitakah." Something jumped out at me, something translating oddly.
"That…means Bug right?" She shrugged.
"She also knows the Bezel system of magic." I narrowed my eyes, I had heard that before.
Bezel, Bezel, Bezel.
The Charms of Bezel…that's Ben 10 isn't it?"
"Do the Charms of Bezel ring a bell?"
Elle nodded. "Stripes said they were in the hands of some human mage, Gwen something…?"
So that confirmed Steven Universe, amutilated DC elseworld, Ben 10, and from what I had heard about Kur, Secret Saturdays, and looking up the nanite incident got Generator Rex. Though really that was more a single package since they already took place within the same universe, or were at least close together.
Wasn't there a Generator Rex crossover for the Reboot?
Also Gravity Falls…and Amphibia, and they had punched a hole into Owl House's dimension…not a big deal.
"I've gone quite mad haven't I…?" My horrified whisper was thankfully not heard by Elle.
But it was the truth, everything about this was crazy, this was insanity. I was on Mars having magic practice with a girl able to make reality her bitch, I had a gem in my belly, I was magic, and a participant in a transdimensional war across galaxies with sci-fi technology, literal magic, with hundreds of alien empires working against giant space monsters responsible for destroying worlds in numbers given in scientific notation. You need to be calm…
My world was in the crossfire where planets were collateral damage, and it was dangerous and awful, and everything could fall, fall, AND FALL AND FALL AND MAKE IT STOP, MAKE IT…
STOP. BREATHE.
I gripped my chest, a gentle warmth filling my mind, from…my Gem? There was something, something missing, something I didn't understand yet. But it made me feel safe, it made me feel less alone even when there was nobody around me. It kept me moving forward, even when I woke up alone.
Elle was giving me a look, and I smiled hesitantly.
I wasn't going to dump my baggage on her, that was by business, my issues.
"Any other spell glyphs you wanted me to learn?"
Elle beamed.
"Hello Gregor." Gregor the Snail blinked as I called out.. "How's that gemstone selling business been doing?"
"We've found a number of buyers across several cities, even being discreet we can expect to make three quarters of a million a month." He sounded suitably impressed. "More than enough to support ourselves and our…investigations." My smile shrunk.
Right, there was that whole business about their origins I wasn't sure how to explain without one of them going ballistic and going out and murdering the Triumvirate. Plus we still needed to figure out how to heal them, my power should work but their fucked up chimerism made things difficult.
Would a large dose of my ichor heal them, or would it bring out the inhuman part of their genetics, removing their human DNA as damage? Or were their cells so integrated that my power simply considered them an odd organism?
"You do not approve." He stated plainly, expression shifted.
"It doesn't matter what I approve, you are not under my aegis. Not like Elle, or Rachel after we took down a dozen dog fighting rings in the span of a few days." Global teleportation and precognition tended to be really helpful, along with a bevy of other Gem abilities. It didn't help that literally every Gem had some level of clairvoyant sense of the past and future.
Though it was more instinctual, for Gems it was a sort of sense of the flow of battle, and a better ability to infer data. Like if people had advanced sensors strapped to their brains. We were like machines, able to sense all types of energy from polarized light to the resounding light of true magic. That lets us divine out the patterns in our own ways.
We had a few hundred dogs, with most of them being kept under the care of a handful of Gems. But not everyone had the time for pets, so a dog shelter had been bought by us using our gemstone money and placed near Brockton Bay due to the low cost…and reduced government scrutiny.
Of course everything was set up to keep them safe from the E88, and there was instant coverage with a stealthy warp pad in the basement. That plus a helping of magical defenses made it a real cinch.
Plus it puts us in range of various useful shards, from the administrator to the shaper, and a fragment of Scion's path to victory. As well as the shard used to censor trigger visions.
We had scanned the city, with the Sapphires helping with targeting of the Hole Punchers. The devices used to punch holes through the dimensional barriers set up by the Entities.
Most forms of dimensional transference were based on aspects of the Infinity Portal created by one Stanford Pines some thirty nine years ago. They were unique, utilizing complex multidimensional mathematics with vaguely disturbing characteristics.
That portal seemed to lead into the space between dimensions, that distance that was not distance, that space that was not space, the Bleed between worlds. This made it cycle across an effectively infinite number of dimensions, skipping past them like the pages in a book.
The Entities had converged on some aspect of this science, but it was much more limited, even if ten to the power of eighty one dimensions was a number beyond human comprehension.
"Aegis. What does that mean for your people?" I refocused on the present. "Your adopted people if you would." He amended.
"Gems aren't human, I'm sure we've established that by now right?" He nodded and I continued. "The Diamonds themselves created the Gems, they're kind of like our family." I ignored how that idea felt so odd, but not wrong. "Our laws, our own nature reflects that." It has even affected mine, with that protective streak that really wanted me to ask for my world to be mine.
"How so?" He rumbled, sitting down on the bench of foreign magic from another world.
"The Gems who've joined my Court, the ones willing to help me adjust, the young teenager I found on my doorstep. My family, my human family," Something hitched in my song. "Hell even Rachel with her poor adjustment and terrible social skills." I wasn't as violent but I wasn't amazing with people either. "They are mine. They are vein adma. Cherished kin."
"Dreki. " I understood perfectly. Calling us Dragons was a good description.
"Diamonds are the first Gems, the archetype. We are a draconic sort, but we also collect people rather than just treasures." I felt that urge with some of the more interesting full blooded humans. "Having a Ballas brain can be real trouble." I tapped my forehead.
"So if we were under your aegis…?" He sounded curious to know my reply.
"You would be under my protection, from anyone and any thing that would want to harm you." Within reason of course, I couldn't shield them from the bumps and bruises life left on a person. "And when you have nominal influence over a galactic empire, that protection can be…significant." I rubbed the back of my neck. "But that can be a serious choice, a very serious one. Elle was willing because she wanted a semblance of family, and Rachel went for it because she took a shine to Frills and Aventurine." Plus rescuing hundreds of dogs got on her good side.
Relatively speaking. She was still an aggressive little shit, and she was spending time with the Quartz and Rubies to get the rough edges bumped out. A little bit of empathy was kind of needed to help her, as well as enough patience and toughness to deal with all her hard edges.
"You have a crow on your shoulder." Gregor pointed out. "It seems to want to tell you something."
Oh him. I thought he had decided to leave me alone. "What do you want?"
"No-Wings. You never gave me a name to call you by." He spoke in his language of chirps and pulsing birdsong.
"Because I came to the conclusion I was hallucinating your existence." I replied dryly, sulking.
He lifted a wing, almost like he was lifting an arm to his chest. "By the Rolling Sun, what a hurtful thing to say to one of your flock."
"Come again?" I stood up, I thought Steven had brought the mutant crows into his aegis and not under mine, we were still sharing joint custody of the colony.
"I've volunteered to join your little flock of Light-Stones, you gave me red feathers, it's your responsibility." I noted the occasional streaks of red on black.
"How…injured were you? That kind of thing tends to require being pretty dead." There was a ring of concern from his aura, which had a different shape to it, a flickering mass of twisting cyclones rather than the more solid flames of human aura.
"I did take in a lot of smoke." He seemed more concerned now. Smoke tended to hurt birds more due to their type of respiratory system, more sensitive.
"Luckily it wasn't too bad, I'm not ready to start curing cases of death. Tends to lead to giant immortal pink zombies with interdimensional wormholes in their heads."
"You are speaking to a crow." Gregor was giving me an odd look.
"To be fair, this is a mutant crow created by a time manipulator and a striker capable of minor mutations combining their powers. Even though I understand regular crows too. " I didn't let him hear the last part. "He…uhh." I was going to say his name and realized I didn't know it.
"Tungwup." The crow answered me.
"Tungwup here is a perfectly sapient being, his species have come under the aegis of the Empire since they decided they wanted nothing to do with Earth Bet."
"Really?" I nodded and he gave the avian a more measuring look. "Then why is he here and not with his people?"
"Apparently he was so close to death that he took some aspects of magic into his biology." It was a day ending in Y and thus expected. "Not that it matters, with all the cracks in reality, magic is spilling through effectively everywhere."
Gregor cracked open his mouth when I was suddenly bowled over and spun in the air. All I could think was soft and then baby when I peered at dark pink to the point of almost red eyes, with an innocent glimmer.
"Rose, you shouldn't surprise people like that. It's…not polite." Starry emerged in a burst of speed, going from five hundred to zero in a matter of seconds. I was put down, and looked up at a Rose Quartz I hadn't seen before.
I recognized her quickly, and I swallowed spit(ichor) as I saw the shape of my face in hers, and the waves of my hair in her voluminous curtains of pink and lightest red. She wasn't quite as large as Starry, with a softer pudgier shape and more around the standard size of a Rose Quartz, at the lower range even.
So around seven and a half feet tall, and she wore not a uniform but more casual but fitting clothing. Dark pink working pants, with well-fit red boots. A voluminous pink blouse marked with red vines blooming with amaranthus, and a Diamond insignia on her knees, chest, and elbows.
I know this gem.
Rose Quartz Facet-SD Round-01. The sole Gem born of this planet, not a prototype so much as the complete model. She was mine, my Gem, the only one that would be born of my ichor for quite a while until the Kindergartens on Mars were mapped out.
Baby. Another word that came to mind, this was a being born of my blood, this was effectively one of my kin, and I started to realize I had not thought this through in the slightest when I decided I wanted to make a Gem.
"Hi!" She stared back at me with muted naive eyes, bobbing up and down in excitement.
So this is what it's like to feel a deep almost parental love for another living being…
"Hey there." I was gentle, my song became almost crooning in response.
"Perhaps we can speak at a later time Sunrise Diamond." Gregor respectfully bounced.
"Yeah…okay." I was distracted, waving him away to talk with this Rose Quartz.
I ended up not getting much of a chance though since Rose had run away from an Azurite teacher.
Annoying, but shit happens.
Brass Pearl was an old Gem, only a certain tall Ruby was older. In her twenty eight thousand seven hundred years of life, she had seen things that would beggar the mind to believe.
So it didn't surprise her when they found a new player in the game, a shift in the possibilities, people moving towards Boston for an unknown purpose. A biotinker as the natives labeled it had gone disconcertingly silent from their bugs embedded into the network of the villain known as Accord.
The man reminded her of the many, many Turquoises she had met in her long life. An intelligence that scales to the size and scope of the problems presented to him. The main issue of course was that the man was insufferable and violently perfectionist. It didn't help that his plans didn't always take humanity into account.
He would be a powerful enemy…if they didn't have 'Thinkers' of their own to counteract his own plays, and far superior technology. Getting bugs into his enterprise had been as easy as stealing…was it candy? Yes, as easy as stealing candy from a baby.
Even then underestimating him wasn't a mistake they were willing to make and they were keeping him in mind for their operations within the city.
"Black Beryl, what have you seen with your Vision?" She asked Beryl, a newer gem than most but a very skilled one at that.
She was a tall Gem, a couple of inches above her own height. Wild black hair cascaded behind muscled shoulders hidden by a puffy almost furred dress, skin almost as dark as obsidian and flecks of reflective sable staring back at her.
Her claws flexed in and out, and fangs flicked out into needle daggers like the teeth of a deep sea anglerfish.
"My Vision caught a few people behaving…oddly, bringing materials and items to several warehouses across the city." Brass understood.
"There's likely an unknown Master in this town, and based on what Sunrise Diamond has told us of what she saw in their auras…it's likely a child of Christine Mathers."
A true annoyance, Mama Mathers power wasn't as effective as it should be due to the arcane nature of Sapphire's future sight, but it still caused a small reduction in proficiency to filter out the chaff. Up until they adapted to the assault and updated their clairvoyant programming.
"We know his home planet has a clairvoyant reading of some of this world's players. The description of burns…likely Lionheart." Black Beryl rubbed her chin in reply to Brass, a chittering pulse of curiosity surging into her song. "His emotional manipulation abilities would serve him well in acquiring manpower."
"And we can't have that happening." While they weren't here to solve the world's problems, doing some of that was inherent in the nature of their mission. There were billions of shards to take care of. Collapsing their cycle, their remaining hub and shutting down their Asura would account for a good fraction of their problems.
But in the end, this wasn't their Earth, and they couldn't force change on a planet with six billion lives. Even if that wasn't even close to a tenth of a percent of their population, much of their labor was taken up with monitoring the galaxies for rogue shards, as well as infrastructure overhauls after the massive boosts in technology in the last decade.
The Empire had never found much of a point to shielding colonies, despite their capabilities. They were always more worlds, and their infrastructure was itself shielded. They were conservative, not idiotic.
Of course that had changed after Galvan Prime had been destroyed by a mass energy bombardment by the Atasians, the former 'Highbreed' empire. It had saved a number of colonies from the shards energy projection abilities. Further improvements had come about when Yellow Diamond had been caught in an Incursean Conquest Ray that had destroyed a higher shard, one capable of harvesting powers.
It was certainly a test of Diamond durability, and the immediate aftermath left the general in charge in utter terror when she walked off a planet exploding around her and proceeded to break into the ship through the vents to berate him. With a full burst of Diamondsong in his ringing ear holes.
She had heard the general had been exiled by Empress Attea, gaining the animosity of an extragalactic nation of world destroyers wasn't considered smart when you were already enemies with the fucking Reach. They had been the major power in the Milky Way for thousands of years, until the various aliens rose up to fight back.
The Incurseans had stolen five hundred worlds, and they hadn't even done it through conquest, the natives were treated badly enough to prefer the rule of the Incurseans of all peoples.
She shook her head, whistling a quiet song to herself. The Incurseans had become softer over the past thousand years, barring a handful of incidents they were less conquest happy than they had used to be.
There was a knock on the door, and Brass gestured to Black Beryl. The Gem grinned and leapt out the window. Crazy Gem…
"Come in." The little Diamond quietly shuffled into the room, umber eyes meeting her own with a curious light.
Brass Pearl tilted her sunglasses, shifting her attention to her Diamond. She was young, effectively a zygote by her standards if it wasn't for how humans matured.
She was inexperienced, but she had a real strength and power, a potential that was untapped. She had seen it in the spars she had with Starry, the impact of shockwaves from punches and kicks, and crimson Diamondfire flaring around clenched fists.
Well she used she but that was simply a default for all Gems, it would be a bit unfair to call her she when she didn't want to be called she. As well as rude to call her he when she wanted to be called she. Brass had her doubts that Sunrise cared much, though she suspected he didn't understand the implications of moving back and forth as easily as he did.
Then again she was a Gem and not a human, maybe he just liked using shapeshifting and didn't care that his proclivities would make human bigots crack.
Good for him.
"My Diamond," She hid a smirk at how he seemed mildly shy at the use of the honorific. Poor fool had no idea what he was in store for. "I've been meaning to talk to you after you sent out your suspicion on the net." She tapped her fingers against her thigh, schooling her expression.
The little Diamond was rubbing his slightly haired chin, bright umber-red eyes shuttering as their focus shifted to her. "About the possible Master?"
Brass nodded, adjusting her glasses. "I know this may be a lot to ask when you're still quite new to this…"
"Yeah?" The young Diamond grunted, eyebrows furrowing.
The Pearl clasped her hands together. "I think it would be for the best that you help us find him."
I swept past the swirling auras of humans, the dynamic pulses becoming so much more clear after training with Steven. They were dynamic, shifting, shrinking, weaving and pulsing. It was becoming instinct to know what those shifts meant, my empathetic senses growing in power and range.
My Aura had been kept close to my skin, muted, smothered by my own inexperience. Now it extended for two miles in every direction, my radiance set free. Even then it paled in comparison to the vast radiance of the other Diamonds when I paid attention.
Being a Master was however a rather dangerous prospect in a world like this. All I needed to do was extend my Aura to read surface thoughts and feelings, and part of that was automatic.
And mind control wasn't exactly hard, though I suspected I was limited to a single person like Steven. Reading intentions and emotions was going to be the bulk of my use of psychic powers, with perhaps periodic Dream walking. But there was a reasonable fear of Masters with people like Heartbreaker and literal monsters like the Simurgh.
I had gotten stronger based on my sparring sessions, overpowering Starry by accident. Which was rather impressive when taking into account she was a quarter ton Euhedral Quartz. Kind of frightening in retrospect when I had seen her lift a literal thousand tons with little strain. But then the strength of a Diamond was effectively unlimited. Steven could lift a Terraformer Injector as a teenager, and I was a grown adult with a gem tailored to my biology.
I ignored the storm of emotions, grimacing when I saw a flash of lust-interest in my direction. I hadn't made this form in the interest of being ogled by anyone other than myself. It was more for obscurity, and because I liked the aesthetic of black and red. Also the soft shoulder length hair, and the additional… cushioning to my body.
Also because I could. That was a big part of it.
I adjusted my choker, keeping a grip on the Transporter Jewel, a device capable of teleportation across both normal space and the greater spacetime structure of the multiverse. I had another in my gem that could activate in case of a threat, along with a Time Hourglass. Which was there the whole time and I never even knew it.
It was to anchor myself against dangerous time effects, like time looping, time acceleration and time deceleration, and deleterious alterations of the arrow of time. Not that time acceleration would kill me when I didn't have to age.
But trapping me was much easier than killing me, and a time loop or a time slowing field would be the best means. But that was not a weakness anyone with a Time Hourglass had. It was just unfortunate they were so expensive to create, since Time can be a real bitch.
I brushed back my dark wavy puffy hair with a huff, ignoring the other auras. Though there was something…something off about a very small number of them, aura tainted with ash, a sulphurous taste in my mouth.
That…that was more concerning than it should be. I was going to have to deal with it… later. Well…I had already broadcast a message on automatic so nevermind, I did it.
People really were so loud when you were a Gem, and it was hard to get used to the click of their phones, the sound of their bones cracking and their muscles tensing. Then there were their natural stripes in UV, a limitless pattern unique to each and every person.
I was walking towards a food court to feed my belly, though I technically didn't need to eat like I used to. Aster, or Steven I suppose could act like a plant and eat ambient energy. Sunlight, radioactive energies, as well as energy fields in general. It was apparently how Steven…uhh, destroyed Bill Cipher's memories due to his infiltration of the Dream Realm.
There was a good chance killing Bill with the Zodiac would have caused severe damage to people in the Dream. So he was cannibalized and reduced to a shade that would one day be reborn.
But not as himself, he was gone.
And of course us Gems could sense strange energies, we'd be dead if we couldn't. Homeworld was a very different place before White Diamond, a world of magic and strange primordial energies, of beasts chasing future negentropy, and warped senses of What Simply Is.
Which is why I caught the whiff of magic, so small, tiny flames being stoked by sparks bursting from cracks between the worlds. The fault of the Black Wyrm, of his shards and the reckless use of magic. Failures which created more questions than answers.
Magic wasn't some incomprehensible thing, the Loner should have been able to use his sight to steal it from the Gems. Then again, all Gems were seers, their crystal mechanisms could be inscrutable to the precognition of one another.
Why not to the Entities? But that wasn't right, once his war was spread out across hundreds of races, many of them organic, it should have been the shards using magic to destroy the galaxy. Abaddon had been made up of some two hundred billion shards, and he had apparently recently merged a number of shards.
He had some sixty solar masses to his flesh, which ignored the energy shifted into an exotic state by his reality warping abilities. From his memories they guessed that Zion and Eden were around four hundred solar masses in mass each.
Which was frankly terrifying no matter how it was put or described. Giant star sized creatures with billions if not trillions of powers, from precognition to time manipulation to faster than light travel and an immense toolset of energy and force manipulating powers.
I remember…eating half of his shards, absorbing the energies of countless beings in the darkness between stars, energy encoded into the fabric of spacetime. I remember feeling so incomplete, and being directed towards a source of shining light, a star, a nursery, now burning beneath my skin.
I looked up at the sun, easily ignoring the radiance of Bet's star.
I̢̢̙͉̦̤̖̲̝̰̎̌̄̓͋͘͝͡'̮͇̭͔̰̍͂̓̒̋͢v̶̨̛͚̟̙͊͆̈͆͐͟e̛̦̖̗͔̮̩͉͍̝̾̂͛͋̓̒̂́ ẹ̛͙͇̯͈͂̀̿͂̐̀̍̄a̴̡̢̻̦̟͖̦͗̒͗̎͟͠t̸̨̟͙͕̭̤̝͉̃̎̇̅͠ē̙̘͙͎̯͓̺̬̒̋̈́̈̍̊̈́̍͜͞n̵͉͉̫̼͎̰͆̀̌̾̌ b̴͉͓̩̞̗̱͂͆̆̐̋͘͟i̷̡̧̨̛̲͚̘̖͙̺̦̒̇̄̔́̔͐̀g̴̡̘̺͚͍͕̼̣̗̊͛̔͒̓̀̌̿g̦̥͔͍͍̯͐͐̅̐͡e̴͙͖̤̥̬̾͊͒̅̽̚͡r̨̹͔̝̠͛͊̀̄͆͂͒͜.̧̛͇̥̣̞̈́̏͗̒̒̂̈̑̈
And let it live, to feed the furnace within my soul.
I yawned, snapping my jaws as I went over to Charlie's. I loved their chicken cheri— teriyaki cheesesteak though without the disgusting pickles. Pickles were gross, and my one time trying watermelon had been a mistake. It was solid water, and bland. I liked water better.
Ten minutes later I was biting into my meal, mumbling under my breath as I also took in the sunlight. Very literally in fact, using the light to bring forth magic into this reality.
Again…there was a mystery to solve here, on how the Entity had effectively lost, crippled into uselessness to send his data to others of his kind. What had happened to the other half of the shards? They were dead, the galaxies knew that much. But their energy wasn't in my Heart and Aura, so what had become of it?
The energy of an entity taken and used to form a primal seed of magic, that Steven had found and directed into a massive red star. I didn't know the full story though, only that at some point, the Gems of the Diamonds emerged from the heart of dying stars.
They were sent across the void, and fell into the core of a distant heavy planet. From their Dreams there came a world of magic and light and esoteric energies. White Diamond was the first, coming from an enormous white star.
There was a mythology there, but there were missing pieces, a gigantic and unfathomable backlog some seven hundred million years old, caused by something older than that, older than almost all life in the galaxy. There was a connection, but I couldn't find it, I couldn't…
I felt a burst of entitled interest, a subtle oily taste to the air, and my attention was returned to the person who was invading my space. I looked up and lifted an eyebrow.
The man had greasy, greasy hair, a flirtatious look, almost handsome if it wasn't for his gaze. It was wrong and gross, and I didn't like it, I didn't like it at all. His aura was sharp and arrogant, less like thorns and more like clinging venomous vines.
I gave him an unimpressed look, my heart beating faster, something like disgust and disquiet piling up at the way he was looking at me.
"Hey, names Mike Samson, looked a little lonely there, thought I'd join you." I shied away, his aura proving to be a turn off in every possible way. "And with the way you're dressed, I imagine you wouldn't mind a little company." His look was positively lecherous.
"I'm wearing a black dress shirt and blue jeans." I was both confused and grossed out, and was keeping my Aura from trying to send him flying with a telekinetic energy field.
"Let me buy you dinner, maybe that'll change your mind." I stared at him, and repeated it to myself several times.
Was he trying to buy me? Was this really happening?
"No." I said quite firmly, a mix of disgust, anger and pride coming to the surface of my aura.
His expression shifted slightly, but his aura became dark, a low violent insistence, one that made me want to react defensively. If that meant crushing him into a fine paste. Then so be it. His emotions were awful and I felt my breath hitch, and I narrowly kept it from ever leaving my lips.
His facade was gone. "Let's not pretend you're some type of high class woman. Not with a body like that." I was going to murder a man tonight. "A little fun won't hurt anybody, and I'm sure—"
"Is this seat taken?" The man got bumped out of the way and not too gently, and I realized my breathing was hitching again. A woman with a pronounced sharp chin, straight dark hair and eyebrows with piercing green eyes. She was as tall as the man, but she looked as built as Connie though shorter.
"Oh. Hi…"
"Basilia! It's been a while hasn't it? This chump bothering you?" She sat down, giving the man a beatific smile that promised torment and horror. The man stepped back, or Crook for his messed up nose.
"He's a little bitch Samantha." I nodded, finally letting out my seething rage. "I'd like him to leave."
'Samantha' smiled, and Crook ran away with his tail between his legs.
"You alright?" Her concern became more obvious when he left, and I nodded with a shudder of revulsion.
"Yeah. Just…stick around for a bit would you?" I felt gross, and I was now going to pay an order of magnitude more attention to my surroundings.
There was silence between us, as the people passed by us without a second glance.
"So what is your name?" She broke up the quiet.
"Brenda." I answered, she offered her hand to shake, smiling.
"Marion." I shook her hand, grinning.
I guess Challenger was a hero both in and out of uniform.
I could hear Elle muttering under her breath, looking through a few books like the Magic of The Boiling Isles, and Glyphs: Gifts of the Titan as well as Doctor P's Extraordinary Guide To Magic and Mystery.
I remembered Amphibia well enough, it had become some of my go-to shows after well…SU and SU Future met their conclusion for the foreseeable future. As did Owl House, which ahh…was a little concerning. It meant those universes were real, and connected in some way to Steven's Earth.
Not that I was ignorant anymore to how different this Earth was from my own and from the 'canon' world line. I had looked up a lot of the shakers and movers of the Earth of dimension 460'/ and there were many.
From Wayne Enterprises to LexCorp and Dayton Labs, to the Pines Institute of Weirdness. There were a lot of notable differences of course, the number of superheroes was…well frankly barely there at all in comparison to Bet or at least not in a form I recognized from cursory readings. Though there were rumblings of a global superhero team, with Wonderwoman as one of the largest movers and shakers.
The war had caused a number of problems for it, and at the point in history I had checked it had the tentative name of the League of Heroes. Terrible name really. But there were a lot of different things I hadn't read up on yet. Superheroes weren't new, but they had stayed localized until a couple of years ago.
Whatever this weird freaky elseworld was, it had diverged long ago. That there was anything recognizable at all was likely due to some form of cosmic constant. Even so the Green Lanterns(and the Guardians) didn't seem to even exist. It was like pieces of one world had been plucked into another, reinterpreted through a new and foreign history.
For example in this reality many Gods manifested from belief, and most of the ones on Earth were dead, forgotten by humanity. But at least Diana of Themyscira existed in some weird way. The Amazonians were effectively the final torch of power for the Greek Gods.
And apparently they were okay with that, their Godhome was all they needed.
There may or may not be Martians, I really hadn't checked. There were stories about heroic speedsters, and there was a Flash among the League of Heroes. Though there was no evidence of the Speed Force. But then I guessed the fundamental laws of physics were simply different.
No Darkseid, but the Reach was a thing though their ten thousand world empire had collapsed over the past few centuries. Species 26 were the Tamaraneans, and the Psions had gone extinct when a few dozen shards ate them and then died screaming.
The Citadel had suffered the same treatment, and I knew there were a number of other powerful forces both on Earth and beyond. Like the Incarnation of Kur, and the Nanite Heir.
The Demon Realm, the reality the Boiling Isles exists in is linked to Earth Wicce and is closer to my reality than it is theirs. In a metaphorical sense. And literal but I didn't fully understand dimensional science yet.
Elle was absorbing knowledge like a sponge, from mathematics to the science of arcane study to the arts. Architectural design was one of her best subjects, though she had gone with Artificer as a name rather than Architect. I guess she wanted something more magic themed.
I was doing the same, and had picked up an interesting(frightening) read. Theogony: On The Nature of Higher Beings was not an expected thing. But I read on regardless.
The topic of Higher Beings is a contentious topic across the galaxy, as their existence can be…fuzzy and up to interpretation. There is no one way they can manifest or ascend. From the many dead deities of humanity to the X'Hal of Tamaranean fame.
The most common characteristic they share is that they possess a level of power beyond most mortals, and great control over aspects of reality. Some require worship, while others are more simple, naturally powerful, paragons of their species. The Dreamer, Bill Cipher is one such entity, crippled and reduced to a shadow by the Zodiac and His Radiance. Unn, one of many Life gods is another type, a spirit born from the essence of life itself.
Higher Beings are not necessarily gods, but they are beyond mortals, power passed down by chance, by belief, or by bloodline. They—
I heard crumpling paper and a fwoosh of wind, and noted the magical energy. There was a look of wonder on Elle's face as she prepared her first spell. A little ball of yellow light floated in the air, magic reacting to her plea, to the geometry of wild power.
I grabbed the light without thinking, and put it in my mouth, absorbing the solar radiation.
"…" Elle's look was unreadable, but her aura pulsed angrily, turning dark.
"I'm sorry, I just…Gems eat light and I'm still kind of new at this so, so…"
"Pfft…hahaha!" She laughed, slamming her hand against the desk she was practicing magic on. "No, it's okay! I—" She cut herself off, eyes widening. "I did magic? I did magic! I did it!" She stood up from her swivel chair, and hugged me, lifting me for a moment before dropping me back down.
Oh right she's been exercising with Brass Pearl, and has been cheating using my healing powers. Kind of gross when you think about it, but it didn't matter. Any strain on her muscles was healed in an instant, and her body took to the healing magic quite well.
It was how Aster's First Knight had gotten so buff, Diamond essence is an effective boost. The magic was positively infused with the essence of Life, an aura of magic and higher energies given form and purpose.
"Now you try!" I was pulled back to reality by Elle as she dragged me, offering me a pencil and a sheet of paper.
"Okay?" I indulged her, easily copying the light Glyph onto paper. As I expected the spell worked, creating an orb of light. I could feel the magic respond, and if I had been more active…
I could have created a number of light based magic, light projections, and flashbangs. Instead I consumed the magic gathered by the spell, and nodded. So that had proved I could learn spells, though certain types weren't possible.
Like certain types of necromancy, anything involving blood and flesh wouldn't work due to my odd physicality. Though it worked better for me than it did for Steven due to being born human. So it might be possible.
"Now this one." I obliged the girl, narrowing my eyes at the plant glyph. I decided to be a little more attentive with this one as I tapped the paper. I could feel the aura of magic twisting into the paper, and held my breath as I tapped a nail to trigger the spell.
Let leaf and root be the essence.
Let the Titan be your Foundation.
Bring forth Life from the breath of the gods.
Become one with the Green, become one with the Red.
Come forth from the circle of power, energies of the Verdant.
Let the Titan be your Foundation.
Bring forth Life from the breath of the gods.
Become one with the Green, become one with the Red.
Come forth from the circle of power, energies of the Verdant.
A flower bloomed from nothing, magical energy taking shape into matter. Universal energy turned to almost mundane substance. I could hear the aura of the magic, the foundation it was based upon was almost unique, alien and yet compatible, coloring the native magic with its weight.
This was magic belonging to another world, magic born of a Titan the size of an island. There was power in the symbols born of the Titan, and while it was foreign it was also interesting. Gems were mostly self contained aside from ambient energy absorption. They sort of drew their energy from the universe itself, but Gem magic was in a way a school, a foundation of magic carved into the fabric of reality.
It meant they weren't always compatible with certain types of magic, though they could learn with some time, or learn how to copy it with their own magic.
"I…I can use magic, I'm a witch!" She sounded so happy, Elle…no Artificer's aura soared.
"That begs the question, who is teaching you magic?"
"Stripes. Err…Labradorite. She's a practiced magic user with a few different systems." Of course for Gems, learning wasn't always easy. Most Era 2 Gems had a hard time with it though due to the reduced amounts of Pink ichor. Glyph magic was easy enough, all you needed was ambient magic, intent and knowledge and you were on your way.
Some were more fundamentally incompatible though.
"What schools of magic has she learned? I'm sure you've asked." I flicked away a lock of her platinum blonde hair with a sardonic grin.
Elle grinned. "Yeah. She's learned magic from the Boiling Isles, Alchemy from Shambala, and magic from the Kitakah." Something jumped out at me, something translating oddly.
"That…means Bug right?" She shrugged.
"She also knows the Bezel system of magic." I narrowed my eyes, I had heard that before.
Bezel, Bezel, Bezel.
The Charms of Bezel…that's Ben 10 isn't it?"
"Do the Charms of Bezel ring a bell?"
Elle nodded. "Stripes said they were in the hands of some human mage, Gwen something…?"
So that confirmed Steven Universe, a
Wasn't there a Generator Rex crossover for the Reboot?
Also Gravity Falls…and Amphibia, and they had punched a hole into Owl House's dimension…not a big deal.
"I've gone quite mad haven't I…?" My horrified whisper was thankfully not heard by Elle.
But it was the truth, everything about this was crazy, this was insanity. I was on Mars having magic practice with a girl able to make reality her bitch, I had a gem in my belly, I was magic, and a participant in a transdimensional war across galaxies with sci-fi technology, literal magic, with hundreds of alien empires working against giant space monsters responsible for destroying worlds in numbers given in scientific notation. You need to be calm…
My world was in the crossfire where planets were collateral damage, and it was dangerous and awful, and everything could fall, fall, AND FALL AND FALL AND MAKE IT STOP, MAKE IT…
STOP. BREATHE.
I gripped my chest, a gentle warmth filling my mind, from…my Gem? There was something, something missing, something I didn't understand yet. But it made me feel safe, it made me feel less alone even when there was nobody around me. It kept me moving forward, even when I woke up alone.
Elle was giving me a look, and I smiled hesitantly.
I wasn't going to dump my baggage on her, that was by business, my issues.
"Any other spell glyphs you wanted me to learn?"
Elle beamed.
"Hello Gregor." Gregor the Snail blinked as I called out.. "How's that gemstone selling business been doing?"
"We've found a number of buyers across several cities, even being discreet we can expect to make three quarters of a million a month." He sounded suitably impressed. "More than enough to support ourselves and our…investigations." My smile shrunk.
Right, there was that whole business about their origins I wasn't sure how to explain without one of them going ballistic and going out and murdering the Triumvirate. Plus we still needed to figure out how to heal them, my power should work but their fucked up chimerism made things difficult.
Would a large dose of my ichor heal them, or would it bring out the inhuman part of their genetics, removing their human DNA as damage? Or were their cells so integrated that my power simply considered them an odd organism?
"You do not approve." He stated plainly, expression shifted.
"It doesn't matter what I approve, you are not under my aegis. Not like Elle, or Rachel after we took down a dozen dog fighting rings in the span of a few days." Global teleportation and precognition tended to be really helpful, along with a bevy of other Gem abilities. It didn't help that literally every Gem had some level of clairvoyant sense of the past and future.
Though it was more instinctual, for Gems it was a sort of sense of the flow of battle, and a better ability to infer data. Like if people had advanced sensors strapped to their brains. We were like machines, able to sense all types of energy from polarized light to the resounding light of true magic. That lets us divine out the patterns in our own ways.
We had a few hundred dogs, with most of them being kept under the care of a handful of Gems. But not everyone had the time for pets, so a dog shelter had been bought by us using our gemstone money and placed near Brockton Bay due to the low cost…and reduced government scrutiny.
Of course everything was set up to keep them safe from the E88, and there was instant coverage with a stealthy warp pad in the basement. That plus a helping of magical defenses made it a real cinch.
Plus it puts us in range of various useful shards, from the administrator to the shaper, and a fragment of Scion's path to victory. As well as the shard used to censor trigger visions.
We had scanned the city, with the Sapphires helping with targeting of the Hole Punchers. The devices used to punch holes through the dimensional barriers set up by the Entities.
Most forms of dimensional transference were based on aspects of the Infinity Portal created by one Stanford Pines some thirty nine years ago. They were unique, utilizing complex multidimensional mathematics with vaguely disturbing characteristics.
That portal seemed to lead into the space between dimensions, that distance that was not distance, that space that was not space, the Bleed between worlds. This made it cycle across an effectively infinite number of dimensions, skipping past them like the pages in a book.
The Entities had converged on some aspect of this science, but it was much more limited, even if ten to the power of eighty one dimensions was a number beyond human comprehension.
"Aegis. What does that mean for your people?" I refocused on the present. "Your adopted people if you would." He amended.
"Gems aren't human, I'm sure we've established that by now right?" He nodded and I continued. "The Diamonds themselves created the Gems, they're kind of like our family." I ignored how that idea felt so odd, but not wrong. "Our laws, our own nature reflects that." It has even affected mine, with that protective streak that really wanted me to ask for my world to be mine.
"How so?" He rumbled, sitting down on the bench of foreign magic from another world.
"The Gems who've joined my Court, the ones willing to help me adjust, the young teenager I found on my doorstep. My family, my human family," Something hitched in my song. "Hell even Rachel with her poor adjustment and terrible social skills." I wasn't as violent but I wasn't amazing with people either. "They are mine. They are vein adma. Cherished kin."
"Dreki. " I understood perfectly. Calling us Dragons was a good description.
"Diamonds are the first Gems, the archetype. We are a draconic sort, but we also collect people rather than just treasures." I felt that urge with some of the more interesting full blooded humans. "Having a Ballas brain can be real trouble." I tapped my forehead.
"So if we were under your aegis…?" He sounded curious to know my reply.
"You would be under my protection, from anyone and any thing that would want to harm you." Within reason of course, I couldn't shield them from the bumps and bruises life left on a person. "And when you have nominal influence over a galactic empire, that protection can be…significant." I rubbed the back of my neck. "But that can be a serious choice, a very serious one. Elle was willing because she wanted a semblance of family, and Rachel went for it because she took a shine to Frills and Aventurine." Plus rescuing hundreds of dogs got on her good side.
Relatively speaking. She was still an aggressive little shit, and she was spending time with the Quartz and Rubies to get the rough edges bumped out. A little bit of empathy was kind of needed to help her, as well as enough patience and toughness to deal with all her hard edges.
"You have a crow on your shoulder." Gregor pointed out. "It seems to want to tell you something."
Oh him. I thought he had decided to leave me alone. "What do you want?"
"No-Wings. You never gave me a name to call you by." He spoke in his language of chirps and pulsing birdsong.
"Because I came to the conclusion I was hallucinating your existence." I replied dryly, sulking.
He lifted a wing, almost like he was lifting an arm to his chest. "By the Rolling Sun, what a hurtful thing to say to one of your flock."
"Come again?" I stood up, I thought Steven had brought the mutant crows into his aegis and not under mine, we were still sharing joint custody of the colony.
"I've volunteered to join your little flock of Light-Stones, you gave me red feathers, it's your responsibility." I noted the occasional streaks of red on black.
"How…injured were you? That kind of thing tends to require being pretty dead." There was a ring of concern from his aura, which had a different shape to it, a flickering mass of twisting cyclones rather than the more solid flames of human aura.
"I did take in a lot of smoke." He seemed more concerned now. Smoke tended to hurt birds more due to their type of respiratory system, more sensitive.
"Luckily it wasn't too bad, I'm not ready to start curing cases of death. Tends to lead to giant immortal pink zombies with interdimensional wormholes in their heads."
"You are speaking to a crow." Gregor was giving me an odd look.
"To be fair, this is a mutant crow created by a time manipulator and a striker capable of minor mutations combining their powers. Even though I understand regular crows too. " I didn't let him hear the last part. "He…uhh." I was going to say his name and realized I didn't know it.
"Tungwup." The crow answered me.
"Tungwup here is a perfectly sapient being, his species have come under the aegis of the Empire since they decided they wanted nothing to do with Earth Bet."
"Really?" I nodded and he gave the avian a more measuring look. "Then why is he here and not with his people?"
"Apparently he was so close to death that he took some aspects of magic into his biology." It was a day ending in Y and thus expected. "Not that it matters, with all the cracks in reality, magic is spilling through effectively everywhere."
Gregor cracked open his mouth when I was suddenly bowled over and spun in the air. All I could think was soft and then baby when I peered at dark pink to the point of almost red eyes, with an innocent glimmer.
"Rose, you shouldn't surprise people like that. It's…not polite." Starry emerged in a burst of speed, going from five hundred to zero in a matter of seconds. I was put down, and looked up at a Rose Quartz I hadn't seen before.
I recognized her quickly, and I swallowed spit(ichor) as I saw the shape of my face in hers, and the waves of my hair in her voluminous curtains of pink and lightest red. She wasn't quite as large as Starry, with a softer pudgier shape and more around the standard size of a Rose Quartz, at the lower range even.
So around seven and a half feet tall, and she wore not a uniform but more casual but fitting clothing. Dark pink working pants, with well-fit red boots. A voluminous pink blouse marked with red vines blooming with amaranthus, and a Diamond insignia on her knees, chest, and elbows.
I know this gem.
Rose Quartz Facet-SD Round-01. The sole Gem born of this planet, not a prototype so much as the complete model. She was mine, my Gem, the only one that would be born of my ichor for quite a while until the Kindergartens on Mars were mapped out.
Baby. Another word that came to mind, this was a being born of my blood, this was effectively one of my kin, and I started to realize I had not thought this through in the slightest when I decided I wanted to make a Gem.
"Hi!" She stared back at me with muted naive eyes, bobbing up and down in excitement.
So this is what it's like to feel a deep almost parental love for another living being…
"Hey there." I was gentle, my song became almost crooning in response.
"Perhaps we can speak at a later time Sunrise Diamond." Gregor respectfully bounced.
"Yeah…okay." I was distracted, waving him away to talk with this Rose Quartz.
I ended up not getting much of a chance though since Rose had run away from an Azurite teacher.
Annoying, but shit happens.
Brass Pearl was an old Gem, only a certain tall Ruby was older. In her twenty eight thousand seven hundred years of life, she had seen things that would beggar the mind to believe.
So it didn't surprise her when they found a new player in the game, a shift in the possibilities, people moving towards Boston for an unknown purpose. A biotinker as the natives labeled it had gone disconcertingly silent from their bugs embedded into the network of the villain known as Accord.
The man reminded her of the many, many Turquoises she had met in her long life. An intelligence that scales to the size and scope of the problems presented to him. The main issue of course was that the man was insufferable and violently perfectionist. It didn't help that his plans didn't always take humanity into account.
He would be a powerful enemy…if they didn't have 'Thinkers' of their own to counteract his own plays, and far superior technology. Getting bugs into his enterprise had been as easy as stealing…was it candy? Yes, as easy as stealing candy from a baby.
Even then underestimating him wasn't a mistake they were willing to make and they were keeping him in mind for their operations within the city.
"Black Beryl, what have you seen with your Vision?" She asked Beryl, a newer gem than most but a very skilled one at that.
She was a tall Gem, a couple of inches above her own height. Wild black hair cascaded behind muscled shoulders hidden by a puffy almost furred dress, skin almost as dark as obsidian and flecks of reflective sable staring back at her.
Her claws flexed in and out, and fangs flicked out into needle daggers like the teeth of a deep sea anglerfish.
"My Vision caught a few people behaving…oddly, bringing materials and items to several warehouses across the city." Brass understood.
"There's likely an unknown Master in this town, and based on what Sunrise Diamond has told us of what she saw in their auras…it's likely a child of Christine Mathers."
A true annoyance, Mama Mathers power wasn't as effective as it should be due to the arcane nature of Sapphire's future sight, but it still caused a small reduction in proficiency to filter out the chaff. Up until they adapted to the assault and updated their clairvoyant programming.
"We know his home planet has a clairvoyant reading of some of this world's players. The description of burns…likely Lionheart." Black Beryl rubbed her chin in reply to Brass, a chittering pulse of curiosity surging into her song. "His emotional manipulation abilities would serve him well in acquiring manpower."
"And we can't have that happening." While they weren't here to solve the world's problems, doing some of that was inherent in the nature of their mission. There were billions of shards to take care of. Collapsing their cycle, their remaining hub and shutting down their Asura would account for a good fraction of their problems.
But in the end, this wasn't their Earth, and they couldn't force change on a planet with six billion lives. Even if that wasn't even close to a tenth of a percent of their population, much of their labor was taken up with monitoring the galaxies for rogue shards, as well as infrastructure overhauls after the massive boosts in technology in the last decade.
The Empire had never found much of a point to shielding colonies, despite their capabilities. They were always more worlds, and their infrastructure was itself shielded. They were conservative, not idiotic.
Of course that had changed after Galvan Prime had been destroyed by a mass energy bombardment by the Atasians, the former 'Highbreed' empire. It had saved a number of colonies from the shards energy projection abilities. Further improvements had come about when Yellow Diamond had been caught in an Incursean Conquest Ray that had destroyed a higher shard, one capable of harvesting powers.
It was certainly a test of Diamond durability, and the immediate aftermath left the general in charge in utter terror when she walked off a planet exploding around her and proceeded to break into the ship through the vents to berate him. With a full burst of Diamondsong in his ringing ear holes.
She had heard the general had been exiled by Empress Attea, gaining the animosity of an extragalactic nation of world destroyers wasn't considered smart when you were already enemies with the fucking Reach. They had been the major power in the Milky Way for thousands of years, until the various aliens rose up to fight back.
The Incurseans had stolen five hundred worlds, and they hadn't even done it through conquest, the natives were treated badly enough to prefer the rule of the Incurseans of all peoples.
She shook her head, whistling a quiet song to herself. The Incurseans had become softer over the past thousand years, barring a handful of incidents they were less conquest happy than they had used to be.
There was a knock on the door, and Brass gestured to Black Beryl. The Gem grinned and leapt out the window. Crazy Gem…
"Come in." The little Diamond quietly shuffled into the room, umber eyes meeting her own with a curious light.
Brass Pearl tilted her sunglasses, shifting her attention to her Diamond. She was young, effectively a zygote by her standards if it wasn't for how humans matured.
She was inexperienced, but she had a real strength and power, a potential that was untapped. She had seen it in the spars she had with Starry, the impact of shockwaves from punches and kicks, and crimson Diamondfire flaring around clenched fists.
Well she used she but that was simply a default for all Gems, it would be a bit unfair to call her she when she didn't want to be called she. As well as rude to call her he when she wanted to be called she. Brass had her doubts that Sunrise cared much, though she suspected he didn't understand the implications of moving back and forth as easily as he did.
Then again she was a Gem and not a human, maybe he just liked using shapeshifting and didn't care that his proclivities would make human bigots crack.
Good for him.
"My Diamond," She hid a smirk at how he seemed mildly shy at the use of the honorific. Poor fool had no idea what he was in store for. "I've been meaning to talk to you after you sent out your suspicion on the net." She tapped her fingers against her thigh, schooling her expression.
The little Diamond was rubbing his slightly haired chin, bright umber-red eyes shuttering as their focus shifted to her. "About the possible Master?"
Brass nodded, adjusting her glasses. "I know this may be a lot to ask when you're still quite new to this…"
"Yeah?" The young Diamond grunted, eyebrows furrowing.
The Pearl clasped her hands together. "I think it would be for the best that you help us find him."
