Abandoned Crystal System Colony Planet Earth - Friday, Fandom Time
It had all started with the Crystal Gems taking a break. A break! In building the drill! To save the planet! The work was so tantalizingly close to being done that Peridot had complained to Steven, vehemently. It had involved waving a little power drill in the air for emphasis. Which had, as most things around here seemed to do, inspired Steven to
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Peridot
"Don't say that," Peridot said, pointing at Rufus and practically yelling. "Say we're gonna do it together and it's gonna be great!"
Because, sure, that was going to happen.
They were all gonna die. But at least they'd die trying.
Rufus
Rufus just looked at her.
He'd rather die before saying something like that. And, oh look, dying was coming up rapidly! How convenient!
The look was really more of a glower. He was here and he was willing to try.
That was more than any other person in the entire multi-verse could expect from him. Deal with it.
Tip
Tip had always been a fan of going down fighting. Also, this was wasting time. "Well let's get going then," she said, heading purposefully for the drill. She'd figure out how to run it herself if she had to. She taught herself how to drive both a regular car and a flying one made by an alien with only the loosest idea of how a car was supposed to work; a giant drill ship couldn't be that hard.
Peridot
Under their feet, the Earth shook again, more violently this time. Peridot gave a little yelp and scurried up the ladder to climb into the drill's cockpit.
"Ready or not, we have a mission."
She frowned a little as she deposited herself into the driver's seat.
... It was a little cozy in here for five, wasn't it? Maybe it was for the best that the Crystal Gems were off fighting Malachite.
Rufus
Rufus climbed after her, resigned to getting this done no matter what other people thought.
"... This is going to be a tight squeeze," he observed, sitting down and making himself as small as possible.
Lovely.
Tip
"It can't be that bad," Tip said. Then got a look at it.
It was that bad.
"Hope everyone wore deodorant."
Anakin
Why did he have to be six feet tall? Why?
Anakin jammed himself in as tightly as he could, knees up around his chin. "Cosy," he muttered.
Jalian
"Smaller than ghess'Rith's feathernest," Jalian muttered in silverspeech. She slid into the side of it, glad she was no bigger, and closed the hatch behind her.
"I think we're ready."
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Peridot
Peridot nodded, and then turned the drill on. It lurched downward, throwing up dirt as it bit into the ground below, rattling the poor Fandomites squished within.
"Increasing speed," Peridot ground out, and then the drill was burrowing into the Earth like a rocket. A very big rocket. That was actually a drill.
It grew dark, with the exception of the panels in the cockpit glowing a faint green.
Anakin
"Green is generally a good sign, right?" Anakin checked, trying to learn the setup of the panels. He was a pilot. It was what he did.
Peridot
Peridot just turned a glance and a smile back toward Anakin.
"Would I have it any other way?"
Your engineer had a bit of a bias. Still, the panels were fairly straightforward. There was a monitor that showed their position relative to the Cluster - there was still a long way to go - and there were rows of buttons, some numbered, some with words written on them in the Gem language.
... Plus there was a pair of N64 controllers. There was probably a reason for those.
Rufus
Rufus was leaning over his knees and peering at the buttons with clear interest.
It was probably the most actively engaged in something anyone here had ever seen him.
"What do the buttons do?" he asked. "And what are those?"
The controllers.
Peridot
"They're all important," Peridot assured Rufus. "This row here is to deploy additional drill parts. These are for the periscope. And this one?"
She hit one of the buttons.
Elevator music began to play.
"For the trip. As for the controllers? We use those for--" She paused as the ground shook around them, and then shook her head. "Get ready! We're about to penetrate the asthenosphere!"
The darkness of the dirt and rock that had surrounded them gave way, suddenly, into a brilliant orange glow through the window as they passed through into a layer of molten rock. Fortunate, wasn't it, that the drill was built to withstand 360 gigapascals of pressure and temperatures of 9800 degrees?
Rufus
"Amazing," he said, watching the window. "Given where we are in the Earth's crust, that's peridotite, right? Super-heated."
It looked an awful lot like lava, just saying.
The elevator music made him wince a bit. But nothing was stopping him from getting all of this recorded.
Peridot
Peridot glanced at Rufus... again, as best as she was able. It was a squishy proposition, there inside the drill. But sometimes things came out of his mouth that impressed her, and this was one of those things.
"Yeah," she confirmed, and then smiled faintly, almost fondly. "It's made of the same stuff as peridots."
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"Could you augment yourself with peridotite?" he asked dispassionately.
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"I don't... actually know," she said, after a pause. "I assume it could theoretically be possible, though the process could take hundreds of your Earth years. Which I would have to spend without a body. Something to consider, if I ever need-"
She was interrupted by a sudden banging on the top of the drill's cockpit compartment, and looked up just in time to see a red hand press itself against the window, quickly and forcefully. It was a rather fearsome sight when highlighted by the peridotite's molten glow.
"Fusion experiments," she moaned. "They must have buried some prototypes with the Cluster."
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Or fascination. Or some combination of the both.
Either way, he was not nearly as discomfited as Peridot.
"As guardians or as garbage?" he asked, even as a second hand followed with more banging. He was still filming. Tseng was going to have a heart attack.
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Please keep all arms and legs inside the vehicle while traversing the asthenosphere.
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He reached for them carefully, around the others, and settled one in his lap--well, more like perched on his knee--and considered the other one and his PHS.
"Hold this," he ordered Peridot, handing his PHS over. "Keep it pointed at me and at the things outside. Touch none of the buttons on it." He didn't want her messing up his recording! It was important.
Then he took up the controller that wasn't on his knee and got to work.
It took him a few moments to figure out which button did what but, after that brief learning period... his aim was very, very good.
The reckless glee that, many years later, would drive him to jump off a building without a safety net was evident now in the smile he was wearing. It wasn't a grin, he didn't do grins, but it was gleeful in a sharp, hard-edged way.
Rufus should have been born a Diamond, really.
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Peridot wasn't thinking that exactly as she took the phone-thing from Rufus, blinking and... pointing it at him. She was pretty sure it was at him. She'd never handled one of these things before.
It was possible that there was going to be the tiniest bit of a little green thumb in the frame. It was going to stay there until the drill broke through the asthenosphere and into a layer of dense rock. The few remaining fusion experiments were thrown off as the drill started to shake. Sorry, Rufus. Peridot was dropping your phone in favor of grabbing the steering controls so that they didn't get torn apart at the last moment.
"We're hitting some denser rock! This is it!"
Brace yourselves, folks.
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Then he lunged for his PHS and held it back up.
BECAUSE SCREW BEING SAFE.
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The rattling of the drill suddenly stopped, and a bright, dazzling light filled the tunnel that they had come to rest in. Peridot frowned, then reached for her periscope. Which... was really just a pair of binoculars with a flashlight on it, but that flashlight had just survived impossible degrees of pressure and heat, so periscope win, right there.
"Recovery depth achieved. Target found."
And then she steered the drill into the chamber of the cluster.
It was... it was definitely a sight to behold.
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"We made it," Rufus breathed.
Yeah, that had been rather in doubt. Not that he'd had a bad time of it so far, but getting this far hadn't been assured.
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They'd survived! Against all odds! There had been insane grinning in there somewhere! And now... now the Earth was shaking. The Cluster was shaking. The cluster, that was made of the shards of millions of shattered Gems. Peridot didn't even care that her first instinct was to shriek in terror, because, frankly, it was terrifying.
Especially when the whole surface of the gigantic Gem fusion began to ripple, and then a series of arms, legs, entire torsos, screaming faces and all, tried to break free from the resulting ripples, trying desperately to take shape.
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Especially not while he was filming.
Though it likely that she was going to be tempted to kill him as the world went rather... rainbow and white under them and around them and Rufus started to laugh.
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Peridot lost her balance. Peridot got that incoming knee to the face, leaving her swinging back the other direction again, arms in the air and tiny legs akimbo as the wave receded again.
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This time it was Rufus dropping his PHS as he lunged for the controls.
He had no formal training, especially not in this ship, but he was a Shinra and, more importantly, he was Rufus.
He'd seen Peridot control it. That was enough for him to manage to stabilize the thing as well as it could be given… everything going on outside.
Once he got it under control, he absently scooped up his PHS.
"Honestly," he said snarkily to Jalian, "this is no time for ridiculous antics."
Because laughter had been the reasonable response. Of course.
"Does anyone have any idea about what to do with all of... that? Peridot, will the guns work on them?"
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