Carnelian can hear her quite clearly from halfway down the tower. Though, really, she could probably have heard her all the way from the crash site. It's her cue to quite literally drop everything, the record she was writing their latest capture into tossed aside as she dashes for the stairs. As she climbs the last few steps, she pulls her sword from the gem in her throat. She leads with the sharp point, ready to fight as she bursts through the doorway--
Which, it turns out, has a stranger not far in front of it, and she's between her and her Pearl. With a wordless shout, Carnelian lunges forward.
Alright, yelling and being attacked was not was he expecting. Not that he's expecting anything specific now that he's on a new, primitive planet, but he was kind of hoping for a pleasant welcome.
Oh well.
Black Diamond is so still that it almost looks like Carnelian is going to go right through him--but at the last moment, he throws up his arm and diverts the direction of the blade into a benign path.
"Wasn't expecting this," he says calmly, as if this cold greeting wasn't even happening. "I thought all gems evacuated this place when they called for a retreat..."
He brings a hand to his chin thoughtfully.
"...and if you two have the gall to attack a Diamond by yourselves...that can only mean..."
He grins wildly.
"You two must be the remnants of the Crystal Gem rebellion!"
Normally when you get into a fight, especially a two on one fight, there are weapons crossed and someone ends up defeated. Seldom does a two on one fight result in the two being so outmatched that the one doesn't even draw a weapon.
What kind of gem diverted an attack with just a hand? But he's talking to them, as if this means nothing to-
The claim that they're confronting a diamond makes her stop, staring in awe and, honestly, fear.
But he says the magic words "crystal gem rebellion" and that's really all it takes to set Champagne off. If he'd intended to calm them down by casually saying everything that he did, it certainly hadn't worked for her.
She rushes him, fully intent on sticking her spear right though his face. She's not going down without a fight!
Black Diamond simply shifts his head to the side as Champagne's spear tries to find its way into his forehead. Under the force of her momentum, their faces come intimately close to each other, and Black Diamond looks her in the eyes with the same wild grin.
"This how you guys initiate all of your new recruits? Now this is more my speed."
He shrugs them off just enough to get space to do a backflip, adding some yards of between him and them. He crouches slightly, assuming a readied defensive stance while still not pulling out his own weapon.
"Alright, don't go easy on me. I want to make a good first impression. Formal introductions can come later."
Carnelian seizes Champagne's spear arm, holding her back.
"Prove it."
And they can work out what in the worlds she's talking about regarding "new recruits" after. The sword fizzles away into light, and locking eyes with her Pearl, Carnelian takes her other hand. The meaning is clear; let's dance.
Edited (wrong icon. easy to misclick on the phone) 2016-08-18 18:52 (UTC)
Black Diamond is rude. He clearly wasn't taking any of this seriously, but if he could so casually brush off their attacks then maybe they did have to try harder.
She doesn't consider fusion until her hands are in Carnelian's, but she's on board with the idea immediately. Their dance is everything a fusion dance should be, full of passion and intensity and a unified goal of dealing with this new arrival.
After a flash of brightness and a dramatic dispersal of sparkles, there they stand. Cinnabar.
Hopefully it's a scary enough display, because now they're stronger and bigger.
All he can really think is that dancing seems like an awfully strange and inefficient way to start an attack; still, he doesn't let his guard down...
Until he sees the shift in light, in their forms, until the two of them become one. That's when his posture slackens a little bit, his face clearly entranced and fascinated by what had just happened.
"The two of you--a fusion? You guys are taking me seriously!"
He strikes up his readied posture again, a sharpness in his smirk. It's a weird thing for someone to say when they're clearly not taking it seriously themselves...or is he? It's hard to tell through his delight and excitement.
Their fusion stands somewhat taller than a quartz soldier, with a slimly powerful build like her Carnelian half and four arms. Her hair frames her face in in a billowing cloud of deep red. Raised lines and whorls, like the humans might carve in a stone like their namesake, decorate the exposed skin of her upper set of arms.
"I don't hold back."
Cinnabar touches a hand to her throat gem and pulls. A stream of metal, semi-liquid and glistening, follows her hand and, as it reaches its end, solidifies into the shape of Carnelian's sword. She draws out a spear in the same fashion, and as she holds them together, they shift and mold into a new form.
In a flash of red and silver, the two weapons are gone, replaced for a moment by a mass dripping light. It lasts only for a moment before the shape bursts, revealing their true weapon grasped in both hands.
A long, two-tipped spear. The business ends are long, slender blades on the outside with sharp tips just waiting to be plunged in Black Diamond's direction. But she isn't going to start with that kind of attack, he'd asked for their best shot.
It was a shot he'd get.
She levels the spear in his direction, and he gets only a moment's warning as energy crackles between the tips before it fires an orb of energy directly at him. (Their alternate-universe selves would be probably be alarmed at how similar the energy orb was to the Flood() function).
His eyes are trained on that new weapon. All new experiences today, isn't it? A Pearl and a Carnelian fusion, and their weapon...
He already loves this planet.
The crackling directs his attention towards the spear tip in particular; as soon as the projectile leaves the weapon, Boxer braces himself--to catch the orb of energy in his waiting palms, stopping it in its path as if freezing it in position. He pulls in his arms, one over the other to hold the orb directly in front of his chest.
Black Diamond presses his hands inward, warping its shape into a squished figure--for what it's worth, there's a look of extreme concentration on his face while he does it--and it gets continuously more distorted until something finally "pops" and turns the orb into a pulse that sends a forceful wave through the tower, knocking over anything that wasn't cemented to the floor.
"Be careful!" Cinnabar snarls as dust rains from the ceiling. The tower is in better shape than Carnelian and Champagne found it, but that's not going to last if they keep setting off force explosions in here.
It does give her an idea, though. Another shot is already charging when she draws her spear arm back, and she lets it loose. Just like before, it streaks straight towards him, crackling and popping through the air, but now she wants him to catch it. Go on, Diamond, give her an opening.
"Look, sister, you're the one that picked the arena!"
Does he catch it this time? No, of course not; that would be predictable. Diamond is no one-trick pony. Instead, Diamond thrusts his palm forward directly towards Cinnabar's energy projectile. In a split second there's a blue, glassy shimmer that overtakes the sphere and ricochets directly back towards Cinnabar with twice as much speed as it was originally sent.
Cloudbank Central Authority would hereby like to announce that all instances of diamonds catching and/or redirecting projectiles shall now and forever more be illegal. Any diamonds caught in the act of making a mess of things will be made a mess of themselves.
Which is to say: Rude.
There is no panicked response to the sudden change. It would have been so much nicer to take advantage of any opening the Diamond was willing to give. If only things were that easy.
There was only one choice to make that didn't put the tower further at risk, and it involved getting this horrid energy blast away from everyone. Cinnabar steps to the side as the energy blast hurtles through the air. She twirls her spear around once and, like a baseball bat, slams the crackling tips directly against the back of the blast.
It's a home-run.
The energy blast goes hurtling out between two columns and out into the endless sky beyond, where it promptly explodes. Cinnabar doesn't see it, though, because taking her eyes off of the Diamond for even that short moment had been dangerous enough. She's not about to get stabbed in the back here.
And for her opponent, he doesn't seem nearly as concerned with the same thing. In fact, his back is turned to Cinnabar, hand over his brow as if to shield it from the sun as he watches the projectile explode.
"Nice flair," he comments genuinely, turning around to smile at her. "Got anything else?" he asks, shoving his hands into the pockets casually. Come on, you're a quartz and a pearl; surely you have more up your sleeves than a bunch of energy projectiles and a spear, right?
Her voice fades into a viscous gurgling as her face begins to turn gray and melt. The rest of her follows, collapsing into a pool of shining liquid metal that spreads over the floor to meet him. Where it contacts his feet, it slithers upwards, wrapping the diamond's legs in glistening coils. Coils that become an engraved, serpentine tail, tightly wrapped around his legs as the rest of her body rises from the blob.
"... just going to stand there?"
She falls away, sloshing back into liquid form, reforming at spear's length behind him. Think fast, Diamond.
Boxer's eyes brighten as he watches her shift into liquid. Shapeshifting is something that gems can do, but for it to manifest like this is truly a unique way of doing it! It must have less strain on her body, since she's not actually changing her light projection...
He doesn't try to get away from her coils--just watches them as if he's interested to see what she does next.
As the speartip nearly pierces him, his hand wraps around the pole and stops it with the strength of his grip alone. From under his palm, an electric blue pattern akin to Earth-native circuitry spreads over the weapon. When it reaches Cinnabar's hands it forces them away like magnets of the same pole pushing away from each other with an electrical crackle.
"I could, but..."
Black Diamond twirls the spear, now laced with that circuit pattern, for effect. He moves forward, lunging at Cinnabar with noted agility, catching her neck between the prongs of the spear and pinning her to the ground with it.
"I'm not interested in hurting the gems I want to be friends with."
And he never stops giving them that genuine smile.
Diamonds aren't supposed to be friends with anyone. They're rulers. Conquerors. Leaders. Authority figures over all other gems. They were merciless killers, unflinching even in the toughest of situations.
He'd certainly been unflinching with that pin of his, it had been a strike that could have been a hit if he'd meant it. He's bound to give some kind of an opening if she plays along, so the opportunity to strike could still surface but...
Friends? What? There's a ripple of uncertainty that rushes through Cinnabar.
Black Diamond pulls back on the spear, freeing Cinnabar, and slinging it over his shoulder casually as if it had always been the weapon he'd produced for himself.
"What, did you think I crash-landed here on a broken ship, alone, to try to take over the rebel planet? Please."
He waves dismissively.
"If I was half the threat you think I am, I still wouldn't have done something that stupid."
Good to have that confirmed. Cinnabar gets to her feet; she immediately summons a replacement spear, not to strike at him with just yet, but to hold ready if she needs it.
"Why? What do you get out of this?"
He's a Diamond, made to rule. Always at the top of the heap, seemingly above the cares of the common gem. He was surely in line for a colony of his own sooner or later. Why would he walk away from that?
He looks away, rolls onto the heels of his feet, one hand in his pocket and clearly not intimidated by Cinnabar's new weapon.
"To be honest..." he rolls his shoulders in a shrug. "Don't know. It's all very new to me. But what I do know is why I'm here in the first place. It's kind of a long story."
He pauses, thinks about it for a moment, and tilts his head to the side.
"I said some things, did some stuff, and now I'm no longer welcome in Homeworld. Exiled."
At the very least, Cinnabar isn't rushing in for another attack. But she's also not about to just accept his claims with open arms. An exiled diamond, here on earth?
Cinnabar's reaction, honestly, shouldn't be surprising at all.
"You're lying." She pauses for a moment. "You have to be."
Because if he wasn't lying, that would make him an ally. A diamond as an ally. There was no way, it wasn't possible.
"Suppose it's to be expected. An exiled Diamond seems like a pretty far-fetched story to anyone who wasn't there to see it."
He brings up a hand to his chin, thinking about what he could possibly do. But all of this is very new, and he knows rebel gems have a culture very different to that of Homeworld...well, he supposes it doesn't hurt to ask.
Cinnabar raises the spear until its prongs are level with his chest.
"Were you followed?"
She believes him when he says he was alone only because her component gems have seen the wreck with their own eyes. That doesn't mean he can't have more ships in orbit waiting for his command.
"Yeah," he says with a nod, as if the spear wasn't there in the first place. "At least at first. Couldn't find any trace of them half-way through my flight."
He pauses, gives it some thought, then continues.
"I can't guarantee that no one is going to come looking for me. But on solid ground, no amount of soldiers they could dispatch would be able to subdue me."
He doesn't sound like he's bragging at all--just stating facts with a straight face. He is a Diamond, after all.
"If they ever want to bring me back, it will take no less than one of the other Diamonds herself. They've got bigger things on their plate than fetching an exiled gem from the rebel planet."
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no subject
Which, it turns out, has a stranger not far in front of it, and she's between her and her Pearl. With a wordless shout, Carnelian lunges forward.
no subject
Alright, yelling and being attacked was not was he expecting. Not that he's expecting anything specific now that he's on a new, primitive planet, but he was kind of hoping for a pleasant welcome.
Oh well.
Black Diamond is so still that it almost looks like Carnelian is going to go right through him--but at the last moment, he throws up his arm and diverts the direction of the blade into a benign path.
"Wasn't expecting this," he says calmly, as if this cold greeting wasn't even happening. "I thought all gems evacuated this place when they called for a retreat..."
He brings a hand to his chin thoughtfully.
"...and if you two have the gall to attack a Diamond by yourselves...that can only mean..."
He grins wildly.
"You two must be the remnants of the Crystal Gem rebellion!"
no subject
What kind of gem diverted an attack with just a hand? But he's talking to them, as if this means nothing to-
The claim that they're confronting a diamond makes her stop, staring in awe and, honestly, fear.
But he says the magic words "crystal gem rebellion" and that's really all it takes to set Champagne off. If he'd intended to calm them down by casually saying everything that he did, it certainly hadn't worked for her.
She rushes him, fully intent on sticking her spear right though his face. She's not going down without a fight!
no subject
"This how you guys initiate all of your new recruits? Now this is more my speed."
He shrugs them off just enough to get space to do a backflip, adding some yards of between him and them. He crouches slightly, assuming a readied defensive stance while still not pulling out his own weapon.
"Alright, don't go easy on me. I want to make a good first impression. Formal introductions can come later."
no subject
Carnelian seizes Champagne's spear arm, holding her back.
"Prove it."
And they can work out what in the worlds she's talking about regarding "new recruits" after. The sword fizzles away into light, and locking eyes with her Pearl, Carnelian takes her other hand. The meaning is clear; let's dance.
i headcanon their fusion dance as a tango
She doesn't consider fusion until her hands are in Carnelian's, but she's on board with the idea immediately. Their dance is everything a fusion dance should be, full of passion and intensity and a unified goal of dealing with this new arrival.
After a flash of brightness and a dramatic dispersal of sparkles, there they stand. Cinnabar.
Hopefully it's a scary enough display, because now they're stronger and bigger.
no subject
Until he sees the shift in light, in their forms, until the two of them become one. That's when his posture slackens a little bit, his face clearly entranced and fascinated by what had just happened.
"The two of you--a fusion? You guys are taking me seriously!"
He strikes up his readied posture again, a sharpness in his smirk. It's a weird thing for someone to say when they're clearly not taking it seriously themselves...or is he? It's hard to tell through his delight and excitement.
"Give me your best shot."
These details okay, Skie?
Their fusion stands somewhat taller than a quartz soldier, with a slimly powerful build like her Carnelian half and four arms. Her hair frames her face in in a billowing cloud of deep red. Raised lines and whorls, like the humans might carve in a stone like their namesake, decorate the exposed skin of her upper set of arms.
"I don't hold back."
Cinnabar touches a hand to her throat gem and pulls. A stream of metal, semi-liquid and glistening, follows her hand and, as it reaches its end, solidifies into the shape of Carnelian's sword. She draws out a spear in the same fashion, and as she holds them together, they shift and mold into a new form.
no subject
A long, two-tipped spear. The business ends are long, slender blades on the outside with sharp tips just waiting to be plunged in Black Diamond's direction. But she isn't going to start with that kind of attack, he'd asked for their best shot.
It was a shot he'd get.
She levels the spear in his direction, and he gets only a moment's warning as energy crackles between the tips before it fires an orb of energy directly at him. (Their alternate-universe selves would be probably be alarmed at how similar the energy orb was to the Flood() function).
no subject
His eyes are trained on that new weapon. All new experiences today, isn't it? A Pearl and a Carnelian fusion, and their weapon...
He already loves this planet.
The crackling directs his attention towards the spear tip in particular; as soon as the projectile leaves the weapon, Boxer braces himself--to catch the orb of energy in his waiting palms, stopping it in its path as if freezing it in position. He pulls in his arms, one over the other to hold the orb directly in front of his chest.
Black Diamond presses his hands inward, warping its shape into a squished figure--for what it's worth, there's a look of extreme concentration on his face while he does it--and it gets continuously more distorted until something finally "pops" and turns the orb into a pulse that sends a forceful wave through the tower, knocking over anything that wasn't cemented to the floor.
no subject
It does give her an idea, though. Another shot is already charging when she draws her spear arm back, and she lets it loose. Just like before, it streaks straight towards him, crackling and popping through the air, but now she wants him to catch it. Go on, Diamond, give her an opening.
no subject
Does he catch it this time? No, of course not; that would be predictable. Diamond is no one-trick pony. Instead, Diamond thrusts his palm forward directly towards Cinnabar's energy projectile. In a split second there's a blue, glassy shimmer that overtakes the sphere and ricochets directly back towards Cinnabar with twice as much speed as it was originally sent.
no subject
Which is to say: Rude.
There is no panicked response to the sudden change. It would have been so much nicer to take advantage of any opening the Diamond was willing to give. If only things were that easy.
There was only one choice to make that didn't put the tower further at risk, and it involved getting this horrid energy blast away from everyone. Cinnabar steps to the side as the energy blast hurtles through the air. She twirls her spear around once and, like a baseball bat, slams the crackling tips directly against the back of the blast.
It's a home-run.
The energy blast goes hurtling out between two columns and out into the endless sky beyond, where it promptly explodes. Cinnabar doesn't see it, though, because taking her eyes off of the Diamond for even that short moment had been dangerous enough. She's not about to get stabbed in the back here.
no subject
"Nice flair," he comments genuinely, turning around to smile at her. "Got anything else?" he asks, shoving his hands into the pockets casually. Come on, you're a quartz and a pearl; surely you have more up your sleeves than a bunch of energy projectiles and a spear, right?
no subject
Her voice fades into a viscous gurgling as her face begins to turn gray and melt. The rest of her follows, collapsing into a pool of shining liquid metal that spreads over the floor to meet him. Where it contacts his feet, it slithers upwards, wrapping the diamond's legs in glistening coils. Coils that become an engraved, serpentine tail, tightly wrapped around his legs as the rest of her body rises from the blob.
"... just going to stand there?"
She falls away, sloshing back into liquid form, reforming at spear's length behind him. Think fast, Diamond.
no subject
He doesn't try to get away from her coils--just watches them as if he's interested to see what she does next.
As the speartip nearly pierces him, his hand wraps around the pole and stops it with the strength of his grip alone. From under his palm, an electric blue pattern akin to Earth-native circuitry spreads over the weapon. When it reaches Cinnabar's hands it forces them away like magnets of the same pole pushing away from each other with an electrical crackle.
"I could, but..."
Black Diamond twirls the spear, now laced with that circuit pattern, for effect. He moves forward, lunging at Cinnabar with noted agility, catching her neck between the prongs of the spear and pinning her to the ground with it.
"I'm not interested in hurting the gems I want to be friends with."
And he never stops giving them that genuine smile.
no subject
He'd certainly been unflinching with that pin of his, it had been a strike that could have been a hit if he'd meant it. He's bound to give some kind of an opening if she plays along, so the opportunity to strike could still surface but...
Friends? What? There's a ripple of uncertainty that rushes through Cinnabar.
"What are you talking about?"
no subject
Black Diamond pulls back on the spear, freeing Cinnabar, and slinging it over his shoulder casually as if it had always been the weapon he'd produced for himself.
"What, did you think I crash-landed here on a broken ship, alone, to try to take over the rebel planet? Please."
He waves dismissively.
"If I was half the threat you think I am, I still wouldn't have done something that stupid."
no subject
Good to have that confirmed. Cinnabar gets to her feet; she immediately summons a replacement spear, not to strike at him with just yet, but to hold ready if she needs it.
"Why? What do you get out of this?"
He's a Diamond, made to rule. Always at the top of the heap, seemingly above the cares of the common gem. He was surely in line for a colony of his own sooner or later. Why would he walk away from that?
no subject
He looks away, rolls onto the heels of his feet, one hand in his pocket and clearly not intimidated by Cinnabar's new weapon.
"To be honest..." he rolls his shoulders in a shrug. "Don't know. It's all very new to me. But what I do know is why I'm here in the first place. It's kind of a long story."
He pauses, thinks about it for a moment, and tilts his head to the side.
"I said some things, did some stuff, and now I'm no longer welcome in Homeworld. Exiled."
no subject
Cinnabar's reaction, honestly, shouldn't be surprising at all.
"You're lying." She pauses for a moment. "You have to be."
Because if he wasn't lying, that would make him an ally. A diamond as an ally. There was no way, it wasn't possible.
no subject
He frowns, and it's hardly mocking.
"Suppose it's to be expected. An exiled Diamond seems like a pretty far-fetched story to anyone who wasn't there to see it."
He brings up a hand to his chin, thinking about what he could possibly do. But all of this is very new, and he knows rebel gems have a culture very different to that of Homeworld...well, he supposes it doesn't hurt to ask.
"What can I do to earn your trust?"
no subject
"Were you followed?"
She believes him when he says he was alone only because her component gems have seen the wreck with their own eyes. That doesn't mean he can't have more ships in orbit waiting for his command.
no subject
He pauses, gives it some thought, then continues.
"I can't guarantee that no one is going to come looking for me. But on solid ground, no amount of soldiers they could dispatch would be able to subdue me."
He doesn't sound like he's bragging at all--just stating facts with a straight face. He is a Diamond, after all.
"If they ever want to bring me back, it will take no less than one of the other Diamonds herself. They've got bigger things on their plate than fetching an exiled gem from the rebel planet."
Black Diamond's shoulders heave in a shug.
"That's my assessment of the situation, anyway."