Your new best friend!

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*  SPINEL - STEVEN UNIVERSE   ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:*

🤡 - A happy-go-lucky, bouncy, energetic, immature Gem! She just wants to be your new friend!

🤡 - A friendly, playful doofus, she’ll probably want to play tag or dance or climb stuff with you!

🤡 - Bright pink, 4′7 in height, and dressed in a cutesy outfit somewhat like a clown or court jester’s, her appearance and personality might make you confuse her for a little kid! But she’s not - she’s over 6000 years old!

🤡 - Darndest thing, though, she’s missing her memories! As far as she knows, when she woke up here, it was for the first time...

🤡 - Once she decides you’re her friend, she absolutely will not ever leave you alone! Ever!

🤡 - DO NOT TRY TO ABANDON HER. DO NOT DO IT

…she was singing. Something that Broken Vessel would never be able to do xemselves, born from their void-filled egg with any voice xey may have once had stolen away from xem. Their mask didn’t show it, but a surge of bitterness ran through xyr body for a moment; they knew there was no way this “gem” could have known, but it felt like a slap in the face, almost.

Something else caught xyr attention too, though. One particular line of her song: “We’re beings of light.”

…light.

Light. Light. Light. They were made of LIGHT. Burning light. It burned. It burned! They could feel it pulsing behind xyr mask, tears of void staining xyr shell as they began to shiver, sobs wracking them as tiny hands ran over the back of xyr head in a panic. There was nothing actually there, but to them, all they could feel was the heavy blob of infection weighing on them, burning through them, casting it’s feverish haze over xem–

Xey were taking steps back away from the pink light being, unable to process what was really happening; unable to process that xey weren’t actually in any danger. They were signing, but instead of their usual fluid sign language, the most they were getting out was singular, choppy words.

‘LIGHT BAD. LIGHT BURNS. GET AWAY GET AWAY GET AWAY’

Spinel does not understand what’s happening or what to do. The light hurts xem? But she’s made of light! It’s not like she can help it, but she’s hurting them... she’s hurting them and it’s her fault, it’s her fault!

She hurts everyone she touches, her mind tells her, even though she doesn’t understand why she thinks that. She hurts all her friends, she hurts strangers, she hurts her diamond...

Her diamond...

But then, that train of thought stops, like there’s a wall between her and it, and she just steps backwards in shock.

“I’m... I’m sorry, I didn’t... I didn’t mean anythin’...” she mutters, clutching her head.

While the question of what xey were was, admittedly, starting to get quite old, the vessel found themselves staring back in response once the squeak of the gem’s shoes had gotten their attention. This… couldn’t be a human, could it? Humans generally weren’t pink, though to be fair, xey didn’t have much experience on the subject yet. Still, the fact that they seemed so stretchy was another dead give-away that something was up here. Humans were supposed to have bones that prevented that sort of thing, right..?

Pausing in their steps, the vessel turned around to fully face the gem, examining her in return just as she was examining them.

‘I’m a bug,’ They signed, cocking xyr head to the side in curiosity. ‘What are you?’

“A gem, of course!” Spinel answers instantly, retracting her torso back to normal and pointing a thumb at her chest, where there sits her heart-shaped gem. Then she starts to... sing?

“I’m a gem, silly,

And I’m a silly gem,

We’re beings of light,

Not like you or them!

We can stretch our limbs,

And shapeshift too!

Some of us're pink,

Some of us’re blue!”

Spinel notices the weird creature walking around almost instantly. They’re not a gem, that’s for sure, and they ain’t one of those human thingies either.

She hops over to them (literally) and starts following them with wide strides, stretching out her arm to scratch the top of her head while putting her chin in her hand.

Look out, Gyomei, out of nowhere at all comes Spinel! She pulls him into a full-body tackle, using arms that are definitely longer than a normal human’s arms, on account of how they wrap around his massive frame three times. The sudden appearance of her scares off a nearby cat, causing it to hiss and run away.

When she speaks, her voice comes from far below him.

“Wow! You’re huge! That means you must make lots of friends!”

Spinel doesn’t need to eat, but even she knows a good smell when she smells one. And the smell coming from this building - Lovely Loaves - it makes her want to float on the air like she’s laying on a cloud.

Following her nose right up to the window, where a number of baked goods are on display, she clonks her face right up against it so she’s squished against the window pane. She looks from item to item, without moving her face away from the window - if she wasn’t a light hologram, she’d probably leave a smear.

A group of nearby smaller-than-average humans look up at her and giggles, and she pops off of the window pane and looks at them.

“Oh, wouldja lookie here! A buncha l’il guys!”

“You wanna play with your new best friend, Spinel?!”

The kids all react excitably, so Spinel takes that as a yes.

She forms a transparent, purple ball in her hand and starts to juggle it, then adds a second, and then - miming as if it’s increasingly difficult for her, even though it isn’t - a third, a fourth, and a fifth. Soon, she’s juggling six balls effortlessly, and the kids are staring in wonderment as they try to keep up.

So Hallo’ween is this big shindig where we all dress up in spooky costumes, right?

I love it! That’s super easy for me, on account of bein’ a Gem and all!

“I think—” Steven paused, taking a few breaths.

The entire reason Spinel wanted to kill him and destroy Earth was because his mother abandoned her. It wasn’t even a clean break, it was a long and slow death. Maybe if she made more friends while she was still in her goofy state, it could save her hell in the long run. And the more she made, the softer the blow when and if they started to disappear from this place.

And he knew one person who wasn’t going anywhere any time soon.

“I think…you’re…right.” He forced a smile. “Maybe we could be friends.”

He watched her face change, maybe to the slightest recollection. He could still remember back home, but if she was rejuvenated, her Homeworld memories might be a little rattled.

“It’s—it’s not that important.” He said quickly. “It’s just somewhere to play. But, uh, you know…we can play here!” He looked around the beach, the grey sky and water and the empty stretch of sand. No one was around, giving them plenty of room.

For a moment, that doesn’t seem to work. Spinel’s eyes go distant, her pupils becoming small as she loses focus. She grabs her head as her mind becomes flooded with blurry images of someone, someone she recognizes, someone who’s so familiar...

And then...

It stops, just as quickly.

“Play?!” Spinel shouts, as if nothing had happened. “Oh, golly, I’d love to! I’m pract’ly born to play!”

“You don’t know the HALF of it!” Out of place, indeed. This place is meant to be filled with villains, so of course Thebestmaster is here to get tips, feedback even, on their methods of being scary.

Instead, it’s an uncomfortable echo of everything before he came to the city–nobody’s taking him seriously, and he doesn’t even have his powers to prove he’s capable of anything beyond being a ‘cute’ little puppet. Ugh.

…Who is this, though? It’s the first person who doesn’t seem to be talking down to him today.

“It’s like wearing black and spikes is all these people will recognize…! Hwaaaa, who am I kidding? Getting better at the scaring act doesn’t mean I’m good enough to rub shoulders with the big dogs yet.”

Spinel laughs, a little too loudly, a little too uproariously, throwing her head back as she laughs a full-belly laugh. People stare.

“Ahahaha! Black and spikes! Gosh, that’s... that’s so funny! Hehehehe!”

“Ugh…” Steven cringed, her enthusiasm was already exhausting. It was a weird thought, but one he’d had a few times before—that classic Steven would have adored original Spinel. But he was hardened now and calloused right over his optimism. So they brought her this way while he was this way. Such is fate.

“Yeah, I did.” He took a breath. “But you don’t recognize me at all? That’s…fine. I’m Steven. You’re Spinel, and we’re—” Not friends. “—acquaintances.”

He ran a hand through his curls, wincing.

“If you don’t remember anything, then you must be pretty confused why you’re here on this…colony and not—” He braced himself. If she was confused, she didn’t seem bothered, yet. “In the garden?”

“Nope, never seen you before in my life! And I wasn’t even born yesterday!”

Spinel practically leaps forward, getting even more into Steven’s face than she already was.

“But we’re acquaintances, huh?! Not friends?! I think we should be friends! It’s the darndest thing, but I really feel like we’ve...

"Got...”

“Garden?”

Spinel’s face drops as an image flashes in her mind, an image of a warp pad atop a set of stairs. Pillars. Vegetation. Space, the stars whirling by over decades and centuries and millennia... the warp pad, the pillars, everything, getting overwhelmed by grass and weeds and plantlife... and her, in the middle of it all...

This isn’t going like Spinel hoped it would. Not at all. She was supposed to be having a happy-go-lucky, rooting tooting old time, making all these new friends with all the friendly folks around this little island. Instead, she’s...

Miserable.

A Spinel isn’t supposed to feel miserable. She’s supposed to be happy! She’s supposed to make other gems happy! But instead, she finds herself moping and crying and not even having the energy to stretch her limbs about and do silly dances.

But she won’t let herself cry any more tears about it, oh no. She’s going to find the first gem she sees and she’s going to cheer her up and feel normal.

And aha! There’s one now! A purple gem with her gem right in the middle of her chest, totally unmistakable! The other gem hasn’t noticed Spinel herself yet - she’s just walking around, putting things in her mouth for some reason - so Spinel smiles to herself. She knows just the way to cheer someone up!

Using her ability to stretch, she climbs up onto the top of a short little building, waits for the gem to pass...

And then, like some kind of stretchy toy, she curves herself over the side of the building so that she’s hanging off it, before she curves herself back, right-side up, her torso hanging in midair in front of the gem!

Steven loved listening to the ocean. Sometimes, he couldclose his eyes and imagine he was back home, his toes in the familiar sand andthe weathered pieces of the temple protruding from the ground all around. Hehated he felt so sad when he opened his eyes.

There was nothing constant here but himself. He’d made thebest of friends, only to have them disappear. He’d run into friends from homeonly to have them do the same. The whatever it was—the algorithm, it seemed determinedto keep away those he missed most.

In his mind, in his own timeline, it’d been almost two yearssince he’d seen Connie. Even longer since he’d seen his father. Random snippetsof Pearl or Lapis would show up an then fade. He tried to make the most of whenthey were here.

But it was tougher now. He owed  something to gems who came here. Just like hegave his whole childhood to them back home. But these gems weren’t friends—the oneshere now.

Jasper had nearly gotten him killed, and Pink Diamond was nobetter. But she was lost and confused, so he had to help her, right? He kind ofwished everyone would just disappear again.

“I wish I could tell you that I—“

Steven froze, his hands resting on the strings. His eyessnap open and he focused, listening past the sound of the roaring waves forthat other familiar squeak of shoes.

“—Ahh!” Steven jumped, his hair standing on end.

You’ve gotta be fucking with me, is all he can think as helooked into that heart-shaped face. He groaned, rolling his eyes.

“Spinel? They got you, huh?” He sighed. After a secondglance, he realized something else, his tone now serious and maybe evenslightly worried. “Wait, did they… rejuvenate you!?”

Spinel doesn’t... at all understand the reaction. OK, so she’d scared her, that wasn’t a big deal - startling people was fun! But the stranger had also groaned and rolled her eyes and then said the weirdest things, like she’d... recognized her? Which almost wouldn’t make any sense, if it wasn’t for the weird flashbacks she’d been having...

“Gee, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say we already met!”

Gasp!

“Did we?! Ya know a little ol’ Spinel like me?! Golly, I’m so flattered!”

ANOTHER gasp!

free