One morning during a long stroll through the woods, you emerged upon a vast area of rolling hills and cornfields. Your face lit up when you saw an unmistakable landmark just a little ways off - a large, faded red barn with a silo jutting out from the side at an angle, and with the back end of a pickup truck emerging from just above the barn door.

“I come in peace!” you called as you approached. Peridot leaned out from inside the barn, just enough to be able to see you.

“Who are you?” she asked with mild disgust in her voice at your intrusion.

“I'm (Y/N) - a friend,” you replied.

“What do you want?”

“I was just passing through and thought I'd stop in and say hello.”

“Lapis, you can come down now!” she shouted. Lapis Lazuli sat up from the back of the truck, extended her wings of water, and dropped soundlessly to the ground.

“Hello,” you said with a gentle smile.

“Hi,” Lapis replied hesitantly but pleasantly. “So… what brings you out here?”

“I live nearby. I came upon your home here, so I thought I'd like to meet you guys.” You spied an unusual metal construction inside the barn behind her. “Is that one of your-” you started to ask, pointing over her shoulder and trying to remember their word for art.

“Meepmorps?” Peridot suggested.

“That's the word I was looking for.”

“Pfft, hardly,” Peridot scoffed. “That is a fully-functional multi-gem superluminal interstellar transport. I built it myself. It wasn't easy. It took me nearly a week. It probably slowed me down that Pearl helped.”

“So it's..?” you asked, a bit lost from the diminutive gem's technobabble.

“It's a spaceship,” Lapis clarified.

“Well, yes,” Peridot admitted.

“Have you tested it out yet?”

“Oh, we did more than that,” Lapis said, knowing Peridot would want to be the one to tell the full story.

“We made use of its full potential just last week, well, a few thousand years ago taking the time dilation into effect. There was this gem ruler from a distant galaxy, Heliodor of the Emerald Hegemony. She came here to steal a corrupted gem from the Temple to experiment on to try to find a corruption cure, because the Hegemony’s original ruler, Chrysoberyl, was corrupted and kept in a semi-lucid state by Heliodor’s technology. She hoped that if she could find a way to cure Ja-aah…” she trailed off, looking apologetically at Lapis.

“You're allowed to say her name, you know,” Lapis said, rolling her eyes but smiling at Peridot's consideration.

“Right. Anyway, since Jasper was a unique case of secondary corruption, she thought she could cure it and extrapolate from there. But we all used the transport to follow through the temporal wake, and we met up with another group of rebel gems called Matrix Null and a squad of human and alien soldiers and wizards. By the time we caught up, Heliodor had actually decorrupted Jasper, but it turned out the solution was only temporary, so Heliodor was going to shatter her like she'd done to her previous experiments, well, technically, a gem supersoldier called Hematite was going to do it, but she broke out and poofed Heliodor, who we then captured, and helped us escape after she punched Hematite out into space! Jasper reverted and got poofed and put back in the Temple when we got back to Earth, but then Heliodor’s gem ship showed up a few days later and stole Jasper again, they probably would've stolen Heliodor, but they keep her well hidden. We'd follow in our ship, but there hasn't been a temporal wake detected, so they probably haven't even left!” Peridot was left gasping for breath.

“Right…” you said uncomfortably. “Are you by any chance able to write in the English language?”

“I consider myself reasonably proficient,” Peridot said with feigned humility.

“Then write all of that down for me sometime, because I hardly followed a word.”

You spent most of the day there, and drove there the next day to have a picnic with the duo. You advised Peridot against eating anything; it probably wouldn’t go too well for someone who could not shapeshift a digestive system.

The sun was nearly out of sight over the horizon as you drove back home. As you got onto a long, isolated stretch of road with trees on either side, you observed a sickly yellow-green glow coming from ahead. Reducing your speed and continuing towards it, you saw a large crater just beside the road which had flattened several trees. Strewn about the crater were massive yellow shards which seemed undecided between crystalline and metallic in their nature. The wreckage burned with flames of that same yellow, which fortunately did not seem to be spreading to the trees.

You slowed to a crawl and pulled to the side of the road. You were about to step out to inspect the scene when frantic movement further down the road caught your eye. A large orange gem wearing a helmet (no doubt Jasper) was knelt upon the asphalt, being beaten like a piñata by an odd-looking dark grey gem wielding a piece of wreckage far larger than herself in one hand. She was at least eight feet tall, maybe nine, with an oddly slight build, a jaw so square her face was rectangular, thin, shrunken lips, a small, flattened nose, and shoulder-length dark hair that hung stiffly in great grey mats which appeared to have wicked points and edges, as though her hair were made of knives. You didn't have to remember the details of Peridot's rambling story to recognize that this was surely Hematite.

You were panicked at first, unsure what to do, until, in an instant, you made an admittedly crazy decision. As quietly as possible, you started the car and pulled back onto the road. You rolled down your window.

“Jasper, move!” you yelled, immediately before flooring the accelerator, speeding directly towards the two. Taking advantage of Hematite's distraction, Jasper leapt aside. You were about to ram the grey gem when you felt yourself jostle to a halt inches from her. Hematite's eyes burned into yours. Her sclera were black, her irises silvery, and her pupils piercing white. They glowed brighter as you felt yourself lifting off the ground. “Ferrokinesis?” you asked out the window. She nodded wordlessly, before swinging the car sideways through the air and bringing it down on top of Jasper. You heard the sound of the orange gem poofing beneath you and felt the vehicle sink to the ground as her form vanished. No way this was good for the axles or suspension.

You ducked down as Hematite approached. She seemed to ignore your presence, instead tilting the car up with one hand so it was balancing on its left wheels. When she set it back down, a familiar orange gemstone was clutched in her other hand. She placed it in the middle of the road, walked back to retrieve the same piece of downed ship with which she had been thrashing Jasper earlier, then raised it high as you stepped silently out.

“Hey grey, whaddaya say?!” you shouted. Hematite turned her unsettling face toward you… only for you to swing at it as hard as you could with the fire extinguisher you kept in the car. She dropped her bludgeon and staggered back. You struck her again, this time with the end of the heavy cylinder, causing her to fall dazed, before uttering a pained grunt. Hematite looked down and saw that she had been impaled by a sharp piece of the wreckage she had been wielding.

“You…” she hissed in a dry, echoing voice, before vanishing in a black cloud that smelled of rust.

After a moment of uncomfortable silence, you pulled out your new smartphone. Rats. You didn’t have the number of anyone who could contact the crystal gems. You started up the car to test how it worked. The engine worked fine, but the wheels wobbled as they rolled. At least you had the number for a tow truck. While you waited for it to arrive, you looked in the back of your car for something to put the gems in. A toolbox! Perfect! You placed Hematite’s smooth, grey, lustrous gem inside and shut the lid. You reasoned that a gem probably would not be able to regenerate without sufficient space, but didn’t want to risk both of them regenerating together and fighting again. You were looking for something to put Jasper in when the tow truck arrived.

“Sorry,” you murmured to her gem before slipping it into your pocket.

“What happened here?” the driver asked in shock, spying the flaming crater.

“Long story,” you answered. “A gem ship went down here, and-”

“Ah. Gem stuff. Got it.”

Nearly two hours later, you shuffled through your front door like Frankenstein’s monster, immediately setting the red metal toolbox on the floor, lumbering upstairs, and collapsing face-first onto your bed. You were snoring within five minutes.

(Y/N) = Your name (this can be either your given name or your full name, depending on context and what feels right to you).
I apologize for my tardiness in getting this chapter out; it is exam time. Also, it is quite possible that this chapter’s action was the most intense you will see in this story. Also, if you're wondering about Peridot's weird infodump, that is the plotline of a crossover fanfiction a friend and I are going to work together on at some point.
Any feedback at all is appreciated!