Author's Note: Hello everybody! This is going to be my first Steven Universe story of many more to come, and it's technically not even mine. So, my two friends, my little brother, and I got really into Steven Universe lately. We drew pictures of us as gems, and then decided that we should write a fanfiction about it. I'll be the one writing the actual fanfiction, but my friends and my brother are contributing ideas and plotlines to make this a collaborative project. This first chapter's characters are based on me and my little brother, you should be able to tell which is which. It's like a pilot episode in the sense that this chapter is shorter than every other chapter will be. If you like it, I'll release all the other chapters I wrote. The canon characters will interact with us, just not for a while. Anyway, enjoy! Tell me what you think in a review.

"Stupid mission, stupid busy work, stupid everything!" muttered a very miffed and stressed out, and very brown young woman as she walked across an orange landscape.

Or at least, that's what she appeared to be. In reality, Picotite Spinel was a gem from the planet Homeworld, the ruling home planet of the Crystal Empire. At the moment, she was stuck doing a job that she didn't like, on a planet that she didn't know, and to top it all off, something she couldn't get out of. As the highest classed technician and battle strategist on homeworld, Spinell (Call her that and she'll break you) only took orders from the very top, The Diamond Authority. Spinell worked for Yellow Diamond, occasionally submitting to other jobs from Blue or White Diamond. But Yellow Diamond's latest job for her was to check the status of multiple Kindergartens on multiple planets. Yellow Diamond said it was important to know how abandoned planets were doing, but it just seemed like meaningless work to Spinell, a job fit for a Peridot. Nevertheless, orders were orders, and to refuse a direct order from Yellow Diamond could mean re-education for her. Spinell shuddered at the very thought.

Spinell had always hid the fact that she didn't like her job. She was always doing menial, insignificant tasks for the Diamonds, despite the fact that she was very highly ranked. But Spinell knew that she could never rebel against her superiors, she didn't want to anyway. She was loyal enough to Homeworld and the only thing that she wished she could change was her job.

Spinell was in the prime Kindergarten of the planet Beal2o4, the last planet on her list, inspecting each and every hole in the ground and the cliffs, looking for signs of activity. Just like she expected, there was none, which meant that Spinell could finally create a log of her findings or lack thereof and then warp off planet. Beal2o4 made Spinell uneasy anyway. Orange landscape and a neon green atmosphere could make anybody uncomfortable. Plus the entire planet was vacant and the Kindergartens were so poorly managed. Being in any Kindergarten was a weird and slightly disconcerting experience. Lucky for her, Spinell had been made and brought up the natural way on Homeworld. Spinell looked around the holes made by gems who emerged from them, the out of date injectors, and the dead land for miles, and felt very creeped out. There was also that nagging feeling that she was being watched.

"It's just your imagination" she thought to herself. "The only living thing on this planet is me."

Yet it was getting harder to believe with each passing second.

Chrys wasn't really sure what the word "home" even meant. Maybe it was because he's never had one. Even the hole that he emerged from didn't seem like a good definition of home to him. To Chrys that dirty old hole was just the place he rested in after a long day of traveling. His alleged "home planet" Beal2o4, was more of a house. Not a home. He didn't like staying in one place for an extended period of time, so he'd rather just go from planet to planet, meeting new people, making new friends, learning new things. But even with all the people he's met and the planets he's been to and all the friends that he'd made, he'd still feel lonely. As far as he knew, there was no other gem that looked like him. Every gem he'd ever seen had been female, while he'd taken to like his male form, with his gem replacing his right eye. He was also the only Chrysoberyl he knew. Chrys had never met another Chrysoberyl gem. None of that bothered him very much though. What really bothered him was that all the people and gems that he'd befriended could never travel with him. They all had their own lives on their own planets. Why would they ever leave all that behind and go with some weird-looking gem they just met?

Whenever Chrys found that he was developing thoughts like that, he would travel back to Beal2o4, just to remind himself that it was worse to be alone on his "house" than to travel without a real purpose.

His current sulking was interrupted though, by a brown gem that he saw in the window of the building in the middle of the Kindergarten that he came from. Chrys heard her low, smooth voice echoing in the dark orange canyon below him. His curiosity was at it's all time highest, he just had to know what she was doing. Right now, he was standing on the edge of a cliff, leaning down so that he could listen to her. It was impossible to make out exactly what she was saying, so he shapeshifted into a bat and flew down into the canyon. He landed on the windowsill of an open window that was facing her, and could now hear and see so much clearer. Luckily, she was distracted so she didn't see Chrys on the windowsill.

Her face was a regular brown color, and her lips were coated in a darker brown lipstick. Her eyes were a dark shade of brown that could clearly be seen behind the goldish yellow visor that went in a W shape and was short enough so her pointy nose would be right in the middle. Her hair went in an octagon around her head, and she was wearing a pair of yellow-gold diamond shaped earrings on a pair of ears that didn't seem to be there. It looked like they were clinging to the side of her face to Chrys. Even as she was talking, she was wearing a permanent scowl on her face.

The gem was wearing some odd clothing, and Chrys felt like he recognised it. It was a light brown shirt with two dark brown lines going in an X across it, and a small golden-yellow diamond in the middle of the crossed section. She was wearing dark brown pants that also had golden yellow diamonds marking the knees. The shiny gold stripes on her big light brown boots reflected the light from the three moons in the window. The brown gem had a light brown, octagon shaped, holographic screen projected in front of her from the vertical, brown, hexagon shaped gem on her chest, on the right of the top half of the X on her shirt. She was talking to the screen like it was a diary.

"-search for signs of activity on planet Beal2o4 have come back negative. My task is now complete so I may return to Homeworld. This is Picotite Spinel, facet 1, end log." Chrys watched as her projected screen disappeared and the gem breathed a sigh of relief. "Finally that's over. Now I can get off this miserable plane-" Her sentence was cut short when she saw Chrys the Bat perched on the windowsill.

Chrys decided that now would be the perfect time to introduce himself. "Hi! My name is Chrysoberyl, who are you?"

The gem before him blinked a few times before saying, "Are you… from this planet?" Chrys nodded.

Picotite Spinel grinned wickedly. "I guess that means my mission wasn't a complete waste after all!"

She promptly pulled a tool from her back pocket that looked like a tuning fork, but with yellow electricity sparking at the tips of the object.

Picotite Spinel swiped at him with her weapon, but Chrys flew back fast before it could reach him. "Hey! What did I ever do to you huh!" Chrys yelled at her.

She tried to swipe at Chrys again, almost touching his wings. "Don't take this personally you little twerp, but it would look really good on my behalf if I were to capture a gem from an abandoned Kindergarten and show you to my superiors. Sorry but not sorry." Picotite Spinel jumped out the window so that she could have a chance at reaching Chrys, but as long as he was in bat form, She could never reach him. Chrys laughed down at her. "Missed me, missed me! Now you've gotta kiss me!" He taunted.

"What does that even mean?!" Picotite Spinel shouted up at him angrily.

"That's for me to know, and for you to find out!" He shouted back at her. Chrys had to admit, this was the most exciting thing to happen to him in a while. That is until Picotite Spinel started firing balls of energy from her weird weapon. Uh oh Chrys thought.

The yellow balls of electricity proved to be much more accurate than her trying to swipe at him, but Chrys was still able to doge. He knew he couldn't keep this up forever though, so he flew high up into the sky, before diving as fast as he could toward the ground. As he dived, he shapeshifted in midair into his human form, pulled his trusty hammer from the green gem that should've been his right eye, then held it out in front of him as he fell. When he hit the ground, the result was the land underneath him exploded into waves that expanded outward.

Picotite Spinel hadn't been expecting that, and fell flat on her back from the force of Chrys' ground-pound. When the ground settled down, Picotite Spinel jumped up and looked at Chrys with a murderous glare in her eyes. "Enough games!" she shouted. Chrys was still trying to pull out his green and yellow hammer that was stuck in the ground, he turned his head so that he could face her. She walked towards him, brought out her weapon, and when Chrys thought she was going to end him, she threw it down.

She was still glaring at him, but the look of hate in her eyes when she was fighting had lessened. It looked more like begrudging respect. "You're a lot stronger and more... intelligent than I originally assumed. Capturing you is way above my job description. So I'm going to let you keep existing on this run down planet… for now." Chrys knew that the threat was empty though. Picotite Spinel hadn't even pulled out a weapon from her gem, she must be scared of Chrys' power but didn't want to admit it.

Chrys was okay with that.

"So, what are you going to do now?" he inquired. Picotite Spinel sighed overdramatically.

"I guess I'm just going to submit the information I gathered about the 70 Kindergartens that I'd visited over the course of the week, and write this planet off as vacant. Yellow Diamond doesn't need to know that anything ever happened."

Chrys looked a little sad. "You… you're not even interested in how I pulled a weapon out of my gem?" Chrys really wanted to see if he could be friends with her, and if she could visit him again.

Picotite Spinel was surprised. "I am certainly interested in how you pulled that hammer from your gem, and how you shapeshifted. What was that creature that you turned into anyway?"

Chrys smiled victoriously on the inside. "The creature is called a bat. If you could visit me again, I could tell you all about bats, and weapons and shapeshifting. I'm going to be here for a while."

Picotite Spinel froze. Then she nodded slowly. "You would become my guide, and teach me about things I do not know. Perhaps I could visit again, and next time we can discuss how you should look. I mean, is this the form that you take all the time?" she teased, smirking at her own witty comment.

"Hey, at least I have normal hair... hexagon-head!" Chrys taunted back.

Picotite Spinel crossed her arms. "That was possibly the worst comeback I've ever heard."

Chrys sighed. "I tried."

Picotite Spinel looked around. "Well, it looks like I should be heading back now. I'll try to visit this planet again when I feel like it."

Chrys nodded, already excited for next time. "Yeah okay. Bye Picotite Spinel."

Before she warped away, she paused, then said, "Just call me Spinell, Chrys."