8. Brood Parasite
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It was sunnier the following morning, so it was the perfect opportunity to soak some light in and get enough energy to roll up a really big snowball. He stretched, yawned, and sat up. He had a great night’s sleep after all that work, the past few months spent aimlessly wandering on the ice. It was amazing he got home at all. He looked around and noticed that there was another guy inside the shell, rooting through his spoils of stolen goods from the big island.
Wait, what?
He’d been gone so long that another gem was born and he didn’t even notice? Well, each time he came back after a failed outing he didn’t stay long. Huh. He was a little bummed he didn’t get to welcome him.
This gem was significantly shorter than the spiky gem he would’ve expected to be sleeping beside him, and made of clear crystals. He was also kind of spiky, but not nearly so much as the former. He, like any newborn gem, was totally eyeless. Tourmaline was planning on using the two eyeballs he stole to plug up his own and the spiky guy’s empty eye sockets with, but it seemed he’d have to change plans. You can still get by with one eye, right? He approached this new glassy gem, intent to figure him out. First, he tried scratching him to see if he was harder or softer than the stuff he was made of. He left a little scratch, but didn’t really damage him. “Okay, maybe 6 to 7,” he muttered to himself. He himself had a hardness of 7 and a half, so he was able to leave a scratch on anyone with a lower grade than him. He thought about the color and structure of the gem, too. Totally clear, a little spiky but not nearly acicular. Not really hexagonal either. He didn’t seem to have any internal fractures or inclusions that would suggest this guy was anything other than a quartz. Crystal clear, a little pointy, decently hard, uncleavable. Yep, that fit the bill. It looks like Tourmaline still had his mineral identification skills after all. At this point, he realized that he meant to take a look in the encyclopedias back home to try and figure out what the spiky gem was, but forgot, and still had no idea what he was made of. Bummer.
He continued to study the probably-quartz and thought to himself. Well, he’d just brought back some eyes and a chisel and clothes, so he could probably take a crack at polishing this guy into a shape like his. The spiky gem was far too fragile and regrew crystals too often for it to be a reasonable endeavor, but this gem was totally inert and would probably take well to being polished into form.
So, he got to work, or he tried to get to work, chipping off pieces that jutted out and trying to stick them where the crystals caved in to make him more of a uniform shape. He stuck the two eyeballs into his sockets, too. Surprisingly, the little gem didn’t mind this, perhaps because he was just born and didn’t know any better. A few hours later, he took a step back at his craftsmanship.
It looked terrible.
Tourmaline then got an idea. He’d been largely unsuccessful at trying to teach language to the spiky guy, at least to his knowledge, and he knew that trying to do the same for this new quartzy guy would probably end the same way. He was also terrible at polishing gems, as it turned out. Now that he knew the way back to the big island, he could always… just drop him off for a few years, let him get a solid education and a good polish job, and then bring him back over here.
Yeah, that was a good idea. It was still winter, so he could bring him over right now. So, he did, headed about 30 degrees northeast, over the ice, leading the little quartzy gem by the hand. Although they were both different hardnesses, 7 and 7.5 weren’t too far off, and Tourmaline was fine with scratching up the new gem’s hands a bit. They were, after all, going over to the big island to get him polished, and his hands were no exception.
During the day they slept on the ice, and at night they went onwards, using the stars to guide them. About a week later they arrived, just as Tourmaline expected.
It was the dim part of the morning where the sky was a vibrant blue and the horizon close to the sun was taking on electric greens and yellows. With any luck, Rainbow should be patrolling around the place, but he was nowhere to be seen. Hm. Maybe he was in his quarters. Which one was his quarters again? He walked up and down the hallway, poking into each room, with the quartz following close behind him. When he finally found Rainbow’s quarters, he was fast asleep. The two crept in, as quietly as possible, and both leaned right over him.
Rainbow woke with a jolt, and was about to scream when Tourmaline grabbed the blanket that Rainbow was sleeping with and stuffed it in his mouth. “Hi, Rainbow! It’s me again!” He said, with a wide, annoying smile. “Look what I’ve got!”
Rainbow took the blanket out of his mouth. “You scared me half to pieces, what the hell is wrong with you? You’re not supposed to come back for a year! And…” He took a good look at the quartzy gem beside Tourmaline. He was maybe half-polished, with fragments from other parts of his body crudely glued on, and had two eyeballs jammed into his sockets without any care taken to build him eyelids, or any facial features of any sort otherwise. “Did you do this hack-job?”
“Uh… yep. I was wondering if you could help me.” Tourmaline then began to explain his plan. “See, I’m not a good teacher, and it’s clear I’m not good at polishing. Can this guy, I think he’s a quartz, hang out with you guys until he learns language and looks normal? And then I can take him back after.”
“Do you actually, like, care about the well-being of anyone here?” Rainbow asked.
“What do you mean? That’s the whole reason I brought him here, to get him a good start in life. I can’t really do that over there.”
“You’re gonna have us host a newborn for a few years and then fake his kidnapping right after? Do you know what that’s gonna do for morale?”
“You’re about to leave anyway, aren’t you? What do you care?”
“Hm. Right.”
“You could do most of the hosting and training and emotional investment into him, that way when you both disappear it’s not a big hit to anyone else.”
“Okay, fair enough.” Rainbow got out of bed, put on his work clothes, and led Tourmaline and the quartz downstairs to the infirmary.
“We’ve still got a month or two until spring.” Rainbow said, “So it’ll just be the two of us until then.” He collected some chisels and sanding blocks and began chipping away at the quartz. “I’m probably no better than this as you are, but at least we can give him some eyelids and a mouth, and maybe teach him some basic language. This spring, though, I’m gonna toss him to Nuummite. I want to sleep for the summer.”
“You can’t do that.” Tourmaline said.
“Why?” Rainbow stopped chipping and sanding.
“You gotta make sure he doesn’t spill any beans. Secret island. It’s gotta stay a secret, I want you to keep an eye on him, make sure he doesn’t bring me or anything else up.”
“Once again, do you actually care about the well-being of anyone around here? I want to go to bed. I’m tired.”
“He knows, though! He can’t tell anyone! And he’s just a little guy, he doesn’t know why he can’t, and then the whole thing's gonna be ruined!”
“I’m, like, what, a thousand years your senior? I don’t need you ordering me around.”
“And I’m, ‘like, what’, the one with the secret island the moon doesn’t know about. Help me out here.”
“Fine.” Rainbow got back to work, chiseling out a nose for the quartz.
While Rainbow was doing his thing, Tourmaline figured he’d go to the library and pick out some encyclopedias to skim through. He came back and sat on the windowsill that Rainbow had the quartz laying on.
Tourmaline sat down and opened a big, thick book. “I’m trying to figure out what this other guy is. He’s soft, spiky, soluble, yellowish, and can regrow his limbs using volcanic gases.”
“Chalcopyrites grow around oceanic volcanoes.”
“But this is a land volcano, so the stuff that comes out is different. It’s mostly sulfur, but he’s not yellow enough to be a sulfur. I’d argue he’s about as soft, though.”
“Yeah, I got nothing. I’m not a geologist.” Rainbow said. “Good luck with that, though.”
Tourmaline continued to skim through minerals. The book was organized by class. Native elements first, then sulfides, then halides, then oxides, then carbonates, borates, sulfates, phosphates, silicates, and finally organics. He was looking through the sulfide section. It mostly described metallic, dark, shiny minerals. There was one that was sort of yellowish and soft. “Maybe he’s an orpiment. It grows around hot spots… oh, but it degrades in light.” He flipped through some more pages, reaching the halide section. “Or… maybe he’s a halite. No, salt doesn’t come out of volcanoes… Or… cryptohalite. That one does come out of volcanoes. That’s a cool name, we could call him crypto. Maybe not. Maybe… calomel. No, I haven’t seen any mercury around for him to have grown out of.” He continued to spitball minerals aimlessly for a long time. “Or… salammoniac… It also grows around volcanoes… or maybe he really is just a sulfur…” He was getting tired, so he put the book down and picked up another one.
All day long they hung out just like that.
Tourmaline broke the silence between them, “If you didn’t have to fight, what would you like to do?” He asked.
“Hm. I think… I would be a tailor. Opal beat me to that, though.” Rainbow replied.
“Well, when you get to my island you can be the tailor there. We can grow flax and make clothes out of it,” Tourmaline said, “And you can design all the clothes however you want. I think that would be cool.”
Rainbow smiled a bit. “That would be cool.” He continued to sand away, and Tourmaline continued to read.
“I think I would be a doctor.” He said.
“You can hardly polish a newborn, you’ve got a long way to go if that’s what you want to do.” Rainbow replied.
“Okay, let me have at him then.” Tourmaline said, and reached for Rainbow’s chisel.
“No way! You can sand him instead.” Rainbow handed him a sanding block. Well, that’s better than nothing. Rainbow chipped away the big bits, and Tourmaline sanded the little bits.
Eventually, the two figured they were done. Quartz was still rather faceted, but at least he had a nose and a mouth now.
Tourmaline figured he’d hang out for the next few days, too. Every morning Rainbow would put his fancy white work clothes on, shovel the snow from the halls, and every couple of days he’d walk out to the sea where he’d work on sawing down enormous chunks of ice that crunched up against each other and made a terrible groaning sound when they did. That was the general idea for the winter shift. You shovel, break ice floes into little pieces so they don’t make enough noise to wake everyone, and fight off the moon people when they show up. Winter was usually cloudy, and the moon people only ever showed up on sunny days, so they didn’t come often. It seemed like a good fit for Rainbow, at least in his sorry, friendless state. Tourmaline tried his best to teach Quartz about language and grammar, but he got impatient and gave up after a day. Rainbow was right, better leave the hard part to the other guys when they wake up in the spring.
After a week had passed, Tourmaline felt bad about leaving the spiky, possibly salty, gem behind on the volcano, so he figured he’d head on back. The agreement was that Quartz would spend the next year being taught how to speak and read and write and fight, and once everyone went to sleep for the winter, Tourmaline would pick up both he and Rainbow, and bring them over to the volcano where they’d never have to fight again.
About a week later, he arrived back at the volcano, and finally rolled up a great big snowball so he could hibernate. There wasn’t much winter left, so he only got a couple weeks of sleep in before it all melted away, and eventually the seas melted too. He wouldn’t be able to get back to the big island until next winter, so he just had to hope that Rainbow would keep his promise.