Chapter Text
“Guess what, Zircs?” said Peridot, barging into Zircon’s office without knocking.
Zircon thought for a moment. “You’re not really giving me much to go on, here.”
“I invented a Time-Turner!” Peridot proudly held up her creation, which looked like an hourglass in a bubble. “It’s based on ancient Gem technology that was left behind on Earth. You can use it to go back in time, but only a few minutes.”
Zircon was horrified. “Peri, that seems excessively, unnecessarily dangerous.”
Peridot opened her mouth and closed it again, searching for a response. “Yes.”
“Now that we’ve established that, why are you doing this?”
“Because,” said Peridot, hoisting herself to sit on Zircon’s desk, “if I can get this to work properly, think of how much more stuff we could do! Like, you’re always busy, right? You could get twice as much work done in a day and have time to do more important things, like watch Special Vampire Unit.”
Zircon pinched the bridge of her nose. “So what you’re telling me is that you’re going to risk ripping a hole in the space-time continuum so you can watch more TV.”
“Well, when you put it like that, it sounds like a bad idea.”
“Because it is! It’s a bad idea!”
“Aw, c’mon Zircs. I already tried it once and it worked great.”
“Wait, you already tried it?” said Zircon, panic rising.
“Yeah, and it was --”
“Guess what, Zircs?” said Peridot, barging into Zircon’s office without knocking.
“Oh stars,” said the Peridot sitting on Zircon’s desk.
“Peri, what did you do!?” said Zircon, grabbing the first Peridot by the shoulders and shaking her.
Peridot didn’t answer, instead hopping off the desk and running to the window. “Oh, this is bad. This is bad. This is really, really bad.”
Zircon braced herself and looked out the window. Down below, in Little Homeworld’s main square, there were dozens of Peridots running around.
“I gray goo scenario’d myself,” said Peridot, in terrified awe. “Green Gem scenario?”
“What does that mean?”
“I think I may have caused copies of myself to infinitely replicate.”
Zircon blinked. “Are we going to die in a flood of infinite you?”
“Yeah,” said Peridot. “Sorry about that.”
“I’m actually impressed,” said Zircon. “I’ve imagined my own death so many times, but I really didn’t see this one coming.”