A mining operation is taking place at a new outpost on Midnight Iris, a planet settled only a month ago.

  A sea of purple trees, red grass, and various colorful flowers grow in this unknown terrain, inhabited by strange plants and exotic wildlife.

  All very much uncharted territory to the planet’s new human visitors.

  The venture had been a great success so far, the planet's rich resources exceeding all of their expectations, but it had not been without its setbacks.

  Attacks from various indigenous animals were commonplace, not even the weather seemed to be on their side.

  But today, in a long line of black rain and storms, it was sunny once more, the twin suns shining down harshly.

  In the bright sunshine, near the bottom of a long winding path that leads up the side of a quarry, a man walks.

  He stops before a strange out-of-place lump on the dusty path, a result of an event he had witnessed, and heard from afar.

  At his feet, a creature he has heard so much about lies unconscious.

  He strokes his chin’s stubble while observing the animal.

  After a brief analysis, he makes up his mind and draws a device from within his white scientist coat.

  A small gun-like object, a rod sticking out of a rectangular metal frame.

  He adjusts its settings on a small screen, aims it at the creature, and pulls the trigger.

  From this command, a white ball at the tip gathers, shining a teal glow. It erupts out as a ray of energy, hitting its helpless mark.

  I wonder what kind of result this blatant misuse of our latest and greatest leads me to.

  Using it on this, of all things.

  The scientist taps the display, navigates through the user interface, and turns it off.

  He swipes his lab coat to reveal a holster on his belt, plonks the pistol-like invention in its slot, and covers it again.

  The creature before him lies on its side, motionless, four legs splayed in every which way.

  Its arms lack the fingers found in conventional hands, replaced instead by a curved blade of purple. It's shiny, and almost see-through, like colored glass.

  Similar, but much bigger blades extend out of its elbows too, one of these blades sunken to the pebble-filled dirt ground, appearing undamaged.

  It would have been outright sinful for me to pass up such a great opportunity for more tests, just hurry up and wake up...

  It’s still alive, right?

  Did I miscalculate? Maybe the latest parameter change was too much...

  His tapping foot creates a small localized dust storm around his shoe.

  The creature is completely covered in a tough-looking carapace, consisting of different segments, adorned in various shades of purple and blue.

  Heavily armored, apart from a few spots, mainly its face, covered by pale gray skin-like tissue instead.

  Its features resemble a human’s in basic aspects, even with a set of equally purple hair to go with the rest of its appearance.

  Its eyes are closed with an expressionless face to match, missing a visible nose.

  He scratches his short brown hair, attempting to decipher the remaining details of this strange humanoid, though it’s hard to make out everything, even with detailed study.

  The strong insect-like features are confusing, a real mess of arthropod-like appendages, blades, and gems.

  The gemstone-like objects are embedded in its body in various locations: shoulders, knees, and the biggest one just below its chest.

  Crystals, yes, that’s what its blades resemble, these purple stones, like amethysts.

  Though these appear much more unique like there is something swirling inside, akin to a whirlpool.

  How very fascinating.

  Is it born with them or do they acquire the stones during their childhood?

  Do they collect them? Maybe even fight over them?

  Suddenly the figure’s legs spasm, in response, the man retreats a few meters back.

  Finally, the experiment starts!

  The creature’s upper body straightens and the creature stands up taking support from the ground with its bladed hands.

  It stands tall and proud, approximately two meters high, facing away from him, revealing a hard shell also covering its back.

  Remarkable, it survived the fall all the way from the valley unharmed?

  The man looks up at the sheer cliff above them, a few purple tree’s leaves and trunks can be seen high above.

  He looks back down and spots green liquid running down the creature's left arm.

  Or not quite unharmed.

  The armor is bent inwards and fractured on its shoulder, it must have punctured the softer tissue underneath.

  The insect turns its head to the left and right, looking around.

  On its head, hard segmented bone-like appendages, antennae of some sort, form a wing-like structure on each side, just without anything covering the gaps.

  It resembles a sort of an elaborate crown or a chandelier.

  Various smaller antennae cover its head too, sprouting from under the flock of hair, the two bigger main antennae even covered in some dark fur.

  All of them shake and turn as if grasping the situation, smelling the air.

  No science with no danger.

  The scientist takes a deep breath.

  “Hello? Can you understand me?”

  In response, four legs nimbly turn the insectoid around in place, it looks over him calmly.

  Its eyes are strange, arctic blue irises, filled with even more eyes, sort of like compound eyes.

  However, it also has a black pupil at the middle of each eye, with a normal white sclera as the background for each.

  Some sort of hybrid eyes? What benefit would it have for a split vision like that?

  It looks in his direction, but it's hard to tell if it's actually looking at him or not.

  As if it’s looking past him, or maybe around itself at the same time?

  “Are you okay?” The man asks a follow-up question.

  The creature seems to turn its full attention to the man, as all of the eyes in its irises, as well as the two pupils, turn to look at him.

  Its face betrays no emotion, appearing almost devoid of such things.

  Then, it nods.

  Amazing!

  “You don’t look okay to me, you’re hurt,” he points at the creature's left arm and then touches his own left arm at the same spot.

  The creature moves its bladed hand and touches its arm with the wide side of its blade.

  As it connects, the creature recoils with pain, its lips contort and frown—the first show of emotion.

  “Hurts, right? My la- uh, clinic is at the other side.”

  He points far into the distance, at the far wall of the quarry.

  “Come with me and I’ll help you with that.”

  The creature tilts its head quizzically, its antennae wildly rotating around her head before fixating backward.

  “You don’t understand? A clinic is a place to fix injuries. Make hurt go away.”

  The creature nods once more, but its antennae have stopped moving entirely. Slowly they shift from left to right, like tracking something.

  As the antennae start to point directly behind it, a massive cat-like creature appears, far along the path to the valley, at the very top.

  It seems set on walking down toward them.

  “You fell because you escaped those sabertigers?

  Come on, let’s go, we’ll ascend that stone pile to escape them, they're terrible climbers.”

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  The insect creature wastes no time and starts a four-legged run down the path, he dodges out of the way, letting it take the lead, before bolting into a run himself.

  Looking behind him, he witnesses the sabertiger sniffing the air, its large cat snout twitching.

  The majestic beast looks like a mix between an ancient saber-tooth tiger and a normal tiger, although contrary to both, it's as big as a truck.

  It bellows out a roar and starts running towards them, its massive paws shake the ground with each of its leaping steps.

  To top off their misfortune, another one jumps down onto the path and joins on the hunt.

  The escapees reach the bottom of the upwards-sloped path and get to the ground level of the quarry where huge piles of large stones are laid around, with wide paths in between them.

  The stones stacked and collected by the workers, lie ready for shipping and further processing to get the valuable ore inside.

  Ahead of him, the insect creature seems to have understood his instructions as it's already galloping towards the nearest stone pile.

  He is woefully left behind by the large and unwieldy-looking creature, somehow better built for speed than he is.

  Where’s everyone?

  “Saber alert! Saber alert!” The scientist shouts as his long lab coat billows behind him.

  I really hope somebody hears me...

  He glances back at the approaching doom, the massive tigers are more than halfway down.

  He forces himself to quicken the pace, pushing himself to his limits.

  The insect is already scaling the rocks, its long four legs making the climb look easy.

  The ground shakes violently and the scientist almost falls mid-run, only the wild waving of his arms allows him to keep his balance.

  Behind him, the first tiger has taken a shortcut and just jumped the rest of the way down.

  Just a little more to the rocks.

  A quick glance behind him confirms that the tiger is only two steps away from making him its breakfast.

  “Hey, you! Insect creature!“

  He calls out for help, no reaction from the rock-climbing quadruped.

  The ground shakes once more.

  “Insectoid! Arthropod! A- Amethyst!” The last one manages to make the insect creature turn around and stop climbing, almost having reached the top already.

  “HELP ME!”

  The ground trembles right behind him and the sunlight darkens, but he doesn’t look back.

  Almost there!

  He scans the pile, spotting a dozen cracks between the stones suitable for hiding, awaiting ahead for him.

  A booming sound of two hard surfaces hitting each other echoes, followed by a ferocious bone-chilling roar.

  A massive stone drops right next to him, shaking the ground, splinters of stone and small pebbles blast him.

  The boulder, at least a meter in diameter, has sunken into the ground from the force of the impact.

  What the hell! That almost crushed me!

  He looks behind, but mostly upwards, right as another rock strikes the tiger, hitting its shoulder, the eight-meter cat roars in pain flinching backward.

  Up on the pile, the scientist spots the source of the stones; the insect, stabs a nearby stone with both bladed hands, seemingly easily puncturing the stone.

  Then, it lifts the boulder above its head momentarily, before flinging it down towards the tiger.

  His savior staggers forward a little by the force of the throw, threatening to almost go with it, fortunately, its four spread-out legs manage to keep it steady enough.

  What the-?

  Not intent on wasting any more time than his shock demanded, he sprints and reaches the stone pile.

  Jumping up against the first rock, his chest hits the hard stone painfully, but he quickly pulls himself up regardless.

  Screw hiding if I can get up there to this super strong insect’s side!

  He was confident he’d get enough covering fire from his stone-flinging pet to make it.

  Surely the cats wouldn’t try to climb after him, the stones would definitely roll loose under their massive paws and weight.

  He didn’t want to think what would happen though, if the cats decided to try it anyway and caused a big rock slide.

  The other sabertiger stomps past its stunned mate's side, as another stone hammers the first tiger.

  The scientist concentrates on climbing higher and congratulates himself on the decision to wear his brown climbing boots, despite only having planned to go on for a brief outing.

  They looked downright awful combined with his lab coat, so he usually avoided using them if not necessary.

  It was bad enough everyone ridiculed his way of wearing a lab coat everywhere, but those fools just didn’t get that science is made wherever he goes, wearing it at all times was mandatory!

  Only one person understood that…

  Biting his lip, he grabs onto another stone, his panicking body relentlessly pushing him ahead.

  The sound of laser guns firing fills the air and the other tiger gets peppered with gunfire.

  It flinches in pain and roars, turning towards the shooters to advance on them, but as the barrage continues, it’s discouraged quickly.

  Another stone is flung, missing its target as both of the tigers have turned tail and are now fleeing up the same path they came down from.

  The rifle-wielding crowd chases after them up the path, they wear mostly worker uniforms, some soldiers in the mix, but all wielding laser rifles or other laser shooting weaponry.

  They number at least 30, a good-sized crowd, but nothing compared to the total number of staff present on site. All eager to secure some vengeance, and some good-tasting rations.

  With the adrenaline still running through his veins, a swift climb up the stone pile leads him to the insect still standing there, waiting for him.

  “Phew, that was close... thanks, Amethyst,” he pants and leans on his legs.

  In response, the creature tilts its head puzzled.

  “Is that not your name?”

  It doesn’t respond, only retaining the same blank expression as before.

  “Is it okay if I call you that anyway?”

  No reaction.

  He points at himself.

  “Grent.”

  And then at the insect creature.

  “Amethyst.”

  Amethyst nods.

  Grent looks up at the path and the people have just about reached the top in their mad hunt for the sabertigers.

  “Alright, let's get down from here and continue to the clinic, we still need to treat your arm.”

  Grent says, makes a 90-degree turn at the top and starts scaling down towards the direction of their destination.

  Amethyst does as she is told and follows.

  Getting down is much easier and faster than climbing up, but Amethyst still passes Grent just two steps in.

  They hop and skip their way down and lay their feet on top of firm soil once more.

  “If we just go left of this next rock pile and then continue for another two piles, we will reach the entrance to my clinic.”

  They set out walking, headed around to the next stone pile’s left side.

  Grent observes Amethyst walking before him, it doesn't seem to want to keep pace on his side, the long stride of four legs always pulling ahead.

  But he doesn't mind, it works out this way just fine.

  “Your injury has stopped bleeding?

  Well, we should still hurry and get it checked out. We wouldn't want it to get infected or inflamed, now would we?”

  Amethyst keeps on going, Grent getting no reaction nor confirmation of it hearing this.

  As they reach about the halfway point of the pile, voices echo from above.

  “Retreat!”

  “Run-!”

  Screams sound from the valley as the sabertiger hunters appear again and scramble down the path.

  They are being chased by something else than a tiger: a violet and blue arthropod, with elbow blades and sharp hands, four legs, and purple crystals covering its body.

  So, it's here...

  Grent thinks before announcing, chipper:

  “Okay, we climb once more! Up the rocks!”

  Amethyst stares at the creature, the same species as she, except triple her size.

  “Hello? Amethyst, we gotta climb.”

  Grent tries to get her attention back by waving his left hand in front of her.

  “I said...”

  As it has no effect, he grabs the hilt of his holstered pistol-experiment with his other hand.

  “We must climb.”

  Amethyst snaps out of it, turns around, and obeys, starting to scale up the pile of rocks.

  He lets go of the pistol’s hilt and hides its holster under his coat again, joining in on the climb to safety.

  2024 Edit: Currently working through the earlier Chapters to correct grammar and sentence structure, whenever I have the time, as most of the early Chapters were written a year ago, and they are no longer representative of the current text quality of new Chapters.

  Jan 2025: Progress: 24/24 (that needs editing). [Done].