Starter for @coldharddiamond
Peridot stared blankly at the black screen in front of her as well as the depressingly empty road on the other side. In her mind, for the thousandth time, she recalled how she’d ended up in this almost medieval situation.
The job had been so easy! Go to this little village in the middle of nowhere, check in on some data by the local research-station, perform some maintence, check out potential mining-sites or other things the station had found, then go back home.
It should have taken a week at the very most - she wasn’t a geologist so her checking out potential sites would mostly just be sure there wasn’t a house on top of it - before she could go back home.
The first thing that happened when they came to town really set the tone for the whole stay - the company van broke down half an hour outside town.
Jasper, her security-guard, had said it’d be easy to fix and tried that. Peridot was fairly certain there was just more damage from that!
So they had had to walk in to the village and ask for help - and they’d instantly been met with what Peridot could only call ‘held at gunpoint’, just without the gun.
A gang of local ‘protectors’ calling themselves the Crystal Gems had told both her and Jasper to go back where they came from, that ‘their kind’ were not welcome in town. Turned out they knew about the company... and did not like them!
It was just luck they’d gotten away without a fight... but Jasper had left just an hour later to ‘go get help‘ when the local mechanic told them that the van needed a certain part to be ordered to be repaired. That had been one and a half months ago!
Peridot was lucky she’d found this inn/resturant/postal office to hire a room in. But there was no way to report back to the company - this place did not have internet. Or a phone-line. Or, by the looks of it, actual mail-service.
Walking back to civilization was impossible - it’d take weeks to trek back by foot, even for Jasper. If you didn’t get lost or ran out of food or water or anything like that!
So she was stuck here, waiting for a chance to get back to the real world. Waiting for a car, the postal van, anything that’d be willing to drive her away from here. Or someone else from the company to come and rescue her!
And almost daily those ‘Crystal Gems’ came by and made it clear they wanted her to leave. They’d already dropped her smartphone so it broke, soon they’d probably do it with her laptop too.
