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

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

All very much uncharted waters to the planet’s new human visitors. Not even mentioning the body of water it was known for, the planet’s huge black sea.

From space, this black dot was surrounded by the rest of the planet’s purple outline, giving it a fitting name, the Midnight Iris.

The quarry had been dug deep already in search for precious metals, finding a lot of success. Their effective equipment having already bored a huge hole in the landscape.

The wide and deep hole, surrounded by a tall cliff face on all sides, the edges with winding circular paths eventually taking you to the top.

At the ground level, huge piles of large stones are laid around, paths left in between them to allow for better navigation on the bottom level.

The stones stacked and collected, ready for processing to get their valuable ore inside.

Large cranes, drilling vehicles and truck like transportation machines littered around the site near to these caves.

This new venture had been a huge success so far, exceeding all of their expectations, but it had not been without its setbacks. The planet was not exactly a welcoming place.

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

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

A man is standing next to a creature, at one of these valley-leading winding paths, near the bottom of the quarry. He strokes his chin thoughtful as he observes the animal.

He holds a small gun like object, his latest gadget. It’s missing a clear barrel, just a metal rod sticking out of the rectangular frame, finished with a small white ball at the end of it.

He taps the display at the back of it and turns it off. The rod is still warm from having been fired recently.

He holsters it on his belt and swipes his white coat on top of it to cover it again.

I wonder what kind of result this outrageous misuse of my latest and greatest, leads me to.

Using it on this, of all things.

The creature before him lays on its side, motionless, four legs splayed every which direction.

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

Another much bigger such blade at both of its elbows too, one of these blades sunk to the pebble filled dirt ground, but appearing undamaged.

The man wears a white lab coat, despite being outside.

He always insists to everyone asking about it that science is made wherever he goes, so he has to be wearing it at all times.

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?

He thinks getting tired of waiting.

The creature is completely covered in tough looking carapace consisting of different, dark and light 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 resembling a humans’ 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, missing a visible nose.

He scratches his short brown hair as he attempts to decipher the remaining details of this strange insect like creature, faintly humanoid, that lays before him. It’s hard to make out everything about it without closer observation, as it’s the first time he has seen one for himself.

It’s a mess of arthropod like appendages, blades and gems. Gemstone like stones cover this creature, embedded in its body in various locations, on its shoulders, knees, and the biggest one on its chest.

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

Though unlike any gem I know, there seems too be something swirling inside of these ones, like a whirlpool, as if they were hollow.

Truly fascinating, what are these stones, 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, the man retreats a few meters back.

Finally the experiment starts, let’s see what the outcome of this one is!

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

The four legs nimbly spread outwards to support its weight.

It stands tall and proud, at least at two meters, back turned to him, also covered with a hard shell from behind

The man seems to have escaped the creature’s notice.

Remarkable, it survived the fall from all the way up 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 up at the valley, high above.

He looks back down and sees a green liquid run down the creatures left arm.

Or not quite unharmed.

The armor is bent inwards and fractured on the spot, 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 looks a little like 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?” The man asks the creature.

In response, four legs nimbly turn it around in place, it looks at his direction calmly.

Its eyes are strange, arctic blue irises, filled with more eyes, like compound eyes, however, it also has a black pupil at the middle, with a normal white sclera as background.

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

It appears to be looking at him, but the scientist cannot quite make out if it’s actually looking at him or not.

As if it’s looking past him, or maybe around itself at the same time? It’s hard to say for sure.

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

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

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Then it nods.

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

Amazing!

“You don’t look okay to me, you’re hurt” The man points at the creatures left arm and then touches his own left arm at the same point, demonstrating his point.

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

As it connects, the creature recoils with pain, its mouth on its face showing the first show of emotion as it frowns.

“Hurts, right? My la- uhh clinic is at the other side” he points far into the distance, at the far wall of the quarry, an area that had it’s mining operations finished, a calmer more secluded place.

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

The creature tilts its head quizzically, its antennae wildly moving around her head before fixating backwards.

“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 starts 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 it.

“You fell because you escaped those Sabertigers? Come on, lets go, we’ll climb up to that stone pile to escape them”

The insect creature wastes no time and starts a four legged run down the path, the man lets it take the lead and follows after it.

He looks behind, the sabertiger faraway sniffs the air. It looks like a mix between the ancient saber tooth tiger and Earth’s tiger, only as big as a truck, but not quite as long. It starts running towards them, its massive paws shake the ground with each of its leaping steps. To top it off, another one jumps down on the path and joins on the hunt.

They reach the end of the upwards sloped path and get on the ground level of the quarry, the nearest stone pile about 200 meters from them.

The insect creature seems to have understood his instructions as it gallops towards the stones quickly with its four legs. The man is left behind as it is much faster on level ground than he.

Where’s everyone? I really hope somebody is within earshot at least.

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

He glances backwards, the massive tigers are more than halfway down.

He forces himself to quicken his pace, pushing himself to his limits. Ahead he sees the insect scaling the rocks already, its long four legs making the climb look easy.

The ground shakes violently and the man almost falls mid run. Behind him, the first tiger has taken a shortcut down and just jumped the rest of the way.

Just a little more to the rocks. But the tiger is so big and close now, it can just take two steps to eat him whole!

“Hey you! Insect creature!“

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

The ground shakes once more.

“Bug creature! Arthropod! A- Amethyst!”

The last one manages to make the insect creature turn around and stop climbing, almost having reached the top.

“HELP ME!”

The ground trembles right behind him and the sunlight darkens, but he doesn’t look back. He’s almost at the stones and scans the pile, spotting a dozen cracks between them suitable for hiding, awaiting ahead for him.

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

A massive stone drops right next to him on his right side, the ground shakes, splinters of stone and small pebbles blast him. The stone, at least a meter in diameter, has sunken into the ground slightly from the force of the impact.

What the hell! That almost crushed me!

He glances behind, another rock strikes the tiger, it hits its shoulder and the eight meter cat roars in pain flinching backwards.

He looks up at the insect, as it stabs a nearby stone with both bladed hands, the hard stone easily punctured. The stone is lifted above its head momentarily before it flings another stone towards the tiger.

The creature staggers forward a little by the force of the throw, threatening to almost go with the stone, but keeps it steady with its four legs spread out for balance.

What in the world.

He sprints and reaches the stone pile, he jumps up against the first rock, his chest hitting the hard stone painfully, quickly pulling himself up regardless.

Screw hiding if I can get up there to guaranteed safety at 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 cat’s wouldn’t try to climb after him, if so, the stones would 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 instead.

The other sabertiger stomps to its mates side and past it, as another stone hits the first tiger.

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

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

A sound of laser guns firing fill the air as the other tiger is peppered with gunfire. It flinches in pain and roars.

It turns towards the gunfire to advance, but is discouraged quickly.

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

The people with the rifles chase 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 group, but nothing compared to the total number of staff present on site.

With the adrenaline still running through the man’s veins, he swiftly climbs up the stone pile towards the insect still standing there, waiting for him.

“Phew, that was close… thanks. Amethyst” He pants as he makes it to the same level as it.

In response the creature tilts its head puzzled.

“Is that not your name?”

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

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

No reaction.

He points at himself.

“Grent”

And then to the insect creature.

“Amethyst”

“Okay?”

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, lets 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 skip their way down and step on top of firm soil once more.

“Alright, if we just go left of this next rock pile and then continue on 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 side by side, the long stride of four legs always pulling ahead.

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

"You're 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.

“Aargh!”

“Uaaah!”

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 the same for hands, four legs and purple crystals covering its body.

So it came back...

Grent thinks before announcing to Amethyst, 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.

He grabs the hilt of his pistol like experiment, holstered on his belt, with his other hand.

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.