Selena
Steele

KAEL CAME TO HOMEWORLD on Viltromite business. The mission was standard; assess the planet, assess the species, determine compatibility for conquest or population continuation. The Gems met him the way they met most outsiders, with hostility. He expected that. What he did not expect was Morganite.

She was the only one on Homeworld who approached him with curiosity instead of aggression. She asked him questions about where he came from, what he had seen, and what other worlds looked like. Kael had never met a Gem who cared about anything outside of Homeworld's rigid order. At first he considered her a useful contact and then a potential asset. The Gems were a strong species and a half-Viltromite offspring from such a pairing had value to the Empire. He told himself that was the reason he kept coming back to her. It was not the reason.

Morganite had spent her entire existence on Homeworld being told that nothing outside of it mattered. She did not believe that. She asked Kael everything and he answered everything, and somewhere in those conversations he stopped thinking about the mission and started thinking about her. He fell in love with her. She fell in love with him. Homeworld noticed and Homeworld did not approve.

Kael took her off Homeworld before that disapproval became something worse. They came to New York City, crowded enough for two outsiders to disappear and varied enough that Morganite could spend years finding something new every day. They settled in Queens. Kael found work, Morganite threw herself into Earth culture, and neither of them attracted much attention among millions of people already occupied with their own lives.

They married. They built a life. Morganite spent those years doing what she had always wanted to do; learning everything she could about Earth, humans, and the variety of life Homeworld had told her was beneath notice. They had decades together.

Then Morganite fell pregnant. Gem reproduction is unlike most species. A Gem cannot carry a child the way humans or Viltromites do without a significant cost. The pregnancy progressed over months the same way a human pregnancy would, giving them time to prepare, set up a space for Selena, and have the conversations they needed to have. But at the end of it a Gem has to give up their physical form entirely to bring the child into the world, passing their gem to the child. That is not a side effect. It is the requirement.

Morganite knew this going in. During those months she recorded videos addressed directly to Selena for different points in her life; her first birthday, her first day of school, the hard days, and the questions she might have about who her mother was and why she made the choice she made. She left Kael instructions on when to show Selena which ones. She did not want her daughter growing up without a version of her mother to talk to, even if it was only a screen.

Kael did not handle it well. He had known what the choice meant, tried to talk Morganite out of it, and she had made it anyway. Now she was gone and there was a baby who was the reason she was gone. He took care of Selena because she needed taking care of and because she was Morganite's, but it was a long time before it felt like anything other than obligation.

What changed it was the gem. He noticed the way it caught light the same way Morganite's had, and the way Selena watched everything with the same curiosity. Selena was not Morganite, but Morganite was in her, and Kael stopped being able to separate his grief from his love for his daughter because they were the same thing.

He raised her hard with Viltromite discipline, no shortcuts and no softening the training because she was small or young. He taught her to fight before she could read, pushed her endurance, and drilled her in combat until she stopped losing. He stayed close the way Morganite would have wanted him to, answered her questions, and showed her the videos at the times Morganite had marked.

Queens handled the rest of her education. Growing up half-Gem and half-Viltromite in New York meant Selena learned quickly to handle herself in situations most people her age never encountered. She started running recovery jobs with Kael in her mid-teens, tracking skips and doing contract work for bondsmen who paid well and did not ask questions about how a teenage girl could outrun and outfight men twice her size.

By nineteen she was working solo. By 21 she had a reputation in New York's bail enforcement circuit that made certain skips try very hard not to get caught by her specifically.

In her early twenties Selena walked into a wrestling school looking for people who could give her a better challenge. She expected the fighting to be easy. It was. Everything else was not. She had to learn timing, trust, control, how to take a hit without making someone look foolish, and how to protect another wrestler while making the audience believe she wanted to break them in half.

She kept coming back because it frustrated her. Eventually it became the first part of her life that did not begin with Kael, Morganite, the Gem Empire, or the Viltromite Empire. Prism Plex belonged to Selena.

She is 24 now. Wrestling has become her main career, bounty work is something she still takes when the job is worth it, and she plays rugby casually with a local women's club. Kael is still nearby and still showing up whether she asks him to or not. The Gem Empire considers her an aberration while the Viltromite Empire considers her an asset. Neither has moved on those opinions yet. Selena is still deciding what she considers herself.