Candy Gems Short Story

Prologue
It was only two months ago when the small town of Frontier, Nevada, became a worldwide spectacle. This wasn 't due to its central main street where locals liked to take afternoon strolls, lined with old brickwork boutiques and candy shops. Nor was it due to the dusty foothills with swaying sagebrush that isolated the town from the thundering highway next door, or the ring of mountains holding the town in its palms. Ideally, the town 's name should never have been known. But something changed that would forever scar their undisturbed history.
The pavement on the streets was surely never of high quality. Most of the work involved slathering a mixture of asphalt and small rocks over former dirt roads, which were left to the mercy of

The gem had a mysterious attractive quality to them. Maybe it was the way the gem shimmered elegantly against the wearer 's skin tone, regardless of color. Or how it seemed to give confidence to its wearer. Or maybe, like diamonds, the people felt a sense of prestige wearing them. Indeed, the value of these gems had reached four times the amount of gold. Many had their fantasies of owning some in their jewelry box.
Even the geologists and mineral researchers were captivated by these Candy Gems. What were they made of? How did they get here? All of them had researched the structure of the crystals and had developed their own theories. Carbon-based, like many crystalline compounds, and similar in hardness to the diamond. It can be cut evenly to fit pendants and sequins. But the discovery that baffled scientists was that the structure of molecules was attracted to each other so well that when a chipped piece of crystal was reintroduced to the rest of the structure, the piece fused itself back to the main body like a puzzle piece. And still more, there seemed to be traces of energy found within the crystal that may have accounted for its glow. However, after these discoveries, intensive studies on the crystal were halted when the government 's Area 51 suddenly confiscated their results and ruled any information on the crystals to be highly