"Is this it?" Amethyst asked, holding up another random bauble that she'd produced from one of the countless piles in her room. Garnet shook her head.

"No." Amethyst groaned and tossed it over he shoulder. Pearl was helping to search, but she found herself getting sidetracked on occasion trying to organize things.

"You're the one who got it back from Greg," she said, having finished stacking a bunch of broken appliances into what Steven could only assume was supposed to be a robot.

"Just because I grab something doesn't mean I remember what it looks like," she shot back, coming out with another item for Garnet to look at. "This it?" Garnet took the trinket, a small necklace with a blue stone, and nodded.

"This is it." Steven looked at it with starry eyes.

"Cool!" He held it for a moment, and then blinked. "Wait, why did dad have a Gem item?" Pearl laughed a few short, pitchy laughs.

"Well, Steven," she began, "Rose was very proud of gem culture, as she should have been. She wanted to share as much of it with your father as possible. So she let him have that." She gently took it from him and held it at her own eye level. "This was made to protect Gems from all sorts of hostile environments, so she reasoned it would do just as well for a human." She handed the necklace back to Garnet.

"I see..." Steven said, nodding. "But why do we need it now?" Garnet put the necklace on, and walked out of the room.

"Garnet is going to use it to check places that were too deep or volcanically active on the seabed," she explained. "We're hoping that we can find Malachite."

"Why're we looking for that dysfuntion junction?" Amethyst asked, walking with Pearl and Steven back into the house portion of the Temple.

"We're looking for her because these new gems are like Lapis Lazuli. They have wings, they control the forces of nature..." She produced holograms of each of them, side by side. "They even look similar. The only thing different is the hair and the height. Well, and the color, naturally..."

"So you think Lapis is gonna join their team?" Steven said. Pearl sat down and crossed her legs, eyes closed.

"Honestly, with her fused as Malachite I don't know what to expect," she said, looking up. "Spinel seemed to know Garnet and I, but I can't recall her. Not with all the other hundreds of gems I fought."

"But she didn't recognize me at all!" Amethyst chimed in. "Which would mean she knew you guys from before the war." Pearl bit her lip.

"That makes her so old, though- her and Nepheline." Pearl got up and walked over to the warp pad. "If Garnet gets back before I do, tell her I went to the Crystal Library to do some research." With that, she was off.

Steven helped Amethyst disorganize all the piles Pearl had stacked in her room for a little bit, and then he left, sitting in front of the television. The black, dusty glass reflected his slightly confused face. What was going on with all these Gems? They weren't from Homeworld, not like Jasper and Peridot, and they were so like Lapis. Were they related? Like sisters, or whatever the gem version of being siblings was?

Steven laid back and just thought for a while before nodding off. He woke up a few hours later to the sound of Garnet coming through the door. She made a slight noise of disapproval.

"Steven, I thought I said-" she started, but then she saw the television wasn't on. "Oh." She shook her head. "Where are the others?" she asked.

"Amethyst was in her room last time I talked to her," he said, standing up. "Oh, and Pearl went to go do research at a place called the Crystal Library." Garnet sighed.

"We should try to stick together," she said. "At least you three should. But she's doing research, which should help." The sound of the warp pad coming on told them Pearl was back. She looked particularly pale. Amethyst came out of her room and immediately stopped.

"You okay Pearl?" she asked. Pearl went over to sit on the couch, and then took a deep breath before promptly freaking out.

"They're from Homeworld all right but not from any time we'd have known about how could Rose have not told me she told me everything I-" Garnet put a hand over her mouth and Pearl seemed to find the contact comforting, at least enough to calm down.

"Again. But slow enough I can understand." Pearl tried again, taking a deeper breath than before.

"These gems we've been facing," she started, "were all part of a mission sent here from homeworld many eons ago, way before we had a lot of things even we take for granted. They apparently got here while Earth was still cooling down." Steven's eyebrows knit together.

"What, like during the Ice Age?" he asked. She shook her head.

"No, Steven. When the planet was first forming." Steven's eyes got big.

"But... they don't look that old!" Garnet put a hand to her forehead.

"Steven, we don't age." She put a finger to her chin. "But I'll admit, I didn't think we could go on for that long."

"It gets worse," Pearl said. "Nepheline and Spinel aren't the only two. Lapis Lazuli is listed as one of them, as well as a gem called Marialite. Together they were all sent here to assess if the Earth was viable for harvesting. They never reported in, though, so Homeworld deemed it inhospitable."

"But they didn't keep it like that," Amethyst piped up. "Otherwise I wouldn't be here."

"No, but Rose wrote in a Crystal Memoir," Pearl said, "that they'd allowed themselves to enter a sort of torpor-" she saw Steven's confused look and corrected herself, "-that is, a very deep trance where they only inhabit their gem. Then they woke up once Rose found their Temple."

"That place in the volcano?" Steven asked. Garnet shook her head.

"No, but I know where it's at," she said. "I had forgotten about it until now. It was so long ago, and I had figured we had taken care of things there." She stood, and beckoned Pearl and Amethyst. Steven got up too, but she held out a hand. "No, not you Steven. We're probably going to be fighting some very tough battles where we're going." She took off the necklace and put it on him. "If they come for you, find a safe place on the bottom of the ocean and hide there. Malachite wasn't down there, so it's probably about the only safe place now."

And then they teleported. Steven went over and sat on the couch, kicking his feet for a couple minutes before getting bored. He called Connie and they talked about how Unfamiliar Familiar was getting a movie series made, and then about the most recent episode of Crying Breakfast Friends, which Connie had agreed to watch so Steven could keep up without breaking his grounding. Then they talked a bit about some of the heavier stuff that was going on, like the new threat, and how they needed to hang out more often.
It was about an hour later that the warp pad hummed and the Crystal Gems all appeared. They looked like they'd been put through a salad spinner and then wrung out in a laundry press. Pearl collapsed first, poofing out in a cloud of white smoke. Amethyst next. Garnet managed to fall to her knee, exhausted, and then say one thing before poofing.

"No television while we're gone."

Steven dropped the phone, eyes big and tearful, as the two gems fell to the ground. Connie was still on the line.

"Steven? Steven!? Is everything okay? I thought I heard the gems just now. Did they get back from that mission? Steven?"