"So she tried to abduct you?" Peridot said. Her eyes sparkled excitedly behind her visor. "That's outstanding!"

The interior of the barn hummed with a plethora of new devices, each one a mishmash of repurposed junk. All of the other sculptures and oddities—meep morps, Steven had called them—and the furnishings had been shoved up against the walls to make room for Peridot's ultimate creation. As the green Gem tinkered with her devices, Connie stood back with Steven and Amethyst, watching far enough back so as not to be caught in the blast radius if anything went dramatically wrong.

Connie grimaced around a headache that had long since outgrown her skull. "Not really," she said. "I keep waking up afraid that I'm going to be halfway to Ocean Town, and my mom keeps 'checking up' on me."

Half-buried in the hood of a pickup truck propped on cinder blocks, Peridot waved off Connie's words. "Yes, yes, I'm sure the strain on your family unit has been difficult. But the actions you describe don't just confirm my hypothesis…I told you so, by the way…but they denote the presence of an intelligence beyond anything I anticipated!"

Amethyst idly crunched on the contents of a bag of CHAAAAPS. Cheese dust sprayed from her lips as she said, "So she's smart? So what? I thought you said Jades were all about information and junk. Turbo-nerds, kinda like you."

Running a set of jumper cables from the truck's guts to what appeared to be an inside-out washing machine, Peridot said, "The turbo-nerdiest, to use your parlance. But corrupted Gems never retain their capacity for reason. They're just big, dumb, mindless creatures acting on instinct."

A wave of CHAAAAPS spattered against the back of Peridot's head, spraying crumbs and flavor dust across her back and crunching at her feet. She stiffened and whirled around to see Steven already armed with another handful from Amethyst's bag. Steven gave her a reproachful look, one that Connie did not quite understand.

Brushing the orange dust out of her hair, Peridot said through her teeth, "Excuse me: corrupted Gems are lost, tortured beings, lonely and incapable of expressing themselves."

Steven nodded in satisfaction and handed the CHAAAAPS back to Amethyst, who ate the whole handful in a single bite.

"But why does trying to sleepwalk me out a door make Jade smart?" Connie asked. The tantalizing, tangy nacho cheese scent of the CHAAAAPS was driving her crazy, so she tried to focus on the reason they had come to the barn instead. Her lunch bar sat in the pocket of her jeans, waiting to make her miserable.

Crawling inside the inverted washing machine, Peridot said, "I assume your human habitation pod features viewports? Either as aesthetic choices or for passive climatic control?"

"I think you're asking if my house has windows," Connie said slowly. "And yes, it does. So?"

Peridot's head popped out the top of the machine, her hair phoomping back into shape. "So, why would a locked door stop a corrupted Gem? It would just jump through a win-dow and be gone long before your matriarch discovered you."

Connie thought through Jade's wordless murmurings while Peridot unspooled a length of heavy wire to wrap around a rusty piece of flagpole. All through Friday's classes at school, Connie had gotten flashes of impatience and boredom that weren't entirely her own, although she could empathize with those feelings during history class. Those feelings were coming more frequently, the emotions clearer and more complex than before.

"But why is that important?" asked Connie.

"Why?" Peridot echoed in disbelief. "Because whatever Jade's doing inside of you, she's doing it semi-rationally. Something about the bonding process might have suppressed, or even reversed, her corruption! That's unprecedented!" she cried. Then she looked to Amethyst and said, "That's unprecedented, right?"

"Uh, I can't be sure. It's never really happened before," Amethyst said. Her CHAAAAPS consumed, bag and all, she laced her hands behind her head to watch Peridot work. She glanced around the cluttered workshop and asked, "Where's Lapis? She get bored by all the nerd stuff too?"

Peridot paused in mid-coil. "Lapis is…elsewhere," she said, and then stabbed the flagpole and coil into the heart of the washing machine. "I promised her I would have her morps moved back before she returned."

More likely, Connie thought, Lapis would refuse to return until the experiment, and its subject, were long gone. She shivered at the memory of the graceful blue Gem's anger when she had first suspected Jade might be aware inside of her. It was hard to blame Lapis for not wanting to watch her barn-mate poke and prod another trapped Gem.

"What about the others?" Peridot asked, quickly changing the subject. She ran a new cable over to a microwave sitting atop an old engine block, both of which had lost most of their pieces. The microwave was an ancient model, the kind that used a dial instead of a proper, civilized touchpad. The dial was labeled with numbers, and it had little pictures of microwavable foods pasted around the outside of the dial as a quick reference for the foods' cooking times.

"Eh, they're out checking the Beta Kindergarten," Amethyst said, shrugging. "Something keeps bugging Garnet's future vision. This is, like, the third time this week she and Pearl have run off on a wild duck chase."

"Goose chase," Steven corrected her.

"Her precognitive abilities make her pursue local water fowl? That makes no sense," Peridot said. Then she produced a small toy car and carefully, exactingly, placed it in the center of the gutted microwave.

"The farther out Garnet sees, and the bigger the possibilities, the more room there is for different stuff to happen or not happen," Steven explained. Puffing out his chest, he said, "Garnet's lent future vision to me before. I'm kind of an expert."

He had to jump out of the way as Peridot shoved a large brown easy chair into the center of her machines. The chair had been modified, or maybe impaled, with a series of metal rods that formed a reticulating armature that hung above the seat. Peridot fitted the arm with some kind of forked apparatus made from old grilling tongs and electrical tape.

"Enough preamble!" Peridot announced. "Behold the fruits of my genius: I give you a fully functional Kindergarten-grade Gemological Dissipation Inducer. And I didn't even use a single resonance crystal." She blew on her knuckles, obviously impressed with herself.

"I just heard a bunch of words, but I don't think any of them explained what this stuff actually does," Amethyst said.

Frustrated, Peridot gestured to the armature above the easy chair. "It's a tool we use in Kindergartens. Sometimes when a Gem emerges and forms, she has trouble making a workable construct. Too many arms, an extra torso, mouths for knees, that sort of thing. So we just give 'em a zap with one of these, and they go back in their gem, typically correcting the issue on their next attempt. Of course," Peridot said, snickering and slapping the side of the truck, "ours were handheld, but I've improvised a working model."

Steven squinted at the prongs looming above the chair. "That part looks like the thingy you zapped us with when you abducted us," he said.

Her self-satisfaction cracking, Peridot said, "Yes, well…once the technology was developed, certain other military applications were discovered. It uses the same principles as the Gem Destabilizers supplied to us on our mission to Earth."

Connie stared up at the menacing prongs. Her eyes followed the cables snaking across the floor to each piece of the composite apparatus. Visions of Victor Frankenstein's laboratory flashed behind her eyes, with herself cast as the reanimated monster. She wanted to seem brave, but there was a tremor in her voice as she asked, "Will it hurt?"

Tapping his chin, Steven said, "I got zapped with one of the Gem Destabilizers, and it's kind of like a cross between being tickled and being a phone stuck on vibrate."

"The device is worthless against whatever Steven is," Peridot agreed. "But if Jade's connection to you is different than Steven's is to his Quartz, we could see a different reaction. If the connection Jade has with you has anything to do with her partially taking form inside of you, this process will disrupt the connection. Best-case scenario: we turn the machine on, and Jade just falls off of you."

"What's the worst-case scenario?" Connie asked.

Peridot grew absolutely still. An awkward smile spread slowly across her face, ostensibly meant to reassure Connie. It had the exact opposite effect. "Let's not get lost in speculation," Peridot said. "This is an experiment. So, let's experiment!"

With trepidation, and a helping hand from Steven, Connie climbed into the overstuffed easy chair. Her body sank into the upholstery, her skin sticking noisily to the cracking vinyl where her tank top left her bare. Without warning, the chair flipped backwards, its footrest extending and its back tilting until Connie laid flat. She clutched the armrests in surprise, swallowing hard as she stared up at the grimy, holey barn ceiling high above.

Hopping onto a wooden stool, Peridot aimed the tines of the armature squarely at the green stone beneath Connie's neck. The metal tips loomed above the gemstone. "Amethyst, I'll need you to regulate the power from the repurposed radiation food preparation device while I maintain calibration on the de-attunement tines. I've routed power control to the device's primary dial."

Amethyst followed the direction of Peridot's gesture and found the gutted microwave with the toy car inside. "I'm on it," she called, readying her hand on the timer dial.

Connie's empty stomach knotted itself as Peridot lowered the tines to grasp either side of Jade's flat, blocky stone. The cold touch of metal raised goosebumps across Connie's skin. "Peridot, are you certain about this?" she asked.

The green Gem scoffed in reply. "Nothing in science is certain until after it's happened. Sometimes not even then." She produced a set of thick, clunky welding goggles, which she layered over her yellow visor. "Okay, Amethyst, start the device on the corn fragment rupture setting," she called over her shoulder.

"Crankin' it to popcorn," Amethyst said, and twisted the dial so its arrow rested on the little picture of a piece of popcorn.

Seven different mechanical noises arose, filling the barn with a discordant hum-clatter-wonk that rattled the walls. The assembled machines shook with bolt-rending force, but aside from a few loose pieces here and there, they remained intact. All of the machines' thunderous work poured up the armature of the chair and into the metal tongs, where it manifested as a yellow light that shimmered and arced.

Connie stiffened at the sensation filling her body. It was as if every inch of her had simultaneously licked a battery. True to Steven's word, it did not hurt, but it was a far cry from a tickle.

Peridot's mouth puckered in concentration. "No reaction yet. Let's increase the power to the vapor-prepped plant matter setting," she said.

Turning the dial further, Amethyst called back, "We're up to steamed veggies!"

The tingling intensified. Connie felt herself start to shudder involuntarily at the power coursing through her. The vinyl of the chair squeaked and squalled as her skin shivered against it. She watched her hair begin to rise at the edges of her vision, drifting and dancing with static. Her fingers dug into the armrests as she tried to remain still, but all she wanted to do was throw aside the tines. And she wasn't sure that the desire was entirely her own.

Evidently displeased, Peridot smacked the side of the armature as if to jiggle loose some extra effect she had been expecting out of the device. "Okay! Take it up to cryo-preserved animal byproduct pre-convection!"

"Meat defrost!" Amethyst confirmed, cranking the dial. Her own long, white hair began to drift upwards as the power flowing through the cables steeped the air.

In a flash of yellow light, the noise of the machines became a deafening roar. The washing machine jerked itself across the floor by inches as its unbalanced insides whirled. A keening honk arose from the old truck, its horn joining the din. Peridot had to keep both hands on the armature to hold it in place above Connie. The triangle of golden hair surrounding the Gem's goggles became a wild bottle-brush puff.

Doubled over beside the chair, Steven had his hands over his ears. Connie wanted to shout to him, but her jaw was locked shut by the numbing, seizing force of the energy. Veins of yellow light began to crawl beneath her skin, forming lines in her arms and legs that were almost technical in their pattern. It would have amazed Connie if she still had the capacity to think or feel anything beside the raw power that was turning her into the filament of a light bulb.

The stool quaked beneath Peridot, threatening to toss her to the floor. "Amethyst!" she screamed, "raise the power level to subterranean tuber preparation!"

"We're going baked potato!" Amethyst bellowed, and turned the dial to its furthest. The tiny car inside the microwave became a fountain of sparks.

Connie clenched her eyes shut and gripped the armrests. Her mouth tasted like pennies, and her whole body felt like cold, crackling fire. She could see the yellow lines forming in the skin of her eyelids, turning her vision into a blinding haze. She needed the sensation to stop. She needed to break free from that terrible machine. She was already late, and she needed to get back with what she knew, before…before

The light and sound vanished all at once, plunging the barn into dark silence. Daylight streamed in through the open doors to paint the lifeless machinery the color of the late afternoon sun. The quiet was its own kind of deafening, the sudden change startling all of them as the composite device powered down.

Connie jerked forward as the tension in her muscles relaxed. The motion shoved the tongs off her chest, which threw Peridot off the stool. Looking down at her arms, Connie found that the glowing lines had vanished. A soft halo floated around her head, and when she reached up to touch it, she found her hair in a static cloud hovering above her.

Peridot snarled, ripping away her goggles. "It's that lousy circuit breaker again," she snapped. "You humans have a laughably low threshold for what constitutes 'acceptably safe' levels of voltage."

Steven rested a hand on the chair, his features heavy with concern, his hair puffed out from the static cloud in the air. "Connie?" he said.

"I'm okay," she told him, trying to smooth her hair. "Just a little rattled."

Amethyst made a wide circle around Peridot's griping tantrum to stand beside Steven. Her own hair still floated about her head. "Nice 'do!" she said to them. "It's like we're all cartoon characters who got scared. Did anything happen with Jade?"

EXTREME DISCONTENT

Touching the gemstone, Connie said, "She's still here. If anything, her feelings are clearer than ever. And I kind of agree with her right now."

Peridot's tantrum abated and she look up, exclaiming, "Really? Fascinating! Perhaps if I recalibrate for our next attempt…"

Connie laid back in the armchair, sighing. Her body ached from the strain of the machine as if she had forced a week's worth of sword training out of herself in just a few minutes. As she lay there, her thoughts untwisting, she saw a fleeting glimpse of something shimmering above her. Through a gap in the distant roof, she thought she saw something watching her from above. But when she looked back once more, it was only the blue of the sky.

"I'm willing to try again," Connie said, "but maybe not today. And I don't think Jade will appreciate it much."

Peevishly, Peridot retorted, "Well, if Jade has any better ideas, I'm all ears. …in the colloquial sense. If I was actually all ears, you'd need to use a Dissipation Inducer on me."

"Hear, hear!" Amethyst agreed. Her body flashed white, and she reshaped herself into a giant human ear, her face dangling from the lobe.

Connie chuckled and said, "If she comes up with any suggestions, I'll be sure to let you know."