I was woken bright and early the next morning, by a combination of the cacophonous chattering of the birds, and Emily's fingertips, gently brushing my face. As it turned out, while Olivia and I were quite happy to be wrapped up in our sleeping bags all night, Emily was a rather more restless sleeper, and had broken free of her confines and was splayed out, across the middle of the tent. It was a wonder the cold hadn't woken her.
As I gently lifted her hand, and placed it by her side, Emily muttered something in her sleep, about Mandy, and an anime I knew they were both fans of. I giggled. It was pretty adorable that Emily was dreaming about her. Sitting up, I noticed that Peridot was nowhere to be seen. I decided to get dressed and join her outside.
We'd kept the bulk of our belongings in a small, storage tent, including our warmer clothes, so we'd have more sleeping room. As such, my jeans and t-shirt were rolled into a ball in my corner of the tent, next to my boots. I quickly and quietly pulled them on, then made my egress in the same fashion, carefully climbing over Emily as I went.
With snow everywhere, I had to shield my face from sunlight, coming at me from all directions. After my eyes adjusted, I glimpsed Peridot, not far from the tent, but before I greeted her, I raced over to the storage tent, the icy air biting into my entire upper half. I snatched the first coat I could find, only realising after I pulled it on, that it was Emily's. I was sure she wouldn't mind, although I was somewhat nervous about the fact that the pockets were full of her gadgets. I hoped none of them were explosive.
Death by frostbite staved, I took in our fully-lit campsite for the first time. I saw much of what Olivia had described, yesterday morning, after using her powers. We were in an enormous, circular clearing, in the centre of which, was a tall, round boulder, the size of some of Empire City's smaller skyscrapers. I was no geologist, but I'd guess it had wound up here after a volcanic eruption or something (again, total guess). At its feet, were the site's Warp Pad, broken as Olivia had described, and the Gem machine she had mentioned.
The machine had been savagely torn apart, as if by some ferocious animal, but I reconstructed it in my mind, like a jigsaw, imagining what it had once looked like. It had been a tall, cylindrical device, with a casing make of glass and black metal. At one end, there was a large, red Gem, and at the other, a long drill, surrounding by four smaller drills, and four spindly, spider-like legs. On one side of the wreckage, was a deep, crater-like cave in the rock, and on the other, Peridot was clutching her hair, and muttering anxiously to herself.
"This is bad... very very bad... We should never have come here... Why did we come here...? All we had to do was ask Olivia to describe the machine she saw! How cloddy would you have to be!? Oh my stars... Oh my stars... Oh my stars..."
"Peridot...?" I nervously greeted, as I walked over to her.
Peridot screeched in alarm, and span around, bracing her arms in a fighting stance which (thanks to Pearl) I knew was poor.
"Is everything okay...?" I asked, rhetorically.
"Oh... Jayla..." Peridot greeted, breathlessly. "No, everything's not okay. We need to wake the others and leave immediately!"
"What, why!?" I demanded. "What is that thing?" I asked, regarding the destroyed machine Peridot had been staring at.
"It's a long story!" Peridot snapped, dismissively.
"Then you're telling it!" I ordered. "We didn't come all this way, just to go home!"
In spite of my protests, I respected Peridot's urgency, and helped her quickly but gently wake up Emily and Olivia, and catch them up on the situation. Within minutes, they were dressed, and the four of us sat on some rocks and logs, we arranged in a circle, so Peridot could tell us what was wrong.
"I... suppose this is fitting, as Steven tells me this is a staple of a complete camping experience..." Peridot laughed, nervously.
"What is?" Olivia asked.
"A ghost story..." Peridot dramatically replied, sending shivers down my spine (or it could have been the cold). "The machine you see behind me is called an Injector. Gems use them to grow more Gems at isolated sites we call Kindergartens. Officially, Earth has two Kindergartens, one near Beach City, and another in the Sahara Desert. This place wasn't in the report I was given before I came to earth, because it's not a Kindergarten... It failed."
"Why...?" Emily asked, in a hushed whisper.
"Well... that's where the story comes into it. It's a horror story passed around between Peridots and other Kindergarteners, a cautionary tale, if you will. Most assume it never really happened, myself included... They say that, back in Era 1, on a planet matching many of the characteristics of this one, a team of Peridots picked a site for a Beta Kindergarten, and messed up bad. The soil was more than inappropriate for Gem production, it was toxic!
Ordinarily, the fluid an injector pumps into the ground takes decades to form a solid Gem, and centuries for that Gem to emerge, but here, it was as though the Gem couldn't stand to remain in the ground for a moment! The second the injector penetrated the soil, there was an explosion as a handful of partially formed Gem flakes burst from the ground! They could barely hold a form for a moment, but that form lashed out at anything that moved, grasping for another Gem to devour, to make itself whole!
That Warp Pad over there wasn't broken by an outcast, to keep others away... It was broken by Kindergarteners, throwing a rock into the air, before warping away... to keep a monster in!"
My heart was pounding anxiously as Peridot reached the end of her story. I was about to comment, when all four of us screeched in alarm, in reaction to a gale, which came out of nowhere, and tore through the campsite for just a few seconds, before stopping abruptly. The wind had made me flinch, but before I closed my eyes, I could have sworn I saw something black, shooting overhead.
"It's the monster!" Peridot whined. "It's taken on a spectral form! As soon as it's manifested a corporeal body, it'll tear our Gems from ours and swallow them!"
Emily patted down her pockets, before squinting at me, accusingly. "JJ, you're wearing my coat..." She pointed out, before unapologetically pulling my zip half-way down and fishing her scanner out of one of the inside pockets. "There was just a 33% spike in geo-organic pheromones, it's not a Gem monster, it's the Gem-human hybrid!" She took a deep breath. "HELLO!? YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE AFRAID! WE'RE LIKE YOU!"
"Hang on." Olivia said, before her eyes and Gem began glowing again.
While Olivia searched with her power, and Emily tuned her device, with a determined frown on her face, Peridot pouted in frustration. "It seems downright hazardous to assume the story is unrelated to our current situation." She complained. "That crater over there is proof that a misformed Gem monster burst from the ground over there several thousand years ago."
"Well... maybe she got better, and then fell in love with a human?" I suggested, optimistically.
Peridot looked at me like I was an idiot, and to be honest, I kind of felt like one. "Jayla, there was nothing to get better! The human equivalent would be a sack containing 10% of a mutilated corpse!"
"Well regardless, the scanner says there's a hybrid here now." I pointed out. "Your monster had thousands of years to leave this place!"
As Olivia's eyes returned to normal, with a look of defeat in them, Emily banged on the side of her scanner, irritably. "Well... I think I've shaved a few dozen meters off the hybrid's estimated location radius. Let's head off in the direction it..."
As Emily spoke, my eye was drawn to something spinning down through the air, like a helicopter seed. It was about to fall to the ground in the middle of the small group, when I caught it. It was a feather... about a foot and a half in length. We all looked up, but there was no sign of the large bird that had lost it.
"Did the hybrid drop this?" I guessed. "I suppose if they're a survivalist type, living out here, they'd have a fur or feather coat."
"JJ... step back and hold the feather up for size reference." Emily requested. I complied, and Emily snapped a picture of me, holding it, on her phone. "I don't know much about wildlife, but I haven't seen a single bird out here, that had feathers that big... I'll send a pic to the nerd lab, and see what they can find."
We all got to walking in the direction the hybrid had flown, and before long, Emily's phone started to ring. Emily answered, and put it on speakerphone.
"Emily." Dorothy politely greeted. "I got your..."
"Emily? How are you!?" Perry's voice loudly interrupted. "Did you sleep okay? Remember, sleeping in unnatural positions because of new habitation circumstances can lead to spinal injuries! And have you eaten breakfast yet?"
"Perry, what did we talk about!?" Dorothy scolded.
"You talked about your apathy for Emily's wellbeing!"
"You have some strange synonyms for 'trust' and 'respect', Perry!"
Emily nursed an oncoming headache, and whispered, "Oh my god..."
Trying not to laugh, I gently took the phone from her. "Hi guys, we're all here too!" I greeted, before adding, too quietly for them to hear me, "In case that makes any difference..." Even though I knew from experience that it didn't.
"Oh, hi Jayla!" Perry greeted. "That was a really pretty picture Emily just sent of you!"
"Although we're confused as to why it was sent, and why you're holding a large feather." Dorothy added.
"The feather was dropped by the hybrid." I explained. "But we don't think it's from any birds native to this region. Can you find out what kind of bird it came from, please? That might tell us where the hybrid's from, or where they've been."
"Well, avian biology isn't exactly what we specialise in, but I don't see wh..."
The phone line went silent went silent for a few moments, before a solid tone declared the call to be over. I looked at Emily worriedly. Her relay drone had flown just above the tree line, after we'd entered the forest. Emily's Gem had barely begun to glow, presumably to summon her drone for maintenance, when the drone's mangled remains came crashing through the canopy, and into the dirt, next to us, with a burst of sparks.
The four of us shared an anxious look, but I didn't waste a second further, before summoning all my Gem strength in my legs, and leaping up through the canopy, shielding my face from the whips and scrapes from a hundred twigs, on the way up. I soared above the trees, and soon saw a figure darting away, through the forest. It was still a little fast to get a good look of, but one thing I definitely saw, was a massive pair of feathery wings, not a coat, at all.
I landed amongst the branches of a tree, and leapt in the other hybrid's direction, as fast as I could. Sprinting along treetops was far from an exact science, as anyone who's done it will tell you. Most of the branches snapped or bent beneath my feet, and got a face full of leaves on several occasions. I lost sight of the hybrid very quickly, and soon after, fell painfully through the canopy, getting several bruises, and even more scrapes, before landing, face-first in the dirt. All things considered, it wasn't my finest moment...
"WAIT, COME BACK!" I shouted. "WE'RE NOT GONNA HURT YOU! WE'RE HYBRIDS TOO! WE JUST WANNA TALK!"
"JJ!" Through the trees, the rest of the team hurried to catch up with me.
"Oh gosh, you're hurt!" Olivia gasped.
"I'm fine..." I argued, wanting to focus on the hybrid.
"You're bleeding." Olivia sternly corrected.
I looked myself over, and saw a bleeding scratch on the back of my left hand.
"Peridot, could you please go get the first-aid kit?" Olivia asked.
"Right away!" Peridot confirmed, before running back to the campsite.
"What's this hybrid's problem?" Emily asked, squinting in the direction they had flown. "When I thought I was the only one, I'd have sold the lab to meet someone else like me."
"Maybe they don't believe us?" I guessed. "People don't live by themselves in the middle of nowhere, if they're prone to loving and trusting people."
"Speaking of being cut off..." Emily produced the still sparking wreckage of her signal relay drone, and frowned sadly.
"You can't fix it?" I guessed, from her expression.
"I could knock together something crude, but it'd take me a while..."
"What happened to it?" I asked. Obviously, the hybrid had destroyed it, before flying away, but how?
"It was pierced in eight places, like it was stabbed by some really weird knives, really fast."
I looked at the drone, the punctures were spaced out in a strange pattern, for a knife. There was a row of six, in groups of three, and beneath each three, were the seventh and eighth. I knew what they looked like, but it was too bizarre to say out loud, at least without building up to it first.
"Never fear! Nurse Peridot is here!" Peridot cried, returning to the group.
While Peridot and Olivia cleaned and dressed my open wounds, I caught them up on what I'd seen.
"Guys... that feather didn't come from a bird... the hybrid has actual wings..."
"What...?" Emily reacted, with skeptisism. "But not, like, as a part of their body, right? It's gotta be something they summon, like your boomerangs."
"No." Peridot argued. "This feather proves that those wings are physical. If they were a hardlight manifestation, they couldn't exist away from the host. Observe."
Peridot winced, as she plucked a yellow hair from her head, and dropped it. Almost as soon as it left her hand, it fizzled away, like my boomerangs.
"But... we're all Gem-human hybrids, and our Gems didn't mutate us like that..." Emily said.
"Maybe it has something to do with Peridot's story?" Olivia suggested. "Maybe that shard monster somehow had a human kid, and having shards instead of a Gem, messed with their DNA?"
"Well... if it did, I don't think it just gave them wings." I said, ominously. "Look at those puncture marks on the drone... don't those look like massive talons to you?"
Emily looked at the drone, and her eyes slowly opened in alarm. "I can't believe I didn't think of this sooner..."
Emily took the feather from Olivia and ran her scanner up and down it, then tapped her foot anxiously, as the results calculated.
"Oh my god..." She breathed. "The Gem shards didn't mutate a human, making it look like a bird... it's not human at all! It's part Gem and part... bald eagle!"
With perfect timing, the predatory screech of a bird of prey echoed through the forest.