Author's Note: Thanks for your patience, everyone, I spent the better part of February 2018 putting myself back together. Let's celebrate with an extra-long chapter!


Connie hunched over her desk, scowling at the worksheet of word problems waiting for her solutions. The problems themselves weren't so challenging, but she had to cover each problem so she could only read one at a time and solve them before the cheating voice in her head could feed her the answers. It added an extra layer of difficulty to the proceeding.

"Write faster, human. I want that candy," Jade insisted.

Her eyes flicked up to the tiny gift basket on Miss Gala's desk. Their teacher had offered the wicker cache of assorted mini candy bars to the first student who could correctly finish the worksheet of mathematical riddles. It was a naked attempt at bribing the class into doing schoolwork, and she had admitted as much, but she didn't seem too concerned with the students who weren't really trying.

Even Connie, as studious as she prided herself on being, felt the energizing distraction that came hand in hand with the last day of school. The air in the classroom vibrated with the anticipation of impending freedom, practically rattling the windowpanes in their frames. Summer stood at the very brink of the school's doors, its warm breath seeping through the cracks to make everyone, student and teacher, eager to finish the perfunctory school day.

Her leg jittered under her desk as Connie thought about the long days of freewheeling ahead of them. She could take Jade on proper excursions, not half-daytrips, perhaps wheedling some transportation and company out of Steven in the process. Maybe they could even take their instruments, or at least Connie's violin and a more portable wind chime, back to Jade's spot so they could play for the human tourists down on the paths. A thousand possibilities lay before them, with even more beyond those that Connie hadn't even yet considered.

"Human, that basket contains no fewer than five distinct varieties of candy. I can recognize the differing color combinations of their wrappers from here," Jade said. "I have never experienced any of them before. Lay down your pride for the greater good of my culinary survey, and let me complete this trivial human educational exercise for you."

Connie drew a smiley face with a protruding tongue next to the latest completed problem on the worksheet as answer to Jade, and then uncovered the next problem from beneath her hand. Her passenger's need for flavors didn't justify cheating, at least not to her. Besides, Connie knew she could win the impromptu contest honesty if only the voice in her head would stop howling about candy.

But as she skimmed the next question, Connie felt a light tremor run up the legs of her chair and quiver through her seat. Her pencil skittered at the buzzing, making Connie frown at the crooked numbers she'd written. Another tremor followed quickly, this one strong enough to rattle the windows for real. By the third tremor, most of the other kids in the class had noticed as well.

Miss Gala looked up from her paperback romance, drawing a sharp breath to scold the class's rowdiness, and then scowled in puzzlement at the lack of any such thing. The rest of the students looked just as confused as she did.

As Connie pushed her awareness out, keening her senses as Pearl had taught her, she could feel the tremors radiating from a source in the direction of the classroom door. A muted thump accompanied the rattling of the desks and chairs with each tremor. Suddenly Connie felt a memory overtake her, one from a time long ago when her father had tried to show her an old dinosaur movie from the Nineties. It had taken her mother's gentle coaxing and promises of cookies to lure a sobbing four-year-old Connie out of the bathroom, where she'd locked herself after watching a tremendous monster try to eat two kids right out of a Jeep as though they had been oysters in a stubborn shell. The thudding footsteps of that T-Rex had haunted Connie's nightmares for weeks and had instituted a new household rule against buying DVDs without express motherly approval.

An echo of that clenching fear grabbed Connie by the stomach as the tremors intensified. "Footsteps," she murmured to herself. Then a flash of motion caught the lower edge of her vision. She looked down to find her idle hand filling in the last answer of the worksheet in the impossibly neat handwriting of her passenger. "Hey!" she hissed.

"There. These paltry mathematical hypotheticals are solved. Now collect our prize," Jade commanded.

"You're not the least bit worried about the shaking floor?" Connie snarked under her breath, too softly even for her to hear herself, but clearly enough that she knew Jade would understand.

"Curious, perhaps, but hardly worried," Jade said.

Connie was about to whisper an admonishment when the thudding abruptly stopped. A new sound arose in its place, a booming, rumbling voice that filled the hallway outside the classroom. "Hello? Are you in there? I mean, I know you are, but I'm supposed to ask first. Polarite gets mad when I go in without asking," the voice said, its pitch and cadence at once familiar to Connie.

A new fear wrapped around her old fear to clench her innards harder. Connie swallowed hard against a wave of hot terror trying to climb up her throat, and she heard Jade say, "Oh. I am now worried, human. Perhaps more than worried. We must find egress immediately."

The legs of her desk skidded as Connie threw herself out of her seat, her worksheet flapping in her hand. She slapped the worksheet onto Miss Gala's desk, startling the confused teacher, and then scooped up the big wooden toggle on a keyring that served as the classroom's hall pass. "I'm finished, thank you, I gotta go, excuse me, sorry!" she blurted on her way through the classroom door.

A hand the size of a manhole cover waited for her on the other side of the door. The white gemstone in the center of its palm flared at Connie's arrival. As she slammed the door closed at her back, Connie watched Milky Quartz draw back. A satisfied grin filled the Gem's craggy features as she said, "There you are! Hello!"

Connie's brain struggled to reconcile the huge Gem's presence inside her school. Milky Quartz dwarfed the lockers behind her, and her wild white mane brushed at the tiles of the suspended ceiling. It was hard to imagine her squeezing through the front doors of the school at all. Perhaps there was a hole somewhere where the Gem had made her own entrance instead. She seemed to block the entire hallway just by standing in it, her gray bodysuit crowding everything around her. A splash of new color hung at Milky's hip, a disc made of some kind of viscous purple alloy that seemed to shift like liquid in the fluorescent lighting. It clung to her suit, but was not a part of it. Something she carried that wasn't a part of her form, perhaps?

"Milky? Why are you here?" Connie said, failing to keep the quaver out of her voice. She started sliding along the wall, trying to back away from the Gem.

But Milky took a single, lumbering step that gobbled the distance between them, and loomed over Connie once more. "Well," the Gem said, "Flint was getting bored with waiting, which made Zircon mad, and they were shouting at each other a lot. Then Pyrite told them both to shut up, and then told me to find one of the squishy Crystal Gems and poof them. And I found you!" Milky's grin broadened, making her stalactite chin bow with the shape of it.

The door to Connie's math classroom cracked open, and Connie caught sight of Miss Gala's eye peering through the gap. "Connie? What is…?" the teacher started to say, but then choked on her words as her widening eye traveled up the length of Milky Quartz. The Gem heard the intrusion, and her smile vanished, replaced by irritation.

Connie was struck with a sudden vision of the irritated Milky Quartz 'dealing with' a curious student body or teachers with a misplaced sense of authority. "Jade, she's gonna hurt people," Connie said in a graveyard whisper, even as Milky's attention shifted toward the door.

"Plug your ears and tell them to stay hidden. I will do the rest," Jade commanded.

With no time to argue, Connie stuck her fingers in her ears, closed her eyes, and summoned her loudest, most authoritative tone: "All students and teachers are to remain in their classrooms until further notice!" she shouted.

The words left her mouth, and then boomed through the hallways of the school. Connie could feel her own voice reverberating through her body, rattling in her teeth. If she hadn't plugged her ears as Jade had instructed, she was certain the volume of her amplified voice would have ruptured her eardrums. Even the gigantic Quartz staggered back, clapping her mismatched hands to the sides of her head. But the classroom door next to them slammed shut, with seemingly no signs that it would open again from the other side.

As if sensing the question that arose between Connie's ringing ears, Jade explained, "Amplifying and propagating the vibrations rendered by your voice. A complicated trick, but a handy one when shouting to be heard above a platoon of unruly Rubies. Now run, human!"

Connie did not run, though. Locking her legs so her knees didn't quake, she waited for Milky to recover, keeping her features carefully neutral as the Quartz shook herself clear of the reverberations. "Hey, that wasn't nice!" Milky complained, and dug at one ear with her smaller hand. Then she reached out with her massive, rocky mitt, her fingers spread to engulf Connie. "Anyway…"

"Wait!" Connie shouted, holding up her own hand. She was a little shocked when Milky actually paused. "Milky, I don't want to fight you."

"Human, talking is not running!"

Milky's head tilted. "You don't?" she asked.

"Of course not. We know you weren't sent by Homeworld. And even after that stuff on the farm, and at the Kindergarten, we don't need to fight," Connie explained in a rush. "If we actually just stopped to talk to each other, we could figure out a way where everybody gets what they want. Wouldn't that be better?"

Connie could hardly believe it as Milky nodded at her pleas. "That does sound better," the Quartz agreed. Then, before Connie could sigh in relief, she continued, "But I really like smashing and poofing. And Pyrite said I had to anyway. So…"

As Milky's grasp descended to crush her, Connie threw out her hands and shouted again, "Wait!"

"Huh?" Milky hesitated once more, and scowled around the edges of her thick fingers. "What now?" she snapped.

"Uh…" As Connie's mouth fumbled for an excuse, the hall pass she'd taken from Miss Gala's desk dangled in front of her, hanging by its keyring from Connie's thumb. She lifted it higher, suddenly struck with a terrible idea. "You, um, need a hall pass to stay out here in the hall. You're not allowed here without one."

"…really?" Jade uttered.

"Really?" Milky asked, her irritation retreating into puzzled confusion.

Jade's disgust shifted at once from Connie to Milky. "Really?" she snarled in disbelief.

Connie exhaled, lowering her hands. "Really," she said, nodding emphatically. "It's a, uh, a human rule. We have to follow the rules here, or we'll both get in trouble."

Looking around helplessly, Milky said, "But where do I get one?"

Smiling, Connie offered the Gem her own hall pass and said, "Here, you can take mine. Then, if you wait here, I'll go get another one, and then I can come back so you can poof me. Is that okay?"

Milky brightened as she took the pass. The wooden toggle looked comically tiny in the Gem's grasp. She waggled the keyring, chuckling, and then said, "Okay. Thanks!"

"Great! Wait right here," Connie said. Then she sprinted down the hallway as fast as she could. Her sneakers squealed against the grimy tile as she rounded the next corner.

"I am torn between my pride in your duplicity and a new deep concern for my species at large," Jade groused. But then her annoyance ignited into wild alarm as Connie made a beeline for a utility closet door down near the end of the new hallway. "Wait. What are you doing? Find the exit!"

"We can't just leave," Connie huffed, her lungs burning with the words. "Milky might—"

A booming cry erupted behind her, cutting the thought short as Milky rumbled, "Hey, wait a minute!" Then the thunderous footsteps from earlier returned, rattling the whole floor harder than before.

"She might take it out on the school," Connie hissed at her passenger. Her hands closed around the knob of the closet door, and she threw herself inside without looking. "We need—"

As the door slammed shut behind her, Connie collided with something warm, solid, and screaming. She fell into a tangle of limbs, recognizing the shape in the dark as something vaguely middle-schooler-ish. Desperate, Connie reached for the source of the scream and clapped her hand across an open mouth. Cries of alarm rattled against her palm as another hand clawed at hers.

"It's okay!" Connie pleaded in a brittle whisper. "It's okay. I'm not gonna hurt…you."

The last word thudded out of Connie as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, and she recognized the wide eyes of Mandy Petti staring back at her above her hand over the queen bee's mouth. A keychain-toggle hall pass dangled from Mandy's finger, clacking loudly as Mandy fell back onto the closet floor and skittered backwards on all fours. "What is that thing out there?" Mandy whisper-screamed.

"What are you doing here? Didn't you hear me before? Stay in the classrooms!" Connie whisper-screamed back at her.

Mandy shook her hall pass. "I was going to the bathroom! Then I saw a monster in the school, so I ran and I hid! That's what you do when there's a monster in the school!"

"Human! Focus!" Jade snapped. "We have to get out of here now!"

Connie dug into her pocket for her phone. Her thumbs raced across the screen, typing with frantic speed and appalling grammar. "MLKY QRTZ SCHOL, TRAPD NEED HELO," she sent to Steven, and then stared intently for the bubbles on the bottom of the screen that would indicate he was typing a response.

"Go find your own hiding—" Mandy hissed.

"Human, this flawed strategy will be the end of—" Jade insisted, her ephemeral voice rising above Mandy's.

"Everybody be quiet!" Connie whisper-snapped, silencing her gallery. She listened to the thumping footfalls coming from the hallway outside, where Milky Quartz was passing the intersection where Connie had lost her. "Help is coming. And if she passes us, I can double back and then lead her toward the exit. That'll get her out of the school."

Mandy gaped at her. "Wh…What?"

Jade seemed less impressed. "Tactically sound, human, save for one detail: she's a Milky Quartz! How do you suppose she found us in the first place?"

The point struck Connie an instant before the thudding footsteps stopped directly outside their closet door. With a shriek of metal, the doorknob dropped from its housing as its other half was yanked away from the other side. A slate-gray eye suddenly filled the hole, glaring into the dark closet.

Connie wanted to scream at herself for forgetting Milky's sole purpose as a Gem hunter, but there wasn't time. She whirled, grabbing Mandy by the shoulders, and spun the blonde into the corner, wedging her behind a shelf filled with buckets and bottles of cleaning product. When Mandy tried to protest, Connie covered the girl's mouth again. "Crouch down and stay quiet," Connie murmured. "She won't find you. I promise."

"What are you—?" Mandy tried to say through Connie's fingers.

The door splintered, cracking like a gunshot as enormous stony fingers smashed through and gripped at it from the outside. Looking around hurriedly, Connie grabbed a mop and bucket and moved it in front of Mandy. Then she winced at the flimsy camouflage. "I'm sorry," she murmured to Mandy, and to Jade.

"Human, I can possibly delay her. But it would result in extensive damage to the school," Jade said. "There is, admittedly, a not-insignificant risk to your classmates' safety vis-à-vis the building collapsing from interior hurricane gales. But it would at least slow the Milky Quartz in her pursuit."

But Connie shook her head as she turned away from Mandy. She scooped up Mandy's discarded hall pass from the floor, and then straightened to face the door as it was ripped in half. Milky Quartz filled the empty frame, glaring through the spray of flinders that used to be the door.

Holding up the second hall pass, Connie smiled nervously and stammered, "Got that other pass! Heh…"

She tried to dart through the gap between the Quartz's legs, already imagining herself rolling back onto her feet and leading Milky on a breakneck chase out of the school and down the street. But Milky moved faster than she could ever have imagined. In a flash of white, Connie felt the Gem's grasp close around her like a tomb, engulfing her from hips to chest and yanking her out of the air. The blood rushed up into her head as Milky's gargantuan hand lifted her to eye level with the Gem.

"Human rules don't count for Gems!" Milky roared. The words hammered into Connie, almost as painful as the crushing grip wrapped around her. "Didn't you know that? Were you trying to trick me?"

Connie felt her guts trying to squeeze up her throat. Her eyes bulged, the edges of her vision growing red. She pushed at the edge of Milky's thumb with both of her hands, but it felt like pushing against a concrete wall. "No…" she wheezed.

Milky considered her for a moment more, and then relaxed. "Really? That's weird. It's pretty obvious," she said, and swung Connie out into the hall. "Well, come on. I'm supposed to poof you and wreck this place until your friends show up."

A sliver of fear lanced up Connie's spine for Steven, whose answer she had never seen before Milky had snatched her. The phone lay on the closet floor now, and any warnings she might send now to keep him safe were being crushed out of her, with her innards soon to follow. Jade was shouting something at her, but she couldn't hear her passenger above the ringing in her own ears. The red edge in her vision started turning black as it closed around her, the hallway fading into a spinning haze as Milky turned to lumber away with her in hand.

And then a white liter bottle thumped into the side of Milky's head. It struck with a half-hollow thunk and bounced off the Gem's shoulder, rolling down into the crook of the Quartz's rocky elbow. Connie's scrabbling hands hooked onto the handle molded into the bottle's plastic, and she clutched it tightly. The bottle was marked in large, dull lettering with the word BLEACH, and it took everything Connie had to cling to it as Milky whirled to face the origin of the bottle's arc.

Mandy Petti lowered her arm, shrinking back from the attention of the lumbering monster. A second bottle of bleach dropped from her limp fingers and rolled across the tile. "S-Sorry," she whimpered.

Connie wrenched the cap from the bleach bottle she'd caught and jammed her thumb over the bottle's mouth, leaving only a sliver open. "Jade," she croaked.

The sides of the bottle bulged as the air inside pressurized, propelling the bottle's liquid out from under Connie's thumb in an acrid spray of chemicals. Connie aimed the spray into Milky's face, closing her eyes and twisting her face away from the noxious liquids. The huge Gem squalled and staggered backwards, dropping Connie to paw at her face with her mismatched hands. An entire row of lockers crumbled behind Milky as she collapsed into the wall.

Scrambling backwards, Connie sucked in greedy lungfuls of air, her ribs aching fiercely. "Mandy," she wheezed, "get out of—"

By the time she looked over, Mandy was already gone. A fleeting glimpse of golden hair and the heel of a designer sneaker vanished around the far corner of the hallway. As beleaguered as she felt, some small part of Connie still had to admit that, whatever else Mandy was, she was clearly a good captain for the track team.

Then Milky regained her feet amidst the shriek of flattening lockers, and Connie put her mind back into the fight. The big Gem sputtered and wiped at her face with her smaller hand. "Yuk!" groused Milky. "That was a dirty trick!"

"I would suggest a pun regarding the cleaning product we employed, but the jest would likely be lost on her," Jade said. "Also, WHY AREN'T YOU RUNNING?"

The floor was only now settling back into place beneath Connie. Her head swam with the rush of blood, and her lungs blazed, thirsty for air but aching with every breath. She doubted she could manage a decent jog in the next minute or so, let alone matching Mandy's quick exit. "I'm sorry," she groaned to her passenger, sagging onto her hands and knees as she fought to regain her breath.

"Human…" Jade called to her, still half-muffled by the pounding of Connie's pulse in her head.

"No you're not!" Milky snapped, mistaking Connie's words as meant for her. "You're just like all the other little Gems who try to get away. You use tricks, and you cheat, and you run. You all think you're so much smarter than me!"

Sneering, Milky lifted her enormous arm, her hand closing into a fist like a boulder. The shadow of it eclipsed the fluorescent lights in the ceiling, leaving Connie to stare up at a dark Milky surrounded by a flickering halo. She had seen how deceptively fast the big Gem had moved to grab her before, and knew she had no chance of dodging the blow in her winded condition.

"But nobody's smart once they get poofed," Milky sneered.

Milky's fist dropped, hurtling with the force of a crashing asteroid. Then the air between Connie and Milky flashed apart in a leonine roar.

As the sound of it punched Connie backwards, she watched the glowing tear spread apart and spit out a great pink wave that skidded across the slick tile. Ribbons of wax and grime peeled beneath pink claws as Lion crashed into Milky Quartz, bowling through the Gem and sending his three passengers flying off his back as the cat and Quartz smashed a crater into the brickwork at the far end of the hallway.

Steven scrambled out from under the dazed forms of Pearl and Amethyst. "Connie!" he exclaimed, and all but scooped her into a frantic hug. "Are you okay? Are you hurt? Where's Milky?"

As welcome as Steven's hugs always were, Connie felt the memory of Milky's grasp screaming through her ribs. Blinking back tears, she squeezed Steven back before stepping out of his embrace to catch her breath again. She pointed down the hall, where Milky Quartz was already rumbling back to her feet, batting aside Lion with the effort it would have taken to flick a ladybug off her bodysuit. The hulking Gem's brows avalanched into a scowl when she spied Pearl and Amethyst untangling themselves to face her.

"Steven," Pearl barked, "get Connie out of here. Amethyst and I will take care of this lout." Her stance broadened, shifting back as she drew the glowing length of her spear from the stone in her forehead.

"I don't know what that word is, but it sounds mean!" Milky shot back, and conjured her hammerhead around her enormous fist. It dropped to the floor beside her, cracking the tile. Her other hand hovered near the purple disc at her hip, quivering as if to grab it, but hesitating. After a silent decision, she dropped her hand from the disc, clenching it instead into a fist to brandish at the new arrivals.

"Don't worry," Amethyst said, and yanked glowing whips from her own gemstone, "I'll explain it with my foot in your face! Or maybe your butt, because that's easier to reach! You're very tall!"

"Thank you!" Milky bellowed, enraged.

Steven took Connie by the hand and dashed for the heap of pink fur that picked itself up from the tile. Breathless and aching, she dangled behind him like a banner. The floor beneath them quaked as Milky lumbered forward to intercept them, even while Amethyst and Pearl darted forward to intercept her. They all converged onto a single spot, poised to crash into a raging calamity of weapons and soft human flesh.

Milky's bulk overshadowed the teens, her weapon poised to crush them both with one swipe as she lifted her hammerhead in an overhand blow. But Amethyst was faster, tucking and rolling into a white whorl that kicked a spray of tile in her wake as she dashed into Milky. The whirling Crystal Gem struck Milky like a cannonball, blasting the massive Quartz back down the hall. She struck the wall in the crater she and Lion had made, and then kept going, vanishing into a haze of dust and mortar with the piercing crack of brick shattering behind her. Pale daylight streamed through the hole where she'd been, the pluming drywall glittering in the air. Still spinning, Amethyst drove through the hole, shearing one edge wider as she disappeared after the massive Quartz.

Steven winced at the fresh hole in the wall. "I hope that doesn't go on your permanent record," he said to Connie.

Lion finished shambling to his feet, rumbling in irritation while Pearl ran past them in pursuit of the battling Quartzes. "Go!" she shouted to the teens, and then leapt forward, folding herself along the haft of her spear to pierce the hole in the wall without brushing its edge.

Connie accepted a hand from Steven, grateful to cling to him as they mounted Lion. With a gentle plea from Steven, the great cat loped forward and split the air with another roar, turning the world around them into a rushing corridor of light.

Sagging against Steven's back, Connie allowed herself to sigh in relief. She buried her face in his shoulder and squeezed with her arm around his waist. The touch of his hand on hers as he pressed at her grasp around his waist was a comforting anchor that made her world finally stop spinning. "Thanks, Steven," she breathed into him.

"You're okay now," Steven said, possibly more for his own benefit than for hers. "Pearl and Amethyst can handle Milky. I guess Garnet was right, that she didn't need to come. Now I feel bad for yelling at her… I'll apologize as soon as we get back. What matters most is that everyone's okay. You're okay."

As Connie caught her breath, reveling in the scent of powdered sugar and ocean breeze, her pulse slowed, and Jade's voice rose above the faded throbbing between her temples. "I am glad we are safe, despite your own best efforts to the contrary. But now that the immediate danger has passed, I have concerns."

Connie chuckled through her nose. "I think Jade's complaining about the rescue," she told Steven.

"It was a little rushed," Steven admitted. "Next time we'll do better. After all, we'll have more practice at it after this time."

"No," Jade insisted, pushing back against Connie's post-gallows bemusement. "Human, the Milky Quartz could have found us at any time. Why attack now? And more importantly, why did she attack alone? We had yet to see her without the Flint before now, and she mentioned others."

The niggling thought drew Connie's brows together. "Maybe she didn't think she needed anyone else to 'poof' us? She wouldn't exactly be wrong," Connie suggested.

"Humph. Perhaps she would care to try again when there isn't a building full of potential collateral damage surrounding us," groused Jade.

The tunnel of light around them rushed into a single point, collapsing into an instance of sunlight and sand that then exploded into a familiar, picturesque shoreline. Sweet sea air rushed around them, the sand spraying in great clumps beneath Lion's paws as their feline steed touched down in a controlled skid. They landed in the shadow of the Gems' temple, mere steps from the edge of the house's porch, and came to a rest facing the glittering sapphire expanse of the ocean.

Steven started to say something, his weight shifting to slide off Lion's back. Then he froze, and his breath hitched. Connie felt him tense beneath her arms, and she followed his gaze to the edge of the shoreline.

Garnet stood with her back to the house, her feet planted firmly in dry sand. Her heavy gauntlets hung formed at her sides, clenched into fists as she faced the surf. Everything about her stance screamed warning that she was about to wreak mayhem, and that warning was aimed squarely at a figure crawling out of the frothing waves.

"Well, well," Flint called to Garnet. The lanky Gem straightened from the white foam with rivulets of seawater streaming from her black armor. Her red hair hung heavy and limp around her leering gray features. Strands of yellow and green seaweed were plastered to her limbs, dangling from her elbows and hips. "I've been looking forward to finally getting some alone time with you."

"Or maybe it's a trap," Connie breathed, finishing her thought from the warp tunnel. The air stirred dangerously around her, and her hands tightened into fists.