Thanks to an insomnia-fueled Fiki-fest, Connie knew—and would know forever—that the sneeze is a semi-autonomous, convulsive expulsion of air from the lungs through the nose and mouth, usually caused by foreign particulates irritating the nasal mucosa. Sneezes were powerful, with windspeeds of up to a hundred miles per hour. Of all the things humans expelled, sneezes were among the most impressive and least-ish disgusting.
Some studies had measured the average sound of the sneeze at eighty to ninety decibels. But those studies were conducted with adults. With her teen-sized lungs, a long and storied history of library quiescence, and having grown up around two silent-sneezer parents, Connie knew that her average sneeze was much quieter, probably under forty decibels. That soft a noise could be easily lost behind the ambient sounds of nature, especially when covered up by four angry and deadly Gems who wouldn't stop arguing with each other about which one of them would carry more boxes.
But Connie didn't have an average sneeze anymore. Instead, her sneeze erupted as a hurricane gale that knocked her out of her crouch. The wind blast carved a divot out of the ridgeline they stood upon and turned the strawberry patch that hid them into a geyser of juicy pulp.
Dirt and strawberry gore sprayed over the little valley, drumming the side of the parked spaceship. It spattered across the stacks of crates and over the startled faces of the four Gems, who had turned in unison at the sound of the explosion to stare at the two spies revealed.
"Gesundheit," Garnet deadpanned, rising up from behind cover that no longer existed.
Connie could only gape at the wreckage of their hiding spot, and then down below at the four expressions of shock staring up at them. A small, niggling, overly rational part of Connie's mind wondered how the equal and opposite force of her sneeze hadn't blown her head clean off her shoulders. Then it wondered if Isaac Newton had ever encountered the Gems while devising his Laws of Motion, and how much of his hair he must have pulled out at their stark refusal to obey those laws.
As the sound of the sneeze echoed across the fields, a sweet miasma settled into the valley, tamping down the lingering scent of smoke and char. Of the enemy Gems, Flint broke from her shock first to throw an accusatory finger up toward the ridgeline. "ESPIONAGE!" she shrieked.
Garnet braced herself low, gauntlets clenched at the ready. "Run," she said. And only when the fusion shot forward at blinding speed did Connie realize that the word had been meant for her.
Connie knew exactly what the intent of the word had been. But she refused to let her friend face this alien invasion alone. She wouldn't be an innocent bystander or a victim. And besides which, one of those enemies had her sword, Steven's sword, Rose Quartz's sword. So she drew her saber and obeyed Garnet's command in the worst way she could, charging down the hill as she bellowed her fiercest war cry.
In the time it took Connie to run five long strides, Garnet had already become a living nightmare to the enemy. Her gauntlet crashed through Flint's nose before the Quartz had finished her outburst. The blow flipped Flint hair over heels into Milky, and the two Quartzes fell into a tangle of limbs.
Garnet spun through the punch into a kick aimed squarely into Pyrite's chest. The golden brawler staggered, but then puffed out her chest, and the motion threw Garnet across the valley floor. Which seemed to be Garnet's idea all along, as the stoic fusion bounded off of Pyrite and made for the open ramp of the rectangular spaceship.
"The ship!" Pyrite bellowed, realizing too late to grab the fusion.
As fast as Garnet was, she wasn't faster than Polarite's gesture. The skinny Gem lifted her arm, and her fingers twitched. A chirpy bweep-bweep sound emerged from her arm and, in response, the ramp and door of the spaceship began to retract. Only a sliver of opening remained when Garnet slammed into the side of the ship. She jammed her armored fingertips inside to stop it from closing, and braced her whole body against the mechanism of the door, shaking with the effort. And the door, inch by agonizing inch, began to yield open once more.
Polarite lifted her sleeve to her mouth, and her arm bweeped again. "Beryl, launch!"
A tinny reply filtered out of the arm. "What? But I still have pre-flight diagnostics, and the gravity drive—"
"If the ship is compromised, then we lose everything, you clod!" snarled Polarite. "Launch!"
The sophisticated new Gem looked ready to hurl even meaner invectives through the connection, but Connie had arrived. Leaping, Connie swept her saber down into Polarite's arm and felt the blade ring against something metallic and draw a hiss of static that ended the call. She swung again, forcing Polarite backwards, and the Gem tripped over her own feet and collapsed onto her back.
"Hostile fauna! Hostile fauna!" Polarite yelped. As she crawled backwards, the fingers of the arm Connie hadn't chopped all merged together, combining into a long, curved pair of tines. Polarite lifted the tines at Connie, and the air began to hum.
Connie's sword stopped mid-swing. She nearly split her face open on the blade as her momentum had her crashing into her own hilt. Before she could recover, she felt the saber jerking straight upward, and held onto the grip for dear life. Her saber lurched overhead with her hands attached, her toes scrabbling for purchase on the grass as she dangled from the hilt. No matter how she pulled or thrashed, the saber refused to budge from the invisible force that held it aloft.
Polarite kept the sword motionless with her tines—a giant alien horseshoe magnet of tremendous power and specificity, Connie realized too late. "Fascinating," Polarite murmured, stooping to examine Connie's fruitless struggle to reclaim her sword. "The Crystal Gems have domesticated some kind of anthropoid servitor. And they've even decorated it with a faux gemstone. How curious."
Arching her body backwards as she clung to the hanging saber, Connie gathered momentum, and then swung forward with all of her might, kicking her heels through Polarite's jaw. The Gem collapsed with a squawk, curling into a ball on the ground as she cradled her face. Connie's sword fell free of the invisible grasp, and she stumbled back to the ground with her weapon in hand.
The spaceship door creaked, giving another inch to Garnet's unyielding might. The fusion's gauntlets pressed fingerholds into the alloy, actually distending the hull while the whole ship shuddered as if straining to get underway. Yet the ship could not budge because Garnet would not budge.
Then Milky Quartz forced Garnet to budge anyway, wrapping her tremendous hand around Garnet's waist. With a yell and a twist, Milky hurled Garnet out of the ship's door and cratered her into the side of the valley's slope. Pyrite was already in motion, flying through the air to stomp her boots through Garnet's visor, but the fusion recovered too quickly, rolling out from under the blow…but away from the contested ship.
No longer stymied, the spaceship's door closed, and its seams melted back into the hull. The only memory of the door was the shape of Garnet's grip bent into the hull, marring its otherwise smooth, bland perfection. Evidently the door's closing was the last thing holding the ship back, for the instant the seam vanished, the ship leapt skyward faster than Connie's eyes could follow. There was no sound of gathering power in its thrusters, just a whoosh of air rushing to fill the absence it left. It glimmered in the stratosphere for one instant, and then vanished in the next.
Connie rushed after Garnet, crying out in warning as Pyrite and Milky gave chase to the fusion. But a puff of intense heat raised the hairs on Connie's arms, and she threw herself to the ground in mid-stride. A stream of fire as thick as a telephone pole roared over her from behind, blazing through the space her head had occupied. The world became acrid heat, and she clawed at the ground to rise into a sprint, barely keeping hold of her saber as she escaped the flames.
Whirling around, Connie saw Flint snuff out the thick blast and begin gathering a new one. "You look better than you did at Ascension. Got your form all sorted out again, eh?" taunted the lanky Quartz.
Reacting faster than thought, Connie lifted her hands, reaching out with her half-hollow. She squeezed, and the air around Flint obeyed, dragging wisps of the Gem's fire as it condensed into a shimmering ball in front of Flint's chest. Just as quickly, Connie let go, and the ball exploded outward. Flint staggered back from the air grenade's detonation, and her own fiery blast went wide, blazing a nonsense line into the greenery far left of Connie.
Flint's haughty sneer melted into a scowl. "Why, you gusty little squidger!" she snarled, and blasted again.
Connie mashed another air grenade in front of Flint, and then another, and another. Every time Flint gathered a new stream of fire to hurl at her, Connie nudged the Gem with another node of pressurized air. Black spiral lines littered the ground to either side of Connie. The air shimmered with heat and pressure battling it out in the atmosphere. But Connie remained untouched, while Flint grew more irate with every wide miss.
"Alright, then! Blow this!" howled Flint. And she spun, drawing and flinging a black javelin from the gemstone at her shoulder in one smooth motion.
Her eyes prickling with sweat, Connie yelped and stumbled backwards at the sudden blur of motion. Something firm caught her heel, and she toppled, yelping, her air grenade missing its mark. As the ground rushed up to pound the breath out of her, she felt pain lance through her ribs.
Gasping, Connie clutched at her side. Her hands found the shaft of the javelin sticking crookedly in the air above her. As she ran her hands down, she felt sticky wet warmth spill through her fingers. She swiped at her eyes, feeling that same warmth smear across her face. When she could see her hands again, they were covered in red, dripping with stringy gore. The sounds of battle dimmed behind the furious beating of her heart as she pressed at her open wound in a panic, her chest heaving, her tongue lolling across her bottom lip.
She tasted strawberries.
With a second to think, and a deep breath, Connie realized that she had fallen backwards into a strawberry patch. The javelin was pinned into the ground beneath her with the edge of her shirt caught under its tip, which had grazed her ribs with a shallow scratch that she doubted was even really bleeding. Only the strawberries that had caught her had suffered, and they had exacted their vengeance by soaking through her jeans and her new V-neck shirt.
Stomping in fury and drawing a fresh javelin, Flint howled, "What does it take to land a hit on—"
Garnet leapt through Flint, the fusion's gauntlet hammering the Quartz through a line of her own charred strawberries. The quaking ground warned Garnet in time, and she turned to block Milky's enormous punch with crossed fists. Even blocked, the blow pushed Garnet back a dozen feet, the fusion's heels drawing twin lines into the dirt as she barely kept her footing. Then she sprang forward to answer Milky's punch in kind.
Connie rose when the javelin pinning her to the ground evaporated into motes. Her first impulse was to run to Garnet's aid, but Garnet seemed like more than a match for the huge Quartz. And besides which, she doubted her saber would do much to Milky anyway. Polarite had taken cover behind her stacks of crates to watch the battle, her half-hidden expression a mix of wonderment and fear.
Realization jolted through her, and Connie whipped her head around in searching. It took her two more seconds to find Pyrite, who had circled wide up the hill and now descended upon Connie with an almost casual stride. When the big Gem saw Connie spotting her, she grinned and reached under her cape to draw her manifesting double-headed axe.
Connie's hands tightened against the leather binding of her saber's hilt until her knuckles cracked. She felt herself scream, felt the sound of it tearing through her chest. Then she charged.
"Aren't you that Green Beryl from the landing pad?" Pyrite quipped. "You look different."
Steel flashed in Connie's hands, but it arced through empty air as Pyrite leaned back out of its reach. The Gem's axe swung in reply, a languid response that Connie could barely follow and only just ducked behind the protection of her saber, her arms quaking as the axe glanced off the blade. The blow knocked Connie back three full steps, her feet fumbling to stay underneath her. But she bellowed again, and attacked again. And again, her sword missed.
"You barely got away last time. I never thought you'd be the one looking for a rematch from me," Pyrite jeered. Her lazy axe caught Connie's sleeve on a near miss and tore it away, staggering Connie. It was all the invitation Pyrite needed to advance, swinging one-handed as she forced Connie backwards across the valley floor.
Sweat and strawberry juice spilled into Connie's eyes. She let herself believe they were the reason her eyes stung as she pushed back against Pyrite's taunts. Her arms trembled with the effort of deflecting the Gem's golden axe, and her breathing came in ragged snarls. But at last she saw her opening. She ducked the double blades, coiled, and pushed her whole body behind the hilt in one thrust, bellowing with every ounce of breath she could muster.
The saber stopped cold in Pyrite's grasp. The Gem had caught the thrust between her thumb and forefinger, pinching the flat of the blade. Connie's bellow choked into a whimper as she ran into her own pommel. Her hands remained locked around the grip on reflex as she fought to breathe again. Her weak twisting couldn't wrench the saber free of Pyrite's grasp.
Pyrite beamed at her as she struggled. "This one's new. Is it a local sword?"
The Gem's fingers twisted.
A flat thunderclap rang in Connie's ears. She staggered backwards, freed so suddenly that she ended up on the ground. Blinking, she stared at the stub of rough, craggy steel jutting out of the hilt clutched in her hands.
The rest of the blade remained in Pyrite's grasp, twirling between her fingers like a majorette's baton. "Oh, too bad. This one's no good. Your old sword was much better. I've been meaning to thank you for giving it to me." As she flicked the blade away, Pyrite leaned forward, putting the rose petal hilt behind her shoulder on clear display for her foe.
As she stared up at the Gem mocking her, something inside of her broke. The wall of her half-hollow swelled with the mockery of the smug brawler, and then cracked, spilling a sensation of cold lightning into Connie's chest and down her limbs. The hilt rolled out of Connie's limp hands, forgotten.
Connie reached up, gripping the air above her and pushing it back with a sharp sweep of her arms, throwing herself off of the ground with a fierce wind that billowed through her hair. The cold mountain morning obeyed her silent command, filling her hands as she cupped them at her waist. "Give me that sword!" she shrieked, and then threw her hands out at Pyrite.
A howl of wind leapt from Connie's palms to barrel through Pyrite. The cold air pushed against Connie, doubling and redoubling with every second she held the gale, but she pushed right back, gritting her teeth and planting her feet against her own funneled hurricane.
Pyrite's purple hair snapped straight back under the force of the gale. The big Gem lost a step, and had to press a hand to the side of her mirrored visor to keep it on her face. But that was all.
Quickly, the gale petered out, the force of the winds sapping every ounce of strength from Connie's arms. Connie wheezed and toppled forward, landing on her hands, her hair falling into her face. Every feeling she had stuffed into her half-hollow was gone, making it a true hollow once again. Empty, spent, she looked up through her sticky curtain of hair at Pyrite.
The Gem sighed, pushing her visor back up her nose. "I wanted this to be fun," Pyrite groused. "You were a lot spunkier back on the landing pad. What a disappointment." And she took up her axe, marching forward with renewed purpose in her gait.
Connie's body was spent. Her half-hollow ached emptily. But her teeth flashed in a snarl, and her trembling hands flew, throwing gusts of air that billowed over Pyrite without effect. "Give! Me! That! Sword!" She screamed with every blast. "Give! Me! Tha—"
The world suddenly glowed green. Connie saw her outstretched hands awash in the strange light, and Pyrite stopped in her tracks, startled by the light's emergence. Looking down, Connie gasped at the brilliance emerging from the stone beneath her throat. Then she lost her breath at the sight of a shape emerging from the stone, a shape composed of the purest green light she had ever seen.
She waited. The glow did not emerge further. It waited for her, Connie could tell. It needed her. No, that wasn't quite right. It knew that she needed it. So Connie reached up and grasped the glowing shape. It sent an electric jolt through her hand as she pulled it free of the stone, the glow fading as she swept the shape into fullness.
It was a sheet of green, metallic fabric, dangling from one corner in Connie's fist. The fabric twisted to the ground, where the rest of it pooled at Connie's feet. She recognized the material in an instant, remembering how Jade had shaped it into a sailcloth when the Gem had owned her body. In Connie's hands, it stubbornly remained a sheet.
"That's it?" Pyrite guffawed. She doubled over, clutching her midsection as she laughed herself hoarse. Her axe clattered to the ground. "Stop! You're gonna make me crack myself! Oh, my stars!" she heaved between laughs.
"Pyrite!" Polarite whinged from behind her crates. "Stop entertaining yourself and dispatch these rebels!"
"Sorry, thinker," Pyrite wheezed back, "I don't answer to you. I answer to Zir—"
Two rocketing gauntlets slammed into the cluster of stacked crates, which vanished into a blast of smoking debris. The shockwave threw Polarite across the valley floor to roll through a patch of strawberry char until she finally came to rest among the torn, blackened runners.
"My equipment!" Polarite wailed, gaping at the smoldering crater where her crates had stood.
Connie followed the gauntlets' contrails back to where Garnet stood poised and empty-armed. Dark bruises mottled the fusion's body, and the corner of her afro had been ripped away, but she still stood tall. Flint and Milky couldn't say the same, pulling themselves up out of the dirt where Garnet had evidently left them facedown.
Garnet paused only long enough to cover her gemstones in a new set of gauntlets before she rushed forward, a living blur that snatched Polarite off the ground by the collar of her long white coat.
"Tell us why you're on Earth," Garnet demanded, turning her gaze enough to let Pyrite know the words were meant for the golden Gem as well.
All of the mirth had flattened out of Pyrite's expression, leaving only her purified contempt. "How about this instead, doublet?" she said.
Faster than Connie could react, Pyrite slipped her boot under the tangle sailcloth in Connie's grasp and kicked it into the girl's face. Green fabric blinded her, and she felt something grasp the cloth by the corners and scoop her off the ground in a makeshift bindle. Connie scratched at the smooth metallic fabric but found no purchase to escape.
Through her fabric prison, she heard one word from Pyrite that filled Connie with instant dread. "Catch," the golden Gem said.
Impossible force mashed Connie into the weave of her own sailcloth. She felt herself spun like a centrifuge, whirled inside of the bindle, the blood fighting against tremendous G-force to reach her eyes and brain as the green world around her began to grow dark. Then the spinning stopped, and the force redirected her along a straight line, and she felt herself rushing into the unknown, blinded by the sheet pinned to her face by the force of the wind rushing past her.
Shaking her head, Connie managed to loose the sheet from her face, letting it rip past her and vanish into the howling wind surrounding her. When she finally saw where she was, her heart shrank, and her stomach dropped out of her, trailing a mile behind her: she was sailing through the air with the rolling fields spread below her for miles in every direction. Strawberries dotted the greenery like freckles, and the pyramid temple looked like a tiny model dropped and lost in someone's backyard.
Pyrite had flung her out of the sailcloth like a sling, throwing her higher and farther than Connie could have believed, and now she was arcing over the fields toward the inevitable end of her flight. She felt her own scream tearing at her throat, but she couldn't hear it for the wind rushing past her ears.
Too high, too high, too high! the primitive part of her brain screamed at her. Some more rational part kept her arms and legs wheeling until her tumbling slowed and she could push her face into the wind. She was unthinkably high, hilariously high, bodily at an altitude meant for airplanes and helicopters, not teenager, and she could feel gravity's pull correcting the mistake.
She tried to steady herself inside and out, steering what little she could with her limbs while she tried to take a deep breath. The wind didn't listen to her movements, and it pushed so hard that she could barely get any air into her lungs.
Really, given the force necessary to throw her to such heights and speeds, it was already a miracle that she hadn't broken her neck, or even just liquified in the sheet when she's been thrown.
Not helping, brain!
Already the ground loomed closer. Something dark ran across the ground below her as if to keep up, and she realized she was watching her own shadow racing over the fields at unthinkable speed. She had seconds at best before she and the shadow collided.
"Sail!" she screamed into her half-hollow. The thought echoed back at her. All of her misery had been spent in her useless blasts against Pyrite. No winds would listen to her, and Jade's gemstone remained dark.
Strawberries rushed below her in red streaks. The smell of lush green returned as the thin air became warmer and fuller. Her shadow rippled closer, closer.
"Jade!" The desperate sob came unbidden. She couldn't hear it, but she felt the name quake through her body with the power of her final word.
The earth rushed up to meet her. Connie screamed and closed her eyes.
Her dark world tumbled, her body jerking hard at her landing. She felt impact, and rolling, and heard leaves and vines tearing around her. The chaos rattled around her for three long, awful, endless seconds. Then it all stopped.
Connie was not splattered. Bruised, possibly cut and bleeding from a dozen tiny cuts, but definitely not splattered.
"You can open your eyes now."
The gentle coaxing made Connie crack an eyelid. She saw herself at the endpoint of a long, deep furrow in the ground, with shredded plants and strawberry pulp sprayed to either side. Garnet held her close, her arms and gauntlets still wrapped around Connie. The Gem had dirt and greenery staining her form, and half a strawberry had been lodged in her afro, filling in the corner that the Quartzes had ripped out.
Connie was amazed. The Gem had somehow managed to keep up and even catch her out of the air to cushion her landing. "Th-Thank you," Connie stammered as she rose out of Garnet's embrace on shaky legs.
Garnet's visor turned back to the direction they had come from, and she stood. As disheveled as she looked, she still seemed ready for more. "They'll be gone by the time we get back," she said, "but we should still check their landing site for any clues."
Connie opened her mouth to reply. Her trailing stomach finally caught up with her from the air, slamming into Connie and shooting up her throat. She fell to her knees and emptied her breakfast all over the ground. To no surprise, It's Bran looked more or less the same post-stomach as it did in the bowl.
"We can take a minute first," Garnet said, and rubbed Connie's back while she heaved.
