"Are you sure you don't want to come?" Steven asked again.
Connie shook her head and smiled up at Steven and the Gems, who stood gathered on the warp pad in front of the temple door. "I do want to come, Steven. But until I have a weapon that's tough enough to protect me, I'll just be a liability out there."
The morning sunlight streaming through the windows painted Steven's worry in hues of red and gold. "I went on missions with the Gems all the time before I got my shield," he insisted, "and I wasn't a liability. Right, guys?"
Amethyst grimaced. Pearl squirmed. Garnet became suddenly fascinated with the joists in the ceiling.
"Huh. Yeah, okay," Steven conceded. "We're gonna leave that for now and maybe unpack it sometime in the future. But if you're staying, then I should—"
"You," Connie said, stopping him before he could dismount the warp pad, "should go on patrol. Pyrite and her goons are still out there. The Gems need you." Her smile widened with reassurance.
He worried his bottom lip in his teeth. "If you're sure…" drawled Steven.
"Tell you what," Connie told him, beaming. "If I change my mind, I'll just warp out to catch up with you guys."
"But you can't—oh." Steven smiled briefly before his frown took him back. "Okay. But before we go—"
"Amethyst?" Connie said through her widest grin.
"On it!" The stocky Quartz grabbed Steven by the shoulders and lifted him bodily over her head. "Have fun being queen of the castle. Don't do anything I wouldn't do," Amethyst said as she made Steven her luggage.
"Don't do most of the things Amethyst would do either," Garnet added.
"There's-fresh-iced-tea-in-the-fridge-okay-bye!" Steven blurted as the warp tunnel swallowed them out of the world.
As soon as the last light faded from the warp pad, Connie sagged in relief. She rubbed her aching cheeks as she staggered, blank-faced, back into the living room. With a bitter snort, she realized that the best thing about being left behind was the fact that she wouldn't have to put on a brave face about it for anyone.
But then, she wasn't completely alone in the house. A mountain of pink fur napped in the middle of the floor where the morning sunbeam crawled slowly across the room. Connie made her way toward Lion, pausing briefly at the coffee table to collect the packet of origami paper she'd left there the night before.
"You have the right idea, Lion," she sighed to him, and collapsed into his flank to slide to the floor. Lion didn't seem to notice the new presence leaning against him as she let her head drop back into his fluffiness. "Just hang back, nap all day. A little tuna for lunch. Maybe I should just do that."
By the time she'd finished the thought aloud, she held a finished paper crane. Dozens of its kind now populated the house, perched on the counters and bookshelves, and even a couple dangling from the ceiling, where Amethyst had hung them with strings and tape. Birds don't belong on the ground, the Quartz had explained when she'd done it.
Her eyes crossed, and she focused on the paper crane's pointy beak as it dropped against the tip of her nose. She'd made this crane from a sheet of deep green paper. "What is this, human?" the bird said in an acerbic version of Connie's voice. "Loitering? Dawdling? Oh, no, this is much worse. You are wallowing."
She sighed again. "I guess I am," she admitted.
The bird rustled its paper wings with the help of her fingers. "No one possessed of a Jade gemstone, even a pustule of liquids such as yourself, should ever stoop to wallowing. Seize the day! Be worthy of that stone!" insisted the paper crane.
Connie squeezed her eyes shut. "I'm trying, bird," she mumbled.
The paper crane pecked her nose. "Bawk! Bawk!"
She set the bird aside. Her idle hands made three more to join its flock before she gathered enough resolve to leave her pink cushion. Lion grumbled at the departure of his noisy space heater, but the sunbeam quickly filled in for what she took with her.
"Okay," she said, forcing life into her body once more. "Be a Jade. Be a Crystal Gem. You can—ulp!"
Mid-affirmation, a sudden force yanked her by the collarbone to faceplant onto the floor. She groaned and rolled over, peering underneath herself, and once the stars had faded from her eyes she found the culprit: Jade's sailcloth had poured itself out of its gemstone, and the edge had fallen underfoot before it had finished coalescing, giving Connie her chin-first landing atop the billowy green nuisance.
The pain radiating from her chin became a plunger that tamped all of her anger and frustration into her half-hollow. She wiped her mouth into a sneer as she yanked the sailcloth out from under her. "You know what? I'm glad you're here," she told the cloth, her lips peeling away from her teeth. "You and I have work to do."
With the sailcloth in tow, Connie changed into her father's old Herculoids T-shirt and some running shorts. Then she took down an old shoebox from the bookshelf, one Steven had shown her to contain a wealth of treasures from his dad. Inside the box were dozens of cassette tapes inside plastic cases, each one labeled with a strip of masking tape and a title written lovingly in marker.
Her finger traced down the row of tapes and stopped on a box labeled Mega Montage Mix Vol. III. She plucked the tape from its box and stuffed it into the ancient boom box Steven kept next to his bed.
As the synth bassline of Offramp to Danger Town by Loggy Kennins filled the house, Connie tied the sailcloth around her neck, letting it drape over one shoulder. "Let's do this!" she declared, raising her fists high.
The boombox fell silent with one final clack as the mixtape reached its end. But Connie hardly noticed, too deafened by the long, agonized groan she poured into Lion's side as she slumped bodily into the slumbering cat.
Hours of work had given her zero improvement. If anything, she felt like she was going backwards. Her Gem jumps were even less impressive than her regular jumps thanks to her exhausted legs. Gem strength lasted only a few seconds at a time, proven by the dumbbells she'd tried to lift and the new divots in the wood floor where she'd been working with them. And despite her best efforts at shifting it, her shape remained its everyday boring human self, only sweatier.
Worst of all, though, were her wind powers. No matter how she pushed and pulled the air, Connie couldn't produce more than a medium gale for more than a second. Her winds wouldn't be enough to harass a kite, let alone stop a rampaging Gem warrior. The air grenades she made were as strong as ever, but she knew that squeezing the air into a medium explosion was the absolute least Jade could do at the height of her power. Compared to the hurricane blasts the Gem had done while trapped in her own stone, Connie's own efforts felt pitiful.
She rolled over, untangling herself from the only real sign of progress she had made in the last week. "What about you?" she demanded of the sailcloth. "Are you going to do anything for me? Can you make me fly? Block an axe? Can you do anything besides hold up a picnic?"
The sailcloth drooped, stubbornly unresponsive.
Connie bundled the cloth into her face and screamed, kicking her heels against the floor until she emptied herself. Then she collapsed back into the pink plush, panting, and wishing the tantrum had made her feel even a little better.
She felt stupid for having expected anything different. Why should one more morning of training suddenly fix all of the things that were wrong with her? At the end of the day, she would still be the same weak, unstable, unhelpful human, exactly who she had been at the start of the summer, and exactly who she would be tomorrow, and the next day. She had no control over these dangerous powers, and no way of protecting the people she cared about. She was even less than she used to be, now that she didn't have a sword.
As she rolled over, clutching herself in misery, her eyes fell onto the warp pad. The beautiful white crystal had always fascinated her, allowing the Gems to galivant across the world with just a handful of steps. If she wasn't so useless, she could have galivanted with them. If she could master Jade's gemstone, she could use it herself, returning to the farm, or to the strawberry battlefield, or to the Sky Arena.
Connie's misery hiccupped as she remembered the extra sabers Pearl kept up in the Arena. Her hand itched for a hilt, for the weight of a blade in her hand, if only to remind herself that she was good at something. Good for something.
Lion chuffed as she pushed to her feet again and strode to the pad, leaving the sailcloth to dissolve behind her. "Just warp to the Sky Arena," she told herself as she mounted the crystal platform. "You've been there a hundred times before. It's easy. You can do it."
Closing her eyes, she sculpted the entirety of the Arena in her mind. Her booking power summoned up every crevice, every crack and crumbling pillar, every empty seat and missing tile. She mashed the sum of it all into a single thought, which she pushed down through her feet, trying to shove it into the darkened crystal beneath her.
"Any Gem can do it," Connie said through gritted teeth. "Now warp."
Frustration crackled through her, breaking the seal on her half-hollow. Her own nasty feelings spilled out faster than she could stuff them back inside. A hard breath whistled through her teeth, and she dropped to her knees, clutching the stone at her throat as if that could stem the leak. Something tickled the back of her neck, and she realized that her hair was caught up in a breeze that circled the pad.
"Come on. Come on!" Connie snarled at herself. She tried to imagine the sludgy feelings dripping through her soles into the warp pad, willing it to get rid of her out of sheer disgust for her presence. But something else kept scattering her thoughts, pulling at her from the outside. "Work! Do something! Let me IN!" she bellowed.
A sound filled the room, chasing after the echo of Connie's shout. It wasn't the chime of the warp pad she had been hoping for, but instead a familiar grungle-whoosh. Her head turned at the sound, and her stomach dropped.
The temple door stood open. And beyond it lay a dark staircase bathed in a red light cast from some unseen depths.
Connie startled backwards from the door. The wind around her snapped, then died, settling her hair back over her shoulders as she stared into the darkened stairs leading downward into the temple. The stairs and the light both were familiar to her, though she had only seen them twice before. Unless this was some new chamber, she knew those stairs would lead her down into the Burning Room.
She started forward, but then hesitated. It felt strange enough to be left alone in the beach house. How wrong would it feel to go into the temple by herself? And besides that, she knew the temple held unknown dangers even to those who belonged there. Steven had been hunted by her bizarre, matrimonially-themed doppelganger in his own room. Whatever waited for Connie might not be so creepily whimsical if it decided to hunt her.
But the temple had opened its door for her. Its powers of creation might be somewhat monkey's-paw-ish, at least for Steven, but she knew the temple wasn't some hungry creature trying to lure her into its stomach. It had responded to her. That meant something. Didn't it?
She felt the round edges of Jade's gemstone, which her hand had unconsciously risen to clutch. Hesitation didn't befit a Jade, she decided. So, with her heartbeat pounding in her ears, Connie stepped from the warp pad and, with one last breath to steel herself, entered the temple.
The slap of her bare feet sounded like gunshots in the thrumming silence of the room. She lingered at the bottom step, summoning her courage before she descended to the floor of the Burning Room.
It was a different experience altogether, standing alone beneath the sea of bubbles that floated at the ceiling. She felt small beneath the sheer number of stones the Gems had collected, as though the entirety of a war she'd only known through stories was hanging over her head, just one wrong move away from popping and raining down on them to start anew.
As she wandered with her heads in the bubbled clouds, her toe thumped against something hard. She frowned down at the lumpy mass of slag she and Steven had transported from his mother's Armory. The Slag Mite's gemstone still lay trapped within, its mirror surface perfect amidst the muddy blend of metals around it.
Crouching, Connie traced the outline of a blue crossguard in the mass. The remnants of Tempest Rain made her wistful for that beautiful period of five seconds when she had once again been a useful member of the team. If only the Slag Mite hadn't eaten the sword, she might have been with the others on patrol at that very moment instead of being a magical trespasser.
Something irresistible pulled her gaze overhead. She didn't want to look. She knew no good would come from looking. But still, her eyes tilted until she looked up at the only uncorrupted gemstone being held in that room.
"Bismuth," she said, rising to glare at the pink bubble and the pyramidal stone inside of it.
Pyrite took you apart without even trying, Connie heard from somewhere overhead, in a voice that sounded very much like a paper bird she'd traded words with earlier. She beat you at the strawberry battlefield even worse than she did at Ascension.
Connie's arms crossed against an imaginary chill in the lava-lit room. "You're lucky you never met me," she told the gemstone darkly. "I don't like people who try to kill my best friend. Except Lapis, but she's a special case. And the jury's still out on Peridot. But I definitely didn't like Jasper, and if you ever tried that again, I'd give you what we gave her."
She took you apart like you were nothing. Because you are nothing.
Her finger tapped nervously at her elbow, and she hugged herself even tighter. The weight of her glare made her face ache until she couldn't hold it anymore. "Then I'd tell you I was sorry," Connie continued. "I'm sorry Rose Quartz locked you away. I'm sorry you were trapped in Lion. You were angry, and dangerous, but that didn't make what she did right. And I'm sorry you're locked up now. Nobody deserves to be trapped like that, without a body."
The gemstone at her neck felt heavy.
You're nothing without Rose's sword. You're barely anything with it."
"And then," Connie murmured, "I'd tell you what a good job you did, making Rose's sword. How much it meant to me. And that I'm sorry I lost it."
Rubbing her arms, Connie gave the bubble one last look. Then she shook her head, feeling silly for talking to herself. She didn't belong in the Burning Room. Resolving herself to leave, she steadied herself for the climb upstairs with a long, deep sigh.
The breath from her sigh rushed out of her with the force of a cannon shot, staggering her and yanking her hair up over her face. As she clawed the long tresses out of her eyes, she watched in horror as her hurricane sigh swept up through the room, visible most by the ripple it sent through the sea of bubbles overhead. Perfect spheres whorled together, their four colors knocking against one another, each collision ringing out like a glass chime to create a terrifying discordant crescendo that deafened the room.
Connie's heart stopped, waiting for a wave of bubbles to pop and send a nightmare hail falling upon her. But the bubbles all held, falling to silence as they all stilled.
All of them, save one. Her errant breath had caught the pink bubble above her in its wake, spinning it into a loopy path high above the floor. Like a leaf on the wind, Bismuth's gemstone flitted with alarming speed and no clear direction, content to ride the current to its end.
Jolting in horror, Connie chased after the bubble, trying to catch it, or to guess its next direction, and failing at both. "Oh, no! No, no, no, no, no!" she cried.
The bilious sigh, not content to merely persist long after Connie had lost her breath, picked up speed. The bubble caught in its grasp became a pink blur. Its long, comical loops carried it toward the far wall of the room, and to rough-hewn stone waiting to catch it. Heedless of how beautifully fragile it was, the bubble looped closer to its end, where it would surely pop.
"No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no-no!" Connie babbled. Her fingertips craned at the bubble, as though she could reach halfway across the room to stop it. The imperiled bubble slipped further and further away with every slap of her bare feet on the stone. With nothing left to lose, and no coherent sense to stop her, Connie jumped.
Her stomach lurched as the world around her became a blur, the colors of the room smearing together. She kept her eyes fixed on the pink bubble, reaching for it with every inch she could muster, determined to do everything she could to prevent a catastrophe. When she felt her hands close around the bubble's sides, she could hardly believe it. But there was no time to celebrate with the stone wall still hurtling at them. So she flipped her body in midair, holding the bubble straight out in front of her as her back slammed into the wall.
She collapsed to the floor with the bubble held aloft. Every other part of her puddled onto the warm stone, but the bubble remained untouched, save for her tender grasp.
Groaning, Connie shambled onto her knees, using her elbows to lift herself. Her eyes watered in relief as she examined the pristine bubble and its contents. Then she looked past the bubble to the long expanse of floor, all the way to where she knew she had been standing on the far side of the lava pool when she'd jumped. In one bound, she'd crossed more than thirty feet of floor.
She had done it. She'd Gem-jumped! And she'd saved the bubble!
Connie laughed, shaking with post-adrenaline jitters. Then she bowed her head and sighed in relief.
Like the last sigh, her tiny breath emerged in an explosive gale. The wind tore the bubble from her hands and slammed it into the floor, where it popped with a single, resounding poip! Now freed, Bismuth's gemstone clattered across the room, falling to rest at the base of the lava pool. The stone gave a little shake, and then lifted off the stone, floating up as its surface began to glimmer
"…oh, no," Connie breathed, parting her curtain of hair to watch the gemstone rise.