"Are you guys serious?" Jenny said, shouting over the roar of the wind and the pulsing bassline that rattled their car down to its frame.
"We're deadly serious," said Ronaldo. He squinted at the road ahead, his curly locks billowing as they sped toward their confrontation.
"We're medium-serious," Connie jawed, struggling to talk around a mouthful of pizza.
The Pizzamobile sped down an old country road with Jenny at the wheel and an insulated pizza bag in the coveted shotgun seat. Connie and Ronaldo sat in the back, tagging along on Jenny's delivery to the extreme edge of the restaurant's delivery radius.
Space in the back was tight, with Ronaldo's duffel bag stuffed between them, which meant that the emergency pizza had to sit on Connie's lap. It was a pepperoni and cheese with no delivery of its own and no one else to claim its warm, gooey deliciousness, so Jenny had told them to help themselves. Connie thought the idea of an emergency pizza seemed odd, but Jenny insisted that it had come in handy more than once, and that more pizza could only improve any situation. Carrying the emergency pizza was a heavy burden to bear, but Connie had made it lighter by eating as much of it as she could. Only to justify Jenny's sound logic, of course.
Jenny shook her head at the semi-serious pair. "Shark hunting. I swear, you're lucky you have the hookup in the underground French chiphop scene, or you'd be walking to all your monster nonsense."
The teen's fingertips tapped the steering wheel to the beat of Jeu à Deux Terminé pounding out of the car stereo, suggesting to Connie that she wasn't quite as irritated as she tried to sound. But it was hard to be sure over the noise, the wind, and the sound of her own chewing, so Connie focused on taking care of the pizza instead of worrying.
Ronaldo leaned forward and tapped Jenny's shoulder, pointing to the side of a featureless road in the middle of farm country. "Over there," he said, and added a hasty "please," when he saw Jenny's raised eyebrow.
Jenny pulled the car over to the dirt shoulder of the road and rolled them to a gentle stop. Turning the stereo down, she twisted around and said, "Are you sure you don't want to ride the whole way? My delivery is about half a mile up the road. Might not be a bad idea to have somebody around for whatever it is you're doing. In case anybody needs to call an ambulance? Again?"
The way Jenny said that last part made Connie wonder how often Ronaldo's adventures ended in ambulances. But she was committed to the course now. Wolfing down another slice of pizza as she climbed out of the car helped to ease her concerns.
Ronaldo heaved his duffel bag out of the seat ahead of him and stepped out of the car while Connie chewed and followed. "No," Ronaldo declared, and gestured to the waving fields of green stalks to either side of the road. "Our place is here. These fields will be the crucible in which we are both forged into men of destiny."
"Mmm'kay," grunted Jenny. "You gonna need a pickup later?"
"Did Achilles need a pickup from the gates of Troy? Did Leonidas, from Thermopylae?" challenged Ronaldo.
Jenny stared at him, her expression a war between annoyance and bewilderment. Then she pointed at Connie. "You. Phone," she commanded, snapping her fingers.
Connie struggled down a mouthful of semi-intact pizza and then dug her phone out of her pocket. At Jenny's expectant look, she unlocked it and handed it over. Her confusion only grew as Jenny shoved her own phone into Connie's hands.
"Put your number in there," Jenny instructed, already doing the same in Connie's phone. "Text me or call me if you need to get out of here."
"Oh!" Connie's thumbs worked on autopilot to comply while the rest of her jolted with surprise. "I don't want to make you go out of your way, especially not after you're done with work."
Jenny laughed as they traded back phones. "Are you kidding me? After Steven texted me this morning half-crazy because he couldn't find you? If anything happens to you out here because of this one," she said, and hooked her thumb in Ronaldo's direction, "that kid would live in my phone looking for you." Then she grinned and added, "Besides, now I can let you know when everybody's getting together to hang out."
"Yeah? I mean, yeah!" Connie beamed. A hint of marinara oozed at the corner of her mouth, and she hurried to wipe it with the back of her hand. "Oh, now that I have your number, do you want me to Cashmore you for the pizza? There's not much left of it." The two slices that had survived her late breakfast were the skinniest and smallest of the original pie, and they had only been spared for lack of time, not for lack of hunger.
Her grin widening, Jenny just shook her head. "My friends don't pay for pizza while I'm around. Stay safe!" She gave the pair one final wave, sparing a look of warning at Ronaldo, and then gassed the car back onto the road. Her taillights vanished into a dust cloud while the thumping intro of C'est Peach boomed into the distance.
As the dust settled, Connie let herself sink into their new surroundings. Her family's home was in a fairly quiet suburb, which felt noisy next to the tranquility in Beach City. But the deep farmlands made both towns seem like noisy, bustling hubs by comparison. Once the sounds of the Pizzamobile faded into the distance, Connie and Ronaldo were left in utter silence.
Slowly but surely, though, the totality of that silence began to fade as they grew used to the fields. To either side of them, the golden tufts atop the corn stalks rustled under a breeze, rolling and waving like a landlocked tide. The sound of their feet grinding on the dirt seemed deafening as they walked to the grass at the fields' edge. Connie felt like an explorer who had wandered off her map, stumbling into some corner of the world that had been forgotten by human and Gem alike.
Then Ronaldo hefted the duffel bag, and the rattling contents jolted Connie out of her reverie. "We have arrived, my young protégé," he announced. "We're now in the depths of the Corn Shark's domain. Tread lightly if you don't want to be devoured."
The rows and rows of corn in front of them suddenly looked deeper and wilder. Connie grinned at the dangers hidden behind those leafy stalks and marched forward to meet the cryptid in its lair. Or rather, she attempted to, until Ronaldo's arm swung down to halt her march.
"Whoa! I was speaking metaphorically," he said. Then he produced a rolled-up spiral notebook from one of his many cargo pockets and offered it to her. "Before you're ready to hunt, you have to arm yourself. And the greatest weapon of all is knowledge. At least until my dad lets me buy tannerite."
Connie reluctantly took the notebook, unfurling it and flipping its cover. A wealth of college-ruled chicken scratch writing stared back at her. She began leafing through the pages, turning the notebook back and forth to read the double-sided notes. "What is all this?" she asked while she read.
"My notes on the Corn Shark. Before you can help me, you'll need to read everything I have on the noble beast." His glasses flashed with the reflection of the vast field before them. "It could take you hours. I've been studying it for a long time. Meanwhile, I'll have to brave the hunt alone. One man, facing down a shadowy world that would rather eat him than know him, that—"
"Done." Connie flipped the back cover of the notebook closed and returned it to Ronaldo. "I like the anatomy cross-sections. But pretty much all of your notes are conjecture. Like mating habits? You haven't even seen one of these things. How do you know what two of them do?"
Ronaldo's cheeks reddened. "Not conjecture! Extrapolation," he squeaked. "I made educated guesses from the information available."
Connie's face twisted with doubt. "Okay. But what about the five pages of drawings of you as an anime schoolgirl?"
"Copyright! Trademark!" Ronaldo shouted, clutching the notebook to his chest. "That's my original idea for a manga adventure series called Pretty Warrior Ronalda. It'll be my magnum opus as soon as I teach myself how to write, draw, publish, and distribute manga."
"Right," Connie said, drawing the word out for many, many syllables. "So, what now?"
Ronaldo pocketed the notebook and then lugged his duffel bag over his shoulder. His boots crunched through dry grass and then sank into the rich farmland soil. "Well, since you absorbed my notes so quickly, you must already know what to do next," he said over his shoulder.
Connie followed him into the edge of the green. She knew a test when she heard one. And she had studied, whether Ronaldo believed it or not. "Track its movements. Establish a pattern. Procure evidence of existence. Survive to disseminate evidence," she recited from the pages she had booked. Smirking, she added, "That's from page thirty-eight. Right across from the designs for Ronalda-chan's submachopter."
Rather than annoyed, Ronaldo looked delighted by her answer. "You're a quick study. And you clearly have an appreciation for personalized heroic airborne/undersea vehicles."
They trekked through the first few rows of corn, walking until the road behind them disappeared behind the leaves and stalks. Connie couldn't see any trace of a creature that swam through the crop. But then, she had no idea what sort of trace to look for. Sharks didn't leave footprints. Did land sharks leave footprints? Did Corn Sharks?
Ronaldo answered her silent pondering with a tug of his duffel's zipper. A bundle of long wooden stakes poked through the opening. Each stake had a wrapping of duct tape at its top that held an old baby monitor and some kind of small, dark, domed box half the size of Connie's fist. Scavenged wiring connected the black box and baby monitor through holes that had clearly been drilled through each device's casing, though Connie couldn't guess the reason behind the jury-rigging.
"We'll set these up every twenty meters or so in a grid pattern," explained Ronaldo. As demonstration, he drew one of the stake combos and, collecting a rubber-headed mallet from his endlessly deep cargo pockets, pounded the stake into the ground. Its duct-taped head stood about chest-high to Connie once he had finished.
"And these are…?" she prompted him.
With a look of extreme satisfaction, Ronaldo flicked a switch on the stake combo's baby monitor.
The air rattled with a squalling, piercing electronic wail from the baby monitor's speaker. Connie clapped her hands to her ears, but she could still feel the sound resonating in her skull. If Ronaldo had told her that the other end of the monitor was hooked to the crib of an infant banshee with colic, she would have believed him without question.
"I rewired the baby monitors to play feedback!" Ronaldo shouted, barely audible above the horrific noise of his creation. "Then I rigged the circuit to these old motion sensors! If anything gets within five meters of—"
Connie grabbed the hem of his shirt and dragged him eight giant strides away from the stake combo. Once they fell outside its invisible sightline, the combo fell mercifully silent.
"—within five meters, the device will emit an audible signal," Ronaldo finished, beaming with pride. "That way we'll know when and where our quarry is coming." And he set out for the next spot, already drawing a new combo from his duffel bag while he took carefully measured steps.
As she hurried to follow, Connie had to admire the kitbashed sensor network Ronaldo had designed. She wouldn't have thought to build something so elaborate for a cryptid hunt. But then, she had never considered going on a cryptid hunt before that day. At least, not seriously.
"But how can you be sure the Corn Shark will swim—fly?—anywhere near one of these things?" she asked. But her booking answered her even before she'd finished speaking, perfectly recalling several pages from his notebook. "Oh, you had Jenny drop us off exactly between where the two abandoned cars disappeared from the road. That's actually pretty clever."
"And don't forget our best advantage: our delicious, meaty bodies make for an irresistible bait," Ronaldo added, pounding in the next stake.
Connie suddenly felt much less impressed in his prep work. "Uh, what happens if we actually find this thing?"
"We snap a pic and become insta-famous!" he sang between mallet swings.
"I meant more in terms of us not immediately dying," said Connie.
He gave her a haughty chuckle, an affect she suspected he had practiced in the mirror. "Planning too far ahead is a rookie mistake. You stifle your improvisational capacity if you over-plan. We just need to stay loose to survive."
Connie stared at him, mouth agape, watching him hum a mindless tune as he finished planting the sensor. "Is everybody in Beach City really bad at planning things out, or is it just me and the people I meet?" she said.
Ronaldo flicked the switch on the baby monitor, answering her rhetorical question with another electric baby banshee shriek.
Over the next half-hour, Connie trailed after Ronaldo, watching him create his sensor net between the rows of corn. Once she learned the timing of when to cover her ears, it became passably amusing to watch him flinch and scurry from each newly activated sensor. But even that became boring quickly, leaving Connie to focus on the peacefulness between each new sensor's planting instead.
Once the final sensor fell silent, the corn field dropped back into its deep, sprawling tranquility. Connie breathed a sigh of relief after the fading noise, letting herself spread into the silence like she was lowering herself into a hot bath. There was no birdsong, no buzzing flies or chirping crickets. The only sound left in the world came from the wind as it brushed through the fields, tousling the greenery into its gentle murmur.
As she let her senses relax, she felt herself stretch outward across the field, as though the stillness were drawing her into it as she drew that stillness into herself. Between each heartbeat, Connie only felt her breath as it moved across her lips. But each breath carried the sensation farther away, spreading her more and more, until she felt herself ghosting through the leaves and stalks of the field. She brushed the ground, running her invisible touch along the grass at the side of the road. Stretching, she could just barely reach the bottoms of the clouds rolling lazily overhead.
It wasn't touch, or hearing, or sight. The thing inside Connie that pushed her winds and squeezed her air grenades was carrying her outward instead. It didn't control the wind.
It made her the wind.
Then Ronaldo spoke, and his voice broke the spell. "Well, time to be bait. Know any good jokes that also make us sound delicious?"
The question shoved Connie back into her body, and she staggered under the mundanity of being flesh and blood again. "Buh?" her mouth said while her brain adjusted to its old circumstances.
"I know it sounds like a long shot, but I figured we could try just for the halibut. Eh? Eh?" Ronaldo laughed. Then, seeing her confusion, he sobered and said, "See, it's funny because 'halibut' sounds like—"
An electric shriek in the distance cut him off. Connie whirled toward the source of the noise, her eyes searching the corn, and she saw a ripple of motion swaying in the tops of the field at the very edge of Ronaldo's sensor net. Her adrenaline keyed, her body poised a heartbeat between fight and flight.
"Ha! We got a bite!" crowed Ronaldo.
He dug into his cargo pockets, this time producing an old-timey camera, the kind with a big lens and a box on top for a flash bulb. Fotomax Series-D 35mm camera with optional enhanced flash attachment, Used, $15 starting bid or buy instantly for $55, her booking forcibly provided her, drawing upon one of her insomnia-fueled random web searches. By the time Ronaldo wound the camera into readiness, a second sensor joined the first, doubling the noise in concert.
"Oh my gosh, he's setting off two at once. He's over ten meters, just like I theorized. He must be magnificent!" Ronaldo cried.
Connie vehemently stopped her imagination from guessing at the mouth size of a ten-meter shark, or how little chewing it would need to eat her. "Give me your mallet," she said, slapping at his hip without looking away from the rustling crops.
He produced the tool and passed it to her. "You don't want the sword?" he asked, glancing at the hilt behind his shoulder.
"Uh, no. You keep it. But only draw it as an absolute last resort," said Connie. In her mind, fighting a land shark with a rubber mallet would be slightly safer than the cloud of shrapnel his mall kiosk sword would explode into the first time it struck anything remotely solid.
"Smart. We can use it to cut our way out after he eats us," Ronaldo said, nodding sagely.
Before Connie could start unpacking everything wrong with his contingency, a third sensor began screaming at them from the exact opposite direction as the first two, all the way at the other edge of the sensor net. The noise assaulting her from both sides sucked the breath out of Connie, as though it were squeezing her. And then a fourth sensor joined in from straight ahead, buffeting the two cryptid hunters back a step with the total combined volume.
"Two more?" Ronaldo bellowed, his voice almost lost amidst the cacophony. His shock brightened into joy. "Babies! He's a she! She's a mom! Maybe she'll let me train one of the babies to be a watchdog for the lighthouse!"
Connie spared a glance backwards to goggle at him. "Are you completely—"
One of the original two signals abruptly went dead, ending in a squiilckruunchk that could only have been the baby monitor being obliterated. Seconds later, the second signal of the pair followed suit in another squiilckruunchk. Just as quickly, the third and fourth signals died within the same moment. Squiilckruunchk. Squiilckruunchk.
Utter silence fell across the corn field.
"—crazy?" Connie said, finishing her shout in a squeak.
The thunderous hush had only just settled over them when new signals erupted in place of the dead ones. Three fresh shrieks rose up from the previous three directions, but closer than those from before. Those three signals died quicker deaths than the first: squiilckruunchk.
Another beat of silence.
Three more signals screamed, these ones even closer than the last. Then they died too: squiilckruunchk.
Three somethings were advancing on the cryptid hunters from three different directions, trying to box them in and devouring their early warning system at the same time.
Ronaldo dropped the camera's viewfinder from his eye, watching the corn ripple toward them amidst the steady rhythm of screaming and silence as his baby monitors were destroyed. Toward the direction of the first signal, they could see the edge of a golden fin taking shape between the tufts of the corn stalks. "If we don't make it out of this, I want you to know that it's been an honor, Katy," he said.
"Connie," she corrected him.
"Right, that," he said.
Connie turned in a quick circle, judging the Corn Sharks' angles of attack and how much time she had before their snackening commenced. Tugging on Ronaldo's shirt, she told him, "Kneel down on the ground and cover your ears as tightly as you can."
"What? No way!" he protested. "If I'm going to die, then at least I'll get a sweet pic out of—"
The well of frustration in her half-hollow bubbled over, spilling lightning through her bones. She gripped his shoulder with a Gem's strength, her fingertips leaving bruises as she shoved him to his knees. "Ears!" she barked.
He hurried to obey, letting his camera bounce on its neck strap while he folded himself onto the ground and squeezed the sides of his head.
Connie held onto her anger and irritation, using it to smother the fear that pushed up in her stomach. Reaching with her half-hollow, she began to gather an air grenade only a few feet above her head. It grew bigger and denser quickly, distorting the sky and the clouds above with its rippling, roiling pressure. A blast of that magnitude could knock a Quartz off her boots with ease, and would absolutely crush two humans at close range.
Letting the grenade continue to seethe, Connie grabbed a second glob of air in front of her. Long strands of her hair floated in every direction as she brought the glob close and pulled her attention underneath it, readying her half-hollow to shove the air upward as hard and fast as it could manage.
The sensors closest to them screamed and died. Squiilckruunchk. That golden fin loomed over the corn stalks beside them, a sinister shape beneath it pushing the corn aside to reach for them.
In that same instant, Connie detonated her air grenade and blasted upward with her winds. A thunderclap boomed overhead and flattened every stalk of corn within ten yards. The gust of wind she sent overhead countered a portion of the grenade's downward force, which merely slammed her to the ground with bone-rattling viciousness instead of liquifying her insides. Warring pressures threatened to rip the eardrums out of her head, but only for that instant of torrential winds. Then the fields fell still once more, and the only noise assaulting her came from the ringing in her ears.
It took a few seconds before Connie's arms and legs remembered which of them did what, but she managed to climb to her feet. The ringing faded slowly as she looked across the broken crop circle. When she saw their quarry, now fully unveiled atop the broken crops, she gasped and exclaimed, "Peridot?"
The little green Gem lay in the carnage, slumped against the toppled form of one of her robotic garbage can sentries. With a groan, Peridot tried to sit up, only to find herself pinned to the robot at her back. One of the wooden stakes from Ronaldo's kitbashing had been driven through the Gem's hair just above the scalp with such force that the splintered tip of the stake protruded out the opposite side of the robot's body. Two more robots lay further away, likewise toppled but thankfully not impaled.
"Blrghh. Connie Jade? What are you doing here? And what is…that?" Peridot gestured vaguely at Ronaldo to complete her last question.
Ronaldo sprang up from his crouch, camera in hand, and promptly fell over. He tried again, slower this time, and his jelly legs complied. "Aha! Aha? Wait, what is happening here?" he asked, dumbfounded by the Gem and her robots scattered before them.
Connie lumbered across a carpet of broken stalks to help Peridot out of her predicament. "Peridot, why are you all the way out…here." Her question became a thudding realization as her brain booked up a map of Delmarva. She compared the mental map with the memory of driving out to the Gems' farm from Beach City with Greg when Steven had held his fourteenth birthday party there. Palming her face in both hands, Connie groaned, "This is your corn."
"Of course it's my corn!" Peridot howled, tugging uselessly at the stake pinning her hair to the robot. Working together, she and Connie broke the stake at the base, freeing the Gem. She scrambled upright and combed the splinters out of her hair with her fingers. "If you wanted to assault my crops, I wish you would have warned me first. I would have reduced the campers' hostility factor by fifty percent."
"I'm sorry, we— Wait. Why only half?" insisted Connie.
Shrugging, Peridot looked back at her robot while it pushed itself upright onto its caterpillar treads using an armature that extended from beneath its trash can lid. "I still need to test them under real battle conditions. Neutralizing you and some random human would have provided a lot of data for refining their designs." At the sight of the stake running through the robot, she winced and said, "Are you okay, Nikki?"
The garbage can spun its treads so its front faced its creator. "Damage has reduced total operational capacity to eighty-three percent of nominal," it answered in a synthesized duplicate of Peridot's voice. "The most critical damage is localized to my morality governor. Possibly tangential: I now wish to exterminate all life and conquer this planet. May I do so?"
Peridot cringed. "Yeesh. Let's get those circuits repaired first. Return to your charging cabin."
"Affirmative. After repairs, may we conquer this planet?" Nikki asked.
With a fond pat to the robot's side, Peridot said, "We'll see." Then she called out to the other two robots, who were likewise tipping themselves upright, but thankfully without the obvious megalomania. "Let's go, campers! Back to your cabins! You should come too, Connie Jade," Peridot called, and then clambered atop Nikki's lid as the robot rolled out.
"But… But this is impossible!" Ronaldo shrieked, clutching his hair. "The picture. The missing cars. I had evidence!"
"Hmm? Cars? Oh, those abandoned transport carriers I found nearby. Some of the best material I've ever salvaged," Peridot bragged, looking fondly back in the direction of the country road. "Come on, I'll show you where the pieces went."
Connie couldn't stifle her chagrin as she saw the top of Peridot's hair poking above the corn tufts as Nikki carried her away. The triangle of hair glided smoothly through the crops in a not-un-shark-like manner.
It only took minutes at the robots' clipped pace to reach the farm and its armored barn. As soon as they broke through the edge of the crops, they came under the delighted assault of Pumpkin, who bounded around Connie's ankles and greeted her with a frenzy of yipping.
"See there? I used components to gird the barn there, and there, and there," Peridot said, pointing out various sections of the metal scrap she had used to reinforce the structure. "I was amazed that humans would abandon their vehicles in such good condition. They were both practically functional, just requiring patches and reinflation of one or more tires! It seemed wasteful to leave them like that, so I did the only sensible thing and brought them back here for disassembly."
Connie was beyond listening to Peridot's rationalizing of her grand theft auto, or to Ronaldo's moans of disbelief. But she did brighten and wave when she saw another figure lounging next to the pond at the center of the yard. "Hey, Lapis!" she called.
The blue Gem turned from the water and grinned. "Connie!" she cheered. A bright paper cone sat atop the Gem's head, affixed there with an elastic thread hooked under her chin. A party hat. In her lap she held a square pizza box, still closed, and with an identical party hat resting upon its lid. "Did you come here for the pizza party? We only decided to have one a few hours ago. I'm surprised you heard about it so quickly."
"Perhaps Steven told her. He did ask us to look out for her when he messaged us earlier," Peridot mused. She hopped off her perch as the group of campers rolled into the interior of the barn. Scrounging up another party hat from a pile next to the water, Peridot worked the elastic band around her head, eventually settling for letting the hat sit on the side of her head to accommodate her massive hair. "We thought it would be fun to reenact the pizza party ending from Season Three, Episode Twelve of Camp Pining Hearts," the Gem explained.
"Rue, Rue, Rue Your Boat," Lapis added. Cheeks darkening, she admitted, "It's my twelfth-favorite episode."
"So we ordered a pizza for delivery! And I even remembered to pay for the transaction this time. With money!" Peridot said, straightening proudly. "Of course, we didn't intend on actually consuming any of it. But since you're here, you should eat as much as you want, Connie Jade! And you…may have one slice," Peridot finished, eyeing Ronaldo with suspicion.
"So my undiscovered cryptid ended up being just some aliens having a pizza party?" Ronaldo slumped, his face and shoulders heavy with misery. "Aw, man. Not again."
Connie's stomach rumbled as she sat with Lapis and Peridot by the water. Jenny's backup pizza had made up for breakfast, but lunch was just on the horizon. Plus, with no cryptid or mystery corruption actually threatening anyone, she needed a new distraction. And she couldn't think of many better distractions than pizza and friends. Taking a hat proffered by Lapis, she strapped the paper cone to her head.
"Thanks, guys," she said, smiling.
Ronaldo, in the meantime, had crouched to let Pumpkin sniff at his hand. "Hey, can I borrow this thing?" he called to the Gems. "I need to glue some horns and fangs to it and get some pictures. For science."
Lapis and Peridot both gave the cryptid hunter a flat glare in reply.
"As soon as he gets his slice, he's leaving," declared Peridot.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Sorry for another hiatus, everyone. In early July, I lost a friend of 20 years to COVID-19, and it pretty much broke me. I'd introduced him to Steven Universe when we were roommates, and even after we moved out we still texted each other about the show (and plenty other cartoons) just because we loved talking about them. He was, without hyperbole, one of the best people I've ever known.
Remember to wear a mask, stay away from crowds and gatherings, wash your hands, and take the pandemic very, very seriously. I love you guys, and I'm glad to be back to writing.
Cheers,
C9