~We've almost made it through winter! Hang in there, everybody. :)~
You lean in, weight propped on one elbow, toward the board-game track and move the blue plastic marker forward. Like you, it takes the shape of a human without being one; unlike you, it is firmly tethered to the material world.
The snapping fire behind you warms your back. You were surprised to learn humans will still build fires for warmth, although these days their firepits are carved into walls, sectioned from the rest of their houses by glass and stone. Its glow dances across the sand-colored carpet running the length of Kim's new living room, paints an orange glow on Ron's yellow hair as he moves his marker, and climbs up Kim's form where she sits on the couch with her knees up, a book almost as thick as some of Homeworld's antiquated tomes balanced on them.
Drakken draws a card to see where his next turn will take him and stretches a hand toward your blue marker. You tap his hand and point to the red marker several squares behind yours. He was gracious enough to offer you the blue pieces he customarily uses, but he keeps mistaking them for his.
Kim turns a page and squints at it. "Yeah. That'll SO be on the test," she says, more to herself than anyone else. She grabs a second, thinner book sitting beside her and writes something down in quick graceful strokes.
Ron shakes his head. "I swear, KP. You're the only person I know who starts studying for finals a month in advance."
You know he refers to the final tests before the winter break, which will be around Christmastime. Right now, however, it's Thanksgiving that approaches – and with it, you realize, the anniversary of Pumpkin's Emergence. You and Peridot will have to celebrate that as well.
When Drakken called to tell you that Kim and Ron were in Middleton for Thanksgiving, you invited Peridot to come with you, but she opted to stay at Little Homeworld and help Bismuth with the metalworking. She did instruct you to give hugs to Kim and Ron, which you have already done. The sensation of their arms wrapped around you was odd yet not entirely unwelcome.
Kim gives her nose a playful wrinkle. "Hey, if it works, it works. And I want to ace Gen Ed before I get started on Criminal Justice."
"What do those words mean?" you ask her.
"Means I'm finishing up the classes I have to take so I can get to the classes I want to take."
"Cool. Thanks," you say, moving your blue marker forward another two squares, to where Ron's yellow marker already sits. You are glad this game doesn't abide by the same rules as the first one you played, which would banish the player already there back to the start of the track when you landed on the same space; Drakken alternated between pouting and reassuring you that you had done nothing wrong and had no need to feel guilty.
"You got any big Thanksgiving plans?" Ron says.
"Nothing huge." Drakken gives his marker a push. "But still delightful! We're going to have the big family dinner…"
"Which I won't be attending," you explain to Ron. "I don't have a lot of practice eating, and I don't want to make everyone else worry about me."
"And then after that, Eddy will want to watch the big football game." Drakken draws in his lips. "Which I don't care about and never will, no offense. So then – provided I'm still able to move – I'll go seek out Lapis and we can celebrate together!"
"The Gems are actually having kind of a party, too," you add. "Only without the food. Most of them don't understand Earth holidays yet, but as soon as all the old Crystal Gems learned there was a day to, you know, give thanks, they wanted to do something special for it. They've got a lot to be thankful for. Like the fact that they're not monsters anymore."
"That actually sounds totally badical," Ron says. "Well, as badical as a Thanksgiving without food can be.
"Speaking of which – get this – the fam finally agreed to let me cook for Turkey Day this year! I have so many new recipes I want to try out." Ron's face, so calm moments ago, now blazes with timid pride.
You grin at him and he grins back, his eyes a kind brown in the firelight, without any misgiving to cloud them.
"INCOMING!" a voice yells.
"Look out!" A second voice overlaps the first.
What appears to be a primitive space missile flies into the room and swoops toward you. You spring to your feet, trip over the edge of the game board, and have to grab on to the side of the sofa to keep from falling face-down on the floor. The book falls from Kim's lap and lands noisily on the floor.
You feel your cheeks flush a darker blue and turn to see Drakken giving you an encouraging smile. The women in Pretty Hairstylist often say, At least my boyfriend wasn't around to see me making a fool of myself, which you do not understand. If you are going to be embarrassed, Drakken is the ideal audience.
A pair of boys obviously of the same class and facet stand in the doorway, boys you vaguely recognize from pictures Kim keeps in her money holder. One wears a green jacket, the other a shirt with red sleeves, and their hair is almost as disorderly as Drakken's. The one in red holds a bulky remote control, not unlike one Peridot might build.
"Tweebs!" Kim glares at the boys. "Seriously? Apologize to our guest."
"Sorry, Lapis," the boys say in unison.
"Just testing our new hover droid," adds the boy in green.
They disappear from the doorway, and the ship flies after them.
Kim turns to you and opens her mouth as if she too has an apology for you, but you shake your head at it. "Don't worry about it," you say. "Peridot does that all the time."
You stoop to pick up her book and straighten the bent pages. A graph looks back at you, the type your people called circumference graphs, though Drakken has told you humans call them pie graphs for their resemblance to the Thanksgiving treat. The colors that illustrate different possibilities are loud and flashy. When you glance away from them, your eyes land on a cluster of text opposite the graphs, and the room becomes shadow, the fire serving only to cast an eerie slanting light over pieces of furniture.
You read the words aloud: "Nearly one million people die each year from contaminated water."
Tension steeps the air. A sad squeaking sound rises from Ron's pink pet.
"Is that true?" you say. "Humans die from that?"
Drakken, Kim, and Ron pass a look around like that piece of cake no one wanted to eat at your first harvest celebration. Kim is left holding it, and she nods.
"How?" You have heard the word contaminated used before. It is something that can happen to Gems during their formation, should their gemstone absorb undesirable minerals from the soil around them: less damaging than corruption, it would still render her an Off-Color and ruin her chance for a normal life.
"It means things get into their water that shouldn't be there," Kim says. "Impurities. Bacteria. Things that humans weren't meant to put into their bodies."
"It's mostly in developing countries that need a little more development," Ron says.
Those words from your people have always meant destruction, and you are too stricken even to shiver at them. You sink to the couch and stop breathing; it feels wrong to hoard oxygen that a human might need.
"Then why don't the richer countries go and fix it?" you say.
Kim pushes the book away and settles her hand beside yours, friendship without touch. "Believe me, Lapis, people are trying. But it's really hard. It takes a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of other resources. And sometimes, the countries that need help aren't on good terms with the countries that could help them, so people aren't allowed to go there even if they want to because it's too dangerous."
She folds her brow at you as though wondering if you understand. You understand perfectly. A cold knot forms at the top of your spine, despite the fire.
"War," you say, unexpected roughness in your voice. "I hate war."
Behind you, Drakken sighs, and you see his shoulders flagging, his fingers almost brushing the carpet.
You stare down at the book, which has drifted open to a different section, a white interruption between chapters. Your mind fills in images of this species you have come to care for, drained and withered and dry, snatching whatever water they stumble across only to find its contents toxic enough to shatter them. The back of your throat stings.
"Lapis, I'm sorry." Kim slaps the book shut entirely and looks at you with sympathetic eyes. "I hoped you wouldn't have to find out this early on that Earth tanks sometimes."
You have grown familiar with her terminology over the months. It is the one thing not puzzling you now. You feel like a naïve, pampered Elite, astonished to realize that the Emergence Song wasn't sung to every Gem. Humans die. And other humans, knowing why, don't always fix it.
It fits with what you once believed humans to be: petty, warring, disastrous lifeforms. Yet you see another broken world with another warped hierarchy, struggling beneath a harsh white sky and hiding among the darkness, and you see the little boy who never gave up on it.
You give your head a slow shake. "No," you say. "I always knew it tanked. That's why people like me have to help it."
Drakken, who has sputtered wordlessly this entire time, finally makes a happy sound. He moves closer to you and lowers his skinny hands to your shoulders, and though his face is outside the reach of the firelight, it glows. You let yourself rest against his chest.
You keep staring at the page, however. In its top right corner sits a photograph that appears to be of a landscape, though you can hardly tell sky from water from ground: the picture has been captured in dismal gray shades. You stare at it for minute after minute, towing the image into your brain and tying it down, holding it fast.
Several days later, while Dr. Drakken is on duty at Global Justice Headquarters, you leave a note for him and fly to Middleton's freshly finished warp pad, which the Diamonds and Peridot have situated in a span of unclaimed grass beyond the farthest house in Drakken's neighborhood, hidden by a stand of trees from the gawking eyes of humans who might try and fail to use it. Tangles of leafless branches rustle in the wind, and the grass crunches beneath your shoes. It has been many thousands of years since you have seen a warp pad in such exquisite condition; you had almost forgotten how brightly and smoothly they shine, elevating the dignity of everything around them. Your steps slow as you remember watching the Galaxy Warp fall into disrepair over the centuries as the mirror's glass became cloudier.
The smallest of ponds, scarcely more than a large puddle, sits beside the warp pad, and the sight of it returns you to the present. Currents of newly cold air push wrinkles in its surface around as you walk up to it and stop with one hand up, a question. The water grants you permission at once, as you knew it would, but it is the asking that separates willing partners from slaves.
You raise your arms and hold your palms over the water, your fingers crooking forward. The pond's surface begins to sway, amassing into the picture your mind projects from Kim's book. A silver veil falls over your eyes, turning the reflection even darker and more grave. You turn and walk backward toward the warp pad, your fingers still stiff. Only when your feet glide across its familiar slick texture do you hold your arms directly out from your body and close your eyes, filling your being with the image and opening yourself to the warp pad so it can take you to the nearest match.
Its hold seals around you and lifts you into the air.
You no longer see silver. All colors fall away from the shaft of energy and race ahead of you, reassembling to become pools over which you pass and arches through which you travel. The warp pad, you know, preserves the shape of your body, yet you cannot feel it now. You are a ray of light, spilled out, your soft blue gem the only weight you sustain.
On either side of you, Earth streams by in glimpses of brown and flashes of green. A moment later, the sides swap as your intangible body rotates and positions itself to land. The warp thins, flattening your particles of light as though attempting to compress them and pack them away somewhere. Rather than the multihued prism and the lively chime you anticipate when you arrive, your journey ends with a faint wash of white and a single shaken chord.
You regain form and stumble a few steps, and as soon as you look down you understand. Fissures scour the warp pad where you have landed, none of them wider than your finger but some as long as the warp pad from end to end. You bend down and search for the Crying Breakfast Friends patch that Steven places on every warp the Crystal Gems demolished to bar Homeworld's forces from returning, and you do not find it. Abandonment, not Garnet's gauntlets, is what destroyed this warp.
A whisper flows up and down your back that can only mean that water is nearby. You follow it across a plain of tall, limber grasses soaked in sunshine that could not penetrate the layer of fog over Middleton this morning.
You would have thought a region without clean water would have the same careworn ugliness you saw in Lowerton, yet what surrounds you is far from it. Grass extends to the horizon and must continue beyond it, alive in faded Jade and Peridot. The soil beneath it seems tender and malleable, trees still bearing green leaves dot the backdrop, and the wind that stirs them feels nearly as warm as an underwater heat vent compared to the cold of both Beach City and Middleton at this time of year. A watery blue sky runs overhead, no immense buildings or signal towers cutting into it; when you spread your wings and rise, you have nothing to dodge. The only structures tall enough to cast deep shadows are rock formations almost the color of the walls in Jasper's kindergarten but a great deal richer, brown-veined and slanting, some angled skyward and others protruding like Drakken's chin.
You wonder if this was where Rose Quartz was standing when she fell in love with Earth.
In the distance, you glimpse a river, and on the other side of it a cluster of what appear to be humanmade huts, similar in size to the imitation hut at the pool entrance. These, however, lack its artificial veneer, and you have no doubt their wood is real. A few vague human figures stroll between huts, some take a moment's rest in the shade, and still others hunch over projects you are too far away to identify. Fortunately, you are also too far away to be seen; none of the humans have yet reacted to the presence of a Gem in their sky.
You turn your attention toward the river, and you hear the contamination before you see it. The water's voice is twisted and slurred, struggling to make its way to you. You can reach out for it, touch it with your mind, but something bitter rattles against the connection you share.
It is this connection that makes words superfluous as you approach it, not needing to speak or even think your message, which can best be translated as, Please don't be afraid. I'm here to help you.
The water hesitates for a second and then gurgles, a sadness more familiar to you than your own tears. As its misgiving recedes, you recognize what lies underneath: it feels guilty, having failed in its Purpose to keep alive those who depend on it.
Landing beside the closest riverbend, you steady your arms, skew them to the sides, spread your fingers for ease of movement, and slowly, cautiously pull up your hands. A portion of the river rises and hangs about half a meter from its rocky, glistening bed.
You straighten your shoulders and prepare for what comes next. The separation of water from all other elements is something you know to be difficult: not painful in the way that subduing Jasper was, but strenuous. You have not tried to do it in a very long while, and never without a partner.
By now, you are close enough that the water can hear that you sing the universe's song in the same key it does; this seems to be all the reassurance the river needs. You lean forward and slide your hands into the water. In its sun-warmed tumblings and flowings, you find a beauty, diseased as it is. You run your fingers between the droplets, parting them, until you brush against something that resists your touch.
You close your eyes and set about the task of untangling it, your concentration simmering. The artificial muscles in your back lock, and yet you smile when it finally works free. You tug the impurity to the edge near you and return to the water, your hands searching out the next one, and then the next one, and then the next one.
Eventually you reach toward your segment of river and only water speaks to you. You let your arms fall, and only water drops back into the riverbed. Everything else that was in it now sits in your lap, a collection of invisible debris on your pants.
Your powers lift inside you; you will them to bend and curve, and a blue sphere materializes on your crossed legs, sweeping the impurities inside and bubbling them as you have seen your friends do with corrupted Gems. For a moment you blink at it, this object you have never fashioned before, and then you rest it beside you on the ground. An idea of how to dispose of it begins, but this you decide to save for later.
Dimly you are aware of the changing color of the sky as the Earth shifts positions, yet the companionship of the water and the strength of the work consume the hours as a good book or a good nap would, swallowing whatever pieces of you still feel lonely or lost. You pick up the river one armful at a time and plunge your hands into it up to the wrists, sifting through the water to locate and isolate the objects that would do harm to humans.
At one point when the sky is fiery from the setting sun, a woman approaches the river holding a metal pot. The thought of being seen is like a pinch of sand in your gemstone that you cannot shake. You dive into the river, its rippled surface enclosing you before she arrives at the riverside, and allow yourself to sink to the bottom. Even from below you can see she has that human spark in her eyes, brighter than the jewelry in her ears, that spark that you have promised to protect, and you hurry to yank the impurities from the water around her with a far less gentle hand than you would ordinarily use.
Fish swim around you, none of them stopping to puzzle over your presence. They know you belong down here. Once the woman has walked back toward the village, you remain on the riverbed a moment longer, letting the water play with your hair before you surface and swim to shore, where you dry yourself with a flick of your body.
Night has begun to descend when you reach the next significant turn in the river. The water twists sharply off in the opposite direction, and when you glance back over your shoulder you see that you have left the village far behind by now. The water's voice, though still nervous, sounds much calmer, no longer accented with rot, and it titters its thanks to you.
Surely this is enough, at least for one day.
You stand up and lift your bubbles into your arms, a position that makes flying impossible, so you walk uphill beside the river back to an area near the warp pad where the soil is already weakened and dusty. A cloud floats by overhead, and you snag the water vapor from it and fashion it into a slicing tool you have seen in Steven's books, carried by both harvesting farmers and cloaked ghosts. You don't look at it any longer than necessary as you set the bubbles down. These are powers you have to reach backward across ages to recall, and yet the familiarity of them makes your gemstone feel that it is about to be cleaved in two.
Hands trembling, you thrust the slicing tool at the weak spot in the soil, striking blows that reverberate down your back even at their mildest. The ground cracks, and inanimate pebbles jostle loose and shower into the gap that has formed.
It is still frighteningly easy.
In words soft and patient, as though you are talking to Dr. Drakken, you remind yourself that you are doing this for the benefit of organic life, not the glory of Homeworld. Your hands clench into fists; you release them to examine your fingerprints, and you begin to push the bubbles over the edge. One by one you watch them disappear into the earth, at such a depth that humans will hopefully never find them again.
You grab another cloud and wring it out over the dust, turning it to a running, slopping swell of mud. With a few quick swings of your arms, you send the mud streaming across the crack and affix it to every place where you split the ground apart. When it dries, it will leave behind a crusted incision that may never vanish, like the black stitching on Drakken's face: a mark of suffering healed.
You lean back on your heels and gaze up through the gauzy layer of clouds at the purpling sky. While you have no idea what time it is back in Middleton, here it is approaching the hour where humans come to a stop for the day, and although you do not need to sleep the way they do, you long to join them. Your powers are limp and quaking inside you, expended; they will still rise up and fight if needed, but they don't want to.
It seems impolite to leave the river without warning, so you turn to it one final time, immersed in your union, feeling the faint burble of hope that runs beneath the misery it has accumulated over the years. Without words or movement or effort, you speak to it, bidding it farewell and wishing it the best. You climb onto the warp pad and raise your tired arms, and you are immediately tumbled upward.
When you arrive at Mama Lipsky's house again, the sun has just passed its peak in the Middleton sky and Dr. Drakken is pacing in the front entryway, a yellow petal protruding from each side of his neck. He whirls at the sound of the door clicking shut as you step inside, and his face brightens at the sight of you.
"Lapis! Where you been, girl?" He tries to say it casually, but his eyelashes patter across his cheekbones at a frantic pace.
You lean back against the door. His presence is so vivid after all those quiet hours of work. "I don't know."
"You don't know?" Drakken says.
"I took a warp pad to somewhere, and I don't know what it's called," you explain. "I think the area was just abandoned after the war, but it's not bad. There's a nice river, and a little village."
Drakken frowns, in what you know to be thought, not annoyance. "Oh. All right. Well, gee, Lapis, if I'd known you wanted to go to a little village with a nice river, I'd have taken you to…have taken you to….well, I'm sure I could have found a place!"
"That's not why I went," you say.
Drakken's eyebrow leaps.
"Do you remember yesterday – or the day before – when I read that thing in Kim's school book about how many humans die from contaminated water?"
"Ye-es." Drakken nods, his eyes on yours, slanting as they hunt around for your meaning, almost grasping it.
"I got on a warp pad and asked it to take me to a developing country. Someplace where that kind of thing happens." The weight of your words presses against your shoulders, and you turn your eyes to the floor. "And when I got there, I found their water supply, and…I…I purified it."
You hear a sharp breath. It brings your attention back to Drakken, whose arms are folded at the elbows, trembling in glee. "No kidding?" he says.
"No kidding."
The smile that breaks across Drakken's face is a shout of its own even before his voice booms out: "Stupendous! Magnifical! Terrifinacious!" When he sees you wince, he stares down at his hands and says, "Oh. Too loud?"
"Yeah," you say.
"Sorry," he says much more quietly. He swallows, as if he can send his exuberance back down his throat for one of his automated systems to get rid of it.
You pull away from the door and walk over to him.
Drakken moves your bangs from your forehead and brushes his lips across it. Their clumsy touch is as soft as the petals that skim your cheeks. "Lapis, that is so…kind of you." His eyes are bright and proud, threatening to spill over.
"It's the least I can do," you say with a shrug, trying to forget how you sliced the ground open.
For a moment he looks puzzled, and in that moment you anticipate a question for which there is no good answer. Rather than asking, though, he curls an arm around your waist and says, "Well, no wonder you were gone all day and night! Laboring for a noble cause!"
"Yeah, and I'm beat," you say, using an expression you have heard from Greg. "I'm gonna go take a nap."
"In the middle of the afternoon?" Drakken says.
His dancing feet slow as he walks you into the living room and toward the couch. Chopping sounds spring from him, as incoherent in their happiness as they are in their frustration.
"Yep." You collapse onto the couch, still smelling river water and watching the hot breeze rock the tall grasses back and forth. "I'm going to have major vurd when I wake up, but I'll be okay."
"'Vurd'?" Drakken repeats.
"It's a word I made up," you say. "For the feeling you get when you fall asleep while the sun is up and then wake up when it's dark out and are really confused for a while."
"Ah, yes! I know that sensation quite well." Drakken chuckles, lacing his fingers in front of him the way you have seen Sapphire do when she watches one of her predictions come true. "Well, you're certainly due a little vurd after saving everyone."
A wave slams into you from within, and you dig your fingernails into the matted fabric beneath you. "I didn't save everyone," you whisper. "That was just one village, with one river, in one country. That's not enough. How will I know when it's enough?"
Drakken's eyes go wide and wild, but he snaps his head firmly to one side. "Shhh. We'll – we'll come up with that later. I can call some people, get some advice…" He picks up one of Mama Lipsky's blankets, as heavy and pink as Lion's mane, and drops it over your body. "Just rest, okay?"
You open your eyes and take one more look at him, smiling and gaudy beside you. "Thanks," you say.
His reply is lost as sleep pulls you under.
You dream of rivers and swamps, of minute particles of pollution forcing their way into fresh water and of the long, exhausting struggle to cleanse, and you awaken to find a pair of moon-shaped green eyes looming before you. Their owner squawks, "Hi, Lapis!"
A scream tears from you. Your gemstone cannot decide where you are and imagines you to be both inside and outside of the mirror, of the interrogation room in Yellow Diamond's palace, and of the chains of your own making, and your hand jerks forward to swat at the face that pokes in next to yours. You fall from the couch onto rough carpet that stings your backside.
None of your nightmares, in sleep or in waking, have ever had carpet. As soon as you realize this, you recognize the face, although it takes you several more minutes to remember where you are.
"Sorry, Lapis," she says. "I did not mean to startle you."
You push yourself to your knees and shake your head. "It's okay, Peri. Yikes – I didn't hurt you, did I?"
"Negative." Peridot resettles her visor, knocked sideways in the chaos. "Dr. Drakken sent for me while you were asleep. He needed the help of my technological skills and natural genius ability."
She could be Drakken herself, speaking in a far higher, more clipped pitch. You let yourself laugh.
"I mean, of course," you say. "But why?" You glance out the window. As you expected, the last of the sun's brilliant rays are fading, replaced by stars that shimmer from a blue-black sky, and the vurd sweeps over you.
"He said that you were apparently 'stressing out' over the vastness of the world's polluted water supply." Peridot hoists her tablet with ease; it has bonded with her as surely as the agile, crystal-studded whip has with Amethyst. "Therefore, there is need for a system that will relieve said 'stress' by giving you a clear goal to focus on and straightforward steps to get there. I will figure that out."
Her speech has become more articulate and her movements more calculated, even her glances around the room seeming to take measurements. It is a side of her that often gets buried under her silly nasal giggling and the joy she takes in the first three seasons of Camp Pining Hearts.
"Don't you mean 'we' will figure that out, Peridot?" Drakken strolls into the room, his hair pushed in a different direction than it was when you fell asleep. He scoops Peridot up and pretends to toss her into the air, grinning when she squeals before he sets her down on the rug. From one pocket sticks a shell of plastic topped with an antenna like that on a signal tower: his cell phone. Judging from the muffled sounds emanating from it, someone else is trying to speak through it.
Drakken yanks the phone from his pocket and jams a button on it. "You're on, Computer Kid," he says.
"You do remember my name is Wade, right?" The voice on the other end is young, almost as bright and new as Steven's was when you first heard it. Now it sounds annoyed, but only briefly before it calls, "Hey, Lapis?"
"Hey," you call back. You do not recognize the voice, but you have heard the name Wade before; he alerts Kim Possible to troublesome situations around the world that she needs to repair, and he can manipulate the Internet like Peridot can manipulate metal. You have never spoken to him before, though, and your wings flutter timidly inside your gem. "What's –" you think of how Kim addresses him – "what's the sitch, Wade?"
"Well, Drakken told me about your whole thing with saving the world's water – which rocks heavy, by the way –"
You frown. "Rocks as in 'rock music' or rocks as in 'stones'?"
"Obviously as in 'stones,'" Peridot says with a scoff. "Stones are heavy, whereas music cannot even begin to be weighed on a conventional –"
"Guys!" Wade breaks in, and you can hear him laughing. "It's not either one – it's just a way of saying I think it's a really cool idea."
"Oh." A blush spills across your cheeks. Peridot does not appear embarrassed. She rarely does. "Thanks."
"But Drakken also told me it kind of overwhelmed you just how much of the water around the world needs your help, that you didn't know how you could be sure you'd gotten it all. Is that right?"
"Yeah," you say.
"So we're here to come up with a strategy. We probably can't get it perfect," Wade says, ignoring Peridot's shrill cry of dismay, "but together I'm sure we can develop a pretty efficient plan."
You blink. The words are not alien to you, but you still find it odd when they are not fired at you as commands. "Okay," you say cautiously.
"Good thing you know so many geniuses!" Dr. Drakken interjects, shiny-eyed. "Between the three of us, we can help you with anything." He pauses. "Or is it 'among' the three of us? My genius lies in science, not English…"
You smile at him.
"First thing we should do," Wade says, "is figure out which areas lose the most people each year to bad water. 'Course, we'll make those top priority. Then we'd identify what the main sources of water in those areas are, and we'd go down the list from the most serious to the least serious." You hear his fingers pressing buttons, probably on one of his computers. "Sound good?"
"Sounds just about perfect," you say.
On her tablet, Peridot pulls up a map of the Earth, a flat, childish thing with none of the multidimensional realism of the Diamonds' hologram on the moon of the Earth they planned to make. You scoot off the edge of the couch and inch closer to Peridot on the floor, as though you can leave the memory behind. "Ready, Internet Master!" she says in her birdlike way, chirping now rather than squawking.
Wade showers Peridot with the names of countries unfamiliar to you, which Drakken helps her find on the map; she takes great delight in raising red dots when she taps them on the screen. Blue dots mark the water sources in need of cleaning. The dots multiply until Drakken's eyes begin to cross trying to keep track of it all, and he needs to stand up and pace to "jump-start his genius brain."
You don't look away at any point, however. You watch, mesmerized, as Peridot's bold little hands tag and group the possibilities, her ordered world for once simplifying things rather than making them more complicated. By the time Wade has to go to bed for the night, Peridot's list has begun to assume a shape, like the foundations of the houses in Little Homeworld.
The next morning, when she warps back to Middleton, eyes that have never known sleep glow with pride as she introduces you to her latest locator-droid. A small bubble of metal, it straps around the bare space left where your shirt ends and calculates exactly how far you have to travel in any given direction to reach the destination you input. You follow its instructions across your ocean and to continents you don't recall visiting.
Over the next several months, you befriend water in nearly all its existing forms: a run-off from white rapids that still carries its turbulent flow, speaking to you coldly and frankly; a brook with a bubbling nature that splashes you and tries to coax you to play, believing the whole thing to be a game; and a stifled lake ashamed of its impurity, crying and apologizing to you as you strain it away. You relate to all of them.
Restoring them, an element of Earth which you have always understood and cherished, is almost as much an honor as saving humans, an element of Earth which you have only now begun to understand and cherish.
One day, while you ease the last plot of a straggling, grateful river back into place, footsteps shuffle in the brush nearby. You take the shortest of moments to hold your palm over the water's surface and send your love into the river before throwing yourself into the sky.
Behind you, you hear a clicking noise, the sound of a machine taking a breath. You turn, expecting a bottle to hurtle toward you like the one the man on the road to Jersey threw. Yet there is nothing of the sort, just a knot of humans far below, squinting up into the sky as if they have seen something they cannot begin to explain. You wonder if, through the bright sunlight and the alternating clouds, they have.
Hopefully not.
A few weeks later, when you are helping Peridot install the plumbing that will work your new house's bathroom, Steven appears with his new pink jacket flapping open. "Drakken called, Lapis," he says. "Said he has something super-amazing to show you, and it shouldn't take very long!"
You turn to Peridot with your brows high. Dr. Drakken's sense of timing can be skewed, even more so than yours, and he has spent his entire life on the same planet.
Peridot nods. "Yes. I suppose I can occupy myself with some other task until you get back."
You grin at her. "You're the best, Peri. Be back in a bit."
You warp to Middleton and fly to Drakken's house. You have barely pressed the chime to let him know you are there before he flings the door open, his smile so broad it makes cushions of his cheeks. "Lapis! Hi!" he says. "Ohhhhh, wait until you see this! You're going to l-o-o-ve it!"
He catches hold of your wrist, and you feel the struggle in his fingers, his enthusiasm warring with a desire to handle you with delicacy. You run along beside him so he doesn't have to worry about that any longer.
Drakken skids to a halt in the kitchen, boots leaving small dark treads on the floorboards, and drops into the chair in front of his computer desk. The computer's screen is filled with icons that remind you of the envelopes where the characters in Camp Pining Hearts store letters to their families before sending them home, and the top of the screen reads "E-mail." This, then, must be another way for humans to communicate without phones. The sound it makes when Drakken clicks on one of the envelopes reminds you of the tech Homeworld used in Era One, and you relax against him as a video begins to play.
The face that appears at the start of the video isn't one you know: skin an umber-brown, dusted with darker sun-speckles and topped by black curls clipped close, a neater variation of Steven's. Yet you recognize his voice as soon as he begins to speak.
"Hey, Drakken." Wade looks directly into the camera. He has intelligent eyes, like Drakken and Peridot, yet the intelligence in his waves forward, sharp and not submerged in indecision as theirs so often are. "I found this floating around on the Web today and I had to send it to you. I know how pumped you'll be to show it to Lapis."
You consider for an instant what other meaning the word web must have, because most objects are not capable of floating in webbing, when Wade hits another button. A color photograph splays across the front of the page that appears, and text falls away in straight panels beneath it. It looks like an object that you remember from television is called a newspaper.
Drakken makes a sound like steam escaping from a vent and pulls you closer to him. One look at the photograph and you understand why.
You have never seen a picture of yourself from behind before, but it is clearly you, wings translucent in the daylight, almost hiding your gemstone, waterproof pants dark as a thundercloud.
With one hand on the back of Drakken's chair, you read the words printed beneath your image.
Encouraging international news turned baffling: Regions of the world known for high mortality rates report those numbers falling drastically in the last four to six months. Experts agree on the cause – the sudden improvement of nearby water sources, which appear to have been professionally filtered – but remain puzzled by how such a thing is possible. Unsubstantiated rumors have been circulating of a small humanoid figure with wings flying away from the scene, but they have largely been dismissed until now.
Above you will see, captured on film for the first time, the strange figure locals have dubbed "The Water Fairy" or "The Water Angel."
Theories continue to abound as to her identity. Is she an eccentric scientist eschewing the limelight? Is she a lifelike android designed to covertly improve quality of living? Or is she even, perhaps, a being from another world?
Whoever this mysterious benefactor may be, she has become a symbol of hope, and we owe her our thanks.
All you can see is the word mortality. It is a word you haven't heard before, except as the core of the word immortality – one of the most radical differences between Gems and humans.
You glance up at Drakken. "They didn't hear this from you, did they?"
Drakken shakes his head, bobbing up on his toes. "My dear Lapis, if I'd told them, they would know your name, your favorite ice cream flavor, and your area of residence!
"Plus, I would have mentioned myself. At least twice."
"Mortality rates," you say. "Falling. So that means…I actually saved humans?"
"Heck, yeah, you did!" Drakken holds up his hand for a high-five and when you oblige, he lowers his fingers to rest against your knuckles. The kitchen's light stumbles over the quirks of his face, soaking into his hair and beaming off his teeth and the round, black eyes that stare at you in admiration. "I hope you remember this the next time you get to feeling down on yourself."
You nod. You will remember this. You will remember much other contradicting evidence, but you will also remember this.
~"Vurd" comes from the Steven Universe tie-in book Make Art (On Purpose!), specifically as an example the page where the reader is given a word search and told to make new words from the random letter combinations and make up meanings for them. It doesn't say Lapis was the one who made it up, but she is the character featured on that page. :D~