And now for something completely different: Steven in mental realms!
Steven awoke to what was definitely the strangest sight in his life. Considering his fourteen years consisting of traversing fantastical locations, fighting corrupted alien soldiers, and living with a menagerie of such colorful personalities that made up the Crystal Gems nowadays, that was quite the accomplishment. Even still, this new scene had blown everything else away.
The sky was a mix of vibrant blue and red, mixing and shifting as if two pools of dye dancing around each other above his head. Splotches of purple would appear when the clouds touched and vanished once the respective colors separated. Despite there being no clouds in the sky, snow was still falling onto the ground which Steven curiously felt both and heat and cold emanating from it. The oddities continued to pile up as he noticed the snow was two different colors as well. Some flakes were pure white snow, but others were a harsh black. When he caught one on his finger in a daze, he noticed it crumbled instead of melting. The black flecks were ash raining down along with the snow.
He soon found his footing and gaped at the landscape around him. The ground was a chaotic mishmash of arctic and volcanic - glaciers of ice several stories tall sitting in pools of lava, streams of molten rock ran alongside frigid rivers filled with ice floes, beds of volcanic rocks were interspersed with large fields of picturesque snow. All the plants around him were pine trees that were either winter postcard-worthy loaded with green needles and white blankets or charred to a crisp with orange flames at the ends of branches. The temperature was surprisingly stable as the heat and cold created a pleasant warmth that his body relished for something familiar.
He tentatively took a step forward onto the field of blackened stones. They seemed stable enough so he stepped on, baffled at how he could end up in such a place.
He muttered in amazement to no one in particular at the antithetical scenery. Nothing here made sense, it all should have fallen apart, but it somehow remained harmonious. Even the dancing colors of the sky moved as if their conflict was an enjoyable dance instead of anything threatening.
"Hello?" he spoke into the surreal space before him, wondering if this was all some grand hallucination.
"Steven," spoke a familiar voice. The boy in question was taken aback even further.
"Garnet?! Where are you? What is this place?" As he continued wrapping his head around this phenomena, the fusion in question appeared in front of him looking just as confused as he was.
"This…is my mind."
All at once, Steven was relieved and baffled at the same time. While he had gone into another person's head before, he had never done it to one of the Crystal Gems. It also never led him into some sort of surreal mindscape.
"Garnet, what's going on? Why am I here?"
Garnet let out a morose chuckle and turned away from him. "I don't know Steven. Again."
"Huh? What are you talking about?"
"I was supposed to be the leader of the Crystal Gems in your mother's absence. For the most part I believed I was doing an adequate job until recently. All my recent decisions have either been wrong or failing to account for major events. Hard to keep your head up when the world keeps proving you wrong."
As she chastised herself, Steven felt the ground beneath him shift and change. The glaciers were beginning to melt in the lava, the frosted trees began to burn, and massive vents of steam began erupting from the ground. The swirling colors in the sky began dancing faster, as if trying to smash into each other now with violent patches of violet appearing more frequently. He also noticed a real change in Garnet, all three of her eyes filled with regret and self-loathing.
"Garnet, calm down! I'm sure everything will be fine…" he tried to reassure her, but that only got a resentful chuckle out of her.
"Steven, it feels so off to hear you say that. Knowing everything is going to work out is supposed to be my job. I am supposed to keep you secure, not the other way around."
The geysers grew in height and intensity, the chilly water and scorching lava met and began to meet and cause masses of black rock to emerge like scars across the land around them.
"Garnet, stop it! Can't you see what you're doing to yourself?!" He panicked as another steam vent emerged between his legs, but Garnet rushed forward to save him before he could be scalded. She did not know if he could be harmed in this place, but chose not to take the chance.
"See, you saved me! You don't have to beat yourself up over every little thing!" As Garnet put him down on the snowy ground, she turned away from him.
"You're right. I can see little things. And a lot of good has come of that…" she snarled inwardly.
"Okay, I get that you feel bad, but-" He started, before she began literally pounding the ground with her gauntlets in a rage.
"I feel like a failure! That's all I've done these past weeks is FAIL! I could have stopped it, ALL OF IT! But I didn't!"
Back in the realm of the conscious, Amethyst and Pearl dragged the now senseless Garnet by their juryrigged signal tracker where she remained completely still. Peridot, Lapis and Greg looked on in shock at the normally infallible gem left a husk of her former self.
Amethyst was taking her usual approach to handle this type of situation; slap it in the face.
"Garnet!" she yelled delivering another harsh smack to her face, "Snap out of it! We need your zappy hands to get Steven back!" Another smack, no response. "Gah! Come on, I thought you wanted Steven back!"
"Amethyst!" chastised Pearl, "I'm confident Garnet wants Steven back, but personally attacking her is not going to solve the problem!"
"Uh, maybe she's just stressed from everything going on?" offered Greg.
Peridot stood over the unconscious fusion with an analyzing eye. "Perhaps, but considering her constitution, both physically and emotionally, I highly doubt this is the result of sporadic depression or exhaustion. My hypothesis would be this is the result of a large capacity of pent-up emotional baggage."
"When did you get so good at reading people?" asked Amethyst, giving one last pat on the cheek for good measure.
"Soap operas. You'd be astonished how much foreshadowing can be created with facial expressions."
Lapis, impressed by her barn-mate's display of newfound prowess as she was, noticed a bizarre glowing from Garnet's hands. She knelt down and opened her fists to find the two gems on her palms were emanating bright rays of light, red from her left hand and blue from her right. The rest of the crowd was shocked by this development.
"Uh Pearl, does this happen when gems get knocked out?"
Upon seeing this new development, Pearl reached a new threshold of stress. In the past twenty-four hours her peaceful day with her family had been dashed by two rogue elemental gems who abducted her pride and joy right in front of her, their de facto leader had fallen unconscious, she had created a new electronic signal tracker from spare parts and electronics in a few hours, and now this phenomenon. Combining this with the bad taste left by that cursed tilt-a-whirl and Pearl reached a new point of stress. She simply let herself fall forward, standing perfectly straight, and let her face flop into the sand with her pointed nose dig in several inches.
"No Greg, this is not a common occurrence. I don't know what to do about it," she muttered from the sand, fully out of energy to raise a fit. At this point, she was relishing the cold sand getting into her nostrils and dirtying her clothes. At least that was something she could easily clean up later.
Garnet finally stopped her outburst after several minutes. Each punch at the ground accelerated the rotting of her mental world. Crags of black volcanic rock were spreading like cancerous tendrils, eradicating the ethereal beauty the realm once had. Steam and black clouds had sprung up in the sky, now a sickly shade of purple as if both dancing colors merged and then became ill.
Steven, despite never being touched, could feel every hit as if they had collided with his soul. He had never imagined Garnet of all people could suffer so much confusion and regret. He stepped towards the fusion as she knelt on the ground, tears freely flowing from her eyes. He carefully placed a hand on her shoulders, desperately trying to relieve the pain radiating off of her.
"I don't think you're a failure…" he whispered, "Why do you think you are one?"
Instead of answering his question directly, the black and white clouds began collecting into a single gray mass above his head until they formed a screen. Steven watched as the events of the past several weeks played before him from Garnet's perspective. First was the recent attack from Adamite and Cinnabar, the fusion fighting the fiery invader with all she had while trying to keep an eye on Steven trading blows with his mudslinging foe. When Cinnabar resorted to lighting the beach house on fire, Steven suddenly felt a weight drop in his stomach. He began mentally kicking himself and trying to find a solution, but nothing came to mind. Instead he watched himself offer himself to the intruders in exchange for Greg's safety.
Garnet's head dipped even lower as she felt the terrible feelings all over again.
As the memory concluded, Steven began hearing two voices arguing back and forth. Out of his peripheral vision, he could see the figures of Ruby and Sapphire standing in lava and snow respectively. They both shared a sense of responsibility, but for different reasons.
"How could I miss such a path?" asked Sapphire, her single eye practically popping out of her head in horror.
"It's not that, I should have fought harder! I could've taken down that fire freak myself, but I didn't!" screamed Ruby, literally slamming her head into the ground in anger.
"I should have known Steven could have handled himself… The odds of him getting hurt were slim," Sapphire chastised herself again as icicles began appearing around the bottom of her dress.
"It's those rotten gems' fault! How could they just endanger someone like that?!" shouted Ruby as her feet began to ignite.
Back and forth the two went, Sapphire seeing so many other ways to change the future and Ruby blaming herself for not fighting hard enough or smart enough to stop the situation altogether. Either way, they felt equally responsible for their failure.
Steven stood in the middle of their continued screaming as Garnet was bowing before the screen which began playing a new memory; Steven's capture by Aquamarine and Topaz.
The boy felt bile rise in his mouth as he watched Garnet remain silent as the smug nuisance and her stoic accomplice threatened the humans they captured, left all of them helpless to stop them and forcing Steven to play Spartacus to save his friends. Steven could literally feel his heart tear in two as he flew away into space, possibly out of the gems' lives forever.
This only meant more screaming out of Ruby about those no-good Homeworld gems and more criticism from Sapphire about all the ways to avoid the catastrophe. Steven tried plugging his ears, but between the heartache of Garnet and both her components he began to feel his head pound and spirit failing.
The scenes continued, snatched from millennia Garnet has been together on Earth. Hundreds of failures swarmed her mind at once, pushing the fusion into depression. Steven tried to push the despair overwhelming his heart, but wondered if there was anything he could say to fix this.
Adamite looked back as she rocketed up a steep hill with Steven still clinging to her back. His eyes remained closed, but his mumbling had stopped. He had also begun shedding small droplets of water from his vision spheres, causing her to debate if this was of concern. She quickly decided to continue on her way as their destination was only minutes away. Cinnabar continued rocketing behind her as a massive fireball, unaware of Steven's current state and more concerned with getting the hang of that song their hostage was humming earlier.
After several minutes of back and forth between the two science buffs, the Crystal Gems worked on an external power source for their tracker since Garnet was still out of commission. Pearl had thankfully recovered from her earlier collapse and, after sneezing several times to clear the sand from her nose, was carefully constructing the device with Peridot assisting her. Amethyst and Lapis were once again on collecting parts from the area, though this time Amethyst was much more open to parting with her collection of junk if it meant saving Steven.
That left Greg with nothing to do but keep an eye on the unmoving Garnet in case any new development happened. He used this time to pray that his son was still in one piece while also wishing he had some way to properly contribute to their efforts besides keeping vigil over an unconscious gem.
Many uneventful minutes later the device was almost complete when Greg noticed something was wrong with Garnet's gems.
"Hey guys, you know how her gems was glowing earlier? Well, now they're not."
Confused, the four remaining gems gathered to confirm that, indeed, the dazzling lights from her hands were fading at a rapid pace. While Amethyst and Greg brightened up and expected Garnet to return to consciousness, the other three pondered what this new development could mean. Their skepticism was earned when the light fully died down to reveal both her gems had lost all color.
The five were uneasy seeing this, none of them having ever seen a gem being drained like this. Said uneasiness quickly grew to full on panic when they saw Garnet's left foot start fading into nothingness.
"What in the world?!" shouted Pearl, horrified by such a sight. Amethyst reached over and tried grabbing the space where her toe was, only to feel nothing but air. She considered redoubling her screaming efforts, but worried that might speed up the process.
"Okay, this is getting really weird! What do we do now?" asked Lapis, hugging herself out of fear she would evaporate as well.
"Well… it appears to be a very gradual process. For all we know this could take several hours. In the meantime, we must continue our project in order to recover Steven." Peridot tried putting on a brave face, but even she squirmed watching the scene before her. She had never wanted one of her hunches to be correct as right now otherwise their most powerful member might vanish into thin air at any second.
Next time, plenty of things come to a head! Garnet's mental struggle, Adamite and Cinnabar's plan and rescuing Steven. Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion!
Thank you all so much for reading! Please feel free to leave a review!