~Hey! Did you think I'd fallen off the face of the Earth? Please forgive the long delay and enjoy this new chapter.

Thanks to everyone who's been reviewing, including my very nice guest LordofCinders. :D~

The next day, you learn another thing about your new friend Dr. Drakken:

This is not the name he was given at birth.

It begins when you bring up the question of multiple humans having the same names, when you ask if there is more than one person named Steven.

By the number of quick nods Drakken grants you, this must be an easy yes. "Oh, yes. Probably scads of them. I myself know someone named Steven. Well, actually, his name is Steve, but that's usually a nickname for Steven, so he's probably a Steven."

Steve. Well, you can see how it was formed, cleaving the last letter from the word. But it sounds foreign to you, dull and distant, a fading ember as opposed to the lively spark of your Steven.

"How do two people with the same name not get confused for each other?" you ask.

Drakken is standing on a clump of beach grass; he chuckles whenever the breeze tosses the strands across his toes. "Ohhh, good question. That's why we have what are known as last names."

"Last names?" you repeat.

"More formally known as surnames." Drakken's posture straightens, until you are looking squarely into the bump in the center of his throat. You prefer the face view. "See, the Steve I know, his surname is Barkin. So his full name is Steve Barkin. It's a distinguisher, because your Steven's last name probably isn't Barkin – well, I can't say for sure."

This makes sense. "How do humans choose their last names?" you say.

"Well, traditionally, they get passed down through families," Drakken says. He is backlit by the sun, seemingly glowing with knowledge of Earth. Though it may be a miserable planet, it is fascinating as well. "Like, take my former arch-nemesis Kim Possible. First name – Kim, chosen by her parents. Last name – Possible. Her mother and father and her brothers all have the last name Possible. Because –"

"Brothers?" You hate to interrupt, but you cannot let this small puzzle be swept away in the rush of his explanation.

"Ah. Yes. Brothers and sisters are your parents' other children. Brothers are boys; sisters are girls."

"Oh." You frown. "I don't think Steven has any of those."

How could he? One human/Gem mixture is enough of a rarity. Surely it won't be repeated anytime soon. Not with Rose Quartz –

"Anyway, traditionally, a woman takes her husband's last name when she gets married." Drakken raises both hands above his head as if you are brandishing a sword, when you haven't even moved. "Not to belittle women or anything. It just makes it easier to keep track of who's related to whom. There are a lot of women nowadays who keep their own last name or hyphenate it with their husband's anyway."

You stare, silent, across the water. Human relationships sound so complicated. The people who brought you to life, along with any other creatures they've created since becoming…married, a term you have a vague understanding of but still feels too shaky to support your weight.

"Is Drakken your last name?" you ask. "Dr." sounds like a title that takes the place of a first name, but you are not sure.

Drakken's cheeks unexpectedly turn the color of Steven's shield. He glances down at the grass spiking between his feet. "Actually…Drakken is a name I took for myself when I grew up. My real name is Drew Lipsky. First name – Drew. Surname – Lipsky."

"Drew Lipsky," you murmur. The new combination of syllables is jarring yet sweet, like ice cream on your tongue.

Dr. Drakken – Drew Lipsky – cringes as though he is anticipating a blow to the temple.

"It's a nice name," you say, though you have little experience with what makes a name nice. "But you seem more like a Drakken."

His shoulders relax from their own spikes. "Yes. I thought so, too."

"So – where do last names come from?" you say. "I know they get passed on, but where did they come from originally?"

"Ah!" Drakken's face lights, and he thrusts a finger into the salt-kissed air. "An excellent question! A long, long time ago, people didn't really have last names, and you're right – it made them really easy to mistake for each other. They were identified as 'the sister of so-and-so' or 'the son of such-and-such,' and eventually some of those turned into last names. 'Johnson.' 'Neilson.'

"I don't know where 'Lipsky' comes from, exactly. And heaven knows about 'Possible.'" One corner of Drakken's lips points upward, while the other angles down. "I do know a lot of them also came from their occupations. 'Archer,' 'Weaver,' 'Mason.' There were quite a few blacksmiths and ironsmiths, which is why 'Smith' is such a common last name down here."

You nod and close your eyes. Images are wafting into your memory, golden-framed pictures of a happier time. Of a more open, radiant Homeworld, with more tinkering and less mastery. Where the technology would more likely than not stall and stick, causing the Gem working it to growl in playful frustration and give it a good hard kick.

Now, now the technology rarely fails, but when it does – it is as if your people, your once proud people, have been disconnected from their very life-force.

"You'll notice that those are all pretty old names," Drakken continues. "Middle Ages or even earlier. That's why you don't see people named 'Programmer' or 'Engineer.'"

You release a sigh, one you didn't notice forming, from your nose. "Thank goodness."

Drakken's jaw goes slack. "What did you just say?"

You have forgotten, temporarily, who you are talking to. Dr. Drakken may be one of the kindest humans you have ever interacted with, but he is also a scientist. Technology is the backbone of his business, the more advanced the better.

He doesn't know. He doesn't know…

You shape the new Homeworld in your brain: Strange hums and clicks and whirs winding into a low-key throb across a sky that was once silent. Giant Injectors poised for their next Duty, the blades sharper in the starlight; you had forgotten how sharp, and deadly-looking. You attempted to walk away from it, down a road that ran north-south when you last lived there. In many thousands of years it was repaved many times and it ran east-west now. You realized your mistake and corrected it – not, however, before bouncing off the elbow of a particularly burly Quartz Gem who rasped at you to "watch where you're going, brat."

You shape the scene in your brain, and then it hits you that you have no method of easily replaying it for Dr. Drakken.

For the briefest of moments, you miss the relative simplicity of the mirror.

"Technology just messes things up," you hear yourself saying instead. "The more it advanced, the meaner the people on my planet got."

Drakken rubs the spot over his eyebrow. "Well, we aren't on your planet now, Lapis! This is Earth, and technology has been used for a lot of good things!" The buoys of his voice are no longer gently bobbing; they are a typhoon, gaining volume and losing control. "People can get tested for awful diseases now…"

You begin to shake. "And then what? What do they do once they find out you're defective?"

Homeworld has always scanned unknown Gems for corruptions. Sometime during your imprisonment, they implemented scans for cracks as well – undamaged, hairline fractures, deep, deep gouges. What they do with the cracked ones, you do not wish to learn. Centuries ago, it would have been their prerogative to fix you, but…now…

A small clump of humans walk by just then, faces pasted into the rectangular objects of their communication. They barely glance up in time to avoid hitting one of those octagon signs that populate Earth's street corners, do not even speak to one another as they scroll through whatever information is holding them captive.

You gesture toward them. "See? They're not paying any attention to each other – or to anything that's not on their screens."

Your words wring out tight.

Drakken leans in and shoves his eyes level to yours. He is close enough that you can see weary lines of red receding back toward the pupil like fissures from a foundational crack. Tiny black dots of sun-wear that he did not have when you first met freckling his cheeks. The cold scent of ice cream on his otherwise hot breaths. "Not all technology is bad, Lapis!" he bursts.

You back up one shaken step.

The instant your heel dips into the sand, Dr. Drakken recoils and slaps a hand over his mouth. The red lines bulge in what could be fright. "You know what?" he mumbles into his palm. "That was rude. That was too loud. I need – I need to go cool off."

And then he turns and scampers a few meters away as if a predator is chasing him. You do not think it is because of you.

You stand there another Earth-minute, wanting to run after him, to tell him it is not him you fear; it is conflict itself. But you have no framework to build on. Arguments are for Crystal Gems with conflicting loyalties, not for faithful citizens of Homeworld.

The best you can do, right here, right now, is breathe the scent of the ocean as it blows your way. Listen to the rhythm of the waves beating the shore, slap-pull, slap-pull, slap-pull. It calms you. You hope it can calm Dr. Drakken, too.

You plunge your knuckles into the sand, over and over, pull them back up and let the sand drizzle through your fingers. You close your eyes and you search for the Homeworld that now exists only in your memory. The one where love outshines the imperfections that, you are beginning to realize, were more substantial than you ever thought.

When you can no longer abide the ache that threads the length of your back, you switch your attention to Dr. Drakken. He brushes aside the fine, dry grains of sand to reveal the wetter, denser layer beneath; he gathers a handful and gels it together; he molds it, creating wavy dents in the top with his fingertips. The movements of his small, flighty hands have more certainty, more purpose.

As you watch, Drakken forms a squat wall and raises two taller towers on either side. The commonplace, sun-warmed sand takes on a regal look.

It straightens you out of the fold that curves your shoulders inward toward your chest.

Drakken scoots on his knees over to the south tower and begins to construct another wall. This one, though, is too gritty in texture, too thin to hold together, and it collapses in a runny heap. Drakken lets out a mournful howl and pumps both fists at the sky, as if the few inklings of clouds are to blame for this failure. His voice rumbles even over the slap of the waves, but from his kneeling position, with flower petals ringing his face, he appears feisty yet helpless – a single, disconnected Ruby.

Still, you understand what it is to be frightened by part of yourself. Your own temper is usually small and meek, frozen inside you – but when it is activated, it spills over its banks, defying any attempt to control it.

So you wait, fingering the sand, legs furled under you as though anticipating flight, listening to the sea-birds cry for things you cannot give them. Drakken's expression becomes smoother, his pace quicker, his hands more at ease. Your curiosity lifts higher, pulling cautious joy with it. His chest ceases to heave and instead resumes a level tempo, its rising and falling no longer alarming.

Once another of his walls crumbles and he responds with a silent flop horizontal to the turrets he's already built, peace fills you like warm water. You could not explain why if questioned…

…But you know it's okay to approach him now.

You make your way across the beach; around small, shallow tide pools whose clear water reveals small anemones and sea urchins; steer over a hermit crab in a scuttling hurry to find a new home. The gap between you and Dr. Drakken closes, step by tiny step, until you are near enough to hear the peculiar pop in his knees when he shifts from one to the other.

He glances up. His eyes will only meet yours out of the corners.

"What are you doing?" you say.

The ends of Drakken's eyebrow, his single eyebrow where most have two, crook in opposite directions. "Building a sand castle."

It is softer, somehow, than he usually speaks, as if he is deliberately hushing whatever lurks beneath his surface.

Castle. Somewhere in your millennia of memories, it triggers an understanding. That is what it looks like, a marvelous building worthy of the aristocracy – the ones who are not mass-produced. The angles, though, are austere and off-putting, foreign in their Earthliness.

"Can I help?" you ask.

You realize how badly you long to.

Drakken still won't look at you, but the half of his mouth that faces you quivers up at the edge. "Yes," he says.

And there is no technology corrupting his buoy-words, no sign that you have cracked that which is precious to him. The skin on his forehead is puckered, still imprisoned by stress, though not a crevice of irreparable damage.

You reach down into the sand, following Dr. Drakken's example, rooting for the more malleable dampness. It gives surprisingly easily under even your timid touch, leaving the imprint of your fingers behind, every line and bump preserved. Familiarity shoots across your mind, but it is so far away and vague this might as well be the first time you have ever left your mark.

A laugh comes out of you, a squeaky, bewildered thing.

And then your hands move over the clump, squeezing and stretching and rolling, all in short jerks. Over the next several Earth-minutes, though, your knuckles relax, permitting color to wash back into them, and the sand seems to grow lighter.

You mold it with precision, forming six-sided figures with rounded corners, every variety of crystal shape known to your people. The slight incline of warp pads, elevated and notched by the barest of steps. The sleek, lean shanks of broadcast towers – short, as you recall them being once.

Once when it was tender rather than calculated.

It is as though all the anger, the fear and the loneliness, you have felt since you returned to an unrecognizable home seeps through your fingers the way humans secrete sweat when the heat is too much for them. What you are left with is gentle and bittersweet.

You shapeshift a pair of lungs, uncharacteristically spontaneously, just to sigh out into the salty air.

And then you know – this is the facet of Homeworld that you will always claim. Not courageously or passionately – you have never been either of those things, and you do not see yourself starting anytime soon – but with whatever tendrils of strength and hope you still possess.

You sense the focus of Dr. Drakken's eyes on your back, then shifting over slightly to land on your creations. When you turn they are close, so curiously close that you can distinguish the uniform black at the center of all humans' eyes from the softer black smudged around them. The sun plays over them in a way that should not be remarkable.

"This is traditional Gem architecture," you explain, not boasting but proud.

Drakken responds with an appropriately solemn nod. "Well, I like it," he says. "Very geometrically fascinating."

You understand enough to receive it as a compliment.

As your fingers twist for more of the cool, moist sand, they are suddenly interrupted by the presence of Drakken's fingers resting atop them. Before the touch has even traveled from your illusionary limbs to be felt in your gem, he's picked your hand up in his, given it a quick squeeze – surprisingly gentle. The soft, organic feel of him is refreshing.

Drakken says nothing, and yet he communicates so much. You marvel that with nothing more than a simple press and release, he has both apologized and forgiven you.

You marvel – and you squeeze back.

When Drakken pulls his hand back, it grasps at the air, seemingly uncertain of where it should go next. "You – I – um – your eyes." His voice sounds as if he can't figure out where to put it, either. "They get all sparkly when you talk about Homeworld. And then they get sad."

"Oh?"

Drakken does more than shrug; he spreads his arms wide as his shoulders rise and grins until his mouth is one squiggled, skinny line. "I think I like them better sparkly," he whispers loudly.

The breeze tousles several strands of your hair, and you push them back, wondering about his vision of you. It hasn't yet been worth venturing close to something hated and reflective just for a glimpse of an image that has remained unchanged for thousands of years.

You and Dr. Drakken return to your sandcastle, each assembling the prettiest designs of your native planets. You add the oval doors you remember so fondly, while Drakken finds scraps of seaweed and weaves them among the turrets in an elegant fashion.

It becomes a palace fit for a Diamond. Still, as Drakken himself concedes, it is missing something. He scampers down the beach and returns with a sliver of driftwood, which he pokes grandly into the castle's highest tower.

"There!" Drakken declares. He parks his hands somewhere on the torso as flat and unchanging as that driftwood and grunts with satisfaction. "It's perfect!"

And he looks so content, sounds so pleased, that you believe him.

You lower yourself, one skirt swish at a time, to your own stomach and rest your chin on your open palms. It is a pose you have not felt safe enough to assume since before the War.

Something seems to skim across the surface of your gem, then flutter away. There was a time, back before Dr. Drakken was even – was born the term he used? – when you would have unquestioningly have given such an imperial model to Blue Diamond to show your devotion. The picture of her shrouded in her portable palace, her eyes cold blue behind the veil, devoid of emotion as she ordered an insolent Ruby to be broken, skirts along the boundaries of your trust: Your trust that Blue Diamond was a fair and kind ruler; that her every action was justified; that her decrees were to be followed without hesitation.

As you gaze at your castle – what you and Drakken have built together – all you can envision Blue Diamond noticing is the slightly sagging south wall or the scallops that Drakken's fingers have carved with more enthusiasm than even spacing.

And you would rather give it to Steven.

"Yes," you say. "It's perfect."

Drakken laughs out loud, a delighted boom, and fiddles with the sand feathering the peaks of his hair. "I have to get a picture of this with my phone!"

Picture? With a phone?

"Oh, drat," Drakken says, patting his pockets. A frown gathers on his face. "I must've left it back in the hovercraft."

That is a word you are acquainted with, and you're impressed that he was able to build one using only Earth technology.

"Be right back!" Dr. Drakken calls, jogging up the beach, nearly tripping over clumps of dune grass.

"All right!" you say. You keep track of each other now.

And then it is just you, alone in the company of your ocean, beguiling you as its waves clap the shore and fizzle away, as if chanting your name: lap-is, lap-is, lap-is, lap-is. It remains unchanged and loyal even after the centuries you spent apart, unlike so many others.

That is why your mind has floated somewhere else, why you only register the inevitable when you hear a volley of squawks behind you. The tide, moving to the phases of a moon that remains hidden, slinks toward your creation.

"Nooooo! No, no, no, no, no!" Dr. Drakken's hands flail aimlessly, the small shiny phone firmly encased in one. "The tide! No! Curse that tide! Not before I get a picture! Ple-ease!" With the exception of his mouth, he appears frozen.

You, for once, are not.

Rushing forward, you stop just short of the foam that respectfully bends around your ankles and thrust your hands in the air. The tide locks into place, deferring to your wishes. It pulses, heavy, against your fingertips.

You glance back at Dr. Drakken. His mouth is dangling open, as though to catch the stray beads of moisture. "Take the picture! Take the picture!" you call.

Drakken snaps his jaw back into place and lifts the phone, poking at buttons you cannot see, begging them to cooperate. Somewhere in the seethe of constrained water and the squawk of the seabirds overhead, you think you make out a distant click. It is followed by a wild whoop as Drakken punches a fist into the air: "I got it!"

You sigh and drop your arms. The tide washes in, devouring the shapes in the sand, pressing the castle back into its roots until it is nothing more than a memory. You feel the welcome release in your ears, between them, down through the vibration of your legs.

And then Drakken's loud voice crashes through.

"Lapis!" he says. "Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!" He skitters, sandals spraying sand, up to you and his arms encircle you with all their long, narrow strength.

You are taken aback.

The word hug, old and only familiar in a rusty, barnacle-encrusted way, comes to you. Your species has always been spare with affection, although a companionable hand-squeeze or a kiss on the forehead is not unheard of. Your only recollections of those last days, though, those dark days when the war was peaking, are of clutches and grabs, angry swipes. No one embraced on the battlefield.

And so you are surprised by how…nice it is to receive Drakken's clumsy hug. On all sides of you rest comfortably loose folds of fabric, and a human framework, brittle yet unyielding, holds you there with its sweat and its joy; it is a shelter, not a prison.

That's when you hear the sound. Deep within the chest you are pressed against, there is a strong, steady thrum. There is a pattern to it – in and out, in and out, rise and fall, give and take.

You can vaguely remember being Taught, at some point, about human beings and their heartbeats – how essential it is; how even the slightest interruption can prove disastrous. But you were never told of its ebbs and flows, its resemblance to the ocean. You were never Taught that each human has a tiny version of the sea living inside them.

Peace nestles between your shoulders, stretching and loosening.

"You're welcome," you somehow say.

Drakken pulls back and wiggles his phone from hand to hand. "Now we should take a selfie!" he says. Facets etch into his forehead. "Or is it a groupie? I've never been able to tell which one is the proper…"

You shrug. Having never heard either term in your substantial lifetime, you aren't able to help him here.

It does not seem to trouble Drakken for longer than a second or two. He breaks back into his wide, gleaming grin and holds the phone at arm's length, poking more buttons with one hand. The other curls around your wrist and tugs you, as gently as his excitement can, to stand against his side. "All right, say cheese!" he says.

"Cheese?" you repeat. You've heard of it – a human food, somehow derived from milk – but what does it have to do with taking photographs? You wind up staring, your lower lip smashing into your cheek, as you face a blurred screen, bordered in white, that reflects what it sees.

"Sorry," Drakken says between chortles. "It's an Earth thing. Don't know where it got started – I think because saying the word 'cheese' makes your mouth look like it's smiling."

"Oh. Well –" your voice quiets – "I don't need that to make me smile." The one you give him is tentative but unforced.

And it is returned, doubled in size and in ease. "Okay, well, we'll take a nice smiley one, and then we can make funny faces, all right?" Drakken doesn't wait for you to respond, instead raising the phone high and far again. "Three – two – one – now!"

There is a brief blip – of white light, then blackness, and then back to the afternoon sunshine. Depicted on the strange little device Drakken holds are two blue faces, one jubilant to meet it, the other cautious but hopeful.

"Funny faces time!" Drakken declares. His eyes squint near shut, his tongue extending toward his chin as giggles shake it out of place. He is having such fun; you want to be a part of it.

You remind yourself that it is not a mirror, that it cannot capture you with the images it throws back. Gradually, your fingers stop vibrating against the hem of your skirt. You inflate your cheeks with some of Earth's gases, tinged with ocean salt, and wrinkle your nose.

Drakken laughs, a happy noise not unlike the one Steven's pink lion makes. The phone clicks and clicks and clicks.

When it is over – signaled by Drakken giving a satisfied grunt and tapping the option marked "Caption" – muscles your body hasn't had cause to shapeshift for centuries ache. You are warm, not from the heat shimmering off the boardwalk in the distance, not from your constantly regulated temperature, not the way humans are hot, and not uncomfortably so. There is a cool streak on your back, the sensation of happy wings just below the surface.

Dr. Drakken frowns to himself as he pecks at a letter-board. "Beach City Summer Vacation," he murmurs. "Dr. Drakken and. . ."

A dull ache prods at you, like a sword the renegade Pearl forgot to sharpen. For all his human frailty, he has something you will never have – a name; a – what did he call it? – a last name that ensures he will never go unidentified in a crowd.

He will never experience what you did: returning home, not sure if you're sprinting or flying in your haste to report back to your Diamond, until you are blocked by two Quartzes wielding weapons the likes of which you have never encountered before. Blurting out, "I'm here to see Blue Diamond."

And getting back, "Who are you?"

You braced yourself against the sword-pricks then; you suspected they would need to be reminded. It was the same after any prolonged absence. "Lapis Lazuli."

It hurts again – the Quartzes turning toward each other, the first one's questioning look and the second's harsh whisper, "Doesn't she already have one of those?" Both gazes, as hard as the gems embedded in the physical forms they have taken, reduced you to some useless thing salvaged from a shipwreck.

For a moment, you ceased to feel your own body at all, as if the whole thing were an illusion, right down to your consciousness, and you might just dry up and blow away.

"…L-A-P-I-S L-A-Z-U-L-I…" Dr. Drakken turns the phone in your direction, brow ridged again. "That's how you spell your name, right?"

"Yes." To see your name in writing again after so long anchors your feet again. You are the only Lapis he knows.

Drakken cleanses his forehead of sweat, perhaps so more can take its place. "Okay, good. See, I have to ask because I have this thing called dyslexia…"

This word is not hug; this word's unfamiliarity is total, and it has a foul, menacing hiss to it that pulls you down like a riptide. "What's that?" you say. "Is it a corruption?"

You search his face, remembering that blue is not its original color, wondering if whatever "lab accidents" gave him this and his petals and his scar have also slowly burrowed their way down into his core health.

Dr. Drakken seems surprised at your sudden shift in tone. "No, no! Well…maybe just a little one…nothing to worry about." He taps the delicate pulse on the side of his head, the one humans call a temple, though it bears no resemblance to a holy place. "It's only in my brain – it gets overwhelmed from being so brilliant, see – sometimes, it switches around letters or numbers or even whole words, especially when I get upset." He flashes a broad smile whose message – Everything is all right – could not be more clear if it were transmitted by an ancient Wailing Stone.

"Oh." You've never heard of this problem. It is definitely not one of the warning signs you were Taught to watch for. "Does it hurt you?" you ask.

As he looks at you, as he says, "Wha -? Oh…nope. Not at all. It just makes it a little hard to read and write sometimes," Drakken's enthusiasm gentles.

And you believe it, because dishonesty, one of the more confusing human traits, has never managed to settle in Dr. Drakken. It would not coexist easily with the glow upon his face. One would push the other away, like Gems too at odds with one another to fuse.

"Lapis?" Drakken sticks his phone back into his pocket in order to twiddle his fingertips together. They swoop with no real pattern, never seeming to make the same movements twice. "I just wanted to say one more thing about the technology…stuff…and then I'll drop it."

Since he isn't holding anything that can be dropped, and since his use of "one more thing" tells you the discussion will be limited, you are able to gather what he probably means. You nod him on.

Dr. Drakken grunts and coughs and expels "Ahem"s from his throat, as if his words must be carefully weighted and presented with a clear path before even one of them can come out. "Most people use technology for good." He holds up his hands – I don't want to fight anymore! Steven proclaims in your mind. "But my entire career as a mad scientist-slash-supervillain was built on the fact that it can be terrifying in the wrong hands."

Though his eyes are no deeper black than usual, they appear it. They look beyond your shoulder and the light piece of fabric tied over it – far beyond, to whatever the past may harbor, to whatever has put those invisible shadows in them.

Then they come down to rest on you again, and they come alive again, bright and tuned to the right now, no longer parsing through recorded data as you have seen Pearls do. His grin returns, in increments, and he rubs the back of his neck. "Which…I don't know how I forgot that," Drakken continues. "Just goes to show you how bad my memory can be…"

His voice is bobbing once more, rising and falling with the tide. You glance down at your own hands, spread and hoping.

It would be unbalanced, unfair even, for him alone to concede, you know this. Dr. Drakken is more than a new curiosity to study; he has become a very dear friend. What can you give him that is still true?

"Well," you say at last, "if you still love it so much, it must not be all bad."

Drakken laughs, the sound pouring out of him as though it has been waiting for the perfect moment to emerge. "Thank you," he says, and his foot pokes at the drenched sand. "We make a mean sand castle, don't we?"

You frown. "I thought it was a nice one." You have see mean sand sculptures, cast by the lost and frustrated Desert Glass.

A sliver of a growl, wrapped around a chuckle, curls its way toward you. "Yes, yes, yes, it was a very nice sand castle," Drakken amends. "Sometimes we – I mean, us humans – say 'That was a mean…' whatever, when all we're really trying to say it that it was a stunning example of that type of thing."

"Oh. So it's a good thing." You don't understand how or why this works in human language, but you find yourself soaking up his explanation much as the anemones in the tide pools soak up moisture.

Drakken shrugs. "Don't ask me – I didn't invent it." He turns toward the nearest post, the chunky heel of his sandal indenting the sand that has now almost become sludge, his posture happily edgy again. "Ohhhh. . . look at this, Lapis! There's a concert down on the beach in a couple of days! That's right before I have to leave town! Oooh, I wonder if The Elements will be in it. . . they were my favorite band when I was a teen –"

You don't know what a "teen" is, and you don't ask. The words leave town form a vacuum around your hearing. Is this how humans would experience space? No wonder they aren't eager to venture beyond Earth.

"Have you heard any of their music?" You choose, you force yourself to focus on the buoys right here in Dr. Drakken's voice. "Ooh – I should take you down to the music store and play you a sample!"

He turns and heads up the beach, with such earnestness one might think his planet were in danger and he, the only hope. Drakken does not walk – he runs and skitters and staggers, and you can't help but wonder how he approached the Lorwardians when he stepped up to defeat them. Surely it was nothing like the stride of a Gem onto the battlefield.

You follow him, glancing back once to take in the two pairs of footprints. Yours are longer and narrower, more widely spaced; his soft and stumbling, sometimes landing sideways.

Surprisingly, they meld quite nicely.