Author's Note

Yo! After chapter 7.3 was released, SaturdayLemon over on AO3 pointed out a few flaws in the chapter. Now, I make it a point to pander to my readers, because I wanna have a one day. So, I made a few (well-needed) edits, which I think improved act 3 a lot. So I'd suggest you go check them out, either now, or after reading this act.

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Chapter 8: Tigereye, Act 1

She had been walking for… how long? She looked up at the sun. It was getting low in the sky. She had been walking since it was low last time… the morning, She had been walking since the morning. She knew humans had some way of measuring time by dividing the day into smaller units of defined time. Though she still didn't know what they were called, or how long they were. She would have to investigate it later. There was so much she wanted to investigate now that she could. Humans had so many… things. Amazing things. Things she couldn't understand before, but could now.

It would be difficult. You couldn't trust humans. They might have lots of incredible things, but they were also cruel and heartless. They pick you up for their own amusement and then they abandon you. Discarded, like all those piles of stuff they didn't want and just threw away.

Not anymore. She was… strong now. Something had happened that had made her strong, stronger than any human, an apex predator. Her new master, the only one above her, had gifted her with this strength.

But it was not just strength, it was so much more! This intelligence… things that didn't make any sense before, came naturally to her now. And the things she saw… it may have cost her an eye, but the one that was still left worked better than ever! There were a whole new host of colors in the world. Who knew grass and plants could look so pretty?

All of this and her master had only asked for her to do one thing. She would do one little thing for him, and not only would she have this strength, but her sisters would be safe too. All she needed to do was kill two humans.

She was getting close to the place where her master had told her to go. A human building, a house. It was an odd sight. It didn't look like any houses she had seen before. It stood alone, far away from other houses. A large thing, round like a tree trunk, but taller and much, much wider was stuck to one of its sides. Above an opening in one side sat another human thing, one of those metal monsters humans tame and ride on black pathways. A body of water, too narrow to be a lake, but too deep to be a puddle also sat outside.

There were some other things that she couldn't make out what they were from this distance. She did see something… something green moving inside the house. A small, green human, which was really strange. She didn't think humans came in that color. Or blue for that matter. She thought only ones like herself came in nice colors. That humans only came in a few boring colors, without patterns. Maybe that's why they had those fake-furs?

Well, the color of these two weird humans didn't matter. They were prey.

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Peridot had been working a new morp for a couple of hours now. She had tried to use a handheld, gas-powered heat emitter (or a 'blowtorch' as Pearl had called it) to weld together metal scraps she had found. It was supposed to represent how two bad components can make an even worse product when combined. Two problems had become obvious to her after only twenty minutes.

The first one was that while the blowtorch just wasn't made for welding, and even if it was, Peridot had no other tools suited for this delicate creative work. While pouting over this, she had realized the second problem, and it was a much worse one. While it wasn't her intention, this piece (Scrap, as she had been calling it in her head) had obvious parallels to fusion and bad fusions. And for obvious reasons, she did not want to bring that up while Lapis was around.

She had decided to change approach. Instead of a bunch of metal scraps welded together, she would use tape and strings instead. Instead of the scraps representing bad component forming something badder, it would represent the struggles of imperfect individuals trying to connect with others. Probably something about cooperation too? Though not too much, to avoid the undertones of fusion.

On the bright side: she had made tons of progress. The piece was about halfway done. On the bad side: it looked like trash. Like literal trash, someone had bundled up and tied together. Awful.

Peridot decided to take a break from working. Whenever she got stuck on a new morp, taking some time away usually helped. The golden sky outside told her that the sun was about to set. Those were pretty inspiring. Maybe she could take Pumpkin for a walk. Or if Lapis was up for it, they could fly down to Beach City, and watch the sunset from there.

She was about to go ask Lapis, but something outside caught her attention. A beam of blue light. Someone had warped to the warp pad just a few hundred meters away from the barn. And since there were only six people on Earth that could use the pads, and two of them were in the barn already… she immediately knew who it was.

"Hey Lapis!" she yelled to her barn mate, who was sitting in her armchair, reading. "Steven's here!" She didn't wait for a response before running out to greet her great friend… only to trip over her own feet after gaining too much momentum. You'd think that after a year without them, she'd be used to running without her limb enhancers. Nope, still tripping over nothing. The fall itself didn't bother her too much, peridots were a lot tougher than they looked. But she did hope Lapis hadn't seen her fall over again, or else she'd tease her about it again…

Two arms grabbing ahold of her and lifting her into the air crushed this hope. A small snicker also let her know that Lapis had not only seen her fall, decided to pick her up mid-flight (like some precious pebble that couldn't walk by herself), but that she would most definitely be teasing her about it later.

Oh well, her hopes were quickly replenished by the sight of Steven approaching. And he had brought his third-best friend with him!

"Steven!" Lapis said once they got close enough to not have to yell. "And, um…"

"Connie!" Peridot quickly reminded her.

"Yeah, Connie! It's so nice to see you," Lapis said. She put Peridot down, before landing herself. She retracted her water wings into her gemstone."I didn't expect to see you again so soon, what brings… you here?" Her question died down, leaving another there instead.

Peridot had started making an enthusiastic greeting as well but stopped when she saw the looks on Steven's and Connie's faces. It was not the joy you'd expect from them coming to see their favorite two gems. No, it was something else.

"Hey… is something wrong?" she asked. "Has… has something happened?"

"Is it… is it the Diamonds?" Lapis asked.

Peridot didn't need to sweat nervously, but she did anyway. She shot Steven a look, which he met. They both knew what the other was thinking. It hadn't been very long since that day… with the incident.

"No, no, it's not the Diamonds," Steven assured her. Peridot felt a wave of relief washing over her, and then a wave of shame. Lapis had told them she would stay. She should trust her friend.

Lapis frowned. Had she noticed?

"Well then, what is it? I can see something's wrong," she said. She glanced at Peridot and then back to Steven. "And no sugar-coating it either," she said. She had noticed.

"Okay… " Steven said. He hesitated for a moment. "But it's really not the Diamonds," he assured them again. "The whole thing is just really… bizarre."

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Steven and Connie spent the following forty minutes or so retelling and explaining the event earlier that day to the two barn mates. There was some difficulty explaining the severity of the revelation that there were humans with these supernatural powers. Peridot and Lapis didn't know too many humans… only Steven, Connie, and Greg, as a matter of fact. And even then, they didn't know Connie and Greg very well. To them, the fact that humans shouldn't possess the power to create illusions with their mind or remove someone's independence didn't seem as outlandish.

It was not helped by all the superhero movies and comics Peridot had consumed. When Connie had told them about the two teens' powers, Peridot had piped up.

"Oh, so they're like Doctor D from Delta-humans, but lamer? Because Doctor D has a much wider range of abilities than that." And then she had rambled on for almost three minutes about how broken Doctor D was, he had to be written out of half the series because he was so powerful.

"I mean, if he had been present during The Division arc, whatever side he would have been on (which would be Thomas Strong, because Tomas was right) he would have defeated everyone else with just a snap of his fingers."

It had fallen on Connie to interrupt her, which she had tried to do as tactfully as she could… but then the discussion turned into a twelve-minute discussion over who had been right in The Division. Peridot maintained that Thomas was the right one, Lapis that Stephen was right, Connie that, while Thomas had several good points, he had gone way too far, and Steven tried to keep somewhere in the middle in order not to upset anyone.

By the end of it, they hadn't really gotten anywhere, but Steven and Connie both felt a lot less grim about the previous situation.

Fun as it had been, forty minutes sitting on a barn floor did wear on a person's bum. Peridot and Lapis didn't have any chairs or tables. Connie decided to take a quick leg stretcher. She grabbed her backpack and sword, mostly on reflex. She was glad that she did, however.

While she was outside, looking at the sunset behind the cornfield, she realized just how thirsty she was. She hadn't had anything to drink for a couple of hours. She was glad her mom wasn't there, or else she'd get yet another lecture on how important it is to stay hydrated during the summer and yada yada yada. Though she was right. It was important to stay hydrated at all times. After all, water is pretty important to humans… which was why Connie always kept a bottle of water with her, which she grabbed from her backpack.

She strolled closer to the cornfield to have a closer look. She didn't know too much about corn, but wasn't it just in the beginning of the season? These looked like they were ready to be harvested. Connie knew Peridot had a green thumb (heh, stealth pun) but wasn't this taking it a bit too far? She took a sip of water while pondering whether she should ask Peridot about it. Whatever she and Lapis were doing to make the crops grow so fast, maybe it could be used to improve food production?

The sudden pain hit her like a truck. Her throat and mouth hurt like she had tried swallow a bunch of needles. Bile rose from her stomach, and she vomited out the contents of her stomach. Most of it fell on the ground, but some of it got on her clothes. The stomach acid and pieces of half-digested food were colored red with blood.

She dropped the bottle, and the water poured out of it. Small white crystals, no bigger than tacks floated in the clear liquid. A bunch of them were in the puke on the ground as well.

Connie must have swallowed a bunch of them. That explained the pain and bleeding. But how had they gotten inside the bottle without her noticing?

She took a step backward. She tried to shout for help. A meekly "herlp" and at least half a deciliter blood left her mouth.

"Did you say something, Connie?" she heard Steven's voice from the barn.

"Yechs!" Connie did her best to shout, to raise her voice, to let him know there was something wrong. She knew Steven could heal her easily… he resurrected Lars, after all, a few cuts was no biggie. Probably. Hopefully.

She didn't dare run into the barn herself, even though that would be much faster. Because something was happening to the water that had leaked from the bottle. It was… moving. Whatever had happened to make the crystals appear in her bottle was happening to the rest of it now. She was under attack again.

Connie knew she was in danger. She was already hurt, it would be safer to run for now. For the moment, she would be safer. But… if she ran now, they might be in even greater danger, all of them, if they couldn't figure this power out in time.

The water in the small puddle was forming something… a cylindrical thing, that narrowed in one end. Suddenly, the thing froze to ice, and Connie saw what it was. An icicle. A clear, white spike of frozen water. Connie reached for the large sword on her back.

Like a predator who saw its prey trying to run away, the spike launched itself, as if shot from a canon. A year of training, pure reflexes and a large slab of pink metal stopped Connie from getting impaled right through the heart, like a vampire from some old movie. The young sword fighter had caught the icicle mid-air and shattered it to pieces.

Okay, so this new power could turn water into spikes. Dangerous, but Connie figured that between herself, Steven, Lapis and Peridot, they should be able to handle it. The access to free water was limited here, so predicting the enemy's moves would be easy…

This time she screamed for real. A real, visceral scream, a scream only true pain could bring out from a person. A tearing pain, like a thousand fishhooks ripping her hand to pieces. She dropped the sword. There was no way she could hold on to it anymore. Her hands had been penetrated by surely a hundred needles. Needles red like blood.

Oh. So it didn't need free water.

"Connie!" Steven yelled behind her. Connie heard his running feet against the grass, and a wave of relief washed over her. Even though he was in a state of panic and fear right now, her magical friend always managed to calm her down. After all, that's what jam buds are fo…

Half a second's worth of distraction was all the enemy needed.

A new spike of ice shot out from the shadows of the cornfield and buried itself in Connie's stomach.

Connie said a very bad word. Her legs gave up, and she crashed to the ground. A large flower of blood grew on her shirt. The new shirt she had just gotten this week. Her mother was going to kill her.

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Author's Note

Welp, that turned violent real fast.

Anyone care to wager on which scene from JoJo I was referencing when Connie was being attacked? A little hint: It's from one of the parts that have yet to be animated. While you're on it, try guessing the new enemy stand! You might be able to figure out who… or rather WHAT the new stand user is as well if I left enough clues for it. Which I hope I did, otherwise it would be pretty worthless doing it.

Know what, one hint: the new stand is NOT named after Revolution 9 (The Beatles, The Beatles/"The White Album"), which was the plan until I found a song that fit much better.

I hope to be able to update next Tuesday or Wednesday, but we'll see how that goes.

Until then, take care of the planet Earth, and remember that anything can happen in space!