A number of things happened while Jasper waited for the scouts to return. Some of the gems created a game of kicking a rock around, and rules were made at need. Eventually this turned into a big affair involving two teams trying to kick the rock into one of the holes on the other side. Another game was tussling, which usually turned into piling up on Jasper whenever she got involved and seeing how many of them she could throw off of her. Someone discovered shapeshifting one night and everyone was trying it out by morning. The tiger's eyes returned to report that they'd measured the perimeter at twenty-two thousand of the jasper's paces. Several more gems emerged, and all that remained were a jasper and a couple of carnelians still incubating. The skinny jasper and the tall citrine started tracking the stars and how the moon changed each night, and they got one of the carnelians so invested that they'd taken to naming her Skywatcher. More often than naught, the green creature retreated into her alcove when she wasn't watching new gems emerge. No one seemed particularly inclined to do anything with the green one, which was just as well.
It was during one early morning that the skinny jasper hollered at her from atop the red cliffs. Something about one of the scouts returning. The pale jasper returned with a story of a great cliff to the west where a river carved out a near-perfect circle in the cliffs, and with her she brought samples of plants that grew in the riverbanks. Some of the samples were fragrant, others carried little squishy things that released sticky liquid upon squeezing, and others still dropped hard little bits when nudged. The tiny jasper took more interest in these than the rest, and the pale jasper gave her one of the multicolored plants in her hair after much cajoling.
The smallest carnelian came back from her venture to the south a few days later, and all she had to report about was a vast expanse of badlands, dried-out canyons, and mesas. The carnelian returned when she got bored, and along the way discovered that she could curl up in a ball and rush along for short periods of time. After her came the citrine with her gem in her neck, who reported of much the same in the east.
The one-armed jasper and the belly-set carnelian didn't return for fourteen nights. When they did, the moon was waxing and they brought with them a mewling creature wrapped up in some thin, soft material. It looked like the smallest of the gems, if one squinted, except it had parts that they had to shapeshift to emulate and was much smaller than even the tiny jasper. It had brown skin like the tiger's eyes, but without the yellowish banding, and it was warm to the touch. But it seemed helpless, for it flailed its limbs around in its coverings and did not seem capable of walking on its own. It couldn't even hold its own head up. The belly-set carnelian demonstrated a little trick, where she pressed a finger to its mouth and it sucked on the tip for a few desperate moments before crying again. Jasper had misgivings about the thing and its helplessness outright bothered her, but she had no idea what to do about it.
As if summoned by the weak little cries, the green creature darted from her alcove with more energy than she'd ever shown before. She had barely one good look before she started screeching at them. The crest of feathers rose in what Jasper could only guess was alarm, and she butted hard into Jasper's thigh. Which didn't tell Jasper much, but it was as good an excuse as any to get rid of the bundle.
"Take it back where you found it," she said in that tone she'd started cultivating, the one that brooked no argument. It was a work in progress.
"But there are… I don't know, not-gems? They look like us, but also like this thing." The belly-set carnelian gestured absently at the squirming brown creature. "They'll have noticed it's gone by now."
Jasper grunted and bit down the urge to berate the two scouts for their short-sightedness. This creature was weak and looked to be growing weaker by the minute, and she suspected that she didn't have time to properly rip into them. Which meant that she would have to take it, herself. "Then tell me where you found it and I'll handle it."
The one-armed jasper looked a little more contrite than her companion, and she rubbed absently at the place where her left shoulder should be. "Yeah. Um. Sorry. The… not-gems are up north, at the river banks."
The carnelian glanced at the one-armed jasper and seemed to take her cues from her, for guilt twisted uncomfortably on her face. "We'll take you."
It was something, and she would have ordered one of them to go with her had the carnelian not volunteered, anyway. Jasper turned to scan the audience of nervous gems for one of the watchers. Not that the skinny jasper was hard to miss; she'd leaned over the canyon wall to watch. "Skinny! You're in charge until I get back."
The skinny jasper waved her off and Jasper took the bundle carefully from the carnelian's arms. Its tiny face scrunched up in discomfort from the handling. Jasper arranged it in her arms until it was more comfortable, and started walking north at a brisk pace. The two scouts had to trot to keep up with her. Frankly, they deserved the extra work.
She followed the river bed, her stride covering several feet of sun-baked mud and sand at a time with ease. The canyon opened up to a wide clearing where the river must have pooled, and the cliffs had eased into gentler slopes on either side of her. For four miles had the dried-out river bed given her an easy path, but then they came to a rough upthrust of unyielding sandstone divided by a fissure in the rock too narrow and uneven for her to pass through. It looked like it dipped downwards, too, which meant climbing into the unknown.
"The going gets rougher here on out. If you don't go through and walk over instead, you'll have to detour on both sides to avoid the side-canyons. If you go through, you'll have to be shapeshifting and squeezing through for about… six hundred paces?" The carnelian frowned as she tried to recall the specifics of her earlier trek. "It was six hundred thirty something for me, but I just walked over, not through. She did the walk-through."
The one-armed jasper rubbed at the gem embedded in her left-side ribs self-consciously. "It's really interesting going through, but you'd have to be my size to manage it. Even then, there's a lot of climbing involved. And then there's an even tighter canyon five hundred paces north."
That made up Jasper's mind for her. She hadn't tried shapeshifting yet, and she wasn't interested in banging this bundle of not-gem against the rocks in the attempt. "Long way, then. Which side?"
"Right side is easier going, but you have to detour about a thousand fifty of my paces from the canyon rim to avoid climbing through the side-canyon," the carnelian explained, and illustrated the steepness of the side-canyon with her hands. "The left side is rougher. The side-canyons aren't as steep and there are more of them."
Right it was, because a detour sounded like less of a hassle than risking this bundle with multiple climbs. Jasper turned to pick her way among the rippled and scalloped red sandstone that threatened to trip her up if she didn't pay attention, and the scouts followed behind her.
The further they went with the canyon rim as a guide, the better Jasper understood why these two scouts had taken so long on their expedition. The river bed had branched out into side canyons, insets, and alcoves even before they got to the too-narrow slot of a canyon, and it didn't take much to guess that they had explored everything along the way. Scrubby little plants eked out an existence in the dun and red dust above the canyon, and they sheltered little animals that could almost distract Jasper if she didn't have this not-gem to return. A few horned, four-legged animals nibbled at the plants and paid the passing gems little mind, and Jasper ignored them in turn. The going was slower over the rough sandstone outcrops and the few detours they had to take, but she was still making progress.
In time, the wind brought with it new smells/tastes that took her a moment to match up with whatever knowledge was stored in her gem. Wet stone and earth, warmed by the sun. Smoke and vegetation. A myriad of other smells that didn't fall into predefined parameters. She chose to follow the wind and leave the guidance of the canyon rim, because the smoke didn't smell quite right and there was a hill further north from which she could use to view the landscape. The one-armed jasper, upon noticing her walking away from them, ran to catch up with her and fall in to a respectable distance near her side.
"We found the not-gem this way, where the little river drains into the bigger one."
"Yeah, well, there's a hill I'm going to check things out from," Jasper countered, her eyes more on where she was going than anything else. The footing was getting to be tricky the further along they went. "There's smoke's coming from further north. Tastes weird. Was there fire where you took this thing from?"
The one-armed jasper huffed in irritation. Jasper could hear the carnelian trot up to catch up with them, but the carnelian said nothing. "Yes, but—"
"If we find nothing where the smoke is coming from, we'll look where you found it." Jasper left it at that and continued on her way up the gentle slope of the hill.
The little scrubby plants got more frequent the closer they got to the river, and soon enough she could see brilliant blue sky reflecting in the river water and the vibrant green of plant life that clung insistently around it. At the top of the hill she could see further still, and across from the river were rough-hewn cliffs of dun, rusty red, and chalky white. Beyond those cliffs were buttes and mesas jutting against the sky as if in challenge. Far in the distance, pale and faded against the horizon, were mountains. There was an ancient, harsh beauty to the landscape that she hadn't had the time to truly appreciate until now.
"There they are! The not-gems moved!" The carnelian chirped suddenly, pointing at cluster of brush shelters next to the river shore and the brown not-gems moving around them. The carnelian and one-armed jasper made their way over the edge of the cliff, and Jasper retraced her steps down the gentle slope. It might have taken longer to walk around to where the scouts were waiting, but the bundle in her arms had squirmed to remind her of its presence and she wasn't going to do anything different in her treatment of it now.
A not-gem stood at the outer edge of the camp and shouted something at them that she couldn't make out. She paused, confused, as it continued to say things to her. Then other not-gems emerged from their shelters and pointed at the bundle in her arms, and some of them wielded spears and darts and things her gem had no name for. None of the weapons looked particularly threatening, so she waited for them to calm down. Then, between one minute and the next, something seemed to change. She could make out the intent behind the words. Another minute and the words started to make sense to her. They were confused and saw the gems as strangers, and why did the gems take their… baby? Jasper glanced briefly at the bundle and tried to find the words to explain what happened.
"Our scouts took this without knowing what it is. We're new to this world. Sorry." The scouts muttered their own apologies as she held out the baby. One of the not-gems stepped forward to take the bundle from her, and on its face was relief tinged with confusion. It looked over the baby and lifted it to the mounds on its chest; the baby attached its mouth on one and began suckling. The other not-gems lowered their weapons.
"You are strange and do not look like any people we know," the not-gem said. "What do you mean, new?"
She wondered how long the not-gems had existed, but it was clear that they'd been around for longer than the gems. "We emerged from our holes in the time it took for the moon to go through a single cycle. We didn't exist before then."
This brought forth a smattering of perplexed murmurs from the not-gems, and another stepped forward. This one was hunchbacked and used a stick for support, and its hair different from the others of its kind in that it was white. "Did you come from the Third World?" Its voice was weak and had a rough quality that Jasper suspected wasn't natural like hers.
"We don't remember anything from before. We don't know anything," the carnelian offered with a lop-sided grin that had just a touch of self-effacement.
"And there was no one waiting for us but a green creature," the one-armed jasper added. "We just happened."
The white-haired not-gem extended its free hand, a gnarled and twisted thing that reminded Jasper of the scrubby plants, and opened it palm-up in a gesture she didn't understand. "Share our fire and we will teach you so that this doesn't happen again."
Jasper should have headed back, and she was sorely tempted. But at the same time, none of the gems knew a thing about their world and this was their best opportunity to learn something. Knowing something was better than nothing at all. So she agreed and let the white-haired one lead them to a fire contained by rings of stone and sand, and they sat around it as the not-gem explained the world.
They learned of the differences between not-gems—people—and their growing stages. A small person sat with the carnelian and was introduced as a child, a girl, and she showed the carnelian her collection of little animal-shaped figures made of twigs. The carnelian laughed and played with her, and the figures were used to name different kinds of animals. They learned of clothing and tools and their creation, and Jasper took an interest in the weapons because they might be useful. They learned of food and water and their preparations, and the carnelian and one-armed jasper were quick to experiment with eating and drinking. They learned that the people traveled with the seasons, and that it was early summer and the people harvested plant foods in this time. They learned that their canyon would be inundated with floodwaters come mid-to-late summer, the season of storms. And, after a day and night, Jasper learned how to hunt the antelope that resided among the rocks. She took to it naturally; even though the dart-thrower felt awkward and small in her hands, she appreciated how it magnified the penetrative force of a dart thrown from it. Then the people taught them how to tan its leather and use the antlers for making spear and dart points out of flint, and how to fashion bones into whistles and tools. The carnelian and one-armed jasper, who decided to accept the names Aster and Dandelion, took more easily to snare-building and trapping.
After four days and nights, Jasper decided that it was time to return. The elder gifted her with a dart-thrower made to her size and a short, simple leather cloak that barely covered her shoulders. Aster, who had taken to the children, was given a figure of a sheep and a flute. Dandelion, whose name was offered to her based on her wanderlust and the nature of dandelion seeds, received rope and a walking stick to aid her explorations. Now that Jasper knew the people and some of their ways, she recognized the gesture as a sign of goodwill and a proposal of a future relationship between the people and the gems and accepted them with newly-acquired grace.
It was morning when Jasper, Aster, and Dandelion returned to their canyon. The gems crowded eagerly around them, and Jasper let Aster and Dandelion tell their tale and sought out a little privacy after several days without. She ended up at the green one's alcove and sat with her back against the sandstone wall. It was a full thirty minutes before the green one came out to look at her with an expression she couldn't quite read. When she did nothing in response, the green one settled at her side.
"We took the baby back to his people," she began, though she never expected any real response from the green one. And male pronouns still felt so strange, but she was getting used to them. "Just in time. The people taught us things they thought would help us survive. They'll be leaving soon, but they'll be back at the river next year. It might be help to stay friendly with them. What do you think?"
The green one gave her a look that might have been approval and settled her chin on Jasper's knee. Jasper's hand settled on the green one's back and stroked down it in that way that the green one seemed to like. It did remind her of something, and she chuckled. "Ah, eheh. Aster, the carnelian scout, says you might be our mother and the people agreed. What do you think? We need something to call you."
The dark green eyes almost looked appraising, and then they closed. "'Mother' it is, then. You can correct us when you're ready."
Jasper didn't need a verbal answer. The answering chirp and the way Mother relaxed against her was enough.
Notes: Due to similarities between Beta Kindergarten in canon and Antelope Canyon in Arizona in real life, I'm basing Beta Kindergarten out of there. The river mentioned is the Colorado River, and for reference I used photos from before the Glen Canyon Dam turned part of it into Lake Powell. At this stage, the humans are of the archaic, pre-Basketmaker culture, though there is a nod to one of the Hopi origin myths. The feature the pale jasper ran across is Horseshoe Bend near Antelope Canyon, which is amazing and you really should look it up. The human material goods mentioned are artifacts found at several Archaic/pre-Basketmaker sites. Also, while the dandelions most of us are familiar are invasive species from Europe, North America does have several native species and Dandelion is named after the alpine Horned Dandelion indigenous to the Four Corners.