A/N: Hello readers! It was really great to see you guys sharing your thoughts in the comments last chapter! I wanted to take a moment to address a few things that were brought up by multiple people:

First of all, it was pointed out to me that Lapis isn't an "official" Crystal Gem, not the way that Peridot is. However, she's definitely one of their allies, and the mission in Song Seekers is a big one that the Gems would need to call on all of their allies for. Lapis is barely in this story anyway, so don't worry too much about her.

Some of you also wanted to know about Jasper and Bismuth. They will most certainly be addressed (particularly Jasper, for obvious reasons) but I can neither confirm nor deny that either of them will be appearing here.

Finally, I do plan to follow the canon as closely as I can, given that this is an AU - as more Season 4 episodes air, I'll more than likely wind up incorporating elements from those, but nothing that happens in Season 4 is considered "canon" to Song Seekers. Also, I love seeing everybody's ideas and headcanons! I do have a more or less definite plot for this story, but I'm always open to suggestions, so feel free to keep sharing; I can't guarantee that I'll end up using anything, but your comments are always considered and always appreciated!

Two hours later, Centi's arm had recovered, and it was now holding a sabre in a tight, anxious grip. The weapon felt foreign in her hand; it was like when Steven first brought her art materials, and crayons and pencils and paintbrushes all felt clunky and awkward, except that art materials didn't have the potential to run somebody through.

The doubt on her face was starkly contrasted by Steven's eager encouragement and Pearl's confidence as they stood in front of her, side by side…and next to Pearl was another figure, a translucent red-eyed duplicate of her. 'Holo-Pearl' also held a sabre, and every so often the doppleganger would flicker and bellow, "DO YOU WISH TO ENGAGE IN COMBAT?" The three of them – er, three and a half of them? – had gathered in a sky-high ruin that was apparently the preferred place of training for the Crystal Gems.

"So if I defeat this hologram, I receive one 'Pearl Point'?" asked Centi dubiously.

"Yes," Pearl confirmed. "Normally I'd have you compete against Steven, but today is all about figuring out what your strengths are and what kind of weapons you're comfortable with, so we'll just stick to exploration for now. If you can beat Holo-Pearl, you'll get a Pearl Point, and three Pearl Points can be redeemed for valuable prizes!" She patted her fanny pack proprietorially.

Centi frowned, lowering her sabre for a moment. "But what if it defeats me?"

"There's only a very slight chance that she can inflict serious damage," answered Pearl in what was probably intended to be a reassuring tone of voice. "And even corrupted gems can regenerate, can't they?"

"Well, yes, but…!" She hadn't had to regenerate since Steven healed her – what if retreating into her gem erased all the months of progress?!

"I'm sure it won't come to that," Steven cut in quickly. "You can do this, Centi! Even if you don't have your own weapon right now, we have lots of stuff for you to use! It's just a matter of figuring out what your strengths are!"

"But I don't have any strengths right now!" she blurted out.

Pearl tilted her head slightly. "Don't be ridiculous. Everyone has their own strengths. Now, let's commence, shall we?"

"DO YOU WISH TO ENGAGE IN COMBAT?" blared Holo-Pearl.

"I suppose so," sighed Centi. She adjusted her grip on the sabre and shifted into her best approximation of a sword-fighting stance.

Pearl pressed her lips together, and she seemed about to issue a correction, but her hologram lunged forward before she had a chance. Centi flinched when she saw her opponent's blade thrusting towards her and flailed with the sabre, just barely managing to dodge. Even as she stumbled aside, Holo-Pearl bounded forward with the grace of a dancer, leaving Centi to defend herself with a clumsy two-handed block.

"Concentrate!" shouted Pearl. "Find a proper stance!"

Concentrate? Yeah, right, fat chance of that happening. Centi was too busy trying to avoid the fast-paced sword strikes to even think about countering them. Her feet fumbled backwards, and when she dared to glance over her shoulder and see where she was headed, Holo-Pearl swept her legs out from under her. With a short cry, she slammed hard against the ground, and Holo-Pearl's sabre came plunging down at her…

…and just barely prodded her in the chest.

"CHALLENGER DEFEATED," boomed Holo-Pearl.

Slowly, Centi pushed herself up, her legs still tangled beneath her. Pearl and Steven were looking at her, none too reassured by her lack of skill.

At last, Pearl tented her fingers. "Well!" she proclaimed. "Maybe you're not a swordfighter, but we've got plenty more weapons to try where that came from!"

Centi didn't say anything as she pushed away Holo-Pearl's sabre and rose to her feet, but all she could think was, Oh, good. Plenty more ways for me to lose.

…

Next up was a bow and arrow.

At first, it seemed to be going better than the previous "exploration." Steven and Pearl set up a series of makeshift targets, and when Centi drew the bowstring back, she didn't feel completely out of her element. Captain-class Nephrites were designed to have very specific enhanced vision skills, including the ability to estimate object trajectories (useful for both piloting a ship and steering it around obstacles) so her aim with the arrows wasn't completely inaccurate. She never quite hit the exact center of the target, but she did come close on multiple occasions.

Pearl suddenly became a lot more optimistic about her progress. "Very nice!" she declared. "Now, let's see you put that bow to use in a battle!"

And of course, everything went rapidly downhill from there. The second that Holo-Pearl took the battlefield again, every shred of confidence that Centi had been cautiously building up was scattered into oblivion. She had to try to hit a moving target, and block incoming attacks, and dodge…and when she had to do so much at once, it was like her brain short-circuited, throwing out everything that it should have known about distance and velocity in favor of sheer self-preservation.

Ten long, painful minutes later, Holo-Pearl cornered her and knocked the bow out of her hands before pushing her onto a pile of arrows that had spilled from her quiver. "CHALLENGER DEFEATED!"

Pearl placed her fingers against her mouth, as if that would hide her disappointed frown. "Maybe…maybe the weapons are just distracting you. How are you at hand-to-hand combat, Centi?"

Very mediocre, as it turned out. Even when Pearl recalled her hologram's weapon, Centi still didn't win a single match against her artificial opponent, ending up pinned and kicked and backed into walls over and over again. The only thing that she could ever do to prolong a fight was simply to heel turn and run away, and even then, she was always caught in the end. The blackboard where her score was tallied remained completely vacant of Pearl Points.

Over on the sidelines, Pearl watched the proceedings with an expression of increasing dismay. She didn't need to say anything in order to communicate that she'd expected more from a soldier in the Gem War. "There must be something we can do with you," she muttered furtively.

Steven tugged on Pearl's sash lightly. "Hey, Centi is pretty fast! Maybe we should do some kind of speed training!"

Pearl brightened. "You're right, she does have pretty good speed! So next up, we'll have a test of agility!"

The test turned out to involve Holo-Pearl stationed at one end of the ruins while Centi started moving forward from the opposite side. Holo-Pearl wouldn't move, but it would fire off a series of laser bursts from the tip of its spear, which Centi had to avoid as she ran ahead. If she could reach and tag Holo-Pearl without being struck, she'd win her first Pearl Point of the day.

In theory, this sounded simpler than the previous challenges. She didn't have to keep track of where her enemy was or counterattack in any way, she just had to run forward and dodge. Yet even as she began the test, weaving to and fro around long-range laser blasts, she found that she was having trouble handling it. The bright lights dazzled her eye; the crackling and whooshing sounds battered at her ears. She kept her head down when she should have been watching for projectiles, and a few barely rushed passed her, leaving trails of cool sparks at the edges of her hair and jumpsuit (thankfully, these were only safety lasers, incapable of hurting her – but she scarcely could have felt more intimidated if she'd been in the midst of a real battle).

Things ended decidedly not in her favor when one of her legs decided to pick a fantastically bad time to revert, transforming into a slender stick of chitin and awkward joints that didn't work well with the rest of her body. She tripped almost immediately and went sprawling facedown on the ground. Laser blasts ruffled her hair as they skimmed over the top of her head.

"Time out!" called Pearl, dashing forward to shut down her hologram.

Centi sighed, resting her chin on the smooth-worn stone below her. She wasn't hurt, and she probably could have figured out how to walk on her reverted leg with a bit of trial and error, but she simply didn't see the point in getting up. Even without any kind of physical hindrance, she would have done poorly, just like she had all day. And what made it worse was the knowledge that Steven, who'd had such high hopes for her, had been right there watching her fail.

Moments later, he approached her, though all she could see of him from her current vantage point was his sandals. "Are you okay, Centi?" he asked worriedly.

"I am fine." She sighed again, folding her arms beneath her.

"Are you sure? Can you stand, or…?"

"Probably. But…not right now." She rolled over onto her back, which was a little more comfortable, and yielded a slightly better view. "Sometimes I like to lay on the ground. It helps me feel more relaxed."

"Can I join you, then?"

She gestured noncommittally, and he spread out beside her, following her gaze as she watched the pale sky.

"So you had some trouble with training," he spoke up hesitantly after a pause.

"That's an understatement," Centi grumbled.

"If you don't mind me asking, what was going on? Do you think it's just because you're corrupted?"

"Yes…and no." Her pupil flitted down to her mismatched leg for a moment. Certainly her tendency towards sensory overload hadn't helped her at all today, but that wasn't the only reason why she hadn't proven to be a very good warrior so far… "I was never meant to be a fighter."

Steven propped himself up on his elbows, eyes widening. "You weren't? But you said you were a soldier in the Gem War!"

"I said I was a soldier. I never said I was any good at it." She brushed her hair away from her eye before turning to him. "Nephrites are designed to be pilots. We can fly ships, we're good with engines, we can navigate by the stars and have nice spacial coordination. When the Gem War started, Homeworld needed everyone on Earth to fight if they possibly could, so of course me and my crew joined up like good little Homeworld gems. But we mostly just used our ships, whenever we could, at least. Homeworld knew that we wouldn't do very well as foot soldiers."

"Don't you have a weapon, though?"

"It's just a grappling hook," Centi admitted. "Good for climbing around on the outside of ships. Sometimes I used it for self-defense, but calling it a weapon is going a little far."

Steven pursed his lips, and she could see him straining, struggling to come up with something that she could do. "But you must have other powers…"

"Yes. But I can't use them. They all get messed up, one way or another, by…" She waved vaguely at her reverted leg. "So…now you know just how useless I really am."

"Aww, don't say that!" He reached out and placed his hand on her arm. "Nobody is ever useless. So maybe you're not the best fighter ever, so what? There's lots of other things that you're good at!"

"Like what?" asked Centi doubtfully.

"You're a good artist," he replied. "And – "

"Being a good artist isn't going to win any wars. Or find any songs."

"If you really want to be a better fighter, you just have to practice, that's all! Most people aren't good at something the first time they ever try it!"

"I'm just not sure if it will make a difference." She folded her hands on her stomach despondently. "I've been corrupted for so long, I barely even remember how to actually fight. All I know how to do now is just survive."

"Surviving's not bad," he assured her. "It's a start, anyway."

Centi shrugged, not knowing how to explain that she was tired of living on survival instincts, of living her life like an animal…tired of her corruption leaving her with no other option.

Steven removed his hand from her arm. "So, just to clarify, you don't think that you'd work well with any kind of weapon?"

The corner of her mouth twitched. "Not unless you've got a spaceship for me to use."

Suddenly, Steven's head shot up, and she looked over at him in surprise. His eyes had become huge and shiny as he stared into her face.

"We do," he almost whispered in his enthrallment. "We do have a spaceship!"

She sat up quickly, her bad leg scrabbling at the ground beneath her. "Wait, really?!"

"Yes!" He nodded ecstatically. "It's a Homeworld ship that we got from some Rubies! You remember when I told you about that?!"

"More or less," she responded. "But you never told me that – "

He wasn't listening anymore. "Peeeaaaarl!" he cried, scampering to his feet and nearly tripping in his haste to reach his guardian. "Pearl, Pearl, Peeeaaaarl!"

Centi kept her eye fixed on him, rubbing at her malformed leg while he revealed this new revelation to Pearl. None of his actual words carried, but the overjoyed tone in which they were spoken certainly did. Pearl listened to him thoughtfully for several long moments, before finally taking his hand and leading him back towards Centi.

"I'd nearly forgotten that you were a pilot, Centi," she admitted. "That's certainly going to come in handy if our search for this song takes us off of this planet."

Hope stirred in Centi's chest. She hadn't flown in much too long, yet she was certain that she hadn't completely forgotten the one thing that she was made to do – and if she could still fly, then perhaps she wouldn't be entirely useless to the Crystal Gems after all.

"However!" added Pearl. "A spaceship isn't really the kind of weapon that you can bring onto a battlefield with you. I think that we ought to keep practicing with more traditional weapons, just in case something happens and you end up in a tight spot."

Well, there went her relief at not being made to embarrass herself anymore. "Okay," Centi conceded wearily.

"We'll help you get it right," Pearl promised. "I think we were on to something with that bow and arrow. And maybe I can design an easier Holo-Pearl training program for you, just to start off with, you understand…"

And as she began to describe the new combat regimen that she would create, more walking herself through it than actually addressing anyone else, Centi nodded along and didn't even attempt to follow the thread of the conversation. The Crystal Gems had a spaceship, which meant that there might be hope for her after all. But she suspected that as long as she was corrupted, trying to make her into a warrior would be a lost cause.

At last, Steven helped her hop to her mismatched feet, and Pearl headed over to the blackboard. Centi presumed that it was just to start putting it away, but instead, the taller gem placed a single sticker beside where she'd written Centi's name.

"Yay!" cheered Steven. "You got a Pearl Point after all!"

Centi blinked. "But…I didn't beat any of the challenges! I didn't even come close!"

"Maybe not," said Pearl, "but you did display one of the Three P's – perseverance. I can tell that you're not enjoying yourself, but not once have you given up. And that's something to be admired!"

Steven grinned and nodded, and Centi smiled thinly, internally certain that this was less of a Pearl Point and more of a Pity Point. Surely everyone knew that she wasn't really persevering, not in the slightest. It was just that after all this time, after being created as one of Homeworld's little pawns, she couldn't really do much more than follow the orders of her superiors and hope beyond hope that she didn't disappoint them.