Chapter Three: Good Times, Bad Times

Steven lay on a reclining beach chair on the sand in front of the temple, trying to get a tan. In actual fact, he couldn't tan or even burn-his skin maintained the same tone as ever, but the sun felt good.

Led Zeppelin played on the radio. The singer crooned "When I read the letter you wrote me, it made me mad, mad, mad..." and far away, seagulls imitated him. The low tide washed back and forth a little ways from him.

Inside the temple, he knew there was a state of cold war. Turquoise and Tigereye had probably forgotten Ruby and Sapphire's fight, but now they had one of their own. Steven could barely understand that Turquoise was staying fused because Tigereye wouldn't unfuse first, and vice versa. Neither spoke to the other, neither enjoyed their new fusions: they both just fumed around the temple, glaring at each other when they passed. Relationships were still a fairly new thing to him, and he couldn't understand that the key word was unfaithfulness.

But still, it bothered him that all of the other Crystal Gems were tied up in a conflict he didn't understand. So despite the beautiful music and the seagulls and the sunlight, he was restless.
He uncovered his eyes and pulled up the news app on his smartphone.

The breaking headline caught his eye at once. "Mysterious Figure Rampages Through the Pentagon- U.S. on High Alert." And the figure in the pixelated security-camera footage was clearly a strange Pearl.

Steven ran inside to show one of the fusions.


At the barn, the heat was almost unbearable. It was the first really hot day of the year, and the sun beat down. Without the cool air coming off the sea, it felt like a furnace.

Peridot blushed when she saw the new fusions. To her artistic eye, they were two of the most beautiful creatures in the universe. She thought for a moment that she was in love with the blue one, but her logical side prevailed and convinced her it was mere infatuation. She steeled herself to talk to the ethereal creature.

Seconds passed and the silence became awkward. The barn door creaked behind her and she jumped.

"We don't have time for this," Turquoise said. "Someone's attacking the humans, an uncorrupted gem. We need you to put a trace program on the Galaxy Warp."

Peridot stammered something inaudible, and Steven, standing between the two fusions, buried his face in his hands.

Tigereye had an idea. "Peridot, it's time for you to show us that big brain of yours, huh, dude? We're counting on you."

"I won't let you down," Peridot said, much louder and in a much higher voice than she'd intended.

Watching through binoculars from the top of the grain silo, Lapis drew a heavy sigh. "You idiot," she thought. "Notice me."


The work went on all day. Peridot got a lot of money from Greg, on the order of a hundred thousand, bought three laptops and two digital projectors, a soldering iron and a mile of cable, and fetched a half-dozen flask robonoids from the storage rooms of the temple.

Getting it all out to the Galaxy Warp took five trips, and all the fusions could do to help was to carry things back and forth.

"So, the war, huh?" Tigereye said at last, while loading the second crate of robonoids onto the warp pad at the temple.

"What?" Turquoise said, sharply.

"We've got new perspectives, dude. Maybe we should talk about it?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Turquoise said. "I doubt you'd appreciate what Pearl thinks about the war, and you already know what Sapphire thinks."

"But what does Turquoise think?"

Steven scrambled onto the pad just before they warped.


Meanwhile, at the Galaxy Warp, Peridot had set up shop next to the master homeworld warp pad. She'd opened access panels on the pad that had been invisible when closed, taken apart one of the lap-tops and the projectors to build some sort of device with lenses on top, and soldered ersatz cables and linkages between the new device and the two remaining lap-tops.

Turquoise, Tigereye and Steven warped in carrying the robonoids. Peridot asked them to bring the crates over near the edge of the platform. They didn't ask why. Peridot picked out a robonoid and read its serial number.

"Nah, this one's a little bitchy."

She threw it over her shoulder, off the Galaxy Warp. Far below, it made a scar in the bright tropical waters.

Turqoise was aghast. Tigereye shrugged and walked off.

"This one's got a scratch." Off it went over her shoulder. She pulled another one.

"Eh, I never liked number 32045." This one she hurled with some force, and a seagull had to dodge it."

The fourth one she liked. She threw the other two over. "Phew, I thought I'd have to send you back for more."

Turquoise made a face like she'd just seen the President do the "chicken dance" on national television. Steven didn't understand what Turquoise was so upset about.

Peridot walked back to the central warp pad and started hitting the robonoid with a ball-peen hammer.

"What are you doing?" Turquoise shouted.

"I just need the central processor."

"And you couldn't have used the first one or one of the others for that?"

Peridot shrugged.

When she finally made a big enough crack in the robonoid, she split it open over her knee and pulled the processor out. She soldered a mess of wires to it. Some of them were attached to one of the lap-tops, and some of them were led over to the device she'd made from the projectors. She attached the processor it to a part deep inside the main warp pad.

At last the device was complete. She flicked a switch on it, and it projected a holographic globe of the Earth in the air. Peridot typed on both of the laptops at once, and a spiky ball appeared overlaid on the Earth like a shell.

"This represents the local bubble of warped space. See, if we track backwards for the last couple of years-in high speed, of course-we can see that I was the last person to warp in from O.O.G.-"

"-O.O.G?"

"Out of Galaxy. Don't interrupt. I was the last person to warp in from homeworld, as you can see from this massive spike that represents local warp-space becoming linked with homeworld's warp-space."

A hollow spike appeared in the shell over the South Pacific and shot off into space, out of the field of projection. Peridot reversed the recording and it began to play forward. After some time, she reduced the speed. Little arches began appearing between spikes on the ball, representing connections between two pads.

"But in the last few weeks, local warp space has been perturbed."

Tigereye turned around and raised her hand. "What does perturbed mea-"

Peridot kept talking. "But these are all comparatively minor warp pads. None of these are near major gem sites."

Steven raised his hand. "They must be near human places! That one's near our local nuclear power station. And then she warped over to... that's the one outside Capital City. That's when she attacked the Pentagon. Then... Norway, near the battlefield with all the swords?"

"Her last warp was early this morning," Peridot said. "To somewhere out on that little fiddly land-bridge thing... Central America?"


The place was a warehouse in Honduras. Some miners had dug up a buried warp-pad and left it in their storage bulding when the mine dried up, unable to break it or determine what it was.

There were bizarre, jury-rigged tools all over the place, pieces of disassembled computers, and in general, the place didn't look dissimilar to the mess Peridot had left when building her device. No Pearl was to be seen, and even Peridot couldn't tell what she'd been building.

Steven stepped outside, into the cool, crisp mountain air. Parental instinct forced Turquoise to follow, and they stood together in silence a moment. A thundercloud moved towards them up a long valley that formed a point in the rocks beneath them.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Steven said.

"I... I gave two lifetimes to this planet. I can barely see it, sometimes."

"Well, I think it's great, dude!" Tigereye shouted from the doorway. "It's all like, sanguine, man. Most planets are more melancholy or shit like that."

Turquoise's jaw dropped again. "How do you know words like that?"

"Amethyst did go to school, you know."

"When?" Turquoise asked.

"In the whatchacallit... the Renaissance. You think she just wandered around talking to rocks for a thousand years?"

There was an awkward silence.

Tigereye deflated. "You've both been fused with her, dude."

More awkward silence.

"Oh, so you just had your mind on smashing stuff when you were fused with her. Typical."

Tigereye went back inside.

"What did you mean you couldn't see it?" Steven asked.

"Like I said... I've walked this world for a combined total of twelve thousand years. Pearl was here once-not right here, but probably within a hundred miles of here. This was before the war, of course. Her mistress-" She stopped cold, caught on the word.

"You don't have to talk about it."

Turquoise stood staring out into the distance. A few moments later, it was raining, a cool but not cold rain, exactly the temperature of the air. The drops blew right into her face, and as she looked up with closed eyes the rain pooled in her eye sockets and ran down.

Inside, Tigereye was sitting on top of an old crate, looking glum.

"Listen," Steven said. "I care about all of your pasts. And she does too. She just... has some hang-ups right now."

"They see us as the young and reckless ones, Steven. We're just the ones who'll always play sidekick, be the ids to their super-egos..."

"I don't know what that means, but-"

"Come quickly!" Turquoise shouted from outside.

They ran back outside. In space, bright enough to see through the atmosphere and the thinning rain at one edge of the sky, was a gigantic hologram of a Pearl with dark grey coloring and long, pulled-back hair.

A distorted, deafening voice like thunder spoke, first in Chinese, at some length, then in Spanish and finally in English.

"People of Former Colony 45619-C, your attention please. You have been harboring dangerous rebels against the Great Diamond Authority. You will turn the Crystal Gems over or I will drop a massive thermonuclear bomb on your most populous site, err... 'Tokyo.' When you have apprehended them, I will know and I will be there to take possession."

She repeated the message, and then began in what Turquoise recognized as Hindi.

"Well, that's us screwed," Peridot said. Tigereye walked to the warp pad and left them there.

The rain came quicker and harder now, and blocked out the sky and the hostile gem completely. Real thunder mingled with the sound of her voice, until there was no difference.