Garnet opened the door to the Big Donut and found Steven and Connie exactly where she thought she would.

"We're going with Ten to see Peridot. I want you to come with us."

"Really?" said Steven, standing up. "Is it okay to talk to Ten now?"

"She's doing better, but she has a lot of work left," Garnet admitted. "Still, she is okay to be around for a little while, unless something riles her up."

"That's good. I think I should talk to her again. Maybe if she and I get to know each other better, you'll feel more comfortable with letting me around her."

"And you'll feel more comfortable, too." Steven blushed. "It's okay, Steven. I can tell that you noticed too. Ten isn't well, but we'll try to make her better if we can. It's not something that we can do in a few days."

"I hope it's sooner rather than later. Come on, Connie, let's go see Peridot."

"Ooh! Can we use the warp pad? Those things are awesome!"

"Connie," began Garnet.

"She can come too, right?" said Steven quickly, giving Garnet the widest eyes he could manage.

Garnet looked back and forth between their two eager faces. A small smile spread across her lips. "Connie, can you buy some donuts for Amethyst before we go? She would appreciate them, I'm sure."

While Connie went for the donuts, Garnet shook her head. "Looks like Amethyst was right."

"Huh? About what?"

"Nothing. Let's get back home."

When the trio walked back into the beach house, they found themselves in the middle of an extended silence.

Ten sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the warp pad, simply waiting. Pearl sat on the couch below Steven's loft, her face turned away from the kitchen and displaying a slight frown. Amethyst stood in the kitchen, not eating like normal, but watching both Ten and Pearl as she leaned on the counter.

"Is everything alright in here?" Steven asked the room at large.

"Just waiting for Garnet," Amethyst said, though even with Garnet there, she still wasn't moving from the kitchen or looking anywhere but at the other two gems. Pearl did not deign to reply.

"Enough of this," Garnet commanded. "Everyone to the warp pad." Everyone in the room made their way over to the plinth. Amethyst took efforts to make sure she was behind Ten. Ten either didn't notice, or didn't care.

"Right, well," said Steven nervously. He grasped Connie's hand. "Take us to the barn."

The column of light erupted around them. The beach house vanished from view and, after a moment passing through the warp stream, they were out in the open country, just downhill from the barn. Connie managed to land on her feet, somewhat breathless and giggly from the excitement of the short journey. Steven pulled on her hand and the two of them ran up the hill.

"Did they all seem a little tense to you?" he asked Connie.

"What?" She looked back at the other gems making slow progress behind them. "Maybe? Sorry, I was thinking about warping since the Big Donut. I even forgot to introduce myself to Ten. Oh!" She noticed the bag of donuts in her hands. "I also forgot to give these to Amethyst."

"Jeez, you would have forgotten mom's sword if it wasn't strapped to your back." She looked at him with some embarrassment. "You forgot you had the sword, didn't you?"

"Maybe a little."

As they approached the barn, they saw Lapis Lazuli lounging in the grass, her blue dress splayed about her as she stared at the sky. She sat up as she heard them approach.

"Hey, Lapis!" Steven called excitedly.

"Oh," said Connie, slowing down. "Uh, hi Lapis."

Steven turned. "Oh, right, last time you met Lapis was when she stole the ocean, right?"

"I was thinking more about the part where she almost drowned me."

"Well, she's our friend now, right, Lapis?"

Lapis studied Connie. "I'm your friend, Steven. I don't really know her."

"Well, if you like Peridot, you'll LOVE Connie!"

Lapis looked at Steven, then at Connie, then lay back down in the grass. "If all of the Crystal Gems are here, then I'm sure you guys aren't here for me. Peridot is inside working on some loud, obnoxious project."

"Yeah, but we can hang out afterwards. You can get to know Connie and Ten."

"Ten?"

"Yeah, she's coming up the hill. You'll know her when you see her."

A loud, mechanical screech issued from the barn, causing Lapis to sit up in annoyance. "Ugh, it's been doing that on and off since yesterday. Peridots are supposed to be engineering geniuses, so why can't she fix it already?"

"If the noise bothers you, why don't you fly somewhere else?"

"I would, but I'm tired. I spent the last few days flying all around the Earth, seeing what it has to offer. Your planet is lovely, so I got a bit distracted and forgot to rest. I'm just holding up here for a few days before I set off again." The screech repeated itself, causing Lapis to wince. "Maybe I'll leave early and just take my chances. I might get tired and fall from the sky, but that's not so bad. I'll just land in the… ocean." She paused, frowning at nothing. "Maybe the sound isn't so bad." She lay back down and closed her eyes and didn't react when the sound came again.

"What is that sound?" said Connie. "It's really loud and really annoying."

"I'm not sure how Peridot suffers all that noise," said Pearl as the gems came up the hill. She looked down. "Hello, Lapis."

"Crystal Gems," Lapis said stiffly. She opened an eye, taking in the stranger in the group that stood a head taller than Garnet. Her other eye opened and she sat up. "Wait, I thought…" she looked over at Steven, then back at Ten, confusion on her face.

"Uh, excuse me?" said Ten.

"Sorry, for a second I thought you were the former leader of the Crystal Gems."

"Oh." Ten looked pleasantly surprised. "That's flattering, but no. I'm fairly new here on Earth."

Lapis stood up and rubbed her head. "I'm more tired than I thought. I should know she's not around anymore. I'm Lapis Lazuli." She offered her hand, which ten shook.

"I'm Rose Quartz, but I prefer to be called Ten."

"Ten? Oh, that's a pretty name," Lapis said in a strangely bubbly manner.

"Pretty? It's a number."

Lapis laughed nervously. "That's funny, I was thinking—" Lapis was interrupted by another shriek from the barn "—that you're probably here for Peridot, so I won't take any more of your time." Steven was certain she was going to say something else, but the interruption ruined the moment. Lapis watched them as they walked past, but she was especially focused on Ten. She looked disappointed.

Steven turned to find Connie was moving with the rest of the group, so he ran to catch up, leaving Lapis alone outside.

Inside the barn, standing against the side wall, was some sort of console. One of the panels on the side had been removed and Peridot's lower half was sticking out of it. She was tinkering with something inside and, as the party approached, the console let loose another one of its terrible grinding shrieks.

"Stupid fractured…" Peridot grumbled, her voice echoing inside the machine. "Stop going off! You're not supposed to go off yet."

"Peridot," Garnet called out to her.

Peridot shuffled out of the machine and took a look at the group. "So it was a Rose Quartz," was all she said, then popped back inside. "How long did it take you to find her? You were last here nearly a week ago. I thought you weren't going to bring her here at all, and after I offered to help facilitate communications. I would have thought you would be grateful enough to inform me that the mission was a success rather than making me sit here like a clod wondering if you had been shattered by some renegade Rose Quartz. You keep telling me I'm a Crystal Gem, then you just go off and do your own thing and don't think to inform me when your plans reached completion without any casualties. Just leave me here to worry, why don't you?" The sound of her tinkering on the machine ceased. "Are you still out there?"

"Yes," said Garnet. "Just waiting for you to finish."

"Well, I'm finished."

"Sorry to make you worry, Peridot," said Steven. "I would have come told you if I wasn't grounded. And also if I had remembered. Thanks for being worried though."

"Yes, well, it's just…" she searched for some excuse, then gave up and resumed work on her console. "Anyway, I assume you need something?"

"We need your knowledge of Homeworld to help settle an issue we're having," said Pearl.

"'Settle' nothing," said Amethyst angrily. "I still say it won't prove anything."

"Not this again," said Garnet.

"What would she have to gain from telling such a convoluted lie?" demanded Pearl.

"Uh, a lot of stuff, Pearl," said Amethyst. "She gained your trust, didn't she?"

Ten butted in. "If I was lying, wouldn't I come up with something you couldn't check? Give me some credit, shrimp."

"Who you callin' shrimp, killer?"

"You, shrimp."

"Enough!" Garnet put her hands between them and pushed them apart. "Let's just ask Peridot about the Emeralds and get this over with."

"Wait, what?" Peridot's voice echoed from inside the machine, followed shortly by a loud bang as she hit her head. She scrambled out of the console, staring wide-eyed at her now-confused guests. "Did you just say Emeralds? Did you see them? Are they actually here?"

"Actually here?" repeated Pearl.

"What's an Emerald?" asked Connie.

"I dunno," said Steven.

Peridot went to her console, staring at one of the monitors on it that looked like it had been pulled from an old portable television. "Then this thing actually is working? I thought it was busted."

"What is it, exactly?"

Peridot gave them all a smug smile and patted the machine. "After the Ruby ship arrived and then the Rose Quartz ship crashed shortly thereafter, I decided to invest some time in establishing an orbital monitoring station to avoid any future surprises. Using some frankly glaring flaws in the humans' security measures, I got this console hooked into the Earth's various global positioning systems, weather satellites, communications arrays, even a few of their primitive telescopes. It is an advance warning system with the sole purpose of informing us when unknown ships are in orbit." The machine proceeded to screech loudly at them and, now that they were so close, they could identify it as a recording of Peridot's voice screaming 'Alert!', though heavily garbled as it issued from what appeared to be an old gramophone with a mono speaker crammed inside. "And that's the warning it's supposed to give."

"Why is it so loud?" asked Steven, his hands on his ears.

"It's an advance warning system, Steven. If I didn't hear it, it wouldn't be much of an advance warning, would it?

"And what does this have to do with Emeralds?" asked Garnet.

"Because," Peridot explained patiently, like one speaks to a child, "I thought I had somehow programmed this machine incorrectly because it keeps going off due to an unusual and unlikely trigger. I mean, what are the chances that we are seeing not just one but two of the mere thirty Emerald ships in existence hovering on the edge of Earth's gravity well?"

"What?!" Ten ran forward, looking at the console. She couldn't make any sense of what she was seeing. "How can you tell? What is this? What am I looking at?"

"It's primitive, I know, but try not to break it," said Peridot, moving Ten's hands away from the console. "The humans call is 'ASCII.' It's just various symbols I'm using to represent objects. That frowny face is Earth, those squiggly marks are satellites and other human constructs, that circle with the open center—"

Ten grabbed Peridot by the hair and pulled her to within an inch of her face. "The ships! Where are the ships?!"

"Hey!" shouted Amethyst. "Don't go manhandling Peridot!"

"Here! Here!" said Peridot, hurriedly tapping some buttons. "It's a legend! It shows what each object represents! And here is the ship category. See? That's a Ruby ship!" She pointed to a tiny red 'R' that was hovering around Neptune.

Amethyst peaked over. "Are those idiots still over there?"

"And these," Peridot indicated two green 'E's "are Emerald ships."

"But what about all of these?" said Ten, releasing Peridot and pointing to a second monitor slathered with letters. "There must be hundreds of ships there!"

"Oh, t-that's just Gnome Citadel. It's a human game that I might have borrowed some ideas from."

"Don't you go bringing Citadels into this!" Ten roared, sending Peridot scurrying away.

"Great, so a couple of Emeralds followed you here?" said Amethyst.

"Oh, now you believe me." Amethyst grunted noncommittally and started picking her nose.

"That can't be," said Pearl. "According to Ten's story and some basic conversions, she would have last seen Emerald over a thousand years ago. Gems can be patient, but that's absurd."

"Not if your job is eliminating Rose Quartzes," said Garnet. "I wouldn't see much other use for an Emerald that can control them."

"That would be a reasonable assumption, yes," said Peridot, who had moved to put Garnet between her and Ten. "Was your Rose Quartz this angry? I feel like if she was you wouldn't have been so fond of her."

The console started blaring again, but this time it made a different sound. "What's it doing now?" Pearl shouted over the racket.

"Oh," said Peridot. "That would be the descent warning. That means at least one of the ships is breaching the atmosphere."

"They're coming down?!" Ten turned on the machine and gripped the edge, leaning in close to the monitor. "How fast are they coming?"

"Please be careful with my console. It's not very stable."

As if on cue, the console buckled and the monitors collapsed into the innards of the machine, bringing Ten down with them, and everything hit the ground with a loud crash, though not nearly as loud as the alarm, which abruptly shut off.

Ten lifted herself out of the rubble unscathed. "Where are they coming down?!" she shouted at Peridot.

Peridot sighed. "I'd tell you where if you didn't just destroy my monitoring station, you cloddish cabochon. Ugh, I exhausted most of my resources here already so it's gonna take me weeks to find enough parts to fix it again. The Emeralds will have touched down long before then." She didn't sound particularly concerned with the Emeralds.

"No!" Ten grabbed and yanked at her own hair, then fell to the floor and pulled herself into a fetal position. "I can't. I can't face her. I don't want to lose control again."

"Calm down, Ten," said Steven, moving forward a step. He had barely closed half the distance to Ten when she reached out and grabbed his shirt, hoisting him into the air.

"You've got to hide me!" Her eyes were wide and hysterical and brimming with tears. She rushed over to Garnet, shoving Steven into her arms. "You can't let them get me again! Who knows what they'll make me do! I don't want to do it! I won't—"

Garnet summoned her gauntlet and gave Ten a devastating backhand, knocking her to her hands and knees. Even Amethyst winced at the powerful blow. "I warned before we left that you were not to touch Steven," Garnet said as Ten looked up at her. "Are you calm now?"

"No! Now I'm just scared AND ANGRY!" Garnet hit her again, sending her face first to the floor. "Okay," she mumbled into the floorboards. "I'm calm now."

"Good," said Garnet. "Because if I have to hear one more person yelling today, I'm going to really lose my patience." She turned and gave a meaningful look at Pearl and Amethyst, both of whom suddenly found something interesting on the other side of the barn to look at.

Ten pushed herself off the floor and rubbed her face. "This isn't you losing your patience?"

"Try me and find out," said Garnet, dismissing her gauntlet. "You've already done about as much damage as you can today, so I advise you against pushing me any further." Ten had the grace to look ashamed. Garnet turned to Peridot. "It may be too late to do anything about the Emeralds, but we should still get the monitoring station up and running as soon as possible. If anyone else is coming behind them, I want to know." She turned to Amethyst and Pearl. "We're treating these Emeralds as hostile. I don't know if they have any plans for the Crystal Gems or the Earth, but if they work directly for the Diamonds, that means they are no friends of ours."

Finally, she turned to Steven and Connie. "I think you will need to sit this one out."

"Aw, what? They all get cool orders and I get shut down? Lame."

"Steven, it is likely that one of them can control Rose Quartzes. We have no idea what sort of affect that will have on you. What if Emerald can control you? What if she makes you fight against us?"

"I would never fight you guys."

"Steven…" she quickly told him about Ten's encounter with Emerald. "Even if you would never fight us, Emerald might be able to force you to do what she wants."

Steven was going to object again, but Connie's hand on his shoulder stopped him. "Steven," she whispered. "Just look at Ten. Look at how terrified she is, and she's a huge warrior."

Steven looked past Garnet and, while calmed down considerably, saw that Ten was still shivering and her eyes darted around, as if she expected the Emeralds to materialize in the barn at any moment. "Ten? Is all of that true?"

She slumped, dejected, but managed a nod.

"You could have told me, Ten."

"I wanted you to like me and, well… you wouldn't make friends with a terrible person, would you?"

"I'd probably try." Steven gave her a small, reassuring smile.

She returned the smile briefly, then it vanished and she looked at him with pleading eyes. "I didn't want to hurt them, Steven. I didn't. Please believe me."

Something shifted within Steven. His apprehension about Ten suddenly lessened, then vanished altogether, and he felt he was finally able to see the real Ten. This was the truth he had known deep down was being kept from him all along and now that he had it, he knew he could trust her and count her as a friend. "I believe you."

"Ha!" Pearl let loose an indelicate honk of a laugh and threw an arm around Amethyst. "That's three to two, Amethyst. Team Ten wins!"

"Ugh," groaned Amethyst, pushing Pearl off of her. "It's two-and-a-half to one-and-a-half at best." Garnet frowned at that, and then started laughing. Soon, Pearl, Amethyst, Steven, and Connie were laughing as well.

Ten turned to Peridot. "Why are they laughing? Did something funny happen?"

Peridot's whole body sagged. "They just do this. I've stopped asking why."