Back to the Beginning, and Beyond (lapidot)

Into the Storm

"Let's hope this thing holds!"  Jasper's words ricocheted their way to my ears as the gem fighter sailed past us and out towards the stars.  We all held our breath as we watched it turn in a gigantic arc and began its return, not to us but to Homeworld.  Garnet was turning her head from side to side like she was trying to figure something out.  "Well, what was it doing?  Isn't it going to shoot at us or something?  What's going on?"  were her words as the three fusions, Jasper, Lapis, and I waited and listened for something to happen.  "Five seconds to booster rocket throttle!"  Opal shouted.  At that precise moment however, something slammed into the side of the craft, sending us into an uncontrollable spiral.  My thoughts were racing with equations... 'the drag coefficient of the atmosphere, the increased frictional torque due to the spiral, the outer metal might not hold...'  All of that wouldn't 'have been a problem, except for when the red emergency light went off, and the video feed from outside the ship.  

We stared in horror as we watched thousands of tiny gem-mite-things eating through the outer metal and starting on the inner crystal shell, making alarming progress.  Opal let out a shriek.  "Aaaahhhh!  They're eating through the hull!  Why didn't we think of that!?  We should have thought of that!"  Then she slapped herself with one of her four hands.  "Get a hold of yourself!"  Jasper looked away from her statistics feed.  "Listen everygem!  The mites just ate through our landing flight gear so there's no point in using the booster rocket!  They outsmarted us this time, but we can still land!  Stevonnie, make a bubble around all of us, then push it outward radially!  It'll destroy the ship but it'll get us away from the mites as well!  Once we do that we'll be in free fall, but we can use gravity to our advantage!  Opal, once we're in the bubble, start making hologram ramps outside the bubble so we redirect our motion horizontally!  Lapis, you need to make the biggest wings you've ever made on the outside of the bubble and slow our fall down as much as you can!  Garnet, if we make it as far as the ground we'll be traveling at one ten thousandth the speed of light, so you need to help me with your powerful limbs to bring us to a stop without popping the bubble!"  Everyone nodded and I stood there staring.  "What should I do!?" I asked her.  "Peridot, you can analyze our descent path and tell us if we need to make any adjustments in our fall so we don't kill ourselves!"  I nodded as well.  Even in the thick of battle it felt horrible to be useless, as usual.

Everything seemed tense for a moment after my head stopped moving up and down, then Jasper yelled, "Ok Stevonnie, go!"  Being both Steven and Connie, Stevonnie had the powers of Steven's bubble and shield and healing spit, as well as Connie's katana.  She held her arms out at ninety degrees and concentrated, until a rose-colored bubble sprang into existence around our group.  Her hands then began to squeeze as hard as they could, and the bubble started expanding outward from the center, pushing against the ship walls just as the first few crystal mites broke into the interior of the control bridge.  Seeing this, Stevonnie clenched her eyes shut in concentration as she fought the walls of the spiraling piece of beautiful gem technology that would never reach its full potential.  Thinking about the ship's design, I realized that I could be of some use after all.  "Stevonnie, if you expand and contract the bubble with a frequency of two bursts per second, it'll match the average fundamental frequency of the whole ship and cause it to break easier!"  "Thanks Peridot!"  was her reply as she began doing what I had suggested.  After several seconds of doing this I could tell from the pitch of the echo that it was working, and finally the crystal walls gave way to the blackness of space as Stevonnie's bubble expanded further very rapidly.

I looked behind the plummeting gem sphere and saw the mites flailing around with nothing to grab on to.  Good riddance.  I turned back around to see a gigantic projection ramp forming out in front of us and Lapis pressing her back to the edge of the bubble, her wings appearing on the outside as we continued to fall.  We hit the ramp at an angle and bounced a little ways before landing and sticking on the downward-facing inclined surface.  At that moment I immediately started doing calculations on my finger pad to make sure we were still on a course for maybe not dying.  Up until that point we had been in free fall so it had seemed weightless, but now that the ramp was redirecting our motion, gravity inched its way back into effect on us, pulling us down to the bottom of the now rolling sphere Stevonnie was maintaining.  Everything seemed fine, with Opal's disintegrating and reforming ramp and Lapis's wings decelerating our fall, until several more green gem fighters arced through the sky and began firing glowing pulses of energy at us.  They seemed to have locked their target fairly quickly as more and more pulses started hitting our only defense.  It probably would have broken if Stevonnie hadn't quickly turned it into a full shield bubble, another trick Steven had learned while fighting together with Connie.  

Garnet raised her voice over the noise from the outside blasts.  "Stevonnie, we won't be able to see when we're close to the ground if you keep using the shield as a bubble!"  "I don't have a choice, they'll break through if I don't!"  Jasper craned her head down slightly.  "Then how will we know when to put on the brakes?"  I had the answer for that one.  "If Opal keeps up the current exponentially decaying curvature of her ramp, my calculations will be able to tell us when we'll be at ground level, so just wait tight!"   Both Garner and Jasper looked at Opal as if to ask if she understood what I'd said, and she nodded in a grim reply.  Everyone got tense as they alternated between looking at Opal concentrating on maintaining the construction of the ramp, Lapis railing her wings against the rushing air as hard as she could, and my hand computer showing the time until we were parallel with the ground.  My blue angel, using her natural powers to help save humanity and its legacy.  Maybe one day I could aspire to be as magnificent as her.  

The time dwindled...it ran out.  "We should be level now; put on the brakes!"  I yelled even as Jasper and Garnet jumped through the hole Stevonnie had made in the shield bubble.  With a gasp, Lapis ended her stationary flight and collapsed into a tired heap across the bubble floor.  At that precise moment, the two gems on the outside started to bring the speeding rose-colored bullet to a halt, and everyone flew forward as the bubble started slowing down and we all continued moving forward.  This would have been fine if all us had been prepared for the change in motion, which almost all of us were.  Almost all of us.  A moment ago time seemed to be slipping away, but now it slowed to a crawl as I threw my arm out to try and catch the one gem I cared about the most, but I was too slow.  I had calculated every instant down to the nanosecond, and I was too slow to catch the blue gem as she sailed through the air, unable to summon the energy to withstand the impact.  Her form twisted through the air, and a sickening crack filled my ears as Lapis hit the front of the moving bubble, back first.  Her eyes went wide, and she let out one infinitely startled cry.  Her elegant form vanished in a puff of white clouds, and her gem fell as I dove and caught it in the web I had formed with my fingers.

The last few things I remembered after that terrible moment were the tears that welled up in my projected eyes as I heard Garnet's voice telling us to brace for impact, the shield bubble exploding apart in fiery rose shards, sailing through the air holding the almost shattered blue gem that held the one I would not let go of to my chest, and landing hard on the muddy surface of Homeworld, being slowed down by the soil until a crystal spire brought my momentum to zero.  I was separated from the rest of the Crystal Gems and the only one capable of healing powers, clutching my broken blue angel after her last flight, alone.  The storm clouds began to gather in my mind.