He Did It For Me: Steven's Legacy

Chapter 11: The Garden

"Lapis! Bismuth! Peridot!" An out-of-breath Connie shouted as she, Amethyst, Pearl, and Spinel, at last, met up with them. When the four of them ran up the hill, they passed by slowly dying plant life, and saw it spread.

"They've arrived as I said they would," Sapphire said as Ruby, who appeared visibly worried about the injector, guarded her, as she held her hand and watched after an equally concerned Pink Pearl.

"Connie! Pearl!" Peridot greeted and looked over to see with them, "Amethyst! Are you back to normal?"

"Who is Amethyst?" The purple quartz responded in a robotic tone.

"Oh, no. She's even worse." She waved her hands at her and looked away. "Get away from me. I can't stand to see you all vacant and bereft of personality."

"Yo, I'm just goofin', ya dip. I'm back, baby!"

The green Gem let out an exasperated sigh. "Too soon, Amethyst. Too soon."

"So, what's the damage?"

"Oh, well, you're all just in time for the end of the world!"

"What?!" Amethyst, Connie, and Pearl shouted.

"It's a little too soon to make that kind of claim." Bismuth said as she and Lapis walked over with a bubbled soil sample. "But this is no ordinary injector.

"And whatever it's leaking into to ground, it's toxic," Lapis added.

Peridot took the bubbled sample from Bismuth and put it into a microwave refitted into a new device. She says to herself, "Let's get a scan going to see what we're dealing with," and pressed a button. A few seconds went by, and all the information was uploaded to her tablet with a ding. "Just as I thought. Bio-poison. Pure and uncut. As of this moment, the ampoule has drained fifteen percent of its contents, meaning the poison is releasing at a destruction rate of five cubic meters per hour, giving us about.... forty... forty-one hours until the destruction of all organic life on Earth."

"All organic life?" Connie asked.

"Yeah, like all the animals, the plants, the insects. You know. People."

Spinel's words replayed in the young woman's mind, 'For all your strength, it ain't gonna serve you forty-eight hours from now. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.' "This is what she meant. Whatever Pink did to her, to get even, it wouldn't be enough to just to take away her friends and family... but everything else she valued. Bismuth, Lapis, can't you lift that thing? Peridot, what about your metal powers?"

"You think we didn't try that?" Lapis replied.

"Disturbing the injector accelerated the poison's rate of release," Peridot stated. "Also, it might explode. We have to find a way to move it without that happening, or at the very least, neutralize the poison, before it's too late."

"Then, we gotta change Spinel back," Connie stated. "She activated this thing. So, she must know how to deactivate it."

"As cute and harmless the spinel is now if she's returned to how she was before, I foresee her killing us all." Sapphire grimly stated. "However, all of us will die anyway if we do not deactivate the injector."

"She's right, Connie," Amethyst told the young woman. "You got me back. You can get her back too."

"That's different, I know you," Connie replied. "I don't know anything about Spinel. The only ones who do are Pearl," she looked over at her Pink Pearl, "and Pearl." Connie ran over to Pink Pearl, as Spinel followed from behind. "Pearl. We need your help to stop this."

"I'm not sure how much help I could possibly be." Pink Pearl responded.

"You just need to tell us what you know about Spinel."