Chorus, Mountain Region

"You know, you should probably rest at some point. At least remember to drink some water. I'm just saying! If you collapse I'm basically stuck here and no offense, but that sounds boring."

Agent Carolina smiled as she trudged around the snow-covered mountains, scanning the area for movement. "Thanks, Mom, but I'll be fine." Even if Epsilon tried to hide his concern behind selfish motives, she understood where it was coming from. "Besides, if I'm going to rest it's not going to be out in the open like this. Would be a hell of a place for a firefight."

Some part of her thrilled at the idea. Her heart pounding as she sped through the frozen pine forest, knowing an enemy could lurk around every cliff or near every rock formation, using Epsilon to calculate the exact perfect angle for a sniper shot, that rush of adrenaline that came whenever her life was in danger, all of it had a certain appeal. It would be a hell of a place for a firefight.

"Okay, fine. Sheesh. And never call me 'Mom' again." Epsilon's digitized voice spoke to Carolina through her helmet, though he wasn't bothering with his blue holographic projection. "It's just too weird, you know? How 'bout 'nagging big brother who is Wiser and is monitoring your health signs and knows you're probably going to forget to eat again?'"

"We'll start with 'nagging' and negotiate the rest."

Epsilon humphed. "Hey, some of us don't get to eat! Or, uh, can't. We..." His voice abruptly dropped off, the last few words suddenly sounding distant and distracted.

"Epsilon, what is it? You pick on something?" Carolina pressed her back to a tree just to be sure, staring around her. No movements, nor even the suspicious air shimmer that would indicate a cloaking device.

"Nah. Uh, sorry. Just, you know. One of those memories that isn't mine. They just come out sometimes. It's annoying." That was the Epsilon-Church-downplays-something-troubling voice. Carolina knew it well.

She sucked in a breath. "Do you want to talk about it? Was it one of Alpha's?"

"No, it was-it was one of his. You know. You'd run around all the time when you were little, especially when it snowed out and you got to build snow forts with the neighborhood kids, and they'd have a hell of a time getting you to come back inside for dinner. Sorry, this is weird, isn't it? It's so damn maudlin, like God, he was an asshole and..."

"...Yeah. No, it's fine." Carolina wasn't sure whether to smile or throw up whenever one of the Director's memories manifested strong enough for Epsilon to talk about it. She suspected they weren't completely accurate, copies of copies, mixed and corrupted by Alpha's mental state at the point the AI had been driven to create Epsilon. "He was an asshole." An asshole that loved her at some point.

He was dead. It was over. There was no point in questioning his motives anymore, or wondering when he started being 'The Director' and stopped being 'Dad.'

"So! Yeah, total asshole. Man, I should scan for things. Scan. For things." Epsilon's voice rang with false, forced energy as he performed a scan Carolina suspected was just for show, possibly more for his own sake than hers. "Hey, wait. I'm picking up on something kind of weird."

Carolina stood up straight. "What? Where?"

"I don't think it's a person. A weird heat signature to the west, not far off. Maybe 40 feet away? It's not moving. Might be some kind of artifact, but it doesn't read like one..."

Whatever it was, it was a welcome distraction. Carolina liked goals. When she had a goal and a focus, she didn't think too hard about her situation. She just lived. "Well, we're gonna find out."

Epsilon's directions led her to what was at first glance a nondescript spot in the mountainside forest, save for one blackened tree having been split in half. Brushing away the falling snow revealed signs of something having crashed or fallen here, though the impact was far too small to suggest a meteorite or even a small explosion.

Something glinted under the snow.

"I think that's it," Epsilon said. "The signature's coming from there. It's just-it's not something I recognize."

Carolina brushed the snow away, revealing a shimmering blue gem the size of her palm. She carefully lifted it and tested its weight. There was something familiar about this, something mentioned in the thousands of training seminars that made up the early parts of Project Freelancer.

"A gem with a strange heat signature. Isn't that..."

The gem flared a brilliant blue-white as Carolina instinctively pulled her hand away with a shout and a curse. It floated in midair, surrounding itself with an aura of light that rapidly reshaped itself into a humanoid form. The figure had blue skin and long white hair that obscured most of her face. She wore a layered blue ball gown, the gem implanted into her palm.

She looked up at them for just a moment, Carolina and Epsilon both too stunned to say anything. It was the gem being who spoke first.

"Agent Carolina and Artificial Intelligence Fragment Epsilon. Hello."

Beach City, Earth, Three Hours and Five Hundred Years Earlier

"I can't believe this!" Pearl scowled as the light from the teleporter faded. "I'll bet Peridot did it. Would she really bring it back online just to get ahold of Homeworld?"

"Uh, yeah? She's a jerk. A Homeworld jerk." Amethyst stretched as she stepped off the platform. "Come on, Steven! I bet we get to smash something."

"Really?" Steven asked from atop Garnet's head, where he'd ended up perched. She didn't mind. "Because this place at least looks kind of nice. Can't we just turn it off instead of smashing it?"

The Time-Space Palace was indeed a marvel of Homeworld architecture, a circular structure with walls of seashell fossils painted over with instructions in mural form. The central room was alight with glowing tubes of colored liquid bubbling up and down, the tubes running along the walls and shrinking into glassy veins as they reached the ceiling. The floor was rock-hard and transparent; beneath it one could see a clock with a hundred thousand hands pointing in all number of directions. At the center, just above the middle of the clock, a translucent orb hovered, crackling with energy. It was, Garnet had to admit, beautiful.

"No. It needs to be smashed." Garnet gingerly set Steven down, dusting him off and smiling. "Now pay attention. This thing's always been a little haywire, so we don't know what might happen." Though she said that, little glimpses of 'what might happen' danced at the edge of her subconscious. Her Future Vision was awakening, though nothing alarming set it off.

Pearl took the lead, very carefully walking along the thin spiral pattern lining the floor. "Just follow me and make sure to step on the line. The security system is probably a mess at this point."

"Uh, yeah!" Steven took very careful steps, one foot after the other, stumbling a few times. Garnet walked behind him to keep an eye on him. "I'll be on my guard! Uh, Pearl. What is this thing we're smashing?"

Pearl rolled her eyes and glowered behind her at a grinning Amethyst. "We're not smashing it. We're just taking the control jewel and deactivating it again, and bubbling it so nobody can use it anymore. This was a Homeworld experiment, an attempt to create a meta-warp system that would cross not only space but time itself. They were going to use it for-well, we were never sure exactly, because it backfired and most of the Gems involved in testing it were lost."

"Vanished, into thin air. Poof!" Amethyst paused. "Uh, I mean I wasn't there. But that's what it sounds like."

"Neither were we," Garnet said. "Homeworld canceled the experiment and brought it offline before we got here. We just ensured it was unusable. Or it should've been."

"No sign of Peridot, though..." Pearl frowned.

Steven gave another curious glance at the floating orb. "What if she used it already?"

"Then that orb in the center would have been depleted. It generates energy to be used to power the warp." Pearl paused in her steps. "Do you think it brought itself online? But...why?"

"...It's lonely." Steven had stopped too, and was still looking at that orb. "It wanted some company."

"I don't think it's self-aware, Steven...at least, I would hope not." Though Pearl sounded hesitant, she was clearly unwilling to dismiss his input wholesale. It probably reminded her of the warp incident with Peridot, Garnet realized; it certainly reminded Garnet of it.

Light flickered in the orb, and lightning crackled.

And Garnet saw what would happen, as vivid and horrifying as it was every time she saw a future claim Steven's life.

"Steven! Get down!" She leaped over and shoved Steven away, watching the floor beneath her illuminate as the security system was activated. The electricity struck her and all went white, like the blinding shine of a warp times twenty.

Wherever she was she couldn't hear the other gems or Steven anymore, could only feel the sensation of her own body being pulled in a thousand directions. Something grabbed at Ruby, something else at Sapphire. Garnet felt the splintering of herself that happened when the two were forced apart.

Sapphire! Sapphire, hold on! I'm not letting you go!

It's okay, Ruby. We won't be far. I'll see you again.

The last thought the two gems had in union was a desperate hope that Steven and the others were safe.

Chorus, Crash Site Bravo, Roughly Three Hours and Five Hundred Years Later

"Ugh..." Ruby rubbed her head after she regenerated, getting back on her feet. A Ruby never rested long, she reminded herself, no matter how much Sapphire tried to get her to relax.

Sapphire. Sapphire.

The intense, burning loneliness hit before Ruby could even assess where she was. She was in a small cave somewhere, and it didn't matter. She didn't care about the smell of dry grass, the summer heat or the sound of machinery and voices outside. Her senses were overwhelmed by the reminder that she was alone, Sapphire was somewhere else and Steven was far, far away.

The Future Vision was gone again, and losing it was like missing an eye. She could see, but what use was it when she could only see the present? When the future was unclear and ambiguous? Sapphire had promised they'd see each other again, but when? How?

"Oh, great. This is just great!" Ruby kicked at a nearby crate about as tall as she was, shattering the wood and sending the contents spilling everywhere. They were small, round things, which she ignored or kicked around as stress relief. "And here I am, useless again! I can't even concentrate. How am I going to find her if I'm just panicking? Okay, okay, calm down." She made herself take deep breaths. It didn't have the same kind of relaxing physical effect it might on a human, but the practice helped. "I just need to find out where I am, when I am, and where Sapphire is. Then we just need to refuse, figure out how to get back across space and time and deactivate the Time-Space Palace while making sure the others are safe. Yeah! Easy! Not an intimidating task at all."

"Do you hear something?"

Ruby froze up as she heard the voice, hiding behind another crate. The voice sounded human, filtered through a radio, though the footsteps sounded heavier than she would have expected. The reason soon became clear to her as the first humanoid came into view at the cave entrance, silhouetted by bright sunlight. They were wearing full body armor, in a style of which Garnet hadn't seen on Earth before.

That was probably a good sign Ruby had ended up in the future instead of the past. Darn. If she were on the past of Earth, she could have found the Crystal Gems of that era and hoped it wouldn't break the time-space continuum too much. That gave her a very vague sense of when she was, and absolutely none of where. Progress.

"I don't want to go in there!" The one in orange hesitated at the entrance, a pudgy figure shorter than the one in red. "There's bats. Those caves have bats."

"Then just run fast for once in your life so the bats can't catch you, asshole! Sarge told you to go check on the tertiary storage unit and me to keep watch." The maroon one was a lot taller, though Ruby could tell little else about him. She wasn't even entirely sure she was dealing with humans after all. They weren't Gems, but that didn't mean anything. There were any number of sapient species in the universe.

Ruby realized a little too late that there were little flickers of flames at her feet eating up the bits of splintered wood and dead leaves. She always did have trouble keeping control of that. Hoping that the two tall figures would be too distracted by their argument to see her, she began sneaking towards the entrance.

"Hey," the taller one said abruptly as Ruby had almost reached the entrance. "Do you smell smoke?"

"I dunno, man, I barely smell anything anymore. Nose blindness. Trust me, it's for the best."

"Somehow I'm not surprised." Maroon shook his head. "Just, uh, don't we keep ammo in there? You know, flammable materials."

Ruby's eyes widened.

She had enough time to shove the two armored figures away from the entrance and leap away herself, rolling into the grass before something went off in the cave like fireworks. The explosion was thankfully contained, though the cloud of black smoke it left behind was not.

"Uh..." Ruby sat up on the grass, staring up at the two coughing, confused figures and hoping against hope that they were at least friendly and forgiving of emotionally charged power malfunctions. It didn't take them long to notice her, and stare right back. "Hi."

She really missed being tall.

(Author's note: I've been posting this over on Archive of Our Own and decided to crosspost it here. It's another case of me taking two things I like and mashing them together. It's made for fun writing in the past, so why not? There's going to be a mix of humor and drama, and perhaps some Grimmons here and there? Anyway, hope you enjoy the ride! I'll be crossposting the rest of the chapters here in the next few days until it's caught up to the AO3 one and then I'll update them both at once as I go.)