CONTENT WARNING: This story may contain graphic depictions of body horror, body parts, implied animal death, vomiting, blood, drowning, and peril. Please read at your own discretion.

Steven watched Lion wander away from the parking lot and into the street, where a pastel sedan screeched to a halt, honking at the indifferent beast as he made his way to the sidewalk.

"That explains a lot," he muttered, harrumphing as he turned back to the library.

Connie, having reprimanded himpreviously for calling her cell phone in the middle of pre-algebra, was still at school. The plan was to meet here after she was free at last. Steven smirked as he tiptoed through the glass doors, sidling past the receptionist's desk and straight to rows of hardcovers. He was a gem on a mission now.

"There's gotta be something cool," Steven whispered, crouching and looking through the seemingly infinite spaces between shelves. "If Buddy's book was just lying here, then what else can be...oh!"

There it was - a dusty old time, lying near the bottom in an unlit section of the metal shelves. It was bound with leather, not plastic, covered and protected by someone who clearly wanted it to be saved. Steven's fingers wriggled in anticipation before he puled it out, blowing softly to remove the top layer of dust from its cover. He lifted the front of his t-shirt and wiped it off, revealing the silver letters, a gilded title that reflected Steven's widening eyes.

"Walter Berdshire's Modern Arguments Against Contemporary Political Theory Regarding Tax Law and Punitive Measurements..." Steven breathed. "Thiiiiiiiird Edition."

He shuddered, then glanced up to see in what section the book had been entombed.

"HORROR Kr-Qu," he mused. "Kuuur-kwuh." Misalphabetized, perhaps, but the section seemed spot-on.

Steven slipped it back under where he had found it. "Some things are too strange even for the Universe," he said with a sigh, wandering back into the open rows. A glance back and forth showed little signs of life today. Some teenagers were clicking through the computers, headphones turned up as far as they could go. At the end of the rows, Steven saw one of the librarians pulling a heavy cart out of the elevator, picking up a clipboard from the top of the pile of periodicals.

An elevator! A basement! Steven jogged as silently as he could to the doors, sandals flopping to a halt as he saw the tiny laminated sign above the buttons.

"Employees only?" he whined. "But I bet there's so much cool stuff down there!"

As if in agreement, there was a rustling from the magazines that had been left on the cart. Steven turned to see an insect emerging from the pages, and it -

"Wait...you shouldn't...have that."

Steven extended his finger towards the bug. It was like a beetle, one of the larger stinkbugs, about an inch and a half long. Unlike the stinkbugs that clogged up the florescent lights of the fry shop in the summer, it was not brown, but red, bright red. Too red. Its proboscis extended to test the sweat of Steven's skin.

It flitted its wings curiously. Steven's eyes widened as he saw the smallest of gemstones embedded in its abdomen. He didn't recognize the stone at first glance, but he knew a Gem when he saw it. "Where'd you come from?" he whispered, a delighted smile covering his face.

The elevator, of course! Something strange and gem-related, something mysterious and tantalizing in the basement! Steven crouched behind the cart, lifting his hand so that the bug could scuttle onto his shoulder. One finger raised to the button, and the orange light glowed underneath his skin. In a moment, a tiny bell chimed and the doors slid open. Steven slid inside as fast as he could, spamming the button to close the elevator behind him.

"We made it!" he said, turning his head to the bug on his shoulder. Its wings twitched apathetically.

Steven's sandals made soft slapping sounds on the concrete floor as he stepped into the basement. It smelled of iron and printer ink. Several copy machines made the air whir with subtle electricity. Under the squares of a concrete arch, there was another larger room with multiple steel shelves. A desk and bins of donations were at the far end, stacks of bound and torn novels and children's books and journals alike collecting dust. Each shelf held a handful or so of plastic-bound stories, cataloged and forgotten here for some reason or other.

"Nothing? C'moooon..." Steven wandered between the shelves with his hands in his pockets.

If there was something around here related to the Gems, then it would be more visible than the gray walls surrounding Steven and the bug. The insect clicked through whatever tiny organs made sound, as if questioning the boy.

"No, seriously," he replied, "where DID you come from? Everyone comes from somewhere, even bugs."

There were no dates in the concrete, but it was evident that it had been around for several years. And yet, it didn't seem enough for a Gem to gestate, however long that was in human time. Steven wondered what was the fastest that a Gem could be grown without any issues in physiology. The vision of serums and technology in the Kindergarten made him think twice about his curiosity.

Steven's stomach warmed, and he lifted his shirt in surprise. The faint glow emanating from his belly was not unwelcome, although the source wasn't coming out of the corners to greet him either.

He held his shirt up with one hand, and with the other he maneuvered the stone like a radar dish. Nothing made it glow any brighter, or pulse with any kind of different energy. Not even a gentle "boop!" made it respond. That always seemed to work some of the time sort of.

"This isn't working, Mister Bug." Steven circled back to the center of the room and sat down on the floor. "We need to go deeper!"

The insect jumped off of his shoulder and buzzed away back towards the elevator, almost in a panic with its high-pitched whir.

"Hey, what are you doing! We don't wanna go up, we wanna go - "

The concrete sank down beneath Steven's rear with a hallowed groan of stone, the gray matter glowing pink as it collapsed smoothly. In the moment before he started screaming, Steven couldn't help but notice that the transition was similar to the opening to the Gem's rooms at the Temple. As soon as it had opened, it closed before Steven's eyes, and all was sudden darkness.

It took a moment of panic before Steven realized that he was floating once more, his gem glowing healthily through the descent. Smooth walls were doused in pink as he fell, simple etched patterns in the stone.

Moments later, Steven saw the ground coming towards him; at the bottom of the hollow column was a platform, circular and carved with the likeness of a rose. It shone, as if it was coated in glass underneath his sandals. Only the faintest echo resonated through the chamber. Pinkness still surrounded him, and he lifted his shirt, aiming his belly upwards in the darkness. Despite how long it had seemed, the fall had apparently only been a few hundred feet, and he could clearly see the disguised entrance near the top.

"I hope I can float out of here," Steven murmured, taking a tenuous step from the platform onto the floor.

At his touch, something akin to a note resonated through the stillness, a chime that echoed in time to the light that suddenly emerged from the walls ahead of him. Each crack was a neon highway spreading deep into the earth. The hall before the child was massive, enough for the largest man or Gem to walk through with ease. It seemed to stretch on like the shelves of the library's basement. Steven let his shirt fall and stepped into the passage, gaping at what was laid before him.

Hundreds upon thousands of bubbles were laid in even rows from floor to ceiling, supported by elongated stone pipes like pinballs on a track. They were all the same shade of pink, the same kind that Steven made when he bubbled a Gem shard. It was like a hyper-organized Burning Room, with each of the specimens within obscured by their magical shields.

Steven approached the wall of bubbles with caution, his fingers curling and uncurling as he thought about picking one up. After Peridot and Centipeedle, however, he knew that bubbles were more volatile than they seemed.

"Did mom do all of this?" he said, peering into one of the orbs. There wasn't any gem inside, and Steven stumbled backwards, his hands over his mouth as he saw what it truly was.

The river otter's curled body was twisted to and fro, smooth fur flowing with a hidden gravity separate from the earth. Its eyes were closed and its mouth was just slightly open, immobile. Upon its forehead, an oval blue gem protruded, followed by a string of similarly smooth gemstones, like scales, trailing down its spine to its rudder. One paw pressed against the surface of the bubble showed another set of gems embedded in its flesh, pushing out its claws.

Was it dead? Steven looked for a sign of life, something to show that it was still merely trapped, but there was no motion in the room at all save from the shallow breaths from his own lungs.

"Did that bug come from here?" he asked, walking down the aisle of bubbled corpses. "Did...did Lion come from here?"

All of the animals here were trapped in bubbles just their size, but none of them were particularly massive. Some species of snake were twisted awkwardly, it seemed, but nothing exceeded the size of the shelves upon which the bubbles were placed. There was nothing even close to the size of a lion, or even a grown human.

The wall at the end had an arch carved into it, and yet another rose curled in the middle. Steven lifted his shirt, and a pink foam dissolved the stone from the center, opening up for the gem of Rose Quartz. He shuddered as he walked through. Rose had kept so many secrets, and he could feel their weight come upon him.

The door grated and reformed behind him. "Maybe the Gems know more about this," he said, turning his attention back to the new room.

The neon lights had come through here and lit up the space before he had even arrived, but this was far more usual than Steven had anticipated. Black onyx tables supported a series of terrariums, their perfect glass dusty but otherwise intact. Most were covered, but Steven approached one with the heavy lid laid to the side. That answered the question of Mister Bug, as the sand inside was littered with several wavering insects, all with red gems, all with the same bright wing cases and ruby proboscises. Only a few flitted around the exposed rim, aimlessly staring at the emptiness from which they were grown.

"Looks like you guys are pretty harmless," Steven said, extending another finger towards one of the bugs. It didn't even acknowledge him.

Steven moved on to a larger terrarium, still with that strange white sand covering its floor. A scorpion rested in the center, prone, a glowing opal embedded in its exoskeleton. It was almost as long as Steven's arm, and its tail raised as the boy approached the glass. Steven backed away, not wishing to disturb it. These were, perhaps, successes of whatever Rose was containing here. Steven thought, perhaps, that they were parts of gems that had become fused accidentally with the wildlife of the earth. They were like the basilisks that Lion brought to the temple sometimes, their crystalline flesh torn from his teeth and their spines made from turquoise spires.

In fact, there was a terrarium of smaller, chameleon-like gem hybrids walking along some twigs in a farther terrarium. Steven couldn't help but grin as their soft vice-like hands reached for the branch before them, emerald eyes swiveling in his general direction. He watched them for a moment until his gem started to warm in a way he hadn't felt before.

A smell came up into his nostrils. He inhaled softly, and almost immediately started to retch, curling his mouth in disdain as he attempted to spit out the rotten stench.

"What is that stuff?!" he cried, glaring at the direction of the smell. As soon as he had turned, his gem put pressure on the muscles of his stomach. His pupils shrank in fear, and his feet moved independent of his mind.

Each step echoed in his ears around the sound of his heart pumping blood through his mind. The relatively cool air suddenly felt hot and cold at the same time, staining the inside of his shirt with sweat. The door at the far end of the room was smoothed to a fault, with only the faint outline of a shiny rose on its matte surface as decoration. That rose swelled as Steven approached, and he struggled through solid stone, slipping through it like water, falling with a surprised yelp on the floor beyond.

His swimming vision came into focus after what seemed like hours, and Rose's carved face stared down at him with white eyes from the ceiling. Steven cried out as he stumbled and stood, wiping tears and grime from his face. Every muscle inside of his abdomen was aching, as if gleefully reveling at each nerve ending's severance from the child.

There were more bubbles here. Steven stared in terror.

"No. Oh, oh no, no no no..."

The first bubble was a severed human hand, suspended in pink light, curled and still twitching as the light itself stimulated it. In the bubble next to it, a bisected head showed half of a brain inside of the skull of a stranger. The only other organ connected to it was a swiveling eyeball, panicking as it stared through the room and landed on Steven with a panicked vibration. The half of the mandible still attached opened in a silent scream, floating in the pain of eternal consciousness.

Steven put a hand to his mouth, doubling up but still standing as the vomit slipped between his fingers. The tension was too much; he released his hands and opened his mouth, letting the bile slide out onto the floor. He stumbled backwards, his head ringing with the buzzing of the horrific silence that surrounded him. The magenta neon turned to black as he collapsed to his knees, then to his shoulders, and finally to his head as it hit the stone.

He awoke with acid in his mouth, coughing as he rubbed his aching head. The air itself seemed to carry his limbs, cradling him in its sourness. He sat up shakily, wrinkling his nose once more. This was the source of the smell, the smell of death. No, that was too dramatic. Nothing in here was really dead, not quite.

Steven glanced up to where the half-skull had been, but the organs merely floated now, as motionless as the otter from before. His brain had tricked him, overwhelming his senses, making him hallucinate. The power of containment in this room was far beyond anything he had felt from the Gem's adventures before; the only thing comparable was Lapis' control of the ocean, and even that was a totally different kind of magic. This was a Frankenstein sensation, a tampering with life that was beyond immorality - at least, to the child's senses.

Steven wiped his face with his shirt, sniffling as he stared at the ceiling, at the carving of Rose's face.

"Why?" he whimpered.

Silence coiled around him. "What is this place?" he said. "Does anyone else know that you did this? What...what did you even do?"

It did not constrict or retract. It merely existed.

Organs pulsed around the boy as he stood and shook himself, wiping the remaining bits of the gunk on his hands onto his jeans. He saw a lung, several bones, an entire ribcage, some sort of triangular muscle, and a -

Steven put his hand up to cover his vision from that particular bubble as he walked past. Had he anything left in his stomach, he might have felt nauseous again. Everything here was for Rose to study, to tear asunder as she chose in pursuit of something that still remained secret. There were things, apparently, that his mother had pondered and that she had to see for herself, experiments and parts of life that she just couldn't resist. Had she killed these people? Now that, well, that he might never know, and for that he was thankful.

Darkness enveloped the other side of the room, but it dissipated as Steven stepped towards it, a spotlight on the monstrosity on the wall before him.

Strangely, he didn't feel as affected by the structure, and he put one hand on his gem, feeling its dull warmth faded from his collapse. How much time had passed? He knew there was something he was supposed to do. It was so far away now.

The structure looked almost like a clam cut in twain across the middle, with massive curved lips clenched right down the center, vertically stuck on the wall with hundreds of black tendrils which pulsed, pumping into the stone. The exterior was pockmarked with tiny craters of blackness, fading into the fuschia of its 'flesh.'

Thankfully, it didn't seem to be doing much. Steven sighed and pressed the heels of his hands into his temples, trying to clear his head.

"I need to get out of here," he said to himself, his voice low and sick. There was something sinister behind this wall. There was -

It began to crack. Steven stood up straight, too numb to panic, too scared to defend. The twin lips started to split apart, and a hand slipped through the slimy curves, pale flesh cracked and broken like porcelain.

Bituminous and sanguine, the stench of two thousand years emerged more powerful than before, and Steven took the half-second of time to clasp his hands over his nose and pinch it shut as he took several steps backwards. The hand clenched into a fist and grappled at the nothingness of the room. Soon, the elbow bent to clutch at the rocky prison, then the upper arm, then the shoulder.

A cracking sound echoed through the room as the side of a bald, veined head began to press through the veil of the womb. The force with which it finally emerged was so sudden that Steven screamed. Its eyes opened and snapped onto the child, teeth pulled back to show the blackness of its gums. It was smiling. The monster's wide cheeks and bright eyes were studded with bits of gems growing on it like mold, misshapen and malformed. Its lips parted, and the voice that came through was like a mirror. It was everything that Steven had said and done, each bit of curiosity, each part of excitement, but like a distorted recording, the words foreign and unhallowed.

"Eart þū mīn brōþor?"

Two seconds of silence came before them, and then the creaking, and then the sudden break. The pressure of the fluid sustaining the fetal hybrid burst through the tendrils that came from the wall. The entire shell fell down, and for one frame, one second, Steven made eye contact with the beast as its smile faded, its pink pupils wide and fearful before the edge of the womb crushed its skull. Bone fragments and gemstones splintered through its skin, popping one eyeball out of its socket and crushing the other under the weight of the shell.

The entire wall was starting to collapse. How much had Rose stored up in preparation for the monster's emergence? How much had remained after its gestation was over, waiting, then, for Rose to come back?

Steven ran for his life, but he didn't realize it until he was already streaking past the terrariums, the doors flying open for him immediately. Waves of black vitriol followed him, cutting through the walls, the smell of bloodied oil chasing after his panicked footsteps.

So much life wasted. So much life tampered with.

Did she know that humans felt pain?

Did she know the pain that was to follow?

Steven stood on the circular platform and pushed off, but the oil was already lapping at his toes as he scrabbled in the air. He floated as fast as he could, his head hurting from the sudden pressure, the sounds and the lack of air. He didn't know that what he was hearing was mostly his own voice, crying out in primal fear, screaming at the door above him to open, please, open up.

One last pink glow allowed the emergent florescent lights to blind him, and he felt the light and the air pulling towards him as the oil pulled him down. One last glance below, and he could see the disfigured face, he swore he could, crushed and dissolved, eaten away as if my acidic corrosion from the spoiled fluids that had once given it life.

And then it closed. Steven laid supine on the concrete. There was no trace that there had ever been a hole in the ground. There was no trace of anything except a dusty library basement, archives of the past, sitting next to piles of the new, waiting for the light.

In the pile of oil, Steven shuddered as he tried to breathe, turning to the side. The insect with the gem on its back stared at him, uncaring, but still living.

The sound of heels clicking on the concrete echoed in the base of Steven's skull. A foot came out of the corner of his vision and crushed the insect as if it had never been there at all. A woman turned his stricken face to hers, concerned, kind, unknown.

"Young man, are you alright? Where have you been? Oh, dear, you're such a mess, and - and goodness, what on earth is that? You need to be taken home, to be - young man, where is your mother?"

Thirty years before, Rose Quartz stood by the ocean alone, a single bubble in her hands. From England, across the Atlantic, from coast to coast, fifteen hundred years had passed inside the bubble's skin. Rose's lips parted to sigh as she prepared to speak to the being inside.

"There is so much left to learn," she whispered. "To be able to live like a Gem, and to grow, to be - it's possible here. It's better here. I've made a home for you, and I hope...I hope, some day, that I can find a place for you on this planet. There is so much new for you to learn, and if this works, then - well, will you even be able to learn it at all?"

The curled form did not respond, its soft glow the only indication that it was even alive.

Rose Quartz's stomach fell as she recalled the bodies, the sounds, the words she later learned were cries for help, the emissions that were screams, the whiteness of fresh bones in the sun.

"You are not made of love." She glared at the bubble now. "You are made of...ignorance, and I was just so stupid when we - how could we think that there was nothing there? You shall have it, too."

She took one last breath and vanished the bubble to her construct, where the last of her archives remained, the ones that were never to see the light of day. Perhaps, she thought, one day the humans of Earth could forgive her. She would reveal the past in private, she would bare her wrongs, she would...

I'm a monster.

"You shall have a soul," she whispered, a single tear running down her cheek. And she turned against the sound of the waves, picking up her dress as she walked back towards her temple.