“Aw, c’mon, Pearl! They only have three left!” Steven pleaded, staring into the freezer. Deep in the icy bowels of the cooler, three Cookie Cat wrappers could be seen poking out of the ice, taunting Steven with their frozen goodness.

“Absolutely not,” Pearl replied calmly, fishing a frozen dinner out of the next freezer over. “You remember what happened last time we got you those.”

“But that wasn’t—” Steven began to protest, but Pearl cut him off.

“You buried the last ones we bought!” she said, placing a bag of frozen peas into her basket. “That’s simply not healthy. Now, come along, Steven. We can stop at the Big Donut on the way home.”

Steven grumbled as he pushed away from the freezer and joined Pearl as she meandered through the aisles, grabbing items off shelves and loading them into her basket.

“Thank you for shopping at the Beach City Breadbasket. That’ll be $86.75,” the grocery clerk said in a flat, affectless voice. “Do you have a rewards ca-”





He was cut off mid-sentence as Pearl reached her hand to her forehead and a brilliant flash of white light shot out of her gem. When the light faded, Pearl was holding a wad of bills and change.

“That should cover it,” Pearl said confidently, placing the money on the counter and gathering the bags full of groceries.

Pearl and Steven left the stunned grocery clerk staring at the wad of bills on the counter as they exited the store.

~~~

Pearl placed the bags on the kitchen counter and began her favorite part of the grocery shopping experience: unloading the food into the cabinets in nice, orderly arrangements. Or, at least, they would be nice and orderly until Amethyst noticed there was new food.

However, partway through her second bag, Pearl noticed something unusual: a box of frozen tater tots.

“I don't remember getting these...” she muttered.

“Steven?” Pearl called, glancing over her shoulder at him. “Did you get a box of tater tots at the store?”



“Tater tots?” Steven replied. “No, I don’t think so. I got some waffles, but I think that was it.”

A cold feeling of dread began building up in Pearl’s gut. She took a deep breath to calm herself and picked up the receipt. She scanned through the list of purchases.

There were no tater tots.

The cold feeling of dread sharpened.

“Oh, Steven! I just remembered! I have to... uh, sharpen my swords! You can’t have dull swords in a battle, right?”

“Uh, sure—” Steven began. Pearl cut him off.

“Great! Glad you understand. Can you finish putting these away for me?” Pearl said a little too quickly, edging closer to the temple door all the while, the package of tater tots behind her back. “ I really have to do this soon, thanks! Bye!”

Pearl’s gem flashed, and the temple door slid open. Before Steven could get a word in edgewise, she dashed inside, incriminating tots still in hand.

The temple door slammed shut, and Pearl was left alone in the room of waterfalls. The crashing sound of falling water helped calm her nerves slightly as she stared at the frozen package in her hand.

“Okay, Pearl, there’s no need to panic,” she said, making her way out across the water towards the closest waterfall. “So it looks like you left the store without paying for this. No harm done, right? You can just take it back!”

Pearl reached the base of the waterfall and stepped into it. A moment later, she burst out of the top of the waterfall in a cloud of mist and began to pace.

“Oh, I can’t just take it back. If they take it back, they’ll know I stole it, and I’ll be banned from the store, and they’ll involve the human police and—”

Pearl stopped pacing.

“—they’ll take Steven,” she finished in a whisper.

She stared down at the package of tater tots in her hand. The box was decorated with a picture of an astronaut holding a bag of potatoes below a speech bubble that read, “Blast into flavor with Spudnik brand potato products! Frozen for your convenience: Buy now, eat tater!”

Pearl’s grip tightened as she made up her mind. Nobody was going to take Steven away from her. She had to think of a plan.

She walked to the edge of the waterfall and glanced over it into the abyss that lay beyond.

“First things first: I need to get rid of you!” she said, punctuating her final word by tossing the package of tater tots off the edge and deep into the bowels of the temple.

Pearl strode away from the edge of the waterfall and back towards the temple door. It opened as she approached it, revealing Amethyst and Steven on the floor of the kitchen, messily devouring the snacks that Steven was supposed to be putting away.

“Hey Pearl!” Amethyst called, her voice muffled by the fistfulls of raw peanut butter she was shoveling into her mouth.





Pearl’s anger and disapproval overwhelmed her sense of purpose.

“Amethyst!” she scolded, marching over to where the two sat. “ Steven is supposed to be putting these away in their proper places, not eating through it all in a single afternoon!”

“Oh, c’mon, Pearl!” Amethyst exclaimed. “Here, try some of Steven’s marshmallow sandwiches. It’s a marshmallow between two other, larger ones!”

“No, thank you,” Pearl said sternly, pushing away the proffered sandwich.

“I’ll put them away, Pearl, I promise!” Steven said. “It’s just that... Well, it was lunchtime, and Amethyst made a pretty convincing argument in favor of eating them now, and...”



Steven trailed off sheepishly, but Pearl wasn’t listening. She’d just had a brilliant idea.

“It’s okay, Steven!” she said. “It’s fine! I guess I’ll just have to go to the store and pick up more snacks! Haha!”

“Uh, Pearl?” Amethyst said, a tinge of worry creeping into her voice. “Y’alright?”

“Hm? Oh, I’m fine, Amethyst, don’t worry! You just enjoy your crushed nut snack, and I’ll be right back!”

Pearl hurried out the door to the house, leaving Amethyst to shrug and scoop another fistful of peanut butter into her mouth.

~~~

A short time later, Pearl was standing in front of the Beach City Breadbasket, staring at the automatic doors and the humans moving through them, working up the nerve to execute the plan she’d been mulling over on the way.

Finally, she stepped through the doors into the cool, air-conditioned interior and glanced around the building. She spied three cameras: one pointing at the entrance, one pointing at the center aisles, and... one pointing at the frozen food section.

Pearl knew then that she had been caught on camera—and she knew what she had to do next.

She hurried off towards towards the back of the store, through the aisles, and into the bathrooms. Mercifully, it was unoccupied.

Pearl took a deep breath to calm herself and closed her eyes, focusing her mind. Her gem began to glow, faintly at first, and then with a brilliant light. A beam shot out and hovered in midair for a moment. Then, with a flash, a blue, slightly translucent version of Pearl stood on the bathroom tile, holding an equally blue blade in one hand.

“DO YOU WISH TO ENGAGE IN COMBAT?” it said at a near shout.

“Engage patrol mode,” Pearl said with a smile. The perfect plan.

“PATROL MODE ENGAGED,” the holographic Pearl replied. It then proceeded to march out of the bathroom, shouting “YOU’LL NEVER GET PAST ME!”

Pearl breathed a sigh of relief. With Holopearl patrolling the store, she had an alibi—a cover while she executed the next stage of her plan: destroying the evidence.

Pearl slipped out of the bathroom door and sidled along the wall, away from the entrance, trying her best to stay out of sight of any shoppers.

Finally, she made her way through the small door at the far end of the store and slipped into the back room.

The room was mostly empty, with nothing but a few pallets of packaged food, a retracting door for unloading shipments, and...

To the right of the entrance was a small alcove containing a desk and a television monitor with a feed of the three cameras.

Pearl rushed over to the monitor and, with a flourish and flash of light, pulled a long, blue-bladed spear from her gem.

“Good luck catching me now!” she shouted. She leveled her spear at the monitor and three blasts of white light shot from the tip of her spear and slammed into the monitor, which exploded into shards of metal and glass. When the smoke cleared, there was nothing left in the alcove but rubble and burning scraps of wood.

Her work complete, Pearl lept into the air and brought her spear to bear against the retracting door. With three short strokes, she cut a hole large enough for her to escape, and darted through it.

Pearl felt elated as the knot of dread and panic that had been growing in her all this time finally began to abate. Nobody could find out what she had done now, and Steven was safe again. That was what mattered—Steven was safe again.

Pearl looked to the sky to find it streaked with the colors of the setting sun and began the walk back to the beach and to the temple.

~~~

Several hours later, Peal stood atop the waterfall in the center of her room, admiring her collection of blades from all the different periods in Earth’s history. Pearl found few things more relaxing than organizing her blade by age or size, and considering how stressful her day had been, she was enjoying the task even more than usual.

Her calm evening was interrupted, however, as the door to her room slid open, revealing Amethyst.

“Pearl!” Amethyst shouted, striding into the room. “What’d you get at the store?”

Pearl raised her hands to run her temples, and at the same time, the swords quivered in midair. Pearl didn’t bother looking away from them.

“Did you check the cupboards?” she asked, without bothering to hide the exasperation in her voice. “I’m pretty sure there’s still some of that mushed-up nut gunk you like behind the breakfast cereal.”



“Oh, sweet!” Amethyst said, turning back towards the door. “I can dip the tots I found in that.”

Pearl shot a look at Amethyst, suddenly tense. She was walking back towards the door, and clutched in her hands was a now mostly-thawed, dented box of tater tots.

Pearl dove below the surface of the water and shot up in front of the door, blocking Amethyst’s path.

“Where did you get those?” Pearl asked, a twinge of hysteria creeping into her voice.

“Jeez, Peal, what’s your problem?” Amethyst said, attempting to sidestep the taller gem. “I found them in my room, okay? They’re mine.”

“They’re not!” Pearl shouted. “They’re... they’re mine!”

Amethyst froze, a look of disbelief on her face.

Then, she began to laugh.

“Yours?! Ha, everyone knows you can’t stand eating! Why on Earth would you buy food for yourself?”

“I... I changed my mind! I like tater tots!” Pearl said, shifting uneasily.

“Oh yeah?” Amethyst said, a wicked smile stretching across her face. “Let’s see you eat one!”

Amethyst tore open the box with one hand, reached inside, and tossed a tater tot to Pearl. She caught it with little effort.

“Of course I’ll eat one. Don’t be silly!” Pearl said, staring uneasily at the tater tot.

She lifted it to her mouth unsteadily, her normally practiced hands beginning to shake. She hesitated.



“I’m waiting!” said Amethyst.

“For Steven,” thought Pearl as she popped the tater tot into her mouth.

Her face distorted into a look of pure horror as she chewed the icy tater tot. Finally, after a few agonizing moments of chewing, she swallowed the mess in a gulp.

“Mmmm! My favorite!” Pearl said weakly. “Now, give me the box and get your own food.”



“Ha! Whatever,” said Amethyst, tossing the box to the other gem and ducking under her legs to exit. “I’m going to my room. Thanks for the show, Pearl!”

The temple door slid shut and Peal stared down the box in her hands, her stomach twisting and knotting from more than just the tater tot she forced down. She had to end this.

Tonight.

She stood on the surface of the water and waited until she was sure Amethyst had returned to her room, then opened the temple door. The room beyond was dark, but far from quiet: a storm had began to rage outside, blasting the side of the house with wind and rain, and shaking the shudders with thunder.

Pearl snuck through the moonlit room as slowly as she could, finally slipping out the door and into the pouring rain.

She lept off the stairwell and down onto the surface of the beach.

A hysterical laugh began forming deep in her gut, finally bursting forth and she began to dig and scrabble in the sand.

“You thought you could come between me and Steven?” Pearl shouted at the box of tater tots, now soaking wet with rain and half covered in sand. “I’ll bury you so deeply nobody will ever find you! Not if they searched for a million years! Not if they built a kindergarten over this very spot! Not if—”



“PEARL.”

Pearl froze mid-dig and looked up to see Garnet looming above her.

“Garnet! What are you doing—”



“Pearl,” Garnet repeated, cutting her off. “What exactly is it you’re doing?”



Pearl hesitated for a moment as she tried to think of a cover story, but found that, despite her best efforts, she couldn’t stop the truth from spilling from her lips.

“I was buying food for Steven, and this box of frozen potato bits fell into my bag, and I didn’t pay for it, so I went back to the store and destroyed the tapes so that the human police wouldn’t take Steven away, then Amethyst found them and I had to get rid of them, and—”



Garnet cut Pearl off by covering her mouth with her hand.

“We’re taking these back,” she said. “Now.”

~~~

Garnet rounded the corner of the street leading to the Beach City Breadbasket, soggy, completely thawed tater tots in hand. Pearl followed behind, sheepishly.

The duo entered the grocery store only to be greeted with a chaotic sight. Most of the aisles had either been tipped over or destroyed entirely, and the ground was littered with shattered glass bottles and crumbs.

Standing in the middle of it all, legs straddled over a terrified-looking clerk, was Holopearl. She was brandishing her blue blade, the tip of which was pointed directly at the clerk’s neck.

“I WON’T GO EASY ON YOU THIS TIME!” Holopearl shouted.

“Y-you can take anything you want!” the clerk said scrambling away from the hologram.

Holopearl raised her sword to thrust down, but before it could finish the movement, Pearl lept towards the hologram, pulled her spear out of her gem, and impaled the transparent copy of herself.

“MATCH SET. CHALLENGER WINS!” Holopearl declared as Pearl pulled the spear out with a strange, hollow buzzing sound. “WOULD YOU LIKE TO DUEL AGAIN?”

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Pearl said. Her gem pulsed with a flash of blue light, and Holopearl disintegrated into fragments of light that skittered along the linoleum of the store’s floor, rejoining and splitting, before finally vanishing

Garnet helped the store clerk to his feet.

“Thank you so much! I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t shown up—we had some kind of explosion in the back, and then that thing started going crazy, destroying everything in the store, and—”

Garnet cut him off by holding up the box of tater tots.

“We’re returning these. We took them by accident.”



The clerk looked at her with confusion. “You... what?!”



“Sorry about the mess,” Pearl said. “My training dummy can get a bit overzealous.”



“But - I—”



“Thanks for understanding,” Garnet said, turning to leave. Pearl turned to follow.

Garnet and Pearl exited the store’s automatic doors into the night.

“We’re going to have to find somewhere else to shop,” Garnet said.

“Oh, I don’t know, Garnet! The clerk seemed nice. And he held his own with my training dummy for, what, six hours? That’s pretty impressive!”

“Mm, true,” Garnet said, a hint of levity creeping in to her voice.

“How did you know it would be safe to return the potatoes?” Pearl asked. “Weren’t you worried they’d call the police?”



Garnet smiled at this and tapped her shades.

“Future vision,” she said. “I knew this would lead to better outcome than letting you bury the tater tot. I do have a question for you, though.”

“What’s that?”

“If you were really that worried, why not just throw it in the lava in the room in the temple where we keep the bubbled gems?”

Pearl stopped walking.



“Throw it - the lava—” she stammered.

Garnet began to snicker.

“Let’s just go home,” Pearl said. “I’m ready for this day to be over.”



The two gems made their way through the darkened streets of Beach City, leaving the Beach City Breadbasket behind.

THE END





