12. Jellyfish
Quartz and Tourmaline had made it to the volcanic island, at long last. It was still the dead of winter so there wasn’t much point in staying awake. There was too much snow to begin any of their cool landscaping projects that the two of them had plotted over the past week. So, Tourmaline rolled up a great big snowball as he usually did, and curled up in the quiet dark of the big shell, now home to three gems, and truthfully he was hoping it would be four, but he’d have to make do with Rainbow’s withdrawal, at least until next time he went back to the big island.
Spring came as it typically did, melting the great big snowball away and with it the darkness it provided, so it was time to get to work. First order of duty? A jellyfish pond. A jellyfish pond would be splendid, not only because they had great personalities but also because everyone would be able to scoop out a jellyfish in a bowl to use as a light source whenever it was convenient. In fact, that was how gems typically got light at night. Although some gems could produce light briefly using various methods like triboluminescence or piezoelectricity, Tourmaline being one of them, those properties were seen as destructive and the bioluminescence of a jellyfish was considered far more appropriate. So, in order to make a jellyfish pond, first he’d have to build a pond, and then source some jellyfish.
He plotted out a nice spot in the field and used his spike leg to draw out a perimeter in the dirt. Then, it was time to dig. Tourmaline started stabbing the ground to loosen it up, and then grab clumps of earth, then pile it around the edges to create a rim. The pond would be decently sized, so this took a very long time. Quartz sauntered over, watched for a minute, and then joined in. The two of them spent most of the day digging, and by sundown, a decently deep hole had been excavated.
“Um… how are we going to get out?” Quartz, asked, looking up.
“That is... a fantastic question.” Tourmaline said.
The spiky gem approached the great big pit, and looked down to the bottom of it where the other two gems were standing.
“We could tell him to get my pajamas. They have pretty long sleeves, right? Maybe he can hold one end and pull us up.” Quartz suggested.
“Great idea!” Tourmaline said. “Hey!!!!! Spiky guy! Can you get his pajamas?” He shouted. The spiky gem looked back at him, expressionless.
“Does he know what you’re saying?” Quartz asked.
“I have no idea.”
“We could draw him a picture?”
“Another great idea!” Tourmaline then proceeded to use the sharp edge of his leg to draw a crude picture of Quartz’s hibernating pajamas that he was wearing when he came over.
“Can you get these?” He called out.
The spiky gem turned and left.
“Do you think he got it?” Quartz asked.
“We’ll have to see.” Tourmaline replied.
Shortly after, the spiky gem returned, with Quartz’s pajamas in hand.
“Yes! Okay, let me grab onto it!” Tourmaline called out.
The spiky gem then tossed it down to Tourmaline.
“No! Wait! Keep holding them!” he shouted as the outrageous outfit flopped down onto him. He took it off, balled it up, and threw it back to the spiky gem, who caught it, and then looked down puzzledly. He threw it back down to Tourmaline again.
“Wait, what if we acted it out?” Quartz asked.
“Oh! Yeah, we can do that.” Tourmaline grabbed one sleeve and Quartz took the other, and the two tugged back and forth. “We need you to hold the sleeve! Like this!” He shouted.
Tourmaline then balled up the pajamas again and tossed them up once more, and to his delight, the spiky gem held one sleeve and dangled it over the edge. Great! Now he could pull the two of them out.
Tourmaline hopped up, grabbed the sleeve, and, because somehow he couldn’t have possibly foreseen this coming, was rather surprised to find that the spiky gem wasn’t actually very heavy or strong, not at all, and as he yanked the cloth sleeve the poor sod was sent tumbling down with it.
“EEK!” Tourmaline yelped as he too was sent off balance and fell onto his back.
The spiky gem hit the ground facefirst, and produced a terrible crashing noise as he broke into many little pieces.
“Noooo!” Quartz cried.
“How are we gonna get out now?!” Tourmaline sat up and shook himself off.
“Us?! What about him?!”
“Oh, don’t worry about him. We’ll just put him on top of the volcano and he’ll be good as new in a day or two. He’s made of the same stuff the volcano spits out so he can regrow himself, unlike us inert gems.”
“Oh, okay. That’s kind of cool.” Quartz seemed relieved. “But how are we gonna get out of here to do that?”
“That’s the big question. You got any ideas?”
“We could… dig some more, and then use the dirt we dig out and pile it up into a staircase?
“Brilliant!” Tourmaline said, and began to do so. The two dug around the pit, avoiding the spiky gem’s pieces, and piled the excess dirt into a stair that spiraled around the perimeter until it reached the top. This also took a while, and it was the middle of the night by the time they were done.
“I think it’s too deep.” Quartz said, looking at the hole having finally escaped. It was probably about 15 feet down at this point. And then, once it was filled with water, if the spiky gem accidentally fell in, he’d totally dissolve.“...maybe we could fill the hole back up?” He continued and gestured to the piles of dirt left around the hole.
“Oh, yeah, good idea.” Tourmaline said and went back down, wrapped the spiky gem’s pieces in Quartz’s pajamas to keep them safe, and brought them back up.
“You start, I’m gonna go up to the volcano and put him there.” Tourmaline made his way through the fields and up the slope of the volcano.
It was a clear, pleasant sort of night. The moons were bright enough to shed a little light to keep him going, but a jellyfish would have certainly been convenient right about now. Having livestock would really make the place come together, he figured. Right now, it was just some guys hanging out, but if they had something to care for, like jellyfish, there would be something to work towards, and that would make it official.
After scaling his way to the very top of the volcano, he then proceeded to lower down into the center of its bowl, meandered around through the neon yellow crusts (and made sure to NOT slip this time) and made it to the bottom where he neatly placed the pieces in a vaguely person-shaped arrangement. Oh well, he’ll probably be back in a day or two. Better give him some privacy while he regrows.
By the time Tourmaline made it back down the volcano and into the fields where the hole was being dug, he found that Quartz was almost done piling the dirt back into it.
“Hey, nice job!” He called out.
“Thank you! It’s kind of fun! I think we could maybe slope the edges inwards too so you can’t really fall into it. Then it’ll be safer!”
“You’re just full of fantastic ideas, aren’t you?” Tourmaline was fascinated and mightily impressed with just how interested in problem-solving Quartz was at only a year in age. Almost a little jealous. A little prodigy, he was. Surely he would’ve been popular back home, the same way Beryl was back when he himself was little. The other guys always latch onto the youngsters who are peppy and smart and, most importantly, useful to the cause. Was he any different? Well, here the cause is related to digging holes and Hanging Out while the cause over there is Surviving The Forever War, and, well, it should be obvious which one is more fun to be living in.
Both Quartz and Tourmaline had exhausted themselves through digging the whole day long, and made their way back to the big shell to retire for the night.
The following morning, as one can imagine, it was hole-digging time, once again! As the sun made its way across the sky, Quartz and Tourmaline made their way around the great big hole, digging outwards and piling dirt, to create a smooth slope to the bottom instead of a dangerous pit. The spiky gem emerged from the volcano, good as new, and watched them work. The whole ordeal took the better part of the day. Then, they’d still have to fill it and stock it.
“So… how are we gonna fill it?” Quartz asked.
“Good question. We could wait for it to rain?” Truthfully he wasn’t quite sure how to go about filling it, or if it would even hold water in the first place. If not, then they’d just have a big pointless hole.
A few days rolled by, and to everyone’s delight (except the spiky gem’s, of course), it was raining. Tourmaline spent the entire day outside in the rain watching the pit fill with water. Except, to his disappointment, it wouldn’t hold. The water just sort of soaked into the ground! And then, when the rain stopped, it was as though it never rained at all.
“UGH! Our big pit is a disaster! It won’t fill!” He cried to Quartz and the spiky gem, who were hanging out in their shelly shelter. He waited for another one of Quartz’s great ideas, but instead he just replied “aw… it would’ve been really cool to have a pond, wouldn’t it?”
What? No suggestions? Was he all out of them?
“Do you… have any ideas for how we can fix it?” He asked.
“Um… well, I dunno. If the dirt is soaky then there’s not much you can do, right? If we had a lot of glue we could seal up the bottom, but we’d need a ton of it.”
“WAIT!” Tourmaline cried, “We DO have a ton of it! Hold on!” He sprung up and ran out to the volcano, scaled its height, hopped down into the bowl, tried his very best to not slip, and looked frantically for the excessive amount of resinous liquid that he’d prepared last spring and left up at the top of the volcano. It would be great! He’d spent a whole day collecting little buds of waxy stuff, stored it in a big shell, and left it in the warmth of the volcano so it would stay molten. And when he finally came upon it, although it was a good deal thicker and darker than he’d remembered, and the shell was positively covered in yellow junk from the volcano’s depositions, he yanked it right out and ran back up the top of the bowl and down the slopes, into the field, and out to the hole, where he proceeded to pour as much as possible into the pit and quickly spread it out as much as he could.
Well, the results left a little to be desired, because it wasn’t nearly enough to cover the whole bottom. However, he was certainly getting somewhere.
“QUARTZ!!!” He shouted to the shell, “Come on out!”
Quartz emerged and came over to investigate.
“Hm?”
“Last spring I harvested some waxy-shelly-bumpy-resiny-gluey things that grow on the stems of these flowers,” Tourmaline picked one of the little fluffy things that grew all over the place and handed it to Quartz, “And I found that when you heat them up, they melt and harden into glue! So we can seal the pond up with this! We just have to pick a lot of them. You wanna do that with me?”
“Sure!”
The next few days largely consisted of Tourmaline and Quartz harvesting waxy lump upon waxy lump and piling them all in the storage shell. This piqued the interest of the spiky gem, who began to follow the two of them around as they worked. Once they had harvested a good amount of them, and waited for the bugs who lived inside to vacate the premises, Tourmaline lugged up batches of the lumps up to the top of the volcano to heat them up into a waxy soup, then hurried back down before they cooled so it could be poured into the pond while it was still hot. The entire ordeal took multiple days, but eventually the majority of the pond was sealed.
“And NOW this time when it rains it won’t soak through!” Tourmaline exclaimed.
“We’ll have a pond!” Quartz said.
“Yes, we will!”
Quartz and Tourmaline waited for it to rain again. This wouldn’t happen for quite some time. In the meantime, the two gems turned their attention towards where they’d source their jellyfish from.
“How do you catch a jellyfish, anyways?” Quartz asked.
“Hmm. They’d have to live in the sea, right? We’ll need, like, a net or something.”
“My pajamas! What if we took them apart and used them as a net?”
Yet another good idea from Quartz. The two gems made off for the shell and got to work. He felt sort of guilty cutting up the sleeves and undoing the waistbands because he knew how much effort Opal, the tailor back home, had put into each and every outfit, every year, for as long as he could remember, and centuries before that too. Of course, many gems thought the whole practice was wasteful, the excessively ornate outfits made entirely for sleeping in and little else. Undoing all his hard work felt distasteful, though at least it was in the name of a good cause. The noble sacrifice of Quartz’s pajamas would usher in a new era of glorious jellyfish rearing for the volcano gems!
The clothes had then been fashioned into a nice little net, which would be perfect for bundling up some jellies. Everything was in place, they just had to wait for some rain.
The following week, it rained a great deal. This time, the water actually stayed in the pond! And so, the next order of duty was to go jellyfishing. As Tourmaline knew his way around the seafloor, at least in some vague capacity, he was the one to do it. He marched on into the sea, net in hand, and looked for some jellies to catch.
The sea was quite empty. Not a jelly in sight. The whole day passed and he didn’t find a single one! Not wanting to admit defeat, he remained underwater for a couple days more, but found nothing at all. He figured he’d throw in the towel on the fifth day and emerged from the sea, terribly disappointed.
Over the next few weeks Tourmaline and Quartz worked together on other projects to pass the time if the jellyfish pond was a bust. At least it was *a* pond, or more of a pool, that they could hang out in, if nothing else. They went into the sea together to collect more shells for bowls and sheds and such, harvested more wax, attempted to fashion the little puffy things into string for clothes (they weren’t very successful) and so on. And when they got bored of all that, they switched to simply laying about in the fields. Quartz’s powder began to wash off through all this activity, and now his entire body looked the same as his hair, all shiny and crystal clear.
It wouldn’t be until a few months later that their project would be revitalized. One summer morning, Quartz noticed the sea looking significantly redder than before, and the beach significantly dirtier, littered with the shells of tiny snails and wiggly wormy things. And, most importantly, washed-up jellyfish.
He immediately scooped one up and ran over to the shell where Tourmaline and the spiky gem were still asleep.
“Guys! Look!” He exclaimed, giddily, waking the two of them. “We got a jellyfish!!!”
Tourmaline sprung up. “Really?!”
“Yeah! Look! The sea is red for some reason and all sorts of things are washing up. Let’s go collect them and put them in the pond!”
Tourmaline and Quartz ran over to the pond to drop off the little jellyfish that Quartz was holding, ran over to the shell to get some boxes and empty shells and bowls, and then back to the beach to collect some more sea critters. Once their containers were filled with all manners of snails and jellies and wiggly sea-worms, they jaunted back over to the pond to dump them in. This would go on for the better half of the day. The spiky gem came over and watched the two of them work, knowing he wouldn’t be able to touch any of these watery slimy creatures without harm to his body. By sundown they had fully stocked the pond, but a new problem presented itself.
“What are we gonna feed them?”
“Oh, I didn’t even think of that.”
Back home, the gems would feed their jellyfish with seeds harvested from the flax plants. The seeds could be crushed for oil that would be used on wooden tools, but there’s only so much oil the gems really needed, and there would always be a surplus that would be fed to the jellies. Here, they had no flax, and, thus, no seeds. It looked like another trip back to the big island would be in store for Tourmaline.
Of course, that wouldn’t be until the winter, as traversing under the sea is a great deal more difficult compared to traversing over the sea when it’s frozen solid. The rest of the year was spent collecting algae and what little organic material that could be found in the immediate vicinity around the island, which truthfully wasn’t much at all, to try and feed the jellies with, but the sea was sort of eerily empty. Eerily, eerily empty…