AlternativeTwoie

@twobladedswordsandmauls

@oforangeandblack

@alternativetwoie

So far though, it seemed like he was good. Even Kiddo didn't look at him, but that might just be because he's so focused.

Twoie needed to just let events play out. This needed to happen, or Peridot might not give up. If she thinks she has a chance to stop the cluster herself, or to escape the planet on her own, then all may be lost.

So far so good, events were lining up exactly as they had before. Stumbling across Peridot, the resulting conflict, her subsequent escape, and Pearl and Amethyst leaving to go find her while he stayed behind with Garnet.

"... If Peridot's mission was to reactivate the Kindergarten, the injectors would be on. But they are not" Said Garnet to his younger self.

"Oh, oh" said Kiddo.

Garnet picked up the collapsed injector, revealing a hole.

"Let's go see what she was actually doing"

Garnet, Kiddo, and Twoie went down into the Kindergarten's prime control room.

But only Twoie knew what horrors would await them.

"Oh I wanna see!" Kiddo commented excitedly.

Twoie put his hand on his chin as he thought. He didn't really have an opinion on this, mainly because he had been so focused on just mastering them for so long. Self healing came to mind, but he wasn't lobbing his head off in front of kids. It did make for a neat, if terrifying, party trick. One that usually waited for everyone around him to be very drunk before doing so they would think they imagined it after the fact.

Most of the things to do with his mind powers were out, mainly because the only ones that were visible were forms of mind control.

That left... oh, that would be fun.

Twoie smiled and took his hand off his chin, and with a theatrical snap of his fingers, opened a portal.

Kiddo looked on in awe, but Connie had scene it before. What neither of them were expecting was that he'd grab the hands and pull them through.

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The portal lead to the top of the steap hill that the temple was built against. The kids seemed confused about his choice of locale, so Twoie just moved right into his demonstration.

Sprinting toward the downward slope, Twoie summoned his shield, jumped, and moved it to his feet. With an enthusiastic exclamation that contained a lot more empathic projection than Twoie would normally have allowed, Twoie surfed on his shield down the grassy hill. Kiddo and Connie looking on in awe behind him.

When Twoie reached the bottom, he leaned into a sharp turn, and went back towards the hill. With a sharp kick, Twoie's shifted his body weight backwards and shot back up the slope. Reaching the top saw him rocket into the air, at which point he did some tricks to kill his momentum in order to not throw himself off of the cliff.

Twoie foated down with a smile on his face.

"That is the coolest thing I can do with my powers"

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Empathic projection would always terrify him. It, like mind control, took people's freedom from them. Unlike mind control however, it couldn't be controlled well enough to simply ignore. Twoie had to choose to mind control someone, and it was a hard thing to maintain. He had to put an active effort into not spreading his emotions to all around him.

Plus, it was pretty hard for mind control to hurt him. Empathic projection, before he realized it was there, can and has hurt directly. It had its good points, but its bad ones nearly ruined his life (though part of that was his fault).

Now though, he needed to use it, and he need to do it right. Folding laundry helped, mainly because it kept eyes off him as he practiced and caused people to not notice his screw ups.

What he was trying to do is project a sense of disinterest toward him around himself. This should cause people to not consider him, especially Gems due to their weakness to psychic infiltration. If he messed up, he'd most likely project a feeling of boredom, hence why he was doing this while everyone was folding laundry.

He needed to do this because he couldn't mess up this mission. Timing was important, and if his team mates were thinking about him and what he would do, that timing could be messed up.

He hummed as he worked, while singing wasn't important to empathic projection, making deliberate noise was. It was essentially a variation on the naturally transitive properties of the Gem language. Using noises to directly project meaning, rather than the noises themselves having inherent meaning.

It wouldn't effect Kiddo of course, as a Diamond he had quite a bit of resistance to this type of attack, further accentuated by Kiddo being psychic in his own right. Worse, his younger self might be able to sense that he's doing it, and that might mess things up. All he could was trust that Kiddo won't try and make things harder on him.

About halfway through the laundry session, Garnet began to speak.

"We need to track down Peridot. We found her pod. We know she's out there somewhere. She came to Earth with a job to do and odds are, she's still gonna try to do it. That's why I've gathered you here."

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(Yes, this is basically filler. I overslept).

Twoie didn't think he could avoid it, at least without altering the timeline too much. His younger self could, but he'd also have to face the Grafted together shards eventually anyway. It was a hard decision for Twoie, he could protect Kiddo's mental health now for the price of maybe making things worse later, or he could let Kiddo be harmed now, so he might deal with it better in the future.

He'd been thinking about it for weeks, and hadn't come to a decision. He wasn't even sure he was the right person to make this decision in the first place. Did he have a right to protect Kiddo from this?

In truth, probably not.

Twoie was just another person in Kiddo's life, he had no more right to protect him than Pearl did. And Twoie didn't think Pearl had the right to make this decision as of now.

Twoie got up from the couch, and looked to the loft.

"Hey Kiddo? Can I talk to you about something?"

Kiddo looked at him with a surprised expression, then he nodded and patted the spot on the bed next to him. Twoie went and joined him.

"What is it?" Asked Kiddo

Twoie took a deep breath.

"Tomorrow, there's going to be a mission, and there is going to be something REALLY scary on it. It's something you're going to face a few more times, and I don't think you can avoid at least two of those. I wanted to ask if you wanted to not go on the mission?" Asked Twoie, trying to sound calm. In spite of his emotional control, he failed.

Kiddo eyebrows fell into a look of unsurprise.

"Twoie, I'm going" It was simple, to the point, and slightly out of character for the kid.

Twoie winced.

"Okay then"

And then Twoie left.

For those of you also following @suau-reshuffled, we'll see if I'm feeling up to it then.

All in all, it was a confusing and frustrating day, one he wanted his younger self not to have to deal with it. Now, how to do that...

Twoie pushed his mind into super speed to give himself more time to think. It resulted in him feeling like he was frozen, but he'd done it plenty of times before. So while it was uncomfortable, he was used to it.

His first thought was a polite dismissal, but he quickly shut that down. No way it would work forever, and it was too unpredictable as a solution.

It was a hard thing, he didn't want to hurt anyone, but he didn't want to let his younger self be hurt more than strictly necessary.

He might be overthinking this. Twoie was a Diamond, it is in his nature to manipulate others, but he's also a human. Human nature is to go against their nature when it doesn't serve them. It's what allowed him not to be just another cog in the machine.

It meant that the first thing he needed to ask himself is does this really need fixing? Sure, Kiddo would likely be hurt by it, and it didn't make him stronger for the experience. But did that mean he shouldn't go through it? People are the some of their experiences, did Twoie have the right to take that experience away?

In truth, no. But that wasn't what he was doing here, he wasn't taking an experience away, he was just making an experience with his younger self. That is something he does have right to, making a memory with another person.

All he had to do now was make it a positive memory.

That was the hard part. Twoie was decent at talking his way out of things, he knew a few tricks in that direction, but Ronaldo was equally good at not being tricked. The Frymen was adapt at keeping his mind open to possibilities and looking at things from more than one angle. More to the point, he was a minor grade psychic. If he suspected anything then simply talking wouldn't work.

However, between Ronaldo's minor precognition, and his very open and outrospective mind, it should make him fairly weak to psychic influence. Specifically, it would make him open to psionic suggestion.

That did present a moral issue. Psionic suggestion was a form of mind control, and while Twoie wasn't entirely against manipulating that minds of others, there was a certain amount of morality needed to do that properly.

He might need to just let this one slide on Ronaldo's part. Twoie didn't think he had the moral backbone to be able to do that to Ronaldo without hurting either him or himself.

Twoie went back into Normal time, and took a deep breath. He wasn't strong enough to fix this, it had been a long while sense he felt that.

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(Yeah, Twoie DID just fully consider mind control as a potential solution to the problem, what of it).

(Also, this is a one off, "Rising tides, Crashing Skies" continues mainly as normal. With Twoie standing in the background at points and comforting Steven).

Two sat cross legged with his forearms on his thighs, his palm turned toward the air. Steven followed suit.

"Okay, Kiddo. Are you comfortable?"

Steven nodded.

Twoie smiled.

"Good. Then to begin, we'll focus on our breathing. Part of the form meditation I find most helpful involves breathing slowly and evenly. To do that, we're going to use a five step process. Breathe in for eight seconds, hold our breathe for five seconds, breathe out for another eight seconds, hold our breathe for three seconds, and then repeat. Do you understand?"

Steven gave an uncertain nod, hoping it would become more clear when they started doing it.

Twoie eyed him slightly suspicious, but continued.

"Okay then. Breathe in. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8."

Steven did so, but he found that it was already hard.

"Okay, hold it. 5 seconds"

Twoie didn't count, so Steven had to do it himself. He didn't hear Twoie's next words until a few moments after he had reached five.

"Now breathe out. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8."

This was just as hard as breathing in, but they were just starting.

"Now hold. 1. 2. 3."

Steven got through it, but it was very tiring. Unlike with the five second hold, he didn't have any air in his lungs, so it made him feel like he was suffocating.

Then he repeated it, over and over again. Breathing in, holding his breathe, breathing out, and holding his breathe once more. All for very specific amounts of time.

It got easier with each repetition, but it was still just hard enough to require that he focus on it fully to get it right.

He didn't know how long they were out there, but when Twoie finally decided that they were finished. The sun had moved, and Connie and Pearl were out training nearby. They decided to go watch.

Steven did have to admit, he did feel way calmer. If exceptionally tired.