Nine Lives, And More
Garnet doesn’t use her future vision for everything. It’s not just because Ruby influences her to be “in the now”. It’s because there is fundamentally no difference between what it feels like to live in the present as the future. All of the sensory details filter in the same. Her mind is as clear as ever. Even Sapphire, usually so adept at traversing this world of might be’s, can’t point out the differences when prompted.
Garnet’s initial thought is that it must be a matter of familiarity. She’s doesn’t have thousands of years of experience to draw upon—not as herself, anyway. However, with Sapphire’s memories readily available, Garnet should be able to figure this ability out in no time. These visions can’t be so consuming as to indefinitely fool her over which reality is real, right?
The ridiculous, low-probability futures weed themselves out as a general rule. It’s taken a couple of centuries, but Garnet has finally managed to figure out how to side-step them entirely, with merely a passing glance of acknowledgement. But the futures with similar probabilities, the ones statistically most likely to come to pass—sometimes, Garnet experiences them and honestly doesn’t know whether or not she comes out.
Sapphire, precise and detached, can dismiss the ridiculous and see through similar probabilities almost instantly. Her predictions are almost always right, even when the probabilities make it look like a crapshoot.
Of course, even Sapphire occasionally gets caught up in visions, but that’s when she allows her emotions to take over. As long as she’s clinical with her observations, she’s fine. But that’s just it: Sapphire observes. She doesn’t have to live it in order to find out what might happen. For better or worse, that’s Ruby’s influence. Even when she sees the future, Garnet is still fully immersed in the moment.
The tradeoff? Garnet sees much, much farther ahead than Sapphire can. Her long term predictions are not mere extrapolations, she knows because she’s already been there. In addition, no matter how long Garnet thinks she’s been gone, nothing more than a few seconds ever passes in the present. That’s a useful feature, if one is pressed for time.
It isn’t a matter of familiarity, Garnet realizes one day. Her future vision feels so much more different than Sapphire’s memories because her future vision is different. Sapphire has her emotional detachment, but Garnet needs to come up with her own ways of telling the difference between When and Now.
It’s a simple trick, but bracing her fingers on her temples is a surprisingly reliable tell. Well, she has yet to be stranded in a vision like that, anyway. Asking the answer to a specific question also limits the time she spends exploring the future, because of course there are only so many answers.
Garnet has been around for 7,000 years now, give or take a few centuries. But if you factor in every time she’s been destroyed and Ruby and Sapphire have been crushed or shattered; how many times she’s lost the same handful of close friends; the wars she has and hasn’t won—all together, that’s substantially longer than 7,000 years. Garnet has lived like a cat with far more than nine lives, and no matter how many times she dives into the spectrum of maybes, or how often the fingers-on-the-temples trick saves her, she’s never entirely certain she comes back out.
All of which is to say, there is a reason that Garnet doesn’t use her future vision for everything. She’s gotten good at closing her third eye and shunting the ability to the side, though she can always feel its presence, a never ending movie of fast forwards, whiplash pauses and sudden reversals. Let the chips fall where they may in nonthreatening situations; it’s not statistically likely that the world will end in disaster from such things.
She goes to Funland Arcade for Steven’s sake. Garnet wants to humor and support him, encourage the kind of bonding that would bring the Crystal Gems—all of them—together. It hadn’t seemed like a poor choice at the time.
Meat Beat Mania, though.
Garnet figures there will be an easily predictable end to the game, and she’s pretty eager to get there (she loves Steven, but let’s be honest, arcades aren’t really her style), so she peeks into the future for the right possibilities.
The problem is, she doesn’t come out. She thinks she does. Several times Garnet is conned into thinking she’s finally reached the end of the labyrinth of blue, green, green, pink, orange-pink combo, blue, yellow, and she mentally wrenches away—only to find herself dropped right back into the loop. She doesn’t know how long it lasts, all she knows is orange, blue, green, pink, pink, yellow-blue combo followed by a green-blue combo…
There’s an algorithm to Meat Beat Mania, you know. Even the most advanced levels all follow the same endlessly repeating patterns.
The next thing Garnet knows, Steven is smashing the game with one of its own fake grills. The little drill parasites are reaping havoc on Beach City, and she honestly has no way of knowing how much time she’s lost.
Her head is hazy like it’s packed to the forehead with fog—is this what it’s like to be woozy and hungover?—but Garnet still fist pumps for Steven. Supportive, just be supportive. “You won!” she says, though in truth that little boy has no idea just how he’s saved her.
Nevertheless, she can sense the little corrupted gem drills just outside of the arcade, and she flips out onto the boardwalk to begin taking care of them, as she should have from the start. Defeating monsters never fails to put Garnet in good spirits—and the fast pace and quick thinking required for combat has the added bonus of grounding her here in reality, for sure this time.