unknownseas | WEEK 5

That's three murders now - and this last trial got more than slightly out of hand. It looks like you might be in for another tough week... or at least, maybe that's just the refusal of this place to change too much. You lose Saturday again, but maybe six-day weeks are starting to feel normal by now. Who knows? The cycle of day and night continues apace, changing so little.

Speaking of change, though, there's a new area to look through, the biggest and most complex yet. And the end of one wing of the facility, from the looks of it - though you can probably guess where more areas might start to open up.

And speaking of opening up (segues!), this week if you're out particularly late, you might sometimes see Angel out and about! So hey, maybe change is on the horizon.

Just gotta hope it's a change for the better, don't you?

SUNDAY | MONDAY | TUESDAY | WEDNESDAY | THURSDAY

[ ooc: Welcome to Week 5! Remember to turn in AC here, threads for regain coins here, and if you feel so inclined you can visit Angel's office hours over here! Or, if you want Angel to come to you, that's now an option! Simply put a prompt after lights-out into your toplevel and indicate you want Angel in the subject line, same as investigations! ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ hmm ]

The first thing that came to mind for me was mommy issues, but your idea is a lot more interesting, actually. He acts like he's just a normal psychology professor, but when you think about it, we don't actually know how much more there might be to his history, do we?

Mommy issues?

[She's from a species without parents; she doesn't really follow ~~despite basically having the Gem version.~~]

We don't. His profile is a lot more vague than some of ours.

[ This is the second time Rin has blithely said something, only to realize that it's way, way more embarrassing to actually explain. When will she learn from her hubris? ]

You know, when you have issues about your mom. Like maybe his mother was cold and harsh, instead of treating him kindly, so the whole "you never should have been born" bit struck a nerve for him?

Oh.

[what, like that's uncommon?]

I guess humans are usually nice to their children...

They're supposed to be. We don't come out of the ground fully-formed like some people do, so kids need someone to take care of them.

It would be nice if people would take care of us, too...

[not so much in the "literal infant" way, but new Gems are still naive. And really, doesn't everyone deserve to be taken care of?]

I guess, but you don't really need it in the same way a kid does, do you?

[ Absolutely not. Rin, for example, needs no one, ]

[Rose thinks back to the time she watched a human infant climb up a Ferris wheel.]

Maybe...not? But even if new-formed are programmed with information about their job, they don't really have any life experience.

And none of you would for unofficial mentorships, or anything like that?

It's supposed to be up to a Gem's commander to...discipline them, I guess. I've heard some of them are kinder than others.

Yeah, but we're not talking about discipline, are we? I mean older gems taking younger ones under their wing so they don't make mistakes.

I'm sure it happens within units.

[But it certainly never happened to her.]

[ Rin nods to that. ]

It's just the sensible thing to do. I have a hard time imagining it no one ever has, anyway...

[ But she does notice the implication in what Rose says, that she doesn't have the firsthand experience of watching it happen. She hates when people pry, so she isn't going to do it to someone else... But she notices. ]

Still, sounds like it'd benefit everyone to make it an official thing.

It would. But that's a change. To say that something should change is to say it isn't perfect - and everything the Diamonds do is perfect.

[you see how gem society has been the same for all these thousands of years]

[ ughhhh ]

You know, everything you say about them just makes me hate them more. It's kind of amazing.

[ After all, if there's one thing Rin hates more than authoritarian autocrats, it's authoritarian autocrats who keep society stagnant! ]

They allow for technological advances, of course. Jasper's been telling me that.

[She sounds faintly amused - what, like that's supposed to mean anything to her?]

But from what she says, it sounds like nothing about their society has changed at all.

[ Rin hums. ]

You two must be from really different times, huh? But I guess that makes sense, given how old you both are. It's honestly hard for me to imagine...

She says she's fifteen years in my future. But she says a lot of strange things about what happened then. Or is that what's going to happen?

[Rose does not see how a mere fifteen years would help her fuse with a human, when she hasn't been able to in the past five thousand. Maybe she never had the same kind of relationship with any of them as she does with Greg, but still, you would have thought - ]

So not that long relatively, then...

Hey, out of curiosity, were you familiar with the idea of parallel worlds before being brought here?

No, not at all. Gems have dabbled in time-travel technology a little, but it never went anywhere that I know of - I guess maybe it was too risky.

[And too costly; of course she did hear some things. There's old hourglasses stored away on Earth. But disrupting time was impossible according to the Sapphires, and strangely the test runs against the Rebellion never seemed to work!]

I'm sure they haven't advanced in that since, or I'd have been shattered thousands of years ago.

Yeah, that's not really the same thing. Parallel worlds are timelines that have branched off from one another on their own. So, say, maybe there's a version of your world where Gems have mastered time travel technology, and exactly that happened. That kind of stuff.

[ Of course, doing that itself might create a new timeline rather than just altering the one it occurred in... Well, whatever, they don't need to think about that. ]

Oh. That's interesting.

[Bit of a rough example there, but she gets it .It sounds like a story.]

[ Look, it... It was what they were talking about, so. ]

It just makes me wonder if your relationship to Jasper isn't something like that, if what she says seems so weird to you. You're thousands of years old, how much could change in a decade and a half?

Do you really think so?

[That's not a thought she'd considered.]

I...I had thought it seemed like too little time. She said she saw me fuse with a human. That isn't even possible - I've had thousands of years to try.

Like I said before, you'd obviously know more than I would. But it's what came to mind, given that it seems like you two are out-of-sync somehow. [ Other than the obvious ways. ] So, either you managed some kind of huge breakthrough in that time, or...

(no subject)

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