Rosie was assigned to the human zoo alongside many other Rose Quartz soldiers. She took a more active role in the human's lives, as she was smaller and less intimidating. When the other Rose Quartzes were bubbled, she was looked over, as nobody thought to look in with the humans. Rosie found out and escaped to earth, as she had heard that there was a group that could help her. Rosie was part of the Crystal gems for a while, but after hearing that Rose was the reason the Rose Quartzes were bubbled, she got angry and left, eventually meeting Sodalite. When Jazz was born, she took up the job of her caretaker, raising her in the human village. When the corruption hit, Rosie first came across Jazz and despite not recognizing her, felt the need to protect her. She continued to care for Jazz until humans took both of them in where Rosie was treated somewhat like the family dog.
Size wise, she's slightly taller than Amethyst normally and about the size of a large dog when corrupted.
Note: This is coming out later than I anticipated, I'm under a new treatment regimen so I'm unsure of what writing time is available right now, but will hopefully keep updating on a semi-regular basis. Thanks for your patience.
…..
Pearl ownership turned out to be very different than Slim had initially feared. She had acquired enough cash over the orbits to afford a brand-new one, for her needs were modest, but her natural wariness over being in the company of other gems had her thinking it would be awkward to have a gem, even a gem that barely counted as a gem, permanently in her space.
But the pearl was so unobtrusive she kept forgetting it was there. She could spend entire quadrants going over spatter evidence with such focus that whenever she turned around and spotted the pearl, she jumped. It wouldn't move unless she told it to, so it was more-or-less a constant fixture in the corner of the apartment.
Slim asked it to pick up things, tidy the apartment, even process some of the more boring data for her, but she was naturally self-sufficient and there just wasn't much work to give the pearl. A fleeting thought of using the pearl for her carnal urges occurred to her, but it was gone in the next moment; Slim had never really had trouble with those urges in the first place, and she found the idea of doing that with the pearl oddly distasteful.
It wasn't until a full seven cycles passed since Orthoclase had handed over the pearl that Slim finally hit a breakthrough.
She had been analyzing some crime evidence that didn't seem to make sense. Improvising as she always did, she picked up an object of equivalent weight and heft to the supposed weapon (a small sulphide container) and swung it in the supposed trajectory of the evidence. But her swing was clumsy, and the container was heavier than she expected, it slipped from her grasp.
She had, more-or-less, hurled it at the pearl.
There was less than a single pelmetre between Slim and the rest pod that the pearl had been sitting on, and less than a parsec to avoid being hit. Slim didn't see the pearl move, but it had, and the container hit the back of the rest pod, smashing the control panel there.
“Hm. You dodged it,” she murmured, a little stunned.
“I'm sorry,” the pearl responded.
“No, don't be sorry,” Slim said. Her mind was ticking over fast, as it usually did when she was piecing evidence together. “Why did you dodge it? I didn't have time to tell you...”
“I have a basic self-preservation program in place, and you did not order me to ignore it.”
“I can do that?”
“It's recommended in the manual.”
“Which I never got, because you're illegal,” Slim mused, tapping her forehead. “And your previous owner didn't follow the instructions?”
“My previous owner didn't read the manual. She only owned me for three cycles before she lost me on the tracer.”
“I see.”
Slim wanted to test the pearl's reaction time, so naturally she didn't give any warning when she struck out and slapped it across the face. To her shock, the pearl didn't even attempt to defend itself.
“What...?” Slim sputtered. Her hand stung, she hadn't held back. “Why didn't you block me?”
“I'm sorry. Did you want me to block?”
A deep purple bruise was already blooming across the pearl's cheek. Looking at it, Slim felt a little sick.
“Well, yes!” she said, fiddling with her hair as she always did when she felt on edge. “You just told me you have self-preservation programming, I assumed you'd stop me and I wanted to see how fast you could...”
“You're my owner. I can't defend myself from you.”
“Even without me ordering you to let me beat you up?” Slim snorted, incredulously.
“Of course. It's a basic rule.”
Slim made a little noise in the back of her throat. She had assumed the pearls that had been mutilated by their murdered owners had been ordered not to defend themselves, but she hadn't realized that all pearls were programmed to be helpless towards their owners in particular.
“Okay,” Slim sighed. “I'm going to hit out at you again, and this time I do want you to try and avoid getting hit. In fact, I want you to avoid getting hit by anyone or anything from now on, okay?”
“I understand.”
Slim held off for about half a quadrant before she struck out again. This time, the pearl had been idling by the corner of the apartment and the only way to avoid Slim's fist was to jump over her.
She did.
It looked to Slim like the pearl had disappeared into thin air, with just the slight air displacement that set Slim's hair floating to indicate she had moved at all. Slim's fist just about glanced the wall, and the pearl was behind her.
That's interesting.
Slim knew from the evidence she had found that a pearl's physical strength was nothing compared to even the weakest of gems, but not much had ever been written about their speed. It made sense for them to be fast, they had considerably less mass than normal gems, but it seemingly had never been utilized in any real way.
A little shiver ran down her spine. The great advantage that the zoatox species had had against gemkind had been their unbelievable speed. Breeding, growing and attacking had all happened in the blink of a gem's eye, and every time gems managed to gain some upper ground the zoatox evolved and attacked in a new and more vicious way. Diamond Core's great and horrific sacrifice had just barely managed to stop them.
Whispers across Homeworld were saying that these murders bore the hallmarks of a zoatox attack. Perhaps they did, but pearls had been compared to zoatox more than once and for good reason.
Slim was just about to download the most recent pearl ownership manuals when her holocast rang. She didn't even have to look at it.
Another one.
…..
The markets were so busy when Slim made her way to the far quadrant it was hard to believe a gem had been shattered.
Let alone two.
Well, one and a half. We can't register a pearl as a gem shattering.
On the surface, it looked like the pearl was mere collateral damage. According to the witnesses (who were talking rapidly in the constructs about the little they had seen), whatever had struck Hematite had gone through the pearl. Slim inspected the perspex box the pearl had been inside, measuring the cracks.
There goes my theory.
Her mind had just been starting to come around to the idea that a pearl had committed these crimes, perhaps on the order of some gem that had seen possibility in their speed. Whatever had hit those targets had been long and thin, and could only do serious damage if they were used at high velocity. But she couldn't imagine a pearl destroying another pearl in the process.
On the other hand, pearls didn't seem to be capable of going against orders even at risk to their own safety, why wouldn't they destroy a pearl if they were following orders?
I don't know enough about pearls for this.
And that was probably why Orthoclase had handed over the pearl.
Lavender. That's its name. Her name.
“What are you thinking?” the commanding Amethyst asked her. “Turf war?”
“Unlikely,” Slim mumbled. “Hematite's had this shop here for seven hundred plus orbits.”
“So?” the Amethyst scoffed. “This whole quadrant changes hands every couple of orbits. Maybe she was a holdout.”
“Whatever you say,” Slim said, rolling her eyes.
The attack trajectory was once again coming from the ceiling. It had gone through the upper corner of the perspex box, through the pearl's gem, out of the base of the box and through Hematite's shoulder. The pearl wouldn't have felt a thing, but the Hematite had been in enough pain to scream, loud enough to attract the attention of every gem shopping in the district. By the time anyone was in direct line of sight, Hematite was shattered and whatever had attacked her was long gone.
All within the space of three parsecs at most.
No gem was capable of that kind of speed.
As far as they knew.
“Aw, they got the pearl too?”
A Spinel was lingering by the door (probably just released from the evidence constructs), staring at the perspex box with vague dismay.
“I'm afraid so,” Slim told her. “But even if it wasn't, it would have been taken in as evidence.”
“I know that,” the Spinel groaned. “I wanted to get dibs when it gets released on the pre-owned circuit.”
“Why? What's so special about this pearl?”
“It's freaky,” Spinel said with a cheerful grin. “Hematite used to sell tickets.”
Aha.
“Freaky how?” Slim asked, feigning disinterest by rummaging through her toolkit.
“Like, it's been dead the entire time she had it,” the Spinel explained. “Except sometimes it used to move when you weren't looking. Hematite kept it in that box to show she wasn't making it move. It was seriously spooky,”
Curiouser and curiouser.
“How shattered is it, exactly?” Spinel asked.
“Completely.”
“Ah, slag it,” Spinel muttered and slumped away.
Two mutilated pearls and a dead one that moved.
The squad dealing with the case were packing up and moving on. No doubt they'd be pinning this as a turf war between rival gangs and Hematite as an innocent bystander. Slim, of course, knew it ran much deeper than that, but she also knew they wouldn't listen to her.
…..
Slim lingered around the market stalls for a little longer than was comfortable for her. In the past it had been a good place to pick up rumours that lead to case facts, so it was worth the mild anxiety being surrounded by so many gems tended to provoke. They never clocked her for a patrol Amethyst; at her size, she was usually mistaken for a strangely-coloured Jade.
Even so, the cycle had nearly ended before she heard anything useful.
A downstreet stall selling offcut compound mixes was a quiet corner in the otherwise-crowded market, a steady stream of gems stopped by to drink compound and chat to the Iolite running the stall. Slim camped out there for a while before a Larimar stopped by and, over the course of three compounds, told her entire life story. Slim half-listened right up until she heard something interesting.
“She just hasn't been the same since,” the Larimar moaned. “It's like, nothing's really exciting anymore!”
“Well, why don't you hit the backstreet? They've got that blind pearl, it's supposed to be pretty nifty...” the Iolite responded. She sounded bored.
“We got banned from that place,” Larimar groaned. “She got carried away....besides, when you've seen the Murder Pearl take out old zoatox veterans everything else just pales in comparison.”
Murder Pearl?
“Better you than me,” Iolite shivered. “Personally I find the whole idea of murder pearls creepy.”
“Lucky for you there's only one then,” Larimar laughed. “But I asked and Hematite says she has no idea when the next fight is going to be. She says the pearl is down for maintenance, but like I believe that...”
There were many Hematites on Homeworld, and a good number of them involved in criminal activity, but Slim knew exactly what Hematite this Larimar was talking about. Only one Hematite was known for hosting underground fighting matches. She paid large amounts of cash to the Amethyst squadrons to look the other way.
…..
“I don't have it,” Hematite growled. “Don't you need a warrant?”
“Actually, I don't. I have authority to raid at random,” Slim responded. “I don't really feel like doing that, though.”
“Okay, what do you want? I can give you a few thousand...”
“I don't want cash, I just want you to answer some questions. All off the record.”
Hematite cursed under her breath, rubbed her temples and sighed.
“Okay, fine. I'll tell you what I can. Off the record. If it goes any further, I'll deny everything.”
“Deal,” Slim shrugged. “Tell me about the pearl.”
“It was a joke, okay? It was just some old broken pearl I got off the black market, got it rejigged and set it up in the arena. It was supposed to get smashed. It was never meant to fight.”
“But...it did fight?”
“It did. It fought and it won. Over and over.”
“How is that possible?” Slim asked. “Pearls aren't built for fighting, and from what I understand you get really tough gems volunteering for this kind of thing...”
“I don't know how, it just kept winning. It just...always found a way to kill them.”
“What orders did you give it?”
“I didn't give it any orders,” Hematite moaned. “I just said something stupid, like 'try not to die too quickly' or something, I don't know! I never had a pearl before, Larimar had a bunch of them...I didn't know what I was doing, okay?”
“Okay,” Slim agreed. “So, where is this pearl now?”
“No idea,” Hematite growled. “Orthoclase borrowed it and never returned it. Not that I want it back, it made me lots of money but it scared the slag out of me...Larimar left me for a while because of it....why do you want to know, anyway?”
Happy Pride Month~ We know it’s awfully late, but life kept us occupied and we finally had free time Monday/Tuesday to finally hammer out our ideas. Kaku and I designed some gems for Pride Month. They’re a group of male identifying gems and gem hybrids that found solace on earth Red- Pyrope (fusion of Rubellite and Black Star Sapphire) Orange- Citrine Yellow- Bumblebee Jasper Green- Amazonite (fusion of Tahitian Pearl, Green Zircon, and Peridot) Blue- Human + Lapis hybrid Indigo- Paraíba Tourmaline Violet- Lepidolite Pink- Coral
So a little while ago, I submitted some OC Gems for @birdiiielle/ @thegreatclodauthority Chill White Diamond’s Court! I made a White Agate, White Jade and her Akoya Pearl! I originally submitted just a rough sketch but since it was all bleh, I wanted to line and color it! Hope you like it!
Oh! ON MORE THING!
I’m gonna start doing commissions and requests. Since I seem to be kinda good at matching Steven Universe’s still, I’m willing to draw other people’s Gemsona’s or whatever other requests they have! For now, I’ll only do No BG figure for $3 a piece. If anyone has a Gemsona they want illustrated and colored, gimme a hollar!
