Used and Discarded
"What's this?" Yellow asked, disgust dripping from her voice, as she poked at the washed up thing with her foot.
"Oh, that's a glass bottle. A beer bottle to be specific, I believe," said Pearl, glancing at the object her fellow Pearl had found in the sand.
"What is it for?" asked Blue, a few steps behind the other pair.
"For holding a kind of alcohol that humans drink," said Pearl.
"Ah, yes." Yellow bent down and picked the bottles up. "Humans require liquid sustenance for their continued existence, don't they?"
The tone of mild condescension in Yellow's voice made it clear just how poor a design she thought the whole concept was. Pearl didn't comment. She'd felt the same way at first, and after five thousand years, the thought of drinking still made her uncomfortable.
That said, this seemed like a little bit of human-trivia that the other Gems would appreciate. "It's true that humans require water, yes. But alcohol is very different." Pearl smirked conspiratorially. "It's actually toxic to humans. Ingesting too much of it is fatal to them.
Yellow stares at her in confusion.
Blue raised a single finger, and in a soft voice, asked the obvious question: "Then why do they drink it?"
Pearl grinned. "It 'intoxicates' them. They become dazed, confused, illogical."
"More so than they are already?" said Yellow.
"That makes no sense," said Blue.
"I know!" Pearl declared. "They simply find it fun! I don't understand it myself, but it can be very amusing to watch, let me tell you."
The other two Pearls shook their head in disbelief, but surprisingly, Yellow didn't drop her bottle. She simply turned it over in her hands, apparently inspecting its half-peeled label, as if hoping to pry it for secrets. Blue came to her side, gently craning her neck to conduct a similar inspection of her own. When about ten minutes later they stumbled upon a second bottle (this one being a longer, larger wine bottle, green and with a chip at its lip), Blue picked that up too.
Pearl didn't comment on it or discourage them. They were on Earth. They deserved to be able to explore anything they wanted, even human garbage.
When they arrived back at the house after their walk, they did seem rather more awkward about their 'prizes'. Blue considered storing her wine bottle in her gem, while Yellow was prepared to simply dump hers in the recycling.
"Oh! But you can recycle it yourself!" Steven was quick to interject.
"How?" asked Blue.
"Arts and crafts! Lots of ways. You could make it into a pretend telescope, or if you collected lots of bottles, smash them into pieces so you could make a glass mosaic, or you could put model ships into them…"
"Model ships?" Yellow and Blue Pearl asked in unison.
"Yeah! You make a whole fake ship and… somehow get it in a bottle I guess? I don't know how it works, but I always see it in movies, so…"
And of course, that spurred a solid forty minutes of internet research. Pearl didn't pay close attention- she had some snacks to prepare- but she half-listened to the discussion. Yellow talking about how this seemed useless, as aside from a a hypothetical challenge, Blue commenting that it did seem like an interesting pursuit, Steven wondering if they could buy some kits online…
"We don't need a kit," Yellow sneered. "I'm sure I could make that myself, no human preparation or instructions or required!"
"Oh really?" said Steven, light, teasing, gentle.
"Yes, really!" said Yellow. Teasing just wasn't something she was used to. "I'll prove it!"
And she did prove it. Once Yellow Pearl put her mind to something, she rarely backed down.
Same for Blue, in her own way. It was harder to notice, because she did everything so quietly, never commenting unless she thought it was completely necessary… But she had spent millennia practically running Blue Diamond's Court when no one else did, so she never did anything in half-measures.
In only a matter of days, the two Pearls had both created their first model ships in a bottle.
Pearl put them up on display on the shelf, next to all the other human nick-kacks they'd collected over the years. There was something reassuring, about the myriad of strange styles their home had grown into, the lack of single aesthetic. And there was something deeply satisfying, Pearl found to her own surprise, in turning old, discarded garbage into art. Maybe Amethyst had been onto something there, after all.
… Well, though Perl with a smirk. Maybe she'd unleash Yellow and Blue on Amethyst's room, and see what happened.