Intermission: Yaldabaoth's Lament

[Instrumental] ( watch?v=RepXOI13fVI)

She had not moved from this place in a very long time.

Were she on another world, the folds of her cape would have been covered in spiderwebs by now; Had there been anyone around to shed dead skin cells, the columns of her heels would be covered in dust, but she was all alone within the walls of her grand, pharaonic tomb.

Were she a more finite kind of being, she would have been covered in festering sores; but time could not touch her, just as gravity could not hold her, nor could any walls have prevented her from passing through – for all intents and purposes she was a truly singular, intangible being -

And yet she had been touched.

She felt the hot, disagreeable mark on her, not anywhere on her body, but in her mind, the jarring, discordant awareness of things not going her way.

And you must understand, this was her world through and through. Everything within these walls obeyed her every wish, so it would seem that she was here of her own free will, with all this power at this world at her fingertips -

but those fingertips were idle, paralyzed, held in place by a creeping sense of doubt held stiff in the crevices of her back, the vague, shapeless shadows of thoughts she would never allow herself to have, such as -

How could this have happened?

If this was her world, made by her, of herself, and it wasn't going like she wanted,

then what did it mean about that world, and what did it mean about her?

Should she have held the reins even tighter? Had she actually allowed herself become swept up in the world below?

But when?

When did it even happen?

...

For most of gemkind, personal space considered one of the highest luxuries.

Most housing on homeworld and its colonies was strictly communal, with each individual gem barely receiving more than a cubby barely larger than themselves, and whatever storage space they required for their equipment.

They'd get this open space barely wider than themselves, and that was where they would keep their things and stand at attention when they weren't needed.

Of course, much of the space inside your typical 21st century human dwelling would have been taken up by facilities which gems simply did not require – They had no use for toilets or fridges, they didn't cook, they didn't have to wash themselves, most could store and summon at least some items inside their gems and since most of their clothing was shapeshifted or summoned, they had no requirements for clothes racks, though some might keep at least a few additional material appearance modifiers, weapons or other personal belongings, and neither did they require any cleaning implements, since most of the cleaning that was even required and not otherwise taken care of by advanced technology would be relegated to lower ranked gems whose primary task would be to keep particular buildings in order.

Without pesky things like ligaments bones and circulatory systems to worry about, they could leave their hard-light forms in the same place and position for as long as they pleased (or were ordered to) and without having to pause for sustenance or sleep, they could and often did work for days or weeks without interruption -

And perhaps it was that very resilience that had made it easier to justify this kind of society, though their subjects were still sentient creatures liable to experience under-stimulation ("boredom"), frustration or debasement, whereas 19th century factory conditions had not lasted long because humans flat out broke under the strain.

Given the option, the architects of gem society might have opted to dispense with personal spaces altogether- But as hardy as White Diamond and her many "children" might have been, they were ultimately still finite. Typically, each one was imbued with vast amounts of energy in the moment of their creation (absorbing a large amount at once whereas organics would need to be consuming additional fuel on a regular basis) which they could then access over time and even supplement or recharge their reserves using little more than ambient light, through a process much more akin to the physical processes that took place in the crystalline wafers inside solar panels than the chemical-based photosynthesis employed by plants.

But as per the laws of thermodynamics, it was simply not possible to convert one form of energy to another without loss or the generation of entropy, which, in context, imposed a technical limit on how much energy could be processed or accessed at once.

– meaning that gems would still get exhausted and require rest after prolonged exertion, which meant that they would need places to do so, and hence, some however minimal manner of dwellings, many of them stacked on top of each other in large rooms that were themselves often stacked in large complexes on gem-controlled planets and structures.

Their occupants were usually grouped according to which units they belonged to, what tasks they were assigned on, or where they had been produced (which, for newer units that had not yet had may of their members replaced, usually overlapped), and generally speaking, it was common for the members of such units to be closely bonded in what could perhaps be considered the homeworlds' equivalent of clans or families, though the comparison only went so far since the denizens of the empire would typically choose their romantic partners from within those units if they were so inclined.

Couples were somewhat rarer than in dimorphic species like humans where the mechanism of pair bonding would have been tied up with reproduction, which, for gems, was a completely different process which most individuals would never be concerned with. (And even among humans and the like, you might still find individuals who were born without the urge to mate or form couples)

It was thought that the early crystal lifeforms in homeworld's distant past evolved pair bonds in tandem with the ability to fuse together, which, in itself, was a response to the scarce environment that allowed for cooperation rather than competition in tight spots spots, or to render themselves hardier in the face of stressors.

On earth, microorganisms like yeasts were thought to have used merging and separation for this purpose long before reproduction by merging became all the rage in the course of their revolution, but apart from certain slime molds, almost nothing there would retain the ability for complete mergers of entire organisms (rather than specialized cells) into more sophisticated stages of life where complex behavior would have been a consideration. The jump from mere self-organization, that infamous gray zone where you would mostly find viruses, snowflakes and the odd physical process half-metaphorically described as a life-cycle (like the formation of stars), was much more recent at the time that some of the results attained the ability to wonder how they got there.

Before that, it was said the crystalline mats lifeforms would form pairs or small social groups that would exist as individual units or large mats depending on outside conditions.

Of course by now, these creatures had been extinct for untold eons and all that was left on them were a few dusty records that very few knew or cared about, and even if they had, they would probably have been used to characterize casual or permanent fusions as primitive rather than natural, or used to support the predominant paradigm that fusion was only for battle by emphasizing the 'survival' aspect over the social one - It's not like anyone could disprove those spins by studying an ecosytem that no longer existed.

The tale had been spun many times over the ages, often with an ideology behind it, so ultimately no one could be certain that it wasn't all made up from whole cloth.

But regardless of its murky origins, gems were now an intelligent species which had heavily modified themselves through technology, and as such, were left to give their bonds and/or fusions whichever shape and purpose they desired... as long as it didn't piss off the authorities, that is.

As it was, fusion was officially relegated to battle, which was perhaps comparable to those religious and political movements on Earth that purported mating to be solely for reproduction when most social mammals on Earth also used it for social bonding, at times by individuals who would not produce offspring together.

An off-world xenobiologist or xeno-anthropologist writing a treatise might have wanted to mention the alternate modes of cohabitation common in alternate societies bands of off-colors or movements like the crystal gem rebellion in order to represent a more complete picture of gemkind, but for obvious reasons, you would not have found an unbiased account of these anywhere in homeworld's archives.

On Earth, the relation of pair bonds with reproduction (and the distribution of property to the offspring) had led to a number of societies where those were strictly reglemented or at least emphasized -

On homeworld's mainstream society, they were all but forgotten, and there were almost no ritual social trappings around it. Something like marriage would have been a foreign concept, but the same would go for oaths of blood-brotherhood where one would formally bring a close friend or comerade into their clan as they had been practiced among many ancient cultures of the earth, for all that they might have fallen out of fashion by the 21th century, nor would you have found anything like birthdays or namedays as occasions for the whole family or social circle to gather in celebration of an individual.

By and large, personal bonds of any sort were not terribly valued or formalized in the empire's culture, though they very much existed all throughout the ranks, from the tiniest Pebbles to the most enormous Diamonds, not that it occurred to the latter that this might be a good and unsurprising thing for an social species.

But if intelligence is the ability to program yourself, to exceed your nature – then that also comes with the risk of going against it in rather counterproductive ways.

Not only were love or friendship not considered valid reasons to fuse or associate across ranks, they did not count for much of a reason at all.

If a quartz were to incur a severe crack in line of duty, her 'sisters' would be expected to leave her behind if bringing her back with them would interfere with their mission and might be punished if they acted differently and thereby compromised their objectives. None of them could expect compassionate leave if the unfortunate soldier gem were to perish, and neither would any lover of theirs have been permitted to stay behind to care for her in her final moments if her own platoon were ordered to move out, unless their superior was feeling merciful that day, and in any case, she would explicitly have had to request the exception from her manager, which might be a risky, frightening prospect if you were a lower-ranking gem and your handler was a capricious individual, and just more of a stressful hassle than someone might be capable of putting up with in that sort of situation.

(In the Pink Court, such requests actually had a good chance of being granted, insofar as the superior in question could do so without incurring the wrath of their own higher-ups. In the Blue and Yellow courts it was... unlikely, though one could increase the odds of being granted such permission by sucking up to their superiors or archiving great merit. Overall, the odds were higher in the Blue court, but mostly for the higher ranks – under Yellow Diamond's stern, pragmatic command, even an elite might still have to listen to a put-down about how they should honor their comrade's sacrifice by dutifully continuing in their work instead of disgracing them by slacking off.

On White Diamond's planets, it was virtually unheard of, but not necessarily because the answer was always "No". If one actually went through with asking and managed to get a hold of one's superior, they were already quite close to being one of the lucky few, but this was an exceedingly rare occurrence because all the wide assortment of gray and rainbow gems was discouraged from accepting any comfort their comrades might have been willing to give.

If you were no longer of use, you were expected to stay quiet and out of everyone else's way so as not to drag them down, you know, out of the 'good judgment' and 'consideration' that the white court prided itself of.

It was no coincidence that a certain Bismuth always felt the need to emphasize to herself and her friends that they, too, were important, and that a certain Pearl would spend a long time struggling until she could convince herself of that)

One way or another, by the time the remainder of our hypothetical quartzes would have returned from the war, their fallen comrade's old cubby would have been reassigned to some fresh recruit who'd just popped out of the ground days earlier on one of the frontier colonies, with all of the shattered soldier's former belongings unceremoniously re-purposed or discarded.

That said, a quartz would have been just high enough up the totem pole that they could hope to win themselves some more exclusive accommodations through merit (Gems celebrated no birthdays, but they did have jubilees), perhaps a curtained-off rectangular loge between the columns of an arena, maybe even at its upper edge (though still away from the pulpits reserved for visiting elites), where they would have a good view of any gladiatorial battles and a short way to walk if they wished to participate – though a simple quartz would have to be quite the decorated veteran before they would receive such honors, which have been virtually unattainable to a simple Ruby, but pretty much the default for a Topaz who could count on such lodgings from the day they emerged (even if they'd much rather shared their lodgings with a special someone.)

If one of the near important fighters were to own a Pearl, she would have to share their dwelling and preferably make herself at home in one of the room's corners where she would be unobtrusive, but still visible enough that her master would get the chance to brag about whatever glorious achievement had netted her this prestigious reward – Pearls still qualified as a noteworthy sight in the dwellings of the decorated fighters, whereas most of the aristocracy would generally be granted one on request, or, in case of certain gem types from the higher nobility, would have a Pearl commissioned for them after their emergence – but if you were this high up in the hierarchy, it could be safely assumed that you'd have somewhere to keep her, as you probably had a sizeable complex of rooms to your serial number, or even your own pocket dimension (considering a height of magitech sophistication, those had been all the rage in the outlying colonies in late Era I)

- complete with cramped lodgings for your various underlings.

In brief, having your own proper room was a prestigious thing, possessing a large one, or more than one, was mostly a privilege of the upper 10%, and anything much beyond that would have been fit for a monarch or a deity – or indeed, a Diamond.

When Blue Diamond, on some much later occasion, would ask her irate creator which room she was supposed to go to, she might have been unwise in her choice of the moment, but it was still a legitimate question – after all, each of the Diamonds owned quite a lot more rooms than one.

White Diamond herself was no exception – out of the four, her rooms were probably the most numerous, the most luxuriant, and the most spacious, and not just because of what would have been required because of her greater size, accumulated over her longer life or even justified her seniority in rank:

She had countless palaces, maintained for guests or just representative purposes, with enormous galleries, pompous ballrooms and endless mirror-halls – those were a particular favorite of hers, at least in conceptual terms. She never even stepped foot in many of them, some of those on remote colony worlds, just in case she might choose to visit, though she never ever did, and would probably return via warp rather than stay over, or bring her palace ship if a longer stay were expected, which never ever happened.

All together, she had tens of thousands of gems employed in tending to her ample collection of unused, empty rooms, or indeed, forming part of their lavish furniture.

And to many, this might have fostered the impression that she was a lover of excesses, and more than everything else, a rapacious coveter of empty room –

Such was certainly a common assumptions among the Bismuths under her banner, including the illustrious one that would eventually defect and take great pleasure in decking her in the face with a mechanical arm – particularly since most ordinary gems were seldom given a space much wider than their own shoulders.

At least the ostentatious complexes kept by Blue Diamond would have actual galas and functions taking place in them and serve some other purpose than just abject waste, even if they were solely for the enjoyment of herself and the elite.

Even if one choose to denounce it, one could more or less comprehend that sort of self-centered indulgence, and say that it produced some petty, restrictive forms of real beauty, unlike the purely utilitarian, blocky avalanche of steel and concrete that were Yellow Diamond's infrastructure projects – enough so that many gems missed the former when the latter became the most prominent flavor of architecture during the progression of Era two, not that the more 'technological', functional styles she preferred didn't have it's own appreciators, particularly within Yellow Diamonds's own court (just as styles like post-war brutalism, turn-of-the-20th-century engineer's style latticework buildings, or just industrial and urban styles in general would come to have their small share of devoted fans on Earth).

Pink Diamond, while she was around, picked mostly whatever she most liked, often rewarding the architect with the quirkiest proposals and being easily taken with modest yet decorative designs that had no higher ambition than to be pretty. When given the choice, she would generally opt for public works that large segments of the population would get to use and enjoy, one of the most famous being the Pink Diamond Memorial Library situated in the outskirts of the capital, and a park bedizened with specimens of various alien plant species, the only patch of green anywhere on homeworld. (It wound up becoming a popular spot for couples)

Once she received the Earth, she would develop a taste for stylized depictions of its flowers, such as the ones used in the lattice walls of her palanquin. The few results of her patronage would later become pilgrimage sites for the scattered leftovers of her court.

White Diamond's tastes, then, were the exact opposite, always very classical and never straying far from the canon of past ages – though it might be argued that the 'great classics' of gem culture had been designated as such because they pleased her rather than the other way around.

White Diamond's projects did not stall nor did they progress in bursts and surges. They were often scheduled and planned-out tens of thousands of years before their completion, planned so as to take future developments into account as if the unfolding of the future were mainly a matter of moving over to the next segment of a designated path, large, monumental projects for purposes as narrow and arcane as their proportions were immense. For her most devoted followers, it showed the hand-prints of a being that operated on a completely different scale;

For those less charmed, it was simply a symptom of excess and empty vanity.

But that impression would have been a mistake, resulting from a fundamental misconception about the primary purpose of those buildings.

They existed not to provide amenities for her personally, but to remind her gems of her presence and watchful eye, even when she could not (or would not) be there to remind them in person.

The grandness and the space and the mirrors that lit up the cave-like chambers like the day? Those were the purpose and and of themselves, to be object's d'art, silent monoliths, the works of someone who spent most of her time in a spaceship that never took off.

If asked to describe what they imagined its inside to be like, those who had no understood that minute distinction might have pictured something excessively gaudy and ostentatious, and they would have been wrong, not that they would ever get the chance to be proven wrong -

The layout of White Diamond's personal rooms would have been unfamiliar even to the other Diamonds. At most, they would remember the large audience chamber, though it was rarely a good thing when they would find themselves summoned there, and they'd have much direr things to worry about than to take note of the immense stark gray walls.

The surfaces were composed of a glittering, crystalline material and without doubt, much effort had gone into polishing and manufacturing it, but the design was almost aggressively simple, or even minimalist.

Had there been ornamentation, one could have critiqued it, interpreted it, drawn conclusions from it, one might have said what the iconography was, but also, what it was not, and what else it might have missed out on being instead.

But what argument could you have with the stark gray walls of an enormous oval room, what could you pry from an array of perfectly smooth surfaces?

The only distinct feature in the room was the elevated pedestal in its center, and the puristic, sharp-edged rectangular stairs leading up to it – and that was all she needed to make matters clear, that platform, and herself arranged on it.

There was one only thing it could possibly have to say, and no room for further misunderstandings or interpretations, not any more than there was any room for hues and tints amid the clear-cut lines of pristine monochrome marble...

Almost pristine. There were exactly three (3) minuscule bumps in various parts of the room, and White Diamond knew precisely where they were, and when she was in an appropriately foul mood, the very sight of one could set her off – but she didn't trust the pebbles not to go overboard and leave behind an even tinier depression instead, and it wasn't really worth potentially breaking a nail over. They were so minute that even she might not have noticed the tiny blemishes if she had not spent many dozens of millennia staring at these walls day in, day out.

Even so, one would have surmised that this was not the only room she frequented – the complex was somewhat larger, continuing well into the 'torso' of the bust-shaped palace ship, and at the very least, she would have needed to have something like an office in here, assuming that her usually excuse of being 'busy' was not a blatant lie.

All those planets couldn't have been running themselves after all, or so one would think.

No one knew for sure, unless some of the Bismuths who first constructed these halls were still in service, and even they would only know what the rooms looked like when they were new and empty, before White Diamond had moved in and put them to her use. It was quite possible that she did have the means to contact her underlings on distant planets without the use of a computer terminal or a subspace communicator, but if the convenience of modern technology could not entice her, her reclusive disposition certainly did. If she thought it necessarily, she would certainly have made use of her telepathic capabilities to make an appearance and you could count on her entrance being dramatic, but she had much preferred written missives even back when that would have referred to literal clay tablets, and that's the most that her direct subordinates would ever see of her.

But if any single gem had ever been so bold (or so foolish) as to attempt to sneak their way inside her chambers, it would have been the one and only Pink Diamond.

Before she was given the Earth, she had resided on homeworld for a good four-thousand years, and four-thousand years was a very long time.

So would it then be so strange if she had ever succeeded, even just by chance?

Before the War, before the Earth, before all of their bitter falling out, there were at least two and a half occasions were the mischievous little Diamond got past those hallowed walls, in both a literal and figurative sense.

One might well picture not much unlike her son when he sneaked inside the table to assemble his guardians for a hearty breakfast, except that she would soon have forgotten whatever it was she had been seeking or looking to attain the moment that her unfamiliar surroundings had exited her curiosity – she confirmed that there was, indeed, an office, equally composed of the simplest, minimalist lines – the table was merely a rectangular arch held up by two walls connected by a large board in the middle, all firmly attached to the floor – the chair was a blocky, s-shaped affair composed of one single surface – most of the room was dominated by empty space and the polished, reflected panes that formed the floor and ceiling, one again perfectly featureless, the other up above very much its twin, if it were not for the extensive, simplistic, glittering star charts etched into it.

It was enormous even when compared to its intended master – and these feature-starved surroundings made it all the more impossible to overlook White Diamond herself, for there was nothing to divert attention from her radiance or rival the splendor of her elaborate attire.

As with the great hall, the composition of this room was only complete with her as its center, and only to be understood in that context – and if the control room with its lone elevated pedestal was a monument to her elevation above anything else, this sanctum of her works was a stony hymn to the manifold ubiquity of Her Who Was Light;

She was the beginning, and she was the end, the one who is everything, and everything rolled into one – everything except perhaps surprise, for she was already turned toward the doorway when Pink stepped inside the room, one arm resting on the table surrounded by various light gray holoscreens, angling her shoulders so as to face the younger gem.

"I am impressed that you managed to get inside here. I'm also quite a bit cross with you. But lucky for you, I'm more impressed that I am displeased."

With that, she had reached out her arm to lift Pink Diamond by the frilly ruffles of her attire and booted her out.

The second time, Pink did not make it in the flesh (or the light, rather) – instead, she astral projected, popping up in front of her creator as she was busy surveying her star maps for further viable colonies.

She floated upside down, waiving around her arms and legs quite a bit before she realized that this was actually quite futile since she was not actually present in the room. This time, it was a bit of an accident – she had been playing a bit of a game with Pink Pearl, trying to impress her by showing off her powers. She started out trying to guess what was going out in adjacent rooms, whilst Pink Pearl had dared her to reach further and further into the palace complex – But it was Pink Diamond alone who had gotten quite carried away and made the unwise decision to float through a few too many walls.

For the most part, she had been sure that no one was actually going to notice, since her actual body was still safely parked in her room, exactly where it was supposed to be. There was a narrow miss when she'd almost crashed into Blue, who had thoughtfully touched a finger to her chin and loudly wondered if she'd heard something (loud in the mind-scape, that is; She did not actually speak.)

But once she found herself hurtling toward the palace ship and struggling to redirect her trajectory in this unfamiliar realm, she knew playtime was over – White spotted her right away, as surely as if she were present in the old-fashioned way.

White actually applauded a little, with a perky little smile, but Pink had known her far too long to take that as a good sign. "Hello Starlight! I see that you're making some progress! As expected of my creation! And right you are to practice, for you still have a long, long way to go before you can keep up with me. Perhaps you might want to try spreading yourself to another vessel? One of your playthings, perhaps?

But I hope you'll understand that I have much to do and cannot make the time to play with you today. Surely, you out of anyone would understand the value of a little privacy! Enjoy your playtime!"

And then, instead of wondering why her 'daughter' had resorted to such drastic means simply to speak with her, White Diamond kicked her offspring straight out of her head (literally, this time.)

She came to in her room, losing balance on arrival and tumbling straight into the lap of Pink Pearl, who wound up buried up to her chest in her master's poofy curls.

Vaguely concerned, the spindly servant gem looked down at her, her hands entwined just below her chin, her little round face framed by her ringlets.

The pebbles, which had previously been entertaining themselves with various amusing pursuits, some of them mimicking the cross-legged pose their Diamond had clumsily assumed in order to concentrate better, had also gathered all around, apart from the two that were currently busy extricating themselves from under where Pink had fallen.

"Are you okay, o Great Princess Fluffybuns?" ('Great Princess Fluffybuns' being what Pink Diamond was currently insisting to be called by, mostly by her various little playmates. Blue sometimes played along; Yellow mostly just rolled her eyes. )

Instead of replying or attempting to remove herself from the floor, she pulled her lips into a pout and crossed her arms.

"Mind powers are for clods. Let's go play something else."

(

"Maybe I could bring my pebbles! Have them build some cool sculpture or something..."

"If you want a sculpture, you should commission a Spinel to make it. That's what they're for. "

"How does it matter who makes a sculpture? As long as it's nice to look at..."

Blue Diamond sighed. "Pink, take this seriously."

"But isn't a celebration supposed to be fun instead of serious?"

"Well, yes, but it's also an official event. Many important gems will be there... it's an opportunity to inspire everyone, so that they can keep doing their best..."

"But my pebbles are super inspiring!"

"Please, Pink..." she reiterated, and her younger companion did not catch the significance of the slightly strained, uncomfortable quality in her voice. "It's important that you do this right... in case White decides to come."

"What do you mean, 'in case'? You think she won't come?!" The magenta gem wailed in dismay. "This sucks! We make all this big fuss so she won't get all cranky, and then she never shows up! It's like she never wants to talk to us unless it's to scold us."

"You know that's not true... " Blue responded, but her voice trailed off at the end, almost like it was a question.

It was not at all like when Pink had asked her about Yellow – She couldn't just smile and say 'Well, I've known White a little better than you', or mention all the things they discussed when they were alone.

Instead, her eyes grew heavy and distant, though Pink lacked the patience to reflect on this much further.

"Then why wouldn't she come?!"

"You have to understand, she's not like us... She has lived for a very, very long time. She's been here longer than anyone else. Even longer than longer than Yellow or I. As far as she's concerned, she only just saw us, and we'll throw another event soon enough... the one next week will be no different from all the ones she's seen before. "

"Maybe if you let me do what I want, it would be!"

"Sure, if by 'different'`you mean that we'd all end up poofed." That was Yellow Diamond's voice. She had been leaning against the door arch with her arms crossed, hoping that the diplomat-in-chief would be able to handle this troublesome situation.

"Aww come on. She wouldn't actually do that."

Yellow sighed deeply, taking a moment to massage the bridge of her nose, but none too surprised that Pink would still hold such misconceptions.

"Look, we might all have our own areas of expertise, and our own courts to oversee, but White is in charge of ruling the empire as a whole. She has a lot of things to take care of that she doesn't trust anyone else with... It's only natural that she doesn't always have time for us... She expects us to handle ourselves."

"Well, maybe she would have time to come if she let us help with some of that important leader stuff! I'm super bored anyways. Maybe I can do her work, and then she can come have fun with us, and everyone will be happy!"

"That's a nice thought..." Blue conceded, "...but I'm afraid it won't work like that. If she decided that she isn't coming, there's nothing in this world that could convince her. In all the 125.354 years of my life, I've never seen her change her mind on anything, not even once. "

"Then she's pretty stubborn!"

"That's rich, coming from you!" Yellow shot back.

But then, her countenance softened the slightest bit. "She just doesn't see the world like we do. Haven't you ever noticed how she sometimes mentions things that you never told her about? Things no one could possibly know? Even if we had been around for as long as she had, we could never hope to understand her. "

"Well, then maybe she should try to understand us!"

"I wonder if she can..." Blue mused quietly, her melancholy gaze trailing off in the distance.

Her words left behind a silence that was keenly felt by every single one of them.

Pink had no answer to this – in the end, it was Yellow who moved them along: "Don't you two have a ball to organize or something? We're expected at the court tower within the hour."

"Well, maybe the sculptures weren't entirely the wrong idea... I could have your Pearl go and get one of your spinels so you can pick out the decorations while Yellow and I attend to the court cases..."

Later, Pink Diamond would find herself with her back the window of her room, trying hard not to glance at the gleaming, pale silhouette of the towering starship that shadowed all of the central plaza.

She was most definitely not imagining whatever its mistress must be up there in there – yep, certainly not conjuring some preposterous tale featuring talking animals or anything.

"I wish I knew more about you... " she mumbled, surly.

The Palace Ship could be seen from almost anywhere in the higher levels of the capital. "Everyone expects me to be like you one day, but how am I even supposed to do that?"

Pink could seldom avoid looking at it.

Sometimes, when she'd see it, she'd think of the gem in whose likeness it had been crafted, and she'd be impressed by her great power and magnificence, and she'd think that it must be great to have all that.

On other days, (pretty much all days) she'd feel quite intimidated and a tiny bit watched.

Did she really know everything, have everything right, including everything she had ever said about Pink? Did she know what she was doing right now?

)

There was one more attempt, the last one that succeeded, not long before Pink Diamond gave it up forever.

As soon as she made it inside, having slipped in through some fuel pipe from the docking bay, she knew to remain alert, expecting that her creator would greet her at every turn of the enormous walls.

Everything here was so huge that it would still look pointlessly enormous with White right here for scale, but oddly enough, Pink couldn't find her, or perhaps White hadn't found her yet, as if that would be hard – She was the one obvious splotch of magenta in an universe of gray, the lone sound in a wold of untouched primordial silence, a single pale flower poking through the cracks and the gravel.

White Diamond wasn't in the control room. She wasn't in her office, either, and the room looked even emptier with the holoscreens deactivated.

Without White around, this was a rather dim and gloomy place – it might be presumed that she needed no illumination but her own. How very practical, but what would she do if she wanted to sneak upon someone in the dark? Because, however she'd do it, Pink very much believed her capable of it.

But faced with the dark unknown beyond her sparse mental map of those few familiar rooms, even Pink had been seriously daunted, and she might have left and retreated, if only she had known how to get out on her own.

She couldn't believe that she was actually hoping for White to kick her out, but as it stood, she had no choice but to find her – or the exit, whatever came first.

Around her was little but eerie glassy silence and emptiness, like a little world of its own enclosed in an airtight chrysalis, a tiny bit of primordial nothing preserved in amber, or stacked away in some distant corner whence it never felt anything of the world's creation.

In the murky depths awaited unfamiliar sights, and Pink couldn't make heads or tails of them. Once upon a time, she might have gratefully sucked up every detail of what limited glances she would get, but now, she just wanted to know what was going on or, failing that, make it out of here.

She found a flight deck adjacent to the control room, with a large crystalline throne and a large screen that had likely been out of use for eons.

Further down, near the office, Pink stumbled about a dome covered in star charts, and nearly fell into an immense pool of liquid in a dark chamber where the polished floor flat out stopped beyond a square, polished platform. Further out, there was a large, approximately cross-shaped structure and a large number of translucent tubes and wires of various sized hanging from the ceiling.

In another room, she found a gallery of bizarre objects in varied shapes, all of them made of translucent, glass-like material and imbued with a faint glow of power.

You'd think White would have an observation orb somewhere in here, but apparently, she had no need of one.

Instead, Pink found – well, she did not immediately know what to call it. First of all it was another large room, encased in a large, dark dome with decorated with star motifs not unlike the inside of White's cape. And in its center was a raised, circular platform, no stairs this time, though it could probably serve as a single step if you were about White Diamond's size.

In the center of the platform you would have found what, in any other context, might have been a nondescript block coated with polished, glittery material, but its central location alone made it into an altar.

At this point, Pink Diamond almost stumbled over something, something so bright that it took a second glance and a moment's notice to make out what it was, and only then did she comprehend the sight before her as a whole.

She'd found White, reclining on the altar with her hair unbound and spilling onto the surrounding floor like a torrential waterfall of light, probably because the usual spiky updo would have made it cumbersome to lay down. She had also shifted away, or discarded her ornate sandals, as one could easily tell since she had one of her legs swung over the other, leaving one set of bared black toenails up in the air – and in case this required any further clarification: No, she was not presently engaged in anything that could be construed as "work".

Were they human, this might have been... well, not quite the equivalent of catching someone in their bathrobe, stuffing their face with junkfood in front of the TV, but Pink was surprised enough to forget that she was supposedly trying to be stealthy.

"White?! Is that you?"

It was her, not that it could have been anyone else, there was no one quite as luminous anywhere on the planet; But this didn't quite fit Pink's idea of her, and so she wasn't quite convinced until the titanic being before her propped herself up on her eyebrow and turned in her direction with that unmistakable brilliant-cut gem embedded in her face. There was nothing like it anywhere in the universe, an exceedingly unlikely mass of ultapure, quantum-computer grade diamond; in all the history of the universe, there might never be a second one.

(But here's an interesting funfact for you: Even ultrapure quantum-computer grade diamond was not completely without irregularities – after all, those minuscule trace amounts were precisely what made it possible to process and store information in it-) Her luminous magnolia-petal face looked every bit as surprised as Pink's.

Whatever means she would have had to see her coming, she must have been too distracted by whatever she was doing to actively employ them – By the looks of it, she simply hadn't been paying attention.

"...Pink?! W-what are you doing here?"

She honestly sounded more flabbergasted than angry, though the wrath-o-meter would have hardly shown a zero.

But Pink was sufficiently thrown off that she replied without any thought or regard for context: "Oh- sorry! Were you resting? I didn't mean to interrupt you... or like, I kinda did, but I thought you were working..."

Realizing that this statement would not make much sense to anyone but her, Pink sheepishly ran her hand through her gravity-defying cloud of fluffy bubblegum hair, accomplishing little more than to throw it into a disarray that White must surely disapprove of. Of course, even Pink would have been aware that it was generally a better choice to visit someone in their spare time than when they were supposed to be working, but paradoxically, this felt like a more important thing to have barged in on.

She rambled on between feeble bursts of nervous laughter, trying to chase away the silence, or stave off what might follow on its tail: "I guess even you need to take a break once in a while... even if it's probably just once in a hundred years or so."

Pink didn't expect White to laugh, not truly – jokes were, by the very nature, grounded in the little ambiguities and gradations of life and the subtle shades of meaning that existed inside it, so it was no surprise that they should be wasted on someone who saw

Even Blue and Yellow agreed that White had no sense of humor whatsoever – when she laughed, it was usually in ridicule of some statement or viewpoint that clashed preposterously with her own.

But what she did instead might have been even more unexpected.

Miffed and curt, she immediately rushed to answer, instead of taking her sweet time as she usually did: "I. Do. Not. Engage in such a thing as 'breaks'!"

Instead of assuming a sort of wide, towering stance as she usually did, she even remained seated, wringing her hands together, holding her elbows close to her body and her knees close together – You'd almost think that she was the one who had been caught doing something she was not supposed to, and though it would not have occurred to Pink to parse the mighty empress as 'nervous', she instinctive realized this was not at all like her typical behavior, which unsettled her more than anything – but incorrigible in her foolhardy ways, the younger Diamond tried to play it cool:

"Aww come on, why wouldn't you? In a way, it's almost a relief..."

White narrowed her eyes huffishly. "Of course, you would think that."

"No I don't!" Pink insisted. "Or, maybe I do, but not like you think. I just didn't want to think that you never even – that you don't… that you can't ever..." She trailed off.

White took that as an invitation to take over the conversation.

"Well, I'll have you know, that if I ever did take a 'break', it would be solely because you are all so very exhausting!" The elder Diamond griped, poutily, with her nose turned up in the air, just a little bit away from Pink's direction.

"Not just you, Yellow or Blue, all of you! I keep telling and telling everyone, and you just keep doing everything wrong, wrong, wrong!

You know sometimes, it really makes me wonder if there's any point in even talking to you all..."

You might almost, almost think she sounded just a little bit distraught, if you weren't Pink Diamond, or anyone else with an inkling of what she might have done if anyone had brought up that notion in her presence. But it was obvious enough that she was complaining.

"Well..." the younger gem figured, "Maybe you could... not scold us?"

"If only! The day that I could do that in good conscience, my work in this universe would be complete."

"Well hopefully not, if it means we'd never get to see you anymore..."

"That's touching, Starlight, but absolutely no excuse.

"Still, if scolding doesn't seem to be working, why don't you just try something else? Like maybe just letting it be? Or telling the others what they're doing great? I'm just saying..."

"Can liquids flow uphill? Can the dust of a nebula suddenly flock back together to turn back into a star? Can the planets stop in their tracks and start spinning the other way...?"

Now, her arms were back to gesturing as they pleased. Same old immutable White.

Then, a thought seemed to occur to her, and she leaned forward, reaching out her arms.

"...Come over here. I've something to show you."

Pink was not completely certain about this, but its not like White would have taken 'No' for an answer, and that was a good enough excuse to step forward and let herself be picked up.

She ended up on White's lap, sized like some sort of stuffed doll in comparison to her. As often, Pink thought her size was really irritating sometimes. Too small to look Yellow and Blue straight in the eye, too big to fit in the Pebbles' hiding places.

But that train of thought was clearly derailed when White commanded her attention, pointing one deliberate finger up at the domed roof above, and the twinkling points that dotted its charcoal expanse.

"That's a nice carving you got there, White."

"Oh, that's not a carving at all, Starlight. It's a projection of the stars outside, just as they are right now."

"You sure about that? It's daytime."

(Outside, the ice and rock that made up homeworld's rings was sparkling up magenta skies)

"But the stars are still there, even if you can't see them as well from out there. They always follow the same paths. If you know where they were a hundred thousand years ago, you know without doubt where they are today, even as the constellations keep spinning round, and round, and round, just as they've done so many, many times ever since I emerged.

What is one remains one, and what is separate remains separate, and never the twain shall meet, all according to their natures, from the moment they came into being.

Even when they appear to change, they are simply following along the paths of the same familiar laws. Gravity. Chemistry. Light.

Do you understand what I am meaning to tell you?"

"Maybe..." Pink admitted. "But can't we choose our own path?"

"Sure, if you like. But don't expect it to lead anywhere but ruin if you choose to go against your nature. Anything you choose or do will still be a result of it. Neither of us could escape it, even if we wanted – so it's best to accept it, don't you think?"

"I wonder if that's right..."

"Of course it is. I know it as surely as I know anything at all."

White seemed to regard this as a comforting thought, but for Pink, just holding it within her mind made her feel uneasy. What if she really couldn't change? Would she go on being the way she was now forever and ever and ever? As long as the stars spun around in the sky, or rather, as long as homeworld kept hurtling around the center of its galaxy?

Pink hoped that it was not so, that even White could be something other than what she was if she were to put her mind to it, but at the time, she had no arguments to back it up, apart from the wishful thinking that would go on to blind her a great many times.

Later, she would come to find that it was definitely quite possible for at least some other beings, maybe even other gems – and go on to conclude that it was impossible for White, forever in doubt as to what little hope that left for herself.

But that day was yet to come. "I know I shouldn't have been sneaking in here, but I'm kinda glad I did. It's good to know that even you have some things that you actually enjoy doing... Should've figured that you like the stars, since you've got them on your cape and all."

Observing the sparkling, illusory lights above, White Diamond's face took on a thoughtful expression for a moment, unseen by all including a certain pink gem who couldn't really make it out from below.

"Sometimes I have this thought, about a time where I might have been right among them, with all of their protons or neutrons. Or perhaps, they were voices, speaking, some very long time ago... but I know that it cannot be a memory, because no such thing could ever have happened."

Sounded like a daydream really, but she would probably resent the very implication, much like she had repudiated the concept of her 'taking breaks'-

"When I first gained awareness of my own existence, the first thing I knew was that there was nothing else there but me."

Pink Diamond did still produce a bit of a childlike gasp at this. "Then you were all alone?"

"I was the only existence, yes. "

In a way, that never changed, just as nothing else truly did.

But with this little rascal around, she might even be tempted to forget it for a little while.

"That must've sucked. Good thing it's not like that anymore... Hey, how about the four of us all get together and look at the real stars sometime? There's this fancy courtyard that Blue likes which has a pretty great view... "

"No thanks. I think I prefer these ones. No such pesky things as the daytime getting in the way of the view."

….

"Yellow... do you think White... understands?"

"Has she finally lost it completely, you mean? Is it that what you're asking me?"

"Of course not! Don't even say such a thing... this... this must be hard for her too, right? Right? … in her own sort of way... "

Blue clung to her with her thin, long fingers, beseeching her with that fraught, weepy voice of hers, but Yellow had no answer to give her, at least none that she'd admit to herself, as surely as she felt the sting of the obvious conclusion deep within her gem.

"Surely, she wouldn't abandon us at a time like this, right...? Right?"

"You think she has abandoned us? She has scorned us. Disowned us. Perhaps if we manage to mop up those rebels with some semblance of dignity, she might admit us back into her presence before the heat death of the universe."

Or she might admit Blue.

Yellow knew better than to expect that she would be included in this hypothetical mercy – and she deserved no better. This was her fault. Blue wouldn't say it, White wouldn't say anything to them at all, but she knew that they must know it. Knew that they must see it, when they looked at her.

She could not forget it for a second, not with Blue's weeping, hooded figure in her arms.
She was here because Yellow brought her, in what was designated the current situation room, a new one, in one of the structures on the surface, not the old one on the moon base, where she would be haunted by the afterimages, all the times Pink had peered up at the charts while Yellow explained things to her, how she'd tutored her in strategy, advised her in terms of battle plans, sparred with her out on the pale regolith dust of the surface.

She'd insisted that Blue take part in the war meeting, but she'd spent the bulk of it curled up in her seat, buried in the layers of her robes without speaking or looking at anyone, and nothing much was accomplished beyond slightly increasing both of their misery and causing a brief interruption halfway through the meeting when she could not restrain herself from crying when the subject turned to the leader of the rebellion.

"If only we had done more! If only we had intervened long before! We should never have let her do this by herself... I told her that... abomination couldn't hurt her... what must she have been thinking, right before she was broken, all alone... in the dirt!"

"We should have been stricter with her..." Yellow concluded, not quivering, not quaking, nothing but somber and burnt out in the face of harsh reality. "We should never have given in to her whims. We should have insisted that she keep her gems in line..."

And they never really had a real reason before, not enough to merit this degree of hatred. They had been callous for sure, casually accustomed to the destruction they so often dispensed. Sure, they had never enjoyed it, and they still didn't, but now, every time Yellow beheld a new world overgrown with organics,

every time that Blue found herself sitting in judgment over transgressors, they thought with disdain:

'She was killed over creatures like those?

By gems like these?'

and they felt acutely how nothing in this world could possibly have been more precious than her life. At least not to them.

But there was more than that.

She had not been ready to have her own world. She had not been ready to create her own gem-type.

"Accursed Rose Quartz!" In one fell swoop, she had knocked over the table on which the war plans had been drawn, sending piles of maps, charts, artifacts and miniatures tumbling to the ground. She did not even notice how Blue flinched away from her, so overtaken was she by her wrath, brought to her knees, fighting back tears of rage.

"She just keeps evading me! It's like she somehow knows all of my strategies. As if she had been listening in in this very room! And that... power of hers? I wouldn't believe it at first, until I saw it for myself, and ever since, I've had the soldiers under orders to pulverize every crystal gem they come across, lest they return as good as new and mow down our troops faster than we can grow them...

What IS she?!"

A/N:

Listen up guys, gals and nonbinary pals! Apparently, there is such a thing as "magic Russian diamond" which is used in quantum computing. And yep, it's clear/white.

I'm not saying our favorite tyrannical light bulb is one of these, but she's totally one of these.

It's notable for being exceptionally pure, but ironically, it's the very very few stray nitrogens (and corresponding little holes, yay for the power of THE VOID) that make it so useful. (with the unusually pure carbon lattice acting as an isolator of sorts)

Of course where you can have computers, you can have AI. Though even regular I is basically just the result of a meat computer so like this detail might also fit into the various origin story speculations, with or without literal magic involved.

If you wanted to go the mythological route, it has occurred to me that WD is kind of a lot like the gnostic concept Demiurge, particularly the interpretations where it's not so much outright out to entrap people but simply ignorant misguided and/or flawed like the world it created.

Also, Pink Diamond would totally build a public library. We know she was probably an imaginative type, and she'd want to sponsor something wholesome and leisure-related. Wouldn't be surprised if Pearl was involved in the setup as well. If it were up to her she'd probably have let anyone in there but the other Diamonds ensured that gems that aren't supposed to be reading aren't allowed in, or at least that there'd be a fancier second floor for elites and only regime-sanctioned books... or like it probably doesn't have actual books but something more "crystal spires and togas-y" like magic scrolls or space kindles. Once Pearl finally taught Steven to read/write in gem language, he raided it and translated some for Connie, who then made a sophisticated social critique of them which Pearl and Bismuth were very proud of. I kinda hope we'll get Bismuth & Connie interacting more in season 6 since Connie also kinda has this politically cynical side to her with her apocalypse prepping & social critique of books. Besides they'd probably be impressed by each other's boldness like, they'd totally hit it off.

The idea that Bismuth formerly served WD is just my headcanon, but she can't be from the Pink one since she mentions building other colonies in the past, she's got a rainbow color scheme (like "our" Pearl, who was made for Pink but definitely by White, at least the implication's pretty strong) and the implication that Bismuth got to wreck her former Diamond in a mecha battle is just very satisfying. Like, it feels that would mean a lot to Bismuth?

It's a pity that we'll never see whatever priceless expression WD was making inside that ship.

The idea for the park comes from the one park in Venice that is otherwise just a bunch of islands completely plastered in buildings. Venice is one of the most beautiful impressive sights I've ever seen but one striking aspect of that is its complete artificiality. The park is also famous because of the popular Austrian empress that got married there once.

Absolutism-era castles often had rooms that were purely for showing off. (Including so called mirror halls that were lined with mirrors to make the rooms brighter – and simply because ) I mean the wall gems definitely strike one as a "the king of france needs five servants to put his shirt on" type of thing.

But here's the thing: The Sun King was actually a total cheap skate. Versailles, the archetypical showing-off-let-them-eat-cake palace, was actually pretty unpleasant to live in And the Queen had to have her kids in public! Same goes for Sanssoucci palace in Berlin, which, as ridiculously pompous as everything about it looks, was actually considered pretty modest by palace standards, like aside from the party rooms, the actual royal dwelling wasn't that big. (He had a second palace to show off to guests tho, which is where his heirs lived till we kicked em out after WWI)

So there's this image of total waste and excess but it was really all a giant farce and just for show and the Diamonds strike one as having the exact same vibe going on.

I have absolutely no idea if this chapter is any good or not. Either I veered completely and indulgently off-topic, or the strategic placement between the last chapter and the next will make for an effective composition as a whole while piling on some extra lore bits – I genuinely don't know.