IC contact [Mask or Menace]

[infomodder]

"Gone fishing."

[ so don't leave messages to ruin the after fishing glow !!!

your one stop shop for not leaving him alone ]

Comments

voice; a few hours after the last misfire text

[oceanthief]

[Lapis has tried her damnedest to figure out the meaning behind the messages that Will had sent her. they must have some significance, right? because they'd just kept coming and coming, each more obtuse than the last.

she was no codebreaker; that had never been what Homeworld had wanted with her. her research had been painstaking and, ultimately, frustrating. eventually she'd had to admit defeat, and that is what's led her to dialing Will up. when she speaks her voice is hesitant, like she doesn't know the consequences for failure here.]

Um. I don't know what you're trying to tell me.

[infomodder]

[Fortunately, there is no code to break. Unfortunately, Will has no idea what's been going on, at all. He is no stranger to getting calls outside his circle, so to speak, but this pulls him up short, and that shows in the delay and attempt to cover complete confusion when he does speak. Where is awkward turtle when it's needed most?]

I wasn't aware I'd been telling you anything.

[Which is close enough to "I don't know what you're talking about" to be understood, at least?]

[oceanthief]

But - the messages were all coming from your communicator.

[Lapis is not a tech support gem, but the things on earth are so laughably rudimentary that even she doesn't have difficulty with them. she is absolutely certain that the texts were from Will, and his denial of it only magnifies her own confusion.

was this part of the game? was she failing even further because of this?]

[infomodder]

[Oh God. Will has sent and received some questionable stuff on his communicator, if she accidentally got a hold of...No? No. No, it wouldn't...no! That just doesn't happen, right?]

I've kept it turned off a lot lately—what were these messages about?

[No game, he's genuinely confused, too. And trying to understand, hoping for anything but the worst.]

[oceanthief]

Human seafaring history..? I had to look most of it up.

[thanks a lot Will, your weirdass not-code forced an alien to learn way more than she ever wanted to about the nautical background of earth.]

[infomodder]

[Give him a second. No, give him two.

Three, three is good.]

Were they worded as interesting facts you might or might know, only coming through once a day?

[oceanthief]

I...guess? There was only ever one at a time, at least.

[she's not sure how interesting these facts actually are. human stuff is weird.]

[infomodder]

I.

[Am an idiot with technology? No, no, too self-deprecating.]

I have a few places [it's more like a dozen, but Will has seven dogs at his home and never thinks of that as a lot, either] that I get daily facts from, and I'd...meant to turn them off about a week ago. Sounds like I didn't, and you had some knocked your way instead.

[oceanthief]

...why do you need to know about this kind of thing?

[Lapis Lazuli: only the highest quality priorities]

[infomodder]

[Congratulations, that smacks a laugh out of him. Short, but still. Achievement unlocked!]

I'm a fisherman. I've worked with boats. I don't necessarily need to know, but it's in my interests. I find it worthwhile.

[oceanthief]

Wouldn't it be easier to just look it up all at once?

[or maybe that's the part of her that was still mentally trapped in that mirror. archives were meant to be used for accessing everything after all.]

[infomodder]

Not especially. There is a lot of history on any given subject to find, take in, understand. Some of those are things I already know, some aren't. The ones I don't know that strike me as interesting, I'll look into later. If I tried to read every little fact about the history of seafaring, I wouldn't do anything else for quite a while, there's so much to know. Does that make more sense?

[He's not too pleased his silly facts went off the radar, but he can do his best to explain as clearly as possible. That's just polite. Lapis doesn't seem to be condemning him or ready to chew him out for wasting her time, and her desire to ask and understand before anything else is something he'd be a complete and utter idiot to discourage.]

[oceanthief]

[she makes a thoughtful sound in the back of her throat, turning the answer over in her mind. humans didn't seem to specialize with the same intensity that gems did, it seemed; the Homeworld higher-ups certainly wouldn't have been pleased with anyone who had a gap in their knowledge of their chosen profession.]

...oh, that's right. [it's a quiet sort of mumble, in the tone of one remembering something important.] You don't have as much time. I guess you have to be really picky, in that case.

[it's a general you, a species sort of pronoun, but Lapis doesn't bother qualifying. to her it's obvious.]

[infomodder]

Exactly. Not many people can afford to sit around and learn everything there is to know on any one subject. Time-wise and money-wise...that's a luxury most don't get, back where I'm from.

[Yeah, he figures. Wouldn't bother him too much if she didn't, though, since he knows he probably won't live as long as most people do anyway. Hannibal is a jerk.]

[oceanthief]

It's not much of a luxury anyway.

[and wouldn't she know all about that. while there's certainly something alluring about having an infinite amount of knowledge at your fingertips...well, maybe it was just her circumstances. prisoners rarely appreciated libraries built into their cells.]

[infomodder]

Different worlds. Or just different circumstances, I suppose.

[He didn't even get a pillow in his cell :c]

[oceanthief]

[he also got out before several thousand years had passed!!! just saying!!!!]

Unique ones, I hope.

[people shouldn't have to go through that. even the people that Lapis really hates - she'd even given Jasper some company, hadn't she? despite herself and her own wishes.]

[infomodder]

[SIX WEEKS OF HELL WOW IS THIS THE OPPRESSION OLYMPICS, LAPIS????]

Depends on what you mean by unique.

[oceanthief]

[NO, BECAUSE SHE WINS ALL OF THE GOLD MEDALS. THERE IS NO COMPETITION. NONE.]

I never want anyone else to go through what they did to me.

[infomodder]

[WHAT DO YOU CALL GEM HUBRIS B/C WOW LAPIS WOW]

They who? [Only natural to be curious, perhaps, but Will's quick to catch himself and follow up with:] If you want to talk about it, that's fine. If you don't...that's also fine.

[oceanthief]

[well usually they call it Jasper but she's rather indisposed at the moment har har.]

It's alright. Not talking about it doesn't suddenly change the fact that it happened.

[if anything, it prompts people to forget. Lapis has had her fill of being forgotten and refuses to go back to that - no matter how painful it is, it's still a part of her, and she won't let that go.]

I meant the Crystal Gems. Homeworld fought them a long time ago for control of earth.

[infomodder]

[Give him a second to digest this and try to figure out what it means. The idea of living far longer than what humans are meant to isn't one that Will generally thinks on much. Mostly because he's pretty sure he won't even make the regular age for humans, but that's partially his fault. In the context, though...prisoner in a library of some sort? Maybe? With lots of crystal meth to go around? Hell.]

And they took you captive during the fight?

[oceanthief]

I got hurt.

[he can't see it, of course, but her hand creeps up to rest on her shoulder for a moment. it's the closest she can get to her gem, to that memory of the awful absence its crack had caused in her very being.]

They used me to power an archival mirror, and they left me there. I was trapped for thousands of years and they never did anything to help me.

[infomodder]

[For a world with a group called the Crystal Gems, this suddenly got super horrific. Holy shit!? Not gonna find these kids in a Happy Meal, huh.]

So you'd be the foremost expert on your world's history, then. Or of whatever was in those archives, at least?

[oceanthief]

The mirror recorded whatever it was shown. It mostly had to do with gem culture and the things we'd built on earth.

[and the war. she'd had to watch the only people who might have - should have - freed her suffer loss after awful loss and then flee the planet entirely. and then it had been stored in the mirror's depths so she could never forget it.]