infomodder | IC contact [Mask or Menace]

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.]

[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?

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.]

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.

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

[Lapis Lazuli: only the highest quality priorities]

[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.

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.]

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.]

[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.]

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.]

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.]

Different worlds. Or just different circumstances, I suppose.

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

[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.]

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

Depends on what you mean by unique.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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?

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.

[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?

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.]

[He's quiet for a long while, almost like he's not even there. Though the background noise should give away that he certainly is, just...taking his time.]

That sounds extremely unpleasant. [Understatement, but there is apology in his voice. The I'm sorry you had to go through that is present without him saying it directly.] I imagine adjusting to the freedom here has been a challenge.

It's not really as free as you'd think.

[she was still on earth, and more alone than ever in some ways. she still didn't really know who she was or what she wanted from this unexpected gift of time to make her own decisions in, or if it really mattered in the end.

some shackles just never broke, she supposed. but at least they were almost all her own doing here.]

But it's the best I'm going to get.

[Tryin' to break the chains but the chains only break her o-o-o-ohhhhhhh]

Freedom's always a double-edged sword in some way or another. [Physically free but mentally stuck in the mire, yeah, Will knows that feel.] Though this is the first time I've run into freedom coming at the price of a tattoo that can change what it says, glows in the dark...

I've had stranger. At least this one makes a little sense.

[mark them, monitor them probably, make sure that they can change the label whenever it's appropriate. it's the kind of thing that Homeworld would have probably adopted if they'd found they had a need for it.

better than deciding that freedom is the freedom to form a gigantic monster and trap yourself at the bottom of the ocean forever, at least.]

IC contact [Mask or Menace]

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