fandomhigh | Library, Wednesday

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Library, Wednesday

Peridot was absolutely hard at work today, really.

Honest. She had been. Until, in re-shelving books, she stumbled across some kind of fantasy romance piece about a matriarchal society with a strong affinity for gemstones, and...

She came from one of those, okay? She had to investigate. And investigating quickly turned into settling in and reading, and when she was finished with one book, she realized it was a series, and...

If anyone needed the Gem, she was buried under ridiculous novels.

[OOC: Open!]

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Excuse you, those novels were amazing.

Karla hadn't been in the library since she was a student. She paused just at the doorway, looking around the old familiar room with a smile. Mother Night, she used to stop by every...Friday, was it? Back when George used to work at the desk? And the D&D game in Special Collections, when the rest of reality had ceased to exist, and the "radio broadcast" that they'd all heckled through. So many old memories in this one room.

With one more fond smile, Karla crossed over to the circulation desk. "Excuse me?"

Peridot squinted up from her book.

... Oh, right. Working meant that (very) occasionally, people came in looking for things. With one last look at the page she was on, she set a bookmark in to keep her place and put the book down on the desk.

"Can I help you?"

"I have a book I'd like to return," Karla said, calling in the book onto the desk. "I borrowed it when I was a student and lost it for awhile."

"A while?" Peridot flinched, squinted a little at the book, and then up at the one who had... summoned it. A little bit like some Gems summoned their weapons. A few seconds later, once she was certain that Karla wasn't going to attempt to break her with it or something, she made a tentative reach for the book. "Is it terribly overdue?"

There were fees for that sort of thing, not that she'd ever had to collect on them before.

Relax, little Gem. Karla wasn't going to break you, even over library fees!

"Oh yes," Karla said with a laugh. "I graduated something like...four years ago?"

It was hard to keep track.

Peridot was squinting a little bit more as she turned the book over in her hands a few times, and then shrugged and reached to scan it in to the system.

"Is that a long time?"

She really still had no frame of reference for that sort of thing.

"Considering library books are due within a few weeks, it is," Karla explained. "Even if I'd borrowed it for an entire month, I've still had it for forty-eight times longer than I should."

Okay, yeah, Peridot was actually hissing between her teeth a little at that.

"Well... that's irresponsible."

It was less a judgment and more an observation, really.

"Agreed," Karla said. "I was gearing up for a civil war back home and it got lost in my aetherspace, but that's no excuse." She pushed the book forward, one on guerrilla warfare tactics. "But I was cleaning up in there and found it and realized it needed returning."

She smiled a bit. "And there was a fine to be paid."

"There is," Peridot agreed, and then kind of squinted at the screen. "It's... up there. I think."

Her grasp of the local currency was not exactly the best, either. Unless it was in relation to how many Camp Pining Hearts boxed sets one could buy with it.

"What's an aetherspace?"

This was infinitely more interesting than late fees, okay?

"It's where I store things after I've vanished them," Karla explained. "And where they're kept until I call them back in." A split second of concentration and then things started appearing on the counter next to the book: water bottles, a tea set, a packed diaper bag, three magazines, one of her court gowns, and at least four stuffed animals. "This is the barest bit of it all," she said with a grin. "That poor book was lost amidst the shuffle."

Peridot hesitated for a long moment before leaning forward to poke experimentally at a water bottle.

"... Can anybody learn to do that?"

Look, most Gems could, and she was kind of feeling left out. It was great that she had powers! But a secret storage place for just her? That would be even better.

"I'm afraid not," Karla said, apologetically. "It's an ability that I have because I am Blood and have Craft--a kind of magic that only my people can access."

She raised her hand reflexively to the Ebon-gray Jewel hanging around her neck.

Peridot watched Karla's hand move to the gem she was wearing, and she squinted at it a little. She... couldn't quite identify that one. Which was odd. Usually she had some idea...

"Most of my people have a similar ability," she sighed. "They tend to only use it for storing their weapons, though."

Guess who also didn't have a weapon.

Almost like it wasn't a rock at all!

"May I ask about your people? Who are they? You're not human--not even organic, it looks like," Karla asked, all curiosity. "Are their aetherspaces very small, then?"

You know who had an awesome pocket dimension. ROSE QUARTZ WAS WHO.

Sure she did! But it was a hairy ordeal getting access to it. Particularly for whoever wound up as the doorway.

"My people are Gems," Peridot replied, tilting her head at Karla in thought. "For the most part, we aren't from Earth, though of course there are a few exceptions."

Mostly Quartzes.

"I... don't know how to quantify 'small,' really," she added. "I mean, it's a very relative term."

"Gems, huh?" Karla asked, reaching for her Jewel again. "Are any of you Sapphires? Or maybe Tiger's Eye?"

Blood humor. Sorry, Peridot.

"I see your point about small," she added. "Can they hold more than just weapons? Or are they big enough for a weapon or two and that's it?"

"Some are," Peridot replied with a shrug, because she hardly understood human humor. Blood humor was just a step above and beyond, still. "And... I think it depends on the Gem."

She fidgeted a little.

"I can't do it."

Well. As far as she was aware, she couldn't do it. She'd been surprised once before.

"Oh!" Karla said, looking chagrined. "I'm sorry. Is it a thing only certain people--Gems--can do?"

"All of the older Gems can do it," Peridot sighed. "And I've been told ever since I was made that I couldn't, that my generation of Peridots was made inferior to the ones that came before, but I was told a lot of things that I'm beginning to question."

"'Different' is not the same as 'inferior'," Karla said, frowning mightily at that. "You're Peridot? Or, rather, a Peridot?" Since she'd just said 'generations' of those. "Did you get the Jewel--I'm sorry, your Gem--" she nodded at the stone in Peridot's forehead "--because you're a Peridot, or are you a Peridot because of your J--Gem?"

"I am the Gem," Peridot replied, chewing on the inside of her cheek and trying not to think too hard about that 'different' and 'inferior' thing. "This, my body?" She gestured up and down at herself. "It's a hard light projection from it. Solid and functional and mostly here so that I can actually interact with my surroundings."

It would be difficult for Gems to perform a hostile takeover of the universe without bodies.

"Ahh, I see!" Karla said, nodding. "So even if your body were to no longer exist, so long as your gem was okay, you'd be fine? Because this is just the form you pilot around."

Again, her hand found her Jewel and squeezed it. There was a sharp delineation between what was Karla and what was the Jewel, and yet...

Peridot nodded, wide-eyed.

"Not many humans understand that so quickly," she confided. "My body can take plenty of damage. If it gets too bad, I just retreat into my Gem until I can form a new one."

She paused, and then added, "But any damage to my Gem would be..."

She shuddered.

"Among my people, we have a concept that is similar enough that I can get it," Karla explained. "If my physical body sustained enough damage to kill it, but I still had enough psychic strength, I wouldn't die, exactly. My autonomic functions would cease and my body would be physically dead, but I would be able to continue to use it. I would be what the Blood call 'demon-dead.'"

The corner of Peridot's mouth twitched a little.

"You can keep using yours? Lucky." She waved a little toward the Gem on her forehead. "We don't die. If we're shattered, our consciousness lives on, in the shards, unable to form a body. Just... stuck, in pieces, forever."

There were few fates worse than being shattered.

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Library, Wednesday

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