fandomhigh | Library, Wednesday

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Library, Wednesday

The books were actually behaving themselves today, and so Peridot was making use of any of her spare time in the library by looking up the properties of Earth's metals. She wanted something sturdy, but lightweight, and preferably only faintly magnetic...

... Maybe capable of having an antimatter blaster built into it...

Not that she didn't enjoy being short, but she couldn't find the ladder again, and was having one of her 'I really miss my limb enhancers' days. If she could just figure out adequate replacements, maybe a ladder would be entirely unnecessary anyway.

Maybe. Hopefully.

Probably not.

[OOC: Open!]

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Why? Spite. Almost entirely because of spite.

"Minerals, mostly," Peridot replied with a shrug of her shoulders. "The plan for Earth was to create a new series of Kindergartens to create more Gems in, and then when those resources were exhausted, turn it into another Gem colony."

She frowned a little, and then shrugged.

"That was before my time. The plan changed after that."

"How did it change?" Breq asked.

"We abandoned the planet and the Diamonds put it to a different use as a sort of... experiment," Peridot sighed. "One that would have destroyed it completely, but it never reached its final stage."

A fact that she was both thankful for and a little conflicted about.

"Destroyed it? What kind of experiment?"

That reminded her a little too much of Garsedd.

"A massive geoweapon," Peridot muttered, wrinkling her nose a bit. "It was... in poor taste, and made no rational sense."

To say the least.

"That sort of thing doesn't always make sense," Breq said. "Or it does, but for the wrong reasons. Why did they do it?"

"I... I thought it was in order to strengthen Homeworld," Peridot said, and now she was poking through the books some more, even though the atlas she'd pulled was already sufficient. "As it turns out, it was more... to satisfy a grudge, I think. There was a war. We lost."

"My... people did something similar," Breq said. "We were challenged for the first time, and our ruler ordered the complete destruction of our enemy. It changed us."

She closed the atlas.

"Is that why you are here? Because you refused to participate?"

"In part." Peridot wasn't looking up, now. "Originally I had come to Earth in order to check on the progress of the experiment. I ran into some resistance, and was unable to return home."

She had little problem talking about it, even if she wasn't making eye contact now. She wasn't proud of it, either.

"Now I can't return home because I had a hand in destroying it. The Diamonds would have me shattered if they knew."

Noticing the lack of eye contact, Breq asked:

"Do you think you did the right thing?"

"For Earth, absolutely."

Peridot shifted her weight uneasily, and then started to walk. They had books about space travel to find, yet. And this let her keep her eyes on the floor.

Breq followed, still holding the atlas.

"For you, then? Considering the circumstances. Considering the choice."

That one was a harder question to answer. Peridot walked quietly for a while before finally pulling together the proper words.

"I lost everything I know for this planet," she said, finally. "I'm a traitor to my own people, and I don't belong here. But for the first time in my life, my future is my own. I don't know what to do with it yet... but I'm starting to think that maybe it was worthwhile. Not easy. But worthwhile."

"I think I understand," Breq said after a while, then fell silent.

Peridot just nodded a little in response to that, finishing her trek to the books about space, and then quietly looked for one of the few about modern Earth's space program. It took her a moment, and she had to climb up onto the shelving to get what she was looking for, but she was small and surprisingly nimble, and she fetched the book with the ship schematics in it with ease and held it up to Breq.

"Thank you."

Breq opened the book, leaving the previous conversation behind, which was what she guessed Peridot preferred.

"As one could expect, I suppose," she said, studying the blueprint of the moon lander.

"Primitive," Peridot agreed, hopping back down to the floor and crossing her arms in front of herself. "But... crudely effective, I suppose."

"It filled it's purpose."

Breq looked up.

"What are spaceships like where you come from?"

"They're like..." Peridot paused for a moment, thinking of a good way to describe them to someone who had never seen them before. She looked down at her hands, quirked a little smile, and shrugged. "They're fast. Capable of reaching speeds faster than light, though we only do that under very specific circumstances. The last time I came to Earth, it was aboard a Gem Warship, which is shaped something like a hand."

Exactly like a hand, actually.

"Like a hand," Breq repeated. "Did you bring a lot of soldiers?"

She turned another page. These - they weren't even proper ships, were they? - looked like mere toys, and yet they reminded her of being her whole self, instead of this one, limited body. She fell silent, not quite listening to Peridot's response.

"Only the one soldier," Peridot replied, frowning a little. "As far as Homeworld was concerned, one Jasper was all we needed."

And that would have been true enough, if not for Steven's half-human heritage.

Breq looked up. "Just one?"

She had had hundreds, thousands more in storage to replace them when needed. And she had just been one troop carrier.

"And what if you had lost her? I assume you did, but what was the plan."

"You don't just lose a Jasper. Especially not that one," Peridot sighed. "She's still alive out there somewhere. We were separated when the rebels destroyed the ship."

You didn't need a backup plan for losing Jasper. Jasper was the backup plan.

"Is she still a danger?"

It was obvious that she could be.

"Very much so," Peridot confirmed. "And nobody knows where she is."

Which was kind of a problem.

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