noicemagazine | (no subject)

The Beta kindergarten is not improving Jasper's mood – but then, she doesn't typically go there when she feels like her mood deserves improving. The dry Earth landscape, the uneven, misshapen holes of the gems who emerged here, the scattered metal bars left behind from her ill-fated attempt to capture an army of corrupted gems... It's all a pretty miserable picture. Even the hole she emerged from, testament to her supposed perfection, only serves as a bitter reminder of her failure to live up to her shining potential.

She doesn't always think like this. There are some days on Mask Island when the sun rises and the sea is lapping at the sand and it's quiet and she actually appreciates it. Some days she even finds herself thinking this is how things always should have been, that this planet where she was born should have been her home. Sometimes she allows herself to just be motionless and enjoy the peace, feeling the wind in her hair or submerged in the ocean for days at a time until her guilt or her shame or the restless need for action that quartzes are made with catches up with her.

She doesn't go to Beta Kindergarten on those days, though.

Her boot scuffs against the ground, hard rock and dust underfoot. She lost to Pearl. She lost to a pearl. There's no reassurance she can offer herself that makes that alright. It was a close fight, but even if she'd won a close fight against her obvious inferior, in the one area where she was made to excel - there's no excuse for it being close. It doesn't prove anything except how pathetic she's become.

She almost wants to crawl into her hole as if the rock might reclaim her, but Jasper's hole isn't cosy and lived-in like Amethyst's – she burst forcefully out of it as soon as she was finished and never looked back, and its proud shape and glossy walls are no reassurance, only a reminder that nothing she's done since she emerged has been as impressive as emerging itself was.

Instead she's pacing the floor of the failed kindergarten, fists clenched, jaw set, her mane of hair still unkempt from the fight she lost. Every now and then she stops to smash something, which if nothing else probably makes her fairly easy to locate.

Threaded | Flat

It's been... a while, now. Maybe a few days. Or, actually, more like eight days and eleve hours. Steven's concern was the first voiced among them, but it had gripped Pearl immediately. The guilt, the self indignation, the shame—she'd let Jasper get to her, and had subsequently humiliated her to prove a point. She'd stepped on Jasper's ego to gratify her own—possibly undoing progress! And in front of the others, too. It was almost worse that they probably understood why.

"Oh, Steven," Pearl had said with mournful eyes, gently holding his shoulder. "I'll find her. I need to be the one who talks to her."

That was about four hours ago, back at the temple. She walked with light steps, on the tips of her toes, carefully scaling the edges of the various plateaus for better views, trying to find the estranged quartz soldier.

When Pearl finally spots her, thanks to...a pretty rowdy noise cue, her eyes widen—and she carefully leaps down, soundless, some meters away from Jasper. And she carefully approaches, not intending to impose, but also not wanting to sneak up on her.

"Jasper," she ventures with some hesitation, her voice gentle, her hands curled by her collar bones. She isn't sure what to say.

She doesn't have her guard down, exactly, but she doesn't want to set Jasper any further on edge than she already might be. She's also prepared to pursue her. She's...done this kind of thing more than once.

"I—we...need to have a conversation."