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You are a Diamond— the shimmering matriarch of all Gemkind, the ultimate blueprint by which all your creations are expected to conform to, lest they be marked as defective and cast aside— and yet one day, betraying your own intended purpose, you find yourself playing a game.
This game wasn’t your idea. No, of course it wasn’t… after all, what use would a Gem like yourself have for a juvenile activity like this? Rather, it came at Pink’s request.
Pink… the newest of your quartet. The smallest. The least mature.
Ever since that incident with the escaped organics in the ballroom at the last Cosmic Jubilee, Yellow and Blue have largely ignored her nagging appeals to play. You don’t fault them for this. Pink is a known troublemaker and disturbance, and it would prove difficult to balance one’s duties to the empire and one Gem’s seemingly insatiable desire for attention. Thus— even if such activities are otherwise a vast departure from your typical objectives— in these circumstances, you’re performing a vital service to your fellow Diamonds by placating her needs for a while.
Your strides are long and assured as you pace across the length of the otherwise empty throne room, no one else present except you and the object of your quest. A muffled peel of giggles shatters the otherwise stale silence, drawing your eyes towards the row of tall, billowing curtains framing the far wall. A thin smile curving its way upon your lips, you call out to her in a sing-song voice.
“Oh, Starlight…”
The giggles intensify. You catch a fleeting glimpse of her feet poking out from the bottom of the middle curtain as she slips from her perch on the window’s sill and tries to readjust herself. Her efforts are futile, mind you. No matter where she hides, you have your ways of seeking her out.
You advance to her hiding spot and whisk the curtain aside.
“There you are!” you exclaim to an absolutely delighted Pink, who erupts in full-bodied laughter as she hops down from her position in the window.
“Aww, not again,” she whines with a playful lilt, stamping her heel against the throne room’s cold stone. “You’re so good at games, White! Can we play another round? Please, please, please?”
You pause, contemplating this invitation. It’s impossible to deny the insidious fact that— once upon a time— you also craved nothing more than to fill your endless eternity with such fleeting, simple pleasures, but unlike Pink, you’ve since evolved beyond this blemish in your coding. You’ve extruded all these ineptitudes and impurities out in their entirety, used them to create new Gems in your own image. So instead, your thoughts turn towards all those Prime Kindergarten production reports you’ve yet to sign off on. A menial task to be sure, but given its utility to the empire, one you’d far prefer to slacking off and wasting your potential productivity.
“Not now, my dear,” you say, shaking your head as you turn to leave. “You of all Gems should know how busy we are.”
“Another time, then!” she chimes, her energy seemingly not deterred by your brusque wave off.
“Next round, I’m gonna find a hiding spot that’s so brilliant you’ll never, ever find me.”
The sheer inanity of this suggestion draws a lofty chuckle from the depths of your core.
“Oh, Pink… I sincerely doubt you will.”
There’s one time she calls upon you to play this game of hers where she sees fit to break their agreed upon rules entirely.
‘Hide wherever you please within these chambers,’ you instructed her back when this fanciful little tradition started, ‘but a Diamond such as yourself mustn’t wander outside the palace walls.’
You often wonder why— with her harboring such a potent streak of defiance— you bother requesting anything of Pink.
In the end it’s impossible to know how long you pace up and down those endless palace corridors, scrying every last nook and cranny for a sign of that ditzy, rebellious Gem. But no matter. As you’ve told her so many times before, there’s nowhere she can hide where you won’t eventually find her.
You close your eyes, focusing all your energy inwards… stretching out your influence beyond mere physical projection. And when next you open them, you find yourself watching the world from a second perspective as well: a humble decorative tile hanging at the border between the outer walls and the surrounding city. With this potent technique at your disposal, you jump from Gem to Gem and locate your missing Diamond hiding in a nearby transport bay just in time for your next meeting.
“Aw, no fair, you cheated!” Pink pouts when her savvy ruse is foiled.
The irony of this exclamation is not lost on you, but you choose not to address it. Instead, you remind her that she’ll need to be a lot more clever than this to evade your watch. After all, as the core-most progenitor of every Gem in your society, there’s no corner of this vast empire that your white light doesn’t touch.
Pink merely giggles, unhindered by the blunt truth of this statement, and promises that she’ll think a lot harder about her strategy the next time they play.
You don’t doubt her conviction. If there’s one thing the young Diamond has proven herself more than capable of, it’s rising up to meet a challenge as best she can. No, no… what you are beginning to doubt is her capacity to align with your society’s rules. And by definition alone, any Gem who cannot— either by form or function— abide by the rules is cast aside as off-color.
It would be disastrous to Gemkind’s very way of life, should a Diamond openly lead an off-color lifestyle. It would be disastrous for her.
So until Pink learns to mask these impurities… until she learns that there’s simply some activities unbefitting of a Diamond’s luster… you must keep a close watch on her, be it through the eyes of your creations or your very own.
You’re listening, and you’re watching.
Always watching… always one step ahead of her silly little schemes.
Another few thousand solar cycles gone, another game.
Pink scurries up to you in the palace gardens and tugs at your leg, begging you to play a new round of her favorite hide-and-seek activity with her. Today’s schedule, however, is packed to the brim with court sessions and progress updates on the latest colony you secured in the Kyanite Cluster. You simply do not have time to accede to her whims and play along with her antics as she so desires.
“Oh, Starlight,” you coo, falling to a kneel to regard her, “I’m afraid I’m much too occupied with other matters to search for you right now. How would you like to play a different game instead?”
This appeal seems to grab her undivided attention in an instant. Bouncing up and down upon the tips of her flats with a wholly vivacious sum of glee, she asks her what.
A somewhat humored smile curving across your lips, you continue.
The rules you describe are quite simple: Pink must stand very, very still and not leave this exact spot until you return from your meetings to release her. If she succeeds in this challenge, then she wins! Doesn’t that sound like fun?
She agrees to the terms of their game wholeheartedly, planting herself in a ready stance with one heel perfectly nestled against the inner curve of her foot.
“This is gonna be so easy!” she says, wholly overconfident in her ability to stay on task for more than a few spare moments.
You rise to your full height and part ways, thinking of little more than the long walk you’ll have to take across palace grounds to your next meeting space since idle observations of the Gems in your court have shown that the warp pad in that annex is broken, and busy being repaired. How… woefully inefficient. In any case— all your efforts forever aligned with the flawlessness of your luster— you arrive precisely on schedule anyways.
But by the time you return to this garden, sure enough to your suspicions, Pink is… gone.
Nowhere to be seen.
Yet another of your games forfeited.
You sense a clear shift in the mood when next you join the young Diamond in her favored activity.
Pink has not yet admitted to her emotional distress— has not made any move to voice the troubles that truly plague her spirit— but what she doesn’t know is that you understand the code of that gemstone just as intimately as you do your own. Her dragging footsteps… her halfhearted hiding spots, nowhere near as clever as the ones she’s attempted to stump you with in the past… today’s game was never about ‘having fun’ or burning through excess energy. No, of course not.
After all, you’ve been keeping a close watch over her. Thanks to your potent scrying ability you’ve already seen the foolish tantrums she’s thrown in Yellow and Blue’s presence. You’re already aware of her truest desires.
But does she dare admit them herself?
And is she self-aware enough to recognize her own shortcomings in the matter, to acknowledge all those micro impurities etched within the deepest crystalline layers of her gem? The very reasons that Yellow and Blue denied her request in the first place?
You sincerely doubt so.
It doesn’t take long for you to seek out her latest hideaway, a small crevice caught in between the bottom of your throne and the rear wall of the ballroom. But as you ring out your cheery, victorious greeting, Pink does not appear so enthused.
“I’m done playing, White,” she says as she steps out into the light, expression miserable and morose. “I’m not in the mood anymore.”
You tilt your head, immensely curious as to how she’ll choose to characterize herself in her own recounting of recent events. “Whyever not, dear Starlight?”
She merely crosses her arms in response, her lips curving upwards into a pout. “What’s the point in explaining, I already know you saw everything.”
“Perhaps,” you hum, crossing to sit upon your elevated throne. You tap your fingertips against the armrest— easily broad enough for a Gem her size to perch herself upon— and invite her to join you. “But explain it to me anyways.”
Despite serving you a frustrated huff, Pink ultimately complies with your request. She leaps to grab ahold of the armrest’s edge and pulls herself the rest of the way up with barely a grunt of effort. Idly swinging her feet back and forth… her mouth pressed into a thin, ponderous line… she begins to pour her troubles out to you, just as you expected.
“Yellow, a-and… and Blue— I know they don’t take me seriously,” she says, hanging her head low, avoiding your glance. “They never have! I’m supposed to be a Diamond, right, I—I’m supposed to be one of you, but…”
Hesitation. Her fingers clench inwards, catching wrinkled handfuls of her leotard’s frilly skirt.
“But—?”
“But how can I prove that I’m capable if you won’t ever give me a chance?” she exclaims, throwing her arms out. “So, yes. I went to see them, separately. And of course you already know how that went.”
You nod, ever so slight. True to her suspicions you saw everything, watching silently through the eyes of the other Diamonds’ pearls. She approached the others just as she approached you— under the innocent pretense of play. One by one, she secured their attention… and one by one, she flipped the script without warning, outright begging them to give her a world to colonize. And true to her present immaturity, when Yellow and Blue denied her this request, Pink’s fit of rage left cracked floors and a number of broken window panels in her wake.
“It’s just not fair!” she whines, whirling herself around on the armrest to face you directly. “I work so hard with everything you task me with— I’m ready for a colony of my own, I swear I am! Forget what they think, won’t you let me have a chance?”
Humming in a performative show of consideration (never mind the fact that your present opinion remains unchanged from this dialogue), you cross one leg over the other, holding your head high as you deliver your blunt response:
“I must admit I’m inclined to agree with the others. As hard of a truth this may be to accept, I’m afraid you’re simply not fit to run a colony. Not in your present state, anyways.”
Her expression plummets.
“What?”
“You’re brash,” you go on to explain with a flick and a flourish, every last gesture punctuating your honest words with pinpoint accuracy. “Impulsive. Prone to intense distractability. Stars, look at you! You’re all but smothered in your impurities, and instead of addressing this issue head on you’ve chosen to bury it within the context of all your silly little games… until even something as simple as an appeal for conversation can’t be made directly.“
Pink’s expression flares wide, surging with a near-destabilizing sum of anger and shock. Obviously this was not the answer she was hoping to draw from you during this encounter.
“So no,” you finish, shaking your head as you peer down at her, seeing the sheer aghast intensity of her reaction as proof of your point. “I will not give you a colony. And until you prove to me that you’re capable of taking such a responsibility seriously, my answer will not change.”
Hot tears welling up within her eyes, the youngest of your quartet shoots you a boiling, bitter scowl before spinning on her heels, hopping off your elevated throne, and parting ways without so much as another word. Once she disappears around the corner into the conjoining hall, you hear her stamp her foot against the floor and bite back a muffled scream. And ah, there she goes. Yet another of her tantrums.
You understand that such deep-cutting words must be upsetting to grapple with, but this kind of self reflection is what you expect of every Gem in this empire, not just her. You’re not being intentionally cruel, you’re simply delivering the truth:
That to Pink, everything in this entire universe can only be comprehended through the narrow lens of her predictable little games.
And even though you challenged her to evolve past this maladaptive pattern— to recognize her own insufficiencies and willfully lock the underlying code of these blemishes away forever— you sincerely doubt she will ever change.
You know her like the very facets of your own gemstone, after all… because she was a part of you, once.
The part you’ll forever have to repress.
