Post by seapearl on Sept 30, 2021 4:13:13 GMT
Name: Sea Pearl
Appeared Gender: Female
Appeared Age: Young adult
Gemstone: Pale Sea Green Pearl (Oval Shaped).
Gemstone Location: Chest
Faction: Crystal Gem, but not currently a member.
Corrupted: No
Appearance:
Like all Pearls, she is graceful and quite dainty, with a slightly shorter nose than many classic Pearls. Her hair is long and wavy, but she keeps it in a bun tied at the nape of her neck.
Her skin is a very pale shade of turquoise, with her hair in a contrasting darker shade of the same. She has bright green eyes.
Sea wears a skirt in various shades of sea-green and blue, starting paler around her waist and graduating to a darker shade at the hem. It is slightly transparent and dotted with shining beads reminiscent of sea foam or smaller pearls. She wears a shorter petticoat which ends at her thighs and is nearly invisible under the top skirt. It's tied with a bow at the small of her back.
Her bodice is a solid pale blue, decorated intricately with similar pale shining beads and subtle lace around the waist. The sleeves are short little pleats of a similar sheer fabric to her skirt. She has single bangle around her left wrist and right ankle.
Personality:
Sea is hesitant to speak, because she isn’t used to offering a thought that hasn’t come from someone else. She has a bad habit of speaking so softly it is often hard to hear her. But rather than it coming from shyness, it’s more the result of long disuse.
She has a deep curiosity for all life on Earth, but particularly that found in the ocean. Since being accidentally knocked over the side of a communications array, she has been drawn to the peace and fascinating variety she saw a glimpse of beneath the waves.
Sea Pearl is naturally quite a cheerful person, but she has long since learned not to let such emotions show on her face. Fear, happiness and sorrow all have a habit of provoking her owner, so she has learned to keep them hidden.
She is well organised and tidy, but conversely actually enjoys mess and chaos, so long as it’s hygienic. There is a bit of a nurturing side to her, a curiosity about organic life forms and all their fragilities.
Sea is a little vain and likes keeping herself presentable and beautiful. She worries about her appearance a lot, particularly matching accessories to her skirts in ways that are elegant and eye-catching without being ostentatious.
Because she was created as part of the colonisation efforts for Earth, she has not been to Homeworld since her creation. Aside from occasional journeys to the Reef for upgrades and repairs, they rarely leave the Moonbase or Earth itself. Therefore she is a little isolated from wider Gem culture, with her mistress being her only connection to Homeworld. This has made her dependent on her mistress for nearly all her social relationships, so she doesn’t have a good idea of how to relate to people outside of a hierarchical relationship based on power and control.
Sea’s relationship to her mistress is a volatile one. Her mistress is prone to fits of violent temper, often tearing apart everything in her quarters to soothe her rage. Sea is rarely the direct target of such tantrums, though she has been the victim of the occasional flung object.
In the early days of their relationship Sea tried to be the perfect servant; quiet, obedient, passive. But she soon learned that nothing provoked her mistress more than signs of fear or distress, so she learned to hide it all deep.
She was then accused of being dull, but better dull than ‘irritating.’
As the years passed her fear lessened as she learned her mistress was unlikely to risk damaging what she saw as a prized status symbol, which afforded her some small amount of power.
She was programmed to love her mistress above her own life, but so far from the glitter of Homeworld, alone with no one but that mistress for company, that programming became bent out of shape.
Sea resents her mistress for failing in everything she should be: a ruthless leader, a cruel tactician, even indifference could carry some sort of dignity with it.
But the constant tantrums, moodiness and general inability to fulfill her duties without Sea there to guide her was grating. How could Sea fulfill her purpose with such an unworthy mistress? What was there about her to love?
Yet she loves her anyway, her programming is unbroken.
Likes/Dislikes:
Fears:
Weapon: None
Ability 1: Signal receiver. Sea Pearl was designed as a personal correspondence assistant and is therefore capable of picking up any signal designed by Gemkind. She has also become attuned to Earth radio and internet signals. This is both her greatest strength and her greatest weakness, because she can be easily overwhelmed if targeted directly by a particularly strong signal or be distracted by a multitude of smaller ones.
Ability 2: Holograms. Like many Pearls, Sea Pearl can create hard and soft light holograms for display purposes. She isn’t capable of making large independent structures, but she can make temporary birdlike holograms for the purpose of delivering small items.
Fusions: None.
History:
Sea Pearl was created as part of the colonisation project for Earth, given to a Rosasite in charge of communications. In the beginning her role was simply as a conduit for the many correspondences between her mistress and Homeworld. She was designed to be attuned to the various frequencies used by Gem society, part radio operator, part aerial. Her life was the constant buzz and background hum of other people’s conversations, so she never felt lonely even in the crowd. She spent her days accompanying Rosasite to and from the Earth’s surface, working on the communication arrays and warp pads, boosting signals, and keeping her mistress connected to the social events on Homeworld.
One day, while testing some theoretical components on the Galaxy warp, Pearl found herself drawn to that strange body of water the humans called ‘the sea.’ She had only ever seen it from orbit, she was surprised by the strength of those waves. She stood a little too close to the edge, drawn by the soothing hush of the waves. A soldier moving a support strut got a little too careless, and knocked her over the edge into the water. Pearl didn’t need to sink. Her body was light enough that she might have floated. But a strong current pulled her down deep. And down there, it was almost silent. For the first time she could hear her own voice and she was frightened by how shockingly alone she suddenly was, but for just a moment, she could rest. This small moment was hers. They would never know if she closed her eyes. They would never know she hesitated to return.
When she opened her eyes she had reached the bottom, the sand beneath her fingers coarse and fascinating in its tiny infinite variations of colour. Her gem provided enough light to see, shimmering off the sand and throwing tiny glimmers back. She had stayed too long. She needed to return. But at the last moment a tiny glint caught her eye, and she closed a fist around it before returning to the surface. Her mistress was displeased by how long she had taken to surface, but did not assume she had rebelled. There was a glimmer of relief in her eyes, relief that her precious tool had not been lost, that she would not have to be replaced. Sea Pearl had not been her name. But she loved the word. It became the word she used for herself, in her own head.
The shell she had taken was a little broken, entirely unremarkable, there were millions just like it. But it was hers and that was enough.
On the day the communication arrays went down, everything changed. It was another day of routine maintenance, her mistress was more ill-tempered than usual and Pearl was doing her best to weather it such that she almost didn’t see the attack coming. A strange gem stepped out of the shadows and swung a weapon at her mistress. Pearl automatically stepped in between them to block the attack and that was the last she knew.
It was a long, difficult wait for rescue. Then one day the broken Communications Hub became the centre of the world. Gems gathered from all over the planet, clustered in excited groups all around the base of the tower. Pearl closed the doors and barricaded herself in with her mistress. The rumours she had heard were frightening: outcast gems, defects, gems that disobeyed orders and turned against their masters, against order. What would such Gems do to her and her mistress if they were found?
Then she heard it: A great echoing boom from across the universe, like a bright streak of lightning striking down from the upper atmosphere and rooting her to the spot; Rose’s message. But it would never get through, she and Rosasite had changed the settings since the attack. The message, intended for all the creatures of earth, would fizzle out into nothing. The signal was already failing.
They were surrounded, she had no choice. Or that was what she told herself later. She could have, should have, ignored the signal. Perhaps the Gems outside would have left by themselves eventually, perhaps not. All she knew was that in that moment she found herself thinking of that small moment at the bottom of the ocean, that small moment of calm and wondered if something like that could be hers forever. While her mistress was otherwise occupied, Pearl interfaced with the tangled mess of the communications command system and reverted the settings, releasing the rebellious message to the world. She covered her tracks later, insisting to her mistress that it was a fluke in the system, that the circuits were burnt out and it would not happen again. Rosasite was too incompetant to know better. But the implications of her rebellion still frightened her.
But no one asked questions and she returned to her duties. Eventually Pink returned to her Colony and Pearl’s role changed.
Before she was only expected to organise the personal messages for her mistress, discover the urgent ones among the trivial, and intersperse serious business with the right sort of idle pleasure to keep her mistress in good humour when the demands of work grew to be too much. Now she was no longer the treasured tool of a singular entity, but charged with deciphering complex strings of military code, searching for rogue communications, responding to high level security messages from Homeworld and still keep her mistress entertained in the moments in between. The noise was so much that even the quiet voice in her head grew silent, she lost herself entirely, her world compressed down to the next moment, the next order, the next piece of information.
Sea currently spends her time both on Earth and the Moon Base, running errands for her mistress in between interpreting various communication signals for the base. Sometimes she needs to go somewhere specific to catch a certain signal. Her mistress is stationed on Earth and rarely returns to the Moon Base.
Character Arcs:
Minor
Sea has no skill or experience in battle, which means she cannot summon a weapon or defend herself in any way. She is used to being a pretty ornament rather than a person with agency and the ability to protect other people.
Sea needs to discover her love of the ocean. She will eventually make her home in the ocean and become a sort of mermaid Gem.
She’ll also discover a passion for writing and studying sea creatures.
Major
Sea has no model of relationships that is not based on power and control. Her mistress is often cruel, calling her all sorts of things but ‘dull’ is somehow the one that hurts the most.
Sea needs to learn how to relate to others as equals, without being either superior or inferior. She needs to learn how relationships work.
She fears being alone, but reflexively isolates herself whenever she fears she’s going to hurt people through her ignorance of how to relate to others.
Appeared Gender: Female
Appeared Age: Young adult
Gemstone: Pale Sea Green Pearl (Oval Shaped).
Gemstone Location: Chest
Faction: Crystal Gem, but not currently a member.
Corrupted: No
Appearance:
Like all Pearls, she is graceful and quite dainty, with a slightly shorter nose than many classic Pearls. Her hair is long and wavy, but she keeps it in a bun tied at the nape of her neck.
Her skin is a very pale shade of turquoise, with her hair in a contrasting darker shade of the same. She has bright green eyes.
Sea wears a skirt in various shades of sea-green and blue, starting paler around her waist and graduating to a darker shade at the hem. It is slightly transparent and dotted with shining beads reminiscent of sea foam or smaller pearls. She wears a shorter petticoat which ends at her thighs and is nearly invisible under the top skirt. It's tied with a bow at the small of her back.
Her bodice is a solid pale blue, decorated intricately with similar pale shining beads and subtle lace around the waist. The sleeves are short little pleats of a similar sheer fabric to her skirt. She has single bangle around her left wrist and right ankle.
Personality:
Sea is hesitant to speak, because she isn’t used to offering a thought that hasn’t come from someone else. She has a bad habit of speaking so softly it is often hard to hear her. But rather than it coming from shyness, it’s more the result of long disuse.
She has a deep curiosity for all life on Earth, but particularly that found in the ocean. Since being accidentally knocked over the side of a communications array, she has been drawn to the peace and fascinating variety she saw a glimpse of beneath the waves.
Sea Pearl is naturally quite a cheerful person, but she has long since learned not to let such emotions show on her face. Fear, happiness and sorrow all have a habit of provoking her owner, so she has learned to keep them hidden.
She is well organised and tidy, but conversely actually enjoys mess and chaos, so long as it’s hygienic. There is a bit of a nurturing side to her, a curiosity about organic life forms and all their fragilities.
Sea is a little vain and likes keeping herself presentable and beautiful. She worries about her appearance a lot, particularly matching accessories to her skirts in ways that are elegant and eye-catching without being ostentatious.
Because she was created as part of the colonisation efforts for Earth, she has not been to Homeworld since her creation. Aside from occasional journeys to the Reef for upgrades and repairs, they rarely leave the Moonbase or Earth itself. Therefore she is a little isolated from wider Gem culture, with her mistress being her only connection to Homeworld. This has made her dependent on her mistress for nearly all her social relationships, so she doesn’t have a good idea of how to relate to people outside of a hierarchical relationship based on power and control.
Sea’s relationship to her mistress is a volatile one. Her mistress is prone to fits of violent temper, often tearing apart everything in her quarters to soothe her rage. Sea is rarely the direct target of such tantrums, though she has been the victim of the occasional flung object.
In the early days of their relationship Sea tried to be the perfect servant; quiet, obedient, passive. But she soon learned that nothing provoked her mistress more than signs of fear or distress, so she learned to hide it all deep.
She was then accused of being dull, but better dull than ‘irritating.’
As the years passed her fear lessened as she learned her mistress was unlikely to risk damaging what she saw as a prized status symbol, which afforded her some small amount of power.
She was programmed to love her mistress above her own life, but so far from the glitter of Homeworld, alone with no one but that mistress for company, that programming became bent out of shape.
Sea resents her mistress for failing in everything she should be: a ruthless leader, a cruel tactician, even indifference could carry some sort of dignity with it.
But the constant tantrums, moodiness and general inability to fulfill her duties without Sea there to guide her was grating. How could Sea fulfill her purpose with such an unworthy mistress? What was there about her to love?
Yet she loves her anyway, her programming is unbroken.
Likes/Dislikes:
- She likes to write with Earth instruments, the slow meandering process of the pen scratching the paper, the glide of the ink and the satisfaction of having something solid to hold.
- She likes music, particularly string instruments. Sometimes she can hear the humans playing on the beach, or by the fireside at night.
- Listening to whales sing is her secret hobby when alone on the moon base.
- Sea will love to swim once she figures out the complicated rhythm of all her limbs moving through the water. She learns by watching humans and animals.
- She likes drinks, particularly fruit smoothies and milkshakes. Teas are pleasant too, but she prefers them cold.
- Sea dislikes complete silence. It’s unnatural and frightening and it makes her voice too loud. But she does like relative quiet and soothing, natural sounds to contrast with the constant artificial buzz of communication in her head.
- She doesn’t dislike loud noises, but does tend to reflexively retreat into herself as a learned response.
- She dislikes germs and bacteria, even when she learns that mould has a purpose she can’t stand being in contact with it directly and so needs to wear gloves or have some sort of barrier. She’s worried about infection and the Corruption specifically.
Mud and mess is just fine because it washes off. She quite enjoys the subversion of Homeworld's perfect order.
Fears:
- Corruption and other contagions; bacteria, viruses, human illnesses ect.
- The Diamond Authority
- Being alone
- Hurting others the same way she was hurt
Weapon: None
Ability 1: Signal receiver. Sea Pearl was designed as a personal correspondence assistant and is therefore capable of picking up any signal designed by Gemkind. She has also become attuned to Earth radio and internet signals. This is both her greatest strength and her greatest weakness, because she can be easily overwhelmed if targeted directly by a particularly strong signal or be distracted by a multitude of smaller ones.
Ability 2: Holograms. Like many Pearls, Sea Pearl can create hard and soft light holograms for display purposes. She isn’t capable of making large independent structures, but she can make temporary birdlike holograms for the purpose of delivering small items.
Fusions: None.
History:
Sea Pearl was created as part of the colonisation project for Earth, given to a Rosasite in charge of communications. In the beginning her role was simply as a conduit for the many correspondences between her mistress and Homeworld. She was designed to be attuned to the various frequencies used by Gem society, part radio operator, part aerial. Her life was the constant buzz and background hum of other people’s conversations, so she never felt lonely even in the crowd. She spent her days accompanying Rosasite to and from the Earth’s surface, working on the communication arrays and warp pads, boosting signals, and keeping her mistress connected to the social events on Homeworld.
One day, while testing some theoretical components on the Galaxy warp, Pearl found herself drawn to that strange body of water the humans called ‘the sea.’ She had only ever seen it from orbit, she was surprised by the strength of those waves. She stood a little too close to the edge, drawn by the soothing hush of the waves. A soldier moving a support strut got a little too careless, and knocked her over the edge into the water. Pearl didn’t need to sink. Her body was light enough that she might have floated. But a strong current pulled her down deep. And down there, it was almost silent. For the first time she could hear her own voice and she was frightened by how shockingly alone she suddenly was, but for just a moment, she could rest. This small moment was hers. They would never know if she closed her eyes. They would never know she hesitated to return.
When she opened her eyes she had reached the bottom, the sand beneath her fingers coarse and fascinating in its tiny infinite variations of colour. Her gem provided enough light to see, shimmering off the sand and throwing tiny glimmers back. She had stayed too long. She needed to return. But at the last moment a tiny glint caught her eye, and she closed a fist around it before returning to the surface. Her mistress was displeased by how long she had taken to surface, but did not assume she had rebelled. There was a glimmer of relief in her eyes, relief that her precious tool had not been lost, that she would not have to be replaced. Sea Pearl had not been her name. But she loved the word. It became the word she used for herself, in her own head.
The shell she had taken was a little broken, entirely unremarkable, there were millions just like it. But it was hers and that was enough.
On the day the communication arrays went down, everything changed. It was another day of routine maintenance, her mistress was more ill-tempered than usual and Pearl was doing her best to weather it such that she almost didn’t see the attack coming. A strange gem stepped out of the shadows and swung a weapon at her mistress. Pearl automatically stepped in between them to block the attack and that was the last she knew.
When she woke a few weeks later it was to discover her mistress was yet to recover, and the communications hub was destroyed. Sea anxiously awaited the return of her mistress and tried to salvage what she could, but it was no use. By the time Rosasite reformed, she had set up a new home for them in some of the spare rooms. Her mistress was displeased, but eventually came to accept their new situation with something close to grace.
Then she heard it: A great echoing boom from across the universe, like a bright streak of lightning striking down from the upper atmosphere and rooting her to the spot; Rose’s message. But it would never get through, she and Rosasite had changed the settings since the attack. The message, intended for all the creatures of earth, would fizzle out into nothing. The signal was already failing.
They were surrounded, she had no choice. Or that was what she told herself later. She could have, should have, ignored the signal. Perhaps the Gems outside would have left by themselves eventually, perhaps not. All she knew was that in that moment she found herself thinking of that small moment at the bottom of the ocean, that small moment of calm and wondered if something like that could be hers forever. While her mistress was otherwise occupied, Pearl interfaced with the tangled mess of the communications command system and reverted the settings, releasing the rebellious message to the world. She covered her tracks later, insisting to her mistress that it was a fluke in the system, that the circuits were burnt out and it would not happen again. Rosasite was too incompetant to know better. But the implications of her rebellion still frightened her.
But no one asked questions and she returned to her duties. Eventually Pink returned to her Colony and Pearl’s role changed.
Before she was only expected to organise the personal messages for her mistress, discover the urgent ones among the trivial, and intersperse serious business with the right sort of idle pleasure to keep her mistress in good humour when the demands of work grew to be too much. Now she was no longer the treasured tool of a singular entity, but charged with deciphering complex strings of military code, searching for rogue communications, responding to high level security messages from Homeworld and still keep her mistress entertained in the moments in between. The noise was so much that even the quiet voice in her head grew silent, she lost herself entirely, her world compressed down to the next moment, the next order, the next piece of information.
Sea currently spends her time both on Earth and the Moon Base, running errands for her mistress in between interpreting various communication signals for the base. Sometimes she needs to go somewhere specific to catch a certain signal. Her mistress is stationed on Earth and rarely returns to the Moon Base.
Character Arcs:
Minor
Sea has no skill or experience in battle, which means she cannot summon a weapon or defend herself in any way. She is used to being a pretty ornament rather than a person with agency and the ability to protect other people.
Sea needs to discover her love of the ocean. She will eventually make her home in the ocean and become a sort of mermaid Gem.
She’ll also discover a passion for writing and studying sea creatures.
Major
Sea has no model of relationships that is not based on power and control. Her mistress is often cruel, calling her all sorts of things but ‘dull’ is somehow the one that hurts the most.
Sea needs to learn how to relate to others as equals, without being either superior or inferior. She needs to learn how relationships work.
She fears being alone, but reflexively isolates herself whenever she fears she’s going to hurt people through her ignorance of how to relate to others.