fandomhighdorms | Fourth floor common room, Wednesday afternoon

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Fourth floor common room, Wednesday afternoon

Tip would have gone to hang out on the deck after class this afternoon, but apparently being in space didn't stop June from being about a billion and a half degrees outside, and she frankly wasn't interested in sweating through her clothes while sitting still, just now.

So instead she parked herself in the nice, air conditioned common room, a bowl of tortilla chips and freshly smashed together guacamole on the coffee table, and wondered why everyone on this show she was watching had a name that started with the letter P.

At least it wasn't about crying breakfast foods. She'd made it through approximately three seconds of that one before changing the channel.

[with not actual apologies to the SU kids on the island. YOUR SHOW'S SHOWS ARE SO WEIRD. Also I've only been at work for two hours and I have already run out of internet and may be about to start spending money irresponsibly on Amazon. Please save me.]

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Having decided at the last planet that exploring planetside when the island traveled to a new world was a bad idea, Peridot was finding herself faced with a new and altogether unfamiliar predicament. One, in fact, that she'd sworn to herself would never actually get the better of her.

But here she was. Peridot was bored.

And, in her boredom, she started wandering, looking for something that could grab her attentions. That something came in the form of noise from the fourth floor common room, and after a moment, the sight of a familiar face, staring at one of those audio-visual devices that humans seemed to hold in such high regard.

After another moment of consideration, she walked into the room.

"What are you doing?"

Whatever it was, it seemed to involve gratuitous maple syrup.

"Hey Peridot," Tip greeted, scooting over a little to make sure there was room on the couch for two. And eyeing the window to make sure there wasn't a whole lot of probability that she'd get shoved out it. "I'm just -- watching a show."

She was going to say 'hanging out', but then she was probably going to have to explain idioms.

"I've never seen it before. It's very dramatic and everyone's name starts with a P. I think they're arguing over who has to team up for a three-legged race."

She wondered how much of that she was now going to have to figure out how to explain. She had money on the three-legged part.

Peridot hesitated at that, apparently working through all possible replies before settling on one that seemed most pertinent, at present.

"... Do humans possess a third leg that they keep concealed, or do they actually have some shapeshifting capabilities?"

Maybe they kept it a secret from alien species. It would make sense, after all, as shapeshifting did present some advantage that many species lacked. And if their entertainment (frivolous as it was) was created just for their sake, there would be little point to leave that detail out completely.

She hadn't actually started to pay attention to the show, yet.

That would end poorly, probably.

Score! Tip owed herself five dollars.

"Neither," she said. "It's a pretend third leg. Two people stand next to each other and some one ties their legs together and they have to walk around like they're one person with three legs instead of two people with four."

That was a pretty good explanation, right? It'd probably be better with a visual, but Tip's notebook was all the way on the other side of the chips and guacamole. And also she was still convinced she was a terrible artist, right now. Anyway, she was pretty sure they'd start doing it on the show any minute. Unless they skipped the actual race and just showed the aftermath.

Tip hated it when shows did that.

Peridot was silent again, trying to parse that, and then looked toward the television. She pursed her lips a little for a moment.

"And they'll be... doing that? On this..." She waved a hand toward the screen, puzzling out what in the world to call it. "Distraction?"

She had yet to actually make time for television outside of class. She was still failing to understand the draw.

Hey, Tip wasn't going to argue with "distraction". "Distraction" was extremely accurate, let's be real.

"I think so. They were talking about it earlier." She reached for a chip and scooped up a little glob of guacamole with it, and nearly offered it to Peridot before remembering that Peridot had only barely learned that eating was a thing. She looked down at her chip, then back up at Peridot, and laughed.

"Look! It kinda looks like you."

Peridot glanced at the chip, and then squinted at it. It was hard to miss the resemblance, even for her.

"Superficially," she decided. "I'm much taller."

You weren't that much taller, Peridot. But take it where you can find it, huh?

"You're also more than just a head," Tip agreed, and ate the chip. "So how goes your adventures in learning to read English?" she asked, even as her eyes dragged back to the TV.

She was better than she used to be about getting distracted by televisions when she was talking to people. But not by a lot.

"It's an effort that's been much improved by the repairs I did to my screen," Peridot replied, sounding rather proud of herself, actually. "I obtained employment in town at the Stark Industries, and their tools were... still primitive, for the most part, but JARVIS was most helpful in suggesting Earth alternatives to tools I would have had ready access to back on homeworld."

She looked at the television screen as it cut to the commercial break screen and squinted a little.

"Camp... Pining... Hearts?"

She mispronounced 'Hearts,' drawling out the 'e' sound so that it rhymed with 'hear.' That 'when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking' rule was tripping her up already.

"Almost!" Tip was pretty impressed. J.Lo still got the two vowels thing wrong all the time, and he'd been on Earth for years, now. "Hearts. It's one of those exception-to-the-rule things to make the underclasses look dumb, I think. You get used to them after awhile."

"What clod makes up a rule like that just to break it? It makes no sense," Peridot grumbled, though she did pause for a moment to make her fingers form her screen, and then she poked and prodded at it, making a note in a combination of English and the Homeworld's written language. 'Heart.' It had the same 'art' sound as 'Kindergarten.' "It makes things needlessly complicated."

There was a pause, and then she was looking at Tip curiously.

"Does making the underclasses look lesser make the upperclass humans... better, somehow?"

"Not really. But they think it does. Humans are all actually really similar to each other, so we like to make up arbitrary differences based on income and ability and even, like, age and color. And then we make up the rules of how to be one thing or the other and punish each other for not following them, even when we won't tell each other what all the rules are."

"What makes those differences arbitrary?" Peridot frowned thoughtfully. "Gems are judged based on their abilities, too. Age doesn't usually matter in most circumstances, but the type of Gem we are dictates almost everything about our society."

Peridot was going to miss the three-legged races, at this rate.

That's alright. This conversation was interesting enough to Tip that she was actually tuning out the TV completely. This was exactly how she'd ended up with a full-grown mad Boov genius for a best friend, back home.

"Just because a person isn't able to do everything any other person can do doesn't make them less of a person," Tip explained. "You're not a -- lesser being than I am just because I can read English really easily and you can't. We both still have thoughts and feelings and ideas that can be really useful and worth listening to."

"But..." Peridot's screen dissolved, mostly so that she could have those fingers back in time to spread her hands in question. "Why? Those who have more useful abilities and attributes have more to contribute to the betterment of their species. It makes sense to give more recognition to those who can further improve their kind."

Gem society was, as a whole, not terribly big on social equality. At all.

Tip turned on the couch so she was fully facing Peridot and not the TV -- where the Camp Pining Hearts campers were having a very dramatic row over who had to get tied to whom for the race.

"But who determines which abilities and attributes are the most useful?" Tip asked. "The person who helps remove trash and keep things clean is super important to society working right, but everyone still looks down on him because trash is gross and they don't want to have to deal with it. But maybe he's building a giant death ray and the near obliteration of your entire species could've been avoided if you just listened to him!"

If that seemed like it was a strangely specific example, that's because it was. Funsize had left quite a mark on Tip.

Someday, Peridot would actually sit down and watch that race. And then nobody would see or hear from her for days on end.

Today was not that day.

"... Do your garbage collectors frequently build large weapons?"

She needed to make note of this. For reasons.

"Sometimes they build altars," Tip said. "And he wasn't a human, he was a Boov. But -- Bill!" A little silver bug robot floated up from his position resting on Tip's hair. "Bill is a robot who was so ignored that he developed sentience out of frustration. Everyone thought he was only a billboard, but he's saved my life countless times!"

Bill spelled a Boov 'hello' out of bubbles. It probably mostly just looked like he was imitating a faulty washing machine. Or whatever equivalent thing gems might have that produced bubbles when they didn't work properly.

Other Gems produced bubbles. Peridot tried not to think too hard about them, though.

She gave Bill a curious look, tilting her head this way and that at the... thing.

"He developed sentience on his own, without being programmed to do so?" That was fascinating. And would have Peridot keeping a better eye on her robonoids once she got back to Homeworld. "That seems... exceptional. That can't possibly be something that happens frequently enough to make exception for every... billboard... that's out there."

"Well, he was programmed to try and get Boov to pay attention to him," Tip said, doing her best to explain what she only barely managed to understand from J.Lo's explanation back on New Boovworld. "And it's when you want something, like to get attention, and you can't get it that you start to have to think about how to get it. So . . . you learn how to think. And plan and imagine and dream and things. His frustration made a glitch in his programnming and now he can think."

It made more sense when J.Lo explained it. Sort of.

"It happens often enough that J.Lo was able to explain it right off the bat. And he's just a maintenance Boov. Well, I mean, he's actually now the President of New Boovworld, but that's really in name only."

Intelligence as a programming glitch. That was a new one to Peridot. But so long as it was still a useful intelligence, she supposed a little extra thinking power didn't hurt.

"You mean, people can actually rise above their station?" Her eyes went wide as the implications started to sink in. "And they aren't broken for it?"

"Well, I mean, they can be," Tip said. "The people on top don't always want to share their space. But it's not a guarantee. And the more people rising, the harder it is to break all of them."

Peridot was looking thoughtful again. She hadn't even existed yet, back when Rose Quartz and her Crystal Gems had risen up against Homeworld. But they had fought for that worthless rock, and they'd driven Earth's invaders away. Any one of them alone certainly wouldn't have been able to do that.

She frowned a little. It would have been useful for her if it had gone that way, at least. She wouldn't be stranded here, for a start.

"Does that happen often? People rising up to take a higher station?"

"Pretty much continually on Earth, I think."

Peridot reached up to scratch at her head, fingers not actually making much of a dent in that big dorito-shaped hairdo of hers.

"How does your species get anything done?"

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