Onyx, Reshuffled
She’s told the transfer is due to cohort numbers being skewed across the Containment Unit, and the labor force on this one needs to be padded. Officially, that’s why the rule to never make a gem switch cohorts is being broken.
Onyx doesn’t believe that malarkey for a second. She’s the only gem that’s being transferred—that’s not number padding, that’s being singled out. Additionally, everyone knows that forcing a lone gem to switch cohorts within the same Containment Unit is an unofficial death sentence. “Oh, we had no idea the cohort would turn on her like that,” the Supervisors will croon as they bite the insides of their cheeks to keep from smirking in triumph.
Any single-gem transfer that’s ever happened in all Onyx’s long millennia in Unit 6 has never ended happily. They are all shattered in the end. The Supervisors are negligent and cruel, but they can’t be that stupid.
They are, however, blasted fools if they think Onyx can’t see through what they’re trying to do.
She has a Mohs of 7. Not bad. She might survive long enough to make friends and melt into the background. Perhaps that strategy might work.
It’s doubtful, though.
The Supervisors will say that transferring you into another cohort during their recreational hours—even if you have already had yours today—is a favor. A courtesy, so you can find someone to socialize with before you get to work in the mines, or the forge, or the assembly lines, or basic Containment Unit maintenance again. Supervisors will tell you they’re being kind.
They aren’t.
Onyx has survived in the Containment Unit system long enough to know that rec times are when the most in-cohort bullying happens. It’s in the rec center—the only six hours where the cohort is not laboring—that unpopular gems are tortured most.
What a better way for an ‘accident’ to happen than to make a gem switch cohorts during rec hours? Even if Onyx isn’t outright confronted, she will still be resented for having two recreational periods in the same day.
She’s not an idiot. She knows what the Supervisors are doing.
Combating what’s happening, however, is a different matter entirely.
Onyx’s suspicions are first sparked when she is not immediately confronted upon arrival. She tenses, and her hand slowly travels close to the gem set in her chest. What sort of tactic is this?
It isn’t until she’s positioned herself in an easily defensible corner that she is bombarded.
“What are you doing?” asks an asymmetrical talc. She’s rapier-thin, and chalky-hued, and frilly. Even her hair, tightly curled around her ears and chin, looks delicate and girlish. Her eyes are big and shining; innocent looking. Her head also only comes up to Onyx’s ribs, due to her gem being on the back of her left hand.
“Not drawing attention to myself?” says Onyx, and she’s only being half-sarcastic. She flicks her dark bangs out of her face when she notices another flash of white in her peripheral.
“You’re the transfer, right?” says another talc as she approaches. She is built very much the same as her sister, except her chalky hues are greeer. “From another cohort, or another Unit?”
Onyx’s nose must have twitched just so, because the first talc makes a noise of realization and says, “Nah, she knew the most defensible space; she’s been in Unit 6 for a while.”
“Do you know why you alone were moved?” asks a third talc as she arrives. This one has a more translucent white-chalk palette.
“Did you do anything to mess with the Supervisors? Is this their revenge?” asks a fourth. Her palette is somewhat rusty in color, but still mostly white.
Onyx is surrounded at this point—how many stars-forsaken talcs are in this cohort, anyway? What happened in this cohort to make gems of such lowly Mohs so bold?
“Even if I told you,” Onyx says. “You wouldn’t believe me.” She is symmetrical, after all. It’s hard to other gems to conceive that she’s not volatile.
Except the only gem who didn’t think so hadn’t even needed Onyx to say anything. That diminutive blue sapphire had seen through all of Onyx’s attempts to be as aggressive and cruel as she was presumed to be, almost as if Onyx weren’t even trying at all. She defied everything Ruby had obviously told her without even an ounce of trepidation.
To be honest, Onyx is glad that gem is gone. The way she looked at you from under the aquamarine of her hair was chilling, and not in a good way—besides, Onyx is the only one who should be able to control how she’s seen. If she wants to make herself into a monster so that the other gems in Unit 6 will leave her the hell alone, she has that right.
Not that she’s doing a very good job of that at the moment, but still. It is her right.
“Revenge, then,” says the talc with the rusty palette.
The green-hued talc sister glances over her shoulder. There are a lot of gems she might be looking at, though, so Onyx doesn’t glean much from the motion. “So what did you do, exactly?”
“You look like you should be on the Supervisor’s side, more often than not,” says the opaque-white talc matter of factly, and Onyx realizes that she has been given a very blatant once over in that brief moment of distraction. The talc props the knuckles of her gem-supporting hand on her skinny waist, jostling the girlish frills of her skirt. “That’s what symmetrical gems do, right? Help the Supes gang up on the defects?”
It only takes a second for Onyx to fall into character. She wrenches her long-handled warhammer out of her gem and slams the butt of the staff into the metal floor as she takes an abrupt, threatening step towards the weak little gem. “Yeah, that’s right, I’m just like them—so why don’t you get out of my face!”
The talc sisters scatter, but there’s something about the way they do it that’s unnerving. Whatever information they were hoping to get out of her, she had inadvertently given it to them. In fact, it’s almost as if they planned for this to be the moment they dispersed—but that’s not possible, right? Are things really that organized in this cohort, or is it just the talcs?
No, that doesn’t make sense. If even talcs are this organized, things are only going to get more structured and clever as you move up the Mohs hierarchy. Onyx keeps her hammer out as she reestablishes her defensive stance in her easily defensible corner. She tucks her loose, elbow-length hair behind her ears and strains to listen to what’s being muttered around her—and there’s a lot. Single gem transfers are often the talk of the town, so to speak. She’s never been close to any cohort’s informant due to inherent mistrust over her symmetry, but she knows about them and the kind of work they do, and whenever a new gem joins a cohort their name and that of the local informant are usually what get whispered the most—oh, wait until X hears about this; that sort of thing.
Except, this time, there isn’t one. She hears her own name tossed around a lot, but there is no X that anyone is murmuring about, though. Not even a whisper of the gem’s name.
Does this cohort… not have an informant?
No, that’s impossible. Intra-cohort communication (read: gossip) is the secret backbone of Unit 6. It’s what keeps gems entertained, buoys morale, helps them all feel connected despite the inherent isolation of being buried deep within Homeworld’s crust and away from the rest of society. The intra-cohort communication is also what warns other cohorts which inmates and Supervisors to avoid—it saves people. There is no way that this cohort is isolated from the other three in Unit 6.
So, what? Everyone here is just trained to keep from talking about her?
“I thought I heard banging!”
Onyx’s head snaps up just in time to see a nearly symmetrical watermelon tourmaline barge through the crowd. Her color palette is primarily a rich green, with pink only for accents on the lacy mermaid dress that so deliberately cinches itself around her curvaceous projection. Her hair is styled in a curly bob around her round, delightedly grinning face. She’s tall—not as tall as Onyx, who probably has a solid three or four inches on her, but she’s close.
She also marches right up to Onyx as if they’re old friends, much to the obvious dismay of the asymmetrical dark blue apatite with the flyaway hair and painful looking striations in her projection’s arms.
“Tourmaline!” the apatite cries out, aghast. “Would you just—oh, what am I even saying? She’s doing it anyway.”
For Onyx, who wouldn’t have known this gem if her life depended on it, being approached so boisterously is nothing short of problematic.
“Whoa, hey, back off—I said back off!” Onyx brandishes her warhammer to keep the green-and-pink gem at bay. Her jaw is set, and her eyes are narrowed. She’ll fight, if she has to. It’s never too early to start a reputation as the gem nobody wants to mess with.
In a flash of light, Onyx finds herself staring at the head of a very unfamiliar warhammer. Tourmaline’s is shorter and—well, pinker, but truth be told her hammer actually heavier than Onyx’s own.
Tourmaline has dropped in a stance very similar to the one Onyx is currently poised in, but it seems quite perfunctory when she’s still beaming like they’re long lost friends. “You are as tall as Ruby said!”
Onyx blinks. She’s so stunned by this dialogue that she nearly lowers her weapon. “…What?”
“You know, Ruby—you used to be more than friends, back in the day?” And Tourmaline gives her this look. Onyx doesn’t even have the words to describe the amount of innuendo and exasperation existing simultaneously in this one expression.
That’s when it clicks. “Oh, no.” Onyx can’t help it. She straightens up and slams the hilt of her hammer into the floor again. “Stars help me—you’re telling me this is her old cohort?”
It all makes so much sense now. The cohort Ruby and that creepy sapphire occupied for three thousand years is well renowned throughout the Containment Unit as not only the safest, but also the most highly structured group. Between Ruby and her little friend definitively beating the snot out of every bully they so much as heard rumors about, the cohort’s informant is the one that streamlined and refined the gossip system currently in use throughout the entirety of Unit 6.
And this is the cohort Onyx is a part of now.
She can think of at least three different gems who would literally kill to be in her position, potential alienation and shattering be damned.
“What, you didn’t already know?” asks Tourmaline blankly. She, too, straightens up. She then promptly leans on the weighty head of her hammer like it’s an armrest. The pose looks good—languid, even—but decidedly practiced. Has she been planning for this conversation? “Didn’t your informant tell you?”
Onyx scowls. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“It was an honest question, if you can believe that.”
Onyx gestures pointedly to her gem. “Informants don’t go near me. One of the bad guys, remember?”
A peculiar expression crosses Tourmaline’s face, but that’s when Onyx catches a glimpse of one of the talcs talking to her apatite friend.
Everything comes together after that, and her eyes fly open. None of it ever made sense in her last cohort, those whispered rumors about an apatite finding out about This or That, wondering what she would do about Event A or B.
She looks so weak. Well, apatites don’t have very high Mohs to begin with, but those striations, those thin arms…
But all of the pieces fit. Her reaction to Tourmaline, Tourmaline’s seemingly implicit knowledge about Onyx (well, part of that is probably Ruby’s fault, but still). No other conclusion really makes sense.
“That’s her,” Onyx says, torn between shock and incredulity. “She’s the one—!”
Tourmaline abruptly scowls. “You know, I’m not sure I appreciate how much focus you’re putting on everything else. I’m the one who’s having a conversation with you, you know.”
Onyx blinks, bemused and suspicious (which, to be fair, is how she wears bemusement these days). What gives this tourmaline a right to be so familiar with her, anyway? “Have we ever actually met before?” she asks outright.
“No.” This does not perturb Tourmaline as much as Onyx thinks it should, because then she grins. It’s a nice smile, Onyx supposes, but still far too personal and forward coming from a gem who might actually be able to pose a physical threat to her—a gem with whom she should be acquaintances, at best. “But we have now!”
There is such a hefty tone of implication in that last statement that Onyx can only bristle, uncomfortable. What in the cosmos had Ruby told these people about her? If she were still here, Onyx would be going after her.
Except Ruby isn’t here. Onyx is at her old cohort instead, and one of Ruby’s old friends has apparently taken a shine to her. Whatever her reasons or motives, right now Tourmaline’s overt friendliness may just be what helps Onyx survive this rec time, and all of the others to come until she fully assimilates with the rest of the cohort (if that is even possible; she’s doubtful).
She had wanted a way to make it through this transfer more or less unscathed, hadn’t she? Well, this might be a way. Beggars can’t be choosers, and if Tourmaline has connections with the Apatite, well…
Onyx makes herself smile. She’s not used to smiling, it feels odd an inappropriate on her face, but she thinks she manages without making herself look too toothy and animalistic. “Yes, I suppose we have.”