nacreous | iridescent

Pleasant, she says. He wonders if she’s being ironic.

She has a point, though: no one gassed them or concussed them or put a bag over their head. It’s easy for people to talk about a gilded cage when they haven’t had their legs broken to keep them from running. (He has not, and people don’t generally take clones as prisoners of war for reasons of expendability, but he’s been on enough Separatist-occupied planets, seen enough horrors–) 

No, they’re all being treated with velvet gloves. It’s probably the strangest thing about all of this.

“I can see the similarity,” Hope says, eventually. “But we aren’t all human. Or from Earth, for that matter. You have to wonder why do something like this. What– observation or test or whatever it is could merit spending this much money to put a place like this together.”

That’s the other thing bothering him– it’s too much work, without any clear payoff. It feels like they’re waiting for a bomb to go off.

Pearl nods, thoughtfully, and folds her arms in front of her body. “I agree, it seems similar but it doesn’t all add up. Everything seems to be designed to look natural and as far as I can tell the matter everything is made from is constructed to be as authentic as possible.” It wasn’t an amount of effort she’d expect the Diamonds to expend on something they barely even cared about. 

“There are people in the universe with more resources and time on their hands than they know what to do with, however. I doubt that the ones that I know of are the only ones.” But then that begged the question, how did whoever was behind this know of them. And none of it explained the why.