#serial numbers

Every Gem has two numbers, their Facet, Cut, and/or Cabochon (pronounced Kab-uh-zhan, it’s what Nephrite has in place of a Cut, and its spelling is almost as bad as the word “Colonol”). It's the only unique part of a Gem's name – the rest of it is shared with every other Gem of their type.

(I could write another essay on just the sociological implications behind a culture that numbers people. It’s seen as a method of dehumanization in most cultures, as taking away someone’s name and replacing it with something you’d use to keep track of an object. Yet, in a culture where the word part of a name is something dehumanizing (simply the object you are made of) and the only unique part of your name is your number, it would be a complete role reversal. Suddenly, being referred to with a word might be seen as rude, and people would rather be called by a serial number instead. If Gems were real, the xenoanthropology discussions around them would be the most interesting shit ever.

Unfortunately, I dropped out of college before I got to take the sociology course that was going to be part of my degree, so any essay I wrote about the topic would be sub-par at best.)

The words do all describe parts about a gem’s shape – when a gemstone is cut, it has been shaped into a polyhedron, with each face being called a facet, and a cabochon gem is a smoothed down shape, most often spheres or ovoids. The definitions of these words don’t actually have any bearing on who uses them in the show, though; Peridot and Nephrite both have cabochon gems, but both have a Facet and Peridot has a Cut. Their meanings as serial numbers are independent from their meanings as nouns, as the show wasn’t interested in giving them much logic at all. It was reasonable not to – who the fuck would pay attention to numbers given to all of three characters? (not counting the Famethyst, who only get Cuts)

I would. I am autistic as fuck about this show.

Let’s look at what little we do get in canon. Every Cut has exactly three digits, a number and two letters. The Crystal Gem Amethyst has 8XM, Peridot has 5XG, and the Famethyst have 8XG-8XH. We know from the episode “Back to the Kindergarten” that the third (and possibly also the second digit) have to do with either the order or location of the exit hole of the gem, going from top to bottom. We can also possibly presume that the Famethyst all share a Facet, based on the fact that they don’t use it as part of their introductions – it might’ve been redundant.

Cut and Cabochon might be mutually exclusive, based on the fact that no Gem that we know of has both, but they might mean something similar, seeing as how both appear after the Facet. There’s only one Cabochon Gem (Nephrite) compared to the Seven Cut Gems, and her Cabochon number is 12. A Cabochon might not need as many digits to distinguish itself because it’s a lot rarer.

What information we have on Facet is so vague as to be utterly useless.

The range of values that a Facet can hold doesn’t have any pattern. Nephrite has Facet-413 and Peridot has Facet-2F5L. It could be that Facet holds one base 36 number (using 0-9 and then every letter of the English alphabet before it rolls over into 10, making a base-36’s 10 equal base 10’s 36.) that can get arbitrarily high, but why the fuck would they need that level of extreme specificity? Yes, there’s probably an absolute shit-ton of Gems, but you also have what type of Gem they are to help differentiate them further, so you wouldn’t need their serial numbers to get too high. If there’s only millions of Pearls, you only need a Pearl’s serial number to hold as many digits as a Social Security number. Probably less, since SSI’s differentiate between hundreds of millions of people, rather than just millions, and the use of letters in the Cut can lessen the digits needed further.

The Prime Kindergarten Amethyst was born in was located in Facet-5, which is amethyst’s Facet, but that could mean Facet 5 of Earth, or the Milky Way, or space in general, and we have no way of knowing which unless it’s suddenly revealed that, say, there’s a Facet-5 Gem that was made on Neptune, or a Facet-10 Gem that was made on Earth, so that’s not helpful. And, honestly, If Facets denote a location on a planet, then why the fuck would planets need up to ZZZZ Facets? That’s 1,679,615 in base 10. And if Facets are for regions of Space, what part of the Gem’s serial number denotes the planet they were made on? The Facet can’t do both. It can’t use some amount of digits to denote a region of space and another amount to denote planet – Facet-5 has only the one digit. It would make the most sense if Facet denoted planet, but then why would Earth be planet 5? In what fucking way are they ordering planets that would make Earth planet 5?

We basically know nothing about Facets, is my point.

Let’s move on to the part where I throw bullshit at the wall to fill in the gaps.

Cut denotes location, so let’s say that Cabochon does the same – but for a location that is smaller or less commonly used than a Cut location. An easy way to do that is to have Cut be for Gems made on planets, and Cabochon be for Gems made on those planets’ moons/sattelites. Since Steven was born on Earth, this allows him to have a Cut, and I can use what info we have on Cut while also not having to worry about giving the Cabochon number a meaning.

I want to give each digit in Cut a separate meaning, since that feels more interesting. We know the first digit can go up to 8, which seems like a good number to top it off at. Going with the location theming, a planet can be very neatly split up into eight sections – top and bottom hemispheres, and four quadrants within each, giving the first digit in Cut a range from 1-8. Interestingly, there is a word for a quadrant with 8 sections instead of 4, and it’s an octant.

The latter two digits can denote the area/time within the octant, let’s say the first denotes some measure above/below sea level. Assuming Steven was born in Beach City, he was most likely born very close to or above sea level. Since I don’t want to use negative letters, let’s just say that the second digit starts with A for some distance far above sea level, and sea level itself is tucked between M and N.

As for the third digit? No clue. There’s very likely thousands of Gems born in each elevation, so the way I’ve split up Cut was flawed from the start, but also 3 digits really isn’t that much. If they were simply a base-36 count of Gems made on planet in Facet-whatever, then you’d only have Cut go high enough to count up to 46655 gems per planet; remember, they hollow planets out to take as much as they can from them, and the smallest thing it would make any sense for a Facet to denote is a planet.

Let’s just say that Cut can have a variable amount of digits, with the first two being octant and elevation, and the ones after being the order, because that feels good enough.

Steven’s Cut, then, can be 8MX. The 33rd Gem made just above sea level in octant 8. He and Amethyst can now be even more siblings than they were already.

Moving on to Facet – Screw it. Throw every canon fact about Facet into the trash, we’re starting over from scratch. Facet can denote the planet a Gem was made at, with the number being based on the chronological order of when those planets started making those Gems. A Facet-1 Pearl would have been made on the first planet to start making Pearls, a Facet-2 Pearl on the second, and so on. This works assuming not every planet made every type of Gem – which is probably true, as Earth was only ever shown to be used to make Quartzes.

(This would mean that Amethyst was made on the 5th ever planet to make Amethysts, and Peridot was made on the 112,953rd planet to ever make Peridots, which leads to some strange implications, but shhhhh I’m writing this to use in a fanfic, I can just change Peridot to be Facet-9 or some shit.)

Steven is a Pink Diamond, and we have no idea what planet Pink was made on, but we know it wasn’t Earth, so Steven would be Facet-2. (Unless you for some reason count “Steven” as a type of Gem. In which case – get off my fucking lawn, you degenerate. And no, the Diamonds aren’t all the same type of Gem either.)