#I hear davesprite is where its at

[evilevilevilnotevilevilagain]

happy bird day to all who celebrate

[thewertsearch]

Asks Comp 4/8

The thing is, Davesprite's situation is more complicated than an unfulfilled time loop. His timeline isn't an irrelevant offshoot - in fact, it's integral to the existence of the Alpha Timeline, and presumably always was. Davesprite forms part of a weird, fully intact time loop which spans multiple timelines.

And since this is a future Dave, you have to assume he knows about Bro. The two clearly had a complicated relationship, but he's surely shaken by his death - if nothing else, it's a sign of how serious things have become.

That'll be a fun thing to check out when I've finished the comic! It reminds me of those Hunger Games simulators that were doing the rounds a couple of years ago.

That's true. Dave knows how strong the Underlings have become - and yet, he's still confident that Jade can stand up to them. Presumably she finds some sort of workaround for their First Guardian powers?

Sunslammer is so good! A standout song, even in a comic with as many bangers as this one.

Honestly, part of why I'm dragging my feet on the album reviews is because I want to hear these songs for the first time in context. If I'd heard Descend before watching Descend, I feel like it would have robbed the song of some of its dramatic weight.

I assumed it was just because witches are associated with frogs.

That would have explained why they're part of her Land, but I'm pretty sure that Kanaya's glitched planet was also a frog Land, and she's not a Witch, so...?

*The rest of Sal's response has been redacted, lest we fall once more into the Frog Theory Black Hole.*

I'm pretty sure that's a statue of Echidna, the mother of monsters and Jade's Denizen. Dave's probably close to LOFAF's Palace!

The Seer sees all - and sometimes, she understands the implications before we do.

It'd certainly be interesting. I just reread that conversation, and the biggest takeaway would have been that the kids were going to befriend the trolls, and get involved in their personal drama. This would certainly be consistent with the tone established by an Act 1 Hivebent!

Yup. Vriska was only able to 'create' Perfect Jack because Becquerel didn't object.

Really, he could have prototyped anything he liked, no matter what Vriska did. Even if she tried to shut the Entry down by incapacitating Jade, he could simply have activated the piñata himself.

I mean, that's basically what happened!

If any Aspect is geared around survival, then it's Feferi's. There's no breath left in her body, but our girl is still in the game!

Getting back to the trolls will be interesting, especially since - I assume - we'll be zipping back to when Feferi was still alive. The Veil is a much less friendly place, now - but does Feferi know this? What, exactly, is about to happen to the trolls?

I suppose. I guess there's no reason for every Carapacian to be created with knowledge of the Rings.

Actually, Sburb might not want them to know - Jack's probably not the only one who wouldn't respect the Ring's rules. There could be potential ringwielders out there who are far more dangerous.

Thank you! I feel like I've been doing a lot more character analysis in Act 5 versus previous Acts, where most of my speculation was about the lore. It's a fun change of pace.

Damn, I didn't think we'd actually be explaining these!

It's moments like these which really enhance the comic for me - justifications for things that I genuinely thought were just nitpicks on my part. It's really gratifying, honestly.

@thelegendofgreg asked: Here's some commentary from the jade enter flash, theres uh. alot to read but its all neat stuff "I talked about this way back, maybe even in an earlier book? Well, here I go again, so hold on to your ass. There are four entry items: Apple of knowledge, Bottle of wine, Crow's egg, Dog piñata. A, B, C, D. All of them are related to new life or new beginnings. You bite the apple, you fall from grace, enter a new world, begin this wild journey. You smash a bottle to christen a ship. An egg hatches, creating new life. You break a piöata to celebrate a birthday. Each involves breaking or puncturing something. Each involves a form of sustenance, or something to consume (piñatas have candy inside). Two are vessels for the substance (bottle, Piñata), two are the food items themselves (apple, egg), and one arguably counts as both (egg). Two of them drop from the same basic tree template (apple, piñata). They ramp up in complexity. John's is a simple test: bite the forbidden fruit. Not much to it. A single unit of departure, almost conceptually elemental, like an apple, as Rose goes on about later. The challenges get trickier. Rose has to break a bottle. Easy enough idea, but things go wrong, and she has to take a blind leap to get it done. A sacrificial gesture, and one of faith in a friend (Jaspers). Dave's is even more obscure. A simple test of patience, but one that's not clear. He isn't told what to do and just has to wait. Non-action is the key, and in a way it's another gesture of faith under dire circumstances. Finally, Jade's challenge incorporates a lot of these elements. It's another "blind faith" situation. She has to take a shot in the dark. There's a sacrificial gesture, but instead of risking herself (like Rose), Jade must symbolically sacrifice her friend via effigy and cannot complete the sacrifice without help from that friend. (Bec must redirect the bullet. There's no way this works if he doesn't.) It is also a signifier that the pet she knew as a friend her whole life is about to, in a way, become her enemy. Like a good dog gone bad, who now must be put down."

So they are all intended to be foodstuffs! And, apparently, alphabetical - although I think 'Crow's egg' is a bit of a stretch.

There are also themes of sacrifice and faith that I didn't really think about before. Choosing to enter Sburb at all, knowing the stakes, is absolutely a leap of faith - and it's a game which sacrifices your whole planet. Skaia's been telling us the score this whole time.

Homestuck absolutely deals with dark themes - but they start out buried under the surface, and even now, are still in the process of revealing themselves. This makes sense for Homestuck, a coming-of-age-story whose protagonists are slowly coming to terms with some dark truths about their lives.

Awful Hospital, however, immediately says: here's our protagonist. Her baby is dying. She just woke in a strange room. She doesn't know how she got here. Her baby has been stolen. There are monsters inside her brain. By the way, here's a quip, because this is actually a funny comic. It just felt... dissonant, and not in a fun way. I don't really know what it's going for, tonally.

Don't take this as a negative review, though! I only read a couple dozen pages, so I'm really not qualified to rate the comic - I just wasn't feeling it at the time, so I shelved it. I enjoy a lot of Bogleech's writing, and Awful Hospital's lore sounds pretty interesting, so I'll probably give it another shot at some point.

Not for the most part! I'm super into time travel stories, though, so I'm well-Primed to understand their intricacies.

So there might be intermittent stages between the four we've seen in the kids' session? That'd be interesting - I'd love to see the intermediary stage between John's 2D chessboard and Rose's 3D cube.

There are, at this point, too many awesome songs for me to pick favorites. Umbral Ultimatum and Sunslammer are excellent, but what songs aren't, at this point?

I can't imagine what we're in for when we reach the Act 5.2 finale...

Ooh, interesting. Considering how many accidental references Hussie seems to make, it's honestly up in the air whether that was intentional.

That said....

Jack is looking awfully divine these days.

I suppose Tavros has probably logged the most rocket-hours, yeah.

I'm sure all Breath Players probably learn to fly, unless there are some oddball classes which don't let you interact with your Aspect.

Anonymous asked: forwarding this message to you from someone who doesn't have a tumblr account. ~DJ "Important fact. Dave and Aradia both use musical instruments for time travel, but different ones. Aradia’s is a music box, it has a single prerecorded music, the only way to “play” it is to turn it so it plays the music that was always in it. Dave’s is turntables. They contain a preexisting music, but what you do with them is to jump, cut and shuffle this music, creating something new, having full control of it. - RM"

I like it! As Time Players, they both follow the set path of the Alpha Timeline - but Dave gets a little funky with it, multiplying himself with a complex series of time loops.

Aradia, ever the fatalist, instead turns to doomed clones for reinforcements. I don't think we've ever seen her make a stable loop.

[pesterloglog]

Davesprite

Act 6, page 5941-5945



DAVESPRITE: wake up sleepy head

DAVESPRITE: wait why did i even say that

DAVESPRITE: stay asleep all you want like i give a fuck

DAVESPRITE: but you are kind of missing some important shit here

DAVESPRITE: we spent three faux relativistic years cruising through the metaphysical asscrack of nowhere

DAVESPRITE: and when we finally get here youre all tuckered out

DAVESPRITE: like yall didnt sleep enough on this boat already

DAVESPRITE: some of the sicknastiest shuteye anyone ever got i owe to this friggin boat

DAVESPRITE: dude this is a big deal everyones waiting for us out there

DAVESPRITE: i mean...

DAVESPRITE: probably

DAVESPRITE: i dont know where we are some green hilly place with all these stone henges sprinkled around

DAVESPRITE: did you know there could be a plurality of stone henges i didnt but guess fucking what

DAVESPRITE: henges APLENTY where this place is concerned

DAVESPRITE: hey wheres jade

DAVESPRITE: i guess she left already?

DAVESPRITE: maybe there was an emergency somewhere and her doggy senses led her there

DAVESPRITE: maybe someone fell down a well

DAVESPRITE: what do you think john do you think our teen parents fell down a well

DAVESPRITE: nah i sincerely doubt that any of them would be that pathetic

DAVESPRITE: whatever it was it must have been important enough for jade to ditch us like this

DAVESPRITE: either that or

DAVESPRITE: maybe she was that desperate to finally get away from me

DAVESPRITE: between you and me john

DAVESPRITE: i didnt really handle things with her as well as i could have

DAVESPRITE: oh well maybe real dave will treat her better

DAVESPRITE: or not i dont know

DAVESPRITE: i did her a favor cutting bird dave out of her life

DAVESPRITE: nobody really deserves bird dave as a boyfriend or a friend or anything its like getting one of the janky daves from the bargain bin at the dave depot

DAVESPRITE: or one of the marked down daves the day after national dave day

DAVESPRITE: its like somebody taxedermized your dave and expected you not to notice

DAVESPRITE: "feathers what feathers haha no that dave is totally normal and ok"

DAVESPRITE: you should just go back to being bros with real dave when you see him

DAVESPRITE: ill be fine ill just flap around and do my thing alone

DAVESPRITE: im completely alright with that at this point

DAVESPRITE: we had our ups and downs john but all in all it was cool to go on this road trip with you

DAVESPRITE: there were some times man

DAVESPRITE: the times

DAVESPRITE: im telling you they were unreal

DAVESPRITE: i bet you people would pay good money to see every second of the madcap stunts that were going down on this ship basically 24/7

DAVESPRITE: if hulls could talk wow

DAVESPRITE: haha just joking it was seriously boring as hell

DAVESPRITE: but i mean it was still cool so yeah

DAVESPRITE: hey

DAVESPRITE: whats that ring anyway

DAVESPRITE: ive seen you with that ring before and i guess i was just like

DAVESPRITE: ok john has a magic ring for some reason

DAVESPRITE: no need to mention that or anything

DAVESPRITE: but where did you even get it

DAVESPRITE: you cant even hear me you got your snooze on so hard

DAVESPRITE: aint gonna wake you up to hassle you about no ring

DAVESPRITE: i probably should have said all this stuff when you were awake anyway

DAVESPRITE: like the stuff about friendship

DAVESPRITE: fuck it ill just leave another one of my patented magic notes taped to your shoe or your cowlick or something

DAVESPRITE: my magic notes rule ill miss leavin em taped on stuff

DAVESPRITE: i sure do talk to myself a lot dont i

DAVESPRITE: wow why have i never made this observation

DAVESPRITE: i probably needed to be a bird for exactly three years to finally have that epiphany

DAVESPRITE: i wonder if real dave ever had that epiphany

DAVESPRITE: probably not cause hes not a bird

DAVESPRITE: the bottom line is being a guy whos also a bird makes you think

DAVESPRITE: anyway im out

DAVESPRITE: p.s. happy birthday john

DAVESPRITE: have some watermarks for the road

[gemalawasliveblogs]

There's a LONG commentary here, so it goes under a cut.

As you watch this animation load, the "GATE 5" up there is really ominous. The Fifth Gate? What happened to...the first four? You wouldn't guess it just going by the scenery, but LOHAC is the bustling financial capital of the Medium. There is a thriving stock exchange here, run by energetic, greedy lizards. This animation was pretty slick at the time. Lots of action, cool music. Neat time tricks by Dave. It's an absolutely massive time skip that left everyone overwhelmed by its implications. Dave has already been here for months, battling monsters, hopping around gears. He's made a stylish new suit too, I guess to foster a certain Secret Time Agent chic. He's like the James Bond of horsing around with weaponized time travel, is the message being conveyed here. Just as the monsters on LOWAS and LOLAR have oil and chalk themes, these ones on LOHAC are amber-themed and yield grist accordingly. I touched on this a while back, but the "planetary pollutant" in a world full of clockwork would be a substance that could gum up the clockwork and make it tick slowly or grind to a halt. That would be a sticky, hardening substance like amber. The quest here on this planet, if done by the book, would involve clearing the land of its sticky pollutants so the gears could tick freely, which probably would wake up the denizen, and so on and so on... But here's the first glimpse of why so often in this story the by-the-book quest falls into the background as something trivial, like a sidebar of mythos-color that's mainly of academic interest and not plot importance.

It's because there's always bigger fish to fry. Something more imminently concerning or threatening, like having to survive for months in this hellhole while two of your friends are dead. He did it. He prototyped the crowsprite with Cal. He knew it was a bad idea. But he did it anyway. The cursed journey of Davesprite begins with one unspeakable folly. So tragic. Say what you will about Calsprite. He's a formidable combatant. That huge puppet-ass attack? Absolutely devastating. This sword concept is pretty cool. Caledscratch, as the weapon is named, is a broken sword, which Dave can wield thanks to his ½bladekind specibus. But it has a built-in time travel mechanism that allows it to cycle through previous states in its history, including back to a period of time when it was not yet broken. So it can extend and contract at Dave's will. A bit like a lightsaber, maybe? If you could turn on a lightsaber only halfway, I guess. Dave is doing all these cool time-attack tricks. Hopping forward and backward in time, but only by a little to keep the maneuvers simple. Each time he does, he's creating a little stable time loop he has to account for. Good practice for a Knight of Time. Starting now, Dave gets into the habit of casually encountering himself a lot. It's kind of his thing. Some kind of charactery thing about his character that he has to deal with, think about, and learn from. What? Referring to it as a charactery thing about him isn't highbrow enough for you? Why don't you go back to book school for lame nerds, you dork.

He made some TURNTABLES offscreen over the last few months. They let him time travel. I'm not sure what he used to make them, other than his record players from home. Looks like some sort of mystical gear component he probably plundered from the local industrial ruins. He probably went on a lot of exciting but lonely adventures on this planet we'll never get to see or hear about. Those block-type grists are sulphur. I wonder how many huge sulphur cubes have fallen into the lava over the course of his Knight of Time berserker fits? They're kind of like giant, stinky bouillon cubes falling into a huge vat of boiling broth. It probably absolutely reeks on LOHAC when Dave goes on a rampage. Right about now, the Ruby Giclops is wondering where it all went wrong in his life. It was probably when he, for some inexplicable reason, decided to swim through an ocean of lava to go mess with this boy in a suit going nuts with a sword. You can tell Dave is probably overloaded with grist he doesn't particularly need by now. He carves up that giclops, and it starts raining huge rubies everywhere. But he doesn't seem to care at all about harvesting them. Instead, he takes a moment to yell at his puppet.

Yeah, there's a lot here, from inconsequential to VERY consequential - the same can't quite be said of the Flash, being short enough that all the details are fairly relevant. To summarize, Dave's now up to the 5th gate and capable of casual time travel, accompanied by Calsprite. We don't know this yet, but he's been in there for months with two out of three of his best friends dead and the trolls absent. He's having it...very rough.

[incorrect-hs-quotes]

//source

D: you know how restaurants will like, ban unruly clients from ever coming again

John: sure, but then they’ll- then they’ll be trending on twitter the next day, but sure.

D: i banned obama

John: oh- oho no.

D: for- for ruining- for ruining the united states of america, i banned him

John: what did obama ever do to you?

D: he ruined it. he ruined the country

John: wh- what did- what did he ever do that affected you?

D: think about how bad this country used to be, and think about how awesome it is now

John: i dunno about that, i’m calling shenanigans. i’ve yet to hear- i’ve yet to hear-

D: look at this guy hes sideways now

D: hes sideways whaddya say about that

D: sideways obama? you want that man to be-

John: um, obamas upside-

D: upside down obama?

D: forty-fourth president of the united states-?

John: nah, nah, he’s right side up,

D: yeah, exactly

John: cause he’s brobama.

D: no hes not “bro"bama

John: he is.

Dave: (obama is my world)

Dave: (obama is my king)

D: what, do you like obama?

John: what’s wrong with obama? you gotta tell me what’s wrong with obama, why do you dislike obama?

D: because he ruined the united states

John: i would like to know how he ruined the united states.

D: think about how bad the country was, and now think about how good it is

John: i think the country was pretty great- you know, i would actually say that america was already great.

D: *deep breath*

D: 

D: what are you, a liberal?

D: 

John: 

John: d- eehehehhe-

D: ahahah

D: look, all im saying john, is that obama is banned from the kfc dome

Dave: (haha- the crushing blow)

John: okay, you know what i’m gonna say? so long as obama is banned from the kfc dome, you enjoy dick and balls. that’s all i’m gonna say-

D: WHAAT?!

John: it’s almost like-

D: NOOO

John: there’s a correlation between the two! 

D: oh my god,

D: im sorry obama. im sorry, youre not banned any-

D: i unbanned him john, come back

John: i’m outta here.

D: i unbanned ob- oh my god

John: i hereby rest my case.

D: you cant do this to me on pride month!

D: you cant do this to me on pride month, john, come on man!

John: it’s been done. it’s done. 

D: oh

D: my

D: goodness gracious mamma mia i hate obama

Davesprite: who put a peepee on the sign!!!

D: i- wh- theres a peepee on the sign, where?!

Davesprite: the big one in the sky!

D: aaAAH ITS A DICK AND BALLS DAVESPRITE WHAT THE FUCK

Davesprite: noooooo

D: AAAAAAAAAAAA

D: im gonna be honest, i put that dick and balls there

Davesprite, at absolutely ear-piercing volume: WHAT

D: ahahahahahaheheh-!

[pinktatertots99]

🔥 Feelings on the canon ships of Homestuck?

Send Me a 🔥+ a Topic, and I’ll Tell You My Honest Opinion About It

god am i gonna need to go with the sequals too? just og or all ships that’re considered canon by the end? whatever i’ll just go in order in what might be the ‘canon’ ships from all three of these categories. this is gonna be fucking long so anything and everything is under the cut. also i’m SO not gonna add hiveswap that can be its own separate ask. so:

roxygen: it’s a cute ship...but the sequal vers is garbage considering how inconsiderate roxy is to john’s feelings and his house burning down like damn rox this is the guy who sat with ya as ya mourned doom rose’s death give the guy some fuckin time himself.

rosemary: also cute ship...sequal versions are fuckin godawful tho. their barely a thing in meat from wha i can gather and then there’s candy...oh CANDY kanaya deserves better fuck this sense of her sayin she’s over it idc if it was off screen, even then half the cast ate stupid pills during that time so WHY must i be surprised that this is wha happens?

dave/kat: i dun like it. in either universe. meat is just perfect gay bois who have occasional deep talks and literally do nothing else while candy they split up thanks to jade which, geez ya guys must’ve been shit to tell her to fuck off like come on. og hs wise i barely consider them canon if we only get pictures and them just being on equal footing on quadrant talk. not to mention dave implied to be crushing on jade and JOHN not karkat, idk where this couple even came from other then love triangle situation with terezi but like, that’s barely much of a reason to become canon. i’d go with em bein pale/moirails more.

jadedave: i’m guessing candy and meat i thought meat implied they were dating but may aswell. so....it sucks but thats because candy and meat suck, meat dave’s basically cheating on her i didnt hear any implication they broke up and she’s like...chill??? and then there’s candy where she literally forced him and kar to break up and dated after dirk apparently died, i do not like the implications of this whole thing. course candy dave is dead and a robot now so...anyways canon wise dave had a crush on her and if jade does like him i’d hope it’s not cause of davesprite cause despite both being dave’s they were different. it’s cute otherwise.

davepetajade: it’s...cute? i guess? idk i kinda found davepeta a bit...idk overwhelmingly overrated? like i know where their popularity came from but readin the series now after all that hype i dont really see it anyways tho it’s basically davespritejade with nepeta in the mix. and idk nothin implied much of nepeta liking jade, or talkin to her much. and davepetasprite is a mesh of both so idk. it’s a ship with cute fanon works of em hanging with outfits but that’s bout it.

janejake: i hate it. legit. this is disgusting and completely throws out jane’s character. like even in the fixed timeline the talk she had with dirk probably still happened on the god bed’s and how she acknowledged wha she thought was wrong on wantin jake’s kids and so on trickster still happened and how she also realized she might’ve overhyped jake. but lets throw it ALL out the window to force jake in an unhappy marriage in both universes and possibly force him to stay in candy due to having tavvy if i’m reading the implications right. even then jake isn’t good for jane either both got their own needs this ship would’ve been sunked in canon and WAS but the sequals are beyond it so maybe that explains it but it disgusts me.

roseterezi: guess in meat specifically. yeah i kinda dont...care for it, like i still cant tell if rose and kanaya broke up or if she just fucked off without breaking up either one is fucked up on kan’s behalf. even then i just dont care for their kismesis it got brought up once and that was it.

jaderose: candy wise i guess even tho it was a fling. it disgusts me still mostly because of kan’s behalf on bein fucked over and both goin through a ‘surrogation’ process without her notice. like fuck this shit the jaderose fans deserve better.

roxycallie: idk if this one’s canon but it’s heavily implied callie lives with roxy least in candy. it’s cute, cant deny it even in og it was pretty cute, dont really care for candy vers tho but then again maybe their not a couple in it idk what’s canon couples anymore.

johnterezi: literally fucked in meat universe and john has kismesis feelings for her in canon. it’s...interesting, idk tho i feel like it’s one sided on john’s side.

ms paint/spade slick: i cant deny it’s cute, he’d least know how to treat a lady but god i’d hope it wouldnt be his only defining trait with her. also want ms paint to call his bullshit out pls and thanks.

dirkjake: honestly i cant tell if their STILL canon in og or not god forbid the sequals. in general though...i dont. i honestly dont really like em together much. they seem like the type to least stay friends but idk bout another relationship would be a good idea for em. maybe later down the line but otherwise canon wise they need a break.

and now for the canon one timer ships this involves any ships implied, uncomfirmed, ex-relationships, crushes, etc:

arasol: it’s cute, best ship. their quadrant was never confirmed but regardless their cute. sol tho in the sequals deserved better then to get abandoned by aradia goddamn.

fefsol: also cute, i live for both of em bein ass’s together.

erisol: oh boi this one...this was...yeah i cant even deny they wouldnt be too healthy, i like lookin at fanon ways tho for em. canon wise tho yeaaaah no these guys definietly wouldnt work.

gamtav: it’s...cute but boi gamzee needs some help i think.

gamsol: -sollux did imply he either wanted a kismesis or matesprit with him in one of the flashes- again same as gamtav.

aradia/equius: BIG NOPE nope nope nope equi that’s weird wha ya did never do it again thank fuck aradia hasnt been around him since.

karterezi: their actually kinda cute, looking back on em they could’ve worked. stupid doomed timeline bullshit.

daverezi: also kinda cute, idk tho if i got flushed for em tho i get more pale vibes but it was semi-a thing.

kanvris: it’s baaaaad kanaya deserves much better and vriska never seemed much the type for cementing into a relationship.

vristav: even worse, like i’d like to thank fuck tav one up-ed her in the end cause fuck wha he had to go through.

karmeenah: it...could be cute? maybe? only iffy part is the ages, i thought the dancestors were like sixteen tho since the kids said they were teenagers even tho they were at the time about fourteen? idk tho if eighteen is considered an adult in alternia or not tho it’s kinda implied to be? anyways tho it’s just off puttin maybe a bit tho.

meenahvris: it’s kinda cute, it was atleast, idk lookin back it does feel more unhealthy.

rufidama: baaaaaad i love rufi but he’s got some bullshit he needs worked out and damara deserves someone better.

rufihorr: just as bad as above, both deserve someone better or atleast horrus does with some therapy on it rufioh i think should just chill on relationships but it’s so obvious their not meant to be.

mitula: it’s cuuuuuute i cant deny it, ...okay fanon vers is canon is barely anything and tula does give more pale implications for tuna but with how protective she was over damara near him it’s sweet, but god do i wish canon tuna gave more feelings for tula.

kantula: it’s...creepy. like it’s so obvious the vantas bois cant communicate well but kankri’s crush feels almost pressuring on tula when he kept goin about them and goin “oh but we’re totally friends and i’m celibate so it’s okay its whatevs” like kan go to a corner give tula some air to breath.

crotuna: BIG NOPE cronus needs to learn fuckin boundaries thirsty fish bastard.

should i even add cro//eri due to the fact he literally asked an eridan out? regardless gross, ew, no, i’ll take the fanon ampora brothers anyday canon i didnt fuckin need that thx.

porrnea: it was implied to be more of a fling. idk considerin aranea’s track record i cant really say i’d trust her in many flushed quads. and porrim seems the type to have hers open and not a closed off thing so idk they got different cases.

aranea/jake: i cant deny it’s fuckin cute, i’d would’ve loved if they tried to do somethin but aranea was definietly uhhh not a good choice for jake. least she backed off when he didnt wanna be kissed but man yeah, it was cute while it lasted.

kurmeu: i cant deny the idea kur forced himself quiet due to hurting meu hurts me in a sweet way but as of rn them bein ‘pale’ and him mind controllin her when we dunno if she’s alright with this or not is...disturbing.

vristerezi: i am HIGHLY doubtful this is canon considering everything but i guess i gotta cement this. i dont see em as canon in og or sequal wise since vris is still gone in both, even then i dont like, see it, i see it but idk man i like em more pale then pail.

erifef: honestly no. both are much too different for a relationship, kinda glad they uh...got cut short cause honestly even their moirailship wasnt healthy what’s to say a matespritship would? on BOTH sides mind you.

rosejohn: thank karkat’s shipping board. anyways, i think their cute cause fuck it rose is a bi-con to me, canon wise probably wouldnt work but i’ll take fanon.

vriseri: kinda glad they got cut short of their kismesis cause boi eridan deserves a better one with how shit vriska was in breaking up with him.

johnvris: it was cute, i cant deny i’m soft over how the two talked things about vriska’s life and john’s it’s just kinda cute. it’s obvious tho canon wise with wha john went through it wont work out. would’ve loved if they became moirails tho but o well canon is god i guess.

spadePM: i dont like much of their implications, would be an unhealthy relationship regardless considerin spade’s flushed and PM’s pitch, they deserve some therapy and other people.

dadbert/momlonde: their cute i like the implications of em, sad they died though, it was cute while it lasted.

meowrails: may aswell count moirails in this shipping mess. anyways their cute, they gimmie sibling vibes course equius early into it was so...not a good moirail.

kurtuna: i guess it might be cute moirails? idk tho with kurloz’s implications it concerns me.

gamkar: as moirails...karkat was fuckin shit at his job i cant sugarcoat it. i get where it’s from he’s not gam’s lusus and shouldn’t be forced to check on him during his time of gettin high and such, i get they were kids, but god gam kinda deserved a better moirail. and then later on in the series it gets more fucked up between kar gettin stabbed by him and both in a pretty unhealthy moirailationship to the fixed timeline where gamzee is just shut into a fridge and kar doesnt fuckin care, like dude, wow. gamzee was bad yeah but damn, harsh a tad.

terezigam: as a kismesis it’s almost disgustingly unhealthy to me and honestly terezi deserved better and gamzee maaaaybe shouldn’t get a kismesis, ever, unless he can sort his shit out -the sequals tho wont do that lol-

minorly gonna count johndave in this: idk if i can see john reciprocating for dave so dave’s crush on him almost kinda hurts, especially since fixed timeline dave’s john is well, dead and our john is probably still different from his john, has angst but man i kinda dont mind it as a one sides crush it’s nice confirmation of dave bein bi atleast.

nepetajasper/jasprose: i cant see it, it’s disturbing i guess. i like em more as friends but jasprose is probably more creepy bout it.

signless/diciple: i think considerin the implications they were fuckin adorable and deserved the best.

summoner/mindfang: it’s kinda sad considerin its implied mindfang’s love for him might’ve been one sided, they could’ve been cute tho.

orphanor/mindfang: probably sounded like the best kismesis’s until he murdered dolorosa.

dolorosa/mindfang: BIG NOPE i dun like the implications.

condence/orphaner: since it’s implied orphaner had a crush on her, gonna say tho big nope considerin condence is a bitch.

condence/lord english: its hard to decipher their relationship in canon, but to cover all my bases it’s big nope to me somethin bout it makes me uncomfy despite both bein bastards.

[homespork-review]

Homespork Act 4, Part 2: Flight of the Paradox Groans

BRIGHT: Remember Spades Slick being bizarrely aware he was in a comic, back in the Intermission? Buckle up, things are about to get even more fourth-wall-breaking. Appropriately, this starts by the comic focusing on an actual fourth wall, which activates to show...Andrew Hussie.

Hussie’s MS Paint avatar notices the audience watching him, laments that his side of the wall doesn’t have an off switch, and then recaps the first year of Homestuck.

Now, in all fairness: The recap is thorough, full of links, and explains things fairly well. It’s quite long, but given how much territory it has to cover I’m not sure it could be any shorter. So it does its job well, and it’s a boon if you’re getting lost with the plot.

As for the author insertion...on this occasion I don’t mind it. It comes across as tongue-in-cheek, but framed more as the author talking to the reader than as the author inserting himself into the narrative. It’s definitely very Homestuck.

Anyway, AH gets back to work, and after a couple of false starts we return to John!

John is still flying around with his jet pack. GC trolls him to offer him a world map of LOWAS and tell him she feels awful about killing him, although in literally the next line she tells him that technically he never even died so she doesn’t understand why he’s so upset. John understandably finds this disturbing. They have a brief nonsensical discussion about Jesus/Jegus, and then John agrees to go take a look at what’s on the other side of his Second Gate. Yes, on the advice of someone whose previous advice got him killed.

CHEL: Almost a shame we didn’t set up a Too Dumb To Live count, but then to be fair that was a separate timeline and he’s probably not thinking of it as something that “really” happened. This is supported by his later dialogue.

FAILURE ARTIST: The word Jegus is really popular in the Homestuck fandom, used far more often than it is in the canon. Gets quite annoying, in my opinion. Actually, a rather Jesus-like figure does appear, but he’s not called “Jegus”.

CHEL: Yeah, I think only Terezi, John, and Dave ever use the term, but it somehow became latched onto as an actual term used by trolls in general, even though in canon it isn’t.

BRIGHT: Fortunately, this time GC appears to be playing nice. John flies though the Second Gate and emerges...into LOLAR?

FAILURE ARTIST: Hussie does an amusing trick where he has what looks like a loading screen for a flash but it’s actually a still image eternally at 2%.

BRIGHT: Yes, it’s LOLAR. John promptly crashes into Rose’s house, smashing through a wall and into her bedroom, where Rose is still snoozing in her knitting pile. Apart from briefly being stuck upside down, he does not appear injured by this collision.

Rose has somehow slept through the commotion. John decides to let her rest and borrows her computer to talk to Dave.

The first one he talks to is actually Davesprite, who points out how moronic John was to listen to GC again. No arguments here! Then he explains how the Gate system works: Odd-numbered Gates, above players’ houses, lead to somewhere on their planets. Even-numbered Gates lead to other players’ planets, exiting over their houses. Normally they aren’t meant to go through even-numbered Gates until the houses are built up, so they don’t fall to their deaths, but fortunately John has a jetpack workaround. So far Davesprite is living up to his promise of being straightforward.

John realises he’s talking to Future Dave, and asks “do you think i could talk to the real dave for a second?”

...ouch, John.

Davesprite goes off on a tear, ranting that he is a real Dave — arguably the realest Dave, since he’s been running around LOHAC for months trying to get enough information to save everyone. John apologises sincerely.

CHEL: This won’t be the last we hear of this theme, though.

EB: i think i pissed off your future self. TG: what did you do EB: i said he wasn't the real dave. TG: ahahahahaha EB: i think i might have really hurt his feelings though! TG: pff TG: dont worry about it EB: why not? TG: cause i wouldnt give a shit TG: and hes me

BRIGHT: Not a hundred percent sure I believe Dave, there.

CHEL: Dave uses John to snoop around Rose’s room and get the captcha code for her journals. Classy, Dave. Not a SLAMMER point, however, as this does come back to bite him very soon.

Rose’s dreamself has awoken on Derse, the purple planet, and flies across to the opposite tower. Dave’s dreamself appears to be awake, sitting upright in his computer chair; the room is entirely an unsettling bloody red colour apart from the SBaHJ cartoons on the walls, and… oh shit, there’s Lil Cal again, now in a long purple nightdress and hopping around the room on his own. If Rose was having nightmares because of dreamself issues, I can only imagine how Dave’s nightmares must look. Rose throws a ball of yarn at Dave’s dreamself, alerting him, and causing the awake Dave to pass out.

Back in Rose’s room, it seems that Charles Barkley quote was not misattributed:

FAILURE ARTIST: Another SBaHJ reference in the book quote. Is that where Dave got it?

Still, I don’t recall this book ever coming up again. Just another item that seems like a Chekhov's Gun but isn’t.

CHEL: John feels guilty about opening his birthday gift from Rose, but reasons that it’s technically now his anyway, so he does, finding another bunny, this one black and filthy-looking except for the pristine knitted purple patches repairing it, though its shape is eerily familiar.

The gift in this box is a resurrection. I used your present to thread life anew into a tattered heirloom. As long as I can remember, its black, greasy appendages have been tethered limply to its ratty, porous carriage. Too delicate to wash, too dear to discard. I used to love this rabbit. Now he's yours. I trust you'll find this to be adequately sentimental. Happy birthday.

Oh my gosh, awwwwww. Even if you don’t ship them romantically how can you not love their interactions? Definitely one of the comic’s strong points. Also I need to go hug my childhood teddy bear.

John puts the bunny back in the box again and the box in his sylladex, freeing Casey the salamander while he’s at it. And let’s just take a minute to feel utter horror because dead John still had Casey in his sylladex, so the best option is that she died too, and the worst is that we have an And I Must Scream situation on for a baby salamander. Gah.

FAILURE ARTIST: Thanks, I’d never thought of that and I never want to again.

You aren't actually sure if she is a girl though. You don't even know if salamanders can be girls. Aren't they hermaphrodites or something?

CHEL: No, for the record. Though some frogs can switch from one to the other.

FAILURE ARTIST: Casey is very popular as a name for an OC child of John (often having Rose as the mother).

CHEL: John answers Rose’s Pesterchum, upon which GA is half-heartedly sending antagonistic messages. John answers on Rose’s account, saying that Rose is asleep, which GA takes for Human Sarcasm, prompting John to pretend to be Rose.

GA: I Should Figure Out How The Viewport Feature Of This Application Works GA: So I Can See What Such A Primitive Creature Looks Like TT: haha, well i know what you guys look like. TT: you look kind of like... TT: howie mandel from little monsters.

Wait, how does he know? Am I forgetting a point at which he saw them?

BRIGHT: I always assumed that he was just goofing around and his guess happened to land in the right ballpark, but thinking about it, I’m not sure the kids ever express surprise at the trolls’ appearance.

CHEL: John, pretending to be Rose, talks about how awesome John is.

GA: He Is Either The Leader Of Your Party Or You Hold Whatever The Human Equivalent Of Mating Fondness For Him Is

CHEL: Both. Both is good!

FAILURE ARTIST: Knowing what we do of troll culture later this is an odd statement. Heck, it’s just an odd statement. Maybe this is why people think trolls don’t do friendship.

CHEL: John apparently confuses GA by saying it’s because Rose is thoughtful and John appreciates his gift, and suggests GA talk to John.

TT: why don't you pick the time that will make the most complicated mess out of everything imaginable?

GA sounds very annoyed, and leaves, intending to have the conversation with John that she had previously. We see her, GC, and the horns of AT and an unknown troll in the grey room, now revealed to be a computer laboratory. For some reason she chats via Pesterchum with another troll instead of just walking over to talk to them. This new troll is twinArmageddons, an appropriate name for the circumstances, who type2 iin yellow text liike thii2; he is, as it turns out, the hacker guy GC mentioned earlier. TA is busy setting up the network and seems irritable in general, and is not willing to help GA work her viewport.

TA: iif ii 2ee one more 2narl of wiire2. TA: kiind of juttiing out and beiing tangled or whatever. TA: ii am goiing two perform 2ome 2ort of athletiic fuckiing 2omer2ault off the deep end and get a call from the pre2iident or 2ome 2hiit.

Nice callback, but trolls, as we’ll later find out, don’t have presidents.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 14

GA wonders why TA doesn’t want to talk to her, and TA complains that he knew in advance the trolls were doomed and no one believed him. He refuses to troll the humans himself but is setting up the system so the others can in order to get them to leave him alone. GA asks again for help, to no avail.

TA: iif you cant fiigure 2hiit out by fuckiing around you dont belong near computer2. TA: kiind of liike wiith regii2tered 2ex offender2 and 2chool2. TA: iif you move two a new town you have two go up two your neiighbor2 door and warn them about how 2tupiid you are. TA: and giive them a chance two hiide all theiir iinnocent technology. TA: and vandaliize your hou2e.

Ooh, a threefer plus one! Tacky simile for the Problematykks. As for WSP, we’ll later find out that 1) trolls kill all their criminals, 2) trolls don’t give a shit about the welfare of their children, and 3) trolls don’t appear to actually go to school. These two counts are neck and neck in the lead now!

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 17 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 17

BRIGHT: As with much of Homestuck, the trolls give the impression of being made up as Hussie went along. That’s not entirely a bad thing -- it certainly makes the comic pretty unique -- but it does lead to some out-of-place slip-ups.

Anyway, GA chucks her F1 key at TA’s head and then starts poking him. We also see CG in the lab.

FAILURE ARTIST: I think I recall GA/TA were a popular ship before we learned more about GA. It does seem like they have a Rose & Dave dynamic going on.

BRIGHT: Back on Derse, Rose and Dave have a dance party to Dave’s music while accompanied by some crows and Lil Cal, who keeps teleporting around the room. Rose eventually gets tired of Cal’s shenanigans and hurls him out of the window, to the relief of many.

FAILURE ARTIST: The flash originally included music by Bill Bolin. In fact, it was his unfinished music being included here that caused all the drama in the first place.

BRIGHT: Time for some random interludes! First up is Maplehoof the pony, who is following Rose’s mother through a large cave which, judging by the grist lying around, recently contained very dangerous monsters.

FAILURE ARTIST: Apparently pets can collect grist for their masters...and know what grist is despite being a normal(?) animal.

BRIGHT: First Mom, and then Maplehoof, stand on a transportaliser platform and disappear. Second is Dad, who has just acquired a replacement shoe and hat (which showed up in the walkaround game, way back at the beginning of the Act), when he encounters a familiar-looking stranger with a Colonel Sassacre book, who leads him to another transportalizer platform. Both of these interludes do become relevant later, but at the time they seem a tad unnecessary.

Meanwhile, John uses Rose’s alchemiter and a code Davesprite gave him mid-rant to produce a truly epic hammer called FEAR NO ANVIL. It’s far too big for John to wield, but fortunately he can use the scaling upgrade on the alchemiter to reduce it to a more useable size. ...wait. When did Rose’s alchemiter get a scaling upgrade? Dave and Jade added a lot of modifications to his, but Rose’s should be the original edition. Sigh.

EB: so what is this? EB: the thing the code made... TG: really powerful hammer EB: how do you know? EB: i thought you couldn't use hammers. TG: i cant TG: better be though TG: got it from hephaestus EB: who's that? TG: really tough to kill dude EB: you killed him for it? TG: nope EB: how'd you get it then? TG: shenanigans EB: ok.

...and we’re back to sprite evasiveness. Davesprite is being less than forthcoming here, although it’s less obvious than with Nannasprite because it superficially imitates John and Dave’s bantering.

CHEL: Now, this would be a good way of keeping us interested if we were eventually going to see how he did it, and also they have a time limit, so not going off into a long anecdote would be understandable. However, we’ll see how his evasiveness level proceeds in the future.

BRIGHT: Dream Rose and Dave see John using Rose’s alchemiter on Dream Dave’s computer. Rose wakes up.

FAILURE ARTIST: It is interesting how early Homestuck avoided having characters have face-to-face conversations. Would have been unique if it kept up throughout the entire comic.

BRIGHT: Back in the meteor, GA hassles TA into opening the viewport on her computer. This turns out to be as simple as clicking on the point in Rose’s timeline that she wants to see. No wonder TA was frustrated!

Of course, by this point, the only one left in the room is Rose, now awake, and the young salamander. Rose hurries to catch up with John, but he blasts off to explore before she can reach him, taking her mutated kitten with him.

CHEL: John renames Vodka Mutini to Dr Meowgon Spengler, and Rose renames Casey to Viceroy Bubbles von Salamancer. Interesting link to the themes of identities which are starting to crop up, though it’s not really a direct analogue. The animals are the same animals with different names; the alternate timeline characters have the same names and superficially the same identities, but are they really the same people after their new experiences?

BRIGHT: Back on Derse, Lil Cal inexplicably lands on a stray rocket board, catching the attention of AR.

You're not sure which laws are being broken, but it is probably a lot.

AR follows Cal to yet another transportaliser, and they both dematerialise.

We jump back to John, who spies a boat on one of the islands dotting LOLAR and lands to investigate. He follows hoofprints in the sand into a subterranean hallway filled with monsters. Fortunately his new hammer has time powers, which stun the monsters long enough for John to kill them. Further on, he finds the transportaliser Mom used. John, naturally, stands on it, and is transported to a meteor in the Veil.

Actually, it’s not just a meteor; it’s one of the laboratories where the Skaian troops are produced. John, along with the cat and Maplehoof, finds a bunch of chess guys being grown in glass jars on a giant podium. Most of them are the standard carapaces we’re familiar with, but there are also a few larger pieces, apparently based on knights and rooks. He also finds a JUNIOR ECTOBIOLOGIST’S LAB SUIT, and another of those strange house-shaped sets of monitors.

On Prospit, PM is preparing to board a shuttle to Skaia when a COURTYARD DROLL sneaks up behind her. Unaccountably, she fails to notice him, despite the fact that he’s wearing a hat larger than he is. CD successfully pickpockets the White Queen’s ring, and PM departs for Skaia, none the wiser.

CD radios the DRACONIAN DIGNITARY to report mission success, and is told that he doesn’t need to keep wearing his ridiculous outfit, per orders from Jack Noir, who is now going by the SOVEREIGN SLAYER. CD says he’d rather keep wearing the outfit. Apart from the sword-through-the-chest part, it is a very nice outfit, so I’m with CD on this one.

Catastrophe is averted by Jade delivering a flying kick to CD’s head and following up with a very efficient smackdown. Her robot body replicates this back on Earth, beating the stuffing out of her mummified grandfather. Jade retrieves the ring, and puts it on her fingers to remind herself to give it back to PM later. Unfortunately, this doesn’t cause Jade to sprout wings and tentacles. Seems the rings don’t work on humans like that.

Meanwhile, in a Timeless Expanse, a WARWEARY VILLEIN is getting tired of the battle between Derse and Prospit. The next animation is called “WV?: Rise Up” and it’s one of my favorites! When I first read Homestuck I had to watch it a few times before I understood what was going on, but it is a very neat video.

Watch on YouTube

The Battlefield has been prototyped three times, and is now spherical. The forces of Derse and Prospit meet. The usual carapaces with swords are backed up by larger pieces -- some of them very strange -- and by battleships clashing in the sky. In the chaos, WV, who is farming peacefully on Skaia, has his home and farm burned down. He raises a flag and addresses the troops of both armies. Elsewhere, Jack Noir appears, flying over the Battlefield in search of the Black King.

WV rallies the armies and tells them that their real enemies are the monarchs, who are responsible for the war. Encouraged, the Dersite and Prospitan troops band together and march on the Black King.

Meanwhile, PM has reached the White King and discovers that she no longer has the White Queen’s ring. The White King listens to her and hands over his scepter, which seems to represent Skaia and serves a similar function to the Queens’ rings. Behind a nearby hill, the Hegemonic Brute radios somebody to report the transfer.

As WV and the united armies reach the Black King, Jack arrives and slices the Black King’s scepter in half, nullifying its powers and turning the Black King back into a normal carapace. PM is attacked by HB, who knocks the White King’s scepter out of her hand; it falls down a waterfall. Jack Noir beheads the Black King and turns to WV, and the animation ends.

...okay, much as I love it, I have to admit there’s a glaring question here: Namely, the kids started playing the Game less than a day ago and Dave’s kernelsprite has been prototyped for a few hours max. The second prototyping made the Battlefield more complex and the third took it into its current form. That’s a very short time to instigate a cross-faction revolution, organise the troops, and march on a monarch. For that matter, how long has WV been a farmer? The inhabitants of Derse and Prospit have obviously been doing their thing all the kids’ lives, but the Battlefield was supposedly a static, rudimentary space until John entered the Medium, so what gives?

Then again, the timeline in the Medium is supposed to be distinct from the timeline on Earth, so maybe that explains it?

CHEL: An interesting point is also raised by WV’s revolution. Namely, Derse is presented as a kingdom of darkness and evil by the game, while Prospit is presented as good. However, while PM is good, WV and AR are demonstrably not bad people either. In this animation, we see carapaces of both sides apparently don’t want to be involved in the war and are willing to rise up against the Black King. The rank-and-file carapaces on both sides, it seems, are decent people who are just following orders. (Not to mention very cute.) Jack Noir and his gang are nasty pieces of work, except CD who’s also just kind of going along with it, but there’s nothing saying white carapaces couldn’t also be… And is that a Problematykks point, presenting the black-coloured people as bad and the white-coloured ones as good? I know they’re chess pieces, but still.

This raises the question, however, what’s Derse’s motive? Are its rulers and archagents simply destroying for the evulz? I wonder. I also wonder how much Skaia itself is involved in this and how aware it is. Skaia is called the crucible of creation, and it’s responsible for the creation of the carapaces too. References are made to it “seeing” and “knowing”; it’s quite possibly sentient, though maybe not sapient. On top of that, SBurb is specifically a game, and a game needs an objective, and an adventure-type game needs enemies. Derse, it seems likely, was created and presented the way it is in order to give the players something to battle against even if its people don’t want to be their enemies. No wonder WV’s pissed!

BRIGHT: Yup. Hmm, thinking about it...the imps and other enemies we saw attacking John’s house early on were obviously Dersite, but the ones we’ve seen in Rose’s seem to be Prospitian, if anything? The colour scheme looks that way, at least. But Nanna said earlier that Derse was the enemy, nothing about Prospit.

Perhaps it has something to do with Rose being a Derse dreamer, while John is a Prospit dreamer? But in that case I’d have expected it to come up in the text. Instead it just goes unremarked.

Rose goes on a massive alchemising spree and ends up creating the Thorns of Oglogoth, a pair of wands.

The needles seem to shiver with the dark desires of THE DEEP ONE. Any sane adventurer would cast these instruments of the occult into the FURTHEST RING and forget they ever existed.

Instead of throwing the wands away, Rose takes on the enemies camping all over her house, with style.

Meanwhile, Dave goes on another, less visibly productive alchemising spree.

GET ON WITH IT!: 18

FAILURE ARTIST: The SBaHJifier could be considered productive in that it provides foreshadowing cartoons. Wish Dave’s Brain in a Jar came up again.

BRIGHT: Once he’s done creating smuppet variations to disturb the monsters encroaching on his house, he sits down to take a look at those two journals he copied from Rose earlier. One of them is called ‘MEOW’, and is literally just those same four letters, repeated over and over in different orders. The second is ‘Complacency of the Learned’.

There is no way to adequately recap the beauty of ‘Complacency of the Learned’, so we’re just going to show the whole thing:

Frigglish bothered his beard, as if unkinking a hitch in a long silk windsock. A more pedestrian audience would parse the exhibit as nervous compulsion. Behavior to petition contempt among the reasonable. He was however not surrounded by the reasonable, but the wise, a distinction in men that would forever be the difference in history's garland of treasured follies. As a matter of fact, his cadre of fellow wizards were all putting similar moves on their beards as well. The practice would evince thoughtfulness - sagacity, even - if they didn't do it all the time. Standing in line at the bank. Shooing squirrels from bird feeders. Few occasions were safe. Zazzerpan inspected the clue. A single piece of evidence cradled in his coriaceous old man palms. It was a human bone, not striking in the tale it told alone so much as that told by the thousands like it festooning the marshy soil of the mass grave. The grisly expanse bore the texture of a decadent dessert, like one of Smarny's formidable custard trifles wobbled out on wheels for the holidays, to the dismay of a small nation. "You're certain of this?" asked Frigglish. Despite what he was doing with his beard, he was, in fact, immersed in meaningful contemplation. "I am afraid I am becoming more so with each terrible tick groused by that gaudy timepiece slung around your neck." In case it wasn't clear, Frigglish wore a clock Zazzerpan didn't care for. It was magic. "The massacre of Syrs Gnelph was not as written." "What has you convinced it was the hand of our disciples in this blackness?" Executus chimed in. "I believe... I..." a fat face stammered, eyes darting with the guilt of a thief in the throes of an unraveling alibi. "I can summon a... more pressing line of inquiry..." No, Smarny. Nobody was in the mood for a sticky bundt loaf just now. Zazzerpan's ears fell insubstantial to any line of inquiry, pastry-oriented or otherwise. His abstruse contour carved a pondering shape in the fog carpeting centuries-dead. His eleven contemporaries too embraced the muted consternation of their great Predicant Scholar. Few wizards kept sharper adumbratives or read them with such lucidity. When Zazzerpan treated men with silence it was seldom unrepaid by the wise and reasonable alike. It was harrowing to entertain. Zazzerpan the Learned's storied Complacency of Wizards was marked for grander descendence. Disciples hand-picked, vetted by Ockite the Bonafide and tested by Gastrell the Munificent. The twelve sweetest, most studious children a pair of elderly eyes could give their sparkle. Not the ragged guttersnipe so oft-harvested by the common Obscenity, those vituperative little beggars with hearts to corrupt as dropped bananas brown. That these chosen youngsters would turn was not merely unthinkable, but something of a roundhouse to the temporal bones of the Upper Indifference's high chamber of Softskulled Prophets. His wisdom-savaged brow pruned further with recount of his many lessons to wouldbe successors. Lessons to advance humanity's elucidation and prosperity, an outcome this bleak trail now painfully obviated. There were few puzzles The Learned could not suspend and dissect in the recondite manifold beneath his extremely expensive pointy hat. Daring to pitch his cherished pupils in with the foul melange of history's rogues, the heretofore abstract scourge that built up civilizations with ungodly magic and tore them down with joyful malice, would prove an intellectual trespass to make his calcium-deficient bones quake. And more daring yet was the only question that now mattered. Could a bunch of bearded, scraggly old men in preposterous outfits hunt them down? He didn't have an answer. Only a simple observation so blunt and uncharacteristically jejune for the lauded sage it was breathtaking in its selfevidency. "We're going to need more wands." (Wow. Think of something better.)

Wow.

Dave is understandably intimidated by this, and decides to stop reading for now. He puts his copy of the SBURB Beta in the notebook to act as a bookmark, and leaves both books in his room for later.

Then he checks in on Rose, who is burning her version of the MEOW book.

CHEL: Dave inquires about the wizard story.

TG: i thought you hated wizards TG: whats the deal with that TT: I like wizards. TT: What I don't like is my mother's obsession with feigning interest in them to antagonize me. TG: oh man thats so messed up TG: that you think that TG: she probably digs wizards for real just like you and youre blowing shit out of proportion like pretty much always

Once again, we see exactly how fucked-up Rose’s relationship with her mother is. Mom Lalonde has somehow managed to raise a child in such a way that Rose interprets everything her mother does as an attempt to mock and provoke her.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 16

TIER: The Lalondes are pretty damn dysfunctional as a family unit, and considering the zany nature of early Homestuck and its world's weird logic that is saying something indeed.

CHEL: As for the MEOW book, it turns out the gods from the Furthest Ring informed Rose while she was sleeping that the book’s contents are highly dangerous and must be destroyed. Said gods dwell in the sky above Derse; Dave’s never heard or seen them, but Rose points out his dreamself is always wearing shades, listening to music, and distracted by Cal.

TT: You're the prince of the moon. TG: ........ TT: I'm sure they've been meaning to seek a royal audience. TG: ..........................

Davesprite chats to Rose next. She protests at being spied on by two people, but Davesprite asks her why she burned the codebook. She didn’t need to in the future, but according to her future memories of the gods absorbed from her future dreamself, Davesprite appeared to make it relevant by traveling to the past. A sinister and familiar face watches through Dave’s window, soon proving to be the Draconian Dignitary, while Dave and Davesprite awkwardly spout elaborate mixed metaphors about how safe they are, until Dave, embarrassed, says "so i guess ill go back down and burn that book".

As any savvy reader could guess, he’s too late. The prompt suggests that he should go back in time to stop the books from being stolen, but, well...

It looks like you already tried that. GORE GALORE: 10

Dave looks completely undisturbed, but whether he is undisturbed is a different matter. He flings the corpse out the window into the lava, claiming it would freak Jade out.

John, in the lab, presses a button, causing the first monitor to depict his town, shortly before his birth. There is a Betty Crocker factory and a shopping mall, neither of which are in the town now. Zooming in locks a target over Nanna Egbert, who is taking a stroll with Dad. A meteor looms; this looks like it’s going to go very badly, considering the target lock, but it hits the factory instead. When John presses the glowing blue button, a PARADOX GHOST IMPRINT of Nanna is created; refer back to Rose’s experimentation in the lab and the green slime blobs. This time, the slime is sucked into a tube.

The next monitor does something similar with Grandpa Harley on his ship, and the next the same with Bro Strider, who stands over a meteor crater on an unseasonably warm day; something of an understatement, as the sky is the same lurid red and the sun the same glowing spiral that they were during the Strider bros’ battle even though it’s December. Bro is, regardless, prepared for the occasion with a small pair of outrageously awesome shades. What he needs these for will soon be revealed.

The fourth monitor goes back to John’s home town, a gigantic crater where the factory once was. In the shopping mall, Dad Egbert stands outside a joke shop, while Nanna apparently remains inside, busying herself with a tall bookshelf, a ladder, and a rather hefty unabridged joke book.

Mom Lalonde, clutching the infant Rose and wearing a rather snazzy long Jaspersprite-pink scarf, has come to town to study the meteor impact at the request of Grandpa Harley while he explores elsewhere. Unfortunately, now is the time a meteor chooses to strike Nanna’s location, destroying the shop.

An old mother lost today, but a new son gained.

Wait for it.

Mom Lalonde flees, dropping her scarf, which Dad Egbert picks up and slightly creepily sniffs. The monitor continues tracking her, and John captures her paradox imprint too, starting the machines whirring away...

Four babies abruptly appear on the pad, already diapered and bespectacled and old enough to sit up unaided. Convenient, no?

When the kitten jumps on a green button, the slime is blended in pairs; Nanna’s and Grandpa’s, and Mom’s and Bro’s. More blinking lights ensue, and another four extremely familiar-looking babies appear.

BRIGHT: I will say this: These kids are adorable.

While babies clamber over him, John vaults up his echeladder to the rank of Ectobiolobabysitter, acquiring one million Boondollars in the process. This automatically converts itself to a Boonbuck, the weight of which smashes his Porkhollow.

Finding out just what is going on here will have to wait, as the comic takes a brief detour to a battleship navigating the Medium nearby. There’s someone very familiar at the wheel…

An old man has much to do before he returns to Earth, dies, gets stuffed by his adopted-yet-biological daughter-slash-grand-daughter, and stuck in front of a fireplace.

Also aboard the ship are Dad Egbert and Mom Lalonde. Dad returns Mom’s scarf, and the two of them hold hands as Grandpa Harley pilots the ship towards Skaia.

We return to the lab, where John has his hands full with the babies. One of them has managed to break one of the paradox slime jars from earlier, but appears uninjured. Also, CG’s trolling him again.

CHEL: CG makes mention of the ULTIMATE RIDDLE, but John is confused because CG hasn’t told him about that yet. He uses an ableist description in explaining.

CG: SEE I KIND OF PAINTED MYSELF INTO A CORNER. CG: I STARTED TROLLING YOU AT THE END, JUST BEFORE THE RIFT. CG: AND THEN JUMPED BACK A LITTLE. CG: AND NOW I GUESS I'VE BECOME RAILROADED INTO WORKING BACKWARDS HERE. CG: UNLESS I WANT TO DO THE SORT OF DUMB SCHIZOPHRENIC HOPPING AROUND LIKE THE OTHERS. CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 18

… why wouldn’t you just hop right back to the start and work in a linear fashion from there?

TIER: Because CG excels at making things complicated for himself and is fundamentally rather stubborn and set in his ways/actions. Like he's made his bed, he's gonna lie in it.

CHEL: Anyway, CG banters with John for a bit, and then informs him that he (John) has arrived in the Veil and created infant versions of the players and their guardians.

EB: so they are like cloned copies of us? CG: NO. CG: THEY ARE LITERALLY YOU AND YOUR GUARDIANS. CG: PARADOX CLONES.

A paradox clone, we are informed, is A CORRECTLY CLONED DUPLICATE THAT WILL INEVITABLY GO BACK IN TIME AND BECOME THE ORIGINAL TARGET THAT WAS CLONED. The game worlds contain many clues hinting at the ultimate destiny of the players to create their own selves through the game, and the only way things could possibly go involved the players creating themselves, or else the game session would never happen.

CG: WHICH IS ESPECIALLY PATHETIC SINCE PARADOX SPACE APPARENTLY WENT TO ALL THIS TROUBLE TO MAKE YOU JUST TO HAVE YOU FAIL AND DIE. CG: REALLY THERE'S NOTHING MORE TRAGIC THAN THESE NULL SESSIONS FULL OF KIDS ENTERING THE GAME AND FULFILLING SOME COSMIC DESTINY SHIT JUST TO GET WIPED OUT AND LEAVE BEHIND AN EMPTY POINTLESS INCIPISPHERE FOR ALL ETERNITY.

Tragic and completely unnecessary, when there are millions of perfectly good humans already in existence who could just as easily create winning game sessions without this aspect of it. Here we see another aspect of Homestuck which hasn’t come up quite so clearly before; an extremely weird take on determinism. I’m not sure if this is meant as a parody of Chosen One plotlines or if Hussie just thought it sounded cool, but it’s uncomfortable. As it turns out, only clones created by SBurb have a hope in hell of winning the game, and even they fail most of the time. Regular people who enter the game to save themselves from the destruction of the planet will fail and die there, which honestly is not really selling this game as a good thing, since it’s what causes the destruction of the planet in the first place. I’ve had actual, legitimate, honest-to-God nightmares about this aspect of SBurb, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

FAILURE ARTIST: I think many fans wish to play SBurb. There’s lots of fan sessions and fake GameFAQs and custom Lands. Yet in reality SBurb is not a fun time. This is cosmic horror. I think Hussie is sometimes playing it for horror and sometimes he ignores the implications.

Then again, some people want to live on the troll planet, which is straight-up dystopia.

CHEL: Again, it isn’t really clear what he’s going for. Is it supposed to be terrifying or did he just think it would be clever? Does even Hussie know what he was going for? While it’s not exactly a joke, I think it’s worth another point here:

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 17

It might be a joke. As I said, I could see it as a parody of or playing with the Chosen One narrative. In this case, literally only the chosen ones have any hope, for reasons that are not down to any merit of their own. But if it is, there isn’t really much made of it.

Of course, the reasons people want to live on the troll planet are reasonable when taken alone, but a) contradicted every alternate scene and b) not a fair trade for everything else that’s going on there. But we’ll get to that when we actually see it. And I admit, SBurb powers would be fun, but not worth the loss of my entire species.

TIER: To me at least it's fun in the same way wondering how I'd fare as a wizard during Harry Potter's years at Hogwarts, or a ninja in Naruto is. Fundamentally you'd rather want to never encounter this sorta stuff even if you get some swanky I guess powers, but the mental exercise of it is quite honestly, really fun. The game has quite a lot of interesting things to poke around with, from lands to quests to what your co-players are up to. And I'm def guilty of playing trollsona games, because the world presented is just really fascinating in its gruesome glory.

Never want to have to actually go through it, Lord knows I'd be dead within the first ten minutes if I'm super lucky, but stories about it are pretty neat.

CHEL: That’s true, but the paradox clones thing seems almost to be taunting us for having that mentality. We can pretend we’d be the super-smart strong competent ones who make it, but in this universe if we demonstrably have parents we’re doomed to die for nothing and there’s nothing we can do about it.

BRIGHT: Another fun thing about this is that it fundamentally isolates the players from the rest of humanity. If you think about it, unless they have children with a non-player, they are completely unrelated to anyone else on Earth.

CHEL: And they can’t have kids with a non-player unless something thoroughly horrible happened, because as is stated later SBurb specifically takes its players away and destroys their planet around the point of their puberty.

BRIGHT: Although I think John is actually related to Dad — as far as we’re told, Dad is in fact Nanna’s biological son, which makes him genetically John’s half-brother.

They also miss out on (going by how active the babies are) the first couple of years of life. Those two years are crucial in terms of brain development. SBURB probably controls for that, but it wouldn’t be surprising if there were negative consequences.

Oh, and if you’re a player, your existence means your civilisation is doomed. Lovely!

CHEL: And do the players ever feel any guilt or conflict over this? Do they hell. It doesn’t even occur to them, and I’m pretty sure it didn’t occur to Hussie either.

TIER: Welcome to the hell game that is SBURB; it's fundamentally pretty fucked up! It runs on a hellish scale of "things have already been predetermined" and I am Big Fear™.

CHEL: That’ll come up later, too, but there it’s obviously intentional nightmare fuel, and not at all a bad use of time travel as a story device.

CG, meanwhile, explains that he was the one to create his session’s players. With twelve of them it was a bit more complicated, but troll lineages are complicated anyway, and we’ll find out how later.

The babies are still getting all over the lab. Note that they're repeatedly referred to as "little pink monkeys". Then again, calling a non-white child a monkey really wouldn't be good.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 18

John’s infant self has latched onto the Sassacre book, while his infant Nanna is sitting in Dad Egbert’s old hat. Baby Bro is napping in the lap of Lil Cal; that baby’s braver than I am, I can tell you that. Baby Dave is sitting on Maplehoof, and baby Grandpa has found a pair of pistols. John does not take them away from him, or even seem to notice he has them.

HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 7

BRIGHT: Earlier baby Bro broke one of the paradox slime cylinders and was sitting in it. John is pretty astoundingly bad at keeping babies away from obvious hazards.

TIER: That or the equipment is probably not sturdy enough to make it past an inspection into faulty management.

CHEL: But then he’s distracted by CG trolling him again, at least this time moving forward in time from the last conversation.

CG, like GA, apparently fails to grasp sarcasm...

EB: we had this great dare going. EB: to see who could be the least helpful and informative. EB: and you totally lost, dude! EB: you were hella helpful. CG: I WAS OBVIOUSLY JUST SPITING YOUR STUPID POINTLESS HUMAN DARE. [...] CG: ANYWAY, HOW COULD WE HAVE MADE A DARE IF I'M MOVING BACKWARDS ON YOUR TIMELINE.

… which is weird because moments later he uses it himself.

EB: do you even have elves? CG: YES, LET'S COMPARE WHICH FANTASY CREATURES THAT DON'T EXIST WE BOTH DO OR DON'T NOT HAVE. CG: WHAT A GREAT FUCKING IDEA, JOHN!

Hussie seems to waver back and forth a lot on whether trolls get sarcasm or not, in general. Since he’s contradicting himself with troll worldbuilding, that’s a point.

WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 19

Banter aside, he informs John that the babies are sent to Earth via meteors during the Reckoning.

BRIGHT: How do they survive the impact? Some of those meteor strikes destroy buildings. Those are some ridiculously resilient kids.

CHEL: Cut to AR, who is still having fun on the rocketboard, until he runs into a frog temple atop a meteor. This is apparently horrifying and illegal by his standards.

You are going to throw whoever is responsible into the slammer. You always call jail the slammer when you are extra angry at crimes.

Inside, he finds an empty time capsule, like Jade’s, some complicated machinery, and a monitor screen showing a greyscale house with a very familiar bespectacled female infant and dirty old hat in it. The year depicted, says the monitor, is 1910. Enter none other than Colonel Sassacre himself.

Eight days prior, the orphan girl was taken in by an aristocratic southern colonel and legendary humorist. He recovered the young lady from a crater where a bakery once stood, operated by the man's wife, a notable baked goods baroness.

An explosion outside leads them both to a crater, where once stood the doghouse of the colonel’s pet, Halley, but before the Colonel can investigate further he’s shot through the heart.

This is exactly why babies should not be allowed to dual-wield flintlock pistols.

BRIGHT: I remain baffled as to how Baby Grandpa can even lift those things, let alone pull the triggers.

CHEL: Baby Grandpa crawls from the crater, and Halley the dog turns out to be alive.

The young boy has difficulty pronouncing the name though. Sounds more like "Harley" when he says it.

How does he know it? The colonel died before he even noticed the baby was there. Is baby Nanna speaking well enough to tell him yet? I guess he could be told later, as Sassacre wasn’t in fact their only sapient guardian...

Thirteen years later, the boy develops a taste for adventure. He and his guardian bid farewell. His sister is sad. She will be left all alone with the wicked pastry baroness. She can handle it, he tells her. He believes in her.

It isn’t clear why she didn’t go with him, or leave under her own power. They don’t seem to be imprisoned, as the panel depicts them outside on grass with no restraints or guards over them, so it’s not a matter of only one of them being able to get out. That’s a point for Nanna not trying and a point for Grandpa not bringing her:

HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 9

That dog is also remarkably lively, considering it, unlike Bec, is an entirely normal dog, it was an adult thirteen years previously, and it’s somehow supporting the weight of an entire teenager on its back (again, please don’t try this at home, you can break the dog’s spine that way).

FAILURE ARTIST: As we’ve said, Colonel Sassacre is a thinly-veiled Mark Twain expy. The real Mark Twain died in 1910 at the same time Halley’s Comet was in the sky. It’s a cute historical gag having him be literally killed by a comet but it does muck up the timeline. Nanna must have been a senior citizen when Dad was born. Perhaps he’s adopted?

CHEL: The other option is that Dad is a senior citizen now, but surely John would have wondered why his dad is so ridiculously old. I think it’s just that thing in mainstream comics and cartoons where adults are split into Old and Not Old, and the parents are normal ages for parents but the grandparents would have to be in their hundreds going by the gags. See how Scrooge McDuck in the DuckTales reboot is over a hundred and forty years old yet his sister’s son is still a youngish adult.

AR notes that the appearifier is centred over Halley the dog, but hears someone coming. It proves to be the Draconian Dignitary. AR hides and watches, noting that DD is carrying Rose’s notebooks and Dave’s beta envelopes. DD keeps the MEOW book, but throws away the other items. Complacency of the Learned lands on the floor, and the envelopes land in the time capsule, which sets to bloom in four hundred and thirteen million years.

Meanwhile, John talks to CG while infant Mom Lalonde pets the mutant kitten. John asks if there’s any way to delay the Reckoning, but nope; CG warns him that the smallest meteors will start going in only a few minutes.

EB: ok, well you keep saying how doomed we are and how all this bad stuff happens sooner, but you never say why! EB: what happens in our game that's different from yours that makes things go so badly? CG: JACK NOIR.

The Jack Noir from the trolls’ game session allied with them and helped them dethrone and exile the Black Queen, while the one from the humans’ session, as you may recall, killed the Black Monarchs and gained their powers, and is currently rampaging through the Incipisphere. John asks if it’s the same Jack Noir, but CG explains.

CG: SO LET'S SAY YOU PLAY YOUR BANDICOOT AND I PLAY MY BANDICOOT. CG: THEY ARE ESSENTIALLY THE SAME BANDICOOT, SAME APPEARANCE AND DESIGN AND BEHAVIORS. CG: BUT THEY ARE STILL COMPLETELY SEPARATE BANDICOOTS ON SEPARATE SCREENS. CG: SO WE BOTH HAVE OUR OWN ASS BANDICOOTS TO OURSELVES, THE SAME BUT DIFFERENT. CG: OUR JACKS ARE THE SAME BUT DIFFERENT TOO. CG: SAME GUY, DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES AND OUTCOMES. CG: OUR JACK TRUMPED THE QUEEN, BUT GOT NO FURTHER. CG: YOUR JACK GOT THE BEST OF BOTH OF THEM, AND IS NOW SOMETHING HIGHER THAN A QUEEN OR A KING… EB: like an ace? CG: SURE OK.

The trolls don’t know what went so differently to cause the two Jacks to behave so differently, but CG doesn’t think it matters by now. John interrupts him, deciding to do yet another Con Air ending re-enactment.

Watch on YouTube

Recap: montage of Con Air posters and images to the tune of “How Do I Live Without You”. John hands the thoroughly disgusting Con Air bunny to the protesting baby Rose, while CG watches huffily on his monitor. Jade demands a toy too, so John hands her the bunny he received from Rose in an excessively dramatic fashion. CG frustratedly hits himself in the head. In scribbly crayon-like drawings, Casey the salamander performs a drum solo with glowing blue mushrooms for drums and the Con Air plane crashes. More Con Air imagery, John embraces baby Jade and the baby Lalondes while sobbing; GC points and laughs at him over CG’s shoulder and they have a slapfight. John imagines himself in Nic Cage’s iconic wifebeater and mullet and performs an air guitar solo.

TIER: Lemme tell ya, as someone who's only experience with this darn movie is whatever pops up courtesy of John this sequence is just a trip and a half. Possibly a higher number.

CHEL: Cut to end-of-act curtains; they open on the next page, declaring a PSYCHE; there are more pages to go.

Cut to Dave’s hands, covered in the dead Dave’s blood. I… guess he’s supposed to be staring at them in shock? It’s impossible to tell through his shades. For all I know he could be worried about the cleanup. GC trolls him and they banter creepily, with her demanding to know what his blood smells like and him taunting her about her blindness.

TG: just him and me TG: havin a see party TG: like a couple of eagle eyed bros peepin shit up into the wee hours GC: D4V3 GC: C4N 1 COM3 TO YOUR S33 P4RTY? TG: i guess but youll have to be careful not to stumble around bumping into all the gorgeous masterpieces hanging around everywhere TG: god so beautiful to look at with my perfect eyesight GC: C4N 1 L1CK TH3 P41NT1NGS? TG: yeah thats fine

Neither of them seems to take it particularly hard. If there was narrative around the dialogue, I think we’d get a better grasp of how Dave feels. Lacking much body language or punctuation, tone is a bit tricky to get.

FAILURE ARTIST: There’s a character later who gets a lot of grief for insulting her blindness but reading what John, Dave, and CG say I don’t know how that character could be worse.

CHEL: AT, meanwhile, is trolling Jade, rather politely. He even takes time to ask if she’s having a good nap. She’s worried about John’s dreamself not waking, and AT scrolls into his view of the future timeline, but can’t find John awake, nor see into his dreams. Jade, however, will wake up soon, and she thanks him for this report. Unfortunately, when Jade wakes up she will be in danger, and AT can’t see any further. He tells her CG wants to talk to her about her exploding robot. He can’t see whether it exploded or not because there are a lot of explosions, but asking future Jade shows it did, and that she declared CG to be a pretty nice guy, which surprises AT since he doesn’t think CG is particularly nice. Jade says she thinks AT is nice too, and asks why he’s the only one who talks to her while she’s asleep.

AT: bECAUSE YOU HAVE A ROBOT, tO LET YOU SAY THINGS THAT HAPPEN, oN PROSPIT, AT: aND i'M CURIOUS, AT: bECAUSE THE ONLY TIME i EVER HAD FUN PLAYING THIS GAME WAS WHEN i WAS ASLEEP, AT: bUT NOW ALL OUR DREAM SELVES ARE DEAD, AT: }:'(

AT happily remembers his own time on Prospit, and we cut back to Rose, being trolled by GA despite the fact that Rose is obviously in the middle of an epic magic battle. The conversation is understandably chilly, and GA still hasn’t figured out that “Dumb Rose” as opposed to “Smart Rose” was John rather than a bizarre roleplaying scenario.

GC continues trolling Dave. He asks her how she operates a computer without sight.

GC: 1M SORRY D4V3 TH4T YOU W1LL N3V3R 3XP3R13NC3 TH3 S3NSORY BOUQU3T TH4T 1 3NJOY 3V3RY D4Y GC: TH4T 1 3NSCONC3 MYS3LF 1N L1K3 4 W4RM 4ND COMFY B4THROB3 M4D3 OF FL4VOR 4ND M3LODY TG: oh ok TG: so the dumbest and most far fetched explanation imaginable ok got it

Yes, pretty much. This brings me to a Problematykks point; GC is supposed to be blind, but it really doesn’t seem to affect her in any way at all. Its workaround is ridiculously convenient and effective, and while I’m not blind myself, I know many people with physical disabilities hate it when fiction does this. I know I would be pissed off if a piece of fiction showed an easy and convenient way to not have autism anymore. (Horrible, horrible memories of someone back in the days of Livejournal’s Fanficrants of a fic in which autism was somehow cured by having a foursome. I don’t remember how that was supposed to work.) “She’s a space alien” only goes so far in explaining it. Why even bother making her blind if it’s not going to affect her in any way?

CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 19

FAILURE ARTIST: She’s the least blind blind person in media. Characters like Daredevil from Marvel Comics and Toph from Avatar the Last Airbender have a Disability Superpower but at the end of the day they still can’t do things like read printed text. GC has no disadvantages.

BRIGHT: She can apparently smell and taste photons.

Which raises the question why none of the other trolls ever show a heightened sense of smell or taste. If GC can learn to interpret smells as colours, her sense of smell must have been that strong all along, and there’s no indication in the text that she’s biologically more sensitive than her companions. Trolls must be better at following a trail than bloodhounds.

CHEL: Synaesthesia which makes one strongly associate colours with smells is a thing, and synaesthesia is generally the word the fandom uses to explain Terezi’s ability, but you still have to actually see the colours for that to work. If she was only mostly blind and was picking up blurry colour patches, I could buy it (and that is how the fandom tends to do it with human AUs), but not if she’s supposed to be completely blind, and she still wouldn’t be able to read text that way.

BRIGHT: Time for another animation, and for a hop back into the recent past.

Watch on YouTube

As the meteor locked onto Dave’s house approaches, Dave climbs up the tower to retrieve his cruxite egg from the nest his sprite made. Unfortunately the sprite attacks him, knocking him and the egg off the tower. Bro Strider appears on top of the approaching meteor and slices it in half with his katana; the two halves are diverted by the blow and strike different areas of the city. Dave’s fall is broken by a rocket board, which is presumably how Bro got up to the meteor in the first place. (How did he manage to aim it to intercept Dave’s fall? Wouldn’t it take longer to get from the meteor to Dave than it takes for Dave to fall from the top of the tower to the roof of the building? We shall never know.) The egg hatches, and Dave is transported into the Medium. There’s no sign of what happens to Bro.

CHEL: Yet more cartoon physics around the Strider bros.

BRIGHT: I don’t know if we mentioned this earlier, but although Dave and Bro live in an apartment block that presumably housed multiple people, only Dave’s apartment gets transported into the Medium. Everyone else in the complex is left to die on Earth. SBURB is sociopathic.

Elsewhere in the Medium, back in the present, Grandpa’s ship is approaching Skaia, with Mom Lalonde and Dad Egbert on board.

Down on Skaia, Jack Noir draws his sword and slaughters the army WV raised to march on the Black King. WV cowers, but Jack leaves him alive. He then uses the Black Queen’s ring to send some sort of giant red tentacle attack through Skaia, slaughtering Dersite and Prospitian forces indiscriminately.

CHEL: Are they tentacles? I always thought of them as some sort of lightning lasers.

BRIGHT: That makes a lot more sense!

In the ectobiology lab, as the clock ticks down to the Reckoning, the babies are teleported to asteroids around the lab. There must be an air supply in this asteroid belt — characters are consistently shown as being able to survive outside.

CHEL: Maybe it’s just the players’ natural badassery. Batman Can Breathe In Space.

BRIGHT: On Skaia, CD makes his way through Jack’s slaughter fest, which has now ravaged a sizeable chunk of planet, and hands him the White King’s sceptre. Jack raises the sceptre and initiates the Reckoning. The meteorites start to vanish into Skaia’s defence portals. In the frog temple, DD somehow combines the MEOW genetic code with a paradox clone of Halley, creating Jade’s guardian Bec. Bec’s creation damages the laboratory equipment in the temple.

Cut to Jade, who is snoozing peacefully while her dream self explores Prospit. She looks up at Skaia, to see Jack’s shadow passing in front of it. Jack launches his tentacle attack on Prospit, slaughtering the inhabitants, then severs the chain attaching Prospit’s moon to the planet. The moon begins falling towards Skaia.

Jack then flies to LOHAC, where he encounters Bro Strider on one of the turntable mesas. Unexpectedly, Bro is able to give Jack an even fight. After a few exchanges, he drives his katana into the mesa; some sort of golden light emanates from the crack, and Bro absconds.

Wait, how did Bro get onto LOHAC? How did he survive the meteor impacts?

TIER: The ol' "rule of cool". As long as something is sufficiently "absolutely kickass!!" the rules of reality and physics can go sit on the bleachers twiddling their thumbs for all they fucking matter. There's a reason early fandom pinned down Bro as an unorthodox but immensely cool older brother type guy for so long. Because with what little information was available before we got bludgeoned with "No actually he was the absolute fucking worst thing to happen to Dave and fucked him up for life" that was the general impression he gave off.

CHEL: This and the meteor splitting are yet more reason not to take Bro’s treatment of Dave seriously; this is a world in which ludicrous animesque badassery rules the day, and physically impossible feats of battle occur every five minutes. Forcing a child to go through extensive and excessive sword training in brutal heat in a precarious place, possibly every day, ought by rights to be normal there, and I can’t believe he was physically hurt by swordfighting when he survived a meteor collision as an infant. Besides, training that extensive quite possibly could be the only thing that would keep Dave alive in these circumstances.

ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 18

BRIGHT: There’s a random Squiddles interlude, and then we return to Skaia.

John’s unconscious dream self has fallen out of Prospit’s moon as it plummets towards Skaia. Jade tries shaking him awake, and then slaps him, but to no avail. At the last moment, she throws him out of the path of the moon, and her dream self is then killed when it lands on her. Back on Earth, her dreambot overloads and explodes.

CHEL: Taking her tower room with it; Jade’s sleeping body plummets towards the earth.

BRIGHT: The moon leaves a gigantic crater in Skaia. John’s now-conscious dreamself hovers above it.

The babies vanish through the defence portals to Earth.

CHEL: Each takes an item with them. John takes the Sassacre book, Rose the first Con Air bunny, Dave rides Maplehoof, Jade takes the bunny Rose gave to John (which is in fact the Con Air bunny plus several years and repairs), Nanna sits inside Dad’s old hat, Mom takes the mutant kitten, Bro sleeps in the lap of Li’l Cal, and Grandpa dual wields the flintlock pistols he should not be allowed.

BRIGHT: Dave and Rose reach the Gates above their houses and set out to explore their Lands. We close on an eerie shot of Bec outside the frog temple on Jade’s island at night.

CHEL: Jade’s tower room is blown to bits, and a truly enormous meteor hovers over the scene.

Curtains close. End of Act 4. Before Act 5, we receive a message from Rose, via her GameFAQ.

[ZZZZ] Rose: Egress. This is my final entry. My co-players and I have made every earnest attempt, with occasional relapse, to play this game the right way.

Really? You haven’t been in the game for more than a couple of hours and Jade still isn’t in at all! Maybe consider that the fact that not all your players are in the game yet when you wonder why it isn’t working?

I have been meticulous in documenting the process to help our peers and successors through the trials should we fail. In my hubris I believed these classes were relegated to the Earth-bound, but in even this quaint supposition I was in error. Our otherworldly antagonists have assured us of our inevitable failure repeatedly, while the gods whisper corroboration in my sleep. I believe them now. I just blew up my first gate. I’m not sure why I did it, really. I am not playing by the rules anymore. I will fly around this candy-coated rock and comb the white sand until I find answers. No one can tell me our fate can’t be repaired. We’ve come too far. I jumped out of the way of a burning fucking tree, for God’s sake.

I can see her point. The game is horrible and should be stopped. On the other hand, I’d at least attempt to spend more than one day investigating it before trying to break it. Randomly destroying shit is more likely to make things much worse than anything else.

I have used a spell to rip this walkthrough from Earth’s decaying network, and sealed it in one of the servers floating in the Furthest Ring. The gods may disperse the signal throughout the cosmos as they wish. Perhaps it will be of use to past or future species who like us have been ensnared by Skaia’s malevolent tendrils. In case it wasn’t clear, magic is real. Pardon my egress. You’re on your own now.

This note is signed with a glowing multicoloured “RL” and revealed to be emitted from a purple box with an aerial, floating in space. It seems that’s how their internet’s still working.

FAILURE ARTIST: The internet seems to be a magical dimension in Homestuck and not something that’s part of physical infrastructure.

CHEL: Hours in the future, WV lands in the desert remains of Earth, wrapped up in John’s old ghost-patterned bedsheet, which is still white. A villein becomes a vagabond. In his memory, he tears up an effigy of Jack Noir… where’d he get it? Did the game create it for some reason? Anyway, John’s blanket falls on him from the sky as Prospit plummets; WV calls it a RAG OF SOULS. Adorably melodramatic.

John’s awoken dreamself gazes sadly at Jade’s deceased one, which for some reason isn’t actually under the rubble of Prospit and appears to still be three-dimensional. There’s no excessive blood splatter like with the dead Dave, which is good, not too over the top. He retrieves the Queen’s ring from her hand. Was he told at any point that it’s important? Because if he doesn’t know, I’m not sure robbing the dead is very heroic. He sees an image of himself flying over the battlefield in a large cloud above him; in the vision he’s near a castle, so he goes to seek it out.

On Earth, PM wraps herself up in an old Prospit banner. A mistress becomes a mendicant. In her memories, she has beheaded the Hegemonic Brute and is arranging a meeting with Jack Noir. He arrives and she presents the crowns; smirking evilly, he honours their bargain, and the Courtyard Droll brings her the green parcel. She brings it to the castle from John’s vision as he arrives there, hands over the box, and angrily walks away.

FAILURE ARTIST: She’s Honor Before Reason (maybe she’s programmed that way) but she has the right reaction. This is a lot to go through to deliver a package.

CHEL: Inside the box is a letter from Jade’s unknown pen pal, who writes in dark green and a distinctive jolly-hockey-sticks dialect, with a tendency to ramble off on tangents about movies and wrestling.

Anyway you should listen to jade from here on out john because she sure seems to know whats best for you. Whatever your adventure throws at you im sure shell tell you you can handle it. She believes in you.

And another letter from Jade.

even though its super late and you probably went through a lot of trouble to get it, i really hope this present cheers you up! you looked so sad while you were reading my letter. um... which is to say, the one you are reading now.

She explains that in her dreams she goes to Prospit and John’s sleeping dream self is there, and that’s where she gets her visions. She hopes he likes his present, and says her penpal is fun…

john i am REALLY looking forward to seeing you when you wake up!!!!! its been nice playing with my prospitian friends and all, but also kind of lonely knowing you were in the other tower sleeping and having lousy dreams. :( im not sure where i am when you are reading this but im sure ill make it down to where you are soon! (jeez how did you get down there??? oh well ill find out) i cant wait to fly around the moon with you and show you all my favorite places. itll be so much fun!!!!!!!!! :D <3 jade

Ow. I think this is the only time John cries in the entire comic.

A Single Tear(™) is a bit of an understated reaction to the death of one of your best friends who you just recently learned is also your twin sister, but to be fair, John isn’t left with very much time to react, as next panel Jack Noir’s sword is pointed at his face.

BRIGHT: John knows about dream selves and waking selves by now, I think?

CHEL: He knows they’re a thing but I don’t think he knows they count as backup lives. AT told Jade dream selves can die separately from regular selves but I don’t think anyone told John.

FAILURE ARTIST: Jack Noir wants the ring, but then he’s stopped by Jade’s gift: a robotic bunny wielding multiple weapons.

They line up for a fight.

Hours in the future, on a destroyed planet, AR wraps police tape around himself and becomes a Aimless Renegade. Before the disaster, he went to the Veil, where he found a sleeping John. He saves John by putting him on a rocket board.

Back to the robotic bunny. Jack Noir flies away from the fight. Grandpa’s battleship lands and Grandpa takes away Jade’s body. Mom and Dad disembark the ship and wave goodbye as it leaves. Grandpa cries a Single Tear as he transports Jade’s already taxidermed body. Did he have a machine?

CHEL: For that matter, why isn’t he helping anyone who’s actually still alive while he’s there?

HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 10

FAILURE ARTIST: Nope, transporting a dead body is more important.

Again going back, White Queen leaves Prospit. On landing, she becomes Windswept Questant and wanders the Earth. We go forward years later. She repairs the laboratory and meets up with AR, WV, and PM. WV’s homemade spear hides the ring.

John watches this scene through the clouds of Skaia. He looks at the ring in his hand. In another cloud, there’s Jade’s laboratory. We close in on it and inside is The Fourth Wall. It isn’t turned on, but we are still lead to Andrew Hussie, banging away on a computer keyboard as he recaps the plot for a second time.

CHEL: Which we shall do as well when we’re done with this section, because it’s insanely hard to keep track of everything.

FAILURE ARTIST: Andrew Hussie says Nanna’s comet landed 99 years before John’s “birth” so he has some clue about the age but still doesn’t see it odd that a woman that age has a son who is probably only in his thirties.

CHEL: As I said, it’s also possible Dad was really old too, but that’s never really suggested. Not to mention, since they were brought into existence as toddlers, shouldn’t the kids be noticeably older than the ages given for them? John should be biologically fourteen to fifteen by now and at that age that can make a visible difference. I know the art style doesn’t really give clues, but no one I’ve seen has ever pointed that out in fanfic either.

FAILURE ARTIST: Newborns aren’t distinctive looking and can’t really do the cute things toddlers do. People in TV and movies regularly give birth to six month old infants so it’s not strange.

CHEL: True, but this isn’t TV, it’s a comic, and they don’t have to use an actual infant as a prop here.

BRIGHT: Possibly it’s intentional. Among other things, we see the newly-created players survive short trips through vacuum, crash-land on Earth without even minor injuries, and handle weapons they shouldn’t be able to lift for another four or five years. This could work if players have superhuman abilities (that is, beyond the classpect system). If that was the intent then it really should be made more explicit, though.

Of course, what it really boils down to is that Homestuck runs off Rule of Cool and Rule of Funny, and occasionally breaks down on examination as a result.

On the whole this is a solid Act, I think! We have a lot of new stuff happening, more characters get introduced, and we find out some more about the trolls. It’s much less rambling than Act 1.

COUNTS ALL THE LUCK: 0 ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY?: 18 CALL CPA PLEASE: 8 CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS: 19 GET ON WITH IT!: 18 GORE GALORE: 10 HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC: 15 HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING: 10 IN HATE WITH MY CREATION: 0 RELATIONSHIP GOALS?: 1 SEND THEM TO THE SLAMMER: 1 SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS: 0 WHAT IS HAPPENING??: 9 WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM: 19 TOTAL: 127

[floramodus]

Flora => Finish What You Started

To say you were awake was the understatement of the century.

You spent most of last night tossing and turning, with no human or fuzzy companions to fixate your whizzing thoughts on. All your babies were sent to babysitters- even David himself was spending time in New York with Artemis you assume. You boyfriends themselves know as much as they need to- would you regret not dumping your heart out on the floor instead of the curt, passive explanation you gave them? Perhaps, but you were already brimming with regrets.

Part of you didn't want to do this, knowing without the risk you have multitudes of people to live for now, and risking your life wasn't just risking your life. You were risking the peace of mind of numerous people. Lord knows what your parents were gonna say when they found out. Really, you were expecting a lot of metaphysical waps when you came out the other side. But the other part of you knew you wouldn't have rest for the rest of your immortal days unless you did this.

Thats what you had to focus on right now, the actively completing this part. The chips would fall where they may once you succeed, Thats a fact of life. You finally pull yourself out of bed, pulling off the hoodie and pukka shell necklace you had slept in, giving them a long, pained look before you teleport them into the back of the closet, out of mind. Instead you dressed for comfort in more ways than one, putting on trinkets that reminded you of your loved ones. The necklace Windi gave you, with a piece of his hair tucked inside, the bracelet made of Davesprite's feathers. A sweater Nessa gave you, the day you were adopted. Little, tiny fragments of where your heart belonged, like the planets on your ears. By the time you spent ruminating in that particular mental hole, you bucked up and texted Roxy.

They didn't long to show up, carrying what they needed to do what you asked of them. Your reaction was to hug them, though you know it was just the lack of words sticking in your throat that made you so nervous. Well, a lot of things were making you nervous, but the lack of how to go about being somewhat normal in greeting was certainly one of them. Thankfully they got the memo years ago that you were a complete and utter disaster. The guilt trickled back in, the sensation of knowing they probably don't want you to do this either, but knowing they couldn't stop it. After a few quiet moments you sighed, giving them your best smile as you offered to show them to the lab. They'd seen it, practice with the tech, but agreed nonetheless, letting you have some semblance of control.

For once the lab was fairly clean, free of scattered projects and garbage even if the main event was a lone tower desktop in a side room. You probably should have better protection for the thing considering it hosted all your brain files, but now wasn't the time, ironically, considering Roxy immediately got to work in setting up what they needed in the tiny space. You could eventually feel them in the back of your skull, poking the files and asking questions to make sure they had proper connection.

When it was all said and done the silence returned, saved for the low humming of electronic fans. You shuffled back and forth on your toes until they spoke up again.

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

Absolutely not, you wanted to say, but instead you nod, putting on your ishades. “I don't have any other choice.”

They one hundred percent didn't believe that, but relented, offering their hand. You two had discussed fray-motifs and all that confusing game play junk, and even if you didn't have to have contact to initiate it, you guessed it was a much appreciated gesture of comfort. You both focused your powers until eventually, for all intents and purposes, you ceased to exist. You could still feel you had a form, but even your spacial awareness was thrown through a loop as you also had, no atomic structure to speak of. For all intents and purposes, you were invisible to the multiverse. The plan was to use it long enough to be able to search and skim the universe and the bubbles undetected until you found them. A head-start, if you will. Roxy of course, under the same shield for the time being, was just as aware. That didn't stop you from pulling the potato you had put in your sylladex the night before and giving it a gentle toss at them. They caught it with a fumble, laughing for the first time since they arrived. It gave you the resolve you needed, even as the potato got hurled back over your shoulder. You knew you'd be in good hands. You just had to remember this wasn't the end. A well placed kiss on the top of Roxy's head, and you were off.

When you warped into the universe, specifically the main system, you could absolutely see the theory was correct. Derse and Prospit- at least the skeleton of them, were no longer revolving around your moon. Instead, long strings of bubble like masses wrapped around the Earth and the Moon like some strange, wet spider web, pulsing and shifting with iridescent light. You took a deep breath, not feeling any sort of code grabbing or clawing at you. That was a good sign, and you texted Roxy just that. Encouraged, you took the headfirst plunge into the masses.

You've seen dream bubbles from other universes, and despite the tang in the air that gave away the fact something was wrong, it was an unstable memory, it looked no different. You waded through memory after memory, some your own, some you recall from your teammates, some copies of the places you have firmly in your sylladex, until you managed to pick up a scent once you broke through a fuzzy representation of the Land of Light and Rain. You followed the trail under the heat of a fake skyline, till you saw them. Sitting, almost casual, on the beaches sands. Like they never left at all. You were pretty sure underneath the veil of void you could feel every atom in your body bristle. Was it happiness? Fear? Agony? You were never the best at pinpointing these things. You were happy to see Rose and John at least, watching them skip stones across the acid sea. David hung back naturally under a comical umbrella, smoking. You were disgusted at the pang in your heart at that fact, the rage you knew well you harbored in there threatening to boil over before you showed yourself. Which, you still had to do.

The cloak served well to buy you and Roxy time away from the corruption, but would be useless in helping you do what you came here for. You walked closer, still a fair enough distance away that David wouldn't startle and probably gut you, and texted Roxy to drop her side of the motif. Like the sand under your feet the facade dissolved, leaving you open and vulnerable as the metaphorical clock begin to tick. Even before anything latched you could feel Roxy inside your skull, scanning. Watching.

To say they were surprised was a massive understatement. Even David, who you knew had breached into your own realm of the living on unfortunate occasion, seemed agape at you being here.

“Jaaaaade!” The name made you wince, even now, but coming from John as he practically tackled you, you tolerated it. He was warm and small- visually not a day over 13. You suppose then the bubbles hadn't existed long enough for them to get their bearings on what an afterlife meant. Rose wasn't far behind, though she was much taller than John, wrapping you both up in a crushing grip. She was crying- you could hear it in her voice. You were too, you just couldn't process the fact you were sobbing as you held these two in your arms. It had been so long, and even the ache you've been sure to bury deep clawed its way out of your chest. David made sure not to join in, and you're thankful. Wouldn't want to give anything away to the others. You wanted them happy. Thats why you were here, shaking off corruption from your core like the dog you were to be here.  

You were here to apologize, to make things right, and well at best you did what you could. You explained what happened, and what happened after, and they explained, well, how they didn't even realize they had died until the bubbles appeared. How they thought you were permadead just like they had been. You shared a look with David, who lit up another cigarette in return. He had knew you were alive, and resented you. At least he had the decency to play along with the act.

You were pretty sure even with him here, you could spend forever catching up. Listening to John make Rose laugh was healing. Seeing her happy after all the years of sorrow that had been etched into her skin was healing. Even with the sensation of Roxy in your head pulling code like needles in haystacks, the bitter regret you felt coming here diminished. Even so, you couldn't stay here forever. Roxy was your only lifeline and you couldn't make them strain themselves keeping you afloat in safety. So you made your choices. You told the others you needed to talk to David alone, and obviously they relented. For all John remembers, you two were lovebirds. Rose was a bit more wise to it, but you could feel she was confident in the fact you could take care of yourself. She always was- but now, in the wake of seeing you and hearing your stories, you could feel the pride behind that sensation. It was comforting, considering what you had planned.

You led him till you two were far out of sight, far from any sort of hearing range or at least, enough your space powers, still being debugged, would cover the rest. Far enough he ripped his arm from you in disgust, that same arm trying to cock back for a hit.

It wouldn't reach its target.

In an instant your own fist was at his jaw, knuckles cut on teeth and soon to be glass as the other hit his nose. He pulled out his katana in true Strider fashion, trying to run you through like he had done a million times before, only to have it sizzle and melt, viscous and boiling onto himself as you super-heated the stupid shitty thing once it cut your skin. He staggered, opening himself up to get kicked over, one foot on his cracking and straining rib cage and the other on his throat. He spit out your dead-name between broken teeth, trying to reel in some sort of manipulative pity like he had in the past. It's how you became his fiancee, despite the obvious. It's how you became his girlfriend, without a single comforting touch. It's how he had you under his thumb once the boy he use to be died in the wake of what happened. Did you blame him? Not at all. Would you make excuses for how he treated you even with all he had dealt with? Not anymore. Not ever again.

You ground your heel into his throat, growling. “Do not call me that. I'm not Jade Harley. I'm Flora Rhevtal and you won't forget it I'm sure. Not that you'll have to remember it long, darling.”

You took your foot off his throat, but kept him pinned with the other as you shifted to get down on his level, your knees crushing his bones instead.

“Bitch,” he spat, his vitriol coming up blood. You smiled still, watching his bravado make no ground now. You weren't afraid of him. Your hand found his battered throat, and claws tore the flesh clean from bone. You sure he would have had something to say about that, if he had the chance.

“Stay in hell where you belong, David Strider.”

Not long after a loud gurgle did his ghost evaporate into double death, dissapearing from this plane once more. For good. For the better. You knew Roxy having a front row seat was probably blowing up your phone, but you took your time to wash the blood off your hands and switch into your god tier pj's. They were the only clothes you could switch at will, and well, they were clean! You had to act quickly- the longer you stayed here now that your cover was blown to the terrors, the harder they'd try to reap your body again.

You made your way back to the others, explaining David had to go find something and he'd catch up later. That you also had to go sadly and take care of some universe things, but you'd see them again. Lying through your teeth was not a skill you wanted to have, but you did just enough to get the job done. You hugged them tightly, kissed them both, and told them how much you loved them. How much you wish things had been different. How proud you were of them. Them echoing it back in sincerity made you really feel the meaning in your statements. You do wish things were different, but you have one choice now. They would suffer worse than you without it, and you weren't a Life player.

Goodbyes trailed off in the vacuum of space as you popped out of the bubbles. You checked your phone long enough to see if Roxy was in trouble, but all that greeted you was stuff you'd unpack later. Because you were certain there would be a later now. After all, they did their job well. Skirting just outside of the corrupted universe in an instant, even without the cover of Void anymore the horrors couldn't reach you here. They wouldn't, ever again anyway, once you swirl your hands just enough to completely, absolutely, destroy your universe. Your birth place, your birth right, your prize, no longer a presence in the vastness of space, with nary a supernova to announce its departure. Just the deep, yawning void of space left in its wake as you traveled back home. Your home. The home you had truly made for yourself.

Roxy didn't say much, even when you arrived, just worked quietly for awhile to make sure you were truly, clean of viruses. You were thankful for both, considering not long after they stepped away from the machinery, you crumpled in on yourself, passing out once the tension had left. You made it, you stupid, successful bastard. You're safe. You're home! Forever!

[clonerightsagenda]

Heeeeeeeeeey, happy Homestuck eve y'all. Over a year ago I wrote something featuring GO!John and ghost!Jade (might’ve been an abandoned Tuesjade prompt?) but never posted it because I prefer not to acknowledge any of that. However I stumbled across it while sifting through my files and thought that, on the off chance it gets Jossed by future events, I might as well post it. So here you go. 

Disclaimer that it is Sad and does not reflect retcon events in a very positive light:

You're not looking for her. That's what you tell yourself. You don't think about the timeline or people you left behind. It's not worth it, and there's no point. But people have been pestering you to go find Terezi, who's been gone for a long time and who hasn't answered her phone in months, and the furthest ring doesn't blend well with your powers. So when you zap away to find what you're missing, you find something else instead.

At first, you've done so well forgetting timelines and alternates that you see her sitting there in full God Tier garb and ask, "Jade? What are you doing here?" 

‘It hit me like a punch to the gut’ is a cliche. But you tell anyone who criticizes your movies that cliches don't happen for no reason. They get repeated because they're true. When your sister turns eyes blank as peeled eggs in your direction, you feel an ache spring up in your stomach and your lungs go empty.

She's sitting on the edge of a wooden stage. The green curtains hanging off its frame are faded and frayed. Brightly colored flowers peel off the backdrops. They look like a child's drawing of her old greehouse. Did she make it herself?

"John!" She scrambles to her feet and launches herself at you. Her hug and her stream of questions would stop your breath if shock hadn't done that already. "Where have you been? We've been looking for you and Roxy and Davesprite and Rose for ages. Have you been hiding somewhere? We thought some of the others might be, but I didn't know why you wouldn't come right back." She talks so fast that you can't think of how to respond, so it's your body that gives you away. She pulls back abruptly and looks into your eyes. Her ears flatten against her skull. "You have a heartbeat," she says.

"Sorry," you say.

Jade backs up a few paces. Her ears still reflect a dog on guard. "I'm sorry for jumping on you like that. You must be from the new timeline. Vriska said there must one out there, because she met a version of herself that was alive." She shakes her head. "I don't know why we were doomed, though. I thought I did everything right."

How are you supposed to tell her it's all your fault? "It's me," you say, to reassure her. "I'm from your timeline. It's just... it gets complicated after that."

"I have a lot of time." Her ears lose a little tension, although they don't stand back up all the way. "Can you stay for a while and tell me?"

Terezi's been missing for a while. She can take care of herself, and you're not having much luck searching anyway. "Sure."

Jade has always been a good listener. She gasps and pats your arm at appropriate intervals in your story as you give her the broad strokes. I got new powers. Everyone died. Terezi told me how to fix it. I did.

"Everyone must be so grateful," she says.

"I guess so? They don't bring it up much." It's hard to be grateful when you don't understand what the alternative is. They don't know the fate they avoided, and you don't want to remember it. 

"It's funny that's what Terezi had you change, and that it worked. I've seen her a few times, and she doesn't like to mention it. But Vriska said the living version of her was really mean."

You've heard similar things in confidence. Besides Terezi, no one much cares if the Thief of Light comes home. "I didn't talk to her for very long. She kind of disappeared after that."

Jade frowns. "Wait... if you're from my timeline... how did that work, since there must have been another version of you?"

You had really, really hoped she wouldn't ask that.

"He died," you say shortly. "A little into the trip. To make room."

She doesn't gasp. Instead she breathes out, a quiet huff as the air leaves her. "How did we take it?"

You look away. "Not we. Dave sprite died too."

Jade doesn't say anything for a long time. She sinks down onto the edge of the stage again, and after a moment you sit down too, with a careful few inches between your shoulders. Hers are trembling.

"I can't even imagine," she says finally. "How am I? How... is she?"

"You're fine."

Her lips press together. "Of course. I'm always fine. I don't know why I asked."

"Have you... seen them?" You'd been reluctant to return to the furthest ring. If you ran into another John, dead at thirteen because of you, you're not sure what you'd say.

"No. And we've looked." Her voice shakes. "We looked so hard."

"It was a big choice the denizens gave us. Maybe..." You drag your foot along the ground. "Maybe they had to be gone all the way."

"It's not fair," she says quietly. And maybe it's because it's Jade saying this - Jade, who raised herself from childhood and put up with all your bullshit and is dead, dead in front of you while you're still breathing - you finally let yourself agree.

"It sucks."

"Will you come back?" she asks when you break your long silence and say you have to go. "You're the only one who remembers traveling together."

Everyone on Earth C has divided themselves up into groups that don't include you. There are only so many hours you can budget to movies or staring at the ceiling. "Sure," you say. "I can do that."

"I told everyone I met you, and people have been asking," she says the next time you visit. "They wanted to know where Roxy, Davesprite, and Rose are. We haven't seen them either."

"Roxy came back from the other timeline with me. Didn't I tell you last time?"

"I don't remember... maybe you did. My thoughts get jumbled a lot out here." She gestures toward the horizon, where enormous tea pots rise out of tangled jungle. With surroundings like this, you're not surprised she could get mixed up. She was always forgetful before. "What about the others?"

You'd only heard about the sprites squared secondhand - they vanished somewhere and haven't been seen since. "They... something weird happened to them. I don't know what's going on with that. But... I'd tell people not to expect them any time soon."

She bites her lip and nods. "Kanaya's not going to like hearing that."

"Sorry." An enameled cat painted on two stories of ceramic regards you accusingly. "I get Dave sprite a lot more now. I wish I could've told him that."

Jade doesn't look at you. "I don't remember the last thing I said to him. None of us were talking much by the end, and you don't think about that kind of thing when you see someone every day. There's always tomorrow."

You don't remember what you said to the people from your timeline either. You could change it - you can go anywhere in time and space, teleport right in and tell them, This is what you mean to me. This is what I want you to know. But what would be the point?

"I do know the last thing I said to Rose, though," Jade continues. "I still have all our conversations saved in Pesterchum. I reread them sometimes during our trip. I spent three whole years thinking of how I'd say hello."

"You never said hi?" You had briefly. Rose had wanted you to tell Roxy something. What had her message been? 

"No. First I was evil, and then I was dead."

"I don't know what you said in the new timeline, but you did meet then. Obviously."

She nods. "At least all of you could be happy."

Are all of you happy? You think of Terezi, still missing in the void looking for someone who's never coming back. You think about you. "Yeah," you say. "At least there's that."

Your visits get more frequent. After long breaks, the gap between your ages is too jarring. You're taller than her now. Were you really that young when you played the game?

She offers to bring Dave to say hi once, but you turn her down. "I could hang out with Dave on Earth if I wanted to," you say. "Although he hangs out a lot more with Karkat. They're dating, isn't that weird?"

"Not really. He spends most of his time with the trolls here. I see Jake more than I see him."

"I mean, because he's a boy."

One of her ears flicks back. "I never understood why people got so hung up on things like that. I never saw the difference."

"Wait, are you saying you would date a girl?"

She shrugs. "Maybe in another life."

You had another life, and it doesn't have much to recommend itself. It's your first one you revisit now. It's funny. When you were on the Prospitian battleship, all you wanted was to get off of it. You didn't think you were having any fun. So where are all these good memories coming from? The two of you sit together and revisit them. Remember when we made dinner together that first night? you'll ask each other. Remember when Nanna baked us all birthday cakes and we made wishes when we blew out the candles? Remember, remember, remember?

You haven't told any of the others about this. They wouldn't care - this isn't "their" Jade, after all - but also you want something of your own. Jade covers her mouth when you tell her about Rose and Kanaya's wedding and asks you to congratulate them for her. You explain your living sister spends a lot of time away exploring other worlds. One day you bring her a photo Jade sent you a little after her twentieth birthday of herself on an alien planet. Jade stares at it for a long time before handing it back and saying "So that's what I would've looked like if I'd grown up."

Sometimes you just sit quietly in each other's company. You don't tell her that you barely speak to anyone back on Earth, that you feel like all your friends are actors played by people who aren't doing a very good job, and if you push a tree too hard it'll fall over and reveal itself to be painted plywood like something out of the Twilight Zone. You don't say that for every year your dead sister, forever sixteen, doesn't show, you feel like you're carrying twice that weight, and that even though you're a Breath player, it's getting harder and harder to breathe. You don’t share that Caliborn has been bothering you for a rematch, and you’re thinking maybe you should take him up on it. It'd be nice to have a problem you can hit again. Maybe the others would want to come. It could be as close to old times as you’re going to get.

"Do you think I made the right decision?" you ask one day to break the silence.

She looks at you. She's realized you hate seeing her blank eyes and usually keeps her gaze averted. The sight still makes you flinch. "Oh John," she says. "I don't know."

"This timeline is because of me. I should have found a better way, a way everyone could've been ok. But I just... took orders. That's all I ever do. I take orders and get people hurt." It's hard to force the words out. They wobble and crack, but you don't cry. You won't cry. "I'm sorry. I never wanted things to turn out this way." The last bit is hardest. If you say it out loud, will all the stage dressings of the world you go back to fall down? Will the actors playing your friends believe you think they're not worth what you did? "I think I made a mistake."

"It's ok," she says.

"It's not ok." Your voice rises, and for the first time in years you feel heat prickling at your eyelids. "I was just trying to fix things." Your hands flicker with blue-white light and you know you could keep trying, go back to reset things again and again like a gamer angling for a high score, but you'll never get back that first life you lost. There's no way to win without leaving a million dead ends in your wake. Or if there was, you weren't good enough to find it. "All I was ever trying to do was save you."

[ardenttheories]

You should make a post with how you came to your conclusions about what the classes represent

Most of my understanding of the Classes is based on what I could find from other Classpectors; reading and inferring from there is perhaps one of the best ways you can develop new ideas. I’ve essentially pooled together everything I’ve read combined with things those posts have perhaps touched on but never truly developed. 

Witch: 

Most Classpectors agree that Witches are rebellious, and that they tend to completely break the rules of their Aspect as a result. I mostly use Jade as my example of this because she’s the easiest one to see it with; she breaks the rules of Space and makes them her own by shrinking down planets that don’t turn into blackholes after a certain point. If you were to resize a planet in real life, you’d be completely fucking with the laws of physics, and disastrous effects would occur; Jade bypasses this by defining what these laws are and deciding that, hey, that law isn’t actually relevant to her! I ended up deciding that this was a “Control” class simply because to do this, Witches must have a hell of a lot of control over their Aspect. 

Heir: 

I diverge from a lot of Classpectors with this on a few points, I think? But I mostly used John to define what I thought it meant to be a Heir. They inherit their Aspect, and adhere to its rules, but control it incredibly well within those rules to make it suit them - though often without even realising it. John, for instance, has never really stepped out of the boundaries of what it means to control the Breeze, has never redefined what Breath is or even actively acknowledged that he’s doing these things, but his control is incredible; not only can he turn into the Breeze, but he can literally wield it like a weapon to drill a hole through Skaia itself and use it to move things as heavy as a car. His “Control” is much more passive than Jade’s, as it happens almost naturally as he works through the game, rather than because he looked at the Breeze and thought “huh. wonder what’d happen if i did this”. He just sort of does things and the Breeze bends to his desires without breaking its own rules - which makes him hella powerful still, but definitely much more passive than a Witch.

Seer: 

Seers are actually still kind of elusive to me, so I go mainly on what others have said, which is usually that Seers have to act on the things they see rather than simply advise people on it. They can’t just be informants, or just watch things as they happen; they need to really dive into it. They need to take what they’ve Learnt and put it to effective use themself, rather than relying on others to do all of the work for them. They’re, to me, one of the “Learn” classes (and the passive one, since they mostly observe their Aspect) because their whole purpose is to Seek their Aspect in its various forms and learn from what they See.

Mage: 

So I know that the way I view this seems to be pretty controversial? But I like to think that Mages Suffer and Experience at the same time - mostly because of how Sollux and Meulin act in the comic. It’s one of the Classes I used both research and my own interpretation for! 

Mages experience their Aspect in both good and bad forms, and become actual experts on the subject, which we see most with Sollux who is a complete whizz at anything to do with Code and Rules - two of Doom’s most predominant subsets - to such a degree that he creates a virus to destroy the universe. We also know that Mages suffer for this depth of information, as we can see Meulin actively suffering from Heart; she’s in two relationships that are fairly toxic for her, one of which has led to her own loss of hearing, but she also likely has an incredible understanding of what Heart is and how it can be used - and, yes, that totally means she’s fully aware of who has what soulmate outside of her own situation. 

Much like the Seer, their job is to just… act. They need to break their own cycle of suffering and use what they Know to help others rather than just keep all of that knowledge to themselves. It’s pretty obvious why this is a “Learn” class (through their active experiences with their Aspect, they Learn everything they need to know about it), although I have to admit that it’s kind of funny how this Active class’ challenge is to do something a bit more passive than the passive Seer’s challenge. 

Sylph and Maid: 

Again, mostly based on research rather than interpretation, but I also tend to contrast the two the most out of any other Class pair. Most of this was just a lot of reading! Sylphs are really good at giving advice, but tend to focus too much on helping other people - with the potential of helping too much, and overriding the person’s ability to learn and grow as a person, thus becoming reliant on the Sylph - and not enough on helping themself. Their challenge is to figure out that they NEED to take their own advice, and roll with it, because people will listen to them better if they lead by example and just provide a path for people to follow. 

Maids, on the other hand, rely on people to show them what their Aspect is and what it means, every little nook and cranny that exists as part of it, until they reach a point where they decide they’ve had enough and want to take control - thus stepping out of the shadows and into their own to decide what their Aspect means and why. This definitely sounds a bit like a Witch, and in a way I think it’s meant to! But Sylphs and Maids are very much “Healer” classes; all of their efforts are pooled into either Healing their aspect or Healing others with their Aspect. So while a Witch and Maid sound similar, it’s their purposes that really divide them. 

Thief: 

A mix of research and a mild obsession with Vriska. Obviously Thieves steal, and they steal for their own benefit - we see this with Vriska, stealing Luck from her enemies and using it to boost her own Luck - but I quickly realised that the Beta troll session was completely inundated with Information. They had so much information it was basically coming out of their ears; Rose’s FAQ, the puzzles on their walls, their (slightly more competent) Exiles, their seemingly more helpful consorts - all of it lead to an overabundance of Light. That’s what got me thinking that Thieves tend to show what a session has too much of, similar to how a Knight shows what the session lacks. 

You can even argue this for Meenah! Though they’re technically dead, their lives continue on endlessly in the dreambubbles; I’d say that’s a bit too much Life, considering it’s this abundance of Life that leads to Aranea formulating and acting on her Desires. So naturally Thieves come under the “Steal” Classes as the more active participant! 

Rogue: 

Rogues still confuse me, much like the Seers do. A lot of what I think about Rogues come from research, which means basically anything I say about them is rehashed from Dahni’s posts, or other Classpeting blogs. I can’t really add much else here, if I’m honest, except that Rogues definitely come under the “Steal” Classes as the passive counterpart due to their initial concern of lacking their Aspect, their Stealing of their Aspect for the benefit of others, and the pitfalls they face if they attempt to give too much of their Aspect to other people and don’t try to retain it for themselves. 

As a note, I also tend to accept the idea that Thieves have high confidence to cover up an actual lack of confidence. It suits well with the Rogue’s lacking confidence that they then gain over time. 

Knight and Page: 

This was another controversial one, and I think I got into an argument with someone over it (they were very adamant that they weren’t going to listen to what I had to say). I see these classes as the “Protector” classes, since the way they use their Classpects tends to be to Protect people or their Aspect. Dave, for instance, uses Time to Protect his friends from the severe lack of Time that exists within their session, and takes the brunt of their Endings himself to Protect them from their own ends (which we can see with Davesprite leaping back in time to ensure that John and Jade don’t die). 

Horuss uses Void to Protect himself from things he doesn’t want to see or hear; we see this most notably with the way he pretends not to know what Rufioh is trying to say when he attempts to bring up the idea of ending their relationship. Jake, too, uses Hope to protect himself; Brain Ghost Dirk is a pretty primary example of this, who ends up protecting Jake from Aranea. 

I also like to see these two as inverted Classes of Lack - where Knights think they lack their Aspect when they actually don’t, and Pages actually do lack their Aspect at first but pretend that they don’t. It made sense to me to come to this conclusion when considering that Jake tends to ghost Rage when he starts out the game, using the Doubt of others to Protect himself from situations he found uncomfortable or didn’t want to acknowledge. 

I also like to see the Knights as the passive Class - since their actions are very based around the Protection of others - and Pages as the active Class - since their actions are very based around the Protection of themselves. And just… generally the fact that Jake’s massive Hope explosion is a lot more active than Dave’s living a week in three days (or some similar timeframe) through the use of stable loops. 

Prince and Bard: 

Another bit of both for these! Princes are really the ones that started my whole T/R/F theory because of the disparity between Dirk and Bro, and the initial place where I decided to divide “Destroys with Aspect” and “Destroys Aspect”; Dirk’s actions are a lot more active and hands on than Gamzee’s are, with Dirk actively destroying Heart (such as by trying to puppeteer his friends into getting stronger, or through literally tearing out Souls) and Gamzee passively destroying with Rage (such as by using Karkat’s fear to get to Equius, Terezi’s Rage to get to Vriska, and Nepeta’s Rage at Equius’ death to get the better of her Impulses and catch her off guard). 

Princes always seem to focus more on the destruction of their Aspect to me, while Bards seem to focus more on destroying with it. I mostly got the idea of them being Ghosting Classes from other Classpectors - it’s a thing I adore, with my whole heart - and specifically I developed the idea of the Bardic Split from one of Dahni’s posts; she pointed out how Gamzee, I think, Splits because of Dave introduction the Doubt of his Belief, and that just seemed so poetically apt that I had to jump on it as soon as I could. Most of my ideas of Bards and their whims stemmed from there and, funnily enough, an obsession with Gamzee; we can see how his Aspect leads him around by the horns, and we can see pretty quickly that his challenge is to rein his Aspect in so he isn’t destroying for the sake of destruction. 

This was also based on what I’d already noticed with Dirk as a Prince! Dirk’s journey as a Prince of Heart goes from wanton destruction to a more controlled destruction; he’s not destroying Heart as a whole by late game, not destroying the Heart of himself or his friends - he’s destroying the negative subsections of Heart, or the parts of Heart in his enemies that most benefit the team. So I always adored the concept of Princes and Bards being “Destroyer” Classes, and developed on their passive “with Aspect” and “of Aspect” destructive properties from there. 

Lord and Muse: 

I wasn’t going to do this, but it’d be a good idea to explain it, I think; I completely bullshitted my way through a vaguely understandable explanation of the Lord and Muse Classes. We all know that they’re Masterclasses, and that Muses “Inspire” and Lords “Dominate”, so I collected that under the general umbrella of “Own” because I noticed that a lot of what our canon Lord and Muse do are based heavily on the powers of their Aspects overall; they Own their Aspect to such a degree that everything it encompasses is under their whim. This also led to the idea that the Masterclasses essentially contain an equal divide of the powers of the normal Classes; if you’re meant to have diversity of player style through the Classes, then the Masterclasses would be at a hideous disadvantage - unless they were every other class wrapped into two. 

It also explains why Lord English destroys Time but still adheres to the rules, and why Alternate Calliope advises Alpha Calliope to redefine what she wants Space to be. I also ended up trying to define what their challenges are based on what little we see of them in canon, which… ended up being harder to explain that I had thought; Calliope initially has no Space, and then meets a version of herself that has too much Space. She inspires others to create Space, and then inspires herself to do the same (in the form of Alternate Calliope). My logic with that was that Muses must usually flick between lacking their Aspect and having too much of it, and needing to find a stable middle ground while inspiring themself to act; they can’t let the session have too much, but they can’t let it have too little, either, and they need to learn to take part in what they’re doing because their every action is based heavily around their own concepts of right and wrong, of good and evil. 

Lords we know even less about. I pretty much based that around Lord English, and how I thought he’d be beneficial in a session, and what his drawback was; LE hoards all of his Aspect to himself and deprives every other session of it, then uses the Time he’s hoarded to destroy Time itself. So clearly the way to fix that is to teach him to share his Aspect more evenly, but still to dominate it; to act as he desires, but still give room for other people to grow, and to use his actions to help the group as a whole rather than just himself. So this one was entirely my own interpretation based on vague headcanons more than anything else! I kind of like it, though - and I like the concept that they’re “Own” Classes, as well as Masterclasses that encompass the capabilities of all other Classes as a whole. 

[elfstuck]

War in the Chessfields

I have realized that, no matter how busy my life gets (guys, guuuuuyzzz, it’s Night of the Nocturne right now and I could be searching for Strange Chests that might contain the new Smirch gene!), I really need to get farther along in Homestuck because it’s starting to creep into mainstream politics. (He was told about Homestuck, and then he started reading it.) Also, Chibipaw says there is “good stuff’ coming up soon (that’s as much detail as my anti-spoiler policy allows) and I need to hurry up and get to it.

So... where did I leave off? Oh yeah. NinjaJade had taken out the wearer of my future cosplay project, but had missed PM sailing off into the sunset (moonset? Prospitset? Do they even have a sun on these planet-things?), so she’ll have to get the ring back to her later. To expediate that, Jade marries herself.

Oh wait. The four dots. Agh. I mean, aside from being equally spaced in a way that would make them endlessly annoying to wear, they... they may signify the four fingers. Homestuckians have four-fingered hands. I’m not sure if I’ve noticed this before.

Jade is immediately overwhelmed with the Spirit of the Ring: she gains wings, a tri-pointy hat with horns, tentacles, and a fake through-the-body sword. So... an amalgam of all the sprite encodings so far.

Next panel, turns out she was only thinking that happened. It doesn’t work that way on humans.

Elsewhere (dammit, I should’ve stuck with the last post a few more panels so the POV shift happened at the beginning) we have yet another WV. This one is WARWEARY VILLEIN who is either an animated stick-man, or is waving a stick on a banner: crossed beams, ragged red-and-purple robes and a white sash. He/it has a bucket on its head with the familiar Sburb spirograph.

Next up (aagh) is something with flash and sound. This is probably the Cool Thing Coming Up Soon that Chibi told me about. eep. Flash takes forever.

WV is being told to “Rise Up,” which is probably not supposed to make me think of Hamilton as this was written several years ago. But those words are gonna be attached to that song for a long time.

I click to the next screen. I am faced with this:

And I remember two things: (1) Firefox always thinks Flash is out of date, because every time Firefox updates ANYTHING, it decides Flash is out of date. My Firefox is a couple of editions behind (I’m not “updating” to Quantum that will kill several of my beloved extensions), so I’m going to see this A LOT. Sigh.

And (2) aaaaagh my laptop does not have a “print screen” button. It had a “print screen” macro that stopped working. (I have an Alienware laptop. WHODAFUK decided that a gaming laptop didn’t need a “print screen” button? Like, is that now an obscure and rare function? I STILL HAVE A CAPSLOCK BUTTON. I DO NOT NEED A CAPSLOCK BUTTON; CAN I REPLACE IT WITH PRTSCRN? (I typed that without using the capslock button, because remembering to un-capslock is always worse than just holding the shift button with my left pinky and using the wrong finger for “A”, and I guess “q” and “z” but those don’t come up as often.)

Quick check to the Alien “TactX” command center... huh. Print Screen is working now. It wasn’t last week. Yay, I guess? (Someday, I will once again have a boyfriend who speaks fluent Linux, and this time, I will get him to TEACH IT TO ME and I will defenestrate my laptop.) Anyway. Here we go.

3x3 chessboard; the kings move a bit, and then run into each other and the whole thing turns white silhouette. This means this is a meta-story-thing, related to the previous Grand Chessboard event, which I have mostly forgotten. (I have the link saved, though, so I can watch it again anytime. It’s on my schedule. “1. Run out of Stucky and Stony fanfic. 2. Rewatch Homestuck chess scene.” Blame dsudis for the delay.)

Clownsprite image appears. Chess pieces keep moving in the background. I have to screencap several times to get a good picture of the chess pieces (sometimes there’s only one visible) and the sprite with the pretty shade of aqua in the middle instead of white. I’m sure you’re all thrilled that I’m focused on the important parts of the story.

Next, he flickers and I fail to s’cap the transition between that and the full-layout chess set.

Please, someone tell me that someone makes these chess sets. That several people make these chess sets. Tell me the are sold with the label, “This Is A Chess Set, Not A Collection Of Marital Aids. We Promise.”

Birdsprite appears. (At least, I think that’s birdsprite.) Oh wait, no, that’s catsprite in the princess outfit. It is lavender, Rose’s color. Or one of them. Does that mean the davesprite will be red? (Do I really need to screencap all of these? Probably not, but this is as much for my entertainment as anything else. Also, I want to be able to reread them and figure out what I was thinking.) I considered re-trying to catch one with a darker purple circle or other higher contrast, and decided not to bother.

The music seems nice enough, what I can hear of it before I hit stop so I can screencap. (If you’re new - various suggestions have been made on how to deal with the Flash bits in ways that aren’t “stop & screengrab every couple of seconds.” I have nixed all of them. I enjoy doing this one fragmented piece at a time.)

And then the scene changes: the board is replaced with a WHOLE PLANET BOARD.

Rose and John’s sprites are in the upper corners, starting with top right and moving widdershins. Widdershins is a destructive direction; they are unmaking the world. (Erm. As obscure as Hussie gets sometimes, I have doubts that that particular bit of symbolism applies here.)

Aaaand here comes the davebirdswordsprite. Orange, not red.

 Davesprite tucks away into the bottom left corner, continuing widdershins, and the cubeworld backs off or is replaced by a round world, very bright and faint, with VERY BRIGHT FLASHING blue lines around it. (Same blue lines as above. They just got brighter.) Then the planet darkens (this is what happens when you stop the Flash every second or two; you wind up  giving far too much import to transition scenes.)

Imma make a prediction: Jadesprite is due to make an appearance. (Does Jade have a sprite yet? Something with a pumpkin?)

BUT NO! The world gets bigger, moves closer, until it FILLS THE WHOLE SCREEN! Then it fades out to white, and gradually (well, gradually if you’re stopping every time something moves or flickers), we get a new scene:

Aww, the rolling hills of Chesslandia, with its famed pixeltrees. We float over the landscape until we reach the castle. (Or maybe, “a castle.” I dunno. Maybe there are hundreds of castles in Chesslandia.) The pixelgrass fields bring color to the landscape, and a couple of pixelfolk play hide-and-seek in the tall grass near the aqua river.

Well, it’s got a turret and banners, and that kinda says “castle,” along with the whole, y’know, chess kings & queens motif, but that looks kinda small for a castle. Also rather isolated. Why build a castle if there’s nothing near it to defend? I see that there are people, but no town. Is the castle all that remains? Am I looking upon the desolate post-apocalyptic wasteland of Chesslandia?

We pass the people and zoom in, seeing the yellow banner waving madly in the gale-force breezes near the castle turret. This is, apparently, to introduce the army of Chesslandia, because the scene whites out again, and then switches to the marching hordes.

I am probably not supposed to think their little ± symbol reminds me of a leviathan cross, a.k.a. the Satanic cross. (Hey, if I make a CD cosplay outfit, can I have a purple banner with a pentagonal ± symbol on it? Or is he not part of this army?)

Then we pull back to see the huge crowd of them, and they fade, and a different banner fades in: this one is purple - and behind it is a yellow-clad army.

AAAH! The yellow flag is for Prospit, and that’s the Dersian army marching on it. And the purple banner here is Derse, and the Prospit army - complete with the same ± symbol - is marching. Here, have some Prospit army:

This isn’t because you need the picture, but because I captured the flash at that point so I can watch them marching and waving weapons, with the sky flickering in the background. It’s very soothing. Wish I could capture it as a gif.

And then... FIGHT! Armies meet on the battlefield! Sparks fly from their blades, which are apparently made from different metals. They both wear stripey shirts and chessboard tabards, of different color combos.

Guys. Gals. Whatever. Readers. I have been cheated. I thought Homestuck cosplay was limited to “t-shirts with a zodiac symbol + horns & weird sunglasses,” or “one of these four kids (also t-shirt with symbol).” There is AWESOME cosplay opportunities in this series. Nobody told me.

I mean, they told me about the tentibulges, because my friends know where my interests lie (or squirm, as the case may be), but even the friends who knew I’d done 6+ years of RenFaire didn’t bother telling me, “omg you should see the amazing costume options, and also, they wouldn’t be impossible to make!”

(I mean, I’ve looked into WV’s costume, but it looks difficult and too hot to wear at most conventions.) (See how I focus on the important parts of the story?)

Spaceship takedown attempt. Or maybe this is a drop ship. Looks like there are many such ships. Anyway, we see battles, and it pulls back to show the larger scene, and the horrors of war:

Well, the horrors of neon, purple-vs-yellow war. ... Is that a giant horse shadow with tentacles on its back?

Why, yes it is. Knight vs... King? Queen? We’re back to the chessboard, with only a tiny hint of a pixeltree in the corner to let you know this is the large-scale war happening above the ground. Then we get this:

I’m not sure what’s going on here, but they’re too cute to pass up. There are 9 little fellows, so they’re not “pawns.” Then a giant black chesspiece stomps into the center of them and they fall aside, scattering (I didn’t catch that picture), and then... the WV banner thingie is raised again.

That makes it seem like we’re wrapping up this storything, because that’s the image that we started on. It slowly pulls back to show an empty Chesslandia with a flower stand, waving a red banner.

The pixelgrass has return to the fields, although the pixeltrees have not. Or maybe they just don’t grow here.

AAuugghhh nooo... that was a picture of the past. Now, the lovely flowerstand is in ruins; fire everywhere, and a lone derseling wanders the war-ravaged fields of Chesslandia. :( We pull in tight to his grief-stricken, bleak expression (don’t ask how I can identify that from two white dots on a black circle; I just can) and then he (or she) oversees the huge battle on the fields below.

Woe. Woe has come to Chesslandia. Woe, and fire. Woe, and fire, and pixels.

Zir face is shadowed by woe and fire and pixels.

Zie is not looking nearly as woeful in this image. Hrrm. Then we see the Black Queen rise...

Then we zoom in again, this time to the scepter, which is full of clouds and the spirography thing:

This is all getting a little too “Men in Black,” with the world in a marble and all that. Are we going to zoom into the scepter again, to the center of the spirography symbol, and find ourselves moving into John’s balcony?

Well, no. We do zoom in, into the world and the cubeworld and such, but we get a black-and-white image of something shadowy flying over Chesslandia.

We zoom in again, and we see... not Spades Slick, despite the cut on the eye. That other character with the same appearance.

It flies with malice (don’t ask me how I can identify malice from that), but is faced with a lone Dersian defender:

We cut back to the war on the ground, the clashing swords and all that, but the combatants move aside. And this had better wrap up pretty quickly, because my printscreen macro just stopped working. (WTF? If anyone knows how to give advice on this, plz contact me.) Anyway. They move aside, and then snap into line.

Our lone Dersite with the tattered red banner leads them through the pixeltrees toward a set of checkered ruins.

Elsewhere, PM lands, and notices the missing ring. White Queen is not happy. There’s another huge scepter waving. White Queen flashes white all over, and shrinks - and hands the scepter to PM.

Looks like PM is in line to be the new WQ. However, the handoff is spotted by someone who is Definitely Not A Member Of The Midnight Crew.

Meanwhile, the Dersite hordes march to confront the Black Queen. Our purple-robed hero(ine) glares, and then looks upward, sees the flying not-a-bird person overhead. The Spadesy-person waves a swords and slices through the black scepter.

(I think I figured out the screencap problem. It won’t work if I have the Flash selected. Which is stupid. Really stupid.)

Black queen, missing her scepter and its four spinny baubles, also shrinks.

Heartsy spy leaps out and attacks the new white queen. (Gonna knock her into next week. This is a problem, because next week is a massive international holiday and it’ll be hard to find time to liveblog.) White scepter goes flying over a waterfall.

We see, inside the white scepter, the purple-robed defender, and it pulls back to see the world, and then the scepter itself, which lands by the banks of the aqua river surrounded by pixelgrass.

(That picture’s superfluous; it’s not relevant to the story. It’s here becaue I think it’s pretty.)

Aaand now I should watch it again and get a sense of the whole story instead of stopping every two seconds to ponder the meaning of each cut scene.

***

Two minutes and 15 seconds of flash that takes me an hour and a half to write about, all the while worrying that Tumblr’s going to have some weird hiccup and lose the whole thing.

So: back queen dead; white queen deposed by losing her marbles; new manager of each; war possibly stopped at the moment. White scepter maybe recoverable and could be combined with Jade’s ring to fix it. Black scepter broken; would need something else to fix. (Superglue?)

Jade has not yet entered the chessgame at the macro level. Jade needs to install Sburb and get into the game.

[the-caws-meow]

davesprite?

oh whoa whats this

What they smell like: wet bird, and dust

How they sleep (sleeping position, schedule, etc): they toss and turn a lot but he keeps his wings tucked around him and his tail tucked in them too. he looks like a seed that blooms every morning when he wakes up and cracks open his wing shell

What music they enjoy: alternative indie with light rapping

How much time they spend getting ready every morning: so long,,, he preens for so long his hair must be perfect even though he knows hal is going to mess it up later because hes an asshole and thats what friends do

Their favorite thing to collect: shiny things and ribbon!! so much ribbon

Left or right-handed: right

Religion (if any): if theres a god hes been dead far too long to give a shit

Favorite sport: tennis

Favorite touristy thing to do when traveling (museums, local food, sightseeing, etc): go to the top of the tallest building, where its quiet because very few people arent too lazy to climb it and just,, breathe. feel the air rushing past hear the familiar yet not so familiar sounds. close his eyes and just breathe.

Favorite kind of weather: melting hot, he wants to be dripping into the pavement

A weird/obscure fear they have: dogs

The carnival/arcade game they always win without fail: they’re more of a watcher than a player

i just realized these are all the same answer as if i were describing me except im both handed sjjfndnsk

[betweengenesisfrogs]

OTCHS FOLLOW-UP #1: HEARTS AND MINDS

So, Tumblr seems to have eaten the message, but re: my last post about the nature of the self, someone messaged me pointing out that I completely neglected to mention the Heart aspect, which basically represents the very thing I was talking about: the ur-Self! Which inspired some great reflections, so let’s touch on that before I drop eleven pages of Gnosticism on you later tonight. If that was you, please let me know so I can give you credit!

EDIT: Ah, I figured it out! It was homeschool-winner! Thank you for the terrific message! :)

So, in the past I wasn’t much for classpect analysis ‘cause I kinda saw people trying to use them predicatively, like “this will happen because Character X has Y classpect,” and there was always just such a wide range of interpretations available that any claim to certainty seemed a bit dubious. But now that Homestuck’s over, I find I’m fond of them, not as predictors but as tools for understanding all the weird symbols in Homestuck’s hyperflexible mythology.

I totally agree that Heart represents the Ur-Self. It clearly represents the soul, as Calliope tells us, and we see it on full display with Dirk’s ability to suck out souls (and put them in something else). He’s the Destroyer of Souls, and possibly also a destroyer by means of souls (by accidentally creating the Calsoul and thus Lord English? By duplicating his soul in the form of AR/Hal, whose soul is real enough to be part of a kernelsprite and the Calsoul?) Dirk fucks things up with/for souls. That’s pretty clear.

But these souls also seem to carry enough of their person’s qualities to represent their Ur-Self. LE certainly has qualities of all the people in the Calsoul. It seems pretty reasonable to interpret Heart as relating to people’s Self. That would make Dirk someone who destroys or suppresses Selfhood. Makes sense; Bro was certainly able to suppress Dave’s self, as we see it emerging by the ending. And LE’s Hal definitely comes out in Doc Scratch’s manipulations, which serve to rob others of their agency. So it checks out.

I really love the way souls are represented in the SBURB Glitch FAQ/Replay Value AU (which is an awesome AU, btw, y’all should check it out), where they’re nicknamed shinies, and basically everything has one. They’re the code for rocks or grass or game objects or people, and Heart Players can mess with them as one of their means of exploiting the game engine to compensate for bugs like the debug menu in a Bethesda Game. It’s awesome.

Imagine a game engine that calls up individual manifestations of you, which behave like different entities but they’re all called from one base file that’s copied and modified for different circumstances. That might be the kind of game we’re working with here.

But no classpect is ever just one thing, right? That’s what’s fascinating about them, they’re often multiple meanings fused fluidly together. Light is Luck, but also Information, Knowledge. Even Time and Space have subtler qualities. So I think we need to look at the Leijons as well.

When we first hear about Heart, it seems like it might be a silly, power of heart aspect, right? Because we (all too easily) dismiss Nepeta, and see Heart as just meaning love, meaning Nepeta’s shipping.

But I’m gonna say that Shipping, Self, and Agency all roll together into one concept called Heart. By pairing people up, Nepeta is exploring compatibilities among archetypal versions of people. Terezi fits with Dave in some ways, and Vriska in others. A Rogue of Heart might be able to move people around to their benefit to find better combinations. (A Thief of Heart would of course ship people for her own benefit rather than theirs, a classic seducer and heartbreaker...but maybe she’d also be someone who could steal a literal soul.) Meulin does this too, but more directly, as matchmaker more than shipper (the Mage at work). Heck, I think Davepeta’s very existence is a strong argument for this, right? The fusion of Nepeta and Davesprite’s souls created one hell of a positive, affirming combination. Like a bird and cat-themed Garnet. Meanwhile LE’s souls amplify a monster.

So yeah, in Homestuck Heart means: Soul + Self + Agency over Events+ Compatibility + Love.

Thinking about Heart also got me thinking, interestingly, about Mind. They’re an obvious aspect pair, right? One is the soul and one is the brain, duh. But I was never able to explain them on a larger level than that.

And then just now I got it. Because Mind in Homestuck means Choice. We see this everywhere in Homestuck. Terezi’s Mind abilities allow her to see what choices people will make and how to get the best results from them, to the point where she can use people’s choices to defy luck. Her retcon arc (which I will talk about in so, so much depth later) is about rewriting her own choices, or really giving herself the freedom to make new ones. Meanwhile, Latula uses her own choices as a shield but can easily interpret the choices her peers made as the Ancestors.

So, like Time and Space, Light and Void, and so on, Heart and Mind are a balanced pair where the further you go from one, the closer you move into the other. Heart is your Self and your role in the cosmos altogether. Mind is the individual choices you make to differentiate yourself from all your other selves! Heart is what’s consistent across all timelines, Mind is what makes individual timelines exist! Heart is Dave-ness; Mind is the difference between Doomed Dave, Dave, and Davesprite. Heart is what’s unchangable about you; Mind is what’s changing. Every self matters, but so, too, does the eternal Self

You could almost think of it as if Heart’s your base stats in a video game, and Mind’s the stat boosts you gain a long the way. Say, Pokemon. I bet Terezi would be really good at EV training. >:)

Hell, this even gets spelled out for us! Remember how Karkat introduced the concept of different game sessions to us?

CG: TRY TO THINK MORE ABSTRACTLY. CG: THINK ABOUT VIDEO GAMES. CG: WHAT'S AN EARTH GAME YOU LIKED TO PLAY? CG: NAME ONE. EB: ummmm... EB: crash bandicoot? CG: OK I DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS, BUT I HAVE A FEELING IT'S A REALLY LAME EXAMPLE, BUT THAT'S FINE, IT'S NOT THE POINT. CG: SO LET'S SAY YOU PLAY YOUR BANDICOOT AND I PLAY MY BANDICOOT. CG: THEY ARE ESSENTIALLY THE SAME BANDICOOT, SAME APPEARANCE AND DESIGN AND BEHAVIORS. CG: BUT THEY ARE STILL COMPLETELY SEPARATE BANDICOOTS ON SEPARATE SCREENS. CG: SO WE BOTH HAVE OUR OWN ASS BANDICOOTS TO OURSELVES, THE SAME BUT DIFFERENT. CG: OUR JACKS ARE THE SAME BUT DIFFERENT TOO. CG: SAME GUY, DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES AND OUTCOMES.

Think of all the Dersites and Prospitians, and all the different roles they take on. Jack and all his gang and even WV and PM at different points in their history. Funnily enough, in many ways the players of the Game have a lot in common with its NPCs.

We are all our own individual Bandicoot, yet still part of the much larger Bandicoot that makes us who we are.

Which means that Heart and Mind aren’t just any other aspects. They tie very directly into one of the biggest thematic concerns of Homestuck itself!

That’s so freaking cool!

So yeah, thanks so much for this insight! :D

(PS: Also, I really dug the point that the ur-Self could be described as the Platonic Self, that the “archetypes” I keep talking about really resemble Plato’s theory of Forms. A connection that’s worth checking out, especially when Dirk, Prince of Heart  has the username timaeustestified, a reference to a major Platonic Dialogue. Dirk is the Platonic Form. It’s him. Thanks for that insight, too!)

[classpecting-through-time]

Could you do a Mage of Mind, personality and ability-wise?

First ask of the day!

Mage is the active understand or knowledge Class. People have this idea that Mage’s suffer from their Aspect. While we see evidence in canon as to why this may have gotten started, I don’t fully agree with it. What I actually believe comes from their “suffering”, and a nice counter to Seers, is that the understanding and knowledge they have of their Aspect is biased to their own EXPERIENCES. I think that is a much better word than suffer for them. They experience their Aspect, and from that they gather their understanding of what the Aspect is or means. While Seers may have a broad library to tell them about their Aspect, they are all likely to learn and see the same things. Where the Mage is unique, is in just that. Their own personal experiences give them a varied and sometimes completely unique outlook and understanding of their Aspect. To even a point they can know even more than what Seers can gather from experience. Examples of this in canon come in the form of Sollux having the voices of the imminently deceased, who spoke of their own Doom and of even Sollux’s, down to his blindness and double death. Meulin had her mastery of matchmaking, able to make up the best ships of who would be best with who, and even having possibly the closest person to her change her life completely with deafening her, and even using her feelings and self to groom and conform her into his religion and practices. As was also made clear with the examples above, these experiences are of both the good and bad. A challenge for the Mage would be to broaden their horizons or see things from a different angle.

The Aspect of Mind is the opposite of Heart, as such, I see Mind as being the outer you rather than the inner you. Now hold on, you may be thinking, what difference does that make? Sounds like Heart to me. Well, let me explain. People are driven by one of two things. One’s Heart or Mind. They will either listen to their Heart or Mind when making a decision on what to do. As such, while Heart dealt with biased feelings and just doing what felt right, Mind would be the unbiased logical side. The let’s think this through instead of jumping in on a gut reaction. Terezi’s, and Latula somewhat given Redglare, interest in court is a good example of Mind. That no matter what side of the courtroom you’re on, Defense or Prosecutor, it’s your job to look at the case and evidence with an unbiased eye and use deductive reasoning to prove whichever side you’re on. I think of Mind as the Aspect of reason. Mind is an equal playing field. Unlike Heart where you side on something over another, Mind keeps to the middle. Mind takes in both accounts and doesn’t let their own personal ties sway their exact judgement. Back to what I was saying about the outerself, Mind only shows this outwardness of neutrality of whatever it is they are involved with. Mind makes its decision and comes to the conclusions it does no matter how morally sound it is. I also like to think of Mind as literal thought. Mind is the different choices we make that leads to the different outcomes that come to pass. We see this with Terezi and her coin flips. Leading to things like one Dave going back to lay on his Quest Bed, for another Dave to come alone eventually to kill him and make him ascend. Also with the way we see what happens to the John who goes to fight Typheus early, and the one Davesprite came back to stop.

The Mage of Mind would be someone who knows or understands Mind on their own personal level. This Mage may be sort of know-it-all to those around them. What I mean is, perhaps they were or are surrounded by very smart and logical thinkers. They were taught through their own choices made and by other outside influence to take a second to reflect before making a decision on something. Perhaps they were once seen as a delinquent. Someone who never thought twice on what they were doing or were about to say. This may have led them to getting into trouble or learning lessons based on their decision making. It’s as if their Mind was unfiltered, wanting to do whatever it so pleased because why the hell not? This can allow the Mage to learn a lot, that they cna also pass onto others of their team. I see this Mage as being a good mentor in guiding those in Mind based on what they learned of the Aspect themselves. That maybe sometimes making the right decision is hard, or that all chocies have their own outcomes and consequences. These are thigns this Mage may have experiences first hand. All they can do is look at what’s put in front of them and use their calm and better judgement to lead them down on the path. They would be a good person to get a second, unbiased opinion on. What actions should be taken next, where should one move onto next, what choice should be made to better the current situation at hand, or lead it down a less favorable one, logically speaking. Remeber also, this Mage isn’t speaking for them or for others when being asked these things. They are simply taking a step back, analyzing what’s there, and using their own logic and thought process and past experiences ot come to a conclusion on what choice will come to which outcome. So if someone else or even the Mage them self didn’t want to hear or need to do what was there, well, that’s not a concern to them, just the facts of what it is. They are indifferent. They understand that middle ground that doesn’t take a side in it’s decision making. Perhaps this can also lead to the Mage expanding their understanding, through having some involvement in those made by those around them. They are able to experience all sorts of scenarios to weigh in on. Now, that’s not to say you need to be constantly messaging and fussing with this Mage for their insight, the experience cna help them, but they can be wrong just like any other person. I believe too much failure on their part can lead them to second guessing themselves  and questioning their own better judgement. They are there to not only better and further themselves, but pass on the knowledge they have learned so others can do these sort of things without them. 

[gulescamisade]

Minnesota:  Day 22

DAVESPRITE: -lurking in the woods some distance away from the batterwitch headquarters. Shades gleam. There... that's where the prisoners are being kept. Where Jade and Jane are. DS sends a brief message to Hal and Jadesprite about it.-

JADE: -But it's neither Jadesprite or Hal that answer him first. Instead, there's a flash of green light behind him, a growling note too close to some kind of beast.-

JADE: hello davesprite

DAVESPRITE: -the static in the air makes his feathers stand on end but the millisecond she appears, Davesprite whirls to face her. The sword tucked still in his sylladex and out of her sights.-

DAVESPRITE: -he fixes her with a look from behind the shades, taking the sight of her in.- ...this is some noxious deja vu going down right now

DAVESPRITE: you would think seeing it coming would make it easier but nah

DAVESPRITE: still a pill

DAVESPRITE: and im still swallowing it down dry

DAVESPRITE: sup

JADE: i really dont care to hear even more tragic ramblings right now

JADE: did you think i wouldnt notice youve been lurking around here?

DAVESPRITE: i know for a fact that you would

DAVESPRITE: but now youre here and now im here and hey this is crazy...

DAVESPRITE: you know how it goes

JADE: have you come to volunteer yourself for her imperious condescensions army? im sure we could use a sprite

JADE: she might even let you have an honorary position

DAVESPRITE: -raises wings and flaps in place, letting out a very bird-like chortle. Ha.- god i know its all kinds of inapropro but its like were meeting again for the first time

DAVESPRITE: you an evil psychohound and me

DAVESPRITE: some alien ghost hella committed to his fursona i guess its like the neopets forum all over again

DAVESPRITE: whats better than this

DAVESPRITE: its ride or die harley i know you dig the chest feathers

JADE: no thanks

JADE: ive had enough of your issues to last a lifetime, feathers or no

JADE: you could make a good snack though

JADE: im starting to become fond of the taste of poultry >:K

DAVESPRITE: and then by god she vored me

DAVESPRITE: i have to say this isnt the first time ive been threatened in this exact way and thank god

DAVESPRITE: i thought i was going to have to wait for that slot on the geeky supervillain bingo card

DAVESPRITE: hilarious if it werent so fucked up

DAVESPRITE: but i know youve had enough of me every me every dave in existance

DAVESPRITE: ive just not had enough of you yet and im not sure im ever going to be

DAVESPRITE: sue me

DAVESPRITE: or eat me i guess

DAVESPRITE: same principle applies

JADE: -her eyes narrow, bushy hair standing on end with the slightest of static from her own power. He knows too much, and maybe more she doesn't know.- i have a better idea JADE: -in one quick motion she raises her hands and forms her fingers into the vague shape of a square, framing him in her sight... and then she draws them closer, then twisting them into a little circle. It's something she doesn't need to do, but it feels fun and demonstrative, anyway. Of course, as she does this, Davesprite's world grows larger -- as he grows smaller.-

JADE: grrrr... >:K -reaches out to GRABBO HIM.-

DAVESPRITE: -The world gets larger... no he gets smaller. Pocket-sized in such a way he was capable of doing on his own but never by an outside power. He allows her to grab him, SQUAWKING as she does so.-

DAVESPRITE: always comes down to this huh -HK.-

JADE: if youre not going to leave then ill keep you with me

JADE: you know how it is

JADE: keep your friends close and your enemies closer?? -slides a thumb over his mouth.- you really should stop talking though

DAVESPRITE: -The thumb swiping at his mouth is happening but DS does nothing to stop it. Helpless... but also not really. Bleh. He angles his face away to get at attempting to talk again.-

DAVESPRITE: how close are we talkin here -asks with his face squished, squinting an glowy eye at her.-

DAVESPRITE: its a good opportunity as any

DAVESPRITE: why not tell me about yourself a lil

DAVESPRITE: i been dying came all this way to know

DAVESPRITE: who is the hot mom behind the canines and dog breath yo

DAVESPRITE: whos jade now

DAVESPRITE: (ill tell you dogg)

DAVESPRITE: (shes bad to the bone) D

AVESPRITE: jesus christ that didnt even need a segueway(edited)

JADE: -rolls eyes- are you done yet?

JADE: i have a lot of work to do and you have a lot of things to not do -squeezes him once, and then with another flash of green they're back inside the building. It's a fairly nondescript hallway with several doors.-

JADE: i wonder how long youll be able to stay away from the sun? we could find out together

DAVESPRITE: a long long time baby

DAVESPRITE: -is zapped along with her, more or less where he wants to be. He stays tucked in her hand, soft glow bird.- also no im not done yet im just getting warmed up

DAVESPRITE: you want to get down and talk science yet

DAVESPRITE: i have all the time i could want

JADE: -squints down at him.... and then pulls a handkerchief out of her sylladex and drapes it over her hand, and him.-

JADE: -GO TO SLEEP-

DAVESPRITE: -he falls quiet... but only for strategic purposes. Wiggles again and fluffs feathers. Time to get comfortable.-

JADE: -MUCH BETTER.-

[clonerightsagenda]

Wasn’t really feeling the gemsona prompt, although I thought she might be one of those Nephrite pilots mentioned (Nephrite’s one mineral found in types of jade) so here’s Jade being pilot-y, sort of

Jaspers is the one who lets you know the engine is broken again. You wake up when you feel the weight on your legs, and there he is - trying to sap your body heat by curling up into an inconspicuous ball. It’s hard to be inconspicuous when you’re that big. Davesprite has petitioned you to shrink him down to the size of a normal cat, but you've refused. You're afraid if Bec’s instincts take over, you'd have an unfair advantage. Sometimes, though, you’re tempted. Especially when he tries to jump up onto the table.

You sit up, and your breath streams out of you in a cloud of white. Jaspers shifts, stretches, and yawns, looking demonic for a moment with a mouth of sharp teeth and eyes rolled back to whites. "It's cold," he whines.

"I know." You shiver as the blankets slip down off your shoulders and the heat built up underneath them escapes. When you reach out with Space powers, you can tell the others haven't woken up to notice the chill. Davesprite shifts and mumbles something in his sleep. John has managed to work his way around to being sideways across his bed, legs dangling off the edge. He’ll wake up on the floor again. It would be tempting to leave this until morning, but the consorts are cold blooded. They'll be grumpy and lethargic.

You could go to the boys’ rooms, roll them out of bed, and make them fix it. But John would wait for instructions and then complain about you giving him orders, and Davesprite has already insisted that sprite knowledge banks don't cover engine repairs, an excuse he has also tried unsuccessfully to get out of doing the dishes. They’d get huffy if you appeared in their rooms without asking, especially in the middle of the night. They can be so touchy. In the end, fixing it alone will be faster, and you know you'll do a good job. The work's not hard. It's not as bad as the time you had to climb onto the roof to patch a leak, for example.

"It’s not as bad as…" is a game you've always played with yourself. Don't whine, don't cry, remember how much worse it could be. When you'd tried that bit of wisdom with the others during an early discussion about your situation (not much food, injured passengers, no external communications), they hadn’t been convinced. John had rolled his eyes, and Davesprite had said, "Yeah, but it's pretty fucking bad now." You hadn't been sure how to respond to that. It’s an outlook you never allowed yourself to have.

You pull on socks before padding along the chilly metal hallway. Jaspers follows, twining between your feet and almost tripping you before you growl low in your throat to remind him to keep his distance. He doesn't need the boiler on - sprites give off the heat of a computer left on. You run warm yourself these days. But cats are creatures of habit, and he doesn't like when something in the ship isn't going right. You don't either. The thrum of its pistons are a second heartbeat to you - a system that's nearly invisible when running properly but obvious in its absence. You keep it at its lowest power setting mostly for ancillary functions - the heating, running water. It's not doing any of the work of keeping the ship in motion. Pushing the vessel along is a subroutine that runs in your subconscious, but you check on it regularly like worrying a loose tooth. None of the others seem to realize what could happen if you lost concentration, or do they put that much blind faith in you? You have waking nightmares of something breaking beyond your ability to fix it, the ship and all hands aboard plummeting downward. Without the Green Sun, your senses are too limited to see if there's a bottom to whatever place you're in. Would you fall forever?

This is the third time the engine has gone down this month. This ship was never supposed to run for so long.

What it was meant for was a hopeless war fought over one checkerboard planet. The vessel that you’ve made your home carried carapaces from Prospit to the place where most of them would die, a glorified taxi. Maybe it could engage with enemy ships, although you haven't found much in the way of anti-aircraft weaponry. The carapaces might know, but you haven’t asked. John found something that might be a kind of laser ballista, or a sighting device – he’d swiveled it around and made lightsaber noises for a while before getting bored and drifting off. The hulls are thick and armor-plated, but the engine itself is lightweight. Prospit and the Battlefield are celestial neighbors. It didn’t have to travel far. And the doomed battle between kingdoms of light and dark never lasts long in Sburb, even without a cancer at the heart of the Battlefield urging it along. The equipment doesn’t have to last.

The engine room is deep within the bowels of the ship. Bowels. Innards. Viscera. There are a lot of good words for what's enclosed within you. You'd run through them all while giving your grandfather the sendoff he would have expected, focusing on facts you'd learned from books you could barely read to take your mind off what you were doing. People told the future that way – haruspicy, the art of divining what is to come from entrails. The future you see from this ship's guts foretells a lot more nights like this.

"Get me the toolbox?" you ask, to give Jaspers something to do, and he races off. He's become an unofficial partner of yours in these maintenance sessions. When you have something to focus on, your Bec instincts don't act up, and you don’t feel compelled to take a snap at him.

This ship's chief engineer was killed on the Battlefield. A few of the carapaces aboard know a little about the ship's workings, and they conveyed what they knew to you. Carapaces speak a little out loud, but they use gestures more, a language refined to convey only what's important. You learned on Prospit. In the first weeks of having companionship, when meeting other people’s eyes was too overwhelming, you'd focused on their fingers, making a game of seeing what nonsense sentences their hands formed without realizing it. You don't know a lot of the technical signs, though, and the carapaces here are mostly foot soldiers. Instead, you've cobbled together a strategy out of guesswork. You're used to that. Sometimes volcanic gasses would corrode the wiring of your island's geothermal power relay, and once your dreaming robot got struck by lightning. You've had to consult users manuals and make guesses, tinkering with screwdrivers and sucking shocked fingers until whatever you're working on sputters to life.

A gear has snapped half its teeth off, and a few screws on a steam pipe are loose. "Smallest screwdriver," you say, and Jaspers deposits it in your waiting hand. The screws are a quick fix. The gear and its broken pieces have to be fished out, and your fingers are soon smeared with grease. The ship ran out of replacement parts a few months ago. Once you have everything lined up as best as you can manage, you scowl at the metal until its atoms snap back into a lattice. The connection point is weaker, though. You'll have a crack there again in not too long. But there's nothing else you can do but keep patching the breaks.

You ease the gear back into place - you prefer to use your hands rather than powers for this; you've had them for longer and know you can trust them. It fits in with a clunk and ratchets around a few times before stopping. The whole ship has to think about repairs before starting up again. It's like it's buffering, even though you don't think its technology is that advanced. The radar screens look like they date from the second world war.

"Maybe we should have engine rest days," you say to Jaspers, leaning back against the wall. Your fingernails are stained black. "We can huddle together to keep warm, and I can fill some pots with water beforehand. That might give the ship a break."

He crawls into your lap in that ‘I seem to have found myself here, I wonder how' way that cats like so much. The act would be more convincing if he wasn't so large. "I like breaks," he says, "and cuddling."

"Huddling," you correct him. "I don't know how fond the carapaces are of cats, they might not let you get close."

"They like me better now," he says. "They thought I was something to eat at first."

The food chain on this ship is really getting absurd. "Maybe we should all try to stop taking chunks out of people our size, ok?"

"But I like birds," Jaspers whines. He can be so petulant sometimes. You like to think if Bec could have talked he would have been more polite.

"He doesn't like to be chased around any more than you do."

He hisses softly but doesn't argue. Maybe he knows you could start chasing him around, if you really wanted to. As a sort of apology, you stroke the fur behind his ears. If you don't look down, you can almost pretend you're petting Bec.

Something clinks, and the gear you replaced starts turning. You hear a louder hiss as steam moves through the pipes, and the water tanks gurgle to life. The metal against your back begins to thrum. It'll be a while before the air warms up, but the day is saved. Again. Not that anyone besides you and this annoying cat noticed.

You ease Jaspers off your lap and stand up, rubbing your face and then regretting it when you leave a streak of smelly oil behind. You'll have to wash up with a few handfuls of dish detergent (it's the best you've got for getting rid of this kind of grease) before crawling back into bed and waiting to warm up. It's too bad the ship can't break down on a convenient schedule.

"Two and a half more years," you say to Jaspers, who's now licking his shoulder like he meant for you to ditch him. "Think we can make it?"

“I'm going to see Rose again," he says, which you take as a yes, or a reflection of the fact that a species that licks its own butt probably doesn't have much of a concept of future planning, even if they have been mixed with a computer.

"That's right. Her and Dave and the trolls." Some of them, anyway. Near the end, Karkat had sent so many frantic messages about people dying. It had almost helped, in a way, as you knelt over Dave’s bleeding body in the snow. Remember Jade, it can always be worse. You know he's ok, and Kanaya, and Aradia, at least. You'd seen their Hero of Time one last time when you'd popped into the bubbles, stunned and smoking, with the ghostly memory-imprint of the genesis frog's temporary home still pressing into your palms. "Your friends are fine," she'd told you, "and you’ll be fine too. You're going to do great. I've already seen it. Are you ready to wake up?"

               The first traces of heat are starting to curl around you. It’ll take longer for the upper levels to warm up, but it’s working. You can go to bed. Jaspers feels it too – you see his whiskers twitch, and he blinks in a slow cat-smile. “Time to go?”

“Time to go,” you agree. “And you can come with me if you promise to stay near my feet. Maybe Rose doesn’t mind waking up with a cat on her face, but I do. Even she might object now that you’re so much bigger.”

He floats out of the room, ignoring you. You may never be a cat person, but you know enough not to be too offended. Instead, you take one last look around the engine room before following him out.

“We’ll make it just fine,” you say. “We’re going to do great.”