#Skaia gates

[k3agn]

Absolutely no one:

Me:

[bagels-gate]

OKAY SO, the silliest most unserious thing—me and my younger sister (she's 15) were making post Halloween fun cupcakes bc on Halloween we were too busy and tired—and as a joke we started making an Astarion cupcake... and ended up making the Whole Gang plus my Tav, my partner's Tav, which they've made out of the mini cupcakes bc we ran out (who are also together— Sylvas and Skaia, ladies and gents)

SO, BEHOLD BALDUR GAY 3 GANG:

Skaia and Sylvas for reference:

Enjoy ✨

[kite33]

been playing minestuck with wife (she's never heard of homestuck) and it's fun seeing her confused about all the random complicated bullshit like the alchemy system or captchaloging things

also she put a cruxtruder on my roof

[haospart]

So, my partner and I are each playing BG3-- and these are our first Proper Playthrough beans, right at the start of their journey, and their Guardians (different versions of each other djdjdj)

@elvhenyoung tagging my lovely for this-- *my lovely bean*

------

Obligatory Self Promo:

My Commissions are OPEN AS HELL

[thewertsearch]

AA: […] we all lost track of our books AA: they were gathered surreptitiously by agents assigned to the task AA: and in the veil their codes were merged with the ghost imprints of other mysterious artifacts

AA: our first guardian was brought to life on the seed to pass through skaias final gate of defense AA: the first to find alternia

Well played, Scratch. You rat bastard.

Alternia’s First Guardian was created from an omniscient cueball, the physical manifestation of a child’s terror, and mutant DNA from the mind of a madman - and if that doesn't just track perfectly. The guy is literally a puppet, created to be a vessel for English's will in Alternia's universe. In lieu of his master, he commands the Felt, a gang which I'm pretty sure he named after his own skin.

Lil' Cal is dead. Long live Big Cal.

And here he is, ready and waiting to gloat.

...the fucking bow-tie! He's wearing Cal's Alternian clothes! The proof's been staring us in the face this entire time, and we were none the wiser!

[...] I think it would be for the best if I commandeered the narrative completely for a while. [...] I am expecting a guest to arrive shortly. [...] And if I did have a doorbell, you would have just witnessed it ring. He is already here.

I get it, ya smug fuck. You won before we'd even started playing.

My door is not fitted with a peephole either. Those without eyes or without limits to their knowledge have no need for peeping, and I am without either. I have never once peeped at or through something, and I doubt I ever will.

And - ooh, I'm so wonderfully mad right now - and you know you’re showing up right after the Cal reveal, don’t you? That’s why you’re playing up the smarm.

I can feel the smugness emanating from every thread. Are you going to start laughing, too?

Pardon me while I let Jack inside. Did you not believe it would be Jack? Who else would it be? Someone who would have suspected anyone else is a person I would also describe as a sucker.

Well, I sure didn’t think English would knock - but, that said, I wouldn’t have expected Slick to knock, either.

[homestuckreplay]

Maybe Smuppets Aren’t So Bad, Actually???

(page 792-800)

800 pages! This comic is gonna hit 4 digit page numbers before we know it. At the current rate it’ll happen right around the new year.

We learn why Jade’s shirt changes design, and it’s one of her inventions – the WARDOBIFIER. Jade lives on this island that’s extremely tied to Skaia’s power – the frog tower has its own ‘seven gates’ climbing its sides so the frog might represent Skaia itself – so does her technology only work because it’s drawing on that power? Would a wardrobifier be recreatable, following her exact design plans, by a top of their profession scientist/engineer who didn’t have access to that power? Something tells me it would not, so it’s lucky the world is ending because otherwise she would get a bad shock on her first day at MIT.

Jade is like the anti-Dave. While Dave is curating an image, scared to enjoy anything too genuinely, constantly analyzing the layers of irony between himself and his interests to keep them acceptable and ‘cool enough’, Jade will just enjoy whatever weird shit she wants without thinking too deeply about it. She gets SO excited when the electromagnets in the Squiddles work (she totally installed those herself!) and does the big :D just like John when he’s happy. She plays pretend with the Manthro Chaps, which are objectively the most cursed item in any of the kids’ houses (VACCINATION KITS AND DISHWASHER SAFE SLOP TROUGHS???? This is a crime) but she plays with them so innocent and earnestly that it circles back around to being okay.

And of course, she’s a furry – specifically a wolf. Although furries might be a point of ridicule to 2009 internet users, this doesn’t feel placed for shock value, it makes sense for her character. Of course somebody who is okay with playing an instrument badly, will squeal like a piglet and run around shaking fertilizer everywhere, invents a machine just to give herself more shirt designs, and still happily plays pretend games with dolls and stuffed animals at 13 isn’t too attached to human social norms, and of course that person – who also loves nature – will feel more of an affinity with the animal kingdom.

And instead of laughing at her, Dave is cool with this. He drew Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff with ears and whiskers for her! I think Dave wishes he could be more like Jade, understanding deep down that she’s having more fun with her interests than he is, but he’s not safe to be that person day to day. That’s why he smiles during their conversation (p.382), because she’s the person he lets down his guard for.

I think ‘riflekind’ is a boring strife specibus. Rose’s ‘needlekind’ is the best of the four kids, the only one not commonly used as a weapon, although I will give Dave a pass because swords kick ass. But the imps have ‘bunnykind’, ‘umbrellakind’, ‘bookkind’, ‘tirekind’, etc, and Dad has ‘cakekind’ and ‘shavingcreamkind’. I wish the main characters had cooler ones. What if Jade had ‘squiddlekind’? I’m certain their electromagnets could be used to dangerous effect – she could place two either side of an imp’s head and crush it, and could easily retrieve each Squiddle by attracting it with another one.

Page 796 proves @tenaciouschronicler was right (as usual). The pumpkin has disappeared from Jade’s sylladex! So captchaloguing an item does NOT keep it completely safe, although, what the fuck are the appearifier coordinates for somebody’s abstracted inventory??

> Jade: Change your WARDROBIFIER to its ‘Fursuit’ setting.

[cyvonix]

Cyv Reads Homestuck - Act 3 Wrapup

where doing it man

where MAKING THIS HAPEN

Holy SHIT, where do I even begin? Act 1 was fun. I enjoyed it. Act 2 intrigued me. It kept me wanting more. Act 3, by all accounts, has latched its hooks all the way into me. I am IN, dude. While this act retains the quirky and random interactions that made the previous ones so casually enjoyable, the astonishing leap in the density and frequency of narratively interesting content here is undeniable. And now, at the end of it, I'm the most excited I've been to see the next turns these insane plot threads will take, and how these characters, who have fully endeared me by this point, will develop.

All of the characters have been left in a place that leaves the story ripe to explore so many things. Starting with John, who has now reached the first gate. I have no idea what that even means for him. I know that it was the goal, and that apparently each will be more difficult to reach, but we haven't been told in any way what the journey to those other gates will actually entail. The side story with his dad trapped in the dark kingdom has also been fun to witness, and I'm sure we'll be getting more of that soon enough.

With Rose, it leaves the most obvious cliffhanger. Now that she has also entered the Incipisphere, what happens? We've only seen one character in this environment thus far, so who's to say what adding another one to the mix will even look like? Dave has obviously been tasked with being Rose's server player (the ways he fucks with her game even in the face of imminent despair was absolutely hilarious) so that leaves me to wonder if he will also be transported into this world at some point, but also how Rose will be able to simultaneously manage John's game now that she has a client world of her own to take care of. The other interesting thing with Dave is his relationship to his brother, which clearly hints at the parental figures in their lives being absent in one way or another. With Dave also so clearly seeming to look up to his brother in an immense way, I think that could lead to some really great storytelling.

And then, there's Jade. Oh lord. What can I even say about Jade Harley, other than rambling off the many ways in which I was bewildered by her constant disregard of every "normal" aspect of the three other kids. My point being that she is a total and complete mystery. She seems extremely sweet, and almost aloof, but has by far the most compelling narrative implications of any of the cast. Not only does she not have surviving family at all, instead being cared for, or at least assumed to be, by some sort of magical dog creature of unknown origin named Becquerel, but she is also living on some sort of secluded island littered with ruins that seem to beg the reader to ask their purpose. As if that weren't enough, we now know that she is capable of using her dreams to see into both the past and future, to reasons that are unknown even to her. And as we've already seen how this can drastically affect the events of the story, including in the thread we've been following surrounding the odd denizens of the post-apocalyptic future, I have no doubt that this will play a large part in things going forward.

Finally, the mystery of Sburb continues to deepen, as several of the characters keep finding control rooms, symbols, and various other interfaces that so clearly resemble the iconography of Sburb. Just what the hell is this game? What is its true purpose? How does it tie in to the overall balance of light and dark in the world that has been proclaimed to us? I have a feeling that these questions will not truly be answered for a long time, but the breadcrumbs are enough to keep me fully engaged. Even the lore of this world itself, the idea of the Incipisphere, Skaia, and the two kingdoms in constant conflict for eternity, and all the things that this cosmology implicitly allows the exploration of, is so exciting to me.

Whew. So yeah, I guess that's about as condensed as I'm going to get my thoughts on this one. What a wild ride. I guess here are some other miscellaneous things to mention:

I read the entirety of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. What a horrid, crusty, amazing archive of media.

Of course I know that the trolls will eventually enter this story, but I have zero spoilers for the context or even who they are as character; just that they exist. Thus, I've kept track of which trolls have appeared in Pesterlogs so far, and those are: carcinoGeneticist, grimAuxiliatrix, and adiosToreador. So we'll see how that goes in the next act.

The concept of Jade's dreaming mind/dreambot and the golden city, including the sleeping John Egbert, is clearly important. And clearly has something to do with whatever species is roaming the deserted future. But I have such little idea of how to begin parsing that at this point that I don't have much to say about it. But I am absolutely keeping it in mind

If you actually read all of this: Damn. Thx for inexplicably caring what I have to say despite being an irrelevant poster and like a decade late on this shit :P More (much smaller) updates to come soon as I move forward with this story

[thelifetimechannel]

What are your thoughts on Hussie's statement about Rose's arc here(https://www.tumblr.com/the-meat-machine/734661517556006912)? I see the typical attitude of the book commentary beyond the technical as "no I swear this was totally all planned out and VERY DEEP and I deserve ALL THE CREDIT for the most positive readings because my ideas are TOTALLY INTENTIONAL and I am not just a shitposter who took fame poorly I swear", but what do you think of the interpretation itself? It's certainly a basic idea about her arc that you don't exactly lean into, and while your handling of Rose was of course more satisfying and coherent in execution than Canon's, do you feel like this is an idea you agree with that you might have "left behind" when plotting her arc out, as it were? Or as a less-than-coherent post-hoc justification? Also do Asks have a size limit I'm sorry thus is so long

While I found lategame HS's 'real people don't have arcs' stance to be a handwavy way to excuse dropping all the characters the author didn't care about, I'm fairly content with this commentary, actually. Rose's rejection of SBURB starts early, and her choice to destroy her gate and start ripping apart her land's nice themed puzzles was a good turning point for her and the story. SBURB does not play fair. It does not have your best interests in mind. Why not start gutting it?

You might reasonably ask, if I feel this way, why did we go back to the planet quests in TLC? Three reasons:

Structure. As should be extremely obvious from TLC's everything, we were far more interested in character-based emotional exploration and closure than Dramatic Plot Shit. However, we were trying to bring a very long and increasingly messy story to a conclusion in a reasonable number of pages, and SBURB's tasks and quests provided meaningful goals for the characters to accomplish. They were, in many ways, busywork that we could use to force the characters to act and interact.

An excuse. SBURB's attempts to reflect players' psyches and anxieties meant we could use the land quests to force the characters to confront their issues in very direct ways while lampshading it the whole time. Yes this whole adventure is very metaphorically on the nose! Blame SBURB!

Spectacle. Because our goals for TLC were so character dev-oriented, and because I am so longwinded I never established a twitter presence, we wanted some kind of visual interest to break up 1500 pages of characters having long-winded emotional discussions. Whatever your thoughts are on Rose's obligation to play the rain, it looked pretty cool.

So having Rose play the rain - and forcing the other kids to complete their planet quests - was mostly a choice made out of narrative convenience, and although I have many problems with canon's ending, Rose ditching her quest for good is not one of them. However, I definitely did not want to force Rose to become a good, obedient SBURB player who happily ushers a new world into its clutches. Which is why the true final boss of TLC is SBURB/Skaia itself, and Rose gets to lead the effort to dismantle it.

[tenaciouschronicler]

August 1 2024 2009

Lore dump! Lore dump! Lore dump!

We enter a new stage passing through seven blue spirographs to see Skaia, a blue world of clouds surrounded by and containing more spirographs. The music is almost a dreamy quality, one of bells, strings, piano and wind.

Nannasprite relays to John that beyond The Seven Gates lies Skaia, the core of The Incipisphere. This leads me to believe that if and when the rest of his friends join they too will surround Skaia. Think of it as moons surrounding a planet, just most likely equidistant in their placement.

Skaia is compared to a "dormant crucible of unlimited creative potential." Crucibles are used to melt and heat substances, mostly metal, to seperate it from impurities. In the case of metalwork, these substances are then used in the formation of other items such as blades. This makes sense when taking Nannas words into account. Reaching Skaia would most likely allow players freedom to create whatever they desire. She wont spoil the exact purpose or meaning however.

I did find another meaning that I think could also work in the context of Homestuck. From Merriam-Webster, "a place or situation in which concentrated forces interact to cause or influence change or development." This is a more figurative meaning but it adds an interesting layer. My guess is reaching Skaia will not be easy and our characters will be changed greatly into their 'true potential'. Theres also the fight between Light and Dark which will probably be the crux of this change.

Regarding Light and Dark, Nanna has this to say, "forces of light will forever be charged with its defense, while forces of darkness will just as persistently covet its destruction!" We are then shown a 3x3 chessboard of Kings in an endless loop of checkmate at the center of Skaia. According to her, this stalemate has existed since forever until John arrived. Being removed from time with no outside forces of influence, this outcome will always occur regardless of the size of the board. Johns arrival has most likely disrupted this stagnant 'peace', giving way to the potential for one side to overpower the other. Which way the game will go is yet to be decided.

[cannoliparty]

the incipisphere explained!

the incipisphere is literally the area in which sburb takes place, but in the midst of homestuck's chaos it can be hard to decipher how it works and what's going on in it. but its actually a really fun mechanic in sburb, and the lore is great too ^_^ excited to explain (hopefully) most of it!!

overview

the incipisphere is the space in which you actually play sburb. players enter through using an artifact made off a scanned totem lathe (the method of actually entering sburb is complicated 4 me so this is all im mentioning on that..)

here's a quick map to show we'll be going through in the incipisphere:

medium

the medium is the area inside of the veil, where most things in the incipisphere reside (player planets, the battlefield, skaia, etc.)

the veil

a ring of meteors seperating the medium and the outer fields, where derse lies.

skaia

skaia is the birthplace of a sburb session's new universe. within it lies endless creativity and possibilities, and the players' goal is to build up to all the gates and ascend to skaia with the essence of the genesis frog, creating the new universe and winning the game.

the battlefield

the area inside of skaia in which the 2 kingdoms have the ultimate battle between prospit & derse, creation & destruction. as more and more kernelsprites are prototyped, the kings & queens of each kingdom gain the prototyped abilities/attributes, making both the armies and the battlefield itself more and more complicated & intense as time carries on. derse has always been destined to defeat prospit, but only gains the winning edge once the sburb session actually begins and kernelsprites are prototyped. this is why players must defeat the black/dersian king before they can destroy skaia itself.

prospit

also known as the kingdom of light, prospit is one of the 2 kingdoms in the incipisphere and it resides closest to skaia. it makes sense that prospit dreamers would be objective-oriented and quick to lead, aswell as being easygoing and/or insightful, due to their close relationship with skaia. known as the "kingdom of light" can also be a reference to prospits relationship with skaia, an entity with endless knowledge and insight (aka qualities of the light aspect). goals of prospitian dreamers once they wake up can include a number of things, such as talking to skaia for insight on the session, discussing strategies with the white queen, rally prospitian allies, etc. etc..

derse

derse is the kingdom of darkness, the only thing residing out of the medium & the veil, with its only goal being the destruction of skaia. derse dreamers tend to either focus on the past and/or future, or their goals/sense of self can be shrouded in darkness. the goal of dersian dreamers is to spy on the enemy: the black queen, dersian agents (ex: jack noir) etc..

overall: the kingdoms

prospit isnt "good" and derse isnt "evil". theyre simply 2 sides of the same chess board, battling it out. the goal of prospit is creation, and derse is destruction, and this makes their only inherent difference their motives. prospits creation is predestined, because of skaia's insight. derse is the idea of mystery, because all possibilities are shrouded in darkness (both of these are represented by their physical locations). these qualities are reflected on the dreamers, the carpacians, agents, royalty, everyone. basically a very symbolic game of chess.

player planets

planets that are formed once a sburb player has entered their session. all planets will be located around skaia, will be the same size, have consorts and be the same distance from skaia. the only difference between planets is conducted by the player's classpect, and the challenges they must overcome because of it. a good example is john with the land of wind and shade (lowas). as an heir of breath, he is practically intertwined with his aspect. which makes perfect sense of his planets problem: to play the wind, and be one with it. by succeeding, he blows the dusty/shady clodes away and the consorts/inhabitants of his planet can breathe properly again. planets also each have a denizen representing the player's aspect, and there is always the same possible set of denizens across all sessions (not going too into that... this is where homestuck gets based off greek mythology and such which seems fun to get into but also a hassle to figure out for me personally T_T) players can encounter their denizens at the heart/center of their planet and consult them on personal, aspect-related challenges (like how jade was having a dilemma with the space aspect and went back to her planet to find her denizen and talk to her about it).

thats it!

thanks for reading, i hope it wasnt too long... this is still kind of an overview on just the entire incipisphere but i still like to keep my entries as detailed as possible without it becoming too overbearing! let me know if you have any thoughts, corrections, or add-ons of your own ^_^

[tgirlswagseraphina]

Homestuck began on April 13th, 2009, the 13th birthday of our chief protagonist and future boy-skylark, John Egbert. Three days prior was supposed to be the day he received the Sburb Beta in the mail, but it was running late. It showed up later that afternoon, and after overcoming a variety of domestic adversities, he retrieved the game, along with a birthday package from his internet friend, Dave Strider.

John soon established a game connection with another friend, Rose Lalonde, who'd spent the day badgering him about playing with her, after unsuccessfully attempting to convince Dave to play. Upon connecting, Rose was able to manipulate John's environment, move his furniture around via cursor, and restructure the shape of his room. John was unable to do this to Rose's environment however. He'd installed the client copy of the beta, and required the server copy for that.

The server copy was trapped in his dad's car, along with a birthday package from another friend, Jade Harley. Jade messaged John inquiring about the package. As of this moment, neither her package nor the server copy has been recovered by John. Rose had also prepared a package for John, but had not mailed it yet. It still sits in her room. Dave's package contained the authentic stuffed bunny from Con Air.

In addition to allowing Rose to control John's environment, Sburb provided an array of devices Rose deployed throughout John's house. These devices used together provided a system by which the players could manufacture any item using the code on the back of that item's captchalogue card, if they gathered enough grist to pay for it. Later, they would learn to combine item codes to master the art of punch card alchemy, whereby items could be fused together in purpose and design.

One device on being activated began a countdown, and released an entity called a kernelsprite. The countdown ticked down to the moment John's house would be struck by a meteor, destroying his neighborhood. To escape this demise, John had to use the devices to manufacture a special item that looked like a blue apple, and take a bite of it, in order to transport his entire house just before impact to the safety of a mysterious dark realm, where his house would situate itself atop a tall rock column high above a blanket of clouds. This realm is called the Medium.

Before he entered the Medium though, John and Rose prototyped his kernelsprite with the large harlequin doll his dad got him for his birthday, transforming the sprite to bear its likeness, including the ways the doll was disfigured via earlier hijinks. It had a slashed eye and one arm, and so too did the sprite. When John entered the Medium, the sprite's kernel hatched, thus imbuing all the enemies John and his friends would face with properties of the sprite. The lesser adversaries John faced first,��Shale Imps, all wore harlequin garbs. They became more powerful and more radically mutated with each successive pre-Medium prototyping.

After entering the Medium, John's dad was kidnapped by imps. While John was looking for him, he accidentally prototyped the sprite with his grandmother's ashes, transforming it again. This prototyping had no effect on the enemies, since he was already in the Medium, and the kernel had already hatched. Instead, only the sprite was affected, and it took on the appearance, personality, and memories of his grandmother, becoming Nannasprite, a game-supplied albeit customized guide for John. She explained aspects of the game, about Skaia residing at the center of the Medium, beyond seven gates floating directly above his house, and about an eternal/timeless war fought there between dark and light, one that light was always destined to lose.

Rose, who'd been having frequent internet connection issues, lost her connection as she tried to lift John's car to retrieve the game and the package. The car fell into the abyss below. A storm caused her house to lose power along with its wireless internet connection. Her laptop was able to run on battery power for a time, while she tapped into the wireless signal from the laboratory next door. When her laptop ran out of power, she had to overcome more family strife (and endure a gift pony in the process), go outside in the rain, and plug it into the small generator outside the mausoleum of her dead cat, Jaspers. She continued her session with John inside the mausoleum, while the meteor-sparked forest fire surrounding her house grew more intense.

From the house, Rose's mom opened a secret passage in the mausoleum to help her escape. The passage lead to the lab next door, where Rose found a stable, portable source of power and internet for her computer. She also found a terminal projecting the impact times and locations for the millions of meteors presently bombarding the planet, along with all the other live sessions of other players around the world. She also found a little girl's room, a mutant kitten she named Vodka Mutini, and a cloning machine operating through the science of ectobiology. Its terminal was locked on to her cat Jaspers at whatever point in his life the user specified.

She attempted to appearify Jaspers from a moment in her early childhood, before he whispered a secret to her. But doing so would have caused a paradox, so it appearified (paradoxified) a pile of slime instead. The machine used the slime to create a fetal paradox clone of Jaspers in a glass tube. On the monitor, Jaspers then told young Rose the secret, then vanished, only to show up dead weeks later and put in the mausoleum for years until the present. Rose left the laboratory moments before it was destroyed by a meteor impact. She transportalized back to her mom's room, proceeded to her room to wait for Dave to connect with her and rescue her from the next imminent impact.

Dave was charged with acquiring his bro's copy of the game to help Rose. Earlier he had lost his copy of the game to a mishap involving a crow. It flew in his window, seized the game, and Dave accidentally impaled it with a sword, sending the crow and the game out the window onto a landing far below his apartment. He searched his bro's room unable to find it, was briefly shadowed by Lil Cal, and then found a note beckoning him to meet on the roof for a confrontation. Dave and his bro dueled on the roof extensively, and Dave was thoroughly bested. Upon defeating Dave, his bro dropped the copies of the game, and flew off on his rocket board into the sky.

Dave used the copies to connect with Rose, and quickly deployed the devices while her house was on fire, surrounded by flaming tornadoes, and minutes away from being destroyed by a meteor. Rose prototyped her kernelsprite with Jaspers, specifically to understand the meaning of the secret he whispered to her years ago. She was advised to do this by Jade, who told her about the game in the first place. Dave then prototyped the kernelsprite again with the tentacled princess doll given to Rose on her birthday by her mom. Both of these prototypings would have an effect on the enemies once Rose entered the Medium and the kernel hatched. Rose used the alchemiter to create the special item - for her, a purple wine bottle - which she needed to break to enter. She eventually did, transporting her house just before the meteor collided.

The meteor left a crater. Over time, at the site of impact, a large, white structure that looked like a wine bottle grew there, and the crater filled up with sand as the climate of the post-apocalyptic Earth gradually changed. The "cork" of that bottle was a large metal cylinder with an interior much like an advanced science station, with a variety of devices and monitors inside. 413 years after the meteor impact, the Wayward Vagabond walked through the desert and discovered this station. Inside, he found canned rations, a firefly he named Serenity, an appearifier, and four monitors hooked up to a keyboard.

On one of the monitors was John, just after he'd entered the Medium. WV could type commands to John directly, much as the readers of this story could type commands for the characters to follow. Most of John's actions upon entering the Medium were authored by WV, until he became preoccupied with other activities, such as building a town out of cans, playing chess with cans, and drawing chalk murals depicting the cosmological arrangement of Skaia, the Medium, the light and dark planets known as Prospit and Derse, and the four planets the kids would each occupy upon entering the game, called The Land of Wind and Shade (John), The Land of Light and Rain (Rose), the Land of Heat and Clockwork (Dave), and Jade's planet, which is yet to be seen.

He also activated a countdown in the station which caused it to blast out of the crater and fly to designated "home" coordinates. Along the way, it passed over the sand-filled crater that was the impact site for John's meteor, on the other side of the continent. John's meteor had caused a giant white tree to grow in the crater. The tree grew an apple-like station from a branch, which fell to the sand. The Peregrine Mendicant found this station. After WV flew overhead, PM activated her station's homing feature as well, which caused it to fly to the same destination. Along the way, she used her terminal to attempt to command Jade, who from the perspective of the terminal, had just arrived in the Medium. This caused the terminal to explode for unknown reasons, leaving a hole in the station. One of the station's robotic worms recovered one of PM's falling mailboxes, and she befriended it, after earlier slaying another one with her black regisword.

WV landed at the site of the ancient frog ruins across the now dried up Pacific Ocean. The site was once the island where Jade lived, but nothing of the island remained except for the ruins. The mountain her house was on, and the volcano next to it, were replaced by a large empty chasm. PM landed shortly after WV, and they met. They were confronted by the Aimless Renegade, who fired at them from the frog ruins with old weaponry he'd been hoarding, once belonging to Jade's grandpa. Millions of years ago, the frog ruins grew from a crater, struck by a meteor that emerged from a Sburb portal in space. Jade's radioactive, omnipotent, space-warping dog named Becquerel emerged from this crater as well.

Jade's grandpa pioneered this island, and built the house Jade lives in. Her grandpa has been dead for many years, and stands stuffed in front of the fireplace. She has been looked after by her dog who she calls Bec. She begins the day with several tasks to accomplish - to feed Bec, and to retrieve a birthday package mailed by John. She irradiates a steak, and heads outside to the site where the package will be dropped. She knows it will be dropped there because one of the reminders she wears on her fingers jogs her memory about it. She wears them to keep track of the many things she knows about the future, through dreams.

She falls asleep frequently and spontaneously. When she sleeps, her dream self is awake, and living on the moon that orbits the light planet, Prospit. Prospit very closely orbits Skaia, a huge sphere of blue sky and clouds, which nanna describes as a "dormant crucible of unlimited creative potential." When Prospit's moon eclipses Skaia, it drifts into Skaia for a time, mingling with the clouds. Dream Jade then witnesses many past and future events in the clouds. While asleep, she is often confused about what is real and what isn't. When she wakes up, she pieces together future events from her memory of the cloud visions, and from logs recorded by her dreambot. Her dreambot is a robotic surrogate that activates while she sleeps in her bed. It mimics in the real world the movement and actions of her dream self on the moon, and records a video log of what she sees while dreaming.

Prospit's moon has two towers of identical design, and similar design to Jade's house. Dream Jade lives in one tower. Dream John lives in the other. Dream John is still asleep, and John has no knowledge of the dream world, which is to say, the entire game session he would initiate on his 13th birthday. When he goes to sleep, instead of waking up on the moon as Jade does, he remains slumbering in his dream room, tormented by his subconscious. This torment is expressed when he sleepwalks, and draws troubling scribbles on the walls of his room. When awake, he cannot see the scribbles, as is subconscious suppresses his awareness of them. It is not until he has a perception-altering revelation about his dad does he begin to see them. He initially believed they were new additions to his room, perhaps scrawled by imps. However they were present long before, visible in his room while he prepared Jade's birthday package months ago.

John prepared a package for each of his three friends, whose 13th birthdays were December 1st (Jade), 3rd (Dave), and 4th (Rose). He gave Rose a knitting set, and she then took an intense interest knitting. He gave Dave the pair of shades Ben Stiller wore in Starsky and Hutch, which he wore from then on, replacing the shades in the style his bro wore. He gave Jade a blue version of his own ghost shirt, and some pumpkin seeds to help her replace the pumpkins that kept disappearing from her garden. But she did not receive this on the birthday John intended. She received it in the past, on her birthday when she was very young, causing her to take an interest in gardening in the first place, to take a liking to blue apparel, and to eventually befriend John over the internet and lead him, Rose, and Dave down a path where they would ultimately play this game together.

Jade did retrieve his package in the present as planned, but immediately took it to another location where it disappeared. WV in the far future appearified it from that location on accident. The package contained further instructions for him. He was to bring it to PM, and she was to use her station's sendificator to send it to another place and time. After she did this, the package appeared in front of young Jade on her birthday. Jade orchestrated the sequence of events through knowledge of them by her cloud visions.

She orchestrated similar events for the package she sent to John, plotting the circuitous route through time and space it was meant to follow. She again utilized the exiles for help, while they were still in the Medium. The exiles, WV, PM, and AR, were all formerly agents of the kingdoms, before they were exiled by some means to post-apocalyptic Earth. AR, as an Authority Regulator in the Land of Wind and Shade, discovered the package and the beta copy in John's wrecked car as he gave it a parking ticket. PM, working as a Parcel Mistress, recognized the package from a correspondence she had with Jade on Prospit some time ago, and recalled it must be delivered to John. AR would not relinquish the package, though he did give her the beta, which she delivered into a pyxis to satisfy the carved request of a minitablet. John carved this tablet at the request of PM through the command terminal in the future.

AR brought the package to Derse, where it ultimately wound up on the desk of Jack Noir. Jack is the archagent of the dark kingdom, charged with overseeing affairs through his office's fenestrated wall portals, and processing paperwork. He is forced to wear a silly garment in keeping with prototyping themes by the Black Queen, an order he resentfully complies with. He oversaw the imprisonment of John's dad, who broke loose on multiple occasions. When Jack went to handle it personally, John's dad set Jack's hat on fire. In a surly act of gratitude, he released the prisoner. John's dad fled to the Land of Wind and Shade, fought large monsters, got his hat dirty and lost a shoe. He then carved tablet requests for new ones, which John filled via pyxis, unaware of who requested them.

PM followed AR to Derse in hopes of retrieving the package. After wandering around, she encountered the Black Queen on her throne. Both the light and dark kingdoms each have a king and a queen. The queens sit on a throne, on Prospit and Derse respectively, ruling the planet. The kings command armies on the Battlefield, located at the center of Skaia. The queen takes on the attributes supplied by the prototypings due to the four-orbed ring she wears. When the ring is removed, the queen is restored to normal. PM showed the BQ a parking ticket she was pretending to deliver. The BQ directed her to Jack's office, where the ticket should be filed.

PM met Jack and asked for the package. Jack proposed a deal, and gave her a black regisword. If she would kill the White Queen and White King and bring him their crowns, he would give her the package. She accepted with little alternative. She then visited the WQ on Prospit and explained the situation, with no intention of carrying out Jack's mission. The WQ, understanding the futility of their situation and the need to recover the package, abdicated, and gave PM her crown and her ring. PM was instructed to go find the White King, retrieve his crown, and receive further instruction on what to do with the ring to protect it. WQ would then eventually exile herself to post-apocalypse Earth.

On post-apocalypse Earth, after AR fired on WV and PM from the ruins, he spotted WV's pumpkin, which WV had earlier appearified from Jade's house. He recognized the carving of Bec's silhouette on the pumpkin. Fearful of it, he surrendered. The three exiles soon became friends over a campfire and shared rations. WV and AR built Exile Town out of cans, mailboxes, and bullets. PM operated WV's station terminal to submit commands to John as he explored the Land of Wind and Shade. In the sky, another station teleported and fell to the ground. It was shaped like an egg, and originated from Dave's meteor impact site, in correspondence with the egg-shaped item he would use to enter the medium. Emerging from this station was the Windswept Questant, formerly the White Queen.

AR and WV sought to impress WQ by crafting a crown for her out of a mailbox. She refused the distinction, instead giving it to PM, who had successfully completed her mission to deliver Jade's package to John in the distant past. The means by which she went about this have yet to be seen.

John entered the Land of Wind and Shade (LOWAS) by having Rose build up his house to the first gate, fighting through many imps and ogres with his powerful new alchemized weapons, and entering the gate. This took him to a location beneath the clouds, far below his house. The LOWAS turned out to be a large windy planet, full of dark terrain, incandescent trees, networks of pipes, and oily rivers. In addition to hosting more powerful adversaries, the land is occupied by friendly consorts, a race of salamanders. They help John understand the mythos of the land, and inform him of the planet's persecution by a sleeping denizen, which is responsible for clogging the pipes with oil, and trapping fireflies under the clouds.

Each planet has a sleeping denizen, which the players must first wake, and then kill, in the course of their journey through the seven gates. Rose's planet, the Land of Light and Rain (LOLAR) is a multicolored ocean planet with white sandy islands and pink ruins, and has a denizen responsible for killing all life in the water. Dave's planet, the Land of Heat and Clockwork (LOHAC) is a lava planet, covered in industrial steel frame structures and turning gears, and has a denizen of yet unknown qualities.

Killing the denizen releases a huge grist hoard buried at the core of the planet, which is then used to fuel a process known as The Ultimate Alchemy. Along the way, the kids are meant to learn about their destined roles in this quest as the Heir of Breath (John), Seer of Light (Rose), Knight of Time (Dave), and Witch of space (Jade). Over the course of their quest, the dark kingdom will inevitably defeat the light kingdom. The Black Queen and King will take control, and initiate The Reckoning. This affects a belt of meteors, called The Veil, which orbits far from Skaia, between the four planets and Derse, and is host to various lab facilities used by the kingdoms. The Reckoning causes the meteors to descend on Skaia, ultimately destroying it, unless the Black Queen and King can be defeated in time. Skaia however buys time by opening defense portals to catch many of the meteors, redirecting them elsewhere in space and time.

This is the generic template for the way the game is supposed to proceed. It can deviate from this model however, depending on the actions of the players, and the details of the game mythology presented is unique to each group of players and their session.

Long before John and his friends started playing the game, another group of players had been persistently trolling them, particularly Jade. They are furious about an action she will take that will cause major problems in the four kids' game session, and inevitably lead to their defeat. Specifically, Jade will send a package to John, apparently containing a powerful weapon he will need later. But the package winds up in the hands of Jack Noir, leading to dire consequences. They allude to other things she will do that will lead to not only trouble for the four kids, but the troll players as well.

The trolls consist of 12 kids from an alien planet, who went through the same process as John and his friends, escaping from the annihilation of their planet via meteors, and into the Medium to play the game. Their game session is entirely separate from that of the four kids. It has the same basic template, with its own Skaia, Prospit, Derse, Veil, and a planet for each troll, but separate game instances of these. They also have different instances of the same character templates, such as the kings and queens, and agents like Jack Noir.

The trolls have completed their game session with yet unknown results. They now reside on a meteor in their Veil, sitting at terminals trolling John and co. From their terminals they can choose any point in the past or future of the kids to troll, and observe what they're doing at that moment. As a group, their only stated objective is to harass the kids, which they do so haphazardly throughout different points in the kids' timeline. Though they can choose any point on the kids' timeline to talk, they are mostly resigned to the understanding that no matter what they do, they can't change the outcome of the kids' actions.

The four most vociferous trolls so far have been carcinoGeneticist, gallowsCalibrator, grimAuxiliatrix, and adiosToreador. (The other 8 being apocalypseArisen, twinArmageddons, arsenicCatnip, arachnidsGrip, centaursTesticle, terminallyCapricious, caligulasAquarium, and cuttlefishCuller, each yet to be heard from.)

carcinoGeneticist (CG) appears to have spearheaded the group's trolling campaign. While he was in the thick of his game session, the exile commanding him from a terminal in the apocalyptic future was Spades Slick. This is one difference between his game session and John's, who had WV as an exile commanding him. In CG's session, his version of Jack Noir became exiled along the way, and took on the name Spades Slick. Three other agents were exiled, and the four of them formed a gang called the Midnight Crew, and spent years building up a dark city in the future wasteland of the trolls' dead planet. Another difference in the trolls' session is that at some point along the way, the Black Queen was also exiled, later joined a rival gang called The Felt, assumed special powers that make her highly inadvisable to kill, and came to be known as Snowman. It was not until Slick confronted The Felt in their mansion that he discovered the station terminal to command CG, and not before Snowman blinded him in one eye, severed his arm, and locked him in a vault.

Each troll has a different trolling strategy, and a different rhythm by which they hop around the kids' timelines to chat with them. CG's strategy, for the most part, was to begin trolling them at the very end of their adventure, the moment at which he was most angry with their actions, and then gradually work backwards, mostly talking to John. This proves to be mutually frustrating though, as John knows less and less about the situation the further into the past CG goes. Similarly, the further into the future John progresses, the more he has the advantage over CG by knowledge of his future conversations with him, and vice versa. Over the course of the opposing directions of the two sides of the conversation, John learns more about the nature of the game and why they're being trolled, and in spite of hostility, they gradually befriend each other through an inevitability alluded to on both sides of the conversation.

Early in the correspondence between John and CG, which is to say late for CG, CG discovers he needs to get in touch with Jade, who refuses to talk to him in that time period. So he delivers a message to her much earlier, months in her past, telling her she needs to contact him when she's in trouble. She will know to do this when her dreambot explodes in the future, an outcome that has not yet happened.

Two other trolls, grimAuxiliatrix and adiosToreador (GA and AT) have targeted only Rose and Dave thus far. GA has hopped arbitrarily back and forward in Rose's timeline to talk to her, and is attempting to cultivate a friendship with her that now seems rigged through a series of conversational time loops, while seeking counsel from Dave on how to befriend her. AT sought counsel from Rose on how to troll Dave more effectively, after getting severely counter-trolled by him. He is under the impression he rebounded nicely though.

gallowsCalibrator (GC) has stayed mostly linear in her trolling patterns, and has done so under the guise of helping the kids on their quest. She convinces John to take a shortcut through his land, shows him the denizen's palace, leads him to warp back to his house, then shows him how to fix the faulty rocket pack he made earlier through an alchemy mishap. She tells him to use the rocket pack to fly up to the seventh gate, enter the denizen's palace, and kill it in its sleep. He complied with this, and flew through the seventh gate, in spite of reservations from Dave, who'd just entered the Medium the moment before John took off.

GC also assisted Rose, just after she bested an ogre with ease. She counseled her on understanding her role as the Seer of Light, and the meaning of the voice in her head as an exile issuing commands from a terminal. In her case, it was the exiled White Queen issuing commands from the egg shaped station in the future. Since Dave is Rose's server player, the terminal station from Dave's impact site issues commands to Rose. Just as the station at Rose's site, which WV found, issues commands to John, her client player.

After conversing with GA, Rose found Jaspersprite and interrogated him about the secret which she found so maddeningly mysterious years ago. He explained elements of the mythos of her land, and how she'd need to learn to play the rain to produce the musical analogue of a genetic code to reintroduce life into the ocean. In response to her question about his secret, he simply replied "Meow." She mistook this for more nonsense, but it was in fact the secret he told her years ago. The four letter sequence MEOW unlocked a genetic code in her subconscious, which she would spend years scrawling on her wall using those letters in place of the typically used GCAT letters, while completely oblivious to the scrawlings and their meaning just as John was. As Jaspers said, she would understand their meaning when her dream self wakes up.

Rose's dream self lives in a tower on the moon of Derse. Dave's dream self lives on the same moon in the other tower. It was suggested by Rose's future self, who is fully awake in the tower, that Dave had already been awake in his tower all along without realizing it. This was suggested in a conversation she had in the future with Dave. It was an alternative future timeline not meant to be.

This future timeline came about by this series of events.

Dave was able to enter the Medium by connecting with Jade as his server player. Jade got copies of the game from the frog ruins, after she delivered John's package to her past self. She snuck into the ruins while Bec was asleep, and retrieved the game from a lotus time capsule which had been ticking down for millions of years. The game was Dave's copy from the future, the same one that fell out the window with the impaled crow. Once she got the game, the time capsule started ticking down again, set to expire 413 years later, when the exiles are there. She dropped some items in the ruins, leaving them there for AR to find, and leaving her bass jammed in the elevator. Bec then found her there, took her back to her room, and grounded her there for the rest of the evening.

She quickly helped Dave set up the game, upgrading his alchemiter heavily, and crafting the special item he needed to enter the Medium, a red egg, which needed to be incubated and hatched to activate. She prototyped his kernelsprite with the impaled crow, which would affect the enemies later, including the Black Queen. The sprite built a nest on top of his apartment's antenna tower, and stole the egg to incubate it for hours. A very large meteor was soon bearing down on his city.

Dave then entered the Medium through a series of unseen events. Jade was asleep, thus forbidden by Dave from interacting with his environment at all. Jade complied for fear of retribution. Dave was faced with the Crowsprite, which appeared to be suggesting he prototype it again with the remains of Lil Cal. Dave consulted with John on this, who was about to rocket up to the seventh gate. John had no advice, and proceeded up through the gate against better judgment.

Dave prototyped the sprite with Cal. John entered the palace, presumably found the denizen, and was easily killed by it, as was the intent of GC's trick on him. This meant John could not establish a connection with Jade to rescue her from the looming meteor, and Dave and Rose lost contact with her, presuming her dead. Dave and Rose then spent the next four months in the Medium, advancing as far as they could to collect information before Dave decided to travel back in time to change events.

Dave used his time tables to go back to the moment he was about to prototype with Cal. Both he and his past self strongly urged John not to go through the gate. John was reluctant at first, but soon reconsidered, and flew down beneath the clouds. Future Dave then gave Present Dave all his advanced gear, and prototyped the Crowsprite with himself to make Davesprite, thus serving as his own guide from the future.

Before going back in time, Future Dave convinced Future Rose to go to sleep. He suggested her dream self would be unaltered by the timeline shift, and in her dream state she would remember the events from the future. When Dave went back, Rose's future dream self assumed the position of Rose's present dream self. Rose fell asleep, and on Derse's moon, she instantly woke up. She then saw all the genetic scrawlings she did in MEOW letters, and understood their meaning.

Meanwhile on Derse below, the Black Queen again insisted that Jack Noir abide by the dress code. He refused, and the queen threatened him. He picked up Jade's package to John, removed what was inside, and used it to slice her ring finger off. He then killed the Black Queen, put on the ring, and donned the full upgrade supplied by the three prototypings.

He then became Jackspers Noirlecrow, which is a name I just made up now.

And then after that you started watching me type in this ridiculous study I photoshopped for myself with my cool horse painting propped up in the background.

[29pageshomestuckeveryday]

Homestuck, page 822

[S] Jade: Play a hauntingly relaxing bassline.

Song used in this flash: Gardener by Steve Everson

Song commentary:

Steve Everson:

This is part of the Bolin Incident. If you don’t know what happened, up until half-way through Act 4 a guy called Bill Bolin was on the time, one of the original members. He was a great musician, that much can’t be denied; he wrote a lot of tracks that appeared in early act 3; Jade’s bass solo, the remix of it, the last part of the Dave and Bro battle… some others I forget. During that flash with Dave and Rose on Derse the original music was five Bolin tracks, ones he wasn’t all that happy with. He flipped out and did a lot of things that ended up with him dropped from the team, and his music replaced.

I called replacing Jade’s bass solo (I was enthusiastic about getting something of mine into the comic). We figured there’d probably be an existing piece of music used for the remix on Prospit so there were a couple of different versions remixing different tracks until Something Really Excellent was locked in.

We were on a strict timetable at the time, so I didn’t get the chance to find a really good bass voice or find a good rhythm. That was much improved for the actual release in Volumes 1-4.

Link to the storyboards for this page: http://readmspa.org/storyboards/00822.swf.html

Author commentary: Here we confirm that Jade lives on that island we saw at the end of Act 2. Sometimes I feel these notes would benefit from an OBVIOUS TRIVIA ZONE, about stuff that should be obvious, but you never know. Her house is modeled after her moon tower on Prospit. The ruins are a model of the incipisphere, with the frog in the center representing Skaia (which is where a giant frog is supposed to go). Prospit closely orbits, so is attached to the main temple (broken off). The four planets surround it in the Medium represented by water. The circular edge of the crater is the Veil (consisting appropriately of meteors). And just outside is Derse (also broken). The volcano is called the Forge, which also plays a key role in the overall system here. Oh, and the ruins are seven levels tall, representing the seven gates one needs to ascend through to reach Skaia.

[thewertsearch]

CCG: WHAT THE FUCK COULD YOU BE BUSY WITH??? CAG: I'm making my own plans! I'm a pretty 8ig deal, remem8er Karkat? CGC: 1T LOOKS L1K3 YOU FORGOT HOW M4NY 1RONS SH3 H4S 1N TH3 F1R3 CAG: Exactly!

Terezi is all too happy to back Vriska up, when Karkat needs to get dunked on. She'll also gleefully rub salt in the wound when Vriska gets her ass kicked.

These two facts explain basically everything about their relationship.

CAG: Do you guys realize you are sharing a key8oard and taking turns to argue with each other? CAG: That is kind of cute. ::::) CTA: yeah ii hate to 2ay iit, but iit really 2ort of ii2. CCG: OK FUCK THIS.

You know your flirting is obvious when even Sollux is rolling his eyes affectionately.

FUTURE gallowsCalibrator [FGC] 6:12 HOURS FROM NOW responded to memo. FGC: H3Y! [...] FGC: Y3S, YOU SHOULD TROLL TH3 HUM4NS FGC: 1T W1LL B3 FUN >:] CGC: W3LL, W3 BOTH KNOW TH4T 1 W4S PL4NN1NG TO 4NYW4Y FGC: OF COURS3! 1 TRUST YOUR JUDGM3NT ON TH3 M4TT3R FGC: JUST H3R3 TO S4Y YOU WONT R3GR3T 1T CGC: TH4T 1S N1C3 TO KNOW!

Whatever vices Terezi may have, self-hatred certainly isn't one of them. She's consistently delighted with herself, in any iteration - quite a rare trait in the trolls we've seen.

We're finally back in the present - or at least, what passes for the present in Homestuck. It's been - wait, let me check...

...yeah, it's been ten months since Act 4 ended with a bang, and a recap is probably appropriate. Where did we leave these kids?

John has just escaped the Veil, thanks to the brave sacrifice of the Authority Regulator. He's currently fast asleep, his dream self exploring Skaia with his endgame bunny.

Rose continues to fall under Horrorterror thrall. She just destroyed her First Gate, resolving to break all the game's rules in search of answers, before flying off to parts unknown.

Dave, guided by Terezi, has just soared through his own First Gate on his canonically awesome JPEG skateboard.

Jade has just experienced dream death in Skaia's upper atmosphere. Just as Karkat prophesized, her Dreambot exploded, launching her out of her home. I guess she's technically been falling for ten months.

Welcome back to the stage, Homestuck's original protagonists!

[homestuckreplay]

gardenGnostic alien theory [not clickbait]

(page 696-706)

9/25, 9/26, 9/27/2009 Wheel Spins: Parent Bad :(, Captchalogue Lore, Dramatic Irony Verdict: ❌ NO LONGER RELEVANT ❌

Gonna say something controversial but true: Can Town needs more cans. WV keeps introducing non-can elements, such as ‘roads’ and ‘trees’ and ‘splodgy chessboard’ and it’s just not very can-focused anymore. It is still the most adorably charming way to deliver a major lore dump that I have ever seen, and so deeply cryptic.

WV visually talks us through the cosmology of Sburb in a very similar way to Nannasprite a few hundred pages ago. Of course, WV was listening to Nannasprite’s exposition, so could be recreating what they’ve heard – but it seems like they have extra information, too. This Nannasprite lore is the part of the comic I most often go back to and reread so I guess grandmotherly wisdom is real.

NANNASPRITE: One [orb] goes down, to a kingdom entrenched in darkness. The other, up, to a kingdom basking in light! (p.424)

These kingdoms basking in light and darkness are definitely the ‘luminous planet’ (p.702) and ‘ominous planet’ (p.704) WV draws, although Nannasprite doesn’t mention any moons, and WV is certain of these. The ominous planet is ‘beyond an impenetrable veil of darkness’, which is what John sees when he gazes into the abyss below his house. Presumably the luminous planet is something he will reach on his way to Skaia if he begins to build up through the gates – since the forces of light are charged with Skaia’s protection.

NANNASPRITE: [The Medium] is where we are now! A realm that is a ring of pure void, dividing light and darkness. (p.421)

The four planets without satellites WV draws (p.703) are part of the Medium – more specifically, I think that small parts of these planets have been transported to the Medium. The lower left planet looks like Earth being hit by a giant meteor, so, could the other three be planets that have been destroyed by Skaian technology in different ways? The red planet (Mars?) has been enveloped by a large gray dust storm while the colorful planet and the black planet (Venus and Mercury?) both have strange clouds in orbit. If the Incipisphere is a realm that’s not part of Earth or its flow of time, it makes sense that other planets would be affected by it too, and that other planets with intelligent life might try to draw on Skaia’s power if they discovered it. Four planets, and four screens on WV’s monitor.

I think Rose and Dave are definitely from the same Earth as John but I could totally believe that GG is from a different planet. Rose’s ‘So, shall I expect a green package dropped to my house via airmail from whatever screwball cranny of the globe you're tucked into?’ becomes a great line if GG is not from this globe at all. So, maybe WV figuring out how to view other screens on the monitor is our lead-in to actually meeting GG and discovering what’s up with her.

NANNASPRITE: The Four Spires are situated above a throne, and these two thrones preside over the two respective Sovereign Powers! (p.424)

These Sovereign Powers must be the kings that WV detests so much. On this same page, the animation shows a chessboard – first a 3x3 with just the white and black kings, but as the orbs reach the spires of the light and dark kingdoms, the chessboard becomes a 12x12 (bigger than a standard chessboard) with a whole bunch of extra pieces, which roughly – but not perfectly – correspond to the pieces on an actual chessboard. This is the ‘stage’ that the forces of light and darkness duel on, and is clearly a place WV has either spent time in or spent time watching, because the chessboard is ‘the only logical pattern that occurs to [them]’ (p.697). So WV was in combat? Or possibly had someone close to them who was in combat, since they don’t seem designed for violence, and were forced to lose that person to this war?

NANNASPRITE: This is a war that the forces of light are always destined to lose, without exception! (p.424)

This line hits a little different after meeting WV. They would have won the war. Their side was fated to succeed, but something was important enough to them that they betrayed their king and their planet and voluntarily resigned themself to wandering in rags? I really think they have a more complicated history than we’re let in on right now. There’s a trope I’ve seen in books and movies where a child who has been through something traumatic doesn’t talk about it, but a teacher or carer figures it out through art the kid has drawn. I don’t know how based in reality this trope is, but I’m thinking about it in the way the ‘ominous planet’ is hidden behind pipes and coils of rope and massive messy smears of motor oil, compared to the lovingly crafted clouds of the rest of the scene.

Also, my can research paid off, because I am 99.9% sure that the mayonnaise (the only food from WV’s stash not found canned in real life) was put there so that they could make the ‘MAYOR’ sash. Planted because the (likely reader-submitted) commands ‘Clear out all the cans inside the purple machine’ (p.681) and ‘Become the mayor of Can Town’ (p.685) fit so well together. I kinda love the thought of three people’s brains in different places momentarily being on the exact same wavelength and creating this cute moment.

[angel---eater]

Okay yeah extrapolation on this version cause i like it better

Roxy, Dirk (+Hal), Jane, and Jake are still the ectobiological parents, there's just, like, more timeline fuckery. Jake is the ectobiologist and basically sends everyone's ectokids back in time just far enough to raise them pre-scratch because he's an idiot

Beta Striders

Big winding victorian type house in the middle of fucking nowhere. Dark gothy interiors, real cobwebs, LOTS of cursed/'haunted' objects and occult objects/tools. She's too busy to dust

Lil Cal is kept in a locked wood and fortified glass cabinet yes this is an Annabelle the Doll reference

Beta Rose would've been closeted for a long time. She finally started taking E somewhere in the first year of having Roxy (it didn't save her)

Roxy grows up strifing Sis with many weapons, magical and non-magical

There's like no interaction between them that isn't Sis drilling Roxy on horrorterror knowledge like a sergeant or strifing

Roxy's egg crack moment is conditional as fuck. Might happen post-session, might happen on the meteor who knows

Roxy grows up bitter and sneaks Sis' liquor to self medicate. Types mainly the same just not whimsical or sillay when sober. Tends to put his wants first when it matters, kind of an asshole. In love with Dirk

Beta Lalondes

Sprawling ultramodern mansion on the outskirts of... idk which big, glamourous US city, I'm not from the US. Literal celebrity type shit. They have palmtrees up the driveway and live near the sea

Dad Lalonde is never around, like most of the time he just ain't there. He sends Dirk anything he needs or wants, but Dirk has to ask which gets more and more daunting. Dad lovebombs Dirk whenever he is home, which causes a lot of emotional turmoil when he leaves again. Hal is jealous and wants attention too

Hal is just shades at the start but is prototyped with a dead seagull. Their tension skyrockets

Dirk is still crushing hard on Jake. Jake has no idea

Dirk has less emotional control and is more overtly clingy. He uses emojis (=^_^= and :3c etc) sometimes to overcompensate for his percieved horrible text tones. Its really obviously forced and usually used to convince someone when he's lying or distract concern from himself

Dirk's egg cracked when he made Hal and Hal asked if he was a boy too

Beta Harleys

Nana Harley still dragged Jane out to that island and also still died by gunshot. Nana was stealth with Jane because she simply forgot to mention it

Jane tries hard to be productive all day every day to stave off loneliness. Definition of 'productive' will vary from baking and cleaning the house to writing and then solving her own at-home whodunit murder mystery game.

Burnout central, she's barely hanging on to that smile

Kind of a control freak. She's seen the future in Skaia's clouds so she knows what has to happen, but she's frustrated that she doesnt know how or when. She snaps at her friends sometimes when she's stressed about it and gets into fights with Roxy

Dogtier! Egg officially cracks post-game but starts to wobble when two of her friends come out as tboys. He settles comfortably into nonbinary butch

Also crushing really bad on Jake

Beta Egberts

Granny Egbert lived a very deserved quiet life before Jake dropped himself on her. Jake is raised by her son, Dadbert but green

Jake really, really, really wants to become a famous scientist-philanthropist-inventor-explorer, yes all of those at the same time

Really fucking sheltered. Just completely trapped in a bubble of his own upbringing. Lives in an upper middle class suburb, possibly gated community. Dirk is the kid of a celebrity and Jake makes him look worldly by comparison

Has no idea anyone even considers him a romantic option. Finds the whole prospect of dating really hilarious, but gets a funny feeling in his chest around Dirk

Has every single Tomb Raider game, yes even That One. Talks about Lara Croft like how John talks about Nic Cage

[npclibrarydump]

(my homestuck ocs)

sometime early on i decided i wanted to take the elements/radioctive/genetics theming canon does and run w it. so one of my characters references a specific radioctive fish. and i did my absolute best to look for irradiation experiments on bugs (unsuccessful). and part of the whole premise is that its a universe thats already played sburb. like... not just the 5 sessions that interact in homestuck. this universe (sorta a misnomer w the 'creating a new universe' thing but, yknow) had a session and then that new universe had a session, and then their universe had one too. too many sessions in fact. to the point that whatever sburb game constructs/logic are getting confused and broken up, like trying to run a huge game on a shitty macbook. so yeah, sburb equivalent of uhhh radioactive decay!

its also totally not an excuse for me to ignore parts of sburb thatre too complicated for me to bother with. or write characters for. like the exiles, theres just none. idk why yet, im getting to it. the denizens arent right, the quests hints are janky and out of order. the consorts and carapacians say stuff that doesnt make sense unless they have some repressd memories of other players, other battlefields. the players actually get tons of info just... leaked from game npcs and ruins that probably shouldnt be there. the sprites are either completely glitched out and insane or give so much garbled information it's impossible to actually learn anything from it.

kastri's planet is full of caverns and holes, and its supposed to be. but theres gigantic craters thatve been covered over by phantom images of skaia, chess fields you just fall through. some doors or windows lead out to the battlefield. her kernelsprite flies off and gets itself lost out there, and comes back having revived a dead player from a previous session. even he has no idea how any atom of his remains ended up here.

euris' planet sends them on a quest through ruins of prospit and derse, things that look like consorts or denizens none of their session's players have. their first gate sends them to the wrong planet. they pry stories out of npcs about legendary heroes that dont quite match up with these players. one of the queens says "have i done this already."