#ectostuck

[ardenttheories]

I probably missed something here (recent follower and all that) but what's Ectostuck?

Ectostuck is a Fanventure I’m planning! It’s been in the works for a few years but I’m hoping to be actually writing it up soon.

You can find more info at @ectostuckofficial, though it’s admittedly a little outdated right now, but basically:

Ectostuck takes place in a universe where the ectobaby guardians that John makes in the Ectobiology Lab (and in a parallel universe where Jane does the same to their set of guardians, which I’m calling the Mirrored Verse) are paradoxified into another universe (the Ectoverse). Because they were taken before their timeline split (which diverges them into the Alpha and Beta timelines, essentially turning Orange Ectobaby into Dirk and Bro respectively), they’re a strange mix of their Alpha and Beta selves. 

The paradox specifically means that the timeline is unstable, because they were never actually meant to be there in the first place, and that strange things happen in their universe - such as items being missing out of nowhere, or things being sent with no owner - which also hosts a SBURB session. Unfortunately, the nature of their universe means their session is likewise unstable, and they must therefore figure out how to contact an Anomaly in order to even hope to find a way to win their never-ending session.

Paradoxically, it also means that each kid is only related to themself and their divided counterparts. Because Ectobiology initially makes perfect paradox clones of the Guardians (meaning Bro is literally only related to himself and Dirk, because he’s perfectly paradoxed), and the kids are basically the Guardian babies before the decision on whether they become the Alpha or Beta self, their relations work a little... complicatedly.

So, our two Striders are Drew and Dane, right? Drew Strider is only related to Bro and Dirk. In the mirrored universe (the one where the Alpha session goes first, and the Beta session is their backup), this means that Alpha Dave is the paradoxified Guardian, so Dane Strider is only related to Mirrored Alpha Dave and Mirrored Dave. 

Drew and Dane, therefore, are not related to each other. The same thing is true for the other players (Jaye Egbert, Jace English, Judy Crocker, June Harley, Roni Lalonde, and Rhea Lalonde). Which means there are no player-compatible guardians. Which means there is no Alpha universe, nor even a vague chance for a Scratch - it just straight up doesn’t exist. Which means, they only get one shot at SBURB. 

Honestly the loophole in the Ectobiology is the worst thing to wrap your head around. It’s a lot of questions of identity later in the comic ft. a bunch of kids who aren’t related to anyone else in their universe - not even each other - coming to grips with the shattering isolation of a broken session, desperately trying to contact an Anomaly they think will help them while they’ve actively got a big bad working against them. 

[fdragon-art]

Day 29 - “Insomnus”

While I don’t necessarily intend to make album art or anything for any of the Ectostuck tunes I’ve got, I did think of this idea and wanted to give it a shot. It ain’t perfect, but it was pretty fun trying out the Limbo style heheh.

[flare-dragon]

Ectostuck - Drew’s Theme - Insomnis

Here’s the first of the character’s themes. “Drew has to force himself to stay awake for fear of death due to lacking an alive dreamself, so he turns to horror to keep the adrenaline up. How one can stay up indefinitely is unknown, but a dude like himself would certainly have the willpower - and fear of death - to do it.”

I haven’t really done a horror tune before (and, truth be told, this feel more like “deep sad” instead of “neck tingling”), but it came out pretty nicely in the end! Unsettling in a way that fits his situation, I think.

[hskinstim]

okay, just so you guys know!!! i made @ectostuckofficial as a place to put all of the ectostuck stuff i’ve made, and am still making!! just to keep everything in one place rather than on here buried beneath stuff. you’ll see characters develop as i keep making them and see all the stuff planned for their session, and you’re more than welcome to ask questions and such if you want to!

[askectostuck]

Back stories make me sad.

But let's never talk of the floating brooms.

[fdragon-art]

Day 19 - Rhea from Ectostuck (as shown in @ectostuckofficial )

“You commune with the dark forces in hopes of attaining a fruitful prediction, a vision that leads to the alternate path of action you see. Alas, they only whisper that which you already suspected they would: “This is the path you shall take lest your hubris gets the better of you, Seer of Doom”. Useless crystal ball.”

So you may or may not have noticed but I was making a few tracks for Ectostuck. Seems that it makes for decent fuel for art ideas too heheh.

(Dane and Drew underneath)

(Imagine Dane talking about yet another conspiracy theory that Drew has likely already heard different versions of as he struggles not to pass out)

[hskinstim]

Ok but...mituna and pothus hanging out............pure

mituna and pothus spending any amount of time together would end up with screaming, bees, skateboard stunts gone horribly wrong, and a lot of collateral damage much to latula and kiregi’s dismay

[hskinstim]

i have nothing to give so please take prototype ectostuck quirks and conversations

[hskinstim]

Time to come clean,, i am the pothus person. Whats his interests other than batteries, and such? Like his personality. And whats his relationship with the others? Im so excited!!!!

heya!! i’m gonna post this, if that’s okay with you, and put it in the ectostuck tag cus it’s pretty important stuff for pothus! if not just tell me and i’ll delete it and make it a post instead :B

that said, pothus is still really into technology. he has an even bigger knack for it than sollux does, and instead of just focusing on hacking and things, he tends to try and test himself against big targets. he has to be very careful about it - it’s one of the skills his highblood carer doesn’t know about - but his hacking skills have led to him causing mischief all over the planet. messing with security so highbloods can’t enter their own hives, stealing money from one highblood’s account and putting it into another highblood’s account, hacking the empress’ own computer to browse through her folders - it’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t mean much to him, when he’s just looking at the numbers, but causes chaos to the people it happens to. 

he likes to make games. a lot of his games are just made for the empire - things commissioned by highbloods for their lowbloods to play, things commissioned by the empire itself to act as educational tools - but he’s got a few up that have really big cult followings, which’re on the troll version of gamejolt. he doesn’t think much of them compared to his empire games, despite the higher popularity. 

he enjoys bees. he’s actually pretty big on beekeeping! his highblood caretaker lets him keep bees in his hive, which has led to a development his quirk (in which be starts and ends each sentence with bzt, which is also supposed to sound like the noise a walkie talkie makes when you activate it). he’s got about a hundred bees, all named, and he can recognise each of them at a glance. 

despite how highly he thinks of himself, he’s actually really interested in the history of psiioniics. it’s what made him want to be a battery in the first place; he’s seen all the stuff they can do, and he knows he can do better. he wants to enter the history books as the strongest psiioniic known to trollkind. if he had his way, he’d be the battery to a grand space ship - the kind of big, bulky structure that requires a lot of energy to move, and even more to move through space on long adventures at high speeds. it’s a shame the empress is more than happy to stay on alternia. 

his personality is a mix between mituna and sollux, with a bit of pre-freedom psiioniic thrown in for good measure. he’s not quite as down and dour, and actually sounds rather excited and pumped when he speaks. he almost always sounds like he’s on a sugar high, and his words come out a lot like he’s speaking his mind without really thinking over them. it’s a flow, a ramble. 

EO: bzt 0h c0m3 0n! 1 a1n’t 571ck1ng ar0und 2 b33 b0553d ab0u7 by s0m3 2b1t fa1lur3 0f a s3adw3ll3r! bzt

(the text reads: bzt oh come on! i ain’t sticking around to be bossed about by some two-bit failure of a seadweller! bzt)

that should also explain a bit about his personality. he’s a pro-empire lowblood, but he actively looks down on highbloods who are mutated or need some other form of care. it’s something he actively sneers at, almost? it’s that half of him that dislikes the current system mocking the fact that the supposedly “perfect” highbloods, who by nature are “better than lowbloods”, can still come out wrong. 

he can come across very confusingly like that! he’s very torn about what to believe in, so just when you think you understand where he stands on a certain subject, he may say something that throws your head through a loop. if you called him out on it, he’d probably just shut down completely, cus he doesn’t want to actively think on it. like i said before; he very much prefers to live life just accepting things the way they are and going about the way that life lets him (such as making games for the empire; he likes making games, and these are games he can make, even if they bore him and take, like, a day tops to complete). 

as for his relationships with people...

he and riotar end up talking a lot. he considers riotar a friend, and tends to try and get him involved with random shenanigans, usually again cradin. he sees riotar as something of a lackey, at times, and often uses him as such. of course, he also likes to have riotar beta test all his games, and if he says he doesn’t like even one singular part of it, then he redoes the entire level to make sure it’s up to scratch. riotar doesn’t argue with him, and often goes quiet, so he can spout pro-empire bullshit riddled with his true anti-empire thoughts without getting called out on it. 

he and kiregi tend to butt heads a little more. while the two of them are friends, kiregi doesn’t exactly hide where he stands on the idea of revolution while online. a lot of their conversations usually end with one or both of them getting frustrated at the other, getting angry and leaving the chat, and coming back later with some sort of peace offering to continue normal conversation. they work as friends based on their mutual likes, and the fact that they’re both worried for each other. kiregi is probably one of the people who helps pothus change later in sgrub. 

kittur really gets under his skin. she spouts such blatant anti-empire rhetoric that it drives him crazy, and more often than not he leaves her conversations suddenly with his psiioniics flaring all over the place. he does believe what she says, and that’s part of why he tends to lash out - because she gets so close to convincing him, and then he catches himself and has to stamp himself back down into place. it’s also the only reason he’s still friends with her; cus she speaks the truth he won’t allow himself to think. 

ironically, he and aneboe actually have a fairly okay friendship going on. aneboe is anti-empire in secret, too, so they tend to bond over helping out their friends without “helping” (e.g. she mentions that there’s a treasure she wants to grab, and he’ll knock down the security in the hive she wants to steal from so she can grab it. if it turns out to be a very big pro-empire troll, and if she happens to steal something vital to the rebellion cause from it, then neither of them mention it. instead, they act like ti was all a coincidence.)

he and cradin are... awkward. they read like pothus attempting to violently drag cradin into a blackrom with how harsh he can be, and cradin bouncing back and forth between accepting and vehemently denying. in truth, there’s probably something more red in their actions. pothus somewhat pities cradin for being born the way he is, and for being as subservient to literally everyone else as he is - but as much as he pities those things, he also hates them (cus they’re the same qualities he has, the same things that hold him back). it ends up more often than not with pothus leaving their conversations on a powertrip. he always ends their conversations, too; cradin never replies once pothus has made it clear that the convo is over. despite all that, they do have... something of a friendship going on. sometimes it’s nice for pothus to talk to someone who’s as pro-empire as he tries to fool himself into being, and sometimes it’s just nice for him to realise that at least he doesn’t have it as bad as being a mutated seadweller. 

pothus and arawel have a sort of mentor-pupil teacher relationship going on. she praises him on the things he does; he tries even harder to please her so he gets more praise. it’s one of the few things he sort of really enjoys from the empire. getting praise from the only fuschiablood in existence, and getting it so frequently, just makes him feel a little bit special, and little bit necessary, a little bit useful. it helps to justify why he goes along with the whole pro-empire shebang. once pothus learns to think for himself, and once arawel realises that her laws actually hurt people more than they help them, their friendship really blooms. 

[hskinstim]

i FINALLY have the trollian handles all set out!!

kiregi vantas: hemophiliac pulpitarian (hp) dasuba megido: baleful liniment (bl) riotar nitram: insurgent recreant (ir) pothus captor: erroneous operator (eo) mirdal leijon: solitary huntress (sh) kittur maryam: illicit attendant (ia) themis pyrope: authorised obstreperousness (ao) aneboe serket: autotomic larcenist (al) horqua zahhak: stringent sycophant (ss)  vitila makara: sanguinary nonjuror cradin ampra: timorous laudanum (tl) arawel peixes: earnest tyrant (et)

and when put together? the letters spell out “alpha beta session trollish”, cus i... had the kids spell out “alpha beta session” so i had to follow that on at least a little.

[hskinstim]

Could you kind of tell me how calamity acted? Like just on a tipical basic?

well, calamity is sort of a mess. they’re a fusion of calliope and caliborn, so their personality is very unstable and fluctuates a lot. when they like people, and see them as friends, they’re a lot like callie; they’ll go out of their way to help them, will do their best to make sure they’re happy and safe, will check in on them every day and talk to them as frequently as possible - stuff like that! when you’re their friend, they will do everything they can to make you happy, even to the point of making others sad or hurting them. on the other hand, when they hate you, they get very much like caliborn; they’re rude and abrupt, incredibly hurtful, actively go out of their way to harm the people they hate or at least to hinder their progress, become very demanding and haughty - it’s a complete shift. yet you wouldn’t know, if they liked you, that they could be so awful; and if they hated you, you wouldn’t know that they could be so kind. 

they try to keep that as separate as possible. they have a different chumhandle for people they like and people they hate, so you can actively see the shift by putting the chats side by side. it’s almost like they don’t notice how very black-and-white they can be? cus, honestly, if they like you, they’ll overlook every single one of your flaws - but if they hate you, they won’t see any of the good you do. 

when they’re on their own, they’re actually pretty neutral. they shift between things they like - more destructive past times like tearing apart toys being counteracted with more creative ones like stitching them back together in better ways. they’re very flippy floppy like that!!

[hskinstim]

since i don’t have anything else to post, how about some ectostuck chumhandles?

aa: avarice abound (jace) lb: liable betty (judy) pn: psychic negator (rhea) ha: horticulture artisan (june) ss: sloshed scientist (roni) ee: enthusiastic entertainer (jaye) ti: tortured ichor (drew) os: omniscient surmise (dane)

i couldn’t feasibly do tt, tg, gt and gg for eight characters so i decided to do something entirely different instead! all the letters doubled up for the chumhandles can come together to spell out “alpha beta session” in reference to the fact that the kids are fusions of their alpha and beta universe selves

[hskinstim]

psst i have an ectostuck update on classpects!

drew: prince of rage

dane: knight of light

rhea: seer of doom

roni: rogue of time

jaye: page of breath

judy: witch of life

jace: heir of hope

june: maid of space