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8Homestuck begins as the story of four friends who live far apart and have never met. We are introduced to these kids one by one, starting with John Egbert.
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10It is John’s thirteenth birthday, and he wants to play a game with his online friends. He has been waiting for the game to arrive in the mail for days. After fussing with a gift from his baking-crazed Dad and enduring the pesterings of his friends, John leaves his room to check the mailbox.
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12Seeing that Dad has already brought in the mail, John confronts him in the kitchen. They have a messy battle with hammers and cakes and pies. John ends the strife with a distraction and makes off with his mail.
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14There are two parcels addressed to himself. The first, a gift from his friend Dave, contains the plush bunny prop from the set of Con Air. The second contains the beta release of the computer game Sburb. John and his friend Rose are eager to play Sburb and find out what it is about.
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16Two other parcels for John remain out of reach, locked in Dad’s car.
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18John starts a game of Sburb with Rose.
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20As John’s server player, Rose assumes control of his environment. Experimenting with the controls on her end, Rose discovers that she can extend John’s house, move furniture around, and place machinery that supports a kind of alchemy based on punch cards.
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22The alchemy equipment emits a confusing ball of light called the Kernelsprite. The sprite is “prototyped” when it absorbs John’s maimed harlequin doll and takes on the appearance of a one-eyed, one-armed jester.
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24The mission to alchemize their first item becomes urgent when John discovers a meteor is about to hit his house. After a series of frustrations brought on by Rose’s spotty internet connection, they succeed in creating a tree that bears a blue apple. John has only enough time to take a bite of the apple before the meteor strikes the Earth and makes a crater where his house stood a moment before.
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45                                                                ACT 2
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52John narrowly escapes fiery death by meteor impact. When he bites the blue apple he made, he and his house are moved to the Medium. The house now stands on a column of rock jutting through the clouds of a dark land.
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54The harlequin kernelsprite hatches, producing two images of the kernel that fly away, one downwards and one upwards, and a ghostly sprite that stays next to John.
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56A voice in John’s head begins to boss him around. The voice belongs to the Wayward Vagabond, a black-shelled creature wandering the dry wasteland of future Earth. The Vagabond has discovered a refuge filled with teleportation gear and a monitor of John’s progress in the Medium. Using the attached keyboard, the Vagabond tries to give John orders. His commands intrude on John’s thoughts as if the monitor were a text adventure interface.
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58Rose Lalonde continues to play as John’s server, posting her progress to a Gamefaqs walkthrough. To enter the game herself, Rose needs someone to be her server player. Her first plan is to get John’s server copy out of his Dad’s car so that John can reciprocate, but her laptop loses power and she drops the car into the abyss that surrounds John’s house.
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60Their friend Dave Strider loses his own Sburb discs when he carelessly impales an unruly crow on his sword, launching the bird and discs out of his high-rise window. When John asks Dave to be Rose’s server player, Dave sets off to find his Bro’s client and server discs.
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62Meteors rain down around Dave and Rose’s homes, starting sick fires that no driving rain can assuage.
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64After fighting her drunk mother, Rose retreats to the tomb of her cat Jaspers, where a portable generator is the last remaining power source at her house. Sheltered briefly from the encroaching forest fire, Rose reconnects. She finds John speaking to his sprite, which is now prototyped a second time after absorbing his Nanna’s ashes. It looks like a ghost of Nanna in harlequin costume.
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66Nannasprite explains that far overhead, at the centre of the Medium, there is a world called Skaia where forces of light and darkness, shaped by the players’ kernel prototyping choices, wage eternal war. This sets the stage for the adventure John is about to have, which the float hag calls “The Ultimate Riddle”.
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68Rose’s new task is to modify John’s house to help him reach the First Gate, a portal to the next stage of his adventure. Meanwhile, John must battle harlequin-garbed imps like the ones that have kidnapped his father. The imps and other baddies drop raw materials when they die. Rose and John can use these materials for building or for punch card alchemy. In between his skirmishes with the oily creatures, John experiments with the alchemy machines.
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70When the forest fire encircles Jasper’s tomb, cutting Rose’s connection, John is left to face his first boss battle without her help. Mom remotely opens a secret passage under the tomb to help Rose to safety.
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72Failing to find Bro or his copies in the apartment, Dave arms for battle. A note from Bro summons him to the rooftop for a duel.
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74In the command station, the famished Wayward Vagabond finds canned food (but no opener) and unthinkingly eats a bunch of inedibles including a lump of uranium fuel. After indulging in fancies of civic life as the Mayor of Can Town and locking himself out of the terminal, the Vagabond finds an appearifier, a device that summons objects from elsewhere in time and space. He uses it to release a firefly from its amber prison. Then the station blasts off, flies around the world, and lands a continent and (evaporated) ocean westward at the site of some mysterious froggy ruins.
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95                                                               ACT 3
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100Our fourth kid is the sleepy Jade Harley. She lives alone on a tropical island next to her Grandpa’s old object of study, a lagoon filled with mystic frog ruins. Jade’s only companion is Becquerel, an immortal dog with powers of teleportation, who keeps her out of the ruins.
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102Jade’s dead Grandpa left her a house full of big game trophies and fantastic technology. She has a dreambot, a robot avatar that mimics her actions and lets her pester chums while she is dreaming.
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104When Jade sleeps, her dreaming self wakes and flies around on Prospit, a golden planet in the Medium, home to the kingdom of white-shelled creatures that Nannasprite described as the forces of light. Prospit has a golden moon attached to the planet by a giant golden chain.
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106Dream Jade and Dream John live on Prospit’s moon, which periodically swings into the bright skies of Skaia because of how closely Prospit orbits Skaia. When this happens, Dream Jade watches the clouds and sees visions in them, learning things that are mysterious to the other kids.
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108Dream John has never woken. His dreams, troubled and vague, have caused him to unconsciously deface his walls in both worlds while sleepwalking.
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110Fleeing from the forest fire, Rose enters the neighbouring laboratory, where she finds meteor-tracking and ectobiology gizmos and a power source. Discovering that the lab itself is marked for a violent impact, she escapes to her house with Jaspers’ corpse and a mutant kitten.
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112Rose and Nannasprite help John defeat the Crude Ogres. After finding more birthday presents in Dad’s distressingly normal bedroom, John finally sees the graffiti on the walls of his own room which his conscious mind has repressed until now. Then he plays with the alchemizer while Rose builds his house up to the First Gate.
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114In the desolate future, a white-shelled Peregrine Mendicant finds a mobile command station that flies her to the mystic ruins. She and the Wayward Vagabond must take cover from the aggression of a black-shelled Aimless Renegade who has claimed the ruins as a crime scene. Together, they help deliver a package from John to Jade that needs to be sent into Jade’s past to complete a time loop.
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116The package to Jade was one of three gifts John sent when his friends turned thirteen. He gave knitting needles to Rose and celebrity aviators to Dave. Since at least that time, the kids have been getting messages from internet trolls who claim to be from outside their universe.
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118Bro kicks Dave’s ass.
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120Dad’s black-shelled kidnappers have led him to the purple kingdom of darkness that is Prospit’s enemy. Dad makes trouble for his captors and their archagent, Jack Noir. Before Noir can punish him, Dad does Jack a surprising turn by destroying the harlequin hat that Jack wears under duress. Jack lets Dad go free.
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122Bro drops his copies of Sburb for Dave and flies away on a rocket board. Dave installs the game as Rose’s server player and helps her get started. They prototype Rose’s kernel with Jaspers and a tentacle princess doll. After many difficulties and a leap of faith, Rose enters the game.
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124Meanwhile, two other entries happen: John fights his way up to his First Gate and jumps through, while Jade enters the mystic ruins for the first time and finds a flowering lotus-shaped time capsule.
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145                                                           INTERMISSION
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150Spades Slick, Diamonds Droog, Clubs Deuce, and Hearts Boxcars are the Midnight Crew, a quartet of vicious black-shelled mobsters.
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152The Midnight Crew’s gang war with The Felt and their boss Lord English escalates when Slick and his crewmates break into English’s mansion. They split up and search the house for clocks to break, safes to crack, and green torsos to slay.
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154The Felt’s fifteen members all have different time-related powers, but they are fatally disorganized. The Midnight Crew exploit their weaknesses and kill them one by one. Soon the only foes left are Snowman, who holds the universe hostage, and Clover and Cans, who are respectively too lucky and too huge to take down.
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156Tiring of the fight, Spades Slick goes straight for the big vault. Ignoring a warning from Clover, he pries it open with Crowbar’s crowbar. The vault’s weird time shit backfires on Slick, kicking him into a parallel timeline where things happened differently. The house is a smoking ruin. Everyone else is dead except Snowman, who rips his arm off and locks him inside the vault.
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158Climbing down through a trapdoor, Slick finds a command station monitoring a troll’s progress in the Medium.
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179                                                                ACT 4
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185Previously: John reached the First Gate above his house. Dave helped Rose enter the Medium. Jade entered the Mystic Ruins, finding a time capsule lotus which yielded Dave’s copies of Sburb. And the Aimless Renegade opened fire on the Peregrine Mendicant and Wayward Vagabond when they landed centuries later at those same ruins.
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187Taking the discs from the lotus flower, Jade drops some items which the Renegade later finds in the ruins. Then Bec returns Jade to her house. She installs the game, connects as Dave’s server player, falls asleep, and puts the impaled crow into his kernelsprite, creating a crowsprite.
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189The crowsprite steals Dave’s entry item, an egg, and makes a nest on top of his apartment building’s antenna tower. Unable to hasten Dave’s entry into the Medium, Jade helps him with alchemy instead, fitting the alchemizer with a number of upgrades.
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191John’s First Gate sends him down to the surface of his planet, Lowas, the Land of Wind and Shade.
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193The worlds of a game session are located in the Incipisphere, which is like a solar system with Skaia at its centre. The innermost planet is the golden Prospit, whose moon periodically swings into the skies of Skaia. Next is the Medium, the band of space containing the kids’ planets. Each house gets its own planet and its own Seven Gates overhead. Outside the Medium is the Veil, an asteroid belt, and beyond that, the purple planet Derse, home to the black-shelled creatures that Nannasprite described as the forces of darkness. Dream Rose and Dream Dave live on Derse’s moon, which periodically faces out toward the infinite void known as the Furthest Ring.
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195John explores Lowas. Urged on by the Peregrine Mendicant, he meets some friendly salamanders and uses their postal system to supply Dad with a fresh hat and to request his server copy back, which a zealous Authority Regulator confiscated from Dad’s wrecked car. A pack of terrible minions nearly defeat John. Jade’s Grandpa comes to his rescue and then leaves without a word.
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197Rose’s entry transports her house to another planet, Lolar, the Land of Light and Rain. Rose’s Mom immediately wanders off. Rose fights her first minions and finds Jaspersprite, who challenges her to discover the meaning of her quest.
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199His meteor impact imminent, Dave loses patience and climbs the radio tower to get the egg back. He gets a pecking from the crowsprite and falls off. Dave’s Bro lands on the meteor and slices it in half with a katana while his rocket board breaks Dave’s fall. The egg cracks, ushering Dave into the Medium.
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201Around this time, the kids start getting trolled more often. The troll Terezi contacts John and offers to accelerate his quest by taking him straight to his denizen, Typheus. She leads John back to his house and turns his previous alchemy experiment into a functioning jetpack. John puts the jetpack on and blasts off toward his Seventh Gate.
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203At this point, events diverge into two distinct chronologies: one that reinforces its own existence through stable time loops, and one that doesn’t.
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205In the contradictory “doomed” timeline, Typheus slays John. Jade never gets into the Medium. Dave and Rose spend the next four months exploring their game session and determining that it is futile. Finally Dave travels back in time to visit his past self. Rose, who cannot go with him, goes to sleep in the hope that her awakened dreamself will in some way survive their dead-end timeline.
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207In the self-fulfilling “alpha” timeline, just when Dave has entered the Medium, bringing his apartment to Lohac, the Land of Heat and Clockwork, Doomed Dave arrives from the future and alters the events that caused his doom. He sacrifices himself to the crowsprite, becoming Davesprite, and talks John out of meeting Typheus. John settles for flying to his Second Gate instead.
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209When the doomed Rose’s timeline ceases to exist, the alpha Rose inherits some of doomed Dream Rose’s memories. She falls asleep in her house and wakes on Derse’s moon for the first time. Like John, Rose now sees what she unconsciously wrote on her walls. It is Jaspers’ Meow message, a genetic code.
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211John’s Second Gate takes him to Lolar, where he crashes into Rose’s house and finds her asleep. Snooping around, John finds Rose’s unfinished present to him, a stuffed bunny with knitted patches. He also poses as Rose in reply to the troll Kanaya, tricking her into a marathon of flustered exchanges with Rose. Then he swaps pets with the sleeping girl and blasts off again.
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213Dream Rose visits Dream Dave, whose unconscious graffiti is of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, and sees on his computer that John is at her house. Waking up too late to meet him, she alchemizes new weapons and vents her frustration on the gathering minions.
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215Dave wakes up and alchemizes stuff too while Dream Jade builds his house up. Some crafty snooping nets him Rose’s private journals, which contain the Meow genome and a story about wizards. Dave puts them aside, using his juice-stained Sburb envelopes for bookmarks. Meanwhile, the Gods of the Furthest Ring tell Rose to burn her own copy of Meow. She explains to Dave that as Derse dreamers, they hear voices from the infinite void instead of seeing visions in Skaia’s clouds.
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217The Draconian Dignitary, an agent of Derse, sneaks into Dave’s room and steals the journals. Dave returns to find the corpse of another Dave who got in the Dignitary’s way. From this he learns the importance of using stable time loops instead of trying to change what has happened.
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219Sometime later, Dave reaches his first gate while Rose destroys hers.
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221The kids’ guardians have also been wandering the Medium. John’s Dad returns from Derse to Lowas, receives a fresh hat, and encounters Jade’s Grandpa, who carries the Sassacre’s book that Nannasprite dropped. They find a portal and leave Lowas. The pony Maplehoof follows Rose’s Mom through a similar portal on Lolar. Bro’s rocket board ends up flying by itself over Derse’s moon, where it catches the falling Lil’ Cal puppet that Dream Rose tossed out of Dream Dave’s tower. The Authority Regulator who plundered Dad’s car follows Lil’ Cal through a similar portal on Derse. Bro himself is awaiting a duel with Jack Noir on Lohac.
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223Grandpa, Dad, Mom, and the Regulator all transportalize to the same place, a laboratory where chess piece creatures are made. The lab is embedded in an asteroid in the Veil. John finds the portal from Lolar to the lab soon after, but by that time the others have departed. The Regulator has taken the rocket board and is flying around the Veil. The guardians are piloting a ship towards Skaia, having left behind Maplehoof and a variety of objects for John to find.
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225John discovers that the laboratory is equipped to do ectobiology. Ectobiology is the practice of collecting genetic samples by “paradoxifying” targets that cannot be appearified. The samples can be used to make clones and can be combined to create descendants.
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227The lab equipment has been set to paradoxify four people from four different spacetime coordinates on Earth. John sees Nanna, Grandpa, Bro, and Mom on the monitor and appearifies genetic samples from each one in turn. After all their genomes are collected in the form of spooky time slime, the machine gets to work creating clone babies of each one. It also combines Nanna’s sample with Grandpa’s and Bro’s sample with Mom’s, producing a baby son and daughter from each pair.
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229While John’s ectobiological creations crawl around and attach themselves to the objects lying around the lab, the troll Karkat contacts John and explains what he learned from doing the same thing in the troll session. The four clone babies are destined to leave the timeless Medium, fall to Earth, and grow up to be the people they were cloned from. Their four descendants will also go to Earth and grow up to be John, Rose, Dave, and Jade.
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231Karkat also warns John that an event called the Reckoning will happen too soon in John’s session due to Archagent Jack Noir’s meddling and that the kids will fail and die when Noir becomes too powerful. John has no time to worry about any of that. He is too busy handing out stuffed bunnies in a touching reënactment of Con Air.
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233When he is done, every baby has bonded with something in the lab:
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235Baby John has the Sassacre’s book;
236Baby Rose has the soiled bunny from Con Air;
237Baby Dave has Maplehoof the pony;
238Baby Jade has the bunny with knitted patches that John found in Rose’s room;
239Baby Nanna has Dad’s soiled hat;
240Baby Grandpa has Grandpa’s flintlock pistols;
241Baby Mom has the mutant kitten;
242Baby Bro has Lil’ Cal the puppet.
243On the verge of the Reckoning, these babies and their companion objects and animals are transportalized out of the lab and onto eight neighbouring meteors.
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245Then the Reckoning starts, triggered by a series of events that began when Rose dropped John’s Dad’s car through the clouds.
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247Among the chess piece creatures that serve the kingdoms of Prospit and Derse, there are many Agents doing jobs throughout the Incipisphere. Among them are a Parcel Mistress, an Authority Regulator, a Warweary Villein, and four high-ranking Dersites cast in the same mold as the Midnight Crew.
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249A Parcel Mistress from Prospit is on Lowas, looking for a green box Dream Jade asked her to find and deliver to John. Jade knew from her cloud visions that it would be lost inside the plummeting car and would only reach him later, when he is in great peril.
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251The Mistress discovers an enemy Authority Regulator taking two parcels from the wrecked car. One is the green box and the other is an envelope that John has requested. She greets the Regulator and asks for both parcels. He gives her the Sburb server envelope, which she immediately consigns to the Breeze. He keeps the contraband box for his superiors. Determined to get the box back, she follows him to Derse.
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253After a chance encounter with the Black Queen, who wears a ring giving her the powers of the prototyped kernels, the Mistress finds the box on the desk of Archagent Jack Noir (who looks like Spades Slick). Noir drives a hard bargain: she must bring him the crowns of the White King and Queen. He sends her away with a treasonous mission and a Regisword.
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255His curiosity piqued, Noir looks in the box and discovers the perfect weapon to kill the Black Queen, who is constantly forcing him into foolish clothes. He destroys her utterly, takes her Ring of Orbs Fourfold, and gains its harlequin-jaspers-tentacle-crow powers.
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257Returning to Prospit, the Parcel Mistress relates her predicament to the White Queen, who has the same kind of ring. The Queen chooses to abdicate so that the Mistress can fulfill the bargain with Noir. She gives the Mistress her ring and crown and tells her to find the White King on the Battlefield to get his crown too.
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259The Courtyard Droll (who looks like Clubs Deuce) has tailed the Mistress from Derse. He picks her pocket, stealing the ring that was just entrusted to her. She boards a shuttle and flies off to the Battlefield still believing she has it.
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261Dream Jade notices, beats up the Droll, and takes the ring. It has no power for her, but she puts it on for safekeeping before returning to Dream John’s tower. Playing Sburb with the help of her soon-to-explode dreambot, she stays awake—asleep on Earth—to be around for Dream John’s awakening.
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263Prospit and Derse fight their war on the Battlefield at the centre of Skaia, another element of the Incipisphere that evolves in response to kernel prototypings, growing from a simple chessboard into a planet dotted with farms and castles. One of these farms is tended by the black-shelled Warweary Villein, who despises the eternal war.
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265When his farm is torched, the Villein snaps and launches a rebellion against both kingdoms, rallying white and black carapacians to his cause. Together they march on the Black King and are about to confront him when Jack Noir arrives. Noir now styles himself the Sovereign Slayer. He has flown to Skaia to complete his stone cold coup d’état by breaking the Black King’s scepter and beheading him. Then he massacres the rebels, sparing only the Villein, and begins to devastate the Battlefield with some super deadly red shit.
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267Elsewhere on the board, the White King greets the Parcel Mistress and surrenders his crown and scepter to her. The lurking Hegemonic Brute (who looks like Hearts Boxcars) ambushes them, knocking the scepter out of the Mistress’s hand and over a waterfall.
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269The Droll finds the white scepter and brings it to Noir, who uses it to initiate the Reckoning, a process that propels meteors out of the Veil and towards Skaia. Skaia throws up defense portals to intercept these meteors and send them to Earth instead. Each portal is connected to a different moment in Earth’s history. Most of the Veil’s meteors fly through these portals and are sent crashing into the houses and surroundings of Sburb players on Earth. The ones carrying Agents are sent to later times, while the ones carrying babies are sent to earlier times so that they can grow up, participate in Sburb, and contribute to their own creation. (This is why John’s premature death caused a doomed timeline. The babies had to come from somewhere.)
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271The Authority Regulator, on his wild ride through the Veil, discovers a meteor with a frog temple on it, an intact version of the ruins on Jade’s island. Its raniform iconography is hateful to Derse. Looking for a perp, the Regulator enters the mystic temple, finding an empty time capsule and another ectobiology lab. This lab’s monitor shows two unaccountable freaks arriving on Earth by meteor and unintentionally killing Colonel Sassacre. The Colonel’s widow Betty Crocker raises the pair as brother and sister, and they grow up to be Nanna Egbert and Grandpa Harley. The monitor has targeted their dog, Halley, for paradoxification.
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273The Draconian Dignitary (who looks like Diamonds Droog) enters the temple lab carrying the journals he stole from Dave’s apartment. The Regulator hides and watches. The Dignitary casts Dave’s juice-stained bookmarks into the time capsule, which stores them for release four hundred million years later, and moves on to the lab’s ectobiology station, which is set to make an organism by combining Halley’s genome with a genetic code to be input by the user. The Dignitary inputs Rose’s Meow code and Becquerel is born.
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275The Regulator flees the temple and returns to John’s meteor. He finds the boy asleep as the meteor plummets out of the Veil and the transportalizers break. To get John safely off the rock, the Regulator ties him to the rocket board and sends him flying back to his land. With no escape for himself, the Regulator rides the meteor to Earth.
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277The Sovereign Slayer flies up from the Battlefield and hits Prospit with the deadly Red Miles. The White Queen escapes on a ship and heads for a Skaian defense portal. Noir severs the chain of Prospit’s moon, sending Dream Jade and Dream John plummeting into Skaia amid the wreckage of their golden world. Dream Jade tries desperately to wake Dream John. At the last moment, she throws him to safety and perishes in the impact. He wakes on the Battlefield and takes the Ring of Orbs Fourfold from her body.
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279The Parcel Mistress slays the Hegemonic Brute with her Regisword and uses his radio to summon Noir. They complete their bargain by exchanging the white crowns for the green box, which she takes straight to Dream John.
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281In the box, Dream John finds a gift from Jade as well as letters from her and a penpal who helped her build the thing. It is a robot made from the knitted bunny plush that John gave to Baby Jade. It holds an assortment of miniature legendary weapons. When Jack Noir returns for the ring, the bunny defends Dream John and makes Noir back off.
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283Grandpa lets Mom and Dad off on the Battlefield, finds and taxidermizes Dream Jade’s body, and returns to his island home on pre-Reckoning Earth. He lives the rest of his days raising little Jade. Dream Jade’s mounted body sits in his disused lab with another trophy from his expedition to the Medium, a Fourth Wall that he stole from Noir’s office. When it is on, this wall is linked to Andrew Hussie’s apartment, and Hussie uses it to deliver two recaps of Homestuck covering everything through Act 4.
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285The White Queen goes to Earth, arriving in the post-Reckoning wasteland. Having abdicated, she is now a Windswept Questant. She finds an eggy-looking command station, enters, and speaks to Rose.
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287All of the Exiles are in fact Agents sent to Earth through defense portals. The Warweary Villein becomes the Wayward Vagabond, the Parcel Mistress becomes the Peregrine Mendicant, and the Authority Regulator becomes the Aimless Renegade, who has been shooting at the other two since their arrival at the ruins.
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289Seeing the Vagabond’s Bec-head pumpkin, the Renegade remembers Becquerel’s violent birth. He stops shooting and surrenders. The Mendicant is angered but spares him. They make peace and eat as the sun sets on their camp. The Vagabond shows the Mendicant his command station and John’s monitor. She teaches John to use the salamanders’ Pyxis postal system while the two men rebuild Can Town and Bullet Militia.
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291The Windswept Questant arrives at the ruins in her egg station. Her appearance flusters the other exiles. The Vagabond and Renegade fashion a crown from mailboxes and offer it to the Questant, but she declines and puts the crown on another exile for fulfilling her royal duty. The Peregrine Mendicant is coronated the Prospitian Monarch.
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293Finally, the Wayward Vagabond reveals that he has been secretly guarding a Ring of Orbs Fourfold.
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314                                                                  ACT 5
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320ACT 5 ACT 1:
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322Previously, the aliens that were trolling the kids revealed that they played the same game and failed somehow. Act 5 begins with a prequel telling how the trolls from Alternia played their own session.
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324It is Karkat Vantas’s sixth wriggling day and he is just as crabby as ever. His friend Sollux Captor invites him to play the computer game Sgrub, which Sollux wrote by parsing the hieroglyphic code from the mystic ruins their friend Aradia Megido discovered in a cave.
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326Sgrub, like Sburb, is the gateway to the Medium. Each game session has its own incipisphere containing a Skaia, Prospit, Derse, individualized planets for the players, frog temple borne by the reckoning, and so on. Alternia has two sets of ruins, one red and one blue, so Sollux organizes his friends into two teams.
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328Sollux prepares to lead Blue Team with Aradia while Karkat assumes command of Red Team, connecting to his friend Terezi Pyrope. Looking for teammates, Red Team recruits Gamzee Makara, Tavros Nitram, and Kanaya Maryam. They also ask Nepeta Leijon, but her moirail Equius Zahhak makes her join Blue Team instead.
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330Moirallegiance is one of four acknowledged types of troll romance called “quadrants,” each with its own symbol:
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332Moirails, in the diamonds quadrant, are pacifying soulmates.
333Matesprits, in the hearts quadrant, are reproductive lovers.
334Kismeses, in the spades quadrant, are reproductive haters.
335Auspistices, in the clubs quadrant, are caring mediators.
336When Aradia admits that the game will doom Alternia, not save it, Sollux tries to call the whole thing off. He succeeds only in goading Karkat into running a computer virus that curses his friends to lose their animal guardians known as lusus naturae. They all prototype their dead lusus before entering, except for Aradia. After putting Sollux to sleep to make him the last player to enter, Aradia connects to Nepeta and prototypes her own kernel with the frog head icon from the ruins.
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338What happens next has a bit of backstory:
339
340Some of the trolls used to play a live action game called Flarp. Aradia and Tavros were larping against Terezi and her teammate Vriska Serket when Vriska used psychic suggestion to make Tavros jump off a cliff. The fall made him paraplegic.
341
342Aradia retaliated by summoning ghosts to haunt Vriska. Vriska retaliated by making Sollux kill Aradia. Terezi retaliated by making Vriska’s oracular magic cue ball explode in her face, taking an arm and an eye. Vriska retaliated by hijacking Tavros’s psychic animal communion with Terezi’s unborn dragon lusus to make Terezi stare into Alternia’s sun, blinding her.
343
344After that, Terezi and Vriska made a truce. Terezi’s dragon taught her to see with her chemical senses, while Vriska’s neighbour Equius built her a prosthetic arm. Aradia stuck around as a ghost, communing with the voices of the dead, which guided her in orchestrating the launch of Sgrub.
345	
346Hoping to lead Blue Team, Vriska asks Equius to make a gift for Aradia, a mechanical body that will house her ghost. But after constructing the soulbot, Equius connects to Aradia and delivers it himself, doublecrossing Vriska and shutting her out of Blue Team. Vriska connects to Tavros and Kanaya instead.
347
348In the Land of Pulse and Haze, Karkat meets the Jack Noir of his session, who offers to help him usurp the Black Queen. Red Team aggressively executes the plan, ultimately exiling both Jack and the Queen to post-reckoning Alternia, where they become a Scurrilous Straggler and a Banished Quasiroyal. Later on, Jack would take the name Spades Slick and form the Midnight Crew with his fellow exiles, while the Quasiroyal would join their rivals The Felt as Snowman.
349
350As their entry chains near completion, Red and Blue Teams begin to see signs of each other’s presence. They discover that they are sharing a single twelve-player session, not two separate sessions as they thought. Red Team prove to be the session’s Prospit dreamers and Blue Team the Derse dreamers, with two exceptions. Aradia does not seem to have a living dreamself while Sollux has two, one on Prospit and one on Derse. During Sollux’s long sleep, his Prospit dreamer wakes. After recovering from a taste of mind honey, he connects to Karkat while Kanaya connects to Equius, completing the Mobius Double Reacharound that is their entry chain.
351	
352Kanaya has known about the impending galaxy-wide extinction of her race for a long time. Waking young on Prospit, she saw Rose’s walkthrough in a cloud vision. When her mother grub lusus dies, Kanaya pulls from its carcass a horny orb that she hopes will resurrect trolldom.
353
354The doom of the troll species and their interstellar empire is an event called the Vast Glub. The sea princess Feferi Peixes’s lusus is Gl’bgolyb, a squiddly terror of the deep. In its dying throes, Gl’bgolyb makes a terrible psychic shriek that kills every one of the Empress’s subjects, including Sollux before he makes it into the Medium. Feferi comes to his rescue, waking his Derse dreamself with a corpsesmooch. This comes to be recognized as one of the game’s resurrection mechanisms.
355
356In his effort to unite the two teams, Karkat discovers a chat client feature that lets him create memos which exist outside the flow of time. He and his teammates can read a memo before it is written and write in it after having read it, allowing (and also compelling) them to talk to him from the past and future of the session. The others use this new mode of communication mostly to air their relationship problems. Karkat responds with an unending stream of cantankerous hectoring, much of it directed at himself.
357
358The trolls’ session continues for about a month, but for us readers it all goes by in a blur. They circle the Medium killing monsters, finding treasure, exiling agents, and sometimes dueling. Sollux fights Feferi’s fellow seadweller Eridan Ampora. Aradia in her soulbot fights and fatally wounds Vriska. Then, having made her pay, Aradia time travels straight to the end of the game. Vriska recovers somehow.
359
360The Black King, made vast and powerful by Gl’bgolyb’s prototyping, initiates the Reckoning and sets himself up as the endgame boss. Thousands of sacrificial Aradias arrive from doomed timelines to join the twelve heroes in the final fight. Everyone works together to slay the King.
361
362At the end of their ordeal, the trolls are presented with a door to a new universe that was to be the ultimate reward. But before they can react, an invincible demon appears, destroys the door, and shreds all but one of the Aradiabots. Narrowly escaping the demon’s wrath, the trolls hunker down in an ectobiology meteor in the Veil, stuck between universes.
363
364
365ACT 5 ACT 2:
366
367	
368After an invincible demon with a bloody hand interrupts the trolls’ victory, they retreat to a mazelike laboratory in the Veil, the asteroid belt that surrounds the Medium. They hide there for just over ten hours while the demon lays waste to the troll incipisphere, flying to one planet after another and blowing them up in green fire. While the trolls are holed up, the demon will destroy all twelve of their personal lands, their Prospit, their Derse, and the creature that embodies their ultimate reward in Skaia.
369
370Karkat gets his first close look at the demon when it flies to Prospit and kills the Prospit dreamselves. Later, when Karkat learns about the kids, he begins to piece together where the demon came from.
371
372After witnessing Prospit’s destruction via smelloscope, Terezi gets an unexpected money transfer which Sollux traces to a donor inside the universe the trolls created. That donor is Dave, and that is how the trolls discover the kids.
373
374Terezi’s position outside of the kids’ universe lets her use a chat client to observe the kids’ waking lives in the alpha timeline and troll them at any point with no regard for the arrow of time. At Karkat’s prodding, other trolls join in and make contact at many points in the kids’ lives. Because the two groups are chronologically sideways, their interactions are somewhat acausal and loopy.
375
376The trolls are particularly drawn to the final day of the kids’ timeline. Their view of the kids’ session is cut off twenty-four hours after the Reckoning by a phenomenon called the Scratch.
377
378Taking an interest in Dave’s advancement, Terezi trolls him intensively. She guides him to a crocodile stock market and persuades him to use his time travel loops to run a scam and get rich so he can send her the money she already received. They also draw comics for each other. It’s a cultural exchange.
379
380Exploring his land, Dave finds the sword Caledfwlch in a stone and gets it out by breaking it in half. This provokes a wave of monsters to attack. Dave calls on Davesprite to protect him from Hephaestus’s minions and then abruptly falls asleep. After slaying the monsters, Davesprite flies away to John’s planet to help out Bro, who is being chased by the Sovereign Slayer.
381	
382Previously, Dream Jade died and Jade’s dreambot exploded, blowing up her bedroom. Thanks to a sweet catch by Bec, Jade lands outside on her bed and falls asleep again.
383
384After Karkat and Jade’s dreamselves die, their dreams take place among the tentacled Gods who live in the Furthest Ring, the infinite warped spacetime between game sessions. On waking, Karkat warns the other trolls with dead dreamselves that they should not sleep, lest they have the same nightmares with the Horrorterrors.
385
386Feferi, unafraid of the dream afterlife, defies Karkat. In Dream Feferi’s last moments, she speaks with the Gods and asks them to make an environment in the Furthest Ring where all the dreaming dead can meet. Then the demon comes to Derse and slays the Derse dreamselves.
387
388When the kids’ session started, the queens of Prospit and Derse each had a Ring of Orbs Fourfold which gave the wearer new features each time a kid entered the Medium, reflecting what the kids did with their kernelsprites. John, Rose, and Dave’s entries all added to the queens’ appearance and powers. Jade’s entry was still to come.
389
390In Act 4, both queens lost their rings. Derse’s archagent Jack Noir took the Black Queen’s ring and would continue to use its powers throughout his multi-session rampage. Prospit’s ring was more finicky. It would change hands many times before being used again. The Parcel Mistress, the Courtyard Droll, and Dream Jade each had it briefly. After Dream Jade died when Prospit’s moon fell to Skaia, Dream John took the ring from her body, but that was only the beginning of its journey.
391
392Previously, John fell asleep in a lab in the Veil because his dreamself woke. When the Reckoning propelled the lab toward Skaia, the Authority Regulator strapped the sleeping boy to his rocket board and sent him back to the Land of Wind and Shade. The Regulator stayed in the lab. It fell through a Skaian defense portal and exiled him on Earth.
393
394John lands on his planet without waking up. Taking an interest in John’s advancement, Vriska trolls him intensively.
395
396Wandering the Battlefield with Liv Tyler the robot bunny, Dream John spots his Dad and Rose’s Mom. He rushes to meet them when he is woken and disappears in mid-leap, dropping the White Queen’s ring into a river. The Warweary Villein finds it downstream while mourning his comrades slain by Jack Noir. The Villein holds on to the ring but does not put it on.
397
398Waking up on Lowas, John receives his Sburb server copy by parcel pyxis and rushes home to get Jade into the game. Rose’s server duties have made John’s house enormously tall. Going up, John finds Nannasprite far above his oily planet. She feeds John and makes him comfortable on a floating ghost bed while he gets ready to be Jade’s server player, unaware that the ocean of oil below him is now on fire.
399	
400Feeling miserable after enduring dream death, nightmares, and crabman anger, Jade starts playing Sburb with John. A meteor of cataclysmic size, the one that will wipe out human life on Earth, has Jade’s island in its sights.
401
402With ten minutes on the clock, Jade and John ponder what to put in Jade’s kernelsprite. Their choice will shape the minions, ring-wearers, and Battlefield of their session. Rose warns them to prototype something at all costs or they won’t be able to dig up a treasure that is found in the core of their session’s fully prototyped Battlefield.
403
404Baffled by her entry item, Jade pesters Dave for help but a stupid crocodile answers instead.
405
406John fumbles around with Grandpa’s trophies and then succumbs to a rogue nap before he can prototype anything. In his dream, he returns to Skaia and sees the Villein holding the ring he lost. Before they can meet, the Battlefield starts changing all around them.
407
408John wakes up lost and vulnerable. The ghost bed has landed on the surface of the Land of Wind and Shade, stranding him on a jut of rock in the middle of the oily sea while red fire creeps over the horizon. Karkat is at the peak of his anger when he chooses this moment for his second try at trolling John. Karkat has just discovered the event that led to his own hopeless situation. When John asks him for news of Jade’s entry, he explains with disgust that they are one and the same.
409	
410With both boys asleep and unable to help Jade enter, Becquerel the god dog takes charge. Bec jumps into Jade’s kernel and becomes Becsprite. Becsprite immediately flies up to attack the oncoming meteor to buy time for Jade. An apocalyptic green shockwave circles the Earth, killing humanity.
411
412Jade creates her entry item, a Bec-shaped piñata and a blindfold. Flailing the butt of her rifle around, she swings and hits the piñata and is blasted out of the atrium window. It’s a long fall, giving Jade time to turn the gun around and fire it in midair. Becsprite teleports the bullet at the piñata, smashing it.
413
414Jade and her house enter the Medium. Bec’s prototyping takes effect, transforming the Battlefield for the fourth and last time and adding Bec’s features to those who wear the rings.
415
416First Guardians are immortal beings ectobiologized by agents and sent by Skaia to watch over the planets that receive Sburb players. The source of their limitless power is an object called the Green Sun. Alternia’s First Guardian is the cunning puppet Doc Scratch. Earth’s First Guardian is the dog Becquerel.
417
418The Sovereign Slayer, Jack Noir, inherits Becquerel’s powers. Karkat concludes that this is the biggest disaster and source of woe in both sessions.
419	
420Bro Strider ends his first duel with the Slayer by stabbing his katana into the Beat Mesa, a Lohac landmark that resembles a vinyl record. Bro flees to Lowas. Jack Noir pulls the sword out and follows him there for round two. Bro is aided this time by his newly repaired puppet Lil’ Cal and Davesprite. Escaping the puppet’s awful clutches for a moment, Jack uses his ring to set fire to the oily rivers and seas of John’s land.
421
422Bro and Davesprite are still teaming up on Jack when his ring receives the fateful fourth prototyping and gives him the face and powers of Bec. He becomes the invincible demon Bec Noir. What seemed like an even fight is over in a heartbeat. Noir slays Bro, imbues the spreading fire with his new First Guardian energy, and takes Lil’ Cal for a trophy.
423	
424The fire turns green and spreads across the ocean, circling the rock John is stranded on.
425
426After Karkat is done telling John about Jade’s entry, Vriska explains to John why it happened. She was the one who put John and Dave to sleep with her psychic powers. She did it so that she could be responsible for the rise and fall of Bec Noir. She is planning to leave the hideout and fight Noir single-handedly.
427
428Goaded to action by Vriska and the Wayward Vagabond, John taps into his own latent powers. A Breeze circles his planet, putting out all the fire. The wind lifts John off the rock, deposits him on the shore of a salamander village, and subsides.
429
430Talking to the locals, John learns that the game has a personal quest in store for the Heir of Breath. Defeating the denizen Typheus will make John the saviour of the salamanders and fireflies that live on his world. But first, to gain any more power, he needs to find his Quest Bed and sleep on it, or so says Vriska.
431
432John climbs up to his Quest Bed. It is a slab of rock bearing the symbol of Breath. Vriska offers to put John to sleep on the slab. John decides to trust her and accepts her help.
433
434Bec Noir murders the sleeping child.
435	
436We saw before that a timely smooch can revive a dead or dying player whose dreamer is alive. The waking self stays dead, while the dreamself recovers and gets on with life. During Sgrub, after Aradia fatally wounded Vriska, Tavros intended to resuscitate Vriska this way, but she refused the kiss.
437
438Vriska knew of a better resurrection mechanism, one that would allow a deserving hero like herself to rise up to the god tiers. She made Tavros fly her to her Quest Cocoon. She also asked him to hasten her death, but he could not do that. Regardless, when Vriska’s waking body finally bled out and lay dead on her sacrificial slab, her dreamself rose up to Skaia as the god-tier Thief of Light.
439
440The perks of godhood include a conditional sort of immortality, freedom from exile oversight, a colourful new outfit that reflects the hero’s title, and, for trolls, gossamer fairy wings. Vriska is the only troll to have earned her wings before beating the game.
441
442In the same fashion, as fireflies gather to hug John’s corpse on his Quest Bed, his dreamself rises up on Skaia as the god-tier Heir of Breath.
443
444Dave has been time traveling in stable loops so much that there are several instances of him running around at any given moment during the Reckoning. This gives him time to learn more about his session while gaming the Lohac Stock Exchange and handling server duties for Rose and Jade. He also learns that he and John are the objects of a rivalry between Terezi and Vriska.
445
446Terezi offers to help Dave rise up to godhood, but unlike Vriska, she makes Dave fully aware of the sacrifice it requires. She leads him to make a binary choice that results in a doomed Dave sleeping on his Quest Bed, a slab bearing the symbol of Time, and then presents alpha Dave with the option of slaying the doomed Dave so that he can rise up. Terezi already knows from looking ahead that he will refuse to kill himself. There is nothing she can do to change doomed Dave’s fate. The alpha Dave walks away. The doomed Dave wakes up and gets off the slab. Bec Noir appears and murders the doomed Dave mere steps from his Quest Bed. He does not rise up.
447	
448Becsprite catches Jade with her bed again and she falls asleep again. This time, instead of direct exposure to the Gods of the Furthest Ring, Jade’s dream is contained in one of the memory bubbles Feferi asked them to make. Jade relives an old conversation with the Alternian fish princess. When it diverges from how it originally went, she discovers that she and Feferi are actually meeting in the bubble and that Feferi is dead.
449
450Jade wakes on her new planet, Lofaf, the Land of Frost and Frogs. She fights an imp that teleports her all over the place just like Bec used to do. One of her gunshots wakes Dave from a dream in which he looked out at the Horrorterrors and visited the darkening Dream Rose in her tower on Derse’s moon.
451
452Jade’s hopes for a talking sprite are dashed when she meets Becsprite. He speaks only in blinding green noise.
453
454Returning to her house, Jade learns from Dave that John is busy getting his wind on and can’t be her server player anymore. Dave fills John’s shoes, replacing the alchemy equipment that was destroyed when Jade entered.
455
456Jade is preparing to alchemize items when Tavros asks her if he can commune with Becsprite for the second time. Tavros has just saved a younger Jade from accidentally shooting herself. He used Bec to teleport the bullet toward an old man he mistook for a trespasser on Jade’s island.
457
458Tavros thinks that sending Becsprite to fight Bec Noir will solve everybody’s problems. He is high on the self-confidence that can only come from a shiny new pair of legs. Kanaya and Equius replaced his immobile lower half with a robotic prosthesis while he was sleeping. It doesn’t take stairs very well, although that doesn’t stop Tavros from trying.
459
460Jade refuses. She is upset to learn how her Grandpa was killed, but a bit of alchemy lifts her spirits. She makes all sorts of stuff including a legendary rifle from Eridan and a pair of goggles based on Rose’s crystal ball. She uses the goggles to see her friends around the Medium. Seeing a couple of Jack’s random teleportation murder victims upsets her again and changes her mind about using Becsprite to stop him.
461
462Tavros is no longer available, so Jade does the next best thing. She goes up into the ball at the top of her house where Grandpa stored her stuffed and mounted dreamself and Jack’s fourth wall. She summons Becsprite and completes his prototyping by throwing her dreamer’s corpse into him. Becsprite becomes Jadesprite.
463
464Jadesprite is useless. She is confused and upset at being wrenched from the afterlife. Her outburst breaks the ball off the house and sends it careening down the hill. It rolls to a stop next to a stump of dismay.
465
466The fourth wall flicks on in the chaos, allowing us to intrude on Hussie in his study again. He introduces his servant Ms. Paint, a Prospitian exile, and types up the third and final recap in Homestuck.
467
468Karkat advises Jade to turn off and take the fourth wall. Jadesprite flies away to Skaia.
469	
470With Kanaya’s help, Jade starts to learn about her land and her personal quest as the Witch of Space.
471
472Kanaya contacts a later Jade hoping to learn something about Rose, but by then Jade has begun to enforce a linear chronology with Karkat and Kanaya. She won’t talk to them out of sequence. Kanaya is forced to talk to an earlier Jade first.
473
474Kanaya finds the earlier Jade setting up equipment that became available when she entered Lofaf. As the more experienced hero of Space, Kanaya explains what the cloning apparatus is for. It’s a miniature version of the ectobiology lab where John cloned the babies. It is used for breeding frogs with the end goal of creating the Genesis Frog which Prospit idolizes.
475
476Also known as the Speaker of the Vast Croak, the Genesis Frog is the creature that embodies the ultimate reward. It is an entire universe. Breeding a frog of this nature and situating it in Skaia after the Reckoning is how the trolls created the universe the kids grew up in. Alas, Jade won’t have time to make a Genesis Frog. It normally takes weeks of work, and she has less than a day left before the Scratch. But she decides to try anyway.
477	
478As the Seer of Light, Rose is supposed to “play the rain” and contend with her denizen, Cetus, who ate all the fish in the Land of Light and Rain. But having learned that her session is barren and can’t be completed as intended, Rose rejects her scripted quest. She starts tearing her land apart with dark magic, looking for a way to do something more important, something that the Gods of the Furthest Ring have suggested to her.
479
480Kanaya and Aradia beg Rose not to be led down such a destructive path. Kanaya has taken a liking to Rose and is struggling to understand (and avoid contributing to) the mysterious event that makes her view of future Rose go dark.
481
482Drawing from every available source of information, including an all-knowing puppet who lives in another universe, Rose comes up with a plan to neutralize Bec Noir. The trolls have indicated that Noir is the source of failure and a continuing threat in both sessions. They believe Noir appeared in their incipisphere after a rift in space called the Scratch banished him from the kids’ incipisphere. This is why Karkat blames the kids for the trolls’ misfortune.
483
484Rose’s plan is to create the Scratch and then stop Noir’s rampage through the troll session by taking away his power source. She will do the latter part by detonating a bomb at the location of the Green Sun—but not just any bomb. The aforementioned treasure at the centre of Skaia is called The Tumor. It is an artifact of the session’s infertility and Rose believes it should have enough power to destroy the Green Sun, removing Bec’s powers and making Jack Noir beatable again. Dream Dave will listen to the Gods and draw a map. Dream Rose will use this map to navigate the Furthest Ring and deliver the bomb. This will be a suicide mission for Dream Rose. Instrumental in both parts of the plan will be John, who is poised to dig up The Tumor and destined to go to the Land of Heat and Clockwork later to initiate the Scratch, since that is what Karkat sees him doing the very first time he trolls him.
485
486In the meantime, Rose’s plan is the furthest thing from John’s mind.
487	
488After rising up as the Heir of Breath, John is back on the Battlefield where he saw his Dad and Rose’s Mom earlier. John loses hours watching Skaian cloud visions. The clouds have shown him that his new follower, the Warweary Villein, is destined to keep carrying the White Queen’s ring.
489
490John finds Dad’s wallet, which yields tons of sentimental and practical items including shaving cream, a spare car, and a much-needed computer. John gets back in touch with his friends and flexes his windy powers by taking the Villein for a flying joyride around Skaia’s new form. Its last prototyping has created a tangled wreath of land orbiting the Battlefield and healed the craters left by Noir’s Red Miles and the crash of Prospit’s moon.
491
492Learning from Jade that his Dad and Rose’s Mom are in a castle on the Battlefield, John goes looking for them until Vriska reminds him that he has some planet surgery to do. He puts his pursuit of Dad on hold and operates on the Battlefield. He whips up a tornado to drill a hole into the core, then flies down to locate The Tumor. What he finds, surrounded by carvings of his human friends’ god-tier symbols, is a giant magic taijitu ball with a timer counting down to the end of the Reckoning. He tucks the bomb into Dad’s wallet and returns to the surface.
493	
494When Jack Noir became Bec Noir, he didn’t just gain Bec’s First Guardian powers. He also received the dog’s loyalty and love for Jade, unwelcome feelings that have already prevented him from murdering her once. This hiccup in his otherwise remorseless killing spree troubles him. He tries to get around his doggy feelings by assigning Jade’s murder to the Courtyard Droll, who has been searching the Battlefield for the White Queen’s ring.
495
496The silly Droll instantly forgets his new orders when he and Liv the bunny cross paths with John, who has just resurfaced. Liv gives John another note from the penpal who helped build her. The note describes Liv’s green eye, which can enlarge objects, and tells John to grow the bunny’s miniature weapons. Most of these weapons were lost in the Breeze. The only one left is the Warhammer of Zillyhoo, and after Liv hugens it everyone marvels at its beauty long enough for the Villein to eat Liv’s green eye and preclude any more hugenings.
497
498The Tumor still has to be delivered to Derse’s moon, but John wants to keep looking for Dad, so he delegates. He gives the Villein the wallet and asks his three new friendfollowers to take it to Dream Rose for him. They commandeer a Dersite battleship left over from the war and fly away, leaving John with no computer.
499
500Right after seeing them off, John notices a cloud of grim darkness descending on the planet and goes to investigate. When he enters the darkness, the trolls can no longer see him in their chat client viewports.
501	
502Rose goes to Lohac and pesters Doc Scratch, the First Guardian and master manipulator of Alternia. He feeds her information about the Green Sun, the rules of godhood, and his own mission to summon his master, Lord English. Scratch also corrects one of the falsehoods on which Rose’s plan rested. The Scratch is not a rift in space and its purpose is not to exile Jack Noir.
503
504The Scratch is a built-in mechanism for resetting and changing things on Earth prior to the start of the game. Its purpose is to replace an unwinnable session—that is, a session that cannot produce the ultimate reward—with a new one that could be winnable. When completed, the Scratch will erase the kids’ entire Medium and anyone left inside.
505
506An iguana servant brings Rose an object from Jade’s house. It is a magic cue ball that is said to be the opposite of a Magic 8 Ball, its blank surface hiding perfectly precise and specific answers to any question. This oracle becomes the final topic of Rose’s conversation with the white text guy. He describes it as one of his “seeds” and prods the Seer to figure out how to use it. The ball tells her to answer Jade, who she has been ignoring.
507
508Jade has awful news. Jack Noir has murdered Rose’s Mom and John’s Dad on the Battlefield. Rose is angered and changes her mind about what to throw her life away doing. She wants to fight Noir right away, since the alternative now seems equally futile. Jade tries to talk her out of it. When they debate the agenda of the Gods who set Rose down this path, Doc Scratch nudges them toward settling the question with one more use of the cue ball.
509
510Rose asks whether the Gods are evil. The ball gives her an answer that might be either garbled nonsense or a message in the language of the Gods. If Rose knows, she does not say, because the answer changes her. She goes grimdark. She disappears from the trolls’ sight, exudes a thick black aura, and flies straight to Skaia thinking of nothing but vengeance and death.
511
512On the Battlefield, Rose enters the Prospitian castle where Mom and Dad were killed. Following Jack Noir’s trail of dismembered chess pieces and frog statues, she finds the happily ignorant John, who still hasn’t seen their parents or Noir. Rose tries to tell John what happened, but John does not understand the broodfester tongues. She leads him back to the scene of the crime so he can see for himself.
513	
514Rose and John find Jack Noir standing over their murdered parents. They draw their weapons, but for John the fight is over before it starts. Noir stabs him and he falls over dead, driving Rose to new heights of violent fury. She channels her darkest magic, blowing another huge crater in the face of the Battlefield.
515
516The Seer and the Slayer fight to the death. They trade a few blows, but it’s not a particularly challenging duel for the godlike archagent. Rose falls and dies next to John.
517
518Noir then fields an asinine phone call from the Courtyard Droll. The Droll stole Dad’s wallet from the Warweary Villein and snuck off the Dersite battleship in an escape pod, but the wallet contains neither The Tumor nor the ring he was hoping to find. Liv Tyler lifted The Tumor out of the wallet while the Droll wasn’t looking. After pointing out that none of this is relevant to the Droll’s orders to assassinate Jade, Noir goes to the battleship himself and rips the vessel in half.
519
520The Villein stays on the broken ship as it falls back to Skaia. It enters a Skaian defense portal and exiles him on Earth. Liv takes an escape pod and flies away to Derse’s moon. Noir goes to Lofaf.
521
522God-tier heroes have conditional immortality. They only stay dead if their death is morally significant. If the death is judged neither just, as in comeuppance, nor heroic, as in self-sacrifice, then the hero will soon come back to life. We don’t know who judges fallen heroes. There is a clock in Doc Scratch’s parlour that either indicates or influences the result, it’s not clear which.
523
524John comes back to life, whole and healthy. He finds Rose beside him and gives her a corpsesmooch. Dream Rose recovers on Derse’s moon and waits for Liv’s arrival.
525
526Karkat directs John to prepare for the next stage of Rose’s plan. To initiate the Scratch, John will need to damage the Beat Mesa on Lohac by dragging a giant needle across its surface. By this time, Jade has learned that the kids might be able to avoid being erased by the Scratch and might even meet up with the trolls afterward. She has persuaded Karkat to help out with the plan.
527
528When Jade entered, the dormant volcano beside her house came to the Medium with her. One of Jade’s tasks is to “stoke the Forge”, i.e. make the volcano active, which will thaw out Jade’s land so she can collect the frogs she has paradoxified. Jade wakes her denizen Echidna and stokes the Forge. These events happen off-screen and it’s unclear whether one causes the other.
529
530Dave visits Jade on Lofaf to help her find frogs in the thaw. Jack Noir butts in on their expedition and they fight. Noir riddles Dave with Jade’s own bullets. Dave dies and Jade is forced to save him with a kiss. Dave saw this happen in an earlier time travel loop but decided that averting his death wasn’t worth spawning another doomed timeline. Jade’s corpsesmooch revives Dream Dave on Derse’s moon.
531
532After killing Dave, Jack Noir follows Jade around for the rest of the session, still unable to harm her thanks to the loyalty he inherits from Bec.
533
534Jade visits Echidna twice, first to ask the mother of monsters for one of her huge quills, which John needs to scratch the Beat Mesa, and then to get help breeding the Genesis Frog in time. When heroes meet their denizens, they must make a fateful Choice. In return for helping with the frogs, Echidna binds the Witch of Space to a promise that sounds impossible. When Jade escapes the Scratch, she must bring all the denizens and all their lands with her.
535
536For her end of the bargain, Echidna helps Jade recall an old memory. As a child, Jade was sleepwalking around the lagoon and found an unusual frog that died when she picked it up. This frog’s paradox slime is the final ingredient that Jade needs to complete the Genesis Frog genome. She paradoxifies it, adds its genes to the sequence, and spawns the tadpole that will become the Speaker of the Vast Croak if she can find a more fertile Skaia to nurture it.
537
538Seeing Jade finish her tadpole, Karkat reflects on his mistakes. Sburb is how universes procreate. A successful session produces a new universe for the players to claim as their ultimate reward. When Karkat and Kanaya spawned the frog that contained the kids’ universe, they were in such a rush that its genome was incomplete and it had a malignant defect. Karkat identifies Bec Noir as the embodiment of this defect, an agent empowered to render its host sterile, escape the host, and destroy it from the outside. Thus Karkat blames himself for Noir’s rise.
539	
540With the Forge lit, Dave’s denizen Hephaestus is able to repair something for the hero who seeks him out. This hero is not exactly Dave.
541
542Davesprite was badly injured when he and Bro fought Jack Noir and lost. Some time later, seeing Dave neglect his personal quest as the Knight of Time, Davesprite decides to do as much as he can in Dave’s place, starting with Caledfwlch. The broken bird takes the broken sword to Hephaestus, who offers to fix one of them. Davesprite chooses the sword, and Hephaestus fashions it into a new one, the Royal Deringer.
543
544Having done his part, Davesprite flies to Skaia to spend the rest of the Reckoning with Jadesprite. The meteors from the Veil have overwhelmed Skaia’s defense portals and begun to strike the Battlefield.
545
546Jadesprite sends the Deringer away to Derse.
547
548Nannasprite is also on the Battlefield. She uses her son’s PDA to talk to his acquaintance, screen name “fedorafreak”, who is dying in a different session. She tells him a story about her adoptive mother, the cruel alien Betty Crocker.
549	
550Liv Tyler delivers The Tumor to Dream Rose and Dream Dave, who argue over the rights to the suicide mission. While they are discussing how to pilot Derse’s moon into the Furthest Ring, the Deringer arrives embedded in the ground. Once again, Dave snaps the sword from the stone. He uses the broken Deringer to sever the chain of Derse, freeing the moon from its orbit. He is about to fly the moon away when Rose zonks him with a sportsways yarn bonk.
551
552The Horrorterrors granted Feferi’s wish by making the Furthest Ring into an afterlife for heroes and their dreamselves. The moon’s flight into the Furthest Ring crosses the dream bubble where Dave is dreaming. Rose plays along with Dave’s reënactment of events until he realizes that she took the mission from him. After talking it out, they are jumped by the menacing Draconian Dignitary. The Dignitary spears Dave’s dream projection, making him wake up on Derse. Knowing that Rose is in danger, he flies out in pursuit of Derse’s moon, which is by now a speck in the void.
553
554By the time Dave catches up with the moon and slays the Douche Dag, it is too late to go back. The incipisphere Dave and Rose left is about to be erased. They continue on, deeper into the incomprehensible warped spacetime of the Furthest Ring, until they reach the appointed place for blowing up the Green Sun.
555
556The Green Sun is not there.
557	
558John sets the Scratch in motion by scratching Echidna’s needle across the Beat Mesa and then lifting the Mesa up and away to Skaia. A last wave of minions tries to stop him, but he defeats them handily with the Pop-a-Matic Vrillyhoo, a hammer he alchemized from Vriska’s Fluorite Octet dice weapon. As the Scratch nears completion, it makes the sky crackle all over the Medium, signaling its imminent erasure.
559
560The Courtyard Droll uses the contents of Dad’s wallet to assassinate Jade. She is on top of her house, putting the Genesis Frog tadpole into an oversized Magic 8 Ball tank. Behind her, Jack Noir fast-forwards the view of the lagoon on the monitor until it shows the exiles who would gather in the same place centuries later. Something drifts out of the scratchy sky and lands between Noir and Jade. It is a one-ton beard buster bomb. The explosion kills Jade and knocks the genesis tadpole off the roof and into the fiery Forge. The Droll is tickled by his handiwork until he sees its effect on Noir, whose doggy love for Jade has not relented.
561
562Noir kills the Droll in anger, takes the wallet, and flies Jade’s body across Lofaf to her Quest Bed, a slab of rock bearing the symbol of Space. He lays her on the sacrificial slab and leaves. He goes to the Veil, enters the frog meteor, and puts himself in the lotus time capsule.
563
564The frog meteor speeds toward Skaia and is one of the last meteors to be intercepted by a defense portal and sent to Earth. However, it is perhaps the first to arrive on Earth since Skaia chooses the time on the other side of the portal. Carrying everything that has entered the lotus, the frog meteor strikes the paleozoic Earth. A frog temple grows up in the impact crater, which becomes the lagoon on Jade’s island, and inside this temple is the exit lotus. Everything that entered the lotus in the Medium comes out of the one on Earth, as we saw previously when a copy of Sburb made its way from the Dignitary to Jade.
565
566The Reckoning has risen in violence, meteors striking the Battlefield constantly. One meteor is headed straight for Jadesprite and Davesprite.
567
568As hummingbirds surround Jade’s corpse on her Quest Bed, Jadesprite rises up as the god-tier Witch of Space. Thanks to her dual inheritance of heroic godhood and Bec nature, Jade assumes total command of matter and space in the Medium. She stops the meteors, miniaturizes and gathers up all the planets, and boards a Prospitian battleship with John. She then gets out the Fourth Wall, enlarges it until it is bigger than the ship, and propels the ship through the glass and out of their null session.
569	
570Previously, after landing on the arid post-Reckoning Earth, the exiles wandered and found command stations that showed them the progress of the kids through the Medium. The stations also brought the exiles together at the site of the frog ruins on what was once Jade’s island, though the ocean has evaporated. The Wayward Vagabond’s cork station flew him to the ruins from the site of Rose’s house, the Peregrine Mendicant’s apple station came from the site of John’s house, and the Windswept Questant’s egg station came from the site of Dave’s apartment. The Aimless Renegade is the odd one out. He landed near the frog ruins and has not found any station corresponding to Jade’s house. When he attacked the other exiles, a sentry worm shot back, lasering off the head of the frog icon.
571
572In Act 4, the Mendicant was crowned a Prospitian Monarch and the Vagabond revealed that he had been safeguarding the White Queen’s ring.
573	
574The Questant has a key that flips certain switches in the command stations. After coronating the Mendicant, the Questant finds a switch on a half-buried fragment of a station behind the frog temple. When she flips this switch, fragments fly together from all over the Earth and assemble the Bec head station. This station falls on the temple from above and rests on the shoulders of the headless frog icon.
575
576The Vagabond finally realizes the boy he met on the Battlefield is the same one he was commanding recently. Returning to the cork station to view John’s progress, the Vagabond and his firefly find John on the rock in the sea. They watch John make the breeze happen, find his quest bed, and die on it. Then the console goes dark and the Vagabond has no more access to John. When he was on the Battlefield, he saw John rise up, but he doesn’t get how these events are related or the order in which they happened. He thinks that John has died for good and his work as an exile is over. But he can’t leave the cork station just yet. While issuing some forceful commands, he pressed the caps lock key. Barriers fell around the exits and the station ran out of power. Without fuel, the Vagabond can’t get out or operate the sendificator. There was a chunk of uranium, but he ate it earlier in the day. So, just like the heroes of Problem Sleuth did when there was no exit, he makes a fort for his imagination and goes to sleep in it.
577
578The Vagabond’s dream tempts him to put on the ring and receive its power, reminding him of the horrors that were perpetrated using its twin. The dream ends with a weird bug that resembles Vriska telling him not to bother with vengeance. She wishes to fight the Sovereign Slayer herself.
579
580Flying out through a small gap to get help, Serenity finds the Questant teaching the new Monarch her royal duties. The sendificator in the cork station sends things back to the incipisphere they came from, but it can also be set to send things outside the kids’ universe—that is, to the troll incipisphere, since that is where the universe lives. Using the sendificator, the Monarch will be able to lead the exiles to a new land. But first, they must wait for one more wanderer to arrive. The White King exiled himself and became a Writ Keeper. When he comes out of the lotus time capsule, they will all leave this universe together.
581
582To ensure no one can follow them, they make the Aimless Renegade demolish all the stations. He gets to work rigging the stations with explosives so that all the sendificating equipment will be destroyed. While preparing the Bec head station, the Renegade enters it and finds a console monitoring Dave’s progress in the Medium. He finds Dave mourning his dead Bro and talking to Terezi about justice. The Renegade commands Dave for a short while and then goes back to his bombs. Everything is set to blow when the Monarch sees a tendril of super deadly red shit appear in the sky above them.
583
584The Questant enters the frog temple and goes down to greet the Writ Keeper. He emerges from the time capsule just as planned, but their embrace is cut short when they see the lotus flower wilting as if poisoned. Ten seconds later, the lotus disgorges its disastrous final passenger, Jack Noir, who continues his rampage as if nothing happened. Noir slays the former King and Queen and then exits the temple.
585
586The sky is now full of Red Miles, the same forking tendrils of destructive energy that Noir once used on the Battlefield and Prospit. The Miles are worse this time, though. They are spreading without limit and will kill the whole universe.
587
588Noir and the Monarch spot each other, draw swords, and square off, but before they can fight, the Renegade starts detonating his bombs. He blows up the Bec head station, the egg station, and the apple station. By this time, the Renegade has Noir’s attention and mere moments left to live. He hesitates to blow up the cork station, perhaps paralyzed by fear or perhaps knowing that the Vagabond is still trapped inside. Before he can make up his mind, Noir decapitates him.
589
590The Monarch takes a brave swing at Noir, but does not connect. Noir has already teleported into the cork station which holds the only way to get out of this dying frog. Seeing that the sendificator needs uranium fuel, Noir sniffs it out with his radiometric doggy nose. He finds the Vagabond in the next room, punches a hole straight through the Vagabond’s gut with his fist, and forcibly extracts the chunk of uranium from his stomach. Noir’s hand is now bloodied and will remain bloodied throughout his encounter with the trolls. He powers up the station and uses the sendificator to exit the universe.
591
592In the aftermath of Noir’s appearance, the Monarch finds the Vagabond mortally wounded and unconscious. She is dragging him outside when the White Queen’s ring drops out of his clothes. She puts on the ring and transforms, gaining the same abilities that the other ring gives to Noir. She has failed in one of her royal duties, to lead the exiles to safety, but the other duty was to bring Noir to justice, and now she has the power to do that. Carrying the Vagabond and his firefly, she returns to the sendificator and follows Noir into the troll session.
593	
594After the trolls defeat the Black King, Skaia turns into a home for their genesis frog, Bilious Slick. The frog matures, speaks the Vast Croak, and becomes the universe which contains Earth. From the trolls’ point of view, the dimensions of this universe, including its entire history and lifespan, come into being at once. Time and space inside the universe are not seen in the same way from outside the frog.
595
596When the Vast Croak dies down, the trolls are presented with the door to the ultimate reward. According to Karkat, this meant they would enter the kids’ universe and rule over it. But then Noir appears in their midst and destroys the door.
597
598Aradia’s quick thinking saves her friends. She tosses them through a transportalizer while her doomed selves mob Noir and prevent him from following. The trolls find themselves in an ectobiology lab on a meteor in the Veil, where they will remain for the next ten and a half hours. The lab has plenty of room for them to wander and stick their shit in random treasure chests, but eventually they congregate in the lab’s computer room. Understanding nothing, they get online and talk on Trollian’s timeline-spanning memos while Noir starts hunting for them all over the incipisphere. He destroys the twelve planets in the Medium first, then targets Prospit and Derse.
599
600In the fifth hour, Noir destroys Prospit while Sollux and Terezi discover the kids who live on Earth. Karkat, having fainted when Kanaya amputated Tavros’s legs, wakes up an hour later to find everyone talking about these goofy alien Sburb players who seem both doomed to fail and implicated in his own failure. He rallies the trolls for one last team effort. They will use their chat clients to hassle and verbally abuse the kids.
601
602Each troll has a different approach to trolling the kids:
603
604Aradia, the Maid of Time, refuses. She believes trolling the kids is what gets them into this mess. When she warns Rose not to seek the Green Sun, it’s not because she thinks it will change what happens. Trying to change things only reinforces the alpha timeline’s causal loops.
605
606Feferi, the Witch of Life, feels the opposite. She is eager to get to know the kids and convinced that they are the answer to the trolls’ plight. She talks to Jade about how the Gods of the Furthest Ring will help the two races meet in dream bubbles.
607
608Sollux, the Mage of Doom, doesn’t care about the kids at all.
609
610Equius, the Heir of Void, tries to decipher the kids’ social hierarchy. His blue blood places him in a noble troll caste, but all humans have bright red blood, an aberrant colour unique to Karkat. Equius trolls Dave about human class structure and they drop delirious flow at each other.
611
612Tavros, the Page of Breath, tries to get Dave’s Earth goat and then moves on to Jade. When he offers to command Becsprite, his awkward confessions earn him the scorn of Jade and also Vriska, who was eavesdropping.
613
614Karkat, the Knight of Blood, hates John at first sight. He flirts caliginously with John to no avail. John has already spoken to him many times and knows him as a friend. Embarrassed by the encounter, he continues trolling John backwards. He gradually warms to the kids and learns that there is a plan to meet up with them after they escape their session. Jade needs his help, so he spends the rest of his trolling efforts trying to talk to Jade at the right times.
615
616Nepeta, Rogue hero of Heart, bonds with Jaspersprite.
617
618Kanaya, the Sylph of Space, obsesses over Rose. She idolizes the author of the walkthrough she grew up reading and wonders if this underwhelming kid can really be the same person. They talk many times and become friends, though she frets over Rose’s looming grimdark death.
619
620Eridan, the Prince of Hope, sneers at Rose’s open use of magic. When Rose blows up his computer, he persuades Kanaya to make him a wand. The wand becomes his preferred weapon even as he insists magic is fake. He gives Jade his rifle, Ahab’s Crosshairs.
621
622Terezi, the Seer of Mind, is the most successful troll at first. She can’t see the doomed timelines she creates, such as the one where John picks a fight with Typheus, but Davesprite gives her some idea. She starts helping Dave when she realizes that the kids and trolls are going to be useful to each other.
623
624Vriska, the Thief of Light, makes herself important by manipulating events in the kids’ lives, including their wakefulness at key times, in order to be responsible for creating the demon. She also guides John to godhood, beating Terezi at the chumpy impressionable human boy-off.
625
626Gamzee, the Bard of Rage, has run out of the sedative sopor slime he is addicted to. Dave invites Gamzee to watch a video that blasphemes his clown faith. The video angers and changes him.
627	
628In the seventh hour, Noir destroys Derse and its moon, killing the Derse dreamselves and triggering Aradia’s last transformation. The rust blood has gone from living troll to ghost to frogsprite to soulbot without anyone suspecting she ever had a dreamself. She died before entering the game, so there were towers on Derse’s moon for all of Blue team except for her. In fact, her dreamself was hibernating on a sacrificial slab in the core of Derse the whole time.
629
630When Noir’s green fire kills Dream Aradia in her crypt, Aradia rises up as the god-tier Maid of Time. In the lab, her robotic avatar hugs Sollux g0_0dbye and then explodes.
631
632The Maid of Time emerges from the dust of Derse and confronts the murderous archagent. With her new power, she freezes him in place just long enough for his rage and impatience to turn him into a portal to the Green Sun for a moment. She unfreezes him and then leaps through him and into the vicinity of the Green Sun, to which he can’t teleport himself.
633
634Aradia has escaped into the Furthest Ring, where the Gods blow bubbles for the dreaming dead. The dream bubbles are the afterlife for players of Sburb and Sgrub. Some of the inhabitants are ghosts of players who died and were not resurrected. The rest are projections of alive players who are asleep and dreaming after their dreamselves or waking selves have died. And then there is Aradia, who is uniquely alive and there in the flesh.
635
636The dream bubbles are decorated with scenery from the ghosts’ lives, letting the inhabitants relive old memories without being aware that they have died. Aradia eagerly becomes a psychopomp for these amnesiac ghosts. She talks to them and eases them into awareness.
637
638The first bubble Aradia enters is a memory belonging to one of her own doomed selves, an Aradiabot who attacked Noir six hours ago. Noir dispatched this Aradiabot by throwing Lil’ Cal at her. She travelled back in time to escape the puppet’s awful clutches and was crushed by a meteor speeding toward Skaia during the Reckoning. A defense portal sent this meteor to Alternia some time before Aradia first died. It smashed a hole through the ground and into a cave. The dream bubble shifts to Aradia’s memories of this older event.
639
640Aradia went to look into the cave and found some blue frog ruins like the red ones near Kanaya’s hive. In the impact crater Aradia found the remains of her own future soulbot and, tucked into Lil’ Cal’s shirt, John’s Dad’s wallet. She shared her discovery with Sollux, who needed to know the glyphs carved into the blue ruins in order to finish writing Sgrub. They sent Lil’ Cal to Kanaya for repair.
641
642When the dead doomed Aradia and a dreaming Sollux reënact their old conversation without awareness, the living Aradia steps in and helps them remember. Other ghosts and dreamers drift in and out of this bubble. Aradia takes them on a tour through events in their lives, revealing the suppressed memories in which they wrote out pieces of the genetic code that the agents of Derse would use to make Alternia’s First Guardian. Just as Rose wrote part of Becqerel’s genome in a cipher with the letters “Meow”, the trolls wrote part of Doc Scratch’s genome in ciphers with the letters “t1ck t0ck 8r8k h34ds honk honk”, a harbinger of the Vast Honk foretold in Gamzee’s clown faith. The Black Queen created Doc Scratch by combining these codes with Lil’ Cal and Vriska’s magic cue ball.
643
644In another bubble, Aradia finds Dave reliving a memory of mad snacks, yo. He turns out to be the doomed Dave who was murdered by Noir after getting up off his Quest Bed.
645	
646After Aradia’s soulbot explodes for no apparent reason, the trolls lose interest in working together. Most of them leave the computer room and withdraw into their own corners of the laboratory. In the eighth hour, they start fighting and killing each other.
647
648It goes down like this:
649
650Vriska gloats, telling Tavros how she orchestrated Noir’s rise to invincible demonhood. Tavros threatens to end her inveterate abuse and manipulation. They agree to fight it out, and he goes looking for her.
651
652Terezi leads a doomed Dave to his death while testing the alpha Dave’s willingness to rise to godhood. Her complicity in this event upsets her. When she runs off in tears, the only trolls left in the computer room are Sollux, Feferi, Karkat, and Kanaya. Karkat is agitated about all the fucks going rogue, especially Gamzee, who hasn’t been seen since watching Dave’s juggalo video.
653
654A key discovery in the lab has suggested to Kanaya that the time is right to use the Matriorb, an egg she harvested from her dead mother grub lusus. She hopes to relaunch the Alternian race by hatching the Matriorb in the core of the meteor. But before she can leave for the core, Eridan enters.
655
656Eridan picks a fight with Sollux by declaring his intention to defect and serve Noir. Feferi and Sollux decide that Eridan must be stopped. Eridan tosses off his cape and they duel. With his wand, he is more powerful than when they fought on Lobaf. The gold blood takes a crushing blow and slumps against the wall.
657
658Feferi makes a move to retaliate, but Eridan is quicker on the draw. His bolt of white science impales her in the collapsing and expanding bladder-based aquatic vascular system. The fuchsia blood falls dead on the horn pile.
659
660Finally, Eridan provokes Kanaya by blowing up the Matriorb. She lunges at him and gets a bolt through the torso for her trouble. The jade blood falls sort of dead on the floor. Having completed his rampage, Eridan leaves the computer room.
661
662Karkat snaps out of shocked bystander mode and examines the bodies, finding Sollux to be in stable condition. Messages arrive from Doc Scratch and Gamzee that make Karkat fear for his life. Gamzee has embraced the violent psychosis that is his calling as a purple blood. He promises to kill everyone.
663
664Tavros finds Vriska on a high walkway. He charges at her and is impaled. Vriska sticks the bronze blood with his own lance and throws him off the walkway. He drops a great height and falls dead on the ground behind Terezi, who is alone.
665
666Terezi investigates and pins the murder on Vriska. She sends her findings to Karkat, then takes her computer glasses off and kisses Tavros’s corpse in the vain hope that he might have a dream self to revive. Karkat, weeping, does the same for Kanaya. Nothing comes of their heartfelt corpsesmooches.
667
668Karkat drags the unconscious Sollux out of the computer room in search of a place to hide from Gamzee. At the top of a staircase, Karkat hears a scary honk and panics. He and Sollux happen to× fall down the stairs. The tumble knocks Sollux’s fangs out. Karkat finally responds to Terezi’s message, only to find Gamzee on the line. Fearing the worst, Karkat appeals to Equius to fight back against the psychopaths.
669
670Terezi leaves for the computer room without her glasses, letting Gamzee steal them. Gamzee cuts off and makes out with Tavros’s head. He gets revenge on Dave by subjecting him and John to psychic chucklevoodoos that trouble their dreams. In Dave’s case, the chucklevoodoos create an instance of Lil’ Cal, and in John’s case, they cause the unconscious clown scribbles that would contribute to the harlequin prototyping.
671
672Equius makes Nepeta hide in a safe room while he goes looking for the violent highbloods, but she is not content to sit still. She enters the air ducts and crawls around. She sees Equius through a grate and watches as Gamzee kills him. Gamzee first shoots an arrow into Equius’s knee, then garrottes him with the bowstring. The indigo blood offers no resistance and chokes with a smile on his face.
673
674Losing her moirail spurs Nepeta to attack. She leaps out of the grate at Gamzee. It ends no better for the olive blood than for the other three trolls who lunged at their foes. Gamzee uses her claws for war paint and then clubs her to death.
675
676Terezi returns unharmed to the computer room and smells another murder to pin on Vriska. But the crime scene is not how Karkat left it. Kanaya’s body and Eridan’s cape are gone and there is a bite on Feferi’s neck. This evidence is strange to Terezi. She couldn’t know that Kanaya is now an undead rainbow drinker.
677
678Terezi tries messaging Karkat again and ends up chatting with Sollux. He has recovered from the blow he suffered in the duel, but there are lasting effects. He is now blind, lispless, and free from the voices of the soon-to-die. Their talk is cut short when a bright-smelling interloper ambushes Terezi and sucks her teal blood.
679
680Despite saying they would leave to find Noir, Vriska and Eridan have lingered in the lab. After killing Tavros, Vriska feels remorse for the first time. She bares her soul to John and consults her ancestor’s diary for guidance.
681
682Trolls do not have families, but some of them claim a special kinship with legendary ancestors. This may or may not be true of trolls properly hatched from the Mother Grub, but Karkat ensured it would be true for the players of Sgrub when he cloned them with ectobiology. Just like John’s babies, Karkat made two sets of twelve baby troll grubs. The Reckoning delivered these grubs to their home planet by meteors. The player grubs all landed on Alternia six solar sweeps before the Vast Glub, while the ancestor grubs landed and lived out their lives in different times in Alternia’s history.
683
684When Vriska was little, she found the diary and belongings of her ancestor, Marquise Mindfang, a swashbuckling gamblignant. The Marquise wrote about her kismesissitude with Orphaner Dualscar, Eridan’s ancestor, who took his rivalry with her too far. Mindfang took Kanaya’s ancestor for a slave and violated her. Dualscar had the slave killed and then tattled to the Grand Highblood, Gamzee’s ancestor, a subjugglator. The Highblood killed the Orphaner for being unfunny.
685
686Vriska, Eridan, and Gamzee are wandering alone when they cross paths. The murderers enjoy a three-way staredown, complete with Faygo tumbleweed, when a fourth troll bursts onto the scene with Eridan’s cape tied over a hole in her torso. Moving with vampire fastness, she kicks Gamzee off the walkway, punches Vriska, breaks Eridan’s wand, and saws the violet blood in half.
687
688Vriska is enamored of Kanaya’s rowdy, no-nonsense brand of ruffianism. Meanwhile, Terezi wakes up from her blood donation still believing that Vriska is the only murderer.
689
690Gamzee starts collecting the bodies and manipulating the evidence to frame Vriska further. Terezi finds Nepeta’s corpse and a note that makes her think Vriska has harmed Gamzee too. The note lures Terezi into a room where she finds her old roleplaying accessories, the puppet Lil’ Cal, and Disc 2 of Homestuck. She scratches the disc on a record player, damaging it. After donning the costume of her ancestor, Neophyte Redglare, Terezi decides she is ready to put Vriska on trial.
691	
692Neophyte Redglare was a legislacerator who served the subjugglators. They sent her to arrest Marquise Mindfang after hearing Dualscar’s testimony. Redglare and her dragon lusus Pyralspite succeeded where many others had failed. They burned Mindfang’s fleet and brought her to trial.
693
694At the trial, Mindfang turned the tables on Redglare by manipulating the minds of the spectators. They mobbed Redglare and hanged her while Mindfang fought the gigantic Tyranny presiding over the courtblock.
695
696After escaping, Mindfang holed up with Equius’s ancestor Darkleer and reclaimed the treasure he had kept, a seed of the Doctor who manipulated her. It was an oracle she consulted often before she lost her vision eightfold. It had told her she would die at the hands of her future matesprit, Tavros’s ancestor, the rebel Summoner.
697
698Mindfang decided not to use the magic cue ball again. Instead, she hid it for her descendant to find. The orb would later play a role in Vriska’s cycle of revenge against her friends and in the creation of Doc Scratch.
699
700Terezi climbs to the roof of the lab to confront Vriska.
701
702At this point, the scrõtch in the dis  forzøs us to qÛít plaÿing and take it to a s¤ratch dØctor for re¼áir.
703
704While fixing the Homestuck disc, Doc Scratch narrates part of Act 5 in his own narcissistic style. I have already recapitulated most of his material, and the length I will go to imitate the way he tells it will not extend beyond this sentence.
705
706Terezi knows that Vriska will be responsible for more deaths if she is not stopped. Vriska will fly away to seek a duel with Noir, but before she can goad him into fighting, he will follow her scent trail back to the meteor, discover the remaining trolls, and kill them. Then he will return and give Vriska the fight she wants, but she will be in a doomed timeline whether she wins or not.
707
708Terezi gives Vriska a chance to reconsider and stay on the meteor. Vriska knows that when Terezi says “go,” she means “die.” Terezi is prepared to kill Vriska if she does not stay willingly. But Vriska calls her bluff and turns to go.
709
710Terezi stabs the cobalt blood in the back, killing her. Vriska’s death is judged just. She does not come back to life.
711
712Only Terezi, Gamzee, Sollux, Kanaya, and Karkat remain.
713
714The ghost of Vriska meets a ghost of John in a dream bubble. They drift through their old memories for a long time before he recalls how he died. He is a doomed John who met his denizen Typheus.
715
716Karkat’s ancestor, the Sufferer, was the spiritual leader of a heresy that challenged the brutal caste structure supporting Feferi’s ancestor, the Condesce, empress of the trolls. In his lifetime he was called the Signless.
717
718The Signless shared Karkat’s bright red blood. When he fell to Alternia as a grub, no lusus would adopt him. He survived in the care of the Dolorosa, Kanaya’s ancestor, who had to raise him in secret. After pupating, he had visions from another life in which Alternia was peaceful and kind. But they were not exactly visions of Alternia.
719
720Karkat’s session began on the flip side of a Scratch. There was another Sgrub session in which the Signless and his friends were the players while Karkat and his friends were the ancestors. They lived in a world untroubled by Doc Scratch’s guidance. When these softer trolls played Sgrub, they failed and found themselves at a dead end. The game offered them a second chance at the price of oblivion. By resetting their session, they would let their ancestors play and their roles would be reversed. After completing the Scratch, they lived only in the Signless’s lucid memories.
721
722The Signless preached his vision of peace and gained many followers including Nepeta’s ancestor the Disciple and Sollux’s ancestor the Ψiioniic. Their movement spread throughout the galaxy before the highbloods suppressed it.
723
724The Signless was caught, wedgied, flogged, and left to die in red hot irons. His last breath was a cry of limitless rage.
725
726The Disciple was also condemned, but Darkleer disobeyed and spared her. In hiding, she painted the Sufferer’s gospel. Ages later, their followers secretly prepared for the Sufferer’s descendant so that he would have a sign and a lusus despite his blood.
727	
728Her Condescension drafted the Ψiioniic into her galactic campaign. He became the Helmsman, propelling her flagship through the cosmos faster than light with his telekinesis. They spent millennia expanding the empire, conquering every alien race they met.
729
730The Condesce kept her subjects in line by threatening to make Gl’bgolyb sing. But when she flew too far from Alternia, her bond with the leviathan lusus faded. The Reckoning came, wounding Gl’bgolyb just as the last players were entering the Medium. The Vast Glub killed every troll in the galaxy except the Condesce and Feferi.
731
732The Condesce steered back to Alternia. She arrived home thirteen hundred years later and was greeted by Aradia’s ancestor, the Handmaid.
733
734The Handmaid was the only ancestor to be given a post-Reckoning meteor. Doc Scratch raised her on the green moon and groomed her to serve Lord English. Using time travel, she terrorized the entire history of the Alternian race, reinforcing the events that would cause her master to enter the universe. When the Handmaid’s work was done, she approached the Condesce and they fought.
735
736The Condesce killed the Handmaid and replaced her as Lord English’s witch. She will serve English in another universe.
737
738Doc Scratch’s job is to usher his master into the troll universe. In order to do that, Scratch has to exist and be powerful. The alpha timeline is full of entities contributing to their own creation, and Scratch is no exception. That is why he manipulates the trolls and kids. But once he has secured his birth and power source, he must see to his death. Lord English must be summoned.
739
740When The Felt fought the Midnight Crew, Scratch’s colleague Snowman was able to torment Spades Slick with impunity because if Slick killed her, the universe would end, and he didn’t want that. But that is exactly what must happen now. The thing that summons English is a virus that runs when the universe dies.
741
742After unseen events which gave Slick a prosthetic arm and freed him from the vault where he commanded Karkat as an exile, Slick visits Scratch in his apartment. He does his best to be a horrible guest with curt manners, egregious womanizing, murdering the help, casual arson, and atrocious candy bowl etiquette. He also breaks the judgment clock just as it is relaying Vriska’s fate. Does this interfere with how Vriska is judged? It’s an open question. Make up your own mind, or perhaps consult an oracle.
743	
744After the clock incident, Scratch beats Slick savagely and sends him away with a suicidal mission and a cueball gun.
745
746The Handmaid’s bedroom has a fifth wall, a window between Scratch’s apartment and Hussie’s. After a fight with her guardian, the Handmaid uses this portal to get Hussie’s attention. Hussie bursts through the window and decides to suspend Scratch’s narrator privileges. He finds the cue ball puppet telling the Handmaid how she will earn death after countless ages of service.
747
748Doc Scratch goes limp and lifeless in Hussie’s hands. Hussie pulls the repaired disc out of Scratch’s plush body and returns to his own apartment.
749
750Slick finds Snowman in the city he built. She challenges him to kill her, and so he shoots her through the heart. Just as threatened, their universe starts to die around them.
751
752In the Sgrub incipisphere, after blowing up all the planets, Jack Noir turns his fury on the celestial pondsquatter, Bilious Slick, who is the universe of Earth. In the eleventh hour after arriving, Noir hits the universe frog with the Red Miles. It starts to die. The Miles spread inside the universe until the exiles on Earth see them in the sky, thus motivating Noir’s earlier self to escape to where he is now.
753
754The two universes die in a circumstantially simultaneous arrangement that triggers The Tumor.
755
756When Rose, Dave, and Liv Tyler reach their destination in the Furthest Ring, they descend into the crypt in the core of Derse’s moon. They find two sacrificial slabs there, one for a hero of Light, the other for a hero of Time. There is no slab for Liv. When the kids place The Tumor in the middle of the crypt, it sheds its yin yang shell, revealing a mechanism with a red side and a blue side. The red side is linked to the fate of their universe while the blue side is linked to the fate of the trolls’ universe.
757
758Rose and Dave stand on their slabs and wait for The Tumor to detonate. When it does, it creates the Green Sun. In navigating the perverse Furthest Ring, they had unknowingly come to a point in spacetime before the Green Sun existed. The belief that they would destroy it was a mistake in Rose’s plan, one that Doc Scratch did not bother to correct.
759
760The Green Sun explodes into being, killing Rose and Dave in their crypt.
761	
762The surviving trolls join Terezi on the roof of the meteor in anticipation of the critical moment when they will escape the Veil and the wrath of Jack Noir. They are waiting for a beacon from the Furthest Ring.
763
764The others are not sure what to do about Gamzee, who is still in scary murder mode. They entertain various romantic impulses, but it is Karkat who takes the initiative. Karkat offers Gamzee his moirallegiance and calms his juggalo ass down with the tenderness and grace of a true palemate.
765
766Light from the Green Sun arrives, showing the trolls the way out of their session. Sollux propels the meteor toward the beacon with all his psionic energy. The gold blood violently overexerts himself and dies.
767
768Jack Noir sees the beacon too, but does not give chase in the critical moment. While the meteor escapes into the Furthest Ring, Noir is distracted by the arrival of his vengeful mirror image. The Prospitian Monarch has followed him to the troll incipisphere carrying the mortally wounded Vagabond and wearing the White Queen’s ring.
769
770Like the Castores of legend, Sollux’s ghost is only half-dead. He leaves his dream bubble and joins Aradia, who is waiting at the Green Sun for friends to arrive. Their patience is rewarded when Rose and Dave rise up out of the Sun as the god-tier Seer of Light and Knight of Time.
771
772In the Great Undoing, we see what Doc Scratch meant when he said he was an excellent host.
773
774Scratch’s apartment has been transported into the Green Sun when the virus executes. Lord English bursts out of Scratch’s body and cue ball head. He is a green demon with pool ball eyes and a cue stick leg. He takes his Cairo Overcoat from between Hussie’s portals, speaks the hideous Vast Honk, and leaves to prey on an entire dead universe.
775
776
777
778
779
780
781
782
783
784
785
786
787
788
789
790
791
792
793
794
795                                                              ACT 6
796_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
797
798
799
800ACT 6 ACT 1:
801
802
803Act 6 begins on Earth on the flip side of the Scratch. In this version of Earth, the four kids who will play Sburb are the ones who were known as Nanna, Mom, Bro, and Grandpa before the Scratch. Their lives, and the lives of the original kids, are different this time.
804
805It is the day of Crockercorp’s exclusive Sburb Alpha playtest and rebranding rollout. They change their signature red spoon logo to a culling fork. Few on Earth recognize this fork as a symbol of alien imperial condescension until it is too late.
806
807The company heiress, Jane Crocker, has become an assassination target. Grounded for her own safety, Jane endures the pesterings of her online friends while waiting for the game to arrive in the mail.
808
809On the verge of sneaking out, Jane takes a moment to tell her friend Jake about a dream she had. Waking on Prospit’s moon, which a cheerful alien had described to her, Dream Jane found a state funeral happening and saw that Dream Jake was dead.
810
811Confronted with full fatherly lockdown, Jane enlists a gift from her friend Dirk, the sleek robo bunny Lil’ Seb, to help her break out of the house. Lil’ Seb lifts the refrigerator barricading the front door and smashes it through the wall.
812
813Jane scampers out to the mailbox and is engulfed in a letter bomb explosion.
814	
815Jake English lives alone on a volcanic island stocked with terrifying lusus naturae. With no guardian to keep Jake out of the neighbouring mystic frog ruins, he has used the technology in the ruins to pester his ectodaughter Jade, who he believes to be his dead Grandma in her youth.
816
817Cheered on by the uracil-themed alien, Jake has been helping Jade with her robo bunny plush, which he calls Terry Kiser. Jake needs uranium fuel so he can meet the deadline for Terry’s delivery. The only fuel left on the island is inside Jake’s elusive mechanical sparring partner, Brobot, a gift from Dirk.
818
819When Jake goes out to hunt Brobot down, he is beset by wild lusus including a crabdad and a colossal capricornus. Jake is helpless before the Old Goat when Brobot flies out of nowhere and decapitates it.
820
821
822ACT 6 INTERMISSION 1:
823
824	
825Having broken through the Fourth Wall on their golden battleship, Jade and John find themselves in a space between two portals. Traveling near light speed, they cannot see that they are in the author’s apartment. One portal is set up to let the kids escape their scratched session, and the other is to admit them into a new session.
826
827Hussie measured out the gap between these Fourth Walls with a yardstick, giving him the three nanoseconds he had vowed to confine his meddling to. His ultrafast robotic avatar uses this interval to shower the kids with god tier level ups.
828
829Unfortunately for Jade and John, when Jade enlarged the fourth wall she also enlarged the space on the other side relative to themselves, greatly lengthening their passage through author-land. They will experience it as a journey of three years.
830
831Jade’s inheritance of First Guardian power gives John a brief opportunity to leave the ship and join the others at the Green Sun. John declines, opting to write them a letter instead. Davesprite helps.
832	
833Previously, the trolls determined they could escape to a new session by piloting their lab out into the Furthest Ring. Sollux overexerted and killed himself to give the rock the psionic push it needed to reach the newly created Green Sun. His half-ghost (don’t ask) joined Aradia there for a rendezvous with many of their friends. They met Rose and Dave, who rose up out of the Sun as gods, and lingered there for three more arrivals.
834
835First to arrive are Karkat, Kanaya, Terezi, and Gamzee, the lab’s survivors. They all get acquainted and talk about dead pals and the limitless inferno. Gamzee sneaks back inside, adding the bodies of Sollux and Vriska to his corpse hoard. When Rose points the way to the promising new session created by the Scratch, Aradia and Sollux decide to quit and live in the dream bubbles instead. Rose persuades Kanaya to stay for the trip and try reviving her species again. By the will of the Gods, their journey through the Furthest Ring will take three years.
836
837Second, the letter from John, Jade, and Davesprite. The letter’s comradely sentiment is undermined by the boner of sending it in a container that is disgusting taboo to trolls. Karkat gets a faceful and has a mental breakdown.
838
839Third, the Mayor. Previously, having gained Jack Noir’s matching powers, the Prospitian Monarch escaped with Serenity and the dying Wayward Vagabond to the trolls’ session. Noir has just murdered the Genesis Frog, the very act that forced his escape from that universe, when the angry Monarch arrives. She is eager to chase Noir down and take revenge, but Serenity begs her to help the Vagabond first. She does this by teleporting Serenity and the Vagabond to the meteor, where they will find someone to heal him.
840
841
842ACT 6 ACT 2:
843
844
845Jack Noir flees across the void, and the Monarch follows.
846
847After Jane gets knocked out at the mailbox, Dream Jane wakes. From her tower on Prospit’s moon, she sees the cloud visions of a Skaian eclipse for the first time, but her reverie is cut short. The Jack Noir of her session sneaks into her room, stabs her to death, and peels out. The Courtyard Droll sets off a bomb under the tower, making it careen across the golden moon. Dream Jane’s corpse does a Lifey thing.
848
849In this session, Derse has a new boss. Someone has usurped the Black Queen and commanded the agents of Derse to assassinate all the dream kids before the game even starts. The Droll killed Dream Jake earlier with a mouthful of peanuts.
850
851Meanwhile, the Draconian Dignitary and Hegemonic Brute are planning to assassinate the Derse dreamers, Roxy and Dirk. But they can’t get at Dream Roxy, because she is sleepwalking away from Derse, out into the Furthest Ring.
852
853The Brute sneaks into Dream Dirk’s tower on Derse’s moon, hoping to kill the boy in his sleep. But Dirk is alert and beheads the intruder. With an agent’s body on his hands, Dream Dirk’s cover is blown. Acting on UU’s advice, Dirk flies out into the streets of Derse and sticks the Brute’s head on a pike, declaring himself awake and dangerous.
854
855Archagent Noir, returning to Prospit to check on Dream Jane’s body, finds her alive and asleep. He is about to kill the Maid again when the White Queen zonks him with a faceways scepter bonk.
856	
857The First Guardian of post-scratch Earth is not Bec. It is the fickle GCat, made with a genetic sequence written in the cipher “Bark” by Jake’s subconscious. GCat rescues Jane from the explosion at the mailbox. Jane wakes unharmed, but pays for her crazy stunt by being permagrounded for life.
858
859While Jane was out, her friend Roxy Lalonde sent her a virus labelled as the pirated Sburb alpha. Jane wanted to play Sburb with Roxy, but Roxy feared that by playing they would advance the plans of her mother’s murderer. She meant for the virus to scare Jane and stop her from playing.
860
861From Roxy’s perspective, the Batterwitch killed her Mom. But from Jane’s perspective, the elder Lalonde, a famous author, is still alive. Roxy never succeeded in proving her exotic claims, so Jane never took her seriously. But after two assassination attempts, Jane begins to open up to what Roxy has been saying about the cake sellin genocidal alien overlard sea queen pulling the strings at Crockercorp.
862
863One of Roxy’s claims was that she could appearify things from Jane. Roxy finally demonstrates this ability. She uses her appearifier gun to snag Jane’s cherished family heirloom, the copy of Sassacre’s that fell to Earth with baby Poppop Crocker. It disappears from Jane’s house and appears in Roxy’s. Thanks to GCat’s pointless mischief, the heavy book lands on Frigglish, Roxy’s pet cat. Frigglish is crushed to death just like his namesake in the Complacency novels.
864
865Roxy takes Frigglish’s body to the nearby Skaianet lab and sends the dead cat back to where he came from so that whoever she stole him from will have closure. Roxy believes this previous owner to be her own mom in the past, but she is mistaken. Frigglish is in fact Jaspers. The transmaterializer returns his body to pre-scratch Earth, where Rose finds it prior to learning about Sburb. Rose’s Mom gives Jaspers a funeral and a tomb. He later becomes Jaspersprite, as seen in Act 3.
866
867After sending Frigglish away, Roxy dives into a fenestrated plane to return home, but while she is flying through the void between the windows, GCat teleports the other fenestrated plane to Dirk’s apartment. The window loses power, landing Roxy in a dream bubble, where a ghost troll attacks her with a trident. She jumps back into the Skaianet lab, runs from a pack of hungry neighbourhood carapacians, and climbs out of the lab into the open air of her post-Condy colony. A swarm of imperial drone bots appears on the horizon.
868
869The UU alien knows all about the post-scratch kids and the heroic roles they will assume in their session. When Roxy mentions that she saw the other Lalonde while sleepwalking into the dreambubbles, UU confirms that Roxy will meet her mother and daughter—a cagey way of saying Rose—if she plays Sburb. Hearing this, Roxy reconsiders and decides to play after all. But while they are talking, Jane goes ahead and runs the virus.
870
871Jane’s computer explodes. Thanks to a sweet catch by GCat, she lands on a couch in a tree.
872
873Dirk Strider and his robotic avatars are quick to help Jane recover from the false start. Lil’ Seb the bunny robot installs the real Sburb alpha on Jane’s Dad’s Astairetop. Dirk connects to Jane as her server player.
874
875Dirk has to go to the roof of his post-diluvial apartment building to fight off some imperial drone bots, so his Auto Responder takes the reins and helps Jane with her entry tasks. AR is a software version of Dirk who lives in a pair of pointy sunglasses. He tries to prototype Jane’s kernelsprite with the stuffed body of Poppop Crocker, but GCat foils the attempt.
876
877Jane’s entry item is a tree that bears no fruit and requires no action. There appears to be a meteor headed for Jane’s house, but moments before entering she sees what it really is. It’s the Condesce’s flagship flying over Earth.
878
879Jane enters the Medium with a blank kernelsprite.
880	
881Jane, Roxy, and Dirk are all attracted to Jake, but none of them have wooed him yet. Jane hasn’t worked up the courage, Roxy considers herself ineligible, and Dirk is plotting to win Jake’s heart with a sudden and intense romantic gesture. When Roxy hears about Dirk’s plans, she urges Jane to make a move on Jake before it’s too late. But Jane is not ready to tell Jake she fancies him. She hides her feelings and assures him that he is only a friend to her.
882
883Brobot trounces Jake, tears its uranium heart out of its chest, and blows up. Jake takes the uranium fuel and enters the mystic frog ruins.
884
885
886ACT 6 INTERMISSION 2:
887
888
889Rose, Dave, and the trolls set off through the Furthest Ring, passing through the occasional dream bubble on the way. The first bubble inhabitants they meet are god-tier Feferi and Eridan ghosts from a doomed timeline. The ghostly Feferi, Witch of Life, heals the Wayward Vagabond from the brink of death.
890
891A year later, the Vagabond is happily rebuilding Can Town in the laboratory halls with Terezi and Dave. Karkat is not so happy. He feels shut out of Terezi’s life.
892
893Rose briefs Dave on what she and Kanaya have learned about the new Incipisphere they will reach in two years and the version of Earth it is linked to.
894
895The Scratch was meant to produce a potentially more promising game session, but instead it produced a “void” session with no promise at all. The post-scratch kids will have no way to win on their own. They will all fail to prototype their kernels before entering. The Battlefield will be stuck in its “eternal stalemate” form.
896
897When Jade arrives, she will be able to replace the basic Battlefield with the fully evolved one she is carrying. (Actually, the Droll has already cleared the centre of Skaia by blowing up the Kings and their chessboard.) Victory will be possible through the combined efforts of all eight kids.
898
899In void sessions, there is no cataclysmic Reckoning. Other than the frog temple bearing GCat, the only meteors sent to Earth were the ones with the eight babies on them, and those ones came from the pre-scratch session.
900
901The Scratch made Skaia change what time it was on the other side of the defense portals that sent the babies to Earth after John cloned them. Skaia switched the players with their ectobiological parents. Baby John and Jade landed on Earth in 1910, baby Rose and Dave around 1970, and baby Grandpa and Nanna (Jake and Jane) in the mid-1990s. Baby Mom and Bro (Roxy and Dirk) were the exceptions. They got sent to the twenty-fifth century.
902
903Rose is recording these facts in a book that might someday be useful to other players.
904
905Karkat corners Dave and asks him to share Terezi in vacillating quadrants, a suggestion that is vile nonsense to Dave. They fight and draw dicks in Rose’s book.
906	
907After one year on the Prospitian battleship, it’s John’s fourteenth birthday. He and Jade celebrate by joining the Ghostbusters II mmo that all the carapacians and animal consorts are playing. Except for Davesprite, John and Jade have had no contact with anyone who knows them, not even in their dreams. They are starting to miss their friends.
908
909When Jaspersprite wishes John a happy birthday entirely in meows, his singing incites Jade’s involuntary dog nature and she chases him. John is knocked unconscious.
910
911In his dream, John meets the sleepwalking Dream Roxy and the seadweller troll ghost who attacked Roxy earlier. This troll, Meenah Peixes, seems related to Feferi but does not know any of the trolls that John knows. Meenah is thrilled to hear that she is a ghost. To celebrate, she pitches her fork at the snoozing mystery girl. John pushes Roxy aside and takes the hit for her. The trident pierces John’s dream presence and he wakes up.
912	
913When the meteor passes through another dream bubble, Terezi meets someone she mistakes for Vriska at first. Terezi has been hoping to find Vriska’s ghost so she can atone for killing her. But instead, she finds the ghost of Aranea Serket, a player from the group of softer trolls who scratched their session so that the twelve Alternians could play. In the Alternian universe, grub Aranea switched places with grub Vriska and grew up to be the pirate Marquise Mindfang.
914
915As a god-tier Sylph of Light, Aranea is eager to play therapist and restore Terezi’s confidence in her own abilities. They discuss the nature of choice in Paradox Space and the possibility of undoing the damage Doc Scratch did to their species. Aranea also offers to heal Terezi’s literal eyesight. Terezi declines, but keeps the offer in mind.
916
917death of the author	
918The author of Homestuck rescues Spades Slick from his exploding universe and patches him up with more prosthetics. Hussie is still nursing Slick back to health when Lord English invades his home. Hussie chucks Slick off the balcony into the water to hide him from English. Moments later, English corners Hussie on the balcony and fills him with lead. Hussie dies wishing magic were real.
919
920The ghost of Vriska and the ghost of Hussie meet in a dream bubble full of sand, zephyr, and majestic steeds. Hussie asks Vriska to marry him. Vriska spurns his proposal and his ring.
921
922
923ACT 6 ACT 3:
924
925
926Jane enters Locah, the Land of Crypts and Helium, where floating seedpods water the barren land. Jane’s house appears on top of a seedpod, making it sink into a hole in the ground. She is forced to leave her house right away.
927
928Exploring the crypts on her planet, Jane finds artifacts from an extinct salamander race. The denizen Hemera told the salamanders they would die waiting for Jane and her friends, who are called “Nobles” for their inertness. After arriving, the four Nobles will have to wait for more players, unable to make progress on their own. There is also a set of coloured lanterns on Locah that indicate the spare lives of the Nobles. The emerald light for Jake is extinguished because his dreamself is dead already.
929
930Jane and the bunny brobot, Lil’ Sebastian, solve some puzzles to raise Jane’s house back to the surface. Returning home, Jane finds a clown who apparently got to her house using Aradia’s time travel device. This clown is Gamzee in his dubious god tier getup. He greets Jane warmly and sells her some multicoloured potions of blood drained from the troll bodies he has collected. When Jane asks Gamzee to leave, he throws two corpses into the blank sprite, creating Tavrisprite, a fusion of Tavros and Vriska. Their personalities are so irreconcilable and intolerable to each other that Tavrisprite explodes, leaving Jane with no sprite at all.
931
932Like Jadesprite, Tavros and Vriska were pulled from the afterlife to be a sprite, and when they return to the afterlife after their short union, Vriska’s ghost vows that she will not be jerked around anymore. She decides to fuck shit up. Meanwhile, the Author has been stalking Vriska since she rejected him and he dropped the ring he proposed with.
933
934Jane sets off across Locah to look for Dad, who has wandered off. She discovers a trail of his belongings. Along the way, Jane tries to find out what her friends are dealing with. The only response is from UU, the lime-blooded alien. UU wants to play a session of Sburb with her “brother”, but fears he will kill her instead. She promises to give Jane her dear, sweet, precious, sweet, sweet juju later on.
935
936Auto Responder interrupts the search for Jane’s Dad. Dirk and Roxy are in deadly danger and need to enter the Medium. AR asks Jane to be Roxy’s server player and prep her house for entry right away.
937
938After placing the alchemy stuff for Roxy, Jane gets antsy. Against AR’s wishes, she follows Lil’ Seb into a crypt and through a transportalizer pad to Derse.
939	
940Jake enters the mystic frog ruins to finish little Terry Kiser. UU told him it was vitally important to arm the robot bunny and send it off, which Jake can do now that he has fuel for the transmaterializer.
941
942Jake is descending into the temple laboratory when an earthquake jams the temple’s elevator. Jake falls off the platform and is knocked out cold. Because his dreamself died, he finds himself in a dream bubble.
943	
944Jake’s dream is a recollection of his thirteenth birthday, almost three years prior, when he learned that Dirk and Roxy live in the future. Dirk decided Jake would believe his story about the future of Earth, so he told him the whole thing.
945
946The Baroness, founder of Crockercorp, was in fact Her Imperious Condescension, empress of the trolls. After losing her whole empire in the Vast Glub, the Condesce was pressed into Lord English’s loathsome service to carry out his will in the universe of Earth.
947
948Taking the name Crocker, she insinuated herself into human society as the wife of Colonel Sassacre. She raised Jane’s Poppop (baby John) and Jake’s Grandma (baby Jade) after they fell to Earth on meteors in 1910. Their upbringing echoed that of pre-Scratch Nanna and Grandpa. Leaving home, Grandma took the name English to spite the cruel Batterwitch, while Poppop Crocker stayed and became a comedian and TV actor. Poppop was killed by the meteor that delivered Jane and her dirty hat.
949
950The fish queen’s harmless “Betty Crocker” persona masked an agenda of world domination. Her mastery of the blueblood and lowblood psionics allowed her to zonk people at will and command animals including Earth’s First Guardian, GCat. She used these abilities and her baking enterprise to quietly gain power over humans.
951
952Grandma was the first to resist her adoptive mother’s tyranny. Grandma ran the competing company Skaianet and raised Jake on the Pacific island with the frog ruins. When Jake was little, the Condesce murdered Grandma and blew up her house on the hill. After that, Jake lived in the jungle where his bedroom, severed from the house in the blast, had come to rest. Condy started breeding Alternian lusus naturae on his island.
953
954The other two heroes of the resistance were Dirk’s Bro (baby Dave) and Roxy’s Mom (baby Rose). Bro directed the unwatchable Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff movies starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. Mom wrote the impossible Complacency of the Learned wizard novels. But the political messages in their art could not prevent the Baroness from manoeuvring key Crockercorp shills into positions of power.
955
956Her Condescension’s cronies gradually perverted human politics and civilization. In the years after the Rebranding, Earth turned into a brutal hellhole ruled by juggalos. High Chaplain Fieri and Dual-Presidents Jay and Dope oversaw the death of billions.
957
958In the last gasp of the resistance movement, Bro and Mom assassinated the Presidents and the Chaplain. Then they faced off against the Batterwitch herself, and died at her hands.
959
960Life got worse for the survivors of the Hilarocaust. After the Condesce took direct control, she flooded the world and subjected the remainder of humanity to a series of cruel experiments. She was trying to mould Earth into something like her old Alternian empire. But after centuries of failures, humanity went extinct.
961
962To replace humans, Condy went to the Medium, rounded up some Prospitians and Dersites, and stuck them in floating chessboard ghettos on Earth. One such colony was erected around Mom’s house, which blended in architecturally. Baby Roxy landed there and grew up among the hungry carapacians. Baby Dirk landed thousands of miles away. He grew up alone in his Bro’s mostly submerged high-rise apartment.
963
964At the end of Dirk’s history, Jake realizes he is reliving the conversation three years later while unconscious in the temple. The Dirk in Jake’s dream turns out to be a private figment, not a normal dream bubble visitor. Jake dubs him Brain Ghost Dirk, since he claims to be a perfect clone of Dirk’s personality. Brain Ghost Dirk is a product of Jake’s mind, but he knows things that are not available to Jake’s surface thoughts.
965
966Aranea enters Jake’s bubble and introduces herself. She is arranging a welcome party for her friend Meenah, who she has not seen in unknowable ages. Aranea and Meenah died at the same time, but different ghosts have different chronologies and meetings according to the crazy whims of the Gods of the Furthest Ring. Meenah is new to the afterlife, while Aranea is quite ancient.
967
968Aranea leads Jake to Meenah’s bubble. They find Meenah antagonizing her visitors, the meteor kids. Karkat, Terezi, Kanaya, Dave, Rose, the Vagabond, and Serenity are there. Dream Roxy is also sleepfloating through the bubble. Serenity lands on Dream Roxy’s hair. Aranea takes away Meenah’s gold pointy jam and settles everyone down so that she can tell the story of her session.
969
970Aranea and Meenah lived on a world called Beforus. Meenah was the heir to the Beforan empire, but did not want the responsibility. Beforan troll society was built on noblesse oblige. Each blood caste served and cared for those under it, and Meenah’s rare fuchsia caste bore the greatest duty of care of all. Meenah fled to Beforus’s pink moon to avoid being made empress.
971
972Meenah discovered Sgrub on the moon and convinced her friends to play it with her. There were twelve players in all. They entered the Medium, lost the game, and scratched their session so that their twelve ancestors could play instead.
973
974Normally, a scratch resets the world the players came from so that their lives never happened. To keep existing, a player has to escape the session before the scratch is completed. Rose and Dave did this by flying out into the Furthest Ring. Jade and John did it by flying through the Fourth Wall. But Meenah used a different kind of escape route. At the onset of her scratch, she killed herself and her eleven comrades with a bomb. They became dream bubble ghosts, existing beyond the reach of the hard reset that turned Beforus into Alternia.
975
976(The scratch in the Beforan session made Skaia switch the destinations of the defense portals in the Alternian session, where Karkat ectobiologized all 24 players by paradox cloning. According to Doc Scratch, players are not supposed to be created in a post-scratch session. When they are, it is an unfortunate glitch that indicates Lord English will prey on their universe.)
977
978In her ageless journey through ghost and dreamer memories, Aranea has learned about the lives she and her friends led on the other side of the scratch. She repeats their stories briefly for Meenah’s benefit:
979
980Kankri Vantas in his other life was the Signless Sufferer, who shouted a rude word.
981Meulin Leijon in her other life was the Disciple, who wrote stuff down.
982Mituna Captor in his other life was the Ψiioniic Helmsman, who flew a ship.
983Porrim Maryam in her other life was the Dolorosa, who found a wiggler.
984Horuss Zahhak in his other life was the E%ecutor Darkleer, who built an arm.
985Cronus Ampora in his other life was the Orphaner Dualscar, who told a bad joke.
986Kurloz Makara in his other life was the Grand Highblood, who didn’t like the joke.
987Rufioh Nitram in his other life was the Summoner, who led a rebellion.
988Latula Pyrope in her other life was the Neophyte Redglare, who cut off an arm.
989Aranea Serket in her other life was the Marquise Mindfang, who got all the treasure.
990Damara Megido in her other life was the Handmaid, who made everything lousy.
991Meenah Peixes in her other life was the Condesce, who embraced her hatchright.
992Jake hasn’t been paying the closest attention to Aranea’s stories. When he hears this last one, he believes he is standing before the atrocious Batterwitch herself. He jumps the star-struck Meenah and whales on her. Aranea tries to reason with Jake before giving up and forcibly waking him.
993
994Jake disappears from the dream bubble, but his imaginary friend doesn’t. Terezi senses Brain Ghost Dirk’s presence and sniffs him out.
995
996Jake regains consciousness in the mystic ruins and plays with Terry Kiser, the robot bunny he helped build with his penpal Jade. The bunny shrinks a remnant of Jake’s Grandma’s exploded house, which falls down the shaft under the stuck elevator.
997
998Then some legendary weapons come out of the lotus time capsule for Jake to equip Terry with. UU said she was sending these weapons by giving him enough information in the future to make them and ship them back to Earth in the lotus. But we never see the weapons go into the lotus. This must be one of the many events in Jake’s upcoming session that are obscured from the reader by trickster magic and special stardust.
999
1000Little Terry shrinks the weapons down to bunny size. Jake writes a note to introduce the bunny to John, the kid who will eventually receive it, although Jake still believes he is addressing his Grandma and Jane’s Poppop in the past. He puts the robot bunny on the transmaterializer and sends it across the scratch to Jade. Jade packs it up and sends it on to John. As seen in Acts 4 and 5, the bunny ends up changing hands and fortunes in the pre-scratch session and gets renamed Liv Tyler before being unmade in the creation of the Green Sun.
1001
1002His job done, Jake goes to fetch the infinitesimalated house remnant that fell down the elevator shaft. He extracts a miniature fourth wall from the house ball and keeps it for later. Jake’s Grandma once went to Derse and stole this fourth wall from Jack’s office, just as Jade’s Grandpa did in the other session.
1003
1004Auto Responder interrupts Jake’s trip through the temple. Dirk and Roxy are in deadly danger and need to enter the Medium. AR asks Jake to be Dirk’s server player and prep his apartment for entry right away.
1005
1006After placing the alchemy stuff for Dirk, Jake gets antsy. There is a pair of transportalizer pads at the bottom of the shaft, one to Derse and one to Prospit. Against AR’s wishes, Jake steps on the purple one and goes to Derse.
1007
1008Emerging from the Skaianet lab, Roxy meets a pack of killer robot drones flying in from overseas. They chase her around the colony with missiles, set everything on fire, and then leave as quickly as they came.
1009
1010The drones are replaced by an even deadlier danger, the Red Miles. Roxy races around her neighbourhood, rounding up carapacians and leading them back to her house to save them from certain death.
1011
1012Feeling hungover, Roxy takes a breather to answer her friends. The UU alien tells Roxy that the Red Miles coming from the sky are a sign that someone is killing her universe from without. Roxy hurries home to enter the Medium and escape the Miles.
1013
1014(UU spares Roxy the details, but she means that when Bec Noir murdered the Genesis Frog, his attack reached into both iterations of Earth’s universe. The Miles destroying the post-scratch universe are the same Miles that destroyed the pre-scratch universe.)
1015
1016When Roxy gets home, she connects as Jake’s server player and places his alchemy stuff in the crater of his former house on the hill.
1017
1018UU has something to say before Roxy enters. The cheerful alien fears that she will not survive her next nap. She and her jeering “brother” have adhered to a bunch of unwritten rules for their entire lives. UU finally breaks the rules by sharing a forbidden secret with Roxy. Her name is Calliope, and she is a cherub. Roxy may be able to wake Calliope at the expense of the jeering one if she repeats Calliope’s name the next time she talks to him.
1019
1020His name, Caliborn, remains unknown to the kids.
1021
1022Dirk deals with the killer drones swarming his isolated apartment by fighting them on the roof. While cutting up drones with his unbreakable katana, Dirk attracts the attention of Caliborn, who is obsessed with winning games.
1023
1024Finding Dirk busy in this part of his life, Caliborn jeers him a year earlier and challenges him to a one-sided game. Dirk must draw pornography of himself and his friends, or else Caliborn will kill Dream Calliope. Without complaint, Dirk draws the scandalous smut Caliborn desires. But there is a shitty twist to the game, which Caliborn reveals a year later, after Dirk’s rapping robot Sawtooth rescues Dirk from the drones. Caliborn already killed Dream Calliope. He sent his session’s archagent to Prospit’s moon to assassinate her.
1025
1026Dirk and Sawtooth have just finished off the drones when the Red Miles appear in the sky. Seeing the deadly threat, Auto Responder puts copies of the Sburb server on everyone’s computers and tells them to get their houses ready for entry right away. AR’s quick reaction allows Dirk to be distracted by Caliborn and the crisis on Derse.
1027
1028After piking the Brute’s head, Dream Dirk cut up Archagent Jack Noir’s surveillance walls and went into hiding. The Archagent wasn’t around to deal with Dream Dirk’s insurrection. He was a bit sloppy on Prospit and got himself pinched by the white shells. He is in jail, using the contents of a care package from the Droll to stab as many Prospitian guards as he can reach.
1029
1030Jack’s deputy, the Draconian Dignitary, asked the new queen for some firepower to help smoke out the troublesome dreamer. Condy lent him a “Dronegorg” fighter mech and the Black Queen’s ring of void, which has no orbs and will receive no prototypings. But it can still do the Red Miles. The Dignitary puts on the ring and releases the Miles to scour the surface of Derse. Dirk finds himself beset by Red Miles on both worlds.
1031
1032Jake, Jane, and Lil’ Sebastian transportalize to Derse at the worst possible time. The Miles are spreading through the streets, reducing buildings to purple rubble.
1033
1034Dream Dirk finds Jake and Jane gawking at each other across a fiery chasm. He orders Jane to run back to Locah, but a lash of the Miles impales and kills her. A building collapses onto the transportalizer pad she came from.
1035
1036Next he orders Lil’ Seb to haul Jake back to Earth. The bunny brobot jumps the chasm, grabs Jake, and drags him onto his transportalizer pad moments before it, too, is buried under rubble. This returns Jake to the elevator shaft in the mystic frog temple.
1037
1038Lil’ Seb blasts off with a rocket and carries Jake up the shaft and out of the temple. The volcano on Jake’s island has erupted, spewing lava onto the forest where Jake’s bedroom has been sitting for years. Lil’ Seb flies Jake toward the crater of Grandma’s house, which is on high ground, but they don’t make it there. The two rocketeers attract the baleful garnet glare of a dragon lusus. The rocket explodes, separating them. Jake falls into the ruined house and is knocked out again. Lil’ Seb falls into the lagoon and sinks to the bottom.
1039
1040Before Dream Dirk can do anything else, he is knocked unconscious by falling masonry. The waking Dirk also loses consciousness on the roof of his apartment. His beloved puppet, Lil Cal, falls into the ocean and sinks to the bottom. Caliborn fears and detests this puppet and identifies it as a “juju”. He told Dirk it will be erased when the universe dies because it exists elsewhere and jujus resist duplication.
1041
1042Roxy is at home, working the totem lathe to make her entry item, when a lash of the Miles impales and kills her.
1043
1044On Locah, Jane and Roxy’s life lanterns go out, indicating they have only one life left. Dirk’s lantern dims until it is barely lit.
1045
1046Unconscious on Earth and Derse, Dirk goes to dream in the Furthest Ring. In Meenah’s bubble, the one in which Dream Roxy is sleepfloating, Brain Ghost Dirk becomes a projection of Dream Dirk, visible to everyone. Dirk tells the ghosts and travellers that he and Roxy need to go home and fix everything. He flings Dream Roxy and Serenity out of the bubble. Then Aranea graciously wakes him.
1047
1048Dirk wakes up to a bad situation. Jane and Roxy’s corpses need to be kissed before their dreamselves die. Dirk’s apartment and Roxy’s house need to be brought to the Medium before the universe dies. And Dirk has to escape the Miles, which Caliborn said was impossible. If he dies here in the twenty-fifth century, there will be no one to kiss his corpse.
1049
1050Dirk’s assets include his rapping robots Sawtooth and Squarewave, rocket boards on Earth and Derse, a portable sendificator, a fenestrated plane portal from his apartment to Roxy’s colony, the alchemy equipment already deployed at each house, and the quick calculating mind of the Auto Responder in his glasses.
1051
1052In a whirlwind of action, Dirk delegates his entry to Sawtooth, flies to Roxy’s house, delegates her entry to Squarewave, corpsesmooches Roxy, sendificates his own head to Jake four centuries ago, and falls to the floor decapitated.
1053
1054When Jake wakes up in the ruin of his old house, he finds Dirk’s bloody severed head on the ground in front of him, wearing AR. The chatbot with Dirk’s personality tells Jake that he has taken a new name, Lil Hal, and orders Jake to make out with his head. Jake, striking a heroic pose in front of the erupting volcano for the audience he does not know he has, kisses Dirk on the lips.
1055
1056Receiving the corpsesmooch he needed, Dream Dirk survives and springs into action on Derse. His life lantern explodes with light.
1057
1058The will of the Horrorterrors has guided Dream Roxy and Serenity from the Furthest Ring back to Derse. After Dirk kisses her waking self's corpse, Roxy wakes up and sees Jane’s body in front of her. She tries to corpsesmooch Jane, but Dirk finds her hesitating and kisses Jane himself. Dream Jane wakes on Prospit and finds the transportalizer to the elevator shaft on Earth.
1059
1060Dirk grabs Roxy, gets on his rocket board, and blasts off toward the mystic frog meteor in the Veil. They enter the lotus time capsule, come out of the lotus on Earth, swoop down the elevator shaft, and grab Jane. The three of them fly out of the frog ruins and land in Grandma’s house just in time to surreptitiously wake Jake up and watch him talk to Lil Hal and kiss the severed head.
1061
1062Sawtooth handles Dirk’s entry in his absence and brings his apartment to the Medium. Squarewave does the same for Roxy’s house. And the four kids, unexpectedly united on twenty-first century Earth, enter the Medium together in the ruin of Grandma’s house.
1063	
1064Calliope and Caliborn, the cherubim, grow up confined to a room on a planet devoid of life orbiting a red supergiant star.
1065
1066Caliborn and Calliope do not know it, but their home is in the trolls’ meteor, which ends its journey embedded in the surface of the dead planet. They also don’t know that the hideous Statues of Liberty littering their world prove that this planet used to be Earth. The Liberties were byproducts of an invention that made Dirk’s Bro rich. How Earth and the meteor came to be here in the universe of cherubim is a mystery.
1067
1068Calliope and Caliborn have opposite personalities and scorn each other’s interests apart from games. Not long before they are supposed to start their session of Sburb, they play a notorious chess match. Calliope has never lost a match against the only opponent she knows. But Caliborn is able to beat her in the final duel by first becoming checkmated, and through some unprecedented enchantment, continuing to play beyond the death of the king.
1069
1070Caliborn and Calliope have never met. Whenever one of them is awake, the other is asleep. This is because they share a body. When Caliborn must sleep, he lies on the sarswapagus and cedes consciousness to Calliope, and vice versa. Their blood also changes colour. Caliborn’s blood is red and Calliope’s is lime green.
1071
1072Calliope and Caliborn are able to keep some belongings safe from each other because each of them has a shackle which only they can open. Before sleeping, Calliope puts her chain on one leg, and when Caliborn gets up he removes his chain from the other leg. While he is awake, her chain confines him to one half of the room, and vice versa. These chains are the reason they are homestuck.
1073
1074Cal’s bifurcation is an adolescent feature of their species. When cherubim mature, one cherub predominates over the other and never cedes consciousness again. For Caliborn, this happens before he has matured properly. Dream Caliborn has Dream Calliope assassinated by the Archagent of his session. After that, Calliope goes to sleep for the last time. Caliborn predominates, enjoying exclusive control over his body for the rest of his life.
1075
1076Having killed his rival, Caliborn puts his plan in motion. He escapes her shackle by biting his leg off and equips a prosthetic leg he built (with Dirk’s help) in anticipation of this day.
1077
1078Caliborn launches a session of Sburb on his own. But Sburb is not supposed to be played solo, so his entry is heavily glitched. The kernelsprite becomes a singularity and swallows his entire planet.
1079
1080
1081ACT 6 INTERMISSION 3:
1082
1083
1084The Prospitian Monarch and the Sovereign Slayer, given equal powers by their fourfold rings, have been locked in chase for two years in the Furthest Ring. The Monarch’s drive to bring Noir to justice has not lessened at all.
1085
1086Noir and the Monarch begin to see cracks in the space of the Furthest Ring as if someone is shattering it.
1087
1088Noir takes a breather in a dream bubble containing memories of his rampage across the Battlefield, where he killed Mom, Dad, John, and Rose.
1089
1090After two years on the Prospitian battleship, it’s John’s fifteenth birthday. He and Jade celebrate by watching Con Air. John is bored shitless with nothing to do and suddenly hates Con Air. Learning that Davesprite has broken up with Jade tips John into an angry mood that deepens when Davesprite leaves him a prank fatherly note. John throws a tantrum and falls asleep in his driveway.
1091
1092In his dream, John enters Jack Noir’s bubble. They fight. Noir has John in his clutches when John masters another god tier power, dissolving into wind. He reappears behind Noir and, with help from a Rose distraction, socks him with his pop-a-matic hammer, giving him a ridiculous hat. Then the Monarch chases Noir back out of the bubble, leaving John alone.
1093
1094Still dreaming, John wanders into Tavros and Vriska’s bubble. He finds a ring of orbs nofold on the ground next to Tavros’s sleeping ghost, the same ring the Author offered to Vriska. Tavros wakes and sees John putting on the ring. He claims to have found it first and they squabble over it.
1095
1096Vriska’s ghost arrives. The three of them talk about what has happened since they left their sessions. After rejecting the Author, Vriska decided to take on Lord English, who has started terrorizing the Furthest Ring, smashing dream bubbles and obliterating the ghosts inside them, including a doomed John ghost that Vriska once dated. Those ghosts are toast.
1097
1098According to Vriska, the ones who plan to oppose the time-travelling demon are on three different quests. She has heard someone is trying to find an alien ghost before English does, and someone is trying to raise an army to challenge him directly. The third quest is Vriska’s. She and Tavros are on a treasure hunt. She believes somewhere in the void there is an artefact that can defeat English forever.
1099
1100The problem with treasure hunting in the Furthest Ring is that the spacetime of the Ring bends entirely to the will of the Horrorterrors. That means there have been no permanent locations or bearings until now. But Lord English is giving his would-be challengers something to work with. Every time he smashes a bubble, more cracks appear in the void. These cracks are permanent, reliable landmarks. Vriska has been using them to flesh out the maps that will lead her to the treasure. To explore further, she needs English to keep making new cracks in the Ring.
1101	
1102Meenah is the one responsible for the ghost army plan. When she sees Lord English smash a bubble, she decides to come out of solitude and get the Beforan gang back together. She speaks to all eleven of her erstwhile bomb victims, hoping they will come and fight English with her. But none of them want to fight.
1103
1104Aranea plans to act but rejects Meenah’s foolhardy strategy. Aranea is the one looking for the alien ghost instead. She claims to know that this ghost is a cherub, the sister of the one who became Lord English, and that they will have the upper hand if they find her before he does.
1105
1106Latula’s too busy perfecting her radgirl kickflips and handplants.
1107
1108Porrim likes the idea but doesn’t believe she can help. She suggests Meenah try to find out who among them reached the god tiers before dying. She coins the word “dancestor” to describe the relationship between two players who regard each other’s scratched incarnations as their ancestors.
1109Kankri is seizing the rare opportunity afforded by the meteor passing through his bubble to meet his dancestor, Karkat, and teach Karkat the discipline of Problematics as it is practiced by some users of Bubblr, the social media platform for troll ghosts. Problematics is a social study that uses inclusive and sensitive criticism to validate everyone’s self-applied labels and to raise awareness of all forms of privilege, however slight, except for sexism. Karkat cannot believe how much sanctimonious garbage comes out of this asshole’s mouth.
1110
1111Cronus just doesn’t think he’s in an aggressive space now in his afterlife. His self-absorbed “sensitivity” is stronger than his impulse to score points with attractive people.
1112
1113Mituna’s got brain problems.
1114
1115Kurloz is, perforce, tight-lipped. He sewed his mouth shut before their session began and now he is a complete enigma. No one knows that he hypnotizes Meulin with his chucklevoodoos, that he worships Lord English as the “Angel of Double Death”, or that he has been assembling an obscene god tier outfit for his dancestor, Gamzee.
1116
1117Meulin’s preoccupied with her hypothetical matchmaking and miracles of the heart.
1118
1119Rufioh mistakes Meenah’s question for a come-on since everyone is always hitting on him. He’s not brave enough to fight anyway.
1120
1121Horuss offers to build Meenah an army of sweat-powered horse robots, but will not pit his own strength against another’s.
1122
1123Damara is out of the question. When Rufioh cheated on her with Horuss, she became an unhinged nihilist and the party’s biggest troublemaker.
1124
1125Meenah also approaches some of the kids and Alternian trolls, who are similarly unwilling to fight except for Karkat. Karkat is dreaming and can’t leave the meteor, but he promises to join her if they meet up again when he is awake. She appoints him Grand Threshecutioner of her army of none.
1126	
1127Finally, Meenah approaches Vriska, who has decided to raise her own mob of ghosts to bait English into furthering her treasure hunt. Learning that their plans are in conflict, they challenge each other. Meenah forks John awake again. He wakes up on his driveway, amazed to find himself still holding the ring he picked up in his dream.
1128
1129The Thief of Life and the Thief of Light are set to rumble when they make the mistake of calling for backup. A huge crowd of troll ghosts gather, most of them mistaking the situation for a costume party and frustrating the thieves’ attempts to fight. There are only twenty-four troll players by name, but for each one who lived in the alpha timeline there are a multitude of ghosts who died in doomed offshoot timelines. Tavros weaves frantically through the crowd, looking for the ring, hoping in vain that John dropped it.
1130
1131Aranea tries to broker peace between her best friend and her dancestor. She can’t stop them from fighting, but she does get them to agree that they will combine their plans if their duel ends in a draw.
1132
1133They fight.
1134	
1135Rose makes liquor, starts dating Kanaya redwise, and learns that Terezi is dating Gamzee blackwise. There are signs that Rose’s drinking will become a problem. Dave works on his raps.
1136
1137
1138ACT 6 ACT 4:
1139
1140
1141Entering the Medium together, Serenity and the four Nobles find themselves on Jake’s planet, Lomax, the Land of Mounds and Xenon. Roxy’s house enters Lopan, the Land of Pyramids and Neon. Dirk’s apartment enters Lotak, the Land of Tombs and Krypton. These three new planets are just as inert as Locah. There are no living consorts and the underlings are only shambling skeletons.
1142
1143Roxy names Serenity “Twinkly Herbert” and tries in vain to speak to Calliope, who has died in her brother’s predomination.
1144
1145The alpha kids split up and explore their lands while waiting for the prophesied arrival of their beta counterparts. Five months pass. They do not build their houses up. Their Jack counts the days in prison on Prospit.
1146
1147
1148ACT 6 INTERMISSION 4:
1149
1150	
1151Caliborn enters the Medium, launching a game session that is even deader than the Nobles’ session. His version of Skaia is all clouded over.
1152
1153Caliborn sees a red light and finds Gamzee in front of its source, a radio antenna tower covered in monitors. Gamzee offers to be Caliborn’s guide, but Caliborn shoots him on sight. At the tower’s terminal, Caliborn is able to reply to Hussie, who has been interfering with his thoughts. Hussie challenges Caliborn to search his dead land for keys to unlock the monitors and see what they are broadcasting. With Gamzee’s help (you can’t kill clowns), Caliborn will find a key to unlock his true quest.
1154
1155
1156ACT 6 ACT 5:
1157
1158
1159Five months pass in the Alpha session.
1160
1161Jane, Jake, Roxy, and Dirk make no real game progress. They explore the Medium a little, but the skeletons populating their lands are hard to kill and don’t yield enough grist. The Nobles spend what little they find on alchemy and totally neglect their server duties. 153 days into the Sburb Alpha session, their houses are no closer to the Seven Gates than they were at entry.
1162
1163Then again, they are in a void session with no way to do the Ultimate Alchemy. Their incipisphere has no Battlefield, no frogs, and no Forge. Why try to reach Skaia when there is nothing at the centre? Thanks to Calliope and the long-extinct consorts, the Nobles know they have to wait for four more heroes to join their game before they can win. So they wait.
1164
1165The clown who once greeted Jane at her house has travelled to the other kids’ houses and wrought more mischief with their sprites. He threw Eridan and Sollux’s bodies into Jake’s kernelsprite, making Erisolsprite. He threw Feferi and Nepeta’s bodies into Roxy’s kernelsprite, dashing Roxy’s hopes of making Momsprite from the paradox slime she collected in the lab. And on Lotak, Dirk’s vigilance and dwindling stock of orange soda bribes are all that stand between his unprototyped sprite and the last dismembered troll body in Gamzee’s “chest of whimsy.”
1166
1167Jake has had enough of dating Dirk and has slipped home to Lomax. He calls up Jane, who is decorating cakes for her sweet sixteen at Roxy’s house. Jake pours his heart out to Jane after ignoring her for weeks and forgetting her birthday invitation. It is painful for Jane to entertain the rambling, egotistical “relationship woes” of a boy who still cannot see that she has feelings of her own. She blows up at him, smashes some stuff, and runs away to Locah.
1168
1169At home, Jane’s misery increases when Caliborn jeers her out of the blue. Caliborn has started finding keys that unlock the video antenna towers in his dead session. These towers reward him with views of the Alpha session that he and Calliope were never able to see in the Trollian viewport. After seeing many of Jane’s private moments, Caliborn tells her how pleased he is to see her get fat while her Dad gets brutalized and killed in Derse jail. This is a lie, calculated to tip Jane into despair. Dad Crocker is fine. He is enjoying cushy VIP treatment and social media stardom on Derse because the Draconian Dignitary admires his businesslike fashion sense. But Jane doesn’t know that.
1170
1171Meanwhile, a second human gets put in jail. When Jane leaves Roxy alone with GCat, the First Guardian teleports Roxy straight to its master, the Condesce. Roxy falls to Derse from a great height and gets knocked out.
1172
1173Now that she has no dreamself, Roxy starts dreaming in a bubble. In her dream, she recalls writing Wizardy Herbert, a self-parodying novel about children at a magic summer camp, Herbert and Beatrix, who recognize that they are inside a story that represents little Roxy’s earliest attempts at Complacency fanfiction.
1174
1175Disguised as Twinkly Herbert the firefly, Calliope’s ghost enters the dream and leads Roxy into a silent sanctuary where she has been hiding ever since she died. Calliope greets Roxy wearing her trollsona. She is uncomfortable being a cherub and would rather be a troll.
1176
1177Callie says that her brother has become Lord English. He is following an army of ghosts around the Furthest Ring, hoping to find and annihilate her soul. There are rumours that the Calliope he is looking for is one who predominated and died in a doomed timeline. Callie thinks she should look for this other Calliope too. But for now, she is just hiding.
1178
1179Callie tells Roxy to focus on her game session. She says Roxy and the other Nobles should go die in their quest crypts in order to reach the god tiers and prevail in the next day’s battle.
1180
1181At this point, a dreaming Rose stumbles across Callie and Roxy’s bubble. Callie panics, fearing the Seer of Light will draw attention to her hiding place. She shooes Rose and Roxy out to the waking world before they can get acquainted.
1182
1183Roxy wakes in a jail cell on Derse. She learns that Betty Crocker has a job for her. The Courtyard Droll gives Roxy the Black Queen’s ring of orbs nofold, presumably to boost her voidy powers so she can do this job. But the job is stupid and impossible and Roxy is not willing to help the cruel Batterwitch.
1184
1185Wearing the ring, Roxy learns how to become invisible and immaterial. She sneaks out of the hag slammer. While walking around unseen by the Dersites, she messages her co-players to tell them about god tiering. Alas, she is invisible online too. None of the kids read her messages.
1186
1187On Lotak, Lil Hal wants to be put into the kernelsprite, but Dirk is not inclined to honour his promise. Dirk thinks his AI self already sabotages his relationships and controls his life too much without sprite powers. In his bitterness, Dirk comes close to killing the Auto Responder. By the time he backs down, Gamzee has gotten to the kernelsprite first. But Equiusprite can receive one more prototyping, so Dirk throws AR in anyway, making Arquiusprite.
1188
1189Arquiusprite loves being strong and loves horses. Why horses? Is it supposed to be ironic or something, that his very desire is to be in the proximity of some horses? Just think it over. Think it over.
1190	
1191Caliborn jeers Jake with the stated aim of grooming a worthy adversary. Caliborn says it is inevitable that the Lord of Time will come to dominate all of existence, no matter how much he must suffer and toil first. The Page of Hope, on the other hand, is worthless by default and must be given a free powerup before he can hope to challenge the Lord.
1192
1193Caliborn gives Jake the code for his old juju, a wondrous object that cannot be duplicated. It will leave Caliborn’s possession once it is created somewhere else. When combined with his sister’s juju, its beneviolent effect will be great indeed. Caliborn would have combined them himself but found Calliope’s half missing. Instead, he parts with his half after welcoming an even better juju into his life, the fluffy false man Lil Cal, which Gamzee dug out of the dead dry Earth. Caliborn has bonded with the puppet. He knows someday, somehow, he will use Lil Cal to inflict his hideous soul on everybody who ever shares a universe with it.
1194
1195Jake doesn’t want Caliborn’s hand-me-downs. He passes the code on to Jane. At the same time, Jane receives a single message from Calliope. Before Calliope died, she followed a suggestion from Skaia’s cloud visions and sent the miserable birthday girl the code for her old juju. So Jane finds herself holding both codes.
1196
1197Jane reads these messages on the only communicator she has left, a Crockercorp tiaratop, which makes her available to the Baroness’s tacky style of mind control. She throws off the tiara in disgust, but she doesn’t break it like she broke her other devices.
1198
1199Jane makes the juju items. They are both lollipops, and they fuse together forming a sucker coloured with a red and green spiral. Jane is irresistably drawn to lick it. The juju’s asshole candy magic turns her into Trickster Jane, superpowered and super peachy.
1200
1201Trickster Jane flies from Locah to Lomax and spreads the enchantment to Jake. He becomes Trickster Jake. Then they take Erisolsprite with them to Derse and infect Roxy. She becomes Trickster Roxy.
1202
1203Roxy is alcoholic. She has carefully stayed sober for months despite living in a house full of booze. But as Trickster Roxy, she instantly falls off the wagon. When she takes Jane and Jake home to pick up Fefetasprite, the Tricksters and the tag-along Courtyard Droll all get shitfaced and throw bottles around.
1204
1205The last stop on their candy giggle rampage is Lotak, where they turn Dirk into Trickster Dirk. But unlike the others, Dirk’s mind is not altered by the juju magic. Even after succumbing to the fabled peachbirth trance of the jokebollocks, he is still unhappy and unable to pretend that all his personal problems have been solved.
1206
1207Arquiusprite meets Fefetasprite and has a pang of guilt for causing Nepeta’s death. But his apology to the Nepeta half goes even worse than Erisolsprite’s apology to the Feferi half. Their bickering makes Fefetasprite explode.
1208
1209The Tricksters alchemize a bunch of zilly weapons from cherubim folklore including a Warhammer that ends up with John during his session, a couple of zilly rapping robots, and a disgusting surfeit of zilly Santa figurines.
1210
1211Whatever else the kids do under the Trickster influence goes unrecorded. Caliborn next sees them suffering the aftereffects. This upsets him, because he loved the Tricksters and wanted to see everything they did. With a bit of teamwork, a concept new to the antisocial child, he and Gamzee unlock the next two monitors. They combine their chucklevoodoos to send a care package to Archagent Jack Noir in the kids’ session, who is still in jail on Prospit.
1212
1213The Nobles come to in their quest crypts. Dirk and Roxy are in the crypt of Derse’s moon. Jake and Jane are in the crypt of Prospit’s moon. They are lying on sacrificial slabs bearing the symbols of Heart, Void, Hope, and Life, and they have hangovers.
1214
1215They all know they must die on their slabs in order to rise up, but the only thing they kill is time. They proceed to have the most uncomfortable long-distance feelings jam in the history of Paradox Space. Due to regrets and hand wringing, some of them aren’t talking to each other. Jane and Dirk look back on the Jakestakes which divided them. Jake agonizes to Roxy about being a bad friend and a coward. Roxy opens up to Jane about her struggle with drink and to Jake about her fruitless pursuit of Dirk. Dirk praises Roxy for being the strongest of them all.
1216
1217It becomes clear that the Nobles’ enemies will slay them before they do it themselves. Jack Noir’s care package contains Crowbar’s crowbar and the instance of Lil Cal that Gamzee gave to the Droll when he arrived in the kids’ session. When Jack looks into Lil Cal’s eyes, he is hypnotized and undergoes a completely bonkers transformation. He cuts his eyes out and puts Cal’s eyes in his sockets. They change into Lord English’s table stickball eyes. Jack saws off his shackled leg, glows with weird power, vaporizes half of Prospit around him, and emerges wielding the crowbar. Then he turns his crazy bastard gaze towards Prospit’s moon and fires his mouth laser. Meanwhile, the Condesce turns her psionic tyrant gaze towards Derse’s moon and fires her eye lasers. Prospit’s moon and Derse’s moon blow up. The life lanterns on Locah blow up.
1218
1219The kids die and ascend to godhood. Jane rises up as the Maid of Life. Jake rises up as the Page of Hope. Roxy rises up as the Rogue of Void. Dirk rises up as the Prince of Heart.
1220
1221
1222ACT 6 INTERMISSION 5:
1223
1224	
1225Jade and John’s three-year voyage is over. Their battleship bursts through the fourth wall that Jake left at the Slab of the Jaded Fool’s Ennui. Jade restores the Prospitian battleship to its proper size and sets it down on Lomax. The sprites disembark and fly out into the Medium. Casey, the Viceroy Bubbles Von Salamancer, raises an army of amphibian skeletons on Lomax for no purpose yet seen.
1226
1227Now that she is back in a session, Jade can teleport again. She goes straight to the exploded remains of Prospit to meet her post-scratch parents. Finding the Archagent lunging at them with maniac intent, Jade stops him and teleports him to the edge of the Furthest Ring, where he will not trouble anyone for some time.
1228
1229This is when the Condesce springs her trap. The troll queen inflicts a mixture of psychic powers on Jade, who has been part dog and susceptible to bronze-blooded animal communion since merging with Becsprite. Jade goes grimbark and falls under Condy’s command. She locates the Crockercorp tiaratop and teleports it right onto Jane’s head. The device corrupts Jane and flips her cuckoo fruitcake switch.
1230
1231From this moment on, Jade and Jane obey Her Imperious Condescension.
1232
1233Among the exploded remains of Derse’s moon, Dirk and Roxy face the Condesce herself. But before Dirk can close the distance, Jade appears and teleports him to the edge of the Furthest Ring, where he will not trouble anyone for some time. Roxy makes no move. Meanwhile, Jane plants a spanking haymaker on Jake’s old breadbasket and hauls his ass to Derse.
1234
1235Jade and Jane stick Roxy and Jake in separate jail cells on Derse.
1236
1237Where is John in all this? He’s fast asleep on the battleship, having a lengthy and informative dream. He meets Vriska again in the Furthest Ring.
1238
1239Evidently, Vriska’s ministrife with Meenah ended in a draw, because they have combined their ghost army plans and are working together with Aranea. It’s still mostly Vriska’s plan. Meenah is happy as long as she gets to say she’s in charge. Aranea has given up her search for the ghost of Calliope, but it is convenient for the trio that their enemy seems to think he will find Calliope by following them.
1240
1241The Serkets are mindjacking some troll ghost suckers and using the resulting crowds as bait to draw Lord English to areas of the Ring where his terrible ghost-killing breath will crack space and fill the gaps in Vriska’s treasure maps. They have sacrificed thousands of ghosts in this way. Soon they will reach the treasure, which they hope to use as a weapon against the unstoppable Lord of Time.
1242
1243When John finds them, their treasure hunt has taken on a fun petticoat seagrift theme. Their pirate buddies include Tavros, Nepeta, and Feferi. Aradia and Sollux are also on board as specialists. Sollux is now fully alive after Erisolsprite took his dead half. John spends his whole dream sailing with the gamblignants, hearing their news and stories.
1244	
1245During the last leg of their voyage, Aranea tells what she knows about the origin of Lord English.
1246
1247Aranea begins by describing the cosmic, caliginous, serpentine mating dance of adult cherubim. One cherub, after losing to its mate, laid an egg on the dead dry Earth and then flew away. Earth had been relocated to another universe. It now orbited a star nearing supernova. From the egg hatched Calliope and Caliborn. Like other cherubim, their personalities divided in infancy and began to vie for dominance over their body. But here the cherub norms ended.
1248
1249For two reasons, Cal’s childhood was not typical of their species. First, there was an enigmatic acolyte on Earth who prepared for their arrival, cared for them, and then locked them in a room for most of their lives. Second, they were fated to play Sburb, the game in which universes procreate. Such a willful creature as Caliborn would upset the balance of all Paradox Space if he were allowed to play this game, and so he did.
1250
1251(Aranea does not know that the acolyte was Gamzee, or that he followed Caliborn into the Medium and served him there too.)
1252
1253Caliborn predominated over Calliope, who had hoped in vain that they would play together. Instead, Caliborn played alone. He entered a dead session, the most solitary and empty and unwinnable kind.
1254
1255After a bunch of tedium, Caliborn made it to his denizen, Yaldabaoth. The god of monsters offered Caliborn the most radical choice any player could make: either magnanimous martyrdom, or constant conquest.
1256
1257When Caliborn chose the path of the conqueror, he was forced to prove himself in a unique challenge. His Medium became a game of eight-ball pool. After three planets sank in the break, his task was to pocket the remaining twelve by propelling them into the singularity that was once Skaia. Each conquered planet rewarded him with a baize-skinned leprechaun servant with silly time powers, and so by pocketing all the planets he assembled his entourage, The Felt.
1258
1259(Aranea does not know that Caliborn continued to talk to the Author and badger him with questions about The Felt throughout the pool game.)
1260
1261Winning the pool game unlocked Caliborn’s true land, the Land of Colours and Mayhem, where he would tool up and then face his denizen again. By defeating Yaldabaoth in battle, Caliborn earned the seemingly impossible boons of immortality and limitless power. His soul was then channeled into a juju that would bring unfathomable evil and destruction to any realm in which it materialized.
1262
1263(There are critical gaps in Aranea’s knowledge of this last part. It’s all revealed in the next Act Act.)
1264	
1265The path to the treasure ends in a memory of a green skull cave. The pirate crew disembark and enter the cave.
1266
1267On the way in, Aranea tries to tell a story about a pair of legendary rings whose fates are intertwined. The Ring of Void was a Black Queen’s ring of orbs nofold whose wearer could vanish into obscurity. The Ring of Life, first discovered by travelers in a desert, could bring ghosts back to life.
1268
1269At this point, Vriska has a dramatic outburst that derails Aranea’s story and causes one of the most mindless amporatry slams in the history of Paradox Space. Vriska was in a memory of sand and zephyr when she rejected the Author’s marriage proposal. Tavros and John later found the Author’s ring in the same spot. Vriska realizes now that the place and the object match Aranea’s description. She almost had the Ring of Life herself.
1270
1271Vriska grills Tavros and orders him to help her look for the ring again. Tavros gets fed up with her unpleasantness and quits the expedition. Sollux, Nepeta, and Feferi follow his lead, ollying outie while Vriska curses their mutiny.
1272
1273John reveals that he has the Ring of Life in the waking world. It came with him when he woke up last time. But he disappoints Vriska by not agreeing to give it to her. He doesn’t like how she has trashed the afterlife to find this treasure, and he would rather decide freely what to do with the ring.
1274
1275Playtime is over. Vriska throws off her captain’s overcoat, defends her actions as the greater good on a scale beyond measuring—Lord English destroys universes, remember?—and leads them the rest of the way to the treasure.
1276
1277Kurloz Makara picks up the overcoat.
1278
1279Vriska explains why they have been seeking this particular juju. It is a bit of loot that English got for slaying his denizen. He used it only once as a weapon. After that, it could only be used against him, so he buried it in the void where he thought it would not be found. Vriska doesn’t know what it could be, but she hopes to wield it against Lord English and kill him for good.
1280
1281Meenah, Aranea, Aradia and John watch as Vriska opens the chest and dumps the treasure out. It’s a hole in canon, shaped like the Sburb house logo. Vriska says she invited Aradia to help move it with her rust-blooded telekinesis because it is intangible.
1282
1283This piques John’s curiosity. He tries touching the house juju and puts his hand all the way through it. John’s arm retroactively appears in many places throughout the Homestuck canon, even in meta-fictions like the Midnight Crew adventure and the Mad Snacks Yo video game. Other characters never seem to notice the disembodied arms.
1284
1285Before John can retrieve his arm from the house thing, he gets blurry and disappears, denying Meenah the coveted three-pointed hat trick. His sleeping body also disappears from the couch on the battleship.
1286
1287John begins to travel through canonspace. He retroactively appears on the sidelines of several scenes in the Homestuck canon, even in meta-fictions. He is in each place for only a moment before disappearing and jumping to the next. He can’t control the jumps.
1288
1289Caliborn has recruited the last Felt member, Cans. He reaches the eight ball in his game of pool with planets when he is first haunted by the blue male hero ghost. At least, that is how Caliborn regards John for some reason. John isn’t a ghost. They stare each other down until Cans clocks John out of frame.
1290	
1291John reappears on Lomax and catches a break from his involuntary canon hopping. He gets his bearings and realizes he has arrived in the post-scratch Medium. He rests at the Slab of the Jaded Fool’s Ennui.
1292
1293Rose, Dave, Karkat, Kanaya, Terezi, Gamzee, and the Mayor’s three-year voyage is over. The meteor flies out of the Furthest Ring and into the Medium at great speed. Gamzee is the only player who is ready to go where destiny will take him. The others are woefully unequipped for what they will face in this session.
1294
1295Worst off are Rose and Terezi, whose decisions have led to substance abuse and clouded their abilities. Rose became alcoholic and in denial about it. Terezi fell into kismesissitude with the unruly jester, who hooked her on the sweet drink and eroded her self-esteem. After she got Aranea to restore her eyesight the next time they met, Terezi regretted fixing what was never broken. At age sixteen, the Seers are a mess.
1296
1297Everyone is on the roof, debating how to get off the rock, when Grimbark Jade surprises them with the answer. She teleports them all to Lomax and they fall on the grass next to John—all except Gamzee, who remains on the meteor. John is thrilled to finally see his friends.
1298	
1299Five more characters are converging on the Medium from four directions, and three of them are Jack Noir. First, the Sovereign Slayer has been flying behind the meteor for three years, the Prospitian Monarch hot on his heels. They still wear the fourfold rings that give them Bec’s powers and loyalty to Jade. Second, Dirk and the Archagent corrupted by Lil Cal are flying back from where Jade dumped them outside the Incipisphere. Third, the cyborg Spades Slick is rocketing into town carrying the Golden Cuestaff and the entire Felt. What?
1300
1301After the Author threw him into the sea, Spades Slick climbed back into Hussie’s house. Slick finds his caregiver shot to death by Lord English, who tossed the murder weapon and left. Slick picks up the weapon and finds the Author’s servant, Ms. Paint.
1302
1303Ms. Paint retrieves Slick’s personals, among which is Die’s voodoo doll. The doll moves you to a different timeline when you remove a pin or stick one in. The corresponding Felt member will be dead in this timeline if his pin is in the doll, alive if not. Slick gets the idea of using Lord English’s own gang against him. He pulls every pin except Snowman’s. The Felt stand before him and accept his command. He appoints Ms. Paint as their new eight ball. Aurthour the centaur butler lusus tags along too.
1304
1305Spades Slick and his new crew climb through the Fifth Wall between the Author’s place and the ruin of Doc Scratch’s apartment. Scratch’s home is not a comfortable base of operations now that it’s inside the Green Sun, so Crowbar leads Slick to the judgment clock, which doubles as an emergency exit.
1306
1307Slick loads the entire gang into Biscuits’s oven and steps through the clock. He opens the other side and pops out of a ~ath server box in the Furthest Ring. He spots the glow of Skaia in the distance and blasts off toward it.
1308
1309Disc 2 of Homestuck runs out of content and spins down. There is no Disc 3. No more of Homestuck can be told until another source of content is found. Caliborn laughs wickedly at our predicament. In Act 6 Act 6, Caliborn will fully control the narrative medium he once unlocked, and he will use it to replace Homestuck with a story of his own making.
1310
1311
1312ACT 6 ACT 6 ACT 1:
1313
1314
1315Back when Disc 2 was damaged, Doc Scratch took charge while repairing it. He knew its contents and told some of the story himself. Now Disc 2 is over, and here we are again at the mercy of another narrator.
1316
1317We saw before that Caliborn’s land had a radio tower with an interface for the narrative prompt. The Author still controlled most of this interface, but Caliborn could unlock it if he found the right keys in his land.
1318
1319After rising up as the god-tier Lord of Time, Caliborn can now unlock anything. Thus he takes over as narrator and entertains us for a spell. His narration showcases his artistry, which has improved since we last saw his nasty scribbles. He seems to have decided not to go fight the denizen Yaldabaoth until he has mastered the cartoon arts.
1320
1321Where Scratch’s aim was to continue the story in progress, Caliborn’s aim is to jeer at it. He voices his contempt for Hussie in a new comic called “Homosuck”, a satire of Homestuck’s adventure game conceit and lazy sprite art.
1322
1323Just when it seems as if we will be reading Homosuck forever, Caliborn opens a cabinet in the exile command station where he has been working. The items that spill from this cabinet appear to have been put there by Hussie. They include art tutorials, horse figurines, and a piece of physical media labelled the Act 6 Act 6 Supercartridge Expansion Pack.
1324
1325The Supercartridge promises to rescue us from this endless mockery. The Act Act Acts chronicling Caliborn’s growth as an artist will be punctuated by Act Act Intermissions returning us to Homestuck proper.
1326
1327When Caliborn realizes he is holding the rest of canon, he sabotages it by gumming up the cartridge with “Special Stardust” glitter and candy corn.
1328
1329
1330ACT 6 ACT 6 INTERMISSION 1:
1331
1332	
1333Several events must happen in the Alpha kids’ session whose results we have already seen on Earth, such as the First Guardian GCat and the frog temple. A frog meteor must deliver its seed to the paleozoic Earth, but not before weapons are put into its lotus time capsule for Terry Kiser. This is how we know the lotus does not come from the scratched session. And because Earth with its shitty Liberties is the planet on which Gamzee raises the cherubim, we know that Gamzee and the lab must reach Earth too.
1334
1335Act 6 Act 6 Intermission 1 begins with a cinematic that is poised to close some of these loops while showcasing the Supercartridge’s exciting new gameplay features. Grimbark Jade places the four planets of her old session alongside the new ones in the Medium. She then pilots the troll meteor through a Skaian defense portal and lets it impact the flooded Earth amidst the Red Miles killing Universe B. But the rest of the action is obscured and glitched out by Caliborn’s stardust.
1336
1337The stardust manifests itself not just between us and the content, but also between the players themselves. A colourful static interference gums up the Medium and makes it hard for the kids to understand each other.
1338
1339Rose, Dave, Karkat, Kanaya, and Terezi lose their memory of what happened while the animation was jammed. They find themselves separated on different planets. Dave and the Vagabond are on Lohac, Karkat and Kanaya are on Lofaf, and Rose and Terezi are on Lolar. Presumably, Jade did this, but why?
1340
1341In usurping the Black Queen and commanding the agents of Derse, the Batterwitch has, so far as we know, been carrying out the will of her loathsome Lord. But her failure to turn Earth into a second Alternia, as recounted by Dirk in Act 6–3, hinted at an agenda of her own.
1342
1343Now Jade and Jane are in on that agenda. They visit several of the scattered and jailed players, dictating the roles they are to play in the Waterbitch’s plan.
1344	
1345First, the Condesce is plotting against her master. She thinks that Dave and his sword will be instruments in Lord English’s undoing, but it isn’t yet the right sword. The legendary piece of shit, Caledfwlch, needs to be unbroken.
1346
1347Jade finds Rose’s magic cue ball, which Doc Scratch called one of his seeds, and brings it to Dave at his house. They use it as an ingredient in alchemizing Caledfwlch, supposedly Dave’s top-tier sword, but actually long surpassed by the Deringer which Hephaestus forged from the broken version. Condy told Jade that Caledfwlch is the only sword capable of injuring the constant conqueror.
1348
1349Dave is uncoöperative and out of practice. Jade finds him as exasperating as Davesprite, whom she is still not over. She tries to make Dave spar with her, but he is on strike from his dumb quest. Even when Jade kicks the Vagabond off the roof toward the lava of Lohac’s surface to goad Dave to action, he swoops down and saves the Vagabond with a basic flying dive, not with the time travel turntech she hoped he would use.
1350
1351As Dirk flies back to the Medium, Arquiusprite fills him in on Jane’s corruption and suggests he introduce himself to Dave. Dirk works up the nerve to contact the beta kid version of his idol Bro Strider, but the stardust noise between them makes conversation impossible.
1352	
1353Second, the Condesce wants the kids to perform the ultimate alchemy and create a new universe for her to rule over. After riding the meteor to Earth, Jade shrank Earth and returned with it to the session. This will be the starting point for Condy’s dominion in Universe C.
1354
1355The hitch is that the tadpole that will become the Genesis Frog fell into the Forge during the Scratch. Lofaf’s denizen Echidna now holds the tadpole and won’t give it up to Jade. Echidna will only speak to the other Space player, Kanaya.
1356
1357Jade and Jane visit Kanaya and Karkat and order them to get the tadpole. In a gratuitous act of intimidation, Jane impales Karkat on her culling fork and then resurrects him. She says she can bring everyone back from the dead exactly once except for the vampire, who would be harmed by healing magic. Kanaya thinks this is bunk and is not cowed.
1358
1359When Jane switches to pusher mode, Kanaya acquiesces to her troll blood pitch at an outrageous markup. Kanaya finds herself ashamed of her weakness for the rainbow ichor of her dead friends when Rose messages her to apologize for her own drinking problem.
1360	
1361Third, the Condesce wants to breed a new race of trolls to populate her empire in Universe C. To do this, she needs a mother grub egg known as a matriorb. On the theory that Roxy should be able to bring objects into existence with her voidy powers, Condy has been trying to get Roxy to evoke the horny orb since the last time Roxy was in jail.
1362
1363Jade visits Roxy in her cell and explains what a matriorb is. She prods Roxy to realize her powers and make one. Roxy thinks this is impossible and doesn’t want to help the Batterhag, but succeeds in evoking a perfectly generic object. Satisfied that Roxy is making progress, Jade leaves her to it.
1364
1365In another cell, Jane and GCat visit Jake. Jane now considers herself a supreme being of pure logic to whom Jake is good for nothing but his looks. He will be her obedient royal consort when she rules Earth as Her Imperious Condescension’s heiress. Jake implores his Dirk tulpa to get him out of this situation, but Brain Ghost Dirk cannot materialize at Jake’s current level of Hope power.
1366	
1367The rest of the players have no part in Condy’s new order. Jade isolates the hungover seers on Lolar and doesn’t talk to them. She only returns to Lolar while chasing John.
1368
1369John has been on the run ever since his grimbark sister came back with micro-Earth and broke up the reunion at the Slab. Jade cannot confine John to a planet like the others. Every time she catches the Heir of Breath, he dissolves into wind or involuntarily jumps to another part of canon, throwing her off the trail. Wherever he blows, the stardust disperses and conversation becomes possible again.
1370
1371In this fashion, John shows up briefly on Lofaf to see Jane cull Karkat and on Lohac and Lolar for conversations with Dave, Rose, and Terezi. Rose tells him to try to find the other players.
1372
1373Gamzee is also somehow still around to do minor mischief. Terezi resolves to hunt him down. Gamzee’s continued presence after he is supposed to have gone to Earth seems explainable by his use of Aradia’s time machine. But, as we will see in later Acts, Gamzee’s personal timeline of events becomes incomprehensible unless we engage in speculation.
1374	
1375Until now, the “retjohns” were only cosmetic, with images overwritten so that John or his arm had always been there. It remained to be seen whether John could rewrite history with his canon jumps and create new branches of continuity the way Dave and Aradia did with their time travel. It turns out he can, though the consequences are subtly different from those of time travel.
1376
1377John’s first two rewrites happen in quick succession and cancel each other out. First, he derails Jade and Dave’s sparring argument. Events diverge, and Jade no longer kicks the Vagabond off the roof. Dave has a strong feeling that John is not supposed to be here. But we don’t get to see where this leads, because John’s presence is further rewritten by a second John jumping to the same moment. Future John removes Present John before he is noticed, putting the scene back on its original track.
1378
1379Unlike previous retjohns, this one does not overwrite the pages in which things went differently. The Homestuck canon includes both versions of the scene, even though the version on pages 6402–04 seems not to have happened from the perspective of anyone in the other version. Let us reflect on how puzzling this is.
1380
1381With Dave and Aradia’s doomed offshoots, it was always the case that the doomed time players brought their knowledge of the offshoot with them to the alpha timeline. Rose even gained memories of a doomed self who did not make the trip. Similarly, the Signless Sufferer gained memories from his otherwise scratched Beforan self, Kankri. The offshoots and annihilated realities we know of are those which send information about themselves to the alpha reality.
1382
1383For this to also be true of the retjohns, we would expect Future John to be from the averted future, but we discover later that he is from the reinforced future. No one came from the averted path, and no one but the reader is aware of it. What’s more, despite Dave’s unease, it isn’t obvious whether he is in a doomed timeline or a viable one in which Sburb might still be completed.
1384
1385Are we to read this non-scene as nothing more than a demonstration of John’s new power, or does it have some hidden connection to events on the main path? It wouldn’t be proper for me to speculate here, but we could always consult an oracle.
1386
1387John finally finds Roxy in her cell on Derse. Roxy has stolen the non-existence from more cubes and made a pyramid of them, but she has had no luck with the Matriorb. She and John get to know each other. They figure that maybe Roxy will do better once she is free to evoke the orb for herself and not the evil witch.
1388
1389Roxy tells John about the cherub Calliope whose ghost is hiding from her brother’s rampage through the Furthest Ring. Of all Roxy’s friends, Callie is the one she worries about most.
1390
1391John offers to give Calliope his ring, which Aranea said could bring a ghost back to life. But when John returns to the Prospitian battleship to collect the ring, it’s gone.
1392
1393
1394ACT 6 ACT 6 ACT 2:
1395
1396
1397Caliborn’s comic continues. When we last saw it, Homosuck was a savage takedown of Homestuck. Nothing happened, the foolish story hero died, and the author laughed at you for reading it. But now, the satire has softened and become simple wish-fulfilment. The new story arc invites us to watch and admire the Alpha Male as he gains a following of servile females and accomplishes his quest with ease.
1398
1399John has just discovered the theft of his Ring of Life when he canon-hops into Homosuck. He becomes a rogue element which Caliborn can’t remove.
1400
1401John is disgusted at the sight of Bogus Dave and his bogus bitches. He follows them into the Land of Someone’s Handicrafts I Took, whose creatures are cutouts from the Ed Emberley book that Caliborn found in his studio.
1402
1403John stops Bogus Dave and Bogus Rose from kissing, so Caliborn buries him in a pile of Bogus Daves. John swears to kill Caliborn.
1404
1405
1406ACT 6 ACT 6 INTERMISSION 2:
1407
1408	
1409The thief is Vriska’s dancestor Aranea. After hearing John say that he had the ring that could bring a ghost to life, Aranea hatched a plan. Even though she is a ghost in the Furthest Ring, her cobalt mindjack power reaches into the session. She directs Gamzee to take the ring, fall asleep with it, and hand it over in his dream.
1410
1411When Aranea puts on the ring, she comes alive. She wakes Gamzee and follows him to the waking world. She is now on the Prospitian battleship parked on Lomax. Though she has no immediate use for the juggalo, she keeps him subdued because she can’t handle his filthy mouth.
1412
1413Aranea’s return to life dismays her pirate ghost buddies. Meenah phones Aranea, demanding to know why she has deserted them and given up on the plan to confront the big bad with the house-shaped hole.
1414
1415Aranea explains that she is thinking big. She wants to be the goddess of a multiverse in which the Lord of Time never hatched. Meenah objects that any new timeline that undoes the events of the alpha timeline is doomed, but Aranea is unshakeable in her chutzpah. A skilled Sylph of Light such as herself should be able to undoom a timeline and set Paradox Space on a new course.
1416
1417Meenah doesn’t like where this is leading, so she warns Karkat.
1418
1419Aranea’s departure makes Meenah and Vriska less confident in their house juju plan. They can’t maintain a mindjacked ghost army without her. What’s more, when Vriska sees in Aranea’s power play the same hubris and mistakes that got Vriska killed, she begins to doubt her own judgement and motives. After some introspection, they decide to shelve the mission.
1420
1421To avert Lord English’s creation, Aranea must stop this Sburb session from spawning the universe in which he will be born. The Condesce and the players must be kept from performing the Ultimate Alchemy.
1422
1423For freedom of movement, Aranea mindjacks some Damara Megido ghosts and harnesses their burgundy telekinesis. Just as her psychic power reaches all the way out to the Furthest Ring, theirs reaches all the way back into the Medium. They lift up the battleship and fly it away.
1424
1425Jane is nearby, building up the house on Lomax. She sees the ship leave, follows it, and finds it ditched in the streets of Derse. She summons Jade.
1426
1427Aranea’s ace in the hole is Jake, the Page of Hope. She recognized his untapped potential when they met in a dream bubble. Her theory is that Jake cannot manifest his power due to an accumulation of brain damage and emotional trauma. As a mind reader, she can see these injuries, and as a sylph, she can heal them all at once. She enters his jail cell and lays hands on him.
1428	
1429Jake’s full power bursts out of him in an aura of brilliant light, smashing buildings and emanating angels as it expands. At the centre of the hope field he floats, unseeing, unhearing, bellowing cornball non sequiturs at inhuman volume. Jane cannot get through to him and Jade cannot teleport him away.
1430
1431Roxy and Dad Crocker are in other prisons a safe distance from the hope field. In the confusion, Roxy goes invisible and skips town. Flying closer, she witnesses a standoff between Condy’s servants and the smug Aranea, who claims to be invincible while she wears the Ring of Life. Dad remains in his cell.
1432
1433Jade solves the problem of Jake destroying Dersite property by teleporting Derse instead. She switches the locations of Derse and her own planet.
1434
1435Jake, Jade, Jane, Aranea, and Roxy are now above the Forge next to Jade’s tall house on Lofaf. The hope field is visible to Karkat and Kanaya in the forest below. Karkat alerts Dave, who is still on Lohac. Dave relays what he knows to Rose, who is still on Lolar.
1436
1437Jade tries to break the hope field with Green Sun energy, but is overpowered. Her green fire is forced downward and makes a crater where it meets the ground. The crater fills with lava from the erupting Forge.
1438
1439Jade cannot believe what is happening. Her First Guardian power is supposed to be unrivaled. But soon her power is extinguished. The hope field sends her flying. She lands on the other side of the lake of lava, unconscious and no longer grimbark.
1440	
1441Aranea has neutralized Jade for the moment, but cannot risk her waking up and being possessed again by Condy’s bronze animal communion. With some ghostly help, Aranea pushes Jade’s house over, snapping it off at the blue beauties floor. The house comes down across the lake of lava, shearing into many pieces as it falls, and flattens the Witch of Space where she lies.
1442
1443Jade’s death is judged just.
1444
1445Jane flies to Jade’s body, intending to resurrect her, but gets tackled by Gamzee on the way.
1446
1447Aranea stays with the Daughters of Eclectica and addresses the invisible Roxy, who wants to take back the Ring of Life to give to Callie. Finding Calliope had once been Aranea’s plan too. But now that her plan has changed, she can’t have the Rogue of Void contesting the ring. She puts Roxy to sleep.
1448
1449Next, Jake’s bomb-as-shit hope power does something Aranea did not expect. Jake believes in Brain Ghost Dirk so hard that the imitation Dirk becomes flesh and blood. He stands before Aranea, sword out and swearing vengeance. But, slice and stab as he may, the Prince of Heart can’t get his blows to stick. Every wound on Aranea’s body disappears in seconds. To defeat her, he must separate the ring from her body.
1450
1451Aranea holds out her arm to goad Brain Ghost Dirk into chopping it off, but he senses a trap and lays down his sword. Taking a different tack, BGD exhibits a power we have not seen from the original Dirk. He shoots a pink arcing energy from his hands which attaches to Aranea and starts to rip her soul from her body.
1452	
1453Dave arrives to find Jade dead with her feet sticking out from under the house. Gamzee is riding Jane like a mechanical bull. Jane cannot do the lifey thing while the scurrilous fuckshitting cad has his paws on her. But Terezi has also made her way here since vowing to hunt down the clown. She kicks Gamzee off Jane’s back and onto the chunk of house floating in lava.
1454
1455Terezi’s fury deepens when she realizes Aranea is here too. Back when he was her kismesis, Gamzee pulled Terezi into a spiral of self-loathing and then abandoned her. In her poisoned state, she allowed Aranea to restore her eyesight. She now believes that Aranea and Gamzee worked together to manipulate her. She stabs Gamzee repeatedly, getting more and more enraged at his placid refusal to fight, speak, or even die. The beatdown works its way back over the lake of lava, hopping from house piece to house piece.
1456
1457Once the Maid of Life tears her eyes away from the spectacle and remembers that she wanted to resurrect Jade, she learns that another situation developed while her back was turned. The chess dogs have arrived. They instantly forgot the reason for their three-year chase when they saw their Bec-master Jade. The Sovereign Slayer pulled Jade’s body from the house, while the Prospitian Monarch warded Dave off with her sword drawn.
1458
1459Dave’s cajoling isn’t working, so Jane shoots a resurrection beam from afar. It misses, and the dogs misinterpret the beam as hostile. Jane is forced to deploy a distraction. She summons GCat, hoping to get the dogs to drop Jade and chase the cat instead. It mostly works. The only problem is that they don’t drop Jade.
1460
1461Rose arrives to see Dave flying off after the dogs. The chase enters the forest, buzzing over Karkat and Kanaya’s heads as they run in the opposite direction. In a Skaian cloud vision, we see the dogs flying to Jade’s quest bed.
1462	
1463Jake’s hope field is flagging, keeping his tulpa from finishing the job on Aranea’s soul. Brain Ghost Dirk’s fakeness vial starts working its way back into its gel. Rose airlifts Roxy to a safe distance.
1464
1465When the hope field ebbs to a low point, Jane senses an opportunity. She lobs her culling fork and impales Jake square in the chest. The field pops, Brain Ghost Dirk vanishes, and Jake falls dead on the house piece next to Terezi.
1466
1467The shock of Aranea’s soul snapping back into her body interrupts her mind control of Gamzee. He becomes aware of his situation and fights back for the first time.
1468
1469Jane continues her attack, lunging at Aranea now. Aranea puts Jane to sleep, thinking that will be the end of it. But Jane’s tiaratop corruption keeps her moving robotically while she snores. The unconscious heiress tackles Aranea, choking, punching, and piggybacking on her like a mechanical bullrider. Aranea eyes the katana left there by Brain Ghost Dirk.
1470
1471Special Stardust drifts in and starts to gum up the scene.
1472
1473Jake’s death is judged neither just nor heroic. He comes back to life. He and Rose watch, unsure whether to intervene, as Gamzee savages Terezi with punches, knees to the face, headslams, and backbreaking suplexes. Finally, when Gamzee has Terezi dangling over the lava, Rose shoots a spell which misses and sends Jake flying instead.
1474
1475Kanaya and Karkat pick their way through the green fire to the shore of the lava lake. They draw their weapons. But their arrival is overshadowed by that of the troll everyone fears, Her Imperious Condescension.
1476
1477Aranea finally understands that she has fucked up big time.
1478
1479
1480ACT 6 ACT 6 ACT 3:
1481
1482Caliborn was all set to introduce the trolls in the next act of Homosuck, and had even prepared their sprite art in the same style as the Tragic Male and Alpha Male. Then he fell under the sway of the How To Draw Manga book.
1483
1484Caliborn abandons all previous work. He revels in the creative possibilities of this new style, especially the way it can make affection between males less loathsome to him because the males are rendered more effeminate. He teases a tsundere bishie romance between the Alpha Male and the Krab Guy.
1485
1486Next, Caliborn introduces a self-insert character. This gorgeous bastard has the wings that Caliborn himself will never develop because his premature predomination stunted his growth. Finally, he grants the handsome boy a full body union with the clockwork makjack.
1487
1488John zaps from the pages of Homosuck to the studio where those pages are drawn. He recognizes Caliborn as the author and big bad.
1489
1490They fight. John gains the upper hand and gives Caliborn a beating, then involuntarily zaps away again. Caliborn is left flat on his back, unable to comprehend his first taste of defeat.
1491
1492
1493ACT 6 ACT 6 INTERMISSION 3:
1494	
1495Everything goes to shit in the session as Aranea’s plan falls apart.
1496
1497Having beaten Terezi down, Gamzee has her in a headlock and gloats. Karkat and Kanaya charge at him. Gamzee is half-prepared. He impales Karkat with Terezi’s cane and immolates him in the lava. Kanaya fares better, splitting Gamzee with one vertical swipe of her chainsaw.
1498
1499Dave, trying to recover Jade’s corpse for resurrection, catches up with Jack and PM at Jade’s quest bed. He makes them drop the body on the slab. They draw their swords and fight. The Slayer and the Monarch impale Dave. He falls dead on top of Jade. His death, judged heroic, is permanent.
1500
1501The robotic Jane is piggybacking and choke-holding Aranea in her sleep. Aranea uses ghost telekinesis to shrug Jane off and fling Brain Ghost Dirk’s abandoned sword at her. Jake jumps in front, taking the sword through his own chest to save Jane. His death, judged heroic, is permanent.
1502
1503Jake’s last act is as fruitless as it is noble, because Aranea still has the sword, now with a floppy Jake-shaped crosspiece. She flings it again and gets the heiress on the same skewer. Jane’s death, judged just, is permanent.
1504
1505From the deck of her flagship, the enraged Condesce fires her eye lasers indiscriminately on the scene below, vaporizing Kanaya.
1506
1507Aranea knows she’s dead meat if she doesn’t neutralize Condy. Straining to use the full power of her mindjacked ghosts, she pulls a whole planet, Lolar, out of its orbit and smashes it into Lofaf with the flagship crushed between them. Condy escapes the collision. Aranea sends Locah on the same trajectory, but now Condy bends her own psionic power to the task, pulling Lohac out of its orbit too. Locah and Lohac collide.
1508
1509Rose lunges in retaliation at Condy while Terezi lunges at Aranea. They both fail and are mortally wounded in the attempt, Rose by a trident and Terezi by her own cane-sword. Condy turns her eye lasers on the unconscious Rose. Roxy grabs Rose and disappears with her in the nick of time.
1510
1511After one last planet collision, it’s the end of the line for Aranea. Condy catches up with the teen pirate wannabe, flicks the Ring of Life off her finger, snaps her neck, and chucks her carcass into the flaming wreckage of Lotak and Lomax. Aranea’s death is judged just.
1512	
1513By the end of Homestuck, the whole multitude of troll ghosts joins in a degree of heroism and importance that will not extend to Aranea. She is never seen again.
1514
1515
1516ACT 6 ACT 6 ACT 4:
1517
1518
1519Beaten up by a teen, Caliborn looks inward. He cries woe as a misunderstood artist, drops manga, and swears to reinvent himself. Homosuck becomes a plea for sympathy and funding as Caliborn begins work on the next and final act, which will be his masterpiece.
1520
1521
1522ACT 6 ACT 6 INTERMISSION 4:
1523
1524	
1525Dirk and John arrive back in the session after the fight is over. John flies around the debris of six collided planets. He finds Dirk gazing at the catastrophe, blaming himself for not preventing it.
1526
1527The supercartridge’s Special Stardust settles thicker than ever on Dirk and the broken planets until they dissolve into one hazy mass of visual noise. John is left still wondering what the fuck happened here.
1528
1529Roxy carries Rose away from the noise. John follows and joins them on Roxy’s intact planet, the Land of Pyramids and Neon, or Lopan. The terminally forked-up Rose regains consciousness long enough to speak to Roxy. She regrets never telling Kanaya and Mom that she loved them. In this, she makes no distinction between her childhood Mom and the new one kneeling beside her.
1530
1531Rose succumbs to her chest wound. Her death is judged heroic.
1532
1533John and Roxy console each other. They contemplate fixing things, but it seems hopeless. All their friends are dead or lost in the noise, and John never figured out how to put his canon hops to good use.
1534
1535Roxy thinks they may now be in a doomed timeline. If this is Game Over, then there is nothing more to do but join the dreaming dead.
1536	
1537The only other surviving player, Terezi, ganks the ruby slippers from Jade’s corpse and then jetpacks to a crash landing in front of John and Roxy.
1538
1539The crash is the least of Terezi’s injuries. Dripping blood from her juggalo fight and impalement, she answers the stupidest question ever asked in Paradox Space by headbutting John to the ground. Terezi has no time for John’s dithering. She is dying. She knows he has a power that can undo everything that went wrong. This power is the only thing that matters now.
1540
1541John’s denizen Typheus still slumbers in the other intact planet, the Land of Wind and Shade, or Lowas. Roxy suggests Typheus could help John master his zaps. John agrees, but he won’t let Roxy sit around and get erased when the timeline changes. He makes her visit her denizen too, even if they don’t know what good it will do.
1542
1543After seeing Roxy off, Terezi and John realize they have no plan. Where should John zap to, and what should he change? Terezi feels like a rubbish Seer of Mind with no ability to guide him. But he asks her to try anyway. Terezi has John pick a thought to attach to this moment, the phrase “there’s no place like home.” Then she racks her brain doing a mindy thing which seems to fail. John will have to figure it out on his own. He leaves for Lowas.
1544	
1545We don’t see John’s audience with Typheus first-hand. It comes to us instead as a story shared between dreamers in a bubble.
1546
1547The ghost of Calliope is lonely in her hiding place. She wants to search the Furthest Ring for the other Calliope she has heard of, the one who predominated, but she fears her brother will find her if she tries.
1548
1549A change of scenery warns the cherub that she has a visitor. She puts on her trollsona before greeting the other dreamer. It is Jade, who cannot recall her recent past. Calliope introduces herself as Callie. She explains that she is not a troll but prefers to look like one. This gets Jade interested in doing the same. They have fun designing Jade’s trollsona together.
1550
1551Jade doesn’t know whether she is sleeping or dead. We’re led to think she’s the Jade who was flattened by her house, because the scene with Callie begins right after Jade’s death in Act 6-6-2. But as their conversation unfolds in 6-6-4, we learn she’s a different Jade whose timeline was created by a retjohn.
1552
1553Jade gets back her memories of losing her friends, grieving, dreaming, and encountering the ghost of Calliope who predominated. This Calliope vanquished her brother Caliborn to become the sole occupant of her body, then rose up as the god-tier Muse of Space and died in a doomed timeline. While they shared a bubble, the Muse told Jade a story about John and herself. Jade now repeats it for Callie, who illustrates the story in her ~ath scrapbook.
1554	
1555At first, the Muse told Jade what she already knew: in the first year of the voyage along the Yellow Yard, John and Davesprite were on the surface of miniaturized Lowas when the planet exploded and killed them. For the ship’s crew, that was when events diverged from those of the Game Over timeline. Jade was aghast and heartbroken. She could do nothing about it. She spent the next three years in a deep funk. Then she dreamed and met the Muse.
1556
1557The Muse was able to explain why it happened. Typheus blew up Lowas because, in the Game Over timeline, John had struck a bargain with Typheus which required the erasure of this timeline’s John and his land. Finally having a reason for the tragedy, Jade felt a little better.
1558
1559Drawing pictures of John’s return to Lowas after Game Over, Callie leaves out the glitchy stardust noise that would have hindered a first-hand view. John descends into his denizen’s palace and stands before the great hideous snake. The planet, in cryptic bits and pieces, had given John the quest of clearing its oily pipes and then playing a song through those pipes to chase away the clouds and free the fireflies. John never faced this task, but now he must.
1560
1561Typheus floods the audience chamber with crude oil. John is forced to do something with his power or drown. Instead of zapping himself away, he zaps away the oil. All of the oil on Lowas is dispersed to other parts of Homestuck canon. Little black smears retroactively appear to have always been there on a hundred pages.
1562
1563John returns to the pipe organ he passed on the way down. He plays his song. A mighty wind blows through the pipes, encircling the planet, disspelling the clouds, and knocking the Special Stardust and candy corn out of the Supercartridge Expansion Pack.
1564	
1565When Jade has told Callie all she can, Jane enters their bubble and finally meets her alien friend in person. She joins in on their troll cosplay.
1566
1567Jane’s memories are just as scattered as Jade’s were, but after some discussion she recalls what happened after Jade entered the session. Callie keeps illustrating as Jane tells her story.
1568
1569Just as in the Game Over timeline, the Condesce made Jade and Jane her servants, banished Dirk, and imprisoned Jake and Roxy. But this time, when Jade went to hijack the meteor and scatter its riders, she failed and dropped out of contact.
1570
1571The meteor crew raided Derse to rescue Roxy and Jake. The hypnotized Jane threw her culling fork at Rose, but Roxy leaped in front and took it for the team. Her death was judged heroic. Jane was about to do the lifey thing to resurrect Roxy when she was stopped by an unknown hero who had been retjohned back into the crew. She remembers nothing more.
1572	
1573After shelving their plan, Vriska and Meenah just wander through dream bubbles. They become close. Vriska’s straight-edge, hyper-competitive attitude dissolves. She gets dreadlocks, piercings, and a tattoo. She makes peace with the idea of doing nothing important in the afterlife. They roll down Horse Mountain and kiss.
1574
1575John’s song has teleported Lowas to a blank place beyond all canon locations. On his way back to his house, John finds Roxy, who came along for the ride because she flew straight to Lowas after meeting Lopan’s denizen Nix.
1576
1577Feeling no urgency while they are literally nowhere, John and Roxy compare their denizen encounters. Although Roxy was not challenged to do a new hero thing like John was, they both had their denizens explain the choice they are to make. If they accept oblivion, other timelines will never know what happened in this one. On the other hand, if they stay in the game by changing history and entering the timeline created by their intervention, they will supplant other versions of themselves and make their friends feel the same grief that John and Roxy felt after Game Over. This was not a dilemma for the friendleaders. They are both determined to play on.
1578
1579John flies away to change history. While he is gone, Roxy and the salamanders give Rose a proper burial. Roxy meets Jaspersprite, the reincarnation of her beloved cat Frigglish.
1580	
1581John’s first few controlled canon jumps don’t take him anywhere relevant, except to close the loop on his appearance in Dave and Jade’s sparring scene. He needs to find scenes he can retcon to set things right. He realizes that Terezi gave him one such scene to fix when her shot in the dark failed. She also gave him a way to find it again.
1582
1583By focusing on the attached thought, “there’s no place like home,” John zaps back to Terezi doing the mindy thing and makes it succeed. Now there are two Johns. The John who hasn’t gone to Typheus yet can’t be the John who came back, but he goes anyway, possibly to meet a different fate.
1584
1585Now that Terezi knows she can use key thoughts to send John to any scene, she puts together a plan for him to undo her mistakes with a precise sequence of subtle interventions. She writes the plan in her own teal blood on the scarf she wore as a blindfold.
1586
1587Terezi’s life is spent. Ever the diligent forensic inspector, she falls dead onto her own chalk outline.
1588
1589m3mory l4n3	
1590The first key word on Terezi’s scarf, “r3un1on”, leads John back to the big reunion at the Slab of the Jaded Fool’s Ennui. This is just a reference point for John to get his ring back, but before he does, he bewilders everyone with his fond embraces and reminiscing over conversations they haven’t had yet.
1591
1592The word “fr4m3d” takes John to Terezi’s courtblock playtime on Alternia. As instructed, he makes off with the plush scalemate witness to Lemonsnout’s crimes who was about to be stabbed through the chest.
1593
1594The word “mom3nt” takes John to Terezi’s house tower in the Land of Thought and Flow. While Terezi trolls Karkat, John chalks the message “you don’t need him” around the corner.
1595
1596The word “murd3r” takes John to the meteor lab where Terezi and her scalemate helpers are investigating Tavros’s death by impalement. John places the witness plush for Terezi to find. He increasingly feels that the scarf is playing silly buggers with him. How could these changes possibly be relevant?
1597
1598The word “just1c3” takes John to Nepeta’s corpse before Terezi finds it. He chalks a message over the planted evidence, pointing out that it’s Gamzee framing Vriska.
1599
1600The word “honk” takes John to the Drop Inn, where Gamzee is flash-stepping around the oblivious Terezi. John honks a bike horn to make Terezi catch Gamzee in the act. She hogties Gamzee and carries him to the roof. John takes a door to the whole body for his trouble.
1601
1602The word “fl1p” takes John to the rooftop, where Terezi has given Vriska the ultimatum of stay or “go”. Knowing in advance that Gamzee did some of the murders has not changed her resolve to stop Vriska. John lays Vriska out cold before Terezi can repeat the act she regretted the most. Finally he comes clean to Terezi about his interventions and the bad end he has averted by saving Vriska’s life.
1603
1604Terezi and Karkat flip out at John’s presence and demand answers, but John does not feel the need to explain all his mutha fuckin shenanigans. He leaves them to their three-year voyage.
1605
1606John returns to Roxy, gives her the Ring of Life, and zaps them and Lowas back into canon to discover the new reality he has created.
1607	
1608Jade remembers the final piece of the story she and Jane have been telling Callie. They both assumed they are dead because they lost consciousness while opposing the other heroes. But the mystery hero was Vriska, who simply put them to sleep, and asleep they remain.
1609
1610
1611ACT 6 ACT 6 ACT 5:
1612
1613
1614The curtains rise on the finale of Homosuck. It’s not about Caliborn’s knockoff characters anymore. For his masterpiece, the cherub has rendered in claymation a vision of his own fate, or, as he puts it, “a spoiler to the ending of things.”
1615
1616One of the monitors Caliborn unlocked in his land showed him what he took to be a scene from his future, after he wins his pool ball eyes and treasure chest for slaying his denizen. He also has the Ring of Void. Perhaps Gamzee stole that ring from Trickster Roxy after she proposed to Dirk.
1617
1618The Lord of Time is celebrating his victory with his followers Gamzee, Lil Seb, and Lil Cal, when he is plunged into another fight. The eight god-tier kids crash the party.
1619
1620Caliborn acts fast. He opens the chest and uses the house juju on his enemies. John, Rose, Dave, and Jade are sucked into the juju and trapped there. This changes the juju into a hole in canon. Like Vriska said, Caliborn can only wield this weapon once, and then it can be wielded against him. So, using the Ring of Void, Caliborn sends the juju containing the beta kids to the Furthest Ring where it will never be found. (Vriska found it in Act 6–5.)
1621
1622Only the Nobles are left to fight. Gamzee gets split in half again. Caliborn pummels Jane, Jake, Roxy, and Dirk until the Page of Hope recovers and turns the tide with a powerful hope field.
1623
1624While Caliborn is lying there stunned, the Prince of Heart prepares to rip his soul out with pink lightning. Caliborn evades Dirk’s spell until the muscular Arquiusprite surprises everyone with a herd of robot horses and gets Caliborn in a headlock.
1625
1626Dirk uses the hollow vessel Lil Cal to hold Caliborn’s ripped-out soul. Sadly, the spell also catches Arquiusprite’s soul and half of Gamzee’s. With all those powerful personalities sealed behind Lil Cal’s baby blues, the alpha kids regard the puppet as a dormant danger. The Rogue of Void banishes it forever.
1627
1628The vision ends here. After narrating his future downfall, Caliborn predicts that Lil Cal will resurface in the nightmares of many universes and release its trapped souls in the form of Lord English.
1629
1630The curtains fall on Homosuck. Caliborn relinquishes the narrative prompt and goes to battle Yaldabaoth.
1631
1632The revelation of Lil Cal’s hybrid nature hits the reader like a brick. We realize how, all this time, Lord English and his puppet servant Doc Scratch have embodied a fusion of Caliborn’s soul with those of Equius, Auto Responder, and Gamzee.
1633
1634
1635ACT 6 ACT 6 INTERMISSION 5:
1636
1637
1638Displayed through the medium of an Instagram parody called Vriskagram, numerous snapshots of the meteor trip in the new alpha timeline are shown, with the changes from John's retcons and Vriska's mere presence apparently solving all previous problems. For example, Terezi refuses Gamzee's advances, and Vriska puts a stop to Rose's drinking. All of the dancestors are seen in the bubbles except for Aranea, and Vriska's pre-retcon timeline ghost is shown there too. In the B2 session, Vriska replaces Gamzee as Jane's guide, meaning that Tavrisprite is now simply Tavrosprite. The flash ends with Vriska standing in front of Dirk with Equius's head under her arm, as Dirk holds Lil Hal, the very same scene where Gamzee created Arquiusprite in the old timeline.
1639
1640We zoom in on a black Skaian cloud, which zooms into Skaia itself (showing a destroyed Prospit nearby), and then to a doorless victory platform. Sitting upon the platform are the meteor inhabitants in their respective pairs (with Terezi and Vriska sitting in front of a locked fridge), Jake English (with Tavrosprite nearby), and the sleeping Jade and Jane (with Arquiusprite nearby the latter).
1641
1642Dave starts off a discussion by asking when John's supposed to arrive. Vriska explains that she went fact hunting with the time tables, and that he and Roxy should be here soon, from the pre-retcon timeline and unharmed. Karkat butts in asking how and why Tavros and Equius have been prototyped, and why other trolls have not. Vriska explains that she owed it to Tavros and she finds Arquiusprite hilarious, tactically advantageous, and genuinely happy in this state of being. Arquiusprite is currently deactivating Jane's tiaratop. Terezi asks Vriska about prototyping their other dead friends, and Vriska ultimately deems it not her place to judge people's mortality, plus the empty kernelsprites could be a useful revival backup. Terezi thinks it's pretty straightforward that while Sollux is happy where he is, Eridan doesn't deserve revival, and Nepeta and Feferi did no wrong and deserve life, so she convinces Vriska to let her use the remaining kernelsprites to revive them, but not immediately as Gamzee is currently stored in the fridge with their body parts. Dave interjects, asking if everyone's really okay with Vriska being the leader, and Karkat goes on a rant, ultimately calling himself not worthy of leadership, swearing off it forever, and passing the title to Vriska. Shortly afterwards, John and Roxy arrive nearby.
1643
1644John and Roxy greet the group. When Rose and Roxy notice each other, Roxy excitedly flies over and embraces her.
1645
1646John floats down to the platform and begins greeting everyone individually (except for Kanaya): He thanks Terezi for the plan working out, and she's glad to take full credit for her alt future self's ideas, and clarifies that the "stuffed dragon shit" was her "4LMOST C3RT41NLY FUCK1NG W1TH" him. Vriska thanks him for knocking some sense into her, and Rose thanks him for facilitating the reunion with her mother Roxy. He greets Jake, who is awkward and explains that he had planned things to say, but not in front of other people, and John understandingly moves on after avoiding Tavrosprite. Finally, John sits down and fist bumps Dave and, after an ordeal, Karkat. John asks why Jade and Jane are asleep, and Dave explains that they're under mind control and highly dangerous, as well as elaborating how their John died in this timeline. They both briefly reflect on Davesprite, and then Dave additionally explains that they have a few hours until all the bad guys return to the session.
1647
1648John and Dave briefly rag on Vriska, and then Karkat talks to John about how nice it is to finally meet him. This quickly turns into an awkward revisiting of his old black crush on John, which Dave insists they talk through. This then transitions into John talking about how not homosexual he is, which Dave responds to by encouraging John to question the social messages they absorbed in their childhood about sexuality and romance. Karkat is irritated by the conversation, and has taken to hanging off the victory platform by his legs, while yelling a soliloquy about how unpleasant the conversation is to hear. They change the subject after that, and Dave begins talking about troll romance quadrants in general. Karkat finally comes back up to the platform when John expresses irritation with Terezi, which Karkat insists is a "textbook caliginous crush" from the way John describes it. Dave and Karkat offer to talk to John more about the topic when he's ready, as he seems pretty jarred by it right now, and they go back to casual reminiscing. John and Dave talk about Roxy, with Dave believing John to have romantic interest in her and in the end remarking that he (Dave) views Roxy as a mother, and it's nice to have her around.
1649
1650Roxy and Rose are excited to finally meet each other, and they have a long conversation (with Kanaya joining in several times as well). When Roxy hears Rose talking, she compares Rose to Dirk, going so far as to describe Rose as a "girl version of Dirk". They delight over that a bit, then begin to discuss Dirk, and Rose then moves on to asking Roxy questions about her. She first asks Roxy if she likes wizards, to which Roxy says yes. Rose feels like this helps her understand both of them, explaining how she was too young to understand her mom. Roxy also reflects on how she never knew her mom "in person" and how lonely she was, and tells Rose about her own mom, including her highly successful wizard stories which Rose and Kanaya seem interested in. Roxy also brings up her own wizard stories, which both Rose and Kanaya want to read. Roxy reminisces about the trolls she is meeting and Fefetasprite, and Rose (who is from the post-retcon reality) reveals how her timeline's Roxy died. They reflect on their sadness after losing each other in their own realities. Roxy says that she had a funeral for Rose, which Rose says "is so "mom" of her". Rose further compares her mom and Roxy, which leads to a discussion of both of their drinking habits; they both turn out to have the same motives for drinking and for sobering up. They reflect on how they both relied on friends to help them through such ordeals, and the three share an emotional moment which is interrupted when Dave interjects.
1651
1652Jake tries to initiate a fake conversation with Tavrosprite to appear less awkward in front of the others. Tavrosprite - who has secretly visited Jake on LOMAX in the past, defying Vriska's orders warning him against interfering with the timeline - inquires into Jake's motives, and Jake answers by saying that his damaged relationships with his friends have made him nervous about engaging in social activity. Tavrosprite tries to help him by getting him to say hi to Roxy, then bringing up his own self-esteem issues and how having a figure like Rufioh to look up to helped him gain confidence. Jake says that brain ghost Dirk should serve that kind of role in his life, but his appearances in Jake's life have failed to actually make Jake more comfortable. Tavrosprite gives Jake several compliments, then says that Jake can win back his friends if he uses the confidence compliments give him to improve himself and become a better hero. Vriska suddenly interrupts the conversation to inform "Jape," as she mistakenly calls him, that he and Tavros will never amount to anything. She continues by writing off all Pages as useless individuals who can best benefit their sessions by quietly staying out of the way of the other players. Tavrosprite tries to object by bringing up the class's high amount of potential, but Vriska dismisses it as merely a cruel joke, providing false hope to a player whose personality prevents them from ever unlocking that full potential. Jape's Jake's confidence is once again shattered, and Tavrosprite is prevented from hugging him after Vriska implies that doing so would result in Tavrosprite accidentally prototyping Jake.
1653
1654Terezi asks Vriska if they should get back to their strategy meeting soon, and Vriska says they will, but that this feel-good moment is beneficial for the sake of everyone's morale. They reminisce on their past, and the sequence of events that brought them to where they are in this timeline, with Vriska saying she couldn't ask for a 8etter morail, and Terezi reciprocating. They overhear Karkat yelling, and Terezi speculates he's probably embarrassed about Dave R4MBL1NG S4NS F1LT3R 4G41N, and she also talks about how everyone keeping to their respective pairs allowed Dave and Karkat to get together in the first place. She's grateful, because she correctly speculates she probably would've gotten sucked into it without Vriska around. She says she'll miss Vriska, who insists she has to leave soon, and Terezi then expresses concern she won't be any good in the coming battle, that she feels pressured to be the absolute best version of Terezi in paradox space, and that she can't live up to it. Vriska reassures her, and when Terezi asks when she'll see her again, she promises to make the wait as short as possible, and drop by Earth eventually. They soon hear Tavrosprite reassuring Jake, and Vriska yells at them.
1655
1656Dave enters the conversation between Rose and Roxy, and although Rose finds this rude, Kanaya suggests that "He Has As Much Claim To A Sense Of Ancestral Connection To Your Mother As You" before leaving to give them private time and talk to the other trolls herself. Dave starts Roxy off on a "lightning round" of questions, full of copious Freudian slips, which he owns up to and seems at peace with later in the conversation. Afterwards, Roxy fires back at Dave with her own lightning round of questions. Dave puts an end to the questions as they fizzle out, and this is when she waves to Jake. A few times in the conversation, Dave expresses discomfort with Dirk as well as Dave's actual Bro being brought up. Rose mostly interjects as an "officiator". They exchange psychoanalysis-related babble, which is interrupted by Vriska, as she advises Rose to kill Cetus. She is interrupted in turn by the newly prototyped Rosesprite, Jaspersprite having taken it upon himself to prototype pre-retcon Rose's corpse from LOWAS into Roxy's empty kernel. Vriska is enraged by this waste of a kernel, and she yells at Roxy not to hug Rosesprite. After briefly pondering what it means, Rose breaks down laughing as she reflects on how utterly meaningless the development is.
1657Kanaya, having left Rose and Roxy's conversation with Dave to Talk To Some Trolls, approaches Vriska. She sasses Vriska, and they talk mainly about relationships, particularly their opposing views of privacy in a relationship. This transitions into discussion of the fascinating sociological structure of human families. Just as they start talking about Kanaya's duty to raise a new mother grub, Karkat abruptly joins the conversation, criticizing her leadership choices and throwing an almost excessive number of weak burns her way. She leaves at this point, and Kanaya mentions that Vriska is a romantic dead-end, both because of who she is and because she just told Kanaya she isn't interested in flushed or caliginous relationships right now. Karkat and Kanaya make plans to talk in-depth about quadrants sometime, possibly with WV in tow.
1658
1659Dave leaves the Lalondes to their own devices, and goes to talk to Vriska and Arquiusprite. Dave starts to talk to Arquiusprite, asking him just to what extent he could technically be considered Dave's DBro. Arquiusprite essentially tells Dave that talking to him is something the real Dirk should do, despite Dave saying he feels more comfortable talking to a watered down version of Dirk, and that he would have some sort of social conniption if he had to talk to real Dirk right now. Vriska reassures him that Dirk won't arrive until their enemies do, and Dave changes the subject to (once more) the contents of the fridge. Dave asks if it might be okay to let him out, and Vriska declines thoroughly, stating her plan to simply drop the fridge in the middle of the ocean with him inside when Earth is resituated. Dave shrugs this off, and once more begins his one man Freudian avalanche, asking if "johns hot mom" is awake yet. As Dave stumbles over his words trying to save face, Vriska leaves the conversation, Terezi teases him about it, and soon Rose and Roxy chime in, with such gems as "janey is a straightup sexual fox riding a red hot nuclear bombshell". Soon, John overhears them talking, and when he asks what's going on, Terezi tells him "D4V3 TH1NKS YOUR MOM 1S HOT"
1660
1661John begins talking to Jake, mostly about their favorite movies and the differences in their respective universes and childhoods. The topic of Jane's Dad comes up, and John becomes eager to meet him, especially since Jake's description of him makes John think he was a completely different kind of dad from the one [he] had. John resolves to check in on him soon, and to take Jane along with him. John remarks that Jake seems far less shy now, and Jake talks about his difficulties socializing in large groups, reminiscing on his false bravado in his initial letter to John all those years ago. John reassures him, saying that he's going through some changes, which can be difficult but also good. John also compares Jake's outfit to a superhero's, or that of "maybe a plucky side kick, at LEAST", and goes on to scoff about bat man while praising his sidekick, which lifts Jake's mood even more. John stops as he overhears Karkat whispering to WV, who apparently has plans to build a Can Town to scale on Earth, until Karkat notices him eavesdropping and gets mad at him. Then, Tavrosprite starts sneezing excessively, due to his allergies and the proximity of Jaspersprite, whom John suddenly notices along with Rosesprite.
1662
1663Vriska, banging the Warhammer of Zillyhoo on the fridge like a judge's gavel, calls the tactical meeting back in order.
1664
1665Vriska stands atop the fridge as everyone gathers around, and she begins debriefing our heroes on the situation. The Condesce has regrouped on Derse, preparing for the incoming Jacks just like the kids are, mainly because the Derse raid caught her off guard and robbed her of two key players. Kanaya remarks that the situation sounds complicated, and Vriska tells Karkat to make diagrams for the remainder of the conversation, to which he begrudgingly obliges. Vriska first describes how the Condesce is extremely dangerous, with a wide range of troll abilities, and needs to be taken down or at least heavily preoccupied immediately. She then elaborates on the three Jack Noir iterations, whom she refers to as "Dog Jack, Lord Jack, and Ro8o Jack." She casts Bec Noir and PM as the most powerful and dangerous, especially because she doubts PM's alignment, but advises the team to let her take care of him, unless the Condesce is taken care of and Jade wakes up, in which case she should fight them. Lord Jack she poses as less of a threat, due to lack of first guardian powers, but still lethally dangerous within his range of attack. Spades Slick she considers the least threat, with unknown alignment, so she suggests assigning low-level fighters to take care of him. She emphasizes as key points of the battle that Jane, being a key revival player, should be kept out of the battle and given quick access to the breadth of the session. This, along with needing to keep the battles separate from each other, leads to the necessity of setting up a network of portals, which Rosesprite offers to take care of. Vriska then gets ready to assign specific combat roles.
1666
1667Having told everyone about each of the villains who are approaching, Vriska allows everyone to choose who is fighting who:
1668
1669John, Rose, and Roxy choose to take on the Condesce. Kanaya wants to go as well, noting that It Would Be A Shame If The Party Defeating The Woman Who Terrorized Our Planet For Ages Had No Representation From Our Species, but Vriska tells her that she has a mission of her own that she has to do.
1670
1671Vriska explains that Bec Noir is not an immediate 8attle priority because of PM attacking him, 
1672and thus she reserves Jade for the fight in case she wakes up.
1673
1674Dave volunteers to fight Lord Jack, in the hopes that it will put to rest his prophecy of defeating Lord English. Terezi offers too, on merit of her battle skills. She also volunteers Dirk, much to Dave's obvious discomfort, and Vriska points out he'd probably seek out Dave regardless.
1675Arquiusprite wants to do something different, saying that he wants to do something on his own, "a gesture turning the tide of fortune for all of e%istence, a gesture which he would like to "shock everyone" with.
1676
1677
1678Vriska assigns Jake to take on Spades Slick. Tavrosprite wants to join as well, and Vriska tells him that he can, but not before he performs some particular task which is yet unknown; Vriska says that she will talk with Tavrosprite about it in private.
1679
1680Jaspersprite doesn't want to do anything in particular that is important, saying that he just wants to eat some tuna fish and cuddle with either rose or roxy or both.
1681
1682The mayor is not assigned any particular task, but apparently Karkat is *PERSONALLY* SEEING TO IT THAT NOT A SINGLE POST-APOCALYPTIC TATTER ON HIS HEAD GETS HARMED.
1683
1684Karkat wonders what exactly he is going to do, and Vriska assigns him the task of assisting Kanaya with her mission.
1685
1686Vriska concludes the tactical planning, urges them all to properly thank John later, and moves into basic Sburb endgame responsibilities. She first describes Karkat and Kanaya's mission, which is to speak with Echidna. Both of them express concerns with the encounter, but Vriska assures them that it will be fine, reiterating that this is necessary in order to convince Echidna to release the genesis tadpole. Next, Vriska pulls out Earth, contained within a brownish eight ball, which she hands over to John for safekeeping until they can resettle it (after fast-forwarding its timeline a bit) in the new universe. John inquires as to the nature of it, and Vriska explains that, on a guess of what pre-retcon Terezi meant when she asked for John's wallet, she made this new modus by combining said wallet with her eight ball modus. This allowed her to captchalogue Earth in Jade's place without the use of Space powers. Vriska then explains other crucial endgame Sburb tasks, such as building up the houses, deploying the grist hoards, and lighting the forge, so they can claim the Ultimate Reward. She asks if there are any questions, and John asks what she plans to do in all of this. She explains that she plans to kill Lord English, mainly by reigniting the plans previously abandoned by her pre-retcon self. Everyone starts awkwardly wrapping up the meeting: Karkat and Kanaya figure they should head to LOFAF; John, Roxy, and Rose decide to use the upcoming time to make a battle strategy; John invites Jake along to help him plan for his battle, and Terezi proposes making up a battle strategy with Dave. At this point, Dave awkwardly expresses how he feels uncomfortable making plans around Dirk without him being there, among other thoughts regarding Dirk. Vriska interjects, having had enough of his griping, and decides to expedite matters by pulling out Roxy's Crockercorp Appearifier Rifle, pointing it at Dirk, and shooting a fenestrated wall towards him such that he goes through it and exits out of the one sitting on the victory platform, drastically shortening his trip and launching him right into Dave. Vriska gets ready to leave, stating that she's not sure she can "take another second of this." John asks her if the Striders are really that bad, and she clarifies she doesn't mean them. She screams that her ghost is being a "FUCKING LOSER!!!!!!!!", and jumps into the same fenestrated wall, the Skaianet Laboratory hub that was powering it in hand, severing the connection as she jumps through. John stares at the device, speechless.
1687
1688The frame zooms out from the victory platform, all the way to the Skaian cloud from the start of the act, which is shown through yet another cloud. This cloud fades to black, then fades to an image of the scene in Calliope's dream bubble. We zoom in, and Calliope offers to wake up Jade and Jane. Jade begins to say something before they go, but suddenly the stage they are sitting on disappears. The yellow ring around them glows intensely, and the floor falls out beneath them. They fall through space as the ring unravels into a spiral around them, and they end up sliding down it.
1689
1690At the end of the slide, Jade, Jane, and Calliope walk along the yellow brick path before entering a memory of Echidna's lair, which Jade remarks is either her memory or someone else's. Jane suddenly wakes up, with the word "DISOBEY" flashing" flashing briefly on the screen as she is returned to her normal god tier color scheme, and she bounces near John, Rose, Roxy and Rosesprite before landing.
1691
1692Arquiusprite congratulates himself on his accomplishment and fucks off to who knows where. Jane apologizes to Roxy for killing her, and they hug. John remarks on the increasing height of the hug pile, and he and Rose debate over who Casey/the Viceroy will be more thrilled to reunite with, when Rosesprite interjects that "he's been... scheming", referring to his skeleton army on LOMAX. Jane and John then properly introduce themselves, and Freudian compliments are exchanged by Rose and Jane. Dave, Dirk, and Jake have left, as well as Karkat and Kanaya, who apparently took Jade with them. After Jane mentions meeting Calliope in the dream bubbles, Roxy makes plans to give the Ring of Life to Calliope soon, with both Rose and Rosesprite offering to help her. Jaspersprite, ecstatic over all the human bonding, hugs the nearest person - Rosesprite. This results in Jaspersprite being prototyped, leading to the constantly flashing Jasprosesprite^2. Roxy is ecstatic.
1693
1694A dark dream bubble glowing green is shown, with some of Lord English's cracks in the void nearby. Calliope and Jade look on towards one wall of the lair, which has a hole in it. There is a staircase leading up to the platform, which turns into a pathway deep into the bright whiteness through the hole. A bright flash of green illuminates their faces as Alternate Calliope greets them: "welcome back, jade." She stands atop the platform, glowing green (similar to Doc Scratch), the entire area around her darkened. The light returns as she beckons them forward.
1695
1696Calliope and Jade ascend the staircase to the platform, and Alt!Calliope asks Jade to wait on the platform for a moment, and walks through the hole. Jade and Calliope exchange a glance, and Calliope follows her doomed alternate timeline self. As they look at each other, Alt!Calliope pulls out a wand, glowing green at the tip, which exposes Calliope's cherubic face when its light falls on her. The glow erupts into a bright green flash, ridding Calliope of her troll disguise entirely.
1697
1698Calliope tells Alt!Calliope that she's been searching for her. She was aware of this. After some faltering, Calliope agrees to hear the story of how Alt!Calliope was killed. She doesn't have much time, apparently, so Alt!Calliope chooses to tell the story in brief. As they stand in the middle of a familiar white spiral with a spacey backdrop, Alt!Calliope recounts how she grew up entirely alone, how she killed her brother and dressed [her] words in his blood to hear victory every time [she] spoke. She started a dead session, with the same overall setup and time trial challenge Caliborn had, even down to having the same first break outcome. As a Muse of Space, this proved difficult for her, and she failed, so she eventually went to visit Echidna, who offered her The Choice, and she chose to have her life ended then and there. In exchange, she had to wait in the furthest ring until, after a long time, Calliope would appear, and it would unravel around her and become navigable. This was her signal to leave, and fulfill the rest of her promise to Echidna. The starry pathway fades away after she says this, and Calliope feels disappointed and purposeless, asking what she's supposed to do now. Alt!Calliope walks away, back towards Jade, telling Calliope to be who she is, to "live." The bubble fades to black, leaving Calliope alone, and then Roxy appears behind her.
1699
1700Calliope turns around, and Roxy, smiling at her, places the Ring of Life on her finger. Calliope's eyes return to normal, and she stares at her hand, then Roxy, in awe. Roxy takes her hand, they smile at each other, and Roxy does some sort of Voidey thing (similar to John's retcon powers at the end of A6A6I4) to teleport them out of the furthest ring, as the whole panel glows strongly black.
1701
1702A long, scrollable panel shows Echidna, both in the white dream bubble area that Jade and the Calliopes just left, and in her lair on LOFAF, with Karkat and Kanaya walking along a long pathway alongside her body arching through magma.
1703
1704Karkat and Kanaya reflect on their conversation with Echidna, which went smoothly. Kanaya and Echidna talked, though Karkat couldn't understand a word of it, and she deemed them sufficiently responsible and serious about taking care of the new universe. She Will Release The Frog When The Time Comes. They also talked about Kanaya and Karkat's "Natural Inclinations," with Kanaya's being, broadly, motherhood, and Karkat's implied to be leadership. They talk for a while about how these inclinations relate to their aspects, and Karkat recounts in detail how he killed his denizen, who was "WEIRDLY SMALL": essentially, the very fact that he got a "TRAINING DENIZEN", who knew in advance how insufficient Karkat felt, enraged him so much that he killed it, in a way that was so easy he shocked even himself. He then goes on to talk about how he'd like to do something important, and Kanaya insists that's why he's their leader, which he denies. Kanaya emphasizes that Echidna said so, though, and goes on to explain that Echidna's main condition of releasing the frog was that Kanaya protect Karkat, so he can go on to be a leader for the next generation of their people in the new universe. Karkat then goes to make his way out of the cave, Kanaya lagging behind. She says she'll meet him out there "Once Its All Over", and BONKs him on the head hard enough to knock him out. She then makes her way out of the cave, leaving his unconscious body behind.
1705
1706Roxy and Calliope return to the victory platform, where Jasprose greets them eagerly. John, Terezi, and Jane are also there, but Rose seems the most frustrated with Jasprose talking nonstop since being created. Jasprose explains that her new form has given her "a highly focused understanding of [their] aspect", as well as keener instincts. She then suddenly focuses keenly on Calliope, pawing at her head and admiring it aloud. She suddenly starts floating around Roxy, expressing attraction to her quite blatantly. Talking about Jane quickly segues into Jasprose reminsicing over the deaths of many iterations of Rose and Jaspers, where she also implies connections to several timeline iterations of the two. She also explains to Jane her role in the upcoming battle, then leave upon Rose's suggestion, through a sprite projection of a fenestrated plane.
1707
1708Jasprose comes out the other side in Echidna's lair on LOFAF, just behind Kanaya, talking about how everyone has been through a lot, and saying there was one thing she never got to say to Kanaya. She then nuzzles her intensely and abruptly leaves through a new plane, ending up at LOTAK, where Dave and Dirk were talking. They stare at her wordlessly, and noting the awkwardness aloud, she leaves again, this time ending up at LOMAX, where Jake and Tavrosprite are. She makes an interested note of Jake's unprototyped kernelsprite, stares at Jake silently for a few panels, then leaves again, due to how boring she finds them to be. She returns to the victory platform, much to Rose's chagrin. She reports the interesting tidbit, and everyone insists that they shouldn't, that the plan was to keep it as a revival backup, but she ignores them and recommends prototyping Eridan, Feferi, Sollux, or Nepeta. ;3 She then pulls a Cheshire Cat move, her face fading in the sky, and Terezi says "Y34H, SH3'S JUST GONN4 BR1NG N3P3T4 B4CK 1SN'T SH3".
1709
1710Dirk and Davebriefly remark on the weirdness that is Jasprosesprite^2, but the conversation quickly flatlines into awkward silences and forced attempts to keep the conversation going, and ends with Dave hoping the fight happens soon.
1711
1712Back on the victory platform, John re-ignites the conversation, though Rose refuses to stop facepalming with the pillow. Roxy and Jane both compliment Calliope's appearance in turn, before Terezi interjects, calling her ugly. She explains that it's not an insult, but rather that, simply, "H4V1NG 4 SKULL FOR 4 H34D 1S PR3TTY S1CK", as opposed to pretty. John then starts talking to Calliope about how awful her brother was, asking what she wants to do now that she's alive. She isn't sure, but John says that's fine. Jane then interjects, asking what happened in the furthest ring after she woke up, and Calliope recounts the meeting with her doomed god tier self. Rose then jumps in to pry a bit, asking what her role is in the endgame events, but Calliope insists she has nothing important to do. Roxy then pulls Calliope aside to have a conversation with her one on one.
1713
1714Meenah and pre-retcon ghost Vriska, or (Vriska), are sitting in the horse cliff dream bubble, red Juju chest in hand. (Vriska) talks to Meenah about getting over her apprehension of horses, but Meenah seems generally detached, declining (Vriska)'s attempts to make plans, citing the dull, repetitive, dreamlike monotony of the afterlife. (Vriska) begins to key in to the fact that something is wrong, and asks Meenah about it, but Meenah is hesitant to talk about her problems. At this point, Vriska shows up, interrupting their conversation, and insists that she needs to take the treasure.
1715
1716Roxy apologizes for pulling Calliope away from all her new friends, but Calliope waves it off, saying that she's "still getting Used to the concept of in-person socialization at all, let alone with many people." They reflect on their experiences, both the good and the bad, and Roxy describes her philosophy that everything that has ever happened in their wild journey matters, from the dead people to the doomed and "bad" timelines to the living people in the alpha. Roxy explains that none of these people are "more important" than any others, especially using this to make a point to Calliope about how she's just as important as her dead, doomed self who is going on to do something significant: "you both came from perfectly legitimate realities and IMHO you are both equally valuable." In particular, she tells Calliope about how she's grateful to her for her role in helping the B2 kids and everyone else come together. Calliope accepts it as inspiring, but still wishes to do something useful, and Roxy explains that's another reason why she brought Calliope aside: with the help of Calliope's presence, due to her being a Space player, Roxy thinks she might be able to finally succeed in creating the matriorb.
1717
1718John wonders what Roxy and Calliope are talking about, Jane suspects they are catching up, and John remarks about them all having time to relax. Rose then starts grumbling about Jasprose, and how she presents a challenge to Rose's sense of identity and "Roseness", but John assures her, similar to Roxy's speech to Calliope, that all alternate versions of people are equally important. After remarking how they missed each other, the conversation shifts to wondering how Karkat are doing, and then to Rose's relationship with Kanaya, with John in particular remarking that they "make a nice couple." Terezi calls them N3333333RDS for the second time, and after John shooshes her, she blatantly blackflirts with him, and when asked why she isn't with Dirk and Dave anyway, she says she wants to give them time alone, and John wonders if Dave is okay.
1719As Roxy and Calliope sit across from each other, Roxy focuses her energies, tapping into the history of Alternia, showing all the war and suffering, and the mother grub skull with several troll symbols around it. Roxy focuses her energy, and successfully creates a matriorb. Calliope is shocked, and Roxy does a victory dance.
1720
1721Jasprose hops out of a fenestrated plane upside down, makes note of her severely heightened narcissism while complimenting Rose, and then says the real reason she's here is to discuss strategy with Jane: "But first, I have somewhere to take you!" She carries Jane with her to LOCAH, ejects her out of the fenestrated plane straight into a statue of Hemera, and as Jane squints up at it, Nannasprite peeks out from behind the statue's head, and then floats down to Jane.
1722Roxy and Calliope are standing at the doorway of Jade's house, as Roxy wants to leave her there with WV and Jade for safety, as well as keeping an eye on Jade. They stare at each other for a second, share a meaningful goodbye, and then Roxy flies off with the matriorb.
1723
1724Dirk asks Dave about the imminent battle with Lord Jack, trying to get the details straight, and Dave responds for a while very curtly. Dirk soon starts keying in on the fact that Dave doesn't like him, and when Dirk asks what the problem is, Dave eventually decides to answer, venting at length about the horrible, abusive childhood that his Bro put him through. Dave then calms down from that, apologizing for blaming Dirk for things that aren't his fault, saying Dirk seems like a good person, but Dirk insists the blame is warranted and talks about his own problems for a while. He then goes into detail about why he idolized his own Bro, when Dave asks. After a moment, Dave hugs Dirk, and Dirk hugs him back.
1725
1726Roxy approaches Kanaya and, after playing a guessing game, reveals to Kanaya that she has the matriorb, and gives it to her. Kanaya is moved to tears, saying that she thought the task of making a matriorb would be much more difficult, but Roxy remarks that her role was always probably related solely to hatching it and raising a mother grub. As Roxy sits down next to her, a hummingbird settles on Roxy's shoulder. Roxy and Kanaya talk about their respective trips, as well as shaping the new troll world and its people properly. Owing to this new responsibility, Kanaya expresses hesitation to enter the fight against the Condesce, as she initially planned to do, but Roxy convinces her, reassuring Kanaya that "we are ALL riskin stuff and ALL in this together and if youre with me and rose and john, dont worry we aint gonna let anything happen to you." Roxy takes her hand, and they fly away from LOFAF.
1727
1728Vriska has taken the Juju chest, and yells at her alternate self, calling her a useless, selfish loser and saying that she hasn't grown at all as a person, among other insults. (Vriska) starts to cry, which makes Vriska criticize her even further. (Vriska) starts to walk away, telling Meenah to follow, but Meenah doesn't seem to want to join her.
1729
1730Meenah decides to break up with (Vriska), and join the alive Vriska in fighting Lord English, citing reasons such as being bored, and being afraid that she's too bad of a person to avoid hurting the now very sensitive (Vriska). This drives (Vriska) to tears, as well as Meenah, who follows the grinning Vriska to re-gather the ghost army.
1731
1732Jane talks to Nannasprite, who gives her words of kindness and encouragement. Jane is very pleased, and accepts Nanna as her new sprite. Nanna says that she will assist Jane in healing the others during the final battle. Then Nanna mentions one more thing: there are two of her. As Jane turns around, Nannaspritex2 splats Jane in the face with a pie, sending her flying back.
1733
1734Jake talks to Tavrosprite about how he wonders if he's figured out everything there is to know about himself. He also concludes that he's probably better off alone, without a romantic partner or even any friends, feelings which Tavrosprite sympathizes with. Then Jasprose appears, triggering Tavros's cat allergies.
1735
1736Jasprose uses a magical curative tablet to get rid of Tavrosprite's cat allergies. She then takes out Nepeta's head, gives a speech about the injustices Nepeta has experienced and how she will ensure Nepeta is only happy and fulfilled from here on out, and kisses the head before prototyping it into Jake's sprite, creating Nepetasprite. Unfortunately, this sets off Tavros's allergies again, since Jasprose had actually only given him a placebo.
1737
1738Jake's phone starts ringing as Vriska calls him. She tells him to reach into his hoodie pocket, where he finds the Betty Crocker mouse toy. He throws it down, and God Cat appears and begins playing with it. Vriska then tells Jake to call Tavros over and tell him to pick up GCat. Tavros does so, and GCat is prototyped, creating Gcatavrosprite. He begins sneezing loudly and violently, until Vriska uses her powers to put him to sleep. She explains that she wanted GCat out of the way, so that there wouldn't be a first guardian running around and potentially messing with their plans. She is in what looks to be a memory of the Land of Maps and Treasure, about to execute her own part of the plan.
1739
1740Vriska and Meenah discuss their plan to defeat Lord English. Meenah recounts her group's old treasure hunting mission, and how after Aranea revived herself, she and (Vriska) gave up on the plan for a while and explored dream bubbles, which, along with (Vriska) having mellowed WAY the fuck out, eventually became boring for her. Vriska persuades Meenah to take back up the old plan to use the treasure and the ghost army to combat Lord English, and discusses the possible nature of the Treasure's attack, but the pair are unable to come up with a plan to regain control of or raise another ghost army. However, as they further explore the dream bubble, Vriska sees a huge army of ghosts in what appears to be the Land of Sand and Zephyr, consisting of all 24 trolls except for herself, Meenah, Aranea, Gamzee, Damara, and Kurloz, led by what seems to be the pre-retcon version of Tavros, much to Vriska's shock.
1741
1742Still shocked by the massive army, Vriska demands to know how Tavros convinced them to join, even wondering if his animal communion was involved. He says he simply used friendship and kindness, something Vriska never considered. Vriska, shaken and angry that Tavros actually did something for once, breaks down while he brags gleefully. He starts dancing and playing air guitar, not listening as she says his name over and over.
1743
1744Vriska pulls herself back together and acknowledges Tavros's accomplishment, but asks him never to dance again. With the ultimate weapon and ghost army in her grasp, she decides to make a plan. Meenah interrupts, asking who would lead the ghost army. She decides she wants to lead and challenges Tavros to a duel for the position, but Tavros declines, simply allowing her be leader. He declares her his new empress and prostrates himself before her, to Meenah's delight and Vriska's annoyance. Meenah steps atop Tavros's horns and has him turn to face her new army. She gives them a quick speech about how they are going to listen to her and beat Lord English - and if they don't listen, she'll feed them to him herself. Vriska is delighted.
1745
1746We return to Jake, Gcatavrosprite, Nepetasprite, and Jasprose on LOMAX. Gcatavrosprite is still asleep, and the other three are having a tea party, with Jane's fridge serving as the table (and Gamzee still inside). Jake questions his position as the mad hatter in this loosely Alice in Wonderland based scene, but Jasprose hushes him, and coerces Nepetasprite into allowing the situation to be a date between her and Jasprose. She spends a while flirting heavily with Nepeta and telling her why Karkat was bad for her, when Davesprite abruptly appears. He explains that he was wandering on LOWAS for a while before coming here, and after wondering briefly about the present situation, he introduces himself to Nepetasprite. They greet each other with a handshake, which cause her to prototype him, resulting in Davepetasprite^2, much to Jasprose's dismay.
1747
1748The scene shifts to Calliope as she enters Jade's house. She calls out to see if anybody is inside, and finds WV, who shows Calliope where Jade is: She's in front of the fireplace with a red reminder and a red written note in her hand. We then see Jade and Alt Calliope in the Furthest Ring, traversing nearby the cracks. She explains the mechanics of the Furthest Ring to Jade, and how all of the aspects and pairs therein are closely interwoven out there, not just Time and Space. Jade twice asks to be woken up, and Alt Calliope refuses both times, saying they have to reach their destination first, in order for time to flow correctly. She also makes remarks about Space being the true master, and collapsing in on itself, which seems to concern Jade as she notices her first guardian powers returning. She continues to follow regardless. Meanwhile, Davepeta introduces themself to Jasprose, settling on gender neutral pronouns after some brief confusion. The two talk through some hurt feelings and issues that Jasprose had been having, and consider continuing their date regardless of these new circumstances. Davepeta dawns on the conclusion that they're "a being that [Lord English] should in some way be vulnerable to." However, they decide to kill some time before the battle begins, opting to catch up with "a couple of bros from the past," and they fly away from LOMAX, leaving Jasprose and Jake behind.
1749Arquiusprite is floating near the roof of Dirk's house on LOTAK, which reaches nearly to the edge of Skaia. He deploys a Grist Rig on the roof, and the entire building glows, before the rig begins shooting LOTAK's grist hoard into Skaia. LOTAK was apparently the last planet to be rigged up, as the rest of the planets are doing the same, and orbiting around Skaia, which glows brightly. As Arquiusprite stares happily at this event, Davepeta shows up behind him, much to Arquiusprite's shock.
1750
1751Dave and Dirk, noticing that the latter's house is now built up, discuss their respective guardians. Dirk talks about his Auto-Responder, and Dave follows up by talking about his brother's chat bots on his puppet porn websites. They then start a lightning round of questions to the likes of what Dave and Roxy did: Dave recounts more of his upbringing, and talks about birthday presents, his Ben Stiller sunglasses, and the bunnies John got for his birthday. Dirk then tells Dave how Ben Stiller was crucified by the juggalo presidents and then became recognized as a holy figure, and how the Condesce "remastered" the Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff movies in high defintion, which (along with Stiller's death) really set Dirk's Bro off. After that, they discuss how John ironically doesn't know that he's about to fight Betty Crocker, and Dirk's trainwreck of a relationship with Jake. Dirk notes that he's interested in meeting Dave's friends, but didn't want to stick around at the platform for very long, largely because of Jake. Dave asks more about his adult self's life, and Dirk says that his early life isn't well-documented, so Dave fills in the blanks himself, coming up with his own ideas of his adult self's childhood, which Dirk finds to be in line with the urban legends. They then talk about their god tier outfits: Dirk says that although he hated his at first, he soon found it rather comfortable; Dave had a similar experience with his, noting how they seem to be magic clothing. They also talk about how awkward Jake's outfit is, and they say that they'll probably wear regular clothes again once their adventure is over. Dave then starts a discussion about his sexuality, wondering how Dirk told his friends (that he was gay).
1752
1753Davepeta and Arquiusprite reunite. Arquiusprite is overwhelmed with emotions at seeing Nepeta again. They begin to roleplay together. Davepeta offers to give Arquiusprite a bro hug. They slowly come together, spouting Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff references, culminating in the greatest panel in all of Homestuck. Accompanying the panel is a message from Hussie, demanding that everyone take a selfie of themselves with the panel or he'll delete MSPA forever.
1754
1755Roxy and Kanaya return to the victory platform. John greets them, asking how it went, and says hello to Roxy's hummingbird. They make note of Skaia's light and discuss lighting the forge (with a magical ring), and after dismissing John's questions about Karkat's whereabouts, Rose prompts him to lead. Given his estimation that all the bad guys should be getting here any minute, he urges everyone to get going with a Very... "John" speech, particularly that his group head to Derse. i think we are as ready as we are going to get. Dave then messages Terezi through his smuppet wrist communicator, and she leaves via her rocket wings after bidding everyone adieu, while mutually blackflirting with John. Roxy and Rose both give him questioning looks as he blushes, saying "what?? as Roxy smirks at him and Terezi.
1756
1757Terezi flies towards LOTAK. She tries to contact Vriska, but she doesn't answer, so Terezi pours out her feelings in some messages for her to read later. She explains that although she was glad John stopped her from killing Vriska, she still can't help but feel empty inside. Even though being with Vriska helped cover up her insecurities, it wasn't enough. Hoping that having her pre-retcon memories back will allow her to learn from them, she wishes to remember what happened in that timeline. After her catharsis, she signs off and starts crying. Her Seer of Mind powers activate and she begins to see the memories of everyone, including the experiences of others before they died. (Vriska) walks through the cracked dream bubbles, reminiscing on all the fun times she and Terezi had as kids. Several dead characters are shown waking up as ghosts in dream bubbles. Pre-retcon Terezi awakens herself and begins walking, remembering the same experiences as (Vriska). She and (Vriska) eventually meet, embracing as they stare at the cracks in the Furthest Ring together. The dream bubble they are in explodes and they are both double-killed.
1758
1759Spades Slick travels to LOMAX, determined to get revenge for his casino (which didn't stop being a thing) by taking down English. Slick interrupts Jake's pistol practice by dropping Bicuits' oven in front of him, releasing all the members of the Felt, Ms. Paint, and Aurthour. Slick is distracted, however, when he sees Lord Jack flying by. Using his suddenly real cybernetic eye, Slick determines that Lord Jack is the closest thing to English in the session, and goes to confront him.
1760
1761Rose informs John that the Condesce is in fact his longtime arch-nemesis Betty Crocker; to her chagrin, John responds maturely, stating that there are bigger fish to fry than having a melodramatic tantrum about it. John notes Roxy has taken Bro's sword from LOWAS, prompting her to start a speech about how she will likewise take back the futures that the Condesce took from humans and trolls. Right on cue, the Condesce appears above them while Jane's Dad, still alive in the Derse prison, looks over the kids with Proud Fatherly Admiration. Karkat wakes up in the dream bubbles, and Meenah tells him to go back to the mob of ghosts before realizing that he is alive, albeit not the same version of Karkat she has talked to before. Karkat asks Meenah if he can lead the ghost army's charge and make an inspirational speech, which Meenah agrees to on the condition that he does it quietly and far away from anyone else. Karkat ends up inadvertently starting a soliloquy about Dave, hoping that whoever he is fighting right now, he will be okay.
1762
1763Jade is still asleep and traveling with the alternate Calliope. They reach the Green Sun. Calliope tells Jade that she had Jade accompany her to pass time for Jade, and that they will never meet again once Jade wakes up. She explains that Jade's powers are so great that, were she to wake up and join the battle, she could become a great liability. She advises that Jade have some "fun" before she wakes up. Calliope moves away toward the Sun, leaving Jade alone - until Davepeta shows up. Initially, Jade confuses them for Davesprite before Davepeta explains how they fused with Nepetasprite. They say that they plan to go fight Lord English. After Davepeta brings up their past relationship, Jade muses about the true meaning of the Space aspect, believing it to mean that she will be pushed aside by fate and deprived of important experiences - in essence, she is fated to be very lonely and empty. Davepeta posits that Jade still has memories of all her experiences, from all timelines, but the memories are locked away, and that everything she believed she was missing out on really did happen to her - or rather, to the "greater jade". Jade wonders how she will wake up, and Davepeta helps her - by giving her a goodbye kiss and then stabbing her in the chest with their claws. Jade then wakes up, with a note tied to her finger.
1764
1765Jade awakens to see WV and Calliope. Calliope, wearing the Ring of Life, points to the note that is attached to Jade's finger. The note, written by Dave, and reads: "hey if you wake up you gotta deal with these two [and two images of the Bec symbol]", and, on the other side, "missed ya," which makes Jade smile. The three walk out of the building, look up at the sky, and Jade teleports herself to LOTAK, where Dirk, Dave, and Terezi are getting ready to battle. Jade greets them and tells Dave she got the note. Dave demands that she go back to sleep, but Jade objects, saying "i am very much awake! and i intend to stay that way :)" She tells Dave that he (as Davepeta) is a good kisser, and teleports back out of the scene. On the rooftop, Dave, Dirk, and Terezi see Spades Slick and Lord Jack appear, approaching from opposite directions. As they draw nearer, Dirk offers Dave one last lighting-round question, saying he'll give a straight answer to anything. Dave agrees, and asks why are we so fucking awesome. Dirk responds that That's the best fucking question, anybody ever asked. The three raise their weapons, ready for battle.
1766
1767In the dream bubbles, Meenah, Tavros, and Karkat are at the head of the ghost army, marching forward, waiting for the arrival of Lord English. Post-retcon Vriska sits nearby on the Juju chest, smiling at the sky, with Hussie still watching in secret. The Cairo Overcoat finally approaches the bubble and proceeds to land with a smash, creating more cracks. Lord English exits and appears to roar as pure energy emanates around him. Everyone in the army looks on apprehensively. Caliborn is shown walking through Yaldabaoth's lair, crowbar in hand, to do battle with Yaldabaoth as he said he would. As he enters his denizen's room, Yaldabaoth stares down upon him.
1768
1769PM continues to chase Bec Noir through the session, until (apparently tired of running) he finally turns around to face her atop the ruined Prospit. They draw their swords and lunge at each other with their first guardian powers in full force. Everyone else is then shown in their pre-battle scenarios: Caliborn vs. Yaldabaoth; Meenah, Karkat, and the ghost army vs. Lord English; Jake vs. the Felt; Dave, Dirk, and Terezi vs. Spades Slick vs. Lord Jack; and John, Roxy, Rose, and Kanaya vs. the Condesce.
1770
1771
1772ACT 6 ACT 6 ACT 6:
1773
1774
1775Karkat attacks Lord English in a dream bubble, but is killed and wakes up in Echidna's lair.
1776
1777The Condesce and John, Roxy, Rose and Kanaya begin their Strife. The kids and Kanaya attack Condesce with various Fraymotifs, which seem to do little to no damage to the Condesce.
1778
1779Jake and the Felt begin their Strife. Jake seems to have a hard time against the Felt because of their Time shenanigans. Arquiusprite begins to help Jake fight Cans, and dodges all of his moves. Arquius uses the fridge Gamzee is locked in to damage Cans. Cans gets enraged and clocks everyone to LOFAF. Karkat appears and fights Clover.
1780
1781Jane, Nannasprite, and Jasprosesprite^2 join in the fight against the Condesce using a fenestrated wall to get in, and decide to heal Rose and Kanaya.
1782
1783Jane then goes to LOMAX and heals Jake. Nannasprite appears as well, baking more cookies.
1784Jasprosesprite^2 helps fight against the Condesce. Arquiusprite also appears with Cans.
1785
1786Jane and Jake continue to fight the Felt. Casey helps Jane and Jake by unleashing an army of skeletal consorts, but they summon so many skeletons that no one can move.
1787
1788Dave, Dirk, and Terezi begin their Strife with Spades Slick and Lord Jack. They fight for some time, until Dirk gets wounded by Spades Slick. Dave and Terezi use their combined Fraymotif and heal Dirk. They continue fighting, using various fraymotives to their tactical advantage, but still appear to be overwhelmed.
1789
1790Rose, Roxy, John, and Kanaya are having trouble fighting Condesce, and Cans clocks Arquiusprite and the fridge to the battle in LOTAK. Cans then clocks Arquiusprite to the battle in LOFAF. Their battle then involves LOMAX until finally returning at Derse, with both Arquiusprite and Cans tired.
1791
1792Jane's Dad busts out of the nearby prison cell and joins the fight against Cans.
1793
1794PM and Bec Noir begin their fight in an equal match in the destroyed Prospit. Jade joins, but is knocked off by PM's strikes to Bec Noir.
1795
1796Cans fights both Dad and Arquiusprite. Dad hits Cans with a cake and knocks him down, only to come back up again. Dad then decides to throw more slices to Cans.
1797
1798Caliborn begins to fight Yaldabaoth, using his Crowbar.
1799
1800PM and Bec Noir continue their strife, and they both teleport to other battles while fighting. Jade gets confused on what to do against PM and Bec Noir.
1801
1802Vriska and Hussie fight, because Hussie wants to "kill every character".
1803
1804Jade witnesses the ongoing fight between PM and Bec Noir and teleports them to LOFAF. Jade appears there as well.
1805
1806Alternate Calliope stands near the Green Sun. Lord English appears in the dream bubbles, and Caliborn emerges victorious against Yaldabaoth, and receives his prize: the Treasure and unconditional immortality.
1807
1808Serenity flies past Derse and is witnessed by John, then flies towards Prospit's remains and is witnessed by Jade, then to LOTAK with Dave, and then flies to LOFAF with a crying Karkat, before going to WV, inspiring everyone.
1809
1810Meenah and the ghosts prepare to fight Lord English.
1811
1812Caliborn opens the Treasure.
1813
1814The ghost army fights Lord English. However, he easily defeats entire battalions. Meenah and Tavros decide to attack English. Aradia uses her Fraymotifs against him, and the three barrage English with attacks, however he breaks free shortly.
1815
1816Davepeta fights Lord English, and manages to land a few hits on him while avoiding his attacks. Davepeta then transforms into a pixelated heart symbol, entering a battle in the style of Toby Fox's game Undertale. English then attempts to attack Davepeta with billiard balls, who manages to dodge nearly all of them except one, and proceeds to unleash a devastating energy wave.
1817
1818The dream bubbles show up in a Skaian cloud, and zooms out to Jane being choked by the Condesce (similar to Aranea's death in Act 6 Act 6 Act 3).
1819
1820Various scenes are shown in quick succession: John, Rose, Roxy and Kanaya whom are struggling to take a stand, Jake wildly shooting various members of the Felt, Dad being punched by Cans, Spades Slick and Lord Jack facing off with Dave, Dirk and Terezi in a similar situation as John, Rose, Roxy and Kanaya, PM and Jack Noir draw their swords and charge at each other.
1821
1822The SBURB logo shows up with each of the Beta kids and their houses being shown and various places signifying their growth.
1823
1824The kids proceed to get overwhelmed by their enemies. Gamzee, still locked in the fridge, starts to cry.
1825
1826Dad throws a punch at Cans. Jake punches Eggs and stands victorious in a pile of the Felt members. Karkat ties up and throws Clover to the floor and stands victorious. Clover's eyes flash a star-heart-horseshoe, indicating some sort of relationship with Karkat. Dad then throws a cake at Cans, knocking him through a wall. The entire tower collapses as Arquiusprite watches in amazement.
1827
1828Jade appears as the two dogs stare at her, teleporting them to LOFAF.
1829
1830Lord Jack gets hold of Dirk in a choke hold, and Spades Slick does the same to Lord Jack.
1831Jade stops the conflict of PM and Bec Noir by interposing herself as a shield to block conflict. This goes on until PM gets angry and punches Jade in the face, causing her to plow into LOFAF's surface.
1832
1833With Dirk, SS and Lord Jack still in a hold, Dave realizes what he must do. He slices through Dirk's Unbreakable Katana and decapitates Dirk, SS and Lord Jack in a single strike. Dirk dies a Heroic death and Dave flies past and grabs Terezi. Two more Daves time travel in, grabbing Dirk's head and body, and time travel out as Lord Jack's head causes a massive explosion that destroys most of LOTAK.
1834
1835PM and Bec Noir continue their battle, and PM cuts Bec Noir's arm off. Bec Noir loses his ring, turning him into a normal Jack Noir. PM punches Jack Noir in the face, and he plows into LOFAF next to Jade. PM howls in victory.
1836
1837The Condesce has been stabbed through the back by Roxy with the Unbreakable Katana. Kanaya, John, and Rose stand up and cheer. The view zooms out to a fenestrated wall with a green curtain opened in front of it while amplifier feedback can be heard.
1838
1839The view zooms out further to show the fenestrated wall is attached to a gear, with two levers with the symbols of Prospit and Derse on the ends, floating over an ocean. The background fades to white while the gear fades to black while the music distorts, then cuts out.
1840
1841POST-ACT 6:
1842
1843Roxy takes her Rogue mask from the sword and puts it back on while Nannasprite heals Jane, and John helps her up as Roxy runs over to Rose and Kanaya. Jane's Dad watches the five of them fly away, and Nannasprite extends her hand to him. Jane heals Dirk's injuries on the victory platform, successfully saving his life, while John and Terezi talk (with Rose and Roxy sporting smug grins nearby).
1844
1845Jade gets up as Calliope and Ms. Paint arrive. Jade walks off with Calliope while Ms. Paint tears off a piece of her Three in the Morning dress to stop Jack's arm stump from bleeding. They share a meaningful glance.
1846
1847Vriska walks away from a defeated Hussie with the Juju chest under her arm. Hussie weakly gets up and points at Lord English, who is surrounded by cracks in the void and faint images of horses, and gives him a thumbs down. Caliborn looks into his Juju chest, which is glowing brightly. PM sets down on LOFAF next to WV and Serenity. WV takes PM's ring, returning her to her default appearance. Then, holding Jack's ring, PM points to Jade's volcano.
1848
1849The reunited heroes celebrate on the victory platform, where the Sburb Alpha logo has now appeared. Terezi appears concerned for some reason. Dave points out to John that Nannasprite has brought Jane's Dad to the platform.
1850
1851Dad recognizes John as a younger version of his own father, and he picks John up in a tight embrace while the others happily look on.
1852
1853WV and PM trudge up the volcano, hand in hand, until they reach the peak. PM looks determined.
1854
1855
1856
1857
1858
1859
1860
1861
1862
1863
1864
1865
1866
1867
1868
1869
1870
1871
1872
1873
1874                                                                  ACT 7 
1875_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
1876
1877
1878
1879ACT 7:
1880
1881
1882John, Dave, Jade, Rose, Jane, Roxy, Jake, Dirk, Dad, Karkat, Kanaya and Terezi are all gathered on the victory platform.
1883
1884PM and WV have dropped their rings in the volcano as an offering to Echidna, starting the Genesis Tadpole on its trip towards Skaia, maturing into a frog and passing near the victory platform as it goes. Jade holds Earth with space powers, and cogs fast-forward Earth's time to show a future view of earth (section below).
1885
1886The previously red Sburb house flips turnways, becomes white, and acquires a door. John reaches for the doorknob (mirroring how Karkat did in the trolls' session).
1887
1888Everyone shown on the victory platform, except for Terezi, is now living peacefully on Earth. A large-scale Can Town is built from WV's plans. The words "THANKS FOR PLAYING" float in the sky next to the sun. In what appears to be a park, Dirk and Jake are playing soccer with each other, Jane and her Dad spend some father/daughter bonding, and Dave, Karkat and Jade have a picnic together. In a separate shot, John, Roxy and Calliope walk through a path together, presumably on a hiking trail. In another separate shot, Rose and Kanaya stand next to each other, probably enjoying the view.
1889
1890Alternate Calliope combines three spheres to create a black hole, destroying the Green Sun but sacrificing herself in the process, thus causing Lord English and all other Green Sun-empowered beings to lose their First Guardian powers.
1891
1892The ghost army prepares its final assault against Lord English. Vriska releases the Treasure. It emerges from the chest as a sphere of white light, which transforms into a giant white Sburb house bearing the beta humans' aspect symbols. The house crashes into the ground, creating more cracks that spread towards Lord English. A door appears on the face of the juju. It can be assumed that Vriska used the juju to somehow kill him.
1893
1894Aradia watches as the black hole Green Sun engulfs Paradox Space up to the ring of cracks created by Lord English. This is possibly a callback to her formerly stated desire to watch everything break apart.
1895
1896Caliborn, after inspecting the contents of the chest, uses the crowbar juju breaker to break apart the God Tier clock, beginning his unconditional immortality. Caliborn gains flashing cueball eyes.
1897
1898The next page shows the words THE END. The curtains close.
1899
1900
1901CREDITS:
1902
1903
1904[Immediately After Ending:[
1905
1906The kids enter through the Ultimate Reward and land on Earth C.
1907
1908The Carapacians begin construction work upon the new world.
1909
1910Utilizing the Ectobiology Lab of the Meteor, dozens of Human, Troll and Carapacian children are created.
1911
1912Leaving the children in the care of the Wayward Vagabond and Peregrine Mendicant, Dave takes the kids 5000 years into the future.
1913
1914[Year 1:]
1915
1916During the past few millennia, a bustling society has blossomed and thrived on Earth C. The newspaper Common Hornograph announces their creators have finally returned.
1917
1918Jane, John, Dad, and Nannasprite create the Human Kingdom.
1919
1920Dave, Jade, Karkat, and Terezi create the Troll Kingdom.
1921
1922Rose, Kanaya, Roxy, and Calliope create the Carapace Kingdom.
1923
1924Jake, Dirk, and Gcatavrosprite create the Consort Kingdom.
1925
1926Rose and Kanaya get married. Calliope brings a candy Juju and everyone but the newlyweds partake.
1927
1928Jade, Karkat and Dave unearth an ancient JPEG artifact Statue of Liberty created long ago by Bro.
1929
1930Jake and his Lord English robot battle Dirk and Sawtooth while Gcatvrosprite and Squarewave look on.
1931
1932[Year 2:]
1933
1934John celebrates his 18th birthday. Most of the kids are in attendance.
1935
1936Terezi explores the black hole created at the end of Act 7. She is looking for an unidentified person and has not found her. A Nepeta is shown being sucked into the black hole.
1937
1938Jane holds a ribbon cutting ceremony for a new CrockerCorp. Stocks appear to be up.
1939Jake founds SkaiaNet Enterprises; his ass graces television regularly.
1940
1941[Year 3:]
1942
1943John celebrates his 19th birthday.
1944
1945Kanaya and Rose are tending to a huge new brood of grubs.
1946
1947Dirk works on Squarewave's head; Jake sends a birthday picture to John.
1948
1949Queen Roxy, Calliope and numerous Carapacians wish John a happy birthday
1950
1951[Year 4:]
1952
1953John celebrates his 20th birthday.
1954
1955John receives an authentic Dad hat and pipe.
1956
1957John looks at his Snapchat.
1958
1959John has been consistently messaging with Dave for 1025 days, Karkat 612 days and Jade 413 days.
1960
1961Dave is both Karkat & John's #1 best friend on Snapchat.
1962
1963John is also best friends with Jade, Rose, Terezi, Roxy, and Jane.
1964
1965Jake sends John a lot of snaps, however John doesn't message him as often.
1966
1967John is not best friends with Dirk or Kanaya, however they have best friends in common. (Most likely Dave and Rose)
1968
1969Caliborn (after gaining his "MAGIC RAINBOW EYES" as shown in Act 7) sends John an antagonizing message and is shown alongside Gamzee and Lil Seb. John smashes his phone's screen with a hammer.
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974                                                                  FIN