Act 5 Act 2 He is already here. Spoilers ahead!

first page 2626, September 19 2010 pages 1481

last page 4108, October 25 2011 words in text 155 299

recaps 3238, January 2 2011

4099, September 6 2011 words in media 24 349

adventure map checkpoints

Synopsis

This synopsis covers Act 5 Act 2, Cascade, and Intermission 2. Together, these parts of Homestuck tell how the kids and trolls spend the final hours of their sessions and how their universes die.

first contact After 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. Karkat 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. After 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. Terezi’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. The 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. Taking 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. Exploring 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.

the dreaming dead Previously, 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. After 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. Feferi, 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.

ring recap When 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. In 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.

john wakes Previously, 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. John lands on his planet without waking up. Taking an interest in John’s advancement, Vriska trolls him intensively. Wandering 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. Waking 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.

jade plays Feeling 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. With 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. Baffled by her entry item, Jade pesters Dave for help but a stupid crocodile answers instead. John 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. John 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.

jade enters With 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. Jade 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. Jade 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. First 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. The Sovereign Slayer, Jack Noir, inherits Becquerel’s powers. Karkat concludes that this is the biggest disaster and source of woe in both sessions.

god boss Bro 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. Bro 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.

the windy thing The fire turns green and spreads across the ocean, circling the rock John is stranded on. After 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. Goaded 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. Talking 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. John 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. Bec Noir murders the sleeping child.

the god tiers We 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. Vriska 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. The perks of godhood include a conditional sort of immortality, freedom from exile oversight, flight, 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. In 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. Dave 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 Dave 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. Terezi 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.

becsprite Becsprite 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 burp. 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. Jade 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. Jade’s hopes for a talking sprite are dashed when she meets Becsprite. He speaks only in blinding green noise. Returning 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. Jade 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. Tavros 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. Jade 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. Tavros 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. Jadesprite 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. The 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. Karkat advises Jade to turn off and take the fourth wall. Jadesprite flies away to Skaia.

genesis frog With Kanaya’s help, Jade starts to learn about her land and her personal quest as the Witch of Space. Kanaya 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. Kanaya 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. Also 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.

rose As 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. Kanaya 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. Drawing 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. Rose’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. In the meantime, Rose’s plan is the furthest thing from John’s mind.

i am so, so proud of you After 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. John 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. Skaia’s 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. Learning 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.

friendleader When 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. The 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. The 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. Right 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.

grimdark Rose 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, L rd 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. The 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. An 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. Jade 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. Rose 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. On 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.

conditional immortality Rose 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. The 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. Noir 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. The 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. God-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. John 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. Karkat 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.

p.s. i’ll find my frog When 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. Dave 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. After 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. Jade 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. For 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. Seeing 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.

sprites on the battlefield With 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. Davesprite 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. Having 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. Jadesprite sends the Deringer away to Derse. Nannasprite 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 fedorafreak a story about her adoptive mother, the cruel alien Betty Crocker.

rose ganks the rock Liv 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. The 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. By 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. The Green Sun is not there.

shaving cream? John 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. The 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. Noir 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. The 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. The Reckoning has risen in violence, meteors striking the Battlefield constantly. One meteor is headed straight for Jadesprite and Davesprite. As 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.

exile recap Previously, 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. In Act 4, the Mendicant was crowned a Prospitian Monarch and the Vagabond revealed that he had been safeguarding the White Queen’s ring.

the royal itinerary The 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. The 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. The 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. Flying 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. To 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.

the red miles The 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. The 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. Noir 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. The 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. In 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.

troll season After 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. When 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. Aradia’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. In 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. Each troll has a different approach to trolling the kids: Aradia, the hero 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. Feferi, the hero 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. Sollux, the hero of Doom, doesn’t care about the kids at all. Equius, the hero 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. Tavros, the hero 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. Karkat, the hero 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. Nepeta, the hero of Heart, bonds with Jaspersprite. Kanaya, the hero 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 grimdarkdeath. Eridan, the hero 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. Terezi, the hero 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. Vriska, the hero 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. Gamzee, the hero of Rage, has run out of the sedative sopor slime he is addicted to. Dave invites Gamzee to watch a video that the Betty Crocker corporation had slipped to Dave before he left Earth. The juggalo music video blasphemes Gamzee’s clown faith, angering and changing him.

time to be alive In 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. When 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. The 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. Aradia 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. The 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. The 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. Aradia 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. When 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. In 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.

murders After 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. It goes down like this. Vriska 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. Terezi 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. A 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. Eridan 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. Feferi 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. Finally, 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. Karkat 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. Tavros 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. Terezi 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. Karkat 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. Terezi 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. Equius 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. Losing 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. Terezi 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. Terezi 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.

murders of murderers Despite 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. Trolls 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. When 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. Vriska, 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. Vriska 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. Gamzee 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.

mindfang’s flight Neophyte 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. At 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. After 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. Mindfang 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.

the flip Terezi climbs to the roof of the lab to confront Vriska. At this point, the scrõtch in the dis forzøs us to qÛít plaÿing and take it to a s¤ratch dØctor for re¼áir. While 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. Terezi 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. Terezi 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. Terezi stabs the cobalt blood in the back, killing her. Vriska’s death is judged just. She does not come back to life. Only Terezi, Gamzee, Sollux, Kanaya, and Karkat remain. The 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.

troll jegus Karkat’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. The 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. Karkat’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. The 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. The Signless was caught, wedgied, flogged, and left to die in red hot irons. His last breath was a cry of limitless rage. The 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.

the vast glub Her 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. The 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. The Condesce steered back to Alternia. She arrived home thirteen hundred years later and was greeted by Aradia’s ancestor, the Handmaid. The Handmaid was the only ancestor to be given a post-Reckoning meteor. Doc Scratch raised her on Alternia’s lime-green moon and groomed her to serve L rd 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. The Condesce killed the Handmaid and replaced her as L rd English’s witch. She will serve English in another universe.

tick tock Doc 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. L rd English must be summoned. When 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 procedure that summons English is a virus that runs when the universe dies. After 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 on the green moon. 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.

break heads After the clock incident, Scratch beats Slick savagely and sends him away with a suicidal mission and a cue ball handgun. The 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 the Author’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. Doc 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. Slick 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. In 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. The two universes die in a circumstantially simultaneous arrangement that triggers The Tumor. When 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. Rose 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. The Green Sun explodes into being, killing Rose and Dave in their crypt.