by marathemara

Most sessions of the Game (Sburb, Sgrub, etc.) are dominated by a chess metaphor: Prospit and Derse are ruled by the White and Black Queens respectively, and the White and Black Kings lead armies that fight each other on Skaia’s battlefield, usually until the Dersite army checkmates the Prospitian army.

But Caliborn is a very special cherub. And so his session is based on an entirely different metaphor: a game of pool. He must conquer and destroy fifteen planets in order, saving the eighth one (ruled by his session’s Black Queen) for last. From each planet except the eighth, he collects a minion. These minions are collectively known as the Felt.

The Felt are leprechauns (at least that’s what Aranea calls them; Caliborn has a different name for them every time we see him win one). They have soft green skin that looks and feels like the baize on the surface of a pool table. They wear hats that match the planets they came from (which themselves look like pool balls). By the time we meet them in the Midnight Crew Intermission, they have names which are gamblers’ slang for their numbers and have invented pool as a representation of their hats and the universe they grew up in. And their cultural concepts of romance and sexuality are much more complicated than those of humans or even trolls.

They also have awesome time-travel-related superpowers. Some more so than others: while Itchy (1) has has super-speed, Caliborn doesn’t quite get the point of Doze’s (2) ability to slow himself down. Eggs (12) can move back in time using his egg timer, but Biscuits’ (13) oven can only move forward in time at a rate of one second per second (though it is dimensionally transcendental; it can fit not only Biscuits himself, but also all of the Felt inside).

What Caliborn will eventually discover, and has by the time of the Midnight Crew Intermission, is that the Felt’s powers combine and stack in interesting ways. If Biscuits climbs inside the oven, Eggs can carry him back in time, duplicating them both as many times as they want. Doze’s slowing makes him better at resisting interrogation by the Midnight Crew. Trace (3) and Fin (5) can tell where you’re going and where you’ve been, and beat you up at both points. Stitch (9) is only a tailor, but he uses a connection between Lord English’s Cairo overcoat and the fabric of the universe to literally fix rips in spacetime. And Crowbar (7), whose superpower seems to be that he’s more intelligent than the other Felt, is able to coordinate and lead his comrades in Lord English’s absence. (And Caliborn will eventually give him an actual crowbar with which he can destroy jujus.)

I should pause here to mention that not all of the Felt are leprechauns. Snowman (8) is the exiled Black Queen from the beta trolls’ session. She is the only female member of the Felt, and the only Carapacian; the other Exiles became the Midnight Crew. Snowman’s time power is that the universe will end when she dies. Which does happen. Doc Scratch (cue ball) is the First Guardian of Alternia’s universe. He isn’t necessarily one of the Felt, but as a cue ball, he does have some influence over them. He allows them to live in and operate out of Lord English’s mansion on Alternia, and he recruited Snowman after she was exiled and tied her life to that of her universe. Of course, as a cue ball, Scratch only controls the Felt as an extension of the cue himself, Lord English.

Let’s return to what may be the coolest of the Felt’s time powers: Die’s (6) quantum immortality. He has a voodoo doll and pins that represent all of the Felt (and the Midnight Crew, though using those is generally a bad idea).

[How many times does he have to tell you. He made this town.]

Sticking the pins in the doll doesn’t actually kill the person they’re associated with; it just moves Die to a timeline in which that person is dead. Pulling the pin moves him to a timeline where the corresponding person is alive. In theory, this could keep him alive indefinitely, by moving him out of universes where he’s dead. Unfortunately, the opposite happened once too often: he jumped to a timeline in which Itchy was dead and came face-to-face with his killer, Spades Slick, who ended up killing Die as well.

The voodoo doll outlives its user. Sort of. Spades Slick stole it when he killed Die, and when we find him recovering from the Intermission in Lord English’s mansion, the doll is still among his personal effects. Ms. Paint has used it to summon Stitch so he can fix Slick’s hat. (Apparently now the doll moves the person represented by the pin, instead of the person holding the doll.) Slick pulls all the leprechauns’ pins, bringing the Felt into his timeline. He leaves Snowman’s pin, making Ms. Paint the new Snowman, and convinces the Felt that since Lord English left his pool cue/machine gun behind, Slick is now in charge. They leave Lord English’s mansion and find themselves in the Incipisphere, within sight of Alpha Earth’s Skaia. As of the Gigapause, the Felt now work for Slick, presumably against Lord English.

Overall, the Felt are just cool. They have awesome time powers, they work better as a team than they do separately, and sometimes I secretly want to have minions like them. Or not so secretly. Muahaha.