Act 6 Act 2 Your shit is wrecked. Act 6 Intermission 2 penis ouija Spoilers ahead!

first page 4391, December 30 2011 pages 426

last page 4816, April 2 2012 words in text 50 588

no recap words in media 1299

adventure map checkpoints



Synopsis

two down After 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. In 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. Meanwhile, 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. The 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. Archagent 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.

roxy The 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. While 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. From 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. One 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. Roxy 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. After 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.

jane enters The 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. Jane’s computer explodes. Thanks to a sweet catch by GCat, she lands on a couch in a tree. Dirk 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. Dirk 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. Jane’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. Jane enters the Medium with a blank kernelsprite.

jake Jane, 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. Brobot trounces Jake, tears its uranium heart out of its chest, and blows up. Jake takes the uranium fuel and enters the mystic frog ruins.

what the scratch did Rose, 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. A 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. Rose 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. The 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. When 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. In 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. The 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. Rose is recording these facts in a book that might someday be useful to other players. Karkat 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.

massively multiconsort After 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. When 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. In 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.

healing When 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. As 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.