When 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.

Sollux 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.

Sgrub, 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.

It 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.

Previously, 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.

After 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.

Aradia 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.

Some 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.

As 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.

In 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 .

Hoping 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.

the reckoning