Sburban Spectators

A Homestuck Book Club

> Lexia Velika: Summarize Homestuck Thus Far

Episode 01: Pages 1 to 80

Our journey begins with a thirteen year-old boy standing alone in his bedroom on his birthday - the 13th of April 2009. After failing to name him Zoosmell Pooplord, he is given the name John Egbert and we are introduced to some facts about this young lad as we examine his cake-filled room. Following a game-like structure, John is commanded to retrieve his arms from his chest where he uses his real arms to pick up his fake arms which he then captchalogues into his sylladex. This is his inventory system and the management of this inventory will be a major part of this act for better or for worse. As he captalogues more items from his chest, we learn his sylladex uses a stack data structure fetch modus which inevitably causes him some grief. He messes around in his room for a while learning how to use his sylladex. He has a conversation with one of his internet friends under the username turntechGodhead who asks what he got for his birthday and if he got the Sburb beta yet that came out three days prior. TG suggests John go check his mail to see if it’s arrived. After messing around in his room some more after realizing his Dad beat him to the mail, John continues to message TG who suggests he allocate his strife specibus i.e. pick a weapon. He allocates hammers as his strife specibus and thinks it won’t matter that much. After more inventory shenanigans, He prepares a disguise to leave his room without having to face his father as himself. John explores his living room and ends up accidentally mishandling the urn containing his Nanna’s ashes. He discovers a large present gifted to him by his father and is horrified to learn that it’s a large harlequin doll, harlequins and clowns being something his father is obsessed with. Upon returning to his room, John is messaged by another one of his friends, tentacleTherapist. TT asks John about the game. He goes back downstairs and engages in more antics, including exploring his father’s study. Afterwards he finally exits his house and is no longer Home Stuck.

Episode 02: Pages 81 to 247

John attempts to get the mail only to realize the mailbox is empty. Instead, John discovers a green package sitting on a slip of paper on the passenger’s seat of his Dad’s car. Through the kitchen window, he can see the rest of the mail including a red package and an envelope with the Sburb logo. He enters the kitchen to confront his father, his disguise fails him, resulting in a STRIFE scene, our first interactive panel in the comic. After mischief engineers circumstances wherein John’s smoke pellets go off, he snatches the mail and absconds from the kitchen. Upon returning to his room, he gets birthday well wishes from his third friend named gardenGnostic. He attempts to install the Sburb beta, but is confused by the window that pops up waiting for a server player to establish a connection. After some sylladex antics culminating in John finally opening his gift from TG, the Sburb client connects with a server player, TT. TT now has server control and can manipulate John’s surroundings. She builds an expansion on John’s room and deploys a totem lathe. John realizes that he was supposed to get two envelopes, one containing his server copy of the game. TT deploys two more game objects: a cruxtruder and an alchemiter in different places in John’s house. TT continues to manipulate different objects around John’s house when her connection is disrupted and she drops his bathtub in his upstairs hallway. She reconnects and helps him hit the top of the cruxtruder with a hammer releasing a flashing kernelsprite and initiating a countdown. John collects cruxite from the cruxtruder. Following a walkthrough, TT prototypes the kernelsprite with the harlequin doll. John and the sprite go upstairs to mess with the alchemiter and realizes that a meteor is heading directly towards the house. He uses the lathe to carve into the cruxite dowel producing a totem. TT fully loses connection, dropping the tub in front of John’s door, and we switch to her perspective. Her name is Rose and we get a little information about her interests. Rose sneaks out of her house, avoiding her mother, and goes to the observatory where she can get a better internet connection. She touches base with John and frees him from his room so he can alchemize the totem he carved. A large tree sprouts with an apple on it. John takes a bite of the apple just as the meteor hits and act 1 ends.

Episode 03: Pages 248 to 495

Years in the future, but not many, a curious Wayward Vagabond stumbles across a hatch with the Sburb spirograph logo on it. Presently, Act 2 begins with the start of Rose’s GameFAQs walkthrough she’s writing. John begins receiving cryptic all caps commands from an unknown source and wanders around his house which has been transported into a strange, dark realm atop a tall pillar. John is commanded to retrieve his PDA as suggested by Rose. It is then revealed that the all caps commands are from WV of the future typing from a command console. Rose attempts to lift John’s Dad’s car up to a walkway she created so John can retrieve the server copy of Sburb only for Rose to lose connection and drop the car, causing it to fall to the dark cloudy realm below. We switch to Rose who is determined to seek out a better power source for her laptop and allocates needles as her strife specibus. Suddenly, the perspective shifts to TG. TG is named Dave and we learn about his abundance of interests. We follow Dave through some events that occurred prior to the present moment with John and Rose. Sylladex misadventures cause Dave to spill apple juice over his turntables and copies of Sburb that he then hangs up to dry. A crow attempts to steal Dave’s copies of the game and in response Dave yells “Stop,” causing his sylladex to launch his sword through the bird and out the window. Back to Rose, we learn about her convoluted passive aggressive relationship with her mother as she moves through the house. Rose confronts her mother in a Strife sequence and is gifted a pony she names Maplehoof. John, meanwhile, faces an imp donning a jester costume that he tries to bludgeon with a hammer only for his hammer to fall apart. Rose makes the trek to her cat’s mausoleum whilst John finally bests the imp with sylladex-based attacks. Rose reconnects just in time to see John get pranked by Nannasprite. Nannasprite introduces herself as John’s guide through The Medium and reveals that John’s Dad was kidnapped. She explains that above The Medium past The Seven Gates is a place called Skaia which embodies creative potential. At the center of Skaia, a duel in eternal stalemate takes place until John prototyped his sprite and imbued the combatants with the essence of that which it was prototyped with. A war between forces of dark and light broke out, one wherein light was destined to lose. John is tasked to take the journey of The Ultimate Riddle and build onto his house to reach the gates towards Skaia. John believes that at the end the Earth can be saved, but Nannasprite informs him this is not the case. In the future, WV slips when typing and discovers a hidden hatch full of canned food and a book on human etiquette. Dave explores his house looking for his older Bro’s copies of Sburb. Rose drops a Punch Designix in John’s Dad’s study. Rose begins building stairs up off of John’s house in pursuit of the First Gate. We end this reading with John mounting his slimer pogo about to bash some imps on the way down the stairs.

Episode 04: Pages 496 to 758

John rides his slimer pogo downstairs with some difficulty, but makes it into his father’s study. The commands John is receiving are now lowercase and much more polite. WV is revealed to have eaten pages from the human etiquette book after reading. Rose continues to build onto John’s house. He learns that the back of his captchalogue cards have difficult to read captcha style codes on the back. Entering these codes into the designix with a card will punch the cards with hole patterns, trapping the item in the card. John investigates his father’s safe and punches a blank captchalogue card he found beneath it. Dave busies himself with an abundance of sylladex antics in the meantime while his Bro stealthily torments him by moving around a ventriloquist dummy named Lil Cal. Dave finds a note from his Bro demanding him to bring Cal to the roof. John carves totems based on the cards he punched. Rose then uses the totems with the alchemiter to produce a bunch of captchalogue cards, a new hammer, a new pogo ride, and an entirely useless rocket pack. John gets the idea to overlap two cards and use them in the totem lathe, when done with his hammer and pogo ride the alchemized result is a sick pogo hammer. John takes a nap, having tired of messing around so much. Rose’s generator gives out and she loses power to her laptop. John dreams of strange imagery and the silhouette of a girl. GG messages John once he wakes up and cryptically hints to future events. Dave ascends to the roof of his apartment building to face his Bro only for a psyche out to reveal a room with the girl we saw the silhouette of in John’s dream… only for a second psyche out to bring us instead to WV. We follow WV as he messes around in his hatch and founds Can Town, establishing himself as the Mayor. Immediately afterwards, he eats some uranium. He continues to expand on Can Town with chalk and covers the walls of the hatch with skies and planets. He discovers how to turn on two of the other screens on the monitor he was typing commands from and activates a countdown for 4 hours and 13 minutes that disables the keyboard. He ignores this in favor of playing chess with his cans. Sometime in the imminent future, a Peregrine Mendicant traverses the desert. WV attempts to leave the hatch only to be trapped by the door to the room he was in slamming shut and bars sliding into place at the hatch’s opening. By interacting with a panel on the door, he accesses a new room with a large control panel and strange numbers. The device appearifies a carved pumpkin. He realizes that the numbers are coordinates and manipulates them to appearify objects from the room he was locked out of. He then appearifies a firefly he found stuck in amber. He then attempts to appearify a pumpkin from the past that he had eaten, producing a pile of goo instead. WV ascends out of the hatch just as it flies up from the ground with him in tow and travels across the wasteland skies. We see years in the past how the meteor struck John’s neighborhood and filled with sand atop which a tree would grow depositing a spherical structure near where PM walks. Many more years in the past we see a meteor strike Earth and produce a crater atop which a frog temple is built and an island forms around it. John’s Dad, captured by imps, is led around a strange purple place while Dave stands off on the rooftop with his Bro. WV lands near the frog temple of the future and Act 2 ends.

Episode 05: Pages 759 to 979

Act 3 begins with a letter written to John by his Nanna about a day when he delves into a realm of Warring Royalty where four will gather and ascend: the Heir of Breath, the Seer of Light, the Knight of Time, and the Witch of Space. We are then introduced to a sleeping girl we saw in an earlier psyche out. We name her Jade and learn a little about her by exploring her house. We learn that she lives right next to a dormant volcano and later, as she plays a hauntingly relaxing bassline, we learn she lives on the island with the frog temple we saw at the end of Act 2. Jade logs on to pester her friends and we see a new list of users labeled under “trollslum.” Dave finally starts his strife confrontation with his Bro where he is bested by Lil Cal in the first round. Rose descends a ladder in the mausoleum leading to the laboratory next door. Jade gets trolled by someone named carcinoGeneticist who tells her today is the day she finally fucks everything up. Rose locates a hub in the lab that she collects to use as a power source for her laptop. She also discovers an ominous countdown for SkaiaNet Laboratory’s un-establishment. In the future, PM enters a lab with a time that ticks down to zero and it takes off with her inside it. Dave faces his Bro in a round 2 fight where, after being unable to abscond, he is thoroughly thrashed and thrown down the stairs. Rose discovers a terminal monitoring Sburb sessions taking place in parts of North America. Past, impending, and future meteor impacts are also tracked. Two of the biggest impending impacts appear to be targeting Dave and Jade’s locations. Rose reconnects as John’s server player and discovers him engaged in combat with two large ogres. With Rose and Nannasprite’s assistance, John defeats the ogres. We switch to PM and learn that she has made a solemn pledge to deliver a letter in the wasteland for she believes in the integrity of the mail service. Through the terminal in the base she occupies, she catches a glimpse of a future Jade and tries to contact her only for the terminal to explode. Jade tries to avoid a confrontation with her grandfather, only to fail with an onset of narcolepsy causing her to engage in a strife scene where it’s revealed that her grandfather is dead and has been taxidermied to stand in front of the fireplace forevermore. Rose meanwhile, in the lab, befriends a mutant kitten and finds an appearifier locked on her cat Jaspers when he was alive nine years ago. She tries to appearify Jaspers only to produce a pile of paradox goo that gets sucked up by a neighboring machine. It generates a mutated fetal paradox clone of Jaspers. On the appearifier screen, Rose re-witnesses the day where Jaspers revealed a stunning secret to her before vanishing in thin air, only to wash up dead on shore a couple weeks later. She appearifies the present day corpse of Jaspers and flees the lab. John breaks into his Dad’s room and discovers, much to his shock, that it’s the room of a boring businessman with no clown stuff in sight. We then switch to a scene of John’s Dad breaking out of a mysterious purple jail while a man in a torn jesters costume looks on through strange windows. Someone tries to name him Spades Slick, but he’s actually Archagent Jack Noir who oversees affairs of a dark kingdom. Finally, John, while opening birthday gifts he found in his Dad’s room, realizes that Betty Crocker makes gushers and has a mental breakdown.

Episode 06: Pages 980 to 1153

Jade attempts to retrieve the package John sent her that finally arrived when she is confronted by her dog, Bec, who seems to have reality-bending powers and can teleport both himself and objects around him. In the end, Jade feeds him an irradiated steak and they dance before she falls asleep. Dreaming Jade takes on two forms, herself in a bright yellow dress with a moon on it and her dreambot in the waking world. These two selves share the same behavior. We flash back to months in the past and learn that John had to change his Persterchum handle to avoid these twelve trolls harassing him and his friends. John complains about crude doodles that were drawn all over the walls of his bedroom, but Rose comments that the walls were like that ever since she first saw his room. John doesn’t take this well. In the future, WV attempts to appearify some cables so he can descend from the top of the station ship that landed by the temple. Instead, what appears is John’s gift to Jade from hundreds of years ago with a note written by Jade addressed to the Mayor. He reads the letter, but we don’t learn its contents. He then appearifies the cables and descends from the top of the station with the package. The Aimless Renegade watches both WV and the approaching ship with PM. In the present, Rose tries to talk with John about the revelation of his dad’s room and the drawings on his wall he hasn’t noticed until now. As they talk, John begins to alchemize some fun stuff. Jade’s dream self plays a complicated bass solo at the same time as her dreambot self and it’s revealed that the yellow cathedral dream place is named Prospit and orbits just outside of Skaia. WV meets the PM according to the drawing in the letter Jade sent him. He is about to give her the box as instructed by Jade, when AR open fires on them. Both take cover, yielding the perfect opportunity for WV to give the package over to PM which includes a letter addressed to her specifically. Back to Jade, she flies over to a neighboring tower and finds a slumbering John in the same gilded pajamas she wears. He is having sleep troubles, however, and the doodles marring his real world walls are in his dream self’s bedroom. The waking world’s John goes on an alchemization binge creating all kinds of wacky combined objects. Dave engages in a final round of strife with his Bro where he is once again beaten so hard that this time his sword is sliced in half as well as the record symbol on his shirt. His Bro at least leaves behind his copies of Sburb before he flies off. As Jade dreams, we see that her conversations with John all took place whilst she was dreaming and as Prospit passes through Skaia a cloud mirage flashes by depicting the scene of the distant past where a meteor carrying Bec landed. This was the loud explosion Jade mentioned to John earlier that Bec didn’t want her to see. We then learn that the dream John had earlier was him momentarily waking up as his dream self on Prospit and seeing Jade before he woke up in the real world. Rose finishes building John’s house up to the First Gate just as Dave heads to install Sburb. We flash back to months in the past where Rose got knitting supplies as a gift from John and is trolled by someone named grimAuxiliatrix who complains to her about humans not understanding time travel and asks to be her friend. We switch to Dave in the past getting his gift of his sunglasses from John when he is then trolled by someone named adiosToreador only for it to backfire when Dave makes them too uncomfortable to continue. PM reads Jade’s letter and rushes through the new hole in the ship she arrived in created by AR trying to blow her up. She delivers the package to a device which sends it years in the past to a young Jade. It contains a shirt too big for her, pumpkin seeds, and a letter from John. Dave finally installs the Sburb server copy and speedruns through the deployment of game objects for Rose to enter the game, prototyping her sprite with Jaspers’ corpse and her tentacle princess doll. Meanwhile, Jade enters the frog ruins and discovers Dave’s copy emerging from a flower at the end of a countdown. John fights his way to the top of his house and passes through the First Gate. We zoom out from John’s house to reveal a cloudy planet and Act 3 ends.

Episode 07: Pages 1154 to 1357

The Intermission opens with Spades Slick, a member of the Midnight Crew we have seen previously as a character in the Midnight Crew story on this universe’s MsPaint Adventures. With his subordinates, Clubs Deuce, Diamonds Droog, and Hearts Boxcars, the crew infiltrates the all green Felt mansion belonging to the Felt boss Lord English. They are here to avenge their favorite casino being knocked over. Slick sets several clocks on fire starting a running tally of clocks destroyed. He’s determined to eliminate every member of the Felt and has already taken out three of them. The only member excluded from this vendetta itinerary is Snowman who represents the 8 ball. We switch to Deuce who has Doze (2) tied up and he uses his special ability to slow time down for himself. Slick kills Itchy (1) by tripping him and bludgeoning him. Droog is attacked by Trace (3) who follows trails left behind based on past movements. We see an event running parallel to the present where Die (6) is playing cards with Itchy. Die gets frustrated with Itchy cheating and uses his voodoo doll to jump to a timeline where Itchy is dead, causing him to run into Slick. As he is being beaten by Slick, he uses a pin to jump to a timeline where Slick was killed that has two strange moons. Boxcars, meanwhile, tries to crack the Felt’s safe which features a large clock on its front. He runs into Biscuits (13) as he emerges from his time oven. Moments later, multiple incarnations of Eggs (12) appear with his egg timers. Droog shoots Fin (5) who was messing with his future trail from the past as evidenced by predestined bullet holes and blood trails. Slick kills Die when he returns from the timeline where Slick was killed. He takes Die’s voodoo doll and holds onto it for future purposes, such as his plan to confront the indestructible Lord English rumored to be bested only through spacetime exploits. Deuce leaves behind Doze for Trace to find when following Deuce’s past trails. When Trace catches up, he discovers a bomb planted underneath Doze’s hat which explodes, killing them both. Fin bleeds to death while warning Stitch (9) of Deuce’s arrival. This was insufficient of a warning because Droog appears behind him and knocks him out, imprisoning him for later. Slick takes out Crowbar’s (7) pin to go back to when he was still alive during a shootout earlier, Snowman arrives during the shootout and stabs out one of his eyes with her cigarette holder. Slick returns to the original timeline with the alternate timeline Crowbar, Sawbuck (10), and Stitch. Antics ensue in front of the past Slick that was about to pull Crowbar’s pin (which he still does). After more jumps Sawbuck is dead twice, alternate Crowbar is dead, and a Stitch is dead. The living Stitch is forced to make effigies of the Midnight Crew with their backup hats. Afterwards, Slick kills Stitch when he tries to set fire to the effigies while the others are preoccupied trying to gun down the Eggs and Biscuits mob. Slick uses Crowbar’s crowbar to destroy Eggs egg timer as the crowbar has temporal artifact destruction qualities. Boxcars eats Eggs and Biscuits hides in his time oven. The crew puts a bomb in the time oven to explode later and elsewhere. The crew tries to force Clover (4) to open the safe only for Cans (15) to plow through the wall and punch Droog into next week followed by Boxcars into an outdated calendar. Slick opens the vault and produces a temporal distortion that transports him to a timeline where everyone is dead except for him and Snowman. Inside the vault is a locked door with a spades symbol on it. As he is about to scan the barcode on his blackjack rules card, Snowman shoots a hole through the card. She tears off his arm with a second barcode on it with her whip and disappears, locking Slick in the vault. However, flipping his sprite leaves him with a barcode on his remaining arm which he then scans. He enters the door through a hatch with the Sburb spirograph logo on it. Below is a version of a familiar control panel with additional screens, one lit up with a scene of a strange alien kid with gray skin, horns, and a gray cancer symbol on his shirt that Slick recognizes. The intermission ends on a poorly drawn version of this scene that suggests “everything you are about to do may prove to have been a colossal waste of time.”

Episode 08: Pages 1358 to 1596

Act 4 begins with an interactive walkaround game set on the Land of Wind and Shade as we follow John after he passed through the First Gate. He explores LoWaS and speaks with the various salamander consorts of the land. Jade takes Dave’s Sburb beta discs that blossomed from the floral time capsule which resets to bloom again in 400 years. Jade fiddles with her new pictionary fetch modus until she is caught by Bec and transported back to her bedroom. Jade starts to install both copies of the game ahead of time to be prepared. John gets trolled by CG who is confirmed to be the alien kid seen at the end of the intermission. CG says that he’s had many conversations with John where John gets revoltingly friendlier in his future conversations, but presently demands John make Jade answer him. In the future, the conflict with WV, PM, and AR is settled with a diplomatic exchange of beverages. Jade begins deploying game objects into Dave’s apartment. WV guides PM into the station where he has a monitor observing John. PM communicates with John through the events we had already seen in the start of act game. Rose is contacted by someone with very fancy text and is told to look around her new land. Jade releases Dave’s sprite from the cruxtruder and prototypes it with the dead crow Dave skewered with a sword earlier. On John’s land, a potential past version of AR issues a parking citation to John’s dad’s crashed car and confiscates the package and Sburb server copy inside. A potential past version of PM watches and realizes she has spent a long time looking for that package. Future PM implores John to deliver a message to past PM to fetch the Sburb server copy as well. She manages to acquire the server copy, but not the package, and delivers it to the whims of the breeze. Rose seeks out Jaspersprite and descends down the hatch where the laboratory used to be only to find a dock with a martini on it, a sign that her mother was there. WV and AR create a new exile town together and are interrupted when a large egg-shaped ship crash lands next to them. Dave and Jade alchemize the entry totem producing an egg only for his sprite to swoop in and take the egg up to a nest constructed out of items discarded from Dave’s sylladex. With four hours left still to impact, Jade deploys a jumper block extension for the alchemiter and a punch card shunt which are presently useless. Dave instead installs a CD that Jade also deployed which ends up being GristTorrent, which he uses to pirate some of John’s shale. Rose is trolled by someone named gallowsCalibrator who is also a seer like Rose. They explain that the voice contacting her is an exile, someone from a dead planet years after the end that serves as a guide and to rebuild civilization on the abandoned dead planet to potentially prepare it for seeding again. Past Jade gets contacted by CG who tells her that a future her told him to tell her to contact the trolls when Jade’s robot blows up. Jade receives a mysterious package from her pen-pal that she’s been working on over a long period of time as a gift for John. Past John gets trolled by GC and this is what prompts him to change his chumhandle, we then get a look at what GC looks like, another gray-skinned alien with red glasses. Past PM arrives on the purple planet with the parking citation and approaches the Black Queen who has features based on the kids’ prototyping. She wears a distinctive ring with orbs on it. In the future, the Windswept Questant appears. Past PM speaks to Jack Noir who offers her a deal for the package if she brings him the crowns and hands her a blade. Dave and Jade work to upgrade Dave’s alchemiter with all kinds of useful add-ons. GC trolls John and declares that she wants to mess with him and/or the timeline by taking shortcuts. She sends John a map to a pipe he can jump in as a shortcut. GA trolls Dave inquiring after advice on how to befriend Rose that he takes as a request for courting advice. AT trolls Rose similarly inquiring after advice on how to better harass Dave. GA trolls Rose employing an interpretation of Dave’s advice by sending Rose a supposed transcript of their first interaction where Rose left a very foolish impression. We then see what GA looks like. AT trolls Dave with an attempt at slam poetry and we see him looking very smug as well.

Episode 09: Pages 15978 to 1801

John takes the shortcut provided to him by GC, he rescues his bunny from being swept away by a stream of oil and reenacts a scene from Con Air by giving the bunny to a salamander he names Casey. He then gets trolled by an infuriated CG, followed by a mischievous GC who seem to also be trolling the other troll in some convoluted classical sense. GC’s shortcut led John to his denizen’s palace where she insists John enter by skipping the normal Seventh Gate method and killing his denizen in its sleep. Past PM approaches the White Queen and relays the circumstances of her conundrum in her quest for the package. The Queen removes her ring which also removes her prototype features and presents it to PM. Future PM presents herself to WQ and is crowned. Rose speaks with Jaspersprite who says that her denizen ate all life in the ocean and that she, as the Seer of Light, will learn how everything is tied together once she wakes up. Jade explains to her that she has a dream self that is supposed to wake up when her real self goes to sleep. John sends GC the code for the captchalogued useless rocket pack he made earlier and GC’s hacker friend isolates the rocket pack code and sends it back to him. Dave pesters John just before he’s about to blast off to the Seventh Gate and talks about how he’s already in the medium and concerned about the prototype prospect his sprite is suggesting. John flies through the Seventh Gate. We skip ahead to the Fifth Gate of Dave’s land, the Land of Heat and Clockwork and see him engaged in battle with the assistance of his sprite which has been prototyped with Lil Cal. He is clearly wearing an alchemized suit and wielding an alchemized weapon. In a conversation with Rose we learn it’s been four months in the game since John was killed by his denizen and Jade presumably got killed by the meteor striking when she was unable to enter the game without a server player. Dave resolves to go back in time to prevent this outcome and Rose expresses concerns over whether or not she will continue to exist and in what condition. Future Dave goes back and tells his past self to tell John not to go, John doesn’t believe him so Future Dave has to talk to him himself. Future Dave uncaptchalogues all of his alchemized possessions and jumps into the half-prototyped sprite producing Davesprite. Davesprite contacts GC and confronts her about manipulating John into getting himself killed and messing with the timelines. John, whilst flying up to the Seventh Gate, only reconsiders when he recalls the sincerity of Dave’s birthday gift letter to him and flys away. CG trolls John and explains that he and the other trolls are hiding out in the veil which is a huge belt of meteors nearby Derse, the purple planet. He goes on to talk about the reckoning, an event where the Black Monarchs destroy Skaia by sending the veil into it, initiating a sort of countdown to kill the Monarchs and activate defense portals. Unfortunately, John’s session’s reckoning is slated to start much sooner. On Derse, Jack Noir is accosted by the Black Queen who forces him to don an array of clown-princess costumes before he reaches his limit and mutinies against the Queen, slicing off her ring finger using whatever was in the green package and destroying her. Jack puts on the ring and adopts the prototype transformations, now including bird wings and a sword through the gut from the crow prototyping. Meanwhile, Rose awakens as her dream self and sees the word “MEOW” written all over her walls, the secret that Jaspers told her on the day of his vanishing, which translates to GCAT, letters for genetic codes. This ends the first year of Homestuck and we get a recap from the author themself. GC trolls John, apologetic for killing him, and sends him a map leading to the Second Gate. John enters through the gate and crash lands in Rose’s bedroom where she’s still sleeping on a pile of her knitting. Dave gets John to captchalogue Rose’s journals so he can get the code on the back of the card. Dream Rose visits Dream Dave who appears to be already awake, she throws a ball of yarn at him and real world Dave falls asleep to awaken as his dream self. Also in attendance, is a dream version of Lil Cal. John snoops in Rose’s room to see what her birthday gift to him was. It happens to be another bunny resurrected from a childhood bunny Rose had that’s uncannily similar to the one that John gave the salamander Casey. Casey, who he earlier captchalogued, and now deploys in Rose’s room. GA begins trolling Rose which is actually John typing from her Pesterchum client. GA trolls another troll we haven’t met yet, twinArmageddons, asking for assistance with the viewport feature. We get to see what TA looks like when GA throws her F1 key at him. We catch up with Mom and Dad traversing their respective lands when Dad also meets who appears to be Jade’s living grandpa. Dave and Rose toss out the dream Cal from their dream tower. John uses Rose’s alchemiter to make a powerful hammer Davesprite sent him the code for while Dave’s dream self notices John is in Rose’s house. Rose wakes up. TA sets up the viewport on GA’s Trollian account. Rose tries to exit her door only to fall victim to John’s door bucket prank. John blasts off before Rose can intercept him. The discarded dream Cal is rescued by a hoverboard and followed by past AR. John explores Rose’s land and finds a transportalizer that leads to a meteor lab in the veil containing an interesting assortment of objects, including dream Cal. Past PM is intercepted by Dersite agent, Courtyard Droll who pickpockets the White Queen’s ring from her. Dream Jade swoops in and snatches the ring, but it’s too late to return to PM now. The Skaian battlefield has since evolved into a vast planet across which a war is waged. Past WV, once a simple farmer with his livelihood ruined by war, stages an insurrection against the Black King while past PM acquires the scepter from the White King. This is until Jack Noir swoops in and slays the Black King, overtaking his position. The Hegemonic Brute attacks PM who loses the scepter which falls elsewhere on the battlefield.

Episode 10: Pages 1802 to 1988

Rose alchemizes an abundance of new goodies and tools for her to use. Jade builds onto Dave’s house while he sleeps. Once he awakens, Dave goes on his own alchemy binge creating an assortment of fun objects. Notably, Dave makes copies of Rose’s journals from the code he tricked out of John earlier. One is entitled “MEOW” and contains entirely scrambled iterations of the word “MEOW” whilst the other is entitled “The Complacency of the Learned” which is wizard fiction. Dave pesters Rose and finds her in the middle of burning her copy of the MEOW book at the behest of the gods from the Furthest Ring. Davesprite comments to Rose that future alternate timeline her didn’t do that and Rose says she knows as she remembers some things from her alternate self. The Draconian Dignitary sneaks into Dave’s room and steals the MEOW book. In the veil lab, John activates a button on the device to find it locked onto his neighborhood a few months before he was born. The device is locked in on John’s Nanna moments before a meteor blows up the Betty Crocker factory she and her son were walking past. John activates the machine producing paradox goo of his grandmother that is summarily sucked into a glass tube. John does the same on another monitor that’s locked in on Jade’s grandpa. Another monitor reveals Dave’s bro in the past standing beside an impact crater with small sunglasses. John, once again, targets him and collects the paradox goo. The last monitor is targeted on Rose’s mother as she approaches Dad and Nanna’s practical joke shop which is promptly struck by a meteor resulting in the death of Nanna. John finally collects paradox goo from Mom. Four young paradox clones are created from the collected goo resembling the targeted guardians. The remaining goo is emptied and four more paradox clones are created resembling the kids. Meanwhile, Mom and Dad reunite with one another on a ship piloted by Grandpa. CG trolls John and explains that the paradox clones are literally the kids and their guardians who will go back in time to take their proper places once the reckoning starts. Past AR discovers a frog temple on a meteor that contains a lab with a time capsule and a device trained on a young Nanna from 1910 who was taken in by Colonel Sassacre and his wife who is presumably Betty Crocker. Sassacre is alarmed by the sound of a meteor impact and goes to investigate where he is killed by a pistol wielding baby boy (a.k.a. Young Grandpa) that landed with the meteor. The device is then trained on Sassacre’s dog Halley. Young Grandpa eventually leaves his sister when he develops a taste for adventure. AR hides when he hears someone coming, it’s DD who tosses the Sburb copies into the time capsule. CG tells John that the reason things are going so poorly in the kids session is because of Jack Noir who was harmless in his game, but something happened that caused the kids’ Jack to overtake both Monarchs. We see a snapshot of Dave’s entry into the medium where he had to be saved by his Bro. Jack Noir in the present goes on a murder spree on the Skaian battlefield using the powers of his ring inherited from the Black Queen. As we countdown to the reckoning, the paradox clones begin to disappear. Jack uses the White King’s scepter to invoke the reckoning. DD creates a paradox clone of Halley and uses the MEOW code to create Bec. The White Queen flees Prospit just as Jack descends and begins wreaking havoc on the planet. He severs the chain to Prospit’s moon and sends it hurtling towards Skaia. Jack faces off with Bro. As Prospit’s moon plummets to Skaia, dream Jade tries to wake up dream John before he can be killed in the collision. She manages to save dream John just as he awakens, but gets caught in the impact and her dream self dies, exploding her robot. The reckoning’s meteors start to converge on Skaia as the defense portals crop up, sending the paradox clones to their destined places in spacetime. Dave reaches his first gate while Rose destroys hers. Act 4 ends. Rose posts her final entry to her GameFAQs walkthrough which gets stored in a server in the Furthest Ring. Dream John recovers the ring from dream Jade’s corpse. PM’s bargain with Jack is honored, she acquires the package in exchange for the crowns of both White Monarchs. She delivers the package to dream John. Inside is a letter from Jade’s pen-pal and Jade herself. Jack approaches John, demanding the ring. From inside the package, emerges a robotic bunny armed to the teeth that scares Jack off. Grandpa claims the body of Jade’s dream self and flies off in his ship leaving behind Mom and Dad. He taxidermies her corpse and leaves it in his home alongside a stolen fourth wall. Interspersed with these events is the exiles undergoing their origins as they shirk their respective titles in the wake of the reckoning while in the future, WV produces the White Queen’s ring from his spear. We end with another recap from the author.

Episode 11: Pages 1989 to 2154

Act five opens with the naming of a planet, the troll planet Alternia. Hivebent begins with a familiar young troll, CG, standing in his respiteblock on the equivalent to his thirteenth birthday. He’s named Karkat and we learn a little about his interests and aspirations. The game that he will play later with five of his friends is noted to not yet exist. Karkat explores his respiteblock and we learn more about troll culture including the fact that trolls young emerge from caves, live with custodians, and by custom build their hives at a very young age. Karkat gets trolled by someone named terminallyCapricious, Karkat’s best friend, who reveals that trolls don’t have to type in the unique styles that they do, it’s simply what feels natural to them. We switch to TC and name him Gamzee. We learn that he is part of an obscure clown cult as well as a little bit more about him. Gamzee has a tendency to eat sopor slime pies made from the soporific slime trolls use to sleep in recuperacoons to quell the volatile nightmares characteristic of their race. He does this because he was never taught not to and it does strange things to his head. GC trolls Gamzee and tries to get him to play a game with her. Karkat messes around with ~ATH programming in a language based on loops that terminate at the end of specified lifespans, like that of the universe or the code author. TA trolls Karkat and also tries to get him to play a game, a game that the fate of troll civilization depends on playing and that TA adapted from technology someone named AA dug out of some ruins. TA determines that two teams will play the game, a red team led by GC and a blue team led by TA. We then switch to GC and name her Terezi before learning some information about her. She demonstrates the brutality of the Alternian legal system through a mock trial with one of her scalemate plushies that ends in an execution determined by coin flip. Terezi tries to recruit another one of her friends, arcenicCatnip, to join her team for the game, but she has to ask someone for permission before she can agree. Karkat trolls Terezi and gets her to declare him leader instead. A blank-eyed floating troll with an Aries symbol on her shirt desecrates a frog temple. Returning to Karkat, he goes downstairs to confront his custodian which is known as his lusus. Lusii look after troll young in lieu of parents as troll reproduction entails the supplying of genetic material to imperial drones to be offered to the mother grub in the brooding caverns. Through this incestuous slurry, the mother grub lays thousands of eggs to be hatched into larval trolls that will later pupate into proper troll young with limbs. If the troll young survives their subsequent trials, they are then chosen by a lusus and build a hive together with droid assistance. The majority of adults live off-planet engaged in imperial conquest efforts. We are then introduced to TA who’s named Sollux and he appears to be aware of the imminent annihilation of his planet. He also has powerful psionic abilities in the form of telekinesis and the ability to put things to sleep. Sollux enlists Terezi as team leader and discusses how he is especially doomed to die twice and go blind as revealed to him as a prophet of doom. apocalypseArisen, the Aries troll, trolls Sollux and she discloses that playing the game will not actually save their world, but will instead doom it. But they will all play anyway even if their game is also doomed to failure. Sollux tries to get Karkat and Terezi to not play the game, but they’ve already formed a server-client connection. Karkat gets mad and runs a ~ATH code that Sollux sent him which blows up his computer and curses him along with everyone he knows and will ever know. The curse results in the death of each troll’s lusus whose corpses would in turn be prototyped in each troll’s respective sprites prior to entering the medium. Sollux deletes the viruses he’s coded from his computer and finds an unfamiliar file he copied from an obscure server beyond the planet’s network. The code is tied to the lifespan of the universe and will execute a strange pool ball code upon the death of the universe. We learn that this code will summon an indestructible, time-traveling demon into the dead universe that will ensure his own future summoning. He is, in fact, already here. We are now AT who gets named Tavros. We learn, among other things about him, that he’s got animal communion powers and can also put things to sleep. Tavros uses a wheelchair and will later on get his legs chainsawed off so he can be outfitted with robotic legs. Tavros gets trolled by someone named arachnidsGrip who he is supposed to not talk to anymore. As meteors rain down on the forest surrounding Terezi’s hive, she visits her lusus’ egg on a massive doomsday scale. Terezi’s lusus communicated with her through her dreams and she gradually awakened on Prospit. As soon as her lusus hatches, she is struck and killed by a meteor. We return to AA and she’s named Aradia. Aradia no longer has any interests and hears the voices of the dead. AG trolls Aradia and assigns herself the new leader/co-leader of the blue team. Sollux apologizes to Aradia and makes reference to a blood color based caste system. Aradia tells Sollux to look out the window and she uses her psychic abilities to put him to sleep. When Sollux awakens much later, he accidentally eats mind honey causing his psionics to go haywire.

Episode 12: Pages 2155 to 2295

We start with an introduction of another troll, AC, who is named Nepeta. Karkat reaches out to her to invite her to join the red team as Tavros’ server player. Nepeta replies that she still hasn’t asked her friend for permission yet and defends her having to do this. This friend happens to be centaursTesticle. They engage in banter with one another and CT states that he has planned to join the blue team as co-leader with Aradia. CT demands that Nepeta join the blue team with him instead and ends the discussion sternly. Nepeta breaks the news to Tavros. We get a flashback to the pre-accidents FLARPing days before Tavros used a wheelchair. FLARP is an extreme form of live action roleplaying and involves team-based gameplay. The two opposing teams are team Charge and team Scourge. Past Tavros contacts a very chipper sounding Aradia. Tavros’ adventure is orchestrated by his clouder, AG, who arranges the flapstractions with the intention of providing a challenge. Tavros resists making a move against these overly challenging monsters and is confronted by AG. When he refuses to roll, she taunts him and uses mind control to make him jump off a cliff. Aradia of the present returns to the ruins of her hive and begins the game, allowing one of the bluebloods to enter first and preparing herself second to enter. She uses the head of the frog temple to tier 1 prototype her sprite and then enters the game. However, through all of this, Aradia’s server player Nepeta couldn’t see her because she was dead all along. Only after Aradia tier 2 prototypes her sprite with herself does she become visible. Finally we name arachnidsGrip who is the one and only Vriska. She’s been having terrible luck ever since her accident. Vriska gets contacted by a strange character writing in all white text. He implies that all the ways he has exploited Vriska has been for the purpose of bringing about certain events that are about to transpire. She then trolls GA who asks after her lusus because GA’s is dead and she believes all the other lusii are doomed to imminent death. After Vriska checks on her lusus, we are introduced to her neighbor properly, CT. He’s named Equius and we learn generally disturbing things about him, he’s notably very strong. Equius trolls Gamzee, like he does every day, and partakes in some strange powerplay with him. Equius expresses doubts over his pact with Aradia. He then speaks with Vriska who he is also conspiring with to give Aradia a gift with the intention of usurping her as co-leaders together. This gift happens to be a robotic body modeled after Aradia. Equius macks on this robot body and accuses one of the inert other robots of judging him. He punches the robot out of his hive in response causing it to explode and fall onto the doomsday device Vriska “built.” The device is activated and promptly breaks. It falls from its chained up perch, explodes, and buries Vriska’s lusus in rubble. Equius’ lusus is also killed. Vriska taunts Terezi over the plans she has in motion and we get a flashback to before Terezi’s accident, but after Tavros’. Terezi talks about the incident with Aradia and says she’ll handle Vriska. Aradia, however, doesn’t listen and uses her powers of communion with the dead to summon the spirits of Vriska’s victims to harass her. Vriska talks to the white text guy about this and he goads her into killing Aradia. She accomplishes this by mind controlling Sollux into eating mind honey and sending him to her hive. We fail to become the white text guy, but get introduced to him anyways. He’s known as Doc Scratch and he appears to be a sensibly dressed man with a cue ball for a head. He’s an officer of the indestructible demon Lord English and his job is to ensure the arrival of his master at the death of the universe. Doc Scratch is also Alternia’s first guardian, just like Bec was to Earth. Terezi contacts Doc Scratch to inform him that Vriska has been cheating at their games with an advantage she has. This advantage happens to be a magic cue ball once owned by Doc Scratch that Vriska is able to see through the lack of portal revealing its predictions through her vision eightfold. When Vriska consults the cue ball about Terezi’s plot, Doc Scratch explodes it in her face, destroying her vision eightfold and left arm. Back in the present, Vriska puts her lusus out of her misery and is nearly crushed by another avalanche sending Equius’ hive down towards her. She is only saved by Equius’ timely entrance into the medium. Vriska is infuriated because this ruins her robot body gifting plan and confronts Aradia who says that Vriska was never meant to be on the blue team anyways and she’ll understand this later. Equius claims control over the blue team which Aradia is okay with only for later on in the conversation Equius to suggest Aradia become leader again because the idea titillates him. Equius travels through the second gate to visit Aradia and give her the robot body. Aradia enters the soulbot and realizes that Equius programmed the bot to have romantic feelings for him. Aradia demands he remove it and rips out her robot heart where Equius said the chip implementing the feelings was installed. She destroys the heart and proceeds to beat Equius before kissing him, much to the confusion of the onlooking Nepeta who updates her shipping wall.

Episode 13: Pages 2296 to 2625

Karkat contacts Vriska to get her to join the red team, but she kicks up a fuss when she learns that she has to be Tavros’ server player. Karkat doesn’t get why Vriska hates him and interprets the sentiment as black romantic feelings she’s admitting to him at a poor time. He goes on to give her unsolicited advice on the nuances of emotions like pity and hate as it pertains to troll romance. Karkat eventually reveals the real reason he needs Vriska in the session: her mind powers. He met a double agent named Jack who has information that can help overthrow the Black Queen. We also learn that Jack stabbed him at first and Karkat’s hidden blood color is a bright red. Jack bonds with Karkat over having the same color of blood. The key to this plan was exploiting the prototype-based evolutions to the Queen’s form. She could tolerate inheriting elements of the visages of all the trolls lusii, but could not abide the form invoked by Aradia prototyping the frog head for frogs are the most loathsome creatures to Dersites. She refused to wear the ring any longer and sequestered herself in her chambers and would eventually go into exile until Doc Scratch conscripted her into service. We then get the reveal that there was never truly two teams in separate sessions, they were all in the same destined twelve player session the whole time. We also get to meet GA properly and find her named Kanaya. Kanaya, unlike the nocturnal members of her species, can withstand the immense heat of the Alternian sun under which broods of undead walk. Kanaya gets trolled by someone named cuttlefishCuller and they talk about the game and the impending death of their lusii. Kanaya goes to check on her lusus only to find her already dead. She cuts her body open and retrieves the matriorb from her body. She then gets trolled by someone named caligulasAquarium who demands that she get Vriska to talk to him. Kanaya is revealed to have so much foreknowledge about the game because she dreamt the address of an obscure server containing Rose’s walkthrough. She assumes this is the journal of an alien from untold sweeps ago. We skip ahead to later in the game where Vriska, as Tavros’ server player, has built a tremendous amount of stairs on top of his hive. Only at Kanaya’s intervention does Vriska send him a code for rocket shoes that he alchemizes with his wheelchair so that it can fly. Later on, Vriska guides Tavros to enter through the second gate in his Pupa Pan costume causing him to end up in her land and crash landing in her respiteblock. Vriska is there waiting for him in a fairy costume and forcefully kisses him. When he doesn’t seem to respond the way she wants, she mind controls him into desiring her briefly before abandoning the idea. Kanaya witnesses this and is heartbroken due to her crush on Vriska. We, the reader, try to understand what’s going on by receiving a long exposition dump on the four quadrants of troll romance symbolized by card suit symbols. At its most simplistic, these quadrants are matespritship (human romance), kismesissitude (potent rivalry), auspisticism (mediating toxic pairs), and moiraillegience (pacifying platonic soulmates). Only the former two are concupiscent in nature. We finally get introduced to the last two trolls, a pair of seadwelling moirails. The first is CA who is now named Eridan. The second is CC who is now named Feferi. We get to see both trolls’ respective respiteblocks and learn a bit about them. Feferi’s lusus is an emissary to the horrorterrors and has forewarned her about the imminent extinction of her race. She is also the heiress to the Alternian empire and the only troll on the planet of her blood color. The pair talk about relationship stuff. Eridan reflects on his past kismesissitude attempts with Vriska where they had a fruitful mutually beneficial relationship where both Vriska and Feferi’s lusus ended up fed. Feeding Feferi’s lusus was vital in particular due to keeping her fed being an essential part in preventing her from releasing the Vast Glub, a psychic shockwave that would obliterate all troll life in the galaxy. Once in the session, Feferi breaks off her moiraillegience with Eridan. The last player to enter the game, Sollux, was tragically unable to get into the Medium in time before the Vast Glub was unleashed, causing his death. Luckily, Feferi is able to swoop in and kiss his corpse. This awakens his dream self. One of his dream selves, that is. Terezi is contacted by an 8th exile, BQ, who instructs her to eliminate the archagent Jack Noir. We learn that past Karkat started a transtimeline memo that everyone can read, even across different points in the timeline. Karkat has assumed total leadership of the fully joined session. Many people chime in against his wishes to ask for relationship advice or to mock him. BQ, who is actually Snowman, commands Terezi to collect her former ring and destroy it. On a later memo, Karkat informs Kanaya of an upcoming rift in the timeline of the trolls’ session. Karkat and Terezi have a conversation about the new mission involving Jack and have a moment. We then get to see Terezi’s blinding play out. In the wake of Vriska’s dismemberment, she used her mind control on Tavros to commune with Terezi’s lusus and cause her to sleepwalk during the day and stare directly at the sun. This was sufficient to blind her instantly, but she also awoke on Prospit at the same time. We then see assorted scenes throughout different points of the game culminating in Aradia beating Vriska nearly to death. She awakens on Prospit where she is slapped by Terezi. Aradia starts a private memo for her past selves. She explains how she will amass an army of her alternate future selves from doomed offshoots of the alpha timeline and the trolls will barely defeat the Black King. However, before the trolls are able to claim the ultimate reward a rift opens and a powerful foe slays most of the Aradiabots forcing the trolls to retreat to the meteor in the veil. The trolls were thus denied entry into the universe they created: the kids’ universe. Act 5 Act 1 ends.

Episode 14 The Return: Pages 2626 to 2847

Act 5 Act 2 opens with a recap of some essential scenes in John’s life from killing his Nanna when he landed on his meteor to growing up with his Dad to his entry into the game, all while Karkat watches on with mounting disgust that culminates in him having spades in his eyes, suggesting a black crush. Karkat has his first conversation with John just as he’s about to initiate the scratch which goes poorly enough for Karkat that he gets his idea to troll John backwards through time. As dream John is about to reunite with his father on the Skaian battlefield, Vriska uses her psychic abilities with great struggle to wake him up. The ring he carried falls into a river. Vriska trolls John and tells him to wait around for his server copy to arrive, which it does. WV laments the death of everyone except himself and finds the White Queen’s ring in the river. Vriska, meanwhile, explains the universe creation objective of the game to John among other things. John touches base with Rose and they discuss the building progress on John’s house as well as the upgrades made to his alchemiter. John also tells her about the paradox clone sibling relationship issue, but Rose already knows. Rose has accepted that the session is barren and that the only objective that remains is to wreak as much havoc as possible. We see Rose destroying turtle ruins on her land before switching back in time to the start of Kanaya’s Rose-trolling escapades. We follow Kanaya through all the conversations she’s had with Rose from her perspective up to the matching eighth conversation on both ends after Rose blew up her gate. Then we skip ahead to their sixteenth conversation where Rose is destroying the turtle ruins. Kanaya admits that she’s worried about an imminent stretch of the timeline where Rose alone goes dark. Rose in turn asks Kanaya about the Green Sun which she’s never heard of. Vriska makes John dress like her before getting his ass in gear to do critical things, like rescue Jade. Dave asks John for money so he can continue using time travel to play the stock exchange on his planet. Back in time, Terezi witnesses the destruction of Prospit and reports it on a memo only for a future Nepeta to chime in and announce that Derse was also destroyed. This is when Terezi gets wired the money she asked Dave to send to her in the past, causing the trolls to find out about the humans in the first place. Terezi watches Dave grow up at different points in the timeline and makes first contact with him before the game started. Terezi flirts with Dave some more in the present. Karkat contacts both John and Dave and gets them to join a memo. Karkat demands that Dave stop hitting on Terezi and that John stops talking to Vriska. He goes on to try to convince the boys to engage in sensible human matchmaking pairs complete with a diagram for the sake of propagating their species. When past Karkat wakes up, we get a lengthy walkaround with little else but a lot of trolls talking to each other. Aradia tries to deter Rose from messing with the Green Sun. Gamzee trolls Dave and Dave references a past conversation they apparently had months ago from Dave’s perspective wherein Gamzee complained about Dave ruining his religion. Dave sends Gamzee the music video for Insane Clown Posse’s “Miracles.” Upon watching the video, Gamzee is overcome with rage over the blasphemy. Equius then trolls Dave and earns some semblance of his respect through sincere attempts at rapping. Dave is trying to remove a legendary sword from stone and Equius suggests breaking it, knowing of Dave’s history with broken swords. Terezi sends Dave a comic with what he’s supposed to do next: fall asleep under the watchful eyes and protection of Davesprite. Dave summons Davesrpite and they talk about how he won’t need Davesprite anymore so he’ll go off and do his own thing. Vriska puts Dave to sleep and Davesprite defends him. We lastly catch up with Jack who’s staring at the sword Bro plunged into a massive record platform on LOHAC. He takes it before flying off.

Episode 15: Pages 2848 to 3074

Jade takes a nap without having a living dream self and experiences a trippy squiddle-filled romp that deteriorates into a horrorshow of horrorterrors which Dave also catches a glimpse of by viewing the void past Derse without his sunglasses. Feferi, who appeared in her dream, trolls Jade and explains that now that Prospit’s moon is gone all dreamers' dreams will take place in the “bubbles glubbed by the gods who live in the Furthest Ring.” Jade reaches out to Karkat, as she was instructed, to tell him that her dreambot exploded. This Karkat has no memory of requesting this and opens a memo to allow his future self to comment. This goes poorly as Karkat ends up arguing with himself. John connects as Jade’s server player and begins deploying game objects. Jade and John talk about how she’s always seen her dead, taxidermied dream self growing up in the lab and always knew her dream self was doomed to die. Jack, meanwhile, catches up with Bro on John’s land and they prepare to face off again. Davesprite arrives to assist. John and Jade talk through options for prototyping Jade’s sprite. John consults Rose who is struggling with the conundrum of knowing the outcome, but not knowing whether or not she should say something about it. The only advice she gives is that they must prototype something so the battlefield can yield its treasure. Somehow, John fell asleep in the middle of helping Jade with her entry and woke up with his bed floating in a sea of oil. Rose talks to John about the treasure that John must retrieve for her called The Tumor. She is too preoccupied to explain what that is. Karkat trolls John and explains what the monstrous fuck up Jade did was. Jade’s entry item is a piñata that she has to hit blindfolded. While she tries to hit it, John attempts to prototype something into Jade’s sprite only for Vriska to put him to sleep. Bec teleports away all the surrounding items and jumps into the sprite. As a sprite, Bec has the power to teleport the meteor somewhere else. We cut to Jack’s fight with Bro and Davesprite only for Jade to shoot her entry item with Becsprite’s help causing the prototyping to take effect with the ring. Jack inherits the First Guardian powers of Bec and adopts some of his features. We now see that Jack was the demon that appeared and destroyed the trolls’ access to the new universe and they were only saved by Aradiabot transportalizing them away to the meteor. Karkat awakens on Prospit and recognizes Jack Noir as Slick moments before he destroys Prospit. A final station in the shape of Bec’s head manifests and plops down on the top of the frog temple the exiles were clustered around in the future. WV, remembering that he met John on the battlefield when he first found the ring, returns to the terminal to contact John. Vriska contacts John as he is surrounded by green fire produced by Jack Noir’s transformation. She admits to being the one to put John to sleep and that she did so so John could be properly challenged and become a great hero. She also wanted to be personally responsible because she’s going to be the one to kill Jack. WV demands John do the windy thing and he does. We then learn Jade’s land is the Land of Frost and Frogs. Jade has a trippy dream conversation with Feferi where she says she will establish stable dream bubbles with the gods to have a space for dreamers to still dream in without Derse and Prospit. She also reveals that she’s dead. Jade wakes up and confronts an imp on her land which has First Guardian teleportation powers. She only manages to kill it with Becsprites help. This is when future PM got her terminal blown up in the past after trying to talk to Jade. Jade gets in touch with a future Dave who duplicates a copy of the Sburb server disk so he can act as Jade’s server player whilst John is preoccupied. Present Dave talks to Rose about hearing the horrorterrors crying for help on Derse. They are being massacred. This is why Rose is helping them and knows the things she does. They need Dave to make a map through the Furthest Ring to the Green Sun. This all depends on if Rose can get The Tumor from John, which is a bomb. Rose also reveals that she isn’t getting these instructions just from the horrorterrors, but also from Doc Scratch. Rose plans to use The Tumor on a dream self suicide mission to blow up the Green Sun. Kanaya tries to convince Rose not to do whatever makes her go dark on the timeline and says she’s trained Eridan to wield a wand. Tavros contacts Jade and asks for permission to commune with Bec, admitting that he’s done this once before to kill Jade’s grandfather while saving life. He also admits to having a crush on her and it goes poorly. Vriska saw all this go down on Jade’s projected screen and goes to harass Tavros about it. She reveals that she is the source of Jade’s supposed narcolepsy and Bec’s creation in the first place. Tavros declares he is going to stop Vriska and sets off to do so, falling down the stairs in the process.