Nobles

Jane enters Locah, the Land of Crypts and Helium, where floating seedpods water the barren land. Jane’s house appears on top of a seedpod, making it sink into a hole in the ground. She is forced to leave her house right away.

Exploring the crypts on her planet, Jane finds artifacts from an extinct salamander race. The denizen Hemera told the salamanders they would die waiting for Jane and her friends, who are called “Nobles” for their inertness. After arriving, the four Nobles will have to wait for more players, unable to make progress on their own. There is also a set of coloured lanterns on Locah that indicate the spare lives of the Nobles. The emerald light for Jake is extinguished because his dreamself is dead already.

Jane and the bunny brobot, Lil’ Sebastian, solve some puzzles to raise Jane’s house back to the surface. Returning home, Jane finds a clown who apparently got to her house using Aradia’s time travel device. This clown is Gamzee in his dubious god tier getup. He greets Jane warmly and sells her some multicoloured potions of blood drained from the troll bodies he has collected. When Jane asks Gamzee to leave, he throws two corpses into the blank sprite, creating Tavrisprite, a fusion of Tavros and Vriska. Their personalities are so irreconcilable and intolerable to each other that Tavrisprite explodes, leaving Jane with no sprite at all.

Like Jadesprite, Tavros and Vriska were pulled from the afterlife to be a sprite, and when they return to the afterlife after their short union, Vriska’s ghost vows that she will not be jerked around anymore. She decides to fuck shit up. Meanwhile, the Author has been stalking Vriska since she rejected him and he dropped the ring he proposed with.

Jane sets off across Locah to look for Dad, who has wandered off. She discovers a trail of his belongings. Along the way, Jane tries to find out what her friends are dealing with. The only response is from UU, the lime-blooded alien. UU wants to play a session of Sburb with her “brother”, but fears he will kill her instead. She promises to give Jane her dear, sweet, precious, sweet, sweet juju later on.

Auto Responder interrupts the search for Jane’s Dad. Dirk and Roxy are in deadly danger and need to enter the Medium. AR asks Jane to be Roxy’s server player and prep her house for entry right away.

After placing the alchemy stuff for Roxy, Jane gets antsy. Against AR’s wishes, she follows Lil’ Seb into a crypt and through a transportalizer pad to Derse.

Jake enters the mystic frog ruins to finish little Terry Kiser. UU told him it was vitally important to arm the robot bunny and send it off, which Jake can do now that he has fuel for the transmaterializer.

Jake is descending into the temple laboratory when an earthquake jams the temple’s elevator. Jake falls off the platform and is knocked out cold. Because his dreamself died, he finds himself in a dream bubble.

Jake’s dream is a recollection of his thirteenth birthday, almost three years prior, when he learned that Dirk and Roxy live in the future. Dirk decided Jake would believe his story about the future of Earth, so he told him the whole thing.

The Baroness, founder of Crockercorp, was in fact Her Imperious Condescension, empress of the trolls. After losing her whole empire in the Vast Glub, the Condesce was pressed into Lrd English’s loathsome service to carry out his will in the universe of Earth.

Taking the name Crocker, she insinuated herself into human society as the wife of Colonel Sassacre. She raised Jane’s Poppop (baby John) and Jake’s Grandma (baby Jade) after they fell to Earth on meteors in 1910. Their upbringing echoed that of pre-Scratch Nanna and Grandpa. Leaving home, Grandma took the name English to spite the cruel Batterwitch, while Poppop Crocker stayed and became a comedian and TV actor. Poppop was killed by the meteor that delivered Jane and her dirty hat.

The fish queen’s harmless “Betty Crocker” persona masked an agenda of world domination. Her mastery of the blueblood and lowblood psionics allowed her to zonk people at will and command animals including Earth’s First Guardian, GCat. She used these abilities and her baking enterprise to quietly gain power over humans.

Grandma was the first to resist her adoptive mother’s tyranny. Grandma ran the competing company Skaianet and raised Jake on the Pacific island with the frog ruins. When Jake was little, the Condesce murdered Grandma and blew up her house on the hill. After that, Jake lived in the jungle where his bedroom, severed from the house in the blast, had come to rest. Condy started breeding Alternian lusus naturae on his island.

The other two heroes of the resistance were Dirk’s Bro (baby Dave) and Roxy’s Mom (baby Rose). Bro directed the unwatchable Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff movies starring Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson. Mom wrote the impossible Complacency of the Learned wizard novels. But the political messages in their art could not prevent the Baroness from manoeuvring key Crockercorp shills into positions of power.

Her Condescension’s cronies gradually perverted human politics and civilization. In the years after the Rebranding, Earth turned into a brutal hellhole ruled by juggalos. High Chaplain Fieri and Dual-Presidents Jay and Dope oversaw the death of billions.

In the last gasp of the resistance movement, Bro and Mom assassinated the Presidents and the Chaplain. Then they faced off against the Batterwitch herself, and died at her hands.

Life got even worse for the survivors of the Hilarocaust. After the Condesce took direct control, she flooded the world and subjected the remainder of humanity to a series of cruel experiments. She was trying to mould Earth into something like her old Alternian empire. But after centuries of failures, humanity went extinct.

To replace humans, Condy went to the Medium, rounded up some Prospitians and Dersites, and stuck them in floating chessboard ghettos on Earth. One such colony was erected around Mom’s house, which blended in architecturally. Baby Roxy landed there and grew up among the hungry carapacians. Baby Dirk landed thousands of miles away. He grew up alone in his Bro’s mostly submerged high-rise apartment.

At the end of Dirk’s history, Jake realizes he is reliving the conversation three years later while unconscious in the temple. The Dirk in Jake’s dream turns out to be a private figment, not a normal dream bubble visitor. Jake dubs him Brain Ghost Dirk, since he claims to be a perfect clone of Dirk’s personality. Brain Ghost Dirk is a product of Jake’s mind, but he knows things that are not available to Jake’s surface thoughts.

Aranea enters Jake’s bubble and introduces herself. She is arranging a welcome party for her friend Meenah, who she has not seen in unknowable ages. Aranea and Meenah died at the same time, but different ghosts have different chronologies and meetings according to the crazy whims of the Gods of the Furthest Ring. Meenah is new to the afterlife, while Aranea is quite ancient.

Aranea leads Jake to Meenah’s bubble. They find Meenah antagonizing her visitors, the meteor kids. Karkat, Terezi, Kanaya, Dave, Rose, the Vagabond, and Serenity are there. Dream Roxy is also sleepfloating through the bubble. Serenity lands on Dream Roxy’s hair. Aranea takes away Meenah’s gold pointy jam and settles everyone down so that she can tell the story of her session.

Aranea and Meenah lived on a world called Beforus. Meenah was the heir to the Beforan empire, but did not want the responsibility. Beforan troll society was built on noblesse oblige. Each blood caste served and cared for those under it, and Meenah’s rare fuchsia caste bore the greatest duty of care of all. Meenah fled to Beforus’s pink moon to avoid being made empress.

Meenah discovered Sgrub on the moon and convinced her friends to play it with her. There were twelve players in all. They entered the Medium, lost the game, and scratched their session so that their twelve ancestors could play instead.

Normally, a scratch resets the world the players came from so that their lives never happened. To keep existing, a player has to escape the session before the scratch is completed. Rose and Dave did this by flying out into the Furthest Ring. Jade and John did it by flying through the Fourth Wall. But Meenah used a different kind of escape route. At the onset of her scratch, she killed herself and her eleven comrades with a bomb. They became dream bubble ghosts, existing beyond the reach of the hard reset that turned Beforus into Alternia.

(The scratch in the Beforan session made Skaia switch the destinations of the defense portals in the Alternian session, where Karkat ectobiologized all 24 players by paradox cloning. According to Doc Scratch, players are not supposed to be created in a post-scratch session. When they are, it is an unfortunate glitch that indicates Lrd English will prey on their universe.)

In her ageless journey through ghost and dreamer memories, Aranea has learned about the lives she and her friends led on the other side of the scratch. She repeats their stories briefly for Meenah’s benefit:

• Kankri Vantas in his other life was the Signless Sufferer, who shouted a rude word.

• Meulin Leijon in her other life was the Disciple, who wrote stuff down.

• Mituna Captor in his other life was the Ψiioniic Helmsman, who flew a ship.

• Porrim Maryam in her other life was the Dolorosa, who found a wiggler.

• Horuss Zahhak in his other life was the E%ecutor Darkleer, who built an arm.

• Cronus Ampora in his other life was the Orphaner Dualscar, who told a bad joke.

• Kurloz Makara in his other life was the Grand Highblood, who didn’t like the joke.

• Rufioh Nitram in his other life was the Summoner, who led a rebellion.

• Latula Pyrope in her other life was the Neophyte Redglare, who cut off an arm.

• Aranea Serket in her other life was the Marquise Mindfang, who got all the treasure.

• Damara Megido in her other life was the Handmaid, who made everything lousy.

• Meenah Peixes in her other life was the Condesce, who embraced her hatchright.

Jake hasn’t been paying the closest attention to Aranea’s stories. When he hears this last one, he believes he is standing before the atrocious Batterwitch herself. He jumps the star-struck Meenah and whales on her. Aranea tries to reason with Jake before giving up and forcibly waking him.

Jake disappears from the dream bubble, but his imaginary friend doesn’t. Terezi senses Brain Ghost Dirk’s presence and sniffs him out.

Jake regains consciousness in the mystic ruins and plays with Terry Kiser, the robot bunny he helped build with his penpal Jade. The bunny shrinks a remnant of Jake’s Grandma’s exploded house, which falls down the shaft under the stuck elevator.

Then some legendary weapons come out of the lotus time capsule for Jake to equip Terry with. UU said she was sending these weapons by giving him enough information in the future to make them and ship them back to Earth in the lotus. But we never see the weapons go into the lotus. This must be one of the many events in Jake’s upcoming session that are obscured from the reader by trickster magic and special stardust.

Little Terry shrinks the weapons down to bunny size. Jake writes a note to introduce the bunny to John, the kid who will eventually receive it, although Jake still believes he is addressing his Grandma and Jane’s Poppop in the past. He puts the robot bunny on the transmaterializer and sends it across the scratch to Jade. Jade packs it up and sends it on to John. As seen in Acts 4 and 5, the bunny ends up changing hands and fortunes in the pre-scratch session and gets renamed Liv Tyler before being unmade in the creation of the Green Sun.

His job done, Jake goes to fetch the infinitesimalated house remnant that fell down the elevator shaft. He extracts a miniature fourth wall from the house ball and keeps it for later. Jake’s Grandma once went to Derse and stole this fourth wall from Jack’s office, just as Jade’s Grandpa did in the other session.

Auto Responder interrupts Jake’s trip through the temple. Dirk and Roxy are in deadly danger and need to enter the Medium. AR asks Jake to be Dirk’s server player and prep his apartment for entry right away.

After placing the alchemy stuff for Dirk, Jake gets antsy. There is a pair of transportalizer pads at the bottom of the shaft, one to Derse and one to Prospit. Against AR’s wishes, Jake steps on the purple one and goes to Derse.

Emerging from the Skaianet lab, Roxy meets a pack of killer robot drones flying in from overseas. They chase her around the colony with missiles, set everything on fire, and then leave as quickly as they came.

The drones are replaced by an even deadlier danger, the Red Miles. Roxy races around her neighbourhood, rounding up carapacians and leading them back to her house to save them from certain death.

Feeling hungover, Roxy takes a breather to answer her friends. The UU alien tells Roxy that the Red Miles coming from the sky are a sign that someone is killing her universe from without. Roxy hurries home to enter the Medium and escape the Miles.

(UU spares Roxy the details, but she means that when Bec Noir murdered the Genesis Frog, his attack reached into both iterations of Earth’s universe. The Miles destroying the post-scratch universe are the same Miles that destroyed the pre-scratch universe.)

When Roxy gets home, she connects as Jake’s server player and places his alchemy stuff in the crater of his former house on the hill.

UU has something to say before Roxy enters. The cheerful alien fears that she will not survive her next nap. She and her jeering “brother” have adhered to a bunch of unwritten rules for their entire lives. UU finally breaks the rules by sharing a forbidden secret with Roxy. Her name is Calliope, and she is a cherub. Roxy may be able to wake Calliope at the expense of the jeering one if she repeats Calliope’s name the next time she talks to him.

His name, Caliborn, remains unknown to the kids.

Dirk deals with the killer drones swarming his isolated apartment by fighting them on the roof. While cutting up drones with his unbreakable katana, Dirk attracts the attention of Caliborn, who is obsessed with winning games.

Finding Dirk busy in this part of his life, Caliborn jeers him a year earlier and challenges him to a one-sided game. Dirk must draw pornography of himself and his friends, or else Caliborn will kill Dream Calliope. Without complaint, Dirk draws the scandalous smut Caliborn desires. But there is a shitty twist to the game, which Caliborn reveals a year later, after Dirk’s rapping robot Sawtooth rescues Dirk from the drones. Caliborn already killed Dream Calliope. He sent his session’s archagent to Prospit’s moon to assassinate her.

Dirk and Sawtooth have just finished off the drones when the Red Miles appear in the sky. Seeing the deadly threat, Auto Responder puts copies of the Sburb server on everyone’s computers and tells them to get their houses ready for entry right away. AR’s quick reaction allows Dirk to be distracted by Caliborn and the crisis on Derse.

After piking the Brute’s head, Dream Dirk cut up Archagent Jack Noir’s surveillance walls and went into hiding. The Archagent wasn’t around to deal with Dream Dirk’s insurrection. He was a bit sloppy on Prospit and got himself pinched by the white shells. He is in jail, using the contents of a care package from the Droll to stab as many Prospitian guards as he can reach.

Jack’s deputy, the Draconian Dignitary, asked the new queen for some firepower to help smoke out the troublesome dreamer. Condy lent him a “Dronegorg” fighter mech and the Black Queen’s ring of void, which has no orbs and will receive no prototypings. But it can still do the Red Miles. The Dignitary puts on the ring and releases the Miles to scour the surface of Derse. Dirk finds himself beset by Red Miles on both worlds.

Jake, Jane, and Lil’ Sebastian transportalize to Derse at the worst possible time. The Miles are spreading through the streets, reducing buildings to purple rubble.

Dream Dirk finds Jake and Jane gawking at each other across a fiery chasm. He orders Jane to run back to Locah, but a lash of the Miles impales and kills her. A building collapses onto the transportalizer pad she came from.

Next he orders Lil’ Seb to haul Jake back to Earth. The bunny brobot jumps the chasm, grabs Jake, and drags him onto his transportalizer pad moments before it, too, is buried under rubble. This returns Jake to the elevator shaft in the mystic frog temple.

Lil’ Seb blasts off with a rocket and carries Jake up the shaft and out of the temple. The volcano on Jake’s island has erupted, spewing lava onto the forest where Jake’s bedroom has been sitting for years. Lil’ Seb flies Jake toward the crater of Grandma’s house, which is on high ground, but they don’t make it there. The two rocketeers attract the baleful garnet glare of a dragon lusus. The rocket explodes, separating them. Jake falls into the ruined house and is knocked out again. Lil’ Seb falls into the lagoon and sinks to the bottom.

Before Dream Dirk can do anything else, he is knocked unconscious by falling masonry. The waking Dirk also loses consciousness on the roof of his apartment. His beloved puppet, Lil Cal, falls into the ocean and sinks to the bottom. Caliborn fears and detests this puppet and identifies it as a “juju”. He told Dirk it will be erased when the universe dies because it exists elsewhere and jujus resist duplication.

Roxy is at home, working the totem lathe to make her entry item, when a lash of the Miles impales and kills her.

On Locah, Jane and Roxy’s life lanterns go out, indicating they have only one life left. Dirk’s lantern dims until it is barely lit.

Unconscious on Earth and Derse, Dirk goes to dream in the Furthest Ring. In Meenah’s bubble, the one in which Dream Roxy is sleepfloating, Brain Ghost Dirk becomes a projection of Dream Dirk, visible to everyone. Dirk tells the ghosts and travellers that he and Roxy need to go home and fix everything. He flings Dream Roxy and Serenity out of the bubble. Then Aranea graciously wakes him.

Dirk wakes up to a bad situation. Jane and Roxy’s corpses need to be kissed before their dreamselves die. Dirk’s apartment and Roxy’s house need to be brought to the Medium before the universe dies. And Dirk has to escape the Miles, which Caliborn said was impossible. If he dies here in the twenty-fifth century, there will be no one to kiss his corpse.

Dirk’s assets include his rapping robots Sawtooth and Squarewave, rocket boards on Earth and Derse, a portable sendificator, a fenestrated plane portal from his apartment to Roxy’s colony, the alchemy equipment already deployed at each house, and the quick calculating mind of the Auto Responder in his glasses.

In a whirlwind of action, Dirk delegates his entry to Sawtooth, flies to Roxy’s house, delegates her entry to Squarewave, corpsesmooches Roxy, sendificates his own head to Jake four centuries ago, and falls to the floor decapitated.

When Jake wakes up in the ruin of his old house, he finds Dirk’s bloody severed head on the ground in front of him, wearing AR. The chatbot with Dirk’s personality tells Jake that he has taken a new name, Lil Hal, and orders Jake to make out with his head. Jake, striking a heroic pose in front of the erupting volcano for the audience he does not know he has, kisses Dirk on the lips.

Receiving the corpsesmooch he needed, Dream Dirk survives and springs into action on Derse. His life lantern explodes with light.

The will of the Horrorterrors has guided Dream Roxy and Serenity from the Furthest Ring back to Derse. After Dirk kisses her waking self’s corpse, Roxy wakes up on Derse and sees Jane’s body in front of her. She tries to corpsesmooch Jane, but Dirk finds her hesitating and kisses Jane himself. Dream Jane wakes on Prospit and finds the transportalizer to the elevator shaft on Earth.

Dirk grabs Roxy, gets on his rocket board, and blasts off toward the mystic frog meteor in the Veil. They enter the lotus time capsule, come out of the lotus on Earth, swoop down the elevator shaft, and grab Jane. The three of them fly out of the frog ruins and land in Grandma’s house just in time to surreptitiously wake Jake up and watch him talk to Lil Hal and kiss the severed head.

Sawtooth handles Dirk’s entry in his absence and brings his apartment to the Medium. Squarewave does the same for Roxy’s house. And the four kids, unexpectedly united on twenty-first century Earth, enter the Medium together in the ruin of Grandma’s house.

Calliope and Caliborn, the cherubim, grow up confined to a room on a planet devoid of life orbiting a red supergiant star.

Caliborn and Calliope do not know it, but their home is in the trolls’ meteor, which ends its journey embedded in the surface of the dead planet. They also don’t know that the hideous Statues of Liberty littering their world prove that this planet used to be Earth. The Liberties were byproducts of an invention that made Dirk’s Bro rich. How Earth and the meteor came to be here in the universe of cherubim is a mystery.

Calliope and Caliborn have opposite personalities and scorn each other’s interests apart from games. Not long before they are supposed to start their session of Sburb, they play a notorious chess match. Calliope has never lost a match against the only opponent she knows. But Caliborn is able to beat her in the final duel by first becoming checkmated, and through some unprecedented enchantment, continuing to play beyond the death of the king.

Caliborn and Calliope have never met. Whenever one of them is awake, the other is asleep. This is because they share a body. When Caliborn must sleep, he lies on the sarswapagus and cedes consciousness to Calliope, and vice versa. Their blood also changes colour. Caliborn’s blood is red and Calliope’s is lime green.

Calliope and Caliborn are able to keep some belongings safe from each other because each of them has a shackle which only they can open. Before sleeping, Calliope puts her chain on one leg, and when Caliborn gets up he removes his chain from the other leg. While he is awake, her chain confines him to one half of the room, and vice versa. These chains are the reason they are homestuck.

Cal’s bifurcation is an adolescent feature of their species. When cherubim mature, one cherub predominates over the other and never cedes consciousness again. For Caliborn, this happens before he has matured properly. Dream Caliborn has Dream Calliope assassinated by the Archagent of his session. After that, Calliope goes to sleep for the last time. Caliborn predominates, enjoying exclusive control over his body for the rest of his life.

Having killed his rival, Caliborn puts his plan in motion. He escapes her shackle by biting his leg off and equips a prosthetic leg he built (with Dirk’s help) in anticipation of this day.

Caliborn launches a session of Sburb on his own. But Sburb is not supposed to be played solo, so his entry is heavily glitched. The kernelsprite becomes a singularity and swallows his entire planet.

The Prospitian Monarch and the Sovereign Slayer, given equal powers by their fourfold rings, have been locked in chase for two years in the Furthest Ring. The Monarch’s drive to bring Noir to justice has not lessened at all.

Noir and the Monarch begin to see cracks in the space of the Furthest Ring as if someone is shattering it.

Noir takes a breather in a dream bubble containing memories of his rampage across the Battlefield, where he killed Mom, Dad, John, and Rose.

After two years on the Prospitian battleship, it’s John’s fifteenth birthday. He and Jade celebrate by watching Con Air. John is bored shitless with nothing to do and suddenly hates Con Air. Learning that Davesprite has broken up with Jade tips John into an angry mood that deepens when Davesprite leaves him a prank fatherly note. John throws a tantrum and falls asleep in his driveway.

In his dream, John enters Jack Noir’s bubble. They fight. Noir has John in his clutches when John masters another god tier power, dissolving into wind. He reappears behind Noir and, with help from a Rose distraction, socks him with his pop-a-matic hammer, giving him a ridiculous hat. Then the Monarch chases Noir back out of the bubble, leaving John alone.

Still dreaming, John wanders into Tavros and Vriska’s bubble. He finds a ring of orbs nofold on the ground next to Tavros’s sleeping ghost, the same ring the Author offered to Vriska. Tavros wakes and sees John putting on the ring. He claims to have found it first and they squabble over it.

Vriska’s ghost arrives. The three of them talk about what has happened since they left their sessions. After rejecting the Author, Vriska decided to take on Lrd English, who has started terrorizing the Furthest Ring, smashing dream bubbles and obliterating the ghosts inside them, including a doomed John ghost that Vriska once dated. Those ghosts are toast.

According to Vriska, the ones who plan to oppose the time-travelling demon are on three different quests. She has heard someone is trying to find an alien ghost before English does, and someone is trying to raise an army to challenge him directly. The third quest is Vriska’s own. She and Tavros are on a treasure hunt. She believes somewhere in the void there is an artefact that can defeat English forever.

The problem with treasure hunting in the Furthest Ring is that the spacetime of the Ring bends entirely to the will of the Horrorterrors. That means there have been no permanent locations or bearings until now. But Lrd English is giving his would-be challengers something to work with. Every time he smashes a bubble, more cracks appear in the void. These cracks are permanent, reliable landmarks. Vriska has been using them to flesh out the maps that will lead her to the treasure. To explore further, she needs English to keep making new cracks in the Ring.

Meenah is the one responsible for the ghost army plan. When she sees Lrd English smash a bubble, she decides to come out of solitude and get the Beforan gang back together. She speaks to all eleven of her erstwhile bomb victims, hoping they will come and fight English with her. But none of them want to fight.

• Aranea plans to act but rejects Meenah’s foolhardy strategy. Aranea is the one looking for the alien ghost instead. She claims to know that this ghost is a cherub, the sister of the one who became Lrd English, and that they will have the upper hand if they find her before he does.

• Latula’s too busy perfecting her radgirl kickflips and handplants.

• Porrim likes the idea but doesn’t believe she can help. She suggests Meenah try to find out who among them reached the god tiers before dying. She coins the word “dancestor” to describe the relationship between two players who regard each other’s scratched incarnations as their ancestors.

• Kankri is seizing the rare opportunity afforded by the meteor passing through his bubble to meet his dancestor, Karkat, and teach Karkat the discipline of Problematics as it is practiced by some users of bubblr, the social media platform for troll ghosts. Problematics is a social study that uses inclusive and sensitive criticism to validate everyone’s self-applied labels and to raise awareness of all forms of privilege, however slight, except for sexism. Karkat cannot believe how much sanctimonious garbage comes out of this asshole’s mouth.

• Cronus just doesn’t think he’s in an aggressive space now in his afterlife. His self-absorbed “sensitivity” is stronger than his impulse to score points with attractive people.

• Mituna’s got brain problems.

• Kurloz is, perforce, tight-lipped. He sewed his mouth shut before their session began and now he is a complete enigma. No one knows that he hypnotizes Meulin with his chucklevoodoos, that he worships Lrd English as the “Angel of Double Death”, or that he has been assembling an obscene god tier outfit for his dancestor, Gamzee.

• Meulin’s preoccupied with her hypothetical matchmaking and miracles of the heart.

• Rufioh mistakes Meenah’s question for a come-on since everyone is always hitting on him. He’s not brave enough to fight anyway.

• Horuss offers to build Meenah an army of sweat-powered horse robots, but will not pit his own strength against another’s.

• Damara is out of the question. When Rufioh cheated on her with Horuss, she became an unhinged nihilist and the party’s biggest troublemaker.

Meenah also approaches some of the kids and Alternian trolls, who are similarly unwilling to fight except for Karkat. Karkat is dreaming and can’t leave the meteor, but he promises to join her if they meet up again when he is awake. She appoints him Grand Threshecutioner of her army of none.

Finally, Meenah approaches Vriska, who has decided to raise her own mob of ghosts to bait English into furthering her treasure hunt. Learning that their plans are in conflict, they challenge each other. Meenah forks John awake again. He wakes up on his driveway, amazed to find himself still holding the ring he picked up in his dream.

The Thief of Life and the Thief of Light are set to rumble when they make the mistake of calling for backup. A huge crowd of troll ghosts gather, most of them mistaking the situation for a costume party and frustrating the thieves’ attempts to fight. There are only twenty-four troll players by name, but for each one who lived in the alpha timeline there are a multitude of ghosts who died in doomed offshoot timelines. Tavros weaves frantically through the crowd, looking for the ring, hoping in vain that John dropped it.

Aranea tries to broker peace between her best friend and her dancestor. She can’t stop them from fighting, but she does get them to agree that they will combine their plans if their duel ends in a draw.

They fight.

Rose makes liquor, starts dating Kanaya redwise, and learns that Terezi is dating Gamzee blackwise. There are signs that Rose’s drinking will become a problem. Dave works on his raps.