Of Gods and Tricksters

Five months pass in the Alpha session.

Jane, Jake, Roxy, and Dirk make no real game progress. They explore the Medium a little, but the skeletons populating their lands are hard to kill and don’t yield enough grist. The Nobles spend what little they find on alchemy and totally neglect their server duties. 153 days into the Sburb Alpha session, their houses are no closer to the Seven Gates than they were at entry.

Then again, they are in a void session with no way to do the Ultimate Alchemy. Their incipisphere has no Battlefield, no frogs, and no Forge. Why try to reach Skaia when there is nothing at the centre? Thanks to Calliope and the long-extinct consorts, the Nobles know they have to wait for four more heroes to join their game before they can win. So they wait.

The clown who once greeted Jane at her house has travelled to the other kids’ houses and wrought more mischief with their sprites. He threw Eridan and Sollux’s bodies into Jake’s kernelsprite, making Erisolsprite. He threw Feferi and Nepeta’s bodies into Roxy’s kernelsprite, dashing Roxy’s hopes of making Momsprite from the paradox slime she collected in the lab. And on Lotak, Dirk’s vigilance and dwindling stock of orange soda bribes are all that stand between his unprototyped sprite and the last dismembered troll body in Gamzee’s “chest of whimsy.”

Jake has had enough of dating Dirk and has slipped home to Lomax. He calls up Jane, who is decorating cakes for her sweet sixteen at Roxy’s house. Jake pours his heart out to Jane after ignoring her for weeks and forgetting her birthday invitation. It is painful for Jane to entertain the rambling, egotistical “relationship woes” of a boy who still cannot see that she has feelings of her own. She blows up at him, smashes some stuff, and runs away to Locah.

At home, Jane’s misery increases when Caliborn jeers her out of the blue. Caliborn has started finding keys that unlock the video antenna towers in his dead session. These towers reward him with views of the Alpha session that he and Calliope were never able to see in the Trollian viewport. After seeing many of Jane’s private moments, Caliborn tells her how pleased he is to see her get fat while her Dad gets brutalized and killed in Derse jail. This is a lie, calculated to tip Jane into despair. Dad Crocker is fine. He is enjoying cushy VIP treatment and social media stardom on Derse because the Draconian Dignitary admires his businesslike fashion sense. But Jane doesn’t know that.

Meanwhile, a second human gets put in jail. When Jane leaves Roxy alone with GCat, the First Guardian teleports Roxy straight to its master, the Condesce. Roxy falls to Derse from a great height and gets knocked out.

Now that she has no dreamself, Roxy starts dreaming in a bubble. In her dream, she recalls writing Wizardy Herbert, a self-parodying novel about children at a magic summer camp, Herbert and Beatrix, who recognize that they are inside a story that represents little Roxy’s earliest attempts at Complacency fanfiction.

Disguised as Twinkly Herbert the firefly, Calliope’s ghost enters the dream and leads Roxy into a silent sanctuary where she has been hiding ever since she died. Calliope greets Roxy wearing her trollsona. She is uncomfortable being a cherub and would rather be a troll.

Callie reports that her brother has become Lrd English. He is chasing an army of ghosts around the Furthest Ring, hoping to find and annihilate her soul. There are rumours that the Calliope he is looking for is one who predominated and died in a doomed timeline. Callie thinks she should look for this other Calliope too. But for now, she is just hiding.

Callie tells Roxy to focus on her game session. She says Roxy and the other Nobles should go die in their quest crypts in order to reach the god tiers and prevail in the next day’s battle.

At this point, a dreaming Rose stumbles across Callie and Roxy’s bubble. Callie panics, fearing the Seer of Light will draw attention to her hiding place. She shooes Rose and Roxy out to the waking world before they can get acquainted.

Roxy wakes in a jail cell on Derse. She learns that Betty Crocker has a job for her. The Courtyard Droll gives Roxy the Black Queen’s ring of orbs nofold, presumably to boost her voidy powers so she can do this job. But the job is stupid and impossible and Roxy is not willing to help the cruel Batterwitch.

Wearing the ring, Roxy learns how to become invisible and immaterial. She sneaks out of the hag slammer. While walking around unseen by the Dersites, she messages her co-players to tell them about god tiering. Alas, she is invisible online too. None of the kids read her messages.

On Lotak, Lil Hal wants to be put into the kernelsprite, but Dirk is not inclined to honour his promise. Dirk thinks his AI self already sabotages his relationships and controls his life too much without sprite powers. In his bitterness, Dirk comes close to killing the Auto Responder. By the time he backs down, Gamzee has gotten to the kernelsprite first. But Equiusprite can receive one more prototyping, so Dirk throws AR in anyway, making Arquiusprite.

Arquiusprite loves being strong and loves horses. Why horses? Is it supposed to be ironic or something, that his very desire is to be in the proximity of some horses? Just think it over. Think it over.

Caliborn jeers Jake with the stated aim of grooming a worthy adversary. Caliborn says it is inevitable that the Lord of Time will come to dominate all of existence, no matter how much he must suffer and toil first. The Page of Hope, on the other hand, is worthless by default and must be given a free powerup before he can hope to challenge the Lord.

Caliborn gives Jake the code for his old juju, a wondrous object that cannot be duplicated. It will leave Caliborn’s possession once it is created somewhere else. When combined with his sister’s juju, its beneviolent effect will be great indeed. Caliborn would have combined them himself but found Calliope’s half missing. Instead, he parts with his half after welcoming an even better juju into his life, the fluffy false man Lil Cal, which Gamzee dug out of the dead dry Earth. Caliborn has bonded with the puppet. He knows someday, somehow, he will use Lil Cal to inflict his hideous soul on everybody who ever shares a universe with it.

Jake doesn’t want Caliborn’s hand-me-downs. He passes the code on to Jane. At the same time, Jane receives a single message from Calliope. Before Calliope died, she followed a suggestion from Skaia’s cloud visions and sent the miserable birthday girl the code for her old juju. So Jane finds herself holding both codes.

Jane reads these messages on the only communicator she has left, a Crockercorp tiaratop, which makes her available to the Baroness’s tacky style of mind control. She throws off the tiara in disgust, but she doesn’t break it like she broke her other devices.

Jane makes the juju items. They are both lollipops, and they fuse together forming a sucker coloured with a red and green spiral. Jane is irresistably drawn to lick it. The juju’s asshole candy magic turns her into Trickster Jane, superpowered and super peachy.

Trickster Jane flies from Locah to Lomax and spreads the enchantment to Jake. He becomes Trickster Jake. Then they take Erisolsprite with them to Derse and infect Roxy. She becomes Trickster Roxy.

Roxy is alcoholic. She has carefully stayed sober for months despite living in a house full of booze. But as Trickster Roxy, she instantly falls off the wagon. When she takes Jane and Jake home to pick up Fefetasprite, the Tricksters and the tag-along Courtyard Droll all get shitfaced and throw bottles around.

The last stop on their candy giggle rampage is Lotak, where they turn Dirk into Trickster Dirk. But unlike the others, Dirk’s mind is not altered by the juju magic. Even after succumbing to the fabled peachbirth trance of the jokebollocks, he is still unhappy and unable to pretend that all his personal problems have been solved.

Arquiusprite meets Fefetasprite and has a pang of guilt for causing Nepeta’s death. But his apology to the Nepeta half goes even worse than Erisolsprite’s apology to the Feferi half. Their bickering makes Fefetasprite explode.

The Tricksters alchemize a bunch of zilly weapons from cherubim folklore including a Warhammer that ends up with John during his session, a couple of zilly rapping robots, and a disgusting surfeit of zilly Santa figurines.

Whatever else the kids do under the Trickster influence goes unrecorded. Caliborn next sees them suffering the aftereffects. This upsets him, because he loved the Tricksters and wanted to see everything they did. With a bit of teamwork, a concept new to the antisocial child, he and Gamzee unlock the next two monitors. They combine their chucklevoodoos to send a care package to Archagent Jack Noir in the kids’ session, who is still in jail on Prospit.

The Nobles come to in their quest crypts. Dirk and Roxy are in the crypt of Derse’s moon. Jake and Jane are in the crypt of Prospit’s moon. They are lying on sacrificial slabs bearing the symbols of Heart, Void, Hope, and Life, and they have hangovers.

They all know they must die on their slabs in order to rise up, but the only thing they kill is time. They proceed to have the most uncomfortable long-distance feelings jam in the history of Paradox Space. Due to regrets and hand wringing, some of them aren’t talking to each other. Jane and Dirk look back on the Jakestakes which divided them. Jake agonizes to Roxy about being a bad friend and a coward. Roxy opens up to Jane about her struggle with drink and to Jake about her fruitless pursuit of Dirk. Dirk praises Roxy for being the strongest of them all.

It becomes clear that the Nobles’ enemies will slay them before they do it themselves. Jack Noir’s care package contains Crowbar’s crowbar and the instance of Lil Cal that Gamzee gave to the Droll when he arrived in the kids’ session. When Jack looks into Lil Cal’s eyes, he is hypnotized and undergoes a completely bonkers transformation. He cuts his eyes out and puts Cal’s eyes in his sockets. They change into Lrd English’s table stickball eyes. Jack saws off his shackled leg, glows with weird power, vaporizes half of Prospit around him, and emerges wielding the crowbar. Then he turns his crazy bastard gaze towards Prospit’s moon and fires his mouth laser. Meanwhile, the Condesce turns her psionic tyrant gaze towards Derse’s moon and fires her eye lasers. Prospit’s moon and Derse’s moon blow up. The life lanterns on Locah blow up.

The kids die and ascend to godhood. Jane rises up as the Maid of Life. Jake rises up as the Page of Hope. Roxy rises up as the Rogue of Void. Dirk rises up as the Prince of Heart.

Jade and John’s three-year voyage is over. Their battleship bursts through the fourth wall that Jake left at the Slab of the Jaded Fool’s Ennui. Jade restores the Prospitian battleship to its proper size and sets it down on Lomax. The sprites disembark and fly out into the Medium. Casey, the Viceroy Bubbles Von Salamancer, raises an army of amphibian skeletons for a purpose only to be seen much later.

Now that she is back in a session, Jade can teleport again. She goes straight to the exploded remains of Prospit to meet her post-scratch parents. Finding the Archagent lunging at Jane and Jake with maniac intent, Jade stops Jack and teleports him to the edge of the Furthest Ring, where he will not trouble anyone for some time.

This is when the Condesce springs her trap. The troll queen inflicts a mixture of psychic powers on Jade, who has been part dog and susceptible to bronze-blooded animal communion since merging with Becsprite. Jade goes grimbark and falls under Condy’s command. Jade locates the Crockercorp tiaratop and teleports it right onto Jane’s head. The device corrupts Jane and flips her cuckoo fruitcake switch.

From this moment on, Jade and Jane obey Her Imperious Condescension.

Among the exploded remains of Derse’s moon, Dirk and Roxy face the Condesce herself. But before Dirk can close the distance, Jade appears and teleports him to the edge of the Furthest Ring, where he will not trouble anyone for some time. Roxy makes no move. Meanwhile, Jane plants a spanking haymaker on Jake’s old breadbasket and hauls his ass away.

Jade and Jane stick Roxy and Jake in separate jail cells on Derse.

Where is John in all this? He’s fast asleep on the battleship, having a lengthy and informative dream. He meets Vriska again in the Furthest Ring.

Evidently, Vriska’s ministrife with Meenah ended in a draw, because they have combined their ghost army plans and are working together with Aranea. It’s still mostly Vriska’s plan. Meenah is happy as long as she gets to say she’s in charge. Aranea has given up her search for the ghost of Calliope, but it is convenient for the trio that their enemy seems to think he will find Calliope by following them.

The Serkets are mindjacking some troll ghost suckers and using the resulting crowds as bait to draw Lrd English to areas of the Ring where his terrible ghost-killing breath will crack space and fill the gaps in Vriska’s treasure maps. They have sacrificed thousands of ghosts in this way. Soon they will reach the treasure, which they hope to use as a weapon against the unstoppable Lord of Time.

When John finds them, their treasure hunt has taken on a fun petticoat seagrift theme. Their pirate buddies include Tavros, Nepeta, and Feferi. Aradia and Sollux are also on board as specialists. Sollux is now fully alive after Erisolsprite took his dead half. John spends his whole dream sailing with the gamblignants, hearing their news and stories.

During the last leg of their voyage, Aranea tells what she knows about the origin of Lrd English.

Aranea begins by describing the cosmic, caliginous, serpentine mating dance of adult cherubim. One cherub, after losing to its mate, laid an egg on the dead dry Earth and then flew away. Earth had been relocated to another universe. It now orbited a star nearing supernova. From the egg hatched Calliope and Caliborn. Like other cherubim, their personalities divided in infancy and began to vie for dominance over their body. But here the cherub norms ended.

For two reasons, Cal’s childhood was not typical of their species. First, there was an enigmatic acolyte on Earth who prepared for their arrival, cared for them, and then locked them in a room for most of their lives. Second, they were fated to play Sburb, the game in which universes procreate. Such a willful creature as Caliborn would upset the balance of all Paradox Space if he were allowed to play this game, and so he did.

(Aranea does not know that the acolyte was Gamzee, or that he followed Caliborn into the Medium and served him there too.)

Caliborn predominated over Calliope, who had hoped in vain that they would play together. Instead, Caliborn played alone. He entered a dead session, the most solitary and empty and unwinnable kind.

After a bunch of tedium, Caliborn made it to his denizen, Yaldabaoth. The god of monsters offered Caliborn the most radical choice any player could make: either magnanimous martyrdom, or constant conquest.

When Caliborn chose the path of the conqueror, he was forced to prove himself in a unique challenge. His Medium became a game of eight-ball pool. After three planets sank in the break, his task was to pocket the remaining twelve by propelling them into the singularity that was once Skaia. Each conquered planet rewarded him with a baize-skinned leprechaun servant with silly time powers, and so by pocketing all the planets he assembled his entourage, The Felt.

(Aranea does not know that Caliborn continued to talk to the Author and badger him with questions about The Felt throughout the pool game.)

Winning the pool game unlocked Caliborn’s true land, the Land of Colours and Mayhem, where he would tool up and then face his denizen again. By defeating Yaldabaoth in battle, Caliborn earned the seemingly impossible boons of immortality and limitless power. His soul was then channeled into a juju that would bring unfathomable evil and destruction to any realm in which it materialized.

(There are critical gaps in Aranea’s knowledge of this last part. It’s all revealed in the next Act Act.)

The path to the treasure ends in a memory of a green skull cave. The pirate crew disembark and enter the cave.

On the way in, Aranea tries to tell a story about a pair of legendary rings whose fates are intertwined. The Ring of Void was a Black Queen’s ring of orbs nofold whose wearer could vanish into obscurity. The Ring of Life, first discovered by travelers in a desert, could bring ghosts back to life.

At this point, Vriska has a dramatic outburst that derails Aranea’s story and causes one of the most mindless amporatry slams in the history of Paradox Space. Vriska was in a memory of sand and zephyr when she rejected the Author’s marriage proposal. Tavros and John later found the Author’s ring in the same spot. Vriska realizes now that the place and the object match Aranea’s description. She almost had the Ring of Life herself.

Vriska grills Tavros and orders him to help her look for the ring again. Tavros gets fed up with her unpleasantness and quits the expedition. Sollux, Nepeta, and Feferi follow his lead, ollying outie while Vriska curses their mutiny.

John reveals that he has the Ring of Life in the waking world. It came with him when he woke up last time. But he disappoints Vriska by not agreeing to give it to her. He doesn’t like how she has trashed the afterlife to find this treasure, and he would rather decide freely what to do with the ring.

Playtime is over. Vriska throws off her captain’s overcoat, defends her actions as the greater good on a scale beyond measuring—Lrd English destroys universes, remember?—and leads them the rest of the way to the treasure.

Kurloz Makara picks up the overcoat.

Vriska explains why they have been seeking this particular juju. It is a bit of loot that English got for slaying his denizen. He used it only once as a weapon. After that, it could only be used against him, so he buried it in the void where he thought it would not be found. Vriska doesn’t know what it could be, but she hopes to wield it against Lrd English and kill him for good.

Meenah, Aranea, Aradia and John watch as Vriska opens the chest and dumps the treasure out. It’s a hole in canon, shaped like the Sburb house logo. Vriska says she invited Aradia to help move it with her rust-blooded telekinesis because it is intangible.

This piques John’s curiosity. He tries touching the house juju and puts his hand all the way through it. John’s arm retroactively appears in many places throughout the Homestuck canon, even in meta-fictions like the Midnight Crew adventure and the Mad Snacks Yo video game. Other characters never seem to notice the disembodied arms.

Before John can retrieve his arm from the house thing, he gets blurry and disappears, denying Meenah the coveted three-pointed hat trick. His sleeping body also disappears from the couch on the battleship.

John begins to travel through canonspace. He retroactively appears on the sidelines of several scenes in the Homestuck canon, even in meta-fictions. He is in each place for only a moment before disappearing and jumping to the next. He can’t control the jumps.

Caliborn has recruited the last Felt member, Cans. He reaches the eight ball in his game of pool with planets when he is first haunted by the blue male hero ghost. At least, that is how Caliborn regards John for some reason. John isn’t a ghost. They stare each other down until Cans clocks John out of frame.

John reappears on Lomax and catches a break from his involuntary canon hopping. He gets his bearings and realizes he has arrived in the post-scratch Medium. He rests at the Slab of the Jaded Fool’s Ennui.

Rose, Dave, Karkat, Kanaya, Terezi, Gamzee, and the Mayor’s three-year voyage is over. The meteor flies out of the Furthest Ring and into the Medium at great speed. Gamzee is the only player who is ready to go where destiny will take him. The others are woefully unequipped for what they will face in this session.

Worst off are Rose and Terezi, whose decisions have led to substance abuse and clouded their abilities. Rose became alcoholic and in denial about it. Terezi fell into kismesissitude with the unruly jester, who hooked her on the sweet drink and eroded her self-esteem. After she got Aranea to restore her eyesight the next time they met, Terezi regretted fixing what was never broken. At age sixteen, the Seers are a mess.

Everyone is on the roof, debating how to get off the rock, when Grimbark Jade surprises them with the answer. She teleports them all to Lomax and they fall on the grass next to John—all except Gamzee, who remains on the meteor. John is thrilled to finally see his friends.

Five more characters are converging on the Medium from four directions, and three of them are Jack Noir. First, the Sovereign Slayer has been flying behind the meteor for three years, the Prospitian Monarch hot on his heels. They still wear the fourfold rings that give them Bec’s powers and loyalty to Jade. Second, Dirk and the Archagent corrupted by Lil Cal are flying back from where Jade dumped them outside the Incipisphere. Third, the cyborg Spades Slick is rocketing into town carrying the Golden Cuestaff and the entire Felt. What?

After the Author threw him into the sea, Spades Slick climbed back into Hussie’s house. Slick finds his caregiver shot to death by Lrd English, who tossed the murder weapon and left. Slick picks up the weapon and finds the Author’s servant, Ms. Paint.

Ms. Paint retrieves Slick’s personals, among which is Die’s voodoo doll. The doll moves you to a different timeline when you remove a pin or stick one in. The corresponding Felt member will be dead in this timeline if his pin is in the doll, alive if not. Slick gets the idea of using Lrd English’s own gang against him. He pulls every pin except Snowman’s. The Felt stand before him and accept his command. He appoints Ms. Paint as their new eight ball. A centaur butler lusus tags along too.

Spades Slick and his new crew climb through the Fifth Wall between the Author’s place and the ruin of Doc Scratch’s apartment. Scratch’s home is not a comfortable base of operations now that it’s inside the Green Sun, so Crowbar leads Slick to the judgment clock, which doubles as an emergency exit.

Slick loads the entire gang into Biscuits’s oven and steps through the clock. He opens the other side and pops out of a ~ATH server box in the Furthest Ring. He spots the glow of Skaia in the distance and blasts off toward it.

Disc 2 of Homestuck runs out of content and spins down. There is no Disc 3. No more of Homestuck can be told until another source of content is found. Caliborn laughs wickedly at our predicament. In Act 6 Act 6, Caliborn will fully control the narrative medium he once unlocked, and he will use it to replace Homestuck with a story of his own making.