DARK NIGHT OF THE FEELINGS

Beaten up by a teen, Caliborn looks inward. He cries woe as a misunderstood artist, drops manga, and swears to reinvent himself. Homosuck becomes a plea for sympathy and funding as Caliborn begins work on the next and final act, which will be his masterpiece.

Dirk and John arrive back in the session after the fight is over. John flies around the debris of six collided planets. He finds Dirk gazing at the catastrophe, blaming himself for not preventing it.

The supercartridge’s Special Stardust settles thicker than ever on Dirk and the broken planets until they dissolve into one hazy mass of visual noise. John is left still wondering what the fuck happened here.

Roxy carries Rose away from the noise. John follows and joins them on Roxy’s intact planet, the Land of Pyramids and Neon, or Lopan. The terminally forked-up Rose regains consciousness long enough to speak to Roxy. She regrets never telling Kanaya and Mom that she loved them. In this, she makes no distinction between her childhood Mom and the new one kneeling beside her.

Rose succumbs to her chest wound. Her death is judged heroic.

John and Roxy console each other. They contemplate fixing things, but it seems hopeless. All their friends are dead or lost in the noise, and John never figured out how to put his canon hops to good use.

Roxy thinks they may now be in a doomed timeline. If this is Game Over, then there is nothing more to do but join the dreaming dead.

The only other surviving player, Terezi, ganks the ruby slippers from Jade’s corpse and then jetpacks to a crash landing in front of John and Roxy.

The crash is the least of Terezi’s injuries. Dripping blood from her juggalo fight and impalement, she answers the stupidest question ever asked in Paradox Space by headbutting John to the ground. Terezi has no time for John’s dithering. She is dying. She knows he has a power that can undo everything that went wrong. This power is the only thing that matters now.

John’s denizen Typheus still slumbers in the other intact planet, the Land of Wind and Shade, or Lowas. Roxy suggests Typheus could help John master his zaps. John agrees, but he won’t let Roxy sit around and get erased when the timeline changes. He makes her visit her denizen too, even if they don’t know what good it will do.

After seeing Roxy off, Terezi and John realize they have no plan. Where should John zap to, and what should he change? Terezi feels like a rubbish Seer of Mind with no ability to guide him. But he asks her to try anyway. Terezi has John pick a thought to attach to this moment, the phrase “there’s no place like home.” Then she racks her brain doing a mindy thing which seems to fail. John will have to figure it out on his own. He leaves for Lowas.

We don’t see John’s audience with Typheus first-hand. It comes to us instead as a story shared between dreamers in a bubble.

The ghost of Calliope is lonely in her hiding place. She wants to search the Furthest Ring for the other Calliope she has heard of, the one who predominated, but she fears her brother will find her if she tries.

A change of scenery warns the cherub that she has a visitor. She puts on her trollsona before greeting the other dreamer. It is Jade, who cannot recall her recent past. Calliope introduces herself as Callie. She explains that she is not a troll but prefers to look like one. This gets Jade interested in doing the same. They have fun designing Jade’s trollsona together.

Jade doesn’t know whether she is sleeping or dead. We’re led to think she’s the Jade who was flattened by her house, because the scene with Callie begins right after Jade’s death in Act 6-6-2. But as their conversation unfolds in 6-6-4, we learn she’s a different Jade whose timeline was created by a retjohn.

Jade gets back her memories of losing her friends, grieving, dreaming, and encountering the ghost of Calliope who predominated. This Calliope vanquished her brother Caliborn to become the sole occupant of her body, then rose up as the god-tier Muse of Space and died in a doomed timeline. While they shared a bubble, the Muse told Jade a story about John and herself. Jade now repeats it for Callie, who illustrates the story in her ~ath scrapbook.

At first, the Muse told Jade what she already knew: in the first year of the voyage along the Yellow Yard, John and Davesprite were on the surface of miniaturized Lowas when the planet exploded and killed them. For the ship’s crew, that was when events diverged from those of the Game Over timeline. Jade was aghast and heartbroken. She could do nothing about it. She spent the next three years in a deep funk. Then she dreamed and met the Muse.

The Muse was able to explain why it happened. Typheus blew up Lowas because, in the Game Over timeline, John had struck a bargain with Typheus which required the erasure of this timeline’s John and his land. Finally having a reason for the tragedy, Jade felt a little better.

Drawing pictures of John’s return to Lowas after Game Over, Callie leaves out the glitchy stardust noise that would have hindered a first-hand view. John descends into his denizen’s palace and stands before the great hideous snake. The planet, in cryptic bits and pieces, had given John the quest of clearing its oily pipes and then playing a song through those pipes to chase away the clouds and free the fireflies. John never faced this task, but now he must.

Typheus floods the audience chamber with crude oil. John is forced to do something with his power or drown. Instead of zapping himself away, he zaps away the oil. All of the oil on Lowas is dispersed to other parts of Homestuck canon. Little black smears retroactively appear to have always been there on a hundred pages.

John returns to the pipe organ he passed on the way down. He plays his song. A mighty wind blows through the pipes, encircling the planet, disspelling the clouds, and knocking the Special Stardust and candy corn out of the Supercartridge Expansion Pack.

When Jade has told Callie all she can, Jane enters their bubble and finally meets her alien friend in person. She joins in on their troll cosplay.

Jane’s memories are just as scattered as Jade’s were, but after some discussion she recalls what happened after Jade entered the session. Callie keeps illustrating as Jane tells her story.

Just as in the Game Over timeline, the Condesce made Jade and Jane her servants, banished Dirk, and imprisoned Jake and Roxy. But this time, when Jade went to hijack the meteor and scatter its riders, she failed and dropped out of contact.

The meteor crew raided Derse to rescue Roxy and Jake. The hypnotized Jane threw her culling fork at Rose, but Roxy leapt in front and took it for the team. Her death was judged heroic. Jane was about to do the lifey thing to resurrect Roxy when she was stopped by an unknown hero who had been retjohned back into the crew. Jane remembers nothing more.

After shelving their plan, Vriska and Meenah just wander through dream bubbles. They become close. Vriska’s straight-edge, hyper-competitive attitude dissolves. She gets dreadlocks, piercings, and a tattoo. She makes peace with the idea of doing nothing important in the afterlife. They roll down Horse Mountain and kiss.

John’s song has teleported Lowas to a blank place beyond all canon locations. On his way back to his house, John finds Roxy, who came along for the ride because she flew straight to Lowas after meeting Lopan’s denizen Nix.

Feeling no urgency while they are literally nowhere, John and Roxy compare their denizen encounters. Although Roxy was not challenged to do a new hero thing like John was, they both had their denizens explain the choice they are to make. If they accept oblivion, other timelines will never know what happened in this one. On the other hand, if they stay in the game by changing history and entering the timeline created by their intervention, they will supplant other versions of themselves and make their friends feel the same grief that John and Roxy felt after Game Over. This was not a dilemma for the friendleaders. They are both determined to play on.

John flies away to change history. While he is gone, Roxy and the salamanders give Rose a proper burial. Roxy meets Jaspersprite, the reincarnation of her beloved cat Frigglish. There are still more sprites who have survived Game Over and taken passage on this planet. We will see who in the next act.

John’s first few controlled canon jumps don’t take him anywhere relevant, except to close the loop on his appearance in Dave and Jade’s sparring scene. He needs to find scenes he can retcon to set things right. He realizes that Terezi gave him one such scene to fix when her shot in the dark failed. She also gave him a way to find it again.

By focusing on the attached thought, “there’s no place like home,” John zaps back to Terezi doing the mindy thing and makes it succeed. Now there are two Johns. The John who hasn’t gone to Typheus yet can’t be the John who came back, but he goes anyway, possibly to meet a different fate.

Now that Terezi knows she can use key thoughts to send John to any scene, she puts together a plan for him to undo her mistakes with a precise sequence of subtle interventions. She writes the plan in her own teal blood on the scarf she wore as a blindfold.

Terezi’s life is spent. Ever the diligent forensic inspector, she falls dead onto her own chalk outline.

The first key word on Terezi’s scarf, “r3un1on”, leads John back to the big reunion at the Slab of the Jaded Fool’s Ennui. This is just a reference point for John to get his ring back, but before he does, he bewilders everyone with his fond embraces and reminiscing over conversations they haven’t had yet.

The word “fr4m3d” takes John to Terezi’s courtblock playtime on Alternia. As instructed, he makes off with the plush scalemate witness to Lemonsnout’s crimes who was about to be stabbed through the chest.

The word “mom3nt” takes John to Terezi’s house tower in the Land of Thought and Flow. While Terezi trolls Karkat, John chalks the message “you don’t need him” around the corner.

The word “murd3r” takes John to the meteor lab where Terezi and her scalemate helpers are investigating Tavros’s death by impalement. John places the witness plush for Terezi to find. He wonders if the scarf is playing silly buggers with him. How could these changes possibly be relevant?

The word “just1c3” takes John to Nepeta’s corpse before Terezi finds it. He chalks a message over the planted evidence, pointing out that it’s Gamzee framing Vriska.

The word “honk” takes John to the Drop Inn, where Gamzee is flash-stepping around the oblivious Terezi. John honks a bike horn to make Terezi catch Gamzee in the act. She hogties Gamzee and carries him to the roof. John takes a door to the whole body for his trouble.

The word “fl1p” takes John to the rooftop, where Terezi has given Vriska the ultimatum of stay or “go”. Knowing in advance that Gamzee did some of the murders has not changed her resolve to stop Vriska. John lays Vriska out cold before Terezi can repeat the act she regretted the most. Finally he comes clean to Terezi about his interventions and the bad end he has averted by saving Vriska’s life.

Terezi and Karkat flip out at John’s presence and demand answers, but John does not feel the need to explain all his mutha fuckin shenanigans. He leaves them to their three-year voyage.

John returns to Roxy, gives her the Ring of Life, and zaps them and Lowas back into canon to discover the new reality he has created.

Jade remembers the final piece of the story she and Jane have been telling Callie. They both assumed they are dead because they lost consciousness while opposing the other heroes. But the mystery hero was Vriska, who simply put them to sleep, and asleep they remain.