MASTERPIECE

The curtains rise on the finale of Homosuck. It’s not about Caliborn’s knockoff characters anymore. For his masterpiece, the cherub has rendered in claymation a vision of his own fate, or, as he puts it, “a spoiler to the ending of things.”

One of the monitors Caliborn unlocked in his land showed him what he took to be a scene from his future, after he wins his pool ball eyes and treasure chest for slaying his denizen. He also has the Ring of Void. Perhaps Gamzee stole that ring from Trickster Roxy after she proposed to Dirk.

The Lord of Time is celebrating his victory with his followers Gamzee, Lil Seb, and Lil Cal, when he is plunged into another fight. The eight god-tier kids crash the party.

Caliborn acts fast. He opens the chest and uses the house juju on his enemies. John, Rose, Dave, and Jade are sucked into the juju and trapped there. This changes the juju into a hole in canon. Like Vriska said, Caliborn can only wield this weapon once, and then it can be wielded against him. So, using the Ring of Void, Caliborn sends the juju containing the beta kids to the Furthest Ring where it will never be found. (Vriska found it in Act 6–5.)

Only Jane, Jake, Roxy, and Dirk remain in the fight. Gamzee gets split in half again. Caliborn gains the upper hand and pummels the Nobles. The Page of Hope and Prince of Heart are first to recover, hitting the Lordling with a powerful hope field and then soul-ripping pink lightning.

Caliborn evades Dirk’s spell until the muscular Arquiusprite surprises everyone with a herd of robot horses and gets Caliborn in a headlock.

Dirk uses the hollow vessel Lil Cal to hold Caliborn’s ripped-out soul. Sadly, the spell also catches Arquiusprite’s soul and half of Gamzee’s. With all those powerful personalities sealed behind Lil Cal’s baby blues, the alpha kids regard the puppet as a dormant danger. The Rogue of Void banishes it forever.

The vision ends here. After narrating his future downfall, Caliborn predicts that Lil Cal will resurface in the nightmares of many universes and release its trapped souls in the form of Lrd English.

The curtains fall on Homosuck. Caliborn relinquishes the narrative prompt and goes to battle Yaldabaoth.

The revelation of Lil Cal’s hybrid nature hits the reader like a brick. We realize how, all this time, Lrd English and his puppet servant Doc Scratch have embodied a fusion of Caliborn’s soul with those of Equius, Auto Responder, and Gamzee.

Enough of that. Now that John and Terezi have rewritten history to spare Vriska, it’s time to see the retcon’s effect as the meteor repeats its three-year voyage with Vriska alive this time. Vriska’s presence profoundly improves the team dynamic.

Some events play out the same. As before, Dave, Rose, and the Vagabond join the crew while Sollux and Aradia stay in the Furthest Ring.

The rooftop meeting starts with Gamzee hog-tied instead of pap-shooshed. Vriska neutralizes Gamzee’s antics for the rest of the trip. She gives him no opportunity to toy with Karkat’s pale affections or Terezi’s caliginous ones. She foils whatever he was plotting with his dancestor Kurloz. She takes his place in hoarding the corpses and Aradia’s music boxes too.

Until now, we have only seen Terezi and Vriska in bitter schism after Vriska’s flarping misdeeds. In their youth, these two were the inseperable Team Scourge. Now they are back. The retcon lets Terezi forgive Vriska and restore their old bond. They become moirails.

With those two off gigglescheming, Karkat and Dave turn to each other for companionship instead of fighting over Terezi. They become something more than friends.

As before, Rose and Kanaya fall in love. Vriska third-wheels on them and puts a stop to Rose’s drinking as soon as she sees it.

The crew meet their dancestors as they fly through dream bubbles. Vriska’s yawning disdain for the Beforan ghosts tempers Terezi’s fascination with them. Terezi is never tempted to regain her eyesight. Her crewmates find the ghosts more approachable.

Vriska sees her punk-styled ghost self with Meenah. She learns that they possess the secret weapon to be used against Lrd English and aren’t using it.

While the meteor is in transit, Vriska scouts ahead with Aradia’s time machine. She enters the Alpha kids’ Medium, gathers intel, and prepares the ground for the final battle. She wants her teammates to handle the session’s bosses without her. That way, when the time comes, she can return to the Furthest Ring to take on the biggest boss.

Taking Gamzee’s place as the mischievous dispenser of spirit guides, Vriska greets the Nobles, prototyping their sprites with her stock of refrigerated cadavers.

• Jane gets the undivided Tavrosprite, singly prototyped, with room for a tactical second prototyping later on.

• As before, Dirk and his visitor collaborate to make Arquiusprite, doubly prototyped with Equius and Auto Responder.

• Jake and Roxy’s kernelsprites are untouched, with room for two prototypings each. There is no Erisol or Fefeta this time.

Vriska explains later that her prototyping decisions were part atonement, part strategy, and part recusal.

Other than that, Vriska lets the first five months of the alpha session play out the same way, including the trickster episode, god tier attainment, Casey’s skeleton army, and Her Imperious Condescension springing her psychic trap on Jade and Jane.

Among other tidbits, Vriska learns that a replacement John, Roxy, and planet Lowas will show up. They will be followed by Dirk, three Jack Noirs, the Prospitian Monarch, and an ovenful of leprechauns, all flying in from the Incipisphere’s outer edge.

We heard before how the crew dealt with Betty Crocker’s servants upon their arrival. First they put Grimbark Jade to sleep when she came to meet them. Then they mounted a raid on Derse. They rescued Jake, zonked Battermaid Jane, and lost Roxy in battle.

Jade and Jane related these events to Callie in a dream. Their dream continues in this Act as Vriska keeps them asleep and out of Condy’s reach.

With the Witch of Space incapacitated, someone else needs to bring planet Earth back to the Medium. Vriska and Terezi come up with a modified magic eight ball fetch modus with features of Dad Egbert’s wallet. Vriska follows the vacated meteor to its impact with Earth, captchalogues Earth, and returns with it in her sylladex.

In the Game Over timeline, Gamzee apparently reached Earth by staying on the meteor after Grimbark Jade scooped up everyone else. At the time, readers assumed that he would fast-forward to the cherub egg on dead Earth C once he had tired of messing with the alpha kids’ session.

Kanaya chainsawed that theory in half when the session failed to produce a Universe C. Gamzee would have to reach the egg from a different timeline.

Another chance for the kids to win the game is another chance for Gamzee to reach the egg. But this time, Gamzee is not on the meteor and does not go to Earth. Vriska has him locked up in Jane’s hunger trunk. Unconcerned for his health, she believes he has “plot armor.” He doesn’t. In the upcoming boss fight, he remains trapped in the fridge until he is consumed by a black hole.

Thus we will have Gamzee apparently dying in this timeline, just as in the doomed timeline, before he can go to raise the cherubim in a new universe and follow Caliborn into his session. This reopens the puzzle: which version of Gamzee is the one who gets there?

We may speculate that maybe Gamzee has a secret supply of extra lives, or maybe the cherub acolyte version of him comes from a secret second game-winning timeline. There are many such possibilities, but the text doesn’t give us direct evidence of one over another, so the riddle remains unsettled. Gamzee is a notorious wildcard. His actions are a mystery even to the Author.

Following the raid, the crew bring Jake, Tavrosprite, Arquiusprite, the locked-up Gamzee, and the two sleeping girls with them to the lilypad platform orbiting Skaia. There they rest and wait for the other Roxy and John. Arquiusprite starts operating on Jane to disable her tiaratop brain corruption.

The Heir and Rogue arrive. John has a joyful reunion with his meteor friends, while Roxy goes straight for the embrace of the mutual mom she knew too briefly in the bad end. Their friends tell them the ill fate of the John and Roxy they replaced.

The team has some time to sit and mingle. They chatter with gusto, racking up some lengthy dialoglogs. It’s the payoff for all the years they spent apart.

Karkat assures John he has gotten over the old caliginous crush that John could not reciprocate. Dave and John contemplate the fluidity of human experience and the possibility of doing troll romance. Karkat diagnoses John with pitch feelings for Terezi.

Rose and Roxy bond by comparing their cross-scratch selves. They both fell prey to alcoholism, now recovered with help from their friends, while seeking to feel a connection to their long-gone mothers. Dave and Roxy grill each others’ asses, lightning round style. Dave commits increasingly mortifying Freudian pratfalls referring to Roxy and Jane as hot moms.

Jake asks Tavrosprite for a pretend conversation that becomes real. Tavros flatters Jake to boost his self-esteem. Vriska deflates them both with cruel scorn. John gives more substantial encouragement, helping Jake see that he is still growing up and learning about him self.

Terezi and Vriska give thanks for being friends and teammates again. Terezi worries she might waste the chance at life that her doomed self gave her once Vriska leaves. Kanaya and Vriska pry into each other’s quadrant business. Vriska and Karkat get in some digs against each other. Kanaya judges that Vriska doesn’t have the capacity for sustained hearts or spades.

When John and Roxy brought Lowas with them from the firefly nothingspace, everything on Lowas came along. Jaspersprite finds empty sprites in the session, digs up the freshly buried Rose body, and prototypes Roxy’s sprite with it. He brings the new Rosesprite to the frog stage to meet the girls. In a tragicomic outburst, Rose bewails her “dumbest arc.”

Vriska zillyhonks the assembly into a briefing on the endgame. They will have to fight battles on four fronts with the Condesce, The Felt, the dogs, and the non-dog Jacks.

Most threatening is Condy, who still plots to continue her reign in the new universe. She must be killed or distracted before she can mindjack anyone powerful. Roxy, Rose, and John volunteer to take the fight to the sea witch. Kanaya will join them after her errand with Echidna, who has asked to see her and Karkat about releasing the Genesis tadpole.

Next is so-called Lord Jack, the chucklevoodooed Archagent, who is moved by nothing but berzerk rage. Dave and Terezi volunteer to face him. Dirk is expected to join them when he arrives.

Next, Spades Slick, who Vriska calls Robo Jack for his cool prosthetics, and whose motive is unknown. Slick and his posse, The Felt, barely register as a threat, so Jake is landed with them.

Finally, Bec Noir is even stronger than the Condesce as long as he wears a Ring of Orbs Fourfold. But Vriska is counting on the Prospitian Monarch with the other ring to keep this Jack stalemated until he can be dealt with. If Jade wakes up, she will be sent to subdue the chess dogs. She is the only player who can. She shares their First Guardian powers, and their Bec nature will not let them kill her.

Jane will be on medic duty when she is deprogrammed and awake. She can resurrect each player once. Rosesprite will place Roxy’s window devices around the Medium as a network of portals for Jane to move from battle to battle.

When the fighting is over, the players will shoot their denizens’ grist hoards and Genesis Frog into Skaia, claim the ultimate reward, and make of Earth a new world to settle in their new universe.

The briefing wraps up. Vriska’s last act in the session is to shoot Dirk a fenestrated plane and welcome him to the lilypad.

With that, Vriska reaches the limit of her patience. She maligns her ghost self, the one who found the secret weapon, as a “fucking loser” whose plan has stalled. The living Vriska is driven to correct this failure and to be the one to use the weapon. She considers Lrd English a more important fight than all the fights in the session.

So Vriska departs for the Furthest Ring, possibly never to see Terezi again.

Vriska’s first stop in the dream bubbles is the horsey cliffscape where dead Vriska and Meenah are keeping the juju chest. It disgusts Vriska to see her own ghost happy doing nothing. She seizes the chest and lays into the punk for going soft. Her catty invective smashes her composure and self-esteem.

Meenah, who has grown listless and uneasy in her intimacy with ghost Vriska, accepts live Vriska’s invitation to resume their mission. She leaves her g frond a sobbing wreck, alone in the dark.

Still costumed as trolls, Jade, Jane, and Callie drop into a dream of Echidna’s lair. But whose memory is it? Jane wakes up when Arquiusprite finishes the job on her mind-controlling tiaratop, leaving the other two to find out.

It is the other Calliope, the ghost of the god-tier Muse of Space who Callie was afraid to seek out. The Muse speaks first to Callie, dispelling her costume. For the first time, we hear the Muse’s story in her own words.

The two Calliopes diverged when one enjoyed the comfort of contact with the Alpha kids and the other did not. Nothing distracted this other Calliope from her deadly contest with Caliborn. She proved the stronger and predominated. But she could not win her dead Sburb session like Caliborn could.

Calliope’s denizen was not Yaldabaoth but Echidna. When the alternative was to languish forever at a dead end, she accepted Echidna’s choice, died, and waited as a ghost to fulfill a definite purpose once the Furthest Ring is navigable. Callie’s arrival is her cue to begin.

Callie expected the encounter to accomplish something for herself. But its significance is cosmic, not personal. The Muse, setting off with Jade in tow, tells the Calliope who died without ever playing Sburb that she need not do anything but live.

The lilypad is less crowded when Jane wakes. Dave and Dirk have gone to Lotak, Jake and Tavrosprite to Lomax, and Karkat, Kanaya, the Vagabond, and still-sleeping Jade to Lofaf.

The kids are glad to have Jane back with them. Roxy remembers that she wants to give Callie the Ring of Life to bring her to the waking world. Everyone supports Roxy’s decision.

Their camaradarie excites Jaspersprite. He embraces Rosesprite. Because Rosesprite has room for a second prototyping, she absorbs and merges with Jaspersprite.

Jasprosesprite² is more than a sprite. She has legs, strobing colours, memories from many doomed selves, and a manic personality that brings out the uninhibited extremes of both kid and cat.

Roxy goes to sleep, locates Callie in her dream, puts the Ring of Life on Callie’s finger, and brings her to life. They return, hand in hand, to the waking world.

Jasprose fawns over Callie and Jane, then uses sprite-magic fenestrated planes to bounce between the lilypad and the planets. She introduces herself to Kanaya, the Striders, and Jake. When she sees Jake’s empty sprite, she decides to give it Nepeta’s corpse.

The others ponder whether the resurrected Callie will do something important, but agree she doesn’t have to. There are no strings attached to the gift of life and the love of her friends.

Jane, John, Rose, and Terezi chatter away while Callie watches Roxy try to pin down the concept of a Matriorb and produce one from nonexistence. This time, doing it for her friends and not her enemies, Roxy succeeds.

In the bowels of Lofaf, Kanaya and Karkat have their audience with Jade’s denizen. Karkat has no clue what the other two are saying in Echidna’s monster patois, or why they needed him in attendance.

On the way out, Kanaya explains that the Queen Snake has authorized the Vast Croak. She will release the tadpole and grist hoards for the creation of Universe C. But first, she wanted to make sure Kanaya and Karkat will play a part in the new society they are to raise on Earth C. Kanaya is to help reproduce the troll species, as she has wanted to do for years, though she does not know how it will be possible without a Mother Grub egg. Karkat is to give society guidance in some undefined way, and Kanaya must preserve him for this task.

Karkat doesn’t take the hint. Though he admits to being a poor fighter, he is determined to put himself in danger in the boss battle. Kanaya takes the choice away from him. She zonks him with a headways fist bonk and leaves him to sleep it off in the safety of Echidna’s foyer. She will fib to the others that he stayed behind to meditate.

Roxy flies Calliope to Jade’s house, where Callie will stay with Jade and the Vagabond until the coast is clear. With battle drawing near, this is the time for true feelings, and Roxy doesn’t take off without giving Callie a loving goodbye.

Sometime after Rosesprite’s creation, Roxy retrieves Bro’s unbreakable katana from the grave on Lowas. She will wield this sword against the tyrant who killed her mother twice.

When Roxy presents Kanaya with the horny space egg she conjured, Kanaya joyfully accepts. On Earth C, this egg will hatch the Mother Grub, whose reproductive role is like that of a eusocial insect queen. Kanaya is inspired to fight the Batterhag for the future of trolldom. They return to the lilypad.