Previously: John reached the First Gate above his house. Dave helped Rose enter the Medium. Jade entered the Mystic Ruins, finding a time capsule lotus which yielded Dave’s copies of Sburb. And the Aimless Renegade opened fire on the Peregrine Mendicant and Wayward Vagabond when they landed centuries later at those same ruins.

Taking the discs from the lotus flower, Jade drops some items which the Renegade later finds in the ruins. Then Bec returns Jade to her house. She installs the game, connects as Dave’s server player, falls asleep, and puts the impaled crow into his kernelsprite, creating a crowsprite.

The crowsprite steals Dave’s entry item, an egg, and makes a nest on top of his apartment building’s antenna tower. Unable to hasten Dave’s entry into the Medium, Jade helps him with alchemy instead, fitting the alchemizer with a number of upgrades.

John’s First Gate sends him down to the surface of his planet, Lowas, the Land of Wind and Shade.

The worlds of a game session are located in the Incipisphere, which is like a solar system with Skaia at its centre. The innermost planet is the golden Prospit, whose moon periodically swings into the skies of Skaia. Next is the Medium, the band of space containing the kids’ planets. Each house gets its own planet and its own Seven Gates overhead. Outside the Medium is the Veil, an asteroid belt, and beyond that, the purple planet Derse, home to the black-shelled creatures that Nannasprite described as the forces of darkness. Dream Rose and Dream Dave live on Derse’s moon, which periodically faces out toward the infinite void known as the Furthest Ring.

John explores Lowas. Urged on by the Peregrine Mendicant, he meets some friendly salamanders and uses their postal system to supply Dad with a fresh hat and to request his server copy back, which a zealous Authority Regulator confiscated from Dad’s wrecked car. A pack of terrible minions nearly defeat John. Jade’s Grandpa comes to his rescue and then leaves without a word.

Rose’s entry transports her house to another planet, Lolar, the Land of Light and Rain. Rose’s Mom immediately wanders off. Rose fights her first minions and finds Jaspersprite, who challenges her to discover the meaning of her quest.

His meteor impact imminent, Dave loses patience and climbs the radio tower to get the egg back. He gets a pecking from the crowsprite and falls off. Dave’s Bro lands on the descending meteor and slices it in half with a katana while his rocket board breaks Dave’s fall. The egg cracks, ushering Dave into the Medium.

Around this time, the kids start getting trolled more often. The troll Terezi contacts John and offers to accelerate his quest by taking him straight to his denizen, Typheus. She leads John back to his house and turns his previous alchemy experiment into a functioning jetpack. John puts the jetpack on and blasts off toward his Seventh Gate.

At this point, events diverge into two distinct chronologies: one that reinforces its own existence through stable time loops, and one that doesn’t.

In the contradictory “doomed” timeline, Typheus slays John. Jade never gets into the Medium. Dave and Rose spend the next four months exploring their game session and determining that it is futile. Finally Dave travels back in time to visit his past self. Rose, who cannot go with him, goes to sleep in the hope that her awakened dreamself will in some way survive their dead-end timeline.

In the self-fulfilling “alpha” timeline, just when Dave has entered the Medium, bringing his apartment to Lohac, the Land of Heat and Clockwork, Doomed Dave arrives from the future and alters the events that caused his doom. He sacrifices himself to the crowsprite, becoming Davesprite, and talks John out of meeting Typheus. John settles for flying to his Second Gate instead.

When the doomed Rose’s timeline ceases to exist, the alpha Rose inherits some of doomed Dream Rose’s memories. She falls asleep in her house and wakes on Derse’s moon for the first time. Like John, Rose now sees what she unconsciously wrote on her walls. It is Jaspers’ Meow message, a genetic code.

John’s Second Gate takes him to Lolar, where he crashes into Rose’s house and finds her asleep. Snooping around, John finds Rose’s unfinished present to him, a stuffed bunny with knitted patches. He also poses as Rose in reply to the troll Kanaya, tricking her into a marathon of flustered exchanges with Rose. Then he swaps pets with the sleeping girl and blasts off again.

Dream Rose visits Dream Dave, whose unconscious graffiti is of Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, and sees on his computer that John is at her house. Waking up too late to meet him, she alchemizes new weapons and vents her frustration on the gathering minions.

Dave wakes up and alchemizes stuff too while Dream Jade builds his house up. Some crafty snooping nets him Rose’s private journals, which contain the Meow genome and a story about wizards. Dave puts them aside, using his juice-stained Sburb envelopes for bookmarks. Meanwhile, the Gods of the Furthest Ring tell Rose to burn her own copy of Meow. She explains to Dave that as Derse dreamers, they hear voices from the infinite void instead of seeing visions in Skaia’s clouds.

The Draconian Dignitary, an agent of Derse, sneaks into Dave’s room and steals the journals. Dave returns to find the corpse of another Dave who got in the Dignitary’s way. From this he learns the importance of using stable time loops instead of trying to change what has happened.

Sometime later, Dave reaches his first gate while Rose destroys hers.

The kids’ guardians have also been wandering the Medium. John’s Dad returns from Derse to Lowas, receives a fresh hat, and encounters Jade’s Grandpa, who carries the Sassacre’s book that Nannasprite dropped. They find a portal and leave Lowas. The pony Maplehoof follows Rose’s Mom through a similar portal on Lolar. Bro’s rocket board ends up flying by itself over Derse’s moon, where it catches the falling Lil Cal puppet that Dream Rose tossed out of Dream Dave’s tower. The Authority Regulator who plundered Dad’s car follows Lil Cal through a similar portal on Derse. Bro himself is awaiting a duel with Jack Noir on Lohac.

Grandpa, Dad, Mom, and the Regulator all transportalize to the same place, a laboratory where chess piece creatures are made. The lab is embedded in an asteroid in the Veil. John finds the portal from Lolar to the lab soon after, but by that time the others have departed. The Regulator has taken the rocket board and is flying around the Veil. The guardians are piloting a ship towards Skaia, having left behind Maplehoof and a variety of objects for John to find.

John discovers that the laboratory is equipped to do ectobiology. Ectobiology is the practice of collecting genetic samples by “paradoxifying” targets that cannot be appearified. The samples can be used to make clones and can be combined to create descendants.

The lab equipment has been set to paradoxify four people from four different spacetime coordinates on Earth. John sees Nanna, Grandpa, Bro, and Mom on the monitor and appearifies genetic samples from each one in turn. After all their genomes are collected in the form of spooky time slime, the machine gets to work creating clone babies of each one. It also combines Nanna’s sample with Grandpa’s and Bro’s sample with Mom’s, producing a baby son and daughter from each pair.

While John’s ectobiological creations crawl around and attach themselves to the objects lying around the lab, the troll Karkat contacts John and explains what he learned from doing the same thing in the troll session. The four clone babies are destined to leave the timeless Medium, fall to Earth, and grow up to be the people they were cloned from. Their four descendants will also go to Earth and grow up to be John, Rose, Dave, and Jade.

Karkat also warns John that an event called the Reckoning will happen too soon in John’s session due to Archagent Jack Noir’s meddling and that the kids will fail and die when Noir becomes too powerful. John has no time to worry about any of that. He is too busy handing out stuffed bunnies in a touching reënactment of Con Air.

When he is done, every baby has bonded with something in the lab:

• Baby John has the Sassacre’s book;
• Baby Rose has the soiled bunny from Con Air;
• Baby Dave has Maplehoof the pony;
• Baby Jade has the bunny with knitted patches that John found in Rose’s room;
• Baby Nanna has Dad’s soiled hat;
• Baby Grandpa has Grandpa’s flintlock pistols;
• Baby Mom has the mutant kitten;
• Baby Bro has Lil Cal the puppet.

On the verge of the Reckoning, these babies and their companion objects and animals are transportalized out of the lab and onto eight neighbouring meteors.

Then the Reckoning starts, triggered by a series of events that began when Rose dropped John’s Dad’s car through the clouds.

Among the chess piece creatures that serve the kingdoms of Prospit and Derse, there are many Agents doing jobs throughout the Incipisphere. Among them are a Parcel Mistress, an Authority Regulator, a Warweary Villein, and four high-ranking Dersites cast in the same mold as the Midnight Crew.

A Parcel Mistress from Prospit is on Lowas, looking for a green box Dream Jade asked her to find and deliver to John. Jade knew from her cloud visions that it would be lost inside the plummeting car and would only reach John later, when he is in great peril.

The Mistress discovers an enemy Authority Regulator taking two parcels from the wrecked car. One is the green box and the other is an envelope that John has requested. She greets the Regulator and asks for both parcels. He gives her the Sburb server envelope, which she immediately consigns to the Breeze. He keeps the contraband box for his superiors. Determined to get the box back, she follows him to Derse.

After a chance encounter with the Black Queen, who wears a ring giving her the powers of the prototyped kernels, the Mistress finds the box on the desk of Archagent Jack Noir (who looks like Spades Slick). Noir drives a hard bargain: she must bring him the crowns of the White King and Queen. He sends her away with a treasonous mission and a Regisword.

His curiosity piqued, Noir looks in the box and discovers the perfect weapon to kill the Black Queen, who is constantly forcing him into foolish clothes. He destroys her utterly, takes her Ring of Orbs Fourfold, and gains its harlequin-jaspers-tentacle-crow powers.

Returning to Prospit, the Parcel Mistress relates her predicament to the White Queen, who has the same kind of ring. The Queen chooses to abdicate so that the Mistress can fulfill the bargain with Noir. She gives the Mistress her ring and crown and tells her to find the White King on the Battlefield to get his crown too.

The Courtyard Droll (who looks like Clubs Deuce) has tailed the Mistress from Derse. He picks her pocket, stealing the ring that was just entrusted to her. She boards a shuttle and flies off to the Battlefield still believing she has it.

Dream Jade notices, beats up the Droll, and takes the ring. It has no power for her, but she puts it on for safekeeping before returning to Dream John’s tower. Playing Sburb with the help of her soon-to-explode dreambot, she stays awake—asleep on Earth—to be around for Dream John’s awakening.

Prospit and Derse fight their war on the Battlefield at the centre of Skaia, another element of the Incipisphere that evolves in response to kernel prototypings, growing from a simple chessboard into a planet dotted with farms and castles. One of these farms is tended by the black-shelled Warweary Villein, who despises the eternal war.

When his farm is torched, the Villein snaps and launches a rebellion against both kingdoms, rallying white and black carapacians to his cause. Together they march on the Black King and are about to confront him when Jack Noir arrives. Noir now styles himself the Sovereign Slayer. He has flown to Skaia to complete his stone cold coup d’état by breaking the Black King’s scepter and beheading him. Then he massacres the rebels, sparing only the Villein, and begins to devastate the Battlefield with some super deadly red shit.

Elsewhere on the board, the White King greets the Parcel Mistress and surrenders his crown and scepter to her. The lurking Hegemonic Brute (who looks like Hearts Boxcars) ambushes them, knocking the scepter out of the Mistress’s hand and over a waterfall.

The Droll finds the white scepter and brings it to Noir, who uses it to initiate the Reckoning, a process that propels meteors out of the Veil and towards Skaia. Skaia throws up defense portals to intercept these meteors and send them to Earth instead. Each portal is connected to a different moment in Earth’s history. Most of the Veil’s meteors fly through these portals and are sent crashing into the houses and surroundings of Sburb players on Earth. The ones carrying Agents are sent to later times, while the ones carrying babies are sent to earlier times so that they can grow up, participate in Sburb, and contribute to their own creation. (This is why John’s premature death caused a doomed timeline. The babies had to come from somewhere.)

The Authority Regulator, on his wild ride through the Veil, discovers a meteor with a frog temple on it, an intact version of the ruins on Jade’s island. Its raniform iconography is hateful to Derse. Looking for a perp, the Regulator enters the mystic temple, finding an empty time capsule and another ectobiology lab. This lab’s monitor shows two unaccountable freaks arriving on Earth by meteor and unintentionally killing Colonel Sassacre. The Colonel’s widow Betty Crocker raises the pair as brother and sister, and they grow up to be Nanna Egbert and Grandpa Harley. The monitor has targeted their dog, Halley, for paradoxification.

The Draconian Dignitary (who looks like Diamonds Droog) enters the temple lab carrying the journals he stole from Dave’s apartment. The Regulator hides and watches. The Dignitary casts Dave’s juice-stained bookmarks into the time capsule, which stores them for release four hundred million years later, and moves on to the lab’s ectobiology station, which is set to make an organism by combining Halley’s genome with a genetic code to be input by the user. The Dignitary inputs Rose’s Meow code and Becquerel is born.

The Regulator flees the temple and returns to John’s meteor. He finds the boy asleep as the meteor plummets out of the Veil and the transportalizers break. To get John safely off the rock, the Regulator ties John to the rocket board and sends him flying back to his land. With no escape for himself, the Regulator rides the meteor to Earth.

The Sovereign Slayer flies up from the Battlefield and hits Prospit with the deadly Red Miles. The White Queen escapes on a ship and heads for a Skaian defense portal. Noir severs the chain of Prospit’s moon, sending Dream Jade and Dream John plummeting into Skaia amid the wreckage of their golden world. Dream Jade tries desperately to wake Dream John. At the last moment, she throws him to safety and perishes in the impact. He wakes on the Battlefield and takes the Ring of Orbs Fourfold from her body.

The Parcel Mistress slays the Hegemonic Brute with her Regisword and uses his radio to summon Noir. They complete their bargain by exchanging the white crowns for the green box, which she takes straight to Dream John.

In the box, Dream John finds a gift from Jade as well as letters from her and a penpal who helped her build the thing. It is a robot made from the knitted bunny plush that John gave to Baby Jade. It holds an assortment of miniature legendary weapons. When Jack Noir returns for the ring, the bunny defends Dream John and makes Noir back off.

Grandpa lets Mom and Dad off on the Battlefield, finds and taxidermizes Dream Jade’s body, and returns to his island home on pre-Reckoning Earth. He lives the rest of his days raising little Jade. Dream Jade’s mounted body sits in his disused lab with another trophy from his expedition to the Medium, a Fourth Wall that he stole from Noir’s office. When it is on, this wall is linked to the home of Andrew Hussie, the Author, who uses it to deliver two recaps of Homestuck covering everything through Act 4.

The White Queen goes to Earth, arriving in the post-Reckoning wasteland. Having abdicated, she is now a Windswept Questant. She finds an eggy-looking command station, enters, and speaks to Rose.

All of the Exiles are in fact Agents sent to Earth through defense portals. The Warweary Villein becomes the Wayward Vagabond, the Parcel Mistress becomes the Peregrine Mendicant, and the Authority Regulator becomes the Aimless Renegade, who has been shooting at the other two since their arrival at the ruins.

Seeing the Vagabond’s Bec-head pumpkin, the Renegade remembers Becquerel’s violent birth. He stops shooting and surrenders. The Mendicant is angered but spares him. They make peace and eat as the sun sets on their camp. The Vagabond shows the Mendicant his command station and John’s monitor. She teaches John to use the salamanders’ Pyxis postal system while the two men rebuild Can Town and Bullet Militia.

The Windswept Questant arrives at the ruins in her egg station. Her appearance flusters the other exiles. The Vagabond and Renegade fashion a crown from mailboxes and offer it to the Questant, but she declines and puts the crown on another exile for fulfilling her royal duty. The Peregrine Mendicant is coronated the Prospitian Monarch.

Finally, the Wayward Vagabond reveals that he has been secretly guarding a Ring of Orbs Fourfold.