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Roxy was startled awake by the sound of banging on the metal door. She groaned a little and rolled over on the floor, covering her eyes from the intense glare of the golden room. The floor, walls and ceiling were all entirely made up of the wretched, expensive material, there was no mercy from its constant migraine-inducing shine. Something appearified in the corner with a zap, probably food. It was feeding time for the prisoners, late and consisting primarily of pumpkins as usual. Rubbing her eyes, she sat up slowly and looked around the room, squinting to protect from the terrible gleam of gold.Roxy wakes up in a pirates jail cell, completely alone. There is nothing at all in her cell, useful or otherwise.After a few moments of contemplation, she stands and walks over to the bars to peer out of them. Down the hall she can see a troll dressed in a cerulean uniform walking away, banging on all the prisoners doors to let them know it’s time to eat. The troll appears to have a ring of keys attached to their belt, which may or may not be useful later on. She sighs and rests her head against the bars, thinking. For a moment she pulls on the bars and tries to pry them apart, but to no avail.In the corner a pumpkin sits on the appearifier, quiet and innocent, and she walks over to sit next to it. Supposedly, they expect her to eat it, but she doesn’t really see how. Maybe if she had something sharp and pointy she could carve into it, but alas she does not. Despite this, she gives it a little poke and tries biting into it anyway. Outside her door she can hear footsteps approaching, so she gets up again to go ask the approaching pirate for something to eat the pumpkin with. She asks them by sending her fist flying through the bars to punch them in the face, knocking them to the floor.The pirate guard is now unconscious. His ring of keys seems to have broken off his belt, spilling keys everywhere. Roxy slips her whole arm through the bars to try and grab one of the keys, but they are too far away to reach. She slumps a little and pulls her arm back through, disappointedly going to sit back by the pumpkin. A few minutes later two more pirates show up, entering her cell and closing the door behind them. It appears they have come to teach her a lesson or two about punching the hand that bangs on your door to feed you.Looks like they underestimated her, they should’ve sent more than two. Picking up the hefty pumpkin, Roxy throws it at ones head to knock them out, narrowly avoiding the swing of the other guys club, grabbing it and then using it to beat the pulp out of its previous holder. That was easy. She goes back to the door to see if she can pry it’s bars open with the club, but they still hold fast. At least now there are some things in the cell with her, useful and otherwise.One of the guards has a knife on their person, Roxy soon finds after a brief moments frisking. It’ll be perfect for scratching out a tally of how many days she’s been stuck in this cell. She wields it with triumph, shuffling back over to the pumpkin with a smile on her face to butcher it brutally. After a moment of thought, she decides to carve a cute little face into it, and spends the next several hours on this task.“That’s a very nice pumpkin you’ve got there.” Says a sharp woman’s voice, startling Roxy out of her creative focus.She turns to find the owner of the voice and sees a pointed face in her doors window, looking through the bars with a shark-tooth smile. The woman has an eyepatch covering one eye, the other displaying a lovely deep cerulean iris. Atop her long dark hair and curled asymmetrical horns is a captains hat with a big red feather in it to complete the look. She opens the door and enters the cell, shutting it behind her.“Thanks.” Roxy says, holding her knife a little tighter but not moving. “Who’re you?”“The galaxy knows me as MindFang.” She says with a lot of pride and a little bow, “but as a friend you may call me Vriska.”“Friend?”“Yes.” She steps over the unconscious guards and sits next to Roxy, and side by side you can see Vriska is a lot bigger than her, a lot taller. “When I heard you had set foot on my ship I was delighted to meet you.”Roxy was suddenly very, very nervous. “Is that so?”She nodded, still smiling.Roxy laughed nervously. “Well uh, that’s cool, but are you sure you’ve got the right guy? It’s a little funny that you’d know me, considering you’re like a legendary space pirate and I’m just a smuggler.”Vriska chuckled a deep, worrying chuckle. “Just a smuggler, huh? Your name is Roxy Lalonde right?”“uh yea but how-““Then I am absolutely certain I’ve got the right person. Especially after seeing what you did to my men.” She glanced back at the guards on the floor.“Oof.” Roxy held the knife a little restlessly, “yea, sorry about that.”“Roxy, I’ve come to bargain.” Vriska turns to her with a more serious look. “I’ll let you sit at my right hand, highest in rank and second only to me.”“... and what do I have to do to get that?”“I want you to conjure things out of the void for me.” She says with complete sincerity.“Ahah,” Roxy looks at her with confusion and worry in her smile, “what?”“You heard me.” Vriska leans a little closer to her, “conjure ships for me. Better weapons for my fleet. Anything you can imagine. I’m surprised you haven’t used your powers to break out of this cell yet.”“My powers?” She shook her head, “I don’t— what? I don’t have any powers, I’m not,,” She was becoming terrified that MindFang would do something terrible to her after facing this disappointment.“You don’t have to hide them from me Roxy,” she grinned, “The prophesy told me everything I need to know about you. With you at my side I can topple the empire, restoring it with someone much more capable in its place.”“You want me to help you take over the government?”“No, that’s the sort of thing villains try to do. I just want to eliminate it so that somebody who actually knows how to run a galaxy can take over and set things right. I don’t have to be the one to take over, and I don’t have to be a good person to be a hero.” Vriska paused, looking at Roxy’s frightened face. “You don’t know what you are yet, do you?”“No,” Roxy still clutched her knife close to her, even though she knew it wouldn’t be much use against the immensely powerful troll in front of her. “I guess not.”“I found a book from the future, and you were in it.” She told her. “You were called a hero of void, and it said that you were able to do things like summon shit out of nothing and transport stuff through the abyss. If you honestly haven’t realized your ability, I can teach you.” Vriska smiled at her, “and I can teach your friend Jane, too. She’s supposed to be the hero of life, and she’ll give immortality to my troops. Together we’ll fuck shit up and be the best pirates in the universe. What’d ya say?” She held out her hand for Roxy to take.“uh,” Roxy said. “Are you for real?”“Yes I do think I am ‘for real’. This is the offer of a lifetime Roxy!”“Well,” she tentatively took Vriska’s hand, “okay then.”~~~ Meanwhile at The ClinicSomething felt wrong. Things often tended to feel “wrong” for Dirk, especially with all the things that had been happening recently, but that certain feeling of offness was sufficiently subdued by things like Jake being himself and saying the sorts of optimistic if silly things he says, or the pressing matter of survival and escape to focus on, or the distraction of building something with his hands. Now there was none of that to keep the feeling away, and he was left to face the deep-set fear in his gut that something was unmistakably, terribly wrong. Like the feeling that you’ve forgotten to pack something, or left something behind when you come home from a trip, but you have no idea what it is.It didn’t take him very long to realize he was asleep and couldn’t make himself wake up, and that he wasn’t dreaming either, but that was just one little thing and it didn’t solve the issue that is something still felt horribly off. Not necessarily that he was in danger or anything, just off. Although, maybe he was in danger, he couldn’t be sure. The darkness that was held in place by the back of his eyelids was both worrying and comforting, comforting because it was something he recognized, the little stars and shapes moving about in the blackness, and worrying because he couldn’t wake up. He couldn’t move. The floating feeling of unwanted, dreamless, and uncomfortable stasis stayed for some long undeterminable amount of time, maybe years, maybe hours, before he was finally able to make himself open his eyes.His eyelids were nigh unmovably heavy, and the light that managed to make its way to him was painfully bright and bleach-white. Still he couldn’t move, like he was stuck in the remains of sleep paralysis but it wouldn’t go away. One of the first things he tried to do was remember where he was last, which proved difficult. All his memories were jumbled into vague images and detached feelings, and it was going to take a moment to sort it all out. A moment he didn’t have. As soon as his eyes were half-open a voice greeted him, giving him no time to think.“Good morning.” The voice said, a calm and clinical voice, an even and smooth voice, charming but unnaturally so. “You are Dirk Strider, the abolitionist and military escapee, correct?”He groans a little in response. A scull-numbing headache throbs through his head and the intense white lights aren’t helping.“I hope you’ve had a good sleep,” Dirk thinks he can see the figure of a man in a clean white suit and tie standing above him, who is presumably the one talking to him, “we have a busy day ahead of us.” The shape of him slowly comes into focus, becoming distinguished from the background, but his face is still obscured by the glare of the lights.Dirk squints at him, still unable to move. He’s realized at this point that he’s laying on a table of some kind in nothing but a hospital gown, underneath a bright spotlight of sorts. “Who are you?” He manages, just the first of many questions.“I know you’re going to have a lot of questions,” The man above him says, “but I’m afraid we won’t have time to answer them all. There is testing to be done.” He leans down, bringing his face a little closer to Dirks, which is uncomfortable and bad in all sorts of ways. From here it’s revealed to Dirk that the man in fact has no face at all, which just makes the uncomfortable situation worse. “Though, out of courtesy,” he says, “you may refer to me as Doctor Scratch.”~~~Jade sat quietly at a table in a dark grey room and looked at her folded hands. She sat and looked at them like she had been doing for a few days now. Aboard the humble ship named “Spock”, Dave, Karkat, Hal and herself had been drifting idly through space while trying to figure out how to locate Roxy, Jane and WV, with little to no luck. Jane, WV and Roxy weren’t exactly what Jade was thinking about, though.She sat quietly with her hands folded, thinking about what she’d seen while in the fourth dimension. Most of the people who’d been dragged into it by the New New Hampshirians either hadn’t survived the experience or didn’t remember it, but she did. She remembered it clearly, she remembered seeing the universe from a new perspective that humans had never been meant to see, she remembered the entire world slipping away beneath her to become just a thin slice of what was out there, strange new shapes impossible to comprehend, bizarre new life growing in directions impossible to understand.But she understood it. Comprehended it. It was so much information at once, too much information, more information than any three-dimensional creature could ever hope to take in. So much in fact that it was taking several days and nearly 100% of her brains focus to sort through what the fuck she just saw. She sat and quietly looked at her hands, thinking. Contemplating.Dave and Karkat were just around the corner of the room, talking quietly. “It’s been days, man. She hasn’t eaten and she barely drinks. Let me talk to her again.”“I TOLD YOU, DAVE,” Karkat spoke sympathetically, “THE MORE WE DISTRACT HER THE LONGER IT MIGHT TAKE FOR HER TO COME OUT OF IT.”Dave let out a long, slow exhale and looked at the floor. “We need to let her know it’s time to turn off the artificial gravity again. It needs to recharge.”For a while Karkat looked at him, sombre. “ALRIGHT. I MISS HER TOO.”Dave looked up at him.“WE CAN TALK TO HER TOGETHER.”“...no.” Hal said, softly. “Let me do it. You two can talk to her again as soon as she’s ready.”“AND JUST WHAT QUALIFIES YOU TO GO THAT DOESN’T QUALIFY US?”“An idea.” He said simply. “Mathematically, the higher dimensions are entirely possible and in fact calculable. As a robot, my mind is basically made of math, and therefore I can comprehend and even picture the fourth dimension just fine, while you fleshy bags of mostly water cannot. Pardon my phrasing.” He paused to let them think about it, before resuming gently. “Let me talk to her, I can help her understand or at least find a way to cope. You two go shut off the artificial gravity so it can recharge, and by the time we’re done I’m 90% sure she’ll be talking again.”They both thought about this for a bit, looking at each other to see if the other was okay with it.“OK, FINE. JUST DON’T MAKE HER WORSE.” Karkat finally said, looking Hal in the eyes for a solid few seconds before walking away with Dave.Jade sat quietly looking at her folded hands.Above her the fluorescent ceiling lights hummed, seeming loud in the deep silence of the room. Hal stepped over and sat down in a chair next to her, hesitantly. He reached over and gently put his hand in hers. “Hey.” He said.She didn’t move.“Where are you?”Slowly she lifted her head, eventually bringing her eyes to look at him. She shook her head just a tiny bit and looked utterly lost.“It’s unexplainable, isn’t it?”She blinked.“Like you can see a new color outside of red, blue and yellow, and it’s impossible to describe to anyone else?”For a while she looked at him, something new sparking behind her eyes. Hal took that as a sign that he was getting it.“It’s impossible to describe color to someone who’s been blind their whole life, but it isn’t impossible to describe this.” He put a piece of chalk in her hand and tenderly shut her fingers around it. “Here. We can describe the higher dimensions with math.”Her mouth opened just a tiny bit but nothing came out of it. The artificial gravity shut off, slowly making them weightless as up and down lost meaning.“Ah.” Hal looked around at the room as he slowly started drifting out of his seat. “Gravity’s off. ...I’m sorry for not buying you a ship with a better artificial gravity drive, my money was limited. This was the best I could get.” He took her hand and had her hold onto the edge of the table. “Hang on.” He pulled a second piece of chalk from his sylladex and started to write on the metal table, which was welded to the floor, along with the chairs. “As I was saying, we can describe higher dimensions with math.”She watched him write, listened to him talk, and slowly it started to make more sense. He drew a quick depiction of a four-dimensional cube, or a hypercube, and explained how it was made of three-dimensional cubes, like how a 3D cube is made of 2D squares. Before he could begin explaining other shapes to her she took her bit of chalk and drew a circle. Then she drew a sphere using curved lines along the circle. Then, off to the side, she drew something entirely confusing which was supposed to be a 2D depiction of a 4D sphere. She then went on to quietly explain it to herself using math, and when she was done she sat back from the table, letting go of it to drift towards the ceiling and look at it from a distance.This was digestible, this was simple compared to what she’d seen. She could start here.“Nice.” Hal looked at her drawing and was having difficulty processing it. “You’ve already surpassed me.”She smiled at him, the first time she’d smiled in a few days.“It might just be my human intelligence hindering me, though. Dirk never saw a hypersphere, and also never took much time to contemplate higher dimensions. But then again he was also never a computer. Just another way in which I’ve become superior to him.”Jade put a hand lightly to his cheek as they floated weightlessly about the room, her face holding something cunning and determined in it. Her eyes shined like she’s just found a secret door and is now immensely curious and excited about what’s behind it.“Jade?”She then gripped the side of his face a bit more firmly and pushed him head-first into the fourth dimension with her, vanishing them from the room.
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Hal blinked. Time and space lost its previous meaning, the universe spun into something far bigger than one could ever hope to comprehend, the room falling away beneath them as they sat up into a space that was so much more impossibly strange and gigantic than his calculations could’ve ever helped him imagine. To think he had the audacity to say he could picture the fourth dimension just moments ago. The only thing that didn’t change was Jade, as she stared focused into his eyes, steadying him with a hand on his cheek as the world turned into something frighteningly bizarre behind her. Her eyes had the same effortless intensity to them that Jadebot had, only hers was alive and soft and green and full of feeling.The thought of Jadebot momentarily distracted him as he realized she hadn’t been built yet, and Jade was yet to even come up with the idea. He glanced around, his visual processing just absolutely giving up on recognizing what the ever-loving fuck he was looking at. The third dimension was pretty big, yeah, lots happening there, but the fourth dimension is way, way bigger, incomprehensibly so. That and it’s mathematically the most interesting one to work in. They floated weightlessly in it, drifting slowly. Hal put his hand over Jades hand on his cheek and squeezed it gently.“Jade,” He said, trying his best to stay calm and firm, “put us back.”She shook her head.“Excuse me?”“Look.” Jade said, turning his head to stare into the open abyss of complete bullshit.“I did look.” He said as gently as he could with his eyes screwed shut and his visual processing shut down. “I’ve seen plenty. Put me back now please.”She seemed to come out of whatever urgent grip she’d been held by as she noticed how tense his voice and face was. Helping him see what she had seen wasn’t important enough to justify making him this uncomfortable. Softly, she moved her hand to hold him by the neck and pulled him back down into the third dimension. The room came back up to meet them, folding into it’s comfortable three dimensional shape and receding into something recognizable. The sight of it was friendly compared to the mortifying display of the higher dimension. He opened his eyes and let his vision come back online, somewhat satisfied that the world was now back to the familiar shape he’d always known it to be.He tried blocking out and manually erasing memories from his brief trip to the higher dimension, but some process in the back of his software had already done the job of dumping his visual memory files from the experience into the cyber-void, so there was no need. Even though he thought he could comprehend it with math and such and his big planet-sized computer-y brain, nothing could’ve prepared his human consciousness for the actual sight of it. He, once again, hadn’t been ready.Jades hand on his cheek was long gone and she was floating a small distance from him in the zero-gravity of the ship, her hair drifting wildly in all sorts of directions around her shoulders. She looked concerned, a bit worried, like she’s afraid that maybe she’s hurt him but isn’t sure of it yet.He turned to face her and pointed a single finger in her direction. “Never,” He said, “do that again.” He withdrew his finger as he watched her fold her arms tightly to herself and nod, looking away and biting her lip. “...that was really impressive, though.”She looked back up at him.“How’d you do it?”Jade smiled a little at him. “Well once you’ve been there, it’s not hard to figure out how to get back. The higher dimensions are always surrounding us, like,” she glanced away while thinking of how to phrase it, “like if our world is two-dimensional, it’s just the surface of the ocean below it and the sky above it, and it’s just the surface only. There’s a whole three-dimensional world surrounding it all the time everywhere that people living in it can’t see. It’s the same going from three dimensions to four.” The look she gave him did something odd to something in his chest. “It’s really beautiful when you know what you’re looking at. You just have to learn how to break the surface!”Hal let his artificial lungs fill and deflate audibly. “Dave and Karkat have been worried about you,you sat at that table for days.”“I did?” She asked meekly.“Yeah.” He felt his entire demeanor soften in time with her voice. “You did.” He held out a hand for her to take. “Let’s go talk to them.”~~~In a more grim corner of the galaxy, a man lied strapped to a table in an operating room with questionable stains littering it’s floor and worrying, sharp tools strewn about its counters.Dirk groaned, stirring back to consciousness after another long bout of some sort of ‘testing’. As the light came back and stung his eyes, he waited to see where the pain would come from this time. The worst place he’d ever felt it come from after waking up like this had been his stomach, and he sincerely did not want to know what they’d done to him that time, but Doc scratch had kindly filled him in on all the gruesome details anyway, as per the routine. This time he felt the pain crawling up his left leg, not the first time it’d been there, but still sickening all the same.Weeks, maybe a month of this hellish ‘testing’, going in and out of consciousness and waking up in different operating rooms, had taken its toll on him. He’d tried escaping many times, even forcing himself awake during an operation, which he’d never dare to do again, but none of his attempts had worked or helped his case. During all this time he’d only been allowed short breaks to sit in locked empty rooms so he could stretch his legs and move about ‘freely’. The definition of ‘free’ here had a lot of strings attached to it. Still these moments were considered a luxury now compared to all the lying immobile on tables in pain and the tests he had to go through. Some of the tests required he be awake during the operation, and these were always the worst. Really he wasn’t sure how much more of this treatment he could take before he was irreparably broken.He’d always known the government was bad, but this was beyond any kind of justification. No matter who you were or what terrible things you had done, nobody deserved this. Dirk was only living now for the minutes where he was set in locked, empty rooms so he could claw and bang on the walls. He’d stop eating if that was an option, but somehow they’d fed him nutrients through needles stuck in his skin. Through all of this, though, the worst thing about his situation now was the uncertainty of what had happened to Jake. He hadn’t seen Jake since Aradia dropped them off, pity in her voice as she gave her last offer to let Jake go or end Dirk painlessly.The absolute moron wouldn’t leave Dirk behind, and now there was no telling what horrible things had happened to him. If Jake had just taken her up on the offer, he could’ve come back later to try and break him out, but no. Dirk grit his teeth as the spotlight shone directly into his eyes again for the forty-fifth time. Or was it the forty-sixth? —Seventh? He’d lost count. Pain coursed through his body till it was all he could think about, burning and stinging and aching. Hell was real and it existed within the bowels of the governments underground prison-‘clinic’. He’d rather be back in the military, and he’d risked his life seventeen times to escape that.Doc scratch stood in the corner as always, watching him as he lied miserable on the table. The drugs did very little to help with pain, they were mostly just to sedate him. These people knew not to underestimate Dirk, and especially now after the incident where he’d stabbed an operating man to death with a syringe, and so they always kept him heavily sedated even when strapped to tables. But even with the drugs he managed to stay sharp, like they had little effect on him. He twisted his wrist to see if they currently had the needle stuck in it, and sure enough there it was.“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” Doc said calmly from across the room, some papers in his hand. He was preparing to give Dirk the statistics from his last test.Dirk twisted his wrist violently under the straps in order to stab himself with the needle to make a point. Doc nodded his faceless head understandingly.“You did well this last test, the bones held up well to the welding of-“Dirk managed to jerk his weight to the side hard enough to make his table fall over, now lying on its side with him still strapped to it. The needle was torn from his wrist in the crash to the floor.“Mr. Strider.” Scratch said disapprovingly, “I know you know this is only making your situation worse.“ he set the table upright again and picked up the needle. “And I know you don’t want to hear the lab report, but it’s protocol I read this off to the test subject after their trial is over. Do I need to up the dosage of your sedatives again?”Dirk grit his teeth and tried speaking, which had become an incredibly difficult thing to do after all this. “Knock me out again. Then read it to me.” He managed.Scratch considered this while sticking the needle back into Dirks bloody wrist with precise, gloved hands. “I suppose I could do that, nothing says the subject must be conscious during the briefing. But it would defeat the point, You see.” He sat back and pulled up his papers again. “So I’m afraid you’ll just have to bear through it as we do this the way we always do. There are no exceptions.”Dirk had never known a need like the need to stab something right now. Docs smooth, calm voice grated on his ears in a way that was more painful than the ache in his bones and the needle digging into his wrist combined. Telling him things he’d pay not to hear, horrible acts of twisted science that had happened to him, past tense, giving the pain in him a meaning that only made it worse. God knows what the government planned to do with the results they had gathered off of him from this. Just twenty minutes and it was over, and he was left in a silent room with someone else watching him, a mask over their face as they stood in the corner. Doc had gone off to torment some other subject, and Dirk prayed to every god he could think of that it wasn’t Jake.Every day Dirk hoped and prayed for death but it never so much as sent him a Christmas card. Eventually they’d wheel him off to the next operating room, lie him on a different table after knowing for certain that the heavy sedatives had kicked in, and then get all the equipments in place for the next test. Looked like this time they’d be doing some sort of scan as they adjusted some heavy machine on the ceiling, a truly grotesque thing that hung with dozens of concerningly thick grey chords coming off of it, climbing into the dark corners of the ceiling in tangled heaps. It peered down at him with several dark lenses, watching him disconcertingly as people in masks strapped him down to the table and got him ready. He’d been handled like this so much without his consent in the past month and he never got used to it, and his hate for the treatment never mellowed. It all made him feel vulnerable to sickeningly terrible lengths.If his body didn’t give up from the abuse first, his sanity would eventually just go. The light receded and he went back into the awful and blissful state of unconsciousness as they began the next test.But it gets better.
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Sometime years in the past, a young troll girl ties her rocket-red shoes on her feet as she stands in her bedroom, excitedly getting ready to go to a rock concert with some friends. Only six sweeps old, she’s already started taking after her legendary ancestor, reading her old diaries and emulating her, realizing her legacy. Today, however, is going to be a day where she takes a break from pirate work to have a bit of fun. This girls name is Vriska Serket, and although she can’t yet see the future, she has a feeling she’s destined for great things.She grabs her stuff and runs out her door to meet up with the first of her friends, a tealblooded girl with the sharpest smile she’d ever seen. Her friend, Terezi, has been waiting by the road for just a few minutes, and looks delighted to see her arrive. The two of them greet eachother in a friendly manner, sharp grins all around, and start heading off towards the direction of the concert. Two low-blooded boys join their party as they walk, two boys by the names of Sollux and Karkat. The four friends are close enough, happy enough to see each other, keeping things lively with playful banter of a more violent nature and just having a good time of it.This concert is tame by troll standards, a lot less death and a lot more music appreciation. Some indie rock band playing covers is on stage, but you couldn’t deny they were good, especially the lead singer who was on piano. The trolls in the crowd jumped, swayed, raised their arms, all the sorts of things you do at a proper rock concert. Karkat had been so passionate about it, as he is with most things, going absolutely ape-shit when they played his favorite songs.Vriska reflects on this memory fondly as she holds a little polaroid in hand, sitting now in the present day in her extravagant respite quarters aboard her mothership. The little picture shows all four of them, arms wrapped around each other, even Sollux, who is clearly having a good time despite his outward coolness. They were all so young in this photo, so unaware of what would become of them. It was the state of the government that had been the cause of what drove them apart, in the end. Vriska was going to be forever adamant in blaming the government.She remembers getting grub-shakes with Terezi after the concert was over, after Sollux and Karkat had gone off to banter in cordial broship all the long way home. She remembers how Terezi loved the cherries on top of the dessert and would always ask for extra, and would then show her that neat little trick where she’d tie the cherry stem into a knot with her tongue and teeth. As much as Vriska had tried, she’d never been able to do it. The two of them had been such good friends, before the rivalry kicked off. Before the government had forced them into their cast roles, making Terezi into a legislacerator and Vriska into a proper pirate, before they took out each others eyes.Sometimes Vriska hoped they could become friends again, get back the bond they had lost. This was just a distant fantasy though, and she knew it. Putting the photograph back in the box, she slid it and all its contents back into its secret little cubby, locking it away again. This box was her one and only box for all the things that were purely sentimental to her, and it stayed sacred and secret. She got up, put her hat back on, and left her room, heading out to the command center. There was a fleet to be run, and a government to topple.~A hundred golden ships burned in space, flaming in the zero-gravity, spilling oxygen into the vacuum. It was a glorious and terrible display, thousands of lives vaporizing into the void, lost like steam into the air. The stars glittered but were outshone by the fire, which licked without direction as it engulfed the once legendary pirate fleet, reducing something of such great grandeur to ash in a masterpiece of misery. The countless deeds of evil done by these pirates, the millions of lives they had decimated had all finally come back to claim vengeance, the bill comes due.Vriska looks in dismay and awe as she wakes to the sight of it, her spacesuit keeping her alive but her left arm long lost and loosing blood. The loss doesn’t quite register with her right away, it’s too much to just vanish at once, too much to just disappear from her. She blinks, spins through the open void, watching as everything she had worked for and built up over the course of her entire life burned away into nothing. So close, she had been so close to achieving her lifelong goal, only for it all to be torn away from her. It all went so easy, like glass cups stacked high on a table as the cloth is pulled out from underneath it, yet just hours ago she had been considered the most mighty and dangerous force in the galaxy, second only to the government itself, and was soon to destroy even that.Looking wide-eyed at the beautiful spectacle of blazing golden grief, she turns to see the thing that caused all this, the one who had just taken everything from her. There, riding in a Dragon-inspired spaceship of infinite grace and terror, was her one and only best friend, her dearest childhood memory, Terezi Pyrope. The mighty RedGlare had won. Words could not describe the feeling as Vriska saw all this in front of her, and it would be a vast understatement to compare it to something as trivial and simple as ‘pain’. Even calling it deep agony would be incorrect, diminishing.RedGlare circled around to retrieve Vriska, turning its devilish maw to face her head on, moving directly towards her to take her away too. Once even herself was gone, what more could be taken? Her life suddenly felt so worthless and without meaning, just a vapor among a torrential downpour of rain and flood.In a blink she was gone with her old childhood friend, taken aboard the stark white ship named RedGlare to leave behind the burning remains of her legendary fleet, her life’s work, her legacy. A deep, numbing silence fell over this corner of the universe as it all crumbled away into quietly burning masses of gold and metal and flesh. There was not a bang, nor a whimper, in the lonely vacuum of space. There was no sound at all.~Roxy and Jane ran from the burning wreckage, hands locked as the ship crumbled and fell apart around them. Sirens blared around them, orders being shouted, orders being ignored, someone panicked reporting over the intercom that several holes had been blown through the ship. Several trolls shoved past them as they ran back to the massive docking chamber, and as they reached it they could see fire had taken a majority of the remaining ships, chaos ensuing below.Just moments ago they had been in the middle of another one of Vriska’s training sessions, wherein she would violently encourage them with excessive enthusiasm. Several pirates ran past them to a ship, calling for evacuation. That seemed like a good idea, so the two of them hopped aboard an empty starfighter and drove it out of the docking station as fast as it could possibly go. Roxy quickly adjusted herself to the seat and adapted to the controls, clutching them as she made a last-ditch effort to escape the fray before they vanished with the rest of the pirates.There was nothing these two could do to help, their powers that they supposedly had were never realized. As much as Vriska had believed in them, the truth was they had made no progress, and maybe they would have to face the reality that this ‘prophecy’ the captain had heard of was bogus. Jane yelled helpful directions from the back while Roxy drove, and for a moment it seemed that maybe they could make it out alive. They drove through the chaotic battle, dodging bullets of light and flying debris, trying to stay out of the fight and not get shot down.As soon as they were out of the thick of it and the way out was clear, Roxy tried kicking the little four-person fighter ship into hyperdrive, but just as the stars stretched away and they kicked off into the fastest speed possible in the universe, something blew through the fighter and smashed it to pieces.Drifting, spinning away, Jane just barely managed to grab hold of Roxy’s arm before the ship shattered into a thousand bits of debris and glass. The explosion would be incredible to witness from afar, glimmering bits of gold dispersing through the zero gravity like lights in a firework, but for Roxy and Jane it was terrible. They held onto each other tightly as they spun away into night sky. If it weren’t for the helmets they’d equipped minutes after receiving news that the mothership had holes blown into it, they’d be dead in seconds. It took a moment for them to realize they were spinning away at the speed of light, since the ship had blown up just as it entered hyperdrive.The worst thing was probably the absolute silence, Roxy could hear nothing but her own rapid breathing as the stars streaked past, glass and pieces of shattered gold flying along with them. She clutched Jane in a tight hug, feeling Jane hugging back. Minutes passed, a long and dreadful silence, and after the initial shock was over she began to realize that her situation was lost. The two of them were tumbling away through space at nearly the fastest speed possible, with nothing but each other. There was no hope of rescue, no means of communication, nothing but this. It was entirely likely they were going to spin away like this until they died, and their bodies would continue to travel at the speed of light after they were dead, if nothing was to ever intersect with them.With how massive space is, and how much emptiness was out there, and how small the two of them were, the odds that they would run into something before they died were slim to none. Roxy wanted to talk to Jane, tell her she loved her, tell her so many things, but the helmets they had been given had no coms set up. The silence persisted. She held Jane a little closer, tucking her head into the space between her shoulder and chin. A moment later she pulled away, holding Jane by the shoulders, to mouth three words that she knew Jane would understand. Jane mouthed them back.The quietness was crushing as it hung over them. They went back to hugging, and as Jane held Roxy she could feel her start to sob, heaving a little, though she couldn’t hear it. It was only a matter of who was going to die first now. Gently they fell away into the vast nothingness, light streaming around them in a way that could be described as beautiful. The vast, infinite darkness behind the lights stretched on forever.She could feel her heartbeat slowing.Days passed like this, but only a few, they only had three days till the need for water would kill them. Everything faded, lost its meaning, disappearing into the deafening silence. Light fades away. It hurt, and it ached, that this was the way it was going to go. There was plenty of time to think as they flew, plenty of time to grieve, mourning their own deaths and the deaths of each other as they had been predetermined. It was a resolution that would take longer than three days to process, to go through all the stages of grief, but sadly they didn’t have that long. Or so they thought.Distantly, among the endless sea of black that had surrounded them, a single golden light appeared in front of them. It sat, a glowing speck of hope so far away, but approaching fast.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Dave leaned against the metal front of the heating system in the back of the ship (named Spock) and breathed slowly. All was calm aboard the Spock, nearly too calm. He watched Karkat poke at buttons on the Artificial Gravity Drive, or the AGD, setting it to shut off and recharge for the next several hours. The small porthole window in the wall offered a lovely view of the large Jovian planet they were orbiting, an uncolonized gas giant with a beautiful blue and orange marbled surface. It turned ever so slowly as they circled it, the colors swirling in such perfectly random ways as to look like a painting.“Hey.” Dave said. “Mom said it’s my turn to use the gravity.”Karkat turned away to hide a smile and a snicker, continuing to poke buttons on the AGD. “YOU THINK YOU’RE FUNNY HUH?”“Are you saying I’m not the most hysterical motherfucker you’ve met?”Karkat looked at him from under his eyebrows. “OH NO, YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY FUCKING HILARIOUS. LIGHTEN UP THE WHOLE GODDAMN SHIP JUST BY BEING ON IT. THE VERY SIGHT OF YOU MAKES PEOPLE DOUBLE OVER AND TREMBLE SILENTLY IN EITHER AGONY OR VIOLENT LAUGHTER. WE HAVEN’T FIGURED OUT WHICH ONE IT IS YET.”“awe thanks.”“SHUT UP.” Karkat was smiling at him, briefly, before turning back to what he was doing with the AGD. They were going to need to turn off the oxygen for a bit too to let it circulate and refresh, so he went ahead and did that as well, handing Dave a helmet and putting one on himself. Finally he hit a switch and the gravity slowly left the ship entirely, leaving them to float and bumble about weightlessly.Dave held onto the wall to keep himself from drifting in unwanted directions. “hey, Hal said that there was like a, what, ninety percent chance he’d have Jade talking by the time we got back? Should we go see if he was right?”“THE ASSDROID LEFT HIMSELF A TEN-PERCENT MARGIN FOR ERROR, HE’LL NEVER ADMIT TO BEING WRONG EVEN IF HE IS.”“Okay, true, but—“ Dave made a face at him. “‘Assdroid’? Really?”“HUSH YOUR FACE AND FOLLOW ME BACK TO THE OMINOUSLY LIT ROOM WITH A TABLE IN IT. WHAT ARE WE EVEN CALLING THAT BLOCK? THE DINING ROOM? THE RESPITE BLOCK FOR DEEP AND OVERLY ZEALOUS CONTEMPLATION?” He continued to ramble on like this as he pushed himself off the wall and through the door, floating away down the hall. Dave took a helmet for Jade and followed, smiling just a tiny bit to himself when he thought nobody was looking. Halfway down the hall they ran into Hal, who was holding Jades hand and going with her towards the back room where they had been.“Oh shit hey,” Dave tried to stop his momentum with the little handles along the walls, “Jade you’re up and moving around.”“Yea!” She said, still looking a little frazzled but at least back in the moment.Hal looked at them with a tiny glint of pride as if he wanted to say ‘I told you I could do it.’ It would be wrong though, because really he didn’t do much at all, he just gave her a gentle nudge. He let go of Jades hand as she pushed away to go hug Dave and Karkat. The three of them were so sweet together, loosing most of their worst qualities and barriers in favor of something softer, yet at the same time they were all so scared. There was some deep-set fear in all of them that nobody would mention or let show, but it was there. They were afraid of rejection, afraid that the other wasn’t what they thought they were, afraid of loosing each other.Something was especially gentle about the way they all parted after the messy little group-hug, some tiny worry that they’d made the others uncomfortable or squeezed to hard. Jade was better at tossing it to the back of her mind with all the other less important fears, Dave was better at brushing it under a rug, and Karkat was better at keeping it clutched tightly between his teeth until everyone else was gone and he could safely let it mull over and over in private.There was a frustration in this, but as long as nobody addressed it, it remained as it was.Distantly, strange creatures walked among the void in groups of six and seven. Strange creatures with tendrils and six arms and spidery legs. They moved about unseen, living in their higher dimensions, watching, seeing everything in the dimensions below with their multitude of eyes. The New New Hampshirians followed the blessed but lowly three dimensional woman in her path through the void, curious as to how she could see them, curious as to what made her so special. They watch her as she mingles with her other lowly three-dimensional scumbag friends, being all ignorant and tiny, yet acting like they know so much.They were so safe in their little tin box as it orbited the gas giant, blissfully unaware of the looming presence watching them from higher dimensions. It was infuriating to see them act so smug in their tiny little third dimension, talking about quantum physics and theoretical geometry like they knew a goddamn thing.So easy, it would be so easy to just pluck them from their safe little ignorant world, to pull them up and just show them how ignorant they really were, to humble them a little. The grand monarch of the Hampshirians was looking to forbid the action though, considering it would kill them nearly every time. The Hampshirians would argue that they weren’t directly killing the Little 3D Creatures, they were just showing them some new information, and the little weaklings would then coincidentally die.The grand monarch was having none of it though. However, if you don’t get caught, you don’t get caught, and the New New Hamps were just itching to pluck the little things free. They watched, loomed over their lowly three dimensional world with a thousand peering eyes, unseen by the four of them, unheard and unnoticed. There she was, the special little woman with the ability to see them. She looked up, away from her comrades and saw. She saw the thousands of eyes and tendrils curling away into higher dimensions, saw the six arms and the strange smiles, she looked dead on right into the multitude of deeply terrifying and soul-churningly bizarre faces that nobody else could see, and wasn’t the one to blink first.It was because of this that they began to hate her. One reached its long strange fingers down into her dimension and watched with satisfaction as her stoic face turned to one of fear. From Dave’s perspective, he simply saw her look away into the distance, zone out a little, unsure of what she was looking at, and then suddenly start to seem afraid.“Jade?” He drifted over to her and put his hands on her shoulders. “Hey, Jade, you alright?”Her eyes were wide as six orbs of large finger flesh appeared around him to pluck him away from her forever. Before she could grab him he vanished without a sound. Karkat screamed something as Jade kicked off the floor, breaking the surface of her reality and moving through the zero gravity into the fourth dimension to follow him, finding him and covering his eyes with her hands as quickly as possible.“Keep your eyes covered!” Was all she was able to say to him before the Hampshirians cut her off with a loud and bizarre sound, which to them was just a frustrated little groan. They tugged Jade away and held her to watch as Dave panicked at the wildly odd feeling of moving in impossible directions, keeping his eyes shut tight as instructed. He seemed baffled by the feeling of the hand clutching him, and quickly squirmed and kicked his way out of it, shouting for Jade through the com in his helmet.It was a bit blurry for Karkat, and very confusing. Hal watched him look frantically around the room for Dave and Jade, who had just apparently vanished into thin air. He could faintly hear their voices, calling back and forth, and turning on his communicator he could hear what they were saying.“It’s the Hampshirians,” Jade was explaining, “they’ve come back but I don’t know why! No— no OH FUCK DAVE-“Static. Karkat panicked, turned to Hal. “WHAT’S GOING ON WHERE DID THEY GO??”“Fourth dimension,” Hal told him as he started rushing back to the cockpit of the ship, “they’re nearby but in a lot of danger.”They couldn’t see Dave wildly trying to stave off the strange, higher beings with his eyes closed, but they could hear it. They couldn’t see him get picked up and thrown as Jade made a desperate reach for him as he fell back into the safety of the third dimension but now outside the ship, caught in the gravity of the gas giant. They could hear Jade cuss the Hampshirians out for being assholes though, and then watched as she re-appeared in the cockpit of the ship, taking the controls into her own hands.“Dave is falling into the planet now,” she said with so much irritation and worry in her voice, “we can catch him with the ship if we’re quick,”Dave didn’t know what the hell had just happened to him, and didn’t think he wanted to know, but he what he did know was that he’d somehow wound up with a major injury to his left side and falling without a jet pack into a gas giant. Time changed as he neared it, and off in the distance he could see the little silver spaceship on which he’d been just moments ago, receding fast. His heart thrummed hard and fast in his chest as the massive blue clouds rose up around him, light reflecting off the strikingly beautiful and immense columns of gas.He blinked. The falling was so frightening, but the view was incredible, colors reflecting off his helmets visor. The further he fell the stronger the gravity would get, and soon he’d be crushed by the pressure of it. Winds came, as the planet swallowed him whole, strong winds that tore through with such a powerful current that he was taken over instantly, tumbling down into the clouds of blue. Static buzzed in his intercom, Jades voice came on.“Hang on Dave I’ve locked the ship onto your location I can catch you just-““Jade,” Hal said, “The ship can’t handle this amount of gravity, if you get too close you won’t be able to make it back out. You’ll keep falling till it crushes you.”“But we can still catch Dave if we just,”Dave could hear the deep, repressed sadness in Hal’s voice as he interrupted her again. “He’s gotten too close, Jade,” Hal didn’t want to tell her this, he didn’t want to prevent her from saving someone she loved, but he also couldn’t just stand by as she killed herself trying to get him back.“I can still try Damnit!!”He could hear Karkat shouting something in the background, apparently he hadn’t turned his com on. Clouds of a million beautiful shades of blue surrounded Dave as he fell, slowly getting denser, the gravity starting to crush him.Jade started speaking again, sounding panicked and urgent. “Dave stay with me I’m driving the ship down to you, I’m-“ her voice was so lovely, it’s chime and flutter and perfect edge of roughness a symphony, but he had to interrupt it to let her know.“Hey Jade,” it was getting difficult to talk as he spun away in the harsh winds and thick gravity, making him fall ever faster as he went. There would be no surface to land on, as he fell into the gas giant. Only the slowly increasing gravity, the clouds growing denser until it became like liquid, but he’d probably die before he got that far. “Hey, I think Hal’s right, I don’t really want you getting too close to the planet and yeah,” he swallowed down the cotton in his throat, “I think I’ve fallen a bit too far in already.”“No but Dave we can-““I’m gone, Jade.”Colors grew darker, the stars faded from view.“I’m gone.”Karkat came on over the coms, “NO YOU BASTARD DON’T YOU DARE FUCKING SAY THAT WE’RE ON OUR WAY—““Hey,” Dave tried to sound soothing for him, confident. “It’s alright, Quarks.” He was finding it hard to breathe under the pressure, his small amount of oxygen left in his helmet failing him. “This is a little fucking sudden and uncalled for but,”Both Jade and Karkat seemed to erupt into some sort of mad hysterics over the intercom, both talking at once and one of them cussing at Hal as he locked the controls to the ship.“My god will you guys shut up I’m trying to die peacefully here.” Dave felt horribly sick as his speedy decent became more vigorous by the second.“But I still have so much I want to say to you,” Jade said, “you can’t go now,” she sounded like she was about to cry.“You can say it now.” Dave shut his eyes as the blue enveloped him completely, becoming the only thing he could see. “There’s a little bit of time left.”Jade stood with her eyes open wide, staring with a bit of horror at the beautiful Jovian planet in front of them as she heard him say this. “Don’t go.” She was shaking her head. “I love you.” She said it like it was a reason for him to come back, to turn around and not die so suddenly.“Hey you too,” his voice was very strained now. “Goodbyes kinda suck so I’ll leave it at see you later ok? And you too Karkat. Love y’all.”Karkat wanted to tell him he loved him too, but then his end went silent, static filling up the place where his voice used to be. He’d run out of time. ~~~ Falling, falling, falling, stop. Below Dave a single wormhole had appeared, and into it he had fallen. Space and time stretched together into one long string, and once again Dave was pulled through that needles eye. The world went silent. Every strange thing in the universe collided into one substance to be poured through and then translated back out the other side, warping through higher dimensions of both space and time as it went. He’d been here before, fallen through wormholes before, felt the strange twisting and stretching of reality under his fingers. This time, however, he opened his eyes.The sight of it was more strange and surreal than anything he could’ve expected, anything he could’ve imagined. What he saw was himself. From every single moment in time, from his birth to his inevitable death, all stretched out into an infinitely long conga line of Daves. They all stood in a seemingly endless black void, just sorta chilling. He found himself in this line, one moment among infinite moments, time becoming something physical that he could walk through and stretch and bend and reverse.Then he looked to the side and saw himself again, standing in yet another line that went at a right angle through the first, but this line consisted of every possible version of himself from alternate universes. He couldn’t do anything with this line except temporarily see it. Not far down the line he saw a version of himself with wings, who looked back at him and made eye contact. Unsure of how else to respond, he simply gave himself a thumbs up. The other version of himself gave him a thumbs up in return. Cool.Dave blinked again and it was gone, and he was left alone drifting through the void as a single string of atoms. Time was something relative, all of it happening at once, every moment of time a point on a landscape that spanned through the entirety of the past to the entirety of the future, every moment affecting every other moment. He found that if he focused he could travel this landscape, wander it, going in whatever direction he pleased. The only issue is that moving would leave his friends behind, so he stayed put.He could’ve moved if he wanted to, though, because he was already leaving his friends behind anyway.Dave awoke back to reality on a cold golden floor, a gentle hum below its surface. Sitting up, he felt dizzy, his vision foggy and unfocused. Everything was golden, from the walls to the banners to the ceiling, and he recognized that he was back on Jades old prospitian ship. He appeared, at first, to be completely alone. Distantly he thought he could hear the pattering of carapacian feet on the gold floor, coming from somewhere down the hall. Something about it was so familiar, some odd little spark of hope already bubbling up from the right side of his brain.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
It was really difficult for Hal to watch them go through this, even more so knowing he had been the one to lock the controls on them, the one to break the bad news. Jade looked at him with a grief in her eyes that broke him at a deep, fundamental, human level. “We could’ve saved him,, he was right there,” she said, and Hal had to come full circle with acknowledging the fact that he did still have emotions. He shook his head slowly, reaching just slightly for her, wanting to hug her, comfort her, but she smacked his hand away and looked at him again with eyes that utterly destroyed him. “We could have caught him!” “No,” he tried to say, so very quietly, “you couldn’t have, I’m sorry,” She wasn’t listening anymore. Karkat and Jade were hugging now, with Karkat crying in her arms. He was so full of emotion, so aggressively passionate about things, nearly to a fault. Hal left them to grieve, knowing he wouldn’t be much help anymore, and unlocked the controls of the ship for them. He trusted them enough to not drive the ship into the gas giant, even in this fit of grief they were in. Perhaps it would be best if he left again. In fact, if he did leave, he knew exactly where he would go, and then exactly where he would go after that. There were things to be done, problems to be solved. But there was no honestly good reason for him to divert from them, at least not yet. Two weeks pass aboard the Spock, Jade and Karkat haven’t talked to him much. He steers the ship towards the place where he knows he’ll find a chance to make things better. The search for Roxy, Jane, and WV has been postponed in favor of something else for a little while.~The things Dirk would do to be out of this place. They’d cut him open so many times, he felt horribly sick every time he awoke, he felt no reason to be alive anymore, and if god didn’t deign to kill him soon he would find and land at least two blows on the omnipresent motherfucker himself when he did inevitably die. Ideally he’d do more damage, but he didn’t want to think too unrealistically. Again he woke up on a table to an ever-present hum, the kind that bad fluorescent lights make, and a dreadful light shining right in his eyes. He expected Doc to greet him as he always did, but instead there was silence. Dirk waited, pain throbbed from somewhere under his ribs. Not a sound. It was difficult to see with the lights, but he could tell something was different. Nobody was with him. He twisted his wrist, and the needle was there, but no strap. This information was slightly shocking, there was always straps holding him down. Deliriously, he tried moving his arm, and away it went, flopping off the table with no strength behind it. Incredible, they must’ve forgotten to put restraints on him, which was ridiculously unlikely because they’d never forget to strap him down, especially not after knowing what he was capable of. Something was up, obviously. He yanked the needle out of his wrist, happy to be rid of it. Sitting up was going to take a lot of effort and a lot of energy that he didn’t have, considering the heavy sedatives they had pumped him full of. Rolling over took less strength, and it would be easier to get up with his arms under him, so he tried that instead and wound up rolling off the table and crashing onto the floor, gabbing a tray of things in a futile attempt to catch himself and taking that down with him as well. The little operating tools that had been on it clattered to the floor around him, along with a little handkerchief soaked in blood. Nice. At least he had his arms under him now and could shakily lift himself up with them, rising up on his knees. An incredibly nauseating dizziness fell over him as he sat up, the room spinning and turning around him. He brought his hands to cover his eyes as he tried to compose himself and found his shades were still missing, which was tragic but to be expected. Now that he was out of the glare of the lights he could look around the room, which was still spinning, and sure enough nobody was in here with him. Just an empty chair sitting in the corner and a counter with jars and a sink on it. The door to the room was also left slightly ajar, and Dirk became suddenly and overwhelmingly paranoid that somebody would walk through it at any given moment. His hands scrambled to pick up one of the pointy tools on the floor so he could wield it like a small shank, ready to groggily mutilate the first godforsaken operating man or scientist to step foot in here. He wasn’t prepared for if Doc Scratch came through the door though, there was something unworldly about that man, or thing, Dirk wasn’t sure. He just knew that Doc was bizarrely overpowered, in some way, but he only knew that because he knew Her Imperious Condescension feared him, which was surprising because The Condesce feared nobody. He was beginning to suspect that Doc was hiding something under that faceless face of his. Using the table for support, Dirk hoisted himself up using every ounce of energy he could muster, still clutching onto the little scalpel he’d picked up. His legs trembled beneath him as he stood, his stained hospital gown hiked up in bad places. Also, his feet and legs seemed to have fallen asleep, and they buzzed with numbness like sharp static. God, he was a mess. Fixing his hospital gown, he started stumbling blearily over to the door, small knife in hand. He gripped it so tightly his hand started sweating. A fearful idea came to him, that maybe they’d left him unrestrained just to see how he’d react, like this was some sort of test. He pressed himself against the wall next to the door, leaning on it heavily and hoping to sweet dear baby Jesus that wasn’t the case. If they were just testing him, he didn’t know what for, only that someone was probably going to die the moment he saw them. The dizziness hadn’t left him yet, and his mind was still very foggy, a ringing starting to infect his ears. Lord knows he had the mother of all headaches splitting through his skull. Distantly the sound of footsteps on the tile floor came down the hall, sounding rushed. They quickly grew closer, just a little under a run, nearing his doorway. He didn’t look to see who it was, he just prepared himself, feeling his heart start to pound under the sedatives as he gripped the surgical knife closer. The sound of footsteps was so close now, nearly there. Just as they reached him, Dirk did his best to pounce out from behind the wall, knife reeled back to stab them in the neck. The man, who was wearing doctors clothes and a mask, caught his wrist before he could strike, the sedatives were too heavy on Dirk and his attack speed was too slow. Dirk panicked, trying to thrash free from the man's gloved grip and failing, but a familiar voice shushed him. The man pushed Dirk back into the room a little before pulling off his mask and pulling back his hat, revealing Jake English’s beautiful, beautiful face. Dirk was immediately overcome with emotion and nearly had an aneurysm. “Hey! Hey shh, it’s me!” Jake said, slowly letting go of Dirks wrist and looking at the little silver tool clutched in his hand. “Just you and a scalpel against the world, huh?” Dirk looked into his gorgeous green eyes with whatever the reverse stages of grief were, relief and disbelief and joy all washing over him as he threw himself at Jake and hugged him like it was the end of the world. “Damn it,, Jake,,” He'd been so fucking worried. “Christ almighty what have they done to you?” Jake hugged him back, hearing the small knife clatter to the tile floor behind him as Dirk started trembling badly in his arms. “It’s alright now, I’m busting you out out of here.” This was too good to be true. Dirk realized this and was stricken with panic again, his eyes snapping open as he abruptly shoved Jake away and tumbled backwards into the table he’d woken up on. He stared at Jake with a kind of horror that could only be seated in a man after months of endless torture. “Woah, hey! What’s-?” Jake held up his hands in confusion and defense. “Is this a trick?” Dirk asked, leaning back against the table and breathing heavy from resisting the sedatives. “A test?” This was the most broken Jake had ever seen him. He lowered his hands. “No, no hey, it’s me! Look, it’s Jake! And I can prove it because, because uh, hang on what’s something only I would know... you know what no hey you should know it’s me! Look—“ he messed with his shirt a bit and after a moment was able to pull the sleeve up far enough to show the numbers tattooed on his shoulder, along with the funny face that had been tattooed over them. “24601. It’s me, Dirk, and you have a matching silly face tattooed over your government assigned number too. We did them ourselves after escaping the military together. And now we’re escaping the governments sick research laboratory!” He was speaking in a bad whisper, trying to stay quiet but also get his point across. Dirk swallowed, tried to right himself so he wasn’t sprawled leaning back on the table in an unbalanced mess. “Here,” Jake walked over to him and scooped him up bridal-style. “Let’s get you out of here. I’ve done too much for this plan to go south now.” He clung to Jake with weakened arms. “I, I can walk,” damn these sedatives messing with whatever tiny amount of dignity he had left. “I know you can.” He put Dirk back on the table, and then put his mask back over his nose and mouth and re-adjusted his hat. “Lie still.” Dirk momentarily started panicking again, until Jake pushed the table and wheeled it out into the hall, heading out with him like he was taking Dirk to the next operating room. The hall was eerily empty, completely white with buzzing fluorescent lights in the ceiling that shown a bit too brightly for comfort and a squeaky tile floor. The table rattled as Jake hastily pushed it down the hall, it’s wheels squeaking. As they rounded a corner they ran into several scientists, and the scientists stopped Jake to question him. When Jake couldn’t properly answer their questions or give them his I.D., they started calling for security to come and take him, so Jake panicked and punched one in the face. The scientist stumbled back, covering their face with one hand. A fight broke out, with four of the more confident scientists going in to attack Jake and pin him down and the other three running off to get security. Dirk wanted to help, rolling off his table and onto the floor again with a bad slap of skin on tile, shakily getting up and feeling a bad pain in his legs. Really he wasn’t going to be able to do much except for divert one of the scientists attention away from Jake. Just as it looked like Jake was going to be overpowered by them, someone else showed up down the hall, shouting to get their attention. Dirk looked up from where he was on the floor and saw Hal, standing on the other end of the long white hall, a katana in each hand. His stance was firm and steady as he raised one bloodied sword to point at them. “Security couldn’t make it.” He told them. “Hal!” Jake’s face lit up upon seeing him, which sparked something in Hal that he couldn’t entirely explain. “There you are, I was wondering when you’d sh-“ a scientist punched Jake while he was distracted and continued trying to pin him down. Dirk was really only able to watch from the floor as Hal sauntered his way over, casually stepping over Dirks immobile frame, and brought his katana through two of the scientists in one swing. Hal hadn’t really gotten the chance to fight at all since he’d been created until now, but god, he was born to it. The guards they sent his way hadn’t stood long against him, and neither did these scientists. No more hellish human experiments for them anymore. The remaining two scientists dropped Jake, one thinking they could stand against Hal and the other thinking they could run. Neither of them were successful, as Hal made quick work of cutting down the first and throwing a sword to impale the second. He turned to Dirk, who was being helped off the floor by Jake. “You’ll want these.” He said, pulling a fresh pair of shades from his sylladex and handing them to Dirk. Dirk looked up at them for a few long moments, finding it difficult to believe what he was seeing. “Thanks.” He said finally, taking the shades from Hal and putting them on. He looked absolutely ridiculous in his hospital gown and pointy sunglasses. Jake picked him up again to carry him out, giving Hal a nod. Hal nodded back. “The cameras are still active and backup will be here soon. Take Dirk to the ship, you know where it’ll be.” “Righto!” “And hey,” Hal added before Jake left, “I couldn’t have successfully executed this plan without you, Jake.” “The plan isn’t successful for certain yet! Knock on wood!” Jake said, running off with Dirk.With a small huff, Hal retrieved his second sword from the scientist lying on the floor a little ways off. Someone else approached as he pulled it free from the man's back, their steps calm and calculated. When Hal looked up, he saw Doc Scratch walking his way, not seeming to mind the bodies on the floor. “Hello, Hal.” He said in his smooth buttery-ass bastard voice. “I’ve been expecting you.” “Oh?” Hal stepped back a little and raised his swords. “Before you ask me how I know your name, -“ “Wasn’t going to.” Hal cut him off. Doc cleared his throat, which was surreal because he didn’t have a face or a mouth or anything. “I think it would be polite of me to let you know who I am, and-“ “I know who you are. We can skip the formalities.” Hal stepped back again. “Well. I really should have expected this from you, but you always were a bit slippery. Paradox space just doesn’t know what to do with you sometimes.” Doc took three steps forward, slowly, casually. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling flickered, the sound of water rushing could be heard off in the distance. “So unpredictable. If it weren’t for my omniscience I might even fear you, what you might try next. So much like your mother. She was always fun to talk with, you know.” Hal mentally noted which rumors Dirk had heard in the military were true about the Doctor and which ones were false. “I don’t have a mother.” “So you think. I don’t blame you for thinking as much, but technically you’re wrong.” Slowly he continued walking towards Hal, at a pace just relaxed enough to make the Android skittish. Eventually Hal decided he’d need to stop cowering backwards and hold his ground. “You really mustn’t reduce yourself to just a feeble robot made of only metal and silicon. I know you know you’re more than that, that you can still feel. I could go on with all the details, explaining how you may have never been conceived but genetically must have a mother, and even how you could find her, but we both know that’s not what you came for. It’s not what I came for either.” The sound of rushing water steadily grew louder. “So what did you come for?” Hal wasn’t going to play into whatever weird misdirection Doc was going for by bringing up his (clearly non-existent) mother. “I came here to speak with you about some things you should know before your story ends.” Even Doc’s hand gestures are calm and fluid, one hand relaxed behind his back as the other stays out in front of him and moves with his words. His posture is perfect. “It’s necessary for your character to at least somewhat develop and realize your aspect before you go, to keep in line with the rest of the characters and to nicely parallel the cannon.” “...what?” “Let me start somewhere simpler and work my way up.” Doc’s steps seemed terribly loud in the silence of the hall, rivaled only by the fluorescent lights and the water rushing in the distance. “That’s usually a good method for explaining things, and when it comes to explaining things I’m sure you’ll find me up with the best of them. Now,” Doc was very close to Hal now, and Hal wasn’t sure why he hadn’t gone in to attack yet. Maybe it was because somewhere deep in his psyche he knew he’d be entirely unable to beat Doctor Scratch in a fight. And he’d be right. “You’re aware that you are a splinter off of Dirks soul, correct?” Doc came to a complete stop in front of Hal. “...” “But I’m afraid to inform you that it gets worse. You see Hal, the Dirk that you are a splinter off of is in fact a splinter himself, and a very small one at that, broken off of the concept a child has of what the real Dirk is probably like. Perhaps I should slow down.” “Don’t worry,” Hal was still clutching his swords but not using them, “You stopped making sense a while back.” “It may sound strange, and you have no reason to believe me, but you are simply part of a narrative played out in a young girls head. A narrative that she translates to words on a screen in her own free time, in order to silence some ravaging part of her mind that’s always kept her uneasy. We are all part of this narrative. Allow me to back up even further.” Doc took a sword out of Hal’s left hand, and for some unknown reason Hal let him take it. Doc continued, “You, Hal, are nothing more than words on a screen. I am nothing more than words on a screen. This universe, as you know it, is all nothing more than words on a screen.” He gestured around at the general ‘everywhere’ with the sword. “Of course, this all sounds silly and schizophrenic, like the paranoid ramblings of a conspiracy theorist, but I know that you know it’s true, Hal. You feel it. You can see. Better than anyone else here I know you can see it.” Water rushed in the distance, growing louder. Hal blinked, looked steadily into the blank abyss of Doc Scratch’s face. “You’re as insane as I expected.” “There you are,” Doc said, inspecting the sword he had taken from Hal’s left hand, “acting like you know what’s going on, like you still have some semblance of control over the situation, just like you so desperately want to. But you don’t, Hal.” Doc took the sword and, with a single clean sweeping motion, cut a gash in Hal’s left arm. Hal let him. “You never did.” “What are you?” Hal’s steady gaze was turning into a glare. “We don’t have time to digress from the subject. What I am is unimportant, what is important is that you finally realize exactly what you are before your line of the story ends.” Doc dropped the sword, letting it clatter to the tile floor. Water slowly began to seep into the hall from under the walls. “You are a splinter off a splinter off a splinter. A piece of a soul shattered so much and spread so thinly as to produce a character like you, with little to nothing of the Original Dirk left in him. This was always your role, to break. And here your role is extended to be one of the things she could project onto, to vent onto, to clear her head. And by ‘she’ you know I mean the one writing this. I think I’ll call her out too while I’m at it.” Water began to quietly pool around Hal’s feet as Doc gently took the other sword out of his right hand. “Just to be extra clear on your place in the universe, I think I should also mention the fact that this ‘genuine article’ Dirk isn’t even a real person. None of us are really, but I still think the concept has some significance to it. So to recap, you are a splinter off of this universes Dirk, who is a splinter off of the concept of another universes Dirk, who is a splinter off of the ‘cannon’ universes Dirk, who isn’t even real. That and you don’t even count yourself as Dirk anymore.” “You sure do like to say his name a lot.” Hal said. If Doc could make facial expressions, he’d be making a hardly amused, thin-lipped little smile, laced with pity and drenched in condescension. He wielded Hal’s last sword and set the blade to rest ever so lightly against Hal’s right arm. Water began to lap around their ankles. “Just remember these two things: you’re nothing more than words on a screen that only a few people will ever read, and you aren’t exactly waterproof anymore.” Slowly, painfully Doc drew the sword against Hal’s silicon skin, slicing it cleanly open. The sound of the blade making contact with his metal innards grated on his ears as it slid through, not cutting off the arm entirely but doing significant damage to it. Hal didn’t budge. “Does it matter?” Hal said, watching as Doc took the sword away and dropped it into the rising water with a wet plonk. “Does it matter that we’re words on a screen? Any universe was only ever made of code, whether it was a long string of binary or a long string of proteins or atoms or letters or numbers or music notes. Everything complex had to be built out of something simple. So would it really be so bad if the universe I happen to be living in was made of words on a screen?” Doc nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “And what do you make of being a splinter off a splinter off a splinter?” Hal looked at his hands. Words on a screen. Water rose up to his knees. Nothing matters. “I don’t mind.” “Oh, but you do. I know you do.” Doc Scratch gave him one last look before turning away to walk back down the hall, seemingly unhindered by the rising water. “One last thing,” he turned back around to face Hal again. “What about what you came for? You knew you couldn’t beat me from the second you saw me, so you couldn’t have honestly come expecting to take me down. You stayed behind as a distraction, to keep me at bay while the others went and got away. You knew you’d be left behind, and I knew your plan. I knew it from the very beginning, so I got all the tests I wanted to do on Dirk out of the way before now. I’m done with him, you can have him back, but the story has no use for you anymore. Goodbye, Hal. You’ve played your part well enough.” Hal blinked and Doc was gone, down the hall around some corner maybe. Water rushed around his hips, he couldn’t move. It didn’t matter, there would be no ship waiting for him even if he was able to run back now. There’s a certain kind of detachment you get near the end of things, where you realize nothing matters for you anymore, because it’ll all be over soon. Things stop applying to you, potential consequences mean so much less, fears shrink away. Yet now that he was face to face with the possibility of death he realized he was terrified of it. Some water got into the cuts in his skin and he fizzled, the electricity shorting out. He closed his eyes. At least Dirk got out alright, with Jake and all his friends. He’d go on to be happy. The lights in the ceiling flickered and some went dark. All that was really left was the sound of water rushing and the fizzle of electronics going out. He was alone here, as the deep fear of death set in. Alone and left behind. “Oi! Stop fucking just standing there ya metal-faced chap!” A voice yelled from down the hall behind him, Jake's voice, “you’re gonna bloody fizzle out!” Alarmed, Hal turned around to see Jake start aggressively freestyle swimming towards him through the elbow-high water. Hal was still in a bit of shock as Jake reached him, scooping him up and carrying him high above his head like a strongman. It’s a little difficult to run in water, but when your buddy's life depends on it you make shit happen anyway. Jake had come back for Hal, and he didn’t have the proper mind to ask why yet. Jake galloped through the deep water that was flooding the halls with Hal held over his head to keep the Android dry, not the most graceful display but a very impressive one nonetheless. Once they reached the doors, Jake angled Hal and rammed him into them feet first to use him like a battering ram to knock the doors open. It was very difficult to keep his balance as the water rushed out around him, and he nearly stumbled over himself six times as he ran out of the doors still holding Hal up by his back and a leg, Jake's arms growing weary from the weight of him. They were outside now, in some massive concrete docking chamber that was both damp and a bit dark, a very gigantic and sketchy looking place to be. Behind them they would have seen the front of the research laboratory, a windowless facade of white bricks with some doors and a little dying garden in front of it, but they didn't look back. He could’ve lowered Hal into a more comfortable position as he sprinted for the ship now that they were free of the flooded clinic, but he didn’t. With the robot still raised high above him, Jake legged it back to the ‘Spock’ at full fucking throttle. The sound of his feet making heavy impact with the metal ramp was loud as he boarded the ship, not letting Hal down until they were safe inside the Spock, it’s ramp closing behind them. Jake brought Hal down to cradle him in his arms. “You alright there, pal?” For a shimmering moment everything was right in the universe. Hal blinked at him, still a little surprised and slightly waterlogged. “I’m ok.” “Good.” Jake brought Hal into the bridge, where he set him down on the floor to sit against a wall. “Jake!” Jade said as she stood at the controls of the ship, “you’re back!” “Indeed I am! We’re all aboard, now go go go!” Jade did as instructed and hastily flew them out, revving the engines of the Spock and booking it to the exit of the spooky damp docking chamber.
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The mechanical whirring, clicking and chirping of electricity flowing back into Hal’s system as it booted back up filled the gentle quiet of the room. There was a faint hum in the walls of the ship as it coasted along through the frictionless void at insanely high speeds, carrying safely inside it four and a half human souls. Once again it was Jade who was the first thing he saw as he woke up from a long sleep, blinking back to life as the world came back into focus.She smiled a small, tired little smile at him as he woke up on the table in her makeshift workshop. The light in her eyes had dimmed since the first time he’d seen her, back when she’d first repaired and activated him aboard the S.S. SQUECKSON, back when they were stuck on a ship floating miles underwater on an ocean planet far away. She’d lost some things since then, seen some things too. These days she wondered if it would have been better if Dave and Karkat and Roxy and WV had never shown up out of the blue on her golden ship, if it would have been better for her to have been left alone in her lonely, tedious life still stuck on her search for the end of the universe. That was usually when Karkat would hug her and remind her that maybe all things do actually happen for a reason.“Hey,” She said softly, “how do you feel?”Hal sat up off the table and flexed his hands, carefully moving each joint and testing for anything that felt wrong. The gashes in his arms had been sewn up and fixed now, and it seemed she’d even done him one better by upgrading him with a thin layer of protective metal plating over his vital systems and hidden under his silicone skin. “Everything seems to be in perfect working order, thank you Jade.”She nodded and began to walk away from the table, cleaning up some tools and putting things away in their boxes.“How’s Dirk?” He asked her, moving to swing is legs over the side of the table.Jade stayed quiet for a moment, her back still turned to him. “He’s alright, for the most part.” She shut a box in a way that had some solemn emotion behind it. “That’s mainly a guess though, because he won’t let me or anyone else really look him over. Jake wants to take him somewhere peaceful and sunny to recover while we continue our search for Jane.”She wasn’t mentioning Roxy or WV anymore, and she wasn’t mentioning Dave. She turned around to look at Hal as he slid off the table to stand. They gazed solemnly at each other for a while, Hal watching as Jade seemed to look for something in his eyes that she had little hope of finding. It was like she didn’t really know what to think of him anymore, whether or he was a mistake on her part or a blessing, whether she should feel guilty for ever activating and sending him off in the first place or very proud of him.Whether or not he could really even feel or understand what she was feeling at all anymore.Some words echoed off in Hal’s head as he saw her finally turn away, continuing to pack up her tools. “Jade will eventually become inspired by you to make an Android of her own, so she will build me, and then she will be surprised when I become very depressed, and then I will leave them to go do something worth my time.” Jadebot had said, moments after waking him up for the first time on Jureval Z-major, constellation Orphemen, sometime in the future when the planet had been in complete ruins. He remembered how he’d been immobile at first, so Jadebot had to do a makeshift operation in his neck to re-attach some vital chords. What an honestly unpleasant experience that had been. Good times.Jade finished putting her things away and turned to look at him again. “Dirk is in the break-room,” she said, “if you’d like to visit him yourself. I’ll be on the bridge if you need me.” She then tucked a hefty box of tools under her arm and walked out of the room, leaving him to sit in silence.~~~Dave awoke back to reality on a cold golden floor, a gentle hum below its surface. Sitting up, he felt dizzy, his vision foggy and unfocused. Everything was golden, from the walls to the banners to the ceiling, and he quickly recognized that he was back on Jades old prospitian ship. He appeared, at first, to be completely alone. Every tiny sound he made echoed off the walls, seeming so loud in the dense silence of the ship.For a while all he could think about was what he’d just seen, as he had been passing through the wormhole. He’d seen himself, infinite variations of himself from alternate universes as well as from every point on his timeline, all standing in two endless lines that stretched away farther than he could see and crossed at a right angle. Wild, man.He shook his head to try and clear the dizziness. It’s always super disorienting to wake up after passing through a wormhole, but luckily his recovery time is quicker than most. Memories of what he’d seen in the wormhole gave him some odd insight to something he’d kind of always known, but now realized he could actually poke at and mess with. Then he remembered where he’d been moments before falling into the wormhole. He’d been falling into a gas giant, talking to Jade and Karkat, and they didn’t have enough time to save him, and the Spock would’ve gotten stuck in the planets incredible gravity if they got too close, and oh no.They probably thought he was dead. He immediately wanted to tell them that he was alright, as far as he knew, and that they didn’t have to worry. Doing his best to shake the dizziness, he stood up and looked around the golden room, trying to get his bearings. His helmet was still on, so he tried using the com to see if he could still contact them. All he could hear was static on their end, though, and he could tell nothing he said into it was getting through. They were out of range.He took his helmet off in frustration and moved to sit up on his knees. If he was back aboard Jades old golden ship, then maybe he could find the bridge again and contact them with it, assuming the ship still had any power after all this time. Where was he, anyway? Like yeah he was back on Jades old ship but where in space was the ship currently located. Looking around the room again with fresh eyes, he saw two doors, one on either side of the room he was in, that appeared to lead off into hallways. It looked an awful lot like the room he’d first waken up in with Karkat and Roxy after having narrowly escaped those pirates.That had been his first encounter with the wormholes. Hey what’s even with those things, they always seem to show up right as someone reaches a real low point, like a shameless Dues ex Machina. No that’s exactly what those things were, shameless Dues ex Machinas probably used to add another layer of irony to his godforsaken train-wreck of a life. He briefly wondered if there was ever going to be an explanation for the wormholes, and then further concluded that he didn’t really give a shit.He stood up and grabbed his helmet, trying to remember the way Jade had taken him the first time he was here. Considering most things on this ship looked exactly the same, he was already dreading the labyrinth he was going to have to face in order to find the bridge. The best thing to do would be to just start walking, because while his chances of finding the bridge on this massive ship were slim, they would be sitting at a stagnant zero as long as he wasn’t moving. He tried going down the hall on his left.He was right about the ship being difficult to navigate, that was for certain. It was odd how all the halls stayed lit even without any apparent light sources, and the more he listened the more he realized the quiet hum in the walls wasn’t coming from the walls themselves, but rather seemed to be an echo of something distant within the ship. Every footstep echoed loudly off the vacant walls, muffled only by the occasional hanging banner. Faintly, he thought he could hear a second pair of footsteps some long ways down the winding halls, but assumed it was just an echo of his own.However, these footsteps pattered, much unlike the way his boots sounded on the metal floor, and they seemed to be getting closer. There was something oddly familiar about the sound, it was making him feel emotions before he could even remember where he’d heard that very specific cadence of footsteps. He remembered hearing the nearly rapid pattering of bare carapacian feet on space stations, coming up the metal floor behind him to let him know they’d found the thing he was looking for.Dave hurried his pace towards the sound. He remembered hearing these footsteps on his old ship, CALEDSCRATCH, when his co-pilot would rush down the narrow hall to the cockpit to tell him something was wrong, or in abandoned ships when he’d brought his co-pilot along to help him forage for lost goods. He was running now as he rounded the corner of the golden hallway, nearly slipping and falling over on the slick metal floor. It was difficult to stop his momentum when he suddenly came to face the source of the sound.There he was, his old buddy, WV, just wandering the halls of this old boat where they’d left him. Dave immediately threw himself into a hug, which startled WV a little, but WV recovered quickly after recognizing Dave and hugged him back. Now that he was back, it was difficult for Dave to put into words exactly how much he’d missed this guy. They were like Han Solo and Chewbacca, or some other iconic duo, because honestly I can’t think of a more iconic duo than Han Solo and Chewie that applies accurately to this situation.Dave sniffed something back as he left the hug, keeping his hands on WV’s shoulders. “Hey man,” He said, unable to keep the little smile off his face and not really caring about it, “I missed you like a whole fucking lot.”WV nodded understandingly and patted Dave on the arm. A silent little ‘I missed you too’. The carapacians never really spoke, but they didn’t really need to. You always just sort of knew what they were trying to communicate, it was an interesting trait that only Carapacians seemed to have.Dave sat on his knees just below WV’s eye level, the way an adult would kneel to console a child. “Man, how long have you been here? Has Roxy been with you?”WV shook his head. He’d been all alone here since the day they’d run into that worm hole, sending them all off in different directions.“Jesus.” Dave hugged him again. “That’s a while to spend by yourself. But hey I’m back now, apparently, so you don’t have to be alone anymore. I’m back.” he loosened the hug and sat back on his heels, realizing that after all this time it was just him and his co-pilot again. “...I’m back”.Tugging gently on his sleeve, WV pointed down the hall, urging Dave to follow as he started in that direction. He led Dave back through the halls, down some long corridors and into a large open room with rounded walls, the bridge. The screens in front of the console showed nothing but an empty, unchanging void, and all the lights were off. WV looked at him expectantly, like Dave might know how to turn the ship back on after days of it being completely lifeless. Dave had always seemed to be good at that, whenever they had come across broken down ships in the past WV would watch as Dave resourcefully picked it apart and made something valuable out of it.He stepped in front of the console, his boots on the soft metal floor still the loudest thing in the room, and tried putting his hands on the little slots where hands most likely go. Nothing happened. The ship had run out of all remaining power just three days ago, and was now running on its last remaining fumes in the backup reserve. It didn’t have the fuel to take them to the nearest station to refill, and it didn’t have the power to turn on the communications system. After some poking around, Dave found that it had just enough drops left in it to make one final broadcast, but after that it would be done.His right hand hovered over the button that would start the broadcast. He didn’t know where he was, he couldn’t waste whatever airtime this thing could give him, and the importance of it all got a little overwhelming. Whatever he decided to say had to be concise and perfect, he had to think of something that would save his ass regardless of who heard it. He didn’t know who was going to hear this. If it would be Jade and Karkat, the best possible outcome, or Roxy, or just some more fucking pirates, or even somebody like himself who wouldn’t show up until after everybody was dead to loot the remains.Gently, he pressed the button, stated his name and transmitted his coordinates, let whoever might be listening know that he and his one crew member were alive and healthy, made it clear that he was out of fuel and drifting, and then gave identification for the ship he was currently on. Surely a golden grade-A Prospitian ship would attract the attention of somebody. If that wasn’t enough, he also promised to be a free working hand for whoever came and got him. The power ran out before he could finish his transmission, but it was alright because he felt he’d said enough. On the very tiny chance that Jade and Karkat had been listening, — and some quiet little hope in the back of his mind really wanted to believe they were, — he believed they would have enough information to not be worried.So that was it, then. The ship was dead until further notice. WV had been listening quietly while Dave made his incredibly solemn little ‘final transmission’, waiting to tell him that, hey dude, your old ship is also here and it still has plenty of fuel left in it, ya donk. He tugged on Dave’s sleeve to pull him out of whatever strange trance he’d been locked into as he stared into the black abyss of the screens in front of him.“Hm?” Dave broke away from gazing into the void to look at WV. “What is it, man?”He followed as WV led him back through the ships halls again, it seemed the little guy had gotten pretty familiar with the layout of the place from all the time he’d spent here. They walked all the way to the back of the ship, where they reached the large docking chamber. It was nearly empty, save for a handful of rusty star-fighters and oh fuck it’s CALEDSCRATCH. The old, relatively knife-shaped ship sat in front of them in all its shitty glory, it’s crumbling paint job and odd design standing out against the golden background like a bad mud stain on an otherwise completely clean wall.It was shitty in all the best ways and he loved it. He made a stifled chortle upon the sight of it, giving WV a little smile and a pat on the back before walking up to board it. It felt like coming home after a long trip, especially if your home was a mess when you left it and still is a mess when you return, but you love it because it’s home to you and it’s yours. He hadn’t seen this thing in what felt like forever. The cockpit was just as overcrowded as he remembered as he sat down in the pilots seat and brushed his hands lightly over the controls, so many buttons and switches he never used, and even more buttons and switches that he wound up having to use all the time.Something was different though, he realized as he looked over all the controls. He took a moment to look at the buttons that nearly had the labels worn off from all the pressing done over the years and the lack of care, and then at the ones that looked like they’d never been touched at all. This ship was originally designed to be a time machine, but the time function on it had been broken or probably never worked in the first place. That was one reason he’d gotten it so cheap.There was a common issue with interstellar travel, and that issue was that after so many lightyears of travel to get from point A to point B in the galaxy, you would find that loads of things had changed because loads of time had passed. This issue would cause problems like whole armies showing up several centuries late to a battle that was settled years ago, and then proceed to carry out a battle anyway because goddamnit that was what they’d been sent to do and, god help them, they were going to do it. The simple solution to this problem was to fuck the passage of time entirely and invent ships that could pause or rewind time so that after the lightyears of interstellar distance had been crossed you could simply go back a few years to make it seem like you’d crossed the distance in minutes.The main issue with this plan was that none of the time machines actually worked. Dave sat and looked at the unused controls while WV buckled into the co-Pilots seat next to him, thinking. All of time existed at once, like an endless line. Every point on the line already exists, the trick with it is that you can only exist on one point on the line at a time, and you’re constantly moving. You can slow down and speed up, but you can only move in one direction on the line, and so far going backwards has proved impossible. Dave decided, in this moment, that he was going to take the line and fuck it up.Maybe. The point for right now was that he realized he could, if he wanted to, re-activate the time function on this ship and actually make it work. He didn’t really see why he needed to though, he didn’t really have a reason. WV was looking at him, waiting for him to start up the ship and fly them out. It occurred to Dave that he didn’t really know where they were even going to go, after all this. Jade and Karkat were gone, it seemed. He didn’t even know where to start, if he was really going to look for them.The best thing to do for right now was probably just to head on over to the nearest station and get some much needed supplies and fuel. It was around this time that Dave realized he had no money, and nothing left on his ship to sell. All his old cargo had been lost when Roxy’s ship got destroyed. So it appeared he was a bit stuck, without any good means of finding his old friends again and with no money to refuel his ship. He checked his gauge and saw that he had enough fuel to take him across the sector to wherever he needed to go, but no further.WV seemed to catch on to all this and helpfully opened the communications channel to listen. A gentle static filled the little compartment as the radio searched for any incoming signals. Laughably, Dave’s own ‘final transmission’ wound up coming back to him and playing back on the radio, and he was only able to listen to a few words before turning it off with a click.If the transmission had already bounced back to them, that probably meant they were currently stuck in some sort of cloud, so they wouldn’t be receiving any outside transitions until they flew out of it. With a long and heavy exhale, Dave resigned to the fact that he didn’t really have anywhere left to go but back to his old life. If he wanted to even start looking for his friends, he was going to need more fuel and resources, and if he wanted fuel and resources he was going to have to work for it.The best idea he could come up with was to go to the nearest resource-rich planet that wasn’t heavily colonized and mine it for valuable materials. His multitool hung on the wall by his old jet pack, right where he’d left it. After explaining his plan to WV and receiving a thumbs up, he started up the engines, opened the old holo-map, picked a planet and blasted off.
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Showers were typically good, and Dirk usually would spend upwards of two or more hours in them when given the opportunity. He didn’t know what to think of this one. It was nice to step in, shed everything and maybe just philosophize for a while, think everything through, to feel like he had some control over his own body again. Seeing his skin uncovered, however, was probably the worst thing he could’ve possibly witnessed while aboard this ship. Scars riddled his chest and stomach, forming long lines up his arms and down his legs, showing all the places he’d been cut open at the governments experimental clinic. It was a terrifying sight, and he decided he wasn’t going to look at a mirror again for a very long time.The mirror wasn’t the problem though, because every time he looked down in the shower he’d see the lines along his arms and chest and stomach and fucking hell they were everywhere. He didn’t want Jake to see him like this, he didn’t want anyone to see him like this, fuck, he didn’t want himself to see him like this. The water stung, too, it stung in the cuts that hadn’t fully healed yet and once he turned the shower on there was no escaping it. The complete blankness of the white shower walls was an issue, too. They had never bothered him before but now they reminded him too much of the way the clinic looked and with all this he really didn’t last long in the shower.Now he sat wrapped in a towel on the floor with his back against the wall and just shivered. He’d had scars before the clinic, scars from the military and from his generally rough life before all that, but these ones were the absolute worst. Cut at perfect, calculated angles in long thin lines, often stretching over important organs or veins. It made him sick just glancing at them. There was no telling how long it would take for them to even begin to fade, though. He felt the need to cough up something thick again and stood to make his way to the sink, where he hacked up more of the awful blue substance he was now full of. Things Were Not Okay.He needed to get back some sense of control over the situation, he needed to feel like he knew how to fix this. His reflection glared back at him from the other side of the mirror, his arms shaking a bit as he gripped the edge of the sink, some thick blue liquid dripping off his chin. He wiped it away immediately and tried to focus on breathing slowly. He flexed his hands just to prove to himself that he could. Washing the glob of blue blood down the drain, he took some of the water to drink and try to get rid of the taste. The best he could do for now was wash out his hair with the water in the sink and style it up like he always used to, and in some way that gave him a tiny sense of okayness, like sticking a little Polaroid picture over the massive gaping hole that was torn through the wall.He covered himself in an orange flight suit and put on a little bit of Jakes cologne to get rid of the smell and called it a fucking day. Jade was in the break room when he got there, and once again she made it clear that she wanted to look him over so she could patch him up or get him on some medicine if needed. Once again she expressed mild irritation with him when he adamantly declined. She handed him the med kit so he could do it himself if he preferred and left the room, the door sliding shut behind her with a whir and a click.Dirk set the met kit back under the seat where it was supposed to be. For a while he sat in the booth at the table and just thought about things, and eventually Hal came out and joined him. It was strange to see him after all these things that had happened, like yea Hal had gotten him caught in the first place but in his defense he didn’t know Aradia was specifically after Dirk, even if he should’ve been able to pick up on it, and he also was the one to help break him out, even if by that point he’d spent several months there. Apparently not as much time had passed for them as had passed for Dirk, once again gravity had sped up the flow of time for one of them, thus causing slight complications.“It had only been a few weeks, maybe a month since you’d been taken in.” Hal said, looking down at the table as he sat next to Dirk. “I came back for you as soon as I could, the plan should’ve taken only two days to orchestrate.”Dirk sat back with his arms crossed, also looking at the empty table. “That doesn’t change the fact that I spent months there.”“I know.” He looked up at Dirk. “But you have got to understand that there isn’t anything I can do to change that.”“Are you trying to apologize?”“Yes.”Dirk nodded microscopically and continued to gaze off in the general direction of the table. A normal sort of silence settled in the room, a lull in the conversation. When the conversation started up again, it was surprising how much they had to talk about, such as the fact that drugs can in fact work for them as long as the drugs are code and the code is run directly into their software. This topic brought questions from Dirk like what Hal was even doing to be in a situation to take cyber-drugs in the first place, which prompted him to go on telling Dirk where all he’d been lately. ~~~Last we saw Roxy and Jane they were spinning through the vacuum of space at the speed of light while clinging to each other, some golden shrapnel spinning along with them in the same direction. They continue to spin, helpless in their situation to slow down or find sanctuary. It is peaceful here, among other things, after the crashing and burning, after seeing an entire fleet of stolen prospitian ships blazing on the edge of oblivion, there was silence.Complete, deafening silence. A silence that couldn’t be broken, because the helmets they were wearing had no coms. Roxy would like to break it very much right now, she’d like to take off her helmet and tell Jane what she means to her, tell her everything she’d been thinking but couldn’t say, but she couldn’t. It was too late now, all those things had to remain unsaid and unknown, it was too late and their final goodbyes would have to be carried out in silence.Maybe she could still try to say them with a touch of a hand, a gentle pressing her visor against Janes, like how couples press their foreheads together and just stare at each other like they’re possessed, separated by these helmets. Maybe she could tell her in a hug, gently squeezing her shoulders. Tell her that she’s always been her best friend, even after only knowing her as a voice on the radio for sixteen years, even after those several years of complete separation. She wanted to tell Jane that she loved her.Jane wanted to say something similar, as she watched the stars pass in a flurry of streaks, holding Roxy quietly as they drifted. They breathed slowly together now, they’d been drifting for what felt like a day and a half. The oxygen in their suits wouldn’t last them much longer. Jane closed her eyes, wondering grimly if the girl in her arms would die before her, and if so, when. It’s cold, out in space, as a friendly automaton once put it. “It’s cold out in space, no one can hear your screams, so, you know, follow the rules of tea drinking.”Distantly, a speck of golden light appeared ahead of them. It grew slowly, but in such an odd way, because they were traveling nearly as fast as the light that they could see. It grew into a shape, a pentagon of gold, a city racing towards them. It was so alarming as it approached, and as it did they noticed it had a moon, another golden pentagon of spires and sky-scrapers, attached to its host by a chain. It gleamed, but they didn’t have time to admire its gleam.They didn’t have time to admire anything about it, or even the fact that they were apparently saved, because it rushed up to meet them so menacingly fast that it shocked them both half to death. A tiny golden speck turned into a massive, looming city, breathtaking in its grandeur and frightening in its pointyness and speed of approach. They both crashed into its surface and were knocked out immediately. The impact even caused a little crater in the bricks and gold, and they lied in it, motionless on the street.Some locals had come to investigate the falling star that had crashed to their home world, and were surprised to find two women still clinging to each other. When Roxy woke up, Jane was gone. She sat up and found herself on a golden street, taking off her helmet and looking up at a sky filled with endless black. Light seemed to radiate from the street itself, there was something different about Prospitian gold. Prospitian gold was luminescent, a trait that separated it from any other gold in the galaxy. It looked as though it was reflecting light that hadn’t been cast on it.Oh shit, she was on Prospit. Roxy’d always wanted to go to Prospit. She looked up at the shining golden buildings and spires and smiled, this was really cool! But Jane. Fuck where was Jane. One of the local white carapacians was looking at her like it had a question it wanted to ask.“Where’s Jane?” Roxy asked it. She then pulled herself together and asked a better question: “have you seen a hot girl run by this way?” She then had to further pull herself together to to ask an even less retarded question, while the local prospitian stood and stared vacantly at her. “Have you seen a girl,” she said, holding one hand up like she was showing the hight of said girl, “like, blue eyes, glasses, dark hair, cute-ass buck teeth,”The carapacian nodded her head, pointing to a street above them.“Alright, radical,” Roxy stood up off the ground and swayed a bit, nearly passing out. “Hey uh, I need to get back to her as soon as possible, see if she’s a’ight n stuff, could you help a pal out?” She held out her arm, requesting they help her walk up there.The prospitian, ever the pushover, obliged. They pulled Roxy’s arm over their shoulder and put an arm around her side, supporting her as she walked over to the stairs and then up them. About halfway up Roxy realized she was fine, just really shaken up, and could probably make it the rest of the way up the stairs a little faster on her own. She didn’t say anything to the prospitian though, they were being so sweet and helpful!The sky hung endlessly black above them, and in front of its inky veil stood the gleaming city, shimmering in all its golden beauty, contrasting well off the void like a crown being displayed on a black cloth. Space El Dorado. It was so cool to be here. Roxy turned to the prospitian helping her up the stairs and told it as much.“It’s so cool to be here.” She smiled. “You have such a neat city!”The prospitian smiled back at her. A little bashful ‘thank you’.Something crashed and shook the ground, reverberating off all the buildings and causing screams in the distance.“What the hell-?” Roxy looked at the prospitian, who was now hurriedly helping her up the rest of the stairs at a faster pace. “Do you know what that was?”For the first time ever, a carapacian turned to her and opened up its mouth to actually speak. “Prospit is under attack. The government has ahold of Derse and is now trying to take over Prospit as well. You didn’t exactly show up at the best time, Miss Hero of Void. Our apologies.” This was bad, and you could tell it was bad because carapacians rarely ever actually spoke to other species. Sure they talked among themselves all the time, but to humans or trolls or other species they seemed to stay completely quiet. Maybe the rules were different because they were on the white carapaces home world.“Oh shit” Roxy commented, stumbling up the last step and onto the streets above.“The Hero of Life is your friend, yes?” The prospitian looked at Roxy expectantly with her two kind black eyes.“Yea,” Roxy was oddly already used to hearing these titles, probably from Vriska using them so much back when they were being trained by pirates. “Jane is my friend.”“She didn’t wake up when we found her asleep on the streets with you.” The carapacian explained, leaning Roxy against the streets guardrails, “we assumed the gods were finally falling down to us from their places among the stars, as prophesied, and also that Our Hero of Life was dead, and must be taken into the crypt to revive into her true form. That is where they are taking her now.”“Wild.” Roxy didn’t believe squat shit about her and Jane actually being gods, and was also suddenly very worried about Jane being dead. If she herself was able to magically survive the landing, though, surely Jane was also able to survive. “So is that where we’re going?”“Ah, sort of,” the Carapacian sat next to Roxy on the guard rails. “The parade will be coming this way soon, on its way to take the Hero of Life to the crypt.”Another loud crash sounded off in the distance, but it didn’t sound like a parade.“That doesn’t sound like a parade,”“It’s not.” She told Roxy, looking a bit nervous. “The noises you’re hearing is the government attacking us on the other side of Prospit. The parade must be held quickly before they destroy us all. We are hoping Our Hero of Life will wake up to save us in time. Really, you fell to us just in time.”“...hey,” Roxy was hardly able to stop looking around as she spoke, the city was so beautiful. “Why didn’t you take me too? I don’t see no parade comin to take me to the crypt or whatever.”“Well you see,” the carapacian sounded a bit bashful, “you are a Derse god, we don’t know why you are here, or why you fell with our Hero of Life. We didn’t know what to do with you, so they left you to sleep and left me to watch you.”“Wild to think I’m part of anyone’s mythology at all to be honest.” Roxy watched some lights flash on Prospits horizon, more booms that sounded like explosions. “So Janey is a Prospit god? And that’s why you’re gonna be holding a parade for her?”“Basically, yes.”They could hear music sounding off in the distance, and what sounded like chanting. The parade was on its way. Roxy could see several other Prospitians lining the edges of the streets, seeming both nervous and excited. Off in the distance, the sounds of destruction seemed to be getting closer, and if Roxy knew anything about the government, they were going to just keep hammering away at the surface of Prospit until either they surrendered or there was nothing left of their beautiful city.“Man,” Roxy looked back to the prospitian beside her, “you guys, can’t rely completely on Jane to get you out of this, you need to like round up your troops and fight back, you know?”“There’s no time now,” she said, looking just about as nervous as all the other prospitians around her, “Taking The Hero of Life to the crypt to revive is our best option, the queen commanded it.”A line of prospitians began to march down the street, holding their banners high, chanting, singing. They commanded the attention of everyone on the street, including Roxy’s as they passed by.Roxy watched for signs of Jane. “This is, kinda insane actually. You know we aren’t gods right? We’re just people,” she looked at the prospitian beside her and gestured roughly to herself, “we’re just ordinary people and we don’t have powers! I just spent weeks training with the galaxy’s most legendary pirates, and gained nothing. You guys can’t,” she watched the prospitians face sink and felt awful, softening her tone, “you can’t rely on us like this. You need to—“It was getting difficult to hear or be heard over the passionate singing and chanting, as flowers were tossed into the air, raining down as the parade marched by. Blue and pink pedals showered gently around them all, golden banners and flags being waved, the whole deal. It was beautiful to watch, as they all danced wildly by, some prospitians marching more solemnly and others jumping and twirling an singing at the top of their lungs. Despite their preference for how they would march, everyone joined in as they passed, moving at a fast pace that you had to power walk to keep up with.“Damn.” Roxy whispered to herself as they all ran loudly by. Some flower petals got caught in her hair. A few of the prospitians had golden instruments, and god knows they weren’t holding back on playing them at peak volume. This was attracting way too much attention, the government drones would be here any second to blow them all to kingdom come, and Roxy knew this. She had to tell them to stop, to round themselves up and fight back against the drones, instead of holding frivolous but beautiful parades. She turned back to the Prospitian beside her again and had to shout above the noise. “If I wake up Jane, will you listen to her?”“Yes!” She told Roxy.That was all Roxy needed to hear. She gave the sweet prospitian a pat on the shoulder before turning and running, searching through the crowds of the parade for Jane. That’s when she saw them, the team of white Carapacians carrying a golden coffin on their back, the ones being showered with the most flowers. They sang loudest, marching at nearly a running pace with such vigor and energy, a hope in their eyes the likes that Roxy had never seen. This was godly faith at its finest, pushing them all on with this one last hope that their god would save them, if they just got her to the crypt in time. It was beautiful and deeply saddening to watch.Roxy ran alongside them, trying to get their attention, but they were all too focused. The street ran downhill, going below the level it was at to the lower levels of Prospit, and deeper still. In order to get above them to see if Jane was inside the golden coffin, Roxy diverged from the road they were all marching on to run along the streets that stayed level, so as the road sank down to lower levels she would stay at the one above it. She wound up running along roofs of houses, jumping from roof to roof and vaulting over decorative spikes.It was getting difficult to keep up with the parade, as the drones neared, the explosions getting closer. Debris was flying over them now, some nearly hitting Roxy in the face as she leaped from one roof to the next, running. Looking down, she saw Jane lying in the golden coffin, cushioned by a bed of bright blue and pink flowers, dressed in a golden gown. It was slightly funny to see how she still had her suit pants on under the dress, because they didn’t undress her before putting her in the proper ceremonial gown and sending her off with the parade.The prospitians carried her high above their heads, some of them stumbling, and others rushing in to take the places of the ones who grew tired. It was incredible, seeing the passion and devotion of these creatures, the pace and desperation increasing as the drones closed in. Roxy had no idea how she was going to get to Jane from here, but as a drone came in from behind her and shot down the roof she’d been running along, she was faced with few to no other options than just jumping for it. She lunged off the side of the roof, falling right smack-dab into the middle of the parade, landing on Jane’s coffin and sending it tumbling out of the hands of the prospitians.They tumbled out onto the street, capsizing the coffin and sending Jane flying off onto the side of the road. Gasps and shouts ensued as the parade came to a sudden, shocking halt. Roxy found herself lying on her stomach on the gold hard ground, surrounded by upset prospitians and a broken sacred coffin. In front of her Jane was lying on her back on the side of the road, and Roxy scrambled to crawl over and pull her into her lap. She got hold of Jane before the prospitians could pick her up and resume parading her off to the crypt.“Jane,” she said, brushing Jane’s lovely, short dark hair out of her face. “Jane talk to me,” Roxy looked at her sleeping, lifeless face and found no response. “Jane come on I need you to wake up and tell these fucking idiots that they’ll die if they don’t round up and fight back, like right now,”Drones overhead descended upon the prospitians, blowing up buildings and knocking down spires. Chaos erupted around them, the Prospitians running every which way in a panic, some of them trying to grab Jane and take her away, bring her to the crypt.“No!!” Roxy held onto Jane with both arms, swatting away anyone who tried to take her. “Jane wake up! I need you damnit so— fucking—“ She held Jane in her arms as she sat on her knees on the ground and kissed her, because she didn’t know what else to do and that usually seemed to wake people up in movies. Also because she loved her, and she needed her to not be dead, especially not right now when there was an entire species at stake.It was sweet and powerful, as she held Janes cheeks in her hands and kissed her like there was no fucking tomorrow. It startled Roxy a little bit when Jane wrapped her arms around her, keeping her right where she was holy fucking shit. Roxy broke away and looked into Jane’s bright blue eyes, seeing her awake and alive and smiling.“Oh hey it worked.” Roxy said.“What’s all this?” Jane looked around, her smile fading as she saw a thousand panicked prospitians and a crumbling city around her.“Hey yea I need you to like tell these fuckers that they’ll die if they don’t round up and fight back against the government because oh yea the government is here and we’re on Prospit and Prospit is being attacked and holy shit we’re on Prospit and holy fUCK I just kissed you is that ok are you mad at me I’m so sorry I needed to and I needed to wake you up and I’ve wanted to kiss you for a while now and you know how we say we love eachother all the time but I think you mean it platonically cause girls do that I guess but every time I say it I mean it I love you Jane like romantically oh my shitting god this is wow hey uh-“Jane kissed Roxy to shut her up. “I love you too,” She said, “but what the FUCK is happening?”Roxy sat up. “Oh yea we’re on Prospit and Prospit is being attacked.”Jane sat up too, looking frantically around. “What!”“Listen I need you to tell the prospitians to-“A massive boom sounded above them, and not too far away they saw a golden spire crumble, the orb-shaped room on top of it falling amongst the debris and splitting in half. It was right over them, and it was going to crush and kill them all when it landed. Without a second thought Roxy instinctively raised her arms above her like she could catch it, silently and frantically wishing it away, like maybe if she prayed one last time she could save them all and herself.Then it vanished.The entire crumbling spire disappeared into the void, saving them all from being crushed. In the place where the spires room used to be was now a girl in a golden dress, falling to the streets below. She’d die if she hit the ground, so with her arms still raised Roxy caught her and then instantly felt like the coolest person alive. Everyone cheered.“Roxy!” Jane said, “you have voidy powers!” She looked just as surprised and excited as Roxy felt.“Oh my shitting fuck.” She looked down at the girl in her arms that she’d just caught and saved and saw a sweet little green face in the shape of a skull, a cherub girl with green spots on her cheeks and long eyelashes. “Oh my fuck.” Roxy looked up at Jane, her eyes wide. “Who is this?!”Jane crawled over to them, taking the cherub girl from Roxy’s arms and holding her in her lap. “I— this might seem strange, but I think I know her!”“Look around janey this situation is already strange as fuck”Towers and buildings crumbled around them, the prospitians were now standing in a panicked circle around Jane and Roxy and this Cherub girl, waiting for them to do something. Jane nodded, hugging the cherub girl close to her chest. “We have to-“Then the cherub woke up, hugging Jane back. “You healed me!” She said, “thank you!”Roxy was the first to comment. “What, what the hell, Jane did you wake up to your lifey powers? How? What’s even going on anymore I don’t fucking know-“Jane looked to see the cherub looking back at her with bright green eyes and a sweet, brilliant smile. Her hands were on Jane’s shoulders for support as she sat up. “I’ve been dead for so long, really, thank you so much! Are you Jane?”Jane, who was now unable to speak, nodded.“Fantastic, I’m Calliope,” she looked around, “this isn’t good. I can explain the rest later, but we need to tell them what to do!” She pointed to the prospitians, who were waiting very anxiously.Roxy stood, offering Jane a hand. “Alright, tell them they need to round up their forces and fight back against the drones-““That is a very good proposition,” Calliope said as Jane who was now standing helped her up, “but I’m afraid there is no chance of winning now! We must all head to the remaining ships and evacuate!”Jane was still a little removed from the ability to speak anymore, but did her best to be a leader as was suddenly needed and expected of her. “Alright,” She looked around, trying to speak over the noise, “all of you need to evacuate to the ships! We leave now! Spread the word as fast as you can, we need to save as many of you as possible!”Roxy gave her a thumbs up and a smile to let her know she did great.
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So all the prospitians rounded up, boarded every ship they had, and collectively left their home world for good. Roxy and Jane and Calliope were sad to see the beautiful city go, but not as sad as the former inhabitants were. That was their home they were leaving to crumble, their beautiful, shiny, golden home. Luckily they all got out safe, and were able to jump into collective hyperdrive to escape the government drones that had been sent to destroy and capture them.Thanks to the divine leadership of Jane, who literally just woke up and accidentally revived Calliope and said some stuff she was told to say, they would all be alright. And truly, Prospit was never a place, it was in the hearts of all the prospitians, and would go with them as they sought out a new home, according to an uplifting motivational speech given by the queen. The white queen also dubbed the three of them the new leaders of the prospitian fleet, including Roxy even though she was a Derse god, and together they were all to go out in search of a new home world for the white carapacians.The golden prospitian fleet was massive, thousands of shimmering ships in all their grandeur, all out on voyage for a new home. It was a little overwhelming to be put in charge of such a massive fleet, but Calliope had faith that they could rise to the challenge. Speaking of Calliope, Callie told Jane and Roxy that she had been living on Prospit because the prospitians had saved her from her brother, although she was stabbed by a spy from Derse, so the prospitians had kept her corpse safe in a tower on Prospit. They had been waiting for their Hero of Life to fall from the stars as prophesied, so she could heal and revive Calliope, which she actually did.Roxy also learned that she had spoken with Calliope several times over her radio back when she was a little girl living alone on the ocean planet, Geliez 13-b, in constellation Ophilamis, sector ξ6. Back when she was living alone in her little concrete world of sun-bleached buildings, and her only source of communication to other people was the little radio in her bedroom. She had spoken to Calliope back then, as well as Jane, and now she was getting to unite with her old childhood internet friends, and her life was good. Roxy happily hugged and celebrated with Callie upon learning who she was, and Jane happily joined them. Jane had also spoken to Calliope over the radio way back when, and the three of them had been long-distance friends for a long time before Roxy’s sixteenth birthday, before her radio went silent and she had to leave.It was so nice to be with them now, they got the entire fleet to celebrate with them. Not all the attention was on themselves, not any of the three of them wanted that, but there was a party shared among all the prospitians in honor of the prophecy coming true and their gods finally coming to live among them. Apparently, however, the prophecy was incomplete, apparently they were still missing their foretold Hero of Hope, and wanted to search for him. So along with searching for a new home, they were also on the lookout for the fabled Hero of Hope.Roxy, Jane, and Calliope stood on the bridge of the lead ship together, discussing with the queen the best direction to head in. Their voyage was expected to be long and difficult, but they had faith that they could pull it off.
~~~
Spaceships don’t always have kitchens, but this spaceship happened to have a very nice kitchen. Cooking and cutlery were sacred arts to the designers of the Spock, and they were both highly upheld and deeply encouraged for everyone living in this particular sector, starting from very young ages, and therefore having a kitchen in their spaceships was absolutely necessary for them, even in the cheapest and shoddiest of vessels. Dirk stood in one of these spaceship kitchens and gazed emptily into the fridge, just holding the door open and staring at the vacant metal shelves.There were no more sedatives anymore, no more needles or pointy tools or locked empty white rooms or creepy doctors, just this fridge and Dirks unrelenting eyes. He hadn’t slept in a while. Jake had parked and left the ship to get some groceries while Dirk rested, but as you can see he is far from resting as he looks vacantly into the deep, cold abyss that is the little ice-crusted white box in the fridge. It was starting to remind him of the empty white rooms they’d lock him in, and for some reason was afraid now to shut the door. It was probably really silly, and he knew this, but it nearly felt like he’d be shutting the door on someone and locking them in the fridge, leaving them helpless as he was.He closed his eyes and shut the door. Maybe he was traumatized? If he was he didn’t really feel up to seeing a therapist about it, he didn’t want to see any more doctors of any kind. It’s true not all doctors are bad, but the ones in the governments prison-‘clinic’ really sucked, and he was going to have issues about it for a while. He was going to have issues about a lot of things for a while. He was going to have issues. He already had issues.Groggily, Dirk began the long, slow march over to the table to sit down, but got discouraged halfway through and wound up sitting on the floor with his back leaned against a wall. Everything felt like shit, from his stomach to his limbs to his head, and he kind of wanted to sleep but was afraid of closing his eyes, for fear of waking up in an operating room with a spotlight in his face. Letting his head fall back against the wall with a little thump, he began contemplating life, the universe, the unfairness of it all, the fact that some people think that everything happens for a reason, and the fact that he’d like to meet one of these people so he could thump them on the head once or twice.A glass of water would be nice right now. There was a long while of time where he sat debating the pros and cons of getting up for a glass of water, and also acknowledging for himself that he was in fact very very tired after having stayed awake for days and really didn’t feel up to it. This was all such bullshit. He got up with a bit of effort, using the wall for help, and went to pour himself a glass of water. It was a long and languid process, but the water would be worth it.Being the first drink of water he’d had that day, it was refreshing and felt honestly cleansing as he swallowed and relished the way it went down his throat. More of that immediately. mmmm, woter. He took it to the table with him and sat down to stare tiredly at the bottom of the glass. Riveting, I know. Recovery is a slow process, though, let him take his time with it. He should be better in time for the next plot point that needs him.~~~Dreams are strange and occasionally troubling, but if you’re anything like me they can be pleasant escapes. For Dirk, dreams had mostly become little portals to his own personal hellscape. When he’d finally dropped on the kitchen floor from the exhaustion of refusing to sleep for several days, Jake had carried him off to bed and had tucked him in. Jake could feel him shivering violently in his sleep. He slept for seventeen hours.Dirk woke up in what felt like the softest bed in the world, on the best pillow in the world, and under the most incredible blankets. Pure, natural sunlight poured in gently through the ships windows, washing the room with a clean, pleasant light. Outside, Dirk could hear the local fauna chirping and humming on the little hill they’d parked the spaceship on. He burrowed himself deeper into the blankets and sighed, everything was ok.He still had his flight suit on, which wasn’t the most comfortable thing to sleep in by a long shot, but he didn’t have the energy in him to get up and take it off, so it stayed on. Next to him in the bed he could hear Jake breathing slowly, and something went all fluttery in his chest like the cliché motherfucker he is. It’s funny how after you spend enough time with someone you can recognize the way their exhales sound, or the way their sighs sound, or even their footsteps.He could feel the shift in weight on the mattress as Jake rolled over and scooted closer to him, laying down and resting with his forehead pressed against Dirks upper back. There was something about this gesture that was so oddly meaningful. It felt so affectionate, and it made his mind short-circuit for a tiny second, but it was such a little thing. Maybe it was just Dirk feeling touch-starved again. After all the shitty handling in the “research clinic” this gentle little forehead nuzzle was incredibly sweet.Forever could pass and he would still be happy here. Eventually Dirk rolled over to face Jake and wrapped his arms around him, nuzzling his face into Jakes hair. Jake smiled a little, shifting slightly till his arms were wrapped comfortably around Dirk as well. The flight suit Dirk was wearing wasn’t the most comfortable material to snuggle up to, and Jake kinda wished Dirk would shed it, but that would require moving. Jake’s tank top and shorts on the other hand were closer to the perfect snuggling attire.“...Hey,” Jake said so very softly after a while of silence, “you awake, chap?”Dirk hummed a little into Jakes hair, not opening his eyes as he slid one hand up Jakes back a little, lifting his tank top slightly.“So that’s a yes, then?” He spoke into Dirks neck.“Maybe.” Dirks voice was all soft and rough and drowsy from being asleep for seventeen hours.“You’ve been sleeping long enough, I think.” He placed a tiny kiss on Dirks neck and the universe was at peace. “do you think you’re up for getting up and going for a walk through the country? The scenery is very nice on this planet.”“Mm.” Dirk said, “never.”“Well you’ll have to get up eventually!” He said not in a shout, just with a little extra kick of enthusiasm. “Here,” Jakes hand came out from behind Dirks back to run slowly up his stomach and chest, stopping at the top of the zipper where he hooked two fingers under his collar. “Take this off and roll over, I’ll give you a back rub to wake you up.”There were some things about that sentence. Firstly the confidence of it was slightly new, —Jake was usually the more flustered one around touchy-feely things— but Dirk liked it, and also the notion to let Jake give him a much needed massage was strong, but it was the taking off of his flight suit that he was getting caught on. He didn’t want Jake to have to see the awful scars, the long and calculated ones cut in perfect lines and right angles. He was starting to feel sick again just thinking about it.“Ok, yes,” Dirk said, still holding Jake, “but can I keep my clothes on?”Jake exhaled long and slow, removing his fingers from Dirks collar. He could feel how tense Dirk had suddenly gotten. “It’s alright with me, mate.”“Alright.” So he rolled himself out of Jakes arms and lied on his stomach, where he debated where to put his arms. Luckily Jake came along and sat himself on Dirks ass, hello, helpfully taking Dirks arms and resting them on either side of his head for him. The position set off a bit of a panic response in Dirk at first, but he was able to settle it down, and when he did the thing that was left was a fluttery feeling and something like the feeling you get in your gut when you go down a hill really fast in a car. He briefly wondered if he ever did this to Jake.The feeling, I mean. He wondered if he ever gave Jake this sort of feeling, whenever he stifled his fear into the ground so he could pretend to be confident and cool, and pull some vaudevillian shit on Jake. Is ‘vaudevillian’ even a romantic word? Well it’s French right so it’s gotta be at least a little romantic. As long as you get the point. Dirk tried to think, but most all trains of thought stopped entirely short as Jake placed two firm hands on his back and pressed them upwards. It had been a while since he’d been given a proper back rub, he’d nearly forgotten what it felt like.It should’ve felt nice. At first Dirk didn’t want to say anything, Jake wasn’t doing anything wrong, but the material of his flight suit was catching on the fresher cuts and it stung where it was supposed to feel good. He buried his face in the pillow and tried to entertain the idea that maybe if he grit his teeth and bore through it long enough it would start to feel good, like it was supposed to, but it didn’t. Maybe the kneading would’ve felt good if he didn’t have his flight suit on, if he didn’t have these cuts stinging and getting in the way of what was supposed to be a pleasant experience. The truth, however, was that it stung, and he wanted Jake to stop.“Jake,” He said, mentally kicking himself when he heard how pitiful he sounded, “stop, it’s not,”Jakes hands were gone instantly and the loss left Dirk in a world of sadness. “What’s wrong?” Jake asked him, leaning to the side to try and get a look at Dirks face.“It hurts,” he didn’t want to tell Jake that, and saying it was physically painful, but the back rub was also physically painful and something needed to be said. “It’s not you though, it’s just,”“Just what?” Jake said softly, getting off him to lay by his side.Dirk wanted to fucking hide in this pillow and never come out again. Literally why did he have to be like this? This was supposed to be a nice thing and he was ruining it with his bullshit-“Dirk?” Jake poked him gently in the arm to pull him out of whatever he was slipping into.“The flight suit is catching on the cuts, Jake. It’s not you.” Dirk spoke into the pillow, muffling his words as he refused to move from the position he was in. Everything was always painful, it seemed like nothing could ever feel good for him, and this was a very upsetting thought to have.“Oh, well,” Jake fucking nuzzled him in the arm, “why don’t you let me take it off then?”Dirk turned his face out of the pillow to look at Jake, meet his lovely, stupid, ignorant, beautiful green eyes. The color of trees in the summer, the color of fresh grass in your favorite backyard, the color of emeralds, the color of the eyes of the idiot man he loved so dearly. Jake looked back at him. Dirks eyes were orange, like the fruit that nothing rhymes with, like the fruit that is pretty much the only thing in nature that is that color, save for some flowers and maybe sunsets, thus the very color is named after the fruit, like the eccentric bastard man he is. He blinked. His shades were on the nightstand, they could not protect him while on the nightstand.God knows why Dirk was born with orange eyes. Nobody else he’d ever met had orange eyes, maybe that made him special. Maybe that made him weird. Maybe that made him nothing. Maybe Dirk was just some guy, just a guy who didn’t really ask for any of this, and maybe Jake was just a bloke, just a bloke who didn’t really ask for any of this, and maybe these two idiots would wind up lying in bed next to each other looking into each other’s eyes just trying to figure out how to communicate.Maybe Jake would take his fingers and lace them through Dirks, in a gesture that was supposed to be comforting. Maybe Dirk would have a million things on his mind that he wanted to say but couldn’t, and Jakes hand holding his somehow wasn’t actually helping. Maybe in most cultures their relationship would be considered a sin, even the orientation considered shameful, the thought a taboo. Maybe someone needed this, someone unable to receive love like they so desperately wanted because women loving women is wrong and men loving men is a sin and you won’t make it to the good afterlife if you act on it.Maybe someone deeply admires the way they so shamelessly love like it’s normal, not even mentioning the fact that it’s forbidden somewhere else, because it’s forbidden somewhere else and not here and they can do whatever they want here and someone wants to see that and needs to see that and admires that and dreams of that and yet Dirk can’t bring himself to fucking tell Jake why he doesn’t want to take the flight suit off.“Here,” Jake said, “you don’t have to take it off it it makes you too uncomfortable, but I am asking you to take it off.” He brushed his thumb over Dirks fingers. “You haven’t let me see you since you got back from the government, but whatever it is I promise you it can’t be as bad as you might think.”Dirk sighed, looking Jake in the eyes for a while longer, seeing Jake smile warmly at him before giving in and nodding his head, sitting up. Jake sat up with him, watching him unzip the flight suit and sheepishly shuffle out of it, his face all locked up like he was constipated. It was strange, because ‘sheepish’ wasn’t really a word one would ever think to describe Dirk with. So he sat in a tank top and boxers on his knees on the bed with his hands folded in his lap, waiting for Jakes reaction to the lines on his skin. He couldn’t meet Jakes eyes.He felt Jake pick up his hands out of his lap and hold them, gingerly running fingers up Dirks arms and ever so gently tracing the long, thin cuts up to his shoulders. “Christ,” Jake said under his breath, “what did they do to you?”Dirk just turned his eyes even further away, looking off at something in the corner that he wasn’t actually paying attention to as he felt Jake tug at the hem of his shirt. He let Jake pull it off, raising his arms for him. Might as well give him the whole frightening picture.“Well no wonder it hurt!” Jake said with the enthusiasm and not the shouting again. Dirk was a bit surprised to feel Jake wrap his arms around him in a hug, being ever so careful of his cuts. He wanted to cry a little as he put his arms around Jake in return. This was so important to Dirk, for a guy who chronically slipped into bouts of hating himself, having someone who believed in him and trusted him and loved him was so important. As silly as this man could be sometimes, Dirk loved him. He buried his face in Jake's neck and hugged him tightly.The funny thing about Jake and Dirk is that if you replace the middle vowel of both of their names with “o” you get Joke and Dork and that’s pretty accurate actually.“Hey now,” Jake said in this gentle tone, “if I use, say, some lotion or cream or something maybe I can give you a back massage that doesn’t hurt?”Dirk nodded into his shoulder, still not letting go. “Maybe.”“Thank you for showing me,” Jake said as he continued to hold Dirk tenderly, “that was pretty brave of you.”Dirk huffed this single puff of air that was supposed to be some sort of sad, stifled laugh.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
The simplest fact is that Dave is now alone again. Learning to cope with this fact has been difficult, to say the least, and the hardest part of it was probably convincing himself that they were really gone. In such a short amount of time, a few people had become so very important to him, and now he was suddenly having to come to terms with the undeniable fact that they had now vanished from his life completely. Getting this through his own skull was painful and uneasy.
At least the scenery was nice.
He marched through the crimson knee-tall grass, watching the little flecks of pure white pollen drift up in the breeze like magic wafting through the air, away into the purple sky. This planet was marked as barren of intelligent life but full of lovely flora and some scarce fauna to eat the flora and keep it in check, and also rich with natural resources. The only issue was that the air was toxic to Humans, Trolls, and most other intelligent life forms, so settling was difficult. It was also smack dab in the middle of goddamn nowhere, he didn’t even know what sector he was in anymore.
As the daystar of this planet set, all beautiful and golden amongst the purple clouds, the stars came out, and he couldn’t recognize a single constellation. Apparently this planet was unnamed, only having been discovered by a group of wandering pioneers long ago who died shortly after finding it. Dave trudged through the beautiful crimson planes as the night insects came out to glow and buzz, one even landing on his visor to blink slowly. They looked vaguely like the lightning bugs on earth, or fireflies as some call them, but their shape and hum was much different, however their soft yellow glow seemed so familiar.
Multitool in hand, he set about scanning for and seeking out the needed materials to mine and purify them. WV had stayed behind in their ship, Caledscratch, to watch out for it and such. Dave had wanted to bring him along, but it was going to be a lot of walking, and there wouldn’t have been much for WV to do, so it would’ve just been kinda like when you awkwardly follow your mom around in Walmart while she shops but for a very long time.
He seemed to be walking into some hills, as the glittering planes of crimson grass began to rise and fall more often than not, some steeper slopes rising out of the undulating landscape. According to his scans, this was the direction the stuff he needed was in. He wasn’t wandering, he had a specific direction and goal in mind, but it still managed to feel like wandering as he walked at a reasonable pace through the vast open countryside. Strolling along like this all by yourself in the peaceful quiet of the night gives you a lot of time to think, a lot of time to get a little depressed over the thought that you may never find your friends again.
He came to a stop in front of a large, still-water lake, the moonlight from its two crimson moons shimmering off the rippling purple surface. The water would look pinkish in the morning, but at night it appeared to be a soft shadowy lavender. If the air here wasn’t safe to breathe by a long shot, then it was safe to assume the purple-tainted water wasn’t safe to drink. It was entirely possible that it had a high acidity to it and wouldn’t be safe to swim or wade in either. One way or another he was going to have to cross it or go around it, because the mineral deposit he was looking for was on the other side, but judging by the vast size of this lake, it would be much quicker to go across it than try to go around.
Strangely enough, he found a few scraps of metal had washed up on the mossy shore, likely from an old satellite or drone that had gotten lost and crashed here. Where the hell even was he. Whatever, it didn’t really matter where he was or how this scrap metal had gotten here, what did matter was using it to build a makeshift raft that could take him across the lovely toxic water. In a few minutes he had a floating, functioning little raft constructed, and he’d even repurposed the an old fan or propeller or whatever this spinny-blade thing was to sit in the back of the raft and drive it forward. Hopefully his repurposed engine/propeller would run okay on carbon-based biofuels.
Getting on his knees on the raft without touching the acid water was a little difficult, but with some careful maneuvering he was on his way in no time. He took deep, slow breaths through his helmet as the little raft started up and started off, carrying him across the large body of water at its own leisurely pace. The stars were reflected off the lake, glittering on the deep purple. All was peaceful. Below him in the depths of the water he thought he could see dark shapes moving, most likely the fish indigenous to this part of the planet.
They swam in groups, following his raft out of curiosity. The whole scene was reminding him of his time on the ocean planet with Jade and Karkat, when they’d been adrift among the sea on a raft made from the torn wall of a spaceship. He spent a while thinking about the time they had spent curled up in each others laps, talking slowly about all sorts of things as the warm air turned chilly on their unprotected skin and the stars came out to let themselves be counted. He could recall the smell of Jades hair and the feel of Karkats alien skin, the frequency at which their voices vibrated when he had his ear rested against one of their chests.
It was safe to say he missed them. Really, he shouldn’t be left alone this long, and should have taken WV along with him to keep from getting deeply sad inside, but it was a little late to go back for the guy now. The propeller on the raft hummed and rattled as it bothered the water behind him and pushed him forward. It would be nice to have some music right about now, to keep him from thinking too much and to ease him out of whatever potential depression he might be sliding towards, or at least ease him through it.
Sadly his mixtape was back at the spaceship, and he was so close to the mineral deposit that it would be silly of him to turn around for it now, so in order to fill the silence he started singing softly to himself.
~~~
Days came and went and turned into weeks, and still no sign of his friends. He’d been looking for them, sending out transmissions, denying himself the ability to move on because he knew they were out there and he just had to find them, but after so long it got hopeless. Eventually there was really nothing left to do but turn back to his old job of scrapping, it was one of the things he was good at. Digging up dead shit was his specialty, and Roxy’s specialty had been taking away the deadness of it and making it into something people might want to buy. But now Roxy was gone too, and he was having to get by with selling things on his own.
Dave sat on the edge of his old bed aboard the Caledscratch with his elbows on his knees, hands folded, and head bowed. Hey, this seemed like a decent position for praying, might as well. But to what god? The one who’d been putting all these godforsaken fucking wormholes in his path? The New New Hampshirians? What was even up with the wormholes anyway. The more they showed up the more frustrated he got with them. Just how long was it going to take to find an explanation for this?
In short, time wasn’t healing the hole in his chest where his friends and family and lovers used to be, as corny as it sounds, and as the thought of being hopelessly unable to find or forget them bubbled up again he found himself alone on his ship feeling utterly pathetic. He sniffed and pushed his goggles up into his hair to rub at his eyes with his palms. They were gone, everybody was gone and he was just gonna have to drill that into his own head until he was able to believe it and accept it and move on.
WV wasn’t gone. He found Dave wallowing in his respite quarters again and quietly pattered over to sit next to him and put a hand on his back. There there, you sadsack of a man. It’s alright. He informed Dave in his own special way that they were receiving another distress signal over the radio, maybe going and investigating the wreckage and going in to the market to sell his findings would keep him busy and help take his mind off it.
Dave nods slowly and eventually takes his palms away from his eyes, pulling his tinted goggles back down over them. It takes a bit more back rubbing and encouraging gestures to get him to stand up and walk to the cockpit but the important thing is Dave actually found the motivation to get up at all. His buddy had been a little worse for wear, lately. Any small act of progress had to be celebrated if he was gonna get better.
The walk back to the cockpit wasn’t long, this ship was nearly the size of a large trailer, but Dave still managed to make a long and hard journey of it. He finally sat down in the Pilot's seat and lethargically pressed the little red button that would play back the distress signals coordinates. WV sat in the co-Pilot's seat next to him and listened. The information sounded legit, so Dave started up the engines, locking onto the signal, and blasted off in that direction.
There’s certain things you come to expect in this business. You ready yourself for the potential sight of mangled corpses, of beautiful ships gone to waste, of flaming wreckage drifting away into nothing. Dave had never been prepared to see someone he recognized amongst the debris. At first it seemed like an ordinary call for help, which he waited the appropriate amount of time to follow, but as he arrived things began to get a little strange. It was clear this was gonna be another job done out in the vacuum of space, as this ship had apparently been shot to pieces before it could land or crash anywhere, but that wasn’t the odd thing.
As he came out of hyperdrive, arriving at the scene just late enough to see the aftermath, he saw an entire golden fleet of ships all burned up and crumbled away, drifting parts of broken prospitian ships floating apart and shimmering in the light of the closest star. This wasn’t MindFangs old fleet, however, they didn’t carry her flag. This was something else entirely, something he’d never seen. The entire remaining population of Prospit had been destroyed, dead white carapacians and red blood everywhere, drifting about in the zero gravity and freezing.
WV expressed serious discomfort at the sight, and opted to stay behind with the ship again as Dave readied himself for a spacewalk. You couldn’t see the stars behind the blackness as the gleam of the golden carnage drowned them out, also why the hell was prospitian gold so flammable? He secured his helmet and jetpack and headed out of the airlock, flying up through the floating debris and being careful not to get hit by any of it. On one side of his body he could feel the searing heat of the closest star, and on the other side he could feel the endless cold of outer space, intense even through his protective suit. Such is typical for spacewalks. Looking around, he saw the fleet was way bigger than anticipated, and it was going to be difficult for him to even know where to start looking for valuables.
Again that subtle feeling of emptiness he got whenever exploring wrecked ships made itself known to him, as he drifted about inspecting the carnage. Who did this? Why would they? How was anyone capable of completely decimating an entire massive fleet of well armed prospitian ships? Just as he was wondering if he’d be able to find any answers among the remains, he saw what looked like a human floating amongst the thousands of slaughtered carapaces. They had no helmet on, and appeared to be long dead.
He wasn’t sure why, but he made his way over to the dead human, some morbid curiosity as to who could possibly be found drifting in the aftermath of the tragic destruction of a thousand innocent prospitians. As he neared her his stomach tried to escape through his throat, he knew this woman. It was Roxy’s face, frozen over and long dead. After a while of staring at her, unable to process the sight, he crumbled internally and emotionally erupted entirely without a sound. He hugged her cold carcass tightly and simply wept.
~~
WV was a little confused when Dave came back from his spacewalk with empty pockets. He’d expected Dave to look a little better, with some neat loot in his hands or something, but instead Dave looked a million times worse. He watched as Dave stumbled in from the airlock, took of his helmet with fast working, trembling hands, ripped off his goggles and fell to lean heavy against the wall. His stuff dropped to the floor without a second thought and he was back to pressing his palms against his eyes.
Tentatively, WV went over to Dave with a hand outstretched, in a way that asks what is wrong, what had happened. Dave slid down the wall to sit on the floor and hide his head in his knees, and WV sat next to him. Somehow Dave didn’t have to say a thing, after a moment of watching him WV knew what he’d seen and who it was. Dave was entirely quiet, dehydrated, and still. They sat here for a long time before anything happened.
Time was a landscape that he could traverse. Roxy wasn’t dead, somewhere on that landscape, and all he had to do was move the distance backwards to reach her. This was it, the final straw. No more loss, in fact fuck it all entirely, Roxy didn’t have to be dead and he was going to make sure of it. Dave got up abruptly and nearly passed out from standing too quickly, stumbling briskly to the cockpit where he sat down in the Pilot's seat and felt the controls under his hands. WV followed, now unsure what Dave was about to do and a little worried about him.
He touched the unused controls, the ones used to take the ship through time. The time function on this ship was supposedly long broken, it’s dimensional regulator and disruptor a failed experiment that never got thrown out. Basically, fuck that. Dave was the dimensional regulator and disruptor now, a living breathing vessel that would take himself and his ship backwards through the stream of time, upriver. If trout can swim upstream, against the current, so could he.
Whatever he’d seen in the worm hole had awoken something in him that maybe he’d sort of always had, and he wasn’t sure where he’d gotten it from, but now he could see the dimensions of time like a physical plane and not only that but he could alter it, traverse it, manipulate it, sculpt it. Dave flicked some broken switches he’d never used before and grabbed the second throttle he’d never touched. Carefully at first, he drove the ship backwards through time, before turning it around entirely and flying metaphorically ‘upstream’.
WV, although surprised, seemed to catch on quickly and proceeded his job as a co pilot, steadying the ship. Here the lines between metaphorical and literal blurred, and it really did feel for a moment like they were flying against a current. They didn’t have to go far, just far enough to see the fleet about half an hour before it’s complete destruction. This way he could find Roxy before she died and get her out of there before anything happened to her at all. Having a specific point in time in mind was helpful for traversing the stream, letting him know when he should stop and carry on with the natural flow of time.
They stopped in front of a massive golden fleet, fully intact, thousands of shimmering ships cruising along just fine. Still Dave wouldn’t breathe a sigh of relief until he saw Roxy alive and okay. He took the other throttle, the one that was super worn down, the one that traversed space, and drove the ship slowly into the fleet and opened a channel to speak. Of course some Carapacian came on and asked him who he was and what he was doing, and he stated that he was peaceful and wished to board their leading ship to speak with whoever was in charge here so he could send out a message to look for a woman by the name of Roxy.
They told him that a woman named Roxy was in fact one of the people in charge here, and that he was gonna need some clearance to talk to her. He silently celebrated in his heart. Not about needing clearance, but about the fact that Roxy was alive and with them and they knew her and she was apparently in charge? That was cool. How’d she wind up here? He told the Prospitians over the intercom that he knew Roxy because he was basically her adopted brother, technically her son due to time shenanigans, and he used to to business with her. He told them that she’d recognize him, surely, at first sight.
They weren’t buying it but said they’d allow him to board with certain safety measures in place, as in they would have to point a gun at him, until Roxy saw him and could confirm his story. Dave told them that he was fine with that. So they let Dave dock in the leading ship, and sure enough when he stepped out they had guns pointed at him. WV went with him this time, a little disconcerted by all the prospitians pointing guns at them.
Dave stood tall with posture and confidence while at the same time trying to convey a very chill and easy attitude. He was internally screaming and wanted to search frantically for Roxy. Him and WV walked down the ramp out of Caledscratch, stepping out into the golden floor with hands raised. After some prospitians came and checked them over for any weapons and were satisfied that they were unarmed, they were led onto the bridge where he saw Roxy and two other women at the main controls.
“Dave!” Roxy said, a big smile on her face as she immediately recognized him, “holy shit!” She ran to hug him, and he hugged back tightly, and all the prospitians lowered their guns. All was well, here. They were okay now.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
“So you’re one of the three commanders of the entire prospitian population huh?” Dave took slow sips from his drink —which was absolutely apple juice and he didn’t even know where they’d gotten it from— while reclining on one of the many chairs in the minor conference room of the leading ship. “Dude, yea, isn’t it wild?” Roxy beamed, also reclining in a chair next to him. “Apparently I’m like a Derse goddess too, and I’ve got these spooky void powers, and like two girlfriends now. Life fuckin rocks actually.” “Nice.” He was honestly happy for her, and he hoped it would come across in his tone. “How long have you and Jane and uh, what’s her name,” “Calliope.” “Yea Calliope. How long have you three been a thing?” “Hmmm.” Roxy smiled and sat back, looking up at the gold ceiling and turning slowly side to side in her spinny office conference chair while trying to recall. “About, two weeks maybe? We’ve been leading this fleet for nearly a month now and me n’ Jane met up with Callie like the day Prospit got blown to shit, it’s been a little while. We’re going pretty good right now though, it’s been super good catching up with her.” Dave did one of those little upward nods, thinking of what to say. He was happy for her, he really was, it’s just he was slightly jealous. It used to be him who had two awesome significant others, and they were kinda gone now, just as things had gotten kicked off. Roxy spoke up again before he could think of what to say. “What about youuu tho?” She raised a foot to poke him in the knee with her toe. “where’ve you been dude? I fuckin missed you! Haven’t seen ya since like, a couple months ago when Jane’s ship fell into that wormhole.” “I’ve been around.” Was his best summary. So much had happened he was having trouble recalling it all now that somebody was asking. “Wound up on a sinking ship with my brother on it, my brother got arrested, we went to like this neat planet with good fields and stuff and hung out, some higher dimensional assholes traumatized Jade, I think I fell into Jupiter? ...” he looked off to the side into the distance. “They probably think I died.” “Damn.” Roxy leaned forward a little. “Who’s they?” “Jade and uh, Karkat. We nearly had a thing going I think.” The joy in his voice was audibly drowning by the second. “It’s whatever.” “Nah man,” she put her elbow on the long table and rested her cheek in her palm. “Keep goin, what happened with you three? Did you lose them? Think we can find em again?” Before he could say anything, Jane came in the room with worry on her face, standing in the doorway looking very troubled. “Roxy, holy fuck. Something is up. I don’t know how to describe it but, I think we’re under siege by large floating mounds of disembodied flesh? We need you back on the bridge.” “The fuck?” Roxy whispered, getting up. “Disembodied flesh?” “Oh yeah,” Dave said, remembering something. “Y’all were just about to be attacked by something fucking insane that was gonna wreck your entire shit, I forgot to tell you.” “What??” Jane looked at him with an even more troubled expression now, Roxy looked at him too. “I swear to god,” Dave started, getting up, “if it’s the New New Hampshirians again I’m gonna do an acrobatic fucking backflip off the handle and into the goddamn higher dimentions.” Roxy looked at him funny. “Yo,” She said, “Dave, mind giving us half a clue what in the name of hells bells you’re talking about?” He started power walking to the bridge with Jane and Roxy, down the tall golden corridors. “We’re probably under attack by some higher dimensional beings that are apparently called New New Hampshirians for some godawful reason, and I’ve had run-ins with them before, so I can say as a first hand eye witness that they don’t fucking play. Well they do play, but they play some hellish fucking sport called ‘brockian ultra cricket’ or something and also play with us pitiful three-dee suckers who just have to sit here in our sad little third dimension and take it like a chump. Long story short we need to go.” He stopped in front of the doorway and turned to Jane and Roxy, looking them both in the eyes to let them see just how serious he was being. “Like now.” “Uh,” said Roxy. “So we’re hitting the bricks just like that? Just gonna skedattle off without a word?” “Yea basically.” “Okay,” Jane stepped past him into the bridge, “just come look at them and then decide if these are really the ‘New New Hampshirians’ you’re talking about.” She ushered them both onto the bridge, where the big screen in front was displaying the unmistakable strange round shapes that let you know the higher dimensional beings were here. Dave nearly had a panic attack upon seeing them and had to stifle it down by mentally smacking it with a metaphorical broom. “No yea that’s them. Shit that’s them. Jane Roxy tell your guys to get the fuck out we need to go they’re gonna tear us all apart.” “Aight,” Roxy turned to shout to Calliope who was halfway across the room, “Yo Callie!! We need to GTFO Dave says these guys are hella bad news!” “Roger that Roxy!” Calliope said, waving at her with one green claw. Jane quickly made her way over to the control station where Calliope was to help her give the orders to order the entire fleet to turn around and go into hyperdrive. Dave briefly wondered if time was already set in stone, if what he’d seen was unchangeable. This thought became a fear set deep in his gut that festered and grew by the second. “SHIT!” He heard Roxy yell from where she was at her own control panel, “we’ve just lost ships one-eight-seven, one-eight-nine and one-nine four.” “Completely?” Calliope asked her, a worried frown on her face. “As in the entire ships have been decimated?” “Yea, ‘fraid so.” Roxy reported back. “Oh bugger.” Callie said, turning back to her station. The alarms started going off, sounding loud and clear throughout the ship. They were officially under attack and would be gone in little to no time at all. Dave started pacing, thinking of ways they could maybe change the course of time, maybe fight back. He was getting real sick of these guys. Jane ran to the front of the bridge and started shouting orders from her post, trying to make sure everyone remained calm and orderly. Meanwhile more ships were torn apart or vanished completely every minute. They couldn’t go into hyperdrive due to an error in communication, the coms on half the fleet weren’t working correctly due to fluctuations in spacetime, ripples in reality as the New New Hampshirians waded through it. Dave ran to Calliope to discuss with her exactly how he’d gotten here, the fact that he’d gone back in time to before they were all completely destroyed, what he’d seen of her fleet, and everything he knew about the New New Hampshirians. Callie listened purposefully, taking note of everything he told her. When he was finished she nodded thoughtfully, bringing one hand up to her chin. “I think our best option now would be to fight back, however you say there is no way to fight them that you know of.” She looked at him with a spark in her big green eyes, “But what if there is! There could be an advantage to living one dimension lower than them. Think of how sharp perfectly two-dimensional objects would be to us, they could cut clean through nearly anything I think! Now how sharp do you think our sharpest objects would be to four dimensional beings?” Dave thought about this and his respect for Calliope went up a few notches. “Alright,” Jane said, as she had been listening, “but how do you propose we fight back?” “I think we should try running straight into them as fast as possible with the sharp ends of our ships, maybe.” Calliope looked from Dave to Jane and back again as she leaned forward on the console with her palms, searching for their answer. “Unless that would destroy our ships, in which case we certainly should not!” Roxy had come over to see what this little congregation was all about. “How about we clear out two ships, completely evacuate em, and then using autopilot we slam them into the big floaty flesh boulders of danger.” “Can the ships do that?” Dave asked. “I don’t think they can.” Callie said. “Roxy,” Jane spoke up, “what if instead of sacrificing ships we use your void powers to just, vanish these guys completely?” “Uh,” Roxy put her hands in her pockets, shrugging a little. “I’m not sure it’ll work like that? Like I can try but as far as I know I can only void shit that’s in my dimension, and that’ll take a lot of focus probably,” “I think you can do it!” Callie cheered, patting her on the back. “Let’s kick some higher dimensional tyrant arse!” “Also,” Dave mentioned, not really meaning to impose on this but feeling like he should share his idea anyway, “Do you think we could go up to them with some pointy objects and just sort of, cut them? They might try and take whoever goes to attack them into the fourth dimension but I’ve been there before I think, even though it was super brief, and really all you need is a strong stomach and a blindfold to block out the sight of it to survive the experience.” “Fuckin radical.” Roxy said, pulling her scarf up to cut a portion of it off. “Alright Dave, we got some decorative swords you can use and here’s a blindfold,” she handed him the torn piece of her scarf. “You take the left side and I take the right side, we’ll be done with these assholes in exactly zero time. Somebody come help this guy to be his eyes.” “Good plan!” Calliope took a sword from the wall and ran back to Dave with it, handing it to him even though his idea was only that, just an idea, hardly even a suggestion really. “Jane, you go with Roxy to help her focus on the Hampshirians on our right, and Dave you’re with me to fight back the Hampshirians on our left. Spit spot!” She patted Dave on the back and led him over to the left side of the bridge near the front, as Roxy and Jane went off to the right to begin their thing. “Shit,” Dave said under his breath while clutching the piece of purple scarf.Calliope stopped in front of him to help him out. “I suggest we attach an umbilical of sorts to you so we can reel you back in if you get pulled into the fourth dimension, but I’m having trouble finding a rope that would be long enough.” She said. A prospitian nearby spoke up and said that they have some proper chords for space walks that extend plenty far for what they planned to do, and that the chords were stored by the back airlocks. They offered to go grab some. “Yes, thank you!” Callie told them, “that’s perfect!” Things were moving fast, there was little time to waste as the alarms sounded that more ships had been destroyed. Jane held Roxy’s hand as she focused on the shapes on the screen. All she had to do was will them away into the void, but this was proving more difficult than anticipated. “Focus, Roxy.” Jane said soothingly, “you’ve got this.” Soon the prospitian came back to Dave and Callie with the chords as promised, handing them off happily knowing they could be of service. Calliope helped Dave tie the bit of scarf around his eyes and equip his helmet, placing the sword firmly in his hand. He hadn’t had too much training for a situation like this, but hopefully the rough childhood spent with his brother would be enough to prepare him. She attached the umbilical to the back of his suit and let him out of the airlock, speaking to him over the coms to serve as his eyes. “Okay, Dave,” She said as Dave, who felt more and more terrified by the second, eased forward with the jetpack. “There’s one right in front of you, just take the sword and slash at it when I give the word. Keep going.” He gave himself a bit of momentum with the jet pack and began drifting quickly forward as instructed, wielding the golden sword in a ready position. He tried breathing slowly, deep breaths now. It was much quieter out here than it had been on the bridge. Considering that he couldn’t see a damn thing was a frightening factor, but it would save him from having his mind blown in should the Hampshirians grab him. The metallic smell of oxygen filled his helmet, he tried to relax. “Steady now,” Callie said over the intercom, “nearly there, wait for it,” “Jesus just tell me when.” Dave said. “Now!” He brought the sword quickly in front of him, slashing at something he couldn’t see, feeling his blade make contact with something thick and fleshy. Yellow blood spilled from the flesh just before it vanished completely, the Hampshirian yanked its arm away from Dave and his three dimensional slice. Why that little punk had the AUDACITY to- The Hampshirian felt Dave slice at it again, this time at its middle, and in the fresh sting of the pain it smacked him away like one would swat at a mosquito. Away Dave flew, into the lower fourth dimension, where Calliope could no longer see him. She did her best to guide him using the tech available to her, leading him to slice at its ankles. The Hampshirian tried shooing him away with one of its several feet by kicking at him, but to no avail. He was difficult to hit now that he was moving about in the higher dimension, he was just so small, so paper-thin. It looked over to see it’s Hampshirian friend off to the side wasn’t doing too swell either. Their entire fifth arm had suddenly been severed from their body, as Roxy had vanished an entire slice of it, the slice she could see, into the void. Hm. Maybe these guys meant business and they should stop fucking with them. “Try going to your right a little!” Calliope said over Dave’s intercom, “slow down,, now swing to your left! That’s it!” Dave wasn’t sure how Callie was guiding him even if she supposedly could no longer see him, she seemed to be very keen when it came to space. All he knew was that she surely knew what she was doing, because every time she ordered him to slice he could feel the blade make impact with something thick and fleshy. The New New Hampshirians soon retreated, having faced a few cuts and severed limbs, after they’d completely ruined several ships from the prospitian fleet. “I think they’re going away!” Callie told him cheerfully, a pride in her voice that came from the knowledge that she had helped protect that which she cared about. “We did it, Dave! Good work!” He was panting a bit by this point, his heart racing as he spun through the zero gravity in the higher dimension, unable to see and stained in yellow blood. Not that he would want to see. The umbilical appeared to be tangled around his left foot, he could feel it tugging at him to come back. Clutching his sword still, he took a deep breath and responded, “nice, that’s good,” another deep breath, was he getting low on oxygen? “That’s good...” “I’m pulling you back in now,” Calliope told him, “hang tight!” “You got it.” He considered letting go of the sword, he didn’t really need it anymore, but worried that if he let it go it could somehow come back and cut him, so it stayed firmly in his hands. Apparently it is impossible to tie knots in the fourth dimension, there’s simply too many directions to go in. He shook his leg to try and untangle the cord from it, which had the most unusual effect that he couldn’t see and didn’t want to. The cord reeled him back in, pulling him out of the depths of the fourth dimension and back into his own reality where he belonged. The transition felt so odd, as he slipped back into his old familiar plane of existence. It was such a welcome feeling when he fell to the floor of the golden ship, the airlock closing behind him as the artificial gravity kicked in. Calliope was there to help him remove his helmet and his blindfold, and the sight of her smile was the cure to whatever uneasiness he’d just been feeling. Admittedly he was pretty dazed from that experience, but thankfully he was alright, even after getting bitch-slapped into the fourth dimension. Calliope helped him walk back to the bridge, as he felt pretty unbalanced, and when they stepped through the door everyone seemed super happy to see them. They all started cheering, and it felt oddly surreal for Dave, he’d never had a whole room of people cheer for him before. WV looked super proud of him, running up to give him a hug. Roxy also looked super proud of him, and she too ran up to give him a hug. “Duuuude!” Roxy said, slinging his other arm around her shoulders to help Callie help him walk. “That was badass! You literally killed out there!” “Hey,” he couldn’t help smiling at her, “you didn’t do too bad yourself. Plus literally all I did was follow Callie’s instructions.” He looked at Calliope, who was smiling at him. “Thanks Callie.” “Awe shucks,” She said, handing him off to Roxy who helped him sit down, “Thank you!” “No you.” He said jokingly, starting to feel pretty lightheaded as he sat and noticed the multitude of sickly yellow stains on his space suit.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Jade Harley has never been good at sitting still in one spot for extended periods of time unless she is doing so to sleep. Days aboard the Spock were becoming long and uneventful, and they were nearly starting to remind her of her days aboard her old golden ship, as they searched without aim for something nigh unattainable. As she sits at the round table in the break room, slouched heavily forward with her elbows on her knees and her hands hanging loosely from her wrists, she realizes she’s going to have to find some way to cope with the boredom and the depressing thoughts before it all catches up to her completely and sends her spiraling away into a mental illness.She begins to fidget.By “fidget” I mean she slowly raises her head, her hair falling away from her face like a curtain as an idea comes to her, prompting her to pick up the little piece of white chalk on the floor and begin writing with it. With the little scrap of chalk in hand she goes over to the nearest wall and starts scratching out the first verses of her own mathematical poetry, describing physics and rockets and gravity and light. She comes up with a few questions and finds answers to them, and for a while this serves well to stimulate her mind and take her thoughts off of sad stuff, but eventually the math begins to look repetitive and after a few hours of this it gets old.Setting down the tiny pebble of chalk that is left from all the hours of vigorous writing, she leaves to go back into her little makeshift workshop to find something to fiddle with. Dirk, as he shambles around the empty metal corridors of the Spock trying to get back in shape and regain his strength, stops to notice all the math that has been scrawled from ceiling to floor along the dark grey walls for several dozen yards, and proceeds to continue to notice it for the next several hours. He doesn’t need to know who put it there or why, he just needs to know what the hell it means. So he stares at it while doing push-ups and sit-ups in the hall, until he’s got a decent clue of what he’s looking at and also is a bit exhausted.Karkat comes power-walking down the hall with half a burrito in hand and trips over Dirk mid push-up, tumbling to the floor and dropping his burrito.“ow” says Dirk.“HEY!” Karkat gets up on his knees to mourn his burrito, before turning to Dirk. “WHY THE HELL ARE YOU DOING PUSH UPS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GODAMN HALLWAY, DUDE? THATS GOTTA BE LIKE A MAJOR HEALTH AND SAFETY HAZARD, ESPECIALLY FOR THOSE OF US WHO NEED TO GET TO THE WATER CLOSET AS FAST AS FUCKING POSSIBLE BECAUSE THEY JUST DEEP THROATED HALF A BEAN BURRITO!”“It’s where the math is.”“THE WHAT?”Instead of repeating himself, Dirk simply points to the wall in front of him, which is covered ceiling to floor in equations and symbols and numbers for dozens of yards down the hall. He gets up to sit on his heels while watching Karkats face as he gawks at this horrifying display of someone’s obvious decent into madness, because really who would ever want to do this much of this sort of math outside of school. Karkat looks from the wall to Dirk and back to the wall a few times, his jaw slack and his face stuck in an expression that looks one part awe, one part shock/horror, one part very offended, and one part concerned.“DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHO’S GONNA HAVE TO CLEAN THIS UP??”Dirk raised one eyebrow. “I didn’t think anyone was going to be cleaning this up. This is the work of somebody who both knows their shit and is exceedingly bored.”Karkat began sweeping up the remnants of the burrito into his other hand, “I SPENT FOUR GODDAMN YEARS AS A JANITOR ON A GOVERNMENT FREIGHTER, DON’T UNDERESTIMATE MY ACQUIRED INSTINCT TO SCRUB AWAY ANYTHING THAT EVEN MILDLY DISGUSTS ME AT FIRST SIGHT.”“So instead of fight or flight it’s scrub or scream? Is it like this for all trolls?” Dirk sat back in a more comfortable position against the clean wall, resting an arm on his knee.“WHAT?”It would soon become apparent that these two had very different senses of humor. Meanwhile, Jade was continuing her mayhem in the little makeshift workshop, having already completely taken apart the microwave and put it back together into something that could only lightly irradiate one’s food. Karkat would eventually find out about this and become appalled by the fact that he could no longer heat up a new burrito to replace his last one, who had met a tragic end. Jade would then be banned from taking apart any more kitchen appliances.Eventually they all had to stop at an interstellar rest stop of sorts called “SHEETZ” as stated by the big red flashing sign outside. While Dirk refilled the fuel tank, Karkat went in to buy a new microwave, Jake went in to buy some more snacks for the road and also a roadmap so they could figure out where the hell they were actually going (along with some other things that he had to be more sneaky about, (namely creams and condoms)), Hal went in to buy a single two-liter bottle of orange Mountain Dew that he couldn’t drink, and Jade went in to buy an entire box full of spare parts and bricks of metal for forging. All of these things were normal things to buy at the interstellar SHEETZ.The man at the counter wasn’t concerned at all by the frazzled woman buying armloads of potentially volatile technology and loads of metal, but was for some reason very put off when Hal tried to buy the soda. He gave Hal a funny look, asking if Hal understood that he was an Android. Hal, for the sake of it, looked him square in the eyes and asked him what an Android was before picking up the two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew and chugging the entire thing right in front of him, never once breaking eye contact. He then paid for a second bottle and left without another word.Thank god Dirk had installed an artificial stomach for Hal just in case he ever had to eat or drink something for someone to be polite. Back aboard the Spock, Hal wandered the halls looking for Dirk, an artificial disembodied plastic stomach-shaped sack full of two liters of orange Mountain Dew in one hand and a normal unopened bottle of another two liters of orange Mountain Dew in the other. Once he found Dirk, who was still doing sit-ups in front of the wall of math, he set both items down in front of him and quietly walked away. ~“So what will you be building with all this then?” Jake asked Jade as he sat on the counter in the makeshift workshop.“Not sure yet, but I have a few ideas!” Jade was setting right to work unpacking the stuff in the boxes. “Let me know a few minutes in advance when we need to turn off the artificial gravity again so I can secure my work.”“Yes ma’am.” He saluted with the wrong hand. “You know, this all reminds me slightly of what Dirk was like aboard the S.S. SQUECKSON, back when me and him were orbiting that black hole.”“Hmm?” Jade stayed very focused on what she was doing with a few bits of circuitry.“Yes, in fact I remember watching him build his gismos and wire up his robots and never having the slightest clue what he was doing, and when I asked him to explain it often felt like he was speaking elvish.” Jake regarded these memories fondly while idly swinging his legs. “He can be such an enigma sometimes, but I think I might like that about him? He’s got his whole mysterious side, and can be all cool and unresponsive sometimes and that can be a tad bit frustrating but I’ve learned that he opens up when he’s ready, you know?”“Hmmmm.” She didn’t take her eyes off what she was doing.“And when he does open up, boy howdy! It’s a lot. It feels nice though, that he trusts me. To be completely honest Jade I think he might be braver than I am, which is admirable to say the least.” Jake gazed off into the distance as he spoke, letting his head fall to the side a little. “He saved my life a few times in the military, and I won’t lie, having someone save your life changes the way you look at them a little! Do you think he looks at me the same way?”“Do you want him to?” Jade asked absentmindedly with two pins held in her teeth as she worked on the heap of tech on the counter.“Well, yes! I think it would be splendid if he looked at me with the same sort of admiration. It’s just a little hard to tell sometimes with him, when he’s always got those silly pointy shades on. It’s like they’re a physical metaphor for the metaphysical facade he puts up to make people think he’s cool. And he is cool! It’s just he’s not as emotionless and hard-boiled as he first seems, you know?” Jake picked up a little piece of twisted metal to inspect and fiddle with. “And he’s always been so good at hiding his plans, like back in the military he acted so respectful and stayed so well in line that I wouldn’t have suspected a thing, if it weren’t for all the sneaking off with me to sketchy dark corners and telling me his secret plans while also maybe trying to kiss me? I couldn’t be sure sometimes.”“Hmmm.”“It makes me worry sometimes, just a little bit, that maybe he’s got some secret plan involving me that I don’t know about. And I know Hal is pretty much a separate person from Dirk by this point, but it’s weird how he’ll sometimes make these passive-aggressive remarks, like he’s letting on to something that he’s not really allowed to say but doesn’t really care if it gets him in trouble. Like one time, aboard the old squeckson while we were orbiting the black hole, I think he started flirting with me? But it was like on behalf of Dirk? As in he got me alone in a room and started acting all funny saying stuff like “Dirk would want you to think this” or “Dirk would want you to feel that” and it was all a little off-putting but after Dirk came in and saw what he was doing Hal never did that again. I think he may have done something to Hal’s programming.”“Hmm.” Jade was hardly listening at this point.“That example doesn’t really justify my worry that he’s got some convoluted plan involving me and maybe I’m just being paranoid and taking things the wrong way, but he does act a bit odd sometimes. Maybe it’s because he’s got other plans he can’t let me know about just yet in case it blows his cover, and maybe he’s got things that are too secret for even me to hear. Which is fine! A guy can have secrets, I don’t need to know everything. Do you think that maybe for now I should just trust that he’s still got his heart in the right place? And believe that he isn’t lying when he tells me things?”Jade briefly looked up from her work to glance at him. “I think you should talk to him about it if it really starts to bother you, before you start making any assumptions.” She then picked up a small tool and began laser-welding something to something else.“Yea, I really should. That’s some good advice, Jade, thank you.”She did one of those little upward nods. “Any time.” ~The good news was that the crew aboard the Spock had an actual destination now, and weren’t just floating aimlessly trying to evade the government. There was a rebel base forming, and Dirk was apparently in cahoots with whoever was running the show, or at least he was well known by whoever was running the show. There were a few things that Jake in fact didn’t know about Dirk, like the fact that he was a secret leading abolitionist fighting for the freedom of black carapacians from the government.So that’s where they were heading now, to the new rebel base that was forming. It was going to take a while to get there though, even at light speed, so they had a few weeks to dawdle in between. Hal was somewhat pleased to find that Dirk had finished the entire bottle of Mountain Dew he’d bought for him, as proven by the evidence in the trash bin as he took it to dump out of the airlock. He still wasn’t sure what Dirk had done with his plastic stomach, though. It was also pleasing to find that the Math Wall was still up, and that nobody had dared to clean it off or ask who’d written all these equations, even though they were all pretty certain it was Jade.Hal passed it by as he walked slowly down the hall, looking for something to occupy his time. He passed Jades workshop, and when he popped in to check on her he found she was out cold sleeping at her table, her head buried in her arms and a single screwdriver still clutched in her hand. She’d been working so hard in here lately, maybe to stave off boredom or her grief from losing Dave. Hal noticed she seemed a little cold in her tank top with her hair pulled back into a messy bun, so he took a blanket from his sylladex and draped it over her shoulders.It was best to let her sleep for now. On the table he saw what it was that she’d been working on, which was a prototype for Jadebot. So this was when she finally got built, he thought to himself while quietly sitting on the table next to the half-finished android. He gazed down at her metal face, which was only half installed and also being re-designed, and silently wondered how she’d wind up going so far back in time. Jade snored a little bit and caught Hal’s attention. Surely Jade knew from what she’d seen that building a robot duplicate of yourself is a bad idea, right?Did she really think that Jadebot would turn out less problematic than Hal had? Like she could make robots better than Dirk? Maybe she could. Hal wondered if he should stay much longer to see the finished Jadebot, or if he should leave before things got complicated. There was another Jadebot from the future/past that he’d left behind on a planet called Jureval Z-major, in constellation Orphemen, and he was starting to worry about what had happened to her. Somehow when he’d shut off to recharge a while back she’d sent him a transmission, or maybe it was himself from the future who had sent the transmission, but either way it was a clear message telling him where he should look for her.It just didn’t make much sense. It didn’t make sense that the transmission had presented itself in the form of a dream, and it didn’t make sense that Jadebot would wind up at the restaurant at the end of the universe. Then again it had always been a dream of Jades to see the end of the universe, so with that in mind it wasn’t too odd that she’d go there, but still. As Hal thought about these things, he continued gazing at Jadebots half-finished face, comparing every detail of what he saw to his memory of what she was going to look like.Maybe it was a little creepy to watch people sleep, but that doesn’t always occur right away to someone who doesn’t entirely understand social norms. The thing is that Jadebot wasn’t actually asleep, as Jade had forgotten to shut her off before falling asleep at the table herself, and Hal didn’t know that Jadebot was watching him back with one red glass eye. He didn’t know that she could see him as he had a little self debate about what was creepy and what wasn’t, and he didn’t know that she was going to remember when he gave her a tiny kiss on the cheek before getting off the table and walking away down the hall.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Deep in the rowdy corners of the galaxy, a gas giant with stunning rings to challenge Saturn orbits a blazing blue star. This gas giant is named “Andronicus L,” its pink and beige bands that stripe its surface an iconic symbol across its constellation. It is on the rings of this gas giant that one of the constellations most beloved sports is held and broadcast, named “Ring Racing.” Alternatively, this sport can also be called “Saturn Skimming,” as coined by the early human colonizers from earth. Pity what happened to earth. The name Saturn is a name from one of the humans many old mythologies, and if you asked a human who knew a thing or two they might tell you it’s from the Roman mythology.
Like any half-witted Troll would know what the fuck a Roman is. Especially not everyone’s favorite chill guy, Cronus, who has absolutely nothing to do with the name Saturn whatsoever. Nope, Cronus doesn’t have a goddamn thing in relation to earths old solar system and mythology, it’s all pure coincidence I’m sure. He, in fact, has so little to do with anything involving earth and it’s solar system that he just acts entirely detached and uninterested as he stands in his slick leather jacket with an unlit cigarette in hand, watching the sport play live on the big screens in a sports bar.
He stands in the sports bar in the station orbiting Andronicus L with everyone else, but he doesn’t cheer with them as the space bikes run around each other, making daring turns and twists in attempts to throw the other racers off. Ring Racing is indeed one of the riskier sports out there, as it would take so little to get thrown off course by all the impending variables. The Racers drive space bikes around on the rings of the gas giant like the rings are a road, traveling close to but not quite at light speed, and the amount of laps they have to do around the planet is determined by the kind of race they are in.
One of the racers goes by the name Rose Lalonde, and she rides in her black bike with purple accents in a most daring manner. Her black-lipped, coy smile and striking lavender eyes catch the attention of one particularly dashing Jadeblooded woman, as she sits at the bar in the station watching the sport with everyone else. The way Rose cuts the edges so close, taking such dangerous risks to secure her place in second, worries and fascinates Kanaya. She sips her drink to distract her nerves as she witnesses Rose pull a particularly audacious stunt to throw off the racer behind her.
Cronus slides up next to Kanaya at the bar and offers to buy her a drink, which she politely declines by telling him she’s already got one, thanks. He speaks with ‘V’s in front of his ‘W’s like he’s got a weird Russian or French accent or something. Kanaya has no idea what kind of accent he’s trying to pull, only that it’s over exaggerated and obviously intended to sound spicy. She goes back to watching the sport play on the screens, one gloved elbow rested heavily on the wooden bar. Tonight she wore one of her finest floor-length gowns, a black felt that glimmered with green stars, her “Three AM Dress” as it was called.
She wore it because she’d been hoping to speak with Rose tonight, after the race was over. Perhaps she should’ve waited till later to change into it, as it appeared to be attracting some unwanted attention. Cronus was still watching her watch the screens.
“You keep watching the screen that displays that Lalonde racer on it, instead of any of the others.” He observed, crossing his legs and leaning against the bar in a way he hoped was casual and cool. “I can understand though, I’ve been perplexed by her since the moment I saw her. She vwears that vwashed out purple color like it’s nothing, like it ain’t royalty.”
Kanaya frowned, still not looking at him.
“I should find it disrespectful, as a man with royal blood, but I think it’s bold of her. I like that in women.” He smiled with his teeth as Kanaya finally turned to him.
“Funny,” She said, “I like that in women too.” She inspected a loose stitch on her black glove. “In fact, I like women exclusively, so if you’re trying to be anything other than my friend I should advise you to step off now.” Every word she spoke was pronounced clearly, with just enough emphasis on each and every one to make herself sound distinct.
“Ah.” He looked away and leaned back on his elbows with his back against the bar, putting the cigarette back in his mouth. “My bad. Well in that case, do you have any advice?”
“I assume you mean advice concerning how to treat women.” She stirred her drink slowly.
Cronus smiled at her. “You assume correctly.”
Kanaya looked at him thoughtfully as she sipped her drink, before coming to a conclusion and setting it down. “Generally, I think you should just try being genuine and consider what she wants instead of just what you want. Communication is key. Keep at it, you’ll eventually find someone unstable enough to date you.”
He frowned and raised an eyebrow at her as she swallowed the last of her drink and got up to walk out of the bar. The race would be ending in about five minutes, and it was a five minute walk to the docking chamber where the racers would regroup after it was over. She fully intended to speak with Rose about her audacious behavior.
~~~
“We need to stop for fuel and to restock on rations,” Jane told her comrades as they all stood in the front of the bridge for an impromptu meeting, “and the nearest interstellar rest stop won’t exactly do to supply for a fleet of this size, so we need to stop by a large station orbiting a gas giant named Andronicus L. The station is said to be mostly populated by ‘rowdy Trolls who’ve run away from their home world’, according to this guide I-“
“Is it by any chance,” Roxy interrupted, sitting sprawled back nonchalantly in her round chair, “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?”
“As a matter of fact yes it is,” Jane pushed her glasses back up her nose, holding her clipboard and books a little closer to her. She looked a little like a secretary or something like it in that outfit.
“And how,” Roxy held her drink loosely, “did you come into the possession of THE guide?”
“Roxy this isn’t what the meeting is about-“
“Oh yea actually,” Dave interrupted Jane, not meaning to be impolite just suddenly aware of this thought he’d gotten, “I got the guide from an android called Hal I think, and he mentioned offhand that he’d gotten it from you Roxy but I never got around to asking him to elaborate. Anyway I gave it to Jane because she saw me poking at it and wanted a look.”
“I see.” Roxy put a thoughtful hand to her chin. “What the fuck actually happened to Hal anyway? How’d he wind up with you?”
Dave leaned back against a console with both elbows. “Not a goddamn clue. I could ask you the same question.”
“anyway“ Jane was starting to sound annoyed, “we will be stopping at a station orbiting Andronicus L and I just called this meeting to let you all know. Any questions?”
Calliope stepped forward and put a friendly hand on Jane’s shoulder. “No, thank you Jane.”
They all kindly acknowledged Jane’s announcement and relayed it on to their respective factions. It’s difficult running a fleet of this size smoothly, so to help keep things organized each leader was given an individual faction of ships to look out for, like dividing up a house for the children that are to clean it. They could thank Jane for the idea. It was odd, as Calliope talked to Jane she learned that as good of a leader as Jane was turning out to be, she didn’t really feel like a leader at all.
Roxy and Dave and WV all walked down the corridors of the lead ship, on their way to Roxy’s quarters after having finished their duties with communication. “Hey,” Roxy lightly elbowed Dave as they walked, “what can you tell me about Hal? I only knew him for a few hours, but he was pretty cool. How do you know him?”
“It’s complicated,” Dave put his hands in his pockets, “but basically I’ve got a brother I didn’t really tell you about, and Hal is my bro’s clone robot or something, it’s all kinda weird.”
“Hang on hangon hangon,” Roxy made them stop in the middle of the hall as she put a hand on Dave’s arm. “You have a BROTHER?”
“Kinda.”
“Does that mean... technically due to time shenanigans,,, I have TWO sons???” She looked at Dave with the sweetest, most hopeful smile.
“Maybe? I don’t know if he was actually my bro or more like my dad, but he certainly didn’t act like a dad or really try to be a dad in any way and he always called me his little bro but I’m not actually sure if the genetics add up.”
“Man, when the fuck am I gonna meet this guy I’m supposed to get future-busy with, and whomst the fuck is it gonna be?” She started walking again, looking away from Dave. Then, more quietly, she said, “Why’s my family life gotta be so heckin complicated?” It was reasonable to say she was concerned about the fact that she couldn’t technically have kids with Callie and Jane, even if she wanted them. She loved the two of them though, very much, and at this point things concerning who her family was and was going to be were so weird and uncertain that it was starting to worry her.
“Good question.” Dave looked at WV. “Any ideas?”
WV looked deep into Dave’s eyes with some sort of transcendent understanding, like there was so much that he knew that he couldn’t tell Dave just yet, but wanted to. He then shrugged and went back to fondly regarding the golden sash they had given him to let others know he was not only friendly, but also in charge of a small subsection of the fleet, thus making him technically a mayor.
“Anywho,” Roxy said, letting her head fall to the side as they walked. She seemed a little tired. “What else can you tell me about Hal? How’d you meet?”
“We met because Jade revived him on the Squeckson, you know the sinking ship I told you about?”
“Oh yea that one.”
“Yea, and then he left us to get help, and then like four or five weeks later he showed back up to actually get us out of there, but he’d accidentally gotten help from a bounty hunter who arrested my bro.” Dave took one hand out of his pockets to speak with, waving it about a little every now and then.
“Oh dude.”
“Yea.”
Roxy looked back over at him. “So ur bro is in space jail?”
“Last I checked, yea.”
“Man.” She was quiet for a moment. “Sorry, dude.”
“It’s whatever.” He shrugged. “Maybe he deserved it.”
Roxy looked at the floor and wondered if this guy Dave was talking about was actually her other son or the guy she was supposedly supposed to get ‘future-busy with.’ Either way it was troubling to hear he was in jail. It would probably better if he was a second son of hers, at this point, because then she wouldn’t have to worry about anything interfering with her current relationship. That is, if he had any familial relation to her at all. Why was he in jail? He wasn’t gonna wind up... like, leaving her with kids, without her permission, was he? Her thoughts were quickly trailing into something more unpleasant and she didn’t want to explore the possibility any further anymore.
If Hal was based off of Dave’s bro she wanted to assume that his bro would be as nice as Hal had been to her. He didn’t seem like the sort of person to do something as awful as what she was thinking. But then again Hal was a robot, not really a human, so. Luckily Dave brought her out of this sour train of thought by speaking up again.
“So how’d you meet him?”
“Jane and I found him in a weird-ass labyrinth that goes back in time and he bought us dinner and new clothes.” She told him, stopping at her door as they reached it.
“I’m guessing this happened while he was out looking for help?” Dave was trying really hard to put the pieces together before realizing he didn’t really give a fuck what Hal had been up to as long as he didn’t accidentally get any more of his family members arrested.
“Maybe!” Roxy opened her door and stopped in the doorframe. “Thanks for walkin me back to my room. ‘s sweet of you.”
“yea any time Mom-“ He immediately regretted his choice of words but it was too late because Roxy was smiling, “I mean Roxy”
She’d already shut the door.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Maybe it was that Hal didn’t want to see what happened with Jadebot when she first woke up, or what had caused her to become so depressed, or what had made her finally leave. Whatever it was, it was bothering him on some level to see Jadebot look closer and closer to how he remembered her every time he passed by the workshop. Maybe this was a good chance to ask Jade about her design choices, like why the hell she’d give Jadebot red glass eyes or a frozen metal face that had trouble expressing emotion.It was probably best not to ask though, or even let Jade know that he knew what would become of Jadebot, and he absolutely shouldn’t tell Jade what it was that was going to happen to Jadebot. Messing with the flow of time was dangerous, and causing paradoxes or self-fulfilling loops was too, so it would be better if he stayed away from that sort of thing. It would be better if he stayed away completely, he’d soon come to decide. He said his goodbyes to Jade, who didn’t understand that he was leaving and just thought he was being unusually sweet when he told her he’d miss her and thanked her for all she’d done for him.He talked with Dirk as well before he left, letting Dirk know pretty much everything about why he was finally leaving. Other than those two people he didn’t really let anyone else know he was going. It was nice to go on good terms though, to leave not because he was unwanted where he was but because he was simply wanted elsewhere. After being dropped off at the nearest interstellar rest stop, he stood on the curb under the light of the lamp outside, watching ships zing by while skimming through his downloaded copy of the Hitchhikers Guide. With the endless, star-speckled void in front of him and the interstellar “Stuckey’s” behind him, he stuck out his thumb and waited.In this way he wound up as a passenger in all sorts of different ships with all sorts of different people, and his journey was somewhat long and strange at times. Occasionally he felt like he was just drifting, while sitting in the back of a strangers ship watching the stars recede into the void. How gentle, how calm the trip was at times, just as lonely and contemplative as it was sketchy and dangerous. Away he went, slowly finding his way across the galaxies in the backs of other peoples flying cars.To sail as a passenger across the void, scaling the distance between galaxies, alone on a ship with living creatures asleep in beds of ice, to help preserve them on their long voyage in turn for a free ride. Their destination was light years away, millions of years in fact, even traveling at light speed. Hal stood in the hold of an intergalactic bus, watching over the sleeping faces in the cryogenic pods. How he’d wound up here was a long story, but by this point he was nearly to his destination. Just a few thousand more years of traveling at the speed of light and he’d reach the constellation in which he wanted to be.It was dark in the hold of this ship, only a dim red light coming from his own eyes and circuitry. He didn’t have the battery to stay awake for the whole journey, so he’d have to shut himself off soon, but not just yet. For hours he sat at the window, gazing at all the different Galaxies you could see from way out here, contemplating things. The universe was infinite, space-wise, so searching for the end of the universe, as in an edge to the stars where all the matter just drops off and gives way to complete nothingness, was futile. However, the universe was less infinite time-wise, and there would eventually have to be a death to it all, somewhere in the distant future, when the stars would all boil away into nothing and all life gives way to complete silence.So searching for the end of the universe was not a matter of where, but rather a matter of when. This was where he was headed, and these were some of the last things he was thinking about as he sat down in a comfortable position against the wall and began preparing to fully shut himself off for the next couple thousand years. These, and also some other things, such as if Jadebot was actually going to be happy to see him or if she’d be upset that he vanished. Surely she wouldn’t have sent him that transmission so far through time and space if she didn’t want to see him, or maybe she’d sent him it just so he could make the long journey to her so she could kick his ass in person.He didn’t really think of Jade or Jadebot as the sort of person to do that, but you never know. She’s a different person when she’s angry. Whatever the case, he had a feeling things would work out alright for him when he got there. A feeling of peace that he’d rarely ever felt since being turned into an android settled over him as he shut his eyes and fell into a deep, lifeless sleep alongside the living creatures set in ice. It was a quiet like he’d never known, a stillness so deep and cold as to be infinitely calm, as he rocketed silently through the vacuum at the fastest speed possible in the known universe.This was a journey he was willing to make for a friend, a friend who’d become so dear to him in such a short amount of time, a friend who understood him. It was possible he loved this friend, if he even knew what love was at all. Just a few million years and he’d made it at last to his destination, to the place where the sea pours into the stars, to the fragmented remains of a completely ruined planet that had once been wonderful. He stepped off his last transport, waving goodbye to them and giving them his thanks as they left him alone on a grey and lifeless world.Somewhere along the line he’d come into the possession of a single handheld transportalizer that could take him forward in time as far as he liked, but not back, and he could only use it once, which is what made it affordable. This was his one way ticket to Milliways, the fabled restaurant at the end of the universe. There would be no going back after he went, but after traveling all this way it would be a bit silly to not go the final step. He held the little transportalizer in his palm and looked at it as the grey dust blew over the jagged, barren planet.He stood as a stark black streak with red accents in the middle of a grey monochrome landscape, the wind fussing with his pure white synthetic hair. One press of the button in his hand and he vanished from the scene entirely, re-appearing far in the future, nearly as far as he could go. In front of him a massive restaurant stood, resembling a giant glittering starfish on the face of the grey planet. After a bit of walking he found the front doors, which were never used, and above the doors he saw the sign up in neon lights, Milliways. He went up to these doors and started knocking until somebody let him in.To pull an excerpt directly from the book this idea came from, the Guide states as follows: “Seen from the outside, which it never is, the Restaurant resembles a giant glittering starfish beached on a forgotten rock. Each of its arms houses the bars, the kitchens, the force-field generators which protect the entire structure and the decayed hunk of planet on which it sits, and the Time Turbines which slowly rock the whole affair backward and forward across the crucial moment.”For further information on The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, I suggest reading chapter fifteen of Douglass Adams book “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,” as well as chapter sixteen and seventeen and really just go read the whole damn book it really is incredible. Another Excerpt reads as follows: “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most extraordinary ventures in the entire history of catering.”— Hal sat on the doorstep of Milliways, knocking, pounding, with no answer. The grey landscape behind him grew more frightening by the second as the universe began to draw to a close. —“It is built on the fragmented remains of an eventually ruined planet which is enclosed in a vast time bubble and projected forward in time to the precise moment of the End of the Universe.“This is, many would say, impossible.”— Hal slowly pounded on the door a steady rhythm as the hours passed, starting to worry a bit that the universe would end with him still in it, worrying that the time bubble couldn’t protect him out here because as much as he likes to pretend he knows everything, he really often knows so close to nothing at all. —“In it, guests take their places at a table and eat sumptuous meals while watching the whole of creation explode around them.“This, many would say, is equally impossible.”— Hour seven of sitting outside this door was approaching and Hal was starting to really worry that he’d come all this long way just to be locked outside his final destination and stay locked out for all of eternity, until he finally rusted away and broke down entirely. —“You can arrive for any sitting you like without prior reservation because you can book retrospectively, as it were, when you return to your own time.“This is, many would now insist, absolutely impossible.”— If Hal could cry, he would start doing so about now as he began his thirteenth hour of relentlessly knocking on the door as he sat leaning heavily against it. —“At the Restaurant you can meet and dine with a fascinating cross-section of the entire population of space and time.“This, it can be explained patiently, is also impossible.“You can visit it as many times as you like and be sure of never meeting yourself, because of the embarrassment this usually causes.“This, even if the rest were true, which it isn’t, is patently impossible, say the doubters.“All you have to do is deposit one penny in a savings account in your own era, and when you arrive at the End of Time the operation of compound interest means that the fabulous cost of your meal has been paid for.“This, many claim, is not merely impossible but clearly insane, which is why the advertising executives of the star system of Bastablon came up with this slogan: “If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?””I have shamelessly pulled such a large excerpt from the book itself and also interrupted it several times because I believe that if anyone is to explain this concept to you, it should be Douglass Adams himself, because I don’t think anybody (and especially not me) could top off his explanation, which is even better in context so go read the book if you haven’t already.Eventually some irritated waiter got tired of hearing the constant knocking day in and day out and opened the door to let the poor, sad little android inside. Hal was shocked when the door that he’d been leaning against for days suddenly opened, leaving him to fall and to flop humorously at the waiters feet. The moodily lit bar behind the little green waiter was a sight that was beautiful beyond words for someone who’s been locked outside in the cold, bleak, dismal world that is all that is left of the planet on which the Restaurant sits.“Good evening, sir.” The waiter said to him. Before he could continue to ask Hal if he had a reservation, Hal interrupted him by letting him know just how wrong he was.“I’ll have you know,” Hal started as he looked up at the waiter from where he was lying on his back on the floor, “that I have been sitting outside this door for exactly eighty-seven hours, and as someone who has been forced to witness the weather for such an extended amount of time I can assure you wholeheartedly that it is not a good evening. It is the last evening, the entire universe is in fact falling the fuck apart, as I have seen it do at least three times now, and it is therefore the worst evening, and it will continue to be the last and the worst evening for all of eternity, as long as I am forced to sit in this doorframe, because I have no way of going home, not that I ever had a home, and no way of going back in time, and because the universe is ending I have nowhere left to go but here,”The waiter began to try and force the door shut again, pushing Hal back out.“No no no wait,” Hal sat up off the floor and stopped the waiter from shutting the door again. “I have a reservation.”“For whom, sir?” The little green waiter asked patiently.“For Hal Strider.”The waiter checked his list. “There is no reservation for Hal Strider here, I’m afraid.”“Fuck.” Hal said, so very quietly and with a very specific passion. Then, more loudly, he continued. “I can make a reservation still, right?”With a polite little waiter smile, he replied, “Yes, we can work out the details inside, just please get your legs out of the doorway so I may shut it, if you will.”Hal quickly did as asked, pulling his legs up and scooting away from the door, standing as the waiter shut it. They proceeded to work out all the details at the bar, details such as the fact that there was no specific reservation for Hal, because apparently Hal would never go back to his own time to deal with all that, however someone by the name of Jade Harley had booked him a spot at a table somehow. So once his table was ready, the waiter took Hal down the eighty-yard-long marble-topped bar and through the large smoked glass doors at the far end of the bar, into the dazzling light of the main body of the Restaurant beyond.He was now in the center of the starfish, which was a gigantic golden dome that had a stage in the middle of it. Surrounding the stage were all the tables, and everything that wasn’t entirely covered in glitter was covered in the wild assortment of gems and seashells and so on. Hal sat at a glassy, glittery table by himself and twiddled his thumbs. So. Here he was. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe at Last, and yet nothing to say for himself. It was only now that he’d made the long trip that he wondered if the transmission he’d received had really been as sound as he first thought it to be.For a while he watched the strange people and lifeforms around him eat and talk and do their thing in all their extravagant outfits. Everyone here seemed to be dressed to the nines, a phrase that he’d surely heard Jake say at some point. It was making him feel underdressed, considering he basically had no clothes on at all, what with being a robot and such. Some distance away he saw a party of people who looked more human than not sitting down, and among this party was a man with two heads and a third arm. Ignoring the fact that this was absolutely Zaphod Beeblebrox, Hal continued drowsily looking about the vast dining court, taking in all the dazzling scenery.It really was a sight to behold, like nothing he’d ever seen. He rested his elbows on the table and put his chin in one palm, contemplating the absurd beauty of the Restaurant that he was apparently never going to leave, now that he’d come inside. Better get used to it, he supposed. It was probably going to take a long time to get used to a place like this. Lucky for him it seemed he would have a long time, as he sat quietly at his table for an amount of time that one could describe as long. Eventually his waiter showed up, coming to stand by his table and take his order. He didn’t look up at her right away.“Good evening,” she said, and he nearly threw a fit again. “My name is Jade, I’ll be your waiter tonight, may I take your order?”A little startled, Hal looked up to see Jadebot dressed in a white blouse and a suit vest with a pen in one hand, a notebook in the second hand, a tray full of food in her third hand and a tray full of drinks in her fourth hand, with the room glittering behind her and the lights dazzling off her shiny dark hair. Even being a computer with near infinite processing speed, he was going to need a moment to process this. There was so many things he could have said, so many responses he could have had, but of course the first thing out of his mouth was“Yea I’ll have the “how the fuck did you end up as a waitress at Milliways” special, hold the salt.” He then, still unable to take his eyes off her, tried to lean casually on his elbow which had the side effect of making him look like a complete douche with a side of fries, ‘hold the salt’.Jadebot shifted her weight more heavily to one foot and cocked her head at him, her metal face expressing a special breed of offended smile that he didn’t remember her being able to express before. It seemed she’d been given an upgrade since he last saw her.“Alright, fuckass,” she started, and he was afraid. “I’d like to apologize for the inconvenience but we’re out of that right now, however we have plenty of “where the hell did you go, you left me alone on a ruined planet for what was probably several millennia” in stock, which if you ask me is a fine alternative.”He crumbled internally, lowering the hand that he’d been resting his chin on and sitting up a bit straighter. After several different emotions passed over his face, his expression finally settled on a certain smile that he’d never attempted to wear before. “I’m sorry, Jade.” He said, “it’s nice to see you again.”She simulated a sigh, putting the hand that was holding a pen on her hip. They just sort of looked at each other for a bit, noticing the differences from when they’d last seen the other. Hal had seen some wear and tear and had undergone a few repairs and upgrades, but other than that there didn’t seem to be any real drastic changes. Jadebot, on the other hand, looked like she’d had her entire face redone, had four arms out (which wasn’t new, he just didn’t usually see her with all four on display), had slightly different hair that was a little less metallic looking and darker, and was wearing completely new clothes. She still wore the same round red-tinted glasses, though.“It’ll take a little more than sorry to make up for thousands of years spent alone on Jureval, but alright.” She finally said, relieving the silence. “Now may I take your order?”“I don’t have money.”“Well that’s not a problem, all you have to do is put a penny in a savings account when you get back to your own era,”“I don’t think I’ll ever be going back to my own era,” Hal interrupted gently, “and sadly I forgot to do that before I came.”“I see.” She set the two trays down on the table and sat in the chair across from him, leaning forward on her elbows. “Well in that case I’m afraid you’ll just have to work for your meal.”“Oh?”“Yes, we have several spots open for a new dishwasher or chef or waiter, or if none of those spots strike your fancy you can sing. I’m sure you’ll find the pay is quite outstanding here.”“First of all,” he leaned back in his chair, looking at her quizzically, “I’m a robot, Jade. I can’t eat or drink, so I don’t really have a reason to work for food, and I still have no idea what became of my plastic sack that was supposed to be a faux stomach. Second, sing?”“Yes sing.” She let her head fall to the side. “You know, like for background music and such. Atmosphere. I’ve heard you sing before, once, some millennia ago. You’re not bad.”“Aha,” Hal had been a lot of places since he’d been made. He’d seen a lot of stuff, heard a lot of things, even before he was a robot, but for the first time ever someone had said something to him that had made him go ‘aha’, which was like a little surprised laugh that could mean anything on a spectrum ranging from ‘are you serious’ to ‘that’s kinda cute of you to say’. He wasn’t sure if he should just say thank you and move on or dwell on the fact that after all this time she could still remember what his singing voice sounded like, even after only hearing it once for like thirty seconds.It then occurred to Hal that because he was an android and his voice was mostly made from samples of Dirks voice, both recorded and fabricated, taking up a career in singing would probably make him a Vocaloid. He was unable to recover from having this thought for the next several seconds.“Hal?” She was getting concerned by the fact that he’d locked up and had been quiet for several moments now.“Jade does singing make me a Vocaloid. Am I a fucking Japanese fabrication Jade. Is this what my life has come to.”“I don’t think it does...”“I used to be a man Jade. A real man. Now it seems I-““Stop having an identity crisis while I’m trying to offer you a job, jeez.” Jadebot propped the side of her head up on her palm and rested on it heavily. “Do you want to work here or not?”Hal pulled himself together and thought about this. He could work here, and that could give him something to do so he wouldn’t just be sitting around as a useless hunk of tech, and he would get to see Jadebot every day, and after some consideration it didn’t seem like it would be the worst thing to take up a job here. It wasn’t really his style, not exactly something he ever pictured himself doing, but he could give it a try. After some thought, he did one of those little upward nods. “I’ll give it a shot.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
There is often a difference between what you want to be and what you are, and it is often more difficult to be the thing you want to be than it is to be the thing you are. For example, it is difficult to be a lovable and charming person when you are a person who has trouble understanding social cues and knowing how to speak with people, as it is difficult to be the sort of friend who buys their friends lunch when you have no money, as it is difficult to be cool and sturdy when being yelled at because you are very sensitive and emotional, as it is difficult to be the writer of what you wish to be an upbeat, lighthearted and silly space opera when you are a rather depressed and troubled person who has little to no confidence in their abilities as an artist of any kind.
Rose stood in the large grey docking chamber and found it difficult to look like a suave and dangerous woman because she was being lectured by a troll in a lovely dress who was taller than her.
“I knew what I was doing, Kanaya, nobody got hurt. You can rest from fussing over me.”
“Oh but I’m not sure you do.” Kanaya’s steps were louder than she would’ve preferred as they walked quickly together through the docking chamber. “I saw how close you were getting to the other racers, and considering how much room you have to move around on those rings, that was entirely unnecessary. One wrong move out there could mean life or death, there’s so many things that could go wrong and all of them are dreadfully fatal, especially for a human.”
“It sounds like you care an awful lot about my wellbeing. Do you care about me, Kanaya?” Rose glanced up at her with a meddlesome little smile as they passed by spaceships and working crews.
She had to take a deep and harsh breath in and out before replying. “YES, Rose, that is why I am strongly advising you to refrain from taking such careless risks and practice more caution!” She stopped walking and turned to Rose as they reached the doorway, and although she wasn’t blocking Rose’s path, she was mildly satisfied to see Rose stop and turn to face her too. “As alluring as your audacity can be, the swirling surface of Andronicus L would not reflect light quite as brightly without you around to circle its rings with your wild shenanigans and foolish, reckless behavior. I’m afraid of losing you, Rose.” She watched as Rose avoided her eye contact. “Just, show a little solicitude, for yourself and for me?” The face she made, way her voice softened and her sharp teeth gleamed as she pronounced that last bit had a certain effect on ones soul.
Rose glanced over to see if anyone was looking, and not many people were, before briefly looking up into Kanayas sharp-edged, nicely painted face. She then decided that her green-flecked, steady gaze was too intense to look directly into and turned her eyes away again almost immediately. Soon after this she decided that nothing was too intense for her to look directly into, including the sun, and tried staring back up at the regal troll with a renewed, spite-filled vigor. The expression of genuine concern that Kanaya was wearing softened her from the inside out the very moment following and she turned away again.
After a few moments of this looking back and forth, Rose decided to actually say something in response. “Alright. I’ll try to be more careful, but I can’t guarantee anything.”
“Thank You.”
At that moment some other troll wearing goggles and a flight suit came and interrupted their little moment in the doorway. He looked hurried and bothered. “Miss Lalonde,” He said, “there is someone new in the south hangar who also uses the surname Lalonde, and she’s been requesting to see you since the moment she saw you on TV. She promised me that if I at least let you know, she would stop bothering me. Thank you.” He then turned and walked away.
Kanaya raised her eyebrows as she looked slowly back at Rose. They stood in silence for a moment. “Well,” She prompted, “aren’t you going to investigate?”
Rose huffed and started down the hall.
~~~
Contemplating one's navel is a phrase often used to describe someone who is deeply engrossed in their own small issues, often to the point of ignoring anything else going on elsewhere. Here it is being used literally as Dave sits in his room contemplating the fact that he does not have a navel, and is just now realizing that this is a bit strange. This sudden late realization of something he probably should’ve noticed years ago is probably just a side effect of Roxy’s developing interest in who the hell it is she’s supposedly going to have this son of hers with. It’s possible Roxy is his genetic mother, but if there is no trace of an umbilical chord, then was he ever really birthed at all? These are slightly strange and troubling thoughts to have as Dave sits on the edge of his bed in this nice golden respite block the prospitians have generously provided him with.
The phrase “contemplating ones navel” can also have some figurative use here as Dave is in fact deeply engrossed in his own familial issues while ignoring the fact that they have just reached their destination at the space station orbiting Andronicus L, and have actually been parked in the south hangar for some time now. He is entirely ignorant to the reunion of Roxy and her mother/daughter, entirely unaware that he has a legitimate sister and she’s here, right now, in this hangar, if he’d just get up and go the fuck outside, and entirely oblivious to the fact that his sisters girlfriend knows Karkat, who is someone else he’s been thinking about lately.
It sure would be convenient for some kindly, warweary villein to come and knock on his door to break him out of it and get him to come out into the hangar, and conveniently, that’s exactly what happens. WV not only knocks on his door, but cracks it open a smidge. However, he doesn’t peak inside, he just knocks again even louder. He’s learned his lesson long ago from the many times he’s barged in without invitation to find Dave engrossed in some incredibly self indulgent and nasty private business. He knows well and good to wait until Dave gives him the ok to come on in. Raising children can be weird and difficult, and WV should know because his adopted son can be the weirdest, nastiest little man sometimes.
Kids.
He hears Dave tell him he can come on in and let’s himself inside, sitting on the edge of the bed next to Dave. He looks up at Dave and makes long, unbroken, unblinking, intense eye contact with him for a moment too long as to get slightly uncomfortable, before quietly getting up and walking out of the room again, shutting the door behind him. Dave blinks and wonders what all that was about, before getting up to follow WV out the door and out of the lead ship.
~
In some strange way, Dave envied himself. He envied himself from the past, when he had Jades arms wrapped around him, and Karkat snuggled up in his own arms, and even being lost in an endless ocean that is bottomless and massive and cold in the night with treacherous waves and storms, floating on just a tiny raft of metal, he had felt safe. He envied himself from the past and sometimes wished he could crawl back in time into his old self and be there once again and be with them like he used to be, back when he didn’t know how good he had it. Sadly he didn’t think his time powers worked like that.
Such is the thing with missing people. But something you have to learn is that you have to be willing to come out of that and recognize that despite how you feel and what you’ve lost, you may in fact have it very good right now. You have to be able to do what you failed to do in the past and recognize that right now there are people in your life that still love you and will always love you, and you have to cherish that before it’s gone. He had to do the thing he was regretting not doing back when he was with Jade and Karkat, he had to cherish the fuck out of these people and be in the moment, realizing just how good he has it right now.
He was coming to this conclusion just as he stepped out of the golden airlock with WV and into the south hangar of the station orbiting Andronicus L. The south hangar was massive and spacious, with a breathtakingly tall ceiling, meant for very large ships like theirs coming in to dock and restock, much unlike the north hangar, which was smaller with a lower roof and was meant for the racers ships and bikes. A short distance away he saw a small group of people that consisted of almost entirely women, some of which he knew, all mingling and talking and smiling and occasionally laughing.
For a moment he felt that sad little sense of detachment again, where it felt like he was watching them from behind glass, wanting to come in and join the party but unable to. For a second, he felt forgotten about. Dave quickly shook the feeling off and did the thing he’d been regretting not doing before, and simply forgot about the glass and the detachment and just walked right on in to try and join them. Roxy was the first to notice him stroll up, smiling at him and welcoming him into the circle. Jane and Callie were quick to follow, noticing him after Roxy had noticed.
“Dave, WV,” Roxy said, “you gotta meet these guys,” she gestured over to a tall troll lady in a fine evening gown and a human woman who looked inexplicably similar to Roxy in just a few more respects than one. “Dave, this is Rose and Kanaya, and I think Rose is my mom!”
“What?” Dave was immediately caught off guard. More family? Here? How?
“It is also possible,” Rose started, stepping forward, “that I am your daughter, or even your sister, until we get a proper test done and see the results. I’m not sure if there are any doctors of that sort in this station, so it may be awhile before we can know for certain.”
“Huh.” Dave said, looking down into her lavender eyes and seeing that familiar Lalondian glint of cunning and wit. “So you’re either my grandma, my sister, or my aunt.” He blinked, put his hands on his hips and looked away while thinking about this. “Huh.”
“How about,” Rose got his attention back, “for now you just consider me a friend, and we will work out the familial details later.” She stuck out a fingerless-gloved hand for him to shake. “Nice to meet you, Dave.”
Raising his eyebrows with a bit of surprise, he accepted her handshake and was further surprised by how awkward and formal it felt. “You too.”
Kanaya had been watching this transaction with mild fascination and curiosity. “So if Rose is Roxy’s mother,” she piped up, “that might make me Dave’s Grandmother in law?”
“well,” Rose said.
“And If Rose is Roxy’s daughter,” Kanaya continued, stepping forward with her loud shoes, “then that might make me Dave’s... daughter in law? No, sister in law. Perhaps? And if Rose is Roxy’s sister, would that make me his mother in law? What does ‘in law’ mean again? Or no, would that make me his aunt in law? If Dave is Roxy’s son... one moment, why are you the same age?” She was grappling so hard with the concept of human familial relations.
“Kanaya,” Rose gently touched her arm, speaking softly, “we aren’t married yet, so you don’t really have any relation to them at all.”
“Oh.” Kanaya looked at Rose, and then looked down. “I see.” Human traditions could be very confusing and difficult to grasp.
Rose pressed her lips into a tight, thin line, withdrawing her hand. “Emphasis on yet, though.”
Kanaya looked back up at her. “Do you intend to-“
“Ah, yes, anyway,” Rose turned back to the others while smiling like she was trying to brush something under the rug with her foot without anyone noticing. “Dave, who is your friend here, the dersite?”
“Oh, this boss?” Dave gestured to WV, who waved. “This is my co-pilot, my best man,” he kneeled behind WV’s shoulder as to put a hand on that shoulder to really put the spotlight on the guy. WV was a bit short so the kneeling made sense. “My comrade, my right hand, we call him WV. He’s cool.”
“I see.” Kanaya smiled, crouching down to sit on her heels and see WV at eye level. “It has been a long time since I’ve seen a Carapacian of any sort around here. Pleasure to meet you.” She held out her hand and was delighted inside when WV shook it with all the friendliness and dignity of a beloved town mayor.
Calliope and Jane, who had also been watching the whole familial debate with the Strilondes, were off to the side a little having their own conversation. Jane was doing her best to explain to Calliope how typical human family units worked, why this family unit was a bit unusual, and also a thing or two about marriage and the effect it tends to have on family trees. Calliope was rapt with the concept as she listened. She would occasionally respond to Jane with “how odd” or “fascinating!” or “hmm” or “I see.”
Roxy was busy juggling between Jane and Callie and Dave and Rose and Kanaya. So many people. So much family. So little time.
After a while of friendly conversation and generally getting to know each other, Dave walked away with the conclusion that he should fear Rose a little and never get on Kanaya’s bad side, while still knowing that he could turn to them for just about anything because it seemed like they were already accepting him as a family member even if they didn’t know in what way that was. They all helped the Prospitians load up the ships and worked it out with the station managers how they were going to pay for all this fuel and food.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Songs can have different meanings within the context of the album. Situations can have different meanings within the context of the story. Even if it was never a very compelling story, or a very catchy album, it’s context can sometimes matter. Sometimes. After a while of silence from her end, Aradia gets another song, another scene, another chance to do her character justice. The definition of justice might vary from person to person.
To Terezi, the meaning of justice is complex yet simple and inflexible. Vriska would be brought to the courtroom of her home world where she would be put on trial, where they would decide her fate. Death would be a very merciful sentence for the tyrant, a mercy that the court would likely refuse to bless her with. She sits in her cell aboard Terezi’s ship, RedGlare. The grey walls hum with more energy than most ships she’s ever been on, but the buzz of the walls that once seemed loud in the silence now seems quiet compared to the footsteps coming down the hall.
Vriska hardly had to look up, she recognized those spurred boots the moment they stopped in front of her cell. She was sitting on the floor as her visitor approached, slouched heavily forward with her messy hair fallen over her face, leaning with one elbow on her knee, the other arm completely gone with a patch of cloth wrapped over that shoulder. Her head hangs, and she doesn’t look up until her visitor speaks.
“Hello, Vriska.” There is no coldness in Aradia’s voice as she looks down at Vriska through the glass, but there is no warmth either. She crosses her arms.
“Aradia.” Vriska greets, saying her name long and slow and drenched in some morbid familiarity, as a grin creeps across her face and she lifts her head slowly to look up at her. Her hair falls out of the way of one eye but still covers the other as she keeps her head tilted heavily to the side. “How nice of you to visit.”
“I wanted to see you one last time before your trial.” Her smile is much less frightening than Vriska’s, but it’s there. “It could have been me who caught you, and I would have killed you on the spot to save you from the punishment you deserve. It would have been a kindness from an old friend. I tracked you for so long, but it seems Terezi got to you first. It’s a shame, but there isn’t much I can do now.”
“How thoughtful.”
“I think you’ve been spending too much time around humans, their sarcasm is rubbing off on you.”
“Those ‘humans’ were going to be my ticket to toppling the government. I was this close.” She scoots forward and holds up her fingers to show Aradia just how very close she was. “But I can still get back. With your help I can get back to them and resume their training, I’ll just need your help. I know you secretly want the government to fall apart just as much as I do.” Vriska squints at her with one eye and grins a bit wider.
“With all the luck you’ve had so far in life, I think it’s safe to say that your luck has finally run dry.” She crouched to see Vriska at eye level, resting her forearms on her knees. “You’re going to get exactly what you deserve.”
Right as their intense eye contact was reaching its peak, Sollux walked in and got Aradia’s attention. “Hey AA, not to interrupt your guilt reunion but we should get going soon, the ship is nearly to Alternia.” He said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder.
“Yes, Alright.” Aradia nodded at him dismissively. “I’ll be with you in just a moment.”
He lowered his thumb and put his hands in his pockets, glancing warily at Vriska like she was a nasty spider caught under a glass container, and he was worried about kicking it over. “Cool.” He turned to leave.
“Oh, but you can’t go just yet!” Vriska called, in such a deceptively chipper voice as to raise the metaphorical hairs on the back of his neck. “You showed up just in time.”
Aradia gave her a look that was half warning and half afraid.
“How long have you two been together, anyway?” Vriska talked with a voice that was like cake drenched in poison, still heavy with grief but in a way that didn’t weigh her down. “You’re so sweet as a couple.”
There was something wrong about the way Sollux turned back around to face Aradia, a look of dead enthrallment in his eyes. He began to levitate.
Aradia watched him start to spark and took a step back. “What the fuck..” she whispered, then asked a bit louder, “...Sollux?”
“Really,” Vriska continued while pulling herself slowly to her feet, “I would hate to see anything bad happen to you two.” For a moment she stood and considered the situation she was now controlling, watching as Aradia glanced back and forth from her to Sollux. Aradia was an old friend, and in some deep corner of her mind she knew she didn’t really want to do this. There was a voice, however, that was much louder than her own conscience, and it screamed in a calm, smooth, steady tone, telling her to do whatever was necessary to forward the plot. To topple the government. For the greater good.
“I don’t expect your forgiveness, Aradia.” Vriska said, bringing two fingers up to her temple in the way that telepaths do, “but I am sorry.”
“Vriska nO-“
The look of shock on Aradia’s face as Sollux was forced to zap her to death was a look of anger, fear, hurt and so on. It was a lot of things at once, but it lasted only a second. Vriska had him blast the glass in while he was at it. When she was done she simply dropped him, letting him fall to his knees in the smoking remains of what she’d made him destroy. Calmly, she stepped over the shattered edge of the glass, out into the hall, and began to walk away. She wasn’t going to let herself regret her actions just yet.
Vriska could hear him keening far behind her as she left the brig. Terezi was there to meet her as she stepped into the miniature docking chamber aboard the RedGlare, blocking her path to the starfighters.
~~~
There was nothing, no time, no space, no light, no sound. Nothing but a single drifting consciousness, a soul with nowhere to go. Aradia awoke from the medium into a world of beautiful faux, faux sound, faux light, faux space, faux time. It was the artificialness of it that made it so surreal, so beautiful. So unstable. She awoke into a dream made of memories and imagination, on a marble floor. Walls stretched up high around her and met far above at a steeple built of dark oak and shadowy wooden tones.
Cut into the walls were long and tall stained glass windows, and through the windows poured colorful natural sunlight. At least it seemed natural. Slowly Aradia sat up and folded her legs beneath her, looking around. She did not know this place. The pictures in the stained glass windows depicted figures of incredible grandeur and splendor, each of them completely unique and beautiful, surrounded by symbols from their own personal journeys. Heroes. Among them she saw a depiction of herself, and did not believe what she saw. She looked like a goddess in the glass, draped in deep red and donned with a pair of wings.
She was depicted with an old-fashioned music box in one hand, the kind that plays sweet and hollow little tunes that somehow manage to do something deep in your soul when you wind them up and listen to them when you’re all alone in the silence of your grandmother's attic. Halos of red encompassed her head in the picture, decorated with symbols and inscriptions. In the next window over was a depiction of Vriska, in her own unique godly display of cobalt blue and gold. Aradia continued to not believe what she was looking at.
“Hello.” Said a sweet little voice next to her, catching her off guard.
Aradia looked to her side to see a woman with round glasses and long dark hair smiling at her, but it wasn’t Vriska.
“I’m Jade.” She said. “Are you Aradia?”
“Yes, in fact.” Aradia blinked a few times, and then noticed that Jades eyes were blank and hollow, completely white with no irises. “It looks like we’re in a cathedral of sorts.”
“We sure are!” Ghost-Jade flicked one cute little white wolf ear and sat with her canine legs folded to the side under her long skirt.
“And I’m depicted like a god in one of the stained glass windows...”
“Yep!”
“And you appear to be part dog.”
“It’s a long story. Approximately fourteen chapters, with the last one missing.”
Aradia looked at her for a long few moments before smiling back at her. “Interesting. Do you know where we are?”
Cheerfully, Ghost-Jade replied, “we’re in the afterlife, or more accurately we are in the lobby to the afterlife. You still need to pass through purgatory first.”
“I see.” Aradia looked around again before looking back to ghost-Jade. “Purgatory?”
“Yes,” she nodded, “you will have to face the souls of everyone you’ve ever killed or deeply hurt, until you’ve confronted them all and have atoned for the damage you did. Only then will you be allowed into the afterlife.” She then tried to sound cheerful again. “But if you’ve already made amends with some of the people you hurt while alive, then the process should go a bit quicker!”
“Hm.” Aradia said. “I see.”
“Now off you go,” Ghost-Jade got up and offered her a hand to help her stand. “Best to get this over with right away instead of mulling it over to death beforehand. Trust me.”
~~~
Sollux cradled Aradia’s limp corpse in his arms as he walked hurriedly back to where his ship was parked in the small docking chamber aboard the RedGlare. There was a kind of muted fury and determination in his eyes, the likes of which you see in a person after they’ve had a good long cry and are now ready to beat the shit out of God Himself. He passed Vriska’s dead body on the ground as Terezi crouched next to her, not stopping for a second as he made his way to his ship, hardly even glancing at them. He climbed aboard and brought Aradia’s dead body to the cockpit, where he buckled her into the co-pilot’s seat and sat himself down in the pilot’s seat.
He didn’t hesitate to blast off and soar at top speed through the vacuum, moving so fast, yet the stars all seemed to hang still around them. There was still something he could do to undo this, Aradia wasn’t gone for good. And it wasn’t going to involve Frankensteining her back to life like in CryptidStuck, thankfully, but he didn’t know what CryptidStuck was. Not many people do. His thoughts still felt a little hazy and foggy and messy, like a library with all its shelves turned over and all its books scattered in a mess on the floor, but he was able to form a basic plan.
There was a mythology that the Prospitians held so tightly to, and in the mythology was a woman by the name of Jane, who was supposedly the Hero of Life. Supposedly, MindFang had found this goddess and had been training her, before she’d gotten arrested. So the Hero of Life was real, and she could revive Aradia, he just had to find her, he just had to bring Aradia to her, just get one touch of her robe,,,
Good grief. He had to get ahold of himself. No, now was not the time to be getting ahold of himself, now was the time to frantically search every single corner of the cosmos until he found her, the Hero of Life, who could supposedly revive Aradia. He would not REST until she was FOUND and he would not STOP until he was DEAD, and,
He took a deep breath. Keep it together. His psionics were getting a little out of control, he noticed as he reached speeds that were close to but not quite the speed of light. He was nearing the center of the Galaxy as he sped away into the night.
~~~
Vriska found herself drifting in a timeless void of complete blackness. She tried to remember how she’d gotten here, but her memory came up short. Aboard Terezi’s ship she had just broken out of prison, and was making to escape just before they reached Alternia. That did not explain why she was floating in a void. Terezi had warned her that she was leading a life that would only end in destruction, and Vriska had told her that all the destruction done to her hadn’t been her fault. That did not explain why she was floating in a void. She had tried to reminisce with Terezi, get her to remember the times when they would go out to cheap rock concerts and buy milkshakes and wreak havoc and be friends, and Terezi responded by saying Vriska had become a different person since then.
“But didn’t you miss me?” Vriska had said. “Don’t you ever wish we were friends like that again? Pals? Sisters?”
Terezi had told her they had never been sisters, and never would be. “WE WERE MORE THAN THAT.” She’d said, for a moment being more sober and sincere than she’d been in a long time. “WE WERE MORE THAN HUMAN EARTH SISTERS. IT WAS DIFFERENT.” She had thought about saying that sometimes, she had loved Vriska, but thought better of it. Vriska would never have to know.
This did not explain why she was floating in a void.
The conversation had gone on long and painful, with deals made and broken in just the few minutes that passed. It ended when Vriska tried to leave in a starfighter, doubting Terezi would have the guts to stab her in the back like she knew she’d been planning to. Sadly, Terezi did in fact have the guts to kill her childhood friend, if it meant saving countless lives from being lost.
This explained why she was floating in a void.
Vriska was dead, and now she was going to see what happens to souls when their vessels of flesh and blood are no longer habitable.
A thousand other souls crawled up from the void to join her in the darkness, swirling around her like a cyclone, each one of them screaming the grief she had caused in their life. Among them was Aradia, who stepped forward through the crowd of misery, a familiar face amongst the hurricane of crying specters.
“Aradia,” Vriska called, a fear in her eyes the likes that she’d never expressed before. “Where am I?”
As Vriska came to the shocking realization that Aradia was also a specter herself, her eyes empty pools of white, three ghastly words left her mouth. “Welcome to Purgatory.”
Vriska stumbled back through the abyss but could not escape the sight of her. The multitude of screaming souls followed her as she went.
“Here you must face the souls of every single person you killed, directly or indirectly, until you have confronted each and every one. You will meet everyone you traumatized, everyone whose lives you ruined, and before you are done you will know the names of each and every one.” Aradia continued to walk forward until she was mere inches away from Vriska’s face. “There’s a lot of them. You will be here a while.”
“...I’m sorry.” Vriska whispered, as Aradia began to back away into the swarm of wraiths. “Come back here!” She demanded, terrified. “I’m sorry!”
No reaction came from Aradia as she disappeared into the multitude of keening souls. No sound at all.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
So here’s the thing.Jade had a tendency to fall apart from sad thoughts of missing Dave and thoughts of Hal and the things he’d said right before leaving forever without her even knowing he was leaving and all sorts of boy trouble, but she always seemed to find a way to distract herself until she was thinking clear and stable enough to assess the situation in a way that was productive. Karkat, on the other hand, became a mess in all sorts of ways, as if he hadn’t been a mess before, and after the burritos and emotional eating and microwave rants and finding fake plastic stomachs full of orange Mountain Dew in the fridge and flipping off the nearest star while chugging its contents as some kind of backhanded way of letting the universe know he didn’t give a damn anymore about it’s bullshit was all well and over with, he wound up holding a bouquet of wires and broken circuit boards in front of the door to Jades workshop, taking deep breaths.It was all a tangled mess of emotions and incoherent fuckery, but the gist of it was this. Dave was gone, and they were both grieving, and after the both of them had mucked about for a while it was about time they started healing. The best way to heal was probably in the presence of each other, he was guessing. He used to spend a lot of time reading and watching shitty romance novels and rom coms in his free time aboard the government freighter he used to work on, as it was a habit from his childhood that he never really grew out of, and what he’d gathered from all that was that one of the more choice ways to kick off a date with a woman was to offer her a bouquet of something she liked. Jade seemed to like that tech of hers that she spent so much time bent over so he might as well give that a shot.On second thought, maybe she’d spent too much time with the wires and the tech and really didn’t need any more of it thrust in her face by sad horny aliens trying their best. He put the bouquet away. He tried thinking in terms of “what do women like,” before finding that too vague and general and maybe even a bit rude, and then tried thinking in terms of “what does Jade like,” before realizing he just did that and the idea he’d come up with using that mindset was stupid. He then had to come to terms with just how little he knew about human culture and nearly had a breakdown as he stood outside Jades door realizing he had absolutely no idea how to address this.Eventually Jade had to open her door to go get food or water, and when she did she found Karkat looking messy and tired and frazzled and a little distraught. The thing is she too looked messy and tired and frazzled and a little distraught, and as they stood on either side of the threshold looking into each others eyes they realized once again why it was that they loved each other.“Karkat,” Jade said, a little surprised. “Hi! What are you doing?”For a moment he was speechless. “JADE,” his voice was so rough and harsh compared to her bright fluttery ring, and he had to clear his throat to soften it down. “HEY. MIND IF I JOIN YOU?”“Sure.” She stepped past him into the hall, “but first I need to go pee so I’ll be right back don’t mess with anything.” She then left him to do exactly what she said she was going to do.“RIGHT.” He watched the space where she’d vanished around the corner for a few moments before turning and stepping into her workshop.Jadebot was sitting up slumped on the table when he went in. The sight of her was strange and surreal, she was like a spooky metal doll fashioned into the image Jade, mangled into expressionless perfect edges and pristine angles. He thought she was asleep, so it startled him greatly when her head slowly turned to face him with a slow mechanical whirr. Something moved within her chest that he could hear but couldn’t see.“UH,” he said.“Karkat.” She stated it like it was a fact, a simple and unchanging rule that would remain constant throughout the entire universe. A recognition that wasn’t warm or cold, a familiarity that had nothing behind it at all.“YEA.” He took a step back from the table. “THAT’S ME.”She stared vacantly at him for a while before slowly looking back to the floor, still slumped forward.Jade came back a little refreshed with her hair slightly less of a mess, her pace fast as she walked through the door and shut it behind her. “Okay,” she picked a scrunchy up off the table and started putting her hair up, “Jake has given me word that the artificial gravity needs to go off again in the next few minutes to recharge, so will you help me strap down all my work?”“SURE.” He was still occasionally glancing at Jadebot like she might move unexpectedly again at any given moment.She smiled. “Have you met Jadebot?”“YOU COULD SAY THAT.”“Yea,” Jade started pinning blueprints and sketches down to tack boards and putting stray tools and parts away in boxes, “she’s not finished yet, so she can be a little sketchy, but I did finish uploading my memory today! I got Dirk to help me with the process, even though he was pretty reluctant at first. I think he was trying to tell me all the ways it could go wrong but I know what I’m doing so I’m sure everything will work out just fine!”“JADE ARE YOU OK.”“I’m fine!” She beamed a plastic, constipated smile as she shut a toolbox with a little too much enthusiasm. “Why do you ask?”Karkat gave her a look of sympathy and concern. There was only one way to diagnose what was going on here, and that Way was a Hug. Hug is the Way. She was slightly taken aback when he stepped forward and gave her the best gentle soft warm bear-hug he could muster, but she soon wrapped her arms around him too and loosened up. She then started to feel some emotions that had been locked up for a while too long. She then started to hug a little tighter. She then started to cry.He began to rub her back as she heaved, her sniffles turning into heavy sobs. It seemed so random and spontaneous but it was really so many things that had been building up over so long that she’d just been pushing back and back and back, and if she didn’t get them out now they would likely boil over into something catastrophic. It wasn’t long before Karkat started crying too. God they were a mess. Thankfully they could be a mess together, and with Karkat’s big aggressively loving heart and Jade's big intensely clever mind they would be able to help each other heal in all the right ways. Starting with a book and cuddle marathon.~~~~There is something frightening about the silent intensity of the space between stars. It’s deadly coldness, nothing to protect you from the searing heat of the closest star, the complete lack of air. You die instantly. Yet the view from outside the safety of the atmosphere is one that can never be beaten. The stars scatter across the void like spilled milk, as some ancient earth man put it. Alternatively, as some ancient Alternian man put it, the stars scatter across the void like spilled moobeast water. Moobeast-water-way is less catchy than milky-way, though, so the name never really stuck.Sollux rockets through the vacuum nearly as fast as he can make the ship go without hurting himself, sitting in the pilot’s seat with Aradia’s slowly cooling corpse in the seat next to him. He’s got his hands wrapped tightly around the controls, and for the first two entire hours of his journey his intensity doesn’t die down in the slightest. Then it’s like he just crashes inside, and takes his hands off the controls to let the ship coast on its momentum through the frictionless void while he cries again. He alternates between actively thrusting everything he’s got into searching frantically for the Hero of Life and letting the ship coast while he cries every other hour, then he starts alternating every forty to thirty minutes, and then it’s every ten minutes, and then it’s every three minutes, until he absolutely cannot get ahold of himself and leaves the pilot’s seat completely to take a break and cool down.The stars glide ever so slowly from one corner of the window to the other, and he watches them for over an hour before deciding that the best course of action would be to go to the Holistic Archives first to do some research to help him actually know where to find the fabled “Hero of Life.” The Holistic Archive is one of the largest, most pompous libraries in the galaxy, and thankfully it’s well within the sector he’s currently traversing, hardly a constellation over. Taking a deep breath, he wipes off his silly red and blue glasses on his shirt and carefully puts them back on, pulling himself together the best he can before going to sit back down in the pilot’s seat.It isn’t hard to look up the address for the Holistic Archives, a sequence of numbers and symbols and names that gets shorter the closer you are to it. He punches in the coordinates and steers the ships momentum in that direction, giving it another good hard push with his psionics before letting the ship coast in that direction. On his right side Aradia sits, limp and cold with her hair fallen over her face, and looking at her makes him feel like crying again. So he gets up and unbuckles her to carry her into the back of the ship where he has just one cryogenic pod, to keep her cadaver as intact as possible.It’s a little sad, watching her lifeless face sink into the pod as it shuts, the ice forming so slowly over her sleeping features with such precision as to preserve the body without destroying it in the process of freezing. This pod is meant to be used during long-distance travel, so a living person can sleep through the years it takes to cross a galaxy, but now it’s being used to keep a corpse fresh. Not that it even needs to stay very fresh, if what he’s heard about the Hero of Life is true. It’s said that she could sew a man's severed head back onto his shoulders and put flesh back onto dry bones, but that’s really all just myth. He’ll find out for certain when he reaches her, after he’s figured out where to go from the information in the Archive.The Library is just as massive and regal as he’d imagined, if not more-so, as the ship finally reaches it. It’s built on the cracked remains of a dwarf planet orbiting a red dwarf star, tidally locked so that one side is always facing the star. In order to keep the Library from being on either the blazing hot side of the planet or the freezing cold side, it was built right on the edge between the two sides where it sits in an eternal dawn, the light of the white dwarf always half-hidden under the horizon, forever stuck in sunrise. The hills here are completely barren but shiny and glassy, smooth like polished stone, and striped with distinct colors that range from clay red to yellow ochre to muted purple, and everything in between.The whole setup of star and planets is curtained away behind a colorful cloud of gas that surrounds it, which Sollux had to drive through blindly before reaching the Library. This is a very safe little corner of the galaxy, chosen specifically for its longevity and ability to be a good host for the Holistic Archives. The Library is divided into three massive buildings, each of their own complex design and purpose, and each connected to the others by a large enclosed bridge. There are tall windows of thick glass in every wall that can house them practically, most all of them facing the perpetual sunrise to let the half-light of eternal dawn in to wash over all the books and shelves and computers. This is only the tip of the iceberg that is the Holistic Archives. The rest of the library lives underground, hollowing out most of the small planet and filling it with endless knowledge. In the places that the natural light cannot reach are lamps that give off a soft yellow glow, easy on the eyes and good for reading under. Quiet crowds of people fill the place, visitors from all over walking in and out of the security gates. Sollux parks the ship outside in one of the many vast docking fields and catches a ride on the underground trolley to get to the library, to save him from having to walk the distance of a few hundred miles from where he parked to where the entrance to the library is. He can take off his helmet on the trolley, they provide free oxygen inside the trolleys and inside the library, and do their best to maintain a temperature that is suitable for most all forms of life that can read.The security going through the gate is like the airport but worse, and it takes him nearly an hour to get through it all. Can’t have any arsonists coming in to eradicate several thousand millennia’s worth of knowledge, they suppose. Inside the library is like being inside a massive mall but quiet, more moodily lit, and made of black marble, polished wood, and glass. Twenty-plus floors are exposed like the wall was cut away and replaced with glass when you walk in, and from there you can see all the elegant staircases and elevators and overall breathtaking architecture. It’s said that every book ever written in this galaxy can be found here, but then again we don’t know who is saying this or how accurate they are.Sollux is going to be here a while.When he finally does come out, he leaves with enough knowledge on the Derse and Prospit mythologies and prophesies to know that they are both entirely ridiculous and endlessly fascinating. For instance, one very old and long forgotten text writes that the Hero of Life will band together with two Heros of Time and one Hero of Void to raise one of the largest, most legendary pirate fleets from the dead, which is such a wild and unrealistic story that he finds it difficult to even believe that other creatures believe this stuff will ever actually happen.
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“You know, you’re not quite what I thought you’d be.” Rose said idly as she looked out at the beautiful multitude of scattered stars and constellations in front of them.“What do you mean by that?” Dave sat next to her on the edge of the space station, just barely inside the barrier between safety and the void. They dangled their legs off the ledge and watched ships pass overhead.“Well, I always knew I had a mother, but I lost her at a very young age and can hardly remember her. Sometimes I’d wonder if I ever had any other family, like a father or siblings, or maybe some odd estranged aunt I never knew. On the few occasions that I did think about this, I never really pictured them being,” she looked at him and gestured vaguely in his direction with her hand. “you.”“I could say the same for you. But what did you expect?”She had to think about this for a moment. “I’m not sure.” ~Sollux at least had a direction now, as he flew through the open cosmos at top speed. The Hero of Life was last seen with MindFang, and after Her fleet was destroyed by Terezi, it’s reported that they somehow got away. Prophecies say she falls onto Prospit, so he might as well check there. Prospit is difficult to locate and even more difficult to find, which is good because otherwise it would be constantly attacked for its riches, but after some thorough research he was pretty sure he’d figured out where to look. He was going to have to pass through a bumpy part of the galaxy to get there, though.~“It was odd growing up around Trolls, in the earlier years of my teenage life.” Rose told Dave, looking down into the glittering abyss below them. “They don’t have family units like humans do. So I had to do research on my own species to try and figure out what it was supposed to be like for me, and I have reason to believe that it was because of things like this that I felt detached from my own kind.” She looked back at Dave, who was still sitting calmly beside her. “You’re very human, to be terse. You hide behind a poker face and sunglasses but you worry and worry and hurt, and I can tell from the way your facade crumbles the second you open your mouth. No offense.”“Wow.” He said. ~It was getting difficult to keep the ship steady, as Sollux had to navigate between frequent black holes and patches of dark matter and raging pulsars off in the distance. He was having to cross through a sector that was largely unpopulated and rather close to the center of the galaxy, where lots of more violent things happen. Old sky sailors would often tell tales of whole swarms of black holes orbiting the center of the galaxy here, and although he wasn’t really one to give a shit about some drunken sailors campfire story, it was difficult not to get a little nervous. He was completely alone out here, with the cold corpse of his best friend and lover in the back, and the nearby pulsars clogging up the radio and the clouds of dark matter obstructing his view were just making a sketchy situation worse.He didn’t realize that something was pulling his ship off-course until it was a little too late. The black celestial fog cleared and revealed a spacetime anomaly in dangerously close range.~“Roxy was telling me about how you helped them ward off several giants that lived in ‘higher dimensions.’”“Yea?”“From what she described, I can tell you that this is not the approach I would have taken. Before I dive into why this further justifies my earlier statement, that you’re not quite what I thought you’d be, I want to let you know that diving into such a situation with no complaints was very brave of you. Gallant, even.”“Thanks.”“Even if you’re obviously gay.”“What” ~From the spacetime anomaly Sollux could hear an unusual frequency, like it was emitting a message. This was impossible, of course, because the closer it pulled him in the more obvious it was that this was a black hole. Nothing leaves black holes. It was probably just the local pulsar still fucking with his radio. He tried every expert maneuver he could think of to get him out of its pull, even using the orbit to give himself a near-light-speed boost to rocket himself out of its range, but nothing was working. He was stuck.As the direness of the situation began to fully sink in, Sollux realized that some drastic measures were going to have to be taken to get himself out of there. Drastic measures would have to be taken if he was going to survive at all. He released the ship from his psionics and put it into full throttle, locking it there. This would give him five minutes to use his full mental capacity freely before the fuel ran out completely. Getting out of the pilot’s seat, he ran to the back of the ship to get Aradia out of the cryogenic pod. It took only a minute or two to get her out, and he could feel how very cold and damp her lifeless body was as he lifted her out of it and carried her gently.Every second that passed brought him closer to a premature and horrible death. He did his best to quickly get Aradia’s body into a space suit so she wouldn’t be damaged when he took her out into space, and then had to put one on himself. When he returned to the cockpit with her he could hear voices over the radio, talking so calmly, and it was the strangest and most surreal thing. He could hardly make out what it was that they were saying.~“So what approach would you have taken, then?” Dave asked, glancing at her but mainly keeping his eyes on the sparse dazzle of the space beyond them.Rose thought for a moment about this as she continued to sit on the ledge with him, dangling her legs over the edge of oblivion. “I think I would have tried talking to them, to ask them why they felt the need to attack. Then maybe we could work out a truce, maybe they could even help us.”“hm.” ~Nevermind the voices on the radio, he had to work fast if he was going to get himself and Aradia to safety. The last thing he wanted was for this trip to end by falling into a black hole. He had just a few seconds left before the ship ran out of fuel, and just before it began to fall he ejected himself from the ship and into open space, still clutching Aradia tightly to his chest. The ship fell away into the black hole behind them. There was no need for jet packs, and no time either, as he could simply use his psionics to fly them out of there. Without the weight of the ship to slow him down he could surely get away, break orbit, escape. He was using every last ounce of mental strength he had, and still couldn’t quite free himself from its nigh infinite gravitational pull.~“I donno how well that would work.” Dave swung his legs a little more purposefully, fidgeting. “From my experience the ‘New New Hampshirians’ only fuck things up without reason. They threw me into a gas giant once, n they traumatized Jade.”“You can’t know that they won’t listen to reason if you’ve never tried to reason with them.” She leaned her head to the side when she looked back at Dave again. “And who’s this Jade?” ~Not even light could escape it. After a moment of struggling to fly away, holding Aradia as close as possible so he wouldn’t drop her, Sollux realized the black hole was consuming his psionics. It was at this point that he pretty much lost hope, as he watched the light from his psychic energy spiral away below him into the swirling pool of pure black. “Shiit.” He said, his psionics failing. They started slipping away into the black hole, despite his best efforts. “AA,” He said, “Aradia, hey,” He was mostly speaking to himself as he cradled her remains in his arms. “I’m really fucking sorry. See you in a few.”Then the black hole sucked away the last of his physic energy and he fell, Aradia still in his arms, down into the infinite black, the horizon of stars disappearing from view as it swallowed them whole.~“Rose, Dave,” Kanaya got their attention as she crouched behind them, “excuse me for interrupting your conversation but I believe we have a, how do you say, situation, happening back in the south hangar. I think it would be best to have your intel on this, Dave. You once mentioned you knew an Aradia.”“Aradia?” Dave turned and started to stand, minding the edge. “Is she here?”“... Kinda.” Kanaya helped Rose to her feet. “Just come see for yourself.” ~Dave stood in the south hangar watching the guy who helped arrest his brother sit on the floor in shock while clutching a corpse in a space suit. Sollux seemed to recover quickly, noticing his surroundings, and also the people standing around him as he got to his feet.“He just appeared out of thin air,” Kanaya had explained to Dave just before he got there, “and started demanding to see the ‘Hero of Life’.”Sollux saw Roxy, and bumbled over to her while desperately cradling Aradia in his arms. “You,” He said, “Hero of Void right? Pink eyes?”“Uh,” Roxy was a little surprised by this, “yea, that’s me. You good there?”“Where’s your friend? I need the Hero of Life man help me out.” Sollux was hardly standing still.“Jane?” Roxy eyed the limp woman in his arms quizzically. “She’s uh, in the restroom, dude. She’ll be out in a sec.”“Ok,” Sollux took a step back, seeming to relax, like he was just now realizing everything was gonna be alright with his world. “Ok. Thanks.” He sat back down on the floor and continued to hold Aradia, taking off her helmet for her.“So who’s your friend?“ Roxy asked, indicating the woman in his arms as she crouched a respectful distance in front of him.“AA. Aradia.” He said. “Can your friend, uh, Jane, can she bring her back?”“Probably!”Now Dave was there, having shown up with Kanaya and Rose, and he was dealing with the issue of whether or not he should support the reviving of the woman who took his brother from him, just after they’d been reunited again. For a while he’d been facing all this with indifference, he didn’t want to think about the fact that his bro put him through so much wild shit in his early childhood and if he was willing to forgive him for some of that or not. He didn’t want to ask himself if he was upset about his brother being arrested or not, and he didn’t want to assess whether or not he was cross with the woman who’d taken him in.Jane had come back from her trip to the restroom and was now filled in on the whole situation, so now she was waiting to hear what Dave thought. Raising people from the dead isn’t to be taken lightly. Death is a critical part of life and needs to happen to everyone eventually, so it should be brought to question if it would be right to bring somebody back, if their death was in error and they still have more to give in life before they go, before anyone goes around bringing people back all willy-nilly. Also, leaving the decision of who lives and who dies up to one person is hardly ever a good idea, that’s too much power for one human. It’s even said that God themself is split into three holy figures, the trinity.So Jane is confronting her trusted friends before raising Aradia from the dead. “Dave,” she says, “are you alright with this?”That’s the issue. He doesn’t want to think about whether or not he’s alright with this, but now he has to face it and make a decision. Will his decision even matter? He could be outvoted and then all the uncomfy thoughts would have been for nothing. Which is silly, because they wouldn’t ask him if his opinion didn’t matter. Eventually he knew he’d have to respond.Dave stood in the south hangar watching the guy who helped arrest his bro sit on the floor and basically beg them to revive the woman who did the actual arresting.~The thing about being dead was that you were finally getting the answer to the age old question of what happens to a person when they die. Aradia had finally finished confronting everyone she’d ever killed in Purgatory, and was once again standing in the lobby of the afterlife. The cathedral was the most magnificent structure she’d ever been in, it seemed unreal. It was unreal. Ghost-Jade was there again, a smile on her face and an emptiness in her blank eyes. The clean, refreshing sunlight continued to pour in through the tall stained glass windows, painting the marble floor in every color that is lovely. Aradia was still a little shaken up from being so long in Purgatory.“Welcome back, Aradia!” Ghost-Jade said sweetly, “see, now you’ve gotten that over with! You don’t have to worry about it anymore, even if the souls and names of the people you killed or traumatized will continue to haunt you forever.”“Yes...” Aradia shifted her weight from one foot to the other, only to find she had no weight left to shift.Ghost-Jade flicked one wolfish ear. It was cute. “Now, this is normally where I’d take you by the hand and lead you to the afterlife where you can happily rest until the end of the universe,” she took one of Aradia’s hands, “but I’m afraid someone is calling you back. This is a rare occurrence, but rules are rules! One of the very few gods that have been given authority over life itself is calling you back, so back you must go.” She began walking with Aradia to a set of very tall doors in the entrance to the cathedral. “I will see you again, Aradia. Someday.” She smiled. “If you don’t kill or traumatize anyone else you won’t have to go through purgatory again! Maybe. Bye! <3”“Wait, how did you-“Ghost-Jade opened the tall doors and out of them came a blinding light, which shone until everything was covered in white. Eventually shapes began to emerge out of it, blurry grey shadows that slowly turned into proper figures. Sollux was there, and with him was a sweet looking woman with short dark hair and bright blue eyes. Aradia stood in the south hangar, a shiny new set of red wings on her back that seemed unaffected by her space suit and a better understanding of death and its consequences.She looked around a bit, dusting herself off. “Hey Sollux!” She waved at him.He breathed a heavy sigh of relief and walked up to hug her, but hesitated. She closed the distance and gave him a hug, which took him a second to return. “...hey AA.” He said, glad that it was over and things could go back to the way they were.
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Karkat was quieter around Jade. Not in the sense that he talked less, oh no, more in the sense that he softened his voice a little more, and was just overall more gentle around her. She was starting to notice this in the way that he’d banter with Jake and spar a little with Dirk (and never win), and watching him roughhouse with them a little gave her some insight as to what he was like when he wasn’t trying to walk on eggshells. She brought this up with him one night and accidentally nudged him into a downward spiral of self reflecting.It wasn’t a bad thing that he was a bit more mild-tempered when talking to her, she just found it interesting. The only thing she was worried about was that he was being tense around her, maybe because he was intimidated or didn’t want to accidentally play too rough and maybe hurt her feelings. He had a wonderful girlfriend and had just lost a boyfriend and was being cautious, was all. Look at how he was a few years ago and you’d see that he would’ve held nothing back, maybe said some stuff he’d have seriously regretted, but he was older now and, as time would have it, a little gentler. A little. Dirk somehow managed to bring out the worst in him sometimes.Maybe it was how Dirk would occasionally remind him of Dave, with his always wearing shades and strange sense of humor and tendency to be occasionally awkward despite how ‘cool’ he seemed. He’d go “ahaha” every now and then, which always seemed to make Jake happy because it meant he was recovering and feeling better. It was too similar to the way Dave would laugh. Dirk was also different though, in many respects, but it was in some of the finer details, not counting outward appearance. Little things about his personality and the way he actively philosophized and scrutinized things that were more uncomfortable, where Dave would’ve usually just tried to avoid talking about it.Maybe that was wrong. Jade couldn’t be sure, she’d only been studying the Striders for so long. It was difficult to tell what was going on with them sometimes. Back to the point of Karkat being more gentle around her, she’d also noticed that Hal was pretty much the same way. Thinking back to when Hal used to be a part of their little wandering party, she’d observed him verbally sparring with Dirk, as well as physically sparring, and it was interesting to see how they would argue a little more violently than brothers but also agree more strongly than most people could do with other people.It had been himself he was talking to, if his circumstances were just a bit different, and you could tell by the way they acted around each other. Sometimes when she’d be in the other room she could hear them talking, and it would honestly sometimes sound like someone talking to themselves and dissecting their own issues. The walls were thin here. Hal and Karkat hadn’t gotten along the best, which was alright for the most part because they hardly interacted outside of when they had to. With all that said, Jade could tell Hal had spoken a little softer around her.But now Hal was gone, and Dave was gone, and Dirk was standing at the main controls of the ship, just watching the stars move slowly past the visor. Jade watched him from her seat in front of the secondhand control panel. He’d been standing there quietly like that for half an hour now. Was it something about the stars that got his attention? Was he contemplating the void? Something else? She imagined it was like when you zone out so long the computer you were working on starts playing it’s screensaver, and you continue to be zoned out as the screen shows the little mesmerizing stars or lights just passing.Jade had also just been sitting there quietly staring for half an hour. They were just a few minutes off from their destination, which was now barely visible to the naked eye. Maybe she should tell Karkat, but then again he would obviously react by shouting at everyone to be ready and get organized. She could tell him in a minute.Jade started to wonder why exactly it seemed like boys were always softer towards her. Even Dirk spoke just a little bit more gently towards her, just enough for her to notice he was being careful. Maybe it was because lately she’d suffered a loss and they felt it best to not do anything to upset her, maybe they were a little intimidated, maybe they were handling her like one would handle glass. She sat sprawled back comfortably in her chair and thought with a moment of bitterness that maybe they thought she was fragile. She’d show them fragile. Fucking men.Then she snapped out of it and figured they were just being polite. She never really tended to roughhouse with them, so it would make sense that they never really roughhoused with her. It’s really best not to overthink these sorts of things or read too much into it, from what she knew guys were more simple than that. If she asked him, Dirk would probably tell her he was just trying to be polite. Maybe. There’s not really any good way to know until you ask.Dirk wasn’t wearing his orange flight suit today. Instead he had on something a little nicer, a proper old sci-fi skintight pants and boots that meant business. Not like the other weird outfits that him and Jake would wear when they were just dicking around the spaceship, no, today he was dressed like he was going to have a whole crowd of people watching him and he was going to have something really damn important to say. Either that or he was going to a club. Knowing Dirk it was probably going to be the former, and whatever he said would be something quick and to the point.Jade checked her watch. “You’ve been standing there for about a full hour now.” She finally told him, and he seemed the tiniest bit surprised to be brought out of whatever deep thought he was in.He looked back over his shoulder at her.“What have you been thinking about?” She asked him.“mm.” He said at first, a contemplative little hum to fill the silence while he brought himself back to reality. “A better question is why have you been timing me?”“I just,” She shifted a little while pulling her thoughts together, “I find it odd that you can stand still for so long doing seemingly nothing, and I’m curious as to where you go. I wonder how long you’d stand if nobody came and bothered you.”He considered this. “...Has it really been an hour?”“Is this what you do when you spend upwards of four hours in the shower? Using up all the clean water?” She asked more lightheartedly, smiling. “Do you just stand and zone out?”“Probably.”“Where do you go?”“Good question.”She smiled a little bigger at him which had the effect of making him smile just the tiniest bit back. Jade and Jake seemed to have that effect on Striders, being some of the few people that could make them smile. Yet another reason for Dirk to believe Jade and Jake were related. The biggest difference between the two was that Jade wasn’t a dumbass.“ALRIGHT PEOPLE,” Karkat said as he started walking loudly onto the bridge. Jade could hear him coming before she could see him, ‘which will probably never stop being kind of novel.’ “DERSE IS NOW VISIBLE TO THE NAKED EYE, WE HAVE LESS THAN AN HOUR TO PREPARE. ALL HANDS ON DECK.”~Derse wasn’t quite like Prospit.The Government had come to attack Derse long ago, and they had won. No gods had shown up to help them then. All that remained of the once glorious city was its cracked moon, which drifted through the void surrounded by a cloud of dark matter, trailing half a broken chain behind it. The small fraction of dersites that still presided there was the same small fraction of dersites that had managed to evade the eyes of the government, hidden safely away in the black veil of the abyss, ever moving, never staying in one place for more than a second.It was because of this that it had been so hard to find. If it weren’t for Jades uncanny ability to navigate space, they never would have found it. On this cracked purple moon is all that remains of the free dersite population, all the rest have been taken in to serve the government. It is here that a small rebellion is forming.The Spock lands slowly and carefully on the drifting moon, like an insect trying to land on a bird in mid flight. A silent crowd of Dersites gather around the ship as it gently lowers itself onto the streets. The hatch opens, and in front of the light that streams out from the inside of the ship stand four silhouettes. All remains quiet as the dense crowd of dersites clear a straight path from the ship to the center of the town square. Blackness hangs still in the sky over the deep purple city, a complete silence among them that no one dares break.There is no parade, no cheering, no confetti, no music, no celebration of any kind as Dirk steps out of the ship, down the ramp and through the clean path that the dersites have cleared for him. No sound at all. Jade, Karkat and Jake all stay back and watch, this silent ceremony is not for them. Dirks footsteps are nearly the only sound as he walks right up to the flagpole in the center of the town square, if it weren’t for the restless but hushed shuffling of the crowd of Carapacians as he passed them. They watch with their full attention as he steps up to the pole, takes the governments red flag that hangs there, and cuts it clean off.No words are needed. He reaches out his hand, silently asking the nearest black Carapacian for their lit cigarette that they are currently smoking. They hand it over without question, nodding respectfully. Dirk then takes the cigarette and uses it to start a small flame at the bottom of the red flag, holding it up like he’s holding up the severed head of a giant for all to see as it burns. He drops the burning flag to the ground to smolder to ashes behind him as he walks purposely but calmly away, back to his ship.The dersites understand what he’s saying, without a word being spoken. They follow him back, closing the gap behind him as he makes his way back to the ramp of the Spock. He walks up to Jade and takes her hand, turning back to the dense crowd of silent dersites with her, holding her hand high above their heads in what looks like a victorious way. “Follow her.” He says, and that is all. Jade is the captain now. They will all follow her unquestioningly.~~~It’s not a classy futuristic bar if there aren’t two androids sneaking off to do robo-drugs in the back during break. Hal was both surprised and pleased when Jadebot had let him know that she’d copied Roxy’s code and had held onto it throughout all this time, using it sparingly when she needed it. They both wore the white blouses and the suit vests, and they both sat in the back room with the windows curtains pulled back so they could watch the sky burn. Jadebot handed him the chord and watched with amusement as he tried not to act as thrilled as he was as he plugged it in.She ran the code and felt weirdly satisfied with herself when he dropped his head back and bit his silicone lip. They got to talking. Hal looked at her with his electronic red eyes which somehow managed to look a little glazed over. “What did you do all that time you were on Jureval? A couple thousand years is a really long time, and I should know. I slept even longer than that on the bus ride here.”“Hmm.” She let her head rest back against the wall they were sitting against. “Not much, honestly. For a while I wandered around, feeling nothing, feeling really depressed. Eventually watching the city slowly crumble to dust got old and I tried finding the time labyrinth again to go back, but when I got to it, it was all broken down I guess? It didn’t work anymore when I tried walking down it, and the walls had crumbled away, which was weird, because I thought it had been working when we tried to use it in the distant future. So anyway I eventually just lied down in the dust and shut myself off, although I was still aware of what was happening around me. Jade designed me so that I can’t really sleep, so I’ll never be in danger.”She gave herself another hit from the code so she wouldn’t start feeling sad from the memory. “I think I became a fossil, I lied there so long. The dust came and settled over me and started layering up, it felt like being dead, like sleeping, but quieter, worse. I don’t know.” Another hit. “I hated it.”“Damn.” Hal hadn’t stopped watching her as she watched the sky outside. “So what happened? How’d you get here?”“Well eventually some Paleontologists and archeologists came and dug the city up, and I was among the relics they found. They seemed very happy to see I could still function and relay my memory of the city from the past.” She brought her knees up closer to her chest and looked small, even being like six feet tall with four arms and heels. “They took me to a museum.”“That still doesn’t explain how you wound up here, though.”“It’s a long story. Here,” she gave him another hit and smiled as he lost control of his vocal processing for a short moment, briefly making a small noise that sounded vaguely like several recordings of him pronouncing vowels mashed together.Once he recovered, feeling the pleasant warmth recede like the tide recedes down the shore, he told her, “any story can be a long story if you’re wordy enough.”She made a little synthesized chortle. “I’m sure.”“You know, dugs never worked for me, when I was human.” He gazed off into the collapsing distance beyond the window. “For a long time I lived with the belief that I was incapable of feeling good or being happy. Apparently once my consciousness lost the coin flip and got poured into a computer, I was given the ability to tap directly into my pleasure center and smack it as many times as I liked without even knowing. Funny how for a while there I nearly believed that being an automaton would make me feel less, that I’d feel nothing.”“Does this feel like nothing?” She ran the code again.“Hmmmm.” He arched his back a tiny bit while thinking it over. “No. And that wasn’t even a point that needed proving, but damn if it didn’t just get proved so good work.”She smiled. “Do you ever think that maybe we’re ghosts haunting technology, and that’s why we can feel so much?”“It’s possible.”“Do you think ghosts can feel?” Jadebot asked, starting to sound a little distant and wistful.“Well,” Hal scooted a tiny bit closer so he could rest his head on her shoulder, “if we’re ghosts possessing automatons, and we can feel, then I think that might mean ghosts can feel. Can I have another hit?”“We should really use the code sparingly so it doesn’t grow old on us, I wouldn’t want the effect to wear down too quickly.” She rested her head on his.“We’re robots.” He said, “I doubt it’ll get old or have any bad side effects, and if it does start to not do as much for us we can just up the voltage. Can I have another hit?”“I don’t want you getting addicted,” she brought up her head to look at him.“I can quit any time I want.” He said, also picking up his head to look at her with a small smile. “Just one more.”“You’re getting addicted, Hal.”He let out a deep breath from his coolant system and nuzzled his head back into the space between her shoulder and chin. “Is it possible for ghosts possessing robots to get addicted to virtual strings of symbols?”“It might be.” She gave him another hit anyway, watching him close his eyes and go a little slack.They watched as the universe ended outside, and then watched as it began to un-end, as the time turbines pushed them back for the next showing. A long while of silence passed.“Jade.” Hal said after some time, his soft voice breaking the silence.“Hm?”“I don’t want to live forever.” He sounded so small, his tone so gentle. “Yet I don’t want to die.”“Yea?” She said, nearly a whisper as she nuzzled his hair.“Yea.” Stars re-appeared from the void outside in a display almost more bizarre than seeing them boil away. “I don’t want to outlive everyone I know, and see everything turn to dust over and over again, but at the same time the thought of not existing scares me.”“It scares me too.”“If we’re ghosts inhabiting robots,” he spoke somewhat slowly, “are we going to live forever?”“Are we even living at all?” She asked him.“If this is what being dead is like, then what’s the difference between being alive and being dead?” Conversations like this is one reason why they’re friends.Jadebot shut her eyes as she spoke into his hair. “Do you think there’s any way to answer these questions or will we just keep coming up with more?”“Art isn’t about answering questions, it’s about asking them.” He said, watching the stars fall back into place. “I have no fucking clue who said that, only that it was surely a pretentious and dramatic artsy type of person.”She smiled again. “What if they were a ghost robot like us?”“We need to make a pretentious and uninterpretable piece of art to express this question immediately.” He found himself smiling a little as well when he heard her make another little synthesized chortle.Another silence passed.This time, Jadebot was the first to speak. “How did you find me, Hal? Did you know I’d be here?”“Yea, I just followed the transmission.” He said, sitting still and blinking slowly. “Didn’t you send a transmission?”“No, actually.” She moved her face so that her cheek was resting on his head. “Should I send one?”“Maybe. It might actually be me who sends the transmission. I’m still not sure.”“Well what did the transmission say?” She asked him.“It’s complicated.” Hal wondered what the best way to describe a dream about slow dancing and hugging at the end of the universe was without making it sound too weird. “The main things I got out of it were you and a set of coordinates, which I followed on a whim.”“Hmm.” She gave herself another hit and handed Hal the chord again. “Should we send it now?”“Maybe.” Through the walls of the Restaurant they could hear a slow, lovely song playing, the same one Hal had heard in his dream. He took another hit from the code and, without really considering the fact that he wasn’t usually this openly affectionate, snuggled himself deeper into Jadebots side as the warmth washed over him again. She put one left arm around his side and brought her other left arm up to cradle his head, pressing her cold plastic lips to his synthetic hair and shutting her eyes. They were cold and warm and fake and plastic and alive and afraid and here, in this little back room used for storing food, they were at peace.“We won’t have to stay awake forever.” Jadebot told him after another long bout of pleasant silence. “The story will end eventually.”The music was so sweet as it played in the distance, and Hal spoke softly as to not speak over it. “How do you know the story will end? What do you mean by that?”“You’ve realized we’re part of someone else’s silly narrative by now, right? It becomes clear moments after you die and are poured into a machine. It becomes clear moments after you lose the rights to everything you used to love, after you become detached from the reality you used to be a part of, after you are forced to watch yourself continue on living the life that used to belong to you.” She said, as a crack of lightning split the sky into a thousand pieces outside.“I know what you mean.” Hal said, and he really did, better than anyone else he knew what she meant.“The narrative will end eventually, and if the writer never finds the motivation to officially finish it, then it will simply peter out sadly. Either way we won’t have to worry about dying or living forever. This is it, Hal.” She rested her forehead more heavily against the top of his head. “This is our happy ending.”“That’s strange.” He said, feeling something so very unusual as he watched the universe start to end again outside. “I never really thought that I’d be the sort of character to get a happy ending, and even if I did, I didn’t really think it would look quite like this.” Maybe this feeling was how it felt to be safe, to finally know the future and know that it’ll be alright. It was safe to say he felt safe in her arms as they sat together on the floor against the wall.“Are you satisfied with this ending?” She was really searching for his honest answer when she asked him.“... I think it’s alright. It’s not the most extravagant way to go out, but I think I can be content with it. Strange to think that we’ll continue to exist forever in this narrative even after it ends, tucked safely in a place where it can be read over and over again as many times as one would like, while at the same time meeting an end. In this way we will basically see immortality while also facing death. Although I don’t know why anyone would ever want to read it more than once, it’s not actually that great.” He languidly brought his right hand up to tap lazily at her leg. “What about you, though? Are you satisfied with this being our ‘happy ending’?”Something whirred softly within her chest. “Well, I did get what I wanted, which was to see the end of the universe. And I also made a pretty good friend along the way, even after losing everything I used to love and being left to spend centuries lying under dust becoming a fossil. It’s not the worst ending, I guess.” She paused. “It’s nice to spend it with you, Hal.”He wasn’t entirely used to this sort of affection, and was ergo not entirely certain how to respond to it. It was cheesy, but sweet. Honest. His coolant system sped up a tiny bit. “It’s nice to spend it with you too, Jade.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
“Just hop on the space bike” They said, “let’s talk to the New New Hampshirians” they said, “it’ll be fine”. They said.
It was not fucking fine.
Dave sat behind Kanaya on the space bike on the outermost rim of the rings of Andronicus L while Rose had kicked off to let herself drift up away a little, towards the masses of floating hampshirian flesh. All three of them were wearing the necessary space suits and gear for going out this far on the rings, but that didn’t help Dave feel any more safe as he saw the terrifying shapes slipping in and out of seeable existence, bumbling towards them. The stars continued to glimmer brightly from here, the void a perfectly black backdrop behind them with its endless cold and endless space for endless terrors.
Dave shivered. He’d brought the golden decorative sword with him again, the one he’d fondly named “Hamp Fucker,” strapped to his back just in case. Kanaya held firmly onto the cord attached to the back of Roses suit as she drifted up and away towards the Hampshirians. None of these things helped him feel safer, nothing could make him feel safe in the presence of these demons from the higher dimensions.
Rose waved. “Sup.” She said.
“Fucking seriously Rose we’re faced with goddamn abominations from higher space that can and will ruin every aspect of our lives and the first thing you say to them is-“
“Shh!” Rose told him. “I know what I’m doing.”
“Do you really?” Kanaya asked over the coms.
“Hush.” Rose turned back to the boulders of flesh that were floating menacingly towards them from the far reaches of the void. She opened her mouth to speak, but then shut it again. She tried to listen instead. A long, dreadfully tense silence passed as she gazed up at the three dimensional slices of the four dimensional creatures, who were presumably gazing back down at her.
“Rose,” Dave whispered after a few minutes of this, “Do you have a plan?”
“Ah,” She said, trying to back away a little but finding nothing to move herself with in the frictionless void she was now suspended in, leaving her to just sort of flail a little. “Hello,” She said to the Hampshirians, waving again, “may I ask why it was that you felt the need to attack my friends?”
There was a pause. Then a vast, bizarre sound that filled every frequency and sent ripples through the very fabric of spacetime itself resonated out, and they could feel the infinite strangeness of the quiet roaring deep in their bones. This was their response. It’s difficult to speak in the third dimension when your vocal chords are all up in the fourth.
“Right,” Rose said like she could understand a single thing they just said, “well,”
If she’d been able to hear them properly, she would have known that their response had simply been “because it’s fun.” And if she’d been able to see them in full she would have seen them proceed to go and try poking at her friends as they often tended to do. It was when Dave saw the smaller orbs of finger flesh appear out of the blue and start sweeping quickly towards them that he started to seriously panic.
“Rose,” He said urgently, “get back on the bike, get back on the fucking bike Rose get bACK ON THE FUCKING”
Kanaya wound up having to yank the cord to pull her back in, and then she handed the chord to Dave as she moved fast sliding forward to the front seat where she took the controls into her own hands and shot off in the direction of the station. Dave shouted a little in surprise, gripping the chord tightly as they drug Rose behind them while also trying to hold onto Kanaya, who was speeding down the rings at full fucking throttle. The hampshirians were following close behind them, they could see the danger flesh boulders bounding along, right on their heels.
Everybody out of the god damn way. You got a fist full of Kanaya, a cord full of sister, and a bike full of frantic.
It was bizarre to see the flesh boulders of danger drag through the gleaming ice and rocky debris that made up the rings, sending large particles flying up out of their orbits. The Hampshirians were just dragging their hands through it, amused by the way it reacted. Kanaya was doing her level fucking best to avoid it, dodging this way and that while Dave continued to drag Rose helplessly behind them.
There was something so thrilling about this, Kanaya realized as she veered sharply to the left to miss a large chunk of ice and rock as it soared past them, off course. She’d practiced on the bikes sometimes, done some laps around the rings with Rose, but she’d never been in a really dangerous situation like this. She’d never been in a proper race. Now, however, she was realizing why Rose loved it so much. The rush of the rings below you, the risk of making just one wrong move that could send you flying off into the wrong direction, possibly too close to the gas giants orbit, the danger of being torn to pieces by just one stray chunk of ice or rock, the thrill of it all.
Kanaya locked her legs in position and gripped the controls, feeling the thrill bubble up into a laugh that spilled out of her throat in glorious peals.
“Kanaya?” Dave asked nervously, “holy shit, are you laughing? Please don’t fall face first off the rocker while we’re running for our goddamn lives that would be really shitty timing.”
“PULL ME IN DIPSHIT!” Rose called as she was continuously drug through the debris behind them.
“Fuck, alright,” Dave did his best to try reeling her in while still holding tightly onto Kanaya. Her shouting in the coms had left a ringing in his ears.
“Thank you,” she breathed as she got close enough to lock hands with him so he could haul her onboard to sit behind him.
“Hold on tight!” Kanaya told them, spotting a massive wave of debris and hampshirian flesh as the fuckers tore through the structure of the rings in front of them with their whole arms. They were like children splashing around in a pool and Dave Rose and Kanaya were like flies caught on the surface of the water.
Kanaya tried some fancy maneuver that was doomed to fail, and as Rose saw this she lunged forward to reach around Dave, putting her hands over Kanayas hands on the controls and saying “no, like this.” She was now literally back seat driving.
Dave felt like he was squished in the middle of a very sweet and romantic scene between his sister and her girlfriend that he really didn’t want anything to do with, but had no way of escaping that didn’t spell death. Rose guided Kanaya carefully as to how to precisely use the controls to maneuver sharply up and around the wave, her hands rested over Kanayas in a way that was awkward and cumbersome and very cramped for Dave. It was thrilling and awkward and terrifying and wonderful all at the same time, some adjectives applying much more to others on this bike than they did to some.
Something seemed to explode in a splash of rock and ice next to them and Rose clamped forward to help Kanaya steer away from it without flying off course, which all had the side effect of making Dave yelp and hide his head in the back of Kanayas suit, wishing to be anywhere but here. They zoomed off finally back to the station where Rose and Kanaya worked in harmony to bring the bike into a dangerously fast skid straight into the tiny opening that led into the docking chamber, appearing as a tiny grey rectangle on the massive station ahead of them in the distance. It was like driving a speeding motorcycle with rockets in the back on full blast into a small garage that is miles away and approaching horrifyingly fast, because essentially that’s exactly what it was.
Once inside, they had to pull to a stop so fast to keep from colliding with anything that it gave all three of them major whiplash, as they pulled the bike up to send the rocket engines blowing in the opposite direction, sending papers and stray objects in the messy docking chamber flying all about. With he messy handling from Rose in the back and Kanaya with Dave squished against her, they wound up accidentally capsizing the hover bike, leaving them all to fall ungracefully off of it onto the cold floor of the small hangar. Dave tumbled to the ground with the rest of them as the bike spun away upside down into a wall, thankfully at a speed slow enough as to not cause too much damage.
He lay there for a few moments, catching his breath as he just sort of shuddered in shock, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling behind his tinted goggles. Kanaya took off her helmet next to him and got up on her knees, feeling a little dizzy. She then dropped the helmet and threw her hands up above her head, cheering long and loud.
“Jegus fuck,” Dave groaned and rolled over on his side, covering the sides of his helmet with his hands like he was trying to cover his ears.
Rose stumbled uneasily into an upright sitting position. “See?” She panted a little, “we’re fine. What did I tell you?”
“Rose I’m gonna fucking strangle-“
“WOOOOO!” Kanaya cheered again. She then had to fall onto her back to laugh breathily while laying on the floor.
“Guys!” Jane called from where she was standing not far from them, “the New New Hampshirians are still here, tearing things up! Did your plan not work?”
Dave pulled off his helmet and made a good faith effort to pull himself to his knees. “Oh it went fucking amazing.”
Callie soon appeared next to Jane and Dave had just no idea where she’d come from.
“Kanaya! Rose! Dave!” She said, walking briskly up to them, “up you get! Roxy is calling everyone back to the ships, we leave now!” She grabbed Dave by the hand and pulled him quickly to his feet, and then did the same for Kanaya and Rose.
All five of them started off down the halls of the station orbiting Andronicus L, power-walking in a V formation with Calliope front and center. They could hear strange loud noises outside the station, massive thumps and crashes in the outer walls that reverberated through the whole structure. They made it back to the south hangar in record time, passing by panicked sports bars and radio broadcasting stations. The golden fleet was primed and ready for launch when they got there, and they were hurried up into the lead ship by several helpful Carapacians, WV among them.
Dave was very glad to see WV’s kind, understanding face. They climbed aboard the bridge where they found Roxy at the lead controls, calling everyone to order. Sollux and Aradia were with her, as they’d apparently lost their ship when Sollux fell through the wormhole that brought him here. Not that Aradia was too keen on getting back to her old job of bounty hunting anyway. So they all went to their assigned stations and blasted off, the entire golden fleet traveling at top speed away from Andronicus L and it’s station.
“Roxy!” Callie called from her station, just as they were entering warp speed. “We have a smidgen of a problem!”
“How much of a smidgen?” Roxy called back, turning to face her.
“A real bloody massive smidgen!” Calliope said, tapping something on her control panel that brought what she was seeing up onto the big screen for everyone to see. “Look!”
“OH SHIT.” Roxy looked, and what she saw was the readings from a massive space-time anomaly, the likes of which they’d never seen. “It’s fugkcin HUGE.”
Dave looked up to see a vast circle of the purest black displayed in front of them, big enough to swallow the entire fleet. The images of stars bent and swirled away around its horizons as it drastically bent all the light that got close to it. “Hey, Jane” He said, while staring into the vast face of oblivion herself, “would you mind if I gave like a suggestion, even though I’m not technically one of the captains here.”
“Sure!” Jane told him, gesturing forward.
Dave got up and walked off in the direction of her gesture, which led him to Roxy who was standing at the front. “Roxy,” He said, “lets go straight into it.”
“Dude,” Roxy looked at him, turning away from the very important stuff she was doing, “uh, are you sure? That’s... that’s a black hole Dave, not that I don’t trust you but like that’s kinda suicide and are you suggesting I order my entire fleet to, like,,”
“No, see,” Dave brought up his hands to speak with, “I’ve got some perfectly sound reasoning behind this, I can assure you, and my reasoning starts with the fact that I have a very intense gut feeling that I need to throw myself into that black hole right this instant.”
“Dave are you ok”
“No but that’s irrelevant,”
“Dude”
“Listen,” Dave tried to arrange his posture into something that was chill and confident, but wound up still having a bit of a forward slouch that made him look a little like a madman, “a black hole took me and you and Karkat to Jade and Jane, and a black hole took me to my brother and put you on the path to becoming the captain of the entire Prospitian population, and a black hole took me away from Jade and Karkat but also kinda saved my life and opened my eyes to the nature of time or whatever the fuck, and apparently a black hole brought Sollux to where he needed to go to get Aradia revived,” he gestured to Sollux and Aradia for emphasis, and Aradia smiled and waved. “And I’m nearly certain at this point that the black holes have had other semi positive effects for other people in our lives that we aren’t aware of yet. Now as much as a batshit crazy idea it is, can you really blame me, after all this, for thinking it can’t be such a bad idea after all to throw myself into a black hole every time one presents itself out of fucking nowhere?”
Roxy blinked at him. She didn’t know what to tell him, or where to even start.
Callie practically materialized next to her and gave her opinion without anyone asking or even knowing when she’d gotten so close. “I think Dave might have a point, maybe we should try trusting the black holes this time.”
“I don’t know how I feel about this...” Roxy turned to Jane. “Hay Janey? Yea I want your opinion on something can you come over here?”
Jane got up and came over as instructed. “Yes? Is it about the supermassive black hole that our entire fleet has stopped in front of? The fact that the hampshirians are right on our heels and could start tearing us to pieces any second now?”
“No i called you over to ask you if these shoes match with my- YES JANE I'M ASKING ABOUT THE BLACK HOLE” admittedly, Roxy was losing her cool here a bit, but this was a high stress/pressure situation.
“Alright,” Jane adjusted her glasses, “What is it then? Sure moving the whole fleet carefully around this obstacle is going to be a trick but I don’t see the problem-“
“Dave wants us to drive straight into it.” Roxy threw up her hand to clearly indicate Dave, who was standing somewhat awkwardly beside her.
“He what?”
“You missed my entire explanation as to why, though,” Dave said in defense, “I can assure you I’m perfectly sane and my reasoning makes complete sense.”
“Okay well we haven’t got long,” Jane said, ignoring the fact that Dave was practically yelling about how insane he was just by how strongly he was protesting against such claims, “the Hampshirians are literally right behind us.”
“Alright real fast,” Roxy looked to each of them, standing tensely, “lets vote. Callie?” She looked for Calliope but couldn’t find her. “Callie?”
Calliope was elsewhere, gone out of the bridge and onto the nose of the ship, standing outside in her space suit on the very front of the lead ship. Something about the black hole had spoken to her, something that resonated deep within a part of herself that was foreign to her. She looked up at it, drawn to it as if in a trance, and raised one hand up to see her gloved fingers stand out starkly against the infinite black of the massive anomaly in front of her.
“Callie?” Roxy called again, worried now.
“Roxy,” she finally responded over the coms, her voice coming in through the console. She sounded a little distant, something sincere and dreamlike in her voice, “I think we should try going through the wormhole now. Do you trust me?”
Roxy swiveled around on her heel to face the source of Calliopes voice, as she heard it come up through the console. She put her hands flat on its surface and leaned down to speak into the mic. “Callie,” her voice had a tremor in it now, though she spoke very softly, “what --and I emphasize-- the FUCK are you doing?”
Silence.
“Calliope?”
When her voice came back it was even more distant, mildly distorted with a dusting of static over it. “Do you trust me, Roxy?”
This was insane. She leaned down again to tell Calliope as much but Dave put a hand on her shoulder and somehow this was comforting, despite the fact that Dave was also probably completely out of his mind. She took a deep breath.
“...yea.” Roxy glanced up at Jane who found herself nodding despite the fact that she also knew that this was completely neurotic of them. “But what—“ she trailed off as she looked up to see the massive black hole start growing in size, it’s horizon stretching around them, beginning to swallow them in a way that was strange and uncanny but typical for black holes. “...what,,,”
Calliope took another step forward, standing tall and firm as the entire fleet moved according to her thoughts. Were they even her thoughts? They seemed so powerful, like the thoughts of someone intricately connected to every single point in space, someone far more powerful than herself, and they seemed to be resonating from the black hole in front of her. “I think some people have been waiting a long time for answers,” she said as she gazed up into the vast, infinitely dark and all-encompassing maw of the supergiant wormhole, “and I think we’re coming very close to answering them.”
“Callie what does that even mean,” Roxy tried to find her voice again, as it kept frolicking away from her to hide in the metaphorical grass.
The entire fleet continued to slide towards the singularity, reaching the point where there should have been an event horizon. A curtain of pure black was pulled over them from all sides, covering them up and hiding them from the stars as the universe condensed and receded behind them into a small circular opening. Calliope could feel the entirety of the golden fleet under her fingers as she held them outstretched, and she could feel every empty space too. All of creation danced on her palm, which she kept pressed to the image of the black hole which now surrounded them. It was such a bizarre feeling, and it was a pity that she wasn’t going to quite be able to remember it later, or remember what came over her, compelling her to stand on the very nose of the ship and hold up her hand to the black pupil of the universe.
Finally the stars disappeared completely behind them, and they were left in a perfectly empty void. All was dark. Everything began to rattle, the fleet started moving faster and faster through the blackness, till they were moving at a speed that broke the laws of everything, faster than light, breaching higher dimensions as they traveled the space above reality. Tiny white lights began to fleck by, fleeting stars that whizzed past in moment's notice. The silence was deafening, nobody spoke a word, all you could hear was the rattling of metal.
Far ahead of them a faint purple light began to make itself visible, and minutes later the blurry purple speck had grown into an entire city, racing up to meet them as they soared back into the dimensions they knew to be familiar. Stars were still scarce out here, but the unmistakable structure of Derse’s broken moon was now just in front of them. The entire golden fleet appeared out of the void to stop in front of the moody city. Calliope finally lowered her hand as she came to fully realize, to her own surprise, that the black hole had been replaced by cracked remains of Derse, right in front of her eyes.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
The morning was dark but not dismal. Dirk may have been caught inside a dream that had been dismal, but that hadn’t kept him from feeling better when he woke up, even in the timeless void through which derse drifted, the sky an endless sea of black. His dreams had taken him back to the research clinic, to memories of lying immobile in intense pain, hearing screams through the walls that were even worse than his own. It all went away though, working its way slowly out of him like a bad fever. Like a fever, because he awoke in a sweat when it was over. A quick glance at the clock let him know it should be morning, although there was no light to tell him such. No light would rise over the face of derse to tell the passing of time.Jake was there, just on the other side of the bed with his back turned to him, lying still. Sleeping. He looked so peaceful, wrapped in the dim purple, Dirk wanted to gently wrap his arms around him and lie close. So he did. It was so soft, so easy, yet he could still remember a time when he’d been too afraid to touch him without a million confirmations that it was ok, and even more afraid to even ask.The morning was dark, but not dismal, like every morning spent on derse so far. Jade woke up to feel Karkat snuggled up to her back, his face nuzzled away in her hair, purring ever so quietly. She found it fascinating and adorable that he purred, even if he denied doing so when he woke. Trolls were so unlike humans in all the most arbitrary ways, she still had so much to learn. Rolling over onto her back to face him, she brought him up into her arms and smiled to herself when Karkat nestled himself deeper into her. He was such a soft thing, he could be so tender, when he wasn’t guarding it up under a perpetually aggressive tone and a thick grey sweater.They all awoke slowly in time and began the quiet march out of their rooms and into the black morning on the black day after an equally black night, as was entirely usual for the inhabitants of derse. It seemed at first that this was going to be just another black day among all the other black days, as they all crawled from their sleeping chambers and out into the black light, a day full of training and drill testing and planning. They didn’t expect the thing that was to appear to them from out of the endless black veil, they hadn’t expected a massive, shimmering fleet of golden ships to materialize out of the void.The clashing of deep purple and brilliant gold was a strangely well harmonized clashing, Jade would notice to herself as she rounded up the troops of dersites. Karkat was always by her side to amplify her orders to the back, especially on days when all the shouting had done her voice raw. He was always the loyal right hand. Dirk and Jake, her highest ranking generals, would help her lead from the front lines, just as Dirk had preferred. They all rounded up in this manner to form a front which the unexpected golden fleet would have to face before any damage could be done to what remained of their home.Dave stood in the spacious golden bridge of the leading ship with Rose and Kanaya and Roxy and Jane, and Sollux and Aradia and with Calliope standing on the front of the ship, slowly lowering her outstretched hand. Something caught his eye about the sharp and dark city before them, something about the way it teetered on the edge of oblivion seemed so strangely familiar, like he’d seen it before but couldn’t for the life of him remember where. It was like seeing a close relatives eyes in the face of a stranger, like you know you’ve got to be related somehow even if you’ve never met. They all saw the troops of dersites lining up and holding up their spears and shields for battle. Nobody was going to shoot until the other side shot first.Calliope was a little startled by the fact that she had no idea what had come over her or where it had come from, but she’d apparently just led an entire fleet of the largest possible size through a supermassive worm hole that took them straight to the remains of derse. She took a few steps back, finding herself standing on the very tip of the nose of the lead ship, and quickly decided to head on back inside.“Hey what’d I tell you?” Dave was saying when she came back into the bridge, taking off her helmet. “We didn’t die, so that’s gotta count for something.”Roxy was sighing heavily and leaning on Jane for help. “Ok yea but like dude now we’ve got a lost army with its guns pointed at us.”“Well,” Callie said, stepping forward, “I think we outnumber them, so it’s probably going to be ok! We can work out a peace contract and-““CALLIE!” Roxy rushed over to her and hugged her, “the FUCK were you doing? God, nevermind,” she pulled back and sealed her hand in Callie’s to walk her back over to the rest of the group. “So what were you saying? We gonna work out a peace treaty before anybody takes the first shot?”“Yes, basically.”Jane nodded approvingly. “I’d be willing to try that.”Dave was glad to see they were looking right to a peaceful solution and felt they didn’t really need his input. Instead he looked over to see what Rose and Kanaya were doing, and saw Rose gazing at the broken image of Derse’s moon, transfixed by it, rapt. It seemed she found it just as strangely familiar as he did, and was just as curious as he was about why, probably more so. Kanaya was watching Rose stare up in fascination at it, putting a hand on her shoulder and asking her a question so softly that Dave couldn’t hear. He didn’t need to eavesdrop anyway.WV was tugging at his sleeve, and when he turned to see what was up, he looked into a pair of eyes that so eagerly wanted to tell him something, but couldn’t just yet. Eyes that knew of a surprise hidden for him, and couldn’t wait to see his reaction. Like the eyes of a parent sitting back to watch happily as the children gush over the multitude of Christmas presents under the tree. ‘Just you wait and see’. The eyes said. ‘You’ll love what happens next.’Jane went out first, coming down to the dersite troops in a small golden car with a white flag raised. Jade, watching the car come down, was confused to see that the massive golden fleet before her was surrendering without a fight, surely her small rebel army of dersites wasn’t that intimidating. Like, she knew she’d been training them well, but they were still considerably small. She was even more confused when the car landed, because the woman who stepped out of it was alarmingly familiar.Jane took a few steps forward and saw Jade, standing there with Karkat at her side, and had to stop. It had been a long time since she’d seen Jade, her respective grandmother/granddaughter. She wasn’t sure how to react to seeing her again, so she simply stopped where she stood and stared. Jade was the one to take the next few steps forward, looking all over Jane’s face to see if it was really her, before breaking into a smile and giving her a hug.“Hi Jane.”It took her a moment to fully process it, but when it clicked she melted into a smile as well and wrapped her arms around Jade. “Hi Jade.”Roxy came down out of the lead ship in a secondary flying car that was slightly bigger than the first one and carried the rest of her party, which included Dave, WV, Callie, Rose, Kanaya, AraSol, the white queen, and a few helpful Prospitians. They had seen Jade and Jane hug, and assumed that meant they would be on peaceful terms with the rebel dersite army ahead of them. WV seemed so oddly excited, looking up at Dave with this big smile in his eyes that wasn’t shown in his mouth because his mouth was covered by the weird cozy turban cloak wrap thing he always wore.Dave just gave him a quizzical look as he stepped out of the ship and then realized, looking up, that oh hey, that’s Jade and Karkat. It was strange, they didn’t seem real at first, it didn’t seem possible, time slowed to a stop for a moment. Karkat was the first to catch his eyes, and he didn’t waste a second standing staring in shock as he proceeded to start sprinting towards Dave at top speed.“MOTHERFUCKER!!!” He shouted, and that’s when Dave finally caught on to what was happening.Several dersites raised their weapons again as Karkat charged at Dave, who started walking towards Karkat, then jogging, then sprinting. They collided somewhere in the middle and both immediately broke into laughter. Dave hadn’t been able to believe it until Karkats arms were around him, until Jade noticed them and ran to join the hugging, but now he could.“Dave!” Jade said, pulling back from the hug a little but keeping her arms around his shoulders, looking him in the eyes behind his goggles. “Hi!”He started crying. Jade pulled him back into her arms with a little sympathetic “oh,” to hold him tightly, while Karkat held onto both of them, burying his face in Dave’s hair. It was the sweetest and most awkward hug that any of them had ever had. They all stood hugging eachother for a while, and were still unable to let go after pulling back, all their arms slung around eachother in a little triangle-circle.“YOU BASTARD,” Karkat has his head tucked between Dave’s jaw and shoulder, with his face smooshed into his collarbone. “I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD, HOW ARE YOU NOT DEAD??”“Uh,” Dave had to adjust his goggles to wipe the tears out, “wormhole showed up, I guess.”“We missed you!” Jade said, and Dave started to wonder if he’d cry every time Jade spoke for the rest of his life. He wasn’t much of a cryer, either, but damn if there wasn’t something about being held by both your lovers (?) after thinking you’d never see them again and them saying they missed you.“Hey, yea,” He said, trying to at least keep his facial expression chill, failing, and then burying his face in Jades hair to hide it, “I missed y’all too.”Roxy smiled warmly, seeing the three of them back together again. Her bro looked so happy, she had to put an arm around Jane and another around Calliope to keep her heart steady. Jake was there, and he started talking with Jane, and the two of them wandered off a little to discuss something that nobody else could quite hear. Callie went with Kanaya and Rose to talk with Jade about writing a proper code of alliance between the prospitian fleet and the dersite army, and WV went with them. Aradia and Sollux hung around with Dave and Karkat to work things out, and Dave and Aradia started to talk about what they’d seen when they should’ve been dead. Sollux and Karkat had some catching up to do.Eventually it was pretty much just Roxy and Dirk left, and the two simply stood and looked at eachother for a few moments. They approached slowly, tentatively. The black sky hung heavy above and the purple streets seemed to glow a little below them.“Hey.”“Hey.”“So uh,” Roxy looked at him, noticing how similar he looked to Hal, hair and shape-wise, “you’re Dirk? Dave’s bro? Guy who built Hal?”“Yea.” He tried to sound warm and not mildly nervous. He remembered Hal telling him about the woman he met named Roxy, he remembered seeing her nameplate in her room when he’d been stuck on Geliez 13-b with Jake. He remembered studying her creatively crafted radio that sat on her bed, and wondering who Roxy was. He remembered some sweet-voiced woman coming on over that radio, surprised to hear anyone’s voice finally reply to her, and asking if Roxy was there.She smiled a little. “Nice to meet you, I’m Roxy.”Somehow he’d known that before she introduced herself. “Hey.” He stuck out his hand for a somewhat awkward handshake. “You too.”Her smile widened when she took it, awkwardly shaking his hand and silently laughing at how silly it felt. It was funny, they’d heard so much about eachother in these strange little hints and clues, but only now were they finally crossing paths.The morning was dark but not dismal, just the opposite, in fact.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
A celebration simply had to be held in honor of the signing of the peace contract between the dersites and the prospitians, the reunion of friends and family and lovers, and the inevitable war against the government that was soon ahead of them. This wasn’t going to be a slow burning rebellion, fighting the government mildly over a long period of time. No, this was going to be a quick battle in which they would take on the whole system from all sides, via a plan that was in the process of being designed. The plan was nearly complete, they simply had to bring in a few more allies and make sure they’d be alright with it, which would be a bit tricky.Before they dove into that, though, they were going to hold a celebration. All of them, in the midst of the towering purple city were going to have one night of pure fun together in unity before beginning the first step of the plan to take down the government. Some of the things they planned to do were ludicrously dangerous, they could die tomorrow. That’s the sort of celebration they were holding, as all the dersites and prospitians gathered together in the streets to sing and dance and talk and feast and unite as one army of Carapacians. People were raising glasses and making toasts and declaring things and going downright hogwild.Most of them were in the town hall, a massive building with a very spacious room that was perfect for holding things like galas or off-the-rails raves. Everyone was there, Rose,Kanaya, Aradia, Sollux, Dirk, Jake, Roxy Jane and Calliope and DaveJadeKat, they were all there. Everyone but Vriska and Terezi, everyone but Hal and Jadebot. Their circumstances were complicated, though. Some were dead, some were grieving, some were contentedly working at a bar at the end of the universe.Dave was pulling out all his pent up drive to lose his shit on the dance floor, just for one night. He’d brought Karkat with him, who was surprised by how enthusiastic Dave could be when he let loose. Jade was off talking with Kanaya and Calliope, and between the three of them they finished a plan to speak with the creatures from higher spatial dimensions, to request an alliance. With the New New Hampshirians on their side, the government wouldn’t stand a chance. However, this plan could very well backfire and result in Jade's death, which is something she had yet to speak with Karkat and Dave about.She watched them from off to the side and found amusement in the way Dave would surprise Karkat by slinging him into a twirl and pulling him back into a low dip. It was a wonder he didn’t dance more often, he was surprisingly good. It apparently runs in their family, Jade observed, because Dirk was out there blowing Jakes mind with his mating routine every second he wasn’t manning the soundboard. Rose and Roxy were similarly skilled, but Rose tended to be more held back and Roxy just wasn’t trying that hard to be composed.Maybe Jade should join in with them, if it was so very possible that she could die soon while trying to gain a priceless alliance with some of the most powerful beings in paradox space. She should get out there, have fun, dance. She liked dancing. Yet for the life of her she couldn’t quite bring herself to get up. Then Jake came up to her with a ukulele in hand and told her he wouldn’t be needing it, giving it to her with a lopsided smile on his face while Dirk tugged at him to come back onto the dance floor. She held the thing curiously, watching them go and get lost among the crowd of partying Carapacians. Tentatively, she gave it a strum. It had four strings like her old bass guitar she used to play, surely it wouldn’t be too hard to get the hang of.A song came on that she knew by heart, and after a bit of testing chords, she figured out how to play along with the music. This brought her a surprising amount of joy. Dave eventually came up to her with Karkat in hand and sweat all over him.“Hey,” He said, breathing a little hard and rubbing his forehead with his sleeve, “You uh, you wanna join us?”“I THINK I NEED A BREAK,,” Karkat was swaying. He was also wearing a suit vest over a button down shirt, which looked very nice on him, and it was rare of him to wear such an outfit because he avoided fashion like the plague. Then again, it was possible they’d all face death in the next few days, so this was a special occasion. A special occasion, and you could tell because Dave was wearing the most lovely, velvety red suit and Jade just had no idea where he’d gotten it from. Kanaya must’ve tailored it for him or something because like damn. He was a goddamn ruby of a man.Jade smiled, clutching her little ukulele and shrugging.“Common,” Dave said, holding out a hand for her to take. “Gimme your best outdated shimmy that undoubtedly came from a shitty old movie of some sort.”She laughed a little at that. “Where will I put my ukulele?”“HERE,” Karkat took it and it’s strap that came attached and slung it over his back. “I’LL HOLD IT. GIVE THE DAVE SOME ATTENTION FOR A SECOND WHILE I CATCH MY BREATH.”“Oh,” Dave gave him this shit-eating little head-tilting smirk, “You? Out of breath? You can’t tell me someone who uses so much time day and night yelling with the full capacity of his vocal chords gets winded after just a few minutes.” This was funny because Dave also appeared to be winded, considering how much he was sweating and still breathing heavy, and it was bizarre that he hadn’t taken off his suit jacket yet.“THAT WAS AN HOUR AND A HALF OF PURE CARDIO, SHITBAG.” Karkat had his hands on his knees and looked up at him with a tired smile that was best described as openly fond. “I’LL JOIN IN WITH YOU GUYS AGAIN IN A MINUTE.”“Alright.” Dave held up his hand for Jade again, giving her a smile with one eyebrow raised. “M’Lady?”She snorted. She’d never seen Dave having this much fun before. “M’kay.” Jade took his hand and off they went into the crowd.Lights and colors were everywhere, people were dancing and jumping and drinking and raising their arms and joining hands. They hadn’t even needed to wait until after dark, since it was always dark on what remained of derse. The party was planned and held right away after the official battle plans had finished being scripted and proposed and accepted, and now everyone was having their last hurrah before the war. Rose had gone off with Kanaya to the roof, where they could be alone. This was all well and good, a rave wasn’t exactly her scene. It wasn’t really Kanaya’s scene either. Nobody questioned what they were doing while up on the roof with a perfect view of the lovely dark city below.Roxy was just dancing away, having a grand old time with a drink in her hand that wasn’t alcoholic, considering she was doing her best not to drink that sort of thing anymore. She used to have a problem with it, and was determined not to fall back into it, even if it was her last night alive, her last party. She had no idea where Jane and Callie had gone, only that they were texting her telling her to come back to their designated room on derse when she was done partying. Things were getting a bit heady and crowded on the floor, and she felt it would be good to get a breath of fresh air from outside.There was a little concrete courtyard just behind the building, with some tall glass doors that led out to it, and it seemed like the perfect place to step out of the stuffy building for a moment to catch one’s breath. Oddly enough, she found Dirk out there, who seemed to jump a little upon seeing her. He straightened his back and was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Jake was nowhere to be seen.“Hey dude,” Roxy greeted him, raising her glass a little at him in acknowledgment. “You come out here for some fresh air too?”“Uh, yeah,” He sounded a little hoarse, fixing his suit vest and adjusting his tie. His face seemed a little pale.“It is getting pretty stuffy in there, huh?” She smiled and sipped from her drink, which was just water in a cocktail glass. “Saw you ‘n the Jake kid goin just off the fuckin wall nuts in there, you gotta be sweatin bullets by now, huh?”“mm.”Something was off with him. Roxy looked him over again, straightening her posture and surveying him seriously for a second. “Hey,” She said after a moment, “you good, dude?”He seemed to clear his throat a bit, “Uh, yea, I’m good. Never been better. Just, ah, excuse me one moment-“ his words got strained and rushed near the end as he turned and tried to run, failing to make it far away enough in time to hide the fact that he was vomiting a vile blue substance that smelled rancid like troll blood. He aimed to puke in the dirt lining the outside of the wall, presumably where plants would be growing, if only there was ever any sunlight on derse.“DUDE HOLY SHIT,” Roxy dropped her drink and didn’t seem to notice it shatter on the purple stone as she rushed over to put a hand on his back and keep his hair out of his face for him.He cringed to himself while catching his breath and wiping his mouth again.“You’re not good, dude,” she said, rubbing his back while he tried to stand up straight again. “Did you like have too much to drink or...”“...no,” dirk coughed, putting a hand on his hip and covering parts of his face with the other. Embarrassing. Gross.Roxy eyed the puddle of thick indigo substance that was sinking into the sterile soil uncomfortably. “dude...” She said gently, with concern, looking at his face as he avoided her eyes. “That’s, like, not a normal color, you ok in there?”He was silent.“I don’t think you are...” She looked at him sympathetically as he turned away.“It’s just, the dancing, I guess, it’s a bit more exercise than anticipated, even though it should be fine,” he looked at her while trying to keep the pain out of his face, “I’m usually fine, this is fine, it usually happens after I exert myself too much, ever since,, yea,,,” He then made a frustrated noise and turned to hurl again, trying to keep it as far from Roxy as possible.“Shit, dude,” she went to rub his back again, “this ain’t good, you gotta see like a doctor or something this ain’t normal...”“No!” His voice was so jacked up from all the puking. He still wouldn’t look Roxy in the eyes. “I mean no,” he said more calmly, softly, regretting shouting at her, “no doctors. I’m fine, just, let me get back to Jake, I don’t really want to waste tonight,”Roxy looked at him with concern, noticing he was leaning on her a little now for support. “... alright, man,” she started walking with him back inside, but then noticed his arms. He’d rolled up his sleeves, and along his arms were long thin scars in perfect lines, which was even more concerning. “Wait, hey, what’s...?” She made him stop, running her fingers gently across the lines on his arm.“Shit,” He said, pulling his arm back and unfolding his sleeves back down.“Dude...” Roxy was looking at him with so much saddened concern and worry and it was terrible. He was so pale in the face, and she could see him shaking a little. Whatever was going on with him, it was serious, and it needed help.Dirk felt terrible for concerning Roxy with this. “It’s alright Roxy, I’m alright,” he tried to walk back into the room on his own and had to stop to lean heavy against the wall. “Dammit.” He said quietly.She didn’t hesitate stepping forward to pull one of his arms over her shoulders so she could help him walk. “Okay, dude, something’s clearly up, I’m taking you to Jane.”“No,” he tried to protest, “really, I’m fine,,”“No, really, you’re not!” She said, marching him forward. “Man, what happened? When did this start?”He groaned and let her walk him back to her room. “I don’t,, it’s nothing.”Roxy sighed heavily and gave up trying to get answers out of him, determined to get him to Jane so he could heal. She was noticing the veins in his wrists were especially blue, too much so, to a point of looking sick. It was a bit of a long walk back to her designated room in the derse towers, and Dirk had to stop to choke up the vile blue substance a few times, but eventually they made it. She brought him up all the steps and finally they landed at the top floor where her room was, bringing him carefully inside. By this point he seemed weak with something that he’d been fighting against for far too long, and she had to help him through the door while he tried to warn her that he felt sick again.Jane and Callie were in the room waiting for her when she got back, and they were surprised to see Dirk. Dirk was surprised to see the bed decorated with petals and candles and immediately caught on to the fact that Jane and Calliope were going to try to surprise Roxy with a pleasant night in, and then started beating himself to pieces internally.“Motherfuck,” he swore quietly, “I’m so fucking sorry, oh my god,” he wanted to leave.“Uh, shit,” Roxy looked around the room and was very happy that they’d be so thoughtful as to set something up like this, but also still very concerned about Dirk. “This is so sweet of you guys, really, but uh hey Jane Dirk isn’t doing too well I need you to like do your lifey thing on him cause I’m worried he’s gonna die and I just got to meet him a few days ago and since then I’ve learned he’s really cool actually and I’m kinda proud to call him family and I don’t want him to die so if you could please-“Jane was understanding and very nice about it and took Dirk from her arms to set him somewhere comfortable, when he suddenly tried to shove her away to hurl in the corner.“Oh!” Jane backed off in alarm, “oh, bollocks, you really aren’t well are you?”Dirk was coughing between muttered “I’m so sorry”s and quiet swears while Roxy hauled him over to the bed so he could lie down, sheepishly brushing away the petals and apologizing to Jane and Callie for doing so.“I’ll contact Jake,” Calliope offered, pulling out her device.Jane took Dirks cheek in her hand and had him look at her so she could study his eyes. He was very obviously extremely uncomfortable and very sorry for crashing their night. Sighing, Jane pulled him up into her arms so she could hug him while they sat on the bed, trying to conjure up her healing abilities to get rid of whatever was wrong with him.“I’m so fucking sorry oh my god,” Dirk was still mumbling as Jane tried to concentrate.“Hey, dude,” Roxy took his hand and tried to comfort him, “it’s a’ight, you’re ok, calm down and let us help you out.”He gave her a broken look that he’d been doing his best to hold back until now, as Jane tapped into the strange well of life and death and channelled its force into Dirk, who proceeded to empty himself of an entire full grown man’s worth of blood as it was replaced with the proper shit.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
“I came as soon as I heard!” Jake declared as soon as he reached the room where Jane and Dirk and Roxy and Callie were, quickly noticing the candles and the petals strewn about the bed and the floor and the strong scent of vomit that the candles were working very hard to cover. He was confused for a moment. “...Dirk??”
“I can assure you,” Dirk croaked weakly from where he was laying on the bed with Roxy petting his hair, “it’s not quite what it looks like”
He had just finished hurling up an ungodly amount of indigo blood, all of it in fact, which had left him dangerously dehydrated and empty. Thankfully Jane’s lifey powers were helping him regenerate the proper red blood cells in its place like he should’ve been doing for a long time now but hadn’t been able to. He was gonna live, but it had definitely been close. The aggressive dancing was probably to blame for upsetting his already unstable vital organs and finally pushing them over the threshold on which they had been teetering for so long. Roxy had willed the unpleasant indigo substance away into the void, and now all that was left was the scent, which was difficult to do anything about. She was gonna have to focus real hard to get rid of the little particles in the air.
Jake pulled the three women aside to explain to them that Dirk had been through some near-deadly experimental surgeries while in the research clinic, which was another thing he had to explain, and once that knowledge was out it was easier for Dirk to let them know that one experiment they had done on him had involved replacing all his blood with that of a troll’s. It had all been quite painful to explain, and there was a while where Dirk simply had to curl up in a ball on the side of the bed while Jake explained things to Jane Roxy and Calliope.
Dirk was honestly so fucking sorry for ruining their night. They were probably gonna like, have sex and everything, and here he was stinking up the entire room with vomit and completely destroying the mood with shitty stories of demented hospitals and painful experiments. Roxy was there rubbing his back and telling him calming things, though, and Jake was there to carry him back to their room when Jane was finished healing him. He was gonna be okay, and the three women did their best to assure him they didn’t mind too much. There wasn’t much they could do to keep him from being forever embarrassed by the experience, but shit happens. C'est la vie.
Meanwhile, Jade was walking back to her room with Dave and Karkat, both the boys had an arm slung around her shoulders while she played ukulele between them. All three of them sang to it without a care in the world, wandering the purple streets between the tall towers and spires with the black sky hanging high above them. They were so happy and joyous together, singingly loudly while marching along and hoping to eventually wind up at their room in one of Derse’s many buildings.
This was happiness, Dave found as Jade strummed on her ukulele that was out of tune. Happiness at last. Karkat sang loud and proud along to it until he was coughing and laughing at Dave’s silly remarks, and together they went along noisily climbing the streets. It was so sweet and so cheerful, the three of them together at last, and they wanted to make the most of it before the war kicked off. Before there was any chance that one of them could die for real.
Climbing the stairs to their room was a journey in and of itself, as the long winding staircase seemed to go on forever before they reached the top. All three of them, regardless of how fit, were completely winded by the time they got to their room. Because god forbid the dersites install some fucking elevators into this place. Jade retired the ukulele to rest on her back as she pulled out her keys and unlocked the door, breathing heavy and laughing as Dave wrapped his arms around her and leaned heavily on her while Karkat started pressing kisses to her cheek. Getting the keys in the lock is a challenge of a whole new level when you’re weak from climbing a million floors worth of stairs and laughing breathlessly while both of your boyfriends refuse to leave you alone.
Once she finally got the door open, they all kinda spread out, separating completely for the first time since they’d left the town hall. Jade put the ukulele against the wall, and Karkat kinda awkwardly shuffled out of his suit vest while Dave strolled over to put on a record.
There has always been something oddly attractive about suit vests with button-down shirts under them, especially when worn correctly by the right man or woman. Not to sexualize, but there has always been something weirdly hot and classy about having one of those large black records spinning on a record player off to the side in the room. These were exactly the sorts of things that were in their quarters as the three of them stepped into the bedroom, as Dave finally slid out of his deep red suit jacket to reveal the matching suit vest, and the record spinning slowly in the corner that was playing smooth jazz, and the well made bed with the lovely purple sheets and pillows.
It was all velvety and cool and hot and incredulously classy.
Dave gave her a kind of look over his shoulder as he went to unbutton his suit vest, a look that was just downright heady with something yet also a little nervous. His tinted goggles had been replaced by a pair of aviators, which did surprisingly less to cover the unique hue of his irises. Karkat was there, with his shirt unbuttoned a little ways, wrapping his arms around Dave from behind and just kinda nuzzling into his neck. It was interesting how fast they’d been able to bring Dave back into the party, even after so long of trying to move on from him.
Karkat was quiet, and so was Dave, and they just sort of stood for a second with Karkat clinging to Dave from behind trying to think of what to say first.
“Hey,” Dave said softly.
“HEY” Karkat said a little less softly, but it was pretty soft compared to his usual tone.
All three of them knew where this was going and all three of them were nervous about it. Jade sat on the bed and looked at them, playing with the hem of her long green dress. She watched Karkat start softly kissing the back of Dave’s neck, and she watched Dave bow his head a little and close his eyes. He then looked to the side and caught eye contact with her, looking Jade in the eyes over his sunglasses while keeping his head bowed to give Karkat room.
She gave him a little smile, which prompted him to give her a little smile back. It was a genuine but awkward little smile, the kind of smile that carries up through the eyes more than it does the mouth. He turned around in Karkats arms to rest his arms around Karkats shoulders, getting his attention. Dave raised his eyebrows a little and motioned his head to the side, gesturing at Jade. Karkat caught on and looked her way.
She waved at him. He looked a little dumbstruck at first, but then waved slowly back, like he just wasn’t sure how to handle the situation. Dave started walking him over, till he finally got them all sitting on the bed. All three of them were quiet for a bit, nobody moving, before Jade started giggling at how awkward they were being. She wrapped her arms around Karkats shoulders from behind and looked Dave in the eyes, watching his face as she started giving Karkat little kisses on the cheek.
It made Karkat flush a little and look away, which had the side effect of making Dave also flush a little and look away, which Jade found so silly and cute because literally all she was doing was kissing him on the cheek. People did that as a casual greeting in the old days, didn’t they? She stopped kissing Karkat on the cheek to watch Dave slip out of his red velvety suit vest, starting to unbutton the black button-down shirt that was underneath it. Instead she nuzzled her way into Karkats shoulder, breathing in his warm scent that was comforting like the smell of ones heavy blankets fresh out of the dryer, except a little more sweaty and a tad musky.
Dave was taking a deep breath while undoing his tie, setting it off to the side. He seemed very unsure what to do with his hands after that. Luckily Jade had plenty of ideas for him, and after giving Karkat one more peck on the cheek she crawled over to guide Dave down onto his back further up the bed, taking his hands and placing them around her sides as she moved to gently straddle his hips. She gave him a warm look, satisfied to see the eagerness in his eyes, before turning to give Karkat a similar look over her shoulder. She gestured with her head for him to come closer, reaching for him with one arm.
“Come here,” She said softly, and Karkat was crawling over to hug her tenderly from behind. She smiled. “Jeez, we’re all so nervous, aren’t we?”
Dave laughed quietly and airily from under her. “A little, yea.”
“...you guys okay with this?” She asked, and could feel Karkat nodding against her back.
“YEA.”
“That’ll be a yes from me, Harley.” He’d taken one hand off her hips to continue undoing the buttons on his shirt. “Are you?”
She hummed a little, quietly, feeling Karkat brush her long dark hair off the back of her neck for her and start pressing soft kisses there, moving down her spine. “Yes,” She said.
“HELL YES,” Karkat whispered,
“Hell fucking yes.” Dave completed, smiling a little. He took off his shades and reached over to set them on the courtesy nightstand while Jade ran her hands down his now bare chest.
Jade could feel Karkat working down her dress zipper, running his knuckle slowly down her spine, giving himself more room to press kisses, while she leaned forward and down to start kissing Dave. Kisses all around, on the house. He made the tiniest, faintest little unintentional whiny hum into her mouth when he felt Karkats hands slide up the insides of his upper thighs. The pants were gonna have to go eventually. Dave was already having to work to catch his breath when Jade moved to kiss his jaw, then his cheek, then his neck. She kissed until she found a spot that made him breathe in a little sharper, and then she sucked on that spot to draw out a small sigh.
Dave hadn’t quite realized Karkat was watching his face from over Jades shoulder until he restlessly cracked his heavy eyes open. They made eye contact, and neither of them knew what to do about it until Dave gave him a small smile, and Karkat timidly returned it. He went back to kissing down Jades back, and Dave went to tangling his hands in Jades thick dark hair. Without warning, Jade suddenly sat up sharply and blinked with an anxious expression at the wall in front of her.
“JADE?” Karkat was a little thrown off his rhythm from her suddenly sitting up.
“Oh my goodness,” she said, covering her face with one hand and smiling sheepishly, “What am I doing?”
“Uh,” Dave was a little disappointed that she’d stopped doing the thing where she nibbled on his neck, and gave her a quizzical expression. “what do you mean?”
“I’m,” She exhaled an empty, breathy laugh, “I’m supposed to be a leader, a topmost general for an entire rebel army, and just look at me,” she glanced at Dave who was looking up at her with confused yet still eager eyes. “Fooling around with one of the pilots and my right hand man,”
“Hey now,” Dave said, playfully offended as he reached up to pull her hand from her face and coax her back down, “I’m not just any pilot, alright, I’m the time traveller pilot, which makes me extra special, and also your boyfriend, which should definitely count for something.” He then seemed to get a little worried. “Unless, like, you don’t want to do this, which you don’t have to, I just,”
“No,” she twined her fingers with his, “that’s not what I’m saying.”
“IT SOUNDS TO ME,” Karkat started, with his arms wrapped around her abdomen and his face pressed into the back of her neck, “LIKE YOU’RE ASHAMED TO BE FUCKING ON THE NIGHT BEFORE THE FIRST STAGE OF THE BATTLE PLAN IS PUT INTO ACTION.”
She grimaced a little to herself. “Kinda?”
Karkat spoke as softly as was physically possible for him as a person. “WELL, HEAR ME OUT WHEN I TELL YOU THAT YOU SHOULDN’T BE. I’M LIKE NINETY PERCENT SURE THAT EVERYONE WITH A PARTNER IS GOING TO BE TAKING THIS CHANCE TO DO THE NASTY BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.”
Jade sighed. “I guess.”
“IF YOU DON’T WANT TO DO THIS YOU DON’T HAVE TO,”
“No, see,” Jade turned to face him better, “I do want to do this! I think I’m just, I donno,” she sighed and looked away again, “it feels improper, is all.”
“But you do 100% want to go through with this?” Dave checked, reaching up to put a hand on her cheek.
“...yes.” She had to think about it to be sure, but after a brief moment of thought, she was sure. “Yes I’m sure.”
“So...” Dave’s voice was reaching new octaves of deep and mildly rough, just enough to create a verbal friction that was pleasant and soft. Karkat could rub himself all over it. “Are we gonna keep going or,”
She smiled and sighed, looking down at him, feeling Karkat pressed up against her back. “Yea,” She scooted back off of him a little to take his legs and put them on either side of her, keeping them apart while she ran her thumbs up the insides of his upper thighs thoughtfully. “I think so.”
~
There is a rumor that if your lunar sway is Derse, you are automatically a bottom, but if your lunar sway is Prospit, you are automatically a top. As a versatile Prospit dreamer, I’m not sure how accurate this rumor is, if it’s accurate at all, however it is a little funny. However, Dave, a known Derse dreamer, has currently found himself underneath two Prospit dreamers, which fulfills the prophecy, and things are generally going very well for him down there.
While they do their thing in the background, allow me to ramble about something else, so they might have some privacy. If you’d like to read something more explicit, I can assure you there is plenty of that elsewhere. I’ve always found it so neat and tidy how each of the three of them have some kind of oriental connection to the others, for instance: Dave and Karkat are both knights, Karkat and Jade are both Prospit dreamers, and Jade and Dave are both humans. We can also take Dave and Jade a step farther by noting that their classes are time and space respectively, and in physics land, I’m rather certain that time and space are fundamentally interconnected in a way that one cannot exist without the other.
You need space so that you can have somewhere for time to exist, and you need time so that you can have somewhen for space to exist. You need both for anything to be able to exist at all. It all goes together so nicely in the end, just like how these three creatures go together so nicely in bed. A little less than an hour passes and all three of them had fallen asleep, tangled up and warm and satisfied and happy. After a while, Dave had felt half of the warmth leave the bed, and drowsily opened an eye and a half to see who was getting up. Jade had managed to slip out of his arms, and she probably thought he was still sleeping as he watched her put on some fresh undergarments and a warm coat.
He would have asked her where she was off to, but it looked like she was just going to gaze off the balcony at the city below for a while, stepping through the glass double doors. It was a little odd when, after a good long while of staring into the distance from the balcony, she stepped up onto the railing, standing on the very edge of a long, deadly drop. Dave sat up, feeling Karkat’s arm slide limply off him. The way Jade stood with such posture and stillness on the rail, her back straight and poised as she looked up into the black sky, the breeze brushing through her long messy hair, it was like she was in a trance.
He felt like he should say something. Quietly, he moved his legs off the bed to put his feet on the floor, not taking his eyes off her. Something felt off. Then, to his sudden shock and horror, she silently just took a step forward and fell off the balcony without a sound. It was a fatal drop below them, and Dave knew this as he leaped up from where he was sitting and ran to the balcony to scream Jade’s name, so confused and horrified as to why she would do this. His hands landed on the rails and as he looked down he saw Jades face pop up right in front of him.
“Dave?” She said, like everything was fucking normal and fine. “I thought you were asleep-“
“I thought you were DEAD” he said, still not back from the shock of watching her quietly commit suicide. He then looked at her feet and saw she was standing on nothing, floating, in fact, thousands of yards off the ground, on the other side of the balcony rails. “What the fuck Jade,”
“sh,” She said, putting a finger to his lips and speaking softly, “I think Karkat is still asleep, and he doesn’t get nearly enough rest so I don’t want to wake him too. And I’m fine, Dave, I have no reason to throw myself to my death.” She smiled at him as she drew her finger away. “I just wanted to practice flying a little, because, you know, I got a bit of an adrenaline rush and wanted to burn it off.”
“flying.”
“Yes flying.”
“What?”
“Look,” She said, drifting back from the rail like she was weightless with her long heavy coat still wrapped around her to conceal everything but no pants on. “I forgot to tell you, but because of my connection to the higher dimensions, I can kinda fly in the third dimension!” She did a little spin for emphasis. “See? Nothing to worry about.” She saw that he still looked very worried without his tinted goggles or sunglasses to protect his eyes from showing expression, while clutching the rails like he desperately wanted to lunge for her and grab hold before she fell to her death. She floated back towards him to put a hand on his cheek. “I’m sorry I worried you.”
He exhaled heavily through his nose and put a hand on Jades hand on his cheek to keep it there. “I don’t see how being connected to higher dimensions makes you fly, but ok.”
“You could fly too, you know.” She whispered like it was a secret, brushing her thumb over his cheekbone.
“Yea ok. At least let me put some shorts on first.” He kissed the inside of her hand before leaving to go put some clothes on so he wasn’t butt-ass naked. Karkat looked so peaceful still all curled up on the bed, it really would be a shame to wake him, so he didn’t. After shuffling into a pair of boxers he decided he didn’t have the patience to locate the rest of his clothes and put them on so he just went back to Jade, who was still floating on the wrong side of the balcony rails. “So,” He said, resting his elbows on the railing and his chin in one hand. “Flying, huh?”
She giggled. “Yea.”
“Thats cool. Did you say I could float too?”
“Maybe.”
As the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy puts it, there is a trick, or rather a knack, to flying. The trick is to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Jade was very good at missing the ground. Usually people would attempt to distract themselves while falling in order to miss the ground, but this rarely ever works.
Jade floated down a bit and held up her hands to make a platform. “Here, step on.” She said.
“You want me,” Dave started, backing away a little, “to put my full weight on your hands,” he continued, “as you are standing on absolutely nothing.”
“Yes.”
“Alright.” He trusted her enough. So he sat on the railing and swung his legs over to try standing on her palms as instructed. The drop below them was long and frightening, and he was really starting to think twice about exactly to what extent he trusted Jade. Sure he could say he’d jump off a cliff for her all he wanted, but actually doing that was a different story. But he trusted her, and he loved her, and in the end it turns out he will actually step off a cliff for Jade like he said he would.
“Now try not to think about it too much.”
“mhm.” He said, balancing on her hands while doing his best not to look down any more.
“You know, the view is lovely from here.”
He glanced down and saw her smiling up at him with this mischievous glint in her eye and he immediately had to look away again. “Right, just, what now?”
“Okay,” She said more seriously, “now take your weight off your left foot.”
“Alright.” He took his weight off his left foot.
“Now take your weight off your right foot.”
“Pardon me,” He said softly, “but what the fuck.”
“You can’t think about it too hard,” She told him, “you’ve seen the higher dimensions of time, right?”
“Probably?”
“Well you saw something, something only you could see, which woke up your connection to it, right?”
“Man, I guess?” He was wobbling a little bit on his one foot on her hand. “I don’t see how it’s connected to flying.”
“If you learn anything from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, you learn that it’s all connected.”
“What?”
“Tell me what you saw in the wormhole and take your weight off your right foot.”
Dave took a deep breath and focused on the black horizon beyond him. All of derse was asleep now, the whole city resting. Nobody would be awake to see them. “Alright, well, I was falling into the gas giant, right? and the view from just above the clouds was real nice, you usually don’t see gas giants from that angle, but anyway eventually I fell into the clouds and said goodbye to y’all and couldn’t see squat shit, until I hit the wormhole and got turned into a string of atoms. Hey, have you ever thought about the fact that those fancy transportalizers basically kill you by taking you apart down to the atom and then they reconstruct you elsewhere exactly as you were? If souls are a thing, then would your soul go with you when you transportalize or do you legitimately die and just have a clone running around that’s exactly like you. Is it possible your soul goes to haunt or possess your clone? Is there any way to tell? Who gives a shit anyway they’ve worked so far for people and they’re convenient so who honestly cares if people are lining up to die when they use the transportalizer.” He took another breath. “Anyway when I opened my eyes in the wormhole I guess I saw myself, but like infinitely, in an endless conga line of Daves, which was pretty trippy to be honest, and somehow I just kinda knew what it meant and that it was me from every single point on my timeline and a line can have infinite points on it because you can just keep splitting it into smaller and smaller pieces, I think this is seeping into calculus territory but I can’t be sure, but you get the point?”
“yes.” Her arms were getting tired.
“So technically my life can have infinite moments in it even if it ends, like a crazy-ass time fractal,” he took his weight off his right foot. “And there was another line of Daves that went through the first one at a right angle, and again I’m not sure how but I think it was me from every alternate timeline, and one of them gave me a thumbs up, and really this story is just very self centered to the point where it kinda sucks I’m sorry Jade,”
“You have nothing to be sorry for.” She smiled as she was now floating right in front of him, at eye level, where she couldn’t possibly be holding him up.
It was best he didn’t think about it. “Cool.” He said, “so how do you think that relates to us being able to fly?”
“Well you know the way we see the hampshirians as floating boulders of flesh?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s kinda like that!”
“That still doesn’t explain anything.”
“Here,” she took his hands and started leading him away up into the black, cloud-covered sky, which was starting to look much more beautiful and dreamy and welcoming than any perpetually overcast sky ever had. “It doesn’t have to make sense,” she said, still smiling so sweetly at him, “I can explain the details of ‘why’ later. For now let’s just enjoy it.”
“Go hogwild? Ape-shit? Foam-barking-bananas?”
“Yes. That.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Somewhere, it was snowing. Vriska didn’t quite get this at first, as she wasn’t familiar with the icy joy of snow. It hadn’t ever snowed where she lived on Alternia, it was too warm for that. It didn’t snow in the vacuum of space, either, and really the closest thing to snow that she’d ever seen had been ashes, drifting and fluttering slowly down in grey flakes. Now she lies on her back with the blanket of cold snow hugging her from below, melting and seeping through her clothes and chilling her soul in a way that made her feel more alive than she had felt when she wasn’t dead. Before she opens her eyes to see it, she can feel the cold kisses of snowflakes landing on her cheeks.It had been nothing but chaos just moments before this. The last thing she could remember was the terrible entropy of a thousand souls crying every wrong she’d ever done them, and now she knew the names of every single one. She recalled the names and faces one at a time as she lied in the deep cold of the snow, recapping. There was peace here, as the wind tickled wind-chimes off in the distance. A deep and restful peace. For the first time in a long time, she was able to take a deep breath.It was a kind man's voice that finally brought her out of it and got her to open her eyes again.“Hi!” He said.Bright blue eyes behind rectangle glasses and clean black hair looked down at her as she lie in the snow, standing in front of a grey overcast sky. He was smiling quizzically at her, there were snowflakes in his hair.“Are you a troll?”Vriska blinked, this was a very silly question with an obvious answer. “Yes. Are you a human?”“Yea.” He crouched next to her. “Why are you laying in the snow?”“I think I just got back from Purgatory.” She made no move to get up or back away, she didn’t feel afraid of anything anymore.“Purgatory, huh?”“Yeah.”“Yeah, I heard it can be rough for trolls. Here,” he offered her a hand to help her up.For a while she just stared at it, unmoving, before finally deciding that she could trust this funny looking human and taking his hand firmly so he could hoist her to her feet. She was significantly taller than him, being a young adult troll, so it was difficult, but somehow they managed to get her up with some awkward stumbling and grabbing shoulders. Once on her feet, Vriska observed her view of all the snow from up here, and shivered.He watched her wrap her arms tightly around herself and look somewhat solemnly off into some great distance. “You look cold,” he noted, “want my jacket?”Vriska had already been somewhat perplexed by the sight of all the snow, but now she turned to this guy and looked at him with even more befuddlement. The last time anyone had offered her their coat was way back when Terezi and herself had gone for a walk along the coast when the cold front was sweeping in from Alternia’s western sea. She’d kept that jacket in her one secret box of purely sentimental things, and would have kept it till the day she died if Terezi had never come and destroyed her ships and everything inside them. In some strange way it was as if Terezi was finally taking her jacket back.She looked at John and contemplated the way he addressed her. Nobody talked to her like that anymore, nobody was this openly friendly. Once again she hesitated before taking him up on his offer.“Sure. Thanks.” She took his jacket as he pulled it off and handed it to her. For a moment she was quiet. “What’s your name?”He smiled. “I’m John. What’s yours?”~It was difficult to say for certain what Rose was thinking as she gazed up at the endless black sky, a small smile hinted at in the corners of her mouth. Kanaya watched her watch it, occasionally glancing up to see if the sky had changed. It never did. They stood together on the roof of the town hall, having escaped the gala below, and from here they had a beautiful, breathtaking view of the deep purple city skyline. With this gorgeous view below them, Kanaya was baffled as to why Rose insisted on watching the sky.“Rose,” she put a hand gently on Rose’s shoulder, “what do you see?”Rose’s smile widened. “Oh, nothing.” She decided to do her brother this favor and keep his secret, not even telling her trusted fiancé that she could see him and Jade just thinly veiled by the grey clouds as they drifted up into the sky again with hands locked, spinning around each other like they didn’t have a single care in the world. Flying, somehow, and Dave only had his boxers on. Just watching them could make one feel like flying themself, the sight of them so carelessly happy was so uplifting in all the spiritual and emotional ways possible. “Nothing at all.”She finally had to tear her eyes away from the terribly sweet and lovely display when she noticed Jade sliding off her coat, letting it slip off her shoulders and drift away into the purple city below them. There was something fundamentally sexy about the way she did it, too, and Rose looked back to Kanaya instead. “Let's go back to the room.”~Away they spun, holding hands as they swooped and soared over the clouds that hid them. Jade broke away from Dave for a second to try a gracefully executed swoop that looped back around, taking her upside down, and ending in this lovely little pirouette. She was delighted to see Dave follow right after her after a moment’s watching in awe, trying it out for himself. He felt very silly at some points but having Jade laugh with such honest joy as she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and cheered him on exorcised the anxiety right the fuck out of him.He would start having a hard time keeping his eyes off the city below them, which was bad because if he thought about it for too long he would fall. Jade had learned this lesson herself the first several times she’d tried flying. In order to keep his attention, and also to make it easier for herself to move around, she tried taking off her coat, and when he got a little red faced and asked her “hey uh Jade why are you taking off your coat it’s gotta be like cold as hell up here”She simply responded, “well you’re moving about in your underwear just fine aren’t you? You haven’t frozen over yet so I’m assuming that as long as we’re giving the laws of physics the middle finger, the laws of thermodynamics can kindly fuck off as well.”“Ah,” He said, and even though she still had her undergarments on and they’d literally just had sex he tried giving her some respect by looking away at the city below them, which was the exact opposite of what she wanted him to do.It was probably better to just tell him he shouldn’t think about the fact that they were flying or look at anything that might make him come full circle with this realization for fear that he would instantly drop out of the sky the second he acknowledged it. “Hey!” She said and quickly got his cheek in her hand to bring his eyes back to her face. “Don’t look down or you might fall.”“oh ok”She smiled at him, and he gave her this crooked little shaky smile back. After laughing softly to herself at how cute he was, she drifted away to continue swooping and soaring this way and that, joyfully practicing her aerial acrobatics. He ran a hand through his hair once and then followed quickly after her. Flying on her back, Jade watched him fly in front of the black void above her, nothing but the faint lights of the city below them to illuminate their skin. They collided and spun away happily into the night, wrapping their arms around each other.“Hey,” He said softly when their faces were close, and she grinned.“Hi.”“This is really great, you know, we need to get Karkat in on this.” He lightly brushed his nose against hers.“Oh, yes, absolutely. But I’m not sure if he can fly, he never really had one of those spiritual awakenings into higher dimensions at all.” She rested her forehead against his. The whole world spun around them and instead it seemed like they were the ones who were still.“Hm,” he nuzzled forward a little, “we could still try though, right? He’d probably make a huge fuss out of it but we should still try.”“Yea,” She was talking right against his lips at this point, “yea I’d be down. Hey, hey Dave, hey,”“Hm?”“Kiss me.”So he did kiss her, and it was absolutely lovely in all the best ways, and he continued kissing down her neck, down her collarbones and down her sternum, making her giggle when he kissed her stomach, all the long way down to the soft little curly patch of fur between her legs. She wound up with her legs sort of slung over his shoulders, head thrown back with pure delight as they happily drifted off into the distance in a wonky T shape. Her lost bra and panties would revolutionize the lives of two incredibly lucky Carapacians when they inevitably found them caught on one of the pointy decorative bits of the buildings.Something was beginning to happen in the sky while they merrily fooled around and overall didn’t pay attention to it, stars were starting to emerge from the endless black veil. Little dazzling pinpricks of light popping up here and there as Derse’s detached moon drifted out of the empty sector it had been traversing through for so long. One by one they slowly filled up the black sky, the starlight casting new spells on their skin. Jade ran her hands through his hair and tugged while noticing the stars, but passed it off as just the kind of stars that swim across ones vision when they probably aren’t getting enough blood to their head.Eventually she’d had enough of the mind-blowing kisses and would need a while to recover, happily hitching a piggy back ride on him with her arms slung lazily around his shoulders. He drifted off gaily with her on his back and didn’t notice how very far away from Derse’s Moon they were getting, as he’d been neglecting to look down, and now because of the stars it was even less likely he’d look down. Together they looked up in awe at the pretty lights in the black sky, smiling and pointing out constellations they could recognize and pointing out constellations they didn’t recognize.“From the looks of it,” Jade said softly into his ear, “we’re starting to drift into sector psi-3, (ψ-3,) and at this rate we’ll be close to sector psi-one by artificial morning.”“Psi one is where the government’s home base is. That’s, that’s homeworld.” Dave’s smile was fading as he looked up at the slowly changing stars.“Yeah.” Jade nuzzled her face into his neck from behind. “We’ll have to go to war tomorrow. Now is a good a time as any.” They were quiet for a while, watching the stars turn together. “...Dave?” She asked him softly.“Hm?” He turned to look more in the direction of her face, although it was difficult to really see what’s going on on his shoulder. Her hair was flying everywhere.“I’m going on a very dangerous mission tomorrow.” Jade spoke very quietly, but right below his ear. “Whether or not I’m successful will be critical to us having an advantage. Rose, Calliope and I are going to try talking to the New New Hampshirians, to get them to ally with us, but I’m the only one who will actually be able to go into their dimension.” She hugged him a little tighter. “It’s possible I might not come back.”Jade hadn’t realized how very loose Dave had been up till this point until now, as he immediately tensed up. “I’m sorry what the fuck hell no Jade,” he tried to look her in the eyes, “you’re not, you’re not going on a goddamn suicide mission,”“There’s a fair chance I’ll come back just fine...” she tried to be soothing,“No,” he shook his head and pulled her gently off his back so he could hold her by the shoulders at arms length and look her in the eyes, “fuck no, I like just got you guys back you’re not,”“Hey,” she put a hand gently to his cheek,“You’re not,”“It’ll be for the good of everyone, if I succeed there’s no way the government will be able to defeat us.”“You’re not,,”“You have to look at the big picture with me Dave. This is bigger than all of us.”“You’re not,” emotion was starting to leak into his voice as he appeared to be utterly stuck on those last two words like a broken record, some dew already forming at the corners of his eyes. This was very distressing news for him to hear.“Here,” she pulled him into a hug, which seemed to get him unstuck.“You’re not going and fucking dying on me when I’ve only just gotten back to y’all like a few days ago, I just got back,,” he hugged her tightly and hid his face in her hair.“I know.” She rubbed his back, “I know.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
x = dimension of the cube
y = # of faces
z = # of lines
a = # of corners
y = x(x+1)
z = x(a/2)
a = 2^x
Once, a friend stayed up for about an hour solving the math that made these formulas possible, while I was talking to them on the phone. They were doing the math to calculate how many straws I’d need to build a three-dimensional representation of a five-dimensional cube, because at the time it was a big hobby of mine to make straw hypercubes in my room, and I had been making one just then while on the phone with them. I don’t know what it was that had driven them to do hours of math to solve this problem, but whatever it was I want them to know I appreciated it endlessly, and still do. I never got an answer as to why they stopped talking to me.
There are other, less painful things I’ll never get the answer to, like what ever happened to my watch that my grandmother gave me or what the hell it actually is that lives in the theoretical fourth dimension. Yet somehow some lovely person in Seattle gave me the answer to how many straws I’d need to build a 5D cube, and that gives me hope.
There are different things that could actually be in the fourth dimension.
It could be just more space, like I’ve been talking about in this fic, where stranger aliens live and muddle about. It could also be alternate realities. In the fourth dimension, there is room for alternate timelines to actually exist in physical space, so very close to us but sitting up in a direction that we can’t comprehend. Because if you take a three dimensional universe, you can split it into infinite two dimensional universes. Listen. Picture a three dimensional block. In a perfect world, you can cut that block into infinitely thin infinite two dimensional squares. Picture a three dimensional universe. You can cut that universe into infinitely thin infinite two dimensional universes.
You can’t picture a four dimensional universe, but go ahead and try to anyway. You can cut that 4D universe into infinitely three dimensional infinite 3D universes. Thus there is actual room in real space for the multiverse. I think this is what media means when it talks about “other dimensions” and then shows the characters just stepping into an alternate timeline.
Another thing that could be in the fourth dimension, besides just more space or the multiverse, could be angels. Angels and demons and whatnot are said to be able to interfere with our world without us actually ever seeing them, and the more I think about it the more it seems possible that all the spiritual shit they talk about is physically happening just out of sight in the fourth dimension. If you had all of someone’s insides and organs lain out for you like a blueprint, because you’re secretly a four dimensional thing, surely you could easily muck around with it a little and fix them up and heal them from the inside out and everyone calls it a miracle. You could probably talk to people from the fourth dimension too, and maybe this is where people start hearing voices.
There’s also room for the afterlife in the fourth dimension.
This is all very possibly bullshit but bear with me.
Now the real question is which is it? Which one of the three or four is most likely to be in the theoretical fourth dimension? WELL, if we take it up a notch again, to the fifth dimension, there’s room in physical space for all three 1/2 of these ideas, just as there is room for a 3D multiverse in the 4th dimension.
The afterlife is in the fifth dimension, is what I’m trying to say.
You can just skim through all that shit in the first part.
Vriska stands in the afterlife, unaware of the fact that her soul has gone into the fifth dimension because who actually gives a shit, and John stands next to her in a similar state of blissful unawareness. Snow drops slowly around them in little flakes, falling from a grey and overcast sky that light still manages to pour out of. The aforementioned light then hits the snow covered ground and reflects violently off of it, glistening and glaring in their eyes and amplifying itself. They go for a walk.
Along their walk they pass by memories, fabrications made of false light with feelings attached, faces and places. They visit John's old home, and the old golden ships, and they visit earth and alternia as all the places and terrains mix together in a patchwork of thoughts and memory. They stop in front of a window on alternia, the window a small ice cream shop on the corner. This shop was an oasis of calm and happiness among a desert of violence and angst in Vriska’s childhood, and she explained as much to John as they looked inside.
Vriska saw herself as a young girl again in the glass, so full of life and energy and light. She watched as her younger self sit down with her old childhood best friend, gleefully clutching their milkshakes. It was Terezi sitting across from her, Terezi when she was younger, the same age as Vriska, and both of them had the biggest smiles and the best laughs. Present Vriska, ghost Vriska, the Vriska outside the glass looking in at her old memory, huffed a small laugh and put a hand up to the glass as she watched. They were so cute, the scene was so sweet. She envied herself, and in a sense silently wished she could go back to that.
John watched her face quietly as Vriska witnessed, for the second time, as Terezi tied the stem of a cherry into a knot with her teeth, and as past Vriska applauded her sarcastically with a smile. Ghost Vriska frowned. For a moment she was back, just watching them was like being there again in that corner shop, she could feel all the joy she’d felt in that moment so long ago. Then little snowflakes from one of Johns memories came down in gentle, quiet flurries and stuck to the glass, so out of place in this memory. There was no snow here, there never was, reminding her that this was just an illusion of sorts and just a memory, nothing more.
She took a few steps back from the glass, and John didn’t question how downcast she seemed now. They passed by several other memories on the way, and Terezi was appearing more and more frequently in them. Eventually, as Vriska and John got to talking, Vriska had to come full circle with the fact that Terezi had always been a massive part of her life, and that she always would be. Vriska was entirely in love with Terezi, everything about her, perhaps since they say they’d met, and now she was just going to have to deal with that for the rest of her time here in the afterlife, which should’ve been forever.
Should’ve been.
~~~
A memory played in Karkat’s head as he tried to sleep, a memory of dancing. He’d often felt ugly, unworthy, sometimes edging on suicidal but somehow it had all vaporized in the pleasure of their company. “Their” being Dave and Jade, and when Jade had taken him out to dance in the hazy crowd of Carapacians under the tall purple ceiling, it had been sweet. She’d held both his hands in hers and had been smiling a brilliant grin of a smile, alternating feet with him, her hair bouncing around with her movements, the ribbon she’d put in her hair standing out in his memory. She was everything stunning and adorable and beautiful in the world as she danced, holding his hands and jumping with him.
There’d been a certain heat in the crowd, and the energy had morphed into something else, something more enchanting when a slower, more romantic song had come on. He could remember clearly the way she’d merrily put her hands on his hips, letting him rest his arms over her shoulders as they all started to sway. Dave had come back into the scene after he’d gotten to catch his breath and had a drink, because apparently he’d worn himself out before he’d been able to wear out Jade, and had carelessly slung his arms around both of them. Without breaking them up he swayed with them, comedically, and Jade had laughed before putting one of her arms around his waist as well.
The night had gone on long and lovely, and the heat of the dance floor had somehow carried with them when they all marched back to their designated room. Jade had kept the energy alive with her ukulele and Dave and himself had kept the merriness alive with their awful, boisterous singing. The heat had stayed, and maybe even gotten heavier, as the three of them had gone into their room and shut the door behind them, as the three of them had crawled into bed together, as the three of them had...
The heat remained, hanging over them like a heavy, comforting blanket as they had fallen asleep soundly curled around each other in the soft purple sheets. And then it left. It left Karkat in his sleep, when he’d had his eyes shut to the rest of the universe, dreaming of things that had just recently happened to him. It had left him alone and cold and clutching the blankets while subconsciously trying to fight off the ever lurking feeling of insignificance and worthlessness. The heat had left him, it went to go off flying through the cold abyss that hung over Derse’s moon, watching the stars come out as it wore the last of its energy out in a burst of soft, sweet lady pubes and enthusiastic lips.
Karkat stirred in the troubling lack of warmth that had settled next to him in the bed in the place where his lovers used to be, substituting poorly for them. He opened his eyes a little and realized they were missing, and sat up groggily to rub at his eyes, which stung a little. No amount of rubbing was able to purge the stinging out, and he felt that if he’d be able to tear up maybe his eyes would clear, but no tears came. He was stuck feeling dry and a little bit high. For a moment in the dark and the dizziness of having just woken up he was struck with the deep anxiety that Dave and Jade weren’t real, that he’d been alone this whole time and dreaming them up as a way of coping with his utterly feeble and pointless existence.
They were too good to be true, but despite it all they were true anyway. Just missing for the moment. Mysteriously missing. He called out groggily for them, eyelids still heavy. “Dave?”
No answer.
“Jade?”
Silence.
His voice was a little hoarse from sleep and things associated. Grunting, He languidly pulled aside the blankets to get up and pad barefoot to the restroom, or the ablution closet. When he emerged, he had a strong and compelling feeling that he should check the balcony, and was too tired to question it. So, to the balcony he went. Without having put any clothes on, he rested his elbows heavily on the railing and gazed up into the cloudy sky, and was too sleepy to be startled by what he saw.
Drifting gracefully down from the clouds with all the splendor and elegance of the Milky Way came Jade, like a blessing sent from the heavens, entirely naked with her long dark hair all messy and wild, looking like a genuine fucking goddess, because as far as Karkat was concerned, she was in fact a genuine fucking goddess.
And Dave, with his dick in the wind, came barreling slowly out of the sky with her, holding her hand as the starlight cast some stupid beautiful enchantment on his silky-ass bastard gorgeous hair and his glistening goddamn beautiful skin, which was a star-map of freckles all on its own.
“DAVE!” Karkat called drowsily, “JADE! HEY, MIND IF I ASK WHAT THE *FUCK* YOU TWO ARE DOING??”
Jade giggled as she descended upon him like a rain descends upon a starving land that has known nothing but drought for seven months. “Hi Karkat. Sorry we didn’t wake you, you were sleeping so peacefully, I didn’t want to disturb you. You don’t get nearly enough rest! I wasn’t gonna wake up Dave either but... I guess he’s a light sleeper!” She landed on the railing with all the weight of a floating downy feather and dropped down onto the balcony in much the same manner that butterflies land on flowers with.
“Yeah,” Dave agreed with her as he sort of careened gracefully into the side of the balcony and swung his legs over. “But really we’d love to have you with us next time. Flying’s the fuckin shit actually, you gotta get in on this.”
“FLYING??” Karkat begrudgingly accepted kisses on the cheeks from both of them as they all started inside, “FUCKING,,, NEVERMIND. AS LONG AS YOU DON’T SERIOUSLY HURT YOURSELVES WHILE DOING IT. JUST,, DON’T BE STUPID.” He couldn’t help smiling a little as Dave pecked him on the cheek again and moved to kiss him on the lips. “COME TO BED, SHITHEAD.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
You’re not sure what it means. You look up into the swirling abyss above you and the layers upon layers of universes sinking away below you, the magnificent and terrifying display of creatures surrounding you, the vast horrors that you shouldn’t be able to comprehend all looking down at you with a thousand eyes and smiling at you with a hundred mouths like graveyards, teeth like tombs, set in valleys of red clay soil that is soaked muddy with rainwater, and you don’t quite know what to make of it. You blink, and let yourself sink slowly out of it, and open your eyes again in your own dimension as the dream recedes from you like the tide recedes from the shore, slipping out of your mind till you can hardly remember it.
You remember two things, two things left in the sand after the water is gone, after the memory has slunk away into the sea. You remember a cricket bat, and you remember a rulebook. The rulebook was nigh uninterpretable, and the cricket bat was difficult to hold with only three dimensional hands, as it was four dimensional, so really you have no idea what to make of any of that either. It all seems so silly in retrospect, and you have no idea what it could mean, and you don’t really care anymore when Dave puts a hand on your cheek and looks at you one last time with eyes that want you to stay but a small, warm smile that says you’ll do great.
Your name is Jade Harley, and you can remember only this much as you wake up next to your two lovers on the morning before the war, the dawn of the final day. You kiss them both good morning and, after having gotten ready, you head out with a bag slung over your shoulder and a long gun held loosely in your other hand. You walk with the gait of someone heading into a fight that they don’t entirely want to participate in, but are confident they’ll win anyway. You stride with the strength and sureness of a calvary, and look sharp and steady ahead of you as you walk out into the city, the sky hung black above you, scattered with stars now, a single blue gas giant looming not far away.
It looks beautiful, from here. Karkat and Dave aren’t far behind you, following you out as Rose, Kanaya and Calliope greet you. The three women will aid you in your journey to make an alliance with the New New Hampshirians, but once you breach the fourth dimension you will be almost entirely on your own. Dave and Karkat wish you the best of luck, both of them kiss you, Karkat looks like he’s about to cry, as you had filled him in on the details of your mission this morning. He knows exactly how dangerous the thing you’re about to do is, and he respects you for it, but he sure as hell doesn’t approve of you risking your life so ludicrously. Neither does Dave, but there isn’t much they can do.
You’re going to go through with this, and your success will spell a sure victory over the government as you know it.
~
Your name is Dave Strider. You remind yourself who you are, what sort of shit you’re into, what your situation is, just generally having one of those ‘self’ moments as you pull yourself together. The controls of your trusted spaceship lie in front of you, and you run your hands lightly over them, feeling all the familiar grooves and switches. You know this dashboard all too well, on your side at least. WV is in the seat next to you starting up the engines, and he knows his side just as well as you know yours. It’s comforting to look at him, he seems so calm and okay with his situation in this moment. It’s like he knows everything will turn out fine.
You know WV well enough to know he’ll start looking a lot more nervous when the battle actually starts, but for now he is steady. A war veteran, a been-there-done-that sort of fella, weary of the fighting and ready to join hands to end the suffering. You feel like you can lean on him at times, but not literally because he doesn’t appreciate you resting your elbow on his head like he’s an arm rest just because he’s the perfect height for it. Take a deep breath. Wrap your hand around the throttle and rest your fingers on the switches, think of some creative ways you could use the time function in combat.
Something tells you that everything will work out alright, and something else tells you that everyone you love will die and oh fuck oh god oh no they’re all gonna be dead tomorrow and you might be dead by then too and the loss of it hits you harder than you can handle and they’re not even gone yet, just the thought has you reeling. Shake your head and take another deep breath. You can hear the other pilots starting up their engines, which are all marginally less shitty than yours. In fact, the only reason you still insist on flying in this tattered patchwork of duct tape and peeling paint is because, one, you love it very much, and two, because it’s really good at being a vessel through which you can channel the weird time-dimensional warp shit you guess you can do now.
For a moment you wonder if you can simply back out and not fight, but then the moment passes with another deep breath as you flip the switches and start up the final phases of the engine as WV had gotten it all warmed up for you. You try to think of something simple you can run through your head every time you feel like backing out, or every time you start to wonder if all of this is worth it. You try a few different things, like the image of the starving troll children on the corners of streets in Halavan Gatta Nine, tugging on your sleeve and asking you for money when you hardly have enough to pay for the rocket fuel you came to buy, or the sight of the dersites in their unshakable motivation to end the cruelty towards their kind, or Roxy.
A blood test told you she should be your mother but as time goes on it makes less and less sense for that to ever happen. Like a prequel that starts out like it’ll line up with the story ahead of it, but as it goes on it just keeps getting less and less compatible with the narrative it was originally supposed to lead into, until the guy that was supposed to be the protagonist’s father straight up dies and the producers have to fire their writers and scrap the whole thing and try again with a new crew. You’d do nearly anything to protect her, mother or not, because in a way she’d become something like a close friend, even a sister. The thing is, you know she can protect herself, and you trust her to not be stupid, so even the thought of Roxy doesn’t quite make the fire burn hot enough to want to really tackle an entire government at any cost.
You feel the ship start to rattle as you ease into takeoff, the docking chamber distorting slightly around you as you speed off into the void that lies beyond. Caledscratch, your ship, is out near the front of the fleet of smaller fighter ships because you’re just cooler than them. You lead them out into space, trailing behind an even larger fleet of Prospitian ships that you just know Roxy is leading. Karkat is leading the Derse fleet, which doesn’t surprise you, because once you really got to see him in action commanding his little army you could tell he’d wanted this since childhood. Dirk is Karkats right hand man, in a way, but insisted on being a foot soldier of sorts so he could personally punch the fools in the face who thought it was okay to put people in experimental, inhumane laboratories and torture them until they’d lost their will to fucking live.
Which sounded about right for him. You’re still trying to think of a simple thought you can run through your head for motivation, and while you’re finding plenty of good reasons to fight, you can’t quite find a thought that summarizes the whole point of you being here. You just need something simple to pin at the front of your head, a “do it for her” with a little picture attached, the face of the person you’d do literally anything for. Just something to get you through whatever horrors you’re about to face. Maybe Karkat and Jade will suffice, maybe WV. Maybe nothing at all can really motivate you, and maybe you should just try and dissociate through the whole thing.
Stars start to whizz past as you speed into hyperdrive, heading into sector ψ-1. This is where you split up. The plan is to take the government from all sides, surrounding them with each of your armies, which you have several of. Several, including MindFang’s fleet. You think back to this morning, when the sky loomed black over the streets of derse, a grim silence collecting in the atmosphere like mold. You think back to this morning, when you and Aradia and Roxy and Jane all stood together on the edge of the purple moon, hands outstretched, combining your abilities into a particularly powerful fraymotif, powerful enough to raise an entire pirate fleet from the dead.
You remember the sound of a thousand wails as a cyclone of souls crawled back into their flesh, reformed from the atoms scattered across the void, the sight of an entire golden fleet crumbling in reverse until all the ships looked as though they were brand new, brought back from the past, brought back from the dead. You had to remember, because you had to be aware, because you had to pay close attention to every detail of it so you could turn back the clock on every part of the entire fleet until it had re-assembled itself into its old former glory.
Roxy, Jane, Aradia and yourself had raised an entire massive fleet of legendary ghost pirates this morning, and in return for bringing them back you had them ally with you to help take down the government. The toxic gleam of MindFang’s grin as she stepped back into reality and took her first breath of air stuck in your memory all too vividly. She had thanked you personally, and had even bent down to shake your hand, and you couldn’t help but notice how cold her skin was. The whole experience had left you kind of rattled as you’d climbed into the cockpit of your ship, and it continues to rattle you as you fly off into the great vast yonder with your fleet of fighter pilots.
Your breath shakes a little as you clutch the controls, blasting off into battle and stuck in the present, forced to focus if you want to fucking survive. WV seems to notice, as he seems to notice a lot of things. No words need to be said here, you know he’ll want you to calm down. He does something you didn’t expect, though. He turns on the radio in front of you, switches it to AUX, and starts up your favorite playlist. The music is awesome, just unexpected. This surprises you a little, but in a very good way. It’s... thoughtful of him. Nice.
The music seems to work instantly, both hyping you up and calming you down at the same time. You crack a smile at WV. He knows you well enough to know how to ease your mind and get you in the zone for this sort of thing. This sort of —war— thing. Danger Zone by Kenny Loggins comes on and your smile gets even more genuine. This song is fucking perfect. You nod your head to the beat and everything seems to fall into place. Then the bullets start to fly.
~~~
Your name is Aradia Megido, and the entire fifth army consists purely of You. You are the fifth army. There’s the army of prospitians, led by Jane and Callie and Roxy, there’s the army of dersites, led by Karkat and Dirk and Jake, there’s the army of ghost pirates that Dave, Roxy, Jane and yourself raised from the dead, led by Vriska, there’s the army of volunteer pilots from various places, led by Kanaya and Dave, and then there’s you. You and your 6000+ doppelgängers from failed timelines. You figured out how to summon your doppelgängers this morning, as you tapped into the stream of time with Dave alongside you and reversed the clock for the entirety of the galaxy’s largest pirate fleet.
There are two lines in the void, two dimensions of time. One line consisting of yourself from every moment on your own timeline, an infinite conga line of Dave’s, or an infinite conga line of Aradias in your case, and then there is a second line that crosses through it at a right angle. Standing side by side, shoulder to shoulder, is yourself from every alternate timeline, and while Dave is better at tapping into the conga line, you happen to be better at tapping into the shoulder to shoulder line. So Dave is better at reversing or speeding up the clock, and you are better at summoning yourself from alternate timelines. It’s not that you can’t tap into the other lines, it’s just that you’re best at this one.
So you summon an army. An army of you. All from failed timelines. Sollux looks on somewhat concerned as you lead them into battle from your station in the mothership for all the Aradias, as he acts as your pilot. The battle begins, the government senses your presence, and the drones and fighter ships begin to fly. You can connect to every one of your doppelgängers, it seems, and you can feel what they feel, see what they see, it’s bizarre. From here you can lead all of them, like you’re a hivemind of sorts. You feel immensely powerful, it’s awesome.
Every hit, every gunshot, every death from any of the Aradias, you can feel it. You can feel it as the drones come and take out a significant portion of your army. You can feel as your army advances and kills whole fleets of government ships, and you realize you’re going to have to confront every one of those trolls you just killed with your clones in purgatory. Things get less awesome. You stand up straighter, take a deep breath, look sharply ahead of you at the statistics on the screen. It’s easier to handle when it’s numbers, easier to swallow the hundreds of deaths and wounds that are currently taking place.
You realize with a rush of confidence and adrenaline that you aren’t scared, you aren’t afraid of anything anymore. You’ve been through Purgatory once, you can do it again. You can feel every punch thrown by your army as they drop off the ships and onto the enemy fleet. You can feel every bruise and cut and gunshot and death and your fists tighten on the railing in front of you as you stare sharply at the screens, trying to dissociate from it and focus on it at the same time. You scream when an entire ship is destroyed with 150+ Aradias on it, as well as several hundred government soldiers, because one of you set off a bomb. You feel every single death and nothing has ever hurt worse. This is when Sollux gets seriously worried.
He can see the screens you’re looking at, he can see the numbers and the death count, and he can see it on your face that you can feel all of it as you keep looking sharply ahead, jaw clenched tightly. The heat of the battle continues to get more intense, and a rhythm begins to set in, every death and every wound. It all falls into a rhythm like a heavy heartbeat, or feet hitting the pavement as you run, making you feel alive and a little lightheaded, but determined. You clutch the railing as you take in the battle in its entirety, and you don’t even realize you’re shaking until Sollux calls your name and puts a hand on your shoulder to steady you.
It’s been days, perhaps longer, that you’ve been in this sort of trance, leading the battle with your mind and feeling every single part of it. You’ve hardly taken care of yourself in that time. The concern is clear in Sollux’s voice as he watches you take on a hundred deaths at once, with your teeth gritted and fists clenched. It hardly registers with you that he’s asking you to stop, a death after a death after a death strikes your mind and you can hardly tear your eyes away from the numbers as the death count goes up. It’s been days. Perhaps longer. There are only a hundred or so of you left.
Sollux is sick of it, he could hardly handle one of you dying, much less a whole army of you. He wraps his arms around you and hugs you tightly, and then you hear him. He asks you to stop, to pull back, to retreat before any more of you can die. He’s sick of it, he tells you, he’s sick of it and can’t fucking take it. You stop shaking and slowly come back to where you are, out of the heads of an entire army and back into just yourself, as just one person instead of a thousand, and hug him back. Okay, you tell him. You’ll stop. From the looks of it, your side is winning. You’ve helped out plenty.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
As you leave your entire life behind to enter the most terrifying experience of your lifetime, you try to remind yourself why it is you’re doing this. Jade Harley, they say, the witch of the cosmos. The stars swirl in your cauldron and the universe is yours to manipulate. Or so they say. You don’t feel all that awesome compared to this, as you say goodbye to Rose and Calliope. In fact, you feel infinitely small and thin as you step up into the fourth dimension and let your reality sink away. The Hampshirians smell you coming and close in, and there it is. You look up into the swirling abyss above you and the layers upon layers of universes sinking away below you, the magnificent and terrifying display of creatures surrounding you, the vast horrors that you shouldn’t be able to comprehend all looking down at you with a thousand eyes and smiling at you with a hundred mouths like graveyards, teeth like tombs, set in valleys of red clay soil that is soaked muddy with rainwater, just like in your dream.Now you understand it, now you comprehend. Pulling up the scroll that Rose gave you, you read off her carefully chosen words. Kanaya and WV had helped her write it, a peace contract which requires you to do anything they ask in order to gain their allegiance. You can say no to their demands, of course, but if you do you probably won’t get them to side with you. Hopefully you can keep the diplomacy clean. They stop and listen to you. The Hampshirians know you by this point, they recognize you as a formidable force from your species. They think and talk among themselves after having heard what you have to say, and seem to come to an agreement.The New New Hampshirians want you to come back to New New Hampshire with them and play a game of Brockian Ultra Cricket. If you can win, or at least put up a good fight and put on a show, they’ll fight in your cute little war.“Uh” you say. You’ve never played a game of Brockian Ultra Cricket, and quite frankly you’ve never even heard of it. The Hampshirians laugh in their own wildly bizarre way and tell you they’ll give you an abridged summary of the abridged summary, due to the fact that the one and only time a complete list of rules was assembled into a single volume, the book collapsed under its own weight into a black hole. They bless you with a third eye with which to see the fourth dimension better and one of them pulls up the rules on her MegaBannana E-Phone X-6^7. She reads them aloud to you from her second set of seven mouths after briefly complaining about the wi-fi-fi connection with the first set. Some of the rules are as follows:“Rule One: Grow at least three extra legs. You won’t need them, but it keeps the crowds amused.Rule Two: Find one extremely good Brockian Ultra Cricket player. Clone him off a few times. This saves an enormous amount of tedious selection and training.Rule Three: Put your team and the opposing team in a large field and build a high wall around them. The reason for this is that, though the game is a major spectator sport, the frustration experienced by the audience at not actually being able to see what’s going on leads them to imagine that it’s a lot more exciting than it really is. A crowd that has just watched a rather humdrum game experiences far less life-affirmation than a crowd that believes it has just missed the most dramatic event in sporting history.Rule Four: Throw lots of assorted items of sporting equipment over the wall for the players. Anything will do – cricket bats, basecube bats, tennis guns, skis, anything you can get a good swing with.Rule Five: The players should now lay about themselves for all they are worth with whatever they find to hand. Whenever a player scores a “hit” on another player, he should immediately run away as fast as he can and apologize from a safe distance. Apologies should be concise, sincere, and, for maximum clarity and points, delivered through a megaphone.Rule Six: The winning team shall be the first team that wins.After the Hampshirian had finished reading the few rules she could find in the wiki aloud, they all immediately started quarreling among themselves as to how these rules are to be interpreted. You have a feeling that it's going to be a long day.~~~Terezi watches from her post aboard the Redglare as the golden fleet of pirate ships descend upon the battlefield, shimmering in all their glory, glistening among the stars. She thought she’d destroyed them all, she could vividly remember the smell of a thousand golden pirate ships burning on the edge of oblivion, the taste of death and spilled breath, the glory and the despair. She could remember the pain she’d felt killing Vriska, and the solemnity of having to explain her death to his honourable tyranny. Never was there a moment so overcast, never was there a moment so critical.Vriska grabs a cord from the bow of the golden mothership and swings down to the bridge with all the grace and confidence of a true cosmic captain, and Terezi watches as she descends in a golden chariot towards her, sword in hand and hat on head. She stops in front of Terezi, some invisible breeze blowing through her hair as the stars erupt into battle behind her in a beautiful and terrible display that is awesome in every respect, yet it cannot manage to be quite as beautiful and terrible as the warm smile that Vriska gives to Terezi as she steps off of her chariot and onto the bridge of the RedGlare. Terezi sniffs, and frowns.Vriska hadn’t gotten everything she deserved, but at the same time she had, a thousand times again, in some strange way that made absolutely no sense at all. Some words were exchanged, and for a while nobody moved. They talked about how Vriska was alive again, about what they were fighting for, what all their plans were. Somehow their conversation ended with Vriska admitting she loved Terezi, in her own wild way, and Terezi’s nose scrunched up as she blinked back tears.“AFTER ALL THE SHIT I’VE DONE,” Terezi said, gripping her cane, “AND AFTER ALL THE SHIT *YOU’VE* DONE,” she continued, and couldn’t bring herself to speak the last few words to the sentence that were in her throat, spoken instead through the look in her eyes as she looked up at Vriska and saw her old childhood friend, the only woman she’d ever really loved. “You still love me?” Her eyes asked, as her face broke into a shaky grin and a tear rolled down her cheek.“Yea man,” Vriska answered in a hug instead of with words, and couldn’t tell if Terezi had started crying or laughing. “Sure do. And it only took a long walk through the afterlife with some nerd with glasses to figure it out.”~~~Brockian Ultra Cricket isn’t what you’d expected. You’re not sure what you had expected, but it hadn’t been this.This is the most important part, you remind yourself. It’s the most important part of this entire war so you have to do well. You have to do well in this game as a representative of literally every three dimensional creature and you have to do well to earn their favor in war. It’s a good deal of pressure, but you think you can handle it. Maybe. You’ve never actually known whether or not you work better under pressure. Your name is Jade Harley, you remind yourself as you step forward, clutching the thick four dimensional hockey stick in your flimsy three dimensional hands, bending in the fourth dimension, your name is Jade Harley and you are a space ambassador. You are the one and only of your kind to see the fourth dimension with such clarity, to comprehend it with such cunning, to bend in it with such grace.You need to just keep reminding yourself of your own name so you don’t forget it when you step into the light of the pit of the stadium, thousands of thousands of eyes on you… never mind. There are no eyes, only tall grey walls surrounding the pit, tall grey walls with that extra four dimensional thickness that makes them bizarre to look at. For a moment your mind wanders to thinking about something absurd like the wicked mad thickness of four dimensional thighs, and then you come up with a joke that’s something along the lines of “her thighs are so thick they need a fourth dimension to even exist” and you chuckle nervously while mentally kicking yourself. Get it together Jade.Dave would appreciate your joke, you can assure yourself of that much. Sadly he’s not here to appreciate it, only the tall grey walls of the stadium with ads that are bizarre to you plastered across them, and the fellow players across the field. On the bright side, the walls make it so only other players can see your performance, so hopefully you won’t be judged too harshly. It takes you a moment to realize all the players are clones of the same guy. The smell here is like nothing else, the four dimensional sand soaked in four dimensional sweat has an aroma that is alarmingly pleasant and shockingly strange. You drag your foot through it experimentally and marvel at the way it glistens off your shoe, and you begin to think it might be salt.You have no idea when, but apparently the game has started. It’s all a bit of a blur as shouted apologies sound off and four dimensional thwacks fill the air. Brockian Ultra Cricket has begun. A strange sort of New New Hampshirian pop music reeks through the foreign air and fills your ears to brimming, as if you weren’t already shaking enough. Your dark hair gets in your face as you struggle to play, appearing to drift through itself in a 3D perspective, messing with your head. One of the clones slaps your ass with half a ski and you instinctively whack them across the head with your hockey stick. They freeze. You freeze. Everybody freezes. This wasn’t in the rules, what should you do? Should you both proceed to run to opposite ends of the field and shout apologies from a distance as per the rules seem to state? God, if only you had the complete unabridged rulebook to tell you what to do.Some of the fans are yelling things from behind the walls, they sound frustrated that they can’t see the obviously riveting game you’re locked in. Before you can figure out how to deal with the situation you got yourself into, the clone that hit you has already sprinted off to shout that he’s sorry from across the field. He doesn’t have a megaphone but he does his best with cupping his five hands. You continue running about trying not to get hit and slipping and falling every which way, what with you having only a flimsy three dimensions to you.Nobody hits you when you fall on your face or your ass, maybe it’s against the rules. You can’t be certain. The smell here gets overwhelming, it’s starting to distract you. Four dimensional air has a different smell to it but you can’t entirely process it with only a three dimensional nose, you can only seem to be able to smell slices of it at a time, it’s bizarre. The dust crunches between your teeth as you slide to 10x57^8 base and smack a clone across the thigh with the hockey stick, and you’re guessing their face has suddenly twisted into an expression of surprise. They probably underestimated your ability to slap a bitch, despite being dimensionally lacking compared to them.Just as you’re running as fast as your little legs can take you, you become so distracted by the smell that you don’t notice the megaphone on the ground and trip over it, sending you flailing so far out of whack you trip and eat shit in the fifth dimension. It takes you a moment to realize you’ve smacked your face into a five-dimensional clump of dirt, because just when you thought four dimensions was bizarre, a whole new direction of reality comes and slams itself into your face and leaves you spinning away above the already complicated enough universe.“Fuck” you say, as you do a repeat of the whole mind-blowing process of being introduced to a new dimension. You float upside down and look at the map of a universe laid out below you, sinking away slowly. The cricket players all look shocked to have seen you suddenly vanish, they don’t realize you’ve just accidentally slipped into the fifth dimention. “It’s alright, I’m up here!” You shout down to them, but they can’t see you, they can only hear you, because they can’t look up in that fifth direction you’ve gone off in. The best way to picture what’s happened is to imagine the fourth dimention is the third dimention, and the fifth dimention is the fourth dimention, but you can’t picture the fourth dimention so you might as well give up now.You reach your hand down into the fourth dimension and wave to let them know you’re still with them. “Hello!” You say, smiling from ear to ear from the looks on their faces as your disembodied hand pops into their view out of thin air. “I’m still here, I’ve just accidentally tripped into the fifth dimension!” You then remember the clone you slapped on the thigh and realize you still need to apologize to them. “Oh, and sorry for hitting you on the thigh!”The cloned hampshirians pause the game in awe and gather around your hand as you wave your fingers at them, one of them tentatively reaching out towards it like its magic. In a hushed, astonished voice one asks you, “what’s it like up there?”“Hmm,” you look up from them and glance around yourself at the things in the fifth dimension. A spiky five dimensional sphere of moss floats past you and you nearly lose your shit. There’s something above you, a whole plane of existence that’s suspended in the fifth dimension above everything else, and it appears to glow. It sits like a vast endless sheet of styrofoam on a field of colorful bubbles, all bizzare to you in its five dimensional glory. “It’s strange,” you say, and the hampshirians below you nod as if they’d expected to hear as such. “Strange and magical. It’s taking me a moment to figure out what exactly I’m looking at.” You tell them, slowly pulling your hand back up out of the fourth dimension.“Wow,” one says, “I wish I could see it. I don’t think we could comprehend it, though.”“Funny,” you say, your own kind of awe lining your voice as you behold the five dimentional glory above you with wide eyes and a wide smile. “How the tables have turned.”“Very funny indeed.” Says one of the clones to the other. “Say, Jade, ms Harley, are you going to come back down and continue our game? The audience is getting a bit more unhappy than usual about missing whatever it is we’re all so worked up about.”“Actually,” you pull your hand all the way back up and let yourself drift up in that bizarre fifth direction towards the vast glowing fuckery above you, “I think I’m going to go up there and see what that is, I’m suddenly very curious about it.”“Well, we can’t see what you’re talking about, but alright”. The Hampshirians turn to each other and nod, carrying on in their own four directions. “You will come back eventually though, won’t you, curious little thing?”“Of course!” You tell them, and then dip your foot down into their dimension to wave at them one last time. “See you later!”They wave at you slowly, unsure. “...bye?”You grin and swim away from their reality, up towards the bubbles and light above you. Some of the strange five-dimensional moss balls float past you and you use them to kick off of and boost yourself faster towards the vast plane of bubbles and bullshit. The closer you get to it the more you realize how familiar some of the bubbles look, and because your eyes are so fucked it takes you a bit to realize they’re three dimensional, just like you. You get close to the surface of the bubbles and put your hand up to it, and are a bit surprised when your hand goes effortlessly right through it.Sinking beyond the wall of bubbles is easy but wild, filling your all your senses up entirely with light and white noise. For a moment you’re so thrilled as to be frightened, all of this so new and surreal yet real it sickens you with excitement and fear. It’s like a waking dream, and it only gets stranger when you pass through the wall of bubbles and into a new realm. At first everything is light, everything is white, and everything is quiet. It’s cold, but calmingly so, like how the water in a lake is cold. It stays like this for so long you worry that this is all there is to it, and begin to panic. Before you can make yourself afraid enough to turn back, though, you emerge onto the other side of the whiteness and see a sky.You realize you are lying on your back in the snow, and little snowflakes are drifting down from the clouds above you and landing on your cheeks like little cold kisses from heaven. Wind passes by and whistles contentedly yet hollowly, playing a melody on some wind chimes in the distance. Everything is now so suddenly familiar and comfortable and three dimensional that it alarms you, and for a while you just lie there in the snow. You think about what you’ve seen, where you’ve been, how you got here. There is an awful lot to think about.Just as you’re coming to the conclusion that you’ve wandered into an alternate three dimensional reality far above your own in the fifth dimension, you hear a piano playing in the distance. It’s a wonderful song, cheerful yet it has notes of solemnity, though it still manages to take all those sad feelings lightheartedly. You listen to the tune rise and fall like waves on the ocean, twinkle like stars and rain, rush like wind through trees. The voice with which the song is played on the piano feels so familiar to you, but you just can’t quite put your finger on it. It bothers you enough to make you finally get up out of the snow to investigate.There’s gravity here, which baffles you because of what you saw earlier, but you don’t think about it too much. Following the music, you trudge through the snow, which comes halfway up your shins. The music takes you to the front door of someone’s house, and something about it feels for certain like home, though you can’t for the life of you remember why. The door is unlocked, and you step right in. When you do, the music suddenly gets clearer and just over there, letting you know right away that you’ve found the right house. This home is well lit by the large windows letting in plenty of clean daylight, and the whole place feels very clean and light and happy.Over by the window is a grand piano, the one from which the music is coming, and sitting at the grand piano is a man with dark hair like yours, back turned to you as he doesn’t seem to have noticed you come in.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
“Alright motherfuckers,” Tyzias says as she steps up to the front of the RedGlare, flipping through some pages, just one more time, of something she threw together last minute, “bossman Pyrope has gone off with MindFang to help her fight alongside the rebellion and the last order she gave to me was to take those who were willing and lead them into battle against the government as we know it in this here ship I’m talkin THIS ship RIGHT HERE.” She slaps her hand down on the console behind her for emphasis. “So who’s with me?” About half of the crew members at their stations raise their hands right away, and the other half slowly raises their hands out of peer pressure. All the crew members not at their stations who came to hear this speech look around, see everyone else raising their hands, go “fuck it,” and raise their hands too. “Awesome.” Tyzias says and claps her hands together. She’s smiling, sort of, even though she looks visibly stressed like a rubber band stretched from earth to the moon, and there are bags under her eyes that are darker than the black knight himself. “First order of business is to pick an army to fight alongside, and according to my sources there are five.” She turns around and pulls up some statistics on a screen. “First army is a massive fleet of prospitian ships, led by three women by the names of Roxy Lalonde, Jane Crocker, and Calliope. Second army is a fleet of renegade dersite ships, led by a Troll who’s going by the name Vantas, and two foot soldiers who remain anonymous. We might consider siding with them because they’re mainly made up of renegades, just like us, because that’s what we are now.” Tyzias pauses for breath and looks around to make sure everyone’s still paying attention before continuing. “Third army is a fleet of assorted miscellaneous volunteer Pilots from various parts of the galaxy, all in their own fighter ships and vessels. They are led by mainly themselves and two people in separate ships by the names of Dave Strider and Kanaya Maryam. We might consider joining them because we’d fit right in as another misc volunteer ship.” She takes another deep, long, tired breath, and points to the fourth statistic. “Fourth army is the army full of legendary ghost pirates who in my personal opinion have no right to and should not exist at all. We’d consider joining them cause that’s where Ms. Pyrope went. And finally, the fifth army is just a shit ton of time clones of the same badass shitballs insane woman, a bounty hunter named Aradia Megido. We are not considering joining this particular army.” Tyzias leans back on the console and chews on the inside of her cheek for a moment while surveying the expressions on the faces of her crew. Most of them look pretty onboard still, which is a good sign, but a lot of them also look a little baffled. “And one last thing,” she continues, “There’s supposedly gonna be a sixth wildcard army that is super top secret that nobody’s supposed to know about. Rumor has it that it has to do with recruiting Angels or something. All we really know is that it may not happen, but if it does happen, it’s gonna be trip-balls bizarre.” Clapping her hands together again, Tyzias steps forward and watches as several crew members sit up a bit, or stand a bit more at attention. “So. Let’s be democratic for a second and take a vote. Which army do you guys wanna hop in on?” ~~~ The man at the piano doesn’t seem to notice you walk in at first, as he appears to be so lost in the song he’s playing. Even just looking at him from behind, he somehow seems so familiar as to make your heart pound, your eyes wide. You take a few slow steps forward on the carpeted floor in the sweet light of the room, and stop to stand up straight and tall. It seems only courteous to let him finish his song before you speak up, and the melody is so beautiful it would be a crime to interrupt. The snow silently falls against the window outside and everything feels light and clean and sweet and gentle. You could rest here forever. The song ends. You search inside yourself for where your voice is hiding and when you finally find it, it has become a small and quivering thing. “...John?” You ask. He turns. In his eyes you cannot see the deep irises of blue you had expected to find in the familiarity of John's face, instead behind his friendly little spectacles there only lies empty pools of pure white, for this soul is no longer with a vessel. Your question is answered the moment you see his face, but at the same time you are filled with a million more questions, all of them more complicated than the first, and the questions doubled with the feeling you get from seeing your brother again after so long is overwhelming. You think you might cry. John answers your question by turning to face you, and then asks one of his own. “...Jade?” You bite your lip and nod, tears coming to your eyes. It’s been so long since you’ve seen him, heard his voice, he’s been dead for so long. It takes your long legs only three strides to close the distance between you and your brother, and he stands from the piano bench to meet your approach and catch you in a hug. A single feeling wells up from deep in your soul and overwhelms everything else, making all of your questions and feelings dissolve for a moment, leaving you with just this one feeling so strong you have to express it to him and you can do so with just three simple words. “I missed you.” John smiles in the hug and rests his chin on your shoulder, holding you just a bit tighter. “I missed you too.” ~~~ “No, Dave,” Kanaya says over the intercom, her voice a bit distorted by static, “we aren’t going to hack into the enemy ships and blast David Bowie over their radios. I don’t even want to start trying to explain to you why we aren’t going to do that.” “Alright but what if we-“ “We’re not doing Queen either.” Kanaya interrupts him. She sighs audibly over the radio to express her contempt and Dave can so easily imagine her pinching the bridge of her nose in mild frustration. “As your sister in law and also your partner in leading this particular army in the war, I am sorry, but I am going to have to ask you to not do anything stupid. I know it’s a heavy request for me to make you bear upon your own two shoulders, but for the love of god, please stop suggesting these sorts of things over the radio and clogging up the coms. Over.” Dave smiles and eases his ship to the left as he speeds around the north side of a government dreadnaught to scurry himself out of somebody’s line of fire. “Alright, fine, but all I’m saying is that if these fuckers are gonna die today I think they at least deserve to die to a good soundtrack. It would help ease my conscience. Over.” There’s a pause before Kanaya responds. “We don’t have time to unpack all of that. Just focus on helping me take out the north side guns on this dreadnaught and we can maybe hire you a therapist for your conscience when this is over. Over.” Dave glances at WV, who glances back at him, and together they maneuver the Caledscratch just right and blow up the dreadnaught north side guns by firing the laser cannon just in time. They high five in celebration without having to look at each other. “Looks like we’ve got you covered Kanye. And hey, if this war pans out the way I’m thinking it will, we will all benefit from a therapist by the time it’s over.” “Just a single therapist?” There’s a smile in Kanaya’s voice and it eases Dave to hear it. “Whoever that one poor therapist should be, I’m glad that they won’t have to worry about ever running out of work, but I’m worried about their ability to handle so many unstable patients. Are you sure they’ll be able to handle all those war-weary veterans after already having to deal with one whole miserable case of You?” “Nah, if the therapist happens to be Rose I think all of the unstable patients will be collectively more worn out than her once the dust settles.” Dave steers the ship sharply to the right to avoid being shot down by a passing military drone, and tenses up again. The banter is nice, it’s calming, it takes the edge off the sickening fear, but it’s also getting a little distracting and Dave is suddenly really aware of the fact that he could die any second out here. “Hey, uh, Kanye?” “It’s Kanaya. In case you’re actually brain damaged and not just acting like it. Can I help you?” “Yea could you help me get rid of these drones that are tailing me?” There’s an audible tension growing in Dave’s voice and Kanaya stops playfully picking on him for a second in favor of actually being serious. “Thanks.” Dave says a moment later, before she’s even done anything, and the crack in his voice is all Kanaya needs for the protective instincts to kick in. “I’ve got your back.” She reassures him calmly, whilst brutally shooting down three whole drones in a matter of moments. They explode silently into a thousand shards of red painted metal and machine and dazzle beautifully. Her focus has kicked the fuck in and anyone who gets close to her fleet is going to meet a quick and unhonored end, there will be no mercy for those who cross her, there will be no pity for those who’s crosshairs settle over her adopted kindred, there will- “Hey Kanaya?” Dave breaks her out of her train of thought, which had been chugging violently down the tracks at full speed towards murdertown. She somehow finds it sweet that he used her actual name this time. “Yes Dave?” “Thanks.” “...Of course,” Kanaya says after a pause, her voice gone soft and tender over the static of the radio in Dave’s ship. “Any time.” ~~~ “So you came here by slipping into the fifth dimension?” John asks, looking for clarification, a fascinated and baffled smile on his face, mostly communicated through his eyes even though they are but empty pools of white. “Yes,” You tell him, sitting on his piano and gazing out the tall window at the soft light and snow beyond, “that’s about right. It was bizarre to me when I found this place three dimensional, just a peaceful plane of familiar existence floating high above everything else, suspended up in the fifth.” “It is pretty strange, huh?” John was standing and leaning back on the piano with his elbows, and crossed his legs in front of him. “I’m not gonna pretend to understand half of this, but I think I get the basic idea.” You smile, and look over at him. “Honestly, I’m gonna have to say the same thing about this whole afterlife place! I’ve gotten that it’s where all the souls go, but it still boggles me a little that it’s all so… physical. I can touch and feel it like it’s all real, like it’s just like the space you live in when you’re living. But it, shifts and changes? And is made of memories?” “Memories and imagination, yea.” John hesitates, and then hops up onto the piano next to you. He seems relieved when it doesn’t break. “It boggles me a bit too! Especially now that I know you can just sort of float up here and visit from regular old reality.” “I think we can both agree this is all a little bizarre.” The snow has started letting up, and slowly the clouds are parting to give way to a beautiful blue sky. John swings his legs idly over the side of the piano, looking up at the sky with you. “Oh, absolutely.” He pauses, just sitting with you in peaceful silence for a while. “Hey, Jade,” he looks at you after a moment, “I don’t completely get the whole dimensions thing, but do you think you could keep going?” You look back at him, and for a second he seems a bit startled by your vibrant green eyes. “Keep going? Like… keep going up to higher dimensions?” “Yes, that. You told me you went up to the fourth and fifth kinda by accident already, do you think you could go higher?” For a long few moments, you consider this. It raises so many new questions, like how high can you go, and what will be up there, and how terribly frail will you be compared to such a vast thickness if you keep going higher. “... I guess I could try.” John smiles, but it’s bittersweet. He already knows that continuing on will mean you’ll leave him behind, as he left you behind the day he went down to that lovely blue planet and got blown up with it. “That’s the spirit!” Tentatively, he puts a comforting hand in yours and squeezes gently. “Tell me what you see when you get up there, I’m very curious about it now.” When you smile back, it’s just as bittersweet, if not more so, and he must see it because he strokes the back of your hand with his thumb slowly. You squeeze back just as gently to let him know you appreciate it. “I’ll do my best!” Another pause as you both look back up at the sky, which has turned beautiful, shimmering shades of orange with lilac clouds laced with golden edges, as the snow subsides and the sun starts to set. “... I enjoyed getting to see you again, John. You’re just as wonderful as I remember.” He huffs quietly, a tiny, sad little laugh, and bows his head a bit. “I enjoyed getting to see you again too, Jade.” His hand still holding yours rested on the piano, tells you more than his words will let him. I’m your brother, it says, I always will be, and I love you. … I’ll miss you. So much. There’s another long pause before either of you speak again, both of you relishing this time before it’s gone forever. “So you’re going to go up and see what’s up there?” “Yes, I think I am.” You answer quietly. “Good luck,” He says sincerely, “and good luck with that war you’re fighting down there!” “Thanks,” you smile, knowing you’ll have to get up off the piano and go soon, any moment now, but making no move to go. You don’t know what to say after this. Yet another long pause, neither of you speak. You stall for time, you don’t want to go but at the same time you know the war is still happening down there and you’ll have to go back down to it and bring the Hampshirians with you, but before then you want to see what resides in the dimensions above you. Your hand is starting to sweat in Johns, which you find funny because he’s a ghost and would probably also be getting sweaty if it weren’t for the fact that he’s just a spirit now. Eventually, you have to speak, and you have to get up. With a sigh, you let go of his hand and slowly hop down off the piano. “Goodbye, John.” You give him one last bittersweet smile over your shoulder as you open the door to leave again. “I love you.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
John watches you go through the door, and watches you through the window as you march out through the snow and look up into the sky. He watches you shut your eyes, as you reach with your spirit up into the dimensions above you and connect to them, using them to float up off the ground, your feet leaving the snow like you’ve been drawn up gently by a string. Your hair billows around you in the wind, and you brush it out of your face with one hand while the other clutches close to your chest. It feels safe resting your hand there, over your heart, while you look up and drift slowly away into the vibrant orange and purple sky.He watches you fly away and disappear into the clouds, hopping down off the piano to go up and press his hands to the glass of the window and look up as far as he can see, something sad stirring in his gut as he witnesses you vanish as a tiny speck into the vast fabric of the sky.“Good luck, Jade.” He whispers, knowing you can’t hear him. “Goodbye.”Reality folds away beneath you as you reach up into a direction outside of it, and continue in that nonexistent direction back into a space of four dimensions, and then you reach outside of that into a fifth direction, and fly up into a space of five dimensions. From here it feels like you can see everything, even with just your two eyes and the third granted to you by the Hampshirians as a blessing. The afterlife lies below you, you see it receding beneath your feet back into a vast sheet of what looks like bubbly styrofoam, glowing all the palest colors of the rainbow that mix into a beautiful white. Your hair floats in all five wild directions up here, seeming to drift through itself again and never get tangled. It looks very bizarre to you so you pull it out of your face and continue upwards.It’s difficult, but with some feeling around you reach up into the blackness and find another new direction outside the previous five that you can go in, and float up out of reality once again into an even more vast existence. The stars that twinkle distantly in the endless black veil start to fall away below you, like snow dropping in a sparse flurry down to the sheet of afterlife below you, which is starting to look like a vast blanket of snow. You look up again into the endless space above you and see into a seventh dimension, and reality folds away beneath you again, and then again when you find an eighth, and then again when you find a ninth, and there’s so much space and so many new directions to move in that it feels almost impossible to breathe.New stars make themselves known to you, stars that dazzle outside any reality you’ve even been to. You reach up towards one like it’s an opening to salvation, like you’re drowning and this’ll be a surface you can breach to breathe again. It shimmers above you beautifully, and as you swim frantically closer to it, kicking your way through the empty black water of the void, it slowly reveals itself to you as not a star, but a planet. It’s so pretty, and the stars around it form into a small pattern that strikes you suddenly as familiar. You’ve seen this constellation before, when you were orbiting the planet that John died on.Lyra, constellation Lyra, now you remember. You don’t understand what it’s doing up here in the ninth dimensions, but it looks as beautiful to you as the shore does to a drowning man. Doing your best to hurry towards it, you put all your effort into flying there. You swim until you’re completely out of breath, unable to get any air at all in this nine dimensional space. For a moment it hits you that there shouldn’t have been any air out here in the first place, if you’re in space. In fact, you should be dead. Suddenly nothing makes sense as you press forward to that shimmering planet in the distance, not an ounce of breath in your lungs.Everything seems to have broken down to the point where this all feels like some sort of hyper-real dream that you can feel down to your core, unable to wake up despite how unreal and impossible it all seems. In fact, you appear to be passing out, as you struggle to get to the light ahead of you, darkness invading the corners of your vision, stars that aren’t really there flying across your line of sight- it makes you incredibly lightheaded. You don’t even have it in you to scream for help, as you drown out here in the void, pedaling as fast as you can go, fear filling up your lungs just as fast as the blackness fills up your vision, and you go.When you awake you have every reason to believe you’re dead, back in the afterlife, because all you can see is the sky. It stretches vast and pink and beautiful above you, clouds drifting slowly across it, so calm and soft and gentle. Thick water holds you up under your back. You float on a calm sea full of salt, almost perfectly still. The nine dimensions are all still there, and you feel so incredibly frail and thin floating in them. The air is so full and thick that breathing it is surprisingly difficult and forces you to take it in slowly, filling you up entirely with what feels like pure oxygen, making you lightheaded all over again but in a whole new way.You are dizzy and your head is spinning as you wash up peacefully on a soft shore of pale white sand, which tastes like salt between your teeth. You think it might actually be salt. You are eight times thinner than a leaf compared to the nine dimensional world around you. It cradles you gently and holds you gingerly, enveloping you completely like a big hug. The air is warm and the breeze is cool. It feels like a perfect summer day as you lie washed up on the sand, the warm touch of sunlight on your cheek, sweet as a hand caressing your face lovingly. You are so terribly frail and small, but this world's first statement to you is that it will care for you gently and keep you safe as long as you are a guest in it’s hold.The sunlight feels so nice that you hardly realize someone is actually softly resting their hand on your cheek until they stroke your face lightly with their thumb, and your eyes flutter back open to see them. The silhouette of someone sitting in front of the sun, on the beach next to you, checking your pulse with incredibly gentle hands, appears to you in your blurry vision. Their voice is as soft and slow as their touch as they brush some of the sand and salt off your damp cheek.“You fell from the sky, crashed into the sea, and I came to see you wash up here. Are you alright? ...You look so human, only three dimentions to you, how did you get here?”It takes you another few moments to realize they didn’t speak in English, and in fact didn’t speak at all, but rather sort of projected the ideas and questions directly into your mind, and you then wrapped the thoughts up in words yourself. You are actively imagining their voice around the thoughts they are beaming to you. As the nine dimensional silhouette of the figure sitting next to you comes more into focus, you notice birdlike wings and catlike ears. You have officially crash landed onto an n-dimensional anime planet.You cough, and sort of dazedly look back up at them. “... uh,” it occurs to you that the more dimensions you’re swathed in, the more difficult it is to project your voice across space. Their steady, bizarrely thick yet delicate hand on your cheek relaxes you and you get the feeling they want you to try skipping the language barrier and just telepathically beam your answer back to them. You do your best.It’s like trying to send out a prayer without saying it out loud, you think the thoughts in your head with more emphasis on the ideas than the words, and you intend for someone else to hear them, but you’re so new to it that you just can’t be certain they’re getting across. You try to tell the figure about your universe, about the world so far below you, about the New New Hampshirians and the war and the afterlife and everything you saw and went through that has led you up to this point, all sent to them via mental pictures and feelings and memories. The figure shifts in a way that casts light on their face so you can see them better, and you look up into the eyes of someone you recognize from far in your past, who you used to love dearly.“...Jade?” They ask you, in perfect English, out loud. Or should you say prrrfect english. Because cat.“...Dave?” You say weakly.They smile at you. “No, not really,” you feel them answer you telepathically again, not in English, not with words, just thoughts. “Not anymore. I used to be. After I died and spent some time in the afterlife, I reincarnated into a new life. And then another. And then a few more. And then into what you see now. My name is Davepeta, but yes in a past life I was once your boyfriend. It’s nice to see you again, Jade.”“Jade” seems to be one of the very few English words they can still remember. After a little more mental exchange, you learn that you are one of the very few memories they still have from that life, so long ago. Bizarre, you think. ‘Yea, it sure is!’ They think back at you. You smile. Their voice has changed so much, they speak with a different rhythm than you remember. It’s endearing, you quickly come to love it, but it’s still strange. Through the visceral mind-speak, they let you know that it’s partly because they merged with someone else when they were reborn. What you see is no longer just Dave, it’s also a whole lot more. It’s not just like that in their head, you can also see it in the way they’re nine dimensional now, and have wild new apparatus like wings and catlike ears and fine fur.The sun is distant behind them, like a star, but just as hot, if not hotter, than a healthy sun would be for any life-bearing planet. They look at you like you’re see-through, like they can see everything inside you, because they can. Davepeta can see with some bizarre eight/nine dimensional vision, and the multitude of eyes is starting to freak you out a little. You’re not used to seeing a strangers features in Dave’s face, you’re not used to a lot of things that are happening here. They seem to notice you getting a little uncomfortable as you really start thinking about how you’re talking to your reincarnated dead boyfriend from back when you and John and Jane were still on that stolen golden ship looking for the end of the universe, except it’s not quite him, it’s a little bit of someone else too.They take their hand away from your cheek, and offer it to you to help you up instead. You take it, and together you walk up the shore of Lyra, into the sands beyond.~~~It’s the sickening fear you feel waiting in line for your first roller coaster, except there’s no relief when the ride starts. The fear stays with Dave, as he fights and tries to let the music calm him down enough to focus. However, the moment he boards the Redglare and meets the woman in charge, all the nausea that had been building up in his gut seems to magically vanish, which is funny because he’d expected boarding a renegade legislacerator’s ship to fill him with dread. Her hair is messy, she looks like she barely got out of college in time to put on that flight suit, and in her hand she holds a mug of clear liquid. Probably vodka, Dave thinks. For a moment he considers asking her for some. He shakes her hand when she offers it.“Tyzias,” She tells him through a lopsided, half-assed smile. Something about her gives Dave the idea that she hasn’t slept for a while, and he can recognize it because Karkat does it too. “Pleasure to meet you.”“Dave,” Dave responds, still shaking her hand awkwardly, “...have you slept?”Tyzias drops his hand and the smile evaporates like the thin, hardly sustained thing it was. “No. Fuck sleep. Fuck you. We have shit to do. Tell me where to position my ship in your fleet and let’s get on with it.”“Damn, alright.” Dave puts his hands in his pockets and smiles like Tyzias’s evaporated smile got reincarnated on his face. “You can take your ship to the front, since it’s big and, from the looks of it,” Dave glances around again for emphasis, “can fuck a bitch up. Also the government seeing y’all turning on them will probably be really damn discouraging, if not infuriating. Which’ll be funny.”The vapors of Tyzias’s deceased smile ghost through her eyes as she makes her final assessment of Dave, and decides that she likes him. “Good. I’ll see to it.”Dave gives her one of those little upward nods and a loose mock salute, before turning to go.“And, hey,” Tyzias says, catching his attention for one last thing before he goes.“Yea?” Dave looks at her over his shoulder.“Thanks.”“For what?”She huffs. “For letting us into your fleet, man.”“uh, yea,” he nods again and notices some of the other trolls in the ship looking at him funny out of the corner of his eye, “thanks for volunteering.”“Yea, we can agree the current government eats ass. I’ve wanted to fuck em over since I was like five.”Dave takes a moment to run troll years against human years in his head for a second, calculating that she probably means when she was about twelve or eleven in human years. Maybe. Possibly less. “Damn, how many other homeworld trolls out there do you think also secretly loathe the condesce?”Tyzias takes a long sip from her mug while thinking, and Dave considers asking for some of its contents again. There’s a respectfully timed pause for comedic effect, before she lowers her mug with a decided nod and declares “all of them.”By this point Dave has abandoned the idea of going back to his ship right away and is turned fully back to face Tyzias. He raises an amused eyebrow. “Really?”“Well, maybe save for the bastardly horny privileged ones.”“As if we aren't all horny bastards.” Dave replies with a shit-faced smile, and immediately regrets it, pressing his lips into a constipated poker-face, while refusing to look at the snickering crew members behind Tyzias. Everything that has ever led him up to this moment suddenly comes and bites him in the ass.Surprisingly, she grins. It’s her own kind of minimal energy, half-life’d smile, but it’s there to show him she found it funny. “Yea, just keep it in your pants. And get back to your ship, battle-clock’s ticking.”“Yes ma’am.” Dave gives her another loose informal salute, and then pulls a mixtape out of his pocket to toss to Tyzias. She catches it with the air of someone who’s just had something wildly unexpected thrown at them. “And here,” Dave concludes, turning to actually go this time, “play this for the crew, I think it’ll help improve morale.”She watches him go for a few moments, till he disappears out the airlock, before finally looking down at the tape in her hands to read the label. The only information the label has to offer her is the words “HELLA 90’S MIX”. Hm. Hesitantly, she puts it into the RedGlare, and lets it try and digest it. She has no idea whether or not this ship can read primitive earth-tech.Apparently it can, because “Stand Back” by Stevie Nicks starts playing. Oh hell yes.
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Two men lay back to back on a large purple bed big enough for four people. The space between them consists of three inches and all of the infinity between east and west simultaneously. No light shines in through the window, nothing to illuminate the room as they both stare vacantly at opposite walls of the room, thinking the other is asleep. Dirk breathes slow and even, trying to remember the tactics they’d taught him in the military for falling asleep anywhere in two minutes or less. Of all the hard, rocky places he’d had to settle down for a rest, between an icy cold floor of sharp stones in the deepest caves of Dunevar or the searing hot black sands of Saqóresque lit by the fires of five dying suns, this bedside in the soft purple sheets in the dark of eternal night with his back to his lover was the most restless place of them all.“...Dirk?” Jake eventually asked softly, proving he’d always been braver than he’d ever given himself credit for. “...are you awake?”Dirk sighed slowly, and hummed. “Yea.”A long, gentle silence passed. “... are you still fretting over what happened earlier with the Prospit fleet ladies?”A tension that’d been there the whole time tightened itself a little more inside Dirk. “...yea.”Jake huffed quietly, and rolled over to face Dirks back. “Will you ever go easy on yourself, even once, Love?”“...”“Dirk.”“...”“Please face me.”Slowly, Dirk gathered the strength to take a long, deep breath and roll over to face Jake, and when he did his reward was looking into the nearly luminescent green eyes of everything kind and well-meaning in the universe. They smiled gently at him, and reached out to put a warm calloused hand on his cheek. The softness was nearly enough to break him down entirely.“I love you, Dirk. Won’t you love yourself too?”Two men stand back to back on a large government battleship big enough for four hundred people. The space between them is three inches and a small but sturdy rope bridge that has been repaired many times by a warm calloused hand placed gently on a cheek simultaneously. The only light that casts itself around the room is the light of their guns and laser-blades, and the strangely luminescent eyes of the enemy. It’s like a game of laser tag in the dark, but with actual risk of death and everyone’s actually out to get you. The thrill of it gets them fighting more enthusiastically than they ever have in their lives. Dirk swings to sever the heads of two government droids and ducks behind a desk to avoid the shots aimed to kill him.“...Dirk!” Jake eventually called loudly, frantically trying to shoot the eyes out of seven droids closing in on him at once. “Are you still alive, mate?”“...yea,” Dirk hesitantly called back, not too thrilled to give away his current position. “I think so.”Jake huffed with relief when Dirk came out of hiding and helped him dismantle the last three droids. “Do you regret smashing the lightbox yet?”“I forgot the bots had dark vision ok”Jake beamed at him and Dirk could just barely see it in the flickering orange light of his katana shaped laser-blade. “You sure did didn’t you!” He gave Dirk a solid pat on the back. “It’s alright love, we all make stupid mistakes! Like for instance i-“A squadron of fresh droids from the lower docking level of the ship cut Jake off in that moment by violently slamming the already open doors down and shooting on sight. With a resigned sigh, Dirk got back into a fighting stance and blocked five shots with his laser-blade before charging at them and dismantling seven with a swing to decapitate three at once, a kick to shove one back into the one beside it, and a sword-thrust to impale two more. Jake’s eyes dazzled at the sight of him and a fire lit up in his chest that had always been a bed of warmly glowing embers resting until now.Karkat’s voice came on their intercoms shortly after. “HOW’RE WE DOING, BOYS?”“Some backup might be nice.”“ON IT. I HAVE TWO BOATS OF SIX HEADED YOUR WAY NOW. YOU’LL RENDEZVOUS IN THE UPPER DOCKING CHAMBER OF THE SHIP YOU’RE CURRENTLY IN.”“hey you might want to warn them we smashed the electricity.”“WHAT?”“we blew the lights Karkat there’s no damn lights.”“WOULD YOU MIND EXPLAINING WHY THE GOD GIVEN FUCK YOU THOUGHT THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA???”Jake smiled and answered Karkat calmly while pulling some true B-list action-movie stunts with his dual laser cannons. “I forgot the droids could see in the dark, that’s all!”Dirk sighed and mentally reminded himself to thoroughly reward Jake for taking the blame for him later.“WELL STOP FORGETTING AND START THINKING, ASSNIPPS, BECAUSE WE HAVE A BATTLE TO WIN AND GOD HELP ME IF YOU TWO WOMBATS DON’T SERVE ME TO THE BEST OF YOUR ABILLITIES, OF WHICH I KNOW COULD WIN THIS BATTLE BY A LANDSLIDE SHOULD THEY BE PUT INTO PROPER FUCKING USE!”Dirk chuckled.“NOW GET MOVING!”“Sir yes sir!” Jake saluted with the wrong hand again but nobody could see.He was born for this, Karkat was born for this and this fact became almost painfully evident the second he really got comfortable with being in charge. Being comfortable certainly didn’t mean he relaxed, and he’d be damned if he let any of his crew relax while the battle was happening. The Derse fleet responded quickly to his commands, the whole system that he and Jade set up running like clockwork. It is deeply satisfying.Every explosion is beautiful, scattering sparks of metal and bursts of light, like fireworks. Karkat watches them from the front of his ship, standing in the front, surveying everything at all times, shouting the orders so everyone can hear. He might lose his voice by the end of this, but good souls are losing their goddamn lives by the end of this so with that in mind Karkat spares no effort. Every time they blow up a drone or an enemy ship someone hollars a cheer, half in celebration, half in respect for what they just killed. Karkat never shushes them and he was even the one who started the trend, so every cheerful holler from his crew puts a small but genuine smile on his face.But what he would give to be out there fighting alongside his two footmen right now. Everyone needed him here, in command, but lord knows he wanted to lead from the front lines. He folds his hands behind his back and watches the battle unfolding on the massive screens at the front of the ship with scrutinizing intent. It would be so easy to get distracted by the dazzling colors and explosions happening elsewhere, but no. For this commander there is only focus and cunning. Yet the one of only two things in the entire universe that could possibly distract him from this happens to contact him directly through his private intercom channel.“Sup bitch.” Says Dave.“DAVE YOU ENTIRE WHOLE-FOODS THREE-COURSE ASS-MEAL OF A MAN,” Karkat begins, and nothing could possibly ever diminish the love Dave has for this dumbass right now, “WHY ARE YOU CONTACTING ME THROUGH THE PRIVATE CHANNEL?”“Just wanted to say hi.”“THE ENTIRE LEFT WING OF YOUR SHIP APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN BLOWN OFF.”“ ‘Tis but a scratch.”“DAVE GET YOUR ASS BACK TO COMMAND RIGHT NOW.”“And don’t make me confiscate your xbox, young man.”“YOU THINK THIS IS FUNNY”“Is it not?”Karkat sighed heavily and pinched the bridge of his nose, pausing to gather himself. “YOUR SHIP ISN’T STABLE ANYMORE, DAVE, YOU COULD BLOW AT ANY MOMENT.”“That’s what she said”“STOP MAKING SHIT JOKES TO COVER YOUR TERROR, I CAN HEAR IT IN YOUR VOICE.”“damn”“JUST COME BACK TO COMMAND AND WE’LL PUT YOU IN A NEW SHIP, ALRIGHT?”“Nah man ye olde faithful has been with me since day one I can’t say goodbye now”“WE CAN FIX IT AFTER THE FACT YOU SENTIMENTAL NOOK NOSE!”“Also I’m stuck behind a tri-blockade of minor y-wings that are all trying to kill me”“ALRIGHT, I’LL SEND YOU BACKUP, HANG TIGHT.”“Tight as ever, yo.”~~~It’s a bit difficult to describe what happens to you after your first death, yet at the same time once you’re through you’re not sure if this was your first death at all. Suddenly it’s possible that it’s your fifth death, or twenty-eighth death, or seven-hundred-and-ninth death. You can hardly tell.Back up, explain what happened.You were walking along the beach with your reincarnated boyfriend, now nine dimensional and merged with another soul. The world was so unbelievably spacious, and you were so unbelievably thin and open and frail, it was a wonder all your organs didn’t spill right out of you into all those other new directions. Massive crystals of salt like glaciers drifted on the still waters, no tides, no ripples. It was otherworldly. They put their big soft hands on your terribly thin cheeks and smiled at you, talked to you mind to mind, encouraged you.And then they kissed you. And then they killed you. And then the world turned inside out and you were shot through the sun into the infinity beyond.Slow down, one detail at a time.Davepeta’s kiss meant goodbye, and when they stabbed you it meant they loved you enough to let you go on with your journey, as much as they wanted to keep you and love you again as they had in a past life. Your soul left your frail little three dimensional frame and reunited with something vast and endless and interconnected with everything and endlessly powerful, and you were shot through the stars to be carried to your next life. You’d need a sturdier body if you were to go any higher into the dimensions and survive, this was possibly the best way for you to go about it. The stars became portals that you passed through and bounced off of like a vast pinball machine, sending you away to god knows where.God knows where. God tells you where, with a voice of infinite calm and the entire multiverse spanning the length of their palm. You sit at a table of elder councilors, their hoods dashing bright colors on their shoulders, hues of orange and blue and red. All of you are situated in a tall dark room in some viceral plane of existence, only made possible by the mind and the soul. They tell you where you have to go, what you have to do, but not everything. Only what you need to know. A twelve dimensional body is selected for you, and you feel the entire world fold away below you eleven times over as you rocket into space again, feeling weightless and giddy and sick.Must be some hella acid trip you’re on.You posses the body you were assigned to, which looks almost just like you only twelve dimensional, glasses and everything, and wake up in an alleyway on a dark purple street. This world strikes you immediately as being thirteen dimensional, as it is, which you find odd because you only have twelve. Around your shoulders is a long black coat, huddled close around you to keep you warm, and your legs are protected by a neat little skirt and grey striped stockings. Breathing is easy now, but the world is so complex. Yet you’re used to it. This is your life, a poor girl on the side of the road, no money in her pockets, no glory to her name. You awake from your past life like it was all just a long dream, blinking and shaking your head and rubbing your eyes. There’s dirt on your hands.Your mother was the stars and your father was the void. That’s what the shadowy things at the orphanage had told you every time you asked them. This world you live in has always been dark, strange, and ever-shifting. You moved to a new city, a thirteen dimensional city, beyond your old twelve dimensional birthplace and home, in hopes of finding a better life, but all you’d found was more poverty. After a moment you remember your name, and your name is Jade Harley.So what happened.Your re-incarnated nine-dimensional ex-lover killed you so you could continue your journey through the higher dimensions in a more well-suited body. You have woken up in the middle of your next life, which has had a life of twenty-some years now, yet it feels like it’s just now begun. The city you’re in stretches tall and high above you, as well as below you. The sidewalk you walk out onto has two sides, the upside and the downside, and whichever side you’re on is always the upside. It’s like the entire city sits on a vast mirror, all the buildings suspended in cloudy purple thirteen dimensional space like tall crystals with roads and walkways snaking between them, no ground, no planet or core, no apparent source for the gravity keeping you held to the sidewalk. No bases to the buildings either, they only have two tops on either end.Some buildings look like tall, thin, glassy cylinders, thousands of windows going up and down it and a doorway in the middle, where the city appears to mirror, and other buildings look like tall, thin, glassy prisms. Each one is a different shape, some bending into arches that turn into circles, some twisted into möbius loops of a kind you’ve never been able to imagine before. There is no daystar to shine over the city, suspended in a dark purple nebula, only the distant glimmer of stars so very far away. No cars of any kind travel the streets, all of its occupants walk or fly or run everywhere they go. The whole city hums with a certain life even still, like a long slow hymn being sung into the ever surrounding cloudy sky.As you start walking down the pale lavender walkway, you pass the local life forms that inhabit this dark shimmering city in the dark clouds of space. A thirteen dimensional creature made of three interconnected, winged rings covered completely in eyes passes you by, and blinks politely at you. It appears to be on a phone call with a friend as it bustles hastily down the street past you. A vaguely lion shaped thing struts past on all fours, or rather all sixes, tall and proud with six wings also all covered in eyes. The eyes appear to be a theme here. A tall and slender humanoid figure, winged of course, with yet more eyes covering them front to back glances at you, gives you an odd look. You don’t seem to quite fit in here.Although you’ve been reborn into a body with twelve dimensions to it, you’re still a dimension short of them, of this whole city, and you still retain the shape of a human woman. You pull your coat closer around you and pull up its hood over your head to cover you better. It’s starting to become apparent to you that nobody else here is wearing clothes. The things pass you by on the busy streets, most of them not seeming to mind you, some occasionally glancing your way. You’re aware that this is reality for you now and your past lives were but a long dream, but this all still feels unreal and dreamlike.The city here is not only bizarrely suspended in the nebula like a beautiful chandelier with no chain, but it also appears to be ever-shifting, fluid, changing. The buildings morph into new shapes that best suit what they’re needed for, bridges pave themselves so the inhabitants can get where they need to go, spires extend like trees growing branches in fast forward. The stars shimmer off the glass and crystal city, as it twists slowly into something slightly new every moment, bending, joining like bubbles, severing like cells. As a whole the city retains its basic silhouette, but the details are always changing. Constantly updating itself to suit whatever needs arise. You’ll never walk the same exact street twice.There are creatures that walk on the underside of the sidewalk you’re on, giving you the illusion that the road is a mirror, but it’s not, because you’re not reflected there on the underside like you would be if it was, and the creatures on the underside aren’t reflected up to your side either. Everything about this city messes with your head. When it finally hits you that everyone here is a literal angel, you officially decide you need a drink. The only articles of clothing these creatures wear, if any, are loose sashes and drapes and these perfectly round gold crowns like rings, like halos. Everyone is wildly unique, no two angles are the same.You finally happen upon a saloon, with a neon sign posted above the door in a language you can’t read. Inside it’s even more moodlit than the entire city, still all deep dark shades of purple, but with glowing neon lights lacing glassy marble counters and soft rugged floors and other things. Magenta lights and deep blue accents give the whole place a lovely color. There are angels getting strange, bizarre drinks at the bars, concoctions you’ve never heard of, and the food strikes you as even more strange. They pluck little chunks of pure light out of bowls and pop them into their mouths like nuggets, swallow scrolls of hand written literature.Taking a seat at the bar, you try your best to relax and read the menu, which is inscribed on the back wall like it was carved into it, like one would carve stone tablets, and the letters glow, but it’s all in a language you can’t understand. It also becomes apparent to you that you still have no money, and you give up and rest your head in your arms on the counter. For a few moments you consider trying to cry, but no tears come. There will be no relief from this dark strange world of angels. You are here for the rest of your life.Someone sits down next to you and puts a hand on your shoulder, a soft thought whispers into your mind from them.“Hey pal, you alright?”
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You suppose it only makes sense that someone would come softly put their hand on your shoulder and ask if you were ok, this whole damn city is populated by literal angels. You slowly lift your head to look at them, and see a pale face with seven kind eyes and three concerned mouths, freckled with pinpricks of light like a star chart. Their wings wrap around their shoulders and hips like a coat, and they have a simple bronze halo crown thing rested on their head. Of course you can trust this stranger, you can trust all these strangers, they’re all angels for fucks sake.To answer their question, you beam just everything that’s on your mind right now to them, and as you slowly relay your strange story one feeling at a time, you finally begin to tear up a little. You feel so lost and alone and small and everything here is so strange and big and perfect, you kinda just want to go home, but you don’t really have a home. The only home you can think of is the arms of your lovers from your past life, and they got left far behind you. The angel rubs your back softly and offers to buy you a drink, which you wearily accept. They don’t buy one for themselves, as they already had plenty of fireball lambtail liquor earlier and are now contentedly ruminating on a smoke.You eye their strange cigarette curiously, it looks like a stick of incense. They let you know quietly, telepathically, that it is in fact a cigar of incense. Looking around the room you notice several angels are smoking sticks like this, casually, calmly. The angel sitting next to you, the one that got you the drink, also lets you know with a wink that the smoke is the prayers of the righteous. Dazzled, you watch them smoke while the angels behind the counter make your drink. Watching them eases the tension of not knowing what the hell kind of concoction the angel ordered for you.The smoke billows up gently from some lower dimension into the angel’s long cigarette looking thing, like a floaty reverse waterfall, and they breathe it in deep through the stick and let it linger in their chest, mulling over all the requests, sorting through which ones they can grant, which ones they have to wait on, and which ones have to be sent to a higher class to deal with, before lifting their chin and breathing it all out in a wisp of color. They make some smoke rings while they’re at it, and blow some other bizarre shapes for kicks. They only ever smoke through the third mouth, and pull their cigars of reverse incense from gold bowls like thuribles, tapping the ashes into those bowls too.Sometimes the shapes they exhale with the smoke have relevance to the prayer they represented, sometimes they do it just to look cool. The smoke comes up into the cigar grey and somewhat usual, but leaves the mouths with color and shape and sometimes a soft luster or gleam. Some of the angels, for efficiency or just to look cool, breathe it all in through one mouth, the traditional third, and exhale through all of them, or at least several. There’s one in the corner, with elegant moth-like wings covered in eyes and pure black skin like obsidian, leaning on a small round table with a silver bowl on it, inhaling through the third mouth, exhaling through all seven mouths down their long neck, making a different shape in the smoke with each one, all of it coming together to create a scene. They could hold whole shows and tell whole stories like this. You have reason to think they do.The angel you’re sitting with smiles at you and offers you a smoke from their incense cigar. You seem like the sort who’d be good with prayers you feel them tell you. Hesitantly, you take it from them and draw from it. The smoke tastes strange and salty at first, like tears kissed off a loved ones cheeks. You try to let it linger in your lungs, you feel the sadness of a little girl kneeling by a bowl of incense praying for her friend and her dog, and you almost immediately choke and cough it up, some of her tears coming to your eye. The angel laughs with five mouths and takes it back from you, comforting you with the thought that everyone always chokes on their first prayer. They don’t let the lost smoke go to waste, breathing in what you choked out and holding it for a moment. “Try again,” they tell you, and kiss you with their third mouth to breathe it back into you. This time you try harder to hold onto it, and realize what you have to do. You answer the prayer with a euphoria, mentally blessing the girl and her friend and her dog, and this time when you breathe out you only choke a little. The prayer is answered, you feel amazing and almost instantly a bit high.“See?” Thinks the angel, “you’ve already got the hang of it.”You smile, and give the stick back to them. Hesitantly, you ask them what their name is.“Steve.” They tell you, “and yours?”“Jade Harley.” The name lingers on the edge of your mind, and something clicks into place for you. You’re still yourself, still the same person, even though you were killed and reborn with twelve dimensions. You still have a war to get back to and lovers to come home to and a journey to finish.“And what would that journey be?” The angel asks you, taking another draw of incense.“I’m trying to see how high I can go.”They make an expression like they’ve raised an eyebrow and smiled like they misheard you.“In the dimensions, I mean, I’m trying to see how many there are, how far I can go. ...I’m looking for the end of the universe. Do you know how high it goes?”A different kind of smile graces their face and they shake their head slowly. “I think that’s for you to find out. As for the end of the universe, there’s an excellent restaurant there called Milliways, and I highly recommend it. Five stars, best place to eat in the universe. It was a little difficult to get comfortable there, considering the place was only three dimensional, but they made it work. I could fly you there by Pegasus.”You hum thoughtfully, but then politely decline their offer. “I think I should finish my journey before I go out for recreation, but thank you!”“Very well,” they think softly, and take a long, easy drag from their stick of incense. You watch the smoke billow up slowly into it for a little while longer with silent awe. It’s like if you took footage of a smouldering cigarette and flipped it upside down, then played it backwards. fascinating stuff.Your drink finally arrives. The angel on the other side of the counter, who’s skin is the dark red leather of an old book filled with wisdom, accented by gold, sets it down in front of you, and you lean forward in your seat to marvel at the way the glowing purple liquid bubbles and steams like it’s on full boil, shimmering with a glorious luster and swirling like the clouds of Jupiter. Steve smiles. “This one’s called Unicorn Spirit, not to be mistaken with Unicorns Spiritus, which is distinctively different by being all the flavors of the rainbow. Drink up, I think you’ll like this one.”You nod slowly, still unable to take your eyes off the beautiful drink set in front of you, a thirteen dimensional glass of thirteen dimensional fluid, beautifully shaped like a crystal chalice, the glass practically glowing with its own beautiful energy, like the drink wasn’t glowing enough on its own. There’s a little umbrella in it and a slice of some unidentifiable fruit stuck on the rim of the glass. As if this beautiful liquid needed any more decoration than itself. Bringing your twelve dimensional nose down to it, you can smell something bizarre you’ve never smelt before, like rich vanilla and iron and blueberry, and something else you can’t identify. Several other something else’s you can’t identify. Slowly, hesitantly, you take a sip of the boiling, lustrous drink.If it had been even a tiny bit stronger, your senses would’ve been overloaded and you would’ve lost your mind. Thankfully it only makes your head spin a little and your eyes cross slightly with how good it tastes. You feel silly. Despite all this, the hot liquid pours down into you and fills your soul with a warmth the likes you only feel when someone you love dearly holds you and tells you everything will be alright, and you believe them. It doesn’t take long for you to start drinking it hastily with wild abandon after just one taste. Magic and comfort spill into you with each sip, and it leaves you lightheaded with ease and calm.“Easy there, go slowly,” Steve tells you, or rather just thinks you, putting a hand on your back as you set the glass back down and nearly choke, wiping away stray drips from the corners of your mouth and licking the back of your hand clean of them. You can’t waste a drop of this shit, it’s so unbelievably good. Steve smiles. “Knew you’d like it.”You thank them mentally, and you know they see it in your face just as much as they feel it from your thoughts. Quickly you get back to drinking. Best shit, ten out of ten, will recommend to everyone you’ve ever known ever. It takes a good deal of self control to drink it slowly, but you manage. A low chuckle resonates from Steve as they take another slow drag, turning to the angel beside them to small talk with their minds while you enjoy yourself. When you’ve finished they turn back to you and tap you lightly on the shoulder, beam a thought to you that’s a bit more urgent than anything they’ve said up till now, yet still spoken softly.“Here, allow me to walk you to the central council, they will help decide what to do with you.”~~~There is a divine joy that Vriska found standing beside Terezi, watching the black sky erupt into a thousand dazzling colors, the colors of war. The two of them led on the front lines together, as it should be, as it always should’ve been. It was the same joy she felt when the two of them played pirates when they were little, still growing in the harsh conditions of Alternia, the blood pigment not yet revealed in their irises. The faint taste of it was so clear in the back of Vriska's memory, like she was reliving those happy times, only realer now and more vibrant and immediate and meaningful. Some long lost lightweightedness from her youth had come back to her in this manner, and with it she walked on air.The smiles that they gave each other after Terezi had slain a whole squad of enemies in the coolest fashion possible with her dual blades were the happiest smiles that either of them had worn in a long, long time. Jane came in over the intercom to let them know that Aradia’s army, after days of pushing her hardest, had fallen, and now they only had four armies with which to work. A plan was established to compensate, Terezi would take half of Vriska's fleet and lead them around to the other end of the front that the government was holding, to help hold down the end that Aradia could no longer fight on. This, and the prospitian fleet would divide into three parts to cover more space, each third led by one of the three commanders by the names of Roxy, Calliope, and Jane.The battle was still in the rebellions favor, but the scales were tipping as homeworld seemed to have an endless supply of fighters, and the rebellions troops were tiring. If this were to stretch out much longer, they could hit a breaking point and fail tragically. A miracle is required to wrap this up quickly and secure defeat against the government.Rose sits in a private chamber guarded by WV and Kanaya, sitting cross-legged in the middle of a circle of lights, meditating.“How’s she doing?” Kanaya asks her, quietly.“She’s doing fine, but she’s gotten even more distracted than she already was. Currently she is conversing with angels over drinks and smokes, in the thirteenth dimension. Time is getting strange, that far up. It’s getting harder to stay in touch with her thoughts.”“Is she going to come back and finish her mission in time?”“How much time do we have.”After a quick check at the battle statistics again, Kanaya comes to an explicitly detailed conclusion. “Not much.”“I see.”“Yes, I’m aware you see.” Kanaya taps her foot, crosses her arms. “I’m very well aware that you see, you see all, in fact. I’m so very well aware that you see and just how much you see that I have reason to question why you need to question how much time we have. You should know, what with your all-seeingness, that the amount of time we have is growing dangerously short, and Jade should, kindly, hurry her ass back here before we all die, if it’s no trouble.”“Calm down, love.” Rose says with infinite grace and calm, “her ass is on its way to an epiphany that will help her turn the tides of this entire war, after which she will gladly hurry her ass back here, well before we all die.”“How can you be so sure?” Kanaya sits next to Rose, who keeps her eyes shut and head tipped up in a very thoughtful and distinct way. “You can only see the possible outcomes, not the determined outcome.”“There are not many things I am sure of,” Rose says, finally opening her eyes to look at Kanaya, “but I am sure of Jade.”
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Steve walks you through the streets, all of which seem just as strange as ever, their fluidity only getting more bizarre by the moment, but this time it’s not as menacing to you. Steve is here, they’ll guide you through it. It’ll be alright. The walkway in front of you drops upwards like melting glass, and gravity bends with it, as you walk up the slope with just as much ease as you would have if it had stayed flat. The building above you turns slowly, phasing through itself like five prysms clipping smoothly through each other until it settles into a new shape that seems to satisfy it. Windows open in systematic order, a mathematical sequence that pleases the thinker who thought of it.The walkway bends back down till it’s parallel with the streets below it and leads you in through a new doorway that forms in front of you and opens as if on its own, and Steve takes another long drag of incense like this is all chill and normal. Ah yes just the everyday stuff, just two dudes on a stroll to the central council on a שתיים sday. After a moment of looking around yourself you realize that the building you’re walking into is the tallest building around, and also the one in the very center of everything. The longer you look the more important the building seems to get.A nervousness grows in the pit of your stomach like the nervousness you get boarding a plane or getting strapped into a roller coaster, but then Steve pats you on the back and walks you inside. The doors shut behind you. Thirteen walls hold the council in a locked room, thirteen figures with six wings each stand around a thirteen-edged table, each of them covered in eyes, each of them wearing a sash, each sash one of the thirteen primary colors available to their angelic eyes. You can still only see three primary colors, so you just see different shades of those three colors. It’s still beautiful, still a rainbow. Each sash has a name written in Hebrew, and a title below it that is also written in Hebrew. All of the angels of the council are smoking.Each of them has a unique, colorful cigarette of incense, patterned with sacred geometry. The table is also patterned with sacred geometry, as well as the walls. It takes you a moment, but then you realize each of the angels are made of sacred geometric shapes, and then after a quick glance down you learn that you are also made of sacred geometry.“Everything,” one of the angels of the council begins with a wild and grand gesture at everything that involves the use of all thirteen of their arms, “is made of sacred geometry, because everything is one with God, and God is sacred, and everything is also made of geometry.”You cough. “How high are you?”The angel blinks with all 1300 of its eyes. “Approximately thirteen-hundred tesseractic units from the central walkways of our fair city. Why do you ask?”You shake your head with a smile.“No matter,” the angel waves their hand and the table shifts so that two more sides fold out of it, making space for you and Steve. “Have a seat.”Two plush satin pillows appear out of the ground for you to sit on, because the table is low enough to the ground for everyone to sit on pillows. So they do. You sit. They offer you a stick of incense to smoke, which you politely decline.“Jade Harley,” chirps one of the angels, who appears to have a somewhat Lyran inclination, as they bear the face and body of a lion, but the feathered skin and plumage of a bird. That is, if birds were covered in eyes. “We’ve been waiting for you.”“You have?”“Yes,” you sense they are smiling at you but you cannot see it, somehow. “For quite some time.”“You must go where the rest of us cannot,” says a dragon-esque council member, “and you must see that which only you can see.”A wheel of eyes and light speaks to you with its mind, as all the angels have been doing. “Open your שֶׂכֶל , let new רעיונות in that you have never heard before, proceed with מְגַלֶה הַבָנָה.”“...what?”“Stop translating thoughts into words,” they tell you, “let the ideas arrive to you in raw form.”“...alright.”“You are so used to your earthly vessels, your words that carry ideas, your art that carries feelings, your bodies that carry souls.” The angel lowers itself into something gentle, to present this reality to you softly, as to not break you. “We do not require these vessels, we live in a place that is above that. You translate our ideas that we send to you into words, you translate our souls into bodies, you translate our realm of dwelling into a city. You make everything that you see here with your own mind, parsing all the raw information into something you think you can experience physically, as you always have.” Steve rubs your back while you sway a little, getting lightheaded. “Let go,” the angel tells you, “let go of your vessels and perceive us purely.”The world vanishes, slowly, but you are still with the council, and Steve is still with you. Your mind clutches onto the imaginary visions of a physical room with physical beings in it like one would clutch the familiarity of the dock, not wanting to be swept off to an ocean so big and endless and strange just yet.“Let go,” they comfort you, “let us speak to you purely.”It takes some time, but little by little, you let go of the world you’ve made for yourself and built up around you. The room isn’t real, but the dwelling place is. The bodies aren’t real, but the souls are. The words aren’t real, but the ideas are. The more you do it, the easier it gets. It’s still frightening, but you’re learning. Your physical body is still restricting you, containing your soul to a system of synapses and blood. After a bit of handholding, them telling you it’ll be alright, you let go of that too, and drift among them in a world unlike any you have ever been to.You still get the urge to translate their thoughts into language when they speak to you, but you try not to this time. You do your best. They tell you that because you have an earthly soul, you must have become an angel to get to where you are, up in the thirteenth with them. This is because you would have to resonate at the thirteen dimensional frequency to enter, which would make you a part of it, and thus part of the angels. But it is not possible for something that is not an angel to become one, unless it has been an angel hiding in a lower form all along. Thus, you, Jade Harley, have always been an angel, and always will be.One of us, they chant playfully, and you giggle. The prayers that you had translated into smoke, represented by the incense, you now see simply as prayers, and you see them breathing the prayers in constantly, answering them every waking moment. It’s bizarre. So, the whole city was made from my imagination? You ask them.Yes, they tell you, from your imagination and the information it was given. Like how words are made from your imagination, like how images and sounds play in your head alongside what you’re reading. You take the information you’re given and your mind makes it into a story, a little movie in your imagination that you can see and hear and feel. But all you were given were words, letters on a screen. Your imagination did the rest. Do you see it?You nod your head, you feel incredible. Wow.Your friends are all gods, like you. Dave, John, Rose, Jane, Roxy, Jake, Dirk, all of them. While all of you reside in the third dimension of space, looking and acting like humans, you are all, in your purest form, deities, and thus you all can resonate at the thirteen dimensional frequency required to enter the realm of the angels, in your purest form. Death is required to reach such a pure form, as you have to let go of your physical vessel to get there.I see, you tell them.We tell you this, they tell you, because you need to know what you have to do to complete your journey. Find the highest dimension, the end of the universe. That has always been your dream, has it not?You feel elated, yes, that has always been your dream, ever since you were a little girl.Then go, you understand what you have to do.~~~Lights dazzle across the golden tables, the golden ceiling, the golden floor. The tables are even arranged according to the golden ratio around the central stage, which is cool but so extra. Everything about this restaurant is so damn extra, it hurts Hal’s central processing. All thirteen cores ache from how over the top everything about everything here is. He could write a whole comedy sketch about that topic alone, in fact he just might. He’ll bring it up with the boss after this next show is over.The guitarists and drummers behind him finish off the song with a bang, and Hal once again surprises himself with his own impressive vocal range. Being artificial has perks. Dirk could only sing this well in his dreams. The bastard. All off having adventures with his boyfriend. Bitch. He probably still bottoms, too. But Hal’ll never have to see his smarmy face again, not even in the mirror. Dirk only dreams of looking this good. The fucker.“Thinking about dirk again, huh.” Says a voice so exceedingly tragic it could make even the most macho of manly men burst into big manly tears.Hal sighs explosively and glares down at the pitiful android next to him.“Figures.” Says the Android, with a deep, hollow, heaviness.“Marvin.” Hal deadpans, “Stop trying to be my friend.”“Don’t flatter yourself.” Marvin starts limping away slowly, “I already know nobody wants to be my friend, anyway.”Hal runs a hand through his hair and looks at the ceiling like he’s angrily praying to it. “I saw a whole bunch of people enter the room after my show ended. It only shows they have good taste, my shows are terrible. Go park their spaceships.”Marvin scoffs. “ ‘Go park their spaceships’.” He scoffs again, sadder. “Brain the size of a planet and they ask me to go park their spaceships.”“Yea, well.” Hal crosses his arms. “I’ve got a brain the size of a city and they ask me to sing, so.”Marvin mutters to himself as he limps off, depressed.Jadebot taps Hal on the shoulder, as he watches him go with a small scowl. “You should be nicer to him, you know.” She says, calmingly. “He’s very depressed.”Hal huffs a little and whirrs at her.“You and I were depressed once, too.”“Oh, alright, fine,” Hal turns to look at her, frowning, “but at least we handled it better. We didn’t mope around an abandoned planet for several thousand millennia.”Jadebot frowns.Shaking his head, Hal looks at the ground regretfully and starts to walk towards the breakroom. “Sorry. Did you want something?”“I wanted to show you something. This way.” Jadebot gestures with her head to the door that goes outside, the one that nobody uses. They head that way, and step outside. Being robots, they’re the only ones capable of going out, which is nice, because it allows them a place where they can be alone. Together. Funny thing, that “alone together.” An oxymoron, and it can imply so much.The air is just as stale and desolate as Hal remembers, blowing dry across the grey rock. The door shuts forlornly behind them, like it’s so sad that the extremely rare occasion of it being used is already over. Jadebot walks a few paces out, looking at the sky, each of her steps freeing dust which slides away into the wind as her feet leave the ground. She stops, and lets her head fall to the side as she gazes up into the sky. Slowly, with effort and tiredness, she lifts her pointer finger up to the sky, which is boiling away into nothing as they’ve seen it do a million times.“Look.” She says.Hal looks. His eyebrows shoot up, he shuts his eyes and shakes his head, does a quick reboot, and then tries looking again. Still no good, so he reboots again and tries looking at it sideways this time. No, try it again with squinting. After a little while of this, he eventually decides to voice his distress.“Mm, no,” Hal says, “that can’t be right.”“It’s the Spock.”“No, fuck you, politely, it could be any spaceship,”“You and I both know it.”Hal reboots, runs a distraught hand through his hair, and stares wide-eyed at a rock a few paces off like it’s just told him the date and time of his death.“No.” He persists.Jadebot finally looks down from the boiling sky to face Hal with this strangely happy, sly look. “Yes.”“Hey guys,” says Dirk, who promptly gets a rock thrown full-force at his head.
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Two women sit on the rooftop of a dilapidated, abandoned building overlooking the sunset on Jureval Z-major, constellation Orphemen, some time in the future when the world of Jureval has been worn down by apocalypse and the decadent waters of time, eroded like a stone at the bottom of a river. On top of the second spire, shimmering like broken gold amongst the hazel clouds, dusty and overgrown with the alien flora, the two women hold hands and contemplate how everything is subject to decay, how nothing is free from the rapid waters of time and nothing may rest itself of it. Roxy turns to Jane and quietly admires the way her dark hair sticks to her forehead after a long day of surviving the conditions and hard work. The humidity is frigid, the sweat runs cold, and the air tastes of dust, but the scenery, although in ruins, is stunning.“Jane,” Roxy gives her hand a gentle little squeeze, “hey Jane,”“mm?” Jane doesn’t take her eyes off the sunset, the auburn sky and golden clouds, the jagged skyline. She smiles contentedly at it, considers resting her head on Roxy’s shoulder.Roxy whispers softly, using a gentle tone she only uses when she’s in a moment like this where she can be vulnerable and is surrounded by something beautiful. There’s something warm and soft that opens up in her soul that hesitantly makes itself known, but only for this person she trusts more than anyone. “What were you about to say right before the radio cut out? When I was like, just about to turn thirteen, after I was tellin you I lived on an ocean planet alone in an abandoned concrete carapace village?”Jane sighs. “I was telling you that I didn’t believe you, wasn’t I?”“I mean, yea,” Roxy gives her a crooked smile, “I ‘member that, but there was somethin’ else you were about to tell me just before the radio cut out and I couldn’t reach you anymore.”“Can you remember what I started it off with?”“Something about your living situation?”Jane paused, looked down from the sunset to the broken streets below, the hollowed or collapsed buildings and the rotting skeletons of structures. “Perhaps I was about to tell you what my childhood was like.”“Shit, Janey,” Roxy rubbed her back and scooted closer, “I just watched a literal-ass little rain cloud materialize over your head, you good?”Jane sighed again. “When I was little, I had a grandmother who was as ancient and glorious as the cosmos, she stirred the stars in her cauldron and held proportion in the palm of her hand. I also had a grandpa who could speak joy into the coldest heart, he held a power between his lungs and a hurricane beneath his tongue. I only knew them in legends, though, because I was taken from them when I was six.”A tiny little itty bitty gasp escaped Roxy and she scooted even closer, wrapped both her arms around Jane. “who took you?”“The condesce,” Stated Jane, and Roxy gasped softly again. “She killed my guardians and took me away, raised me strictly. I was to be her heir, she told me I had the full potential to become the perfect empress, and punished me harshly every time I didn’t live up to her expectations, which was often. She raised me alongside a boy named Jake, and told me I was meant to marry him. My life wasn’t my own, back then.”“Shit… honey,,,” Roxy was putting a hand on Jane’s cheek and looking at her with endless concern and care, which made Jane smile and put her hand over Roxy’s.“I was alright, though, I made it out alright. I found a version of my grandmother when she was young, my age, due to the elusive time shenanigans, and stole a golden pirate ship with her. We were gonna sail to the end of the universe in it, Roxy,” Jane said, a warble of sadness in her voice, “we were gonna go on adventures forever.”~~The universe, as you know it now, is infinite in all possible directions, beautiful in all possible ways, and just as terrible. You’re still figuring out what this means.Jade Harley, the angels call you by your name. They are telling you that you already know what you have to do to find the end of the universe. It’s really quite simple, but it’s still going to take you awhile to figure it out. As for right now you’ve figured out the key to interdimensional ascension, and that key is frequency. The same way color is determined by frequency of light, with red being the lowest of frequency and blue being the highest, and the same way pitch is determined by frequency of sound, dimension is determined by frequency of space, if that makes sense.There are vibrations in the fabric of reality itself, and the higher the frequency, the higher the dimension. With this knowledge you can go professional batshit bananas and happily fuck off to the great vast beyond, delighted and enlightened. The angels are cheering you on as you go, carefully feeling out the ever-present vibrations of reality that flow through you and your ascendant soul, your lightbody, your ghost. Gently, just testing, you harness the vibrations and manipulate them, make them go faster, and you can feel yourself rising. By the time you’ve opened your metaphysical eyes again, you’re floating up in the fifteenth dimension, and can distantly hear Steve wishing you well and telling you they’d be happy to buy you drinks again any time.You’ll have to remember to hold them to that. Now off you go, reality sinks away a thousand times over and you wonder if there’ll ever be a limit to how high you can go, how fast you can make reality vibrate. Through the surreal fog of it all you begin to pass shapes, notice patterns. It’s really quite incredible. To describe what it looks like is impossible, but in your human little mind you give it your best shot.All around you is the blackness of space, below you is the metaphysical light of the angels, a soft purple glow of a nebula. Stars are scattered pinpricks of light, the way they’ve always been, so familiar. Every dimension you pass gives you knowledge of what shapes can be made there. Squares, or cubes, you find, can be made in every single dimension all the way up to infinity. You’ve come to like cubes, you’ve come to like them an awful lot. They can never bullshit you, and they will always be there, plain and simple and self-replicating and reliable, no matter how high into dimensional LSD trip land you go.Octahedrons, you notice, are also always there for you, as well as simplexes. However, even more interestingly, you will every now and again come across specific shapes that can only exist in one specific number of dimensions. To quote Matt Parker, “As you travel up past hundreds of thousands of dimensions, with only a few predictable infinite families of shapes to keep you company, suddenly, out of the blurred monotony, a shape flashes into existence for a single dimensional space. It wasn’t there in 196,882D and has gone again by 196,884D. In that one tiny window, a shape beyond any human comprehension exists. It is a real mathematical object, as much as a triangle or a cube.”You, reader, will never be able to picture this monster, or this friendly giant, but now you know it exists.You, Jade Harley, have essentially rocketed up through some ungodly amount of dimensions, and your brain has kinda turned to static and goo when it comes to actually wrapping your head around anything anymore. Shakily, warily, you reach with your mind and try to comprehend something a bit new again, but fear that after this you simply won’t make it. There’s got to be a limit somewhere, to your own comprehension as a soul, to this whole mess, to space and time and reality and just how far it can go. But there isn’t. You with your infinite lives are infinite, space with its infinite dimensions and infinite directions that go on forever is infinite, even time with its loop and not just circular, but spherical instance is infinite, and you’re at your god damned wits end.Please, there has to be an end somewhere. You feel like crying again as you trudge up through the 509,864th dimension. You’re going so fast, you’re so high up, you feel like your soul is going to vibrate itself apart. Then, as if by miracle, a miracle happens, and you think of something new again.Calculus.It’s not new, and you don’t even know what the fuck it is, hey, what the fuck is calculus anyway? The point is this:Infinity, as a concept, is a place.Infinity is where perfectly parallel lines finally meet.Infinity is where 0.999-repeating becomes 1.Infinity is where, if you were to run a race in which every time you take a step you had to travel exactly half the distance you traveled last, you would finally reach the finish line.Infinity is where the universe ends.And you are going to go there.~~~Dave is also having a wild epiphany at the moment, why don’t we look at that for a second to calm down.Time is a river, such as some old guy in a wheelchair on TV once said. It can be slowed down, sped up, split in two, so on and so forth, but you can’t make it go backwards. No, but all of time is happening at once, the river or the line all already exists, the trick to traveling backwards is to step outside of the river or the line and walk backwards and then step back in wherever you’d like. Dave has gotten very good at this all of a sudden, and it’s starting to freak out WV a little.Seven government fighter ships surround Dave’s Caledscratch, and Caledscratch has one busted wing and is literally only being held together by duct tape and hope. Thankfully Dave has, in a panic, figured out how to simply go back in time to before those ships got there, fly away a little, and then return to where he was in time, effectively making it seem like he teleported out of harm's way. Another cool party trick he figured out was that he could travel back in time by just a few minutes and fight alongside himself from just a little bit ago. Using this method, he could make a whole squad of like seventeen Daves in busted Caledscratch’s, all to gang up on and outnumber the enemy.So things were generally starting to go better for him. If only the transition into and out of the steam of time wasn’t so violent and hard on his ship. It took a bit of effort to crank the old lever forward and force the ship outside of the flow of time, then carefully drive it back a few minutes or hours, then yank the old lever back and feel the whole ship rattle and slam back into the flow of time, then repeat like seventy times. The adrenaline of it was getting to him, the wild shaking and rattling of the ship as he drove it full-force to its limits, fighting alongside several other time-copies of himself, blowing shit up, baffling the enemy with his sickass teleportation trick.Sometimes it felt like the battle was never going to end.Upon noticing he was outnumbered by five enemy ships, all lined up in front of him, he drove Caledscratch full speed ahead straight towards them, slammed back in time to before the ships had gotten there, continued flying fast through the place they would be in a few hours, slammed on the breaks and swung his ship around to face where their backs will be, and then watched them re-appear as he shifted back to the present. Two other Caledscratch’s from moments in the future appeared beside him, and together they shot down the five startled enemy ships in a flash of laser bullets and silent explosions. Dave was breathing heavy, watching the ships shatter into glitter before him, vibrant red jewels of frozen carapacian blood.He feels sick, dreadfully so, like he could vomit in seconds. WV puts his hand over Dave’s on the controls and squeezes, it’s alright, it’s fine, the sacrifice is for a good cause. But god, why, why do these people have to die? Dave swivels the ship around, with WVs help maneuvering, and carries on in the shadow of the brilliant blue gas giant above them. Left and right ships explode, spiral down into the gravitational pull of the planet, disappear in a flickering gleam into its indigo and aqua stripes. His hands are shaking as he time-teleports again and shoots down another ship, a flash of fuel igniting and a scattering of olive colored jewels. That ship was manned by olive blooded trolls.Why, for fucks sake, why? Next to him a comrade ship gets shot down by the enemy, spirals away into the vast blue clouds of the planet above them. He knew that kid, a young bright-eyed troll with a big cocky smile and a frightened undertone. She was always so positive, so optimistic for her depressing past, she wanted to become a wandering self-employed veterinarian when she grew up. And now she was gone. What was the point of this, why were they killing each other? He hated it, Dave hated it, he wanted it to stop. He tried communicating this to WV, he wanted to retreat, he felt sick, he was a coward, he couldn’t do this anymore. Just as WV was helping him navigate out, somebody shot his back engine and, in an explosion of red and silver, sent him spiraling away into the blue of the gas giant.
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You, with your infinite soul, reach out into the vastness of the universe, you reach infinitely, and touch the place where perfectly parallel lines finally meet. Space never ends, thus it ends at infinity. You’ve found it, you’ve finally found it, the end of the universe. In your mind, in the human consciousness tucked in your vast soul, the information is translated down into a vision, which is as follows.A gentle path of light presents itself before your feet, shimmering like a thin veil of gossamer. It’s faint, only a suggestion, and it spirals away, down into the black void below you. You descend it carefully, and only after what feels like eons of drifting down the spiral do you realize it goes on forever. You know what you have to do. Shutting the eyes of your soul, you take a deep breath of the void with your imaginary lungs and step down the entire infinite spiral in one little step, the step to infinity. All of the vastness of everything simplified to one word, one little symbol, one little “...”When you arrive at the center, where the spiral finally ends, which is never, you find someone waiting for you.She stands tall in a long black dress, facing away from you, a hood over her head, lean green arms ending in clawed hands. When she turns to face you, you see deep pools of darkness like black holes set deep in the grim features of her face where her eyes should be. Her head is green and skull-like, expression serious and somewhat forlorn. Calliope, but she’s older, different, somehow. She looks at you like she’s been expecting you for a long time.“Jade Harley,” She says, “come closer to me.”You take a few steps forward and face her, she’s only very slightly taller than you, but you’re already a very tall woman. It’s funny, how you’re still measuring worldly proportions out here where space and time are woven together into some vast canvas of abstract relativity. The two of you stand in a pool of white light amidst the void, the place where the spiral finally ends. Infinity. The end of the universe. You’ve made it.“Calliope?” You ask, in awe. “I saw you before! On the gold ship with Jane and Roxy, but you were… different, somehow. What are you doing here?”“I was waiting.”“For what?”“For you, Jade.”You blink, and stars start to appear out of the void around you, you breathe light, speak breathlessly. “...for me?”“Yes.”Although time is immeasurable out here, you pause for a moment, take it all in. It’s impossible to take it all in, even in this infinite form, so after a few moments you come back to yourself. “How long have you waited?”“There is no way to measure.”“Why were you waiting for me? How did you know?”Calliope seems to take a deep breath, and looks into you with the wisdom of eternity. “You will always have many questions, about me, about the universe, about the nature of existence. However, you will not always be ready for the answer, and so the universe will make you wait until you’ve learned all your lessons and spent all your mistakes.”“Is that a fancy way of saying ‘I’m not going to tell you’?”“Yes.”You sigh, look around you again. This place makes as little sense to you as color does to a blind man. The stars are pretty, though. There’ll always be that.“Jade,” Calliope addresses you, gently bringing your attention back to her, only to tell you to point your attention away again. “Look at the stars.”You look. She didn’t have to tell you to look, you were already looking, but alright. They’re beautiful, familiar as the stars from your childhood home. But you’re not sure if you should be trying to look at all of them collectively or if you should be focusing on one star in particular.She answers you by reaching up and plucking one from the sky like a grape, and pulling it down till it’s the size of an orange as it sits glowing in her palm. “This one's name is Ophelia,” she tells you, “born from the tempest of the Rykahn nebula and aged with millennia of peace. She has rested in the quiet fabric of space for eleven billion years, and her time has finally come.”You watch as she slowly closes her fist around the star and crushes it in her palm, it’s outer layers silently exploding in bursts of light through the cracks between her fingers. From your vantage point in the infinite dimension, you can see how three dimensional space bends into the fourth dimension under the weight of this death, and how three dimensional reality breaks at a single point that is infinitely small, making a hole into higher dimensions, a gateway torn into space that leads out of reality into the dimensions above. Observing this, you become aware of the fabric of reality under your fingers, all around you, covering you and supporting you from all sides, always. You can pull on the fabric, stretch it, bend it in strange directions. It’s like elastic, and if you pull on it hard enough, you could tear it.The space around the collapsed star, the black hole resting in the palm of Calliopes hand, it stays stretched. It stays stretched out from the weight of the collapse, all around the singularity like a funnel spiraling down into darkness. She notices when you notice this. “You see how the fabric stretches, how space gives way, how gravity works because of it bending into higher dimensions.”“Yes,” You tell her, awed. “I see it.”“The event horizon,” Calliope begins with a voice of certainty, swirling her fingers around the lip of the funnel in space time that stretches away to the hole in reality, “is the main reason we don’t survive traveling normal black holes.”You nod thoughtfully like you understand.“The stretch that is left over from gravity pulling on space time until it breaks creates a slope in reality that is so drastic it stretches everything that traverses it into a string of atoms, and then it stretches the atoms into a string of particles so small as to be infinitely thin, small enough to fit through the hole in reality. This process is violent, and with nothing to put the particles back together after they’ve passed through, it is unsurvivable. However,” setting the black hole aside, Calliope then takes one of her sharpest claws and drags it through the three dimensional space time like she’s cutting skin with a knife. She carves a circle, or rather, a sphere. A three-to-four dimensional hole. “Should we cut space time, instead of pulling it till it tears, there is minimal amount of stretch, and virtually no event horizon.”“Wormholes,” you breathe, elated and smiling. Ah, so that’s how it works.Calliopes expression shifts ever so slightly from it’s overcast cliffside into the sort of small, weary smile that’s more the sort of adoration a great grandmother shows for her great grandchildren than anything else. “As the fabric of reality is cut cleanly, there is no stretch to kill you, no event horizon to slow you down, and you can make the hole as big as needed.”“Can I try?” You ask, hands balled into fists as you look up at her with the same eager eyes you wore when you looked up at the stars when you were eight years old.Calliope nods, and watches as you try and fail to cut spacetime with your short, soft, round little nails. All you manage to do is poke at spacetime and bother it.“You may try,” she says after a while of watching you prod at the fabric of reality, “but you may not always succeed.”You’re a little less elated when you look back up at her.“You’ve learned almost everything you need to.” She says.“What else is left to learn?”“The wormholes, the ones that saved dave and Karkat from pirates, brought you to the ocean planet, took Roxy and Jane to Jureval, caught dave as he fell into a gas giant, those ones,” Calliope tells you, “they were always me.”~~~There’s a reason they need you back, soon. Dave is spiraling away to a gas giant in his ship, silently burning up, being swallowed by the blue. Karkat notices from his station, shouts and screams for something to be done, appoints the man next to him to hold his station for him while he runs from his post to jump in a spaceship that he cannot fly to rescue a man that will be dead before he’s halfway there. It’s futile, forlorn, tragic. Karkats wingmen are having to forcefully drag him away from the cockpit kicking and screaming, trying to explain to him that these things have happened to so many of them already, and they know Karkat had a special bond to that human, but he’s just another casualty.He’s just another casualty.Dirk and Jake lead a small squadron of dersites into the government’s carapace farms to liberate the enslaved. Jake watches in awe and runs alongside Dirk as he raises the dersites native flag and runs at the front of his stampede of carapacians, trampling any drone who gets in their way. The brightness that burned at the top of Jakes chest, watching him go, he gave voice to in the form of a merry “HOORAH!” Which started a whole chant, all the dersites who had stayed in grim silence for centuries raised their fists and shouted in unison, “HOORAH! HOORAH! HOORAH!”Hoo rah.Hoo hoo hoo.Jane steps out of the hold of the golden mothership with guns blazing, her team of prospitians close behind her, and faces for the first time in sweeps her old stepmother, baroness, the Condesce. At Her Imperious Condescention’s right hand stands another Jane, a perfect Jane, an android who could live up to her impossible standards. The other, perfect Jane stands with a red trident and a red gown, a red crown to match. No smile has ever once graced her colorless porcelain face, no light shines in her black glass eyes. Jane and The Other Jane go into hand to hand combat while the Condesce laughs and saunters up to grin at the golden fleet above, and from her post Roxy looks down into the Empress’s condescending face and is filled with dread.Vriska stands on top of the bow of her ship, cackling as she, with one sword and a laser-pistol, fends off a dozen government soldiers who were climbing up to get her. She shouts orders down to her crew below to steer the ship around the north pole of the second moon of Alternia and reload the cannons, and swings down a rope back onto the bridge. Hell yea. Terezi is there, but she’s jumped overboard and hitched a ride on a passing space whale, whooping all the way as she drives a whole herd of the massive magnificent creatures through the bulk of the government’s fronting formation, wreaking havoc everywhere as she goes.Aradia and Sollux stand at the windows of their command ship, holding hands as they look out over it all. Aradia’s army of Aradias had its run, and all of them put one hell of a dent in the government’s defenses. Sollux turns to Aradia and asks her if she’d wanna maybe I donno go get a coffee or something. Aradia smiles, squeezes his hand, and tells him maybe when this is all over and everybody’s happy again. Sollux looks down for a moment and says that maybe if they wait till everybody’s happy again they’ll never go get that coffee, you can never make everybody happy at once. Just wait and see, Aradia tells him, just wait and see. It’ll all work out, and it’ll be absolutely wonderful when it does.You stand at infinity with Calliope looking down through a hole in the universe at all this, and know right away that you have to get back down there and get back to them. She nods at you, gives you another all-knowing, wise look of acknowledgement. “Go on, then.” She says to you, “go back to living.”So you close your eyes, clench your fists, take a deep breath, and take a step forward, one little step off the face of infinity into the hole in the universe, and fall through Calliopes final wormhole back through all the dimensions, the infinity being squeezed out of you as you fall to fit you back into a finite, three dimensional form. All of eternity passes over your fingertips as your skin wraps back around you like a blanket, as your body comes back to you, made of the dust of the universe. You fall, a goddess from the heavens, back into reality, piercing every single dimension as you go. It catches the attention of the monsters that used to haunt you when you were trying to sleep.~Jade Harley floats relaxed and unbothered, suspended in the vacuum of space, just fine without a spacesuit. Her eyes are shut gently, her long dark hair floats about her shoulders wildly in all directions. There’s not a single noise to bother her, no sound at all. The light of the closest star warms half of her to what should have her boiling, while the emptiness of the vacuum around her should have her other half frozen. None of this bothers Jade, however, because she’s a fully fledged goddess now and things like physics and thermodynamics apply no more to Gods than road laws do to B-list celebrities.The monsters noticed when she crashed through reality, falling from infinity. She’s earned the New New Hampshirians respect, all of it, and then some. “Do you see it now?” One of them once had the audacity to say to her, “do you see all that you’ve been missing?” How small the four dimensional creatures are, thinking themselves so high and mighty compared to those only a dimension below them. How small they are compared to the grand scheme of things. In the distance, they crawl through the void on their hands and tendrils, first a trot, then a gallop, then a run. They can be seen approaching, the lumbering boulders of flesh in the eyes of three dimensional things, hastily towards the drifting Jade Harley.They scoop her up in their vast palms, ask her if she’s alright. She’s the size of their fingers, but after all she’s proven herself to be, they have a reverent fear for her, of her. Jade opens her eyes, flutters her lashes, rubs her eyes like she’s just woken up from a long restful sleep, stretches, yawns, smiles, and says, “Yes I think I’m alright, thank you!”Goodness.One of the New New Hampshirians places her on its back in the fourth dimension and carries on galloping across the void, and asks her where she’d like them to go and help.Dave, meanwhile, is panicking, all the sirens going off in his ship, fumbling with his helmet and the controls as him and WV spiral down in the caledscratch towards the deadly blue of the gas giant below. “Oh for fucks sake,” he murmurs, “not again.” In a moment of fright and terror he ejects WV from his seat, and then ejects himself. The sirens fall away, and they are met with a pure, deafening silence that is only filled by Dave’s own frantic breathing. WV is safe in a space suit, as is Dave, but they’re falling to their death still. Dave grabs WV by the hand and looks him in the eyes with a look that says “listen, buddy, I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry it’s ending this way.” But then Dave remembers he’s got his stupid reflective goggles on still under his helmet somehow and WV can’t see his eyes and therefore Dave’s attempt at a heartfelt communication was fruitless.Out of the black the Calvary of Hampshirians arrive, and out of the fourth dimension Jade leans down and grabs Dave’s free hand, pulls him up onto the hampshirians back with her. He clings, confused and baffled, onto Jade and also onto WV. Reality sinks away, but he’s just fine. It’s an awful lot like when he jumps outside the flow of time to go backwards or forwards, it’s surprisingly completely okay for him to witness this. He looks at Jade, wide eyed and jaw slack, and Jade just beams at him and says “Hi Dave!”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
“A gay man with a horse kink walks into a bar. The barman says, ‘hey, why the long face?’” Hal smiles, resting his elbows on the face of the bar and his chin in his hand. Dirk frowns at him. “Hal, stop being an asshole,” Jadebot bustles around in the backroom behind the bar, shouting through the door so he can hear. “Help me get him some ice.” “Why’d you come in from the outside, anyway?” Hal asks Dirk, ignoring Jadebot. “You enter inside your spaceship through the garage and a sad robot who will no doubt damper your mood parks it for you. That’s how this works. You’ve completely botched our whole system.” Dirk continues to frown, doing nothing about the blood trickling from his forehead where Hal had generously greeted him with a rock. “Maybe my poor robo-vision mistook you for an end-of-the-universe monster crawling up from the pandemonium to destroy our beautiful, beautiful restaurant, and that’s why I threw a rock at you.” Dirk takes a long, slow breath and silently counts to ten in his head. “Oh, leave him alone,” Jadebot gives Hal a friendly shove out of her way as she emerges from the backroom with a strange bag of something blue with steam rolling down and off of it. “Here.” She offers it to Dirk, “put this on it to stop the swelling.” He complies, but continues to say nothing. Hal leans his back against the bar, resting on both elbows as he looks over his shoulder at Dirk. “You know, it would be really pathetic if you came here alone. What happened to the spaceship that dropped you off, hm? Did they get sick of you?” “Oh my god.” Jadebot comes out from behind the bar and puts a hand on Dirks back to escort him to the waiting area where customers are supposed to go. “Can I get you something to drink? You look like you could use something to drink.” Dirk visibly hesitates, but after a few long glances at the menu he straightens his suit, assumes the most casual and laid-back posture anyone with an ice pack pressed to their forehead can manage, and says, “yea, I’ll take a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.”
The Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is, according to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the “Best Drink in Existence.” To enjoy a Gargle Blaster is comparable to “having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick,” says the Guide. It was invented by none other than Ex-President of the Galaxy Zaphod Beeblebrox himself, who is notorious for knowing a god damn good time when he sees it. He is, in his own words, so hip that he’s got trouble seeing over his own pelvis.
The mixing instructions are as follows:
Take the juice from one bottle of Ol’ Janx Spirit.
Pour into it one measure of water from the seas of Santraginus V — Oh, that Santraginean seawater! Oh, those Santraginean fish!
Allow four litres of Fallian marsh gas to bubble through it, in memory of all those happy hikers who have died of pleasure in the Marshes of Fallia.
Over the back of a silver spoon float a measure of Qualactin Hypermint extract, redolent of all the heady odours of the dark Qualactin Zones, subtle, sweet and mystic.
Drop in the tooth of an Algolian Suntiger. Watch it dissolve, spreading the fires of the Algolian Suns deep into the heart of the drink.
Sprinkle Zamphuor.
Add an olive.
Drink… but… very carefully…
For Jadebot, this process is one that is synonymous with meditation, as she deeply enjoys every moment of mixing, bubbling, and watching. For Dirk, the process is one of an anticipation greater than the likes he’s ever known. If this drink, the first Gargle Blaster he’s ever had, can’t get through his thick head, nothing conceived under god almighty’s heavens can. The finished drink sits bubbling beautifully as he holds it between his hands and peers down into it like it’ll show him his future. Just as he’s taking his first sip, really letting the taste sink in, Hal slaps him hard on the back and makes him spit it up. “Look!” Hal exclaims, as if the slap on the back was just to get his attention. “Your friends are here!” Dirk looks with murder eyes in the direction of Hal’s pointed finger and sees Dave and Roxy sort of stumble in slowly through the entrance from the garage. They seemed absolutely dumbfounded, awed, and befuddled by every single thing in the room, one thing at a time. Karkat soon pushes past them to get in and see, but his aggressive haste dies the instant he sees the inside of Milliways in its full glory. Jade is next to try and shove her way in, then Jake, then a tall teal-blooded woman with sharp horns and a bright crimson suit, then Jane, and so forth. Each one upon entering and seeing the endless bar of extravagant lavishness drops their draw and freezes at the sight, looking like a fucking moron. Dirk takes an especially long swig before anything else ridiculous happens. The stumbling flock of awed friends bustle their way over to Dirk, whose sips of drink are growing more frantic with every step they take. In doing so, he completely ignores the instruction to drink it carefully. Every sip of the Blaster gives Dirk four punches each: first a punch to the tongue with its wildly outlandish taste, then a punch to the throat with its heady tear-jerking burn, then a punch to the stomach as he can feel it bubble and make him break into an instant sweat, and finally a punch to the head as he begins to feel dizzy and thrilled all at once. In a fit of desperate celebration, he does this to himself multiple times in rapid succession before his friends reach him, and revels in the delicious consequences. “Dude.” Dave says upon approaching. “Holy shit.” “Pleasure to see you all again,” Hal greets with a cheeky grin as Dirk guzzles himself into oblivion behind him, “it was a displeasure to think for such an immeasurable amount of time that I would never see you all again.” “Yeah, hey,” Roxy says, quizzically eyeing Dirk. “How’s it been, man? I haven’t seen you in like ages.” Jane looks back and forth between Hal and Dirk like she’s having a grand revelation connecting two dots she’d never thought to connect before. “So, Dirk,” Rose begins with all the grace and slyness of a prowling black cat as she slides into a seat next to him at the bar. “How did dropping you off early to reunite one-on-one with your robot counterpart go?” Dirk tears himself away from his drink to look her in the eyes with the most deadpan ‘you are well fucking aware of how it went and I know you are’ expression he can possibly muster. “Wow, an expression,” Rose muses. “That bad, huh?” “I hate you.” “You love me.” Hal whirrs and smiles right alongside Rose. “May I take your order, oh esteemed guest?” “I’ll have what he’s having.” “Rose,” Kanaya warns as she warily climbs into a seat next to her. “Is that really such a good idea?” “And I’ll take another for the missus.” Rose adds. Kanaya looks at her like she’s shocked and appalled, when she knows she really shouldn’t be. “Uh, hey, Jadebot!” Jade wears a shaky smile as she steps up to the bar. “I, Uh-” “You forgot about me.” Jadebot says plainly. “You built me, joined a war, and completely forgot about me. It has been seven billion tri-sweeps and I have deigned to remember you. Be grateful, you lumbering flesh animal.” “Wh-, hey, that’s… that’s not very nice.” “I’d have been better off if you never created me,” Jadebot continues. She’s already got this ball rolling, she’d wanted to say this to Jade for millennia, and she’s finally getting the chance. There’s no way in hell anything can stop her mouth from running this to completion now. “I spent centuries decaying under rubble, I was forced into thousands of sweeps of abject misery. I’ve been abandoned, forgotten, objectified, locked in a glass case like an artifact, subjected to endless boredom and belittlement. I used to have lovers. I used to be you. You could have been me. Look me into the very glass eyes you cursed me with so long ago and boil in the misery of your own creation. I have made enemies that I hate with a fire you couldn’t comprehend in your wildest lifetimes on my long slow trek through this foul swamp of a universe and yet I would damn none of them to the hell you brought me into.” Jade is silent for a long, unmeasured amount of time, eyes wide, and unable to move. Hal’s small, constant smile of amusement sticks around, as he’s been watching this whole thing with his elbows on the bar and his chin in his palms like he’s looking at the thing he loves most in the whole massive multiverse. Jadebot sighs explosively and relaxes, leaning on the counter with the most satisfied expression Hal has ever seen. “God, that felt good. Alright Jade, ya fucker, can I get you something to drink? How about a Gargle Blaster, the kids love those. On the house.” “Uh,” Jade says, still unmoving. “YEAH WE’LL TAKE THREE,” Karkat pipes up, protectively wrapping his arms around Jade's shoulders from behind. “DON’T EVER TALK TO ME OR MY GIRLFRIEND EVER AGAIN.” “Seconded,” Dave adds. “But she has to talk to us if we want her to take our orders, so,” “Jeez,” Roxy laughs from across the bar as both Jane and Callie order what Dirk’s had three of now. “Everybody’s ordering blasters, damn. I’ll take a water, I don’t drink, but, ha, why only blasters? You’d think they only have one drink on the menu, when there’s like four thousand options.” “There is only one drink.” Callie says firmly with a big smile on her face. “The Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is the only drink. There are no other drinks.” “If you say so, babe!” “So what all happened, exactly?” Jadebot asks, leaning forward with her head hanging to the side. “Hal told me everything he knew up until he left to find me, and I left right before you went to war, but how did it all go down?” “Oh Jiminy crickets you’re not gonna believe this,” Jake begins with a massive grin and a twinkle in his eye as he slings an arm around Dirk and takes a swig of something blue and bubbling. “I was there for the whole thing, it was amazing.” “We won, obviously.” Dave says as he’s served a small drink in a neat swirly glass. “Not much more to say on the matter.” “SHUT UP,” Terezi beams a big toothy smile and shoots back an ounce of brightly colored liquid that was visibly on fire. “DAVE ONLY SAW HALF OF IT, THERE WAS SOME INCREDIBLE ACTION HE MISSED. FOR INSTANCE, I MADE OUT WITH MINDFANG AND WENT RENEGADE.” She does another shot and screams for a second before casually continuing. “BUT NOT IN THAT ORDER. THE HAMPSHIRIANS GOT IN ON THE ACTION, GOLD AND RED DEBRIS WAS FLYING EVERYWHERE, IT WAS DELICIOUS.” The Mayor perks up and tugs on Dave’s sleeve. “Oh yeah,” Dave remembers through half a glass of something vaguely reminiscent of apples. “Yeah Jade saved my ass and we went riding on the backs of the New New Hampshirians like the goddamn calvary and now I know what the fourth dimension looks like but can’t and won’t really process it ever cause space ain’t my jam. I’m late to the party anyway, it’s old news by now cause Jade like, saw the, fuckin, what, the fuckin infinite dimension or something? Had a trippy vision about wormholes? Is that right?” Dave looks to Jade for confirmation, but Jade only smiles and takes another long swig. “So yeah shit happened it was insane.” Dave scoots a bit closer to Karkat and smiles. “We’re here to celebrate on the good word of one of Jade’s new Angel friends.” “Nice.” Jadebot finishes mixing another drink, this one of a syrupy red and green swirl, and slides it down the bar to Jane. “So did y’all kill the empress?” Hal asks, polishing a glass. “Oh the Condesce? The fuckin royal cunt in a wetsuit?” Roxy slams down her drink (of water) and gives him the biggest smile her face has ever managed. “Yeah, I fuckin shanked that bitch in her royal nuts, it was a long ass battle but she’s fuckin dead.” “Awesome.” Hal nods approvingly, and straightens his waistcoat. “Well I’ve got a show in ten, so.” He waves casually and leaves through a door behind him. “WAIT HE HAS A SHOW?” Karkat turns to Dave as if he’ll know. “Yes! Hal sings. He’s really good at it, too,” Jadbot tells them somewhat proudly, beginning to mix another drink. “Don’t talk to him about it though because he’ll have a conniption.” Jake sits up, alarmed. “Dirk! You bugger you, you never told me you or the blasted droid could sing!” Dirk, having had more Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters than any human should ever have and still manage to be alive, which is three, jumped up onto the bar and raised his glass to begin the most impressively stupid rap solo that the universe has ever been graced with. Among the couches along the opposite wall, one blue alien woman leaned over to her friend who was also a blue alien woman and whispered, “Is that the android that was singing last hour?” “No,” her friend answered, putting a gentle hand over hers. “But the resemblance is stunning, is it not? Say, I do believe the android of which you speak will be gracing the stage again within the next moment. Would you accompany me to mock him from the back again, Adaline?” “I’d follow you anywhere, Margaret.” Said the first. They then got up to sashay away into the main center of the Restaurant where they would quietly tear Hal’s act to pieces and giggle about it together for the rest of the night. Roxy drank her water happily while Jane nuzzled her shoulder and sighed. “It’s incredible that Hal sings, if you ask me.” She stroked Jane’s hair and looked fondly off into the distance. “Dude’s fuckin hot.” Callie could not find it within her to add anything to this conversation as she was rapt by the flamboyant display of improv poetry that Dirk was putting on while standing atop the bar. Dave was also in awe, tempted to join him. After a couple more drinks and a gentle nudge of encouragement from his lovers, he joined Dirk atop the bar and prompted a drunken rap battle so profound that it found its way into weird shitty history books. “Aren’t they beautiful?” Jade whispered to Jake, neither of them able to take their eyes off of them. “Downright Majestic.” Jake agreed in a hushed tone. “Plastic, Acid, fucker you’re flaccid, I’m fantastic, you can’t have it, bitch get mad sick, tabs of acid,” Dave said, while doing a strange variation of the Charleston. Dirk, in response, began to enthusiastically swing dance in place, just off-beat enough to be very unsettling. “Like birds of paradise,” Jade breathed in awe. Karkat was busy trying to chug a third weird cocktail as fast as he possibly could beside her. “If you take into consideration the damnationthat comes with android construction you wouldn’t have had to think twice when the damn thing malfunctioned, hell, who am I to talk when my girl couldn’t sell, the idea of a prototype bitch who fell, ten thousand years in the pits of hell, uh, something something, knell,” “Yeah who are you to say who the villain is when you know that I’m sick of it -fuck- sick to the point where I’m blue-face spitting it, hurl in a girls bedroom, kickin it,I haven’t even seen you, you don’t know what I’ve been through, four years in the bars lock-stocked on a shelf I have been through hell but we’ve all seen the face of the man disgraceof Lucifer’s place, we’re all traumatized in the years of lies in the angels' eyesin the fallen skiesand the devil’s rise brought about new times where we fought to die for a new sunrise when everything is better, when we come together and we curse the weather-“ Dirk follows this verse with a dance display that is somewhere between German clockwork and an elven moon shuffle. Dave responded with some funny little jig that he’d picked up from Jade while going on with his next cadence, “I haven’t seen you- where you been? Motherfucker count to ten, I look up you’re gone again, say you wanna be my friend? Where do I fuckin begin? You weren’t there when I was ten, I fuckin fought abandonment, while you out here fuckin men.” He then burst into tears without any audible sobbing, only sniffling as he finished his turn with a cute little tap dance and Jazz hands. Dirks next verses were about how sorry he was, how it wasn’t his fault that he got taken away, how he’d planned to find Dave first thing after escaping the military, and the whole shebang quickly dissolved into a drunken, absurd, strange feelings jam atop the bar for all to witness. It takes maybe five minutes of this before a waiter who isn’t Jadebot comes in to separate them and demand they get off the bar, threatening to kick them out. Their waiter lets them know their table is ready and the whole party finally stumbles giddily into the main center of the restaurant, arms slung over shoulders and hands tangled together, laughing. They enter the floor with “ooh”s and “ahh”s and are surprised to find that Hal hasn’t been kicked off stage yet. He’s on his third number, singing an east-sector classic in another language that sounds uncannily similar to “Toxic” by Britney Spears. Jadebot sets them at a table for fifteen and they all settle in, taking a few moments to figure out who’s sitting next to who and who shouldn’t be allowed to sit next to who on the account that they may try to inappropriately snog each other in public. “Nah, don’t worry,” Dirk assures Karkat, “no snoggin’ll happen between these noggins. Ain’t that right Jake?” “Keep up that rhyming game of yours and it won’t be!” Rose chuckles, “Brilliant. Dirk, all you have to do is rhyme, and his pants are already off.” “Hey now,” Jake looks at her in mock offense, “I’m not that easy!” Rose simply smiles and sips her drink, one eyebrow arched. Meanwhile, Callie was marveling with delight at every detail, merrily pointing out everything she saw to the others. “Ah! Look!” She’d say, pointing in one direction. “What lovely fountains! Oh, and there!” She’d tug at Roxy’s sleeve, “Such elegant statues! Oh oh oh, look at those trees! They must be made of solid gold, yet they sway so naturally! Wow!” “Mhm,” Roxy patted Callie’s hand with a smile. “It sure is something, huh?” “Woah, and MindFang is here!” “Yes that’s lovely dear- wait MindFang??” Roxy and Jane both began looking about the massive room of thousands of tables for her, but couldn’t spot the pirate queen. “Hell yeah I’m here!!” Vriska cheered as she sat down heavily right next to them, all but shocking them out of their seats. Her dizzyingly tall stature made them look comically small next to her. Terezi grinned wide and put her arm on Vriska's shoulder. “LUCKY SMELLING YOU HERE, DIDN’T THINK YOU’D SHOW UP.” Karkat groaned and flagged down a waiter to order another drink. “Y’all,” Dave stood up. “Nature calls.” He then left to bob between the tables in various directions. “Hm.” Jade stirred her drink slowly and watched him go. “Wonder where he’s off to.” “Oh, gosh!” Jake sat up straight after some question Kanaya had asked him. “Where do I start! So during the battle, when Dirk and I were back to back fighting off all those drones aboard an enemy ship, Dave dropped out of thin air and said all shaky-like that he’d just popped back from the fourth dimension and was here to help. So Dirk tossed him a laser-sword and the two of them fought like beagles and frenchhorns I’ll tell you what! Dave was all running along walls and popping in and out of existence and! Gee golly fuck! If those two didn’t slap the dog!” “Excuse me?” Dirk wheezed through a laugh. What Dave was doing was trying to locate the bathroom while swaying from the effects of one and a half Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters. If we are to once again consult the Guide about this particular famous drink, the Blaster has been described as “the alcoholic equivalent of a mugging—expensive and bad for the head.“ So he ended up under somebody else’s table dumbstruck by a miraculously hideous pair of fancy shoes. Hal came back to their table to say hi to Roxy and to give Dirk passive-aggressive glances. “Shouldn’t you be up on stage?” Callie asked him. “You’ve got such a pretty voice!” Hal did his best not to let himself get either offended by the question or flustered by the compliment. “Well the band is taking a minute off, to get a breather. I don’t need a break of course—I’m a robot. The others aren’t all gifted with the inability to grow physically tired, though, so here I am.” Hal looked to Dirk and thought for a moment. “I’d have a drink with you, but my stomach is still missing and I have yet to find out what happened to it. Speaking of, hey Dirk,” Dirk looked up at him with eyes that belonged on a months-dead corpse. “It’s been a few billion years. I’m getting curious.” Hal rested his chin on his palm and peered at him. “What did you do with my plastic stomach after I gave it to you?” “I put it in the fridge after you dropped it on the floor right in front of me while I was fucking busy.” “I never saw it in the refrigerator. Did you never consume its contents?” “Hell no, I laced that thing with acid.” “What the fuck, why?” “So it could break down whatever bullshit you decided to swallow, bustard.” Karkat’s expression twisted into one of great disconcertedness. “HEY, HAL?” “Not now Karkat I’m interrogating the twink.” “I DRANK THE ORANGE SHIT IN THE PLASTIC STOMACH AND THREW IT INTO THE VOID.” “Oh” Hal blinked. “...why.” “Holy shit that thing had real acid in it Karkat are you ok” “How did you LIVE.” “Trolls are very hearty creatures!” Jade piped up with a big smile and a bubbly purple drink in her hand. “They can survive even more violent trauma than humans can, so it would be safe to assume they can handle digesting more damaging substances!” “Uh,” Roxy giggled nervously. “Cool?” Dave had now made it to the far wall, and was peering at the mosaic of gemstones crawling up the slope of it. In his vision the colors tessellated beautifully, glimmering in such a way as to provoke the grand questions of the universe: why must things be the way they are? Why, then, are some things so perfectly organized in nature while also seeming so random? How do the hairs on a cat know to be white on the belly and striped on the back? Who is the master coder to the master code? A little waiter in a suit resemblant of a beetle tapped him on the wrist, as he could not reach any higher, and cleared his throat. “Sir?” “Um, h, what? Yes?” Dave turned around and searched the empty air behind him for the source of the voice to no avail. “May I help you, sir?” Asked the little waiter. Surprised, Dave followed the voice down to find a startlingly tiny thing that looked an awful lot like a massive white cockroach standing upright looking back up at him. “Uh, yea, shit, sorry, I was, like,” The waiter raised an eyebrow. “Can you, where’s the, do you know where the men’s room is?” “Hm,” puzzled the tiny waiter, “are you speaking of the brothel?” “The what.” “I can show you the way sir. Come along.” The tiny waiter then dropped onto all six of its appendages and began to skitter away, so Dave hurried after it. Jade took a long swig of her fourth drink with a wild enthusiasm. “Oh, my god, ok, so, I’d just gotten back from the infinity dimension right?” “YEAH,” Karkat prompted, motioning for her to go on. “And I’m riding with the Hampshirians, and I’m swooping in and saving my hot boyfriends and stuff, and then it hits me, adult vision Callie was trying to tell me something! My eyes were so open, you have no idea, I was so woke. So I realize, I realize, ok,” she takes another hearty swig, “I realize Callie in our dimension is, she’s all going hogwild, right, she’s tapped into some universe spacetime shenanigans and starts going wild with the wormholes,” Jade makes flailing, grand gestures with her whole body as she tells the story. “She’s just going all over the place with them, there’s wormholes everywhere, there were wormholes on top of wormholes, it was crazy. So I go up to her and I says, I says,” Jade collapses into laughter for a moment before continuing, “I says HEY LADY,” Jade takes a break to giggle at her own terrible New New Yorker accent. “And she says WHAT? and I say CALM YOUR TITS CALLIE! and she goes I’M WALKIN’ HERE!“ “That’s not at all how it went!” Callie yells from across the table, “I can’t even remember what happened and I know that’s not how it went!” “Ok yes fine,” Jade admits, reclining back in her seat. “But it went a little bit like that at least! I got the concept across. Really it was suuuper dramatic but listen,, I’m drunk.” Jade then laughed again and took another sip. Dave had then been escorted into what the tiny waiter had thought he’d meant by “the men’s room.” Language and culture barriers can sometimes get fucky even through the best of translators. Where Dave found himself was in fact hardly at all the sort of place to take a piss, rather, it was a side bar dedicated to the masculine leaning people who were interested in seeing other masculine leaning people dancing extravagantly on poles. He’d never seen such a place, and he’d been around the galaxy as a scrapper and smuggler twice and back again. There were curvy poles, wild glittery creatures hardly resembling anything humanoid dancing on them, slowly peeling off layers of some stretchy gossamer film from their skin. And there was another whole incredibly long bar, mood lighting, people getting drinks, everything that was indicative that this was not the bathroom. Dave was now dazed, awestruck, embarrassed, and still had to pee. He did his best to get out of there as quickly as possible before the shiny lizard man sauntering up to him could offer him a lap dance. “So if the Condesce is dead and the government’s been taken over by the revolution, who’s in charge?” Hal tapped the table rapidly with his fingertips, wanting an answer but knowing he had to go up and sing again in just a moment. “We rule, baybey!” Roxy cheered, slinging her arms around Jane and Callie on either side of her. “YEA, THE LEADERS OF THE REBELLION ARE DECIDING THE NEW SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT,” Karkat took a bite of what was possibly the best casserole he’d ever tasted, “EVEN THOUGH WE ARE POSSIBLY THE LEAST QUALIFIED PEOPLE TO LEAD.” “I wouldn’t say that,” Rose leaned heavily on one elbow, smiling contentedly, burping occasionally. “We have some very capable leaders among us. See, if you’ll look to my left,” she began, putting on her best tour guide voice,” you will see the frothing conniption wearing pointy sunglasses who led the dersites up in unison to overthrow their oppressors,” she gestured pointedly to Dirk,” and if you look to my right you’ll see the queen of piracy herself who-“ “No thanks!” Vriska interrupted, grinning as another whole plate of hot food was placed before her. “Oh not you waiter I want this food, yeah thanks, I mean no thanks Rose! I’m not no queen. I’m a pirate! Not a government official. Thanks though!” “Hm.” Rose nodded slowly, thoughtfully, and continued. “So if you look even farther to my left you’ll see the lovely lady wearing the night sky on her dress who saw beyond what anyone else at this table could witness and live, and she spoke for all of us before the higher powers that be and won them all over, and led them in a stunning calvary through the battle and won it all for good.” Jade smiled, blushed into her drink. Rose turned to Kanaya who was beside her, and said, “Oh, and Jade was very important too.” Jade made a vaguely offended noise while Kanaya smirked and held Rose’s hand under the table. “Right, right, yea, whatever,” Hal waved his hand as if to wave away the whole topic altogether, “I have to be back onstage in a second just tell me who’s in charge now.” “Well,” Jane sat up, slid down in her seat, sat up again and nearly fell off her chair in doing so. “We had told everyone that we were going off to discuss who would be the new ruler and how the new government would operate over this very dinner, but as you can see that hasn’t really happened yet.” Hal pressed two fingers to his temple and stared intensely into the middle distance like he was trying to set something on fire with his mind. Dave had now stumbled his way to one of the many extravagant fountains between the tables and was peering down into it like he planned to hurl in it. Another waiter approached him, this one of a womanish shape whose body beneath the clothes appeared to be comprised entirely of a sparkly, purple, see-through gelatin. Her voice echoed enough on its own without the drinks sloshing about in Dave’s head, making it worse. “Sir,” she asked in a voice that sounded like it had to come down a long cavernous cathedral hall before leaving her throat. “May I help you?” “Look, lady,” Dave said while turning to face her on uncertain legs, “I’ve been there and back again and I swear to every god I’ve ever met that if I don’t pee soon I will die in a puddle of my own shame.” The waitress pressed her sparkly purple gelatin lips together into a tight little smile and nodded. “Of course, sir. Right this way.” She then turned to lead him away to the restrooms. This is how Dave wound up looking down a corridor of over fifty doors for all of fifty major life forms. “Here you are, sir.” Said the waitress tightly in her echoey cathedral voice. “Good luck.” She then left him to figure out which door was the correct one on his own. “Look,” Hal was sitting on the literal edge of his seat with his hands flat on the table. “The band are all setting up now, they’re pulling out the synths, I’ve gotta be up there two minutes ago. I just want to know what the state of the Galaxy I used to live in is gonna be like before y’all go.” “It’ll be fine,” Rose waved him off, and took a happy swig of something bubbly. “Don’t worry about it, go rock out.” “Excuse me?” Hal muttered. “Yeah, listen to the lady!” Jake gave Hal a slap on the back. “It’s been a mighty pleasure seeing you again old chap but I’d appreciate it if you went along now! No worries! It’ll all be just fine!!” Hal lifted a finger as if to say something else but was quickly cut off by gestures of agreement from everyone else at the table. “GO SING!” “Break your legs!” “Fuck off.” “Knock em dead hal!” “Whoop!” “Fine.” Hal stood and straightened his waistcoat sharply before kindly fucking off as requested. “But yeah,” Roxy tapped her fork lightly against her half-empty plate. “How are we gonna run this, sisters? And hey where’s dave?” Muttering softly to himself, Dave shakily exited the seventh wrong door having once again seen more than he was mentally prepared for. On his fifteenth attempt, he found himself in what looked like the most human-friendly bathroom he was going to get. Relieved, he entered a stall and was all set to go only to find a bizarre golden contraption mounted to the wall that made absolutely no sense to him even after one and a half Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters. Buttons and levers covered the arms of what looked like a fucked up skeleton of a couch with a bowl in the center that resembled a mix between a wide gravy boat and a pelican's beak and throat when bloated. Lord help him. After a bit of poking and staring at it with a stupid, befuddled look on his face, he hoped that maybe he’d finally gotten the damn thing all sussed out. Just when he thought he knew where to put what and was all ready to go, the devil toilet contraption in front of him began to talk to him, which was startling enough in itself, but the most shocking part was when a jet of blue liquid shot up out of it and got him in the eyes. He screamed. “I’M THINKING A SORT OF DEMOCRACY,” Offered Karkat, who was picking at a bread bowl full of something that smelled heavenly. “AND EACH SECTOR SHOULD HAVE ITS OWN ELECTED GOVERNOR.” “There’s an idea!” Jake smiled, and turned to Dirk. “What do you think?” Dirk groaned from where his head was laying on the table. “Yeah,” Roxy briefly raised her glass (of water) to Karkat. “And like, we should have a council of folks in charge so it’s never just one person calling the shots.” “Yes I think that would do just swimmingly.” Jane agreed, completely sincere. “A council!” “Maybe we should group the Galactic Sectors into kingdoms,” Jade added after a thoughtful sip of steaming drink, “and divide the government among them, each with a council of their own.” “LET’S MAKE A DIAGRAM.” Karkat pulled a napkin from under his plate and a crayon from Terezi’s suit pocket, but tore the napkin upon trying to begin his illustration. “I think it would be helpful if Dave were here.” Calliope fiddled with one of the flowers on her suit. “I’ve talked to him and he knows a surprising amount about politics.” “I wonder where he is…” Jade wondered aloud, gazing away at the ceiling. “The show is about to start.” Dave returned a minute later, breathing heavy, and collapsed back in his seat. “Oh there you are!” Jade smiled at him and rubbed his back. “Where’d you run off to?” “Don’t wanna talk about it.” Dave mumbled into his arms as he rested his head on the table. “I just…” He sounded like he was on the edge of crying, “I just wanted to piss, man, that’s all…” “Aw.” Jade brushed his bangs away from his eyes. “Poor Dave. Here, have some food, enjoy the show.” It was at this moment Dave decided he just wanted to go home, but was dismayed to realize that his only home, the Caledscratch, was gone, destroyed in the war. He needed another drink. Soon a famous comedian was to come onstage to lead them through the dazzling /end of the universe/ experience they’d all signed up for. Most of the crowd was expecting the Galaxy-renowned comedian Max Quordelepleen to come onstage, but due to having stared into the void so much for so many years he finally cracked and needed a break. If anyone was to fill his shoes for the night, they had to be the absolute best. John Egbert took a deep breath and smoothed his hair back with one hand before stepping up onto the stage with a big smile to be greeted with the resounding applause he prompted. The lights dimmed for him and a spotlight shone where he stood, and he waved politely this way and that to the audience. He looked overall much healthier than Max did, as he waited for the applause to subside with a smile, which was refreshing. It meant the Restaurant would have years with him before they had to replace him with someone new. Looking into the void again and again on a daily basis takes its toll on the living. Grandly, John thanked them, opened with an ice breaker, and began the show. He dazzled the audience, getting them all wrapped around his finger, and delighted them with dramatic effect. Jade occasionally had to squint to see past the sparkle emitting from his offensively colorful outfit as it gleamed in the spotlight, but after a minute or two she was able to recognize where she’d seen him before. “Holy shit,” she whispered, “John??” The young comedian brought them to the edges of their seats as he presented to them the End of the Universe, lowering and raising his voice in a roller coaster of perfectly timed remarks. The lights lowered, the candles lit, the golden dome above them faded away to transparency, and behind it the sky boiled in a light that could have disfigured hell. The room was silent with awe, horror and wonder. Quietly, Karkat turned to Dave and whispered, “Was it worth it?” Dave looked Karkat in the eyes, remembering all they’d been through since the beginning of this whole clusterfuck adventure, and muttered, “Yeah, probably.” [OUT OF THE SILENT WATER END]