Homestuck

Rose is in a tiny mausoleum with her former pet, shoes on her laptop connected to hosting John's session of SBURB. Fire from an apocalyptic meteor shower closing in around her. Time is running out. She is contemplating updating her entry to the game on gameFaqs. Gotta admire the devotion.

Meanwhile John is being commanded by a loud voice in his head. He must go get cookies from his grandmother's harlequin ghost sprite. He’s resisting this command really hard.

Years in the future we see a wayward vagabond in a post-apocalyptic desert. He’s in an abandoned facility, below the sands. He accidentally strikes the caps lock key on a keyboard he is using to put a voice in John's head. This unlocks a hidden cache of human relics. Metal cylinders labelled beans and mustard. There is also a plant and a book on human etiquette. I do not think he understands what these are, but he has really hit the survivalist jackpot.

Rose meanwhile is working on those faq updates. She expresses interest in seeing a brass door-knocker and pornography collection. Those would be some knockers! ( I’m so sorry )

Her advice to players is to try and get both prototypes in before setting off the countdown. She also recommends using something sentient as a prototype. This should get a guide that can actually talk to you.

She also pontificates on the lore and how instances work. Will each player get their own Medium? Does prototyping lead to different instance outcomes? She also hatches a plan. With John's server disk not unavailable due to the car incident. They’ll need other players to form a chain.

Four because there seems to be 4 receptacles in each of the kingdoms. But how could the game predict they’d have 4 players? Rose is apparently still working on that article suggesting we bother someone else.

And so we do. Months in the past in a snow covered building…

As mentioned yesterday, Rose is running out of time. The fire is approaching the mausoleum and she’s just gotten to it. She Fires up the generator and takes shelter inside. It’s a small space, Rose kicks the coffin to the ground to make a table for the laptop. The cat is inside apparently taxidermied and put into a tuxedo. I can only assume a drunken choice made by her mom.

Dave is also pestering her and she is ignoring him. She needs to connect to John.

John meanwhile survived his first real fight. But he noticed something odd. Something fixed his bedroom door during the fight, and left slightly ajar. And when he opened.

Granny Pranked! Seems his ghost grandma sprite thing pulled a classic move on him.

Meanwhile, since John is clearly not in danger. Rose chats with Dave. Dave admits he is beginning to get creeped out by his brother's puppets. But he is still working on obtaining the beta so he can save her.

Back to John. It turns out since the sprite is fully prototyped he can just talk to it. It really is his grandma and she’s going to guide him though the medium. John had never actually met his grandma so he is just assuming this is all true. If this was my grandma she'd be about as bad as John's father in that she’d be making me eat till I explode.

Speaking of John's fathers NanaSprite explains that imps kidnapped him. She also explains that SBURB is just a thing that transports people to an instance of the medium. The medium is where John is currently. It is in something called The Incipisphere, but not in its centre.

Above John is the seven gates. These are the rings left by the sprite when it split apart. above them in the centre of the The Incipisphere is Skaia. Skaia a “crucible of unlimited creative potential”

Also there are 2 kingdoms one dark and one light which each have 4 orbs that need to be filled with sprites.

As she explains all this Skies of Skaia is playing and it's a damn good song.

Anyway by coming to this land John has triggered a war between light and darkness. One which darkness will win. But to figure out the point to all this John needs to progress in the game. She suggests John needs to build a path up to the first gate.

John's excited to start this adventure, to save the earth from doom. But granny shoots down that goal. Earth is just screwed, and not relevant to his journey. By playing the game he's triggered the end times and there's nothing he can do about it. Well that is a bummer but we’d have destroyed it anyway. Nanasprite then leaves to make cookies.

Rose meanwhile is smacking John with a box to get his attention.

Rose is on a mission to get to the generator. She just needs to get past her mother. This could be a dangerous waste of time but- oh!

We're now a cool dude who wears his shades indoors. He has a sword and no time for our bullcrap. This Dave Strider also we can safely assume this is turtechGodhand [TG]. He has a lot of interests, including electronic music, turntables and mixers. He likes weirdly preserved dead things. He considers himself an amateur photographer. Also he runs some ironic blogs, websites and profiles. His room isn't messy like Rose’’s room but it is a cluttered and chaotic mess of wires and equipment. His furniture is mostly just cinder blocks with wooden boards.

We go through the usual nonsense we’ve encountered with new characters so far. Dave isn't as obedient as John. When asked to save his friends he had no idea what we meant by that.

He does show us some of his stuff though. He has a blue package from John. It contained a signed image of “Ben Stiller” who is known for being in a lot of dumb movies. I can assume Dave likes him ironically. Also, I'm not even sure if it is an image of Ben Stiller.

He also takes the box and a bottle of apple juice to show how insane his hash modus is. It apparently stores items in a slot based on an equation. The equation uses the number of consonants in the name of the item. What a damn headache that is. Though Dave is a bit of a headache in general.

I can only relate to Dave in that I was at some point in life the cringe anime kid with a sword. I think Dave may have been what gave me the self reflection to grow the hell up.

Anyway, not really motivated to do much else Dave decides to wish John a happy birthday. Also to ask John if he’s had time to play that SBURB beta that he’d been going on about…

Ah! we’ve wandered into more timey nonsense. This conversation between them was way back in early Act 1. This might explain Dave's lack of motivation on world ending events.

We get a taste of Dave internet habits

First we see sweetbroshellablog.blogspot.com where he is posting Ironic reviews of GameBro magazine. The real site's claimed by Andrew Hussie but seems to not actually be in use other than some comments. And then there is sweetbroandhellajeff.com which redirects to a subsite MSPA. This is also in the unofficial collection system as /sbahj/1.

Now maybe I don't get Irony, but SBAHJ is just awful. It comes up a lot in Homestuck and the community was a little nuts about it. I’m sure some still have tattoos. There is a printed book for it, and the memes exist to this day. What credit I will give it is that it's possibly the most famous meta web comic in existence. It's a webcomic made by a character in a web comic. Anyway give it a read if you like it has bearing on what's happening in the story.

Also a webcomic within a webcomic is the Midnight Crew. We learn one of the members is Spades Slick and that the crew doesn't always get along. We will learn more about them later though.

John is again Phernalia with reckless abandon. While tentacleTherapist [TT] is moving the bathtub to the driveway for some reason. Her plan's interrupted by a lost network connection. The tub falls onto the second floor hallway. Given she had dragged that thing right over John's head it's pretty lucky it didn't fall on him.

TT explains she's been having WiFi issues due to a storm. TT’s mother is on a bit of a bender and she doesn't want to encounter her. She has a strained relationship with her mother as a result of the drinking. John compares his own situation to TT’s. She responds with much sarcastic agreement. Sarcasm he deserves really.

Despite the bad wifi it seems TT is still able to do things. John makes a sad attempt to open the Cruxtruder using a sledge hammer. That seems like a really bad idea given he has no idea what it is or how it works. Despite this TT seems to be onboard and helps him swing the hammer. This.. works!?

A weird flashing spirographic.. thing comes out of the machine. The machine starts a countdown of 4:13 (of course). TT has no idea what this actually means. She was checking Gamefaqs but wasn't able to see anything beyond this point. The entries actually exist! Which of you nerds made that happen?

What TT does know is that John is going to need some "Cruxite" and a punch card. The Cruxite is a blue cylinder which was in the Cruxtruder. The punch card is something TT is able to spawn. They seem to be ignoring the flashy orb floating around seemingly of its own accord. But they didn't ignore the countdown and are very concerned by it. It's a little too flashy and hurts my head.