[Fic] "Trollstuck," part 7 -- Homestuck
May. 5th, 2012 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingFirst, a note! Chapter Two is now up on AO3 -- featuring one illustration, an actual typing quirk for Alonde, and some general revisions to make things flow more smoothly. (And no, I am not going to go back and edit those changes into the journal version. That's the beta draft and it can stay in draft form for historical record or something.)
back to part 6
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Trollstuck, part 7
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====>Be the other girl
Oh for gog's sake, not this again. You will have to be more specific!
====>Be Aradia
You are ARADIA MEGIDO, and you are getting ready to return to your latest dig site. You don't eat there, of course -- you may be completely self-trained as an archaeologist but you know at least a little bit about site contamination. So you brought along a grubloaf sandwich and a bottle of water and had a little picnic on top of the now extinct volcano that buried and preserved the ancient town you're digging up.
The view is gorgeous from up here: the endless eastern sea on your left hand, the vast sweep of wilderness and drone-farms to your right with a cluster of brightly-lit hivestems just visible on the horizon, and the lush green valley with its hidden treasure in front of you. The moon is slouching over the horizon now, adding its royal hue to the silvery light of the stars. The little moon is nearly at perigee, almost kissing the edge of Alternia's atmosphere as it slowly swings around its shepherd.
But enough about the landscape! You're more interested in what's underneath.
====>Investigate!
Well really, what else were you going to do?
You captchalogue your laptop and whistle for your lusus. She bounds toward you, her scaled body sinuous as she seems to flow over the rocky ground. Ram-horned raptors are mountain animals by habit, able to balance on slopes so steep they might as well be sheer cliffs! You always feel a little sorry that you live on flat ground, so you made sure to build your hive with lots of stairs for her to play on. She also likes to explore the practice pits you dug in your lawn.
You levitate and begin flying down the remains of the mountain. Raptormom runs after you, leaping from rock to rock. You keep half an eye aimed toward her, ready to telekinetically catch her if she falls, but she never does. She's neat like that!
Soon you are back at the foot of the mountain, where your trial dig unexpectedly dumped you down a chimney into a maze of underground rooms. Well, they're underground now -- back when trolls lived here, you think they were mostly aboveground, except for the lowest levels that don't have any windows. The construction is very strange by modern standards. Instead of separate hives with lots of open space between them to appease territorial instincts, or tall hivestems that answer the same need by leaving a handful of empty floors between each occupied level, all the buildings seem to run into each other like the whole town was one giant communal hive!
You admit this is very convenient for you, since you can explore at leisure without having to constantly blast your way through hardened volcanic ash -- telekinesis is very useful but not entirely without cost! -- but it's still weird. And it does make identifying important public rooms vs. private areas a bit tricky.
====>Ask the ghosts for help
Don't be silly! Not everyone who dies feels like lingering around Alternia as an incorporeal bundle of memories and emotions. Even the ones who do -- and people who got killed by a volcano in the middle of a war are definitely the kind who aren't going to peacefully move on for a while, any more than Vriska's victims were ready to move on without at least trying to get vengeance -- kind of unravel after a hundred sweeps or so. This site is several thousand sweeps old. Any ghosts around here won't know any more than you do. Probably less; ghosts are pretty single-minded and forget a lot of stuff.
If you want to know about the past, archaeology is much more effective than channeling spirits!
====>Are you sure about that?
Well, 0k, necromancy is a thing that exists, but that's more Alonde's area than yours. You'd much rather play around with shovels and brushes and the radiocarbon dating machine that Vriska's creepy neighbor built for you and stared at you with this weird hungry look in his eyes until you smiled and accepted the present. (He is such a creep! Also he's never done a gog-damned thing to stop Vriska though he has to know what she's like. There is no way you're letting him get his claws on Tavros, even if some kind of robot prosthetics or at least an electric four wheel device might help him out. You'd much rather have Sollux look up schematics and build something yourself.)
Anyway, why are you wasting time thinking about ghosts when you could be exploring? You need to record all the personal symbols you can find and mark where they occur on your rough map of the site. You wonder if you'll be able to figure out which ones belonged to the Demoness and Dayblade. It's amazing to think they were real trolls, not just bedtime stories!
You float down the chimney into the buried town. Raptormom whines a little before following you underground, her claws easily gripping the ancient bricks. (There are almost no carpenter drone materials here, as if the inhabitants made all their own building supplies. This says something about the organization of pre-Imperial society. You haven't worked out quite what it says, but you're sure it's important.)
When you reach the bottom, you are standing in a communal food preparation block. Wide counters stretch along one wall, and a three-bay sink stands in the corner -- a clear sign that this town had running water of some sort. The walls are lined with hooks that once held cooking implements, but only the ceramic ones remain; there are streaks of rust where iron ones used to hang, and you suspect some of the other empty hooks held things made of wood. This site is very well preserved, but clearly some cave-ins over the sweeps have let enough outside influence in to keep the normal processes of decay at least somewhat active.
You strap a lamp to your head, clip your whip to your belt, and pull your preliminary map out of your sylladex. Three doors open from this room. The one to your left leads into a maze of twisty passages, all alike, lined by what you think are private respiteblocks. The one to your right leads down a staircase to the tunnels that run underneath the town, allowing access to other giant buildings. And the one in front of you leads out into the main public areas of this communal hive.
Which way will you go?
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---------------
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Subsidiary question: what do you want Aradia to find?
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continue to part 8
And now, dinner!
back to part 6
---------------------------------------------
Trollstuck, part 7
---------------------------------------------
====>Be the other girl
Oh for gog's sake, not this again. You will have to be more specific!
====>Be Aradia
You are ARADIA MEGIDO, and you are getting ready to return to your latest dig site. You don't eat there, of course -- you may be completely self-trained as an archaeologist but you know at least a little bit about site contamination. So you brought along a grubloaf sandwich and a bottle of water and had a little picnic on top of the now extinct volcano that buried and preserved the ancient town you're digging up.
The view is gorgeous from up here: the endless eastern sea on your left hand, the vast sweep of wilderness and drone-farms to your right with a cluster of brightly-lit hivestems just visible on the horizon, and the lush green valley with its hidden treasure in front of you. The moon is slouching over the horizon now, adding its royal hue to the silvery light of the stars. The little moon is nearly at perigee, almost kissing the edge of Alternia's atmosphere as it slowly swings around its shepherd.
But enough about the landscape! You're more interested in what's underneath.
====>Investigate!
Well really, what else were you going to do?
You captchalogue your laptop and whistle for your lusus. She bounds toward you, her scaled body sinuous as she seems to flow over the rocky ground. Ram-horned raptors are mountain animals by habit, able to balance on slopes so steep they might as well be sheer cliffs! You always feel a little sorry that you live on flat ground, so you made sure to build your hive with lots of stairs for her to play on. She also likes to explore the practice pits you dug in your lawn.
You levitate and begin flying down the remains of the mountain. Raptormom runs after you, leaping from rock to rock. You keep half an eye aimed toward her, ready to telekinetically catch her if she falls, but she never does. She's neat like that!
Soon you are back at the foot of the mountain, where your trial dig unexpectedly dumped you down a chimney into a maze of underground rooms. Well, they're underground now -- back when trolls lived here, you think they were mostly aboveground, except for the lowest levels that don't have any windows. The construction is very strange by modern standards. Instead of separate hives with lots of open space between them to appease territorial instincts, or tall hivestems that answer the same need by leaving a handful of empty floors between each occupied level, all the buildings seem to run into each other like the whole town was one giant communal hive!
You admit this is very convenient for you, since you can explore at leisure without having to constantly blast your way through hardened volcanic ash -- telekinesis is very useful but not entirely without cost! -- but it's still weird. And it does make identifying important public rooms vs. private areas a bit tricky.
====>Ask the ghosts for help
Don't be silly! Not everyone who dies feels like lingering around Alternia as an incorporeal bundle of memories and emotions. Even the ones who do -- and people who got killed by a volcano in the middle of a war are definitely the kind who aren't going to peacefully move on for a while, any more than Vriska's victims were ready to move on without at least trying to get vengeance -- kind of unravel after a hundred sweeps or so. This site is several thousand sweeps old. Any ghosts around here won't know any more than you do. Probably less; ghosts are pretty single-minded and forget a lot of stuff.
If you want to know about the past, archaeology is much more effective than channeling spirits!
====>Are you sure about that?
Well, 0k, necromancy is a thing that exists, but that's more Alonde's area than yours. You'd much rather play around with shovels and brushes and the radiocarbon dating machine that Vriska's creepy neighbor built for you and stared at you with this weird hungry look in his eyes until you smiled and accepted the present. (He is such a creep! Also he's never done a gog-damned thing to stop Vriska though he has to know what she's like. There is no way you're letting him get his claws on Tavros, even if some kind of robot prosthetics or at least an electric four wheel device might help him out. You'd much rather have Sollux look up schematics and build something yourself.)
Anyway, why are you wasting time thinking about ghosts when you could be exploring? You need to record all the personal symbols you can find and mark where they occur on your rough map of the site. You wonder if you'll be able to figure out which ones belonged to the Demoness and Dayblade. It's amazing to think they were real trolls, not just bedtime stories!
You float down the chimney into the buried town. Raptormom whines a little before following you underground, her claws easily gripping the ancient bricks. (There are almost no carpenter drone materials here, as if the inhabitants made all their own building supplies. This says something about the organization of pre-Imperial society. You haven't worked out quite what it says, but you're sure it's important.)
When you reach the bottom, you are standing in a communal food preparation block. Wide counters stretch along one wall, and a three-bay sink stands in the corner -- a clear sign that this town had running water of some sort. The walls are lined with hooks that once held cooking implements, but only the ceramic ones remain; there are streaks of rust where iron ones used to hang, and you suspect some of the other empty hooks held things made of wood. This site is very well preserved, but clearly some cave-ins over the sweeps have let enough outside influence in to keep the normal processes of decay at least somewhat active.
You strap a lamp to your head, clip your whip to your belt, and pull your preliminary map out of your sylladex. Three doors open from this room. The one to your left leads into a maze of twisty passages, all alike, lined by what you think are private respiteblocks. The one to your right leads down a staircase to the tunnels that run underneath the town, allowing access to other giant buildings. And the one in front of you leads out into the main public areas of this communal hive.
Which way will you go?
---------------
---------------
---------------
Subsidiary question: what do you want Aradia to find?
---------------------------------------------
continue to part 8
And now, dinner!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-06 12:09 pm (UTC)As for what she should find? Signs of early Red communist economics, most probably in the form of records of food distribution to individuals from collective stockpiles. Maybe such records contain personal signs of the individuals who received said distributions. Just uhh...wow, there's a lot of these clay tablets. They hadn't even invented paper, but they still had too much paperwork.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-08 02:56 am (UTC)I see what you did there. :-D
(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-08 03:00 am (UTC)But in all seriousness, that's actually how ancient Sumerian writing was used-to record who gave what and who got what from their proto-socialist system. I don't know what the actual details were, but it apparently allowed metalworkers and scribes to draw a stipend of grain to live off each year.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-06 08:39 pm (UTC)...prrrrr history. X3333
i like how she describes her lusus! so cute raptormom. X3
Hmmm. Explore this building before going to others! easiest parts first. => STRAIGHT AHEAD! u.u
she should also find skeletons u.u nah, it's been too long, nothing would be left. SADNESS. (maybe the horns? XD idk.) Wall paintings? frescoes? statues?
(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-08 02:58 am (UTC)Yeah sure horns, why not; they could be useful for indentifying personal symbols that have altered in design down the generations. Definitely artwork!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-06 08:57 pm (UTC)====> Stumble across Dayblade's personal respiteblock/art studio. Revise previous opinion re: being unable to go wrong with mazes. (Sweet troll Jegus, is that puppet pornography? And why are all the trolls dressed as hoofbeasts?)
====> Attempt to appreciate irony of troll "high culture" apparently having been strongly influenced by a lowblood.
====> Fail, due to extreme shock, horror, and disgust. And also due to being ambushed by the most terrifying thing in existence.
No don't be ridiculous it can't ambush anything it's just a puppet it's just a puppet PLEASE DEAR GOG let it just be a puppet(Hey there, Li'l Cal.)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-08 02:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-09 03:54 pm (UTC)I mean, if both Gl'bgolyb and the Demoness exist on Alternia despite being an integral part of Scratch's manipulations in canon, this clearly isn't a "butterfly effect" style AU, where you're changing one or two backstory elements but keeping everything else strictly canonical and seeing how everything snowballs from there. Unless I'm mistaken, you've changed the setting's metaphysics and cosmology such that Sburb/Sgrub/Skaia/Bilious Slick/Lord English/Doc Scratch/Pre-Scratch Alternia/etc aren't things that exist in this AU, but many of the things that were products of them in canon now have alternative explanations. Why is Li'l Cal exempt from this?
Sorry if I'm coming across as obstinate or argumentative; that's not my intent at all. I'm just perplexed, for reasons I outlined above.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-11 04:15 am (UTC)The Demoness exists on Alternia because she is Aradia's Ancestor. If you're going to argue that she shouldn't be there, you'd have to argue that none of the Ancestors should be there, or even the troll kids, since they're all game creations. All I did was assign her a time period and assume that she (and all the other trolls) was born normally from a Mother Grub instead of via ectobiology. If she has any clockwork majjyks, she learned them herself or from a non-Scratch source.
Gl'bgolyb is a Horrorterror, and from what I can tell, the Furthest Ring is not a game construct; it exists outside all iterations of reality, be they game sessions or universes. So even a non-game-related universe ought to be able to contact it, which is what the Magician did.
But Lil' Cal is not only created in the game, he's created because of the game, and specifically because of the interactions between two very unusual game sessions. Gamzee brings him to life in Dave's Derse dream room because he's furious at Dave for the Insane Clown Posse video, and because Dave already fears the waking Earth version of Cal (who is in fact the same physical iteration on account of shenanigans and beta!Dirk carrying him down as a comfort blanket on his meteor). Even leaving aside the whole mess with Cal's body later being used as a template to create Doc Scratch, I can't figure out how to independently create him without that impetus. (Also, he is a human-shaped ventriloquist dummy, not a troll-shaped one -- a minor point, but one that would bug me as inconsistent if I stuck him in unchanged.) This is not to say that Dayblade might not have had other creepy puppets! Just not that specific puppet. And definitely not one that could survive several thousand years, let alone move on its own after that. (Lil' Cal might have survived that, being made of god-knows-what that's only pretending to be wood and cloth, but not a normal puppet.)