[Fic] "Trollstuck," part 10 -- Homestuck
May. 31st, 2012 04:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingback to part 9
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Trollstuck, part 10
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====>Enter the room
You're not sure what you're expecting. Davven's kind of your friend? You think? Maybe? It's hard to tell with that guy! He plays everything so close to his skin. You're frankly surprised he's open about his blood color instead of being hemononymous like Karkat, given how hard it is to get any kind of straightforward answers out of him. It took a whole sweep before he admitted his real name to you, for instance, and you still don't know what kind of animal his lusus is. Even Karkat's not that paranoid. (Or maybe it's just that they're paranoid about different things? Come to think of it, most of your friends are a little paranoid or obsessive about one thing or another. You wonder what that says about you.)
The point is, you don't know Davven very well, and you've definitely never been to his hive. That would be tricky even if he'd tell you the exact location, since he lives on the lesser continent like Kanaya, and rustbloods don't have the resources to buy ocean-crossing transportation technology. And you're not a strong enough telekinetic to fly there. Not like Sollux. Which is both good and bad, and... you're going to stop that chain of thought right now. It leads to depressing places. Like starships.
But anyway! You are pretty sure that, no matter what kind of hoofbeastshit Davven talks to amuse himself, he wouldn't paint... um... this sort of art all over his respite block walls.
====>Describe the art
Hell no!
It's bad enough you got stuck overday with Vriska's creepy creeping creep of a neighbor that one time because he caught you leaving her hive after a Flarp campaign and you didn't realize how much of a freaky sleazebag he was until it was too late to get home before sunrise. This is like his hive, only worse, because... well, because this stuff actually has some sense of proportion? And an understanding of color balance? And the landscape backgrounds are really pretty and accurate renderings of the area right around the volcano and it starts to fool you into thinking everything's safe and then bam, musclebeast pornography in your face! And not just red and black porn! Pale porn!!! Hardcore intimacy right out where anyone could see!
====>Speculate what this might say about Davven
No thank you!
You prefer to speculate about what might be in the row of chests along the far wall. For one thing, who even makes ceramic chests? Wood or metal are much more common, and a lot easier to move besides. But clay survived the volcano and the subsequent centuries much better than other materials. It's almost as if whoever slept in this room knew disaster was coming and wanted to make sure some things were preserved.
You are now very suspicious!
(You are also trying very hard not to look at the painting above the chests. This one seems to involve puppets? And trolls dressed up as various musclebeasts? Eww.)
====>Open the chests
There are four of them, each a solid rectangular block with a lid fitted nearly airtight into a groove just inside the rim. There is no obvious latch or place to get a grip and lift the lids. But that's not a problem. You just lift the leftmost lid with your mind until you can get your hands underneath and guide it carefully to lie on top of the next chest over.
You kneel and peer down into the chest.
It contains stacks of fired clay tablets absolutely covered in writing you can't read. But you recognize the letters. They're the same as the inscription over the door of the symbol room, and the cramped wall writing in that other respite block you photographed a while ago. You pick up the topmost tablet in the center stack and turn it over. Yep, writing on the back too.
This is way too much to photograph, especially since the battery in your lamp is starting to run low. You bite your lip, worrying about site integrity. Then you think about the flood of ghosts Gl'bgolyb killed just because she was a little upset -- the death wave you only escaped because you live a little further away from Feferi's hive than trolls on the western coast of the great continent.
You put the lid back into place and captchalogue the chest.
You hastily check the other chests. The second is also full of clay tablets covered in writing. The third contains tablets with what seem to be math. You can't read the numbers, but the lines look a bit like equations and there are definitely some geometric diagrams. Weird. You captchalogue both chests. Hopefully Alonde can figure out the tablets!
You lift the lid off the fourth chest and leave it hanging in midair instead of taking the time to set it down carefully, since you're pretty sure the contents will just be more of the same.
Two seconds later, the lid crashes to the floor and shatters.
====>Aradia: freak out
NO PROBLEM!!!
It's more than a little scary when a puppet shaped like a demented troll in a hoofbeast costume comes leaping up at your face out of a chest that's been buried under a volcano for thousands of sweeps! How the hell did the springs survive so long? Who even makes a thing like that???
It's still bobbing around with that creepy grin on its face, hands jittering up and down, feet waggling, and torso... torso... oh, eww, is it aroused? You try not to look at the bottom half but its face isn't any better and yikes! Did it just wink at you?
No. Obviously not. It's a puppet; it's not alive. Therefore it didn't wink. QED. The motion of your head holding the lamp and the puppet swaying on its springs is just making the shadows shift in ways that create little optical illusions. There's nothing to be scared of, this is just a silly joke in bad taste, which is not surprising given the "artwork" in the rest of this room. You will calmly and carefully take the puppet out of the box and see what might be hiding underneath, and then--
Holy shit it winked at you.
=====>Flee
You do not flee. You are an intrepid explorer, and also fleeing would be really, really stupid down here. You abscond in a rapid and sensible fashion instead.
====>Really?
0k, you flee.
And it's really, really stupid. You're in a maze of twisty passages, all alike, after all.
When your common sense finally gets the upper hand and culls your burst of blind panic, you've somehow flown out of the section you were mapping with your trail of yarn, your headlamp is flickering and probably about to run out of battery power within a couple minutes, and you have no idea where raptormom got to.
Drat.
====>Improvise!
The simplest solution would be to punch a hole straight up until you reach the surface. But that's a horrible thing to do; it goes against all correct archeological technique. Also, you don't like admitting defeat. You're not feeling very charitable toward Flarp as a concept these days, but you have to admit that playing with Terezi (and Vriska, you guess) has taught you a lot about thinking around corners.
Your most immediate problem is your dying lamp. You make a note to bring spare batteries next time, but that won't do you any good right now.
Fortunately, Sollux has taught you a little about how to jerry-rig electronics. This is mostly because asking him to lecture you on topics he knows inside and out is a good way to start dragging him back up out of the slough of despond that periodically tries to eat him alive, but also because he once got it into his head that you should teach him wilderness survival, he'd teach you technology survival, and that way you'd both be safer in case of unspecified instances of doom. (Also, the duality of the teaching/learning relationship appealed to him. He is such a silly dork sometimes. It makes you feel all gooey around your blood-pusher.)
In retrospect, that was a pretty good idea. You make a mental note to troll Sollux when you get home this morning, before you contact Alonde, and thank him. Maybe tomorrow you'll fly to his hivestem to make sure he's eating enough and repaint his nails. You might even let him brush your hair and tell you to put it in braidth before thetting out, AA, the wind jutht metheth it up and what if thomeone dethided to attack while you had hair in your fathe and couldn't thee?
Your lamp flickers, reminding you of more immediate concerns.
You quickly decaptchalogue your laptop and some of your more delicate tools -- little brushes and wire picks for cleaning debris from fragile artifacts -- and set about cracking open the case and removing the power source. It needs some reconfiguring before it will plug into your lamp, but you manage to get it done.
Your light brightens and stops wavering. This trick should buy you at least another hour. And it's not like you needed your computer down here anyway.
Now you just have to figure out where you are, what path to take, and how to find your lusus. You look around. You're at the bottom of a shallow staircase, facing a cul-de-sac with three doors, one on each wall. The left one has no sign, which going on past experience means it's probably a sanitation block. The center one has a line of that unfamiliar writing; that's not something you've seen before in the maze! And the right door has your own sign.
What will you do?
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Bear in mind that I'm leaving Aradia after this next section, and that she does have to be back in her hive when Vriska sends/will send/would have sent (argh, tenses!) Sollux to kill her later tonight. But aside from that consideration, what do you want to see happen?
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continue to part 11
The broad outline of this section is courtesy of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
explodingfrogs, mostly because this story is in response to his/her prompt in the first place. :-) Anyway, the text is pretty much what I wrote last night, just a bit tidied up and with the addition of some Aradia<>Sollux, because those two are unspeakably adorable together and you cannot convince me otherwise. :-D
And now, laundry. I hauled my summer blanket out of storage last week, so it is now time to wash my comforter and put it away until autumn. And I might as well clean my winter coat while I'm at it. *sigh* Chores, bah.
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Trollstuck, part 10
---------------------------------------------
====>Enter the room
You're not sure what you're expecting. Davven's kind of your friend? You think? Maybe? It's hard to tell with that guy! He plays everything so close to his skin. You're frankly surprised he's open about his blood color instead of being hemononymous like Karkat, given how hard it is to get any kind of straightforward answers out of him. It took a whole sweep before he admitted his real name to you, for instance, and you still don't know what kind of animal his lusus is. Even Karkat's not that paranoid. (Or maybe it's just that they're paranoid about different things? Come to think of it, most of your friends are a little paranoid or obsessive about one thing or another. You wonder what that says about you.)
The point is, you don't know Davven very well, and you've definitely never been to his hive. That would be tricky even if he'd tell you the exact location, since he lives on the lesser continent like Kanaya, and rustbloods don't have the resources to buy ocean-crossing transportation technology. And you're not a strong enough telekinetic to fly there. Not like Sollux. Which is both good and bad, and... you're going to stop that chain of thought right now. It leads to depressing places. Like starships.
But anyway! You are pretty sure that, no matter what kind of hoofbeastshit Davven talks to amuse himself, he wouldn't paint... um... this sort of art all over his respite block walls.
====>Describe the art
Hell no!
It's bad enough you got stuck overday with Vriska's creepy creeping creep of a neighbor that one time because he caught you leaving her hive after a Flarp campaign and you didn't realize how much of a freaky sleazebag he was until it was too late to get home before sunrise. This is like his hive, only worse, because... well, because this stuff actually has some sense of proportion? And an understanding of color balance? And the landscape backgrounds are really pretty and accurate renderings of the area right around the volcano and it starts to fool you into thinking everything's safe and then bam, musclebeast pornography in your face! And not just red and black porn! Pale porn!!! Hardcore intimacy right out where anyone could see!
====>Speculate what this might say about Davven
No thank you!
You prefer to speculate about what might be in the row of chests along the far wall. For one thing, who even makes ceramic chests? Wood or metal are much more common, and a lot easier to move besides. But clay survived the volcano and the subsequent centuries much better than other materials. It's almost as if whoever slept in this room knew disaster was coming and wanted to make sure some things were preserved.
You are now very suspicious!
(You are also trying very hard not to look at the painting above the chests. This one seems to involve puppets? And trolls dressed up as various musclebeasts? Eww.)
====>Open the chests
There are four of them, each a solid rectangular block with a lid fitted nearly airtight into a groove just inside the rim. There is no obvious latch or place to get a grip and lift the lids. But that's not a problem. You just lift the leftmost lid with your mind until you can get your hands underneath and guide it carefully to lie on top of the next chest over.
You kneel and peer down into the chest.
It contains stacks of fired clay tablets absolutely covered in writing you can't read. But you recognize the letters. They're the same as the inscription over the door of the symbol room, and the cramped wall writing in that other respite block you photographed a while ago. You pick up the topmost tablet in the center stack and turn it over. Yep, writing on the back too.
This is way too much to photograph, especially since the battery in your lamp is starting to run low. You bite your lip, worrying about site integrity. Then you think about the flood of ghosts Gl'bgolyb killed just because she was a little upset -- the death wave you only escaped because you live a little further away from Feferi's hive than trolls on the western coast of the great continent.
You put the lid back into place and captchalogue the chest.
You hastily check the other chests. The second is also full of clay tablets covered in writing. The third contains tablets with what seem to be math. You can't read the numbers, but the lines look a bit like equations and there are definitely some geometric diagrams. Weird. You captchalogue both chests. Hopefully Alonde can figure out the tablets!
You lift the lid off the fourth chest and leave it hanging in midair instead of taking the time to set it down carefully, since you're pretty sure the contents will just be more of the same.
Two seconds later, the lid crashes to the floor and shatters.
====>Aradia: freak out
NO PROBLEM!!!
It's more than a little scary when a puppet shaped like a demented troll in a hoofbeast costume comes leaping up at your face out of a chest that's been buried under a volcano for thousands of sweeps! How the hell did the springs survive so long? Who even makes a thing like that???
It's still bobbing around with that creepy grin on its face, hands jittering up and down, feet waggling, and torso... torso... oh, eww, is it aroused? You try not to look at the bottom half but its face isn't any better and yikes! Did it just wink at you?
No. Obviously not. It's a puppet; it's not alive. Therefore it didn't wink. QED. The motion of your head holding the lamp and the puppet swaying on its springs is just making the shadows shift in ways that create little optical illusions. There's nothing to be scared of, this is just a silly joke in bad taste, which is not surprising given the "artwork" in the rest of this room. You will calmly and carefully take the puppet out of the box and see what might be hiding underneath, and then--
Holy shit it winked at you.
=====>Flee
You do not flee. You are an intrepid explorer, and also fleeing would be really, really stupid down here. You abscond in a rapid and sensible fashion instead.
====>Really?
0k, you flee.
And it's really, really stupid. You're in a maze of twisty passages, all alike, after all.
When your common sense finally gets the upper hand and culls your burst of blind panic, you've somehow flown out of the section you were mapping with your trail of yarn, your headlamp is flickering and probably about to run out of battery power within a couple minutes, and you have no idea where raptormom got to.
Drat.
====>Improvise!
The simplest solution would be to punch a hole straight up until you reach the surface. But that's a horrible thing to do; it goes against all correct archeological technique. Also, you don't like admitting defeat. You're not feeling very charitable toward Flarp as a concept these days, but you have to admit that playing with Terezi (and Vriska, you guess) has taught you a lot about thinking around corners.
Your most immediate problem is your dying lamp. You make a note to bring spare batteries next time, but that won't do you any good right now.
Fortunately, Sollux has taught you a little about how to jerry-rig electronics. This is mostly because asking him to lecture you on topics he knows inside and out is a good way to start dragging him back up out of the slough of despond that periodically tries to eat him alive, but also because he once got it into his head that you should teach him wilderness survival, he'd teach you technology survival, and that way you'd both be safer in case of unspecified instances of doom. (Also, the duality of the teaching/learning relationship appealed to him. He is such a silly dork sometimes. It makes you feel all gooey around your blood-pusher.)
In retrospect, that was a pretty good idea. You make a mental note to troll Sollux when you get home this morning, before you contact Alonde, and thank him. Maybe tomorrow you'll fly to his hivestem to make sure he's eating enough and repaint his nails. You might even let him brush your hair and tell you to put it in braidth before thetting out, AA, the wind jutht metheth it up and what if thomeone dethided to attack while you had hair in your fathe and couldn't thee?
Your lamp flickers, reminding you of more immediate concerns.
You quickly decaptchalogue your laptop and some of your more delicate tools -- little brushes and wire picks for cleaning debris from fragile artifacts -- and set about cracking open the case and removing the power source. It needs some reconfiguring before it will plug into your lamp, but you manage to get it done.
Your light brightens and stops wavering. This trick should buy you at least another hour. And it's not like you needed your computer down here anyway.
Now you just have to figure out where you are, what path to take, and how to find your lusus. You look around. You're at the bottom of a shallow staircase, facing a cul-de-sac with three doors, one on each wall. The left one has no sign, which going on past experience means it's probably a sanitation block. The center one has a line of that unfamiliar writing; that's not something you've seen before in the maze! And the right door has your own sign.
What will you do?
---------------
---------------
---------------
Bear in mind that I'm leaving Aradia after this next section, and that she does have to be back in her hive when Vriska sends/will send/would have sent (argh, tenses!) Sollux to kill her later tonight. But aside from that consideration, what do you want to see happen?
---------------------------------------------
continue to part 11
The broad outline of this section is courtesy of
explodingfrogs, mostly because this story is in response to his/her prompt in the first place. :-) Anyway, the text is pretty much what I wrote last night, just a bit tidied up and with the addition of some Aradia<>Sollux, because those two are unspeakably adorable together and you cannot convince me otherwise. :-DAnd now, laundry. I hauled my summer blanket out of storage last week, so it is now time to wash my comforter and put it away until autumn. And I might as well clean my winter coat while I'm at it. *sigh* Chores, bah.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-31 09:27 pm (UTC)T__T
and then bam, musclebeast pornography in your face! And not just red and black porn! Pale porn!!! Hardcore intimacy right out where anyone could see!
*deds* XD XD XD
auuugh surprise!puppet WHAT HAVE YOU DONE ARADIA. AWAKENED AN ANCIENT EVIL NO DOUBT. and the pale Sol/Aradia bits were SO CUTE. dorkiness everywhere awwww. (oh god her thinking about tomorrow stuff when DOOM MIGHT BE COMING VIA HIM D: D: D: )
Uhhh what to do what to do. TRY YOUR OWN SIGN. >:O
(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-31 10:49 pm (UTC)Hey, tangential question: any votes on what I should try drawing by way of illustrations for this chapter?
(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-31 11:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-01 01:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-01 06:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-03 06:48 am (UTC)Are you looking ahead in the outline I obviously don't have to snoop at potential future plot points? Sneaky!
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-01 06:00 am (UTC)Given that she's got to get out of here soon, let's decipher the tablets later. It seems like TK would be more useful if it was a sensory system as well as a manipulation system, could Aradia use it to feel for fresher air from the door she propped open? (Counter argument: Blinding/goggling the Psiioniic seemed to prevent his TK from being used offensively, it may be vision controlled. Counter counter: Sollux moved the asteroid blind and Psii helmed the ship blind. Counter counter counter: Sol was learning synethesia and Psii was plugged into a ship to replace his senses.)
Whistle for your raptormom, follow her to the nearest string if TK isn't a sense.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-01 06:58 pm (UTC)My thought on telekinesis is that it can be used as a sensory system, but it gets very fuzzy as you get further away from your body; precise and delicate manipulation likewise becomes hard. So within, say, the space of a room, Aradia can tell where everything is even with her eyes closed, but further out all she'll feel is empty space vs. filled space, and past a certain point she won't even be able to pinpoint those differences, just that there are some rooms and some walls and who knows exactly how they're arranged! Also, that kind of sensing is active and takes energy, whereas sight and hearing (while taking energy to process input in the brain) are basically passive and take a lot less energy and concentration.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-01 01:21 pm (UTC)Idk Maybe raptormom thinks it's cute. (Lil Cal is Jack Noir's "One true friend".)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-01 06:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-01 05:39 pm (UTC)====>Aradia: Be the Demoness.
====>Demoness: Greet your genetic descendent by whatever means are available to you. (Time shenanigans, if they're a thing in this AU? Writing that a) Aradia can actually read, and b) seems to be carrying on a coherent dialogue with her, a la The Tape Knew You Would Say That (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheTapeKnewYouWouldSayThat)?)
====>Exposition: Hapen.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-01 07:29 pm (UTC)Anyway, I will see if any of that can be worked in. :-)