[Fic] "Trollstuck," part 12 -- Homestuck
Jun. 9th, 2012 05:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingback to part 11
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Trollstuck, part 12
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====>I'm tired of girls; be a boy for a change
You know, I hadn't even noticed that, but all right. One male POV coming right up. Any preferences?
====>Be someone we haven't met
That's a little vague. You do remember what happens when you're not specific, don't you? Do you want to be Eridan suffering a Visitation? Because I can do that...
====>Be Davven
Okay!
====>Hours in the past, but not many
You are DAVVEN KRONOS and it has been a very long night. You are so bored, you have almost run out of metaphors to describe your boredom. If boredom were an ocean, you'd have long since drowned. By now the cuttlefish of ennui are nibbling at your skin, crabs snapping their shit-ugly claws down, chopping your fingers and toes, bacteria getting all up in your guts eating you from inside out, cycle of nature at its finest leaving nothing but polished bones. Which the tide will then wash up on the shore and arrange into incomprehensible glyphs spelling out "He died of boredom" in some imaginary alien language.
That is how bored you are.
====>Do something interesting
If there were something interesting to do, you'd already be doing it, numb-globes. But you are monumentally uninspired in the fields of music and art right now, your lusus flew away to hunt or something like the feathery asshole he is so you can't hang or grief with him, and you've even done all your fucking chores and errands for like a week in advance because you were so bored they almost seemed interesting by comparison.
This is the trouble with living on a different continent from all but one of your friends. You only overlap waking periods for a few hours toward the end of your night and the start of theirs -- or sometimes the other way around for the seadwellers, who live even further west. Maryam's not actually any help since she's doing her best to imitate a rainbow drinker and be all diurnal and shit, so she's on the same mismatched schedule as everyone else.
====>Make some new friends
Fuck no. They may be hopelessly uncool dumbass idiots, but they're your hopelessly uncool dumbass idiots.
Besides, it's not all that hard to blink over to somebody's hive and crash in a spare respiteblock for a couple days a week. You used to hang with Agaion a bunch, but these days you're only staying over with Terezi and Jothan. Mostly Terezi. It's easier to work on your epic stupid comic series in person, even if she does have a habit of doodling all over you while you're trying to hash out the shittiest excuse for a plot that's trollishly possible.
You'd up sticks and move altogether except you secretly like the dry desert heat of your home. Also your lusus would never let you hear the end of it. Plus there's the little problem of the empire not looking kindly on young trolls up and leaving their registered locations, but fuck the empire. What's the empire ever done for you?
You lift your hands from your face, where they've been shielding your eyes from the moonlight, and stare up at the clear night sky. Sunglare's gathering along the jagged eastern horizon, light almost the same shade as your blood wrapping hot, grasping claws through the skyscraping fangs of the Scarshreds. Those oh-so-scenic mountains catch what little rain makes it past the coastal range and over the blistering heat of your bone-dry desert home. They also snag any rain that might try to drift south from the steamy river valleys of the northern watershed. The eastern plains are also mostly desert at your latitude, as a visit to Maryam's hive will easily prove, but a fair number of trolls live in the Scarshred foothills, their little lawn rings and hivestems huddling together against the marauding zombies and other daywalkers that stalk and shamble out of the wilderness at irregular intervals.
Wimps. You've lasted over five sweeps out here on your own, just you and your lusus against a world trying to eat you. Yeah, it helps that you had the sense to build your hive on top of a wind-sculpted column of stone (...no one ever has to know that you chose your hive site because it looked badass and not for any tactical reasons) which is murder on zombie hands and claws when they try to climb the sheer walls once you pull up your rope ladders for the day. But even so. You'd bet all the treasure in Serket's hive that even the most useless of your friends would last six times as long as your neighbors if you chucked them in the middle of the desert and absconded with their supplies.
Which is not to say anyone but Maryam, the telekinetics, and maybe Leijon would last long, but at least they'd die from dehydration, not from zombies.
The glare's getting brighter, reflecting off the salt-crusted sand to lance at you from a full three hundred sixty degrees, burning tentacles of light writhing their way under your shades to sink venom-tipped stingers into your eyes. Time to get inside before you start to fry like a grub on a griddle. And hey, maybe some of your friends are finally awake.
Yawning, you roll fluidly to your feet, stretch until your spine makes a satisfying crack, and blink from your roof down into your hive.
Your computer chimes softly to itself as you amble from your kitchen into your respiteblock, munching on some leftover scorpion tails. Someone is trolling you.
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Who is trolling Davven?
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continue to part 13
That was not quite what I meant to write as Davven's intro section, but oh well, sometimes world-building has to happen. It would be awkward to write an entire story set on Alternia without talking a little bit about geography at some point. Davven lives in the Alternian equivalent of the Atacama Desert, btw. Except not exactly, because instead of the Bolivian highlands or the Argentinian pampas on the other side of the mountains, you just get more lowland desert, which is where Kanaya lives.
Anyway, I settled on this basic setup because timezones do exist, and there is evidence for them in canon. Kanaya has to be at least a third of the planet away from all the other trolls, since she's in daylight during Hivebent while they're all in darkness. Also, Terezi canonically lives further east than either Vriska or Tavros, since when she looks into the sun it's still dark at the other two's hives.
I am going with only two continents -- a main one something like the size of Eurasia plus Africa, and a secondary one about the size of North America -- because it's simpler. I still have not figured out a satisfactory way to make astronomical sense of Alternia's dark and dim seasons except maybe something with the fuschia moon's orbit, or the transit of an inner system planet between the sun and Alternia? If anyone has ideas about that, please feel free to share! (I am tentatively defining perigee by the orbit of the tiny moon around the fuschia moon -- perigee is when it comes closest to Alternia. Again, if anyone has other ideas about that, I am all ears. *grin*)
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Trollstuck, part 12
---------------------------------------------
====>I'm tired of girls; be a boy for a change
You know, I hadn't even noticed that, but all right. One male POV coming right up. Any preferences?
====>Be someone we haven't met
That's a little vague. You do remember what happens when you're not specific, don't you? Do you want to be Eridan suffering a Visitation? Because I can do that...
====>Be Davven
Okay!
====>Hours in the past, but not many
You are DAVVEN KRONOS and it has been a very long night. You are so bored, you have almost run out of metaphors to describe your boredom. If boredom were an ocean, you'd have long since drowned. By now the cuttlefish of ennui are nibbling at your skin, crabs snapping their shit-ugly claws down, chopping your fingers and toes, bacteria getting all up in your guts eating you from inside out, cycle of nature at its finest leaving nothing but polished bones. Which the tide will then wash up on the shore and arrange into incomprehensible glyphs spelling out "He died of boredom" in some imaginary alien language.
That is how bored you are.
====>Do something interesting
If there were something interesting to do, you'd already be doing it, numb-globes. But you are monumentally uninspired in the fields of music and art right now, your lusus flew away to hunt or something like the feathery asshole he is so you can't hang or grief with him, and you've even done all your fucking chores and errands for like a week in advance because you were so bored they almost seemed interesting by comparison.
This is the trouble with living on a different continent from all but one of your friends. You only overlap waking periods for a few hours toward the end of your night and the start of theirs -- or sometimes the other way around for the seadwellers, who live even further west. Maryam's not actually any help since she's doing her best to imitate a rainbow drinker and be all diurnal and shit, so she's on the same mismatched schedule as everyone else.
====>Make some new friends
Fuck no. They may be hopelessly uncool dumbass idiots, but they're your hopelessly uncool dumbass idiots.
Besides, it's not all that hard to blink over to somebody's hive and crash in a spare respiteblock for a couple days a week. You used to hang with Agaion a bunch, but these days you're only staying over with Terezi and Jothan. Mostly Terezi. It's easier to work on your epic stupid comic series in person, even if she does have a habit of doodling all over you while you're trying to hash out the shittiest excuse for a plot that's trollishly possible.
You'd up sticks and move altogether except you secretly like the dry desert heat of your home. Also your lusus would never let you hear the end of it. Plus there's the little problem of the empire not looking kindly on young trolls up and leaving their registered locations, but fuck the empire. What's the empire ever done for you?
You lift your hands from your face, where they've been shielding your eyes from the moonlight, and stare up at the clear night sky. Sunglare's gathering along the jagged eastern horizon, light almost the same shade as your blood wrapping hot, grasping claws through the skyscraping fangs of the Scarshreds. Those oh-so-scenic mountains catch what little rain makes it past the coastal range and over the blistering heat of your bone-dry desert home. They also snag any rain that might try to drift south from the steamy river valleys of the northern watershed. The eastern plains are also mostly desert at your latitude, as a visit to Maryam's hive will easily prove, but a fair number of trolls live in the Scarshred foothills, their little lawn rings and hivestems huddling together against the marauding zombies and other daywalkers that stalk and shamble out of the wilderness at irregular intervals.
Wimps. You've lasted over five sweeps out here on your own, just you and your lusus against a world trying to eat you. Yeah, it helps that you had the sense to build your hive on top of a wind-sculpted column of stone (...no one ever has to know that you chose your hive site because it looked badass and not for any tactical reasons) which is murder on zombie hands and claws when they try to climb the sheer walls once you pull up your rope ladders for the day. But even so. You'd bet all the treasure in Serket's hive that even the most useless of your friends would last six times as long as your neighbors if you chucked them in the middle of the desert and absconded with their supplies.
Which is not to say anyone but Maryam, the telekinetics, and maybe Leijon would last long, but at least they'd die from dehydration, not from zombies.
The glare's getting brighter, reflecting off the salt-crusted sand to lance at you from a full three hundred sixty degrees, burning tentacles of light writhing their way under your shades to sink venom-tipped stingers into your eyes. Time to get inside before you start to fry like a grub on a griddle. And hey, maybe some of your friends are finally awake.
Yawning, you roll fluidly to your feet, stretch until your spine makes a satisfying crack, and blink from your roof down into your hive.
Your computer chimes softly to itself as you amble from your kitchen into your respiteblock, munching on some leftover scorpion tails. Someone is trolling you.
---------------
---------------
---------------
Who is trolling Davven?
---------------------------------------------
continue to part 13
That was not quite what I meant to write as Davven's intro section, but oh well, sometimes world-building has to happen. It would be awkward to write an entire story set on Alternia without talking a little bit about geography at some point. Davven lives in the Alternian equivalent of the Atacama Desert, btw. Except not exactly, because instead of the Bolivian highlands or the Argentinian pampas on the other side of the mountains, you just get more lowland desert, which is where Kanaya lives.
Anyway, I settled on this basic setup because timezones do exist, and there is evidence for them in canon. Kanaya has to be at least a third of the planet away from all the other trolls, since she's in daylight during Hivebent while they're all in darkness. Also, Terezi canonically lives further east than either Vriska or Tavros, since when she looks into the sun it's still dark at the other two's hives.
I am going with only two continents -- a main one something like the size of Eurasia plus Africa, and a secondary one about the size of North America -- because it's simpler. I still have not figured out a satisfactory way to make astronomical sense of Alternia's dark and dim seasons except maybe something with the fuschia moon's orbit, or the transit of an inner system planet between the sun and Alternia? If anyone has ideas about that, please feel free to share! (I am tentatively defining perigee by the orbit of the tiny moon around the fuschia moon -- perigee is when it comes closest to Alternia. Again, if anyone has other ideas about that, I am all ears. *grin*)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-09 11:58 am (UTC)I have no idea what the Alternian calendar is like, but have you considered a strong axial tilt? Not as strong as Uranus, but perhaps enough so that you can (somehow) get a day-night cycle at the latitudes of Alternia's continents most of the year, and yet have twilight and night seasons?
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-09 02:31 pm (UTC)Perigees are much shorter then a month?
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-09 05:05 pm (UTC)I like Davven's horns and his kind of morbid thought pattern. Yes, Dave, let's figure out how the landscape will kill your friends, that sounds like a priority. I think Davven should tell us how his horn got broken (unless you're saving that?) and that the person trolling him should be Jothan. Are they still bros? Is class an issue? Can Dave even talk to someone without the ability to use homosexuality/incest chicken to scare them off?
Oh, and can you remind me who Agaion is? Was it Jade?
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-09 07:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-09 07:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-09 08:04 pm (UTC)I have no plans for the story behind Davven's broken horn -- in fact, I have no story, since it's mostly a visual joke reference to Dave's 1/2 bladekind strife specibus -- but I can make one up, no problem. :-) As for Davven and Jothan, that will get answered in-story sooner or later. :-D
Jarlia Agaion = Jade Harley. (Alonde Hekata = Rose Lalonde, Davven Kronos = Dave Strider, and Jothan Aeolio = John Egbert, for reference.) Davven's calling her by her last name because of their falling out.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-09 08:47 pm (UTC)====>Terezi: Persuade Davven to help Jarlia stop the Vriskapocalypse.
====>Terezi: Be Past Terezi.
====>Past Terezi: Discuss impending Vriskapocalypse with Jarlia.
====>Past Terezi: Be Davven.
====>Davven: Refuse.
====>Davven: Be besieged by copious snark, disturbing insight into your psyche and the issues thereof, incredibly shittty art, and general Terezi-ness.
====>Davven: Give in.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-09 08:57 pm (UTC)Later on you can wake Davven up in the middle of the day, of course. He will undoubtedly be grumpy, but Terezi has a decent chance of talking him around. Probably. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-09 09:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-10 08:18 pm (UTC)Hmm. Several possible scenarios come to mind, actually. Since I can't choose just one, I'll present them all:
====>Person trolling Davven: Be Equius.
====>Equius: Get your fundament served to you on a silver meal presentation dish in the ancient and noble arena of slam poetry.
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====>Person trolling Davven: Be Alonde.
====>Alonde: Engage in quasi-sisterly sarcastic banter and not-entirely-serious amateur psychoanalysis.
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====>Person trolling Davven: Be Kanaya.
====>Kanaya: Ramble in transparently evasive fashion, before admitting that you are unable to sleep due to sudden inspiration and require a living mannequin to try new clothing designs on.
====>Davven: Since you're bored out of your skull, agree. But not without giving Kanaya a certain amount of grief (though not Grief) over it.
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====>Person trolling Davven: Be Nepeta.
====>Nepeta and Davven: Engage in incredibly shitty roleplay.
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====>Person trolling Davven: Be Jothan.
====>Jothan: Continue long-running argument with Davven over the acting skills or lack thereof of Troll Nick Cage, and whether your admiration of him is flushed in nature. Also make insensitive comments about Davven's recent falling-out with Jarlia.
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====>Person trolling Davven: Be Jarlia.
====>Jarlia: Attempt to reconcile with Davven. As this is not a doomed offshoot timeline, fail miserably.
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====>Person trolling Davven: Be the Trollian equivalent of a telemarketer.
====>Davven: Alleviate your boredom at this poor, benighted soul's expense.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-11 12:31 am (UTC)Because we need some more rap battles. *is shamed*
Alternatively, ==>Be Karkat with a 132 page dissertation on why Daaven is the biggest Jerk in the entire Empire, no joking, completely platonic hatred.
Or, on the Grasping Hand, ==>Be Kanaya, waking early to get some pre-dawm watering done, and saying hello in an attempt to be neighborly.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-11 03:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-11 03:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-23 05:08 am (UTC)Look what I found! It still wouldn't necessarily be enough to block the sun more than a couple of hours, but it's a start at explaining dim or even dark seasons.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-06-23 01:41 pm (UTC)