Elizabeth Culmer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
edenfalling) wrote2013-08-26 01:41 am
edenfalling) wrote2013-08-26 01:41 am
Entry tags:
[Fic] "Trollstuck," part 33 (end of ch. 8) - Homestuck
I looked at the cumulative wordcount for chapter 8, looked at the outline and suggestions I still have to get through, and made an executive choice to break the narrative again. This iteration of "Trollstuck" will now have NINE chapters.
(Yeah, yeah, I know. I run long. What else is new?)
back to part 32
---------------------------------------------
Trollstuck, part 33
---------------------------------------------
====>Be Aradia
An excellent choice! You are now Aradia Megido. You are in the middle of trying to undo the changes you made to your laptop battery when you turned it into a lamp battery. For some unknown reason, this is twice as hard as the first reconfiguration, even though you did that one under pressure in iffy light. You could just plug the laptop directly into the wall socket -- if there is one thing carpenter drones are good at, it's making sure every wiggler's hive is connected to the planet-wide electric grid! -- but that feels like admitting defeat and you are a more competitive troll than many of your friends would suspect. You are going to fight this silly battery until you win, or else!
====>Stop wasting time
Why? It's not like you're in a hurry. The world won't end if you send your photo files to Alonde tomorrow instead of tonight. Besides, you want to have bragging rights when you talk to Sollux. Obviously he could manage this in twenty seconds flat and he'll brush your struggles off as stupid, but you know he likes it when you show interest in his specialties, just like you get a warm, squishy feeling in your chest when he sends you censored archeological dissertations he's found hidden in odd corners of the internet.
You squint down at the battery and make one last adjustment. Everything seems to be back in order and theoretically this means you can pop it into your computer with no problems whatsoever. Of course, theory and practice don't always agree. But what the hell! The worst that can happen is your computer will blow up and you'll have to fly over to Sollux's hivestem tomorrow and appropriate one of his spares.
You're not wild about apiary tech -- call you crazy, but you kind of like inanimate power sources, or at least ones you're not directly responsible for feeding or making sure raptormom doesn't chase all over your hive (and probably get stung silly for her troubles) -- but in a pinch, a computer is a computer, and Sollux definitely takes good care of his equipment.
====>You won't have a tomorrow if you don't stop wasting time!
0_0
You have no idea why you just had that thought. Maybe because you were thinking about Sollux? He gets into these fits of gloom where he thinks he's as doomed as all the imminently deceased trolls whose dying screams he hears. But you are quite sure that you intend to live.
Something scratches at the door of your hive and you glance over to see raptormom's tail inching through the little flap you added for her. (Kanaya and Terezi both scolded you for carelessness when you told them, but you live close enough to the drone-farms that there's hardly any zombie risk and anyway, you're pretty sure in a contest of telekinesis versus zombies, you'd win hands down.) Raptormom gets almost all the way in, only her muzzle left outside. Then she stops and whines.
Oh, not again. You're glad she can hunt for herself, but you wish she were a little better about judging what can and can't fit through her entry-flap before she gets things stuck halfway through.
====>Open door
In a minute! First you are going to put your reconstructed battery into your laptop and see what happens.
====>Fine, blow up your computer; it will only be the first of many explosions tonight
Wow, Sollux must really be rubbing off on you. Your think pan keeps going off on weird morbid tangents.
Oh well, nobody ever said romance didn't have its ups and downs!
You tell raptormom to wait just a little and pop the battery carefully into the waiting socket. Then you close the cover plate and press the power button.
Nothing explodes. You let out the breath you were holding and leave the machine on your desk to finish booting up while you go see what raptormom brought home this time.
====>Peer through little flap to investigate raptormom's catch
That would be awkward and also pointless. You just open the door.
Raptormom has wriggled back out through her flap and is sitting proudly on your doorstep, prey displayed artistically at her feet. You frown, trying to work out what on Alternia she killed. It doesn't quite look like anybeast you've seen before. The colors are all wrong, almost artificial in a way. Oh shit, did she hunt down one of your northern neighbor's little toy robots again? Hermia always get so pissed off when that happens and then you have another perigee of stupid spybots tapping on your windows and mysterious viruses on your computer until she gets pissed off at someone else and moves on.
You bend down to examine the contraption more closely.
A single baleful glass eye stares up at you from under a ceramic hoofbeast mask.
Oh.
Oh fuck no.
How the hell did raptormom even find that horrible thing?
====>Flip out
You get righteously angry instead. It's one thing to find a creepy artifact in a creepy, pitch-black underground maze buried by volcanic ash. It's another thing entirely to have your lusus try to bring the creepy puppet home.
You snatch the evil thing away from raptormom, who spots your anger and begins to whine and leap toward your hands, which are holding the puppet as far from your body as you can trollfully manage. Normally you would give in -- you hate making your lusus unhappy, when she's been so good to you over the sweeps -- but you have your limits and this is one of them.
There will be NO PUPPETS in your hive. None of the puppets! None at all! Ever! And particularly not skeevy concupiscent pornographic puppets that seem designed to appeal to Vriska's creepy neighbor's kinks.
====>Dispose of evil thing
Throwing it away obviously didn't work -- the old drains in the buried group hive must still be connected to the local watershed -- so this time you'll have to destroy it up close and personally. Well, never let it be said that Aradia Megido backed down from a challenge! And fortunately telekinesis is very, very good at breaking things. You can't reduce matter down to its component atoms like Sollux can, but dust and ash are well within your repertoire.
====>Go wild
You float the creepy relic into the air and prepare to unleash psionic hell.
Davven Kronos blinks in just in time to catch a faceful of puppet ass.
You barely manage to fling your hand aside, altering your aim just enough to keep from blowing off his head as a follow-up.
Davven blinks down at the puppet in his hands, blinks up at you, and raises a single eyebrow. You smile awkwardly. Talk about embarrassing! How in the world are you going to explain this? And come to think of it, what is Davven doing at your hive in the first place? You're not the kind of friends who drop by without arranging the visit at least a night in advance, and even then only as one element of a party with several of your other mutual friends. Something strange must be afoot.
As you open your mouth to ask what's going on, your computer finishes booting up and two dozen Trollian windows open with simultaneous angry beeps.
---------------------------------------------
End Chapter Eight
---------------------------------------------
I am holding to my decision that nobody will talk to anybody else in normal dialogue until the very end -- or at least, nobody will do so on-page -- but I must say, that imposes some weird-ass narrative constraints, not least in choice of POV character.
Quick question: do you want to jump to Vriska or Equius for the opening scene of chapter 8? We will visit both of them in due time, but I have no preference about which one goes first.
---------------------------------------------
continue to part 34
So this technically finishes chapter 8, which was my do-by-September goal... but I'm not done with this story yet, which was the goal-in-spirit, so I think I will press onward until I'm done with chapter 9. Then I will switch to "Lemonade" and concentrate solely on that story until I defeat it once and for all.
I dunno if I'll write much while I'm on vacation. I will email myself a bunch of files, of course, but cabin vacations are always working vacations -- a house in the north woods doesn't maintain itself, you see -- so I may be too busy to bother.
(Yeah, yeah, I know. I run long. What else is new?)
back to part 32
---------------------------------------------
Trollstuck, part 33
---------------------------------------------
====>Be Aradia
An excellent choice! You are now Aradia Megido. You are in the middle of trying to undo the changes you made to your laptop battery when you turned it into a lamp battery. For some unknown reason, this is twice as hard as the first reconfiguration, even though you did that one under pressure in iffy light. You could just plug the laptop directly into the wall socket -- if there is one thing carpenter drones are good at, it's making sure every wiggler's hive is connected to the planet-wide electric grid! -- but that feels like admitting defeat and you are a more competitive troll than many of your friends would suspect. You are going to fight this silly battery until you win, or else!
====>Stop wasting time
Why? It's not like you're in a hurry. The world won't end if you send your photo files to Alonde tomorrow instead of tonight. Besides, you want to have bragging rights when you talk to Sollux. Obviously he could manage this in twenty seconds flat and he'll brush your struggles off as stupid, but you know he likes it when you show interest in his specialties, just like you get a warm, squishy feeling in your chest when he sends you censored archeological dissertations he's found hidden in odd corners of the internet.
You squint down at the battery and make one last adjustment. Everything seems to be back in order and theoretically this means you can pop it into your computer with no problems whatsoever. Of course, theory and practice don't always agree. But what the hell! The worst that can happen is your computer will blow up and you'll have to fly over to Sollux's hivestem tomorrow and appropriate one of his spares.
You're not wild about apiary tech -- call you crazy, but you kind of like inanimate power sources, or at least ones you're not directly responsible for feeding or making sure raptormom doesn't chase all over your hive (and probably get stung silly for her troubles) -- but in a pinch, a computer is a computer, and Sollux definitely takes good care of his equipment.
====>You won't have a tomorrow if you don't stop wasting time!
0_0
You have no idea why you just had that thought. Maybe because you were thinking about Sollux? He gets into these fits of gloom where he thinks he's as doomed as all the imminently deceased trolls whose dying screams he hears. But you are quite sure that you intend to live.
Something scratches at the door of your hive and you glance over to see raptormom's tail inching through the little flap you added for her. (Kanaya and Terezi both scolded you for carelessness when you told them, but you live close enough to the drone-farms that there's hardly any zombie risk and anyway, you're pretty sure in a contest of telekinesis versus zombies, you'd win hands down.) Raptormom gets almost all the way in, only her muzzle left outside. Then she stops and whines.
Oh, not again. You're glad she can hunt for herself, but you wish she were a little better about judging what can and can't fit through her entry-flap before she gets things stuck halfway through.
====>Open door
In a minute! First you are going to put your reconstructed battery into your laptop and see what happens.
====>Fine, blow up your computer; it will only be the first of many explosions tonight
Wow, Sollux must really be rubbing off on you. Your think pan keeps going off on weird morbid tangents.
Oh well, nobody ever said romance didn't have its ups and downs!
You tell raptormom to wait just a little and pop the battery carefully into the waiting socket. Then you close the cover plate and press the power button.
Nothing explodes. You let out the breath you were holding and leave the machine on your desk to finish booting up while you go see what raptormom brought home this time.
====>Peer through little flap to investigate raptormom's catch
That would be awkward and also pointless. You just open the door.
Raptormom has wriggled back out through her flap and is sitting proudly on your doorstep, prey displayed artistically at her feet. You frown, trying to work out what on Alternia she killed. It doesn't quite look like anybeast you've seen before. The colors are all wrong, almost artificial in a way. Oh shit, did she hunt down one of your northern neighbor's little toy robots again? Hermia always get so pissed off when that happens and then you have another perigee of stupid spybots tapping on your windows and mysterious viruses on your computer until she gets pissed off at someone else and moves on.
You bend down to examine the contraption more closely.
A single baleful glass eye stares up at you from under a ceramic hoofbeast mask.
Oh.
Oh fuck no.
How the hell did raptormom even find that horrible thing?
====>Flip out
You get righteously angry instead. It's one thing to find a creepy artifact in a creepy, pitch-black underground maze buried by volcanic ash. It's another thing entirely to have your lusus try to bring the creepy puppet home.
You snatch the evil thing away from raptormom, who spots your anger and begins to whine and leap toward your hands, which are holding the puppet as far from your body as you can trollfully manage. Normally you would give in -- you hate making your lusus unhappy, when she's been so good to you over the sweeps -- but you have your limits and this is one of them.
There will be NO PUPPETS in your hive. None of the puppets! None at all! Ever! And particularly not skeevy concupiscent pornographic puppets that seem designed to appeal to Vriska's creepy neighbor's kinks.
====>Dispose of evil thing
Throwing it away obviously didn't work -- the old drains in the buried group hive must still be connected to the local watershed -- so this time you'll have to destroy it up close and personally. Well, never let it be said that Aradia Megido backed down from a challenge! And fortunately telekinesis is very, very good at breaking things. You can't reduce matter down to its component atoms like Sollux can, but dust and ash are well within your repertoire.
====>Go wild
You float the creepy relic into the air and prepare to unleash psionic hell.
Davven Kronos blinks in just in time to catch a faceful of puppet ass.
You barely manage to fling your hand aside, altering your aim just enough to keep from blowing off his head as a follow-up.
Davven blinks down at the puppet in his hands, blinks up at you, and raises a single eyebrow. You smile awkwardly. Talk about embarrassing! How in the world are you going to explain this? And come to think of it, what is Davven doing at your hive in the first place? You're not the kind of friends who drop by without arranging the visit at least a night in advance, and even then only as one element of a party with several of your other mutual friends. Something strange must be afoot.
As you open your mouth to ask what's going on, your computer finishes booting up and two dozen Trollian windows open with simultaneous angry beeps.
---------------------------------------------
End Chapter Eight
---------------------------------------------
I am holding to my decision that nobody will talk to anybody else in normal dialogue until the very end -- or at least, nobody will do so on-page -- but I must say, that imposes some weird-ass narrative constraints, not least in choice of POV character.
Quick question: do you want to jump to Vriska or Equius for the opening scene of chapter 8? We will visit both of them in due time, but I have no preference about which one goes first.
---------------------------------------------
continue to part 34
So this technically finishes chapter 8, which was my do-by-September goal... but I'm not done with this story yet, which was the goal-in-spirit, so I think I will press onward until I'm done with chapter 9. Then I will switch to "Lemonade" and concentrate solely on that story until I defeat it once and for all.
I dunno if I'll write much while I'm on vacation. I will email myself a bunch of files, of course, but cabin vacations are always working vacations -- a house in the north woods doesn't maintain itself, you see -- so I may be too busy to bother.