#linktoreality

It’s on my steam wishlist!  ; w ;

I won’t have time to play it anyways til after the 13th-- gotta keep working on some art stuff!

There’s a chance that the other, black/red half originally belonging to Caliborn - when touched in its raw form, as Caliborn may not have been able to access at full strength due to that candy shell (EDIT: He actually mentions that he *never* tried to use it because it was "too precious to him", which is code to me for "Gamzee's Rage influence intentionally blinded the cherubs to the possibility of actually employing the juju halves") - could supercharge a hero’s subrole, or ‘inverted’ role. That’s sort of why we initially thought the lollipop might act as some sort of “dualizer”.

The theory behind this would go something like, hm…

If the plothole cursor is the ‘white half’, that which supercharges one’s given role, then John staying in contact with it may have supercharged his Heir of Breath association to the point that he couldn’t control it. Literally, physically unbound from reality and worldly attachments (Blood), he was whisked on a wild, incorporeal journey careening anywhere and everywhere, only now able to arrest a semblance of control over it all (with some lingering effects).

However, as discussed in the subrole link above: A balanced hero respects both their main role and its shadow, their given aspect and its dichotomic pair. Favoring your given role or aspect to the exclusion of its pair can result in marginalization or disaster; after all, if John never stopped warping around and stayed as insubstantial as air for perpetuity, he’d never be able to accomplish anything significant. That’s the consequence of an overdose of Breath.

And favoring your opposed role and aspect too strongly over your given one? Well, that leads to inversion.

So…

At one point a while ago, one of you askers noted that when Jane was struggling with the lollipop:

The colors within it associated with Creation and Destruction - Green and Red corresponding to the White and Black inside it - seemed to be struggling from panel to panel…

…until the side on the right, the Green side she was pushing away, won over and blapped her in the face.

Jane, tellingly, started on the Red side, and resisted being forced to Green. She was in quite the awful mood, after all! Her alleged lowest point, at the time; at least, the lowest that could be achieved without outside and heavyhanded interference by a domineering Thief of Life.

However, though Trickster!Jane was clearly on the supercharged-Maid-of-Life side of things on the whole, it doesn’t necessarily mean her subrole hadn’t received something of a boost as well. As a purely subservient subrole to her normal title (note - NOT on its own, which would be VERY DIFFERENT), the effects of a ‘Bard of Doom’ would look very similar to some of the Maid of Life accomplishments she boasted, inviting the destruction of Doom by doing gleefully away with others’ hesitation and restraint. (Not to mention that whole “heal kills zombie” wipeout of the skeletal underlings on her planet.)

So, here’s my point:

Trickster!Jane? A gray area. “Maid of Life” was the starring role, but the subrole could have been heavily mixed in.

John, right now? Not so much!

John’s theoretical subrole is that of a Mage of Blood, and he gave us a brief, ghosting demonstration of this when getting frustrated on the golden ship. As an active ‘understanding’ class, a Mage of Blood supposedly understands the bonds between himself and others, his friends and their relationships, what holds people down, and can use that knowledge to tweak how reality unfolds. In moderation, it’s proven an excellent facilitator of his oft-demonstrated talents as an Heir of Breath, one who ‘invites change in direction’.

And I believe we can safely say that touching the white plothole cursor did nothing to John that resembles how a ‘Mage of Blood’ would look or act! Or anything like ‘Blood’, for that matter; it was pure Breath, and hasn’t really seemed to mess with his head at all.

So, what if that’s the effect of the theorized black inverse half of the cursor, somewhere? As it would boost the subrole without giving the main one much of a chance to fight back, perhaps someone touching the black juju would experience temporary inversion? It’d be a neat way to demonstrate the effects of role inversion in a contained manner, with a player we wouldn’t expect or such, a short-lived version thereof.

Or it could be the trigger to a more serious inversion we knew would happen anyway, like Tavros’s or-

Wait. SHIT!!!!

Fuck, okay, so if when John put his arm into the white one, it replicated it everywhere—

—Then what if Tavros finds the black one, and

and then he tries to REACH IN but it-!!!!

2nd batch of icons right here, 2 remaining!