#s164

John normally goes where he pleases, and doesn’t worry about the consequences – but Typheus’s sheer aura was enough to rattle even him.

AG: *Snort.*

Heh.

Sorry, John, but you had no hope here. You were meant to show up at the tail end of a month-long campaign, not three hours into your session. This was impossible.

An endgame piano, for the most powerful Fraymotif of all.

...hang on.

Wait, shit. I'm pretty sure I just solved LOWAS.

The entire planet is a fucking pipe organ!

This is how John’s supposed to commune with the Breeze and complete his Quest - by repeating the first [S] page in the entire comic!

Damn, that's cool. It reminds me of how LOLAR's architecture seems to evoke stringed instruments, which may or may not be relevant to Rose's own Quest. At some point, I'll have to check if any other Lands feature musical symbolism.

AG: You were right to 8e nervous. Denizens are incredi8ly powerful monsters. You had no chance whatsoever at this stage of the game. AG: You might have stood a chance after I started helping you. 8ut Terezi really screwed you over 8y leading you here so early.

Would John's early God Tier really be enough to prevail here?

It can be assumed that Typheus himself is a powerful master of airbending. The rapid development of John’s powers has been extremely impressive, but Typheus commands the Breeze across all of LOWAS. It definitely wouldn't be a steamroll.

EB: i guess if i ever see her, i should thank her too. […] EB: because this was important. […] EB: if i didn't make the decision to go, then dave would not be able to go back in time and fix things. EB: in fact, if i didn't die here in this palace, we never would have been born in the first place! AG: How could you know all that?

That’s the sort of thing that Typheus himself could probably clue him in on.

Hephaestus, Dave’s Denizen, was explicitly aware of the fact that he was in a failed timeline. Typheus probably had the same understanding – and furthermore, it sounds like he informed John that this particular doomed timeline was critical to the existence of the Alpha.

Denizens were introduced to us as powerful boss monsters, but we're slowly learning that they have meta-knowledge of the game's deeper mechanics that rivals even Sprites. If you're really supposed to just kill them and leave, then why do they seem so wise? Why do they have an obvious intelligence that Underlings lack? What are they for?

Vriska, come on, you’ve got John’s number by now. This behavior should not surprise you anymore.

AG: Does that mean you'll 8elieve me now? GT: i guess i always did, sort of. GT: i think i've been in denial about what's happening here.

Yeah, no shit - that’s kind of your thing.

You don’t think about this stuff, even when it’s right in your face. Back in the present, John Prime has quickly repressed his father’s death...

...but you’re not John Prime, are you?

This is the John killed by Typheus – confirming that any doomed Player can be preserved in the Bubbles, not just those who died in the Alpha Timeline.

This vastly increases the scope of potential Bubble ghosts. We could meet the Vriska who left to fight Jack, the Jade who never entered the Medium, or even the Gamzee who snapped early and wrote the HONK code. There are some very juicy possibilities here.

We’ve got an audience!

The gods certainly seem to be keeping an eye on these two. Perhaps Spiderbreath's a popular ship, out here in the Ring.

...normally, I’d dismiss this as another illusory memory, but someone bearing Dad’s symbol is texting Nanna as we speak. Could Jack have underestimated Dad's constitution, when he left him for dead?

Honestly. I'd even accept this being Dad's ghost. Anything to keep him in the game, right?

AG: Well, just so you know, he is pro8a8ly not actually there. AG: Kind of like how my lusus was just a memory.

Hm. Well, it's not a confirmation that he's an illusion, but we really haven't been given any reason to believe that 'NPCs' become sentient Bubble ghosts after death. This is probably just wishful thinking on my part.

I guess things would start to get a little messy if anyone could show up in the Bubbles. Making it a Players-only deal ensures that deaths like Mom, Bro and Dad(...?) retain their narrative weight. We don’t want to make death too cheap, or the comic will lose all its stakes.

Mind you, even if we do restrict the Bubbles to just Players, we still have plenty of possibilities on the table. We’ll surely be seeing plenty of Aradias, and it’s not inconceivable that sprites like Davesprite and Jadesprite could get tickets to the afterlife, too. Dream Jade did.

Hell, it wouldn’t even be that hard. She only had, like, four conversations with John Prime, so it shouldn’t take too long to form an equally strong Social Link with his doomed self.

EB: so now what do we do? aside from be dead for probably ever. AG: Man, I don't know.

Well... there are some serious asterisks attached to that 'forever’, as both of these characters could potentially return to the living world. Death in Homestuck has been curable ever since Act 1, when we resurrected a mischievous old lady who probably doesn't even have a ghost.

If we gain access to the reboot session’s Kernelsprites, Vriska could easily be revived via prototyping her body. Furthermore, while Doomed John’s body probably vanished with his timeline, there’s nothing stopping us from bringing a Kernelsprite to the Ring, and trying to prototype his ghost directly. We won’t know whether it works until we try!

I love that this huge, foreboding gateway to Typheus’s dark domain still features his cute lil’ browser icon.

EB: well, like i said, i flew up to the last gate. like this. […] EB: it brought me inside the palace. […] EB: i had that weird feeling of getting to a place in a video game you are not supposed to be yet, because you don't have the right powerups and such.

Which was pretty much literally the case. This is clearly a Lv90 combat zone, and when Terezi tossed you in here, you were Lv20 at best.

It seems she's acting out again. Sorting these clippings will have to wait while I settle her down. I apologize profusely.

Flashing green text usually means a First Guardian - but if a First Guardian was 'acting out' in Scratch's mansion, it would already have been destroyed. So who the fuck is this?

EB: i was tricked by a troll into flying up to the last gate, using this rocket pack. […] AG: This sounds like Terezi's handiwork. […] EB: she was a blind troll. she made me this incredibly shitty map for me to follow! AG: Yep. That's her. AG: I guess she got 8oth of us then. Un8elieva8le. […] AG: Well, not tricked, so much as made a pointless coin flip and sta88ed me in the 8ack. EB: wow. that's pretty cold blooded! AG: Oh, sure. She was easily the most underhanded and villainous mem8er of our group.

I know it’s meant to be kind of ironic that Vriska’s saying this, but let’s be fair - Terezi is at least as bad as she is. There’s a reason the Scourge Sisters worked so well as a team.

AG: 8ut I did let my guard down. And even when she sta88ed me, I sure didn't think I was going to die. EB: why not? AG: It turns out immortality isn't all it's cracked up to 8e. Let's leave it at that.

Come on, Vriska. Are you really that surprised that your death was tagged as Just?

Immediately before she got stabbed, Vriska told John that she expected her fight with Jack to ‘wipe out all the bad things she’d done’ and render her death Heroic.