#serpus

hello! im submitting my sort-of-trollsona-but-not-really. I made him I guess more Alternian and he’s highly personal 2 me but that shouldn’t discourage you! I’m stuck at some parts because I just recently got back into homestuck and I’d like advice from someone who knows their stuff. IT’S SO LONG IM SO SORRY… Thank you so much if you do review it tho!

Hey no worries. Thanks for your patience!

Hell yeah hell yeah ceruleanbloods with Eye Stuff.

World: Alternia, maybe an AU? I’m unsure. But he’s Alternian.

Name: Sancti Serpus

“Sancti” comes from “Saint” and his belief that he can do no wrong, as well as how he believes that his experiments benefit troll society. “Serpus” comes from “Serpent” and his personality being sly and manipulative, could be described as a snake by others in the way he is first nice to his friends but backstabs them later, as well as his lusus being a two-headed Titanoboa (prehistoric Boa).

I understand the reasoning behind the first name! If you want something that plays a little more into the archetypal Mad Scientist “I will become a GOD AHAHAHAHA” vibe then I suggest Apoteu from the Greek apotheoun, meaning “to make a god of.” Still fits his beliefs about himself and how he benefits society…but there is such a thing a vengeful, malevolent god.

I like the serpent theme, especially given the Rod of Asclepius/Caduceus confusion, given that the former is about medicine and the latter about commerce. Plus snake oil salesman as duplicitous people claiming they have a cure when they’re really just selling you whatever they could dig up. Serpus is a little too obvious as a snake troll though, so maybe we abstract that a bit. A slightly silly one would be Davdav, since the longest-living two-headed snake is named Double Dave after its discoverer.

Apoteu Davdav. It has the opposite of a nice ring to it, but I like it because it sounds kind of mad sciencey.

Age: 7.5 Sweeps (16 Human Years)

Theme/Story: His theme is sort of Mad Scientist vibes. He dabbles in forensic pathology, chemistry (even though he often explodes things), troll biology/genes and psychology. Those are his main 5 branches because he’s not very good at math so his knowledge of physics is limited.

fugidghiuuaehiu Bad At Math Science Gang RISE UP

He was hatched and went through The Brooding Caverns. He decided to settle on a Hive in the outskirts of a city, in a suburban area with only a few highblooded neighbors. However, his lusus was very, very hard to feed for the two heads would often argue with and attack each other. His lusus would feed on anyone who visited or came too close, by asphyxiating them. It also neglected him and didn’t pay attention to him for it was too busy fighting with itself. He eventually learned to sedate his lusus through aromatherapy, with chemicals he himself created in his lab. He lives on a huge castle-like hive near a forest where he gets the material for his experiments and corpses to analyze. He has a bunch of body parts in flasks and bottles.

He is a very strange troll, but he doesn’t want to be. Due to his upbringing and his lusus eating whoever came over. He often saw culling, death and destruction near him, which caused him to have a morbid fixation on death and a desire to better troll society through science, influenced by his ancestor Discordi Discipla (he’s a WIP). However, he has fallen victim to his own mental deterioration and apathy as he spent more time around the dead (and undead). This mental deterioration was exacerbated when a presumed dead corpse came to life in his lab and attacked him, causing him blindness in his right eye. He’s somewhat afraid of being culled for his blindness, but knows that it’s not likely, due to his highblood status.

This is pretty good and comprehensive!

Due to his childhood where he didn’t have control over what his lusus did, he now wants to have control over everything in his life. This makes him a very controlling and manipulative person, bent on doing anything to get his way even if it means experimenting on his lowblooded friends. He doesn’t necessarily like hurting others and doesn’t mean to, Alternian society and his own visions of violence has just made him apathetic. This apathy as well as his low self-worth stemming from his neglect has made him have tons of unhealthy relationships, as well as has made him a perfectionist and narcissist. Despite his supposed belief that the end justifies the means and he’s going to make troll society better, he doubts himself and has an inferiority complex.

His mental deterioration has made him a very unstable troll to be around. He’s still a good troll at heart, however the odds are in disfavor due to his blood color causing him to look down on others lower on the hemospectrum and his own childhood. He does things mainly on impulse and suffers from strange hallucinations and visions of the future ever since he was blinded on his right eye. He’s learned to cope with them and they don’t necessarily harm him, but they do cause him significant distress.

He also has a lot of scars from laboratory incidents, and his neighbors hate him.

fjiodshfuo yeah if my neighbor kept making ungodly noises and murdering people with abandon I may also have a beef with them.

Review Goals: General Overview please! Strife Specibus:

Chemicalkind. He carries around various noxious chemicals to use as he pleases, but sometimes they irritate his eyes when he uses them. He can handle it almost all of the time though. He throws them in bottles and that’s how he fights.

I know I *just* suggested this for my most recent review but bottlekind fits here too because if he runs out of chemicals he can just break a bottle off on a nearby surface and stab someone with the broken glass it’s fun it’s easy it’s free.

Fetch Modus:  I kind of took the idea from a mspa fetch modus entry, since I’m bad at coming up with fetch moduses. It’s unoriginal I know, but I genuinely couldn’t think of anything.

Periodic Table Modus.

It requires Sancti to remember his elements, as he needs to remember them for when he’s working and therefore it helps him but also inconveniences him as he can forget them.

This is how it works:

When an item is captchalogued, a quick calculation is checked to see the size of that item. If it is lower than 190x190, the size of the item is totalled and placed on a slot on the fetch modus that corresponds to the periodic table number. 

For example, an item that is 4 in by 2 in would total to 6, and be in the position of Carbon on the table.

Sancti would then have to open the periodic table modus, which would open as an actual metaphysical table, and retrieve the item.

It is blank, with 118 spaces.

This fetch modus is a little confusing to me as well, and your poor math challenged troll likely also finds it difficult.

…but I think I have an idea that keeps with the spirit *and* the confusion while generating some good old Modus Shenanigans. What about an ORBITAL MODUS, with items filling in in each new category as an electron shell would? All items in the outermost shell would be immediately accessible, with deeply nested items remaining inaccessible until the outer shells were emptied.

Like this. Which is perfect for your chemist troll.

Blood Color: Ceruleanblood/Cobaltblood.

Lunar Sway: Derse, because he is dissatisfied with himself.

Derse and Prospit assignations don’t necessarily have to do with how one feelings about *themselves!* Karkat is Prospit and Nepeta is Derse, which reflects the fact that Karkat has accepted the hemospectrum as the way things have to be despite the horrors it inflicts on him, while Nepeta is extremely happy to be herself, but constantly snipes Equius for kowtowing to the hemospectrum. Even Equius is a Dersite, since he doesn’t agree with the hemospectrum so much as develop a really disturbing fixation over the following and subversion of it.

Given that your troll actively uses the hemospectrum to his advantage and delights in doing so, I’d argue he’s a Prospitan!  Title: I’m unsure if I want to make them a sylph of light or a sylph of space, I’m actually not sure at all what they should be.

Between forensic pathology and genetics and chemistry and being attacked by a zombie and feeling he knows best he’s actually coming off VERY much as a Life player to me. Since you’re bouncing between two Sylph classpects I’m happy to keep that title as long as we acknowledge he’s not currently very good at it :P.

Symbol and Meaning: The symbol for purification by burning. He’s my first troll in the session I want to make. It kind of has the meaning of spiritual cleansing or purifying something that is not pure. In this case I think it relates to Sancti’s personal growth that will happen through the session, reflecting how he has to better himself through painful events.

If we go by the EZ, his sign would be Scorsci, Sign of the Fixer. Which is certainly what he sees himself as! I’ll see if I can play with the symbol you gave him and incorporate the Scorpio M into it.

Handle: gravesideAnopsia

Anopsia is a defect in the visual field or blindness, and graveside refers to how he got his blindness.

We definitely see trolls with retroactively foreshadowy trolltags, but I can’t think of a reason for him to have picked Anopsia before his blinding. What about gravesideConjunct, since he sees himself as the connective tissue between the dead and the living? Which can become retroactively ironic when his eye putrifies after it comes into contact with necrotic tissue, which is basically an extreme version of conjunctivitis.

Quirk: ~~( he types…. zzz….. taking… his time…. with words… and….types in caps when he…..wants to zzz…. ASSERT HIS POINT….)~~

Love this quirk he’s a sleeby boy.

He either keysmashes to laugh as “eoeoeoe” “sksksks” or simply laughs like “haha” or “hehe”. He also uses the following emoji    :)-< and (－‸ლ)

Special Abilities: None, unless you count his visions of the future. But he wasn’t born with psychic abilities.

Idk that he even needs visions of the future tbh. Injury does not always confer abilities in troll society.

Lusus/Guardian: A 2-headed Titanoboa (think of a huuuuuge prehistoric Boa, even bigger than an Anaconda). He considers himself to have two dads as the two heads have separate brains. He calls them “my snake dads”. Him and his lusus have a better relationship now that his lusus is sedated, and he often cuddles with his lusus in between their two heads and feeds them the corpses after he’s done analyzing them. However, their relationship used to be negative and neglectful, as explained above.

Omg yes I love his dads.

Interests: Apart from the sciences listed on his theme, he also enjoys the arts and painting with blood of the corpses he studies, as well as making artistic murals outside to the annoyance of his neighbors. He likes cosmic horror books, doomsday devices and machinery, bodily modification, philosophers, and in his spare game he will play puzzle and roleplaying games (but not FLARPing, he’s bad at it). He thinks about hunting the undead sometimes, and likes horror movies, making friends regardless of their dead or alive status, scaring his neighbors, horror movies, and mindless antics.

Appearance: His hair is very straight, but it tends to get messy. Also the string on one of his horns is a string that got stuck on his horn and it’s hard to remove now.

usghiuserg good. I’m gonna see what I can do to his sprite to convey the “straight but messy” vibe more.

Personality: 

He’s VERY creative, more than analytical, which is an oddity for a scientist, others may think of him as a “creative genius” but he rejects the title of being a mad scientist. He wants to be positively known. He also always tries to finish things and has a general curious personality. He’s always seeking knowledge, and often tires himself out from working too much on his experiments, which causes him to enter a cycle of all nighters vs heavy sleeping. He’s a very heavy sleeper, often taking naps throughout the day. He procrastinates on mundane tasks that don’t relate to his interests or experiments. However, he drinks a lot of caffeinated beverages when he needs to work in order to keep himself awake essentially starting an all nighter cycle.

Depending on the circumstances, he can be very friendly and charming, or quite the opposite. It all depends. He likes to crack morbid jokes that make nobody laugh, and is quite disorganized as well as silly. He cares for his moirail (wip) and matesprit (wip) the most, and even though he sometimes snaps at them, he never wants to lose them.

Land: Land of Dreams and Angels, but depending on the classpect you assign him I will change it.

*Hopes and Dreams plays in the background*

What if he’s Land of Regrowth and Thaw, with the grass being fed by the remains of former consorts and the rest slowly unfreezing from ice as his journey continues? Works with his work with dead bodies and also gives us the vegetation associated with Life.

I also have his introduction written out but idk if I should include it. Here it is:

Your name is SANCTI SERPUS and you’d rather be sleeping, or dead.

You love everything relating to THE SCIENCES, but you are not very good at MATH, or keeping organized. However, you are still considered a “CREATIVE GENIUS”. You love anything that STIMULATES YOUR GRUBBY BRAIN -  such as PSYCHOLOGY, FORENSICS and TROLL BIOLOGY. You do many EXPERIMENTS, most of which involve using troll parts in jars, to create true ABOMINATIONS; and one which sadly took your right eye’s vision and has had you in fear of being CULLED. However, you reject the idea of being a “MAD SCIENTIST”.

In a weird fashion, you also highly enjoy THE ARTS, and paint the walls of your GINORMOUS HIVE and other places with objectively “pretty good” PICTURES made from the BLOOD of the corpses you work with, to the annoyance of your neighbors. You also have a slight interest in BODILY MODIFICATION, in an effort to withdraw attention from your accident, as well as an interest in COSMIC HORROR BOOKS, as any good scientist should have. Another interest of yours is VIDEO GAMES, especially ROLE PLAYING and PUZZLE games, and when you’re not working, you spend your time playing them. You’ve even attempted to CODE your own game, and FAILED.  However, you are not a very good FLARPER.

Despite this, all your work leaves you tired, which means you are a HEAVY SLEEPER and tend to procrastinate even the most MUNDANE TASKS that are not related to your interests. On the days that you are energized from drinking CAFFEINATED BEVERAGES, you like to go outside at night and collect all sorts of RANDOM KNICK-KNACKS, which may include CORPSES and FOSSILS to analyze. This has attracted the attention of your neighbors and BEST FRIENDS, who call you an UNHINGED TOTAL MANIAC. You don’t understand why, until you take off your lab coat to reveal an alarming amount of new scars from LABORATORY INCIDENTS. You really are kind of an ODDBALL. 

This is such a frickin MOOD. Let’s go to the redesign, though I don’t have much!

Horns - you said he got string tangled in his horns but those horns are shaped in a way that makes it pretty easy to untangle stuff! I gave him horns that are Klein-bottle inspired, though it’s obviously impossible for horns to actually grow into a Klein bottle shape. Now THAT’S a mess I wouldn’t wanna tangle with!

Hair - I absolutely ripped a fan-troll template to shreds and put it back together again for this hair, but I think this conveys “basically straight but mussed up” with a little more shape than the original.

Face - I adjusted the proportions and replaced the eyebrows with just the piercings because it was looking a little busy.

Shirt - Again it looked a little busy with the jacket with symbols on both flaps and the pendant in the middle, so I gave him a mad scientist jacket edited from John’s.

Symbol - I tried to find a happy medium between the radial symmetry of the original symbol and the Scorsci M with the arrows.

That’s pretty much it! Hope this helped!