caughtinanetwork | ♎

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♎ | 001

[~~through the magic of time shenanigans~~ It has been several hours since Redglare's arrival. Hours she spent investigating, scourging the brochure from top to bottom for every fragment of information, and even checking up on as much of the network as she reasonably could. She's even created a folder of notes on her personal palmtop dedicated to this strange, underwater prison. She is, above all, a professional after all, and it wouldn't do for a member of Alternia's Cruellest Bar to simply run around like a beheaded cluckbeast.

For now, it is time to change the focus of her investigation. Certainly there is much more to be found from investigating the place itself, but it would be a mistake to ignore the people living in it. And Redglare does not make mistakes. She has questions to ask, answers to discovered, and a network to start up, regardless of how long or short her stay may end up being.

She opts for a friendly approach. Catch more flies with honey, after all.]

OH NO! >:[!!!
1 H4V3 F4LL3N 1NTO 4N UND3RW4T3R BUBBL3 4ND 1 C4N'T G3T OUT.
WH3R3 1S TH3 CL3V3R WH1T3 B4RKB34ST TO R3SCU3 M3?
4 BR4V3 KN1GHT TO WH1SK M3 TO S4F3TY SO 1 M4Y SWOON 4MOUNTS TH4T COULD ONLY B3 D3SCR1B3D 4S TRULY OUTR4G3OUS!

H4H4H4, HON3STLY, 1 KNOW 1 D3S3RV3 4 V4C4T1ON FOR MY S3RV1C3S TO TROLLK1ND FOR 4PPR3H3ND1NG TH4T SCOUNDR3L, BUT TH1S W4S NOT WH4T 1 W4S 3XP3CT1NG.
WOULD 4NYON3 B3 W1LL1NG TO H3LP 4 L4DY OUT 4ND 4NSW3R 4 F3W QU3ST1ONS?

Oh no! >:[!!!
I have fallen into an underwater bubble and i can't get out.
Where is the clever white barkbeast to rescue me?
A brave knight to whisk me to safety so i may swoon amounts that could only be described as truly outrageous!

Hahaha, honestly, i know i deserve a vacation for my services to trollkind for apprehending that scoundrel, but this was not what i was expecting.
Would anyone be willing to help a lady out and answer a few questions?

If you want to opt out of me using her text, just comment here.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

No shit it's important. It's three whole kinds of important on different, huge subjects, and I could ramble on for hours if you let me and asked the right questions and I didn't forget anything along the way. We've got tons to cover here. Other people listen, sure, but I'm just impressed that you actually give enough of a fuck to want to record it down--and hell yes, voice is fine.

[Hey, he spent their session making memo after memo. Self-arguments aside, recording doesn't bother him half near to what it could. Listen, Redglare: that's honest gladness in his voice.]

[Oh no, what is this?! Is it?! Oh my, might Terezi be losing out again on the spot of favourite little troll? Is public opinion swaying again-- haha, of course no, Terezi is a solid number one, all due to her remarkable awesomeness.

Karkat and his adorable everything is in a solid second place though.]

Then I guess most of the other people you talk to are absolute idiots!

[She draws the small recorder from her sylladex, checks it over for a moment, before she gives him a nod.]

I'm ready when you are. What would you like to start with?

Edited 2012-11-24 18:11 (UTC)

[Karkat's face quirks. It's not a smile, rare as those are, but it's definitely pleased. Redglare has landed her own self a good spot in ancestor rankings.]

Yes, they absolutely are.

But I'll start on Vatheon. Alternia will just lead into the game, which is a subject that will take ages to explain if just from the the time loops. Besides, the Vatheon explanation is one I'm actually used to giving, so I can just run down the list. And yes, I am going to do this all at once, so keep in mind what questions you come up with and ask me when I'm done.

[He clears his throat, then draws a deep breath.]

First, you're in Vatheon. That's the name of this city in the bubble. The planet itself exists in a different universe than you and I have ever been in before arriving here, and no, I don't know how they got us here. They, in this case, are the scientists in charge. We've only ever seen one, named Carol, but we have seen others who work for them - the head nurse at the local clinic, other authority figures, et cetera et cetera. We've kind of had to scrounge information as we can, namely from discovered papers - I can show you those - or information hacked from a lab some people found a while back, or the rare bit of info gotten from the people themselves. They're stingy about it, either for personal safety or just to be dicks. Carol's not bad from what I've seen of her, but the head nurse is a bitch who thought a fake murder in the Plaza made a good holiday prank earlier this sweep.

Now, why we're here is an experiment. I'm kind of fuzzy on the details, but this is what I've cobbled together from the aforementioned sources. First off, it involves these things called curses. They happen occasionally - anywhere from every other week to a few weeks apart - and last a week each, meaning seven days, from Monday through Sunday. Get a look at a human calendar when you can and learn it; it's how time is measured here. For reference, a sweep is two years and two months, with a year itself being comprised of twelve months.

Now, these curses manifest in a number of ways. They have been known to repeat, but it's impossible to predict what the curse is going to be until it happens. There have been weeks where people have changed species temporarily, been made to act differently by rumors coming true or personality-altering hats, theme weeks where the whole city changes to look different and so do we. One week was games, another fairy tales. We've been followed by literal thought bubbles that show what we think. Most recent was a week that showed us horrors based on our fears. They vary from tolerable to terrible, as that last one might suggest, but most of the time they're just annoying.

Carol told me the curses themselves aren't the experiments, despite my interpretation of those papers I found, and some hacked info kind of corroborated what she said. It's something about emotional energy - farming it from us via the curses, which makes sense with the reactions they inspire.

And you've seen the coral, right? That big thing in the Plaza? That's called the Lamufao, and through the curses, I think they're trying to experiment on that. I don't really know how or why. By the way, the natives--the locals here--will try to tell you it's a god, but that's bullshit. The scientists put it there just like they set up this bubble in the first place. The natives are also useless at giving you any information. Not out of lack of knowledge, necessarily, but because they refuse to discuss it at all.

I have no clue how or why they pick who they do to be brought here, or why the bring us in or send us back when they do. Obviously they control whether or not we remember things. The usual idea is that the longer you're gone, the less likely you are to remember your previous stay, but this is not hard and fast. Sometimes people forget even if they've been gone briefly - or remember a stay from ages back, but not the one in between. Terezi also showed up once only remembering part of her previous stay, but not all of it. Currently she doesn't remember anything of her previous times here, though.

Speaking of which, new arrivals usually come in around the end of the month, trailing off into the beginning of the next, but there are occasional blips where people come back mid-month after disappearing. There's no predictability to if someone will show up a given month or not, nor to when or if they're going to send someone back.

Also, as you might notice, time doesn't match up linearly. Just because you're from a given point of the timeline doesn't mean everyone else will show up from the same point. People can come from before or after you, or the same time, even if they show up at a different time here than you did. If someone's gone, the time spent in their home universe does not match up with the time passed here. I was gone for a few days once and only spent a few hours in our universe - and others have been gone for days or months or whatever, and spent years back home.

At the same time, don't worry about what's happening while you're gone. If or when you return, things will continue as if you were never gone, and you won't remember anything of your time here. If you want proof, see how you had no clue you were here, yourself.

There are also comas. Someone falls asleep, won't wake up, for no apparent reason. They're unpredictable, like a lot else, but they're harmless. The person will wake up eventually and be just as fine as they were before they fell into it. I have no clue why they happen.

The last worry is invasions. They happen infrequently, which is a good thing. I've been here almost two years, or a little less than a sweep - the first year, we had four invasions, and this one, we've only had one so far. Basically, something shows up and starts attacking. In order I've experience pirate ghosts, these big scaly creatures called dinosaurs, rotting fish monsters, a giant tentacled monster called a Kraken, and a giant transforming orb of darkness. That last one stands out because it specifically came from the world of someone here, but the others weren't specific like that.

All that chaos aside, living here isn't actually that bad. Most everything is free, including food, clothing, and shelter. You should have a mark on you--

[He holds up the back of his left hand, displaying the curled symbol on it.]

--and if you show that to whatever native is in charge of the place, they won't charge you. But note how I say most things. There's an area called the Nostalgia Nook - the humans named it, so blame them - that sells things from the universes of the foreigners. That's us, by the way. Ours is called GrubMart, and has things like recuperacoons, foods, sylladex stuff, and so on. Also an alchemiter but I'll get to what that is when we talk about the game. Anyway, things in those stores cost Starfish Tokens. You should have a card with you that keeps track of them, and you can earn more by working a local job. It's totally possible to get by without using it or the Nostalgia Nook stores, though, if you don't mind being cut off from troll stuff.

Also, it helps to know that humans tend to use highblood terminology for appliances and hivehold fixtures, though they have a lot of other words that are just plain different from ours. You'll get the hang of it eventually.

Let's see... The device you used to access the network is called a Starfish Communicator. I mentioned the contact list on there: if you look at it, it lists every foreigner in Vatheon. If you can't find someone and you suspect that the scientists sent them back, check the list. If they're on it, they're fine, but if they're gone from the list, then they aren't here, simple as that.

There's also an island. Ask around for a map and it should show you where the elevator is. There's a man called the Station Master who operates it, and apparently he's the only one who can. I don't know how or why, but when he let me try it myself, it wouldn't respond. The ride is a long one considering you have to go through the ocean up there, but it's worth it if you want to see the sky. The sun's harmless, by the way, and this planet only has a single white moon. I think it might be an iteration of Earth - there's more than one - but I'm not positive. And yes, I'll explain about Earth and the humans more later.

The island's pretty big, so if you want to explore, it'll take a while. There's an abandoned village and a lighthouse, and an abandoned lab where people got that info they hacked a while back, which was discovered after some damage that orb thing did. Long story, which I can also tell you about if you ask.

[Why shouldn't he want to brag about the time he was a god?]

There are only a handful of trolls here, all interrelated in some fashion or another. Which is to say, everyone is either part of my team or the ancestor of somebody on it, and they've never brought anyone unrelated in. There is apparently another group of trolls that might show up in the future if my guess is right, again related to us, but that's a whole other can of dirt noodles and related to the discussion of Alternia and the game. If you want, though, I can list who's here now.

I think that's everything. Questions?

Edited 2012-11-24 19:12 (UTC)

[She is so glad for her recorder. So glad. She wasn't even expecting that long a speech. She needs to let that sink in for a moment, let it digest before she can ask questions. Perhaps it is easiest in the meantime to ask an easy to answer question.]

Another source of mine already gave me a list of who is currently present. Mind checking it over? I do not expect him to have been untruthful but it never hurts to check.

[He raises an eyebrow. Another source? Bunch of options there.]

No, I don't mind. If he left anything off I can explain more.

[She has so many sources. She is falling down all these sources!]

Starting at the top of the hemospectrum, the current list of adult trolls is: Orphaner Dualscar, the Grand Highblood, Expatriate Darkleer, the Marquise, the Disciple, the Psiioniic, a brownblood called the Summoner apparently, your own ancestor and me!

As for the trolls of your age, there is: Feferi Peixes, Eridan Ampora, the Grand Highblood's descendent, Equius Zahhak, darling Terezi, a jadeblood by the name of Kanaya Maryam, Nepeta, the psiioniic's little descendant, the descendant of the Summoner, and you.

Correct?

So that means the Summoner is from after your time? More to explain there, then.

But yeah, that's right, though apparently you're missing names. Maybe some connections, too. Feferi is the empress's descendant, Eridan is Dualscar's, Gamzee Makara is the Grand Highblood's - and don't mistake him for being like him, either, because he's far from it - Equius is Darkleer's - who I'd sooner call the Executor than Expatriate... Marquise Spinneret Mindfang is the ancestor of Vriska Serket, who's absent, but has been here before and will likely show up again. Kanaya is the descendant of the Dolorosa, also absent. Nepeta Leijon is the Disciple's, the Psiioniic's is Sollux Captor, the Summoner's is Tavros Nitram, and you already know my name. My team and the ancestors also include twelfth members, currently missing: a maroonblood by the name of Aradia Megido, and the Handmaid. Yes, that Handmaid.

Karkat, I know I have made disparaging comments about your sense of humour to other people, but this is really not the time for jokes.

[Pfft. Handmaid. Suuuure.]

Continue to doubt me and I'll look up and exchange with her to prove it.

[He really is serious. Look at that face. Does he look like a good liar?]

All right, Mr Vantas, I call your bluff. Show me one of these exchanges with the very Handmaid of Death himself.

Edited 2012-11-24 23:10 (UTC)

[Sigh.]

You know, you could save yourself some time by thinking on why, if it were false, I'd want to waste time trying to make you believe a lie that transparent and liable to be doubted in the first place.

[But he goes to sit now, pulling his SFC from his sylladex as he does. This is going to take some searching, but he shows no sign of giving in. Now, where can he find a good example...]

[She crouches by him, her cane laying across his knees, though her face is patient while he searches.]

Karkat, I spend my nights in the presence of criminals who would rather lie about what brand of grubflakes they had for breakfast than speak a word of truth to a legislacerator. While I have learned that not all the fantastical things they say are false, you cannot blame me for wanting some proof. Especially of the Handmaid of Death herself!

[For all her reasoning, it doesn't stop Karkat from shooting her an aggravated look. But he does keep looking. Sheesh, it's been a while since she was here... But in time, he pulls up two things. First, a video post from her.]

That's what she looks like.

[And then - further back - a text thread.]

And that's when she arrived and explained who she is and so on. If you want to doubt, it lies on her, not me - but you can't tell me she wasn't strong, whoever she was, or that she wasn't Aradia's ancestor.

Edited 2012-11-24 23:25 (UTC)

Wow.

[Redglare's mind is racing while watching the video fragment and reading the test post. Not that she tries to show that too much.]

She is even foxier than the legends say, huh?

[He gives her a look.]

I'm not even going to ask.

[And with that, he captchalogues the SFC.]

Either ask your next question or prompt me for the next subject.

[She laughs, poking a finger at Karkat's cheek for a moment.]

Lighten up, Karkat. Just because we are looking at the terrifying Handmaid of Death himself doesn't mean we can't admire her good looks.

[Is he going to bite her finger? He might very well! Better to quickly distract him.]

All right. What can you tell me about this game called... sgrub, I believe?

Edited 2012-11-25 00:26 (UTC)

[Swat! Swat swat!]

Don't poke me! And we are not talking about her looks. Subject over, dropped, gone, forgotten, the end. Hit on her at your own risk if she ever shows up again.

But before moving onto Sgrub, that does remind me--I always forget something, I swear--death doesn't last here. You die, and you get up again five days later, death wounds healed. But no, this is not free reign to kill whoever you want, and there are apparently going to be punishments for wanton murder if what the head nurse said is true. And I'm not doubting it after she made Eridan go mute for a week just for being a contrary little shit to her.

[But Sgrub... Hell, where to start?]

Anyway, Sgrub is a game, one that directly affected and manifested within reality, regardless of computers having a part in it. If you know anything about video games, it's a mixture of a building and creature-creation simulator, and an RPG. If you don't know anything, it's a game in which we built onto our hives through the computer interface, and later went on to create a whole new universe via breeding frogs. Not that we all contributed directly to the last part - the frog breeding is generally the domain of the space player, but I helped her with that, and all our actions contribute somehow to the end universe. It's complicated.

Anyway, the players form a chain. One person is the client, and the other is the server. The server builds onto the client's hive and deploys various machines that aid progress through the game, the previously mentioned alchemiter being one of many. Generally, though, they're for creating objects - things like weapons, namely, but also whatever useless doodads you can come up with depending on what components you combine. Building and alchemy both require a commodity called grist. How do you get grist? defeating enemies.

Enemies, namely called underlings, consist of various classes of monster. There are imps, ogres, giclopses, liches, basilisks... A number of things. They each serve a sort of boss creature called a denizen, which exists in the Land assigned to each player.

You reach this Land via an entry process via the first item you create, and basically, this means leaving your base planet and universe to the previously mentioned Land, which exists in Paradox Space. Each Land is its own small planet. At the center, instead of a sun, is a big blue orb with clouds called Skaia. Beyond that is the Battlefield, a checkerboarded... area, for lack of a better term. More on that later. Skaia is also orbited more closely by a golden planet with its own moon, called Propsit. Beyond the Lands is another planet with a moon, like Prospit, but purple and named Derse. There's also a ring of asteroids out in that region, and beyond that, a dark area called the Furthest Ring, populated by tentacled beasts called Horrorterrors. The name sounds ridiculous, but they live up the literal meaning, trust me.

You're probably wondering what each of those is for. When a player enters the game, their hive is transported along with them to their Land. The building is meant to reach gates above the hive, which transport you either to other Lands, or different areas of your own Land. There are seven total. The Lands also have different quests, puzzles, and so forth designed to test the player and I guess facilitate some kind of bullshit emotional growth in the process. They relate the titles and aspects we each have, which can also grant powers if you figure out how to unlock them. Each Land also has a dual theme to it, but I'm not going into that.

Prospit and Derse, in turn, are the planets where dreamselves lie. Each player has a dream self. The idea is that when your real self sleeps, your dream self is awake on that planet - and when your dream self sleeps, your real self is awake. But before that can happen, your dream self has to wake from this lengthy lasting sort of sleep in the first place. There's different things that can trigger it, but hell if I understand it. I didn't even wake up on Prospit until after the game had ended, and that was just in time for it to be killed. Lucky me!

[Eyeroll.]

But depending which planet your dream self exists on, you get a benefit. Prospit dreamers see portents in the clouds, and Derse dreamers hear the whispers of the Horrorterrors. Both these are designed to aid progress through the game.

Dream selves also serve extra purpose: they can be a fallback extra life if you get killed, or they can be used to reach a sort of super powered level called God Tier. In each land is something called a quest bed, and if you die on it, you revive with fancy powers and an ugly pajama outfit, and gain conditional immortality. This means that if you die, you will forever revive, unless the death is either just or heroic.

But eventually, all this progress through the Lands - fighting underlings, confronting denizens, building on hives, hopping through gates - gets you to the Battlefield. Here, the forces of Prospit and Derse, these carapaced beings, fight a sort of war. Derse always wins, no exceptions. But Derse, you see, is led by a Black Queen and a Black King. Both of them gain power, as do the underlings, from a process called prototyping.

Remember the devices I mentioned earlier? When you activate one, it also releases something called a kernelsprite. You put up to to things in it, which can be literally anything but usually include at least one dead thing, and that grants physical traits and powers to the underlings and the Black King and Queen. We all, except Aradia, prototyped our dead lusii - which is another story, don't ask. The sprite serves as a guide through the game, which is why you'd want to prototype in the first place. The benefit to your enemies is just the drawback.

The idea is that they serve as the last bosses, but with the help of a Dersite we exiled the Black Queen and destroyed her ring, which is what grants her her power. The Black King, though, has a scepter, and he just has to be fought. One of the prototypings that went into him was Gl'bgolyb - you know, Speaker of the Vast Glub, gets too hungry and we all die, the empress's own lusus. But we were awesome, so we owned the King's ass anyway, won the game, and proved how badass fucking awesome we all are.

And remember the frog breeding? The goal of that is to create the Genesis Frog, which is itself literally a new universe. The idea is that you get to enter this universe as a reward for beating the game. We were going to, and I was literally right about to open the door to it, when this demon appeared and cut it in half. Aradia managed to fling us into this thing called a transportalizer which sent us to a lab on one of the meteors, so we didn't die, but we were basically stuck hiding there to avoid the demon.

But another thing about those meteors. The whole point of entering the game is to escape the end of the world, which comes via those meteors being sent back in time to your world to pulverize it until nothing of use is left. These also affect the game itself. When you're getting close to the final battle, you see, they start to fly towards the battlefield, and it acts as a time limit. If you don't defeat the Black King quickly enough, you all get killed by meteors. Skaia does have defense to give you more time than you'd have originally, though, via portals, which are what send it back to your planet in the first place. Stable time loops are huge part of Sgrub.

You never get to "save" your home planet, though. If anyone wants to do that, that's left to exiles, carapace beings from the dream planets that get sent back to repopulate or do whatever. Exiles also serve as one of the many guides you get in the games, via subtle to overt influence to your mind, or in some cases, direct interaction. I met my exile in my Land and together we orchestrated the plan I mentioned earlier that got the Black Queen exiled. Of course, another one got him exiled later, thus the term.

Also, a big theme of the game is cyclical creation. Frog breeding includes a cloning process via something called ectobiology, in which a clone literally goes back in time to become the thing from which it was cloned. Creating the Genesis Frog, or Bilious Slick as he was nicknamed, involves trying to encourage failed clones via controlled and subtle genetic mutations.

Frog breeding, however, is not the only place ectobiology comes up. I mentioned before that the space player is the one tasked with the frog business, and I helped her with it. That's because I was the one to deal with the other place that ectobiology comes up: creating all of us. By us, I mean both you, our ancestors as a whole, and my team, including myself. You were never an egg: you were created from slime, in a lab, via a series of button presses and failed attempts to appearify you from the past. It's weird and again, complicated, and it ended with me herding twenty four grubs until they disappeared by meteor back to the past, to crash land into our planet and eventually grow up to be our present selves. Not that I knew I was making our ancestors at the time; I just thought they were twelve extra wigglers with no purpose, until the Dolorosa told me about how she found the Signless in a crater.

There's more stuff that comes after the game that I could and do plan to go into, but I'm going to pause here so you can ask questions. And yes, I know that was disjointed, but imagine being the one to actually play the game and have to figure it all out.

[Wow. That was just... wow.]

Karkat.

That's my name, not a question.

[Staring right back.]

[Oh fine you want a question, huh.]

Karkat, can we start talking again about how foxy the Handmaid is because I am not even sure what to make of this.

No, we cannot start talking about how foxy the Handmaid is.

It means that Alternia went through meteoric apocalypse, which is called the Reckoning by the way. This triggered the Vast Glub, so we're doomed to extinction as a species. And I both made every troll here and contributed to the creation of a whole universe.

Edited 2012-11-25 01:38 (UTC)

All right. Lets assume that everything you have told me about this game is true-- hush, quell your inevitable bitching, you already know about my loveable scepticism.

What in Alternia's name motivated you to start playing a game like this?

I can point you to humans from the universe we created that will corroborate my story. If the Handmaid ever shows up, she probably could too, along with the the Dolorosa due to whole story about finding grub Signless in a crater. Remember that she's the one who made me believe in ancestors at all.

As for motivation, none of us knew what the game was until it was too later. My friend Sollux helped put it together from symbols in these ruins, or something, and was all hey let's play this. So we got teams together and set up to start, and by the time he realized it would end the world, I was already in the medium--in my Land, that is. No backing out. And say if we had somehow stopped earlier enough, we all would have been doomed to die, because that would be an alternate timeline. All timelines save the main one are doomed, except for things here? This place is weird and I don't really get how it works in regards to the timeline, but it hasn't screwed us over yet. I wasn't the time player, anyway. Ask Aradia about that if she shows up again.

... time player?

I mentioned the space player, right? Everyone has a title in the game. Aradia is the Maid of Time. Kanaya is the Sylph of Space. That's why I said I was a knight: it's part of my title. The latter part is called your aspect, and it determines the powers you get, if you can unlock them. No, before you ask, I didn't get any.

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