caughtinanetwork | [ VIDEO ]

[ Well, if you didn't want to see a close-up of Prince Gumball's ~~pink~~ orchid face for the opening of this video then today is not your lucky day. After exploring the extent of his little ~~pink~~ amaranth iStarfish, figuring out its purpose, trying to get it to play techno music and dying in the first level of a game he found on it, he decided to use it to communicate.

However, he pressed record too quickly and started the video prematurely. After a moment, he pulled it away so the network can be greeted with a more normal shot.

Generally, when Gumball finds himself kidnapped or in another dimension or possessed, Fionna is efficient and heroic enough to save him within a reasonable timeframe. This time, it's been a while so he decides to take matters into his own hands to see what the hold-up is.

He is also feeling a little extra impatient given how...wet the current location is and how his ~~pink~~ salmon rainboots are nowhere in sight. ]

Greetings, citizens of Vatheon! My name is Prince Gumball of the Candy Kingdom. Though my stay thus far has been nice-- [ and he thinks that's being kind ]-- I worry about my subjects back home and their low tolerance for stress. If you could be so kind as to direct me to your nearest ship port or best place to create a wormhole back home, I would be delightfully grateful. Ideally, I'd like to return on the morrow but if one is not available, my previous requests are sufficient.

[ He holds up a wet and sandy towel between his pinched fingers. ]

Also, is there a towel butler around? I'd like to receive a new towel at your soonest convenience, I dropped mine.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[His response comes some minutes later, with the huff and puff of a troll out of breath post-rage explosion. There is a table in the background. It's upside down, half laying against a chair.]

I cannot even express in communicable words how absolutely, infinitesimally little I care about what that candy-formed freak of nature tastes like, because I do not give a shit. Shit outright vanishes in my presence because my inability to give one erases it from existence, like unto a black hole of all-consuming apathy if not for my fury that reality could stick its lobe up its ass so incredibly far that it got the shitbrained idea to make a place with people made out of literal candy. I give up. I give up wholly and entirely. I am done with understanding anything.

You sound like you could use a Xanax even more than the candy people. And they explode when they get scared.

[Exploding candy people. There goes a chair, kicked right over. Which means--]

Jegus grubfucking nookpus!

[--ow, his foot.]

[Okay, Percy finds Karkat's unbridled rage hilarious, and he can't help bursting out laughing.]

Okay, dude. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Take a deep breath.

HA FUCKING HA, NOOKLORD!

What a novel concept! Surely, a breath is the answer to all the prayers I never bothered with. It's not like I've ever heard that one before. It's not like it's the cliché so trite and overused that even other clichés turn up their sniff nodes at it. What an amazing idea, you gift to fatuity.

If you could take the moment to drag yourself out of the morass of coagulated genetic material that serves as your miniscule pool of thought, perhaps you would realize that I will not calm down just because some bulgewad I barely know told me to take a deep breath.

...do you lie awake at night thinking of creative ways to insult people? But seriously you can calm down. So he's made of gum. That's weird. This whole place is pretty weird, right? The ocean just goes for miles in every direction and I popped into a place full of refugees from an underwater city far away from the gods.

But you don't see me flipping tables over it.

Stop telling me to calm down! Jegus christ, did you miss the whole point of what I just said? If I need to calm down, I have someone to do it, and it's not you. My act of flipping a table is not yours to dictate.

Secondly, no, I don't lie awake at night thinking of creative ways to insult people. My insults are freestyled at moment's notice, and if anything, I would lie awake at day because trolls are nocturnal, if not for the fact that I avoid sleep in the first place.

You sound just like a child of Ares. The war god.

I'm not dictating anything. Just making an observation. Do whatever you want, I don't care. You're the one freaking out, not me.

Then that's pretty impressive.

Listen. I by and large do not believe in gods without the proof to back them up. You know the god I'm a child of? My fucking self. I have helped spawn a universe from its beginning to its end, with galaxies and planets and little hornless monkeys called humans with backwards romance and a failure at space travel. I have temporarily been made literally divine in the past. I retain the power of the god who gave me that. And in between all that, I cloned myself and twenty-three other trolls into existence in a stable timeloop of self-perpetuation.

I know no "Ares", I don't care about Ares, and unless this douche shows up and makes its presence a proven point of fact, I am not going to.

[Okay, Percy is a little impressed.]

All I said is that you sound like someone I know. But space travel? Stable time loops? Very cool.

And Ares is a jerk. So are most of his kids.

I could have told you I was a jerk myself without the needless comparison to a supposed god. Space travel and time loops aren't that cool, either; they are normal facts of the life I had before I came here.

Hey, I'm just trying to hold a conversation. And I've bever been to space or manipulated time, so I think that's pretty cool.

Technically I haven't either. At least not space in the sense I hoped to be in it, despite time spent on a lab on a meteor.

The time loops were set to complete themselves via timeline predestination. Things I did to complete them were done without any purposeful action with time itself. If you want a time manipulator, talk to Dave Strider or Aradia Megido. They're the time players here.

I see. [He doesn't. Not really.] Well you've clearly been though some really interesting stuff, Karkat Vantas.

I've only ever known one person who could manipulate time. Or rather, not a person. A titan. Kronos, Lord of Time. He was way worse than Ares.

[Funny, there's also a Lord of Time in his corner of reality, though Karkat doesn't know that part of the story.]

You do not know one quarter of the really interesting stuff I've been through in my life, Percy.

I'll stick to the two I know. They're an insufferable prick and a morbid creep respectively, but at least they aren't whatever a titan is.

And you don't know any of the really interesting stuff that's happened in mine. We're on the same page, then.

Yeah, he was both of those things and a lot worse, I'm sure. But he's gone now.

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