#interstitialstuck

[citadelofswords]

interstitialstuck kids + 14

14. "you're supposed to talk me out of this."

al finds audrey on a hill overlooking a labyrinth of mirrors, and not for the first time wishes sburb hadn’t been quite so on the nose with making every player confront the strange fear buried deep in their subconsciousness.

“thought it might be you,” audrey says, with a sigh. she barely has to glance at him, her control over mind so total she probably knew exactly who was going to follow her before she’d even decided to storm away.

“i drew the short straw,” al says lightly, because he knows it’ll make her laugh, and it does. “so. you good?”

“does it seem like i’m good?” audrey asks, and groans. “i just found out there was an entire conspiracy, apparently orchestrated by the future version of myself, that brought my best friend, my ex-best friend, shigeo’s brother and your brother into this fucked up game, but now they’ve somehow lost all four of them and have no idea where they are. and we had to find that out from her.” al knows immediately who she’s talking about; shoka had not endeared herself to any of them arriving the way she had. for her sake, al’s glad shadow’s doing his own personal quest on his own planet right now. “i’m surprised you’re so calm about this.”

heh. calm. audrey’s lucky she can’t feel the storm churning in al’s chest right now. “ed’s not incapable,” he says. “he had the alchemy thing too.”

“if he’s anything like you, and he’s still with the others, then they’re probably fine. is that what you’re trying to say?”

“he’s nothing like me,” al says. “but he is my older brother. so yeah. they’re probably fine.” he sits down next to her. “that doesn’t mean i’m not still worried about him. and i’m worried about emma and noah and ritsu too.”

audrey stares at her hands. “if i reach,” she said quietly, “i could probably find one of them. i could nudge them onto the path that brings them right back here, safe and sound. there’d be a consequence for it. there always is. trish would know it better than me. but i could do it.”

al just watches her carefully, and finally audrey looks over at him with some surprise on her face. “you’re supposed to talk me out of this,” she says.

“i told you,” he says. “i’m worried too.” that, and he knows audrey never would; she’s always been very deliberately against taking direct control of anyone’s fate without their foreknowledge and permission. if they were worse people, then perhaps.

“i need to go find them,” audrey says. “i know we have shit we need to do. i know we have to keep looking for the frog. but i— there has to be a reason why i told jason to bring them into the incipisphere. and it can’t just be for them to die. i need to find out where they went and make sure they’re safe.”

“okay,” al says. “give us a couple of days and we’ll go after them.”

audrey looks at him sharply. “what?”

“even if ed and ritsu weren’t there,” al says, “do you really think i’d make you go alone? that any of us would? no,” al says, standing up. “we’re all going to go. we have all the time in the world to find our genesis frog. a little detour won’t hurt.”

he offers her a hand, and audrey takes it and lets him pull her up. “you’re speaking for the group here,” she notes. “how do you know the others will say yes?”

“oh, please, like mob would ever say no,” al retorts. “and i think trish will surprise you. shoka…”

“she doesn’t have to come,” audrey says darkly. al laughs, and rubs at the side of his neck.

“i’m not going to turn her away if she decides to tag along,” he says. “you know that.”

“oh, i know,” audrey says. “but maybe i’ll just… nudge her into one of mob’s soup rivers.”

“yeah, what are up with those?” al starts to tug audrey away, and counts it as a victory when she only looks back at the mirrors once.

[impernaway]

infinitystuck + 19 (“Maybe you’re not thinking hard enough.”)

(written with heavy inspiration for how Audrey and Trish's powers interact together from this post over here.)

Trish isn't the sort to pace when she's agitated over something. She'll move into some odd pose where she never takes her eye off the issue, fingers flexing every now and then as she works the problem over in her head. Al on the other hand has his hands over his face, because it's been an hour now and this is just going nowhere.

"This makes no fucking sense," she says. Again.

"Well, I don't - I don't know what to tell you! It's just-"

"This whole 'session'," she says, shifting into another pose, "Is 'doomed'. It has been since before we got here. There is no frog. There is...No reward. There is just us. All paths lead to the same failure. And any devation from a certain path kills you."

"I mean, it kills all of us eventually," Al says, looking out the window. The Land of Gardens and Candles isn't much of an improvement over his hands, but at least he's not having to look at Trish. "There's one timeline that's the main one, and that's this one. And the rest are just... Branching off from it and withering away as they go."

"But why this one?"

"I don't know! You're the Doom player! I just know it's there, I can - I can feel it, when it's there. If I slide into a doomed branch I can just sort of tell, and then I have to work out why after."

"You should probably. 'Think'. A little harder about it."

"Oh hey," Shigeo says. "I bought chips. What's up?"

"Everything is 'doomed' but the 'alpha timeline' is less 'doomed' than the other timelines. Audrey and I can manipulate fate, so I don't know why this one that the session apparently wants."

"Oh." Shigeo's brow scrunch up a little. "I though we kind of figured that out already though?"

Al stares. Trish stops posing but continues staring. Shigeo is a handful of chips into the bag before he looks up again and blinks at them both.

"Well are you going to elaborate or what?" Trish asks, making a sharp little gesture with her hand.

"I mean... It's all about choices, right?" he says, blinking at them both. "Audrey and I - I mean, Audrey's the one who figured it out and explained it to me. It's like...There's a timeline where I could suddenly go, you know, I could let my powers off the handle and knock over all our houses with us inside them. That's a thing that could happen, it's kinda - there was this one time with a school and my friend Teru, he wasn't really my friend then, he kinda tried to, there was some strangulation, anyway, well - look. It's a thing that could happen, that I could suddenly tear everything up and throw it into the sky. And that could kill us. But unless a lot of stuff sort of comes together and forces the matter, I won't ever actually do that. So I won't."

"The alpha timeline doesn't involve you losing control and killing us because you wouldn't....Choose to lose control in a way that would kill us?" Trish says slowly, raising an eyebrow.

"You'd have to do a lot for it to go that far out control," Mob shrugs. "There's things that...Even my powers follow a certain sort of path you uh, you know? So I wouldn't suddenly do that without a reason. The Alpha timeline is us, it's just the - the choices we actually choose, and not the other ones."

Al flops back across the sofa, throwing his hands over his face.

"Then what Audrey and I do together is just-"

"Leverage, she said," Al says as Mob sits down on top of his legs. "Leveraging choices."

"We change what 'choice' they pick," Trish says, eyes shifting to stare into the distance. "And the flow of what the 'Alpha' is becomes what we 'Direct' it to be. Which means..."

The boys both give her a minute as she moves across the room and strikes another pose for them both.

"I refuse this 'Doom'," Trish says, utterly serious. "I will 'Choose' another path. One that leads us to success. To our...'Reward'. We will find more 'Choices'. Whatever our timeline looks like now, it will lead us to where we have to go to succeed. We will 'choose' a solution. I'll make sure of it."

Al shivers despite himself. Something hums inside him, the beat of Time taking her words and doing...Something. An important choice that she was always going to make/had already made/is still in the process of making but only ten seconds ago/is making, right now. A branch. A big one. Something pivoting in the direction it was always meant to pivot.

Shigeo offers Trish a bag of chips. She takes it with a florish. Their session keeps marching on at a steady rate of one second per second, the same way it should.

[citadelofswords]

i have to write an intro to this somehow. i don't know how to. all i got is that this is caro's fault. i've been thinking about this all day. i have so many more thoughts than made it into this thing and i might write more of it, but this gets across what i want it to. anyway yeah it's an interstitial infinity homestuck au sorry to my non-homestucks in the tag

four teenagers sit around a campfire on the ruined battlefield of a cosmic chessboard. three of them are wearing incredibly comfortable looking pajamas emblazoned with strange, unknowable symbols. the fourth is wearing what looks like a fuchsia tracksuit made of velvet. it looks equally as comfortable, but is notably much uglier than the pajamas are.

“i’m just saying,” says audrey, wearing a teal color that makes her look a little washed out. “it should be fundamentally impossible to lose it. it should be baked into the— the code that makes up the game.”

“maybe it’s a weird glitch?” suggests al, in a black and grey that suits him, but looks out of place on his body, as though he should always be dressed in color. “i know it was successful. i held it in my hands for a moment. it was perfect.”

“and sometime in between then and killing the black king, we lost it,” audrey says. “we lost an entire universe! how does that happen?!”

“you forget to cherish it,” says trish, in dark olive green. despite herself, audrey snorts a laugh.

shigeo, in the ugly fuchsia tracksuit, says, “do we have an idea of how to find it again?”

“no,” audrey says glumly. “i mean. maybe al can mess with paradox space or something?”

“it’s not here anymore,” al says. “it’s its own thing now. its own universe. it’s outside of here.”

“great, so we have nothing.” audrey flops backwards onto the ground and sighs.

“at least we went god tier before the reckoning!” al says brightly, before glancing at shigeo. “oh, right.”

“no, it’s okay,” shigeo says with a sigh. “i don’t know why it didn’t work either.”

“you’re just already too OP. if you went god tier it would just break the whole game,” audrey suggests.

there’s silence for a while, save the crackling of the campfire.

“so this is it,” trish says finally. “this is all there is for the rest of time.”

“it can’t be,” audrey says. “our genesis frog exists. we just have to figure out how to get to it.”

“if we go to the furthest ring, and speak to the horrorterrors maybe?” shigeo offers tentatively. “or i could sleep...”

“prospit’s gone, mob,” audrey reminds him. “and so is your dream self. even though your ascension didn’t take, you still merged. no, if we want to talk to those guys we’ll have to go ourselves.”

trish says, “i could try to reach out to them—,”

“no,” three voices say in unison, cutting her off.

“it’s a good thought!” al says. “but, uh...” he looks behind trish, where a still smoking crater shows the results of trish becoming her aspect. the edges are still dripping, as though the very ground has melted around her.

“yeah?” trish raises an eyebrow. “i have a better sense of how to do it now. it was a learning experience.”

“just stay for a second,” audrey says, tiredly. “give me a moment. i’m sure the pathway to the furthest ring will show itself if we just—,”

“you’re confusing mind with time again,” al mutters.

“sburb did that first!” audrey shouts, with no heat.

—

somewhere, a timer that has been steadily ticking for the last several thousand years finally reaches zero.

—

the conversation on the battlefield is interrupted by a strange fraymotif— gears rotating before being slashed in half. a fifth teenager appears from seemingly nowhere. he, too, is wearing a set of comfortable looking pajamas, but his are dark red, standing out against the grey of his skin. he looks disdainfully at the four humans in front of him.

“my part’s done,” he says. over his shoulder is slung a dark body, which he dumps on the ground in front of himself. “he’s your problem now. have fun.”

with those inexplicably cryptic words, he disappears again.

“what the fuck,” audrey says. shigeo gets up to creep closer to the body. al glances warily at him, but makes no move to stop him.

the figure groans and squints open one eye. it is, strangely-- an anthropomorphic hedgehog. he is unlike any of the beings that any of them have seen before. the eye flickers over al, trish, and audrey before settling on shigeo.

“boy,” he rasps, and shigeo flinches. “have you got any water?”

“i can get you some,” al pipes up, and scrambles to his feet to head for the river. he’s stopped in place by shigeo’s voice.

“you’re him,” he says. he meets the hedgehog’s gaze head-on. “the voice i was hearing in my head. it’s you.”

“what?” audrey says. “but— but i heard one too. and we met her— she was a prospitian.”

“no rules that say they have to be from the moons,” al tries, but trish stands up, her doom powers crackling ominously.

“who the hell are you?” she asks. “what do you want with us?”

“first,” says the hedgehog— the sojourning hellion, if shigeo is to be believed. “i would like some water. please. and then i will tell you what i know.”

it is then that they notice that he is, himself, wearing the pajamas that indicate that he is a god tier player.

—

your name is SHADOW the HEDGEHOG. you are a teenager. you played the game called sburb. it was supposed to be you and your best friend MARIA, but she was killed in the process of entering the incipisphere, and you were left alone. as a result your session became DEAD. it should have been impossible for you to win. you think impossible situations can go fuck themselves. when you reached the FORGE, however, you discovered that someone had already bred the GENESIS FROG before you could get there. being the only living creature left in the ENTIRE UNIVERSE, you have no idea how this could have happened. the only explanation that you have is that SOMEONE (POSSIBLY YOU) CAME BACK FROM THE FUTURE TO DO IT. and so you have set off through paradox space, crawling in and out of the maws of many a BILIOUS SLICK, in order to find the person who would, one day, return to your past and light your forge, thereby granting you access to the ULTIMATE REWARD. what will you do?

[impernaway]

10 (comet) fur prompts!!

i am grabbing your hand so gently i am looking you in the eye and i am saying this to you directly. i'm not sorry i made this into interstitial homestuck AU but i probably should be. oh well!

"I don't get it though," Shigeo says, looking out at the belt of rocks littering the incipisphere. "There were asteroids though. I was breaking them with my uh, with my powers. Or as many as I could anyway."

"I only saw one," Al says, frowning as he looks out over the scene. "It only showed up after my brother took the house and vanished."

Audrey frowns, her eyes looking off into the distance the way they do when she's working on a puzzle. "...I saw them too. Trish?"

"I wasn't really. 'Looking' at that point."

" ...Your house vanished, Al?"

"Yeah! It just left a massive crater in the ground which was, you know-"

"Oh my house did that too," Mob chirps, looking around.

"- I'm guessing the barn did the same after I entered," Al carries on.

"Did...You said your little brother was also playing a game that day, right Shigeo?"

"Him and a bunch of his friends from the Awakening Lab. I guess, uh. I hadn't really thought about what they were playing since then, but I think they might be playing the game too"

Trish takes the moment to mouth [LAB?] at Al over Shigeo's head, who just answers her with a shrug and a shake of his head. Sometimes Shigeo says stuff that's just concerning, and that's coming from her.

The four of them keep looking out at the asteroids, none of which are going to go anywhere. They've all been getting little bits and pieces of prophecy from their lands and consorts, but Audrey's the one who's been collecting them off the others and collating everything. Once the Black King defeats the White King, he's meant to usher in some kind of Reckoning which would throw all of these at Skaia which would respond by throwing them all somewhere else. That somewhere else was meant to be their homes. There's a lot of destiny and predetermination tied up in it all. With Skaia and the eternal war in its current state, though...

Trish closes her eyes and sinks herself deep inside herself, opening her eyes to survey the scene again.

"These comets," Trish says, "They're not moving. They cannot 'move'. These comets...They aren't the ones we all 'saw' before. Those 'shooting stars' must be from 'somewhere else'."

"Noah and Emma were up to something that day, but I didn't think about it," Audrey says quietly. "If - if they're playing too, then..."

"Then it's a good thing," Mob says quietly. "If we all saw asteroids coming out of the sky, and those were meant to be these asteroids, then - then that means all of them must've had a game that could get far enough for that whole thing to start, right? So that, uh. That means their games must be working right because there was something to send back in the first place. They got far enough to trigger that, that whole situation."

That doesn't mean they'll survive it, Trish keeps to herself.

The thing about breeding universes is that the Game only needs to spit out one or two viable ones per universe to keep multiplying, and there are so many planets in even one galaxy that it's practically 'uncountable'. There's no guarantee any one of their worlds would've managed it, even if the four of them weren't somehow locked in this weird hybrid session together.

"We should fucking loot them," Trish does say. "I want to see what we can make from asteroid pieces."

[citadelofswords]

for the writing prompt - the homestuck team shortmotherfuck AU and any shenaniangs they got up to with their powers?

(find context for this here)

al finds audrey and trish laying in the rubble of a half destroyed building, on the edge of a ruined city. for a long, heartstopping moment, he thinks they’re both dead. and then he gets close and realizes audrey’s giggling uncontrollably, and trish is breathing hard but also grinning with the exhilaration of a fight well won.

“you two okay down there?” he calls anyway.

trish shoots him a thumbs up, which for some reason gets audrey giggling again. “don’t do that, oh my god,” she says, wheezing. “my sides hurt. oh, man. hi al!”

relieved, al scrambles over a demolished wall. it’s been a long time since he’s seen audrey quite this happy; she’s been tense and unhappy basically ever since she went god-tier and realized it didn’t come with an immediate understanding of her aspect. seeing her grin like this makes him think everything will be okay again. “need a hand up anyway?”

trish waves him off, climbing to her feet. audrey does accept his hand, and then to his surprise follows through the motion by wrapping her arms around his neck in a brief hug.

“al,” she says, delighted. “i figured it out. i figured it out.”

“mind?” he asks, and audrey pulls away, grinning. “amazing! did you use it with trish?”

“oh yeah,” trish says smugly. “it was pretty cool. i didn’t even know spice girl could do that.”

audrey ducks her head, grinning bashfully. “it’s kind of weird feeling,” she says. “i don’t— i have to be careful with it because i could definitely see myself exploiting it for personal gain, but— it’s leverage, al.”

“how so?” al asks, because he’s been so curious about how it worked for months now, and he’s known that audrey was the only person who could explain it to him, and now that she gets it he can understand.

“trish did the thing, right,” audrey says, and does the thumbs up-thumbs down gesture that trish and shadow have started doing when they deem something is a threat. “and all of a sudden i could like, see the branches. i could see what would happen if i gave trish the thumbs up. it wouldn’t have doomed us, but it would have complicated things, and introduced pawns onto the board we weren’t ready for— and i could see where we could make decisions to influence that, but it felt— if i just gave trish the thumbs down, things would be way more straightforward. and of course that had its own branches, but i—,”

she glances at trish, who breezily says, “i let her influence spice girl a little. not me, of course. she could have, but she wanted to ask first so i told her no.”

“it’s all manipulation and leverage,” audrey says, and there’s a glint in her eyes that makes al shiver despite himself. “concentrating our effort on the path that gives us the best positioning. i don’t think i’m doing a good job of explaining it but— you were definitely right about me and trish.”

she reaches out to fistbump trish, who returns it with a little smile, and al can’t help but think— he’s very, very glad that audrey tends towards being more thoughtful and careful with her decisions before she acts. in the hands of someone rash and impulsive (like shadow, al can’t help but think) audrey’s mind powers would be very, very dangerous indeed.

after all. he’s pretty sure this city was still standing when they arrived on this planet.

[citadelofswords]

the thing about infinity homestuck au is that there's a non-zero chance that team short motherfucker jumps to the actual original homestuck setting

[citadelofswords]

"hand", "blood", and "breath" for wip guessing game

okay there's this from a part of interstitialstuck that i didn't publish:

when audrey looks at trish, she can see a massive construct looming over her shoulder, a pink marionette doll with flat eyes. the construct is also holding her hand out, mirroring trish’s extended thumb.

next two are both from an au i'm writing where team short motherfuck reunite in lakewood after the train (which will of course be thrown out the window post finale)

“audrey!” he calls, and grabs her hands in his. “are you okay? oh my god, that’s blood. are you hurt?”

and then literally the paragraph before:

around the corner is a beat-up rental, and audrey’s breath stops in her throat, because it’s not just al.