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It was as close a fight Vriska had ever had, but Jack had been defeated. Vriska left him floating there, armless and headless, and came back to the meteor to lick her wounds.
She didn't even know how healing was supposed to work in the game. She couldn't find any bandages. Could they make health potions or something? She should have a poke around the Alchemiter. For now, she tore some strips off of the old fairy dress that Kanaya had made for her and wrapped them tightly around some of the more worrisome wounds. Kanaya would understand, probably. At least Jack's sword was sharp, and the cuts were clean.
After a few minutes and some awkward one handed wrapping, she had a couple of fairly shitty bandage jobs on her wrist and elbow and leg. She got up and tested leaning her weight on her leg. Okay, yeah, no problem. Just a flesh wound.
Well...she looked properly brutalized. Maybe she could get a little sympathy out of this. Time to go face the music.
“Hey! Where is everyone!” Vriska yelled, standing in the middle of the control room. There were some signs of violence in here, but no bodies, no trolls, nothing.
“Helloooooooo!” She yelled, cupping her hands around her mouth.
She waited, but there was just silence.
Vriska growled and pulled out her laptop. She opened the Trollian window, but no one was online. Did Jack get the rest of them too? He couldn't have been that fast, could he?
Vriska sighed and fell into the nearest chair. She set up her computer on the table and sent a mass message to everyone on her buddy list. Hopefully one of them would come online soon and ping her back. Did something get knocked loose in her laptop while she was fighting? Could that even happen with the stupid inventory system they had? Where was Sollux when you needed him? He could sort this shit out.
God-dammit, Terezi.
It was way too quiet in here. The silence was oppressive. Normally, at the very least, you could hear clicking keys and mice and shuffling in chairs, but now it was just dead. She snapped her fingers a couple times to make sure that her ears were still working
She needed someone to talk to. Maybe one of the humans could...no, none of them were online either.
God-dammit.
She should probably do something about the bodies out there.
*
After a few days, she had taken to digging around in Terezi's computer for something to do. She managed to find some music, which helped with the oppressive silence on the meteor. A lot of the stuff on here wouldn't be her first pick, but whatever.
And so she walked through the quiet and vast hallways of the lab, wearing Terezi's glasses and listening to her music and wondering where the fuck this all went wrong. No one had come online since she sent out her mass text those days ago. No one had tried to message Terezi either, by the looks of it. Vriska started scrolling through her chat logs.
Let's see here. Strokin' that justice bulge, being sappy with Karkat, talking to John, blah blah blah... There were sweeps worth of messages here. They went all the way back to...
...all the way back to when Terezi and Vriska first met. Terezi had posted on a message board that she was looking for a partner to start getting into FLARP with. Vriska had answered the post. They swapped Trollian names and...
Vriska closed the log file. She couldn't do this right now. She kept thinking back to the jokes they shared and the arguments they had and...she just felt sick to her stomach.
She tried to tell herself that it was because she hadn't eaten anything in three days.
*
After two weeks, she was finally convinced that she was alone on the meteor. Before now she thought that maybe they were avoiding her, that they didn't want to talk to her for some stupid reason. but it's been too long.
She had read through all of Terezi's chat logs over and over again. She lost count of how many times.
They were such good friends. Sure they fought a lot, and the disagreed on a lot of things, but they they kept coming back to each other. Terezi has such a vicious passion for what she wanted, be it justice or games or artificially flavored cherry anything. She was pure and intense and direct, like a flame. Vriska admired that.
The first time they met in person was at Vriska's hive to plan a big FLARP session. Vriska opened the door to see Terezi standing there with a pack over her shoulder and a huge, razor sharp grin on her face.
“You look like a fang fish.” Vriska said without thinking.
“And you look like a legless squeak-beast eater” Terezi shot back, grin not changing.
“Hey!”
“Are you going to let me in or just stand there and admire my good looks all day?”
“Yeah, sure. C'mon.” Vriska waved her in. Terezi kicked off her red shoes and looked around the room.
“Nice place.”
“Thanks. Kind of a bitch to get around though. My room's upstairs.”
It was up many stairs. They climbed for a good few minutes before they god to Vriska's room at the top of the highest tower. They were both huffing and puffing a bit by the time they got to her door. Terezi set her pack on the floor and fell into the first chair she found.
“Ow!” She reached under her rear and pulled out an eight sided die.
“Oh! I was looking for that!” Vriska said, pointing at Terezi. “Just put it...somewhere.” Vriska had disappeared into her closet and was rummaging around
“What are you doing?” Terezi asked, craning her neck to see what all the rummaging around was about.
“I want to show you something. Hang on. Where's that stupid hook? Ah!” Vriska stepped back out into her room with her arms held open. She was wearing a long blue coat, holding a hook in one hand, and an old pair of glasses with one of the lenses blacked out.
“What do you think? Pretty rad pirate costume, huh?”
“...You look like you didn't even try.” Terezi shook her head.
“Hey! Fuck you!” Vriska very nearly threw the metal hook at Terezi's head. “Lets see you do better, miss costume designer.”
Terezi beamed and opened her pack. She pulled out her red sunglasses and put them on. Then she produced her teal and red Legislacerator costume and held it in front of her for effect.
“See? I looked up the designs and I even got the patterns from some old books that I found in-” But Terezi was cut off when Vriska burst out laughing.
“That is...the worst costume I have ever seen! Seriously, you look like some pop band reject. And you think that my costume was-” This time it was Vriska that was cut off, by something white and soft hitting her in the face with a squeak.
“The vicious dragon, Pyralspite strikes down the badly dressed pirate queen!”
“...I'm going to get you for that, Redglare.”
“Bring it, Mindfang.”
It was a couple hours before they actually got any planning done.
Vriska was laying on her back still scrolling through old chat logs when she felt her stomach tighten up. It was starting to get to the point where she had to make something to eat or starve. She managed to find some candy and jerky snacks earlier, and resisted the urge to wolf them down right away. She needed to save the code in the Alchemiter, so she could make more later.
It took her a little while to find the arcane machine, but when she did she took off the red glasses and set them on top of console so that she could see the controls better. She thumbed through a few of the codes that were stored here.
“No. No. Not food. Probably not edible. Holy shit, that's a lot of grist. Yes! Cherries! Thank you, Ter-” She stopped and looked up. No, it was just the glasses sitting on the console. But she was so used to seeing them that they were practically Terezi's face now.
Vriska sighed and pulled the meager rations she found out of her inventory and checked the codes on the back of the cards. Wasn't exactly a healthy meal, but it sure beat starving to death.
*
Three weeks had crawled by.
The lonesomeness was getting to her. The meteor was oppressively quiet. She noticed that even the sounds she normally took for granted were gone. The quiet thud and whoomp as the ventilation powered up. Squeaking tiles. Beeping machinery. She resorted to listening to music when she could start to hear her blood pulse through her ears.
Other times, she ran through conversations in her head with Terezi, imagining how they would go. She wanted to think that she would have forgiven her somehow. That everything would have been okay between them. But the conversations always drifted into arguments.
“How was I supposed to know he could find his way back here, huh?” Vriska's voice echoed
“I told you! I said it right to your face. If my nose could follow you, what makes you think his couldn't?”
“I don't even know how your stupid nose...color thing even works! By the way, you didn't even try to stop me! All you did was spout some big threatening words you couldn't back up. I'll bet you thought it was going to work too!”
“And how was I supposed to do that? I couldn't exactly lock you up. You would have just lucked your way out of whatever I did to stop you. The only way I could have stopped you was to kill you. I didn't even know if that would work with your fancy god-tier powers.”
“Well then maybe you should have done it! You're just as bad as Tavros!”
“Well, sorry we can't all be big bad killers like you.”
Vriska ripped the shades off of her face and threw them across the room. They tumbled end over end, landed, and skidded to a stop, upright and facing in her direction.
She couldn't look at Terezi staring back at her.
*
After six weeks, Vriska flew out past Derse's orbit, to the edge of the Skaia game zone, and stared out into the darkness. She debated if she should try to leave, and find her own way.
She saw shapes moving in the darkness. They seemed much bigger than she remembered them being.
*
Two months later, Vriska sits in the center of the control room, thinking. She was in a doomed time-line. She was supposed to have died. She's sure of that now. And then, what? What was supposed to happen? Would they have met up with the humans? Would John have been sad that she was dead, or would he have just shrugged, shed a little tear, and gone to pailing that stupid pink-eyed witch?
Maybe she wasn't supposed to die? Maybe Terezi was supposed to just...talk her into staying. She didn't know. Terezi wasn't speaking to her anymore. She wanted to cry, and tell Terezi how sorry she was for...everything. For breaking Tavros and killing Aradia even though she totally had it coming and blinding her and...
But she couldn't. Terezi wouldn't talk to her anymore.
Vriska wouldn't look at the sky anymore. Terrible things were there. They made it feel like spiders were crawling under her scalp. They made her afraid.
*
The Horror Terrors arrived near the start of the third month. Sickening dread had welled up in Vriska's stomach like a rotten meal. She could see the monster, unbelievably huge, on the other side of Skaia. The whole planet wasn't big enough to cover it. She thought it would start tearing through the session, consuming everything in its path. It was certainly big enough, and had enough mouths to do the job. But suddenly, Skaia shattered like it was struck a massive blow. Meteors popped like the sparks on a lit fuse. She screamed turned and flew as fast as she could. She would rather try her luck in the abyss than deal with, whatever was coming towards her.
She wasn't fast enough. She heard a huge, low sound that rattled her bones.
All she could think of for that last instant was the pain. There was a sound like cracking bone, and then, nothing.
*
“Well, here's someone I wasn't expecting to find. How long have you been out here?”
Vriska groaned at opened her eyes. She was floating in blackness. The pain was gone, but she felt light headed. The was someone floating gently in front of her. At first she thought she was looking at herself, but she realized that the god-tier outfit was wrong, and her hair was shorter.
“Who're you?” Vriska slurred. She felt like she forgot how her mouth works.
The figure in front of her made a concerned face. “That's a long story, really. I guess you could say I'm your ancestor. Or your decedent, depending on which universe you're looking at. I would imagine the latter is more accurate actually, as Mindfang was necessarily me, per say. Just a copy of me. Though I suppose my ancestor was just a copy of you. Some of my friends have started using the term 'dancestor' but I'm not sure it really conveys what-”
“What is your name!” Vriska cut her off. The other girl huffed.
“Aranea. My name is Aranea. And I suppose you must be Vriska. A Vriska, anyway. Can I ask what happened to you?”
“I think my head exploded.” Vriska said dreamily. She patted her head. It seemed all in one piece. “I thought it did.”
“Well, that's possible. You're dead, I'm afraid. A ghost, like me.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Aranea sighed. “When I asked what happened, I was referring to what happened in your time line. What events lead up to where you are now?”
Vriska remembered, and for some reason, while everything else seemed muzzy and disconnected, this came to her with perfect clarity. Like the events were a solid part of her now.
“I...fought Jack. And I killed him. But before I could...he killed everyone. He just...” Vriska felt her breath catch, “...he just stabbed my best friend and my other friend and...dumped their bodies in front of me. And, I don't even know where the others are. I was all alone. And she blamed...it wasn't my fault! She should have stopped me!” Vriska groaned and tears started to drip down her cheeks.
Aranea looked at Vriska sadly. “You're hurting. It's okay. Here, let me help you. I can make you feel better. I can heal you.” She tried to reach out and touch Vriska on her shoulder, but Vriska culled up tight into a ball.
“I don't know if I should. I mean, I kind of fucked up didn't I? It seems wrong to just wave your hand and make it all -”
Aranea reached out and touched Vriska's forehead. Vriska tried to yell out, but...suddenly everything felt so...nice. All the tension melted out of her muscles. She felt like she was floating. Wait, she was floating. That's cool.
“There. I knew you would like that. It's much better than being sad all the time isn't it?”
“I...yeah. Yeah, it's nice.” Vriska said dreamily. She looked at Aranea and, she just felt a surge of gratitude. All the pain, all the sorrow was just gone, and all she felt was bliss. How could she ever have doubted her. How could she ever doubt someone who was so smart and so nice and so breathtakingly beautiful. She had to do something to thank her. She would do anything for her.
“Would you like to help me with something? There are a lot of us. Ghosts from all different time lines and sessions.”
Vriska nodded eagerly. Yes! Of course she wanted to help.
“We can fix everything. We can make it all right again, and you can help us.”
“Yeah! Yeah sure! Let's do this!”
Aranea smiled and Vriska's heart just melted.
“That's great. Let's go back to the ship. Oh, here, hold still. Let me wipe off your face.”
“Oh...” Vriska frowned as Aranea cleaned off her cheeks. Were her eyes watering? She felt like she was crying recently.
She couldn't remember why she would have been crying.