Chapter Text
[S]: [Blank],
Wake up.
You wake up.
You suck in air like you have been drowning for longer than you could think. Wow, what a quick nap, you think to yourself, completely and utterly unaware of what you were about to find out in about 5 seconds.
5:
Your bed feels, well, just a little different from your usual one. It’s not something that can be placed other than a vague sense of unease and a noticeable oddity. Maybe it’s a little firmer than usual, as though it has been left to gather dust and settle into a shape for the past 13 years. The bed, more similar to a slab, soon leaves your back.
4:
Simply lifting your arm to rub at your eyes that are caked in sleep-sand, you are excruciatingly aware of the signal activating in your brain, dripping down your spine like water after a shower, and then finally buzzing in your forearm.
3:
The weight of your arm alone puts massive strain on your muscles. Your bones break through the air like old, rusted machinery, and you can feel this to the point that it becomes not necessarily painful, but uncomfortable. Like some construction worker is just going at it with a jackhammer directly to your humerus. You do not find this to be very humorous.
2:
Urghhh. You groan at your own joke. It’s like there is some kind of joke parasite living in your brain, except instead of doing any normal parasite things that parasites do like sapping their host of energy and resources until your death (whether caused by the parasite or not), it just says really bad dad jokes in your ear before you can even think about not thinking of it. Except there is no parasite. YOU are the parasite. AHHHH!
1:
You bring your arm back down to your side. Jackhammer guy is at it yet again. You resolve to keep that still, at least for now.
When you look up at your ceiling, there is just… blue. There is blue. Deep blue. A blue that doesn’t show up on an RGB LED screen. And also, there is green. You don’t remember there being green in the sky, unless there is a Very Bad Storm. You remember hearing about that somewhere. Surrounding the blue is a ring of darkness, like vantablack, which has flecks of faint white, the paint of a painter that mishandled their brush. And it is big. You don’t know how you know that it is big, but it’s big. Too big for your head to comprehend.
Oh, wait. It’s the planet Earth.
0:
You promptly fall 20 feet all the way back down to your bed. Ow!!!
A child sits with their legs crossed on their bed in their bedroom. It just so happens that tomorrow, April 13th, beginning at midnight, it will be someone else’s birthday. Someone who is very, very, very important. Someone whose group of friends will bring about a massive change in the entire universe, every universe. Someone who will actually change the course of this child’s whole life. The child pays no mind to this of course, because their birthday has already passed, and nothing has happened to bring meaning to the date April 13th-- Three, One, Four. What is this child’s name?
> Enter name
__________
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There was an error in entering name. Please try again.
> Enter name
__________
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There was an error in entering name. Please try again.
> Enter name
__________
!
Damn it!!
Whatever. Who cares all that much, anyway. This child is smart enough to know what their name is.
>
Your name is [BLANK]. You were born on a day which was NOT TODAY-- unless it was! In which case, happy birthday. As previously mentioned, today is someone else’s VERY IMPORTANT BIRTHDAY, but you do NOT KNOW THAT YET. Your hobbies include reading FANFICTION, being on the INTERNET, and getting into ESOTERIC FANDOMS from OVER A DECADE AGO. There is no need to get into depth. If you already know your NAME, it is not wrong to assume you know MOST OTHER THINGS about yourself unless you have some kind of amnesia. This would necessitate a hospital visit which you don’t have time for. Unlike THE COMIC that you are about to read, the FIRST ACT is not something you will linger upon when it comes up, as much as you would like to remain in the safety of your ROOM.
> Squawk like a bird of prey and roll around in METAPHYSICAL AGONY at the fact that you can’t open it on your phone.
Why would you do that?
> Leave a present on your desk
Okay, you don’t even know what that means. Let’s wrap it up everyone. Bad things are happening. The frequency of your impulsive thoughts grows ever worse by the minute. This happens usually at 11:52 PM.
> Open THE COMIC on PHONE
Argh!!! You know what! Maybe you will! Maybe you just will!
…
It… works.
> Leave and go look at fanfiction website ARCHIVEOFOUROWN.COM
As glad as you would be to do that, and peruse the various possibilities of the timeline that is a fictional story, you are still slated to read the re-release of THE COMIC, Homestuck. You have heard SO MUCH about it and despite this you know NOTHING. You know ZERO THINGS about this behemoth that is longer than the entire King James Bible.
> Watch the HOMESTUCK PILOT, WHICH IS NOW OUT
No! You adamantly refuse.
You will NOT watch the HOMESTUCK PILOT until you have read THE COMIC itself. If you ever want to read the comic after you watch the pilot, it will become forever skewed by your experience watching it! You want to experience the joy of seeing this adapted into something animated! You may not have particularly wanted to read it beforehand and you may have wanted to but were unable to find the time to do so but now you simply must get through it HERE and NOW.
> Open YOUTUBE.COM and watch SOMETHING ELSE that will be a BETTER USE OF YOUR TIME
This simply cannot keep happening!!
> Read Homestuck, the over 800,000 word comic that is longer than the entire bible.
Yes, exactly. Now you are able to focus. You can almost feel the massive story waiting behind such a benign face, like the light of an anglerfish. You know that it’s an important piece of fandom history. At its core among the irony and the jest and the self-referential meta ouroboros you have seen the fandom become tangled in, you know that there must be some kind of heart that draws people in. You know that you will never be able to truly experience it, as the only way to do that is to be in 2009 as it releases, cheering on with the rest of the people, who would have been your people, you suppose. You can imagine how brilliantly delightful it must have been to be a nerdy kid such as yourself, finding a massive community of people that are just like you and are ready to welcome you.
And oh my god it broke again.
>
You fall backward onto your pillow. Sitting up in the middle of your bed isn’t a very comfortable position, because your body naturally wants to slouch, and that has your back buzzing with dull pain throughout the rest of the day. The other option, sitting straight up, is also difficult, because then you will slowly lose your focus and end up slouching anyway. So, lying down it is. You also don’t feel like getting up and reading it on your computer, at least not until after you wait for it to start working again. There’s lots of other things that you can do on a phone. The ceiling spans your vision.
You are, by all accounts, a regular person.
Well, sure, your life has its various moments of insanity, but it doesn’t happen in any particular order for any particular reason. It just happens. You are the very same way. It would be impossible to tamp you down into one linear character arc, that would be like trying to run doom on a vintage calculator-- not impossible, but very janky and you won’t be able to see much of what is going on. So you have thus accepted your reason-less life, and have no choice but to impart reason into it.
Like what you are doing right now. You are going to do other stuff on your phone until you fall asleep, and then when you wake up you will read THE COMIC before you watch THE PILOT, which is really only arbitrarily important. Nothing is ‘important’, because everything is something made-up by people so that you don’t go insane no longer having to run around and hunt in the savannah with a brain that’s too complex for what it’s meant to do, and yet not complex enough to navigate the world you are meant to live in. For a pattern-seeking human, the universe is very non linear, very random, and very very stupid.
You look up at your ceiling with your walls in your periphery. You look at everything that makes your home what it is. You look at that which brings you comfort after an exhausting day (something that happens often), or what can transform into something hostile and suffocating. You look out the window, wherever it is, to wherever you live. Your world is too expansive to fit into text like this. There wouldn’t be any point in trying to communicate all of the moving parts, it would be like trying to write down the name of every star by eye. You can’t see every star, and of the ones that you can are too many to count without going mad. If you stare at the ceiling it kind of looks like the stars.
There’s nothing else to do but hope that THE COMIC will be ready to read once you fall asleep. You really do look forward to the adventures of-- what was that kid’s name? The one with the square glasses standing in the room that’s, like, everywhere? Is it Jake?
Anyway. The light of the full moon shines into your room. As you close your eyes, you have the feeling that this is going to be a long nap.