CNC APPLICATION
[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: Suki
AGE: 22
JOURNAL: dreamoflight
IM: gingerybiscuit
E-MAIL: dreamoflife02@gmail.com
RETURNING: Nope!
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Aradia Megido
FANDOM: Homestuck
CHRONOLOGY: Just after the end of Act 5, having witnessed the creation of the Green Sun
CLASS: Hero
SUPERHERO NAME: Maid of Time
ALTER EGO: Aradia Megido, student
BACKGROUND:
Homestuck is horrendously complicated, so I'll explain the world first and then Aradia's linear journey through it.
Aradia is a Troll from a planet called Alternia, a world like ours but different, where instead of Will Smith you have Troll Will Smith, instead of beds you have slime-filled pods, and instead of humans you have hyper-violent gray nocturnal aliens with a rigid caste system who spend their time subjugating alien races and conquering the galaxy. Aradia's just a kid living on the homeworld with her lusus (animal caretaker), though, living a happy and carefree life talking to the dead and playing archaeologist. (The troll definition of 'happy and carefree' may need a little work.)
The troll caste system is based on blood color, and Aradia, with maroon blood, is the lowest of the low. It doesn't get her down, though, and she teams up with another lowblood, Tavros, to FLARP against a team of bluebloods (a higher caste). FLARP is the troll version of roleplaying, which differs from the human version in that the F probably stands for Fatal. Aradia and Tavros were something like friends with Vriska and Terezi, the bluebloods, though, so it was all in good fun-- the teams weren't actively trying to kill each other in their campaigns.
That is, until one day Vriska got too frustrated with Tavros's lack of backbone and forced him to jump off a cliff. Aradia took revenge for her friend by summoning the ghosts of Vriska's dead victims to torment her; Vriska mind-controlled Sollux into blowing up Aradia's hive (house). Sollux was Aradia's closest friend, possibly her moirail (sort of a platonic soulmate, in troll romance) or possibly her boyfriend, it was never made clear. Either way Sollux felt pretty shitty about it, but Aradia didn't feel much at all, due to being dead.
Whether because of her high psychic ability (innate in lowbloods) or the fact the universe wasn't done with her yet, Aradia hung around the ruins of her hive as a ghost. Since she retained the ability to type and communicate online, none of her friends questioned whether she was dead or alive-- as far as they were aware, all that had happened was that she had suddenly become a gloomy hermit who didn't care about anything much and was no fun to talk to.
Fast forward an unspecified amount of time, and Aradia has found a game in some ruins. She passes it on to Sollux, because the voices of her dead ancestors told her to, and he makes it into something workable. The game is SGRUB, and it is going to destroy their universe.
None of them quite knows the magnitude of it, though, and by the time they do, it's too late. Two teams of six trolls, all 13 human years old, jump into the game (spoilers, there's only one team really). Every player has a game construct called a sprite; it must be prototyped with two separate objects or creatures, and then serves as a helpful guide as well as affecting the form of the enemies fought along the way. The first prototyping of Aradia's sprite is a frog; the second is Aradia's ghost.
Aradia is now visible and also ribbits occasionally, but remains as gloomily prophetic as ever. Vriska teams up with Equius, a blueblood obsessed with caste and strength, to build a robot for Aradia to inhabit, and promises Aradia that they can be co-leaders and friends again, and Aradia has absolutely no emotional reaction to this, as per usual. In fact, she doubts they were ever really friends at all.
Equius double-crosses her and gives the robot to Aradia himself; it turns out that the robot is programmed to pity (troll love) him, and is also a blue-blood because the depravity of pitying a rustblood was just too much for him to bear. Aradia discovers this after posessing the robot, and flips into a rage, ripping the robot's heart out, pulverizing it on the desk, shaking Equius like a rag doll, and then... kissing him? Trolls have a form of romance that's really just hate except you also want to make out with them, but it's never really defined just what Equius and Aradia's relationship is. They're thirteen and everything is complicated.
The game progresses, and Aradia spends most of it creating doomed alternate timeline copies of herself, meant to keep everything running on track. (In addition to her already overpowered psychic abilities, since every game player has a game class, she takes on the role of Maid of Time, able to affect the timestream basically however she wants.) She also takes a minute out to beat Vriska to death, continuing the revenge cycle, although all that did was ensure that Vriska went God Tier. What is God Tier? Stay tuned.
The trolls all get to the final boss, Aradia summons a thousand doomed copies of herself to fight, everyone survives, they win, it's awesome-- and then some superpowered monster from another universe arrives at the very moment before they can claim victory. Aradia teleports them inside the meteor they're standing on to safety, and then sits around moping about fate and doom and the fact they were never going to win anyway while everyone else works on contacting the universe that their game session created.
The monster-- Jack Noir-- flies around the dream planets of Derse and Prospit, home to essentially a second life for all of the game's players. He rips through them mercilessly, but when he gets to Aradia's dreamself, he gets a surprise. As far as any of the players knew, Aradia never had a dream self-- but as it turns out, it was just asleep on its quest bed, far beyond the normal reaches of the planet Derse. The rules of the game are that if you die on your quest bed, you become God Tier-- you gain mastery over your class, conditional mortality (death must be heroic or just to stick), and in the case of trolls, get a sweet pair of wings. So once Jack kills Aradia's dreamself, her robot self explodes as her two selves come together, and Aradia goes God Tier, becoming fully alive for the first time in ages.
She stops time around Jack to halt his rampage, but she knows she can't hold him for long. Instead of holding on or running away, though, she takes the third option and flies inside of him-- he's got pretty weird quantum-esque powers, so she comes out in the dream bubbles of the Outer Ring. These are a place where the dead and those sleeping without dreamselves can meet, and with her time abilities, she can move through them freely-- time and space are only loosely defined out in the Outer Ring, and never seem to stay where you put them. She spends a little time bouncing around bubbles of memory and explaining some things to the characters gathered there, and then heads to the Green Sun to wait for Rose and Dave, two kids from the human game session on a suicide mission to blow it up. It's the source of Jack's power, but as it turns out, their mission to blow it up ends up creating it, even though it existed all along-- like I said, time moves in strange ways out there. Act five ends as Rose and Dave reach God Tier and meet Aradia and Sollux's half-dead soul, the other kids break through their session to the trolls', and the remaining four living trollkids are rocketing towards a rendezvous with Aradia.
There's a lot I skipped over because it doesn't directly involve Aradia, but if I included it I'd probably break the word limit, so if you need anything else, just ask!
PERSONALITY:
Aradia's personality appears radically different depending on when in the timeline you look at her, so I'm going to give something like a chronological summary so you can understand where she comes from and how she's changed. When she was alive, she seemed generally friendly and cheerful; she roleplayed with Tavros, Vriska, and Terezi, and enjoyed archeology and Troll Indiana Jones. The only time we see her angry is after Vriska breaks Tavros's legs; Aradia sends the souls of her dead victims to torment her. This shows that she's perfectly willing to hold her own when needs be; she's not bloodthirsty like many of the other trolls, she's no shrinking violet. In fact, she's a little impulsive and headstrong, not really thinking about the consequences of attacking a ruthless troll like Vriska.
However, even when she was alive, she sp0ke h0ll0wly, indicating that she wasn't entirely sunshine and rainbows. I believe this was influenced by the fact that she constantly heard the voices of the dead telling her about the doomed future of Alternia-- something like that will really bring a girl down, and keeping herself friendly and happy probably seemed a little fake to her. She was also pretty frustrated sometimes by what the voices of the dead were telling her to do-- she resents it when people try and order her around, being a fairly independent person. She says at one point that there's a sense of sickness that's been with her for years, even before she died, linked to the future and the coming destruction.
After her death, she stopped caring about anything much. All her old friends were put off by her new creepy, depressing demeanor, but Aradia was 0k with that. She was 0k with most things. The only thing she spent any significant amount of time doing was what the voices told her needed to be done. Whereas before she had ignored the voices' doom and gloom, after she died she just did what destiny needed her to. She didn't care much about explaining what she was doing to the others, because it wasn't necessary and nothing would change anyway doom gloom sulk brood mope.
Once she entered the soulbot she was a little more expressive, but most of those expressions were anger. The robot had blue blood, and bluebloods are generally more prone to anger, which probably contributed to her newfound rage. She beat Vriska to a bloody pulp for revenge, even though her dead self hadn't really cared about Vriska killing her. When she wasn't angry, she continued to be morose and fatalistic. She got frustrated at Rose, snapping at her and telling her off for trying to break her session even though it's going to happen anyway so she doesn't even know why she bothers! Basically, Aradiabot is pretty negative, and pretty frustrated with not being able to change anything.
God Tier Aradia is similar to alive Aradia, without the hollowness. She's cheerful again, and although she still talks about death and destruction, it's more philosophical and accepting than fatalistic. She refers to people as friends again, and teases Dave playfully when she meets him in a memory bubble. She's at peace with her abilities and her knowledge of what's going to happen, and refers to time as a fun game that people like her and Dave are good at. This isn't to say she faffs around-- she certainly takes her role seriously, but she has a much more easygoing nature about her. Above everything else, she's delighting in really feeling fully alive for the first time in her life.
POWER:
Time manipulation (canon), telekenesis (canon), conditional immortality (canon - can only be permanently killed if the death is heroic or just)
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE: this place is a little weird but dont worry about it
its not part of the main timeline
its like... a side quest?
i dont think were missing anything and i dont think our worlds are missing us
its just a sense i have
that everythings going to be fine :)
well i mean
that everythings going to happen how it should happen
and needs to happen
everyone might not end up where they want to be
but everyones going to end up where they should be!
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE: Aradia had always been headstrong, she guessed. Well, if she was being nice, that is. Mulish, if she was being honest. She could smile about it now, but oh, how she had chafed.
Tracing back through the game, she watched herself throwing ablution traps through the walls of Equius's hive. She didn't even have to look over his shoulder to remember what she had been typing. Fine, you can be leader. Fine, I can be co-leader. Fine, I'll be the secret leader. That's what would happen anyway. I'm fine with everything. There's no point in getting around it so I'll just keep throwing your furniture around because at least that's something I can break.
She hadn't realized that last part then, of course. She had been too wrapped up in moping, dragging her feet over the orders from the dead by passively going along with them like the world's most hollow-eyed wet blanket. She wasn't like Karkat, jumping at the bit to deplore her past self and everything it stood for, but for a supposedly emotionless spirit, boy, she could have moped for Alternia.
Lack of purpose, that's what it was, she decided, watching herself sitting in a corner of the Veil, robotic eyes dimmed slightly, playing at sleep, no tasks before her and no one asking her questions. “Do this so this happens.” “That needs to happen, make it so.” It was like being a train on a track. Well, no wonder it always frustrated her so much! Hadn't her favorite things been discovering history in ruins? Piecing together ancient finds? Playing dangerous games of cleverness and skill for the highest stakes there were? Things that tested her. Things she followed where she chose. Once that was gone, once she died the first time, it's no wonder her only outlet ended up being physically rebelling with violence against buildings and people alike. She wasn't rebellious enough or stupid enough to go against fate when that fate was the only thing ensuring the future of her people, after all.
But the mastery over time that had become hers with her most recent death had given her that back. That ability and drive to seek and understand, those tasks that tested her cleverness. Dying and facing down Jack had given her something that six hundred hours as Maid of Time hadn't managed: the ability to see just how this game was played. Oh, some things still had to happen; she understood now better than ever before that there were some rules of fate you couldn't break. But for every one of those, there were a million rules that could be bent, or tiptoed around, or cleverly avoided.
Letting Jack go versus holding him as long as possible?
Who said she had to stay in his way?
Well?
She'd had one option for far too long. Give her two, and she'd be running for the fifth one before you could blink.
She'd spent her life playing a campaign run by the world's most authoritarian GMs. She'd never had much of a desire to rip the rulebook up, but never had much of an idea for any other solution. Now she understood that just holding the rulebook in her hands was what she needed. Just holding it in her hands was freedom.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
Considering that she types like this with no punctuation, I'll put up a permissions post so people can let me know if they'd rather she typed normally with them.