OOC: Entranceway Application
Name: Kelsey
LJ: everyoneisemo
E-Mail: rpdina(at)gmail.com
IM: dinachan321
Character Name: Zoosmell Pooplord John Egbert
Series: Homestuck
Timeline: Walking with Rose just before seeing his Dad again.
Canon Resource Link: The Man The Legend
Character Background: John Egbert is, perhaps, not a typical 13-year-old, but today is probably still his birthday and he is making the best of it. He’d normally be reading webcomics or watching terrible movies all day, but seeing as it’s his birthday it’s important that he die at least once.
Uh, let’s go back a little bit, though.
Homestuck starts with John in his bedroom, wherein he establishes the basics of how the comic will work-- namely, it is presented like a video game which the readers are playing. Within the video game, John himself plays a video game called Sburb with his three best internet friends: Dave, Rose, and Jade. Initially, he is unable to play the game in the typical manner (like on a computer) and instead runs around in his house as the client player while Rose acts as his server player. Essentially it’s like they’re playing The Sims and John is the sim. While they initially are simply playing around with the mechanics of the game in order to figure out a way for John to get his server disk, things start to get more serious pretty quickly. As in meteor serious.
Luckily, John avoids annihilation thanks to his entire house being transported to a place called the Medium. Not so luckily this comes at the price of having to fight a bunch of annoying imps, but at least it allows him to level up a whole bunch. And he learns a bit more about the game thanks to Nannasprite, which is basically a ghost + his dead grandmother + a harlequin doll. Predictably the sprite isn’t exactly straightforward and the mysteries of the game are still awfully mysterious in a lot of ways. Like how he can kind of sort of hear a voice telling him what to do? John isn’t too concerned with it once it starts being more polite, though.
Having advanced many levels and probably matured or something, John decides it is time to finally enter his Dad’s room for the first time. This results in the Most Shocking Twist Yet, which is basically that John’s Dad isn’t as whimsical as he thought. In a perhaps even more shocking twist, John finally realizes that the movie posters in his room have been defaced-- by him, in his sleep. His dream self has apparently been trying to emerge through drawings of harlequins. All this disturbing shit is ignored for a moment as John creates a shitload of shit by combining shit he already has. This is probably going to helpful eventually or something, but in any case Rose has built enough levels onto John’s house and he can finally enter the glowy gate thingy up in the sky.
John arrives in the Land of Wind and Shade, where he meets a whole lot of salamanders and discovers that his house is on a huge spire far above the planet. The Salamanders call him the Heir and tell him about some guy called The Slumbering One who he apparently has to wake up or something. John explores a little, and is informed via pesterchum that one of the annoying trolls (CG) he’s been trying to avoid is going to be his friend in the future. This is probably just some weird plot shit, though, like how John almost gets eaten by a basilisk and is saved by Jade’s Grandpa. Rather than following his mysterious savior, John tries to do some savioring himself, but apparently shaving cream is really flammable and he maybe should’ve thought this through before throwing it at the village that was on fire. Luckily some Mysterious Wind blows it all away.
John finally finds his Dad’s car, but unfortunately the server disk and package he was hoping to find have both disappeared. At least he’s distracted by another troll (GC) who apparently wants to help him finish the game more quickly. John follows the map GC sends him until he reaches a broken bridge and must return to his house. Once home, GC provides him with a code that allows him to make a totally awesome (and functional) rocket pack. John pchooos off, planning to follow through on GC’s instructions, although an alternate future and present Dave are both telling him to stay on the ground. Thankfully, John reconsiders upon remembering the note Dave included with his birthday present and heads back to land. CG tells John some more about how the game works and how the game he (CG) and his friends played went horribly wrong.
GC apologizes for trying to kill John and provides him with a much less murdery map that leads him to the next gate. John flies into it and crashes directly into Rose’s house. John begins snooping around Rose’s room and opens the present she intended to send him--- which is a bunny just like the one Dave also got him, weird. John leaves the room, having prepared an excellent prank for Rose to wake up to (bucket on the door, classic) and makes himself a new and awesome hammer. He heads into some ruins and transportalizes to a mysterious laboratory.
The lab contains a device that allows him to look into the past of Rose’s Mom, Dave’s Bro, Nanna, and Jade’s Grandpa. John makes ecto-sludge clones of all of them, which allows the machine to make paradox baby clones the four of them. John’s newly adopted cat friend hits a button that causes the sludges to combine-- Nanna and Grandpa’s combine to create baby John and Jade, and Mom and Bro’s combine to create baby Dave and Rose. Yes, this means Jade is John’s sister and Dad adopted him. CG explains that these babies are not just clones but literally the same people and must all be sent back to the appropriate points in time. John takes care of this (after tearfully giving his bunnies away to baby Rose and baby Jade).
Then we finally meet the trolls and jump quite a bit into the future, where John tells Karkat that the trolls are helping the kids make the scratch and that they’re all friends and that while he really likes Karkat as a friend he’s not gay, sorry. Things get awkward with the weird time shit and weird romance shit, so they decide never to speak of it again.
Back in the...let’s call it the present, John has fallen asleep and his dream self has finally awoken. This is all fine and dandy, especially the part where he gets to finally reunite with his Dad, but then some bitchy spidertroll wakes him up and ruins everything. Vriska, said spidertroll, convinces him to help Jade instead of reuniting with his dad, and the two of them become fast friends, which makes the presence of a bucket in his bedroom super awkward. John jumps to the obvious conclusion that trolls are anti-cleaning implements.
John goes in search of Nannasprite, having learned of Rose’s plan to break the game instead of win it. Between conversations with Vriska, Dave requests a donation of an entire boonbuck, and John complies. Since he’s obviously just screwing around at this point, he also sends Vriska a video of Nic Cage in Con Air, and thereby ruins his chances at ever wooing her, probably. Which is good, because Karkat wants him to get it on with Rose instead, since it’d be wrong for him to date Vriska or something. John is mostly amused at the suggestion since he doesn’t know if he likes girls yet anyway.
John finally reunites with Nannasprite, who gives him a necklace he can use to get in contact with her as she cannot leave the house. She proceeds to prank him, much to his embarrassment. He distracts himself with working as Jade’s server player, not to mention catching up with her. Jade tells him he has to get the White Queen’s ring the next time he goes to sleep. John also names his bunny Liv Tyler, after the actress made famous by(?) the film “Armageddon”. More importantly, he and Jade work on getting her into the Medium. He asks Rose for advice on what they should use to prototype Jade’s kernelsprite, but Rose, fearing a paradox, instead tells him of an object he must retrieve from the battlefield next time he sleeps.
And then suddenly John wakes up on a bed in the middle of a bunch of oil for some reason? And his computer and necklace (from Nannasprite) are sinking into the oil so the obvious thing to do is throw his PDA into the oil too, right?
Goddamnit, John.
Luckily he still has some computerized glasses, which allow Rose to inform him that the planet he is on is totally on fire. Having fled safely, John asks Rose what the object he’s meant to get from the battlefield actually is, and she tells him it is The Tumor. Before he can learn anymore, an early version of Karkat tells John what he did to screw everything up (but the readers don’t get to know, goddamn). The ground begins to shake around John.
Dream John makes a grab for the White Queen’s ring, but the Warweary Villein who carries it fights him off initially.
Vriska finally admits that she put John to sleep intentionally so as to allow their shared enemy, Jack Noir, to gain his final power, in the hopes that this would lead to their victory over him. The voice from way back when returns and tells him to DO THE WINDY THING, which John eventually does, causing a hurricane that puts out the flames on the planet. This causes him to gain a ton of levels. Like, all of them. All the levels. Vriska, helpful as ever, tells him he needs to find his Quest Bed in order to continue. He does so, and falls asleep on it once again.
And Jack stabs him. Oops.
But it’s okay, because now his dream self is all up in here and that means he has achieved Godhood. He makes friends with a Wizardly Vassal and proceeds to stare at some weird thing in the clouds for a while. Snapping out of it, he lucks upon his Dad’s wallet. Having apparently grown old enough to be worthy of owning the wallet, John dumps all of the shit it holds on the ground and enjoys his new loot. As he gathers everything up again, the WV guy starts honking the horn of a car that was apparently in his Dad’s...wallet.
Okay, fine, we’ll totally make this into a flying car with the windy thing.
John contacts Jade, telling her that among his prophetic visions in the clouds was an image of her surrounded by frogs, and that he knows WV has the ring Jade told him to get and he figures it’s cool to let the guy keep it. Jade, using some special goggles, tells him that his Dad is in a castle having a tea party with Rose’s Mom. John wonders (ironically) whether this would be bad for his future relationship with Rose (incest and all).
The car crashes into a tree, but thanks to the power of seat belts no one is hurt, and John puts the CAR back in the WALLET. Thankfully he’s right outside a castle so it all works out-- except Vriska tells him it’s the wrong castle. She then asks if he’s angry at her for how she got him killed and all, and he instead thanks her for helping him achieve Godhood. She then tells him how she killed one of her friends and, unlike typical trolls, actually feels kind of bad about it. John assumes she hasn’t killed before, but she then tells him how she had to kill trolls all the time to feed her giant spider. Vriska then goes on to wonder if perhaps the point of the game is to allow children to mature according to their various societies’ rules.
John asks Vriska if she still intends to attack Jack Noir herself, and mentions that he worries about the idea, especially since they have another plan already. Vriska is unsure, but the conversation manages to reveal more about her as a person-- mostly that she based her life off an ancestor she never knew, which John relates to as he based his life on his Nanna, who died before (er, when) he was born. He then recommends being human to Vriska, as it’s worked pretty well for him.
Vriska leaves to fight Jack, but not before suggesting John use his windy powers to find The Tumor. John, in a fit of sentimentality, makes her promise to message him again before she fights Jack. And then he gets totally cre8tive, making a cyclone into a drill to the center of the planet. John flies down to the center and captchalogues The Tumor successfully.
Returning to the planet’s surface, John reunites with Liv Tyler, who gives him a letter from Jade’s penpal. The letter explains that Liv is outfitted with the power to change the sizes of objects, and also clues John in to the fact that Jade is the penpal’s grandmother. Using Liv’s power, he makes The Hammer of Zillyhoo an appropriate size, and then sings an awesome song in celebration.
John begins ordering Liv, WV, and the newcomer CD around in the most friendly requestery manner possible. He raises a battleship with his windy power and, leaving the wallet to WV, sends the three of them to deliver The Tumor to Dream Rose. John then notices a grimdark aura on the horizon and goes off to investigate it. He finds a castle, and inside he finds a bizarrely grey Rose, who leads him to the patio on which his Dad and Rose’s Mom lie dead at Jack’s hand.
The two prepare to fight the douche who killed their parents, and just as we get geared up for a totally awesome fight scene...when Jack just up and stabs John once again. John falls to the ground, apparently dead.
What a bummer.
Abilites/Special Powers: Hammerkind (he can fight with hammers), Bunnykind (he can fight with...bunnies), Umbrellakind (he can fight with umbrellas), and the Windy Thing
Third-Person Sample:
John was usually pretty good with change. Or well, he had been in the past however many hours it had been since the whole Sburb thing started. It’d be kind of hard to get by in a game like that without some awesome coping and adjusting skills.
So when he rounded a corner following Rose and suddenly she was gone and the decor of the castle totally changed, well, he wasn’t totally pumped but at least he knew better than to flip the fuck out. He’d learned way more disturbing things today anyway. The shock of his Dad’s room was bad enough, man. A slightly less fancy castle was really more of a disappointment than anything.
Still, maybe he was just missing something. Maybe Rose was still around and she’d just dissipated into total grimdarkness or whatever it was that was happening with her. “Uh, Rose? Did you, uh, turn into some magic invisible gas or something? Two wooshes is yes.”
John listened.
No wooshes.
Well, time to check pesterchu oh fuck he left his computers in the wallet. John employed a facepalm for all of ten second, groaning softly, before realizing there was something heavy in his pocket.
Something heavy and also a computer of some sort.
...Okay, awesome!
First-Person Sample:
hey so i don’t see pesterchum on here so i guess this is just going out in general
anybody around? i think i lost rose and maybe also myself since i don’t know where the fuck i am
this isn’t a castle is it
come onnnnnnnn