SHAKE IT LIKE A LADDER TO THE SUN
[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: Leah
AGE: 21
JOURNAL: hotforbabyleg
IM: GUYS COME ON
E-MAIL: COME ON
RETURNING: I play Sooraya, Atsuko, and Marceline! Wooooo.
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Aradia Megido
FANDOM: Homestuck
CHRONOLOGY: Exactly as she explodes her robot body everywhere!
CLASS: Extremely ambivalent, fatalistic, jaded-ass hero.
SUPERHERO NAME: Maid of Time
ALTER EGO: Aradia Megido, creepy... chick... who I guess will probably be getting bullied into going to school eventually by CPS which is a terrifying thought.
BACKGROUND:
Okay. In order to tell you about Aradia, I need to tell you about trolls! Like Icy's app did yeah shut up don't look at me. Trolls are an alien species, living in a universe completely separate to "our" own. Their home planet, Alternia, is primarily inhabited by the younger members of the species, as the elder and more prominent ones are usually out in space conquering other planets. The trolls themselves are mostly humanoid other than the green skin, yellow eyes, and candy-corn-lookin' horns they all have growing out of their heads, but based on their terminology the species itself appears to be insectoid (which is totally a word) in nature. Baby trolls, or grubs, go through a pupa process in caves deep underground, emerge as fully-formed tiny trolls, and then are forced to go through brutal trials in order to ensure the survival of the fittest. The lucky trolls who do survive then emerge from their caves with a freakyass animal custodian, called a lusus, which takes care of them and basically acts as a parent until they reach maturity. Basically, it is hard out there for a troll! Troll society is based on a violent blood-color-segregated caste system, violence is commonplace and seen as unremarkable, and all the weaker members of society are eventually "culled." It is therefore no surprise that most trolls are total dickheads.
Or were dickheads, really. Because the trolls are dead now! As is their entire universe. The only survivors are 12 young trolls of only 6 solar sweeps, or 13 years, who managed to save themselves by playing a game that ended the universe. BUT WHERE WERE WE.
Aradia Megido is one of those 12 trolls! Born with the extremely low-class blood color of maroon, she was not subject to many of troll society's benefits, but she was okay with that. She was also okay with hearing the voices of her dead ancestors ever since before she could remember, and surprisingl was quite well-adjusted despite this! Aradia was a genial troll with a strong interest in archaeology and weirdass troll live-action roleplaying, also known as Flarp, in which all hits taken had some kind of impact on the physical health of the player. Instead of being interested in treasure-hunting and violence, Aradia was into it because of the fun and gaming spirit!!!! of it all, in a direct contradiction to fellow Flarper and huge bitch Vriska Serket. Vriska was into Flarp because it assured her a steady supply of young and gullible trolls to feed to her constantly hungry lusus, a giant spiderbeast straight outta Chamber of Secrets. Nevertheless, Aradia agreed to play against Vriska's Team Scourge, consisting of her and Aradia's friendly rival Terezi Pyrope, as part of Team Charge. This would later prove to be an incredibly bad idea, and aprt of the reason why I switched to past tense. Spoiler alert: it's because she's dead.
Here is where we run into our first warning sign; Aradia's friend and partner on Team Charge, Tavros Nitram, was kind of... a pushover and a weenie. A huge weenie. And Vriska hated him for no damn reason!! Trapping Tavros into a no-positive-outcomes situation in their session together and keeping him from talking to Terezi or Aradia for help, she forced him into a corner; then, when Tavros attempted to quit the game, she used her skills in mind-control to force him to jump off a cliff. Tavros survived, but was paralyzed from the waist down, leaving Aradia seriously pissed off for perhaps the first time in her life. Despite Terezi warning her against it, she decided to take justice into her own hands, using her affinity with the dead to summon the spirits of Vriska's victims to haunt her. Vriska retaliated by killing the shit out of her.
This also needs some clarification! Sollux Captor, one of Aradia's best friends at the time, is basically Troll Cyclops. His eyes shoot energy blasts everywhere and wreck shit. In order to keep his lusus calm, he cultivated mind honey, a substance which trolls are under no circumstance ever to eat lest they go completely apefuck bananas. Vriska, again using her mind-control, was able to compel him to eat it and fly over to Aradia's house. The rest is pretty apparent.
As should probably have been expected from someone with such an affinity for the dead, Aradia's death was hardly the end of her story. She returned as a ghost, pretending to still be alive despite the fact that she had no pupils and no functional personality or passion for life left at all. The voices of the dead intensified after her shuffle off the mortal troll coil, and Aradia began to realize one thing; the universe the trolls were living in was not long for this world. Finding the remains of an ancient game in a set of equally ancient ruins, she gave the technology to Sollux and, giving him the false impression that playing the game would save their world, got him to develop it into an actual game--SGRUB. Eventually, a group of 12 young trolls--Aradia Megido, Sollux Captor, Vriska Serket, Terezi Pyrope, Tavros Nitram, Nepeta Leijon, Equius Zahak, Karkat Vantas, Gamzee Makara, Eridan Ampora, Feferi Peixes, and Kanaya Maryam--formed two teams of six and began to play the game together. Aradia had lied to Sollux, however; SGRUB's ultimate goal was not to save Alternia, but to create a new universe at the cost of the trolls' planet. When Sollux realized this, he attempted to stop everyone from playing the game, which backfired disgustingly, but that's another story!
Aradia proceeds to begin playing SGRUB, entering the "Medium", a part of the universe that the game transports its players to. SGRUB works along the lines of games like The Sims, only extending into real life; one player is able to manipulate the surroundings of the other player they are connected to, moving objects, purchasing new ones, and so on, while their partner moves and reacts in their own area. Aradia's true (superdead) nature was discovered by Nepeta, the troll controlling her environment, when she failed to show up on her screen. A key part of SGRUB is the prototyping of sprites, entities which are provided to each player when they begin the game. Basically, this means dropping objects into a ball of light so that it takes on its qualities. After prototyping her sprite with a piece of the Frog Temple ruins she had discovered, Aradia proceeds to add herself to the sprite, resulting in something that looks like this and is finally visible to Nepeta, who she makes promise not to tell anyone else about the whole... being dead... thing.
Later, Equius, a extremely snobbish upper-caste troll who happened to be kind of creepily obsessed with her, makes Aradia a robot body which can house her soul. Just pretend it makes sense. Upon entering the body, Aradia discovers that he's made the robot with a heart programmed to have romantic feelings for him--she rips it out, smashes it, smacks Equius around, and then... kisses... him... yeah. The return to a solid body floods Aradia with a return of emotions she isn't used to dealing with anymore, including a desire for revenge; some time later, she encounters Vriska and fights her, eventually beating her to near-death. It's okay, though! She comes back.
The trolls' gaming session continues as normal until it's time for the showdown with the Black King, a character who serves as their particular session's final boss. As the Maid of Time, Aradia has the capability to travel through, well, time; scores of Aradias from alternate doomed timelines return to assist the trollkids in their final showdown. Eventually, the King is defeated, and the trolls go to claim their ~ultimate reward~--the new universe which they have created. Our universe, in fact! In beating the game, the trolls have created Earth, which, ironically, they never get to enter.
In the year 2009 on Earth, four kids--John Egbert, Rose Lalonde, Dave Strider, and Jade Harley--have begun to play a game of their own, called SBURB. Spoiler alert: it's the same one. It turns out, however, that whatever object the sprites are prototyped with has far-reached consequences; the characteristics of the object are also combined with the existing NPCs in the game. One of those NPCs is Jack Noir, who existed in the trolls' session as a relative ally, using their help to overthrow the hated Black Queen and chilling with Karkat. In the kid's session, he goes apeshit bananas! This would be okay if he was still defeatable; however, after John prototypes Jade's sprite with her dog/spirit/thing Becquerel, he finds out that Bec was actually an incredibly powerful entity known as a First Guardian, and he's just given Jack his attributes, making him a nigh-unstoppable killing machine. Whoops. Naturally, the only solution is to get him the hell out of the kids' game session and into somewhere, anywhere else! And that, apparently, is just what the kids do.
As the trolls are about to enter their new universe, a demon of unimaginable power appears and destroys their only way into Earth. With no escape and an obviously bugnuts monster ready to devastate them all, Aradia's time paradox selves sacrifice themselves by going up against Jack Noir as the rest of the trolls flee to a hidden laboratory/space station on a meteor. And that's where they stay! What they discover in that lab, however, is that they are now able to view the lives and actions of the four alien kids who just totally screwed them over, all the way back to infancy, and they can communicate with them using instant messaging clients. They proceed to, well, troll them, offering information, exposition, and insults. Especially insults. Aradia doesn't get particularly involved at this stage; thanks to information given to her by future selves, and perhaps a little of her own pessimism, she already understands that the children are not only the solution to the trolls' problems--they are also their cause. Instead, she sits around and is creepy at people.
After a while in the lab, however, for reasons that are still slightly obscure because MS Paint Adventures is confusing as shit, Aradia says goodbye to Sollx, actually hugs him, and then explodes as her soul leaves the robot built to contain it. It's as she does so that I'm taking her! Aren't you glad you read this whole background.
PERSONALITY:
Once upon a time, Aradia Megido was a pretty cheerful troll who liked archaeology and various forms of live-action roleplaying with her friends! Then she died.
Passionless, purposeful, and fairly spooky, Aradia as a ghost is pretty much the total opposite of Aradia as she once was. She's bored about most everything, including the inevitable apocalypse, and doesn't show any external signs of caring about... well, anything, except the events that she already knows (thanks to the whispering of ghosts) she's fated to set in motion. This isn't a conscious decision on her part; it's that she honestly doesn't remember what it's like to feel anymore, which is very Evanesence of her. She describes it as having "forgotten" what it is like to feel emotions, even asking her old friend Sollux what anger feels like. The only thing that appears to give her satisfaction is breaking things.
Aradia is extremely fatalistic and obsessed with the total impossibility of bucking the future laid out for her and her friends--a pretty natural conclusion for her to reach, considering she's had her inevitable future laid out before her for almost all of her life. First it was the voices of the dead, which were intensified after she herself died; once in the game, it was the messages left for her by her own future self. Either way, she's very honest about her pessimism, and very honest in general. Aradia has little to hide, and what she isn't straightforward about is almost always for the sake of the perpetual greater plan.
And then she became a robot!! This... actually doesn't mean that much by way of a difference in Aradia's behavior, to be honest. She's still fatalistic and monotone and depressing, but she has regained some feelings; it's just that those feelings aren't the most socially acceptable ones. She's less passive and more prone to violence and anger, confronting her friends, beating her killer Vriska to a miserable death, ripping her own fake heart out of her chest and pounding it into a pulp, and macking on a dude after slapping him around with her bloodstained robot hands! To be fair, the latter was probably at least slightly influenced by the sudden reintroduction of actual emotions to her life, and her actions later on are less drastic, suggesting that she's gotten more used to the new feelings. However, she's visibly more frustrated with her situation than she was when she was nothing but a ghost, becoming increasingly less willing to cooperate with the inevitable and actively discouraging Rose from following through on her gamebreaking plans.
Predictably, there's a side of Aradia that's both more vulnerable and more caring than the one she presents. Even as she entertains the possibility of killing Karkat before he can doom their future via his bad ideas, she refers to him as a friend and doesn't want to do it for that reason. Like most of the other trolls, she's relatively amoral, a fact which is only enhanced by the being dead thing; still, she's loyal to her friends and devoted, to an extent, to their success and wellbeing. This is especially true of Sollux, one of her older friends, to whom she actually expresses regret. She also has some sort of matesprit/kismesis (in nonHomestuckese, love-hate) relationship with Equius, the dude I mentioned her macking on in the last paragraph! His classism, snobbishness, and creepy fixation on her weird her out even as a ghost, and the fact that he tried to engineer romantic feelings for him in her robot body understandably infuriates her; the bottom line, though, which most likely instigated her relationship with him, is that he makes her feel something. Something... which is probably disgust.
Like all the other trolls, Aradia has her 0wn unique tr0ll text gimmick
this m0stly entails replacing the letter 0 with the numerical symb0l for zer0
als0 being really deadpan and never punctuating
in additi0n, ever since pr0t0typing with the fr0g statue she has been ribbiting unc0ntr0llably. The general emotionlessness of her writing reflects on her normal mode of speech, although she used the zeroes before dying; homegirl is spooky. She does, however, use exclamation points on occasion, and has snapped out of her own texting quirk to prove a point! Similarly, now that she's in her robot body and somewhat reacquainted with her emotions, she can and will get frustrated at people, especially when it's related to the Ridiculous Time Shit that's her bread and butter. This is actually quite the opposite of her behavior when she was alive--according to a conversation with Sollux, the only time she was truly angry was when Vriska crippled Tavros--and it makes he even harder to get along with. In general, people don't like being around Aradia; she's blunt, cold, and kind of a downer.
This is going to change while in the City, however, albeit only slightly. Aradia is going to react rather strangely to having her alive(ish) body again. This isn't going to mean all of her emotions return, since she hasn't been truly resurrected and inside still is slightly robotlike--not all there, so to speak--but it is going to mean a resurgence of emotions similar to the one she had when she first entered the soulbot. Her behavior will therefore occasionally mirror that of Aliveadia; she'll have more interest in the things she used to enjoy, more enthusiasm in general, actual feelings of affection for the people in her life which she has no idea how to express, and a sort of curiosity about revisiting parts of her psyche she'd forgotten existed. Because she knows that her time in the City won't last, however, she'll be very reluctant about actually going balls to the wall emotional at first.
POWER:
Aradia... is... a big fat godmode in canon. Let me break it down in bullet points!
-Her soul is currently inhabiting a robot body, which gives her a considerable physical edge; she's fast and strong enough to beat the hell out of monsters as well as her peers, and comments that she can "snap [Vriska's] neck with a twitch."
-She's also... psychic. Yes. Prior to death this manifested mostly via Aradia being able to talk to and raise the spirits of the dead; after entering the game, she presumably hasn't been able to exercise those powers as much, since there aren't a lot of dead people to talk to, but her psychic skills have been significantly sharpened. Instead of using a strife specibus (this is magical Homestuck language for "weapon"), she relies solely on her own telekinetic powers. Which she also uses to fly. Jean Grey shit all up in here, yo.
-As the Maid of Time, Aradia also has domain over, well, time. She's able to travel back in time, and presumably, though she's never utilized it in canon, forward into the future.
Obviously, when she's brought in by the Porter, summa dis shit is going to change--most notably the major time traveling and her robot body. Her power set will instead amount to:
-psychic bullshit (i.e. she can fly and lift stuff)
-turning into a robot sometimes. Aradia's robot body will occasionally reassert itself, giving her significantly greater strength, but only when she's seriously emotionally worked up. This will probably never mean her turning into a fullblown troll robot as seen in her icon set; it's more like she'll get mad at someone, punch them, and then realize once her fist makes contact with their face that it's hard cold metal. The most minor manifestation of this will be her eyes turning all red and glowy, which will do absolutely jackshit with regards to powers of any kind. She'll just have stupid dramatic animu red irises when she's pissed.
-minor time traveling?? She won't be able to go into the future--only the past--and her stays there will be no more than an hour long and leave her incredibly physically drained, more so for the longer she maintains her presence. While time traveling, Aradia won't be able to make contact with herself in any way; she can tell other people things that might then get relayed to her, but if she makes any actions with the explicit intent of informing her past self of what's goin' down, or even gets seen by her past self, she'll immediately be pulled back into the present.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE: 0h w0w
this is n0t what was supp0sed to happen
n0t that i really kn0w what was supp0sed to happen
f0r 0nce
but i am still fairly sure this was n0t it
and the cause remains 0bscure which i will admit is tr0ubling on certain levels
im n0t sure im 0k with this but i d0ubt my 0pini0n matters to any0ne here s0 thats n0t really imp0rtant is it
0h well
0_0
back t0 s0unding c0nfused in public i guess!
i d0nt really care but if that is what will get me answers ill try it
anyway
is any0ne else there
y0u kn0w wh0 y0u are
[A few minutes later, there's an addendum video tacked on to the initial message! Sitting on some sort of park bench is a young-looking and totally human teenage girl with messy black hair and dark rings underneath her eyes, wearing a thematic T-shirt. There's still a little something off about her, though. Maybe it's the hollowness to her voice! Maybe it's the flat way she regards the camera! Woooooooo.]
So apparently this is the preferred way of asking for information. Okay. I understand my location and the name of this planet. We have been enlisted into a new session by a machine of unknown but significant and ominous capabilities. Our immediate goal is to be heroes, despite the inevitable pointlessness of such a task. I know that. She told me already.
But she isn't talking anymore, and I'm sick of being jerked around. Although it's not as if anyone cares about that! Anyway--please tell me more about the City. [Pause!] That's all.
[AND THEN SHE CLICKS IT OFF]
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE: The Earth sun was something very interesting, she thought. She was walking directly beneath it, and yet she was cold; extremely cold, actually. She hadn't felt the need to hide from its rays for some time, given the incorporeal state she had been in for so long, but it was still something she couldn't help noting.
Of course, even if trolls weren't primarily nocturnal creatures, the sensation would be unfamiliar. Equius' sensors had been sophisticated, but a robot was a robot, no matter how much blue blood was pumping through its veins. It hadn't mattered at the time; she was used to not feeling things on a whole different level. Anything was a shock to the senses after being dead. But this was something even stronger, like that return of feeling times ten. It was weird, most of all, and she had no idea what she felt about it, or any of the other new rushes of sensation her extremely pinkish and extremely living body was currently processing.
Her feelings about her new form didn't actually matter, she knew. Aradia was quite certain she would be informing herself of that fact in the near (or not-so-near! time worked like that) future. The absence of ominous communiques from a future self, she had no doubt, was something which would soon right itself. Things would return to how they always were and always would be. Whether or not she was okay with that didn't matter either--none of her experience in this temporal-spatial disconnect mattered--because what happened had no bearing on what she wanted. Perhaps it had always been that way, even before she died. Even before she had understood the voices of her ancestors for what they were.
That was another thing she hadn't quite gotten used to the lack of, but thinking about it was pointless. She exhaled, mostly because it afforded her the opportunity to watch the human respiratory cloud billow out from her open mouth. Perhaps it wasn't important to dissect the meaning of her experiences or ruminate on what would inevitably come. All it would lead to was disappointment and ennui, and she had experienced more than enough of that, and had yet to experience even more.
It would all change soon. There was no stopping that. For the moment, however, on this cheap mockery of the ultimate reward she and her friends had been denied, Aradia was by herself.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
EVERYBODY HATES HOMESTUCK FONTS. I know this. You know this. We all know this. And that is why I will be putting up a permissions post about it if I so happen to get in, so that people can opt out of it! Also, there will be voiceposts. Lots of them.
Also, is it cool if her blood, despite the rest of her physiology being human, stays the same bright blue it was in her robot body? This would also apply to the rest of the trollcast (so Karkat's blood will be like goddamn Hawaiian Punch and Sollux has gross mustard, etc.), and if I ever canon update her she will just....... go back to maroon again and look like a human anyway.
NAME: Leah
AGE: 21
JOURNAL: hotforbabyleg
IM: GUYS COME ON
E-MAIL: COME ON
RETURNING: I play Sooraya, Atsuko, and Marceline! Wooooo.
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Aradia Megido
FANDOM: Homestuck
CHRONOLOGY: Exactly as she explodes her robot body everywhere!
CLASS: Extremely ambivalent, fatalistic, jaded-ass hero.
SUPERHERO NAME: Maid of Time
ALTER EGO: Aradia Megido, creepy... chick... who I guess will probably be getting bullied into going to school eventually by CPS which is a terrifying thought.
BACKGROUND:
Okay. In order to tell you about Aradia, I need to tell you about trolls! Like Icy's app did yeah shut up don't look at me. Trolls are an alien species, living in a universe completely separate to "our" own. Their home planet, Alternia, is primarily inhabited by the younger members of the species, as the elder and more prominent ones are usually out in space conquering other planets. The trolls themselves are mostly humanoid other than the green skin, yellow eyes, and candy-corn-lookin' horns they all have growing out of their heads, but based on their terminology the species itself appears to be insectoid (which is totally a word) in nature. Baby trolls, or grubs, go through a pupa process in caves deep underground, emerge as fully-formed tiny trolls, and then are forced to go through brutal trials in order to ensure the survival of the fittest. The lucky trolls who do survive then emerge from their caves with a freakyass animal custodian, called a lusus, which takes care of them and basically acts as a parent until they reach maturity. Basically, it is hard out there for a troll! Troll society is based on a violent blood-color-segregated caste system, violence is commonplace and seen as unremarkable, and all the weaker members of society are eventually "culled." It is therefore no surprise that most trolls are total dickheads.
Or were dickheads, really. Because the trolls are dead now! As is their entire universe. The only survivors are 12 young trolls of only 6 solar sweeps, or 13 years, who managed to save themselves by playing a game that ended the universe. BUT WHERE WERE WE.
Aradia Megido is one of those 12 trolls! Born with the extremely low-class blood color of maroon, she was not subject to many of troll society's benefits, but she was okay with that. She was also okay with hearing the voices of her dead ancestors ever since before she could remember, and surprisingl was quite well-adjusted despite this! Aradia was a genial troll with a strong interest in archaeology and weirdass troll live-action roleplaying, also known as Flarp, in which all hits taken had some kind of impact on the physical health of the player. Instead of being interested in treasure-hunting and violence, Aradia was into it because of the fun and gaming spirit!!!! of it all, in a direct contradiction to fellow Flarper and huge bitch Vriska Serket. Vriska was into Flarp because it assured her a steady supply of young and gullible trolls to feed to her constantly hungry lusus, a giant spiderbeast straight outta Chamber of Secrets. Nevertheless, Aradia agreed to play against Vriska's Team Scourge, consisting of her and Aradia's friendly rival Terezi Pyrope, as part of Team Charge. This would later prove to be an incredibly bad idea, and aprt of the reason why I switched to past tense. Spoiler alert: it's because she's dead.
Here is where we run into our first warning sign; Aradia's friend and partner on Team Charge, Tavros Nitram, was kind of... a pushover and a weenie. A huge weenie. And Vriska hated him for no damn reason!! Trapping Tavros into a no-positive-outcomes situation in their session together and keeping him from talking to Terezi or Aradia for help, she forced him into a corner; then, when Tavros attempted to quit the game, she used her skills in mind-control to force him to jump off a cliff. Tavros survived, but was paralyzed from the waist down, leaving Aradia seriously pissed off for perhaps the first time in her life. Despite Terezi warning her against it, she decided to take justice into her own hands, using her affinity with the dead to summon the spirits of Vriska's victims to haunt her. Vriska retaliated by killing the shit out of her.
This also needs some clarification! Sollux Captor, one of Aradia's best friends at the time, is basically Troll Cyclops. His eyes shoot energy blasts everywhere and wreck shit. In order to keep his lusus calm, he cultivated mind honey, a substance which trolls are under no circumstance ever to eat lest they go completely apefuck bananas. Vriska, again using her mind-control, was able to compel him to eat it and fly over to Aradia's house. The rest is pretty apparent.
As should probably have been expected from someone with such an affinity for the dead, Aradia's death was hardly the end of her story. She returned as a ghost, pretending to still be alive despite the fact that she had no pupils and no functional personality or passion for life left at all. The voices of the dead intensified after her shuffle off the mortal troll coil, and Aradia began to realize one thing; the universe the trolls were living in was not long for this world. Finding the remains of an ancient game in a set of equally ancient ruins, she gave the technology to Sollux and, giving him the false impression that playing the game would save their world, got him to develop it into an actual game--SGRUB. Eventually, a group of 12 young trolls--Aradia Megido, Sollux Captor, Vriska Serket, Terezi Pyrope, Tavros Nitram, Nepeta Leijon, Equius Zahak, Karkat Vantas, Gamzee Makara, Eridan Ampora, Feferi Peixes, and Kanaya Maryam--formed two teams of six and began to play the game together. Aradia had lied to Sollux, however; SGRUB's ultimate goal was not to save Alternia, but to create a new universe at the cost of the trolls' planet. When Sollux realized this, he attempted to stop everyone from playing the game, which backfired disgustingly, but that's another story!
Aradia proceeds to begin playing SGRUB, entering the "Medium", a part of the universe that the game transports its players to. SGRUB works along the lines of games like The Sims, only extending into real life; one player is able to manipulate the surroundings of the other player they are connected to, moving objects, purchasing new ones, and so on, while their partner moves and reacts in their own area. Aradia's true (superdead) nature was discovered by Nepeta, the troll controlling her environment, when she failed to show up on her screen. A key part of SGRUB is the prototyping of sprites, entities which are provided to each player when they begin the game. Basically, this means dropping objects into a ball of light so that it takes on its qualities. After prototyping her sprite with a piece of the Frog Temple ruins she had discovered, Aradia proceeds to add herself to the sprite, resulting in something that looks like this and is finally visible to Nepeta, who she makes promise not to tell anyone else about the whole... being dead... thing.
Later, Equius, a extremely snobbish upper-caste troll who happened to be kind of creepily obsessed with her, makes Aradia a robot body which can house her soul. Just pretend it makes sense. Upon entering the body, Aradia discovers that he's made the robot with a heart programmed to have romantic feelings for him--she rips it out, smashes it, smacks Equius around, and then... kisses... him... yeah. The return to a solid body floods Aradia with a return of emotions she isn't used to dealing with anymore, including a desire for revenge; some time later, she encounters Vriska and fights her, eventually beating her to near-death. It's okay, though! She comes back.
The trolls' gaming session continues as normal until it's time for the showdown with the Black King, a character who serves as their particular session's final boss. As the Maid of Time, Aradia has the capability to travel through, well, time; scores of Aradias from alternate doomed timelines return to assist the trollkids in their final showdown. Eventually, the King is defeated, and the trolls go to claim their ~ultimate reward~--the new universe which they have created. Our universe, in fact! In beating the game, the trolls have created Earth, which, ironically, they never get to enter.
In the year 2009 on Earth, four kids--John Egbert, Rose Lalonde, Dave Strider, and Jade Harley--have begun to play a game of their own, called SBURB. Spoiler alert: it's the same one. It turns out, however, that whatever object the sprites are prototyped with has far-reached consequences; the characteristics of the object are also combined with the existing NPCs in the game. One of those NPCs is Jack Noir, who existed in the trolls' session as a relative ally, using their help to overthrow the hated Black Queen and chilling with Karkat. In the kid's session, he goes apeshit bananas! This would be okay if he was still defeatable; however, after John prototypes Jade's sprite with her dog/spirit/thing Becquerel, he finds out that Bec was actually an incredibly powerful entity known as a First Guardian, and he's just given Jack his attributes, making him a nigh-unstoppable killing machine. Whoops. Naturally, the only solution is to get him the hell out of the kids' game session and into somewhere, anywhere else! And that, apparently, is just what the kids do.
As the trolls are about to enter their new universe, a demon of unimaginable power appears and destroys their only way into Earth. With no escape and an obviously bugnuts monster ready to devastate them all, Aradia's time paradox selves sacrifice themselves by going up against Jack Noir as the rest of the trolls flee to a hidden laboratory/space station on a meteor. And that's where they stay! What they discover in that lab, however, is that they are now able to view the lives and actions of the four alien kids who just totally screwed them over, all the way back to infancy, and they can communicate with them using instant messaging clients. They proceed to, well, troll them, offering information, exposition, and insults. Especially insults. Aradia doesn't get particularly involved at this stage; thanks to information given to her by future selves, and perhaps a little of her own pessimism, she already understands that the children are not only the solution to the trolls' problems--they are also their cause. Instead, she sits around and is creepy at people.
After a while in the lab, however, for reasons that are still slightly obscure because MS Paint Adventures is confusing as shit, Aradia says goodbye to Sollx, actually hugs him, and then explodes as her soul leaves the robot built to contain it. It's as she does so that I'm taking her! Aren't you glad you read this whole background.
PERSONALITY:
Once upon a time, Aradia Megido was a pretty cheerful troll who liked archaeology and various forms of live-action roleplaying with her friends! Then she died.
Passionless, purposeful, and fairly spooky, Aradia as a ghost is pretty much the total opposite of Aradia as she once was. She's bored about most everything, including the inevitable apocalypse, and doesn't show any external signs of caring about... well, anything, except the events that she already knows (thanks to the whispering of ghosts) she's fated to set in motion. This isn't a conscious decision on her part; it's that she honestly doesn't remember what it's like to feel anymore, which is very Evanesence of her. She describes it as having "forgotten" what it is like to feel emotions, even asking her old friend Sollux what anger feels like. The only thing that appears to give her satisfaction is breaking things.
Aradia is extremely fatalistic and obsessed with the total impossibility of bucking the future laid out for her and her friends--a pretty natural conclusion for her to reach, considering she's had her inevitable future laid out before her for almost all of her life. First it was the voices of the dead, which were intensified after she herself died; once in the game, it was the messages left for her by her own future self. Either way, she's very honest about her pessimism, and very honest in general. Aradia has little to hide, and what she isn't straightforward about is almost always for the sake of the perpetual greater plan.
And then she became a robot!! This... actually doesn't mean that much by way of a difference in Aradia's behavior, to be honest. She's still fatalistic and monotone and depressing, but she has regained some feelings; it's just that those feelings aren't the most socially acceptable ones. She's less passive and more prone to violence and anger, confronting her friends, beating her killer Vriska to a miserable death, ripping her own fake heart out of her chest and pounding it into a pulp, and macking on a dude after slapping him around with her bloodstained robot hands! To be fair, the latter was probably at least slightly influenced by the sudden reintroduction of actual emotions to her life, and her actions later on are less drastic, suggesting that she's gotten more used to the new feelings. However, she's visibly more frustrated with her situation than she was when she was nothing but a ghost, becoming increasingly less willing to cooperate with the inevitable and actively discouraging Rose from following through on her gamebreaking plans.
Predictably, there's a side of Aradia that's both more vulnerable and more caring than the one she presents. Even as she entertains the possibility of killing Karkat before he can doom their future via his bad ideas, she refers to him as a friend and doesn't want to do it for that reason. Like most of the other trolls, she's relatively amoral, a fact which is only enhanced by the being dead thing; still, she's loyal to her friends and devoted, to an extent, to their success and wellbeing. This is especially true of Sollux, one of her older friends, to whom she actually expresses regret. She also has some sort of matesprit/kismesis (in nonHomestuckese, love-hate) relationship with Equius, the dude I mentioned her macking on in the last paragraph! His classism, snobbishness, and creepy fixation on her weird her out even as a ghost, and the fact that he tried to engineer romantic feelings for him in her robot body understandably infuriates her; the bottom line, though, which most likely instigated her relationship with him, is that he makes her feel something. Something... which is probably disgust.
Like all the other trolls, Aradia has her 0wn unique tr0ll text gimmick
this m0stly entails replacing the letter 0 with the numerical symb0l for zer0
als0 being really deadpan and never punctuating
in additi0n, ever since pr0t0typing with the fr0g statue she has been ribbiting unc0ntr0llably. The general emotionlessness of her writing reflects on her normal mode of speech, although she used the zeroes before dying; homegirl is spooky. She does, however, use exclamation points on occasion, and has snapped out of her own texting quirk to prove a point! Similarly, now that she's in her robot body and somewhat reacquainted with her emotions, she can and will get frustrated at people, especially when it's related to the Ridiculous Time Shit that's her bread and butter. This is actually quite the opposite of her behavior when she was alive--according to a conversation with Sollux, the only time she was truly angry was when Vriska crippled Tavros--and it makes he even harder to get along with. In general, people don't like being around Aradia; she's blunt, cold, and kind of a downer.
This is going to change while in the City, however, albeit only slightly. Aradia is going to react rather strangely to having her alive(ish) body again. This isn't going to mean all of her emotions return, since she hasn't been truly resurrected and inside still is slightly robotlike--not all there, so to speak--but it is going to mean a resurgence of emotions similar to the one she had when she first entered the soulbot. Her behavior will therefore occasionally mirror that of Aliveadia; she'll have more interest in the things she used to enjoy, more enthusiasm in general, actual feelings of affection for the people in her life which she has no idea how to express, and a sort of curiosity about revisiting parts of her psyche she'd forgotten existed. Because she knows that her time in the City won't last, however, she'll be very reluctant about actually going balls to the wall emotional at first.
POWER:
Aradia... is... a big fat godmode in canon. Let me break it down in bullet points!
-Her soul is currently inhabiting a robot body, which gives her a considerable physical edge; she's fast and strong enough to beat the hell out of monsters as well as her peers, and comments that she can "snap [Vriska's] neck with a twitch."
-She's also... psychic. Yes. Prior to death this manifested mostly via Aradia being able to talk to and raise the spirits of the dead; after entering the game, she presumably hasn't been able to exercise those powers as much, since there aren't a lot of dead people to talk to, but her psychic skills have been significantly sharpened. Instead of using a strife specibus (this is magical Homestuck language for "weapon"), she relies solely on her own telekinetic powers. Which she also uses to fly. Jean Grey shit all up in here, yo.
-As the Maid of Time, Aradia also has domain over, well, time. She's able to travel back in time, and presumably, though she's never utilized it in canon, forward into the future.
Obviously, when she's brought in by the Porter, summa dis shit is going to change--most notably the major time traveling and her robot body. Her power set will instead amount to:
-psychic bullshit (i.e. she can fly and lift stuff)
-turning into a robot sometimes. Aradia's robot body will occasionally reassert itself, giving her significantly greater strength, but only when she's seriously emotionally worked up. This will probably never mean her turning into a fullblown troll robot as seen in her icon set; it's more like she'll get mad at someone, punch them, and then realize once her fist makes contact with their face that it's hard cold metal. The most minor manifestation of this will be her eyes turning all red and glowy, which will do absolutely jackshit with regards to powers of any kind. She'll just have stupid dramatic animu red irises when she's pissed.
-minor time traveling?? She won't be able to go into the future--only the past--and her stays there will be no more than an hour long and leave her incredibly physically drained, more so for the longer she maintains her presence. While time traveling, Aradia won't be able to make contact with herself in any way; she can tell other people things that might then get relayed to her, but if she makes any actions with the explicit intent of informing her past self of what's goin' down, or even gets seen by her past self, she'll immediately be pulled back into the present.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE: 0h w0w
this is n0t what was supp0sed to happen
n0t that i really kn0w what was supp0sed to happen
f0r 0nce
but i am still fairly sure this was n0t it
and the cause remains 0bscure which i will admit is tr0ubling on certain levels
im n0t sure im 0k with this but i d0ubt my 0pini0n matters to any0ne here s0 thats n0t really imp0rtant is it
0h well
0_0
back t0 s0unding c0nfused in public i guess!
i d0nt really care but if that is what will get me answers ill try it
anyway
is any0ne else there
y0u kn0w wh0 y0u are
[A few minutes later, there's an addendum video tacked on to the initial message! Sitting on some sort of park bench is a young-looking and totally human teenage girl with messy black hair and dark rings underneath her eyes, wearing a thematic T-shirt. There's still a little something off about her, though. Maybe it's the hollowness to her voice! Maybe it's the flat way she regards the camera! Woooooooo.]
So apparently this is the preferred way of asking for information. Okay. I understand my location and the name of this planet. We have been enlisted into a new session by a machine of unknown but significant and ominous capabilities. Our immediate goal is to be heroes, despite the inevitable pointlessness of such a task. I know that. She told me already.
But she isn't talking anymore, and I'm sick of being jerked around. Although it's not as if anyone cares about that! Anyway--please tell me more about the City. [Pause!] That's all.
[AND THEN SHE CLICKS IT OFF]
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE: The Earth sun was something very interesting, she thought. She was walking directly beneath it, and yet she was cold; extremely cold, actually. She hadn't felt the need to hide from its rays for some time, given the incorporeal state she had been in for so long, but it was still something she couldn't help noting.
Of course, even if trolls weren't primarily nocturnal creatures, the sensation would be unfamiliar. Equius' sensors had been sophisticated, but a robot was a robot, no matter how much blue blood was pumping through its veins. It hadn't mattered at the time; she was used to not feeling things on a whole different level. Anything was a shock to the senses after being dead. But this was something even stronger, like that return of feeling times ten. It was weird, most of all, and she had no idea what she felt about it, or any of the other new rushes of sensation her extremely pinkish and extremely living body was currently processing.
Her feelings about her new form didn't actually matter, she knew. Aradia was quite certain she would be informing herself of that fact in the near (or not-so-near! time worked like that) future. The absence of ominous communiques from a future self, she had no doubt, was something which would soon right itself. Things would return to how they always were and always would be. Whether or not she was okay with that didn't matter either--none of her experience in this temporal-spatial disconnect mattered--because what happened had no bearing on what she wanted. Perhaps it had always been that way, even before she died. Even before she had understood the voices of her ancestors for what they were.
That was another thing she hadn't quite gotten used to the lack of, but thinking about it was pointless. She exhaled, mostly because it afforded her the opportunity to watch the human respiratory cloud billow out from her open mouth. Perhaps it wasn't important to dissect the meaning of her experiences or ruminate on what would inevitably come. All it would lead to was disappointment and ennui, and she had experienced more than enough of that, and had yet to experience even more.
It would all change soon. There was no stopping that. For the moment, however, on this cheap mockery of the ultimate reward she and her friends had been denied, Aradia was by herself.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
EVERYBODY HATES HOMESTUCK FONTS. I know this. You know this. We all know this. And that is why I will be putting up a permissions post about it if I so happen to get in, so that people can opt out of it! Also, there will be voiceposts. Lots of them.
Also, is it cool if her blood, despite the rest of her physiology being human, stays the same bright blue it was in her robot body? This would also apply to the rest of the trollcast (so Karkat's blood will be like goddamn Hawaiian Punch and Sollux has gross mustard, etc.), and if I ever canon update her she will just....... go back to maroon again and look like a human anyway.