APPLICATION: ATARAXION
P L A Y E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Your Name: Whit
OOC Journal:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
whitticus
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: Over 18!
Email + IM: amysterioussomeone@gmail.com | t0th3m00n
Characters Played at Ataraxion: Wheatley | Portal |testgasm
Simon Tam | Firefly |doc_pompous
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Rose Lalonde
Canon: Homestuck
Original or Alternate Universe: Original Universe
Canon Point: Act 6, Intermission 3, after she and Kanaya ditch Dave for a HOT DATE.
Number: 134
Setting:
Homestuck | Skaia | The Incipisphere and LOLAR | The Veil | Prospit and Derse | Dream Bubbles
History: Once upon a time, four children played a game.
We'll get to the specifics of this game later, but for now we'll start with this very important point:
Players in a session of the game are effectively created by the game itself through a process called ectobiology. These "paradox clones" are synthesized in a lab in the veil with some magic phlebotnium science, strapped to meteors and sent into Earth's past to eventually begin the game session that births them.
And that's how Rose Lalonde came to be.
Despite the strange circumstances of her creation, she had a relatively normal (if not privileged) childhood in upstate New York. Growing up, she cultivated an interest in a variety of things, perhaps the most important being a curiosity for the supernatural, eventually developing an inclination towards the Lovecraftian. And writing. And knitting. Rose very much enjoyed knitting.
Her relationship with her mother was strained at best. Convinced that everything Mom Lalonde did was to patronize her, Rose frequently engaged in battles of passive-aggression, making it a point to antagonize her parent through elaborate displays of facetiousness.
Somewhere along the line, she met her three best friends on the internet.
April 13th, 2009 marked not only John Egbert's 13th birthday, but also the beta release of a highly anticipated video game called Sburb. Rose in particular was anxious to play (Jade had suggested to her it would be a way to revive her dead cat), and after some parental shenanigans on John's end, they began the game with Rose acting as his server (host) player. Turned out Sburb was more than just a video game--with Rose as the server player and John as the client, she found she was able to manipulate John's real-world environment in real time. She ruined his bathroom. It was an accident.
Following the game's instructions, Rose deployed several game specific items--one of which, when activated, started a countdown. John informed her that there appeared to be a meteor heading straight for his house, and suddenly the pieces fit. Sburb was quite possibly initiating the imminent meteor strike, and several problems arose over the next four minutes and thirteen seconds. One: John's server player CD was locked in his father's car (which had been taken to the STORE). Two: bad weather on Rose's end was making it difficult for her to stay connected to John. Three: they had all these giant alchemizers and totem lathes and cruxite extruders and something called a kernelsprite (which they prototyped with a harlequin doll), but NO IDEA WHAT TO DO WITH THEM. All Sburb walkthroughs seemed to end at this very step, with the authors describing some kind of looming threat, so Rose decided to write her own. While John began to examine the Sburb devices in a desperate attempt to figure out what the heck was happening and how to avoid dying by meteor, Rose's power went out and their connection was lost.
She tried desperately to feed off the wireless signal of the laboratory next door, avoiding her mother along the way. The efforts eventually took her to her house's observatory, where she managed to get John into the world of the game (the Medium), and subsequently his personalized planet, the Land of Wind and Shade--with only seconds to spare, though not without spotting a few meteors of her own. Rose realized that the game, while possibly initiating the apocalypse, was simultaneously the only way to survive. Seven teleportation gates hovered high above John's house.
With the weather only getting worse, she attempted to assist John's progress in LOWAS, a process hindered as her laptop battery ran out of power and the nearby forest caught fire. John fought strange harlequin monsters (clown-like because of his sprite prototyping), and Rose narrowly escaped her mother, making for the backup generator in her dead cat's mausoleum (don't ask). Despite the backup generator eventually failing, Mom Lalonde opened a secret passageway in the mausoleum, allowing Rose to access the nearby Skaianet Laboratory. After discovering a computer terminal that displayed all existing Sburb sessions, she ran from the laboratory with the taxidermied corpse of her long-dead cat, Jaspers. From her mother's room, Rose watched as a meteor obliterated the laboratory.
Enter Dave Strider.
While Rose continued to build up John's house in an attempt to help him reach his first gate, Dave joined the game as Rose's server player, manipulating her environment much as she manipulated John's. Now that she knew what to do with all the strange devices, they wasted no time in deploying her kernelsprite and the unique item to enter her session. While John took a bite out of a cruxite apple, Rose's artifact manifested as a bottle--which she broke, after shenanigans involving her house on fire and the creation of Jaspersprite, her guide, prototyped from her dead cat and a cthulu doll.
Finally in the Medium, Rose began to explore the Land of Light and Rain in an effort to further understand the game, continuing her walkthrough as she progressed. She discovered that Mom Lalonde departed the house for some unknown reason, and after consulting with Jaspersprite learned that her title was Seer of Light. Though the hints were purposefully cryptic (the sprites were constructs of the game, after all), Rose was able to gather that the goal of Sburb was to ascend through all seven gates of the planet, defeat the Denizen, and access Skaia, where a battle raged between light and darkness, Prospit and Derse.
Around this time, Rose began to regularly converse with a group of mysterious internet "trolls" who had been pestering the four kids intermittently throughout their lives. Claiming to be aliens, the group insisted that they were in a separate session of Sbrub and were now monitoring the timelines of the four friends through a chat client and video feeds. Though Rose was initially skeptical, she began to consider the words of one GrimAuxiliatrix, who she would later learn was named Kanaya Maryam, after copious amounts of sarcastic dueling. It was the start of a beautiful friendship.
Jade revealed that Rose had been writing on the walls in her sleep, remaining unaware of the graffiti while awake. Rose, more intrigued than anything, learned of her sleeping "dream self"--an alternate self that functioned while the original slept. Hers had not awoken.
But it did when Alternate Future Dave went back in time (read: to our present) to stop John from prematurely fighting his Denizen and dooming their session. As AF!Dave changes the future (becoming Davesprite), the Rose from his timeline merged with the original, and her dream self woke up on Derse.
Speaking of Derse, we cut to a disgruntled agent of the dark kingdom named Jack Noir. Sick and tired of wearing funny outfits for the ruling monarch (no really), he kills the Black Queen and steals her ring--a game mechanism that allows the wearer to gain the powers and attributes of the players' pre-Medium prototypings (John's harlequins, Rose's cthulu doll and dead cat, Dave's impaled crow). An NPC gone rogue, Jack left to wreak havoc on Skaia's battlefield.
While John began the ectobiological process that would birth them (remember that?), Rose took the opportunity to alchemize a bunch of cool stuff, including the Thorns of Oglogoth. Armed with these new weapons (weapons that strengthened her connection with Eldritch gods from the space between sessions,, no less), Rose quickly grew tired of playing the game the "right" way, and made a reckless decision to blow up her first gate. Having been told by the trolls that their session was doomed no matter what, she abandoned her walkthrough to anyone in paradox space who might find it (Kanaya eventually did). She would play by her own rules, even if that meant tearing the game apart.
Mom Lalonde and Dad Egbert united in the veil and headed for Skaia, as Jack Noir crashed Prospit's moon into Skaia's battlefield. Remember Rose's sleep graffiti? The sequence of letters (MEOW) that she scrawled in a notebook proved to be a genetic code, stolen and used by a Dersite agent to create Jade's dog guardian Becquerel and imbue him with near-omnipotence (this is important, I promise).
Throughout this, the trolls' story becomes clear. The twelve aliens had played a version of Sburb and won, as a result creating the kids' world (the ultimate reward, and the ultimate goal of a successful session is the creation of a new universe). However, just as they were about to claim their prize, a rift opened in paradox space and the trolls were attacked, the aggressor forcing them into hiding in the veil. Many of the trolls blamed the kids for being barred entry to the new universe, but eventually a sense of camaraderie grew between the two groups--even if they all knew that eventually, the kids were going to do something to set that string of events in motion and screw everything up. Despite Kanaya's warnings that after a certain point, she could not see Rose on her video feed and that maybe it was not such a good idea to listen to those Horrorterrors, she was determined to find all the information she possibly could--and she came upon a potential solution. She and her friends would bring Jade into the game, and initiate a reboot: a Scratch.
The trolls' warnings came to fruition when Jade entered the Medium. John, acting as her server player, fell asleep (later revealed to be the shenanigans of one Vriska Serket) in the middle of prototyping her kernelsprite. Becquerel, being the good dog and best friend that he was, prototyped himself in order to save Jade from the imminent meteor strike, and the unfortunate result was Jack Noir suddenly gaining all of Bec's powers through his ring, becoming unstoppable. He ripped through the kids' session into that of the trolls, destroying their gateway and their versions of Prospit and Derse, completing the series of events that Rose and company had been warned of all along.
With the knowledge that John accidentally created an unbeatable boss and rendered their session unwinnable, Rose began to rework her plan. Urging Dave to commune with the Horrorterrors, she claimed they would help chart a map through the Furthest Ring to the Green Sun, Becquerel's (and subsequently Jack's) source of power.
Meanwhile, Jack Noir killed John, who ascended to the god tiers and revived on the battlefield. Rose sent him on an errand for a bomb called the Tumor, hidden deep within Skaia, and revealed that her plan was to use this device to destroy the sun, killing both Jack Noir and her dream self in the process. John drove around in his dad's car for a while and then found the huge explosive, captchaloging it for Rose and later sending it on a one-way trip to her dream self.
Meanwhile meanwhile, the trolls started killing each other.
When Dave asked her where she managed to procure this information, she referred to an "informant", later revealed to be an entity named Doc Scratch. A being as omniscient as Becquerel was omnipotent, he also drew his power from the Green Sun. Despite warnings from...basically everyone, Rose continued to converse with him, ironing out the details of her plan to escape their doomed session, completely oblivious to the fact that he was stringing her along. She inquired about the Scratch, the hard reset mentioned earlier, a last-ditch effort for members of a session where "victory was no longer possible". He explained to her the mechanism by which it could be initiated, and the risks: the universe of the game would be reborn under new parameters, and if the players managed to escape their dying Incipisphere, they could enter the new session and try again. If they did not, they would cease to exist. Doc Scratch also encouraged her to pursue her plan to destroy the Green Sun, because it was the only way he could die--and the only way his master, Lord English, could enter their universe. Growing suspicious, she asked him if the Horrorterrors were evil. Doc Scratch provided an answer (not revealed to the reader), and it was the combination of that and the subsequent discovery that Jack Noir killed her mother which sent her over the edge.
Rose blamed herself and went grimdark.
Now consumed by eldritch magic, Rose zoomed off to Skaia to find Jack Noir and MAKE HIM PAY. What she found were the bodies of her mother and John's father, but no Jack. He was already there. Further enraged by the escape and hellbent on revenge, she continued her quest to seek him out but found John instead, who seemed incredibly excited to see her. Rose, who could now speak only in eldritch gibberish, led him to the scene of the crime to see that Jack Noir had returned.
They fought. Jack stabbed John to death, and Rose, blinded by fury, blew a hole in Skaia before Jack managed to kill her, too.
BUT WAIT
As a god tier player, John revived after Noir's departure, awakening Rose's dream self by smooching her corpse. Yep.
Where Rose had planned on using her dream self to complete the destruction of the Green Sun (with the dream self acting as a sort of "extra life"), the loss of her physical self meant the technically-a-suicide mission was now a for-real suicide mission. Dave, also slain by Jack, joined her on Derse and tried to take the fall himself. Rose had none of that, knocked him out (with a ball of yarn, no less), and proceeded to commandeer the operation.
It didn't work, and Dave quickly went after her. The two ectosiblings delivered the bomb to the designated point in the Furthest Ring, but something was wrong. There was no Green Sun. As John initiated the Scratch according to plan, Dave and Rose ran out of time, and the Tumor exploded, killing them both--
--and creating the Green Sun in the process.
Turned out they'd all been played, but Dave and Rose achieved the god tiers for their efforts. The remaining trolls (Kanaya included oh boy) arrived soon after on their meteor, able to pinpoint Rose and Dave's location thanks to the massive green explosion. Now a fully realized Seer of Light, Rose knew four things--that the plan was now to regroup before attempting to defeat Jack, that the journey to the new session would take three years, that they had precious little time to escape, and that she knew the path they had to take. After making contact with John and Jade (who had also achieved god tier good job Jade), ensuring that they survived the Scratch and were also on their way to the new session (also a three-year journey), the meteor group was off, with Jack in pursuit.
They spent much of the next two years floating in and out of dream bubbles, learning more about their situation and the implications of the Scratch. Lord English started showing up in the bubbles and messed up thing, they met dead alternate universe versions of the troll ancestors (who were attempting to assemble a ghost army for the express purpose of fighting Lord English, of course), and found that the new session would feature their own guardians as players (Rose is, of course, very interested in the prospect of meeting her mother as a teenage Sburb player). All the while, Rose's relationship with Kanaya became more romantically inclined.
Two years on a meteor with Dave and a bunch of extraterrestrial crazies eventually gets to her--after finding that she could make alcohol, she proceeded to get drunk like a responsible fifteen-year-old and missed her date with Kanaya, who eventually found her and took her for a walk.
Into the dark hallways of the meteor. There may have been some sloppy makeouts, and Rose may have fallen down the stairs.
That's about when Rose woke up on a creepy spaceship.
Personality:
Rose is a highly intelligent, if not exceedingly pretentious individual. Naturally questioning, she is rarely satisfied with the simple answer, searching for hidden meanings and alternate methods of navigating circumstances. Driven largely by a thirst for knowledge, she is both incredibly learned and incredibly devoted to understanding something as fully as possible. Logical and analytical, she is the first to start dissecting any given issue for the answers she wants and, in fact, is a seeker of truths above all else. Rose enjoys learning everything she can about absolutely anything thrown her way, wasting no time in picking things apart at the seams--whether that something is a situation, a task, or a person.
She particularly enjoys doing this to people.
Rose comes off as very mature for her age and acts as the occasional voice of reason and "straight man" for her group of friends, exhibiting a penchant for playing armchair psychologist. Psychoanalyzing the people she knows is not necessarily an attempt to help them, rather, how she rationalizes their behavior and makes sense of the world around her. She's more than willing to take the time to step through every aspect of an issue, even at the expense of efficiency. She's a big-picture thinker, able to assemble all her tiny details into an overarching plan to success. That's how one learns and solves problems, after all.
Despite the fact that she enjoys handing out advice, she is not very good at applying it to herself. She's more than willing to spend hours analyzing someone else's issues, but has difficulty looking inward, mostly because she's very good at convincing herself that she has everything under control. Often, this is not the case--she tends to harbor resentment (especially towards her mother), and bottle up feelings that can be disastrous when released.
Rather introverted, she prefers to keep a few very close friends, whom she cares about deeply, often considering herself solely responsible for their progress or safety. However, this means she will often act without permission, doing what she believes is appropriate for them without consult, for fear that they will react unfavorably and ruin her intricate plans. Because of this, she can be quite manipulative, with a bad habit of deciding what's best for others, consciously leaving people out of the loop.
This is, perhaps, her worst fault. Rose is an excessively secretive individual who greatly values her privacy and dislikes attempts to snoop or otherwise poke into her business, despite the fact that she is the worst offender when it comes to prying questions. Rose can be evasive, ambiguous, and infuriatingly mysterious, and she does it all on purpose.
When Rose fixates, she really fixates, becoming single-mindedly devoted to whatever task is at hand, shutting out all distractions (even if those distractions include her friends). If she is especially committed to reaching a goal, she will stop at nothing until she achieves it--and since Rose's ultimate goals usually include knowledge, some of these tasks (like understanding the true nature of Sburb) prove to be never ending, for better or for worse.
Rose enjoys writing and elucidating. She takes great pride in her mastery of language, and is one of very few characters in Homestuck who types with perfect grammar and syntax. Fond of eloquent explanations and advanced vocabulary, she makes a point of being long-winded to an almost exasperating extent. Brevity, thy name is Not Rose. She wields sarcasm and dry humor as a weapon--though she is an incredibly capable physical fighter, Rose would much rather annihilate someone with razor-sharp wit and expert passive-aggression. Everything is a contest of smarts, and she must be the winner, gaining a definite satisfaction from besting someone in a battle of intelligence. Or facetiousness. For Rose, being facetious, sarcastic, and giving people the runaround is a game, a competition she can win.
No one can out-passive-aggress Rose Lalonde. She is simply the best there is. The problem is that no one has fun but her.
As a rule, she constantly keeps her true emotions private and is fairly difficult to read. Rarely will she let someone know how she really feels, and she hardly ever expresses herself in extremes. This is only worsened by her self-awareness-- Rose knows she's smart and talented and often inscrutable. Rose likes letting other people know that she is smart and talented often inscrutable. She can be kind of infuriating in that regard.
Because she spends a good deal of time with her emotions in check, preferring to talk about other people's problems over her own, it can be a challenge to instigate her. On a bad day, she becomes frustrated, terse, and even mean. Communing with the Horrorterrors exacerbates her negative qualities, making her even more secretive and inward. If pressed hard enough, Rose can be volatile, unstable, and violent, acting with no regard for consequence. This is especially true if the matter involves the people she cares deeply about--when her mother is murdered, she does a swan dive off the deep end and embarks on a quest of ruthless vengeance.
She is, however, a teenaged girl and as such has a playful side. Despite her serious, stoic demeanor, she allows herself to enjoy "silly" indulgences like trashy romance novels, adorable kittens, and the occasional pony. Not that she'd ever admit it.
Ever.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
>> Rose's strife specibus (the fancy Homestuck way of saying "weapon of choice") is needlekind. Despite her affinity for passive-aggression, she proves to be ferocious in real combat and is lethal with a pair of needlewands.
>> Rose's Sburb title is the Seer of Light. In Homestuck, the light aspect does not necessarily equate to "good" or literal illumination--rather, fortune, luck, or the revealing of knowledge (a type of illumination in itself). Considered a passive class, the seer aids his or her team by guiding and making information available. A Seer of Light, is one with the ability to chart the "most fortuitous path"--Rose, after ascending to the god tiers, has the ability to not only see the most favorable outcome for their team, but also elucidate what they need to do to accomplish it.
Since the Tranquility is effectively outside all Sburb sessions, this ability will be muddled. Inherently knowing the ideal path is reduced to a slightly heightened sense of favorable or unfavorable courses of action. Basically just some really good intuition.
>> A god tier player like Rose is conditionally immortal, and will be revived in all but two circumstances--a "just" death (one they deserve) or a "heroic" death (which is exactly what it sounds like). This is likely an ability that she will lose upon coming to the Tranquility. You die in space you die in real life.
>> Despite her title's role as an illuminator of information, she has a tendency to be incredibly secretive, withholding important details or hiding her plans despite detrimental effects to herself or her friends (an Sburb title is meant to challenge the player). She is headstrong, reckless, and hyper-committed to a task to the point of tunnel vision or single-mindedness. When she fixates on unraveling the mysteries of Sburb, she becomes mysterious, avoidant, and eventually starts ignoring her friends in favor of her quest. She will likely behave in a similar fashion when it comes to solving the mystery of the Tranquility.
>> Rose can be somewhat naive and easily manipulated simply because she constantly convinces herself that she is in control. Her inclination towards the macabre leads her to ancient eldritch abominations that she listens to without question, despite the warnings of her friends, all the while firmly believing that she was making her own choices. She becomes entangled in the machinations of Doc Scratch because of her curiosity, and suffers a breakdown as a result.
>> Highly sarcastic and exceedingly cynical, Rose is often facetious, naturally suspicious, and has trouble believing that other people don't behave in a similar fashion or think the way she does (i.e. cynically). This rather callous attitude makes her very difficult to deal with at times, especially combined with her tendency to fixate on problems.
>> She enjoys psychoanalyzing everything and everyone, which usually ends up more aggravating than not.
Inventory:
>> 1 pair of god tier pajamas, in Seer of Light flavor.
>> 1 black Squiddle dress.
>> 1 empty Sylladex (tree fetch modus) with several blank cards.*
>> The Thorns of Oglogoth--weaponized knitting needles imbued with dark magic. Mostly she uses them to stab things and then blow them up.*
>> 1 trashy troll romance novel.
*Please feel free to nerf/disallow these items as you see fit.
Appearance:
Rose is a teenaged girl of average height and build, with platinum blonde hair and violet eyes (YES I KNOW I'M SORRY IT'S NOT MY FAULT). She always wears a headband and is most commonly seen in her orange god-tier get up--it's part of the job.
Age: Fifteen, but Rose is independent by nature, a quality only exacerbated by playing Sburb. She's communed with eldritch gods, died twice, and seeing as how the second death was suicide for a cause, it's safe to say she is capable of handling the S.S. Spacehell.
AU Clarification: N/A
S A M P L E S
Log Sample:
She feels stifled.
And it's not just a physical stifling, either. The tube down her throat is bad enough, but something else has happened, something very strange that she can't quite put her finger on.
Stranger than falling out of a tube of blue goo, anyway.
It takes her a towel and a few moments of clearing her head before she realizes what it is. She can't see properly. Not physical seeing, of course, she takes in her surroundings just fine, cataloguing the mess of stumbling, soaking wet individuals who seem just as disoriented as she, filing away some particularly interesting characters for later investigation. No, there's something wrong with her Seeing.
Since dying for the second time and spending what already seems like an eternity on a godforsaken meteor, Rose had become more than accustomed to knowing things, inherently detecting that fabled Most Fortuitous Path, the road to victory. She'd never been able to see just what, exactly, awaited them at the end of their journey, but as her company's Seer of Light, she was certain she knew how to get there. That was her job.
Now, though, that knowing, seeing feeling is...muddled. Stifled. Like someone's wrapped her brain in cotton.The paths are less clear and even if her powers aren't working properly, as if someone has thrown a damp cloth over her face, she can make a reasonable guess that she isn't in Kansas anymore.
Rose doesn't know where, exactly, she's been taken, but if there's one thing she knows about herself, it's that she will have answers.
Comms Sample:
It seems to me we are beyond the point of customary introductions, so I'll err on the side of brevity and attempt to get straight to the essential details of this message with pinpoint accuracy. If I am to understand that we are hurtling through the cosmos, I will need further specifications as to what type of space we currently traverse.
I'm sure it's news to some of you that there are, in fact, different types of space, and as someone who is no stranger to multiple universes existing concurrently, I am curious as to whether or not we, at present, exist outside all sessions of a seemingly innocuous game I once played with my friends. Sunglasses-clad masters of irony and their avian counterparts need not apply.
Please do not trouble yourselves if you cannot enlighten me regarding the situation. The elaborate ins and outs of paradox space are admittedly vexing if you have not been exposed to the aforementioned game, but any information is appreciated. Barring that, I consider myself a fan of a great many conversation topics, so it should not be difficult to find an alternative conference. We can discuss our interests, or what we enjoy doing in our spare time. Perhaps we will even find that we share an intellectual pursuit or two.
I'll go first. My name is Rose Lalonde. I enjoy literature and knitting, and I am exceedingly pleased to make your collective acquaintance.
Your Name: Whit
OOC Journal:
whitticusUnder 18? If yes, what is your age?: Over 18!
Email + IM: amysterioussomeone@gmail.com | t0th3m00n
Characters Played at Ataraxion: Wheatley | Portal |
testgasmSimon Tam | Firefly |
doc_pompousC H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Rose Lalonde
Canon: Homestuck
Original or Alternate Universe: Original Universe
Canon Point: Act 6, Intermission 3, after she and Kanaya ditch Dave for a HOT DATE.
Number: 134
Setting:
Homestuck | Skaia | The Incipisphere and LOLAR | The Veil | Prospit and Derse | Dream Bubbles
History: Once upon a time, four children played a game.
We'll get to the specifics of this game later, but for now we'll start with this very important point:
Players in a session of the game are effectively created by the game itself through a process called ectobiology. These "paradox clones" are synthesized in a lab in the veil with some magic phlebotnium science, strapped to meteors and sent into Earth's past to eventually begin the game session that births them.
And that's how Rose Lalonde came to be.
Despite the strange circumstances of her creation, she had a relatively normal (if not privileged) childhood in upstate New York. Growing up, she cultivated an interest in a variety of things, perhaps the most important being a curiosity for the supernatural, eventually developing an inclination towards the Lovecraftian. And writing. And knitting. Rose very much enjoyed knitting.
Her relationship with her mother was strained at best. Convinced that everything Mom Lalonde did was to patronize her, Rose frequently engaged in battles of passive-aggression, making it a point to antagonize her parent through elaborate displays of facetiousness.
Somewhere along the line, she met her three best friends on the internet.
April 13th, 2009 marked not only John Egbert's 13th birthday, but also the beta release of a highly anticipated video game called Sburb. Rose in particular was anxious to play (Jade had suggested to her it would be a way to revive her dead cat), and after some parental shenanigans on John's end, they began the game with Rose acting as his server (host) player. Turned out Sburb was more than just a video game--with Rose as the server player and John as the client, she found she was able to manipulate John's real-world environment in real time. She ruined his bathroom. It was an accident.
Following the game's instructions, Rose deployed several game specific items--one of which, when activated, started a countdown. John informed her that there appeared to be a meteor heading straight for his house, and suddenly the pieces fit. Sburb was quite possibly initiating the imminent meteor strike, and several problems arose over the next four minutes and thirteen seconds. One: John's server player CD was locked in his father's car (which had been taken to the STORE). Two: bad weather on Rose's end was making it difficult for her to stay connected to John. Three: they had all these giant alchemizers and totem lathes and cruxite extruders and something called a kernelsprite (which they prototyped with a harlequin doll), but NO IDEA WHAT TO DO WITH THEM. All Sburb walkthroughs seemed to end at this very step, with the authors describing some kind of looming threat, so Rose decided to write her own. While John began to examine the Sburb devices in a desperate attempt to figure out what the heck was happening and how to avoid dying by meteor, Rose's power went out and their connection was lost.
She tried desperately to feed off the wireless signal of the laboratory next door, avoiding her mother along the way. The efforts eventually took her to her house's observatory, where she managed to get John into the world of the game (the Medium), and subsequently his personalized planet, the Land of Wind and Shade--with only seconds to spare, though not without spotting a few meteors of her own. Rose realized that the game, while possibly initiating the apocalypse, was simultaneously the only way to survive. Seven teleportation gates hovered high above John's house.
With the weather only getting worse, she attempted to assist John's progress in LOWAS, a process hindered as her laptop battery ran out of power and the nearby forest caught fire. John fought strange harlequin monsters (clown-like because of his sprite prototyping), and Rose narrowly escaped her mother, making for the backup generator in her dead cat's mausoleum (don't ask). Despite the backup generator eventually failing, Mom Lalonde opened a secret passageway in the mausoleum, allowing Rose to access the nearby Skaianet Laboratory. After discovering a computer terminal that displayed all existing Sburb sessions, she ran from the laboratory with the taxidermied corpse of her long-dead cat, Jaspers. From her mother's room, Rose watched as a meteor obliterated the laboratory.
Enter Dave Strider.
While Rose continued to build up John's house in an attempt to help him reach his first gate, Dave joined the game as Rose's server player, manipulating her environment much as she manipulated John's. Now that she knew what to do with all the strange devices, they wasted no time in deploying her kernelsprite and the unique item to enter her session. While John took a bite out of a cruxite apple, Rose's artifact manifested as a bottle--which she broke, after shenanigans involving her house on fire and the creation of Jaspersprite, her guide, prototyped from her dead cat and a cthulu doll.
Finally in the Medium, Rose began to explore the Land of Light and Rain in an effort to further understand the game, continuing her walkthrough as she progressed. She discovered that Mom Lalonde departed the house for some unknown reason, and after consulting with Jaspersprite learned that her title was Seer of Light. Though the hints were purposefully cryptic (the sprites were constructs of the game, after all), Rose was able to gather that the goal of Sburb was to ascend through all seven gates of the planet, defeat the Denizen, and access Skaia, where a battle raged between light and darkness, Prospit and Derse.
Around this time, Rose began to regularly converse with a group of mysterious internet "trolls" who had been pestering the four kids intermittently throughout their lives. Claiming to be aliens, the group insisted that they were in a separate session of Sbrub and were now monitoring the timelines of the four friends through a chat client and video feeds. Though Rose was initially skeptical, she began to consider the words of one GrimAuxiliatrix, who she would later learn was named Kanaya Maryam, after copious amounts of sarcastic dueling. It was the start of a beautiful friendship.
Jade revealed that Rose had been writing on the walls in her sleep, remaining unaware of the graffiti while awake. Rose, more intrigued than anything, learned of her sleeping "dream self"--an alternate self that functioned while the original slept. Hers had not awoken.
But it did when Alternate Future Dave went back in time (read: to our present) to stop John from prematurely fighting his Denizen and dooming their session. As AF!Dave changes the future (becoming Davesprite), the Rose from his timeline merged with the original, and her dream self woke up on Derse.
Speaking of Derse, we cut to a disgruntled agent of the dark kingdom named Jack Noir. Sick and tired of wearing funny outfits for the ruling monarch (no really), he kills the Black Queen and steals her ring--a game mechanism that allows the wearer to gain the powers and attributes of the players' pre-Medium prototypings (John's harlequins, Rose's cthulu doll and dead cat, Dave's impaled crow). An NPC gone rogue, Jack left to wreak havoc on Skaia's battlefield.
While John began the ectobiological process that would birth them (remember that?), Rose took the opportunity to alchemize a bunch of cool stuff, including the Thorns of Oglogoth. Armed with these new weapons (weapons that strengthened her connection with Eldritch gods from the space between sessions,, no less), Rose quickly grew tired of playing the game the "right" way, and made a reckless decision to blow up her first gate. Having been told by the trolls that their session was doomed no matter what, she abandoned her walkthrough to anyone in paradox space who might find it (Kanaya eventually did). She would play by her own rules, even if that meant tearing the game apart.
Mom Lalonde and Dad Egbert united in the veil and headed for Skaia, as Jack Noir crashed Prospit's moon into Skaia's battlefield. Remember Rose's sleep graffiti? The sequence of letters (MEOW) that she scrawled in a notebook proved to be a genetic code, stolen and used by a Dersite agent to create Jade's dog guardian Becquerel and imbue him with near-omnipotence (this is important, I promise).
Throughout this, the trolls' story becomes clear. The twelve aliens had played a version of Sburb and won, as a result creating the kids' world (the ultimate reward, and the ultimate goal of a successful session is the creation of a new universe). However, just as they were about to claim their prize, a rift opened in paradox space and the trolls were attacked, the aggressor forcing them into hiding in the veil. Many of the trolls blamed the kids for being barred entry to the new universe, but eventually a sense of camaraderie grew between the two groups--even if they all knew that eventually, the kids were going to do something to set that string of events in motion and screw everything up. Despite Kanaya's warnings that after a certain point, she could not see Rose on her video feed and that maybe it was not such a good idea to listen to those Horrorterrors, she was determined to find all the information she possibly could--and she came upon a potential solution. She and her friends would bring Jade into the game, and initiate a reboot: a Scratch.
The trolls' warnings came to fruition when Jade entered the Medium. John, acting as her server player, fell asleep (later revealed to be the shenanigans of one Vriska Serket) in the middle of prototyping her kernelsprite. Becquerel, being the good dog and best friend that he was, prototyped himself in order to save Jade from the imminent meteor strike, and the unfortunate result was Jack Noir suddenly gaining all of Bec's powers through his ring, becoming unstoppable. He ripped through the kids' session into that of the trolls, destroying their gateway and their versions of Prospit and Derse, completing the series of events that Rose and company had been warned of all along.
With the knowledge that John accidentally created an unbeatable boss and rendered their session unwinnable, Rose began to rework her plan. Urging Dave to commune with the Horrorterrors, she claimed they would help chart a map through the Furthest Ring to the Green Sun, Becquerel's (and subsequently Jack's) source of power.
Meanwhile, Jack Noir killed John, who ascended to the god tiers and revived on the battlefield. Rose sent him on an errand for a bomb called the Tumor, hidden deep within Skaia, and revealed that her plan was to use this device to destroy the sun, killing both Jack Noir and her dream self in the process. John drove around in his dad's car for a while and then found the huge explosive, captchaloging it for Rose and later sending it on a one-way trip to her dream self.
Meanwhile meanwhile, the trolls started killing each other.
When Dave asked her where she managed to procure this information, she referred to an "informant", later revealed to be an entity named Doc Scratch. A being as omniscient as Becquerel was omnipotent, he also drew his power from the Green Sun. Despite warnings from...basically everyone, Rose continued to converse with him, ironing out the details of her plan to escape their doomed session, completely oblivious to the fact that he was stringing her along. She inquired about the Scratch, the hard reset mentioned earlier, a last-ditch effort for members of a session where "victory was no longer possible". He explained to her the mechanism by which it could be initiated, and the risks: the universe of the game would be reborn under new parameters, and if the players managed to escape their dying Incipisphere, they could enter the new session and try again. If they did not, they would cease to exist. Doc Scratch also encouraged her to pursue her plan to destroy the Green Sun, because it was the only way he could die--and the only way his master, Lord English, could enter their universe. Growing suspicious, she asked him if the Horrorterrors were evil. Doc Scratch provided an answer (not revealed to the reader), and it was the combination of that and the subsequent discovery that Jack Noir killed her mother which sent her over the edge.
Rose blamed herself and went grimdark.
Now consumed by eldritch magic, Rose zoomed off to Skaia to find Jack Noir and MAKE HIM PAY. What she found were the bodies of her mother and John's father, but no Jack. He was already there. Further enraged by the escape and hellbent on revenge, she continued her quest to seek him out but found John instead, who seemed incredibly excited to see her. Rose, who could now speak only in eldritch gibberish, led him to the scene of the crime to see that Jack Noir had returned.
They fought. Jack stabbed John to death, and Rose, blinded by fury, blew a hole in Skaia before Jack managed to kill her, too.
BUT WAIT
As a god tier player, John revived after Noir's departure, awakening Rose's dream self by smooching her corpse. Yep.
Where Rose had planned on using her dream self to complete the destruction of the Green Sun (with the dream self acting as a sort of "extra life"), the loss of her physical self meant the technically-a-suicide mission was now a for-real suicide mission. Dave, also slain by Jack, joined her on Derse and tried to take the fall himself. Rose had none of that, knocked him out (with a ball of yarn, no less), and proceeded to commandeer the operation.
It didn't work, and Dave quickly went after her. The two ectosiblings delivered the bomb to the designated point in the Furthest Ring, but something was wrong. There was no Green Sun. As John initiated the Scratch according to plan, Dave and Rose ran out of time, and the Tumor exploded, killing them both--
--and creating the Green Sun in the process.
Turned out they'd all been played, but Dave and Rose achieved the god tiers for their efforts. The remaining trolls (Kanaya included oh boy) arrived soon after on their meteor, able to pinpoint Rose and Dave's location thanks to the massive green explosion. Now a fully realized Seer of Light, Rose knew four things--that the plan was now to regroup before attempting to defeat Jack, that the journey to the new session would take three years, that they had precious little time to escape, and that she knew the path they had to take. After making contact with John and Jade (who had also achieved god tier good job Jade), ensuring that they survived the Scratch and were also on their way to the new session (also a three-year journey), the meteor group was off, with Jack in pursuit.
They spent much of the next two years floating in and out of dream bubbles, learning more about their situation and the implications of the Scratch. Lord English started showing up in the bubbles and messed up thing, they met dead alternate universe versions of the troll ancestors (who were attempting to assemble a ghost army for the express purpose of fighting Lord English, of course), and found that the new session would feature their own guardians as players (Rose is, of course, very interested in the prospect of meeting her mother as a teenage Sburb player). All the while, Rose's relationship with Kanaya became more romantically inclined.
Two years on a meteor with Dave and a bunch of extraterrestrial crazies eventually gets to her--after finding that she could make alcohol, she proceeded to get drunk like a responsible fifteen-year-old and missed her date with Kanaya, who eventually found her and took her for a walk.
Into the dark hallways of the meteor. There may have been some sloppy makeouts, and Rose may have fallen down the stairs.
That's about when Rose woke up on a creepy spaceship.
Personality:
Rose is a highly intelligent, if not exceedingly pretentious individual. Naturally questioning, she is rarely satisfied with the simple answer, searching for hidden meanings and alternate methods of navigating circumstances. Driven largely by a thirst for knowledge, she is both incredibly learned and incredibly devoted to understanding something as fully as possible. Logical and analytical, she is the first to start dissecting any given issue for the answers she wants and, in fact, is a seeker of truths above all else. Rose enjoys learning everything she can about absolutely anything thrown her way, wasting no time in picking things apart at the seams--whether that something is a situation, a task, or a person.
She particularly enjoys doing this to people.
Rose comes off as very mature for her age and acts as the occasional voice of reason and "straight man" for her group of friends, exhibiting a penchant for playing armchair psychologist. Psychoanalyzing the people she knows is not necessarily an attempt to help them, rather, how she rationalizes their behavior and makes sense of the world around her. She's more than willing to take the time to step through every aspect of an issue, even at the expense of efficiency. She's a big-picture thinker, able to assemble all her tiny details into an overarching plan to success. That's how one learns and solves problems, after all.
Despite the fact that she enjoys handing out advice, she is not very good at applying it to herself. She's more than willing to spend hours analyzing someone else's issues, but has difficulty looking inward, mostly because she's very good at convincing herself that she has everything under control. Often, this is not the case--she tends to harbor resentment (especially towards her mother), and bottle up feelings that can be disastrous when released.
Rather introverted, she prefers to keep a few very close friends, whom she cares about deeply, often considering herself solely responsible for their progress or safety. However, this means she will often act without permission, doing what she believes is appropriate for them without consult, for fear that they will react unfavorably and ruin her intricate plans. Because of this, she can be quite manipulative, with a bad habit of deciding what's best for others, consciously leaving people out of the loop.
This is, perhaps, her worst fault. Rose is an excessively secretive individual who greatly values her privacy and dislikes attempts to snoop or otherwise poke into her business, despite the fact that she is the worst offender when it comes to prying questions. Rose can be evasive, ambiguous, and infuriatingly mysterious, and she does it all on purpose.
When Rose fixates, she really fixates, becoming single-mindedly devoted to whatever task is at hand, shutting out all distractions (even if those distractions include her friends). If she is especially committed to reaching a goal, she will stop at nothing until she achieves it--and since Rose's ultimate goals usually include knowledge, some of these tasks (like understanding the true nature of Sburb) prove to be never ending, for better or for worse.
Rose enjoys writing and elucidating. She takes great pride in her mastery of language, and is one of very few characters in Homestuck who types with perfect grammar and syntax. Fond of eloquent explanations and advanced vocabulary, she makes a point of being long-winded to an almost exasperating extent. Brevity, thy name is Not Rose. She wields sarcasm and dry humor as a weapon--though she is an incredibly capable physical fighter, Rose would much rather annihilate someone with razor-sharp wit and expert passive-aggression. Everything is a contest of smarts, and she must be the winner, gaining a definite satisfaction from besting someone in a battle of intelligence. Or facetiousness. For Rose, being facetious, sarcastic, and giving people the runaround is a game, a competition she can win.
No one can out-passive-aggress Rose Lalonde. She is simply the best there is. The problem is that no one has fun but her.
As a rule, she constantly keeps her true emotions private and is fairly difficult to read. Rarely will she let someone know how she really feels, and she hardly ever expresses herself in extremes. This is only worsened by her self-awareness-- Rose knows she's smart and talented and often inscrutable. Rose likes letting other people know that she is smart and talented often inscrutable. She can be kind of infuriating in that regard.
Because she spends a good deal of time with her emotions in check, preferring to talk about other people's problems over her own, it can be a challenge to instigate her. On a bad day, she becomes frustrated, terse, and even mean. Communing with the Horrorterrors exacerbates her negative qualities, making her even more secretive and inward. If pressed hard enough, Rose can be volatile, unstable, and violent, acting with no regard for consequence. This is especially true if the matter involves the people she cares deeply about--when her mother is murdered, she does a swan dive off the deep end and embarks on a quest of ruthless vengeance.
She is, however, a teenaged girl and as such has a playful side. Despite her serious, stoic demeanor, she allows herself to enjoy "silly" indulgences like trashy romance novels, adorable kittens, and the occasional pony. Not that she'd ever admit it.
Ever.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
>> Rose's strife specibus (the fancy Homestuck way of saying "weapon of choice") is needlekind. Despite her affinity for passive-aggression, she proves to be ferocious in real combat and is lethal with a pair of needlewands.
>> Rose's Sburb title is the Seer of Light. In Homestuck, the light aspect does not necessarily equate to "good" or literal illumination--rather, fortune, luck, or the revealing of knowledge (a type of illumination in itself). Considered a passive class, the seer aids his or her team by guiding and making information available. A Seer of Light, is one with the ability to chart the "most fortuitous path"--Rose, after ascending to the god tiers, has the ability to not only see the most favorable outcome for their team, but also elucidate what they need to do to accomplish it.
Since the Tranquility is effectively outside all Sburb sessions, this ability will be muddled. Inherently knowing the ideal path is reduced to a slightly heightened sense of favorable or unfavorable courses of action. Basically just some really good intuition.
>> A god tier player like Rose is conditionally immortal, and will be revived in all but two circumstances--a "just" death (one they deserve) or a "heroic" death (which is exactly what it sounds like). This is likely an ability that she will lose upon coming to the Tranquility. You die in space you die in real life.
>> Despite her title's role as an illuminator of information, she has a tendency to be incredibly secretive, withholding important details or hiding her plans despite detrimental effects to herself or her friends (an Sburb title is meant to challenge the player). She is headstrong, reckless, and hyper-committed to a task to the point of tunnel vision or single-mindedness. When she fixates on unraveling the mysteries of Sburb, she becomes mysterious, avoidant, and eventually starts ignoring her friends in favor of her quest. She will likely behave in a similar fashion when it comes to solving the mystery of the Tranquility.
>> Rose can be somewhat naive and easily manipulated simply because she constantly convinces herself that she is in control. Her inclination towards the macabre leads her to ancient eldritch abominations that she listens to without question, despite the warnings of her friends, all the while firmly believing that she was making her own choices. She becomes entangled in the machinations of Doc Scratch because of her curiosity, and suffers a breakdown as a result.
>> Highly sarcastic and exceedingly cynical, Rose is often facetious, naturally suspicious, and has trouble believing that other people don't behave in a similar fashion or think the way she does (i.e. cynically). This rather callous attitude makes her very difficult to deal with at times, especially combined with her tendency to fixate on problems.
>> She enjoys psychoanalyzing everything and everyone, which usually ends up more aggravating than not.
Inventory:
>> 1 pair of god tier pajamas, in Seer of Light flavor.
>> 1 black Squiddle dress.
>> 1 empty Sylladex (tree fetch modus) with several blank cards.*
>> The Thorns of Oglogoth--weaponized knitting needles imbued with dark magic. Mostly she uses them to stab things and then blow them up.*
>> 1 trashy troll romance novel.
*Please feel free to nerf/disallow these items as you see fit.
Appearance:
Rose is a teenaged girl of average height and build, with platinum blonde hair and violet eyes (YES I KNOW I'M SORRY IT'S NOT MY FAULT). She always wears a headband and is most commonly seen in her orange god-tier get up--it's part of the job.
Age: Fifteen, but Rose is independent by nature, a quality only exacerbated by playing Sburb. She's communed with eldritch gods, died twice, and seeing as how the second death was suicide for a cause, it's safe to say she is capable of handling the S.S. Spacehell.
AU Clarification: N/A
S A M P L E S
Log Sample:
She feels stifled.
And it's not just a physical stifling, either. The tube down her throat is bad enough, but something else has happened, something very strange that she can't quite put her finger on.
Stranger than falling out of a tube of blue goo, anyway.
It takes her a towel and a few moments of clearing her head before she realizes what it is. She can't see properly. Not physical seeing, of course, she takes in her surroundings just fine, cataloguing the mess of stumbling, soaking wet individuals who seem just as disoriented as she, filing away some particularly interesting characters for later investigation. No, there's something wrong with her Seeing.
Since dying for the second time and spending what already seems like an eternity on a godforsaken meteor, Rose had become more than accustomed to knowing things, inherently detecting that fabled Most Fortuitous Path, the road to victory. She'd never been able to see just what, exactly, awaited them at the end of their journey, but as her company's Seer of Light, she was certain she knew how to get there. That was her job.
Now, though, that knowing, seeing feeling is...muddled. Stifled. Like someone's wrapped her brain in cotton.The paths are less clear and even if her powers aren't working properly, as if someone has thrown a damp cloth over her face, she can make a reasonable guess that she isn't in Kansas anymore.
Rose doesn't know where, exactly, she's been taken, but if there's one thing she knows about herself, it's that she will have answers.
Comms Sample:
It seems to me we are beyond the point of customary introductions, so I'll err on the side of brevity and attempt to get straight to the essential details of this message with pinpoint accuracy. If I am to understand that we are hurtling through the cosmos, I will need further specifications as to what type of space we currently traverse.
I'm sure it's news to some of you that there are, in fact, different types of space, and as someone who is no stranger to multiple universes existing concurrently, I am curious as to whether or not we, at present, exist outside all sessions of a seemingly innocuous game I once played with my friends. Sunglasses-clad masters of irony and their avian counterparts need not apply.
Please do not trouble yourselves if you cannot enlighten me regarding the situation. The elaborate ins and outs of paradox space are admittedly vexing if you have not been exposed to the aforementioned game, but any information is appreciated. Barring that, I consider myself a fan of a great many conversation topics, so it should not be difficult to find an alternative conference. We can discuss our interests, or what we enjoy doing in our spare time. Perhaps we will even find that we share an intellectual pursuit or two.
I'll go first. My name is Rose Lalonde. I enjoy literature and knitting, and I am exceedingly pleased to make your collective acquaintance.