The topic where Dimitri/Planetbox tells us about Homestuck

Homestuck began on April 13th, 2009, the 13th birthday of our chief protagonist and future boy-skylark, John Egbert. Three days prior was supposed to be the day he received the Sburb Beta in the mail, but it was running late. It showed up later that afternoon, and after overcoming a variety of domestic adversities, he retrieved the game, along with a birthday package from his internet friend, Dave Strider.



John soon established a game connection with another friend, Rose Lalonde, who'd spent the day badgering him about playing with her, after unsuccessfully attempting to convince Dave to play. Upon connecting, Rose was able to manipulate John's environment, move his furniture around via cursor, and restructure the shape of his room. John was unable to do this to Rose's environment however. He'd installed the client copy of the beta, and required the server copy for that.



The server copy was trapped in his dad's car, along with a birthday package from another friend, Jade Harley. Jade messaged John inquiring about the package. As of this moment, neither her package nor the server copy has been recovered by John. Rose had also prepared a package for John, but had not mailed it yet. It still sits in her room. Dave's package contained the authentic stuffed bunny from Con Air.



In addition to allowing Rose to control John's environment, Sburb provided an array of devices Rose deployed throughout John's house. These devices used together provided a system by which the players could manufacture any item using the code on the back of that item's captchalogue card, if they gathered enough grist to pay for it. Later, they would learn to combine item codes to master the art of punch card alchemy, whereby items could be fused together in purpose and design.



One device on being activated began a countdown, and released an entity called a kernelsprite. The countdown ticked down to the moment John's house would be struck by a meteor, destroying his neighborhood. To escape this demise, John had to use the devices to manufacture a special item that looked like a blue apple, and take a bite of it, in order to transport his entire house just before impact to the safety of a mysterious dark realm, where his house would situate itself atop a tall rock column high above a blanket of clouds. This realm is called the Medium.



Before he entered the Medium though, John and Rose prototyped his kernelsprite with the large harlequin doll his dad got him for his birthday, transforming the sprite to bear its likeness, including the ways the doll was disfigured via earlier hijinks. It had a slashed eye and one arm, and so too did the sprite. When John entered the Medium, the sprite's kernel hatched, thus imbuing all the enemies John and his friends would face with properties of the sprite. The lesser adversaries John faced first, Shale Imps, all wore harlequin garbs. They became more powerful and more radically mutated with each successive pre-Medium prototyping.



After entering the Medium, John's dad was kidnapped by imps. While John was looking for him, he accidentally prototyped the sprite with his grandmother's ashes, transforming it again. This prototyping had no effect on the enemies, since he was already in the Medium, and the kernel had already hatched. Instead, only the sprite was affected, and it took on the appearance, personality, and memories of his grandmother, becoming Nannasprite, a game-supplied albeit customized guide for John. She explained aspects of the game, about Skaia residing at the center of the Medium, beyond seven gates floating directly above his house, and about an eternal/timeless war fought there between dark and light, one that light was always destined to lose.



Rose, who'd been having frequent internet connection issues, lost her connection as she tried to lift John's car to retrieve the game and the package. The car fell into the abyss below. A storm caused her house to lose power along with its wireless internet connection. Her laptop was able to run on battery power for a time, while she tapped into the wireless signal from the laboratory next door. When her laptop ran out of power, she had to overcome more family strife (and endure a gift pony in the process), go outside in the rain, and plug it into the small generator outside the mausoleum of her dead cat, Jaspers. She continued her session with John inside the mausoleum, while the meteor-sparked forest fire surrounding her house grew more intense.



From the house, Rose's mom opened a secret passage in the mausoleum to help her escape. The passage lead to the lab next door, where Rose found a stable, portable source of power and internet for her computer. She also found a terminal projecting the impact times and locations for the millions of meteors presently bombarding the planet, along with all the other live sessions of other players around the world. She also found a little girl's room, a mutant kitten she named Vodka Mutini, and a cloning machine operating through the science of ectobiology. Its terminal was locked on to her cat Jaspers at whatever point in his life the user specified.



She attempted to appearify Jaspers from a moment in her early childhood, before he whispered a secret to her. But doing so would have caused a paradox, so it appearified (paradoxified) a pile of slime instead. The machine used the slime to create a fetal paradox clone of Jaspers in a glass tube. On the monitor, Jaspers then told young Rose the secret, then vanished, only to show up dead weeks later and put in the mausoleum for years until the present. Rose left the laboratory moments before it was destroyed by a meteor impact. She transportalized back to her mom's room, proceeded to her room to wait for Dave to connect with her and rescue her from the next imminent impact.



Dave was charged with acquiring his bro's copy of the game to help Rose. Earlier he had lost his copy of the game to a mishap involving a crow. It flew in his window, seized the game, and Dave accidentally impaled it with a sword, sending the crow and the game out the window onto a landing far below his apartment. He searched his bro's room unable to find it, was briefly shadowed by Lil Cal, and then found a note beckoning him to meet on the roof for a confrontation. Dave and his bro dueled on the roof extensively, and Dave was thoroughly bested. Upon defeating Dave, his bro dropped the copies of the game, and flew off on his rocket board into the sky.



Dave used the copies to connect with Rose, and quickly deployed the devices while her house was on fire, surrounded by flaming tornadoes, and minutes away from being destroyed by a meteor. Rose prototyped her kernelsprite with Jaspers, specifically to understand the meaning of the secret he whispered to her years ago. She was advised to do this by Jade, who told her about the game in the first place. Dave then prototyped the kernelsprite again with the tentacled princess doll given to Rose on her birthday by her mom. Both of these prototypings would have an effect on the enemies once Rose entered the Medium and the kernel hatched. Rose used the alchemiter to create the special item - for her, a purple wine bottle - which she needed to break to enter. She eventually did, transporting her house just before the meteor collided.



The meteor left a crater. Over time, at the site of impact, a large, white structure that looked like a wine bottle grew there, and the crater filled up with sand as the climate of the post-apocalyptic Earth gradually changed. The "cork" of that bottle was a large metal cylinder with an interior much like an advanced science station, with a variety of devices and monitors inside. 413 years after the meteor impact, the Wayward Vagabond walked through the desert and discovered this station. Inside, he found canned rations, a firefly he named Serenity, an appearifier, and four monitors hooked up to a keyboard.



On one of the monitors was John, just after he'd entered the Medium. WV could type commands to John directly, much as the readers of this story could type commands for the characters to follow. Most of John's actions upon entering the Medium were authored by WV, until he became preoccupied with other activities, such as building a town out of cans, playing chess with cans, and drawing chalk murals depicting the cosmological arrangement of Skaia, the Medium, the light and dark planets known as Prospit and Derse, and the four planets the kids would each occupy upon entering the game, called The Land of Wind and Shade (John), The Land of Light and Rain (Rose), the Land of Heat and Clockwork (Dave), and Jade's planet, which is yet to be seen.



He also activated a countdown in the station which caused it to blast out of the crater and fly to designated "home" coordinates. Along the way, it passed over the sand-filled crater that was the impact site for John's meteor, on the other side of the continent. John's meteor had caused a giant white tree to grow in the crater. The tree grew an apple-like station from a branch, which fell to the sand. The Peregrine Mendicant found this station. After WV flew overhead, PM activated her station's homing feature as well, which caused it to fly to the same destination. Along the way, she used her terminal to attempt to command Jade, who from the perspective of the terminal, had just arrived in the Medium. This caused the terminal to explode for unknown reasons, leaving a hole in the station. One of the station's robotic worms recovered one of PM's falling mailboxes, and she befriended it, after earlier slaying another one with her black regisword.



WV landed at the site of the ancient frog ruins across the now dried up Pacific Ocean. The site was once the island where Jade lived, but nothing of the island remained except for the ruins. The mountain her house was on, and the volcano next to it, were replaced by a large empty chasm. PM landed shortly after WV, and they met. They were confronted by the Aimless Renegade, who fired at them from the frog ruins with old weaponry he'd been hoarding, once belonging to Jade's grandpa. Millions of years ago, the frog ruins grew from a crater, struck by a meteor that emerged from a Sburb portal in space. Jade's radioactive, omnipotent, space-warping dog named Becquerel emerged from this crater as well.



Jade's grandpa pioneered this island, and built the house Jade lives in. Her grandpa has been dead for many years, and stands stuffed in front of the fireplace. She has been looked after by her dog who she calls Bec. She begins the day with several tasks to accomplish - to feed Bec, and to retrieve a birthday package mailed by John. She irradiates a steak, and heads outside to the site where the package will be dropped. She knows it will be dropped there because one of the reminders she wears on her fingers jogs her memory about it. She wears them to keep track of the many things she knows about the future, through dreams.



She falls asleep frequently and spontaneously. When she sleeps, her dream self is awake, and living on the moon that orbits the light planet, Prospit. Prospit very closely orbits Skaia, a huge sphere of blue sky and clouds, which nanna describes as a "dormant crucible of unlimited creative potential." When Prospit's moon eclipses Skaia, it drifts into Skaia for a time, mingling with the clouds. Dream Jade then witnesses many past and future events in the clouds. While asleep, she is often confused about what is real and what isn't. When she wakes up, she pieces together future events from her memory of the cloud visions, and from logs recorded by her dreambot. Her dreambot is a robotic surrogate that activates while she sleeps in her bed. It mimics in the real world the movement and actions of her dream self on the moon, and records a video log of what she sees while dreaming.



Prospit's moon has two towers of identical design, and similar design to Jade's house. Dream Jade lives in one tower. Dream John lives in the other. Dream John is still asleep, and John has no knowledge of the dream world, which is to say, the entire game session he would initiate on his 13th birthday. When he goes to sleep, instead of waking up on the moon as Jade does, he remains slumbering in his dream room, tormented by his subconscious. This torment is expressed when he sleepwalks, and draws troubling scribbles on the walls of his room. When awake, he cannot see the scribbles, as is subconscious suppresses his awareness of them. It is not until he has a perception-altering revelation about his dad does he begin to see them. He initially believed they were new additions to his room, perhaps scrawled by imps. However they were present long before, visible in his room while he prepared Jade's birthday package months ago.



John prepared a package for each of his three friends, whose 13th birthdays were December 1st (Jade), 3rd (Dave), and 4th (Rose). He gave Rose a knitting set, and she then took an intense interest knitting. He gave Dave the pair of shades Ben Stiller wore in Starsky and Hutch, which he wore from then on, replacing the shades in the style his bro wore. He gave Jade a blue version of his own ghost shirt, and some pumpkin seeds to help her replace the pumpkins that kept disappearing from her garden. But she did not receive this on the birthday John intended. She received it in the past, on her birthday when she was very young, causing her to take an interest in gardening in the first place, to take a liking to blue apparel, and to eventually befriend John over the internet and lead him, Rose, and Dave down a path where they would ultimately play this game together.



Jade did retrieve his package in the present as planned, but immediately took it to another location where it disappeared. WV in the far future appearified it from that location on accident. The package contained further instructions for him. He was to bring it to PM, and she was to use her station's sendificator to send it to another place and time. After she did this, the package appeared in front of young Jade on her birthday. Jade orchestrated the sequence of events through knowledge of them by her cloud visions.



She orchestrated similar events for the package she sent to John, plotting the circuitous route through time and space it was meant to-okay this is really getting out of hand I'll stop now.