Last time on Homestuck: troll romance.
This time on Homestuck: Spades Slick reveals that he was Karkat’s Jack Noir hundred of centuries ago. Dun dun dunn! Elsewhere, Sollux wakes up on Derse. There’s a chart that shows which trolls are on which moon: purple for Derse, yellow for Prospit. Sollux returns as the Mage of Doom to his Land of Brains and Fire.
Back on Vriska’s planet, she and Tavros go adventuring. I guess that relationship hasn’t been going as terribly as we left it? Maybe the kiss cleared things up for them? Meanwhile, Terezi as the Seer of Mind in the Land of Thought and Flow hears the strange, cursive voice that Rose heard way back when. I’d be pretty sure that this is Doc Scratch, but Terezi refers to it as a her. Mysteries abound! The voice instructs her to exile Jack Noir.
Nepeta, as the Rogue of Heart in the Land of Little (sugar) Cubes and Tea, finally gets to meet Equius, the Heir of Void. They’re both trying to track down Aradia. So the first thing to do, obviously, is to check on the trans-timeline bulletin board Karkat set up. It’s pretty great. The bulletin board is accessible from all points in time in a sort of self-fulfilling loop of actions and reactions. You show up and respond how you respond, whether you intended to or not and whether you’ve read what you posted or not. When it’s time for you to post, what you’ve already read that you posted has disappeared. It kind of calls into question the whole concept of free will.
People mostly just show up to the trans-timeline bulletin board to mock Karkat, including his future self, and it becomes as big a meme for them as the Bee Movie script is for us. I’m not going to lie here: I would do this.
Elsewhere, Terezi is talking to the White Cursive Lady through crayon questions. Terezi asked her where she is but isn’t getting an answer. Karkat starts up another memo because of chat client predestination, and people pretty much just use it to ask for romantic advice, including Eridan and Tavros. Vriska and Tavros use it to sort out their lack of feelings for each other, and Vriska sounds like she has full intentions of continuing to be a jerk.
The White Cursive Lady talks to Vriska, too, telling her that she has important work to do. It’s revealed to be a future version of their Black Queen! Dun dun dunn. I think in “Intermission I” she was going by Snowman? Anyhow, she’s planning to use both Vriska and Terezi to tear through her own kingdom in order to get back at Jack Noir/Spades Slick. Elsewhere, Kanaya has entered as the Sylph of Space in the Land of Rays and Frogs and has started reading one of Karkat’s memos. The game went pretty much like clockwork since they’re all expert gamers, but something went wrong somewhere. Kanaya suggests that they’re all given roles that challenge them rather than ones that fit their strengths.
Terezi reunites with her dragon lusus sprite, which is heartwarming. She and Karkat discuss missions. Like Snowman told her to do, she’s planning how to retrieve the Black Queen’s ring, destroy it, and exile her game’s version of Jack Noir. Karkat’s not cool with this, but then again he’s the only one who actually likes Jack Noir. Terezi reveals that she has an entirely different mode of perception from everyone else and she doesn’t want to not be blind.
And now, after a really long time, we finally get another video section! We flashback to Vriska lying on the floor in her home on Alternia, her arm cut off. She gets up, her mind set on revenge. Her mind control reaches out and grabs Tavros, who uses his animal mind control to control Terezi’s dragon, who controls Terezi. She walks out into the forest and stares at the sun both on Prospit and on Alternia. I’m guessing that this is why she’s blind? I also didn’t realize that trolls must be nocturnal. I guess the rays of their sun must be too strong for them normally.
In Sgrub, the trolls all fight off various monsters. Robot!Aradia tackles Vriska and starts beating her up, but stops when Tavros comes out. She disappears. Vriska wakes up on Prospit, where Terezi slaps her. Wherever Aradia disappeared to, she’s aware of the person bossing her around, Double Deuces. He’s doing it through the command text that sends you through the story, which we haven’t seen for a while but which definitely still exists. Aradia tells him to stop bossing her around because she’s not okay with it, so he instructs her to keep going as she was. So, obviously, the best thing for her to do is to set up her own trans-timeline bulletin board to converse with her future selves and provide exposition.
Part of Aradia’s big plan is to reroute future selves from alternate doomed timelines to the final battlefield in order to get one last chance at a constructive outcome over the main timeline, even though they’re all doomed no matter what they do. She needs their combined psychic power in order to combat the Black King, the final boss, because Feferi prototyped her terrifying lusus, and he has immense psychic powers now. Aradia says that this could’ve been bad luck, but she thinks that it happened because both Skaia and the gods require that they prove themselves worthy of the ultimate reward through trials.
They do prove themselves worthy, but only temporarily; they’re interrupted by a rift in paradox space opened by the humans we started this webcomic out with. These rifts are pretty normal for paradox space and tend to be called a scratch. But this scratch forced somebody who’d been hiding for their entire game session to show himself: an indestructible, omnipotent, and enraged demon. The main group of trolls absconded while Aradia’s copies bought them all time. They hid in the veil and waited. They were banished from the universe they’d left behind but were unable to enter the ultimate reward of the universe they’d created: Earth. Their zodiac signs twinkle around the planet they made.