Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

ALL BETA SPAWNS

Bethany "Beth" Egbert- Pyrope ♎♀️

Title: Seer Of Breath

-Has John's optimism and Terezi's intuition.

-Bright eyed and whimsical.

-She's giving Pollyanna.

-A bit naive.

-Likes LARPing, pranks, bad puns, and courtroom dramas.

-Is fluent in Braille.

Dash and Dana Strider-Vantas ♋♂️♀️

Titles: Knight Of Time and Maid of Rage

-Most strongly resemble and take after Dave.

-Dash is cool, calculated, and sharp witted.

-Despite appearances, Dana is bold, outspoken, and more emotionally expressive than her brother.

-Dash has a strong sense of irony. 

-Dana talks fast and argues faster.

-All the Strider-Vantas siblings have a close, yet teasing bond.

-Both are almost never seen without their signature shades.

Ararat Strider-Vantas ♋♀️

Title: Page Of Mind

-Most strongly resembles and takes after Karkat.

-Dana calls her Ara while Dash calls her Rat.

-The youngest of the Strider-Vantas kids.

-Highly intelligent and sarcastic.

-More introverted than her siblings, but has a commanding presence when she speaks.

-Fascinated by ancient troll war history and obscure memes.

Jericho Lalonde-Maryam ♍♂️

Title: Sylph Of Doom

-Blends elegance with eerie insight.

-Quiet, but emotionally intelligent.

-Often speaks in cryptic metaphors or poetic riddles.

-Loves literature, fashion, and botany.

-Can deliver a life shattering roast with a calm smile.

-Can glow in the dark.

Tiberias "Ty" Harley 🟩♂️

Title: Heir Of Space

-A wildcard, both literally and figuratively. 

-Enthusiastic and curious.

-Inherited his mother's scientific genius.

-Has an affinity for space-time anomalies.

-Tends to tinker with experimental gadgets, often to unpredictable results.

-Loves astronomy, shooting stars, and trying to build portals (despite being told not to).

Cilicia Medigo ♈♀️

Title: Prince Of Light

-Fashionista

-Half siblings with Cyprus and Petra.

-A firebrand with a flare for the dramatic.

-Owns a sharp tongue.

-Ambitious.

-Never underestimates the power of first impressions.

-Despite her posh attitude and pretending not to, she's fiercely protective of her siblings. 

-The kind of girl that would wear heels in a lava pit just to prove that she can.

Jordan Peixes ♓♂️

Title: Bard Of Heart

-Competes with Lee for Eden's affections.

-Charming, smooth-talking, and a bit vain.

-An underwater hearththrob.

-Can be full of himself, but genuinely cares for his friends. 

-Surprisingly sensitive about his singing voice.

Galilee "Lee" Peixes ♓♂️

Title: Rogue Of Heart

-Competes with Jordan for Eden's affections.

-A deep thinker with a poetic soul.

-More introspective.

-Has an affinity for marine biology and coral restoration.

-Unlike his brother, he's not the one to go for flashy gestures or loud declarations.

-Although he does try to take the high road, Jordan's antics tend to get under his scales.

Gethsemane "Genny" Makara ♑♀️

Title: Muse Of Void

-A sleepy gal.

-Almost exclusively wears pajamas, or clothes that can pass for pajamas.

-Has a fondness for philosophical late night conversations. Usually on the floor at 3 am.

-Insightful to other people's emotions.

-Despite her lethargy, she possesses the Makara bloodline's unpredictability. 

Cyprus Zahak ♐♂️

Title: Knight Of Blood

-Cilicia and Petra are his half siblings.

-Stoic and justice driven.

-Strong sense of discipline and honor.

-Tends to speak formally, even with friends.

-Lets his actions do the talking for him.

-An excellent engineer.

-Never breaks a sweat. Ever.

Petra Leijon ♌♀️

Title: Thief Of Life

-Cilicia and Cyprus are her half siblings. The youngest of the trio.

-All heart, guts, and feral determination. 

-Friendly, but intense. 

-Teases her siblings endlessly.

-An avid shipper who inserts herself into the romantic drama of others with glee. If there's a secret crush, she most definitely knows about it.

Corinth and Minnith Captor ♊♂️♂️

Titles: Mages Of Doom

-Practically impossible to tell them apart looks wise.

-They share everything from their DNA to their bizarre sense of humor.

-Tech prodigies like their father.

-They revel in trolling others with their twin trickery.

-No one knows who's actually who aside from Sollux, and they both refuse to clarify.

Ophir Nitram ♉♂️

Title: Heir Of Hope

-A gentle giant. 

-A deep connection with animals. Can even communicate with them. 

-Any secrets you tell him are going straight to the grave with him when he dies.

-Drops surprisingly profound observations when no one expects them.

-Speaks slowly, but thoughtfully.

Keilah Serket ♏♀️

Title: Maid Of Heart

-Soft spoken with a big heart.

-Meek, polite, and hates confrontation. 

-Constantly worried about being a burden.

-Hides her intellect because she doesn't want to seem arrogant.

-Loves flowers, soft instrumental music, and tea.

Eden Ampora ♒♀️

Title: Witch Of Void

-Not interested in either Jordan or Lee.

-Off in her own little world. Introverted and dreamy. 

-Embarrassed of her dad.

-Her fashion taste is a blend of witchy and nautical.

-Likes making her own stories, sea creatures, and classic literature. 

DYNAMICS

🌀 Beth

Close friends with: Petra, Lee, and Ophir. 

Occasional rivalry with: Cilicia.

Mildly intimidated by: Genny. She can never tell if Genny is awake or plotting something deep.

Mutual respect with: Cyprus. She appreciates his stoicism and he quietly admires her energy.

🕶️ Dash

Close with: Dana (his twin), but they argue constantly. He also gets along with Petra and Jericho.

Rivalry with: Corinth and Minnith. They prank each other with increasingly bizarre tech.

Avoids: Eden. He doesn’t know how to handle disinterest.

Respectful of: Cyprus. Brooding guys silently acknowledging each other’s trauma.

💥 Dana 

Besties with: Petra and Beth. Chaos Trio™ energy.

Rivalry with: Jordan. She finds his dramatics annoying and “not Strider enough.”

Protective of: Ararat, even if she teases her relentlessly.

Back-and-forth flirtmance tension with Jericho, whom she finds mysterious.

🧠 Ararat

Close with: Jericho and Keilah. 

Mild rivalry with: Lee, mostly in philosophical debates.

Teased by: Dash and Dana, but they’d destroy anyone who messed with her.

Respected by: Eden. They share a love of silence and contemplation.

🐟 Jordan

Rival: Lee. Constant competition for Eden’s heart.

Trying hard to impress: Eden (and failing).

Has a sibling-like tension with: Petra, who mocks his overdramatic romantic gestures.

Friendly with: Cilicia. They enjoy being fabulous together.

Irritates: Dana.

🐠 Lee

Rival: Jordan (mutual)

Deeply in love with: Eden, but too shy to say it directly.

Close with: Ophir and Ararat.

Gets along with: Beth, who occasionally tries to push him and Eden together (awkwardly).

🌊 Eden

Uncomfortable around: Jordan and Lee (they both pine too hard).

Close with: Ararat and Keilah- fellow introverts who get each other.

Avoids: Her dad’s legacy at all costs. Eridan who?

Fascinated by: Jericho’s dark aesthetic. They have quiet chats about gothic novels.

🎭 Jericho 

Friendship with: Genny and Ararat.

Mutual fascination with: Dana. She brings the storm, he brings the eerie calm.

Friendly rivalry with: Cilicia over fashion and aesthetics.

😴 Genny

Quiet friendship with: Jericho and Ophir. 

Confuses: Almost everyone. No one can tell when she’s joking.

Surprisingly good at calming: Petra and Dana during meltdowns.

Accidentally intimidating to: Beth, Eden, and Keilah.

🛡️ Cyprus

Protective older brother vibes toward: Cilicia and Petra.

Respected by: Dash, Beth, and Ophir.

Quietly critical of: Jordan’s antics. Finds him exhausting.

Close in ideology with: Ararat.

🐾 Petra

Best friends with: Dana and Beth.

Sparring partners with: Cyprus- both literal and verbal.

Friendly teasing of: Jordan. She ships him with everyone just to mess with him.

Close bond with: Keilah.

🔮 Cilicia

Besties with: Jordan, though she occasionally rolls her eyes at him.

Sibling tension with: Petra (too feral) and Cyprus (too stiff).

Friendly rivalry with: Beth- Pranks vs. Poise

Not-so-secretly annoyed by: Genny’s pajamas.

🤖 Corinth & Minnith

Joint prank war with: Dash and Dana.

Friendly but deeply strange: Everyone finds them weird. They like that.

Often hack: Jordan’s communicator to send fake messages “from Eden.”

Creepy closeness: Even their friends aren’t sure if they have independent thoughts.

🐐 Ophir

Best friends with: Lee and Keilah.

Mentor-like figure to: Eden. Helps her care for sea creatures or just listen.

Highly respected by: Cyprus.

Animal whisperer: Even Genny's spooky pet likes him.

💜 Keilah

Closest friends: Ararat, Eden, and Ophir.

Sister figure to: None, but Petra is her sister figure.

Quiet crush on: Either Jericho or Ophir. Haven't decided yet. Just put a pin on this one for now, okay?

QUADRANTS

❤️ ♥ Matespritship 

Jericho ♥ Dana

Opposites attract: Her fire balances his shadow. Their tension simmers in poetic sarcasm and occasional dramatic flirting.

Lee ♥ Eden (One-sided or slow burn)

Lee deeply pines for Eden, who remains aloof. This could eventually bloom into a mutual matespritship- if she ever pulls her head out of the clouds.

Petra ♥ Keilah (soft ship)

Petra is fiercely protective of Keilah. Keilah, though shy, trusts Petra more than anyone. This has quiet potential to develop into romance.

Ty ♥ Beth (future potential)

Wild chaos twins. She energizes him, he grounds her in science and wonder. They orbit each other like two particles in unpredictable motion.

💠 ♦ Moirallegiance 

Ararat ♦ Ophir

Ararat’s sharp mind pairs beautifully with Ophir’s quiet strength. She trusts him with her darkest thoughts and he never judges.

Petra ♦ Dana

Chaotic besties who regulate each other’s meltdowns. Dana stops Petra from going feral. Petra helps Dana feel seen.

Jericho ♦ Keilah

Jericho offers calm confidence. Keilah finds courage around him. They’re emotionally intuitive and healing.

Ty ♦ Genny

Ty’s high energy is soothed by Genny’s near immobile vibes. He respects her "nap wisdom," and she finds his curiosity amusing.

Lee ♦ Ararat

Philosophical moirails. They talk for hours in libraries and abandoned rooftops, questioning the universe.

🖤 ♠ Kismesissitude 

Jordan ♠ Dana

Mutual annoyance. He finds her abrasive and she finds him pompous. Yet their sparks crackle. They argue constantly, and it shouldn’t be hot… But it is.

Cilicia ♠ Petra

Fashionista vs. Feral. Their sibling rivalry is fierce. There’s an intense love-hate vibe that others occasionally mistake for kismesis energy. 

Corinth ♠ Dash

Passive-aggressive pranking war with hidden emotional tension. The twins constantly bait Dash, and he takes the bait every time. There's a lot of posturing here.

Cilicia ♠ Beth (Low-level or comical)

They both love attention, but for very different reasons. Their playful rivalry could cross into flirt-fighting.

♣ ♣ Auspisticism

Lee ♣ Jordan ♥ Eden

Jordan’s dramatics make Eden uncomfortable. Lee (though jealous) often has to defuse Jordan and protect Eden’s peace.

Cyprus ♣ Cilicia ♠ Petra

Classic “sibling arbiter.” Cyprus often steps in when Petra and Cilicia’s arguments become unproductive or dangerous.

Keilah ♣ Dana ♠ Jordan

Keilah becomes an unwilling third party trying to keep Dana and Jordan from exploding. She mediates their rivalry with awkwardly kind words and cookies.

Genny ♣ Dash ♠ Corinth & Minnith

Genny doesn’t do much, but just being there weirds everyone out enough that the prank war occasionally pauses. She's like a spooky dreamcatcher for chaos.

💭 Unrequited or Complicated

Jordan ♥ Eden (Umrequited)

He is obsessed with her. She is not into it, and it gives everyone secondhand embarrassment.

Corinth ♠ Minnith (borderline self-kismesis)

Their twin dynamic may cross into a parody of a kismesis. It’s weird. No one brings it up.

Chapter Text

This version of Earth is the result of a timeline where the Human and Troll universes collided and merged into a single, coexisting society. It’s been long enough that hybrids are now the norm, though tensions between cultures, blood castes, and ideologies still linger.

🏙️ Geography & Cities

Planet Name: Okalnion

Main Planet Capital: Utune

A massive urban sprawl built atop the ruins of both Earth cities and Troll hives. The skyline mixes steel skyscrapers with bio-organic troll architecture. Neon signs in Alternian and English light the sky. This is where the majority of the story takes place.

Districts are either segregated by culture or blood color.

Redring: A downtown hotspot for lowbloods and low income humans. Full of art, graffiti, and illegal psionics duels.

Highspire: Upper class neighborhood for highbloods and human elites. Extravagant, snobbish, and always watched.

Veilport: A seaside city rebuilt from Derse shipwrecks. Home to sea dwellers and sea obsessed humans.

Sanctum Grove: A quiet, nature filled refuge where jadebloods and space-time researchers coexist.

Wilderness Zones still exist beyond city limits. Many trolls build remote hives, and wild lusii roam free alongside mutated Earth animals.

🧬 Species & Biology

Hybridization

Human-Troll hybrids are genetically viable and now common. Each hybrid has varying degrees of traits (horns, blood color, psionics, lifespans, etc.).

Lifespans:

Life expectancy varies. Most hybrids live longer than humans but shorter than trolls. Blood color may extend or reduce lifespan slightly.

Lusii & Earth Animals:

Some hybrids inherit lusus guardians; others grow up with Earth pets. In rare cases, lusii have adapted to care for hybrid broods. (E.g., a dragon-lusus babysitting twins in hoodies.)

🧠 Society & Culture

Blood Caste Remnants:

The caste system was legally dismantled—but social prejudice still runs deep. Some institutions (especially in Highspire) quietly enforce blood based discrimination.

Psionics:

Tightly regulated in urban zones. Blue and purplebloods are seen as dangerous if unmedicated. Mind powers like Aranea’s are restricted unless licensed.

Language and Slang:

Alternian is taught alongside English. Most hybrids speak both fluently, and slang often mixes them. 

"Grubcakes" = Cupcakes

"Nub off" = Shut up

"Ghost it" = Disappear fast/ Avoid confrontation

"Sparked" = Flustered or flattered

"Casted" = Slurred way to say someone's showing caste-based behaviors/ prejudice.

"Voidposting" = Posting vague, cryptic or emotionally intense thoughts online.

"Highblue'd" = Acting entitled or elitist (usually mocking highbloods or nobles).

Religion & Lore:

Skaian faiths, Derse cults, and Prospitian peace movements all compete for spiritual ground. Some worship the Horrorterrors; others still believe in the gods of Skaia and the Green Sun.

📚 Education & Training

The Skaia Institute (also known as just "The Institute) is a prestigious interspecies academy for humans, trolls, and hybrids alike. Students can either live in the dorms or live at their own homes.

Psionic suppression fields are both on campus and in the classroom, primarily for safety reasons.

Extracurriculars include Grub Rearing Club, Alchemization Lab Rats, Theatrics and Roleplay Society, and Quadrant Counseling Club.

🌀 Student Cliques at the Skaia Institute

💫 1. The Dreamers

Aesthetic: Flowing robes, celestial motifs, lots of gold or purple.

Members: Mostly Prospit and Derse aligned students; often aspect sensitive or prophetic.

Sub Groups include- 

Prospit Daydreamers: Bright, hopeful, sometimes naïve. Often Seers, Sylphs, Heirs.

Derse Realists: Edgy philosophers, late night thinkers. Often Witches, Princes, and Rogues.

Drama Level: 7/10. Lots of brooding and dream based gossip.

🔥 2. The Aspects-First Crowd

Aesthetic: Aspect-color coded uniforms, pins denoting class. Everything is optimized.

Philosophy: Classpect defines destiny. Aspect purity is key. Highly competitive.

Known to host simulation tournaments and god tier theory debates.

Often run student council or control school wide rituals.

Drama Level: 9/10. Strategic alliances, betrayal arcs, and power plays.

💥 3. The Quadrant-Chasers

Aesthetic: Bold colors, dramatic makeup, matching outfits with quadrant partners.

Philosophy: Relationships are everything. Whether for love, rivalry, or balance, your social worth = your chart.

Love hosting shipping walls and fake quadrant “auctions” for charity.

Host Kismesis Fight Nights and Moirail Picnics.

Drama Level: 11/10. Constant breakup/make-up energy.

🎮 4. The Glitchlings

Aesthetic: Digital streetwear, glitched accessories, LED eyes, meme patches.

Philosophy: “Reality is broken. Might as well hack it.”

Composition: Mostly Doom, Mind, Void, and Time kids. Tech nerds, tricksters, outcasts.

Known for building illegal fetch modi and hacking dreamspace.

Have secret tunnels under the campus no teacher has found.

Corinth & Minnith are the co-leaders. Dash is an honorary member, much to his chagrin. Genny sometimes takes naps in their meeting space.

Drama Level: 6/10. Mostly chaotic good, unless you mess with their mods.

🧪 5. The Hybrid Collective

Aesthetic: Horn jewelry, mixed Earth-Alternian fabrics, DNA helix pins.

Philosophy: Embrace your duality. Fight for hybrid rights and identity.

Composition: Exclusively hybrid students with a passion for activism and cultural harmony.

Host seminars, peace rallies, and interspecies dances.

Sometimes in direct conflict with the Aspect-First crowd.

Drama Level: 5/10. Mostly sincere, but their events sometimes get crashed.

🎭 6. The Theatrics (a.k.a. “Cosplayers of Fate”)

Aesthetic: Elaborate costumes, dramatic flair, always in-character.

Philosophy: Life is a stage. Roleplay is the highest form of emotional truth.

Composition: Art students, LARPers, time loop dramatists, and real weirdos.

Hold weekly “fated encounter” improv sessions.

Fiercely protective of story arcs and quadrant plotlines.

Drama Level: 8/10. Scripted chaos and unscripted tears.

🧊 7. The Untouchables

Aesthetic: Impeccable, controlled. White, black, or royal colors.

Philosophy: We’re better than you. And we know it.

Composition: Mostly highbloods, perfectionists, legacy students.

Rarely engage in school wide activities.

Throw exclusive parties in private dorm towers.

Drama Level: 10/10 – Looks cold, but the infighting is brutal.

💻 Technology & Culture

Sylladex and Fetch Modi are still in use, integrated with human tech (phones, AI, etc).

Alchemization is mainstream in DIY communities, though illegal in certain city districts due to the risk of time clones and paradox goo.

Entertainment blends Alternian drama with human media. Popular shows:

"My Moirail Academia"

"So You Think You Can Kismesis?"

"Ghostly Grubhouse Makeover"

🏛️ Government & Politics

Tensions remain high between trolls and humans over caste legacy, rights, and mixed governance.

Highblood purist factions (like the Cerulean Revival) want to restore Alternian rule.

The Skaian Accord is the treaty that keeps the fusion world from fracturing apart again. Its integrity is shaky at best.

⚖️ The Reconciliation Council

A governing body split evenly between troll, human, and hybrid representatives. Meant to keep the peace, but is often gridlocked.

Blood Caste laws were officially dissolved 50 years ago. Social caste, however, persists.

Tensions remain between purist troll factions (The Cerulean Revival) and anti-troll humans (Order of the Broken Sky).

⚔️ Enforcers

Peacekeeping soldiers trained to handle interspecies violence, psionic outbursts, and quadrant related crime (like abusive kismesis duels).

Uniforms are black and silver, with colored sashes denoting their personal aspect.

Some Enforcers are god tier. Their presence is intimidating.

🪦 History 

The Great Merge was the dimensional event that fused Earth and Alternia. A reality quake still studied by space-time researchers.

The Signless and Sufferer are now honored by a united Remembrance Day for all victims of the old systems.

🧥 Fashion & Aesthetic Trends

Okalnion fashion is wildly eclectic. Here are some subcultures:

Voidcore: Dark cloaks, asymmetry, glitchy patterns. Jericho, Eden, and Keilah frequent this vibe.

Grubpunk: Mismatched troll armor, DIY horns, colored lenses. Petra and Dana rock this hard.

Neon Alternia: Cyber-Alternian pop fashion. Cilicia and Jordan dabble here.

Golden Skaia: Flowing robes, aspect themed jewelry. Popular among dreamers and aspect purists.

📅 Holidays & Events

Merge Day (Dec 13) – Commemorates the day Earth and Alternia fused. City wide festivals, parades, and cosmic light shows.

Moirail Appreciation Week – Celebrated like Valentine’s, but for platonic soulmates. Dana and Petra go hard for this.

Trial by Dance – A traditional troll challenge reimagined as a public dance battle competition.

The Veil Eclipse – A cosmic event where dream moons are visible in the real sky. 

A TIMELINE OF EVENTS

🌌 Pre-Merge Era

Earth and Alternia were entirely separate universes, each evolving on its own.

Both planets were bound to Session events that determined their timelines and realities.

Interactions between humans and trolls only occurred through Sburb/Sgrub game sessions and cross universal anomalies.

💥 The Great Merge (~100 years before present day)

“When the Veil tore, reality stitched itself anew.”

A cataclysmic reality event- believed to be caused by a failed multi-session reset or an unstable Scratch- caused Earth and Alternia to collapse into one another, merging both timelines and planetary forms.

The event fused not only landmasses but entire ecosystems, civilizations, and timelines.

Prospit and Derse crashed into orbit, while Skaia itself cracked open and rained fragments of raw aspect energy down onto the planet.

🔍 Consequences:

Trolls and humans were suddenly coexisting in the same world, often literally on top of one another.

Psionics destabilized reality in parts of the planet for decades.

Language, ecosystems, and even gravity warped in fusion zones.

Dream moons began to affect the living world more directly.

🏗️ The Reconstruction Era (Years 0–30 Post-Merge)

“Peace was not the goal. Survival was.”

Massive cultural violence broke out almost immediately. Troll highbloods tried to reassert control; human governments failed to respond cohesively.

Early resistance groups on both sides fought for either racial dominance or survival.

The Skaian Accord was negotiated 27 years after the Merge- a treaty that banned caste enforcement, legalized hybrids, and established a new planetary government: the Unified Council of Terra Alternia (UCTA).

Civic fusion projects began. School systems, co-governance, and joint militaries were created to keep peace.

Hybrid children began to be born and raised in shared communities, often facing isolation from both cultural sides.

👶 The First Hybrid Generation (Years 30–60 Post-Merge)

These children became living symbols of the planet’s new identity.

Moirail culture from troll society mixed with human concepts of friendship and therapy.

Dreamer alignments were recognized early in life and began being used for class sorting.

Social stratification didn’t disappear. While blood based laws were banned, social caste prejudice persisted (especially in fashion, employment, and elite education).

🧬 The Modern Era (Present Day)

“This generation didn’t inherit a war. They inherited the ghosts of one.”

This new cast of characters are part of the second hybrid generation- the first to grow up with no firsthand memory of the Merge but who carry all of its political and emotional aftermath.

Tensions are resurfacing.

Some highblood purist groups want to reclaim Alternian order.

Some humans seek to undo the merge or create human only zones.

Hybrid activism is on the rise, with figures like teachers, journalists, and young rebels demanding full cultural fusion- not just coexistence.

The Dreaming Realms are becoming unstable again, as Skaia begins flickering in and out of visibility.

Prophecies suggest the next group of god-tier ascensions could permanently decide the planet’s trajectory.

Chapter Text

BLOOD CLASSES

🔴 Lowbloods

Petra

Blood: Olive

Ophir 

Blood: Brown

Genny

Blood: Purple-Rust Hybrid

🟠 Midbloods 

Keilah 

Blood: Soft gold

🔵 Highbloods

Cilicia 

Blood: Cerulean

Cyprus 

Blood: Indigo

🟣 Sea Dwellers 

Jordan

Blood: Violet

Lee

Blood: Tyrian-Violet Hybrid

Eden 

Blood: Mutant Violet

A washed-out version of Eridan’s violet. Considered “tainted” by purists. She's extremely embarrassed by it and keeps it hidden when possible.

🟡 Mutant / Hybrid / Nonstandard Colors

Beth

Blood: Sky Blue

A new color that glows faintly under Skaian light. Represents Breath aspect connection and her Earth-Troll hybrid status.

Dash 

Blood: Candy Red

Hybrid of Karkat's mutant red with human influence. It’s bright, saturated, and rare.

Dana 

Blood: Mid-Red

Darker than Dash’s, but still mutant by Alternian standards. Tends to shimmer when under stress or emotionally charged.

Ararat 

Blood: True Candy Red

Most similar to Karkat's exact mutant red. Hides it with gloves or bloodtone dampeners to avoid stigma.

Jericho 

Blood: Lilac-Grey

A soft, spectral tone, almost like a ghost version of Kanaya’s jade. Ethereal, doom coded. His blood glows faintly in moonlight.

Ty

Blood: Emerald-Green Spark

Technically jade adjacent, but mutated by space energy. Glows and pulses irregularly. Not standard troll or human.

Corinth and Minnith

Blood: Yellow

Classic midblood psionics, passed down from Sollux. Their blood buzzes with static energy and glows faintly under certain stimuli.

POLITICS

🌀 Beth, Chaotic Idealist

Beth is technically anti caste, but she doesn’t trust institutions to change things. She believes the system is broken beyond reform and prefers action- pranks, exposure, and public disruption.

Thinks the Reconciliation Council is useless, but will 100% sneak in and broadcast their secret meetings for laughs.

Fiercely pro hybrid rights and protective of outcasts like Keilah and Eden.

Her dream? “Make the system so absurd it collapses under its own nonsense.”

🧩 Dash, Quietly Anti-Elitist

Keeps his opinions close, but he despises power hoarding. Hates people who act like their blood or aspect makes them better.

Thinks caste is a joke that everyone forgot to stop telling.

Doesn’t trust highbloods, especially sea dwellers and Aspect Purists.

Will never join a protest- but will time skip into restricted servers and delete propaganda files.

🔥 Dana, Loud Anti-Authoritarian

Dana is openly anti caste, anti establishment, and anti subtlety.

She rails against any attempt to reintroduce Alternian traditions, especially through fashion or ritual.

Constantly debates teachers, shouts at the news, and makes underground zines with Petra.

Believes the next rebellion will be started by teenagers- preferably with guitars and alchemized explosives.

🧠 Ararat, Strategic Reconstructionist

Ararat supports rebuilding the system, not destroying it. She thinks the current model is unstable but believes in calculated reform.

Wants the Council to expand hybrid and lowblood representation.

She attends meetings, takes notes, and files motions while her siblings set fire to statues.

She’s seen as the “boring” Strider, but she’s the most likely to become a political figure or reformer.

🕯️ Jericho, Mystic Dissenter

Jericho sees the system as a decaying structure haunted by ancestral sin.

He doesn’t protest loudly. He writes essays, composes eerie poetry, and quietly influences the Dreamer network.

Believes caste and hybrid stigmas are symptoms of a deeper void- one that must be filled with truth, not power.

He supports hybrid equality, but mistrusts flashy revolutionaries.

🌱 Ty, Cosmic Optimist

Ty believes the fusion was meant to happen.

He doesn’t believe in destroying the old ways, but outgrowing them.

Supports hybrid diversity, mixed culture zones, and cross aspect experimentation.

Wary of authority, but more focused on exploring space, time, and creation than fighting the system.

🎭 Cilicia, Image-First Centrist

Cilicia supports equality in theory, but resents when it threatens her social standing.

She believes in progress- so long as it’s fashionable. Thinks extremists are tacky.

Keeps her highblood identity quiet unless it helps her win.

 ⚖️ Cyprus, Honor-Bound Traditionalist (With Regrets)

Cyprus follows order and legacy- but only when it protects others.

Privately ashamed of the old Zahhak caste ties. Publicly loyal to peacekeeping laws.

Believes in discipline, stability, and keeping power in check. Sometimes violently.

Refuses to associate with Cerulean Revivalists, but will duel them if needed.

 🎨 Petra, Grassroots Anarcho-Feralist

Petra believes in burning down any system that tries to label her.

Deeply emotional about hybrid and lowblood rights. Supports direct action, graffiti, and quadrant liberation.

Does not trust the Council, schools, or older generations.

Secretly dreams of founding a new culture based on stories, roleplay, and equality.

👑 Jordan, Entitled Liberalist

Jordan says he supports hybrid rights, but mostly wants attention.

Believes sea dwellers should be respected, but not feared.

Thinks romantic success is the true equalizer, and quadrant harmony will solve society.

More performative than impactful, but has a large fanbase.

🌊 Lee, Pacifist Reformist

Believes society can be improved through compassion and education.

Advocates for peaceful protest, inclusive schools, and quadrant neutral policies.

Quietly supports dismantling caste entirely, but avoids violent rebellion.

Sometimes debates with Ararat and Jericho on how best to change things.

🫥 Eden, Detached Nihilist (Lowkey Anti Caste)

Eden avoids politics, but despises being associated with her dad’s caste legacy.

Doesn’t believe in systems or social hierarchies. Thinks they all end in violence.

Supports hybrid and mutant rights, but won't show up to rallies.

Writes weird, beautiful manifestos on dreamweb forums under an alias.

 🌫️ Genny, Surrealist Voidist

Genny does not care about politics. Unless it starts affecting nap time.

That said, she has deep Void insight into power, often dropping haunting truths mid-yawn.

Believes the caste system is a ghost, and everyone’s chasing shadows.

Occasionally shows up to protests, naps under the stage, then vanishes.

🧨 Corinth and Minnith, Hacktivist Agents of Chaos

Anti caste, anti government, anti reality.

Believe society should be hacked, not fixed.

Upload banned quadrant data to public school systems.

Do not trust any institution. Will break into it, memeify it, and livestream its downfall.

SCHOOL

🌪️ Beth: "The Smartass Trickster Who Actually Gets A’s."

Views the Institute as an overly formal joke but still excels because she likes knowing things.

Pranks teachers constantly but turns in perfectly formatted essays on classpect theory.

Most likely to: Hack the PA system and give a Breath themed motivational speech.

⏳ Dash: "Cool, competent, doesn’t talk in class unless it’s devastating."

Excels in logic heavy courses like Temporal Ethics, Combat Simulation, and Void Theory.

Hates presentations, but his written work is flawless.

Teachers suspect he could lead a revolution if he cared more.

Most likely to: Time skip homework and still ace it.

🔥 Dana: "Class Clown with a Tactical Brain."

Wild in class, always in quadrant drama, but surprisingly sharp in Rage Management and Aspect Manipulation.

Teachers either love or fear her. Some assign extra work just to keep her busy.

Most likely to: Get into a debate with the principal and win.

🧠 Ararat: "Underrated Genius, Quiet Threat."

Consistently scores top marks in Mind, Philosophy, and Strategy classes.

Follows rules but questions them intelligently.

Often called on to de-escalate classroom conflicts.

Most likely to: Correct the teacher’s logic mid-lecture.

🕯️ Jericho: "The Poetic Creeper Who’s Always Right."

Excels in Doom Studies, Void Philosophy, and Dreaming Realms.

Turns in unsettlingly brilliant essays. Teachers are unsure if he's okay.

Speaks in metaphor even during oral exams.

Most likely to: Solve a metaphysical ethics riddle in a single sentence.

🌌 Ty: "Genius Inventor With Questionable Safety Record."

Brilliant in Space Sciences and Alchemization Engineering, but chaotic.

Breaks at least one lab safety rule per week. Usually by accident.

Teachers admire his intellect, but keep fire extinguishers nearby.

Most likely to: Accidentally open a temporary wormhole in shop class.

🎭 Cilicia: "The Trendsetter Who Doesn’t Need to Try (But Does Anyway)."

Strong in Light Theory, Social Engineering, and Cultural Rhetoric.

Turns every group project into a presentation platform.

Teachers note she’s “charismatically manipulative.”

Most likely to: Use a school presentation as a runway show.

⚖️ Cyprus: "Disciplined, Reliable, Alarmingly Intense."

Top of the class in Blood Ethics, Combat Theory, and Aspect Mediation.

Never turns in work late. Always over prepared.

Teachers trust him with class leadership. Even when they shouldn't.

Most likely to: Write a 50-page treatise on loyalty. Voluntarily.

🐾 Petra: "Uncontrollable but Weirdly Effective."

Physically brilliant in Combat and Survival Studies; chaotic in academic classes.

Draws cat doodles in the margins of all assignments.

Teachers either avoid assigning her group work or put her with Dana on purpose.

Most likely to: Show up late but still win the class sparring match.

👑 Jordan: "Charismatic Disaster Who Should Focus More."

Struggles with attention span, but thrives in Performance, Quadrant Dynamics, and Aesthetics.

Constantly distracted by romantic drama.

Teachers mark him as “capable but self absorbed.”

Most likely to: Try to flirt with a test proctor.

🌊 Lee: "Thoughtful Overachiever With Constantly Crumpled Notes."

High performing in Hope Studies, Biology, and Empathy Training.

Sensitive and hardworking but gets derailed by stress.

Teachers adore his sincerity.

Most likely to: Write Eden a love letter during a pop quiz and forget to answer Question 3.

🫥 Eden: "Gifted, Unreachable, Mysterious."

Shows flashes of brilliance in Void Theory and Literature of the Moon.

Skips class occasionally to stare at the sky. No one stops her.

Teachers either underestimate her or treat her like a sleeping god.

Most likely to: Write a three sentence essay that gets quoted in textbooks.

😴 Genny: "The Girl Who’s Always Asleep But Still Passes."

Minimal effort, maximum intuition. Never takes notes. Still passes.

Teachers don’t know how to grade her. Some are afraid to try.

Sleepwalks through psionic trials and nails them.

Most likely to: Say something prophetic during a group nap.

🤖 Corinth and Minnith: "Tech-Savvy Menaces Who Can’t Be Caught."

Brilliant at Doom Coding, Psionic Defense, and Reality Hacks.

Teachers never know which one is in class- Or if it’s both, a clone, or a projection.

Frequently suspended. Remotely.

Most likely to: Hack their own attendance records and replace them with memes.

🐂 Ophir: "Soft-Spoken A+ Student Who Lifts Desks for Fun."

Excellent in Beastkeeping, Hope Studies, and Civic Mediation.

Doesn’t like attention, but earns top marks through quiet effort.

Teachers assign him as the group’s emotional anchor.

Most likely to: Save a wild lusus mid exam and still finish the test early.

💗 Keilah: "Too Shy to Raise Her Hand, but Too Smart to Fail."

Struggles with public speaking and participation but aces theory based work.

Best in Heart Studies, Empathy Labs, and Emotion Mapping.

Teachers adore her gentle nature and wish she’d speak up more.

Most likely to: Cry during a pop quiz, then get 100%.

PARENTAL RELATIONS

❤️ Beth

John is the fun dad and Terezi is the scheming mom. Beth learned her prankster spirit from John and her strategic sharpness from Terezi.

Constantly caught in their bickering, but weirdly loves it.

Terezi tries to "lawyer mom" her, John just wants to go on wind powered joyrides.

-Karkat: Surprisingly protective. She teases him, but listens when it counts.

-Jade: Gives her space themed birthday presents every year.

⏳ Dash 

Keeps emotional distance from both dads, but respects them deeply.

Dave pushes him to “chill out,” while Karkat yells at him to feel things, dammit!

Dash inherited the deflection game from both, which frustrates them endlessly.

-John: Tries to bond with him. It’s awkward, but sweet.

-Sollux: They exchange memes. No talking required.

🔥 Dana 

Butts heads with Karkat constantly. Volume is their love language.

Dave is her emotional support dad, but she pretends he’s “so embarrassing.”

Has more of Karkat’s emotional fire, but also a bit of Dave’s need for approval.

-Terezi: Her debate idol. They practice courtroom screaming together.

🧠 Ararat

Karkat trusts her judgment and Dave respects her silence.

She's the peacemaker of the household, and both dads rely on her more than they admit.

Sometimes feels overlooked emotionally, but appreciated intellectually.

-John: Shares tea and awkward, but genuine affection.

🖤 Jericho

Rose is his intellectual muse and spiritual mirror. Kanaya is his guiding light and the source of his inner peace.

They're proud of him, but worry about his isolation.

He inherited Rose’s eerie eloquence and Kanaya’s unshakable grace.

-Dave: Baffled by him, but calls him “Little Dracula.”

-Jade: Occasionally reminds him to eat.

🌌 Ty

Jade is both parent and lab partner. Ty was raised on moons and mushrooms.

Deep respect and affection, though he sometimes wishes she’d stop testing prototypes on breakfast food.

She’s proud of him, but worries about his reckless curiosity.

-John: Brings him weird wind gifts.

-Dave: Likes the kid’s energy, won’t admit he’s proud.

🎭 Cilicia

Aradia is too philosophical and detached for Cilicia’s taste.

Cilicia resents her mom’s vagueness and lack of ambition, even though she inherited her passion for legacy.

Constantly trying to prove she’s more than “the fashion ghost’s daughter.”

-Terezi: Tries to drag her into LARP court. Cilicia refuses, then designs all the costumes.

⚖️ Cyprus

Cyprus loves his father’s discipline, but silently rejects his caste obsession.

He believes in strength as service, not dominance. An intentional subversion of Equius’s values.

Often emotionally repressed. He's working on it.

-Nepeta: Was the only one who could make him laugh as a kid.

🐾 Petra 

Petra and Nepeta are best friends. They hunt, LARP, and cuddle constantly.

Petra sees her mom as the only adult who gets her.

Can’t stand people who mock Nepeta for being “too much.”

Equius: She respects his strength, but mocks his stiffness.

👑 Jordan

Feferi spoiled him. She believes love fixes everything.

Jordan grew up with privilege and pressure. He wants to be adored, but doesn’t fully grasp what responsibility is.

He resents expectations of leadership, even as he chases popularity.

-Kanaya: Gave him etiquette lessons. They only half worked.

🌊 Lee

Lee is closer to Feferi than Jordan, seeking her approval through quiet acts of kindness.

He’s her emotional anchor and her reminder that not all royalty needs to be loud.

He sees the cracks in her idealism, but protects her from disappointment.

-Eridan: Lee avoids him entirely.

-Kanaya: Thinks he’s a darling.

🫥 Eden 

She’s deeply ashamed of Eridan's history and bloodline.

Has a fragile, complicated relationship with him. He tries to bond, but she shuts him down.

She hides her blood color and avoids sea dweller spaces.

-Feferi: Occasionally reaches out with kindness. Eden appreciates it in silence.

😴 Genny

Genny adores her dad. He’s her snuggle buddy, her protector, and her midnight snack partner.

Others fear him. She sees the calm in him- though she knows his violent side.

She imitates his sleepy cadence and mellow energy.

-Terezi: Keeps a watchful eye on Genny.

-Karkat: Bans Gamzee from events. Genny always finds a loophole.

🤖 Corinth & Minnith 

Sollux raised them. Sort of. They were co-coded in a basement and taught to think in dualities.

The twins adore their dad’s broken brilliance and speak in sync with him.

No one else understands their family dynamic. It just works.

🐂 Ophir

Tavros is supportive and gentle, always encouraging Ophir to dream big.

Their bond is understated, but deeply emotional. They garden and raise lusii together.

Ophir feels proud of his roots and wants to honor them by being brave.

-Nepeta: Adored him as a baby. He still keeps her old sketchbooks.

💗 Keilah

Vriska expected Keilah to be bold, brilliant, and cruel. Instead, she got the softest child imaginable.

Keilah lives in fear of disappointing her mother, even though she quietly rejects everything Vriska stands for.

Their relationship is strained and quiet. Keilah avoids confrontation at all costs.

-Tavros: Once gave her a plush beetle. She treasures it.

OLDEST TO YOUNGEST

Jericho

Dash

Dana

Jordan

Cilicia

Beth

Ty

Cyprus

Lee

Petra

Ararat

Corinth and Minnith

Ophir

Genny

Eden

Keliah

Chapter Text

BETH: ENTER

A young woman stands alone in her room. It just so happens that today is an utterly average day in her utterly average life. It is not her birthday (not for a few more months), there is no sudden reality quake (yet), no dramatic quadrant drama (so far), and no eldritch game mechanics to speak of (give it a minute).

Just you, her, and the unsettling calm that precedes all story shaped storms.

What is her name?

>Sternum Poopypants

That doesn't sound right.

>Bethany Egbert-Pyrope

Perfect!

But that's kind of a mouthful, so we'll just call her Beth for short.

Beth is the type of girl who once tried to prank the school’s public address system into broadcasting kazoo covers of revolutionary speeches- and succeeded.

She is sharp witted, kind hearted, and chaos inclined. She keeps her sylladex in a setting called “Lawn Darts,” which makes item retrieval a dangerous sport.

She keeps a court gavel in her sock drawer, a bubble wand in her pocket, and a half sketched dream diary taped under her desk.

Her room is cluttered with paradox plushies, wind turbines made of spoons, and several fashionably ironic wigs she refuses to elaborate on.

She is, in no uncertain terms, a Breath-bound agent of gleeful entropy, even if she hasn’t realized it yet.

Beth's hobbies include but are not limited to:

Inventing impractical machines for the aesthetic.

LARPing courtroom dramas against her cat.

Subtly undermining authority in ways that make teachers suspicious but can’t technically be punished.

Collecting wind chimes made from broken instruments.

Getting kicked out of clubs she never joined.

She lives in Utune, the post-Merge city where Earth's skyscrapers twist upward like troll hive towers- and where politics, psionics, and prom drama all exist in the same crowded hallways of the Skaia Institute near the heart of the city.

What will Beth do?

>Distraction

Beth drops to her knees and peers under her bed, ostensibly looking for her left shoe but inevitably discovering something else entirely.

There it is.

Her unlicensed, entirely experimental, probably-should-be-illegal mini alchemizer. It hums faintly, like it knows it's not supposed to exist. It also seems to be sitting on top of her missing shoe. Rude.

She reaches under the bed for the shoe.

>Click

The alchemizer activates. A puff of light bursts from it, followed by a very loud HONK and a cloud of confetti that smells like orange soda and moral ambiguity.

Beth stares as the device begins to whir, spin, and project something into the air. A random object from her sylladex, fused with… 

Something else?

It’s…

>A lava lamp full of wind chimes. That sings courtroom audio clips when shaken.

“Neat.” She mutters, absolutely pretending she didn’t just scream a little inside.

She picks it up and gives it a gentle jostle.

>“ORDER! ORDER IN THE COURT!” CLINK CLINK CLINK

Yup. That’s going on the shelf next to the plush gavel and the broken wind powered kazoo drone.

>What will Beth do next?

>What a boring day

She nudges aside an open notebook full of doodled wind symbols and dramatic stick figure LARP trials and places her newest 'creation' between the cardboard scale of justice and a half melted bubble wand that fizzes when angry.

She stares at it for a moment, arms crossed.

“Alright. No more bed based fusion experiments until I at least label the inputs.”

Pause.

“Probably.”

She flops backward onto her bed, one arm draped over her eyes like she’s playing dead for drama points. Her other hand fumbles for her syllaphone, half buried under old alchemized prototypes, candy wrappers, and a plush lusus named Sir Honksalot.

Nothing urgent.

No messages.

Just the dull pulse of the city outside and the gentle hum of her alchemizer settling down into post chaotic dormancy.

It’s an average day.

Which, honestly, is weird.

Beth is a hybrid kid. That’s supposed to mean everything is dramatic and pivotal and star shaped. She’s the daughter of a literal Breath player and an ex-bloodthirsty court jester. Shouldn’t she be getting visions by now? Or unlocking a hidden door to some meta-dimensional metaphor? Or at least tripping over an ancient prophecy?

Instead, she’s here.

In her room.

Wearing socks with clouds on them and wondering if maybe the 'fusion kids' are just… Disappointing.

She sits up.

>What will Beth do next?

>To the rooftop garden

She grabs her hoodie- the one with the Breath aspect swirl across the back- and yanks on the zipper with a satisfying zrrrt. It’s faded and soft and smells faintly like ozone and jellybeans.

The hatch in the attic creaks open with its usual dramatic flair, and the late afternoon light spills in like an invitation.

Her rooftop garden is... Weird.

Not pretty weird. Fusion weird.

One side is carefully cultivated. Wind flower turbines, air sensitive vines, and troll plants that only bloom when lied to. The other side? An overgrown mess of flying seed pods, a dented mailbox full of bugs, and a lawn chair with "PROPERTY OF BETH: DO NOT LEGALLY CHALLENGE" spray painted on it.

At the very edge, past a leaning flagpole and a potted mushroom with a bell on it, sits the wind tunnel. It’s a vertical funnel of repurposed drone parts, lined with wind activated chimes, scavenged gust amplifiers, and weirdly, a single sock. Beth doesn’t remember putting that there.

She walks up to the lip of it, pulls her hoodie over her head dramatically, and shouts into the swirling vortex:

>“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!"

The tunnel howls back. A few chimes ding politely.

Then... Silence.

A breeze catches her hair. The sky above flickers just slightly. A shimmer, like an old light trying to remember how to shine.

Beth squints.

There it is again.

Just for a second, there was a glimmer of something above the clouds. Not quite Skaia, but something adjacent.

A crack. 

A seam. 

Like the world is a quilt someone didn’t quite finish stitching shut.

She lowers her hood.

“Okay... That’s new.”

She turns, kicks the sock out of the wind tunnel (it lands in a carnivorous plant pot), and sits cross legged on the rooftop floor.

>What will Beth do?

>Time for art

Beth pulls her dream journal from the inside pocket of her hoodie. It's dog eared, stained with bubble fluid, and sealed with a button that used to be part of a Prospitian ceremonial cloak. She clicks open her pen (green ink, scented like cloudberries) and flips past pages of:

-Floating islands shaped like punctuation marks

-A shopping mall full of quadrants

-A courtroom with no ceiling and a jury made of mirrors

-Someone crying in a field of wires (She never figured out who.)

She turns to a blank page.

The sky above still shimmers faintly, like it’s trying to act normal but failing at it. She squints, watching the air pulse in uneven waves. 

Not color. 

Not light. 

But something else.

Beth begins to sketch.

Not a literal image- her drawings never work that way. More like impression- mapping. 

Shapes. 

Symbols. 

Fragments of what it feels like.

Her hand moves without quite asking permission. Curved lines. A circle that isn’t quite closed. Jagged threads crossing at the center like a broken loom.

A line breaks off the page.

Beth frowns. Her pen is shaking.

>FLASH

For a split second, the journal isn't a journal. It’s a window.

And through it, Beth sees-

Her own face, older. Standing in a blinding white corridor.

Ararat and Jericho behind her, covered in dust and shadow.

The voice of a dream saying, “Breath is how it begins.”

>FLASH

The page goes back to normal. 

The sky settles. 

The ink dries.

Beth’s hand stops moving.

She slowly exhales slowly and closes the book.

“Okay... That was either a cosmic hint or a really intense sugar crash.”

She doesn’t know it yet, but every other hybrid kid is going to see the same sky seam before the end of the week.

And none of them will know who saw it first.

But Beth will suspect.

>What will Beth do now?

>Rewind time

Beth chews on the end of her pen for a moment- contemplative, thoughtful, slightly ink flavored- and slowly starts flipping backward through the weathered pages of her dream journal. Each one is a time capsule of half remembered images, nonsense phrases, and maybe prophecies. She’s not sure how many are real dreams and how many are just her mind playing dress up with anxiety.

Still, she flips.

>Page 11

A scribbled courtroom made of glass, with shadowy silhouettes arguing in reversed speech bubbles. There's a scale at the top, cracked down the middle.

>Page 7

A maze with no entrance. Just an arrow pointing inward. The word “wake” repeated seven times in alternating ink colors.

>Page 5

She pauses. 

There.

Something very similar.

A nearly identical incomplete circle. Same broken threads. Except this time, it's surrounded by symbols.

Breath.

Doom.

Heart.

Void.

And underneath, in small but urgent handwriting- 

>“Someone is going to tear a hole in the world. Don’t let it be you.”

Beth stares. She definitely does not remember writing that.

A chill runs through her. The rooftop breeze shifts, as if reacting to her awareness. One of the windflowers spins violently, then stills.

“Cool cool cool cool cool...” She whispers, voice just above a squeak.

She doesn’t like when her dream journal is smarter than her. She flips the book shut, holds it to her chest, and breathes in slowly, counting to eight like Ararat taught her.

The sky above is normal again. 

Almost too normal.

But now she knows.

This isn’t new.

Something is building.

Something she’s seen before.

And whatever’s coming…

It started a long time ago.

Chapter Text

ENTER: DASH AND DANA

A pair of twins sit on the couch in the living room of their house.

The television flickers. It's hard to tell whethet it's a bad signal or intentional aesthetic. A show is playing on the screen. Something halfway between a vintage martial arts drama and a low budget psychic documentary. A woman in a headband is currently roundhouse kicking a ghost while narrating the emotional symbolism of time loops. Dana is enthralled. Dash hasn’t blinked in five minutes, but not because he’s paying attention. He’s mentally timing how long it takes the same glitch in the corner of the screen to loop back around.

What are their names?

>Left And Right Boobsprinkler

Try again.

>Dash and Dana Strider-Vantas

That's better. But we'll just go with Dash and Dana.

They are twins; born minutes apart. Raised in the echo chamber of irony, trauma, and passionate yelling that is the Strider-Vantas household.

Dash is the older one, by a technicality. Wields sarcasm like a blade, time like a shield, and emotional honesty like a landmine he tiptoes around. His shades are always on. Even indoors, even during arguments, even in his dreams.

Dana is the younger twin. Loud, expressive, and likely to start a revolution just to see what happens. She’s half firestarter, half therapist, and one hundred percent sure she could take fate in a fistfight. Uses her words as weapons and her fists as punctuation.

Together, they are the chaos combo.

The yelling and eye roll duo.

The 'You two were born when?' pair that teachers dread putting in the same class

Their living room reflects this energy.

On the wall are framed photos of all three siblings, one of which is on fire slightly. On the table is a cracked old Prospitian chess set, which is missing exactly one rook and two timelines. On the couch are one hoodie, two Striders, and zero chill.

Dash glances at Dana. “You ever notice this episode plays backwards if you mute the soundtrack?”

“Is that a time thing or a bored thing?”

Dash shrugs. “Does it matter?”

They sit there, in sync but in contrast. 

The flickering screen. 

The ticking clock on the wall that doesn’t actually keep time. 

It just changes the numbers randomly and claims it's “experimental.”

>What will they do?

>Both: Haunted screens

Dana tosses a kernel of popcorn directly at Dash’s head. He dodges without looking.

“You know it’s haunted." She says, stretching across the couch like she owns both timelines and the furniture. “The screen only glitches like that when that psychic ghost lady talks about death. That’s not a coincidence.”

Dash doesn’t flinch. He sips from a mug labeled “TIME IS A JOKE BUT I’M STILL NOT LAUGHING.”

“It’s not haunted.” He replies flatly. “It’s just a mis-synced frame buffer. Or a bad rendering loop. Or maybe the ghost has a bad editor. Not everything is about spiritual trauma, Dana.”

Dana rolls her eyes so hard the couch creaks in sympathy. “Okay, but it flashed my reflection back at me once, and I winked back- Except I didn’t wink.”

Dash raises one eyebrow above his shades. “Maybe your kismesis was trying to reach you from the beyond.”

“I DON’T HAVE A KISMESIS.”

“Yet.”

A pause. 

The screen glitches again. 

This time it skips ahead thirty seconds. 

The popcorn Dana threw five minutes ago is now back in her lap.

They both stare at it.

“That’s new... " Dana mutters.

“Still not haunted.” Dash says, but quieter this time.

The TV makes a sound like a sigh. Or a rewind. Or maybe a chuckle.

They sit back. 

For a moment, neither says anything. 

The air hums.

Then...

“You know...” Dana says, “if this is a cursed broadcast, we’re probably already doomed.”

“Cool.” Dash says. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

>What will they do now?

>Both: Touch the screen. For science.

There’s a beat. One of those sibling charged silences where neither twin says a word, but know exactly what the other is thinking.

Dash lifts his mug to take another sip. Dana’s hand hovers mid popcorn toss. They exchange a single look.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Dana asks.

“Touch the glitch screen at the same time and hope we don’t get cursed or quantum duplicated?”

“Exactly.”

“Cool.”

They count off without saying it.

Three…

Two…

One…

Fingers meet glass.

There’s a flicker- like the screen blinks inward, not outward. Not off, but… 

Under.

The moment their fingertips press the screen...

>FLASH.

The living room goes still. 

Silent. 

The hum of the fridge disappears. 

The ticking fake clock freezes mid number scramble.

For the briefest moment, Dash and Dana aren’t in the room anymore.

They're not anywhere.

Just...

A corridor of static.

A ring of spiraling clocks, each one ticking to a different rhythm.

A voice, or maybe a thought: “BREATH. TIME. RAGE. BLOOD. THE BALANCE IS FALTERING.”

>FLASH.

They’re back on the couch. Both yanking their hands away like they touched a hot stove.

The popcorn is gone.

The TV is off.

Their shadows, just for a second, lag behind.

Dash doesn’t say anything.

Dana says everything on her mind at once. 

“Okay nope nope what the hell was that?! Are we- did we- was that a timeline bleed? A time breach?! A mini session echo?!?”

Dash runs a hand through his hair. He’s trying to stay chill. 

It’s not working.

“It said our aspects.”

Dana stares at him.

Dash adds. “Beth. Jericho. Us.”

Dana swallows.

“Okay." She says. “So it is haunted. Like, quantum haunted.”

Dash gets up and walks over to the TV. 

It’s off. 

Unplugged. 

The cord isn’t even connected to anything.

He presses his hand to the screen again.

Nothing.

Just a faint, lingering warmth.

>What will Dash and Dana do?

>Dash: Consult the sky logs

Dash doesn’t say a word. He just pivots on his heel and starts walking toward the hallway, mug still in hand, fingers tapping rhythmically against ceramic. He’s gone full Strider Mode. Quiet, fast, emotionally unavailable, but radiating very concerned big brother energy. Dana follows, muttering under her breath.

“I swear to Skaia, if you’ve been secretly timeline scanning again without telling me-"

“I always tell you.” Dash replies in a monotone fashion.

“You tell me later, which is basically lying.”

They reach Dash’s room, which is a strange haven of minimalist time themed clutter. Walls of analog clocks set to random times. Fragments of broken record players. A calendar whose pages flip on their own when you lie. In the far corner is a sleek, glowing terminal set into a desk made of repurposed cube drones. Dash sits down and cracks his knuckles.

Dana perches on the arm of the chair next to him, watching with hawk like nosiness.

>beep. tap. access request approved.

>Loading Archive: SKYLOG.STRIDER-VANTAS > Private Feed.

A grainy video feed fills the screen. It’s the sky, recorded over the last seven nights. Taken from his bedroom window with a spectral filter he never told anyone about.

>Night One: Normal stars.

>Night Two: Faint flicker in the upper corner.

>Night Three: The flicker spreads like a bruise.

>Night Four: A crack opens. Just for a second.

>Night Five: A ring. A barely-there spiral. Like something is trying to shine through.

>Night Six: Gone. Sky too still. Too normal. Like it’s hiding.

“Wait!” Dana says. “Pause. Back up.”

Dash does. He rewinds to the fifth night.

"There."

She points.

“That. Do you see it?”

The spiral. Not a cloud. Not a star. A symbol. Something ancient. Something systemic.

Dash enhances the feed, slowly and carefully.

It resolves into a shape. 

A combination of four aspect sigils.

>Breath. Time. Rage. Blood.

Arranged in a circle.

Fused at the seams.

Incomplete.

"It’s like someone’s trying to pull us into a session that doesn’t exist.”

Dash nods. "Or trying to finish one that never closed."

>ARARAT: ENTER

A girl stands at the threshold of her brother's room.

Technically, she knocked.

Technically, they ignored her.

So now she’s here, arms folded, staring at the two of them hunched over Dash’s terminal like they’re plotting time crimes. 

Again.

“What are you two doing?” She asks, voice low, steady, and annoyed in the way only the youngest sibling can be when the older ones are being vague and weird about something that’s probably important.

The room smells like overheated wires and oversteeped peppermint tea. 

Dana is barefoot. 

Dash hasn’t blinked in several minutes.

Neither of them answers.

What is her name?

>Rage Babe Supreme

Try again.

>Ararat Strider-Vantas

Correct.

But around here, she’s usually just Ara (if you’re Dana) or Rat (if you’re Dash, usually when he’s feeling lazy or ironically affectionate).

Ararat is the quiet storm of the Strider-Vantas trio.

She doesn’t yell. She calculates.

She doesn’t leap. She pivots.

If you think she’s not paying attention, you’ve already lost.

She has her father Karkat’s rage- muted, simmering, organized.

She has her father Dave’s sarcasm- less performative, more surgical.

But mostly, she has her own way of navigating the mess of fused worlds and fused families.

By cataloging, processing, and predicting.

By thinking ten moves ahead.

By watching.

She’s younger than her siblings, but often acts like the oldest. 

She keeps a digital journal of every weird thing that’s happened to them since the sky first twitched.

She speaks in facts, not hunches.

And right now, she’s watching Dash rewind the sky.

“That’s not normal." She says flatly, eyes narrowed at the monitor.

“Define 'normal'." Dash mutters.

“Visible aspect convergence forming a broken ring sigil during a temporal feedback loop.” She replies instantly.

Dana lets out a long, low whistle.

“She’s been reading the Institute leak logs again.”

Ararat walks in without asking and kneels beside the terminal. “That’s Breath. Time. Rage. Blood. That’s us.”

Dash nods.

>What will Ararat do?

>Take control of the terminal

Ararat doesn't wait for permission- mostly because she doesn’t need it, and partly because Dash has already scooted his chair back like he knew this was coming.

She slides into his seat, fingers flying over the keys with a kind of calm precision Dana has always found slightly terrifying. Dash sips his tea and watches. Dana paces.

The screen shifts as Ararat bypasses Dash’s private logs and opens a direct link to the Skaia Institute’s satellite relay. She’s not supposed to have access.

She does anyway.

>[ACCESS LEVEL: UNAUTHORIZED]

[OVERRIDE CODE: SRT-VNTS.03.ARA]

[CONNECTION ESTABLISHED.]

“Wait...” Dana says, eyebrows up. “You hacked the Institute?”

“I installed a contingency.” Ararat says without looking up.

“That’s hacking, Ara.”

“It’s efficient.”

On screen is a panoramic, slowly rotating view of the upper atmosphere.

No weather filters. 

No public distortion masks. 

Just raw, celestial truth.

Ararat adjusts the filters.

>Night 3: Faint flicker

>Night 4: Sigil attempt

>Night 5: Sudden spike in Breath aspect radiation

>Night 6: Complete null

>Night 7 (Tonight): The crack is widening

And then...

A data overlay.

>DETECTED: ANOMALOUS SKYFORM

PATTERN MATCH: [SESSION SEED SIGNATURE / PARTIAL / DAMAGED]

LOCATION: UNFIXED

SIGNAL TYPE: INTERMITTENT 

She leans back.

“Whatever this is…” She says, her voice lower now. “It wasn’t meant to happen.”

Her eyes stay on the screen, but her mind is clearly sprinting ahead.

“It’s not a new session. It’s not a reboot. It’s not a game start.”

She points at the data stream- lines flickering, degrading, fracturing like ice.

“It’s the leftovers of something that tried to exist and didn’t finish. Like a seed session that got aborted mid-initialization. A pocket that never opened.”

Dana crosses her arms, one eyebrow raised. “So… Like a session miscarriage? That’s… Kinda horrifying.”

“Yeah...” Dash mutters, jaw tight. “And now it’s leaking into this world.”

>[SIGNAL TYPE: INTERMITTENT / BREATH-ORIGINATED]

Ararat doesn’t flinch, but her fingers tighten on the edge of the desk.

“I think Beth triggered it. Or reawakened it. She saw something- maybe just a flicker, but the signature started tracking her location.”

“She said something about a dream last week.” Dana remembers. “Didn’t write it down. Just looked at me weird in the cafeteria and said, ‘I think I saw Skaia blink.’”

Dash exhales slowly. “That’s not nothing.”

Ararat stands. She’s already pulled her terminal’s portable core from the interface, tucking it into the magnetic slot on her belt.

“She’s not the only one it’s watching. We're part of the convergence, but we’re not the origin point. Not entirely.”

She looks at her siblings.

“We need to find Jericho.”

Chapter Text

JERICHO: ENTER

A young man is meditating in his garden atrium. The air smells like ink, roses, and something older than flowers. The glass ceiling above him refracts the moonlight in slow, deliberate patterns, like it’s thinking through how to shine.

Motes of dreamstuff drift lazily around the room. Not because he summoned them, but because they like to follow him around. They don’t speak. But sometimes, they hum.

He is seated cross legged on a moss carpeted stone circle, surrounded by softly purring glow lotus blooms and tiny lamps shaped like Derse spires. The atmosphere is somewhere between a zen greenhouse and a lowkey doomsday shrine.

What is this mysterious gentleman called?

>Criss-Cross Angel

No, no, no!

>Jericho Lalonde-Maryam

There you go.

But as always, he’s just called Jericho.

Jericho is the hybrid child of Rose Lalonde and Kanaya Maryam, and he wears the legacy like a silk veil lined with barbed wire.

He is calm, deliberate, softly spoken- and his silence is rarely empty.

He knows things before they happen. Hears things no one says out loud. He once woke up from a nap and correctly recited the day’s cafeteria menu, down to the missing Jell-O.

He is a Seer in everything but title.

Derse dreamer. 

Prose conjuror. 

Horoscope cynic. 

Fashion minimalist.

He has three rings, two notebooks, and one slightly haunted pen.

He keeps all of them in his sleeves.

Tonight, his meditation isn’t about calming the mind.

It’s about listening.

And what he hears, even now, is a pattern breaking.

A sky unraveling. 

A breath, caught in a loop.

He opens his eyes. Luminous violet flickers under thick lashes.

The dreamspace is thinning.

He felt it when Beth touched the crack in the clouds.

He heard it when Dash and Dana touched the screen.

And now, the whole world is holding its breath.

Jericho stands, brushing invisible dust from his robes.

“The veil is slipping...” He murmurs.

Then, quietly to the dreamstuff hovering beside him...

“Time to find the others.”

The lamps dim on their own. 

The garden stills.

>What will Jericho do?

>Consult the cards.

Jericho moves with the practiced grace of someone who knows exactly where each of his steps belongs. He kneels before a small stone pedestal near the center of the atrium. Resting atop it is an obsidian box sealed with a silk ribbon- violet, fraying, and tied with a knot that can only be undone by wanting to know.

He undoes it with ease.

Inside is his one of a kind tarot deck.

The cards are made of light pressed synthleaf, etched with silver ink and stitched around the edges with thread soaked in Prospitian dream oil.

They hum softly when he touches them. Not out of excitement, but recognition.

Jericho begins to shuffle with precision.

This is not superstition.

This is ritual memory.

This is what his subconscious remembers the multiverse looking like.

He draws the first card.

>THE TOWER

A spiral breaking. A sky struck through. Lightning from above.

Expected.

The second card comes next.

>THE LOVERS

Not romance- aspects entangled. Four threads crossing. No separation. No safety.

Expected.

The third card came slowly.

>THE FOOL

Not him.

He stares at it.

This card is not confirmation. It’s reminder.

"One of us is about to leap." He murmurs.

The deck flutters in his hands, and the lamps flicker.

Behind him, the sky shifts again, briefly visible through the glass. 

A ring of aspect sigils, turning.

BREATH. TIME. RAGE. BLOOD.

Incomplete.

Jericho stands.

He’s done with questions.

>Message Ararat

Jericho lifts his wrist and taps a single rune set into his communicator. It's custom forged from repurposed dreamtech and subtly engraved with Lalondeian sigils of obfuscation. Most people would mistake it for a fancy bracelet. Most people are wrong.

The display lights up in eerie indigo, shaped like a crescent. He speaks softly.

"You’re looking for me. I’m already moving.”

He doesn’t wait for a reply. He knows she’ll get it. He knows she’ll know what it means.

Jericho slips the last tarot card into his sleeve and turns toward the atrium doors. They open before he touches them.

Outside, the city of Utune awaits.

All glass and towers and hanging gardens, stitched together with Alternian hive metal and Earth's more forgiving stone. The streets shimmer faintly under the combined light of the moons and the synthetic stars.

Above it all, the sky flickers. Not visibly. At least, not yet. But in the edges of awareness, something turns.

The convergence point is moving.

Not physical. Not fixed.

Emotional. Symbolic. Temporal.

Jericho doesn't head toward the Institute, or toward the Spire Loop, or any of the usual session aligned landmarks.

He walks into a forgotten part of the city.

Between memory and metaphor- where session echoes thin the air and the veil’s surface is almost transparent.

The convergence point isn’t a place.

It’s a moment.

And Jericho is walking straight into it.

>Follow Jericho 

The streets narrow as Jericho walks, but the space around him expands. Reality stretches here, albeit just slightly. Streetlights bend at impossible angles. Windows reflect things that aren’t there. Footsteps echo even when he stops walking.

He passes through a rusted iron arch, the kind no one uses anymore. The sign above it once read "Transit Annex- Skaia Line", but the letters have long since melted into gibberish. No one’s taken this route since the merge.

Except for him.

And maybe one or two things that don’t have names anymore.

He reaches an abandoned courtyard. At the center stands a dry fountain, cracked and faded. Once a replica of Prospit’s highest spire, now a jagged ruin filled with moonlight and dust. The air here doesn’t feel like air.

It feels like waiting.

Jericho stands still.

He doesn’t summon anything.

He doesn’t speak.

He simply is.

And that’s enough.

Because this isn’t a place.

It’s a threshold.

A moment already written into his bones.

The temperature drops. 

His breath fogs, even though no one else would see it.

The air hums.

The veil shivers.

Above him, the sky flashes.

BREATH. TIME. RAGE. BLOOD.

The incomplete sigil. 

Again.

Rotating slowly. Dripping starlight like ink.

Then...

A fifth symbol begins to form.

It’s faint, tentative. Like it doesn’t belong, or isn’t sure it should.

Jericho tilts his head.

“Void?”

A wind picks up, whirling around him like a whispered confirmation. The fountain glows from within just briefly. Just once.

Then... Stillness.

He kneels and places one hand on the broken tile.

“This is where it begins. Or ends. Or loops.”

In the distance, he hears footsteps.

Others are coming.

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t look.

He just smiles faintly and says...

“Took you long enough.”

>Ararat, Dash, and Dana arrive

The wind changes as they approach. It's the kind of breeze that brushes past you not around you, like it’s in a hurry to tell someone else something important.

They slow their pace when they cross under the same rusted Transit Annex arch, instinctively stepping in time. Ararat leads, eyes fixed ahead. Dash is quiet, focused. Dana isn’t saying much, but her fists are clenched.

They’ve never come this far into the old city. But somehow, all three of them knew exactly where to go.

The shadows stretch longer here, not because of the light, but because something is pulling at their perception. Time feels thin. Breath feels shallow. Rage stirs in Dana’s chest without a cause. Ararat tastes copper on her tongue. Dash has a headache in exactly the shape of the Prospitian skyline.

They round a corner, and there he is. Jericho, seated in perfect stillness at the center of the broken fountain, like some forgotten prince of paradox. The ground hums around him. The air thick with potential, like the moment before a clock chimes.

He doesn’t look up.

“You’re late." He says simply.

Dana huffs. “We ran through three distorted blocks and a gravity dip. What do you want, a parade?”

Jericho finally opens his eyes. Their irises catch the flicker of the broken sky overhead. Five sigils now, still unstable, rotating too slowly, like the universe is trying to remember how to form a session.

Ararat steps forward. “This is the convergence point. And you’ve been waiting.”

“For all of you.” He confirms. “And Beth.”

Dash crosses his arms. “You want to tell us what this is? Because right now, it smells like the kind of mess our parents warned us about.”

Jericho doesn’t answer right away. He just lifts one hand and traces a shape in the air. It leaves behind a glowing residue- a sigil formed by five aspects.

Breath. Time. Rage. Blood. Void.

“Someone’s trying to finish a session that was never meant to start,” Jericho says softly. “And they’re using us to do it.”

>And four becomes five

Beth runs. Not because she knows where she’s going, but because her feet do.

She left the rooftop garden in a daze, journal clutched to her chest and mind spinning like a wind turbine caught in a storm. There was a pressure building in her chest, like a scream with no source, a call with no voice.

The streets blur past her. Familiar roads twist strangely. Turns take her places she shouldn’t reach that fast.

But she does.

Because Breath doesn’t move through space. It bends around it.

And then she stops.

The sky overhead is open. 

Not cloudless.

Open.

Split along a rotating axis of five glowing aspect sigils, swirling in slow orbit above a broken fountain.

Breath. Time. Rage. Blood. Void.

They pulse like heartbeat runes. 

Incomplete. 

Hungry.

Beth staggers into the courtyard, chest heaving, hair stuck to her forehead with sweat and static.

She looks up.

"Oh. That’s… Not good.”

Four familiar faces turn to her.

Jericho smiles faintly. 

Dash raises an eyebrow. “Hey. Took you long enough.”

Dana grins. “We were just about to blow something up in your honor.”

Ararat nods, eyes sharp. “You felt it too, didn’t you?”

Beth swallows and nods slowly.

“I didn’t even mean to come here...” She says. “I just… Had to.”

She steps fully into the circle.

The sigils overhead pulse.

A sixth symbol begins to stir in the sky, shimmering faintly.

Not an aspect.

Not yet.

Something else.

Jericho steps forward.

“This is it." He says. “We’re standing in a session that never existed.”

Dana crosses her arms. “So what, it’s trying to exist now? Through us?”

“Not trying.” Ararat says quietly. “It’s already begun.”

Beth looks at them.

Then at the glowing sky.

Then back at the slowly forming sixth sigil.

>A shared vision

No one touches anything.

No one casts a spell, presses a button, or recites a dramatic phrase.

The moment just unfolds.

The light from the sigils above flares, each rune pulsing once, in order.

Breath. Time. Rage. Blood. Void.

Then the half formed sixth sigil flickers violently and...

The world collapses inward like an eye blinking shut.

When they open their eyes again, they are no longer standing in the courtyard.

They are somewhere else.

A session.

But not their session. 

Not one that ever fully came into being.

It’s like a dream someone abandoned halfway through.

The terrain is glitching- floating chunks of land stuttering in and out of alignment- like reality’s trying to decide how to render itself. The sky is Skaia blue, but cracked down the middle. Clouds hang frozen in the air. Towers rise in the distance, flickering between Derse and Prospit architecture.

Time is fractured.

The world is unfinished.

Everything smells faintly like static and burnt stardust.

Beth clutches her chest.

“I know this place... I’ve seen this. In my dreams. In the journal.”

Dana is already walking forward, fists clenched. “What the hell is this? It feels like a metaphor exploded.”

Jericho stands still, scanning the glitching horizon.

“This was a session. An unstable initialization that failed to hold cohesion. Too few players. Too much interference. It collapsed before it could fully start.”

Dash steps up beside him. “Then why are we seeing it?”

“Because we’re the missing pieces.”

The land beneath them shifts. The air vibrates, like something trying to form speech but stuck on the wrong frequency.

Ararat frowns. “There’s something under this. A memory, or a warning.”

Beth takes a step forward.

The ground opens below her for just for a moment, and they all fall.

They land in a shared vision.

A flickering replay of something they were never part of.

A session start screen with no names.

Four blank player icons.

One filled in with a name long lost- corrupted beyond recovery.

A single word flashes on screen in jagged font:

>RETRY.

They're back in the courtyard.

The fountain is glowing.

The sixth sigil has vanished.

Then, each of them feels it at the same moment. A low ping in their sylladexes. Not a text or a call. Not something they could send back.

Something delivered.

Five tones. 

One for each of them.

They open their interfaces.

>New message received.

Sender: [UNKNOWN_ID: ███████]

Title: [CONVERGENCE ACKNOWLEDGED]

Attached to the message are two files and a countdown clock, synced across all their devices.

>File 01: [SESSION_REMAINS.LOG]

Encrypted. Partially corrupted. Jericho’s already started parsing the code in his head.

>File 02: [OPERANT_DIRECTIVE.FUSION]

Unreadable. For now. It pulses gently when they look at it too long, like a living thing behind glass.

Finally, their eyes all drift to the countdown.

>Time Remaining: 1 YEAR, 7 DAYS, 13 HOURS, 02 MINUTES.

It ticks down once.

>1 YEAR, 7 DAYS, 13 HOURS, 02 MINUTES.

→ 01 MINUTE.

Dash groans. "Of course it’s a countdown. We finally get a prophecy and it comes with a deadline.”

Dana shook her head. “I didn’t even study for this one!”

Beth’s fingers tremble around her journal. “What happens when it hits zero?”

Jericho looks up. 

For once, no riddles. 

No metaphors.

“Either the failed session ends completely, or it finishes forming. And we’re the ones who finish it.”

Ararat steps into the fountain. The light doesn’t burn her, but rather folds around her.

“We’ve got a year.”

She turns to face them, eyes gleaming with clarity and quiet fire.

“Let’s not waste it.”

Chapter Text

The door to the Egbert-Pyrope household creaks open, letting in a breath of city night air and one very exhausted hybrid.

Beth steps inside and closes the door behind her softly. The sigils are still burned into her mind’s eye. The files in her sylladex feel heavy, like data isn’t supposed to carry weight- but this does.

She doesn’t get more than two steps before...

“You’re late.”

The voice is calm, firm, and unmistakably her mother’s. Terezi was seated in the living room. Not lounging. Not even casual. She’s perched forward on the edge of the couch like a predator waiting to pounce.

Across from her, John leans against the wall, arms crossed. His expression isn’t angry, but worried. But it's the kind of worried that’s been festering for hours.

Beth sighs.

She was hoping they’d be asleep, or at least distracted.

Apparently not.

Terezi taps a finger against her cane, sniffing the air dramatically. “So, how was your stroll through the temporal scar tissue of a dead game session?”

Beth freezes. "H-How did you-?”

“You glow when you’re connected to residual session energy, sweetie.” John says gently. “Also, you left your dream journal open. There was even a small reality ripple across the garden pond. Again.”

Terezi grins, baring too many teeth. “We know, Beth.”

Beth grips her journal tighter.

Terezi stood up, her tone sharpening. “You don’t understand what you’re touching. Failed sessions don’t just disappear, they drag things down with them. Players. Planets. Whole timelines. You think your dreams are just random? You think being a hybrid makes you immune to what the game wants?”

Beth flinches.

John walks forward and places a hand on her shoulder. Gentle, but firm.

“We’re not mad.” He says softly. “But you need to let this go. This isn’t your burden.”

“But it is...”

Terezi steps closer. Her shades glint in the dim light.

“You don’t get to decide that.”

Beth’s breath catches.

For a second, she thinks about telling them everything. 

The vision. 

The files. 

The countdown.

Instead...

She nods. “I won’t look into it anymore.”

The Lalonde-Maryam residence is quiet as always. The stillness isn’t empty, it’s cultivated- designed. Like the kind of silence one finds in cathedrals or libraries. It doesn’t welcome noise. It waits for meaning.

Jericho stepped inside and removed his shoes at the threshold. The lights are dim, glowing lavender from the wall lamps. His shadow elongates behind him, like it knows something he doesn’t.

He doesn’t call out.

He doesn’t have to.

“Jericho.”

His name floats from the upper balcony.

He looks up.

Rose is descending the staircase, robe flowing like fog and her hands clasped in front of her. Behind her, Kanaya emerges from the shadows of the second floor. Her arms are folded and her gaze was sharp.

He’s not surprised.

He knew they’d know.

He just hoped they'd take longer to say something.

Rose’s eyes glint with something ancient and tired. “You accessed a dying session."

"A session that failed to form, by design. One we were told was lost forever.” Kanaya added.

Jericho’s silence is the kind that holds shape, like an invisible wall he’s not quite ready to step around.

“I didn’t go looking for it.” He says finally.

Rose stops a few steps above him. “No, but it found you.”

Jericho looks up. “Then shouldn’t I know why?”

Kanaya’s voice is colder than usual. “No. You shouldn’t. And you won’t.”

She steps forward.

“This is not like the trials we’ve prepared you for. This isn’t symbolism or prophecy or structured game architecture. This is residue. Poison in the system. And it’s trying to rewrite itself using you as a medium.”

Rose doesn’t interrupt. 

She just watches him. 

Quiet. 

Knowing.

“You’re asking me to forget the truth.”

“I’m asking you to survive.”

Jericho nods once, but doesn’t agree.

The elevator dings. The doors slide open. Dash steps out first. Ararat follows in silence. Dana drags her feet, but enters the apartment with the least grace and the most audacity.

And all three of them stop short.

Waiting in the living room...

One sitting, one pacing...

Are Dave Strider and Karkat Vantas.

The moment feels pre-stretched, like someone wound it up and just let go. The air is thick with unresolved tension and years of bad coping mechanisms.

Dave adjusts his shades with one hand and takes a sip from a mug that says #1 Time Dad. Karkat looks like he’s been pacing for hours. He’s holding a pillow. Possibly to avoid breaking furniture.

No one says anything for three full seconds.

Then Karkat explodes.

“WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL WERE YOU DOING AT A CONVERGENCE POINT? WERE YOU TRYING TO SUMMON A DOOM CLOCK? OR DID YOU JUST STUMBLE INTO ANOTHER DOOMSDAY CYCLE BY ACCIDENT?!”

Dana shrugs. “Little bit of both.”

“OH, GREAT. GOOD. SO CASUAL APOCALYPSE THEATER, HUH?”

Dave holds up a hand. “Let’s… Chill for a sec.”

He looks at Dash.

Dash looks away.

“You felt it too, didn’t you?” Dave asked.

Dash doesn’t answer.

“You did.” Dave mutters. “You knew something was pulling you. Something unfinished.”

“Something broken.” Ararat corrects softly. She walks past them, sits cross legged on the floor, and opens her portable terminal. It’s off, but her fingers hover near it like a ward.

Karkat’s voice lowers. Not quieter, but more brittle.

“We fought to keep you from this. The Game. The Loop. The sessions. The trauma. The godhood.”

Dana flops onto the couch dramatically. “Well, you nailed the trauma part.”

Karkat growls. 

Dave winces.

“Listen,” Dave says, trying to remain composed. “You’re kids. You’re smart, okay, I’ll give you that. But this thing? This is not your story. It tried to start. It failed. That’s the end. Let it stay dead.”

Dash finally speaks.

“What if it doesn’t want to stay dead?”

Ararat looks up. 

Calm. 

Precise.

“What if it’s using us to finish what it started?”

Dave and Karkat both go still.

Karkat grips the edge of the couch.

“I’m serious." He says, voice low. “Drop it. Now. I mean it. This isn’t cryptic teen rebellion nonsense. If you dig too deep, this thing will eat you.”

The room falls silent again.

Dash nods.

“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”

Dana grins too fast. “Sure. Definitely. We’ll totally back off.”

Ararat closes her terminal. “We understand.”

All the while, the countdown kept ticking.

That night, the city sleeps.

Or, at least, tries to.

Somewhere in the glow of fused skylines and dream soaked alleyways, the sigils in the sky flicker- just once, too fast for cameras, but too slow to forget.

A breath caught.

A clock stuttered.

A flicker of rage in the corner of the eye.

Five hybrid kids lie in their beds. 

Still. 

Awake.

They all heard the same thing- voiced or not.

“Let it go.”

They all thought the same thing in reply.

“We can’t.”

And far below the foundation of Utune, deep in a place no one visits anymore, the sixth sigil pulses once. Faint, hungry, patient.

It’s not over.

It’s just waiting for them to say...

Retry.

Chapter Text

Nestled into the spine of Utune City, the Skaia Institute for Cross Aspect Integration is the most prestigious- and most quietly surveilled- school in the post-fusion world.

A campus that stretches vertically as much as it does horizontally, the Institute is built from stone, glass, repurposed hive architecture, and dream metal. The towers glint in the daylight and hum gently at night. The central spire holds the administration wing, surrounded by orbiting facilities: 

Training domes. 

Alchemy labs. 

Dream recognition chambers. 

The Library of Echoes, which reorganizes itself weekly.

The Institute’s curriculum isn’t about math or history- at least, not the ordinary kind.

It teaches sessions.

It teaches aspects.

It teaches the rules- and how to follow them, or bend them safely.

At least, on paper.

This school is where trolls, humans, and hybrids alike receive an education. 

Therefore, this is where our heroes converge regularly.

They always sit at the same table.

Not because it’s hidden, because it’s too obvious. In the courtyard beneath the Skyframe Garden- just beyond the eastern glass wall- their table is in plain sight. Most students think that makes it uncool.

For the five of them, it makes it perfect.

Beth twirls a fork in her rice bowl, but doesn’t eat it. Jericho sips something herbal that no one else can pronounce. Dana is upside down on the bench for no reason except why not. Dash has his headphones on, but no music playing. Ararat’s opened her portable terminal again. The screen is encrypted.

No one speaks for a moment. Not because there’s nothing to say, but because saying it means admitting they’re already doing something they promised they wouldn’t.

Finally, Dana breaks the silence.

“So... We’re doing this, right?”

Dash shrugs. “Too late to ghost now. We’re session deep.”

Jericho doesn’t look up. “The countdown hasn’t stalled.”

Beth leans in slightly, voice lower than usual. "What happens if we finish it?”

Ararat answers without looking away from the screen. “That’s what we’re going to find out. Carefully. Quietly. On our terms.”

They all nod.

Beth adds, “No adults. No Institute admin. No oversight.”

Dana grins. “Just five chaos touched freaks and an undead session spirit whispering from the sky. Totally normal.”

They are no longer just students.

They’re investigators.

Rebels.

Caretakers of something unfinished.

And they know they can’t do it alone.

“We’ll need help.” Jericho says.

Ararat glances up.

“From who?”

Dash grins.

“The other kids. The troll ones. But also Ty.”

Dana slams her hands on the table. "Now we're talking! Time to get the dream team together."

It starts with five messages.

Encrypted. Indirect. Designed to look like jokes, inside references, or idle curiosity.

But those who receive them would know better.

They meet after classes, in a half lit alcove beneath the Aspect Alignment Observatory- technically a “restricted maintenance corridor” but really just a space forgotten by adults. It hums faintly from the leftover aspect residue embedded in the walls. 

It’s perfect.

When the hybrid kids arrive, the others are already waiting.

Leaning against the wall, one foot up, arms crossed is Tiberias "Ty" Harley. Green eyed, sharp, and just a little too perceptive. The ever chill descendant of Jade Harley, with an unpredictable grip on space and a calm voice that cuts like a knife.

“You’re in some deep narrative trouble if I got an invitation." He says.

“That’s exactly why you’re here.” Beth nodded.

Already scrolling through notes on her screen, fashionably dressed even in secret meetings, with her boots perfectly matched to the red orange hue of her horns- Cilicia Medigo. Descended from Aradia Megido, but you'd never guess from her cheerful, on trend energy.

“So, let me get this straight." She says, crossing one leg over the other. “A dead session pinged your collective trauma cores, spat out a deadline, and now you’re dragging the rest of us into it?” 

Dash shrugs. “More or less.” 

Cilicia smiles. “Cool. I’m in.”

Jordan and Galilee "Lee" Peixes are sitting together on an overturned alchemy crate, already bickering.

“I told you something was up with the sky!”

“No, you said Skaia was giving you ‘weird fish vibes.’”

“Same thing, idiot!”

Both glance at Beth and the others with a mix of suspicion and curiosity. 

But when they hear about the countdown, the session echoes, the sigils...

They go quiet.

Jordan finally mutters, “Okay. Yeah. This isn’t just dream residue. This is real.”

Lee looks at Beth. "And you want our help because…?”

“Because this session chose us.” Beth says. “But we’re not enough.”

"Yet.” Jericho adds quietly.

The countdown has not slowed.

It’s still ticking.

>1 YEAR, 7 DAYS, 06 HOURS, 14 MINUTES.

Later that evening, the team dispersed- some to dinner, some to their homes, some to keep watch on the shifting skyline.

But Ararat stayed behind.

She sat alone in the re-secured alcove, surrounded by dim blue maintenance lights and the faint scent of ozone. Her terminal rests on her lap, already pulsing with quiet processing sounds. She’s rerouted its operating core through a temporal echo buffer- just in case the file tries to retaliate.

>[SESSION_REMAINS.LOG]

Still corrupted. 

Still stubborn. 

Still humming.

She tightens her fingers around the input ring. “Let’s see what you’re hiding.”

The first few minutes are nothing but static garbled code loops, false starts, stuttering metadata with user ID strings she doesn’t recognize. But the longer she scrapes away at the corruption, the more something begins to emerge.

A structure.

There was a session startup sequence. One that almost completed. It had four player slots. Three were unregistered. One- just one- still flickers with fragments of identity.

>USER 01: ████████

CLASSPECT: Seer of Breath

STATUS: TERMINATED

EJECTION: INCOMPLETE

RUNTIME COLLAPSE: 73.9%

She freezes.

“Seer of Breath…?”

That’s Beth’s exact aspect and class.

But it’s not Beth.

This data is years old. Possibly generations.

"A prototype... The session tried to run itself once. It failed.”

She scrolls deeper.

More fragments appear. Images of a sky rift, a failed alchemization, and a derelict Skaian battlefield with no planets. A countdown reset. 

Then…

>[RETRY SIGNAL SENT]

[RETRY SIGNAL RECEIVED]

[HOST VESSELS FOUND: 5]

The names are redacted. 

But she knows.

"Us.”

She saves the decrypted log, encrypts it again, and adds a second password. Then, she opens a private channel to the others.

>ARARAT: We’ve inherited a session’s ghost. And it thinks Beth is its second chance.

The responses roll in almost instantly.

>DASH: You mean she’s the new Player One?

>JERICHO: The ghost of an aborted narrative latching onto the next best fit. Makes sense. Horrifying. But logical.

>DANA: Wait wait wait. Does this mean Beth has, like, a DEAD session twin??

>TY: …That’s messed up, even by Skaian standards.

>CILICIA: Did she inherit the whole role or just the responsibility? We need to know before she starts glitching.

>JORDAN: Should we tell her?

>LEE: If we don’t, the countdown will.

Ararat types slowly. Decisively.

>ARARAT: We tell her. Tonight.

But by the time they agree, Beth was already asleep.

Or something close to it.

She lay curled under her weighted blanket, clutching her dream journal to her chest. The sigils have stopped pulsing in her memory, but the pressure hasn’t gone away. It’s like static beneath her skin.

She slips under fast.

Too fast.

As if someone was waiting for her to fall asleep.

She opens her eyes in a place that shouldn’t exist.

A fractured battlefield.

Skaian clouds drifting in reverse.

A sun is missing.

Time folds in on itself.

And standing at the center...

Alone... 

Still... 

Waiting...

A girl with her back to her.

Wearing the same clothes Beth wore a year ago.

Hair just a little shorter.

Posture a little straighter.

But everything else?

Identical.

The girl didn't turn. She just lifted one hand.

Beth hears something. Not aloud, but etched directly into her thoughts:

“You don’t get to say no.”

The wind howls.

The dream collapses.

Beth wakes up gasping.

Chapter Text

The class break bell chimed. It's long and melodic, meant to soothe students between various lectures.

But at their usual spot in the garden side courtyard, five hybrid kids and their allies aren’t relaxing.

Beth was seated with her knees pulled to her chest, dream journal open, but for once not writing. The others are gathered around, a little too close, a little too quiet.

She clears her throat. “It wasn’t just a dream.”

The sentence hangs there.

No one mocks it. 

Not even Dana.

Beth looks down at the page, where a rough sketch of the dream battlefield now sits in dark pen strokes. “It was the session again. The broken one. I was there.”

“Same landscape as the vision?” Jericho asks quietly.

Beth nods. “Mostly. But the sky was... Worse. More cracked. And I wasn’t alone.”

She flips the page.

Another sketch.

A silhouette. Her size. Her shape.

Just turned away.

“She looked like me. Exactly like me. Like… First draft me.”

Ararat leans forward, eyes narrowing. “The original Heir of Breath. The one from the aborted session.”

“Did she speak?” Ty asks, arms crossed and tone unreadable.

Beth hesitates. “Not with her mouth. With... Something else. I heard her. In my mind.”

She closes the journal. “She said: ‘You don’t get to say no.’”

Dash leans forward. “You think she’s part of you? Like, residual code? Or the session trying to overwrite your classpect?”

“No,” Beth says, shaking her head. “She’s not me. She’s what the session lost. And now she’s trying to finish her game using me.”

The group falls silent.

Only the countdown hums faintly in their minds.

>1 YEAR, 6 DAYS, 20 HOURS, 39 MINUTES.

The group falls into a thoughtful silence. A breeze shifts the courtyard air, stirring leaves and static. Somewhere in the distance, a bell chimes the ten minute warning for the next block, but no one moves. They’re still wrapped in the implications of Beth’s words.

Jericho’s eyes were half lidded, as if he’d already seen the entire conversation play out in multiple timelines.

"It’s a message." He said quietly. “But not from a person. From the session itself. Using her image.”

He folded his fingers together. “It’s possession by metaphor. A code ghost with no save point. It chose Beth not because she’s identical- but because she’s close enough to make the overwrite work. But it hasn’t succeeded. That means something.”

Ararat was already tapping at her terminal, decoding fragments of log data from the dream.

“She used an imperative statement. ‘You don’t get to say no.’ Not ‘you shouldn’t.’ Not ‘you can’t.’ That’s a built in directive.”

She glances at Beth. “That kind of language implies the session has regained some self governance. It’s not just collapsing. It’s reasserting.”

Dana raises an eyebrow. “So, it’s alive now?”

Ararat doesn’t blink. “In a way that wants her as a vessel, yes.”

Dash kicked at the gravel lightly. His usual smirk is now gone, replaced with something closer to concern.

"I think it’s scared.”

Everyone turned to look at him.

“That girl in your dream? If she really was the original Heir? She was probably left behind when the session failed. Glitched out of reality. You ever get deleted mid-game and wake up still thinking you’re supposed to finish the level?”

Dana nodded solemnly. “Yeah. That’s how I feel during gym.”

Dash ignored her. “Point is- it’s not just a threat. It’s a warning. That girl? She doesn’t want Beth’s life. She wants her ending.”

Dana, uncharacteristically quiet, crossed her arms and looked at the ground. “I think Beth’s being targeted because she’s soft.”

Beth flinched.

Dana immediately softened. “I don’t mean weak. I mean… Open. You feel everything. All the time. And that dream self? That thing? She’s taking advantage of that. Trying to anchor into you emotionally.”

She looks up.

“But if anyone can flip that vulnerability into a weapon, it’s you.”

Beth blinked at her. 

Dana looked away. 

“Ugh, whatever. Don’t make it weird.”

Ty hadn’t moved from his perch. “Dream ghosts don’t usually manifest unless there’s unfinished business. The session isn’t just choosing Beth. It’s choosing all of us to finish something it couldn’t do before.”

He looked at Beth. “You’re just the first name on the roster. Doesn’t mean you go it alone.”

Cilicia sighed and shut her glittery datapad.

“I’m not gonna pretend I understand the metaphysical ghost code of a broken reality loop, but here’s what I do know- that girl isn’t Beth. Not now. Not ever.”

She leaned forward, makeup perfect and voice serious. “And if this session thinks it can force you to become her- we’ll burn that logic tree down before it compiles.”

Beth exhaled slowly.

The pressure in her chest lightened.

Just a little. 

Not gone, but shared.

For the first time since the vision, she felt anchored.

“Thank you. All of you.”

The ten minute bell rang again, louder this time.

Class awaited them.

So does the next move.

The group dispersed reluctantly as the final bell rang, slipping into their separate class tracks. Still haunted, still buzzing from the morning's revelations.

Beth walked into Aspect Theory & Practical Application and takes her usual seat near the window. The lecture is on Breath and its inverse pairings, but her eyes keep drifting toward the sky outside.

For a split second, she swears she sees a symbol flicker in the clouds.

But when she blinks, it’s gone.

Ararat was in Session Mechanics Lab, surrounded by charts and pulsing light screens displaying failed timelines. She stares at a graph mapping “Stability Potential vs. Player Sync Ratio” and thought about the five names not yet spoken aloud by the dead session.

Her instructor asked if she had a question. 

She didn't.

Dana spent most of Combat Synergy class throwing weighted disks at a training drone shaped like a smug chess piece. Her form was flawless, though her aggression was slightly excessive.

“Power’s not the problem,” Her coach muttered. “Control is.”

Dana didn’t answer. 

The drone exploded.

Dash tuned out most of Temporal Ethics, doodling symbols in the margin of his notes. Not time loops or stable paradoxes- just that weird, half finished sixth sigil that won’t leave his head.

He doesn't know what it's called yet. 

But he knows it’s real.

Jericho was in the Dream Analysis Wing, listening to the professor explain what dreamscapes can’t do.

He smiles slightly.

“Wrong again.”

By the end of the period, they’ve all returned to the same truth-

The world keeps turning.

The Institute keeps teaching.

But the session is still watching.

And time is still running out.

Recruitment isn’t easy. Not even with a broken session whispering through the cracks of reality and a glowing countdown seared into their sylladexes.

Some of the troll kids are interested.

Some are skeptical.

A few are deeply, violently uninterested.

The hybrids have to move carefully.

The first to be approached is Keilah Serket.

Quiet. Shy. Unfailingly polite.

Beth corners her after Dream Influence Theory and lays everything out gently. No pressure, just honesty.

Keilah blinks behind her thick rimmed glasses, hugs her notebook a little tighter, and says softly...

“If you think I can help… I want to try.”

She’s in. No drama. Just sincerity.

Next is Ophir Nitram, who listens to Jericho’s pitch with folded arms and the expression of someone being offered free ice cream with suspicious terms and conditions.

"So this session...” He says. “It’s failed. Dead. And now it wants you to... Finish it?”

Jericho nodded.

Ophir thought about it briefly.

“Sounds exactly like something I shouldn’t do.”

Dana shrugs. “That’s why we’re doing it.”

He sighs. “Fine. I’ll come to your next meeting. But if I die, I’m haunting someone. Probably you.”

Cilicia brings in Petra Leijon, half sister and chaos element.

"Am I allowed to punch a session? Just asking.” Petra pondered.

"If you can figure out how, we’ll give you a medal.” Dash replied.

She grins.

She’s definitely in.

And then...

The door to their hidden meeting space SLAMMED open!

Two identical voices...

“WE KNOW.”

Corinth and Minnith Captor.

Practically indistinguishable. Loud. Obsessed with secrets. Unapologetically nosy.

The twins burst in, carrying snacks and matching smug expressions.

“You’ve got a forbidden session trying to finish itself using your identities." Minnith started.

“And you’re not even going to invite us?” Corinth finished.

Ararat glares. “We specifically weren’t going to invite you.”

“Rude.” Minnith says.

“But expected.” Corinth adds.

“So here’s the deal!” They say together.

“You let us in-”

“Or we tell the Institute everything.”

The room goes silent.

Ty sighs. “We're supposed to be doing this in secret, guys."

"They’ll blow it the second we say no.” Dash reminded them.

Beth held up her hands. "Fine. You’re in. But if you break anything..."

"We break your kneecaps." Dana added helpfully.

The twins salute. “Accepted.”

The alcove is louder now.

Beth stood near the center, arms folded, as the conversation spiraled.

“We can’t handle this with half a roster,” Ararat said. “The session chose five of us to start. That doesn’t mean it’ll stop there.”

"Some of the remaining troll kids are unhinged.” Cilicia counters. “We invite the wrong one and we might accelerate the end of the world.”

“Or trigger a promposal subplot." Dana mutters. “Which is worse, honestly.”

Ty spoke calmly from the wall. "We don’t get to choose the timing. The session’s already decided the stakes.”

“The more players we bring in, the more context we’ll have. More roles. More stability.” Jericho adds.

“And more risk,” Dash says. “One wrong move and the Institute finds out.”

Beth exhales slowly. Her fingers twitch near her dream journal.

“We don’t have the luxury of hand picking the perfect team. If we’re going to stop this- or complete it- we need all hands on deck."

The room went quiet. Not defeated, just resolved.

Finally, Ararat nodded.

"Fine. We recruit the rest. We do it smart, we do it fast-"

"And we do it tomorrow." Dana adds.

Beth looks around the room. 

At their weird, broken, mismatched crew.

“We finish what the session started. With whoever we’ve got.”

Chapter Text

The morning sun creeps over the jagged rooftops of the Skaia Institute. Another day, another chance to stop a dead session from hijacking their lives. No pressure.

The team- now nearly a dozen strong- meets before classes in their usual courtyard corner. They’re tired, determined, and increasingly aware they’ve reached the point of no return.

“Three left.” Ararat says. “Ophir found their schedules.”

“So, what’s the plan?” Dash asks. “Charm? Bribery? Threats?”

“Whatever works." Dana grins. “It’s recruitment or bust.”

They start with the easiest.

Gethsemane “Genny” Makara is curled up on a bench outside the music wing, wearing a hoodie that doubles as a blanket and pajama pants patterned with froggies.

“Genny,” Beth says gently. “We need to talk.”

One eye cracks open.

"Is this about the glitchy sky and the whispering dream thing that wants to eat everyone’s destiny?”

The group exchanges looks.

"Yes.” Jericho says.

Genny stretches slowly, like a cat.

“Okay... I’m in... Just give me like... Five minutes to wake up. Maybe ten.”

She's in.

Cyprus Zahak is not so easy.

They find him in the metallurgy lab, calibrating dreamsteel coils. His expression says don’t try me before anyone even opens their mouth.

“Let me guess...” He mutters. “Session. Sigils. Countdown. You need my help.”

Petra tries convincing him first. “Cy, it’s not just weird dreams anymore. We’ve seen it. Beth-"

“I know what you’ve seen.” He snaps. “I’ve been monitoring the convergence fields. I’ve seen the data.”

Ararat steps forward. “Then you know we’re not wrong.”

“You’re not wrong.” Cyprus says. “You’re unprepared.”

Dana mutters. “Oh my god, he’s like if Ararat had a superiority complex and zero chill.”

“I have plenty of chill.” Cyprus says flatly.

Eventually, Beth cuts through the static.

“We don’t need you to believe in us. We just need you with us.”

That finally lands.

Cyprus sighs.

“Fine. But if this gets us expelled or exploded, I’m writing my name first on the blame roster.”

He’s in.

Lastly, they find Eden Ampora sitting alone at the very edge of the Skyframe Garden.

She’s in her usual spot- a cracked pillar overlooking the city skyline, knees pulled up to her chin, sketching in a wind worn notebook. 

When the group approaches, she doesn’t flinch.

“I know why you’re here.” She says before anyone speaks. “I already saw it. In the sky. In my sleep.”

Cilicia blinks. “You did?”

Eden shrugs. “It showed me the empty session. The broken timeline. The voices that never got to become real.”

Beth slowly stepped forward. “And… What did you do?”

Eden finally looks at them- eyes sharp behind her gentle face.

"I ignored it.”

“What?!”

"My dad’s already enough of a walking embarrassment.” She groaned. “If I start poking around in failed timelines and reality echoes, I might actually become him.”

“But you’re already seeing things." Jericho said calmly. “You’ve already heard it.”

Eden tensed slightly.

Dash tilted his head. “You’ve got insight, Eden. More than most of us. And I think you want to help.”

A long pause.

Eden sighs and shuts her notebook. “I don’t want to be part of this.”

And then...

“But I also don’t want to be left out.”

She slides off the pillar and stands up. “Alright. I’m in. But I’m doing this my way. No Ampora theatrics. No yelling. No musical numbers.”

Dana smirks. “What about light pyrotechnics?”

"Maybe.”

She walks past the group, already heading toward the meeting alcove.

Beth exchanges a glance with Ararat.

The team is now complete.

The old maintenance alcove is packed now. Too small for so many kids, yet somehow right. The overhead lights flickered faintly and the walls hummed with quiet resonance.

A sigil- sketched in chalk and surrounded by layered protection runes- rests in the center of the floor.

Beth stands at the front.

Ararat to her left.

Jericho to her right.

Everyone else gathers in a loose circle.

The tension is real, but so is the purpose.

“We’re not here to fight fate." Beth begins. “We’re here to understand it. And stop it from writing over us.”

Ararat pulls up the decrypted files on her terminal. “The session isn’t random. It has architecture. We’ve confirmed it was once active, and that it failed to form fully. That failure left behind remnants- code, roles, an unfinished map.”

“And now it’s trying to run again." Jericho finishes. “Using us.”

Dana crosses her arms. “So we figure out what it wants before it gets what it wants.”

Cilicia raised a hand. “Okay, but how do we do that without turning our brains into corrupted game discs?”

Ty answered. “We split the work. Assign tasks. Study different corners of the mystery. Form squads. Each team takes on a piece of the investigation.”

Beth nods.

“Let’s do this right.”

Team Alpha - The Library of Echoes

The team consists of Jericho, Eden, Ophir, and Beth.

They’ll dig through both written and digital archives- ancient dream journals, game theory codices, and system logs hidden deep beneath the Institute’s official data banks.

Team Beta - Convergence Pattern Analysis

Consists of Ararat, Cyprus, and Ty

They track session echoes, sky sigils, and geographic patterns to determine where the original session collapsed- and whether the countdown is location dependent.

Team Charlie - Dream Surveillance & Recovery

Consisting of Genny, Keilah, and Dash

They monitor dream activity, shared visions, and signs of further intrusion by the dead session’s ghost player.

Team Delta - Countermeasure Development

Made up of Dana, Cilicia, Petra, Minnith, and Corinth

Creative chaos. Field testing symbolic warding, dream armor, joke code shielding, and narrative scrambling devices.

Beth watches them break into groups, organizing, coordinating, even laughing.

For the first time, she feels something stronger than fear.

Hope.

When the meeting ends, Ararat pulls up the shared timer on her terminal.

Everyone gathers around. 

A quiet hush settles in.

>SESSION STATUS: STABILIZED (TEMPORARY)

NEW DATA PENDING

COUNTDOWN:

1 YEAR, 05 DAYS, 14 HOURS, 07 MINUTES

The seconds tick on.

But now?

So do they.

Chapter Text

Somewhere deep beneath Utune, in the collapsed tunnels of an abandoned hive tier, candles burn blue. Ancient troll sigils have been painted over with fresh cobalt paint. Choirs of ancestral hymns hum under the flickering hum of corrupted florescence.

The Cerulean Revival was never meant to survive the fusion.

When Alternia fell and human society integrated with troll culture, its most rigid castes dissolved. At least, on paper.

But the highbloods didn’t forget.

And some, especially the ones born to privilege without power, began to gather.

They preach purity.

A return to “proper order.”

A rejection of hybridization.

To them, the fusion is not salvation. 

It’s contamination.

“When the Signless failed, the Signless died." Their new doctrine claims. “But when the Empire fell, so did the heavens.”

Their leader is known only as The Vesperant- a young cerulean blood, brilliant and soft spoken, whose calm voice hides something sharp and dangerous underneath.

“The ghost session is not a threat. It is an opportunity. A seed of what once was. And we must nurture it- before the humans kill it again.”

They believe the countdown is a test.

Only the worthy will survive.

And the hybrids?

"Aberrations. Blights. False Players."

On the other side of the Divide, far above the surface, tucked behind false bureaucratic fronts and "cultural preservation centers," the Order of the Broken Sky gathers.

They meet in converted lecture halls and warehouses once used by Alternian diplomats. Their symbols are obsidian shards over a cracked dream planet. Their colors are grayscale- purity through simplicity.

To them, trolls represent the failure of post- Earth stability.

“Their games destroyed their world. Now they infect ours.”

Founded by ex-military strategists, failed session survivors, and technocrats still bitter over being displaced by “impossible alien children,” the Order is cold, precise, and deeply anti magic.

Their current operative in Utune is a tall, weathered woman named Dr. Lucia Hale- a former Skaia Institute researcher who lost her son to a misfired kernel glitch. She wears gloves, mirrored glasses, and a data ring that can scramble dream signatures with a flick.

“The countdown is a fault line.” She tells her subordinates. “And we will control where it cracks.”

They do not trust the Institute.

They monitor its students.

And they want the hybrids contained. 

Or at least erased.

The Revival and the Order loathe each other.

One believes in troll supremacy.

The other believes in troll extinction.

But they both agree on one thing-

The hybrids are the problem.

A defunct observation tower near the edge of Utune. 

The kind no one looks at anymore, forgotten between jurisdictions. 

The perfect place for an off the record meeting.

The wind howled through the broken antennae above. The sky flickered faintly with residual Skaian haze. Inside at a long cracked table, two figures sit across from each other.

Lucia Hale. Clean cut. Cold. An earpiece glows faintly in her right ear, constantly pulling silent data streams. Her coat is pristine. Her gloves never come off.

The Vesperant. Cerulean cloak folded neatly at their side. Their expression is serene. The tip of one horn is chipped- a deliberate affectation. Their voice is silk wrapped around steel.

Between them is a projected map of Utune’s leyline intersections, and something pulsing irregularly in the center. 

A disturbance. 

No clear source.

“It’s not natural." Lucia said. “Or technological. We’ve run every diagnostic.”

“Then it is ancestral." Vesperant replied, eyes narrowing. “A residual echo. A wound begging to be bled dry.”

They stared at one another in silence.

“You despise me." Vesperant finally said, unbothered. “And I find your ideology pitifully primitive. But we share a common obstacle.”

Lucia responds flatly. “The Institute’s hybrids.”

Vesperant inclined their head. “Abominations who interfere with the session’s natural correction.”

Lucia agrees. “Unstable. Unsupervised. Over-aspected.”

Their words are different, but the tone is the same.

Control the children, control the future.

Lucia leaned forward. “You don’t tell your zealots about this... Whatever it is. And I don’t tell my analysts what your little church has been stashing in hive ruins.”

Vesperant smiled faintly. “And when the truth surfaces?”

Lucia doesn’t hesitate. “We strike first.”

They reach no formal agreement.

No handshake. 

No signature.

But when they both rise and leave the tower, they understand one thing.

Their truce is in effect.

Chapter Text

In the heart of Utune, suspended between two mirrored spires of fused Earth and Alternian design, floats the crystalline chamber of the Reconciliation Council. A curved table of living quartz encircles a platform of glowing tiles.

Each tile bears the sigil of a world now gone.

Earth. 

Alternia. 

Skaia. 

Prospit. 

Derse.

This is where policy is negotiated, history is rewritten, and the fusion is upheld.

Its members wear blended robes of planetary colors- sapphire, gold, violet, and black.

Some are humans.

Some are trolls.

A few are both or neither.

The Council’s stated mission?

“To preserve harmony between Earthborn and Alternian citizens, and ensure the continued peace of the fused civilization through diplomatic oversight and societal reintegration.”

But today, the chamber buzzes with tension.

Someone has proposed a re-evaluation of hybrid educational independence. It was triggered not by hard evidence, but by a “pattern of increased anomaly reports.”

Councilor Igrith, a rustblood turned scholar, protests. “No hybrid has broken the Accord. Their behavior, while unconventional, is within bounds.”

Councilor Mirren, a human cultural ethicist, frowns. “Intent does not matter. If the session signatures are returning, we need to reassert control.”

Voices rise. Debate spirals.

And all the while, the sigils on the central floor glow faintly.

Not from council command, but from something deeper.

Elsewhere in Utune, in the bastion known as The Frayglass Vault, the Enforcers suit up. They are the sword of the Accord. Those trained to maintain peace, suppress magical anomalies, and erase breaches in narrative continuity.

Their ranks are mixed. Former Imperial drones, now repurposed. Psychic humans trained in session counter memetics. AI-adjacent spectro kinetic constructs born from fusion tech.

“We don’t pick sides.” Says Captain Wren. sharpening his twin nullblades. “We enforce outcomes.”

The Enforcers have begun receiving classified reports. Distorted leyline echoes, dreamscape surge spikes, proximity warnings near Skaia Institute.

Wren frowns at the most recent reading. “Something’s waking up. And it’s old.”

Enshrined in the central archives and drilled into every student at the Skaia Institute, the Skaia Accord was the binding legislation that enabled peace after the fusion.

It has three core pillars.

1. Equal Recognition – Trolls, humans, and hybrids are to be treated as citizens of equal right and potential.

2. Aspect Regulation – All use of classpect abilities must be declared and channeled through recognized educational or diplomatic bodies.

3. Session Prohibition – No new sessions are to be created, invoked, or tampered with. The failure of the Great Session is the final session.

Violating any of these three laws is grounds for memory extraction, academic erasure, and, if necessary, termination.

But the Accord has a flaw.

It was written assuming peace.

It never planned for a session to return on its own.

As the city wakes to another hyperregulated weekday, televisions flicker to life. Projection screens shimmer in public squares and phones auto update with notifications.

“Good morning, citizens of the Unified Territories.” Says a warm, professional voice.

The image stabilizes.

A sharply dressed anchor- Mirielle Port, human, trusted voice of post-Fusion media- smiles into the camera. Her expression is pleasant and her tone is curated neutrality. Behind her floats a calm backdrop. Stylized dream towers, a clear sky, and the faint shimmer of Skaia.

“We begin with a brief anomaly advisory from the Reconciliation Council and Institute spokespeople.”

The graphic shifts.

A soft blue glow pulses behind the headline "TEMPORARY AETHERIC DISTURBANCES - NON-THREATENING"

Mirielle continues. “Several minor leyline fluctuations were recorded over central Utune during the early morning hours. Experts at the Skaia Institute assure us that there is no cause for alarm.”

A clip rolls with blurry footage. The edge of a skyline briefly shimmered. A frame by frame analysis of “atmospheric data inconsistencies.”

“The Reconciliation Council reminds all citizens that high aether spring cycles are normal and should be expected during transitional months. As always, avoid direct meditation beneath sigil bearing spires, and report any unusual dreams to your local Civic Concord Liaison.”

She shifts tone slightly, but it's still pleasant and poised.

“And now: back to school coverage. Did you know the Skaia Institute’s horticulture team recently crossbred Prospitian lilies with Alternian thorns? Spoiler: They bite. Playfully.”

The segment ends. The broadcast fades to something else. Sports, weather, dream music charts.

But for a few viewers- those trained to read between the lines- it wasn’t just static.

It was a warning disguised as comfort.

A signal that the world is changing.

That the dream veil is thinning.

Vantage Station sits on the edge of Utune’s lower district, a major commuter hub connecting the Skaia Institute to outlying education sectors. It's crowded, efficient, and ordinary.

Until it isn’t.

The first sign is the silence. At exactly 08:27 local time, every digital interface on the platform goes dark. 

Ticket screens. Train timetables. Music feeds. All gone. Just flickering static and a low hum.

Then the lights shift- flickering not like electricity failing, but like reality stuttering.

A train then enters the station. It looks identical to the morning commuter line, but it’s not on the schedule. Its doors open, but no one exits.

The first few passengers step forward hesitantly.

Someone- a young troll, tealblood- approaches the open door and peers inside.

Then freezes.

The train car interior looping into itself.

A hallway that didn’t end.

Windows showing skies that haven’t existed in years.

And in the reflection of the dark glass...

A sixth sigil burns.

The troll screams.

Others back away. 

Someone calls for help.

Then, just as suddenly as it arrived, the train lets out a mechanical hiss and departs.

No passengers.

No record of its ID.

An hour later, the platform is cordoned off.

Captain Wren of the Enforcers arrives in full gear. He is calm, surgical, and his coat is barely dusted from the drone transport landing.

He examines the area.

“Residual dreamcode.” He says flatly after scanning the tracks with a sigil reactive lens. “Unstructured. Spontaneous. It’s growing more unstable.”

His lieutenant- an AI-interface agent named VOKE- tilts her head. “Containment protocol?”

“No." Wren says, eyes narrowing. “We don’t contain this. We trace it back.”

The bell hasn’t even rung yet. The team is scattered across their usual courtyard table- mugs of stim-caf, notebooks full of notes and dreams, and a few bleary stares. It’s too early for sky chatter. Too early for sigils.

But then Ararat’s terminal buzzes.

>[ALERT: LOCAL TRANSLINE ANOMALY - CLASSIFIED]

[CONTAINMENT IN PROGRESS - COUNCIL OBSERVERS DISPATCHED]

She frowns, swipes it open, and mutters, “Vantage Station.”

“What about it?” Dash asks, not looking up.

She turns the screen to show them.

Dana leans in, mouth flattening into a line. “That’s five blocks from the north gate.”

"Anyone hurt?” Beth asks.

Ararat shrugs. “No casualties… But they flagged it under dreamcode corruption.”

“That wasn’t on our map. That area wasn’t on the convergence line.” Jericho said quietly from the stone ledge he was seated on.

Cilicia glances around. “So it’s spreading?”

“Or adapting.” Ty commented.

"Worse,” Petra adds. “It’s testing us.”

The courtyard hums with silence.

Eden, sipping from a lidded thermos, finally speaks up. “They’re going to start locking things down. The Enforcers. The Council. Everyone.”

“So we stay ahead,” Ararat says. “We have to.”

Beth closes her journal. “Let’s update the map. Check the satellite traces. If it can manifest a train, who knows what it’ll use next?”

Everyone nods.

In the high chamber of the Marble Spire Annex, Councilor Mirren sifts through that morning’s anomaly briefings.

She’s seated at her private desk, sunlight from the ley infused dome casting pale spirals across her data screens. She’s seen enough to know when numbers lie- and when silence speaks louder than panic.

One report catches her eye.

>Vantage Station: Contained. No injuries.

Energy surge labeled “Seasonal.”

All surveillance videos are “Inconclusive.”

And yet…

Mirren narrows her eyes at the timestamp.

>08:27

Exactly matching the Vesperant's last private withdrawal from the Council feed.

And a recent spike in Skaia Institute access activity.

She tabs open another feed- student monitoring records. 

Legally restricted. 

Quietly overridden.

Her screen fills with names. 

Activity spikes. 

Behavioral markers.

Among them...

>Egbert-Pyrope, Bethany.

>Strider-Vantas, Ararat. Dash. Dana.

>Lalonde-Maryam, Jericho.

>Harley, Tiberias.

Not flagged as dangerous. Not yet.

But trending.

“Unusual clustering...” She murmurs. “Dream pattern overlap. Unscheduled group interactions. Increased proximity to fluctuation zones.”

She taps the edge of her desk, then opens a private log.

>FIELD MONITORING REQUEST – PENDING

SUBJECT: Skaia Institute Hybrid Collective

FLAG FOR: Enforcer Liaison Approval

She hesitates.

Then submits.

As the window closes, her reflection warps briefly- just for a second- in the smooth black glass of her desk.

A flicker. 

A pulse.

A shape behind her that isn’t really there.

She doesn’t see it.

But the reader does.

END OF ACT ONE

Chapter Text

A girl dreamed of a sky that wasn’t hers.

Bethany “Beth” Egbert-Pyrope led an ordinary life in the towering city of Utune- until a mysterious sigil flickered above her home and a dormant alchemizer beneath her bed jolted back to life. That was the beginning. The signal.

From there, the hybrids- children born of Earth and Alternian lineage- were pulled together by a force they didn’t understand.

Dash and Dana Strider-Vantas, fiery and skeptical.

Ararat Strider-Vantas, precise and analytical.

Jericho Lalonde-Maryam, composed and enigmatic.

Tiberias “Ty” Harley, grounding and empathetic.

They witnessed a vision.

A failed session, long collapsed, reaching back through the scars of space and time. In its wake, it left a countdown and a purpose.

Despite stern warnings from their parents- veterans and survivors of a world before the fusion- the hybrids chose to act in secret.

At the Skaia Institute, they recruited other troll students.

Keilah Serket, Ophir Nitram, Cilicia Medigo, Petra Leijon, Gesthemane "Genny" Makara, Eden Ampora, Corinth and Minnith Captor, Cyprus Zahak, Jordan Peixes, and Galilee "Lee" Peixes.

Together, they became a makeshift team of investigators, rebels, and reluctant protagonists.

But the world was already watching them.

In the shadows of Utune, two old enemies stirred.

The Cerulean Revival, trolls who seek to restore the blood hierarchy and erase hybrid bloodlines.

The Order of the Broken Sky, humans who reject all things Alternian and dream coded.

Adversaries united by a shared threat they don’t fully understand. That is, for the time being.

Meanwhile, the very foundation of peace- The Skaia Accord- shows signs of unraveling.

Leylines are distorting.

Dream echoes are manifesting in public spaces.

And the Reconciliation Council has begun to take notice.

As the countdown continues to tick, one truth becomes clear...

The session isn’t over.

It’s just begun again.

Chapter Text

It was deep into the hours of the night. Save for the glow of a single TV, Gamzee's house was pitch black. He was in the middle of another one of his late night obscure cosmic soap opera marathons, laying sprawled on a giant bean bag chair with some Faygo and sopor pie. 

Then he hears it. The faint, yet familiar cry of his grub. He gets up from the bean bag and saunters into the nursery. The walls shone a soft pink with glow in the dark jellyfish nightlights.

Little Gethsemane is curled up sideways in her pod-crib, tears barely formed under half lidded eyes and tiny sobs hitching from her throat. 

"Hey, hey, hey, Little Lady..." Gamzee picks her up gently. "Papa Gamz is here."

She nuzzled into his hoodie without a sound.

He brought her back into the living room and sank into the beanbag again, cradling her against his chest.

"Had one of them spooky little head pictures, huh?” He whispered.

She made a soft grunt in response.

Gamzee chuckled. “Yeah. I get it.”

A pause.

A breath.

And then, his voice dropped- just a little lower, a little sadder.

“You look like her, you know. Your Mama.”

He didn’t say her name. He never really did. Maybe because speaking it felt like admitting she was gone. But he saw her in Genny’s face more every day. 

“She had that same lil’ frown when she dreamed too loud...” He murmured, brushing a lock of fuzz-hair back from Genny’s forehead. “Couldn’t stand nightmares. Or loud noises. Or folks tryna tell her how to live.”

A faint smile tugged at his mouth.

“You gonna grow up weird, you know that?” He asked her softly. “Raised by a clown blood dropout with beanbags for chairs and Faygo in the fridge instead of milk.”

He rocked her a little.

“But I read the bedtime stories. Even if they’re about space hippies and glub ghosts. And I hum the lullabies, even if I forget the words and start makin’ ‘em up.”

Genny’s breathing was steady now.

"I don’t do things like they told me in the parent support forums. I ain’t sterilizin’ your pacifiers with high psi steam. I ain’t readin’ no books called 'Raising a Child in the Post-Accord Age.’ I hold you when you cry. I tell you true things. I keep the nightmares away.”

Another beat of silence.

“It’s enough, right?”

As if in answer, Genny gave a long, sleepy sigh and burrowed even closer.

Gamzee closed his eyes. Let his head fall back. Let the ancient beanbag swallow them both in warmth and memory.

“Yeah... She’d think so too.”

On screen, an overly dramatic alien ghost argues with its twin about destiny and scented candles. Gamzee lowers the volume on it slightly.

“You know,” He admits to her. “Back when I was a lil’ scrungly grub like you, your papa didn’t exactly get the, uh… Prime time bedtime storybook treatment. Things was real messy, real loud. Real angry, all the damn time. But not for you. No way, my sleepy miracle. I ain't lettin’ the world chew you up like it did me... You gon’ have soft things, and silly things, and a whole damn life where you ain’t gotta be scared of the dark.”

Genny let out another sigh, this time in understanding. Gamzee smiled softly.

"I'm always gonna be here for ya, kid... Don't ever forget that..."

Outside, the skies of Utune pulsed.

But inside, beneath old cosmic flickers and the quiet rumble of dream static TV…

A tired juggalo-turned-father held his daughter close.

His methods were strange.

His history was violent.

But his love was real.

And for now, that was all Genny needed.

Chapter Text

It started, as most intrusive thoughts do, without his permission.

Karkat had been walking through the upper plaza of Utune, not thinking about anything except getting back to his shared apartment with Dave. But then, of course, he had to pass by a playground.

A hybrid kid with stubby horns and a neon green beanie was screaming happily while chasing a drone glider shaped like a frog.

Their human parent- tired, smiling, and crouched near the sandbox- laughed and called out something stupid and soft like, “Okay, Captain Chaos, bring it in for landing!”

Something about that moment lodged itself under Karkat’s skin like glass.

Not because it was cute.

Not because it was loud.

But because for a split second, his brain whispered...

'What if that was us?'

He stopped walking. 

Stared. 

Watched the kid stumble and fall into giggles.

He then imagined Dave's stupid grin and stupid sunglasses tucked into his stupid collar. Maybe holding a juice box for a tiny, shouting gremlin in ironic baby shades.

“Oh, come the fuck on.” Karkat muttered under his breath, dragging a hand down his face.

Where the hell had that come from?

He didn’t like kids. He didn’t know what to do with kids.

They were loud, sticky, unpredictable, and terrifying. They cried for no reason. They broke things. They asked questions.

And yet...

When he looked back at the parent scooping up their grub with practiced ease, a thought surfaced in his mind again...

'Would Dave be a good dad?'

It made his chest ache in a strange, quiet way.

He walked faster now, hoping movement would chase the thought away.

But it didn’t.

Because now he wasn’t thinking about playgrounds.

He was thinking about late nights.

Cartoons playing in the background.

Small, sleeping forms tucked in between them on the couch.

Tiny arms. Little horns.

A name they picked together.

“Fuck..." He said aloud, because that was easier than admitting his eyes were stinging.

Karkat tried to forget. He really did.

He went home, made pasta, and proceeded to yell at the stove when the water boiled over.

He put on one of those dumb Earth movies Dave liked with the laser swords and confusing family drama.

“Technically everyone in this movie has parent issues, Karkat. It’s deep.”

“It’s a laser sword soap opera, Dave.”

“Exactly. It’s art.”

They'd watched it a dozen times. Normally, he’d make snide commentary the whole way through, pretending not to like it while secretly loving it.

But this time, he couldn't focus.

Because the main character- a scrappy orphan- was learning his dad had been evil the whole time.

“Great." Karkat muttered. “Fucking great. He finds out his old man is some kind of death wizard and what, now we’re supposed to feel bad for him?”

Dave barely looked up from his popcorn. “I mean, yeah. It’s about redemption and legacies and generational trauma and shit.”

Karkat crossed his arms tightly.

"Yeah, well... Not everyone has a legacy. Or generational trauma. Or fucking... Kids.”

Dave blinked, turning slowly.

“Okay, that came outta nowhere. You good, Karkat?"

Karkat opened his mouth, but then closed it. Then he gestured vaguely at the screen.

“It’s just... It’s fucking stupid! All this family crap! Everyone’s always like 'Oh, what will you leave behind, oh, the next generation,’ like it’s some kind of- some kind of requirement! Like, if you don’t end up with a genetic continuation of your sad little story arc, you failed at living!”

Dave nodded slowly. “Okay... So you’re having an existential crisis because Darth Vader has kids?”

“No!” Karkat snapped. “I’m not- I’m not having a crisis, I’m just-”

He trailed off. Rubbed at his face again.

“I was walking home earlier. Saw some hybrid kid playing with their human parent. They looked so… Happy. And soft. Like the kind of soft you only get when you’re allowed to just be, without someone yelling or bleeding or assigning you a caste.”

Dave was quiet now. 

Karkat exhaled slowly.

“And I just... Thought about us. About what that would look like. With... A kid. Maybe.”

There. It was out. Kind of.

“Hypothetically.”

Dave leaned back, crunching a kernel between his teeth.

“Okay.”

"Okay?”

“Yeah. I think about it too, sometimes.”

Karkat’s head snapped toward him.

“Wait, what?”

Dave shrugged. “You think I haven’t imagined, like, a tiny red-eyed nightmare with your anger issues and my fashion sense? That’d be unstoppable. And also terrifying.”

“You never said anything!”

"Neither did you, dude. You were too busy screaming at Baby Yoda.”

Karkat looked like he was buffering.

Dave reached over and took his hand gently. “If you ever wanted to talk about it- actually talk about it- I'm here. No pressure. No timeline. Just... Yeah.”

Karkat stared at their hands.

Then looked away.

“Yeah. Okay.”

A long pause.

Then, just above a whisper...

“He’d have your smile, you know.”

Dave’s thumb brushed his knuckles.

“Yeah. And your eyebrows.”

“God, what a combination.”

They laughed as the movie kept playing.

Later that night, long after Karkat fell asleep on the couch (wrapped in a blanket he swore was too soft to be his), Dave slipped into his office nook and opened his old journal. Not a digital one. A real ass paper one. Red leather cover. A gift from Rose. He only used it for thoughts that felt like they’d rot if left in his head too long.

He flipped past pages of half poems, therapy sarcasm, and diagrams titled things like “Time Travel For People Who Definitely Won’t Use It (Again)”...

Until he found an empty one.

He didn’t date it. He didn’t title it.

He just wrote:

"He said it out loud today."

About the kid. 

Hypothetically.

"I didn’t know how bad I needed to hear that until he said it. It’s weird. I’ve never wanted to pressure him. Hell, I didn’t even know if I wanted it for real. But the second he said it, I started picturing it.

Not the perfect family. Just someone who laughs like him and rolls their eyes like me. Someone we keep safe.

I think we’d be okay at it. Messy, weird, probably illegal in at least two quadrants. But okay. He’d name them something dramatic. I’d nickname them something worse. We’d make it work."

He paused, then added one more line at the bottom.

"Hypothetically, I’d say yes."

Then he closed the journal and went back to the couch, curling up next to Karkat.

Two nights later, Karkat sat alone with his datapad open, pretending to review updates on hybrid legislation for work.

But that’s not what he typed into the search bar.

"Gender neutral Alternian-human hybrid baby names"

He stared at the results for a long time. He hated all of them. Half were too Earthy. The rest sounded like pharmaceuticals.

Then he opened a blank file. Titled it...

"Names I Would Never Admit I’m Considering.txt"

The first entry:

>Rion (reminds me of “riot” but sounds calm. Don’t overthink it)

Then: 

>Sol

>Vanta

>Clio (Too soft? Might grow on me)

>Noct

>Aegir (Dave will say this one sounds like a shampoo brand. Still cool.)

He stopped and closed the file. He took a deep breath.

Then, grumbling under his breath, renamed it...

“Hypothetically Speaking.txt”

Chapter Text

The clinic was quieter than either of them expected. No sterile hum, no fluorescent buzz. Just soft skylights and the subtle scent of lemon balm. The place probably overcharged by several zeroes, but this was Utune, after all. Even the science came with boutique branding.

Dave leaned against the check-in kiosk, scanning the sleek little display like it owed him a favor.

“So do we want the ‘Express Legacy Package’ or the ‘Dream-Compatible Premium Bundle’? Sounds like a dating sim.”

Karkat shot him a glare sharp enough to sterilize the floor. “Can you please take this seriously for ten seconds?”

Dave held up his hands. “Dude, I am taking it seriously. I just process life-altering genetic commitments with sarcasm. It's how I cope."

Karkat muttered something deeply unprintable and stared at the abstract mural on the far wall- a swirl of blue and red strands coiling around a soft white star. He exhaled through his nose.

"This is fine. We’re fine. People do this all the time. It’s not a big deal. Just splicing our genetic material into a hypothetical being who may or may not inherit every single one of our emotional dysfunctions and mutant proclivities.”

“See? That’s the spirit.” Dave said, bumping his shoulder lightly.

A voice interrupted them. It was soft, pleasant, and entirely too serene. 

“Mr. Strider, Mr. Vantas? We’re ready for you.”

The consultant was a middle aged cerulean with a soothing expression and a datapad clutched like a holy relic. She led them into a softly lit consultation room filled with delicate plants, dreaming crystals, and projection tech.

“We’ve already reviewed your submitted profiles,” She said, sliding into her seat. “Given your blood types and neurological markers, I believe we can produce a stable hybrid genome without artificial smoothing. That’s not always the case with cross-species matches.”

Karkat blinked. “You mean we don’t need a donor?”

“Correct. Your compatibility is exceptionally high. Biologically speaking, your emotional volatility might even serve as a balancing factor.”

Dave raised an eyebrow. “Our volatility is romantically stabilizing? You hear that, Karkat? We’re biologically codependent.”

Karkat grunted, but didn’t disagree.

The consultant smiled politely. "Would you like to review phenotype projections before committing to embryonic synthesis?”

"Can we just say yes and be surprised?” Dave asked. “Like a chaotic little cosmic loot box?”

“Absolutely not." Karkat cut in. “We are not leaving this up to chance. Not with your taste in hats.”

Dave made a wounded sound.

They went over the projections: Skin tones, horn curvature, potential eye color spectrums, emotional trait overlays. They declined any artificial enhancements. They both agreed: whatever this kid was going to be, they’d come into the world exactly as they were meant to.

Eventually, it was time.

Two sterile vials. 

One blood red. 

One muted gold.

Both sealed. 

Both placed into the synthesizer unit with quiet ceremony.

Dave rested his hand on the surface of the machine and looked over at Karkat.

“So...” He said softly. “You scared?”

Karkat didn’t answer right away.

Then...

“Yeah. Terrified.”

Dave nodded. “Same.”

They stood there in silence, hands brushing against the chrome.

Outside, the city pulsed with unfamiliar stars.

Inside, their future had just begun forming.

Cell by cell.

The first thing they bought was a crib. Not one of the fancy, hover supported, AI- integrated ones- just a solid wooden frame Dave found online that reminded Karkat of a real home. 

Something grounded. Something stable.

Dave painted one of the walls of the nursery with constellations. Karkat covered the other with printed lists titled “100 Things You Should Never Say To A Toddler Unless You Want To Start A War.”

The two argued about everything.

Names. 

Lighting. 

Food. 

Swaddle techniques.

“I don’t care what that parenting forum says, Dave! You cannot swaddle a child like a burrito unless you also want to make them associate sleep with salsa related trauma!”

But under the arguing was something soft. Something steady.

Hope.

They talked about lullabies.

Dave practiced holding dolls (badly).

Karkat read entire books with titles like “My Grub, My Galaxy.”

And every night before bed, even when they didn’t say it aloud, both of them whispered the same thing to the air...

“You’re already loved.”

Three weeks later, they returned for the update. Dave tried to play it cool. Wore shades indoors. Brought juice boxes to be ironic. Karkat clutched a clipboard like it was the last shield between him and fatherhood induced combustion.

The doctor-same pleasant cerulean, but this time with a second assistant- greeted them warmly.

“Mr. Strider, Mr. Vantas. Thank you for returning.”

She offered them seats.

“Before we begin... May I ask you something?” The doctor said, her smile never faltering. “On a scale from one to ten, how prepared would you say you feel for children?”

Dave blinked. “Like, in general? I mean, define prepared. If ten is ‘emotionally sound and financially secure,’ and one is ‘screaming into a paper bag shaped like a diaper,’ I think we’re holding steady at a solid... Six point chaos.”

Karkat muttered. “Somewhere between existential dread and shopping for baby proofing foam.”

The doctor nodded. “Excellent, because you’ll be needing twice the foam.”

A pause.

“Wait what.” Karkat said flatly.

“The embryo has successfully taken. Both of them.”

She pulled up a soft light projection. 

Two orbs shimmered in warm blue.

“You’re not having one child. You’re having two. Fraternal twins- One male, one female.”

Dave blinked. He ooked at the screen, then at Karkat.

"So, we broke the genetic odds and got a two-for-one deal?”

Karkat opened his mouth, closed it, and stared. “We’re gonna die.”

The doctor smiled. “Twins are rare, but not unheard of. Especially with hybrid genomes this compatible. They’ve begun forming in parallel.”

Karkat’s hands trembled slightly. “Two... We’re having two...”

Dave reached over, grinning as he took his hand. “Guess we better start shopping for that foam again."

Karkat swallowed.

“Two names... Two baby monitors... Two night feeds... Two future therapy bills.”

But he didn’t let go of Dave’s hand.

When he looked at the projection again- at the twin points of growing life- the fear didn’t vanish…

But it softened.

Because somehow, impossibly, it felt right.

The clinic room was dimly lit, warm, and quiet. Only the faintest hum of monitoring equipment and the rhythmic beeps of a life beginning, times two. Karkat sat stiffly in the corner chair, face pale, hands clenched around the edges of a styrofoam cup of lukewarm decaf.

Dave stood next to the stasis crib, his shades forgotten somewhere back in the chaos of delivery prep.

His eyes were red.

But not from powers. 

Not from trauma.

From crying.

Inside the crib lay two tiny bundles swaddled in soft Alternian blue and white cloth, a single embroidered gear-sigil stitched onto each blanket’s edge.

The first one- the boy- was already frowning in his sleep.

The second- the girl- had her fingers curled in defiance, as if daring the world to interrupt her nap.

Both had fine blond hair and faint red glints in their lashes. Both had Dave’s face, almost eerily so. Karkat approached slowly, as if afraid he’d shatter the moment.

“They… They look like you...” He said hoarsely.

"That’s why they’re so beautiful." Dave replied, without missing a beat.

Karkat shot him a look, but his voice softened.

“Which one screamed louder?”

“They took turns.” Dave said. “Kind of like performance art. You’d be proud.”

They stared down at them for a long, silent beat.

Then the assistant doctor entered quietly, datapad in hand. “You’ve reviewed the final genetic registration forms. You’re free to assign their names now.”

Dave looked at Karkat.

Karkat looked back.

They nodded. No dramatic speech. Just a decision they'd both already made.

Dave typed them in slowly, like the keys were holy.

DASH STRIDER-VANTAS

DANA STRIDER-VANTAS

The datapad accepted the names. The display glowed briefly in affirmation.

Two identities.

Two stories.

No longer hypothetical.

Karkat sat down next to the crib and whispered..

“Hey, Dash. Hey, Dana. Welcome to the worst timeline.”

Dave grinned. “And the best.”

Chapter Text

John didn’t know what was happening the moment Terezi entered their house wearing a judge’s robe, two party hats, and what looked like a belt made entirely out of gavel handles

"So. I've made a decision."

That sentence never boded well for John's peace of mind.

“Uh...” He said, clutching his cup of coffee tighter. “Okay?”

Terezi paced in a dramatic circle, the robe swishing behind her.

"The legal and biological precedent has been thoroughly reviewed. The council of Me, Myself, and Also Me, has reached a unanimous verdict."

She whipped around. "We're having a child!"

John blinked. “Wait. What?!”

"Congratulations, John!" She beamed. "You're about to be a defendant in the most important case of your life!"

“Parenting isn’t a legal proceeding...” He said helplessly.

"WRONG." She said, already drawing up a complicated flowchart titled...

“Operation: PROGENY – Pathways to Controlled Chaos and Mild Sentiment.”

The next few days were a blur of spreadsheets, ironic baby name lists, and long conversations at 3 AM over Cola and Alternian pepper cakes.

John, for all his flailing, was not against the idea. In fact, a part of him had been quietly thinking about it for years.

But he was worried. 

About legacy. 

About failure. 

About-

“-messing a kid up because I still don’t know how to fix myself.” He admitted one night, sitting cross legged on the floor as Terezi built a tower of law books around them.

Terezi stared at him for a long moment, her smile softer than usual.

"Nobody knows how to fix themselves." She said. "The trick is to let your kid learn different mistakes."

John laughed. It came out broken, but real.

“Okay, okay.” He said. “Let’s do it.”

The hybrid clinic staff were not entirely prepared for Terezi Pyrope.

"So. If I file the paperwork in red ink, will my child inherit a flare for judicial aesthetics?"

“Miss Pyrope, that’s not how DNA-”

“OBJECTION! I'll be marking that down as a personal challenge."

John just gave the nurse an apologetic thumbs up from the sample collection chamber.

They opted for an assisted genetic synthesis- with John providing the primary biological baseline and Terezi contributing encoded troll chromosomal markers through ceremonial blood and gene weaves.

“Is that legal?” John asked.

"Nope!" She grinned. "But they said it was cool, so..."

When the confirmation arrived, it came via a digital scroll with golden lettering.

"EMBRYO SUCCESSFULLY STABILIZED. PROJECTION: FEMALE. ESTIMATED TEMPERAMENT: UNKNOWN. POSSIBILITY FOR RECKLESS EMPATHY: HIGH."

Terezi laughed so hard she nearly fell off the couch. John just stared at the scroll, a hand to his heart.

“She’s really happening...” He whispered.

"Yep. A mini you. Or a mini me. Or both. Or neither."

“You think she’ll be loud?”

"I think,” Terezi said, curling up beside him, “She'll be the kind of loud that makes people listen."

The delivery room was glowing with soft blue luminescence- an ambient setting requested by John because it was “less harsh on baby eyes and kinda magical.”

Terezi, however, had requested music.

Not lullabies.

Battle themes.

Somewhere between the steady pulse of monitors and the hum of the incubator, the soundtrack to a trollian courtroom drama was thundering through the speakers.

The midwife was unfazed. The chaos had been noted in the file.

"Okay,” the assistant chirped. "She’s here! Everything looks perfect. Want to meet her?”

John nodded, hands trembling as the swaddled bundle was placed in his arms.

“Oh my god... She’s… Wow. She’s got horns...”

"And she has your cheeks." Terezi added. “I can smell them from here."

John's throat felt tight. "She’s really here. Bethany.”

"A name derived from an ancient Earth village. Which means 'house of figs'. I approve."

“Also it just felt... Nice.” John added. “Warm.”

Their baby girl let out a soft, breathy hiccup.

They sat together, exhausted and luminous, staring at the tiny person they'd made.

For the moment, the chaos was still.

Beth Egbert-Pyrope was a handful.

Not in the way that made adults groan.

In the way that made everyone on the street know her name within five minutes.

By the time she was two, she’d figured out how to climb the countertops and debate with the food replicator.

At three and a half?

She was a tiny chaos engine with a juice mustache and a relentless curiosity for cause, effect, and "what happens if I press this?"

“Beth, no! Don’t put the toaster in the bathtub-!”

Too late. 

She’d already tossed it in and yelled “SCIENCE!”

John, frazzled, yanked it out and sighed. “Okay, that’s strike four today and it’s not even 9AM.”

Beth blinked up at him. Her eyes were wide and innocent. A true master of the “but I’m cute” defense.

“I made it bubble." She said proudly.

John stared at her. 

Then snorted. 

Then laughed. 

And then-

"Okay, yes, but we only do bathtub science with approved items, okay?”

Beth nodded solemnly. 

Crossed her heart. 

And immediately tried to put a banana in the vacuum tube.

Terezi loved Beth’s fire.

They played elaborate courtroom drama games with the stuffed animals. Beth was always the Prosecutor of Chaos.

“I find you GUILTY of crumbs!” She screamed at a plush moose.

“SENTENCING: NO COOKIES FOR FIVE MINUTES!” Terezi howled in return.

Sometimes, they went to the park and played “Blind Tag,” where Beth closed her eyes and relied on her other senses.

She was surprisingly good at it.

Other times, they spent hours drawing on the walls. 

With washable markers, of course. 

Beth’s masterpieces included “Giant Snake That Loves Spaghetti” and “Me As Queen Of The Moon And Also Dad Is There.”

Despite the mayhem, Beth was sweet to her core.

She gave juice box offerings to sad classmates.

She once tried to “defend” a crying bug from a mean child.

She asked if stars get lonely when they’re too far from each other.

John melted every single time.

Terezi bragged about her in every message thread, even the ones not about parenting.

"You can be an agent of pure disorder and still know when to offer hugs." She said, pulling Beth into her arms after a minor crayon incident.

Beth just giggled and said, “You smell like red jellybeans.”

At bedtime, she bounced off the walls twice before finally crashing between her two parents- one arm over Terezi’s face and feet on John’s ribs.

“Goodnight, my little Chaos Gremlin.” John whispered.

"Sweet dreams, Mini-Me." Terezi added. "May you overthrow a king in your dreams."

Beth mumbled. “M’gonna ride a dolphin to the moon.”

And then?

Silence.

Peace.

Until tomorrow’s storm.

Chapter Text

The nursery was dim, lit only by the soft bioluminescence of the vines woven into the ceiling. Jericho lay nestled in a bassinet of repurposed jade silk and carbon weave, his tiny form curled like a comma between breaths. His skin glowed faintly olive under the canopy lights. He had Kanaya’s delicate brows, Rose’s stillness, and a head of inky black hair- soft and fine- marked by two pale white streaks that curled like silver threads through shadow.

He didn’t cry much.

He didn’t make much noise at all, really.

He just watched.

Even now, his eyes were half-lidded, as if he were thinking through dreams he hadn’t lived yet.

Rose sat in the rocker, legs folded, a book in one hand and her free arm draped across her lap. Kanaya stood by the bassinet, fingertips brushing the curve of Jericho’s swaddled form like she was reading braille across stardust.

“He’s quiet.” Rose murmured.

“He is.” Kanaya agreed. “Do you think that’s… Normal?”

“Define 'normal'." Rose said gently. “We fused two vastly different evolutionary lineages and created a being with two hearts, a mirrored neural structure, and a soul that hums in both tongues.”

Kanaya turned, arching a brow. “Is that a yes?”

“It’s a 'we’ll see'.”

They didn’t speak their worries often, but the quiet hours had a way of teasing them loose.

“Do you ever wonder what we’ve consigned him to? Being neither fully of one world nor the other?” Rose asked, staring at their son.

Kanaya sat beside her and took her hand. “Constantly. There are laws now. Protections. But there’s still the rest. The stares. The expectations. The endless dissection of what he is. What he’s supposed to be.”

Kanaya continued. "He will be many things. Most of them unwelcome to others. And still... I think he will be magnificent.” 

Rose exhaled slowly.

“We brought him into a divided world.”

“Then we teach him how to hold it together.”

Jericho stirred. 

A quiet, breathy whimper.

Not quite a cry.

Rose got up instantly, scooping him into her arms with practiced gentleness.

He blinked slowly. One hand curled around the edge of her sleeve.

“I never imagined loving something so much it would frighten me..." She whispered.

Kanaya came behind her, wrapping her arms around both of them. “I did. I imagined it every night before he arrived.”

They stood like that for a long while.

Wrapped in quiet.

Wrapped in each other.

Jericho’s breathing slowed again. His head nestled under Rose’s chin.

“He’s going to change things.” Rose murmured.

“He already has.” Kanaya replied.

The door to their home slid open with a soft chime. Jericho padded in quietly, lunchbox clutched in one hand and his coat slightly crooked. 

He didn’t say anything.

Rose noticed first. The way he avoided eye contact. The way his usually careful steps dragged.

“Hello, little ghost.” She said gently from the kitchen. “Did you haunt anyone new today?”

Normally, that would earn a grin. A rolled eye. A sigh of “Moooom.”

Today, he just shrugged.

Kanaya looked up from the table, immediately alert.

“Jericho?”

He paused in the doorway, then looked up at them both.

“What does ‘splice-filth’ mean?”

The words fell like stones into a still pool.

Rose froze.

Kanaya rose immediately, crossing to her son in two strides. She knelt down in front of him.

“Where did you hear that word?”

Jericho looked down. His voice was small.

“Some kids at school. They said it when I beat them at decoding. One of them said it real quiet, like he didn’t want the teacher to hear. But they all laughed.”

Rose had gone cold. She stepped around the counter, face unreadable.

“Jericho, love… Do you know what that word means?”

“No.” He said, “That’s why I’m asking. But… It felt bad. Like they were spitting it at me.”

Kanaya closed her eyes, but just for a moment. When she opened them again, they were burning like quiet lanterns.

She reached for his hands.

“That word is used by people who are afraid of what they don’t understand. It’s a slur. It was used for trolls once. And now it’s sometimes used against hybrids like you.”

“Because I’m different?”

“Because you’re beautifully different. And that threatens people who aren’t brave enough to learn.”

Jericho looked down again. “So… Am I wrong?”

That was the knife. 

Rose knelt beside them and took his other hand.

"No, sweet boy. You are not wrong. You are proof that the world is changing. That it can become better than it was. That’s why people like that are scared of you. Because you shine too brightly to be controlled.”

“But why do they hate me?”

Rose swallowed. Her voice trembled slightly. “Because someone taught them to.”

“But you’re going to learn how to un-teach it.” Kanaya added gently. “With your heart. With your brilliance. And with us at your side.”

Jericho looked between them. Still confused and hurting, but not alone. He reached out and hugged both of them at once. 

Kanaya kissed his hair. 

Rose held the back of his head.

“If anyone calls you that again,” Kanaya said softly. “You tell us. Always. And remember- they don’t get to define who you are. We’ve already seen you. And you are magnificent.”

They stayed there a while- on the floor, in the soft light of the late afternoon- holding the weight of the world with one small, precious boy at the center.

Entry: Undated

The house is quiet.

Jericho fell asleep curled between our pillows again. I don’t think I’ll move him this time.

He clutched that old plush lusus we gave him when he was three. The one Kanaya stitched from her own fabric stockpile- dark green with sunburst horns. It looks like a tiny monster. I suspect he sees something gentler in it.

Tonight he asked what “splice-filth” meant.

I froze.

It was the kind of question that makes every past pain echo forward.

He said the word with confusion, not bitterness.

Like he’d picked up a jagged rock, not yet knowing it could cut.

Kanaya answered with such precision. With truth.

She never lies to him. Not to protect him, not to soften the blow.

It’s one of the things I admire most. Her honesty is not cruel, but rather luminous.

I held his hand and said he shines.

And he does.

He is a child made of duality and grace, of storm and stillness.

He is our future, and he’s already walking into the very fires we feared he might.

And yet...

He held us after. Not for comfort. But for us.

He saw our pain and tried to quiet it with his tiny, shaking arms.

God, he’s kind.

Even now.

What kind of world would hate that?

And what kind of mothers would we be if we let it?

I don't know how to protect him from all of it.

But I know how to teach him where to build his shields.

In knowledge.

In art.

In fire.

In us.

He is more than they understand.

He is a lighthouse, not a fault line.

And I will not let him flicker.

—R.L.

The bedroom was dark, lit only by the faint bioluminescence of the wall vines and the shimmer of the city beyond the window.

Jericho lay nestled in the middle of the bed, his small hand resting against Rose’s collarbone. Rose, fast asleep, exhaled softly with each rise and fall of her chest- her fingers still gently curled, as if she’d been writing in her dreams.

Kanaya moved soundlessly through the room with practiced grace. She paused at Rose’s writing desk, drawn by the soft glimmer of the open journal.

She hadn’t meant to read it.

But the ink shimmered faintly- magitech-reactive, keyed to both their biosignatures. 

It wanted her to see it.

She read the entry slowly.

Line by line. Word by word.

At one point, her hand rose to her mouth. Her breath caught.

Not from sadness, though there was that.

But from the weight of understanding. From being seen.

When she finished, she gently closed the journal. She placed her palm over the cover, just for a moment.

Then she crossed the room and climbed into bed beside them, careful not to wake either.

She wrapped an arm around Rose’s waist and another over Jericho’s small back, cocooning them both.

“We are his shield.” She whispered into the dark. “And he is our light.”

Chapter Text

The nursery in Equius Zahhak’s estate was not child friendly in the traditional sense. The furniture was reinforced steel. The toy chests were locked behind pressure sealed biometric gates. And the crib railings? Electrified. For “discipline.”

Fortunately, none of the grubs gave a single shit.

Petra was the first to get out of the crib.

She scaled it like a jungle beast, landed on all fours, and scurried across the floor with a triumphant chirp. She wore a hand knitted paw print sweater her mother Nepeta made and absolutely refused to remove it, even though she’d chewed half of the sleeve off.

“MRRRRRRRRR,” She screeched at the ceiling. “PETRA DOES NOT NAP. PETRA HUNTS.”

She then tried to pounce on a security drone.

It dodged.

She hissed.

Cilicia did not get out of her crib.

She summoned someone to lift her.

Clutching a glittery pacifier in one claw, she screamed bloody murder until a nursing drone lifted her out and onto a fainting cushion.

She settled instantly, draping herself in a decorative throw and blinking like a queen.

Petra tried to tackle her.

Cilicia shrieked, dodged, and countered by tossing a fabric swatch at her face.

Cyprus didn’t speak.

Not yet.

He sat quietly in the corner, building symmetrical towers out of magnetic blocks.

Grub sized, slate gray, and unnervingly still. He didn’t cry, didn’t fidget- didn’t even blink all that much.

No one knew who his mother was. Not even Equius, reportedly. Just that one day, Cyprus appeared. DNA confirmed, dead silent, and deeply invested in precision.

He built.

And rebuilt.

And built again.

Petra tried to knock his tower over.

He caught her claw without looking and stared at her until she backed off.

Cyprus blinked slowly, then stacked another block.

Equius stood outside the room with crossed arms, watching the feed.

Aradia had left Cilicia with clear instructions. Nepeta sent Petra with an adorable lunchbox and five knitted scarves. No one had claimed Cyprus, but he never seemed to mind.

“They will be strong." Equius muttered. “And refined. And worthy of the Zahhak name.”

Behind him, a drone burst into flames.

Petra screeched with joy.

Cilicia dramatically flopped onto a pile of baby silks.

Cyprus placed the final block on his sixth tower and watched it align with a red laser line he had scratched into the floor.

Legacy.

Lineage.

Loyalty to order.

These were the tenets by which Equius lived.

The idea of reproduction had always been framed as duty, not choice.

But then Cyprus happened.

Then Cilicia.

And then Petra.

And suddenly, 'legacy' had a face. 

Three faces.

All terrifying in different ways.

No one really knows where Cyprus came from.

Equius awoke one morning to a delivery capsule outside his estate. Inside was a silent, slate skinned grub. Already alert. Already watching.

The DNA was his.

There was no note. No indication. No maternal claim. Just coordinates and a single word on the capsule's console.

“CALIBRATE.”

Equius, to his credit, didn’t panic. He built a nursery within an hour. Ordered a dozen AI parenting manuals. Called no one.

Cyprus was quiet. Strange. Brilliant.

He spoke less than the others, but he listened.

He never asked about his mother.

And Equius never offered anything he couldn’t confirm.

But there were nights when Cyprus would fall asleep at Equius’s side, curled up like a small shadow.

Equius would place one hand on his back, just to prove to himself he was real.

“I do not understand him." He once confessed to Nepeta.

“He doesn’t want to be understood yet.” She said softly. “Let him show you in his own time.”

Aradia’s relationship with Equius had been different. Brief and intentional. Not a romance. More like a philosophical experiment wrapped in inevitability.

“You seek control.” She told him once. “I want to see what happens when you let go.”

Cilicia was born elegant. She didn’t cry. She observed. Weighed. Measured.

“She came out with preferences." Equius whispered once, genuinely awed.

Aradia smiled faintly. “And she’ll spend her whole life refining them.”

Aradia raised Cilicia to challenge perfection.

To dress her power in fashion and steel.

To walk into any room like it already belonged to her.

Equius didn’t always understand her. But he respected her vision.

“She is... Terrifying.” He said one day.

“Good." Aradia replied.

Nepeta had always loved Equius.

Not for his strength, though she admired it.

Not for his discipline, though she teased it mercilessly.

But because beneath the muscles and sweat and chaos was someone who genuinely cared- quietly, awkwardly, but deeply.

When Petra was born, she came out howling and immediately tried to bite the attending nurse drone.

Nepeta cried. 

Equius fainted.

Petra was perfect.

Nepeta raised her wild. Encouraged her instincts. She let her pounce, scratch, scream, and climb.

“She’s feral..." Equius muttered once.

“She’s free.” Nepeta corrected, beaming as she observed their daughter.

The Zahhak siblings were raised in separate homes.

Separate styles.

Separate worlds.

But they always came back together.

For holidays. For birthdays. For fights that turned into memories.

Equius never said he loved them. At least, not outright.

But he forged arm guards for Petra when she started sparring.

Designed heat resistant jewelry for Cilicia’s summer wardrobe.

Installed new reinforced shelves when Cyprus started building his “precision temples.”

He was never the father they asked for.

But he became the one they had.

And in their own ways, Petra, Cilicia, and Cyprus became stronger than he ever dreamed.

It was Equius’s idea. He would never admit to it, of course. He claimed it was a “necessary convergence of logistical oversight” and not at all a family meeting.

Aradia arrived ten minutes early and brought a whiteboard, because she knew Equius hated improvisation. Nepeta showed up with a thermos of hot cream and a bag of hand knit stress toys. 

They gathered around a stone table beneath a glowing core chandelier.

Petra had just been suspended for “misusing public vent systems.”

Cilicia had started a student fashion war at the Institute.

Cyprus? He’d disappeared for six hours and returned with a drone core and no explanation.

“So,” Nepeta began brightly. “How’s everyone’s favorite emotionally confusing Zahhak child?”

Equius cleared his throat. Loudly.

“They are... Fluctuating in behavior. Exceptional physical development. Questionable social discretion. Still within acceptable thresholds.”

“Petra climbed a wall to headbutt a school administrator.” Aradia said flatly.

“He deserved it.” Nepeta grinned.

Equius twitched. “The structural integrity of the building was not compromised.”

“That’s not the point.”

Aradia tapped the whiteboard, where “CILICIA” was written in all caps.

“She’s attempting to establish a personal brand cult.”

“It’s a leadership quality,” Equius said. “She’s building loyalty.”

“She started charging students for color palette consultations.” Aradia deadpanned. “One kid’s clothes caught on fire.”

Nepeta blinked. “Was it ugly?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then she did the right thing.”

There was a pause before they reached Cyprus’s section.

No one spoke for a moment.

Aradia finally broke the silence. “He set up a kinetic sculpture that feeds off thermal classroom tension.”

“It doesn’t even have wires.” Nepeta whispered, genuinely spooked.

“I... May have encouraged it." Equius admitted. “It’s mathematically brilliant.”

“Equius,” Aradia said slowly. “He asked his homeroom teacher if sentience was a flaw.”

“He’s not wrong.”

“That’s not comforting.”

They sat in silence for a bit after that. The weight of parenting three drastically different half siblings with wildly unaligned instincts hung over them like a steel chandelier.

Nepeta sipped from her thermos. “Do you ever think about what we’re doing?”

“Constantly." Aradia said. “Then I remind myself that Petra hasn’t broken a major limb this week, Cilicia has stopped experimenting with volatile perfume compounds, and Cyprus… Still sleeps sometimes.”

Equius grunted. “They are the strongest outcomes I could have imagined.”

“They're going to terrify the galaxy one day.” Aradia said fondly.

“Together.” Nepeta added.

Equius looked between them.

Something passed through his expression. Not quite a smile, but something.

"They are mine." He said. Then: “Ours.”

That did get a smile from both women.

The parents had barely made it ten minutes into the second “stakeholder meeting” before it was completely derailed.

Equius had just opened a long winded briefing on Petra’s latest “vent shaft combat training incident.”

Nepeta was crocheting a stress llama.

Aradia was already quietly drawing a contingency rune under the table.

And then, from the far wall...

SLAM.

“IF YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT ME, I GET TO BE IN THE ROOM!” Petra yelled, barreling in like a missile with legs.

“Absolutely not." Equius muttered, half rising from his seat. “This is a private-”

“Correction,” Cilicia said smoothly, stepping in behind Petra. “This is a summit of key shareholders. And I represent the Zahhak Youth Contingent.”

“That’s not real.” Aradia sighed.

“It is now.”

Behind them, Cyprus wordlessly entered, dragging a chair from another room. He set it down next to the table, backwards, and sat on it like a disappointed philosophy teacher. 

“I’m just saying,” Petra began, claws drumming on the table, “If I’m grounded for climbing walls, Cilicia should be grounded for emotionally manipulating the student council.”

"It’s called charisma.” Cilicia said.

“You hacked the voting system.” Cyprus added.

Cilicia gasped. “I did no such thing! I merely… Optimized outreach.”

Equius looked pained. “What outreach?!”

“I offered free eyeliner consultations. For justice.”

Petra groaned. “You’ve never known justice a day in your life.”

Cyprus raised one hand.

“Counterpoint: I once neutralized an AI uprising in the science lab by teaching it nihilism.”

The room went silent.

“You what?” Aradia asked, visibly blinking.

“It stopped trying to kill people." He shrugged.

“He literally made a robot sad.” Petra added, strangely proud.

The meeting ended two hours later in a truce, a shared snack tray, and a six point “Zahhak Household Behavioral Accord” that literally none of them would follow.

As the siblings left the estate, they didn’t say much.

But Petra bumped her shoulder against Cilicia’s. Cilicia fixed a stray leaf in Petra’s hair. Cyprus, completely unprompted, offered them both encrypted files titled: “Zahhak Emergency Escape Routes v4.”

“For when we accidentally summon another school wide investigation.” He said.

They all nodded.

“See you at detention!” Petra grinned.

Chapter Text

It started at breakfast. Dana was spreading syrup over a waffle like she was preparing it for intergalactic diplomacy. Dash was trying to balance a spoon on his nose. Dave was nursing his first coffee and Karkat was scrolling through the morning news like it had personally offended him.

Then Dana said...

“I want a sister.”

No preamble. No build-up. Just vibes.

Dash immediately scoffed. “No. Brother.”

“Sister.”

“Brother!”

“Sister!”

“Bro. Ther.”

Karkat didn’t look up. “This already feels like a mistake.”

Dave sipped his coffee. “Should’ve started recording.”

The twins followed Dave around all morning.

“You could clone us,” Dana offered. “But change the hair.”

“Or build a new baby with, like, robot arms.” Dash added.

“Why would a baby need robot arms!?”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

Eventually, they cornered Karkat in the laundry room with a marker board titled “Pros of More Sibling”

Extra backup for sibling related negotiations.

More bodies for pillow fort armies.

Baby smell (Dana insisted on this one).

Future emotional support when parents “get old and weird”.

Karkat read the list twice.

“We’re already old and weird.”

“Exactly.” Dana said.

After the kids were asleep, Dave and Karkat sat on the couch in the flickering blue light of the TV. The twins had made them wear matching “#1 Dad” shirts to bed.

Karkat finally broke the silence. “They’re not wrong. About the being old and weird thing.”

Dave smirked. “I was born weird. You had to grow into it.”

“Do you think we could actually… Do it again?”

Dave raised an eyebrow. “Biologically? Yes. Emotionally? You still haven’t recovered from Dash eating that entire box of chalk on a dare.”

“HE TOLD ME IT WAS FLAVOR DUST.”

They were quiet for a bit. Then Dave said-

“I didn’t think we’d be good at this. Parenting, I mean. Thought we’d screw it up or raise a tiny dictator.”

“We did raise a tiny dictator. Two, actually.”

“Yeah, but they’re awesome.”

He looked toward the hallway where their kids slept.

“They want a sibling. That means we gave them something good enough to want to share.”

Karkat leaned back, folding his arms behind his head. “You want a third?”

“I don’t not want a third.”

They sat in silence again.

Then Karkat sighed.

“We’ll need a bigger fort.”

Karkat didn’t cry until they handed her to him. She was warm. Heavy in the way newborns always are, like they carry a piece of time inside them. Her skin was dusky grey, her hair black and wild- thicker than her siblings’ ever were- and she had tiny, unmistakable nub horns just starting to emerge from her crown.

Her little eyes opened just once.

And she glared.

Karkat laughed while trying not to cry.

“Yup..." He choked. “She’s mine.”

Dave leaned in, smirking. “Already judging you for existing. Iconic.”

They named her Ararat that night.

“A mountain no one moves.” Dave said. “Fitting.”

The twins stood at the door like tiny sentries when their parents walked in. Dana had made a welcome sign. Dash had drawn a very questionable crayon rendering of what he thought a baby troll looked like (it had way too many teeth).

When Karkat lowered the bundle into their arms, both kids leaned in.

Ararat blinked once, then growled.

Dana gasped. “She growled at me!”

“Yeah.” Dash said, beaming. “She’s metal.”

"Can we keep her?”

“She is not a puppy.” Karkat muttered. “She is your sister. Be gentle.”

Dave called from the couch. “Y’all were feral at her age. She’s already classier.”

Life with Ararat was loud. She had a big voice for such a small creature and no chill whatsoever. She demanded food, warmth, and attention on her terms- and no one else’s.

And yet, she loved her siblings. Fiercely.

When Dash made her a makeshift horn crown out of pipe cleaners, she gurgled in delight and promptly tried to eat it.

When Dana read to her from a book about clouds, Ararat reached out and smacked the pages like she was trying to flatten the sky.

Jericho came over once and Ararat just stared at him for a full minute.

“She’s evaluating my soul." He whispered.

“She does that.” Dana said fondly.

The house was unusually quiet.

Dash and Dana deep in an intense debate over which snack was better fuel for interdimensional travel: peanut butter crackers or spicy puffs.

Dave sat nearby, scrolling through satellite sky logs on a cracked tablet.

Karkat was on the floor with Ararat, trying to coax her into saying her first word.

“Say ‘daddy'.” He said slowly, pointing to himself. “Daaaddy.”

Ararat stared up at him, deadpan. One horn poked through her bedhead like a crown of stubborn intent.

“C’mon,” Karkat coaxed again. “We’ve been working on this for a week. Dash said ‘bro’ by now. Dana said ‘justice.’ You can do this.”

Dave snorted from the couch. “Still the weirdest first word.”

“It’s a lifestyle.” Dana said proudly.

Karkat leaned closer.

“Say. Daddy.”

Ararat blinked.

Her little brow furrowed.

Then she opened her mouth and, clear as daylight, said...

“BITCH.”

Silence.

Utter, apocalyptic silence.

Dave’s tablet hit the floor.

Dash gasped so hard he hiccupped.

Dana screamed with joy. “OH MY GOD SHE’S PERFECT.”

Karkat’s jaw dropped. “Wha—WHAT!? No! Absolutely not! We do NOT say that word!”

Ararat giggled, like she’d just unlocked a cheat code.

“Biiiiitch.” She repeated proudly, drawing it out like a song.

“No no NO, we are not doing this right now!” Karkat sputtered, face going tomato red. “WHO EVEN SAID THAT AROUND HER?!”

Everyone slowly turned to Dave. Dave blinked behind his shades.

“I mean... Define ‘around her.’”

Karkat wheezed. “You corrupted our infant!”

Dave raised his hands. “Okay, look, statistically? This was gonna happen eventually. She lives in a household with two former rebels and twin chaos goblins. Honestly, I’m surprised her first word wasn’t ‘overthrow.’”

“BITCH!” Ararat yelled again, beaming.

“See?” Dave said. “She’s just got timing.”

In the quiet after bedtime, Karkat slumped face-down on the couch.

“Her first word, Dave...”

Dave lay beside him, still laughing softly. “I’m telling you, she’s advanced. Language, timing, comedic delivery. She’s gifted.”

“She’s cursed.”

“Yeah,” Dave said fondly. “With talent.”

Karkat groaned into a pillow.

From the baby monitor, Ararat’s voice chirped out softly...

“...Bitch.”

Dana cackled from the next room.

Karkat sat up, glaring at the ceiling.

"We are never telling the council.”

Dave leaned back.

"Oh, I’m putting it in the holiday newsletter.”

Chapter Text

THE LIBRARY OF ECHOES

The descent into the Library wasn’t marked by any formal threshold. One moment, the halls of the Skaia Institute were structured and sleek. The next, they were dim and curved. Lit by faded panels and soft pulses of dreamlight.

The Library of Echoes lived within the school like a sleeping organism, all flickering monitors, twitching terminals, rusted access elevators, and rooms that rearranged themselves when no one was watching.

They weren’t supposed to be down here.

Which, of course, made it the perfect place to look for the truth.

Beth’s scribbled notebook is full of erratic arrows and phrases like “NOT A LOOP” and “TIME-SLIPPED?” circled in bright ink.

She mutters as she flips through the next corrupted dream journal.

“Entry jumps from Year 3 to Year 7. And the dreamer’s still the same age. Either dream logic’s doing a number, or someone rewrote this.”

She pretends not to notice how her hands shake when she turns the page.

Jericho sits cross legged on an old server bank, leafing through a codex titled "Pattern Recognition in Fractured Realms". He reads in silence until he suddenly speaks aloud:

“This one says... ‘What is broken dreams of being whole? What is whole dreams of being free?’”

Beth groaned. “You’re gonna turn that into a haiku and I’m gonna have to deal with it, aren’t I?”

“I already did.”

Eden doesn’t talk much, but she stops sometimes to stare at faint symbols no one else can see. Her voice is always soft, like she’s worried she’ll wake something up.

She lingers at a blank wall and murmurs, “This place misses someone. I think it remembers the ones who never woke up.”

“Was that metaphorical or did you actually hear that?” Beth asked.

Eden shrugs. “Why not both?”

Ophir had already opened three partitions that were supposedly sealed by the Institute. He's methodical and cautious, always looking over his shoulder.

“These logs mention a ‘Session Seed.’ The signature matches the anomaly you saw in the sky.”

He taps something on his pad. “But all reference points before Entry 1A are... Erased. Intentionally. By someone with admin override.”

He frowns. “We’re not just chasing a mystery. We’re inside of one.”

The team uncovered a partial session diagram, corrupted but familiar. It echoes what was seen in the sky vision.

An incomplete roster of “intended players” that includes blanks, glitch glyphs, and redacted surnames.

A corrupted audio log that simply plays the phrase:

"...Wasn’t supposed to happen again...” On loop before cutting off.

Jericho slowly unplugs the speaker. “This isn’t just a lost record. It’s a suppressed one.”

From high above, through old surveillance tech that shouldn’t be working, a figure watches them. Not through monitors, but through dreamglass, calibrated to sync with psi-reactive frequencies.

The observer’s notes are scrawled and precise.

“Subject A (Egbert-Pyrope): Irrational pattern seeker. Predictably unpredictable.”

“Subject B (Lalonde-Maryam): Sensitive. Susceptible to dream bleed.”

“Subject C (Ampora): Unstable psi resonance. Potential key.”

“Subject D (Nitram): Too quiet. Dangerous.”

They close the file and whisper to themselves,

“Not yet.”

Before the four leave, the lights flicker. Just once.

A sigil flashes on the far wall behind them. Eden pauses, turning to look back.

“We’re being followed.”

Beth stiffens. “You heard that?”

“No. I felt it. Like a dream I haven’t had yet.”

ON SITE

The old observatory on the Institute’s western fringe had been officially decommissioned decades ago. But its sensor grid still pinged faint traces of spatial fracture, and its rooftop antenna could still track sky sigils as they bloomed and vanished in the upper atmosphere.

It was the perfect place for convergence pattern analysis.

Ararat adjusts the dials of the cracked weather array while Cyprus leans over a glowing map display. Ty kneels beside them, sketching out radial pattern overlays by hand.

Ararat doesn’t believe in wasting breath. She speaks like every word has a job to do. She flipped through satellite logs, cross referencing timestamps with anomaly bursts.

“Third signal this week. North by northwest, just past Jasper's Archipelago. Coordinates line up with last year’s dreamquake.”

She paused, her eyes narrow. 

“Someone’s deleting the ping trails. Badly.”

Cyprus is all cool logic and methodical tinkering. The kind of guy who reads three manuals before turning anything on.

“There’s a latency loop here." He muttered, tapping the holographic map. “Every convergence pulse decays too fast. Like something’s scrambling the delay pattern before we can finish triangulating.”

He pulled up a new projection. It flickered between four locations, none of them stable.

“Either the session point’s still shifting, or someone’s interfering.”

Grounded and steady, Ty is taking in every detail, even the ones the others overlook. He frowned at his notebook.

“Or maybe... The countdown isn’t tied to one place. Maybe it ends where it started- but that starting point’s been wiped.”

Ararat blinks. “Or buried.”

As they compile data, they begin to uncover a pattern.

Every confirmed sigil burst appears within a bounded spiral. The pattern tightens weekly, like it’s closing in on a single point.

The center is a blank zone. Digitally erased, no records, no satellite feeds.

It isn’t a place. It’s a hole in the world.

Cyprus tries to access the coordinates.

The screen shatters into static.

Ty glances up. “Hey, is the camera in the southeast corner supposed to be on?”

The figure is watching, but not from inside this time, but rather a linked relay node buried beneath the old observatory’s ground floor.

They monitor every spike in the team’s readings.

Their notes update rapidly.

“Strider-Vantas (Ararat): Perceptive. Obstructive.”

“Zahhak: Efficient, requires containment protocol.”

“Harley: Non-hybrid. Possibly valuable.”

Then, "They’re starting to feel it.”

A quiet alert pings.

[Subject A7 - Ararat - Direct Eye Contact Detected]

The feed flickers.

Ararat’s fingers pause over the controls. She doesn’t say anything at first.

Then, in a low, flat voice, “We’re being watched.”

Ty stiffens and Cyprus immediately kills the map feed.

“Where?”

“Don’t know. Not from inside. It’s external. Remote tap through the building’s forgotten systems. They’re not using Institute protocol.”

A long silence, then Ararat leans forward and speaks directly into the air.

“You’re sloppy.”

The cameras freeze.

They don’t pursue them. Not yet.

Instead, they back up their findings, encrypt the logs, and lock the terminal with a code they don’t share aloud.

“If they want to follow us, let them." Ararat said. "We’ll lead them somewhere they won’t like.”

A new line is added to her notebook.

“Observer Pattern Confirmed.”

IN DREAMSPACE

The Dream Surveillance Lab is unlike anything else in the Institute. It hums like sleep does- soft, rhythmic, and full of undercurrents no one quite hears unless they’re already dreaming.

Genny is half asleep in her chair, fuzzy pajama pants and all, headphones perched askew as she flips through three overlapping dream feeds.

Keilah is sitting neatly on a floor mat, gently sketching sigils from memory with a trembling stylus.

Dash is hunched over a console, scanning pulse readings for interference.

“I swear, someone was echo surfing through dream layer six.” He mutters. “That’s not normal dream bleed."

“Was it her again?” Genny asks, her voice slow and syrupy.

Dash nods. “Yeah. Ghost player.”

“She’s not talking,” Genny mumbles. “But she’s... Pressing against things. Like a hand on the inside of glass.”

She flips through static laced dream logs.

“Three subjects had the same phrase in their dreams last night.”

She taps the screen.

“'This time, you remember me.'”

Keilah is shy and quiet, but incredibly precise. Her psychic sensitivity borders on clairvoyance. She speaks softly, but what she says matters.

“The pattern’s forming again. The spiral. In the dreams this time.”

She hesitates, glancing at her drawing.

“But this time, the center’s... Screaming. Not loud. Just... Constant.”

Genny looks up at her. “You okay?”

Keilah doesn’t answer.

Dash normally masks discomfort with jokes, but right now there’s no punchline.

“She’s tagging dreams. That’s not just haunting- that’s mapping.”

He taps a blinking icon.

“This isn’t about scaring us. It’s about finding her way back in.”

One of the monitors spikes violently.

Keilah gasps.

All three of them see it briefly.

The same image.

A field of black glass.

A figure with a glitched out symbol carved into their chest.

Eyes like broken stars.

The monitor shorts.

"She’s getting stronger.” Dash says.

The hidden figure logs another round of notes.

“Makara: Unfocused, but resonant.”

“Serket: Dangerously receptive.”

“Strider-Vantas (Dash): Increasingly unstable under pressure.”

They tap into one of the dream feeds. Their own face flickers, reflected in the void.

It watches Keilah the longest, then logs a new line.

“Subject C3 may become a liability.”

Genny looks up, suddenly alert.

“Do you guys... Feel that?”

Dash freezes. “Yeah...”

Keilah grips her stylus. “We’re being watched.”

The dream feeds crackle.

One screen flashes the sigil of the dead session’s player- and beneath it- just one line of text.

"You left me there.”

OUT IN THE FIELD

Out past the outer edge of the Institute campus- near a decommissioned perimeter testing ring- Team Delta has taken over a cratered impact zone. Old dream traps litter the field, most barely functional. Now, they serve as the team’s makeshift countermeasure proving ground.

“Considering Ty’s penchant for making things explode with his experiments,” Dana says dryly. “It was within everyone’s best interest that he wasn’t involved with Delta.”

“Hey!” Petra calls back from the edge of a smoke cloud, “Explosion Number Five was controlled! Mostly!”

Corinth and Minnith are gleefully indistinguishable, brilliant in synchronized bursts, and absolute menaces when left unsupervised.

“If the ghost player messes with narrative gravity-” starts Corinth.

“—Then we counter with joke logic and irony scripting." finishes Minnith.

They slap a sticker on a test drone that reads “PLOT ARMOR – DO NOT REMOVE”

The drone immediately flips off the testing platform and explodes in glitter.

“Success!” They cheer in unison.

Cilicia manages Delta’s theory to application pipeline with exacting standards and a perfect manicure.

“The dream armor didn’t resist intrusion, but it reflected residual sigils. That’s progress.”

She adjusts her visor and mutters, "Next iteration, and make it chic. No point surviving a psychic collapse in last season’s shellplate.”

Petra is a touch chaotic, but her instincts are sharp. She straps herself into the prototype warding suit without hesitation.

"Let me guess,” She says, turning to Dana. “I’m the test subject again?”

“No.” Dana says, throwing a switch. “You’re the field data magnet.”

Dana is the team's grounding wire. She monitors the devices while she enjoys watching them all go slightly feral.

"Dream lattice reacting.” She murmurs. “Looks like we're finally scrambling the ghost player’s echo threads. Or giving her a headache.”

The team is testing...

Symbolic warding tattoos, which are designed to burn away when under dream intrusion.

Dream armor shells; shielding against shared vision entanglement.

Joke code nullifiers. Also known as weaponized absurdity. 

Narrative disruption fields such as reality anchors, stitched with paradox safe logic.

One of the joke codes accidentally generates a rubber duck. The duck quacks in binary as it floats away.

Minnith takes notes.

The figure observes from a thermal blanked node on the crater’s rim, filtering Delta’s logs in real time.

They try to flag the Captor twins as unpredictable.

The log returns the error...

“Which one?”

They try to analyze Cilicia’s data models.

The algorithm returns.

“Too fashionable. Try again.”

Then, the twins turn directly toward the hidden node.

Corinth waves.

Minnith holds up a sign reading, “WE CAN SEE YOU <3”

The camera glitches.

The observer logs:

“Delta: Uncontainable. Threat? Possibly.”

Cilicia finishes calibrating a new field.

“We’ve got ten minutes before resonance collapse. Let’s make them count.”

Petra grins, already throwing the next switch.

Dana sighs. “This is fine. Everything’s fine. Probably.”

In the static left behind by their gear, something flickers.

A dead voice. 

Laughing.

THE MEETING

The sun is setting through grime streaked skylights. The air buzzes faintly with residual charge. And all four teams arrive with the exact same look in their eyes.

Something is happening.

Something is coming.

And they’re not the only ones who know.

Beth: “The session file structure is deliberately fragmented. Someone wanted it unreadable- Until now.”

Jericho: “The dream bleed isn’t just residual. It’s recursive. It loops backward. Like it’s trying to rewrite itself.”

Ararat: "Signal clusters are converging. Countdown or not- we’re heading toward something with intent.”

Ty: “And someone’s watching. It’s not just paranoia. We’ve confirmed remote taps and manipulated feeds.”

Dash: “The ghost player’s not haunting. She’s charting. Mapping our heads like we’re a damn campus tour.”

Genny: “She’s not alone, either. The dreams are starting to repeat. Same imagery. Same screams.”

Cilicia: “Our countermeasures are holding, but only in controlled settings. In the wild? We’re vulnerable.”

Dana: “The files want to be decoded. But they’re... Alive. Not like a virus. More like... A broken memory of a person.”

Ophir: “The timeline we’re in... It’s fraying.”

Eden: “And the world knows it.”

The silence that follows isn’t empty. It’s thick.

They each discovered something different.

But what matters is this-

Each revelation matches the others.

Each team touched part of the same fractured whole.

Beth glances at the countdown.

>1 YEAR, 03 DAYS, 10 HOURS, 02 MINUTES

Keilah speaks softly: “What do we do now?”

They all look at one another.

“We do what they won’t.” Ararat says.

“We keep going.” Dash agrees.

“Together.” Jericho adds.

Chapter Text

The room isn’t much.

Sterile white lighting overhead. Neutral walls meant not to distract. A simple round table, surrounded by mismatched chairs pulled from adjacent offices. There's a tea station in one corner and a malfunctioning weather display that still says it’s raining, even though the sky above Utune is clear.

But it’s quiet and safe.

And that’s why they’re here.

Because some things aren’t safe anymore.

It’s rare for this many of them to be in the same place, let alone the same room. For most, it’s the first time in months they’ve shared more than a passing update.

But today, something’s different. The signs are too aligned.

Their children are changing. Acting strangely. Dreaming in unison. Speaking in half answers. Hiding things.

They know it’s happening. They just don’t know why.

Dave Strider sits with his arms crossed, sunglasses hiding tired eyes. He hasn’t slept well lately- not since Dash and Dana started talking in code during casual conversations.

“They think we’re old and irrelevant. Which, fair. But something’s crawling under the surface, and they’re walking toward it like it’s gonna give them answers.”

Karkat Vantas paces near the window, voice a notch too loud. “They’re hiding things, Dave. All three of them. Ararat doesn’t even try to lie anymore- she just stares like I’m supposed to get it through osmosis.”

“Maybe she gets that from you."

Rose Lalonde, seated beside Kanaya, speaks with cool precision. “Jericho’s notebooks have become increasingly abstract. Phrases like ‘threaded echoes,’ ‘ghost recursion,’ and ‘failing loops’ appear repeatedly.”

"He won’t let me read them.” Says Kanaya, folding her hands tightly. “He used to read them to me.”

Terezi Pyrope lets out a dry chuckle, chewing on her cane’s handle. “Beth’s requesting old surveillance logs. And cross referencing dreamwatch data. You don’t do that unless you’re expecting something.”

Jade Harley, smiling faintly but wringing her gloved hands says, “Ty’s heart rate spikes at the mention of dreams. He’s scared. But he’s also excited. That’s a dangerous mix.”

Gamzee Makara hasn’t spoken, but he’s holding a grub plush Jericho gave Genny years ago. His hands haven’t stopped moving.

Eridan Ampora, seated stiffly beside a visibly withdrawn Eden in a family portrait on his watch face, scowls.

“She’s gone quiet again. When she gets like that, it means she’s seeing things. Things she won’t share. I used to have a hard time reaching her before, but now…” Eridan's voice trailed off.

Equius Zahhak, unmoving, finally says, “My offspring are rerouting infrastructure code beneath the Institute. They do not do so lightly. And they have not informed me.”

Nepeta Leijon, curled up, tail twitching adds, “Petra told me she was practicing ‘ghost karate.’ I thought it was a game. Now I’m not so sure.”

Aradia Megido exhales through her nose, voice calm. “They are responding to something. Something very old. Something that was buried. They might not even know it consciously yet.”

John Egbert, standing by the door, forces a hopeful grin. “I mean, it’s Beth. She’s... Curious. She breaks rules sometimes. But she’s always got good intentions, right?”

There was a long beat.

“Right?”

The weight of the silence lands heavy.

They each look at one another- not as old friends, rivals, or past allies- but as parents.

People who have already lived through loss.

People who know how stories can end.

And how easily they can repeat.

Karkat speaks again, more quietly this time. “They’re not telling us anything. And that means they don’t want us to stop them.”

Kanaya nods, voice soft. “Which means they believe they have to do it alone.”

Jade clasps her hands. “But they don’t.”

Dave finally uncrosses his arms.

"So, the question is... Do we stop them, or do we follow them into the fire?”

Chapter Text

The UCTA Courthouse is an architectural fusion of chrome and coralstone built scaffolding intertwined with repurposed Alternian monument fragments. Transparent solar glass domes hang like artificial moons over the grand hall, filtering harsh daylight into a soothing sky blue.

But there’s nothing soothing about the atmosphere this morning.

Every major news outlet across Okalnion is tuned in. Every diplomatic envoy has sent a representative. Even the trolls of the Southern Spiral, typically reclusive, have watchers present.

The world isn’t panicking yet.

But it’s waiting.

And watching.

President Ceryn Vale walks slowly to the podium in a deliberate manner. 

A former scholar turned leader, Ceryn Vale is known for her clarity of voice and her firm hand in soft gloves. Her short silver hair frames a face carved by time and quiet resilience. She once published entire codices on the metaphysical implications of dream logic, and now governs a planet caught in the shadow of it.

She doesn’t wear military regalia. She wears an elegant coat with a silver thread down each sleeve- symbolic of unity between blood and bone, human and troll.

She clears her throat.

"Citizens of Okalnion. Thank you for your attention today.”

Vice President Tirrix Jyn is by her side.

Tirrix is her counterbalance- calm where she is sharp, fluid where she is steel. A Jadeblood of indeterminate gender, they wear hybrid attire: a ceremonial human lapel over ancient troll robes, re-dyed in peace tones. Their horns are short, polished, and crowned with a circlet of entwined crystal and copper. They speak only when needed. But their eyes miss nothing.

Behind the podium, holographic displays begin cycling through anomaly footage- disasters compiled over the last three months:

Storms in reverse. Mountains that glitch and reassemble. Shadows moving ahead of their owners. Dreamscape overlap bleeding into public spaces. Air traffic redirected due to sky sigils visible in full daylight.

“We have faced turbulence before. Interstellar displacement. Genetic reconstruction. We survived the Merge. We rebuilt cities with our bare hands and bonded with species we were raised to fear. But what we face now is not political. It is not from another government, or a rebellious enclave. It is not born of protest, faction, or fault. It is something deeper. Something old. And we must face it, together.”

Reporters are chosen carefully.

Only five are permitted to speak.

Even so, they ask the hard questions.

“President Vale, is there any connection between these anomalies and the Skaia Institute?”

“Vice President Jyn, are the dreams shared among certain citizens part of an external threat, or internal instability?”

“Have you ruled out sabotage? Could this be the work of an extremist group?”

Tirrix’s voice is calm, smooth as stone worn down by tide. “We are investigating all possibilities. At this time, there is no evidence of coordinated action, nor is there any direct link to political unrest.”

They do not mention the Order of the Broken Sky. They do not mention the Cerulean Revival. And they certainly do not mention the hybrid students currently cracking into the secret history of a failed session.

Because they don’t know.

Not yet.

Off camera, advisors are whispering. An internal memo has already leaked to classified channels.

“Uncorrelated anomalies exceed natural probability thresholds.”

“Skaia’s signature detected in three out of five major incidents.”

“One sigil- sixfold spiral- appears to evolve with each reoccurrence.”

There is also this line, redacted in the public version-

“Countdown anomalies possibly tied to temporal residues. Recommend close monitoring of youth dream activity.”

President Vale closes the conference with practiced gravity. “Okalnion has endured collapse and convergence. We are no stranger to rebirth. Whatever comes next, we will not divide. We will not fracture. We will remain unified.”

Polite and muted applause filters in.But in private, diplomats lean toward one another and ask questions the public never hears.

“What aren’t they telling us?”

"What if this isn’t the start... But the middle?”

The cameras are off, the lights are dim, and the press dispersed. Only the quiet hum of filtered air remains in the ceremonial hall.

President Vale stands by the window, watching a speckled sky beyond the skyline of Utune. Somewhere in the high atmosphere, the sixth sigil flickers- still faint, still undocumented by official channels.

Vice President Jyn approaches, silent at first. They stand in companionable silence until Ceryn speaks softly.

“We can’t keep dodging the question forever.”

Tirrix folds their hands. “Which one?”

Ceryn turns, her voice dry. “Take your pick. Why the dreams are syncing. Why the pattern has stabilized into spirals. Why the anomalies match Skaian era logic structures.”

A pause.

“Why the Skaia Institute has stopped returning calls.”

Tirrix says nothing for a moment, then-

"Because we’re asking the wrong questions.”

That earns a raised brow.

“We keep trying to fit this into familiar language- collapse, glitch, sabotage. But what if this isn’t just a breakdown? What if it’s a recursion?”

Ceryn closes her eyes. “You think it’s coming back.”

Tirrix nods. “I think it never left.”

The silence sharpens.

Finally, Ceryn murmurs, “I used to believe our children would inherit peace. Now I’m afraid they’re walking into our unfinished war.”

Tirrix replies, eyes distant, “They might be the only ones who can win it.”

Chapter Text

All four teams have gathered at their usual meeting place.

Some are still catching their breath from the last round of fieldwork. Others have notebooks open, data streams flickering, or dreams etched in charcoal across the backs of napkins.

There’s tension. 

Excitement.

A quiet understanding.

“We need a name,” Petra pops the cap off a hydration tube. “Something to shout across the void if we get separated.”

The suggestions come fast.

“Convergence Corps.”

“The Sky Busters.”

“Dreampunks United.”

“Just ‘The Team,’ maybe?”

Ophir timidly raises a hand and suggests 'The Fifth Echo', only for Cilicia to immediately shoot it down.

"We’re more than echoes." She mutters. “We’re the rewrite.”

Petra, unusually quiet, tilts her head.

“What about…” She begins, then grins. “Fusion.”

A few blink.

“Fusion?” Ty repeats. “That’s… Kinda basic.”

“Exactly.” Petra replies. “Basic. Strong. Honest. It’s what we are. Not just humans and trolls. Not just dreams and data. We’re fused timelines. Fused history. Fused purpose.”

The room falls into thoughtful silence.

And then, one by one, they nod.

“Fusion...” Beth says. “Yeah, that fits.”

“Fusionstuck.” Genny adds. “Because, let’s be real, we’re so stuck.”

Laughter breaks the tension.

And the name sticks.

As the laughter fades, Ararat pulls up the latest convergence scans. They’re clearer now, almost pulsing. Multiple signal pings are heading outward.

Away from Utune.

Toward distant coordinates in the dead zones.

“It’s not just here anymore.” She says. “Whatever happened in that failed session, whatever’s bleeding through, it’s pulling at the edge of the planet. Fractures. Dreams. Even ghost noise.”

Eden, unusually still, speaks up. “I’ve been seeing the same coordinates in my dreams.”

A collective chill settles in the room.

“Then we have to go.” Says Jericho.

“We’re not ready...” Keilah murmurs.

“We don’t have time to be.” Dana answers.

Maps are loaded and supplies are catalogued. Excuses drafted for the Institute faculty. Backup dream suppression talismans are etched by Petra and Ty. 

Jericho even volunteers to draft a message for their parents.

They don’t know exactly what they’ll find out there, but the signs are growing louder.

And the countdown ticks on.

>1 YEAR, 02 DAYS, 09 HOURS, 13 MINUTES

The sun is low, casting everything in soft blues and burnt gold. The street below Keilah buzzed with gliders and walking drones, but she stays on the upper pedestrian path- narrow, ivy covered, and quiet.

She clutches her notebook to her chest. Her fingers tremble.

Not from fear, she’s long since learned how to hide that, but from the weight of what’s coming.

“We have to go.”

That’s what Jericho said.

That’s what everyone agreed to.

But Keilah isn’t like the others. She doesn’t run toward danger. She doesn’t fight shadow players in shared dreams or decode cosmic files with shaking hands.

She just watches and writes.

What would her mother say?

Keilah doesn’t need to guess.

Vriska, still sharp as glass and proud as a lioness, had a particular way of glaring when Keilah so much as trailed off in a sentence.

"Don’t play small. Don’t whisper through life. That’s not how we survive.”

She’d say this while pacing like a storm in circles, arms crossed over her coat, her metal arm ticking faintly with tension.

“If you see something broken, you smash it until it works again.”

But Keilah doesn’t smash.

She pieces together.

She listens.

She hopes.

As the wind stirs her cloak, Keilah gazes up. The sigils are faint tonight, but still there. Barely visible if you’re not looking.

But she’s always looking.

“Mom would say this is a mistake,” She whispers. “That we’re not ready. That we’re just... Kids.”

And she would be right.

But the countdown doesn’t care how old they are.

The broken session doesn’t care who’s scared.

And her friends- Fusionstuck- need her.

She pulls her hood up and takes the last turn toward home.

“We don’t have a choice.”

The sun is almost gone now, bleeding color into the sky like spilled paint. Jordan and Lee sit on opposite ends of the rooftop rail, legs dangling over the edge and looking out towards the skyline.

Neither of them says a word at first. The silence is surprisingly not hostile.

Jordan tosses a pebble over the edge and watches it fall. “You know, for something that might decide the fate of reality, today’s meeting was kind of... Lowkey.”

Lee raises a brow.

“You wanted dramatic lighting and a monologue?”

“Wouldn’t have killed Jericho to dim the lights and throw out a ‘we’re the last hope of Okalnion’ speech or something,” Jordan smirks.

Lee snorts. “You’d just interrupt him.”

Jordan doesn’t argue with that.

A moment passes. Lee sighs, arms folded behind his head.

“I keep waiting for you to say something dumb so I can get back to hating you.”

“Same.” Jordan replies. “But here we are. Being civil. Not even a passive aggressive dig in ten whole minutes. It’s weird.”

They look at each other.

Then laugh. 

A little.

Not mockingly. Just surprised.

"Guess the world ending puts things in perspective." Lee says, eyes back on the skyline.

"Yeah,” Jordan replies. “Like how if we screw this up, there’s not gonna be anything left to fight over.”

“Or anyone for Eden to pick.”

The jab is light. It doesn’t sting like it used to.

For this moment- just this one- they’re not rivals. They’re not bickering Peixes boys with one foot in chaos and the other in competition. They’re brothers.

And the weight of what’s coming sits between them, understood but unspoken.

Chapter Text

The lab is immaculate. Not pristine out of vanity, but sterility. It's deliberate, almost surgical. The soft glow of status monitors reflects off spotless tile and mirrored surfaces. The room smells like ozone and metal.

Dr. Lucia Hale sits alone at the central terminal with gloved hands, a pressed coat, and tightly pressed lips.

A holographic model of a Skaian kernel floats above the table, rotating slowly. Within it are jagged error markers- fractal burns, recursion spikes, fragments of a session that never solidified.

Her fingers tighten on the control ring at her wrist.

“Run it again.”

The simulation begins for the seventh time today.

And like every time before it, it fails.

A quiet hum.

A burst of corrupted light.

The model collapses in on itself, folding like a broken dream.

Lucia doesn't flinch. She just watches.

The audio log is faint, corrupted by age, but she’s memorized the waveform.

Her son’s voice- small, bright, and full of questions.

"Mom, if the kernel is like a puzzle, do you think it dreams about being finished?"

Then static.

Then screaming.

Then nothing.

Outside the lab, a wall of holo documents scrolls in perfect sync: manifestos, dream contagion reports, classified council memos, grainy photos of mixed blood children.

Her office is adjacent to the larger Order HQ, where analysts and ideologues debate "the threat of symbolic dilution" and "epigenetic contamination from troll dream residue."

Lucia doesn't care about their debates. She just wants answers.

The trolls weren’t responsible for the kernel failure. But it happened after integration. That’s all they need to justify the movement.

And if she lets them believe it?

It buys her time.

Time to crack the recursion.

Time to find the root.

Time to prevent what happened to her son from happening again.

Even if it means walking over the futures of other people’s children.

She pulls up a new alert.

Another spike in dream phase synchronization, this time near the Skaia Institute.

Five echoes, same signature.

Too synchronized to be accidental.

Too human to be troll based.

Too coordinated to be natural.

Lucia narrows her eyes. “You’re hiding something.”

She overlays the incident report with a cleaned up copy of a ghost sigil spotted outside Vaska’s Reach.

A perfect match.

A protest surges past the lab- chanting slogans about “blood purity” and “restoring real order.”

Lucia barely notices. She’s staring at the sigil. She zooms in on the central glyph. An eye shaped design ringed with recursion keys.

And in the center, glowing faintly...

A symbol that doesn’t belong.

A stylized heart, broken in two.

Her gloved hand trembles.

She presses her thumb against the ring on her wrist and tightens it.

“Who are you, and what are you doing in my dreams?”

Snow drifts like ash across the broken glacier fields. Beneath the weight of wind and time, a half buried hive complex juts from the ice like a fossilized scream. Its windows are long shattered. Spires melted smooth by war era weapons. The only light comes from inside- cold cerulean flame dancing through vein like cracks in the walls.

Inside, the faithful gather.

At the center, on a platform of calcified glass and memory coded crystal, stands The Vesperant.

They are still, robed in a flowing cloak that makes no sound as it moves.

Their horns-one chipped, the other smooth- gleam faintly in the filtered torchlight. Their face is calm and soothing, dangerously so. Their voice is never raised. It doesn't need to be.

“The world has forgotten what blood means. In the time before the Merge, we ruled the sky. Beneath us, the castes formed order. Harmony. Purpose.”

The followers bow their heads.

Some are highbloods. Others, casteless trolls longing for certainty. A few humans, marked with dream burn tattoos, stand among them with downcast eyes.

“But the Accord… the Accord demanded we bend. That we compromise. And from compromise came corruption.”

The Vesperant was not always what they are now.

They once had a name, worn down by exile and centuries in hiding.

A cerulean in the shadow of The Condesce, a tactician without an army, they watched the empires fall.

First Alternia, then Earth, then the Session That Broke It All.

When the universes fused, they refused to stand on either side.

Instead, they vanished.

They wandered the post Merge ruins.

They cataloged hivebones.

They learned to listen to echoes.

Below the tower, a chamber has been hollowed out from the glacier rock. Within it are dozens of locked stasis caskets, each sealed in alternating dreamscript and troll spellcode. Most are inert, but a few glow.

Not with life.

With code.

Living fragments of session residue. Echoes of players that never came to be. Strands of logic that never formed full identities.

“The session may have failed,” The Vesperant whispers- alone now- kneeling before the caskets.

“But it spoke. And I listened.”

At the far end of the chamber lies a vast mural carved in chitin and dreamdust. A spiral- a perfect sixfold coil-stretches outward. In its center is a jagged crack, carved with knives and rage. Inside the crack is a single name.

Scrawled, not etched. 

Written by hand.

A name that no one dares say aloud.

The Vesperant touches it with gloved fingertips.

“You were not born... But you were intended... You were denied... But you were written... You are the ghost seed... And we are your revival..."

Chapter Text

The Reconciliation Council’s tower pierces Utune’s skyline like a needle made to stitch two worlds together. From above, the city looks ordered and peaceful. A unity of glass, steel, and lingering myth.

But at this height, peace is just a filter.

Inside, everything is silent except for the low hum of security fields and archival data streams.

Councilor Mirren, Vice Chair of Internal Surveillance, is alone in her chamber. Her fingers rest, unmoving, on a matte black control ring. Her eyes flicker across ten screens of grainy video feeds, dream residue overlays, and psychometric readouts.

On one screen are Beth and Ophir, debating the meaning of a spiraled glyph.

On another is Jericho, walking away from a rooftop argument, eyes distant.

On yet another is Ararat, catching a glimpse of a watcher drone and turning toward it, clearly aware.

The system pings a warning: 

Subject Awareness Detected.

Mirren tilts her head slightly. “Impressive.”

She pauses the video and zooms in on Ararat’s expression.

Then rewinds.

Then plays it again.

She speaks aloud- whether to herself, the system, or the room is unclear.

“We once believed Skaia to be an omnipotent randomizer. A god made of symmetry and war. But Skaia wasn’t a god. It was an engine. And all engines have fuel.”

Her tone is clinical. Not angry. Not eve nostalgic.

“We broke the engine. Then rewrote the rules.”

She waves a hand, and dozens of old surveillance clips flicker across the glass wall behind her. Battlefields, dream bubbles, and spirals etched in ash and hope.

“We called that peace.”

The door hisses open. Councilor Igrith steps inside, boots echoing slightly. His posture is tight but tired. His crimson trimmed sash is draped over one shoulder, unpinned at the edge.

He doesn’t speak right away. Mirren doesn’t look up.

“Close the door.”

He does. “You’ve been watching them for weeks." He finally says. “Without committee approval.”

Mirren exhales softly. “I prefer to call it preemptive validation.”

“They’re teenagers.”

“They’re synchronized teenagers tracing post Session echoes without authorization.”

“They’re also citizens.” Igrith replies. “They’re owed transparency.”

Mirren turns then, slowly. “You sound like you’re not sure where you stand anymore.”

Igrith meets her gaze evenly. “I’m sure. Just… Not of the narrative we’ve been fed.”

He moves to the projection table and places a slate upon it. It expands, displaying multiple things.

Redacted files from early Accord negotiations.

Unverified dream records from failed timelines.

A testimony from a Skaia Institute technician who disappeared five years ago.

“I found this buried under seven layers of encrypted Council backups. It outlines a proposal: suppress hybrid player emergence, consolidate Skaian code into inert relics, and deny all records of the Broken Session.”

Mirren doesn’t respond at first.

“The proposal was never implemented.”

“Wasn’t it?” Igrith asks. “Or did it become policy in everything but name?”

The air in the room thickens with ancient compromise.

“You were born under the Accord." Mirren says quietly. “You’ve never seen what chaos looks like.”

“I was made by the Accord.” Igrith counters. “I know exactly what it hides.”

They stare at each other.

Not with anger, but with something worse.

Recognition.

The screen returns to the courtyard feed. The hybrid kids gathered in quiet discussion. One of them- Jericho- glances up. 

Not at the drone. 

Just… Up.

Toward the sky.

Toward something watching.

Igrith speaks first. “They’re not just rebelling. They’re remembering.”

Mirren closes the interface and sits back.

"Then let’s hope they don’t remember too much.”

Chapter Text

The Enforcer HQ looms at the southern border of Utune like a forgotten limb of a failed god. Its architecture practical, imposing, and utterly devoid of warmth. The building pulses with low level resonance shielding, repelling dreamstatic that’s grown too common in recent months.

Inside, the atmosphere is clinical. Not cold, but measured, monitored, and intentional. 

No excess. 

No ornament. 

Just purpose.

Captain Wren steps into the command floor, trench coat catching a brief gust of recycled air as the pressure sealed doors hiss shut behind him. He doesn't greet anyone. He never does. Instead, he heads directly for Sector Delta, the heart of dream anomaly containment and analysis.

A shimmer of golden blue particles pulses beside him, flickering into a loosely humanoid figure.

VOKE, the adaptive Dreamwatch AI, is simultaneously a data analysis unit, a dream surveillance interface, and Wren’s most trusted partner. Its voice shifts between masculine, feminine, and mechanical- Never officially settling on one.

“Another surge last night, Captain.”

Wren nods once. “Details.”

“Convergence points matched six of twelve recognized event types. The central anomaly reached recursion depth four before self correcting. Signatures include: fragmented dreamseed, ghost dialogue bleed, and glyph imprints matching pre-fusion session code.”

Wren stops in his tracks. “Glyphs?”

“Session architecture glyphs. Legacy grade.”

“Impossible... "

A projection rises from VOKE’s arm- field footage from an Enforcer scout drone patrolling the Outer Seams, near a derelict transit nexus.

At first, the screen is just static.

Then it ripples.

Shifts.

It reveals a brief flicker of impossible geometry- three children, half visible- standing in what looks like a corridor of stars and recursion. None of them are identified. The footage fuzzes out as quickly as it appears.

VOKE plays the following audio.

—don't step there—

—think it's watching us—

—Beth, grab the—

Wren shuts it off.

Wren and VOKE descend to a lower level, where dream antechambers track ongoing anomalies in real time. Several agents are unconscious in padded chairs, hooked up to dreampulse readers. Monitors buzz with pulses, void sectors, and intermittent sigil bursts.

One agent begins seizing. Two techs rush in.

Wren watches, jaw clenched. “This is escalating.”

VOKE floats closer. “At a sharper curve than projected. If the echo density continues rising, dreamstates will begin to overwrite waking reality. Not just bleed into it.”

“We don’t have that kind of time.”

“Then I suggest you ask the right questions, Captain.”

Later, in Wren’s sealed office, a secure relay initiates contact with Councilor Igrith. His projection flickers into view, hooded in shadows.

“Another spike?” Igrith asks, already tired.

"More than a spike.” Wren says. “We’ve identified recursive behavior. Pattern familiarity. The anomalies are tracking something.”

"Something or someone?”

“We don’t know.”

Wren hesitates.

“But every event vector traces back to Skaia Institute. The children there. The hybrids.”

Silence on Igrith’s end.

“Don’t say anything yet." He finally replies. “Not to Mirren. Let her keep watching while you keep digging.”

“And if she gets ahead of us?”

“Then we deal with it.”

After the call ends, Wren reclines in his chair, staring at the dreamstatic monitor. The screen shows an unreadable waveform. Somewhere inside it: a sixfold spiral.

“VOKE... What do you think it is we’re missing?”

The AI pauses, glowing dimly.

"A name, perhaps.”

“Whose?”

“The one the broken session left out.”

That gets Wren’s full attention.

VOKE continues. “What if the failed session wasn’t truly failed? What if it left behind not just echoes- but a will? A player that was never manifested, but never erased.”

Wren exhales slowly. “Then they wouldn’t be a survivor.”

“They’d be a ghost.”

“And ghosts don’t stay quiet forever.”

A drone hums through the clouds.

Far below, traffic swirls around the Institute. Hybrid students walk home, unknowing. Unaware.

The sky pulses once with a ripple of light.

The drone records it and sends it back.

VOKE watches the data flow in, silently tagging the footage:

[FUSION GROUP ACTIVITY: ANOMALY-LINKED]

[POTENTIAL SESSION SURVIVOR: UNKNOWN]

[CONTINUE OBSERVATION / DO NOT ENGAGE]

Chapter Text

DREAMSTATE: UNIFIED CONVERGENCE DETECTED

SUBJECTS: DANA, DASH, ARARAT, BETH, JERICHO, TY

SLEEP PHASE: SYNCHRONIZED LUCID CONSTRUCT

GLYPH PATTERN: [SESSION-ECHO/SEED TYPE/UNFINISHED]

The dream does not begin with falling, but with arrival.

One by one, six figures are drawn into a place that exists only in the gaps between breath and memory. A sky, not quite black, swirls above them in an impossible spiral. 

There are no stars, only sigils.

The ground is slick and glassy, reflecting a distorted version of the sky that shifts with each step.

Beth, brushing dust off her dream pajamas, muttering something about too much tea before bed.

Jericho, kneeling calmly, is already centered in meditation.

Ararat, arms folded, is trying not to show unease.

Dash is pacing in a circle. “This isn’t my dream. This isn’t my dream.”

Dana replies, deadpan, “We get it, drama king.”

Ty blinked slowly. “Is this the afterlife? Did I do something stupid again?”

A soft chime echoes like a struck tuning fork.

The black beneath their feet ripples, then cracks in glowing white lines. Glyphs begin spiraling outward in curved and intersecting paths, orbiting the group like they’re part of a giant clockwork diagram.

Then come the sigils.

For Beth: A coiled breeze caught inside a spiraling loop.

For Jericho: A ring of thorns surrounding a black sun.

For Dash: Twin lightning bolts inside a fractured waveform.

For Dana: A pair of mirrored crescents divided by static.

For Ararat: A claw like wedge cutting through layered stone

For Ty: A triangle blooming into a burst of stars, slightly smudged.

Each sigil glows, locks into the ground, and remains there. The sky tightens as star pull into a spiral until they lock into place.

And then, like a page turned wrong side out, a map projects overhead. It rotates slowly, lines of landmasses shifting until they recognize the shape.

Okalnion.

A single point on the map begins to pulse. Far from Utune, near the border of the Northern Shards.

“That’s one of the locked ruins, isn’t it?” Dash asks.

“The session left pieces of itself there. You can feel it.” Jericho replied.

“I don’t wanna feel anything, thanks.” Ty shook his head.

“Then don’t. But this is real. Whatever the hell’s waking up, it’s got a map.” Ararat spoke.

“And guess who gets to be the lucky ones to follow it.” Dana speaks.

The space shifts again. The lines on the ground collapse inward, folding around their sigils. Then they hear a voice. Not external, but from somewhere deep inside the structure of the dream itself.

A whisper shared across all six minds.

“Six keys remain.”

“You remember because you were chosen.”

“You follow because I couldn’t.”

Then silence, followed by a distant shatter sound as the stars fall inward.

Six bodies sit upright in six different locations.

Beth is tangled in her bedsheets and covered in notebook paper.

Jericho is already halfway through scribbling symbols in ink.

Ararat is clutching her pillow like it's a blade.

Dana is upside down on the couch with her hair tangled in her fingers.

Dash's eyes flicker with leftover static.

Ty yelled from under his covers “NOPE! I’M OUT. DREAMS ARE ILLEGAL NOW.”

Each of their Sylladexes pings with identical data:

A glowing file.

[MAP-SEED_1.ACTIVATE]

A diagram of the sky they saw, now perfectly encoded.

A string of text, repeating once.

“The sky remembers.”

A courtyard usually filled with noise is strangely subdued. Beth, Dana, Dash, Ararat, Ty, and Jericho are currently trading confused glances and dream sketches.

“So we all saw the glowy sky spiral thing and the whole ‘follow me to certain doom’ vibe, right?” Beth pondered.

Jericho nodded. “More or less.”

“I still say we ignore it. I vote we never sleep again.” Ty claps.

“We need Ophir.” Dash says.

They all glance over at a stone bench beneath a flowering netvine where Ophir Nitram sits, sketching a spiral constellation with the exact same geometry.

The group exchanges one last glance and walk over.

Ophir doesn’t even look up.

“You saw it.”

Dana stiffens.

“Okay, how-?”

“Because I dreamed it before you did. But it wasn’t ready to show me the whole thing.” He finally closes his sketchbook. “It showed you because you’re aligned with it now. All of you.”

“The sealed ruin... It's real?” Beth confirms.

“Real. Hidden. Coded with dead glyphs. Locked with six keys.”

“We saw one. That’s why we’re awake now.” Jericho informs Ophir.

Ophir nods slowly. “The session didn’t end. It just... Went quiet. And now it’s whispering back.”

[DREAM WAKE PROTOCOL_1 ACTIVATED]

[SEED MAP UNLOCKED: NODE ONE OF SIX]

Chapter Text

Fusion’s preparations are nearly complete. The false documents are finalized. The transit logs are hacked. The message is written, polished, encrypted, and set on a timed release. They’ve mapped out how to slip away in staggered groups through the bullet train lines, moving quietly toward the first known ruin.

But tonight, they are still home. Still children. Still tethered, however briefly, to the families that raised them.

Jade is adjusting the greenhouse lights when she hears Ty shuffle into the room, unusually quiet.

“What’s up, Ty?” She asks without looking away from the phototropic settings. “Did one of your experiments try to kill the blender again?”

“Not this time.” Ty mumbles. “I triple locked the vault.”

She smiles faintly. “Proud of you.”

They move together down the greenhouse path. She hands him a snip tool, and he starts pruning the star flower vines like she taught him. She watches the way he mirrors her with practiced ease.

“You’ve been… Quieter lately.” Jade says. “It's not like you.”

“Yeah."

“Anything I should worry about?”

“Nah.”

A long pause.

“You ever just… Look up at the sky and wonder if you’re just… Background to something huge?” Ty wonders.

Jade lowers her tool and turns to face him. “You are never background, Ty. You’ve got too much gravity for that.”

He smiles at that. A little sad, a little real.

“Thanks, Mom.”

She pulls him into a hug. It's tight and fierce.

“No matter where you are, just keep making the sky yours.”

Jericho finds Kanaya in the indoor solarium, adjusting the light filters for her nocturnal bloomers. Rose sits nearby, asleep in a tangle of satin and open books.

“You’re up late.” Kanaya says.

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“Because of the dream?”

He nods once. Kanaya closes her journal.

“You’re not obligated to carry the weight of what you saw alone.”

“I don’t think it’s a burden.” Jericho says. “I think it’s a path.”

Kanaya sets her things aside and pats the seat next to her.

“Then tell me where it leads.”

He sits. They talk softly. Stars spin beyond the windows.

Rose eventually stirs and joins them. Jericho doesn’t tell them everything, but he tells them just enough to remind them of who he is.

“You’re the best of us.” Rose whispers to him, brushing a hand down his hair.

“No." He says. “I’m yours. That’s enough.”

Dinner at the Strider-Vantas apartment is always an event. Tonight is no different. Karkat is fuming over a burned pot. Dave is DJing a playlist of “chaotic domestic anthems.” Dana is trying to fry dumplings with a plasma torch, and Dash is streaming the chaos for twelve viewers on his private server.

Ararat? She’s watching. Absorbing everything.

“Why do we let you cook?” Karkat demands.

"Because my love language is overcooked carbohydrates.” Dave replies.

“That is NOT A LANGUAGE!”

They all burst out laughing, except for Ararat. She smiles, quietly, filing that moment away.

Later that night, after the plates are clean and Dana has duct taped a rogue toaster shut, the family sits on the couch.

Dash leans his head on Karkat’s shoulder. Dana sprawls over Dave’s lap. Ararat curls up with a blanket, feet tucked under her.

“You kids are gonna do something big.” Dave says, not really realizing how true it is.

“We already are.” Dana says cryptically.

They fall asleep in a heap of warmth and leftover sarcasm. Karkat covers them with a blanket, his hand lingering briefly on Ararat’s head.

Beth finds her parents in the middle of a “spiral brainstorming session.” Terezi has her court robes on and is doing voice practice with sock puppets. John is juggling pies.

“Should I be worried?” Beth asks.

“Only if you hate performance art!” Terezi beams.

“Or pies with questionable fillings.” John adds.

They pull her in immediately. Terezi sticks googly eyes on her forehead. John gives her a “support pie.” It’s lemon. Beth doesn’t even like lemon, but she eats the whole slice anyway.

Later, they’re all in a cuddle pile on the couch. The air smells like sugar and glitter and candle wax.

“You’ve got your mother’s fire.” John says.

“And your father’s heart.” Terezi adds.

“And apparently my inability to say goodbye...” Beth mumbles.

John kisses the top of her head. “You’ll never have to. We’ll always be right here.”

Beth doesn’t cry. Not then. But later in her room, she presses that pie tin to her chest and breathes in the sugar until she feels whole again.

Chapter Text

The Zahhak house is a strange blend of functionality and eccentricity. It’s got clean angles, old stonework, and smartlight surfaces- likely Equius’s influence. But the walls are covered in colorful pawprint murals. A tangle of vines hangs over the central sitting pit. One hall is decorated with a rotating mobile made of clock gears and fossils.

That one’s Aradia’s.

The kitchen smells like cinnamon and steel polish.

Petra and Nepeta are in the middle of a very serious activity: painting matching armor plated hoodies. Each one has stylized claw patterns, hand stitched trim, and tiny reinforced shoulder pads “for aesthetic purposes only.”

“You think Dad would wear one?” Petra asks as she lines the sleeve with swirls.

“He better, or we’ll both hiss at him.”

Petra grins. For all her bite, she relaxes when it's just her and her mom, sitting on the floor like kits again, the air full of thread, old music, and warmth.

"You’re glowing, furball.” Nepeta adds after a moment.

“Maybe,” Petra says. “Or maybe it’s just the light.”

Nepeta cocks her head, as if sensing something beneath the words. But she lets it go for now.

Cilicia reclines on a divan under filtered starlight while Aradia tunes a music box with surgical precision.

“You know,” Cilicia says, examining her nails. “When people talk about chaos, they forget it can be pretty.”

“Only when you survive it.” Aradia replies, gently adjusting the clockwork’s tempo. “Beauty in aftermath. It’s very you.”

Cilicia preens at the compliment.

“You think I’m ready for... Change?” she asks.

Aradia’s hands pause briefly. "You’ve been changing since the day you out posed a thunderstorm. Wherever you’re headed, you’ll turn it into a catwalk.”

Cilicia turns her head away, but not before Aradia sees the flicker of emotion pass behind her lashes.

Cyprus doesn’t talk much, but tonight he sits beside Equius in the forge room while sparks from the plasma welder bounce against reinforced glass.

"You need better gloves." Cyprus says.

“I require no such thing. These are regulation grade.”

"Still. I’m making you a pair.”

Equius pauses.

“Accepted.”

They work in silence for a while, father and son hammering at the world without saying much. There’s comfort in shared labor. Strength in ritual.

When Cyprus finishes shaping the finger braces, he places them on the bench between them.

“They’ll hold.” He says.

“I know they will.”

And for a long time, that’s all they need to say.

All three siblings pass each other in the hallway, each one changed just slightly by their moments alone.

Cilicia looks to Petra, brushing something invisible off her shoulder. Petra smirks, and nudges her with a playful growl.

Cyprus catches up behind them. Petra reaches out and bumps his shoulder once. He grunts, but doesn’t pull away.

None of them speak of what comes next.

But all three linger just a little longer at the top of the stairs.

The Zahhaks bicker like cats. 

The Strider-Vantas trio are chaos incarnate.

But the Peixes twins? They are quiet tension- a tug-of-war wrapped in perfectly knotted bowties.

Tonight they sit in the family conservatory, polishing tridents in near silence.

“You're using the wrong grit.” Lee says without looking up.

“I’m using the one I like.” Jordan replies smoothly. “The difference being, mine doesn’t come with an attitude.”

Their mother leans in from the adjoining room.

“Are you actually arguing about polishing rods again?” Feferi calls.

“We’re debating combat readiness.” Lee insists.

“We’re bonding.” Jordan says at the same time.

Feferi rolls her eyes affectionately and disappears again. The moment she's gone, the boys relax just a bit.

Jordan sets his weapon down first. “You ever think about just… Not doing the whole ‘rival’ thing?”

“You first.” Lee answers.

Jordan smirks.

Lee doesn’t.

They sit in that stubborn stillness for a moment longer.

Then, without looking, Jordan offers a piece of dried kelp snack to his brother.

Lee takes it.

The Ampora home is dim and unusually still.

Eden sits on the edge of her bed, brush in hand, staring at her reflection in the mirror. Her hair is messy, but her thoughts are worse.

Her father walks in. 

Unannounced, of course.

“I brought you tea.” Eridan says, placing the cup beside her. “Chamomile. Apparently, it’s supposed to soothe unrest.”

"Thanks, Dad.”

A pause. She sips.

Eridan sits at the far end of the bed, eyes flicking to her reflection.

"You’ve been... Distant.”

“I’m just tired.”

“Eden, you always say you’re tired.”

She doesn’t respond.

Eridan fidgets, then sighs.

“I know I’m not the easiest person. Or the... Most heroic. Or whatever you think I’m not. But I’m trying, alright?”

Eden finally meets his eyes through the mirror.

“I know you are.”

She shifts slightly closer. That’s all she gives him, but it’s something.

Eridan raises his cup in mock salute.

“To parental growth. Or... Whatever.”

“To trying.” Eden replies.

And for the first time in weeks, they drink tea together.

Chapter Text

The Serket residence is neat. Too neat. No sign of mess, mistakes, or sentimentality.

Vriska’s never been one for softness, but tonight she actually stayed in. Unusual, considering her usual flare for night flights and backroom gambling.

Keilah sits at the kitchen island, folding a napkin into small, precise triangles.

“You’re twitchy.” Vriska notes, barely glancing up from her datapad. “Something up?”

“Just... School stuff.”

“You’ve been weird all week.”

Keilah hesitates.

She doesn’t want to lie.

But if she tells the truth...

“It’s a group project.” She manages. “Kind of big.”

Vriska grunts, finally setting the datapad down. “Just don’t let those other kids push you around.”

“They don’t.”

“Good. You’re a Serket. You’re smarter than all of them, and meaner when you have to be.”

Keilah nods, biting her lip.