Homestuck: The Novel

Scene 7

chapter warnings:

puppets, language, dead animals, spelling and math at the same time

Chapter TextChapter 7: Act II: Prepare for Inevitable Confrontation with Guardian

Oh psyche!

Chapter 7: Act II: Acquire Sburb Server Disc... Eventually

Your name is Dave Strider, and you are too cool to worry about narrative chronology.

It is an unseasonably warm April day. Your bedroom window is open to let some air in, and your fan is cranked. Arguably even more cranked would be your fly beats, which brings us to your variety of interests. A cool dude like you is sure to have plenty. You have a penchant for spinning out unbelievably ill jams with your turntables and mixing gear. You like to rave about bands no one's ever heard of but you. You collect weird dead things preserved in various ways and displayed on the wall. You are an amateur photographer and operate your own makeshift darkroom. You maintain a number of ironically humorous blogs, websites, and social networking profiles. And if the inspiration strikes, you won't hesitate to drop some phat rhymes on a mofo and represent.

Right now, you are just standing in your room, chillin' next to your turntables. Those and your bed are pretty much the only furniture in your room not supported by cinderblocks. The blanket on your bed and the poster above it display your love of the Midnight Crew. There are cords all over your floor, connecting your turntables, mixing gear, and computer.

A thought occurs to you, that you should get the damn beta and save your friend's life. This notion strikes you as nonsensical. You can't imagine how a video game could save someone's life, and in any case, you're quite sure no one you know is in any danger.

Sitting on your turntables are two envelopes. These are your copies of the beta you received in the mail recently. You've labeled them with your name in bold red print to distinguish them from your Bro's copies, who labeled his in kind. Neither of you really gives a shit about this game or has any intention of playing it, but you'll be damned if you'll let that get in the way of your campaign of one-upmanship.

Again you have a strange thought, that you should bleat like a goat and piss on your turntable. You would never consider allowing any fluid even remotely resembling urine to touch your beloved turntables. That would risk breaking them, and a world without the gift of your godly science just doesn't sound like a place you want any part of. While you're at it, you might as well wipe out human civilization with a meteor or something ridiculous like that which will probably never happen.

That sort of thing only happens in stupid idiot movies for stupid idiots.

You will however contemplate bleating like a goat for ironically humorous purposes at a later date.

To the right of your turntables is your closet, where you keep a lot of your crap. Like that blue box. This is the package that your friend John Egbert sent you for your 13th birthday a couple months ago. It now contains nothing except a note and a certificate of authenticity vouching for the genuine hollywood memorabilia which the box originally contained, and which you are now wearing to be ironic but also to be incredibly cool in a way somehow intangibly related to the ironic nature of the accessory. You find it sort of exasperating to explain these subtleties to people. The box also included a signed photo of Ben Stiller which now proudly hangs above your closet. Proudly and ironically.

You captchalogue the box through your "hash map" fetch modus. The hash function resolves the index by valuing each consonant at 2, and each vowel at 1. The total is divided by your number of cards, and the remainder is the index.