Terezi nearly dies in her first FLARP game.
She's just staring stupidly down at her chest and the slash across it that's spewing teal, thinking that this isn't how it's supposed to go. The rules are-
The rules are turns out to not be her last words, because before the clouder can slice off her head he's run through with a spear, spraying a gout of blue. Amazingly, he doesn't fall but stumbles away, leaving Terezi behind.
"Maaan what's wrong with you?" the girl says, bending down with her bloody hands on her skinny knees. "You should have at least tried to abscond!"
"Clouders aren't allowed to directly interfere with players," Terezi says numbly.
"He was such a cheater!" the girl agrees, staring after him. "He almost got me the last time I played, that's why I made sure to be here for this one! I've been hoping to get him all game. You made GREAT BAIT!" She grins, then asks, "Hey, aren't you going to get up?"
Terezi does, a bit shakily. "Does this happen a lot?" she asks. "Are a lot of the players cheaters?"
The girl nods. "Wanna help me finish him off?"
Terezi stares at her and suddenly things make sense again. The clouder broke the rules when he attacked her. The FLARP guidebooks are clear. Being unable to win within the same framework as everyone else and needing to resort to cheating attempts on the other player's life is a sign of an inferior troll and grounds for culling. You're supposed to follow the rules.
"Yes," Terezi says.
The girl introduces herself as Spinneret Mindfang, marquis and rebel pirate, three sweeps old just like Terezi, who, she says, shouldn't use such a lame name for FLARP, everyone knows you're supposed to play a character. She can help think up a good name if Terezi wants! One day, Terezi will think back and consider that probably the only reason she's alive is how young Vriska is on their first meeting, that later (at six sweeps, or five, or...) Vriska would have waited until after the killing blow to step in.
At three sweeps, after Vriska rifles through the corpse's coat she divides up the spoils evenly. "You don't need the body for anything, right?" Vriska asks.
Terezi shakes her head.
"Great! Hey, you should take his sword. It's not as great as mine but it's better than your lame weapon! Sticking with a tiny little dagger like that will get you killed! Don't you know aaanything?"
She doesn't. She doesn't have a lusus.
This isn't something she'd ever admit. Terezi has the best lusus, a dragon who is a thousand times better than any kangaram or double-mouthed lion. It's just she'll never meet it, not really.
The purpose of a lusus is to be a counterbalance to the official side of things. Schoolfeeding lays down the laws and a lusus teaches the rest, the give and take, when things can be bent or ignored or broken entirely. And it teaches that other people will do the same.
But if her lusus was ever there for her, she can't remember it. Sometimes she likes to think the unborn dragon spoke to her as a wriggler, that she crawled out of the caverns to curl by the egg and pupate against the shell because her lusus picked her and called her to its side. But since she pushed her way out as a sapient creature, with real thoughts and memory, she's heard nothing. And sometimes she thinks instead she found her way here alone, smelling their matched blood behind the white shell, because if it talked to her once, maybe the silence meant it decided it didn't want her so much after all.
She'll prove she's worthy of it.
Vriska is struggling to pick up the body. "What are you doing?" Terezi asks. "Do you need help carrying that?"
"Of course I don't neeeed help!" she says instantly. "But if you wanna carry this to pay me back for saving you..."
By the time they get to Vriska's hive, she's given out her actual name and why she's so interested in lugging around a heavy dead troll. "I'm going to have to feed my lusus for real one day!" she says. "So I've got to get in some practice to be sure I'm the absolute best at it!" They walk together to the edge of the cliff and throw the body over.
Terezi watches the lusus below eat the body. It's unsettling, but it seems... "Just," she tells Vriska.
"Huh?" Vriska says, startled out of her own thoughts. "Yeah. I guess." She turns to look at Terezi. "Wanna team up, then? You can tag along while I beat everyone! I'm prooobably great enough that even a novice FLARPer like you won't get culled!"
Terezi says yes.
