Work Text:
Nepeta was halfway down the tinsel stairs to the little lake of tea when the troll tackled her. Luckily, it was a sideways tackle, so instead of bumping down the stairs in a very uncomfortable fashion, they instead tumbled onto the soft, fragrant frosting of the lemon cake hill.
“Hi,” said the troll, sitting up. “I’m Jade.”
Nepeta knew what she was, of course. She remembered the details from Karkat’s weirdo pretend troll game back over Easter Break -- and then, of course, the shock of how it hadn’t really been pretend. Karkat’s second memo from after they were all in, the OH YEAH, THESE INTERNET TROLLS AREN’T JUST A BUNCH OF DUMB HUMANS, THEY’RE ACTUALLY ALIENS AT LEAST FROM OUR PERSPECTIVE TECHNICALLY WE THE HUMANS ARE THE ALIENS HERE, SHIT’S COMPLICATED, BUT ANYWAY NOW THEY ARE GOING TO HELP US PLAY THIS GAME memo, had just been weirder. Everyone knew Karkat had been messed up for months, but after the memo about blah blah superior species this and interdimensional hellgame that it did not take being a supergenius to think that maybe these funny little horned kids running around had done a number on his noggin. Vriska thought maybe Karkat had been abducted and gotten his head stuck full of alien brainworms. Equius thought perhaps Karkat had been wholesale replaced, like an automaton. Sollux just flat out didn’t want to talk about it. Nepeta... didn’t really know what to think about it, and mostly tried not to entirely.
“So which kid are you?” the troll -- Jade -- asked. She had really sharp teeth, and was pinning her wrists into the icing.
“I’m, um, I’m Nepeta?” she squeaked.
Jade grinned at her. “Hi!” she repeated, and eased off Nepeta’s wrists. “Rose asked me to make contact with one of you guys once I had the chance and you seemed like a decent choice, so I figured I’d drop in.”
“Oh,” said Nepeta. She tried to picture the revised server-client order in her head. She wasn’t positive, but she was pretty sure that there were a couple of people between her and the clump of trolls. “But weren’t Sollux and, um, Feferi and Eridan closer?”
Jade shrugged. “Eridan and Sollux are already handled, and I think you’re a lot nicer than Feferi! I alchemized a jetpack. You can get pretty far, pretty quick that way.”
“Oh,” said Nepeta, taking a good look at the troll, who was dressed in a funny, science-fictiony looking jacket and dress. Sure enough, she had a jetpack strapped to her back. “I see.”
“Yep,” said Jade cheerfully. “I like your cat hat, by the way.”
Nepeta smiled. “Thanks? I like your horns! They look like dog ears!”
Jade grinned back. “Actually, they’re wolf ears! Dog ears would be smaller, probably. Also, my lusus was a wolf.”
“Oh, right,” said Nepeta. “Those are like your animal companions, right?”
“Monster parents,” said Jade, “but close enough. And oh fuck, I think I see an imp on the top of the hill. Lie low--I think I can snipe him from here. Oh, and you might want to cover your ears.”
Nepeta nodded and put her hands over her ears. Jade grinned at her, pulled a gun out of her strife deck, took aim and---
BANG.
“Got him!” Jade said. “Good thing you don’t have uranium imps. Those are the worst. You have to shoot them eleventy-million times before you can kill them, because they keep teleporting you around everywhere.”
“That sounds pawful,” said Nepeta. “I mean awful! Oh shit.”
Jade stared at her for a second and then she chuckled. “Oh my god, you really are a catgirl. I thought you were just faking before--not that it matters anymore! Look, I don’t mind if you’re a catgirl. I was a dog-girl for a while and right now, I’m kind of a wolf-girl... troll girl. Or something like that.” She spread her hands and gave a funny self-depreciating shrug as she laughed. Alien or not, she was really cute, and Nepeta found herself laughing too.
“Something like that,” Nepeta agreed.
“So,” Jade grinned, “is there something in the lake? Is there a quest? Do you need help?”
Nepeta nodded. “All three, really.”
“Great,” said Jade. “I’ll race you down.”
--
“Great. Fucking lost. Of course. Goddamn the old witch.”
Who the hell constructed a planet made from cake? Probably the same jerks who made planets made from fucking muppets. Unless, of course, Mama Dolores had faked the photograph, which she probably could have, considering how much computer equipment that the old witch had paid to have shipped out to an island in the middle of motherfucking nowhere. Please let her have faked the photographs, the muppet planet was ball-curdlingly freaky looking, and Nemo could not wrap his head around why anyone would make a game this utterly fucked up.
Fuck the old witch for getting them into this again. Just -- fuck her.
Metaphorically.
Nemo Vantas was not in a good mood.
Which, okay, was nothing new. But this time he was in a bad mood on a planet of fucking cake and Mags had fucked off to try to find Dee, who hadn’t been in the house when they’d all fucked off to who fucking knows where. And he was missing his goddamn fucking shoes because he’d left the house too soon and and now he was fucking lost and had icing sliding slick and disgusting up between his toes. On a stupid fucking planet made of lemon cake and fucking tinsel.
At least Dee’d remembered to stick his phone in his pocket before he’d gone off to the barn. That way, at least, they’d been able to establish contact with him so they knew he wasn’t dead. Which was good with all the fucking meteors around.
And the old witch had fucking taken command of everyone, like they were her fucking army or something. Claiming she had a better idea of what was going on than the rest of them. Fuck that.
Nemo knew exactly what was going on. Their kids were playing Sgrub. Sburb. Whatever. The point was, they were going to get themselves fucking killed. If some of the shit he’d seen in his dreams was true...
He hadn’t wanted to think it was true, of course. He’d been dreaming some really crazy shit ever since the night Karkat had come back from school half abuse victim and half super-soldier. He hadn’t had the dreams before then but after that he’d had them every fucking night, as if they were trying to make up for lost time. Nightmares that didn’t fade after waking, dreams that had the awful weight of memories. They piled up in the back of his brain and itched.
Like dying in agony on a-- a-- a flogging jut, his mind supplied and why the fuck did he even know what that goddamn thing was even called?
Like a world of burnt-clean deserts, tangled jungles, endless plains, the spread of the ocean dark and dangerous underneath his little ship. Like the stars overhead, 48 sacred constellations to steer by, Mags at his side with eyes that glowed gold-green as a cat’s.
Like looking at a crowd of candy-corn horns set down and deadly, and white fangs all bared for his unnatural blood, telling them there’s a better world than this, we can be a better people than this.
Like watching his friends die in a stupid game just like this one.
In his dreams he was inhuman, alien, one of those “trolls” from the pretend-game Nepeta had told him Karkat had come back from school obsessed with. Which wasn’t even pretend. Fuck.
And he’d kind of known it wasn’t from the start, even before the old witch confirmed things. There had been something inside him, somehow, that recognized how Karkat had acted that day. Had thrilled to it with a kind of wondering, exhilarated sorrow that Nemo hadn’t even been able to parse. He still couldn’t.
It wasn’t just that Karkat was fucked up in that horrible -- and horribly fascinating way -- that Dee had been after Nam, because there had been something in him that had recognized it in Dee too. And maybe even something in him that had expected it too.
He didn’t even fucking know.
Oh. Oh, fuck! Was that what he thought it was...?
Fuck, it was. There was a motherfucking adult-sized troll coming his motherfucking way, god damn the pointy gray bastards got big.
And it was smoking a pipe.
--
The thing about Jade that Nepeta had noticed right away was that she wore like five or six computers at once.
Jade blinked, once asked about them. “What? Doesn’t everybody?”
Nepeta shook her head. “I’ve just got these goggles and my laptop and that’s usually in my captchalog.”
“Oh,” said Jade. “Well, everyone should carry at least five or six around. Especially John. He keeps losing them. Well, smashing them when he gets mad. He’s been doing that a lot lately.”
Nepeta wrinkled her nose. “That’s the one of you guys that Karkat really... likes? Hates? Likes to hate?”
“Something like that,” Jade said breezily. “Quadrants are kind of complicated and silly. They’re fun to play around with, but...” She shrugged.
“They sound pretty pa-- um, awesome to me,” Nepeta said. “I mean, different ways to be romantic? That’s just -- cool!”
Jade laughed and poked Nepeta’s nose gently. “You think all this troll stuff is cool. Paw-some, even!”
“Well,” said Nepeta, grinning. “Meow-be a little! I’m not like Karkat, I don’t want to turn into one of you guys. But you guys are real live aliens -- and you have animal parents! That is the neatest part of all. I mean, I love my mom and dad, lots, but it would be really cool to have a giant monster cat mom too.”
Jade stared at the lake. “Yeah, I guess so. Trolls don’t have family, though. Unless we make it for ourselves. Like the four of us did.” She turned the wrist of her one rolled up sleeve, so that Nepeta could see the purple-outlined scar. It was deep and thickly welted, like a welded seam.
“That looks like it hurt to get,” Nepeta said quietly.
“Yeah, it did!” Jade admitted carelessly. “But it symbolizes how we all belong to each other, and that’s what’s the most important.”
“Oh,” said Nepeta. She studied it thoughtfully. “It’s a heart.”
“I guess it does kind of look like one,” Jade said. “It’s Rose’s sign, though, because she’s our leader! She’s part of us, with this, and we’re part of her. It’s really great.”
“It’s a good thing Karkat isn’t really a troll,” said Nepeta. “He’d probably make us put little crabby signs on all our arms or something!”
Jade looked at her. Her lip twitched. “Oh fuck it,” she muttered under her breath. Then she flopped down and started laughing.
And laughing.
And laughing.
“Jade,” Nepeta hissed. “Jade, you’re rocking the boat.”
Jade ignored her. Or maybe she couldn’t hear her from laughing so much. It was really hard to tell. She was completely adorable, with a hoarse, infectious laugh that had Nepeta giggling reluctantly along
“If I lose my hat in this lake,” Nepeta said, running her fingers over the purple scar, “we’re using your grist to alchemize me a new one.”
--
The troll’s name was Junior, which Nemo thought was a damn funny name for a troll, but what the hell did he know? He did have the impression that troll names were usually longer than that, though.
“I had an unusually terse lusus,” said Junior when Nemo brought the subject up. “You could call me Dolorous, I suppose,” he added. “I used to be one of the Dolorous Wardens, until Strider.”
“Strider?”
“My charge,” said Junior. “I found him in a crater-- a meteor had smashed through one of the brooding caverns. He was a bright mutant red. I didn’t-- I didn’t want to see him culled.”
“So you took him to the surface,” said Nemo quietly, “and raised him.”
“Yes,” said Junior. “How in the world...?”
“When I sleep,” Nemo said. “I dream of being a troll. And I think-- nothing else makes any sense-- I think maybe our kids are starting to dream the same things, somehow.”
His throat locked up with the same kind of hot sorrow he couldn’t deal with, and he looked away. Back when he’d been a stupid young kid he had picked fights when he felt like this, and when he was less stupid young man he volunteered at rallies and demonstrations and now his knees hurt in the mornings and his hair was turning gray at the temples. He was past fifty, older than he had ever been before, and very tired. Everyone on Earth he had ever fought for-- sat with, marched with, volunteered with, been arrested with, maced with, everyone was dead and gone and he was also probably an alien. Everything in every life that he had ever believed in had been an enormous waste of time, and there was no particularly dignified way of saying so without sounding all of his son’s age. A child with a case of the sulks. It’s not fair.
Junior took his pipe from between his fangs and began to tuck more tobacco into the bowl, finishing with a pinch of greenish powder. His patient silence was a kind of soothing that Nemo had missed ever since his mom had fucked off on the batterwitch’s errands with Kanaya -- the only really sensible kid out of the whole pack of them-- and he found his fists slowly relaxing.
“When it was just Karkat,” he said finally, “when I thought it was just Karkat... it was easy to assume it was just the school. But it wasn’t just him. I didn’t notice so much the first night because I was so furious, but Gamzee was really fucked up too. He got high right away every morning and he’d be so--I don’t know--hesitant, maybe?-- about touching his friends. And I mean, the kid’s been a stoner for the last couple years because my cousin Goat thinks pot is a kiddy drug, but he didn’t usually light up first thing in the fucking morning when he’d stayed with us before. And then he and Karkat started acting like they were, I don’t know, shield-brothers out of some stupid historical drama. Fucking waited for each other outside the goddamn bathroom, like kids in prison expecting to get jumped by the guards. You trolls have shield-brothers?”
Junior nodded.
“And Sollux. He was almost normal half the time, at first, but then he’d get these flashes of the same whatever-it-was that Karkat and Gamzee had. And he started holding himself like someone who gets into fights. And win fights. I’ve been in fights, I know how you look when you think you can take on the world and win. And Sollux is-- okay, I mean, I love the little smartass but the closest he’s ever gotten to a genuine punch-up was when he goaded Eridan into taking a swing last Family Reunion, and he got completely clobbered.
“I knew it--I really knew something was wrong, no fooling--when Aradia and Thomas showed up for Easter. Because Sollux has always been kind of weird and flighty, he has these moods? He gets carried away with things a lot, he’s a space-case. And Karkat could have gotten in trouble at the school, could have been abused to hell and back at that school, and Gamzee could have been having a whole string of bad trips and Terezi, man, she’s a little shit sometimes, much as I love her and I wouldn’t have put it past her to have been fucking with us. But Aradia, she was just this cheerful tree-hugger of a girl, I’ve never seen her hurt so much as a fly in all her life. And she stabbed me with a fork.”
Junior blinked. “A culling fork?”
“Nah, just a table fork. I snuck up on her and Karkat at breakfast. I guess I wanted to prove something to myself, maybe? Anyway, I expected her to say ‘Hi, Mr Vantas’ like a normal kid, you dig? Pretend for a while longer that everything was cool, I was just tripping out. But instead she just screams and lashes out, and Karkat fucking vaulted the damn table to get between us, like he thought I was hurting her. He had one of Mags’s hunting knives tucked into his waistband, not even in his sylladex, in his waistband, and I thought I was going to die. The look on his face, on my-- my kid, my son, on his face. I thought I was going to die. And then, suddenly, they’re all sorry and apologetic and shit, but they’re making too much effort, like they’re putting on a show or some shit. And they go and bandage my hand like fucking professionals, like that’s the kind of shit they do every day.
“Soon as I could I got the fuck away from them and freaked the fuck out.”
Junior patted him on the shoulder.
“Thanks, man,” said Nemo, looking up at the troll. He was so fucking tall. Probably seven or eight feet. Nemo hadn’t realized that about trolls, probably because everyone had been roughly the same size in his dreams, but the adults were fucking huge.
Kids were about half the size, though. He remembered that much. And little baby grub things... man, what the hell was with trolls and their growth curve anyway?
“So I freaked out,” Nemo said, instead of asking stupid things. “And then I found Mags -- Mags is my... well, she’s my family. And I guess kind of my moirail too and shit, it’s so weird to know all these troll concepts from those goddamn dreams, but I don’t know, maybe what we got isn’t in any quandrant and moirails are just closest. She’s family. Anyway, I found Mags and I sat her down on the porch swing and I was all, ‘So either our kids are sneaking off to Narnia or I am losing my goddamn mind,’ and she said-- hey, do trolls even have Narnia?”
“If we do it probably isn’t called Narnia,” Junior said.
“Probably not,” Nemo agreed. “Anyway, so I ended up talking to Thomas and he said that the old witch--my Aunt Betty--had been acting weird since that day too. And, I don’t know, I guess I figured that if that was true, she probably had something to do with it all, since she has her gnarled claws in every fucking pie there is. So I called her the fuck up and asked for a goddamn explanation.”
Junior nodded again. “Did she give you one?”
“Sort of. Well, first she was a snide bitch and was all ‘I thought you would be contacting me eventually. You always were a thorn in my side,’ shit like that. Then she gave me all this bullshit about reality rebooting itself and not everyone knowing what the fuck happened and I was all, ‘wait, are you saying until a week ago we were all aliens and that’s why my kid is fucked up and I’m having crazy-ass dreams’ and she’s all ‘yes, exactly, and if you don’t have any other questions, I need to get back to work’ -- because of course she’s working even on the fucking holidays, never mind that maybe she should be spending time with Feferi and Eridan and her brother and the Serkets, no she has to be expanding the fucking Crocker empire all the fucking time, I’m surprised she let Thomas off--” Nemo took a deep breath. “Sorry, man. The old witch just pisses me the fuck off sometimes.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” Junior said blandly.
“Well,” said Nemo. “I told Mags and Dee -- and Rufio and Virginia and Thomas and Carmine and Goat -- everything that the old witch had told me. And I mean, I don’t think they all believed me -- I’m sure as fuck that Carmine probably didn’t and who the fuck even knows with Goat -- but they probably all believe me now, when we’re all trotting around playing god damn Space Invaders. Anyway, that’s my shit. What the fuck’s up with you?”
“Ah,” said Junior. “That’s a bit of a long story. The short version is that Strider and I ran into some trouble and we had to take service with the Grand Highblood to avoid a culling. Strider became her engineer. I became her bodyguard and general dogsbody. We were part of her staff for a good few sweeps, before she and Strider programmed a game using code they’d found in some ruins that Jake -- her secreterrorist and an amateur archaeologist -- had investigated. She then sent the game grubs to her protege and three of her protege’s friends. Once her spyware alerted her to the fact that the first of her protege’s friends had started playing, the five of us ‘ported to the pupa’s island, with the general understanding that we’d be taken up to the game world with her.”
“Wait,” said Nemo. “There are troll kids playing this game too? At the same time as our -- my -- kids?”
“You haven’t run into them yet?” Junior asked.
“Fuck no,” said Nemo. “Man, we weren’t playing with any human kids in my dreams. At least, not in the same game. I think maybe there were some that contacted us? Fuck, I don’t even know. I got woken up early that time. I guess I should have figured, though, since you’re here.”
“Well,” said Junior, “I don’t have any dreams of prior lives myself, so I can’t help you there.”
“Yeah, it’s okay, man. I didn’t expect you to. But shit. First there’s that crazy-ass giant planet in the sky, now there’s a joint human-troll session and I don’t even know if that’s fucking possible, seeing as one of us created the other. What the fuck is wrong with this session?”
“That,” said Junior, “is something we are all trying to figure out.”
--
They draped their wet clothing on the branches of a tinsel tree, before un-captchalogging their spare outfits. Nepeta tried hard not to look at Jade, but it was really difficult not to sneak a peek. Jade was a real live alien after all.
“Well,” said Jade cheerfully. “At least I managed to save your hat.”
“My wet hat,” Nepeta reminded her. “I’m pretty sure tea stains, too.”
“Oh well,” said Jade. “We’ll just alchemize everything over again.”
Nepeta smiled in spite of herself. “That’s your answer to everything.”
“Hey!” said Jade, “it works. Anyway, you’ve all got the grist torrent installed on your computers, don’t you? So we shouldn’t have to worry about running out, especially with all the imps everyone’s been killing.”
Nepeta nodded.
“Do you want to go imp-hunting after our clothes are dry?” Jade asked. “For fun, I mean, not just more grist--though more grist is always nice, I guess!”
Nepeta grinned. “Sure! Just be careful where you’re shooting. Both my strife specibuses are melee. Clawkind and lampkind-- don’t laugh! I started out bashing the imps with the lamp, see, but Equius -- he’s my brother -- he was worried that I didn’t have a good enough weapon, so he sent me the code for the second specibus he’d gotten from Feferi and then the code for his favorite pitchfork and then I combined my old toy Wolverine claws with the pitchfork to make THESE!”
Suddenly the metal claw-gloves appeared on Nepeta’s hands. She didn’t think she’d ever get tired of watching that happen.
“Nice,” said Jade. She ran a claw over the curve of a blade. “Sharp, too.” A bead of spring-green blood welled up on the tip of it. Jade licked at it delicately. Her lips were really dark against her tongue.
“Oh, um, thanks,” said Nepeta, feeling her cheeks heat up. “It’s called the Barnyard Ballbuster.”
“Very nice,” Jade said, looking back up at Nepeta. She had amazing eyes. Instead of whites there were yellows and the pupils were slit just like a cat’s. They got bigger and smaller too, just like a cat’s, depending on the light--or so Nepeta discovered by putting her newly ungloved hand up to shade Jade’s eyes.
“Wow,” said Nepeta. “Wow.” She took her hand away. Jade’s pupils shrunk back down. She put her hand back and there they were, big again.
Jade laughed. “You are a silly, silly girl.”
Nepeta laughed with her. “Yeah,” she admitted. “Appurrently I am.”
“Silly catgirl,” Jade said fondly. “I’m glad I decided to drop in on you.”
“Me too,” Nepeta said. “Wolf-girl troll-girl.” She leaned down and rubbed her nose against Jade’s, like cat might.
This might have been a slight mistake, however, as it left her distinctly off-balance for Jade’s sudden pounce. She fell backwards against the hill of cake, leaving a Nepeta-shaped hole in the lemon frosting as Jade kissed her in what she could only suppose was a ridiculously thorough fashion.
“Um, Jade?” she managed to squeak out. “It’s not that I don’t like you, but isn’t this moving kind of fast?”
Jade licked her nose. “Nope! The time in LOLCAT is now yiff o’clock.”
“But we haven’t even been on a date!”
“Nepeta,” said Jade. “We just rowed around in a boat together. We’re going to be hunting imps later. What did you think this was?”
“I never even had a chance to put us in my shipping notebook,” Nepeta protested.
Jade frowned. “Is that supposed to be important?”
“To me it is!”
“Oh,” said Jade. “Well, I can wait, I guess.” She sat back down on her haunches. Nepeta un-captcha’d her notebook and her coloured pencils and started drawing their pictures on a fresh page.
She did like Jade. A lot. Like, really liked her, liked her. She was pretty, and funny, and really ferocious. Which was a little surprising, because she was an alien and a girl alien too, and they’d only known each other for a day, but it wasn’t as if Nepeta hadn’t had, well, a few crushes before. On girls, a lot, and sometimes boys too when they weren’t stupid jerks. But she’d never been able to do anything about those because... well, because of a lot of stuff.
She hadn’t expected Jade to like her back. Which was maybe pretty dumb, because Karkat had said that trolls didn’t care if people liked boys or girls. Trolls didn’t even have the words for straight or gay, not that there was anything wrong with being gay, but to trolls, it wasn’t even a thing at all. They all liked both.
Nepeta thought she really, really liked that about trolls. She wasn’t Karkat. She didn’t want to become a troll. But if it didn’t matter if trolls liked boys or girls, then maybe it didn’t have to matter if she liked boys or girls.
“So, um, are we going to be matesprites, then?” she asked. “I think that’s what you call it, right? Karkat said being matesprites wasn’t the same thing as dating the human way, although it sounded pretty close to the same thing to me! But I’m new to this whole troll shipping thing, so I could be wrong. Or he could be wrong, since he’s just a troll wannabe. But it’s really cool, even if I don’t completely get all the nuances and stuff! You can make so many new combinations with it and ship everyone four ways, it’s great.”
“Matesprits not matesprites,” said Jade. “And I guess we could. I mean, I don’t really have that one filled, I don’t think. I mean, it’s hard to figure out what you’d call what I have with Dave and Rose and John. It doesn’t fall in very good with any one quadrant. I guess the closest thing would be moirallegiance but I don’t even know... oh fuck it, we’re family, that’s what it’s called, I don’t fucking care if it’s not a troll thing. It transcends the quadrants, I guess! It transcends everything. We’re part of each other.” She sighed. “Let’s you and me just be girlfriends and figure out the rest later, okay?
“Sure,” said Nepeta. “Girlfriends. I like that.”
“Awesome,” said Jade, peering over Nepeta’s shoulders. “Give me a tail.”
“You don’t have a tail,” Nepeta pointed out.
“No, but I want one. And wolf ears!”
“Your horns already look like ears!”
“So?”
“So it’ll be repetitive!”
“Don’t care! Also, draw yourself as a catgirl.”
“Aren’t you Miss Bossyhorns! I was going to do that anyway. So there.”
--
“So here is how I figure it, right?” Nemo said, drawing another line is his diagram. You could say one thing for having a planet made of cake--it was really easy to draw stuff in the frosting, easier than if it had been normal dirt. “So reality rebooted itself or some shit like that, right? What the old witch said. But the way I figure, it couldn’t have just done it once. It had to have done it another time, because I have two different sets of dreams. I’m still a fucking troll in them, no matter what, but sometimes it’s really fucking harsh and fucked up, and sometimes it’s peace and love and all that good shit. Sounds crazy to you, right? Peaceful fucking trolls.”
“Just a tiny bit,” Junior said, leaning down. It was probably a good thing there were holes in his hat for his horns. It might have fallen off otherwise. Up close, Nemo could see that what he’d what he'd taken for a smirk was actually a scarred-in Glasgow Smile, like the Joker in that Batman movie. If aliens even had a Glasgow to name their fucked-up mutilations after. “Perhaps the atmosphere in that iteration was sopor-based? I’m sure if we put our minds to it, we could parse out exactly how that could be feasible.”
One of his forward facing horns had a familiar backhook to its curve. Nemo reached over to touch it, gently. “You’re just Mister Irony aren’t you?” Nemo said fondly.
“It’s a side effect of raising Strider, unfortunately,” said Junior.
“Man, whenever you call him that, I start picturing Troll Aragorn.” Nemo shook his head. “Right, so there are two kids of trolls in my dreams, fucked up soldiers and flower children. Soldiers are more recent, you dig? Because that’s the kind of troll my boy and those other kids were acting like.”
“And I certainly wouldn’t call my own society that of flower children,” Junior agreed. “Whatever those are.”
“Hah. You’re talking to an old hippie, here, you’ve got to make some allowances. So, right, the flower children. I don’t have so many dreams of those, compared to the soldiers. I don’t think I had as much life in that one. The oldest I ever am is about my son’s age. Probably younger, since he’ll be fourteen pretty soon and I think I was six sweeps exactly.”
Junior nodded.
“So! Trolls are flower children. Me and my ma and the rest of my family -- except our kids -- we’re all troll kids ourselves, all the same age, like Karkat’s pack. And Thomas, he comes up with this game he’s programmed for us to play, so we play it and everything goes apeshit and we end up here. Or someplace like here. And bad shit happens, we fuck up. Reality gets rebooted.”
“Go on,” said Junior.
“Right,” said Nemo. “So then trolls are soldiers. Everything is awful. Mama Dolores raises me, I get dreams about the flower children, I meet Thomas and Mags, I go around talking peace like I’m fucking Troll Jesus, and I end up pretty much the same way, with Dee firing the arrow that finally offs me, only I don’t get to come back from the dead, fuck that. Then...”
“Then?”
“Then here I am. Human. Somebody reset the universe again. However the fuck it happens. And that’s where I’m stuck, you dig? I remember enough that you have to be in this game to reset everything. So who reset it that time? And are we going to have to do it again?”
Junior looked solemnly at him for a moment. Then he handed his pipe to Nemo. It smelled like sopor and fuck his life, that Nemo could recognize the smell of sopor.
“Son,” said Junior, “I think you need this more than I do.”