10-13-2015, 09:13 PM
Jade’s fuzzy white ears twitch as she listens, pricking up at the details that she finds predominantly interesting. This is very often, though! Most everything Karkat says is more or less news to her, so she thinks it’s all rather neat. She especially likes hearing about the other SBURB player and the Tangled Green, however.
She grins widely at Karkat’s measly admission that her house is pretty swanky, swinging her legs out in glee. The rest of what he says, however, puts that thrilled elation on hold.
“Yeah, okay,” Jade says, laughing a bit weakly because nothing is wrong with that question. Nothing at all. She can totally fulfill this request. “Just, one moment please! Haha.”
She clumsily excuses herself and practically sprints into the room she has now dubbed the Hall of Transportalizers, One of Which Is Blocked By A Big-Ass Snake. When she steps foot into the room, Jade proceeds to hunch in on herself and clutch her head in a panic.
Shit. Shit. She doesn’t have a shower. She doesn’t even have basic plumbing. It was only, like, four years ago that she finally learned what a toilet even was. Jade is so ill-equipped to handle this dire situation.
Then again, she could always just outright remind Karkat that she was raised by a dog and wasn’t privy to this kind of knowledge, but that seems like a horrible idea to her anxiously twisting thoughts. Anxiety builds up like souring milk; thick, globby bits polluting her brain and making her just want to disappear.
Becquerel snuffles in after her at just the right time, his tail wagging lazily as he walks over to gently bop at her knees with his nose. Jade stares at him, face completely devoid of emotion, as if she hasn’t even registered that he is there. Then, her stance relaxes as some little bits of purely metaphoric metal in her head suddenly ring together, causing splendidly shining sparks to fly. That’s it!
“Keep Karkat distracted,” Jade kneels down real quick in front of Bec, taking his face in her hands while she tells him what to do. She lightly pats his tufted cheeks. “I’m going to go remodel a room real quick. Tell him I’ll be right back, okay buddy?”
The white-furred wolfdog licks her face in return, briefly upsetting her glasses with the force of his doggy affections. Jade wrinkles her nose at him and carefully shoves him away. Gross, dog slobber!
“Good dog,” she says, getting to her feet and starting up the staircase. As the bottom of her glittering coat disappears from view she calls over her shoulder, “Best friend!”
Jade has a lot of work to do.
The room is dark and Karkat is still soaked through with soda. Sitting close enough to the fire is helping with that, but the overwhelming stench of sugar and fruity juices isn’t particularly pleasant either way. He waits rather impatiently for Jade’s return, testily digging his claws into the sofa cushion in his frustration.
Jade’s insanely over-powered barkbeast wanders back into the grand foyer after a few moments, claws clacking inconspicuously against the tile floor. There is a frankly suspicious nonappearance of any Jades following close behind it. Karkat is immediately on his guard.
“Where’s Jade?” he asks the fucking enormous dog, warily side-eyeing the tower entrance in case he needs to make a break for it. Like hell is he staying alone with this thing for longer than five minutes. The flames from the fireplace are casting crazy unsettling shadows across the room as well, which isn’t helping Karkat’s frame of mind at all, thank you very much.
The wolfish beast sits opposite to him on the sofa set, not making a single sound as it does so. He doesn’t even think that this thing is breathing. Now, Jade might sit all safe and sound up in her tower and call her beloved barkbeast pal a ‘big sweetheart’ or a ‘good dog’, but Karkat knows the truth. It isn’t a simple flesh-and-blood lusus— this creature is a goddamn weapon capable of blowing up meteors. It might be severely depowered in this Omniverse, but he won’t trust that particular insurance for one second.
Becquerel’s nose is facing him head-on, its featureless gaze oddly off-putting and way more than a little disconcerting. Karkat feels as if he should be holding a flaming torch under a dark primordial sky, waving this thing off as it observes him from the dusky shadows, although he knows that Jade would murder-kill him if he dared to set her taxidermied grandfather on fire or any of her other ridiculous knick-knacks.
Nevertheless, he does scoot closer to the steel poker leaning on the hearth’s stone.
The frightening barkbeast continues to stare. Menacingly.
“Uh,” Karkat scrappily articulates, and then quickly diverts his attention to his phone.
Only nine minutes in.
Shit.
While Becquerel is entertaining Karkat, Jade makes her way up to what she considers to be her grandfather’s least offensive collection of objects: the suits of armor in all their shiny, metallic glory.
She grabs onto one— North Italian, Circa 1580-1600, Heavy Officer Grade, nicely-etched with a dusty feather out the cap and bearing a military rapier— and lugs it all the way up to her garden atrium’s transportalizer pad.
From there, the power of Spooky Action at a Distance takes over and rockets her up to the room that was once home to her dreambot. As Jade rematerializes, she is treated to the sight of sloshy, muddy footprints tramping a clear path up into her bedroom. She can hear a faint banging sound, like metal striking metal. Grandpabot must be building something!
Humming busily to herself, Jade sets the suit of armor aside for décor. She can’t have her new bathroom area looking anything but spiffy, after all!
Now for the Omnilium summoning— this might take a while. It might be best to see what the heck Karkat is doing, at the moment.
Karkat thinks that this horrible, godawful devilbeast might actually be plotting to kill him. There’s no way of telling how its mind works. He doesn’t know how it could do this without letting Jade become in the know about it, but he is nearly a billion percent certain that this barkbeast could manage to pull it off without even breaking a sweat.
Speaking of breaking a sweat, a tiny bead of it appears on the cherry-blooded troll’s brow, glinting in the firelight. He has been engaged in a pseudo-staring contest with this barkbeast for the past half-hour. His left eye ticks nervously.
To put it in simpler terms, Jade’s dog lusus is so fucking terrifying that he can’t bring himself to take his eyes off of it for even a second. His brain shrieks at him if tries, in a battle cry remarkably reminiscent of his own crab lusus: don’t do that nonono, might attack vicious teeth bite.
Karkat feels as if he needs to abscond immediately, mainly because he doesn't fancy being buried in Jade's snowy backyard with some crappy vegetable-themed funeral procession following his haflway-charred corpse all over the place; and he would really like to, as well. In truth, he should have left thirty minutes ago, but he has been so frozen with instinctual fear that not even his usual mental insult sessions could quell the apparent inability of his limbs to just fucking move.
Somehow, however, after checking his huskphone for like the thousandth time and seeing that Gamzee’s tournament has started and that Jade has been away for an unholy amount of time, he does manage to edge his way off of the couch and into the room Jade pranced off into earlier.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he grumbles at the odiously tall spiral staircase that winds its way further up into the unspeakable heights of Jade’s tower. “Why the fuck are there so many stairs?”
The barkbeast sneezes uproariously from behind him, sending startling electrical sparks up Karkat’s spine. Karkat proceeds to let out a totally-not-shrill shriek and books it up the many flights of stairs, his heart beating out a fast-paced rhythm behind his ribcage.
There! All finished! Jade looks at the sparkling-white shower, sink, and porcelain throne that she has summoned with pride blooming in her chest. Hopefully these are all technologically sound! She isn’t a professional plumber or anything, so that might be a problem.
But, other than that little bump in the road, she thinks that she has done pretty well! A small dish of soap sits beside the sink, glinting and made of a solid metal that would clang loudly if accidentally dropped on the floor. The shower curtains are plasticky and sheer but have a thicker curtain layer on the outside. Fluffy blue towels complete the whole set, lovingly-embroidered with speckled and lacy flowers.
Over all, Jade’s brand spanking new bathroom looks great, despite it being quite small. She hopes it will be sufficient, but right now she should go retrieve Karkat and—
"JADEEEEKSJSDKAJDABLARGHHHh,” Karkat hollers, his voice dying off with a croaking wheeze as he stumbles up the last couple of steps and into the room. He looks like actual hell, wild-eyed and gasping at the air like a bug-eyed fish out of water. Jade is mightily shocked.
“Karkat? How did you—“ Bec makes his appearance at last, leaping elegantly over Karkat’s fallen form and smugly sitting at Jade’s side. Jade squints suspiciously down at him, and then rushes to her troll friend’s side.
“Oh my gosh, did you run all the way up those stairs? There are like hundreds of them, Karkat!” she pauses, considers. “Although, you’re probably super fit if you can do that. Wow.”
Karkat gaspingly wheezes something at her, slapping a hand ineffectually against the floor. The sharp smacking sound echoes in the tile-layered room. Jade observes Bec lying down out of the corner of her eye.
Jade blinks at the troll, green eyes wide and startled. “What is it, Karkat? What are you trying to say? Is little Timmy stuck in the well?”
Glaring, Karkat slowly contorts his hand until only his middle finger is extended upward. The Witch of Space frowns outstandingly at him.
“Well, that’s just plain rude,” she huffs, crossing her arms over her chest, the sequined sleeves of her coat gleaming with the movement. “I set up this bathroom and everything for you, and this is the thanks I get! It’s not my fault you decided to take on a workout you couldn’t handle.”
For a fleeting moment, Jade moodily frowns at a spare dribble of mud on the floor, because uuugh she didn’t clean up Grandpabot’s trail of mud. Then, she’s looking up at Karkat once again, a grin on her lips. “Well, I guess I’ll leave you to it! The transportalizer password is—“ she lowers her voice significantly in saying the passcode, “The Alcubierre Drive is a crapshoot and deep space is no place for a shout-out to Shakespeare or references to that damned yellow piece of schmuck bait from Carcosa.”
Her voice returned to its normal pitch, Jade scoots off from where she’s been crouched at his side to step onto the transportalizer pad. As green flames shoot up around her form, she calls out, “Don’t forget it!” before promptly disappearing in a surge of flashing lights. Becquerel follows her shortly, giving Karkat one last inscrutable snort before he, too, disappears in a flare of green fire.
Karkat is left alone. Miracles.
She grins widely at Karkat’s measly admission that her house is pretty swanky, swinging her legs out in glee. The rest of what he says, however, puts that thrilled elation on hold.
“Yeah, okay,” Jade says, laughing a bit weakly because nothing is wrong with that question. Nothing at all. She can totally fulfill this request. “Just, one moment please! Haha.”
She clumsily excuses herself and practically sprints into the room she has now dubbed the Hall of Transportalizers, One of Which Is Blocked By A Big-Ass Snake. When she steps foot into the room, Jade proceeds to hunch in on herself and clutch her head in a panic.
Shit. Shit. She doesn’t have a shower. She doesn’t even have basic plumbing. It was only, like, four years ago that she finally learned what a toilet even was. Jade is so ill-equipped to handle this dire situation.
Then again, she could always just outright remind Karkat that she was raised by a dog and wasn’t privy to this kind of knowledge, but that seems like a horrible idea to her anxiously twisting thoughts. Anxiety builds up like souring milk; thick, globby bits polluting her brain and making her just want to disappear.
Becquerel snuffles in after her at just the right time, his tail wagging lazily as he walks over to gently bop at her knees with his nose. Jade stares at him, face completely devoid of emotion, as if she hasn’t even registered that he is there. Then, her stance relaxes as some little bits of purely metaphoric metal in her head suddenly ring together, causing splendidly shining sparks to fly. That’s it!
“Keep Karkat distracted,” Jade kneels down real quick in front of Bec, taking his face in her hands while she tells him what to do. She lightly pats his tufted cheeks. “I’m going to go remodel a room real quick. Tell him I’ll be right back, okay buddy?”
The white-furred wolfdog licks her face in return, briefly upsetting her glasses with the force of his doggy affections. Jade wrinkles her nose at him and carefully shoves him away. Gross, dog slobber!
“Good dog,” she says, getting to her feet and starting up the staircase. As the bottom of her glittering coat disappears from view she calls over her shoulder, “Best friend!”
Jade has a lot of work to do.
---
The room is dark and Karkat is still soaked through with soda. Sitting close enough to the fire is helping with that, but the overwhelming stench of sugar and fruity juices isn’t particularly pleasant either way. He waits rather impatiently for Jade’s return, testily digging his claws into the sofa cushion in his frustration.
Jade’s insanely over-powered barkbeast wanders back into the grand foyer after a few moments, claws clacking inconspicuously against the tile floor. There is a frankly suspicious nonappearance of any Jades following close behind it. Karkat is immediately on his guard.
“Where’s Jade?” he asks the fucking enormous dog, warily side-eyeing the tower entrance in case he needs to make a break for it. Like hell is he staying alone with this thing for longer than five minutes. The flames from the fireplace are casting crazy unsettling shadows across the room as well, which isn’t helping Karkat’s frame of mind at all, thank you very much.
The wolfish beast sits opposite to him on the sofa set, not making a single sound as it does so. He doesn’t even think that this thing is breathing. Now, Jade might sit all safe and sound up in her tower and call her beloved barkbeast pal a ‘big sweetheart’ or a ‘good dog’, but Karkat knows the truth. It isn’t a simple flesh-and-blood lusus— this creature is a goddamn weapon capable of blowing up meteors. It might be severely depowered in this Omniverse, but he won’t trust that particular insurance for one second.
Becquerel’s nose is facing him head-on, its featureless gaze oddly off-putting and way more than a little disconcerting. Karkat feels as if he should be holding a flaming torch under a dark primordial sky, waving this thing off as it observes him from the dusky shadows, although he knows that Jade would murder-kill him if he dared to set her taxidermied grandfather on fire or any of her other ridiculous knick-knacks.
Nevertheless, he does scoot closer to the steel poker leaning on the hearth’s stone.
The frightening barkbeast continues to stare. Menacingly.
“Uh,” Karkat scrappily articulates, and then quickly diverts his attention to his phone.
Only nine minutes in.
Shit.
---
While Becquerel is entertaining Karkat, Jade makes her way up to what she considers to be her grandfather’s least offensive collection of objects: the suits of armor in all their shiny, metallic glory.
She grabs onto one— North Italian, Circa 1580-1600, Heavy Officer Grade, nicely-etched with a dusty feather out the cap and bearing a military rapier— and lugs it all the way up to her garden atrium’s transportalizer pad.
From there, the power of Spooky Action at a Distance takes over and rockets her up to the room that was once home to her dreambot. As Jade rematerializes, she is treated to the sight of sloshy, muddy footprints tramping a clear path up into her bedroom. She can hear a faint banging sound, like metal striking metal. Grandpabot must be building something!
Humming busily to herself, Jade sets the suit of armor aside for décor. She can’t have her new bathroom area looking anything but spiffy, after all!
Now for the Omnilium summoning— this might take a while. It might be best to see what the heck Karkat is doing, at the moment.
---
Karkat thinks that this horrible, godawful devilbeast might actually be plotting to kill him. There’s no way of telling how its mind works. He doesn’t know how it could do this without letting Jade become in the know about it, but he is nearly a billion percent certain that this barkbeast could manage to pull it off without even breaking a sweat.
Speaking of breaking a sweat, a tiny bead of it appears on the cherry-blooded troll’s brow, glinting in the firelight. He has been engaged in a pseudo-staring contest with this barkbeast for the past half-hour. His left eye ticks nervously.
To put it in simpler terms, Jade’s dog lusus is so fucking terrifying that he can’t bring himself to take his eyes off of it for even a second. His brain shrieks at him if tries, in a battle cry remarkably reminiscent of his own crab lusus: don’t do that nonono, might attack vicious teeth bite.
Karkat feels as if he needs to abscond immediately, mainly because he doesn't fancy being buried in Jade's snowy backyard with some crappy vegetable-themed funeral procession following his haflway-charred corpse all over the place; and he would really like to, as well. In truth, he should have left thirty minutes ago, but he has been so frozen with instinctual fear that not even his usual mental insult sessions could quell the apparent inability of his limbs to just fucking move.
Somehow, however, after checking his huskphone for like the thousandth time and seeing that Gamzee’s tournament has started and that Jade has been away for an unholy amount of time, he does manage to edge his way off of the couch and into the room Jade pranced off into earlier.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he grumbles at the odiously tall spiral staircase that winds its way further up into the unspeakable heights of Jade’s tower. “Why the fuck are there so many stairs?”
The barkbeast sneezes uproariously from behind him, sending startling electrical sparks up Karkat’s spine. Karkat proceeds to let out a totally-not-shrill shriek and books it up the many flights of stairs, his heart beating out a fast-paced rhythm behind his ribcage.
---
There! All finished! Jade looks at the sparkling-white shower, sink, and porcelain throne that she has summoned with pride blooming in her chest. Hopefully these are all technologically sound! She isn’t a professional plumber or anything, so that might be a problem.
But, other than that little bump in the road, she thinks that she has done pretty well! A small dish of soap sits beside the sink, glinting and made of a solid metal that would clang loudly if accidentally dropped on the floor. The shower curtains are plasticky and sheer but have a thicker curtain layer on the outside. Fluffy blue towels complete the whole set, lovingly-embroidered with speckled and lacy flowers.
Over all, Jade’s brand spanking new bathroom looks great, despite it being quite small. She hopes it will be sufficient, but right now she should go retrieve Karkat and—
"JADEEEEKSJSDKAJDABLARGHHHh,” Karkat hollers, his voice dying off with a croaking wheeze as he stumbles up the last couple of steps and into the room. He looks like actual hell, wild-eyed and gasping at the air like a bug-eyed fish out of water. Jade is mightily shocked.
“Karkat? How did you—“ Bec makes his appearance at last, leaping elegantly over Karkat’s fallen form and smugly sitting at Jade’s side. Jade squints suspiciously down at him, and then rushes to her troll friend’s side.
“Oh my gosh, did you run all the way up those stairs? There are like hundreds of them, Karkat!” she pauses, considers. “Although, you’re probably super fit if you can do that. Wow.”
Karkat gaspingly wheezes something at her, slapping a hand ineffectually against the floor. The sharp smacking sound echoes in the tile-layered room. Jade observes Bec lying down out of the corner of her eye.
Jade blinks at the troll, green eyes wide and startled. “What is it, Karkat? What are you trying to say? Is little Timmy stuck in the well?”
Glaring, Karkat slowly contorts his hand until only his middle finger is extended upward. The Witch of Space frowns outstandingly at him.
“Well, that’s just plain rude,” she huffs, crossing her arms over her chest, the sequined sleeves of her coat gleaming with the movement. “I set up this bathroom and everything for you, and this is the thanks I get! It’s not my fault you decided to take on a workout you couldn’t handle.”
For a fleeting moment, Jade moodily frowns at a spare dribble of mud on the floor, because uuugh she didn’t clean up Grandpabot’s trail of mud. Then, she’s looking up at Karkat once again, a grin on her lips. “Well, I guess I’ll leave you to it! The transportalizer password is—“ she lowers her voice significantly in saying the passcode, “The Alcubierre Drive is a crapshoot and deep space is no place for a shout-out to Shakespeare or references to that damned yellow piece of schmuck bait from Carcosa.”
Her voice returned to its normal pitch, Jade scoots off from where she’s been crouched at his side to step onto the transportalizer pad. As green flames shoot up around her form, she calls out, “Don’t forget it!” before promptly disappearing in a surge of flashing lights. Becquerel follows her shortly, giving Karkat one last inscrutable snort before he, too, disappears in a flare of green fire.
Karkat is left alone. Miracles.
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Gamzee Makara Wrote:S’aight. After all, dogs have a tendency to motherfuckin’ bite.