02-03-2016, 09:30 PM
At the center of the white sky there stood a tower, lordly and tall, with sheets of frozen rain and snow shards rattling across its immense window panes. Its base level was wide and made of dense stone blocks, a warm and roaring hearth languishing in its entrance hall. As the long, winding stairwell within it rose up towards the sky, the grand building gradually wound itself into a more cylindrical shape, a rounded bulb the very same color of a pearl peaking up at its top.
Rocks of differing and gratuitously monolithic structure were placed in a coliseum-like pattern around the tower, although none could match its awesome height. There were mountains beside it, too, resting like the meaty forearms of a large, muscled giant. They were greater in size than a small asteroid, but less than a large one. If one were to take all of the individually divided slopes, cliff faces, and crags, and then measure them up all together, they would find that the whole mountain train was about as heavy as an extremely large amount of anvils.
Speaking of anvils— one was being struck, logically at the time that these observations were made. The sound of metal striking metal reiterated itself again and again. These weighty blows rang out with a supreme and profound quality; a familiar pang that echoed through the bones and jittered along the gums and teeth. Metallic clangs resonated in the upper atmospheres of the air surrounding the towers topmost bulb, cushioning it as an oyster seals around a precious pearl with its velvety soft flesh.
Inside of this pearly-white bulb, a wide-shouldered man was hard at work in creating a most intriguing weapon in the amber-colored light of his forge. His mustache was the color of burnt coal smoke or an oily and well-polluted river at dawn, and it was riddled with micro circuitry that would allow for it to twitch and wriggle across his synthetic upper lip like the springiest, fattest caterpillar to ever live. This long, impressively curled bug seemed to be doing barrel rolls in its jubilation as the robotic man worked.
Reddish smoke honey-combed across the walls of Grandpa Harley’s enclosed lab, poisoning the air and covering most of the furnishings with a slimy layer of black soot. The continual drumbeat of the smithy undulated in the space between the ceiling and floor tiles, heat and frost crystallizing in the warm light of creation.
Then, as a fire-seared and white-hot tong of metal was lifted into the air in the artificial, nerve-dead grasp of the armored senior citizen, something rippled quite alarmingly through the air. The old man immediately likened it to hearing a hyena’s distant cackle, lying with his back against swiftly cooling sands and a crackling fire spitting in lapping tongues towards an immeasurable indigo sky.
Puzzled, the robot placed the metallic rod upon the table before him with a resounding clang. He listened as whispering dredges of wind whistled along the curved edges of the towers highest point, delicate and pittering dabs of snow sprinkled in-between.
When no other sound came forth, he gave a minute shrug of his shoulders and resumed his work, only to be interrupted yet again by a persistent drumming against the roof not nearly an instant later. His synthetically-grooved gloves stained black and smoking, the old man’s hands clenched into fists, prepared for a rounded of fisticuffs with some sinister interloper. He was the very spitting image of Hephaestus, flames snarling at his back and the dogs of war braced for a brawl in his knuckles.
His sensors told him that the odd noise was stemming from somewhere up above when the suction-y, plucking sound made its presence known again. As he plodded over to a rectangular side window, a hand reaching out towards the stringy tie that would pull the window open, his red-lensed eyes gleamed with a fiery orange hue.
A beat later, the window slid open with a swift, jumbling zip!
Face perpetually grinning save for the twitching of his mustache, Grandpa Harley stuck his head out of his home, snowflakes catching on his safari hats metallic brim and melting from the heat of whatever micro circuitry kept him on his feet. He was still Homestuck, but most of his head and nearly nonexistent neck were not and that was all that mattered.
Sizzling noises accompanied the strange, rippling tapping this time. A peculiar grating ran along the rounded roof in eerie accompaniment, like a positively gargantuan child was gnawing on it as if it were a lollipop. As he turned his neck a full 360˚ with a sprightly whirring noise, Grandpabot was just able to watch as his roof was eaten away at by some peculiar, phlegmy ooze. Small spurts of goopy smoke rose into the air as what seemed to be acidic snow evaporated solid stone.
A small bead of the foul stuff dribbled upon his cap, and Grandpabot watched with steadily increasing alarm as a dime-sized hole was worn into his hat. Out of the corner of his lenses, he could have sworn that a tentacle arm or perhaps a scaly dragon's wing waved lazily at him.
“By Echidna’s quills!” he exclaimed, ducking back inside and slamming the window shut with extreme prejudice. With an afterthought, metal panes slid over the usual plexiglass panel. “I’m being made into Swiss cheese!”
After removing his hat, he was able to slide a finger all the way through the newly acquired abrasion with a peeved hmph. He would have to forge a new hat, no doubt, and make it expressly resistant to foul beast juices! In the meantime, he would have to work out some inventive way to eradicate the terror of pale white nastiness skulking about in the greater airy wastes.
His heavy boots drummed loudly against the floor as he stomped towards the transportalizer, taking the newly-made cobalt blue blaster gun with him. As he disappeared in a plume of green galaxies and sparking electricity, reappearing once more in the welcoming foyer at the base of the tower, Grandpabot looped a merry red bow with a card attached about its middle.
A pen was promptly removed from the inside of one of his boots. With a scratchy and clumsy script made all the more ridiculous by his large, fumbling fingers, he scribbled out a quick message:
“Happy birthday, my favorite girl!
I’m afraid that I must step out for a moment to take care of an unidentified flying infestation, but rest assured that I will return home safely to you and we can celebrate with cake and a dozen fancy ribbons!
You’ve grown up to become a fine young woman, dearest Jade, and I deeply regret that I was not there to spend those many trying years with you. This gun is just as sensible as yourself— it will not shoot to kill, but your bullisome interlopers will never cross you again once they have been on the receiving end of one of these frozen rounds! A warning of greater things to come, if you will.
Try to avoid dastardly, no-good fellows where possible, but always do what you know is right. I will return on the morrow, my departure time according to the mantle’s clock is 14:02. If anything should happen to me, do not go to great lengths to recover my components.
Pleasant travels & good fortune to you.
J. Harley.
P.S., Always keep at least five computers with you at all times. You must never be unprepared!
P.P.S., Kindly inform that Karkat fellow that his bathing routine is appalling. I haven’t seen anyone bathe fully clothed since my gambling ventures into the Siberian wilderness!
P.S.P.S. I won’t pry, but your Dataverse chums are a cagey bunch of hooligans. Be cautious, my dear!”
With a swoop and a flourish of dark green ink, Grandpabot tucked the blaster gun beneath the capable arms of the stuffed mummy doll propped up upon the chaise lounge. There, that should do it!
He had just finished retrieving his blunderbuss from the hands of his taxidermied double when a sharp rapping came upon the tower’s front door. The elder Harley turned his attention briefly towards the picture of Jade nestled comfortably atop the fireplace, let out a tinny hum, and made his way over towards the source of the knocking, which had sounded three times in all.
The door to the house slid open, the atomic symbol on its front hidden by the inner wall of the home. Slightly stooped with his head bowed over the front mat, the old man turned a critical eye towards a few tracks in the snow that appeared vaguely shoe-shaped. They were mysteriously empty, as if whoever had stood in them a few seconds before had spontaneously combusted.
It was a surprisingly common occurrence, spontaneous combustion— one of his old explorer’s club chums had been thoroughly combusted while flying a plane over a stretch of grassy plain in Africa. Either that, or he had simply crashed and been devoured by lions and scavenging beasts. Grandpabot preferred the former theory.
His boots made a heavy crunch in the upper crust of snow as he ducked out into the elements, the front door sealing soundly shut behind him with a sigh. With his bulky blunderbuss held out in front of him, Grandpabot marched boldly across the rainbow-splattered front lawn, being certain to pay his respects to the downed snowtroll of whom Jade had spent nearly fifteen minutes bringing into this world with a tip of his hat.
Slowly but surely, with labored footsteps and a whole blizzards worth of snow already sinking into his innermost machinery, Grandpa Harley vanished over the mountain rise.
The Frozen Fields were just as cold and unforgiving as Jade remembered them, icy precipitation coming down in droves and pale snow-fringed mountains seemingly the size of artichokes detached from the swirling, distant mists that ringed them. Her feet sank ankle-deep into the softest scalloped hills of snow she had ever seen. Breathing was a little rough on her throat and her nose immediately turned bright red, like a maraschino cherry.
“Come on, Bec!” Jade whooped, giving the First Guardian’s ears a brief tug before prancing merrily off onto a section of treacherously slippery ice. “Grandpa’s waiting on us!”
There it was: her tower, sticking up like a candle from a single-tiered cake. Jade notched an imaginary bead on it, positioning her arms like she was holding a rifle before miming a cheery “ka-pow!” at it. An unexpected crinkle of paper from her pocket reminded her of the note left behind by Ruby and Weiss. Lips pursing in thought, Jade was quick to bring it up for inspection.
It read as thus:
“Hummmm,” Jade commented to Rebecca and Bec, her fluffy white ears flicking up and sending sparkling beads of frost downwards to get caught in the woolly cloth of her god tier hood. “That’s too bad! Oh well, I’m sure Ruby and Weiss will have a wonderful time, wherever they are!”
She really hoped that was destined to be true— it would just stink to high heaven if something terrible were to happen to her new friends! But, she had other stuff to attend to besides worrying, like the new people streaming in to meet her through the portal.
Turning to look once more across the massive, subtly shifting ice floes that lay between herself and her tower, Jade grinned. She hadn't been able to feel them move, before, slowly grating along one another and the choppy water below them— it felt like someone was incessantly tickling the soft tips of ears with a feather duster. That might get annoying quick!
Oh, but it was just so good to be back! Never mind that she had spent much of her first day in the Omniverse hungry, freezing, and desperately lonesome trekking laboriously across these icy wastes. It was all worth it, to be reunited with at least one of those from her past universe and to make so many new friends! That didn't make losing the old ones any less painful, though.
Her arms spread out to her sides, Jade breathed in that magnificent mountain air, the blizzard roaring in her ears and entire galaxies of snowflakes prickling along her spacial awareness.
“There’s snow place like home, haha!”
Rocks of differing and gratuitously monolithic structure were placed in a coliseum-like pattern around the tower, although none could match its awesome height. There were mountains beside it, too, resting like the meaty forearms of a large, muscled giant. They were greater in size than a small asteroid, but less than a large one. If one were to take all of the individually divided slopes, cliff faces, and crags, and then measure them up all together, they would find that the whole mountain train was about as heavy as an extremely large amount of anvils.
Speaking of anvils— one was being struck, logically at the time that these observations were made. The sound of metal striking metal reiterated itself again and again. These weighty blows rang out with a supreme and profound quality; a familiar pang that echoed through the bones and jittered along the gums and teeth. Metallic clangs resonated in the upper atmospheres of the air surrounding the towers topmost bulb, cushioning it as an oyster seals around a precious pearl with its velvety soft flesh.
Inside of this pearly-white bulb, a wide-shouldered man was hard at work in creating a most intriguing weapon in the amber-colored light of his forge. His mustache was the color of burnt coal smoke or an oily and well-polluted river at dawn, and it was riddled with micro circuitry that would allow for it to twitch and wriggle across his synthetic upper lip like the springiest, fattest caterpillar to ever live. This long, impressively curled bug seemed to be doing barrel rolls in its jubilation as the robotic man worked.
Reddish smoke honey-combed across the walls of Grandpa Harley’s enclosed lab, poisoning the air and covering most of the furnishings with a slimy layer of black soot. The continual drumbeat of the smithy undulated in the space between the ceiling and floor tiles, heat and frost crystallizing in the warm light of creation.
Then, as a fire-seared and white-hot tong of metal was lifted into the air in the artificial, nerve-dead grasp of the armored senior citizen, something rippled quite alarmingly through the air. The old man immediately likened it to hearing a hyena’s distant cackle, lying with his back against swiftly cooling sands and a crackling fire spitting in lapping tongues towards an immeasurable indigo sky.
Puzzled, the robot placed the metallic rod upon the table before him with a resounding clang. He listened as whispering dredges of wind whistled along the curved edges of the towers highest point, delicate and pittering dabs of snow sprinkled in-between.
When no other sound came forth, he gave a minute shrug of his shoulders and resumed his work, only to be interrupted yet again by a persistent drumming against the roof not nearly an instant later. His synthetically-grooved gloves stained black and smoking, the old man’s hands clenched into fists, prepared for a rounded of fisticuffs with some sinister interloper. He was the very spitting image of Hephaestus, flames snarling at his back and the dogs of war braced for a brawl in his knuckles.
His sensors told him that the odd noise was stemming from somewhere up above when the suction-y, plucking sound made its presence known again. As he plodded over to a rectangular side window, a hand reaching out towards the stringy tie that would pull the window open, his red-lensed eyes gleamed with a fiery orange hue.
A beat later, the window slid open with a swift, jumbling zip!
Face perpetually grinning save for the twitching of his mustache, Grandpa Harley stuck his head out of his home, snowflakes catching on his safari hats metallic brim and melting from the heat of whatever micro circuitry kept him on his feet. He was still Homestuck, but most of his head and nearly nonexistent neck were not and that was all that mattered.
Sizzling noises accompanied the strange, rippling tapping this time. A peculiar grating ran along the rounded roof in eerie accompaniment, like a positively gargantuan child was gnawing on it as if it were a lollipop. As he turned his neck a full 360˚ with a sprightly whirring noise, Grandpabot was just able to watch as his roof was eaten away at by some peculiar, phlegmy ooze. Small spurts of goopy smoke rose into the air as what seemed to be acidic snow evaporated solid stone.
A small bead of the foul stuff dribbled upon his cap, and Grandpabot watched with steadily increasing alarm as a dime-sized hole was worn into his hat. Out of the corner of his lenses, he could have sworn that a tentacle arm or perhaps a scaly dragon's wing waved lazily at him.
“By Echidna’s quills!” he exclaimed, ducking back inside and slamming the window shut with extreme prejudice. With an afterthought, metal panes slid over the usual plexiglass panel. “I’m being made into Swiss cheese!”
After removing his hat, he was able to slide a finger all the way through the newly acquired abrasion with a peeved hmph. He would have to forge a new hat, no doubt, and make it expressly resistant to foul beast juices! In the meantime, he would have to work out some inventive way to eradicate the terror of pale white nastiness skulking about in the greater airy wastes.
His heavy boots drummed loudly against the floor as he stomped towards the transportalizer, taking the newly-made cobalt blue blaster gun with him. As he disappeared in a plume of green galaxies and sparking electricity, reappearing once more in the welcoming foyer at the base of the tower, Grandpabot looped a merry red bow with a card attached about its middle.
A pen was promptly removed from the inside of one of his boots. With a scratchy and clumsy script made all the more ridiculous by his large, fumbling fingers, he scribbled out a quick message:
“Happy birthday, my favorite girl!
I’m afraid that I must step out for a moment to take care of an unidentified flying infestation, but rest assured that I will return home safely to you and we can celebrate with cake and a dozen fancy ribbons!
You’ve grown up to become a fine young woman, dearest Jade, and I deeply regret that I was not there to spend those many trying years with you. This gun is just as sensible as yourself— it will not shoot to kill, but your bullisome interlopers will never cross you again once they have been on the receiving end of one of these frozen rounds! A warning of greater things to come, if you will.
Try to avoid dastardly, no-good fellows where possible, but always do what you know is right. I will return on the morrow, my departure time according to the mantle’s clock is 14:02. If anything should happen to me, do not go to great lengths to recover my components.
Pleasant travels & good fortune to you.
J. Harley.
P.S., Always keep at least five computers with you at all times. You must never be unprepared!
P.P.S., Kindly inform that Karkat fellow that his bathing routine is appalling. I haven’t seen anyone bathe fully clothed since my gambling ventures into the Siberian wilderness!
P.S.P.S. I won’t pry, but your Dataverse chums are a cagey bunch of hooligans. Be cautious, my dear!”
With a swoop and a flourish of dark green ink, Grandpabot tucked the blaster gun beneath the capable arms of the stuffed mummy doll propped up upon the chaise lounge. There, that should do it!
He had just finished retrieving his blunderbuss from the hands of his taxidermied double when a sharp rapping came upon the tower’s front door. The elder Harley turned his attention briefly towards the picture of Jade nestled comfortably atop the fireplace, let out a tinny hum, and made his way over towards the source of the knocking, which had sounded three times in all.
The door to the house slid open, the atomic symbol on its front hidden by the inner wall of the home. Slightly stooped with his head bowed over the front mat, the old man turned a critical eye towards a few tracks in the snow that appeared vaguely shoe-shaped. They were mysteriously empty, as if whoever had stood in them a few seconds before had spontaneously combusted.
It was a surprisingly common occurrence, spontaneous combustion— one of his old explorer’s club chums had been thoroughly combusted while flying a plane over a stretch of grassy plain in Africa. Either that, or he had simply crashed and been devoured by lions and scavenging beasts. Grandpabot preferred the former theory.
His boots made a heavy crunch in the upper crust of snow as he ducked out into the elements, the front door sealing soundly shut behind him with a sigh. With his bulky blunderbuss held out in front of him, Grandpabot marched boldly across the rainbow-splattered front lawn, being certain to pay his respects to the downed snowtroll of whom Jade had spent nearly fifteen minutes bringing into this world with a tip of his hat.
Slowly but surely, with labored footsteps and a whole blizzards worth of snow already sinking into his innermost machinery, Grandpa Harley vanished over the mountain rise.
---
The Frozen Fields were just as cold and unforgiving as Jade remembered them, icy precipitation coming down in droves and pale snow-fringed mountains seemingly the size of artichokes detached from the swirling, distant mists that ringed them. Her feet sank ankle-deep into the softest scalloped hills of snow she had ever seen. Breathing was a little rough on her throat and her nose immediately turned bright red, like a maraschino cherry.
“Come on, Bec!” Jade whooped, giving the First Guardian’s ears a brief tug before prancing merrily off onto a section of treacherously slippery ice. “Grandpa’s waiting on us!”
There it was: her tower, sticking up like a candle from a single-tiered cake. Jade notched an imaginary bead on it, positioning her arms like she was holding a rifle before miming a cheery “ka-pow!” at it. An unexpected crinkle of paper from her pocket reminded her of the note left behind by Ruby and Weiss. Lips pursing in thought, Jade was quick to bring it up for inspection.
It read as thus:
Quote:Sorry Jade!
I had forgotten to tell you I promised to meet up with my sister!
I don't wanna interrupt, so I'm leaving this letter for you.
I hope I can make it up to you sometime!
Thanks!
- Ruby and Weiss
“Hummmm,” Jade commented to Rebecca and Bec, her fluffy white ears flicking up and sending sparkling beads of frost downwards to get caught in the woolly cloth of her god tier hood. “That’s too bad! Oh well, I’m sure Ruby and Weiss will have a wonderful time, wherever they are!”
She really hoped that was destined to be true— it would just stink to high heaven if something terrible were to happen to her new friends! But, she had other stuff to attend to besides worrying, like the new people streaming in to meet her through the portal.
Turning to look once more across the massive, subtly shifting ice floes that lay between herself and her tower, Jade grinned. She hadn't been able to feel them move, before, slowly grating along one another and the choppy water below them— it felt like someone was incessantly tickling the soft tips of ears with a feather duster. That might get annoying quick!
Oh, but it was just so good to be back! Never mind that she had spent much of her first day in the Omniverse hungry, freezing, and desperately lonesome trekking laboriously across these icy wastes. It was all worth it, to be reunited with at least one of those from her past universe and to make so many new friends! That didn't make losing the old ones any less painful, though.
Her arms spread out to her sides, Jade breathed in that magnificent mountain air, the blizzard roaring in her ears and entire galaxies of snowflakes prickling along her spacial awareness.
“There’s snow place like home, haha!”
New to the Omniverse? Don't be afraid to PM me for assistance!
Gamzee Makara Wrote:S’aight. After all, dogs have a tendency to motherfuckin’ bite.