Frozen Faygo Flyer (Acrobatic Fucking Pirouette, Take 2)

[Gamzee Makara]

And my God, the Frozen Fields was cold as balls.

Karkat finds it hard not to scream in pure cold agony because god dammit he should've taken Jade's advice and made Gamzee synthesize some stupid sweaters and junk. He would swear at the frozen wasteland stretched out before him but if he were to open his mouth, he'd get it filled with the white stuff.

It's snow, smartass.

After some time of aimlessly flying over the glaciers, Karkat suddenly comes to a realization:

He has no idea where the hell he's going. Jade never sent him actual directions to her tower.

Okay, okay, don't freak out Vantas. You can do this. It's just a shit ton of floating glaciers, I mean, this stupid Tower is probably huge, it has to be pretty easy to spot, even in all this stupid snow and oh my god he's never going to find Jade's eyesore of a tower it's totally hopeless he's going to freeze to death he's-

Suddenly, the Cherry-Blood comes to a sugary halt, his Miracle Elixirizer keeping him hovering in mid-air. He sees a distant silhouette forming in the curtain of heavy snowfall.

Could be Jade's Tower.

Could be a mountain.

Could be a giant snow monster worm behemoth thing.

Fuck this.

Karkat glances over his shoulder, back the way he came.

Fuck that.

With a defeated sigh, the alien steels his will.

Fuck it.

He kicks the jet pack into full gear, speeding into the snowstorm hiding the silhouette.

-----

White stuff. Lots of it, covering his face. It's fucking annoying. The only landmark that Karkat has to go by is the ever looming shadow of the possible tower/mountain/thing that wants to kill him. He was pretty sure he was making progress, but that didn't make this ordeal any less trying or annoying or tedious. The troll was pretty sure he'd rather be shooting himself in the foot.

Repeatedly.

To death.

-----

It's been a while. The low-blood hadn't really been keeping track of time, he was a tad more preoccupied with not freezing to death/getting lost/crashing or some combination of the three. It was a trying task.

At least by now he had confirmed that he was INDEED making progress. The silhouette that eluded him this far was much obviously closer. It wouldn’t be long now. It was also pretty apparent that it was NOT an Alaskan Bull Worm thing that wanted to eat him like a crabcicle. In the time that Karkat had been keeping his eyes on it, it had not moved from that position. It’s definitely a tower.

Or maybe a mountain. That consequently was home to some beast(s) that would violently murder him for food or sport.

Let’s hope for the former.

You’ll have to excuse Karkat’s shitty pessimistic outlook on things. He hasn’t been known to have the best of luck with adventures, quests, games, or life in general.

Ah...Speaking of that wondrous luck.

For a while now, the pilot of the Miraculous Elixirizer has been ignoring it but the problem has grown a bit. For the past hour or so, the alien has felt the jetpack grow...heavier. Like, literally, the vehicle has weighed down more and more on his back. At first he just thought that there was a shit ton of snow that had kinda like, congealed over the jetpack, but a quick check proved otherwise.

He thinks that it’s gotten to the point that if he stopped to hover in mid-air, the pilot might just start sinking into the ground.

What’s worse, the fruity rainbow mist that erupts out of the bottom of the Elixirizer has gradually begun to leak out of the misters as opposed to coming out as vapors. It’s not a comforting feeling. It shouldn’t be a fuel problem, the Faygo is still being fed straight into the engine.

The problem is that it’s getting stuck

Because you know.

It’s fucking frozen.

Just as that thought hits him, the worst fucking thing that could have happened, happens.

There is no more mist propelling him through the frozen skies. It just stops. No more. Karkat sucks in his breath and watches in horror as the tubes filled with the little fruity miracles fueling his jetpack s-l-o-w-l-y come to a slushy halt.

With a slew of quick, intense swears, the crabby pilot begins shaking his body side to side, trying to flap these useless fucking metal wings and glide the rest of the way to the tower its definitely a tower he can see it now he can see the windows and shit mountains down have windows it was so close, so so close FUCKING HELL IT’S RIGHT THERE WORK DAMMIT WORK NEED A MIRACLE RIGHT NOW-

Wait.

Hissing. It’s hissing. The Jetpack it’s-

---KABOOM!---

“MOTHERFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!”

Karkat cries out for help as the Miracle Elixirizer explodes in a fruity rumpus chemical reaction of epic proportions. He only hopes that his startled fucking yelp is carried across the tundra to Jade’s ears.

The troll is propelled a long ways by the explosion, spiraling and turning somersaults through the air. Not quite an acrobatic fucking pirouette, but close. Fruity smelling rainbow smoke trails off behind him, clinging to his body. When Karkat finally hits powder, he skids like a skipping stone across the snow. He sends sprays of it flying through the air with every touchdown, totaling in about three or four skips across the white white ground before finally skidding to a halt on the illuminated doorstep of Jade’s tower. His head thunks loudly against the door as Karkat comes to a stop.

[Jade Harley]

Jade is about three-fifths of the way down the series of staircases between her garden atrium and the ground floor when she hears an odd, high-pitched keen. She halts halfway between one step and the next, listening intently as what sounds like the whine of a burner tube on a gas range heating up grows alarmingly great in volume.

“What the heck is that?” she asks Bec, the wolfdog having also stopped to listen. His ears are laid back flat against his skull, spine rigid and the fur around his neck upraised. Hopefully it isn’t some kind of ballistic missile.

A bit uneasy, Jade scampers down the remaining stairs. Just as her feet hit the ground floor, a loud “KABOOM!” rings out, like how a nearby thunderclap might sound through a thick plaster wall inlaid with iron half an inch thick. Or cannon shot.

From somewhere else in the tower, Jade swears that she hears her grandpa shout something that sounds an awful lot like “Man your battle stations! Fruity rainbow rumpus party incoming!”

Jade only has a few fleeting seconds to consider that particular variety of baloney before there is a solid thump against the front door.

In a few short, agitated strides, Jade moves to stand beside the door and listen for any signs of hostile life forms. Nothing, although it is possible that any vocalizations may very well have been swallowed up by the caterwauling wind.

She slides the door open with the rapid pressing of a few buttons, a worried pucker appearing in between her brows. The door slides open. Chilly air immediately rustles around her and into the foyer. As she moves to take a step outside, Jade gets a very dazed and very angry troll’s forehead knocking against her knees.

Said troll is demonstrating his impressive aptitude for lalochezia, although she already knows that he swears as a recreational activity quite well. He is positively fuming.

“Karkat!” Jade exclaims down at the black-haired troll. His clothes are all covered in sugary soda, and as she looks on it becomes clear that he has left a stream of rainbow-colored liquid across her snowlawn in his spluttering wake.

When she tries to pinpoint the exact extent of the damage that has been done to her property, looking out over smoothly undulating waves of polished rock and snow that spread out from her place on the porch, she can see that the pretty expanses of silvery glacier-scraped soil and ice appear to have been splattered with food coloring by a three-year-old artistic prodigy.

Or, in this case, a Faygo Jetpack. She frowns at the eyesore of technology and fizzy soda pop that has torn a clear-cut path through her yard, sending cascades of snow and carbonated drink erupting all over the place. Seriously, who even thought to make this piece of crap?

“Uuugh, look at what your jetpack did to my snowlawn!” the Witch laments, looking mournfully at a very specific pile of clumped snow, because he blew right through her future snowtroll! She’ll have to build another one, when she has the time. For now, she has an irritable troll to tug out of the cold.

With a huff, Jade seizes Karkat under his arms and hauls him inside, the door sliding shut behind them without a sound. A trail of sticky soda trickles out from his jetpack and streams garishly across the floor. Okay, ew. When Bec wanders over to investigate the new person Jade swats him away, mainly to keep the soda from getting stuck in his fluffy white fur. That would be a damn nightmare to get out.

Jade is sure to extract Karkat from the ridiculous faygo contraption to keep it from getting sticky fluid all over her floors. Even if it pretty much already has done that, so the point is almost certainly moot by now. Ugh. Uuuuughghuhguhgh. Gross.

She has to shove Grandpa’s weird life-sized mummy doll out of the way to make space for Karkat to sit down on the sofa. There’s a stupid little twinge of embarrassment about all of the clutter that she hadn’t felt burble up with the dwarves hanging around, but Jade brushes that dumb feeling away. Instead, she turns her attention on Karkat’s possibly-concussed head.

Thankfully, he isn’t sluggish or hesitant to answer her questions about what his name and chumhandle are, and when she waggles her fingers in front of his face he is quick to track their movements well with his eyes. Good, there is proooobably no serious damage, then!

“What in the ever-loving fuck are you doing?” Karkat asks, sneering as she jubilantly waves her hands in front of his face. Jade chooses to ignore this question.

Her brain is simply abuzz with excitement over having a friend within reach. Seriously, it’s like there are a dozen fat little bumblebees whirring around in there, doing fat little bumblebee things and having a grand old time.

“Oh my gosh. That’s one serious lump,” she says, patting lightly at the slowly-swelling bump that is forming on the top of his head with a single finger. “I mean, it’s small so it’s not too bad, but I bet it hurts like hell!”

It does, in fact, hurt like hell. The low-blooded troll curls his lip at her, completely forgoing casual politeness, gratitude, respect, and a whole other laundry list of pleasant qualities that he doesn’t possess. This is to be expected. But boy, does he have sharp teeth!

Nevertheless, Jade frowns spectacularly at him. “Hey, don’t give me that look! You did this to yourself with whatever… dumb… totally impractical… thing that is.” She indicates the Miraculous Elixirizer with a tilt of her head.

God. She just can’t get over how shitty that deathtrap-y thing is. Apparently it worked, too, which is a ginormous miracle in and of itself. Leisurely melting soda slogs out of the bottles and onto the floor, all the colors of the rainbow mixing together into a disgusting, soupy color that Jade can’t bring herself to identify.

To make matters worse, Karkat’s super cold! She wonders why on earth he didn’t try and make Gamzee throw together some proper winter wear, but then surmises that it was probably just the troll’s stubborn disposition that did it. Anyways, he’s shivering a lot, claws digging into his upper arms as he clutches at them to conserve whatever body heat remains.

Jade unceremoniously shoves the valiant knight doll off of the couch so that Karkat can be nearer to the roaring fireplace. She plops herself down beside him, giving him a moment to warm up before speaking.

“Sooooo.” Jade starts, the beginnings of a grin fluttering across her lips.

“So what.” Karkat grouses, rubbing his palms together and shifting closer to the fire. He hedges warily beside the taxidermied corpse of Jade’s wrinkly guardian, being sure to give it a wide berth.

“Soooooooo, how was your trip? How’s Gamzee? What’s this Tangled Green place like? Who’s this Adam? Is he nice? Ooo! Does he have cool pajamas, like us?” Jade pauses for a half-second to take a short breath.

Karkat opens his mouth to speak. “Harley—“

She doesn’t even let him finish. “Did you meet anyone on your way over? Did you see any snowbeasts? Do you like my tower? Wait, wait, don’t answer any of those, you’re looking a little dazed— how many fingers am I holding up?” Jade proceeds to shove approximately three fingers precariously close to his eye sockets, and Karkat barely resists the hind-brain instinct to rip them off.

“Jade, stop flipping your shit for one fucking second.”

Her mouth shuts with an audible click. Karkat takes a deep breath, the incessant chattering of his teeth gradually dying down, and then lets loose.

”I don’t know what I would be acting like if I had ‘serious head trauma’ like you seem to think I have, but let me reassure you that if my think pan were sufficiently rattled I still wouldn’t be putting up with your particular brand of horseshit.”

Jade blinks at him, seeming to be utterly aghast. Then, she grins toothily, her usual cheer returning full-force.

“Well, that’s as good of a reason to believe you as any, I guess!”

[Gamzee Makara]

Karkat’s head was basically a slushy. Like, literally, it was covered in melty-frozen fruity soda slurry. He really hoped Jade had omniliminized up a shower or some kind of cleaning station, because god dammit everything is sticky.

After carefully deflecting all of this bullshit and eloquently reassuring Jade about his mental health, Vantas takes a moment to gather his frozen, cold, completely scattered thoughts.

One at a time, he answers the questions that Jade Harley has dumped onto his nubby little horns. He tries to speak with a speed that can be understood, but doesn’t leave any room for the little shit to ask questions in between.

“My trip was fucking cold and ridiculously mirthful, miraculous, merry, and everything else that I hate with a fiery passion.”

“Gamzee is being a fucking idiot as always, but his health, sanity, and overall attitude is just fucking peachy.”

“The Tangled Green is basically a big ass giant forest full of things that want to kill us. There’s also this town called Ambrosia ran by this Guu lady. She’s okay, I guess, but something’s kinda weird about her.”

“Adam Gaite is this smartass human kid that vaguely reminds me of Strider, but more annoying and less ‘cool’. Yes, he has fucking God-Tier Pajamas.”

“No, I didn’t meet anyone on my way here or run into any snow monsters, I was pretty preoccupied with not freezing to death in a cold icy tundra, never to be heard from again.”

Karkat looks around, drawing his arms tighter around his diminutive form.

A begrudging, “It’s nice,” is all he can manage about Jade’s home.

After a moment of warming up, the Knight of Blood’s eyes find Jade’s.

“Sorry for losing my shit. It’s been a rough existence." He begins with a genuine tone. “I’d give you a hug but you know damn well I’m against such overtly fucking stupid obvious displays of affection. And I don’t want you to get all frozen either.”

A soft glow illuminates Karkat’s face as he breaks the stare-down to look at his huskphone. The time: holy shit it’s wow they needed to get going.

“Hey, listen, I thought that maybe we’d have time to hang out here and talk about whatever it is that completely platonic friends talk about, but we need to get moving. The clown will never forgive me if I don’t make it to his first fight. ESPECIALLY if he fucking loses, can you imagine? Jesus. You got somewhere I can wash all this muck off with preferably warm water? Or something, I don’t know. I’m cold and wet and sticky and sugary and it fucking sucks.”

[Jade Harley]

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.

[Gamzee Makara]

The crabby alien laying on the floor with his ass and middle finger in the air was about done with this human girl and her antics. Truthfully, the insufferable troll had no idea what to expect for his first meeting with one of the humans. He kind of anticipated, oh, science or something, coming from Jade.

But nope. Just the cheery bubbly shit, coupled with an insane guardian attack paradox dog. As annoyingly endearing as it is, it was-

Annoying.

Something between a sigh and a groan escapes from Karkat’s distraught, crumpled up form. Exhausted was a good term to describe every fiber of his being right now, especially those concentrated in his legs. In a comedic fashion, the no-nonsense Low-Blood inch-worms his body over to the shower cubicle, rising to a stand only when he was actually in the shower. He harrumphs, not even taking off his clothes as he twists the faucet on.

The angsty teen sighs in mild relief when the warm water comes rushing out of the fancy-shmancy chrome showerhead. He doesn’t even care that his clothes are all sopping wet now. They were sticky and gross, and needed a good washing.

After a bunch of suds on his body and quite a bit of fruity miracles gone down the drain, Karkat stands in the middle of the floor, drip dropping water all over the place. His black hair, under quite a bit of water weight, droops in front of his eyes.

“This is just fucking perfect. Probably should have thought this stupid ‘washing up’ shit through a little better.”

Just like the rest of his life.

“How the hell am I going to get dry and presentable without-”

A robotic, metallic voice is filtered into the room via hidden intercoms.

“Drying. Presenting.”

“What the fu-”

Karkat’s confusion is soon drowned out by dozens of hidden dryers all blowing hot air in his face and general body area at once.

“...uck,” He finishes.

His hair is now poofy and majestic, yet wild and frantic. If it was a little longer, it might even rival Gamzee’s crazy locks. His cancer shirt and regular grey pants look like they just went through a rinse cycle, and then subsequently tossed into the dryer moments later.

Which is basically exactly what just happened.

-----

While looking admittedly disheveled the cherry-blood was pretty unashamed as he materialized downstairs, poofy hair and all. Jade is sitting on the couch by the fire, absentmindedly playing and messing with Becquerel’s snow white fur. The transportalizer whirs and whines. The human girl turns at the sudden sound. It is obvious that the internal mechanics and science that makes it work far too complicated for mortal minds to understand.

It’s a good thing she’s God-Tier!

Or should she say, Dog-Tier!

Awful puns aside, the first thing Jade notices is Karkat’s hair! She can’t repress the giggle that escapes her lips, grinning and smiling at the grumpy troll’s new hairstyle.

“Karkat! You’d be a great conductor for static electricity! Your hair, it’s so-”

“Don’t you even fucking dare, Harley.” The troll idly threatens through gritted teeth. “And that passcode was fucking unnecessarily complex.”

“Listen, we’ve wasted enough time. Let’s get going before Gamzee gets his clownish ass Murder-Killed. And I guess we can hang out at the carnival or whatever.”

He murmurs that last bit under his breath.

Jade is ecstatic that he murmured it at all. She yips in happiness, grabbing the frazzled, nubby alien by his gray hand, making for her newly erected transportalizer, one that would take them to Camelot.

“Be a good dog Bec! Make sure Grandpabot doesn’t wreck the house!”

[Jade Harley]

Soon after Karkat and Jade’s departure, the heavy clomping sound of metal jarring against smooth linoleum tile indicates the arrival of someone else on the main floor. Becquerel turns his head to regard this newcomer, green tongue lolling oafishly from his mouth.

“Follow after her, boy,” Grandpabot urges the large dog on, because like heck is he letting his granddaughter go anywhere without a proper weapon or at least three computers, and Beccy boy just so happens to be the greatest secret weapon a person can have. Well, he at least makes for good company, anyways, and robots have no need of that. “She’s about to go on a fantastic adventure, I can feel it! Guidance is a must.”

The dog snuffles stubbornly back at the robotic old guy, firmly planting his bottom on the floor a fair distance from the teleporter platform. He isn’t disobeying a direct order, no matter the identity of the one who is issuing new ones.

Grandpabot gives a tinny sigh. “See here, I will even put the tower on lock-down the whole while that you two are away! Scout’s honor. Not even a whole battalion of trolls could plow through acrylic windows in-laid with a curtain of solid steel four inches thick!”

Becquerel tilts his head to the side, considering this notion. Now this is a thought, indeed. It is entirely possible that what Jade’s grandfather is saying is one hundred point five percent truthful, and that nothing horrible will befall Jade’s home while the First Guardian is away. He would also really like to follow after Jade and make sure that she doesn’t fall asleep in someplace dangerous, as well. Plus, those Alternian trolls sure are frolicsome fellows! Jade could be hurt and he would never know of it. This is quite the dilemma.

Tail slowly brushing scratchily against the floor as it sways, Bec whines at Grandpabot, shifting his paws as if considered taking off for the teleporter pad right this instant to follow after his young charge.

“Good dog,” the robot of advanced years says, patting Bec on his nose with a synthetic glove of rubbery material. “Now hurry up and catch up with Jade! Go on!”

With a muffled grumbling noise, the white-furred wolfdog gets to his feet and steps up onto the golden teleporter to Camelot. He disappears a half-second later in a flashfire of brilliant green-yellow lightning, what sounds suspiciously like a jaw-cracking yawn marking his departure.

Face plate unchanging and eternally locked into a cheery smile, Grandpabot’s voice plays over the tower’s prudently concealed speakers: “Initiate lock-down sequence.”

The entire tower noticeably rumbles, as if the ground beneath it were shifting a few inches to the right. Solid sheets of steel drop down over the shiny glass windows all over the building with hollow clinks indicating their descent. The front door suddenly becomes immovable and locked in place. Every floor in the tower experiences a severe dimming of the lights by several megawatts, save for the garden atrium which glows warmly with thermal light and melts away any frost patterns that collect on the windows.

There is a very obvious “Trespassers Will Be Shot” feel about the Harley residence now, judiciously fused with a noticeable “top secret scientific facility in the Arctic” aesthetic. Just the way he likes it.

His eyes giving off an eerie red glow in the dark like a ship’s lights through a dense fog, Grandpabot turns on his heel and marches off towards his workrooms.

He has quite a few irons in the fire, at the moment. Literally.