Homestuck : Fear and Loathing in the Land of Tents and Mirth

[atolnon]

Homestuck fandom bullshit under the cut.

"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." - T.H. White

We were somewhere outside of Prospit when the soper slime began to take hold. I remember saying something like, "FUCK ME, I FEEL A BIT LIGHTHEADED. GET OVER HERE AND TAKE THE FUCKING WHEEL, YOU SHITTY CLOWN ASSHOLE." When suddenly the air was filled with the screeching of huge, dog-faced bats, all swooping and diving around the motorized wheel-transport which was going over a hundred units per hour with the top rolled down.  And a voice was screaming "SWEET TROLL JEGUS, WHAT ARE THESE FUCKING ANIMALS?" Suddenly, everything was fucking quiet again. Gamzee was taking off his shirt and coating himself with Faygo to facilitate the tanning process.

"ChIlL mAn,"he muttered, "WhAt ArE yOu EvEn GoInG oN aBoUt?" with that stupid, vacent expression.
"NEVER MIND." I said. "GET OVER HERE. IT'S YOUR TURN TO DRIVE." I aimed the four wheeled transport to the side of the highway next to the barren checkerboard landscape. No need to tell him about those bats, I thought. The silly clown bastard would see them soon enough. 

The green sun was high in the sky, and we still had over a hundred units to go, as measured by the road markers. It would be a hard measure. Very soon, I realized, we would both be totally and utterly fucked. But there was no going back, and no time to rest. We would have to ride it out. The registration for Hivebent was already underway, and we had to get there before the sun got too low in order to claim our environmentally conditioned, sound-proofed sopor-rest chamber. An fashionable magazine based in the Land of Rays and Frogs had taken care of the reservations along with this huge, red transport device we'd rented just before we left. I was, after all, a professional ectobiologist, so I had an obligation to enter this session, for good or ill. 

The editors had already given me 300 boondollars, most of which had already been converted into extremely dangerous grist. The trunk of the car already looked like a legislacerator's mobile alchemizer. We had two units of Rust, seventy five units of Shale, 5 containers full of unspecified, high powered Cobalt grist, a cache half full of Caulk, a whole galaxy of multi-colored Amethyst, Ruby, Diamond, Quartz. . . also a unit of Tar, large amounts of generic Build Grist, a case of Gold, and two dozen Uranium from somewhere best left unspoken. 

All of this had been rounded up the night before, in a high speed drive around the land of Pulse and Haze, from an archipelago of close-lying islands covered in jaggy rocks to the nearly deserted castle ruins, we picked up everything that dropped from denizens that we could reach. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious grist collection run, the tendancy is to push it as far as you can. 

The only thing that worried me was the Uranium. There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible and depraved as a troll in the depths of sopor on an alchemization binge, and I knew we'd get into that rotten situation pretty soon. Probably at the next fueling depot. We had sampled the prospects of most of the grist, and then faced with the prospects of 100 more units with this clown in a horrible, slobbering sort of spastic stupor - the only way to keep him alert is to funnel several liters of shitty soda into him, literally, but not all at once but steadily, just enough to keep focus at 90 units per hour through Prospitian wasteland. 

"MaN, tHiS iS tHe WaY tO tRaVeL," said Gamzee. He leaned over to turn up the volume on the transporter's noise box. . . slumped over on the far side of the chair, grappling with a portable noise retention machine turned all the way up on "Sympathy for the Devil." That was the only retained noise we had, transported directly from an alien session, and jammed haphazardly in so that we had no idea how to get it out - if it could even be gotten out at all - so he played it over and over again, as a kind of demented counterpoint to the official noise broadcast from the transporter itself. It also maintained his rhythm on the road, such as it was, which was important since Gamzee already enjoyed swaying methodically from one lane to another. Who knew what would happen without the constant precussive thuds and wailing 'PLEASE TO MEET YOU's.

It seemed important at the time, and a constant rhythm and speed is good for fuel maintance. Avoid those quick bursts of acceleration that drag blood to the back of the thinkpan.