I think he coined it himself. If not for him I would never have noticed it.
While normally I would defend the schedules of people who make things I like I really have to show some concern about the hives and shakes stemming from update withdrawl. Not the first time he's affecting my health, and it isn't the last.
Gotta plug my state and realize how fortunate this connection is.
And then I stumble across the best fanfiction the fanbase could ever create.
It had been ages since the last update.
I grimaced, pulling the collar of my jacket tight against the rain, and peered into the overcast sky. Solar chronography was an art forever impossible on the Pacific coast, but I had become adept at judging the time by the relative brightness of the sky. My phone lost in a harrowing nighttime exchange some weeks prior, I had no way of attending to my obligations save that of the heavenly glow.
My informant was late. Again.
The tree I on which I leant afforded little protection from the everpresent rain, its branches nude from the winter frost. I huddled closer to it, wishing for a moment that I had the gossamer wings of the god tier, the better to shield me from the cruel atmosphere of the outside world. The thin, fashionable, jacket I had donned that morning – perhaps too optimistically – had soaked through in the first minute of the rainfall. The handpainted Slimer knockoff on my breast, painstakingly copied from a vintage issue of Shonen Jump, began to melt and run with the rain. The dowdy woman who inhabited the desk at Fabric Land like some cyclopean spider in her web of thread had misrepresented her wares. The paints were not waterproof, merely water resistant. He was late again, and this time I was cold. This would not stand.
From the other side of the tree came a whisper.
“The most merciful thing in the world is the insufficiency of the human mind to correlate the lore of Homestuck.”
“Men of broader intellect know there is no sharp distinction between Skaia and Prospit,” I said huskily in response, my voice rusty from long weeks of disuse. I paused for a moment. “Plus, that’s a misquote.”
The man in the novelty plastic mask drew forth from behind the tree. Our meetings were never at the same time nor in the same place; he wore a different mask with every occasion. I could never determine if the masks held some special significance, or if he changed them with some arcane schedule, ritualistically, like a spider molting its carapace. This month it was Nixon, a pedestrian choice. His eyes peered through the thin slits of the mask. It was too small for his long face, and the edges pressed white into the skin of his forehead and chin.
“This month it’s to be Terezi,” he said. I could never hear him clearly through the mask; some days, it seemed as though he were doing it intentionally, to avoid identification, others, I suspected he just mumbled a lot. I sighed.
“You said that last month.” I looked askance at the sky, forgetting that it was raining. I blinked the water away rapidly, pretending that I had something in my eye. He didn’t seem to notice.
“Terezi dies every month, and is reborn with the tides of the ocean.”
“That doesn’t make any goddamned sense,” I said. “I’m sick of your shit.”
He turned away from me for a moment and gazed into the distance. Then he continued turning to face me again.
“If you’re really sick of my shit,” he said, lifting his mask slightly, “you’d have stopped reading by now.”
I stared with a shock of recognition at the full, supple lips exposed by the mask. The informant’s skin was pallid, waxy, the skin around the edges of the mask bruised from long hours of mask pressure. As I stared, his skin began to redden and blister; even through the clouds which filled the air, the brief burst of radiation was causing his fragile skin to burn.
There was only one man who saw the sun rarely enough to burn in seconds. I lifted a shaky hand to point at him.
“You –“ I stammered. He replaced the mask slowly.
“You will not see me again,” he said. “I have told you all you need to know.”
He walked away, quickly, and got onto the bus.
I sank to my knees in the cold rain, feeling the mud soak through my vintage Japanese raw denim jeans. I would deal with it later; for the moment, my world was rocked to its core.
“Hussie,” I whispered, my words stolen by the wind and transported to a distant realm.
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Topic: MSPA Homestuck (Read 5199578 times)