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Entry tags:
Monthly Word Count - March
TOTAL: 38 953
:DDDDDDDDD not bad ohohoho.
POSTED:
-Three-Sentence-AU-Ficlets meme (2 328 words) (mostly HS but some GW in there too.)
-Midnight on the Demon Patrol chapter 15 (5 532 words) (not edited yet, will post on lj later today)
-Midnight on the Demon Patrol chapter 14 (8 063 words)
-Midnight on the Demon Patrol chapter 13 (3 171 words)
-Covalent - Rose (3 663 words)
-Covalent - Dave (4 760 words)
-Covalent - John (5 009 words)
WORK IN PROGRESS:
-Terezi/Dave/Karkat/Jade/John oneshot silliness (4 319 words)
-Covalent - Jade (197 words) (failed/abandoned tidbits)
-Covalent - abandoned johnkat chat (137 words)
-Battlefield Terra (1 773 words)
--
Terezi/Dave/Karkat/Jade/John oneshot silliness
--
"I would advise you to get your grubby claws off the gravity controls before I get to you, Mister Blueberry Surprise!"
Troll voices resonate super well. Something to do with subharmonics, she thinks. Jade goes "Whoops" and kicks off the ceiling, twists herself around at the waist so she will face the door. "Terezi?"
Outside in the corridor someone goes by, bounding from wall to wall at breakneck speeds. "Wasn't me! Hahahaha." Something follows with a scrabbling sound of claws on cement.
"Lies! Lies and deceit and treachery!"
Well.
They remind her of a cat chasing a beach ball, a bit. Jade sighs and, since she's now floating slowly in the middle of the room and will take at least two minutes to reach the next wall, teleports herself a couple of meters down and to the left, to the intercom.
"One!" she yells into the mike. Feedback forces her ears flat. "Terezi, it wasn't him, it was me! Two! You have ten seconds to find something to hang on to! Nine, eight, seven, six..."
The wall rattles with the impact of a body, she thinks shoulder first. She thinks it because Karkat is swearing about his gogfucking helldamned shitty anatomy, and his shoulder features prominently. "Wait!" he snaps as he trips the motion sensor so the door swishes open. Jade pointedly lifts her hand away from the intercom. The gravity equipment is at the other end of the room.
"Give me twenty -- no, ten more seconds," he says as he kicks from the doorjamb and dives through the room head first. Jade watches him and his glutes fly by, turns around to watch them fly away.
She would smack them for luck, but she has long since learned that it derails him horribly to have flushed advances made on him when he's feeling so furiously ashen.
Karkat's hands slap the far wall; he unlatches the window, scans the underbrush around the base of the house, and...
"Okay, half-force, now!"
His tone is urgent enough that she just pops over to the gravity machine and flicks it back on, just in time for him to fling himself off the window and actually be pulled down.
A story down, John goes "oof!". Jade peers out of the window in time to watch Terezi trip on their sprawled, piled-up bodies and roll onto the grass with a stunning lack of grace.
"Right," Karkat says with grim satisfaction, and digs his elbow in the curve of John's spine, making him yelp. "Terezi so help me if you get up and go after John now--"
"Even if I promised not to maim him too badly?"
Jade leans on her elbow at the window. A sudden gust of wind warns her of Dave's arrival; she shifts aside a bit so he can lean with her. It's funny; for the first second he moves with a weird ponderous slowness, like he forgot what it's like to move at normal speeds. She bumps her hip into his to remind him.
Before her the world curves up, the slope of her mountain falling away only for her very own patch of sea to rise, and the frog temple spearing straight toward her in the middle of a wall of blue. Overhead, past the bright artificial sun, there are the geodesic glass-sky and its field of endless stars.
Underneath Terezi is circling the John-and-Karkat pile; Karkat is crouching on John's back and growling at her, adorable little nubteeth bared. Jade doesn't know if Karkat is the only one who can't see Terezi is being disarmed by how cute that is and not anything else; it makes Dave chuff out a little noise under his breath that she's pretty sure is a laugh.
Terezi hears it as well, grins up at them with her crocodile maw.
"Hey! We're not your daily auspistice porn, get the fuck back inside and stop being voyeurs, whoever told you conciliation was a spectator sport -- gnah!"
John has, predictably, gotten bored and started lifting off the ground. "Whoops, there's a gnat on my back, hehehe..." Karkat is still sitting astride his back; he scrambles for a hold on John's shoulders as his knees and then feet leave the ground.
"They're gonna be stupidflirting all day, aren't they," Dave mutters to Jade. She nods.
"Looks like. Hey, guys, is no one going to want revenge on me for the gravity thing?"
"Don't be silly, my little spring-fresh bush!" Terezi replies, already shifting her weight lower on her haunches to ready herself to jump and catch John by the foot before he can drift up. Wouldn't be the first time he cuts and runs from disputes by flying up until he crosses the colony's gravity center and touches down on the skylight overhead. "This is very much not about a solitary incident--"
"It was because I-can't-believe-it's-not-sopor won't set right at one G."
Jade sets her chin in her hands, and smiles down until she can almost feel her own dimples. Karkat and Terezi have totally forgotten about John, their eyes trained on her with laser intensity.
"Hey, no fair stealing the show," John says, hovering at about window height, and then Karkat springs from his shoulders and lands against the wall, claws biting in the windowsill on both sides of her elbows.
Suddenly she has a troll boy in her face, eyes staring lava-bright, lava-fierce into hers, nose to nose.
"Tell me you are not fucking joking."
Jade grins, and leans in to kiss the tip of his nose. "I am not fucking joking."
She has to brace really hard on the windowsill so his weight won't pull her straight out after him when he surges forward to wrap an arm around her neck and reel her in for a bruising, mildly slobbery kiss. She laughs in Karkat's frantic mouth as Dave drags them back on the side where gravity will hurt them less, as Karkat manages to put one knee and then two on the windowsill and somehow find a precarious balance where he can still crane his neck for the enthusiastic, bruising pleasure of kissing her breathless.
Scrabbling outside, and then Terezi bursts in the corner of Jade's vision, having climbed the wall like a hole-sowing lizard. She elbows Karkat in the ribs, leans in. Jade doesn't remember ever having been this close to Terezi's face; she could borderline join in on the kiss.
"Are you sure," Terezi says, "are you entirely, completely certain, because I can smell the triumph all over you but how could--"
Jade tilts her head back to free her mouth, and winks, cheeks a bit warm. "I tested it in free fall outside the dome for like a week before doing a people-sized batch. So yes, I'm very, very sure mmmph!"
So, um. Terezi is kissing her. By the way.
"Wowza. Lesbos R us, at long last. I knew that day would come. Anyone got a camera."
Terezi has a lot more teeth to get nibbly with than Karkat and her tongue is way longer and she's a little cooler to the touch and oh lord does she know how to use that tongue. Jade wonders to herself, vaguely, why she never kissed her boyfriends' girlfriend before. That was a really silly oversight.
Mmm.
"Haha, shut up, Dave, you've been modeling for the Gay Dudes R You catalogue for like three years now."
"Like you can talk, Mister It's Not Gay If He Doesn't Have Balls To Touch."
"Will you assholes fucking stop," Karkat starts from his precarious position on the windowsill.
Karkat has the unfortunate habit of being a very physical speaker. He can't speak and be still, it's like his tongue muscles are wired all through his body! Jade should study it. She should study it one day when she's not getting knocked backward by his weight and dragging Terezi with her.
Ouch.
She managed to yank a pillow from her room to appear it under her butt just in time, but that only keeps her tailbone from getting broken; it doesn't keep her from being flattened on the floor by two really compact trolls.
"Oh no!" Terezi exclaims as she pushes herself up on her hands. "We have slain the miracle maker! This is a tragedy."
Jade groans, and then laughs despite herself, as she whaps Terezi's pointy shoulder. "I'm glad to see how much you care! Bluh."
Karkat's worried look is immediately forced back down into a grumpy, uncaring (very unconvincing) expression. "You're fine, stop whining and get up."
"Not so fast," Dave says, and steps around them to look down at Jade, feet almost nudging her shoulders. Wow, she's looking straight up at his crotch. She grimaces.
"Thanks for the view, Dave!" Not that his crotch is a bad thing to look at but seriously, he's a bit too dressed to be interesting at all.
Dave, of course, ignores her. "I can't believe you guys have forgotten the essential rite. I bet she's bruised all over now. And what do you do to a human when you bruise them? Hmm?"
Karkat groans, cheeks heating. Terezi fake-gasps. "The magical healing ritual!"
"You do know it's just an excuse for Dave to make you kiss Jade again, right?" John says from where he's leaning on the windowsill, floating. "Guuuuuuuullible."
Terezi huffs and glowers back at him. "Stop that, you're ruining it."
"Could we perhaps stop faffing around like a band of depraved bucket-sponged assfucks and go check on that so-called sopor substitute that I do not believe for a moment will leave us unscathed?" Karkat interrupts, waving his hand between Terezi and John to break all eye contact, metaphorical or otherwise. "I really can't fucking wait to see if my skin will fall off first or my teeth."
"Maybe it'll glue your nook shut!" Jade comments cheerfully as John hops in and helps her up. Karkat gapes at her in shocked outrage.
John picks the dust bunnies out of her hair and scritches her behind the ears; Dave pats more dust off her butt. She pinches his in retaliation. "Maybe his mouth," Dave says. "That'd be swell."
"Speak for yourself, mister I don't want those teeth near my dick, it'd be a tragedy!"
"I happen to think losing his nook would be worse--"
Karkat's outraged word losses never last very long, so Jade isn't very surprised when he explodes once again. "Auuuuuugh! I can't believe you two would -- no, actually I can!"
"True justice would be to ban them from said unappreciated orifices," Terezi muses, stroking her chin like she's looking for her goatee.
Jade gasps. Dave leans his weight back minutely. Karkat's eyes narrow, slow and cruel.
"Nooo!"
"Good idea."
"Noooooooo."
"For a week."
"Noo nonononono. Nooo."
John pumps the air with his fist. "Booyah! Ashen filth incoming."
Everyone pauses and turns to look at him. Terezi and Jade blink.
"Egbert. What."
John purses his lips. "Dude, when it's not me and Jade it's Jade and Dave or Dave and Terezi, do you even know how to get jiggly with only one person anymore? No? So that leaves me and Terezi."
Karkat's face is so anguished, it is more anguished than a puppy having his toy stolen and his food eaten by another dog in front of his very eyes and a rolled-up newspaper being shaken under his nose. "Oh sweet motherfuck no. Don't even. The last quadrant we haven't profaned! Don't you even think about -- no."
John waggles his eyebrows.
"...I loathe you," Terezi says, rolling the words in her mouth and letting them out slow like each is a revelation.
--
Covalent snippets
--
Troll Jade has the same taste in clothes as Jade does. Jade doesn't think it should be a relief, but it is. (Most trolls she's met dressed so drab, the Alternians at least.)
Most of Troll Jade's blue stuff is green, but that's okay, Jade likes green too.
Her skin is gray. Of course, being a troll! It'll make it easier to accessorize to her skin shade, she could even wear pink now (Barbie pink is one thing; pale rose with brown skin? Not pretty.)
Yes.
She can deal with it. (She has to put on her glasses before the girl in the mirror starts looking like her.)
(The placronym is written in Alternian -- which she knows -- to a Jeydhe Harlea -- who she doesn't.)
(She can deal with it.)
She can totally deal with it. It'll be an adventure.
She puts on her pretty once-blue dress with the froofy skirt layers and her computer everything, and she giggles when she closes her eyes and it turns out she lost dog hearing in favor of some weird kind of echolocation, only soundless, because something is pinging in her horns about the incoming chair to dodge.
-- ectoBiologist [EB] trolled carcinoGeneticist [CG] --
EB: hey, fuckface.
CG: HEY, ASSMONGLER.
CG: ISN'T IT THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY WHERE YOU ARE?
CG: LET ME GUESS, YOU HAD THE DROWNING IN YOUR RECUPERACOON DREAM AGAIN.
EB: it was ghost snot this time around. bluuuh.
CG: IMAGINE ME GIVING YOU THE MOST BLANK FACE THIS SIDE OF STRIDER'S OFFSPRING WITH AN UNPAINTED WALL.
EB: it was really gross, okay?! it was getting in my mouth and everything and like, replacing my insides with gross nose mucus, i woke myself up gagging.
CG: IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MAKE ME LAUGH OR MAKE ME DESPAIR OF YOU? BECAUSE SO FAR IT'S MOSTLY ACHIEVING THE SECOND.
--
Battlefield Terra
--
That was a lie as he typed it, but only because he needed to haul Karkat up from the couch by the wrist. The alien had been vegetating in front of yet another nature documentary, and went from bored to death to ball of knives in about two seconds.
John was too excited about getting to leave the living quarters and do productive things to even flinch. "Come on, Karkat, come on come on come on!"
Karkat let himself be dragged through the front door at a run, slowed down by his flip-flops in a very annoying way that only made John haul harder. "Zhann whadafuck!"
('Fuck' had made its appearance in Karkat's vocabulary sometime last week; it was getting more deeply entrenched every day.)
"Come with me come with me yeeeess oh my Lord yes--"
Down on the ground floor, and Karkat would have veered left toward the exit, though with great confusion, but John (slightly regretfully) went right.
He banged through the fire doors keeping them from exercise!! with great justice, letting Karkat's wrist go to pump his fists at the high domed roof of the gym that took up half the building. Long skylights lined the roof like ribs -- sunlight! Almost as good as being outside okay no but he was being optimistic. Space! There was the sparring area on the right side with the climbing wall overlooking it, and all the training machines on the left, and the cases with the training weapons lining the bottom wall. After the smaller, people-sized rooms he'd been locked in for too many long days, a room that might need at least a hundred steps to be crossed felt huge.
Mr. Strider came out of an office by the machines, in a tanktop and sweatpants, sneakers. He eyed John's clothes and quirked an eyebrow pointedly. John grimaced down at his jeans. "Aw, come on, don't make me go back and change--"
"Go back and change."
"Aw."
"Karkat, stay with me."
"Aww!" then again dragging him back up when he was in sweatpants already would be stupid, John supposed.
Karkat's brow furrowed. "Uh -- sir?"
"He's coming back. C'mon. Let's find you better shoes."
Sighing, John went racing back up to change, and then raced back down. It wasn't even a warm-up, but it was nice to move fast once again, to turn on a dime and jump down flights of stairs and rush. He came back to find Karkat sitting on a running machine, trying on sneakers.
"Aren't his toe claws going to poke out of the ends?"
Strider shrugged. "Got other pairs." He put the spare, rejected shoes back in a bag, gestured at Karkat to get up, and demonstrated the running machine for him. "Wanna try?"
Karkat shrugged, climbed on. John walked up to the second machine.
Strider's foot caught him in the ribs, almost under his arm, shoved him to the side and right off his feet.
He'd been taught how to fall ten years ago or more; he rolled with the momentum, absorbed the shock, put himself back on his feet in a low crouch -- only to get shoved on his back via another foot to the shoulder.
Okay, if he wanted to play it like that. John lashed at his ankle -- Strider jumped over it, of course -- and moved in close for a punch.
Bam, on the floor again. John choked as his chest impacted with the floor head on. Argh!
"Dude. That isn't even rusty anymore. You been taking your vitamins, grandpa?"
... Okay, it was on.
--
"Didn't know the floor was that dusty," said Dave a little eternity later. John lifted his head just enough to glare at him. "No, but don't let me stop you from a life of exalted broomdom, I wouldn't stand in the way of your happiness."
"Fuck you so much, dude. Like. A full rugby team of fuck yous."
"Kinky. I like. Where's my cheerleader outfit."
:DDDDDDDDD not bad ohohoho.
POSTED:
-Three-Sentence-AU-Ficlets meme (2 328 words) (mostly HS but some GW in there too.)
-Midnight on the Demon Patrol chapter 15 (5 532 words) (not edited yet, will post on lj later today)
-Midnight on the Demon Patrol chapter 14 (8 063 words)
-Midnight on the Demon Patrol chapter 13 (3 171 words)
-Covalent - Rose (3 663 words)
-Covalent - Dave (4 760 words)
-Covalent - John (5 009 words)
WORK IN PROGRESS:
-Terezi/Dave/Karkat/Jade/John oneshot silliness (4 319 words)
-Covalent - Jade (197 words) (failed/abandoned tidbits)
-Covalent - abandoned johnkat chat (137 words)
-Battlefield Terra (1 773 words)
--
Terezi/Dave/Karkat/Jade/John oneshot silliness
--
"I would advise you to get your grubby claws off the gravity controls before I get to you, Mister Blueberry Surprise!"
Troll voices resonate super well. Something to do with subharmonics, she thinks. Jade goes "Whoops" and kicks off the ceiling, twists herself around at the waist so she will face the door. "Terezi?"
Outside in the corridor someone goes by, bounding from wall to wall at breakneck speeds. "Wasn't me! Hahahaha." Something follows with a scrabbling sound of claws on cement.
"Lies! Lies and deceit and treachery!"
Well.
They remind her of a cat chasing a beach ball, a bit. Jade sighs and, since she's now floating slowly in the middle of the room and will take at least two minutes to reach the next wall, teleports herself a couple of meters down and to the left, to the intercom.
"One!" she yells into the mike. Feedback forces her ears flat. "Terezi, it wasn't him, it was me! Two! You have ten seconds to find something to hang on to! Nine, eight, seven, six..."
The wall rattles with the impact of a body, she thinks shoulder first. She thinks it because Karkat is swearing about his gogfucking helldamned shitty anatomy, and his shoulder features prominently. "Wait!" he snaps as he trips the motion sensor so the door swishes open. Jade pointedly lifts her hand away from the intercom. The gravity equipment is at the other end of the room.
"Give me twenty -- no, ten more seconds," he says as he kicks from the doorjamb and dives through the room head first. Jade watches him and his glutes fly by, turns around to watch them fly away.
She would smack them for luck, but she has long since learned that it derails him horribly to have flushed advances made on him when he's feeling so furiously ashen.
Karkat's hands slap the far wall; he unlatches the window, scans the underbrush around the base of the house, and...
"Okay, half-force, now!"
His tone is urgent enough that she just pops over to the gravity machine and flicks it back on, just in time for him to fling himself off the window and actually be pulled down.
A story down, John goes "oof!". Jade peers out of the window in time to watch Terezi trip on their sprawled, piled-up bodies and roll onto the grass with a stunning lack of grace.
"Right," Karkat says with grim satisfaction, and digs his elbow in the curve of John's spine, making him yelp. "Terezi so help me if you get up and go after John now--"
"Even if I promised not to maim him too badly?"
Jade leans on her elbow at the window. A sudden gust of wind warns her of Dave's arrival; she shifts aside a bit so he can lean with her. It's funny; for the first second he moves with a weird ponderous slowness, like he forgot what it's like to move at normal speeds. She bumps her hip into his to remind him.
Before her the world curves up, the slope of her mountain falling away only for her very own patch of sea to rise, and the frog temple spearing straight toward her in the middle of a wall of blue. Overhead, past the bright artificial sun, there are the geodesic glass-sky and its field of endless stars.
Underneath Terezi is circling the John-and-Karkat pile; Karkat is crouching on John's back and growling at her, adorable little nubteeth bared. Jade doesn't know if Karkat is the only one who can't see Terezi is being disarmed by how cute that is and not anything else; it makes Dave chuff out a little noise under his breath that she's pretty sure is a laugh.
Terezi hears it as well, grins up at them with her crocodile maw.
"Hey! We're not your daily auspistice porn, get the fuck back inside and stop being voyeurs, whoever told you conciliation was a spectator sport -- gnah!"
John has, predictably, gotten bored and started lifting off the ground. "Whoops, there's a gnat on my back, hehehe..." Karkat is still sitting astride his back; he scrambles for a hold on John's shoulders as his knees and then feet leave the ground.
"They're gonna be stupidflirting all day, aren't they," Dave mutters to Jade. She nods.
"Looks like. Hey, guys, is no one going to want revenge on me for the gravity thing?"
"Don't be silly, my little spring-fresh bush!" Terezi replies, already shifting her weight lower on her haunches to ready herself to jump and catch John by the foot before he can drift up. Wouldn't be the first time he cuts and runs from disputes by flying up until he crosses the colony's gravity center and touches down on the skylight overhead. "This is very much not about a solitary incident--"
"It was because I-can't-believe-it's-not-sopor won't set right at one G."
Jade sets her chin in her hands, and smiles down until she can almost feel her own dimples. Karkat and Terezi have totally forgotten about John, their eyes trained on her with laser intensity.
"Hey, no fair stealing the show," John says, hovering at about window height, and then Karkat springs from his shoulders and lands against the wall, claws biting in the windowsill on both sides of her elbows.
Suddenly she has a troll boy in her face, eyes staring lava-bright, lava-fierce into hers, nose to nose.
"Tell me you are not fucking joking."
Jade grins, and leans in to kiss the tip of his nose. "I am not fucking joking."
She has to brace really hard on the windowsill so his weight won't pull her straight out after him when he surges forward to wrap an arm around her neck and reel her in for a bruising, mildly slobbery kiss. She laughs in Karkat's frantic mouth as Dave drags them back on the side where gravity will hurt them less, as Karkat manages to put one knee and then two on the windowsill and somehow find a precarious balance where he can still crane his neck for the enthusiastic, bruising pleasure of kissing her breathless.
Scrabbling outside, and then Terezi bursts in the corner of Jade's vision, having climbed the wall like a hole-sowing lizard. She elbows Karkat in the ribs, leans in. Jade doesn't remember ever having been this close to Terezi's face; she could borderline join in on the kiss.
"Are you sure," Terezi says, "are you entirely, completely certain, because I can smell the triumph all over you but how could--"
Jade tilts her head back to free her mouth, and winks, cheeks a bit warm. "I tested it in free fall outside the dome for like a week before doing a people-sized batch. So yes, I'm very, very sure mmmph!"
So, um. Terezi is kissing her. By the way.
"Wowza. Lesbos R us, at long last. I knew that day would come. Anyone got a camera."
Terezi has a lot more teeth to get nibbly with than Karkat and her tongue is way longer and she's a little cooler to the touch and oh lord does she know how to use that tongue. Jade wonders to herself, vaguely, why she never kissed her boyfriends' girlfriend before. That was a really silly oversight.
Mmm.
"Haha, shut up, Dave, you've been modeling for the Gay Dudes R You catalogue for like three years now."
"Like you can talk, Mister It's Not Gay If He Doesn't Have Balls To Touch."
"Will you assholes fucking stop," Karkat starts from his precarious position on the windowsill.
Karkat has the unfortunate habit of being a very physical speaker. He can't speak and be still, it's like his tongue muscles are wired all through his body! Jade should study it. She should study it one day when she's not getting knocked backward by his weight and dragging Terezi with her.
Ouch.
She managed to yank a pillow from her room to appear it under her butt just in time, but that only keeps her tailbone from getting broken; it doesn't keep her from being flattened on the floor by two really compact trolls.
"Oh no!" Terezi exclaims as she pushes herself up on her hands. "We have slain the miracle maker! This is a tragedy."
Jade groans, and then laughs despite herself, as she whaps Terezi's pointy shoulder. "I'm glad to see how much you care! Bluh."
Karkat's worried look is immediately forced back down into a grumpy, uncaring (very unconvincing) expression. "You're fine, stop whining and get up."
"Not so fast," Dave says, and steps around them to look down at Jade, feet almost nudging her shoulders. Wow, she's looking straight up at his crotch. She grimaces.
"Thanks for the view, Dave!" Not that his crotch is a bad thing to look at but seriously, he's a bit too dressed to be interesting at all.
Dave, of course, ignores her. "I can't believe you guys have forgotten the essential rite. I bet she's bruised all over now. And what do you do to a human when you bruise them? Hmm?"
Karkat groans, cheeks heating. Terezi fake-gasps. "The magical healing ritual!"
"You do know it's just an excuse for Dave to make you kiss Jade again, right?" John says from where he's leaning on the windowsill, floating. "Guuuuuuuullible."
Terezi huffs and glowers back at him. "Stop that, you're ruining it."
"Could we perhaps stop faffing around like a band of depraved bucket-sponged assfucks and go check on that so-called sopor substitute that I do not believe for a moment will leave us unscathed?" Karkat interrupts, waving his hand between Terezi and John to break all eye contact, metaphorical or otherwise. "I really can't fucking wait to see if my skin will fall off first or my teeth."
"Maybe it'll glue your nook shut!" Jade comments cheerfully as John hops in and helps her up. Karkat gapes at her in shocked outrage.
John picks the dust bunnies out of her hair and scritches her behind the ears; Dave pats more dust off her butt. She pinches his in retaliation. "Maybe his mouth," Dave says. "That'd be swell."
"Speak for yourself, mister I don't want those teeth near my dick, it'd be a tragedy!"
"I happen to think losing his nook would be worse--"
Karkat's outraged word losses never last very long, so Jade isn't very surprised when he explodes once again. "Auuuuuugh! I can't believe you two would -- no, actually I can!"
"True justice would be to ban them from said unappreciated orifices," Terezi muses, stroking her chin like she's looking for her goatee.
Jade gasps. Dave leans his weight back minutely. Karkat's eyes narrow, slow and cruel.
"Nooo!"
"Good idea."
"Noooooooo."
"For a week."
"Noo nonononono. Nooo."
John pumps the air with his fist. "Booyah! Ashen filth incoming."
Everyone pauses and turns to look at him. Terezi and Jade blink.
"Egbert. What."
John purses his lips. "Dude, when it's not me and Jade it's Jade and Dave or Dave and Terezi, do you even know how to get jiggly with only one person anymore? No? So that leaves me and Terezi."
Karkat's face is so anguished, it is more anguished than a puppy having his toy stolen and his food eaten by another dog in front of his very eyes and a rolled-up newspaper being shaken under his nose. "Oh sweet motherfuck no. Don't even. The last quadrant we haven't profaned! Don't you even think about -- no."
John waggles his eyebrows.
"...I loathe you," Terezi says, rolling the words in her mouth and letting them out slow like each is a revelation.
--
Covalent snippets
--
Troll Jade has the same taste in clothes as Jade does. Jade doesn't think it should be a relief, but it is. (Most trolls she's met dressed so drab, the Alternians at least.)
Most of Troll Jade's blue stuff is green, but that's okay, Jade likes green too.
Her skin is gray. Of course, being a troll! It'll make it easier to accessorize to her skin shade, she could even wear pink now (Barbie pink is one thing; pale rose with brown skin? Not pretty.)
Yes.
She can deal with it. (She has to put on her glasses before the girl in the mirror starts looking like her.)
(The placronym is written in Alternian -- which she knows -- to a Jeydhe Harlea -- who she doesn't.)
(She can deal with it.)
She can totally deal with it. It'll be an adventure.
She puts on her pretty once-blue dress with the froofy skirt layers and her computer everything, and she giggles when she closes her eyes and it turns out she lost dog hearing in favor of some weird kind of echolocation, only soundless, because something is pinging in her horns about the incoming chair to dodge.
-- ectoBiologist [EB] trolled carcinoGeneticist [CG] --
EB: hey, fuckface.
CG: HEY, ASSMONGLER.
CG: ISN'T IT THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY WHERE YOU ARE?
CG: LET ME GUESS, YOU HAD THE DROWNING IN YOUR RECUPERACOON DREAM AGAIN.
EB: it was ghost snot this time around. bluuuh.
CG: IMAGINE ME GIVING YOU THE MOST BLANK FACE THIS SIDE OF STRIDER'S OFFSPRING WITH AN UNPAINTED WALL.
EB: it was really gross, okay?! it was getting in my mouth and everything and like, replacing my insides with gross nose mucus, i woke myself up gagging.
CG: IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MAKE ME LAUGH OR MAKE ME DESPAIR OF YOU? BECAUSE SO FAR IT'S MOSTLY ACHIEVING THE SECOND.
--
Battlefield Terra
--
That was a lie as he typed it, but only because he needed to haul Karkat up from the couch by the wrist. The alien had been vegetating in front of yet another nature documentary, and went from bored to death to ball of knives in about two seconds.
John was too excited about getting to leave the living quarters and do productive things to even flinch. "Come on, Karkat, come on come on come on!"
Karkat let himself be dragged through the front door at a run, slowed down by his flip-flops in a very annoying way that only made John haul harder. "Zhann whadafuck!"
('Fuck' had made its appearance in Karkat's vocabulary sometime last week; it was getting more deeply entrenched every day.)
"Come with me come with me yeeeess oh my Lord yes--"
Down on the ground floor, and Karkat would have veered left toward the exit, though with great confusion, but John (slightly regretfully) went right.
He banged through the fire doors keeping them from exercise!! with great justice, letting Karkat's wrist go to pump his fists at the high domed roof of the gym that took up half the building. Long skylights lined the roof like ribs -- sunlight! Almost as good as being outside okay no but he was being optimistic. Space! There was the sparring area on the right side with the climbing wall overlooking it, and all the training machines on the left, and the cases with the training weapons lining the bottom wall. After the smaller, people-sized rooms he'd been locked in for too many long days, a room that might need at least a hundred steps to be crossed felt huge.
Mr. Strider came out of an office by the machines, in a tanktop and sweatpants, sneakers. He eyed John's clothes and quirked an eyebrow pointedly. John grimaced down at his jeans. "Aw, come on, don't make me go back and change--"
"Go back and change."
"Aw."
"Karkat, stay with me."
"Aww!" then again dragging him back up when he was in sweatpants already would be stupid, John supposed.
Karkat's brow furrowed. "Uh -- sir?"
"He's coming back. C'mon. Let's find you better shoes."
Sighing, John went racing back up to change, and then raced back down. It wasn't even a warm-up, but it was nice to move fast once again, to turn on a dime and jump down flights of stairs and rush. He came back to find Karkat sitting on a running machine, trying on sneakers.
"Aren't his toe claws going to poke out of the ends?"
Strider shrugged. "Got other pairs." He put the spare, rejected shoes back in a bag, gestured at Karkat to get up, and demonstrated the running machine for him. "Wanna try?"
Karkat shrugged, climbed on. John walked up to the second machine.
Strider's foot caught him in the ribs, almost under his arm, shoved him to the side and right off his feet.
He'd been taught how to fall ten years ago or more; he rolled with the momentum, absorbed the shock, put himself back on his feet in a low crouch -- only to get shoved on his back via another foot to the shoulder.
Okay, if he wanted to play it like that. John lashed at his ankle -- Strider jumped over it, of course -- and moved in close for a punch.
Bam, on the floor again. John choked as his chest impacted with the floor head on. Argh!
"Dude. That isn't even rusty anymore. You been taking your vitamins, grandpa?"
... Okay, it was on.
--
"Didn't know the floor was that dusty," said Dave a little eternity later. John lifted his head just enough to glare at him. "No, but don't let me stop you from a life of exalted broomdom, I wouldn't stand in the way of your happiness."
"Fuck you so much, dude. Like. A full rugby team of fuck yous."
"Kinky. I like. Where's my cheerleader outfit."