Title: Getting Acquainted
Summary: Jade and John explode dramatically into Jake's bedroom, trickery ensues. Spoilers up to early Act 6. No Pairings.
Note: What? Am I supposed to be working on my multi chapter crossover right now? Or maybe something pertinent to REAL LIFE? N'awwwwwwwww. Also, I wrote the bulk of this before we found out that John and Jade would be stuck in transit for three years. Please forgive me.
Warnings: This is kiddie-friendly. For kiddies who can tolerate mild coarse language. (What? This IS the Homestuck fandom, after all.)
Pairings: None
Characters: John Egbert, Jade Harley, Jake English
John had seen many a thing in his short life that was worthy of an awed gaze and a glassy-eyed stare. These things included the lovely glowing forests of LOWAS, the mind-blowing sight of a tornado (his tornado!) drilling a hole to the center of a checkerboard planet, and perhaps most importantly, one of his best buddies sporting a pair of fluffy white doggie ears. He reminded himself to make a grab at them once things settled down a bit, just for kicks.
Because whoa, was shit getting real.
His friend with the doggie ears, Jade, had gone and upgraded herself to God/Dog Tier, and she was in the middle of manipulating space like a pro. It was absolutely cool to watch her shrink planets to the size of fishbowls and juggle them through the air as though there was no tomorrow. (Speaking of which, was there going to be a tomorrow? Probably not, not if everything went according to plan, but it was probably irrelevant anyway, right? John had never been the best at understanding all the TIME SHENANIGANS; they were more Dave's thing. Or the trolls' thing. Someone else's thing, in any case. John knew that the only thing he had to worry about was his windy thing, so worrying about whether or not there was actually going to be a tomorrow was totally beside the point and utterly useless. Yeah. That's right.)
John watched, one hand gripping his Vrillyhoo, the other sort of hanging in midair like hands tend to do when they're not busy, observing an occurrence that was surely worthy of the most awed of gazes and the most glassy-eyed of stares. Jade had pulled some window-like-thingamabob out of her captchalogue deck, and was expanding it to the size of a large building. Whoa.
And then shit got even real-er.
Images flashed across the surface of the window-like-thingamabob, faster and faster until all John could get out of them was a sense of confusion and excitement as colors flipped and sizzled too quickly to recognize. Jade brought her arms down, apparently satisfied with the wall, and then raised one hand in a fist.
"Ready, John?"
John said something that sounded remotely like, "Auglafjaa?" his jaw slack and his glasses reflecting the psychedelic scenes on the wall.
"Okay then!" Jade shifted her hand into an open palm and sliced it through the air in front of her, "Let's go!"
John died of "Shit Getting Real Overdose" (that's a medical term) as their Prospitan ship shot forward at the speed of light and broke through the industrial-grade glass of the wall. Sound and light blasted them from all sides, constantly shifting and changing and warping and generally being as real as shit can get. But neither of the kids could really fully appreciate the experience, because less than a fraction of a millisecond later, they were shooting through another wall and out.
Jade looked around at the building they'd arrived in. Movie posters were plastered over every visible surface of the walls. Vines, comic books, and artillery coated the floor in a veritable minefield of a typical teenage mess. Jane tsk tsk tsk'd slightly at the disarray.
"John, we're going to disembark. Are you ready?" she asked, turning around to look at her ectoslime-sibling.
John lay dead behind her. What? (The narrator had not been joking when it proclaimed that John died of "Shit Getting Real Overdose." The reader is promptly ashamed and embarrassed for not taking things seriously.)
"Great," she said to John's dead body, with her hands on her hips and her face supporting a frown worthy of a GENUINELY UNIMPRESSED mother, "Reaaaal smooth, John! Going and getting yourself killed like that! Seriously, can't you handle a bit of cross-temporal space-shifting? It's indisputably inconsiderate, dying like that on my hands! Now I'm going to have to wait for you to get your shit together and wake up!" She huffed and shook her head in disapproval.
Jade hopped off the Prospitan battleship, (which, in relation to the room, was about the size of a toothbrush), and did a wonky little Space-Witch dance that made her expand back to normal size. She then regarded the messy room once again. Well, as long as John was out cold, she might as well clean up this godawful clutter.
Two and a half seconds later, the room was cleaner than a microchip factory. Being the Dogess of Space certainly came with its perks.
Just then, the inhabitant of the room stomped up the stairs, muttering to himself about damn robots. He deposited a chunk of uranium on the ground and walked passed Jade to pick up a stuffed bunny rabbit that was sitting neatly on the table. He examined it carefully and reached for a screwdriver that he'd left lying... right... there... somewhere... could've sworn...
"OH HOLY F***ING DICKENS!" he screamed, looking up and seeing Jade standing in front of him with her eyebrows raised and her ears perked up expectantly. By reflex, he dropped the bunny with a CLANG, pulled both his pistols from his Strife Deck, and fired at the SCARY AND CLEARLY DANGEROUS INTRUDER GIRL WITH DOG EARS.
The bullets stopped midair and dropped to the floor with a series of soft paps.
Jake looked at the girl, then at the bullets lying on the ground, then at the guns in his hands.
"Wow," he said, "I've never bungled my aim so terribly in my life."
Jade frowned the most imperious buck-toothed frown she could muster.
"WOOF! Bungled your aim? You f***ass! You should be glad I have space-powers that I used to stop those bullets! I would've died, and then we'd have to wait around for both of us to resuscitate! We don't have time to be shitting around waiting for corpses to come back to life! What do I look like, the f***ing Hero of Time? No!"
Jake blinked bemusedly at her for several seconds.
"And you should thank me for cleaning up your room young man! It was an authentic pigsty in here! What are you, some kind of pig? No!" she yelled, jabbing her finger at him angrily, "Keep your room clean! You don't want any insect infestations in your bedroom, do you? You don't want to step on a bullet and blast a hole through your foot, do you? NO! Now thank me for being kind enough to clean your room up for you!"
Jake blinked a few more times, and said, "Uh, thanks."
Suddenly, Jade smiled and laughed, "Oh, I'm sorry, that was really pretty mean of me to yell at you like that! I guess all the stress of the universe ending was getting to me.. Woof. Ahem," she cleared her throat, "Anyway, are you the new after-Scratch John, by any chance?"
Jake blinked some more as his brain desperately attempted to piece things together in a way that made sense. After several more blinks of short circuiting and fizzling around in his cranium, it failed miserably.
He shook his head dazedly, eyes never leaving the crazy dog-girl in his room, "Uh, no. I'm not John."
"Oh," she frowned a little, "Woof."
"So how in the blazes did you get into my room?" Jake asked, leaning back against the table.
Jade gestured vaguely at the fourth wall lying on the floor of Jake's bedroom. There was a hole punched through one of the glass planes.
"Crap!" he exclaimed, "I'm pretty goddamn sure that's irreplaceable!"
"Don't worry, it's probably served it's purpose already, letting us come here!" Jade said comfortingly.
"Us?"
"Oh, right! Maybe he's revived already."
She turned and plucked the toothbrush-sized Prospitan battleship out of the air beside her, before wiggling her fingers at it in a way that screamed DARK WITCH MAGIC to the sole, confused onlooker. Immediately, a boy clad in blue flew from the ship and expanded to full size, flopping lifelessly and bloodily to the floor with a dull thud. Jake swallowed nervously. Sure, he was a guy for adventure, but having a psychotic girl and a dead corpse land in his bedroom unannounced was rather trying, even for him.
Jade regarded the boy on the floor for a few moments, before shrugging and turning back to face Jake. He wilted just slightly at her cutting gaze.
She then glanced away and looked at the bunny that had fallen to the floor, and her eyes widened with recognition. Eagerly, she pointed at the rabbit, which immediately proceeded to defy gravity and whizz through the air, waving back and forth in front of Jake's face.
"Is this what I think this is?" she asked enthusiastically.
The snippy voice at the back of Jake's mind expressed its disdain with the question. How the hell was he supposed to know what this crazy girl thought the bunny was, anyway?
"Uh, perhaps?"
"Is your name Jake, by any chance?"
At this, Jake's poor, traumatized consciousness gave up the ghost and shut down. (i.e: Jake fainted, for those of us who can't decipher humorous monologue.)
Jade sighed and set the bunny back down, before strolling down the stairs to make sure the rest of the building was cleaned up and in good working order. She was sorely disappointed, and decided that some good old-fashioned Space Cleaning was in order.
Back upstairs, Jake and John awoke near-simultaneously. Well, alright, if one were to be strictly scientific about it, John awoke exactly one seventeenth of a millisecond earlier than Jake did, but surely that frivolous detail is of no real consequence in the grand scheme of things.
(A couple thousand webcomic pages later: The one seventeenth of a millisecond that Jake spent being unconscious longer than John turns out to be a pivotal moment for the entire fate of all universes, past, present, future, and whatever other modes of time we have, as everything CASCADES together and unveils the catastrophically apocalyptic effect of poorly managed time...)
But in the meanwhile, no one really gives a shit. They woke up near-simultaneously, and that's good enough to cut the butterfork, as they always (don't) say.
"Ugh, stupid batterwitch," John muttered distractedly, sitting up and straightening his glasses.
"Huh?" Jake asked, opening his eyes and looking up at John. He nearly fainted again at seeing someone who appeared to be his near-identical twin. "Good grief, man, why the hell do you look just like me? ...And how did you cease being dead?"
"Oh, hello," John said, looking over at Jake and smiling a friendly smile, "I'm John, from the universe before this one. I guess. Or something like that. And I'm God Tier, so I can't die permanently unless the death was heroic."
"So you popped off in a pretty f***ing shoddy way this time around, I'm guessing?" asked Jake.
"Yeah, pretty much." John glanced around worriedly, "Hey, have you seen Jade anywhere? She's wearing black, and she's got dog ears."
"She was here earlier, stopped my bullets midair. She'll probably show up again soon enough... I nearly shat my pants in her presence, to be honest. She's quite an intimidating young lady."
John laughed loudly at this. Jade? Intimidating? Puh-lease. That was like saying Karkat is a shy, friendly little tyke with difficulty voicing his opinion for fear of inadvertently hurting someone's feelings. That is to say, HARDLY REMOTELY TRUE IN THE VERY SLIGHTEST. But perhaps that was too strong of a metaphor. A fluffy little hamster was more likely to grow poisonous fangs and a voracious carnivore's appetite than Karkat was to be verbally sensitive.
Anyway.
Jake and John stared at each other awkwardly for a few moments. It really was strange to meet someone who looked like they could almost be an identical twin who'd had a few minor chromosomes edited just slightly for appearance.
And then suddenly, John had an epic realization.
"Hey, what's your name again?"
"It's Jake."
"Right. Now come on, let's switch clothes before Jade gets back, so we can fool her into thinking I'm you and you're me. She probably won't notice your hair if you pull my hood up. Jade and I haven't seen each other for very long, she'll probably fall for it."
Jake's bucked-toothed frown of contemplation slowly pulled into a full-blown evil grin of appreciation. "That sounds like fun. Let's go for it."
Jake and John managed to fool Jade on their identities for the entirety of several unbroken, unscrambled hours.
Like, whoa.
John was convinced that the gag could have run on longer if Jake'd had the plain and simple decency to speak like a normal human being, and not use arcane phrases like "forgive my botherations," or "you're full of poppycock." Jake, in turn, bemoaned John's lack of intelligence in saying things like, "I wonder when we'll get to see Vriska!" or "oh man, we forgot about Davesprite!" (Which clearly, any proper impersonator of an ignorant Jake English would remember to refrain from speaking aloud.)
Still, it was indubitably the most successful Operation Identity Crisis Prank ever carried out in all of Paradox Spacetime.
Review? ;3