Sealed inside a large metal box, with bare stone or metal shock-cold under every footstep, no chance to live. The hum of electronics and machinery was like another entrapping layer, that pressed down on them in every moment, but even "moments" had lost meaning: sputtering and choking in the strangling grasp of a place that knew no time. Rose tried to embrace it, because pondering the dismal trap was a distraction from the snake-whisper at the top of her sylladex. She had set them at the top of her tree and stacked everything else between, in hopes that the sheer nuisance of having to pick everything else up would deter her from picking at the root. Twice, so far, it had. The Thorns of Oglogoth lay buried. She kept the Quills of Echidna in her Strife Deck now. Much less powerful, much less dangerous: far more acceptable for polite company. Not that she could call them that.

She was mostly sure it had been two weeks since they had arrived in the Troll's session. Time there was a matter of ticks on a wall, and she had not started those until a few days after the fact. She felt reasonably sure "five" but Jade thought "six" and Dave was away every time the question came to mind. Dave was always away, and every time he left, Rose felt a sinking feeling in her gut. She wondered if the others caught it as well: if John wondered or even noticed when Dave slipped quietly out of the abandoned lab. She wondered if Jade had bothered to read into his coy wink and nonsensical "Just going for a walk under the stars," when there were, after all, no stars. Did the Trolls notice that every time he slipped away, Aradia would unemotionally unplug herself from her computer and follow a minute behind? Likely, but if any knew what it implied they hid it well. Instead, these sudden disappearances given rise to a barely coded, tame innuendo, where "going outside" was the unofficial go-word for a private date. Sollux and Feferi, Karkat and Terezi: a walk under the cloak of timeless void and imminent death to pretend there was some beauty in which to conspire. For Aradia and Equius it was to admit there was a foulness in which to bicker and snip at one another, in good ambience. It served.

But Rose could see the doom, and Dave just had the better angle. She knew that there was only one reason both the Knight and Maid of Time would have found some common purpose on that asteroid. The lab was almost outside of time, but the demon had been born within, and had a ways to go to escape and find them. Every time Dave came back, Rose knew it was for only a short time. He and Aradia were only there to watch until, again, they saw that their efforts had failed. They would sit around until the first of them died or maybe, jaded, the sixth, the seventh, or the fourteenth, when they would slip away again and buy them all another day. Rose felt trapped. She had put the Thorns aside, on strong urging, but without them she felt helpless, and wondered if her hesitation in using them was responsible for the demon's continued success, why Dave never stayed more than an hour. Sometimes she pondered the opposite, and wondered how she would truly behave in face of the demon. Would she call on the Dark Gods in a moment of panic or desperation? And if not, was that the reason the sixteen of them were never together?

"Okay, now you've got to admit that the pinnacle of 80s filmmaking was Ghostbusters II. I mean, come on."

"Egbert, you scrape of alien fecal matter on the boot of Fate's ugliest leg, stop trying to piss me off. I've been over your archives like, twice, and it's obvious that the pinnacle of your human 80s filmmaking was John Travolta's hit sequel Staying Alive."

Not that being together was some kind of joy. Beyond John and Karkat hogging the television they had brought over in a captchacard, there were times when simply being around the Trolls was more than Rose could bear. But it was impossible to stay cooped up with Jade forever, and she had gotten to know them for better or for worse. There were some highlights. Feferi was nice to talk to, and Roses's talks with Kanaya more than once went long into what most of them scheduled as "night" for the Humans, "day" for the Trolls. The Witch and Sylph of Space had managed to string together a facsimile Derse and Prospit to let them go back to sleep without interruption from the Gods, considering Rose's past history, but Rose felt safest chatting with her friends. But there were also the secret rules to remember at all times when dealing with the Trolls. These went far beyond the explicit rules Karkat had set in a long, shouted lecture upon their arrival ("Nepeta hunts an hour a day. Any consorts or pets loose are forfeit. And speaking of food, if anyone leaves any fucking lunch lying around I will personally find you and shove it down your oesophagus myself, and once you've had your warning..."). These rules were something already understood by the Trolls, and were at no point fully explained to the humans.

Vriska and Aradia were never to be unaccompanied by more than three persons. Eridan and Sollux never with less than two. Gamzee must have an escort every time he leaves the main room - something it did not take Rose long to discover had to do with the sopor facility they had set up in a lab. Don't go into Equius' room, "you wouldn't understand." It was hard to tell where the well-meaning gestures began and where they crossed the line to "overwrought." Rose also suspected there was some "rule" related to Aradia and Sollux, as Karkat, Terezi and Feferi had a habit of checking their hacker every time Aradia made her intermittent appearances. There was definitely another rule that had twice made Terezi intercept Feferi with meaningless chores when Fef had been en route to talk with Aradia with a trembling, nervous look on her face. But the rules were changing even for the Trolls.

"Are they older, maybe?" Rose had asked Karkat the day after they were positive what was going on.

"What the hell kind of question is that? We're all the same age!" He had not really been in a chatting mood. She was interrupting his lunch, but she had figured Karkat was not going to be in a better chatting mood at any other time of the day.

"That's why I'm asking you." Do you have any idea when each meteor went to after your Reckoning?"

"Yeah: the same batch of grubs. Maybe you should go ask their Mother Grub who hit the ground first? Oh wait, she's been dead for sweeps."

Rose had often wondered just how old Dave was going to get thanks to his constant time travelling, ever since he had started going to John for shaving cream (which their Heir suspiciously had in bulk). The Trolls, on the other hand, were not so subtle about their aging. Rose had caught Eridan in a fight with Karkat when his voice began to warp hideously between his usual tone and a deep, raspy one as though possessed. Karkat, with an astoundingly casual shrug of his shoulder, called it "post-wriggling penultimate moult" and returned to John to pick up watching Xanadu.

Eridan and Tavros were the biological victims. Rose could not think of two more opposed to be suffering so in kind. First there was the voice changes. They had progressed from a rasp to an undercurrent hiss the other Trolls did not seem to hear, but gave the human prey animals the ventriloquist impression that the speaker was whispering from another direction. Beyond that, they were growing. Worse, as Kakat implied and to their embarrassment, they were shedding. Karkat's inner neat-freak soon set to work, using a broom as a baton and whip combined to get them to clean up after themselves.

The itching was terrible, and it gave rise to the next change: a deep hormonal one that brought out sharp bursts of rage. Tavros mostly buried his if he felt them at all. Rose saw one burst through when a moulting itch hit a patch of live skin trapped under his robot leg, and it took Equius almost an hour to get it loose for him. Surprisingly enough, these violent waves, if not the changes in general, had begun to attract moirail-like attentions from the other trolls in curious, pale flirtations Rose was stretched to recognize. Gamzee had offered the unusually-furious Tavros a free night's rest on his horn pile, Karkat had silenced one of Eridan's outbursts with a smack to the head and a series of threats that sounded almost genuinely concerned.

The new bodies emerging from the moult were surprising. Overall, they kept their basic shape: they would just as much resemble their teen selves as any human. But there were changes if one was willing to look. They were larger by proportion to humans, and more built. With clothes on there less to make out, but intimate living conditions bred a certain disregard for certain decencies, especially when one's lower body was constantly under mechanical repair. The skin on Tavros' bare chest met at sharper angles and appeared, on the surface, sublimely changed in a way that implied physical armour. It was clear that Rose was seeing her allies transform into apex predators.

But the worst was Vriska. While she still engaged in a healthy and active dose of spiteful jabs with Terezi and a worrying tail of John, her primary circle was still her ex-kismesis and Tavros. Seeing her circle go through this sort of puberty had a symbiotic effect on her dreamself body. She too began to grow, shift in voice and, when her imagination got the better of her, itch from time to time. While Sollux lisped that he was thankful he wouldn't be "trapped in this stupid wriggling body for the rest of my life," it was clear that Vriska's situation was somehow off. As Rose had only seen adult trolls in two dimensions - on computer screens and movie posters - she could not put her finger on it, but Karkat was perfectly happy to put his boot through it instead.

"Hey moron," he had said, clapping Vriska upside the head with the butt end of his Broom of Office. "Just because you're making shit up as you go doesn't mean you don't have to clean the fuck up after yourself. Eridan! Tell your boyfriend that he either starts growing like a girl or he has to clean up like the rest of us."

Vriska had blushed up like a Christmas light and the next day had changed drastically. Her shedding, as Karkat had implied, stopped entirely. The appearance of armour was gone, but the muscles had not, and she had shot up almost a foot overnight. Rose also got that Vriska's dreamself had replaced her teeth with a new set of not entirely bone: the new ones caught the light at some angles and looked menacingly sharp. Vriska did not hide that she was growing new finger nails as well, though the word "claws" might be more correct, given the way she groomed them.

Rose had discussed the change with Kanaya. It had been one of their long nights, and they traded questions about Troll and Human gender roles, stereotypes and prejudices, especially considering the Troll's vestigial sexes. Any unpleasantness evaporated over time - it tended to with Kan. Kanaya told Rose that she had no doubt that Vriska was already planning to get back at Karkat, even if she had decided to take his advice.

"I don't suppose lashing out at your leader is exactly standard procedure," she had said, sitting to Kanaya's left as her friend typed, alone in the main lab. Rose sat atop the desk, one leg swinging back and forth.

"It is probably closer than any human equivalent. On the other hand, Karkat understands that we're under a lot of stress right now. Some relief would be a help."

"Lashing out is relief?" Rose said with a smile.

Kanaya half-grinned, on the opposite side of her face, in hopes of maintaining her usual look as the neutral auxiliatrix. "Perhaps."

But the morning did not see any sort of revenge ploy. Karkat could be found curled up, as usual, on the couch. He had started the morning straight off with John before the rest of them were even up, watching, god help them, Zardoz. Jade was in one side of the room, playing games with Nepeta and their growing collection of toys and dolls, which Nepeta found endlessly fascinating. Kanaya was still in her room. Everyone else, including Dave and Aradia, were watching the three pubescent trolls scream at one another against the north wall. They were the laboratory's surprise alarm clock that morning, and had a dead zone about them of at least five feet.

"Listen, you little pus-sucking worm! If you don't open your damn mouth and give me an answer..."

Eridan stuck his hand toward Vriska. "vris, maybe if you'd come and turn that rage somewwhere productive..."

Rose squirmed. Eridan must be taking this personally if he was busting out his tone. All the Trolls had a tone - a sort of throaty, heavily accented warp in the voice they used when they were impassioned in their own distinct ways. Whether it was voluntary or biological Rose did not know, but it ran ruin with the undercurrent hiss.

Vriska pushed Eridan aside with a jab from her finger. "Shut up, Eridan, if you were worth shouting at, you'd have known a loooooooong time ago. Tavros, d8mmit, open your mouth or I'll show you what productive rage looks like!"

She decided to act on her threat immediately and hoisted him, robot legs and all, an inch off the ground. She held him there for almost five seconds, before he proved too heavy and she was forced to drop him to the audible protest of the floor.

"uH, gEEZE VRISKA, i REALLY DIDN'T THINK THIS WOULD BOTHER YOU SO MUCH."

"Spine, Travros! Don't you dare open your mouth again unless you've grown some nerve!"

"I..."

Vriska, was still like a trainwreck in her explosions, where the outbursts of someone like Karkat had long since become routine. It was really hard to look away, especially when Vriska was spouting off oxymoronic demands at the top of her lungs with absolutely no sign of self-awareness. But to Rose's surprise, only the humans seemed to be interested in the fight after too long. Karkat had turned back to his film (he had an oddball respect for Sean Connery, red diaper costume notwithstanding), Nepeta had never really left her game and Gamzee outright wandered over to his computer within the fight's perimeter to start whatever constituted his digital routine. Feferi watched the fight out of the corner of her eye, fingers twitching. At one point Rose thought she heard Sollux say "Don't..." but Feferi composed herself and that was the end of it.

Eridan attempted to interpose himself between Vriska and Tavros of them, which not easy given how little ground Vriska had allowed. "Mindfang, why don't you just-"

Vriska's off-hand shot out toward his neck and lifted him into the air. She made a point not to meet his eyes. "Didn't I tell you to piss off about the FLARP names?" she said in a whisper. The hissing undercurrent that ran through all three of their voices was suddenly worse. Rose saw Jade, Dave and John shudder as she heard Vriska as though whispering into her ear from over her shoulder. A small trickle of purple blood seeped into Eridan's scarf and down Vriska's pinky where it hit exposed flesh.

"Cut it out!" Jade said from one side of the room. Vriska ignored her, and Rose instinctively checked with John, but there seemed to be nothing he could do. Karkat was indifferent. True, John's pull with the Trolls was limited without Karkat's backing, but his pull with Vriska might have just been enough...

"Hey, Tavros," Vriska said as Eridan swung a wild kick at her. "If you're just gonna sit there with your mouth shut, hold your head still. I just had the 8est idea."

Tavros winced at her request. He unintentionally lowered his horns, which suited Vriska's needs admirably. She slapped a hand on his head to hold him there, and tried to raise Eridan up toward a horn-tip.

"Hey!" Rose snapped.

Rose never did wonder why the three of them were up so early, though if she had, she might have thought twice about doing what she did. She should have given more thought to what exactly they were fighting about, or imagined what might be going through their heads, but she did not. In hindsight, more than anything else she wished she had kept a better memory of her and Kanaya's eighteenth pesterchum conversation. It had been another quid pro quo conversation, a back and forth exchange of cultural data in hopes of stripping any future conversations of wary misunderstandings, exactly like the one Rose was about to make. But she did not, and instead she stormed up to Vriska.

"Drop him, Vriska."

Vriska reacted very slowly, taking her hand first off of Tavros' head and making a show of a dramatic slow turn towards Rose. She lowered Eridan for need of his weight, but did not release him. She took up so much time doing so that Rose was able to take advantage of it.

"Sit down, Tavros," Rose said, trying to be calm.

"Rose, I don't really think-"

"Tavros: Sit."

He did as he was bid, walking away and taking his seat carefully at the side of the room. Rose did not watch him go. She had to keep her eye on Vriska, even though it meant breaking another one of the unspoken rules. "Never look Vriska in the eye. Never." Vriska tossed back her hair with obvious disdain. Rose kept eye contact.

"What did you say?" Vriska asked.

Eridan decided to throw in his own chip. "Don't..." he gurgled. "Don't need your help here."

"Quiet," Rose muttered. Eridan's insistence that she was his kismesis (something she had long realized was not an exclusive classification) had never really been more irritating. Vriska stepped forward and leaned over Rose to emphasize her increased height, a sneer on her face that showed a full set of her terrifying new teeth. Rose was not entirely sure how much of Vriska's new appearance was genetic and how much was just her gruesome imagination, but there was everything unpleasant about standing in the shadow of a would-be alpha Troll.

Rose lowly raising her hand to Vriska's face, pointed to the floor. As she did, she double-checked her hand. Do not draw your needlewands, she thought in a mantra. Vriska had a quarter of the echeladder on her. Anything short of the Thorns would be absurd. Don't tempt Fate while she still has her dice. ""Put... him... down."

Rose did not know it, but now everyone was looking at her. Karkat had set himself in a pondering look from the back of the couch. Nepeta stalled in mid-play, a plastic dinosaur dangling from one hand. Gamzee even looked away from his YouTube Poop. Kanaya had finally arrived. She was completely absorbed, and leaned with her arms crossed as she blinked away sleep. Vriska started laughing, and intentionally or otherwise, her grip on Eridan tightened. Rose's psychological mind could not help but wonder if having Eridan at her mercy had re-lit some caliginous flame in her heart. With Vriska it was hard to tell, beyond that things could shift at any moment.

Rose set her own teeth, and pointing to Eridan, she slammed her hand down in the air. "Now!"

Vriska's expression shifted from confidence to surprise in an instant, but she recovered, and shrugged. "...Fine," she said, as though it were no concern of her own. "Gamzee!" He took to his feet, face still stuck in a grin, and Vriska tossed Eridan into him. With one last look at Rose, she tossed her hair back again with a harrumph, and walked away.

Rose caught her breath at once and, wishing she had never even gotten out of bed, turned to leave, but John caught her eye with a not-at-all subtle wave of his arms. He pointed back to Eridan, was was seething at her with black hatred. Rose caught John's meaning at once.

"Eridan," she called, exhausted. "Come on, let's have that looked at."

Eridan reached reflexively to his wounds. "What? Why?"

Rose tried - very hard, to limited results - to sound honest. "Because I'm concerned."

Eridan took a moment to really take this in, before he finally said: "...aw, man..." John gave her a thumbs up, and she rolled her eyes as her deflated, would-be kismesis limped over to her. But it was hard to avoid the looks of the others, as they returned to their work. Stranger was Tavros, who did not return to work, but rather watched her with a curious look that only just began at gratitude. Eridan muttered darkly about how he had been upstaged, but he seemed a touch less honest about it. Vriska simply sat at her keyboard, drawing circles above her desk and muttering. Kanaya watched Rose the closest of all.

It would be a day and a half before anyone told her she had just done the clubbed equivalent of walking in and kissing them each hard on the lips.