Note: Sorry this has taken ages. D: Between all the stuff going on and all that other stuff going on, you know how things go. And I'm afraid the quality of this chapter isn't as good as usual. Bleh. Sorry.
AND WHOLY WHOPPIN' SHITE, you reviewers are awesome. All these suggestions and such are pure genius. Many will come in time.
Also: Yes, the four Beta kids will show, I believe. :D I'll have to edit that Note in the first chapter. :B
I own nothing of Homestuck or Harry Potter. I am not making money from this, nor am I intending any copyright infringement.
Chapter 14:
Karkat sat up from the grass and turned to face his classmates, who were all laughing uproariously at him.
The air seemed to shimmer and bend slightly like a dream, and the hysterically screaming laughter was too loud in his auricular sponges. He blinked heavily and shook his head, dazed. One of his horns seemed to have taken a stingingly painful blow from the wall as well, but he couldn't really tell which, on account of his entire head throbbing with the pain that generally came with charging at unnatural speeds into perfectly solid surfaces.
He attempted to make a mental tally of surface injuries he seemed to be suffering, but wasn't sure exactly how many of them were from his collision with the wall, and how many of them were from tumbling headfirst down multiple magical flights of stairs.
"If there's a religion for asscakes who worship some gleefully sadistic figurehead that hands down physical torture for the crime of existing, I might as well find a f***king sign-up sheet at this point," he muttered under his breath, wobbling unsteadily to his feet and trying to keep the ground from twirling away into the sky.
"And that," proclaimed the Proffessor to the class, "is exactly how not to fly."
Which was of course met with a fresh wave of laughter.
Flying was a single time-unit class, so by the end of it, everyone put their broomsticks away and headed to the castle to begin their next set of lessons. Terezi led the way for the Griffindor trolls, snickering nonstop as Karkat occasionally tripped and bounced against Gamzee's shoulder.
"Wait, hold on," Karkat hissed, as Gamzee finally took the moirallegiance initiative and started steering him to the castle by the upper arm, "I have f***ing Herbology next. Just because I happened to have a free class period there doesn't mean I can go to all of your classes..."
"Aw, bro! That's what I have next! Ain't that a miracle?" Gamzee exclaimed happily.
"Sure, it's a miracle. Then why in the name of EVERYTHING THAT DOESN'T SPIT BLOODY PHLEGM IN THE FACE OF SANITY are you taking us both up to the castle?"
Gamzee looked down and stared very seriously at Karkat for a minute.
"Because, best motherf***ing friend, I gotta do what my miraculous little vascular pump thinks is best, and right now it's dictatin' to my feet that this is the way to go."
"Un f***ing believable," Karkat muttered, his vision swimming slightly.
Sollux Captor, Equius Zahhak, and Kanaya Maryam were meanwhile sitting in Transfiguration class, attempting to magic-ify the cute, fluffy, kittens in front of them into growing various extra body parts.
"No, Equius," Kanaya said patiently, "You're supposed to give it additional legs, not horse hooves."
Equius snorted slightly with irritation. He proceeded to glare the kitten in front of him, which was now galloping about in circles on its newfound hooves, and focused his attention on excreting yet another metric ton of sweat. Kanaya discreetly shifted away from him in her seat.
A tiny white kitten sat in front of Sollux and mewed at him, purring and pawing at the wand he was holding over its head like a guillotine. He stared contemplatively at the small creature for a few minutes, before waving his wand and causing tentacles to sprout from the cat's shoulders. It shrieked loudly, but whether it was with pain or surprise, he could not tell.
"I wouldn't be surprised if we went to hell just for this," he said to Kanaya, gesturing at the mutated kitten in front of him. It had started to hiss angrily and swat at its own tentacles. "This has got to be one of the most downright f***king heartless acts I've ever committed in all my lives."
The kitten Kanaya was working on, however, had grown a neat pair of eyes in its forehead and was now blinking contentedly at her, its black fur fluffed up in a sickening cloud of cuteness.
Kanaya scratched her mutant kitten behind the ears.
"Surely not. This one is absolutely adorable. Perhaps the teacher will allow me to keep it?"
"If you want a freak cat with extra ocular spheres embedded in its skull, go ahead and be my welcome guest. But I'm leaving Sir Tentacle Molestation right here so that I don't have to think about yet another crime I've committed against nature."
Equius glared with frustration-turned-facination at the cat-turned-miniature-horse prancing about on his desk.
Tavros glanced up from the messily-written page of notes in front of him and noticed that Feferi (who was sitting beside him), was falling asleep, her eyelids flickering as she attempted to keep them open, her head slowly sinking to her chest before bouncing back up, only to sink back down again. Then, the quill in her hand dropped to to the desk as her fingers went slack, and her head finally came to a rest on her own shoulder, her neck stretched to an angle that would surely leave an uncomfortable pinch in it when she awoke.
Not wanting her to get in trouble for falling asleep in broad daylight (understandable though it was), Tavros gently poked Feferi's side, trying to be as sneaky as possible about the gesture. Luckily, the Professor was in the process of handing out cups half-filled with oil, that the students would soon use to practice the Lighting Charm... Surely nothing would go up in explosive flames that day. It's not as though handing out glasses of highly flammable substances to a class full of incompletely trained wizards could possibly cause anything to go wrong.
Tavros gave Feferi another poke, but she merely mumbled something under her breath and turned her face a little more into her shoulder.
Panicking slightly at the approaching Flitwick and his tray of flammable fluid, Tavros quickly pushed Feferi's head upright with his elbow, grinning brightly. The teacher have him an odd look, placed a pair of cups on his desk, and continued on his way.
He pulled his elbow away and Feferi immediately slumped against him, snoring.
Feeling rather embarrassed and uncomfortable, Tavros sent an imploring look at the Hufflepuff student seated beside him. The look clearly stated, "Please! Help me! I beg of you!"
However, the student apparently interpreted the gaze as saying something along the lines of, "I'm going to chew bites out of your body and soul until you're nothing more than a bloody smear," and scooted away from Tavros in alarm.
A few minutes later, Feferi finally woke up when Tavros pinched one of her face-fins in a last-ditch attempt to get her to awake and take her lolling head off his shoulder.
In his hand was a thin strip of white light, which seemed to leave behind a shimmering trail in the darkness when he waved it. His fist clenched the wand tightly, watching the light spill through the cracks between his fingers.
Hell. This was a dream, wasn't it?
"Eridan?"
He turned around and saw Feferi, her eyes blank and white as the wand in his hand. Her face was lit only by the light of said wand, and the two of them were suspended in an infinite, cloudy darkness.
Fef? he wanted to say, but he opened his mouth and no words arrived.
But she smiled a little bit and reached out one hand toward him, hovering like a ghost.
"I'm sorry, Eridan. I've just wanted to get away from everything, I've been deluding myself. Deluding us all." She shook her head a little, as if to flick away unwanted thoughts, and retracted her hand. Her face and body rotated slowly in space, turning away from him and fading into the darkness.
"Fef, wwait!" He lunged forward and grabbed her by the arm. She didn't so much as twitch in reaction.
"I'm so f***in sorry, Fef, I'm so sorry, I knoww you can't forgivve me, I'm such a f***-up, and there's no wway..."
His voice died in his throat as she turned back to face him. Her eyes were blank, blank as death, and suddenly she vanished, leaving a flood of magenta blood spurting across his skin. He snatched his bloody hand back with a cry, letting go of the wand in his other hand, which spun away into the abyss below him, trailing pure light, but it was soon swallowed by darkness and he was alone.
TWACK!
Someone had smacked his skull hard with a heavy History textbook.
Eridan lifted his face from his desk sharply, his skin peeling away from the surface with a painful stinging sensation. And the fins on the left-hand side of his face had gone entirely numb. He touched the fins gingerly, and they tingled oddly. Wwoww f*** that felt wweird.
He looked about, trying to figure out who'd thrown the textbook. The teacher seemed completely oblivious to the sudden textbook-drubbing incident, and none of the students around him seemed to at all aware of their surroundings. Anyone who was still sitting upright was staring at the ceiling with glassy-eyed stares, their mouths wide open and drooling. Suddenly, there was a bought of snickering from the back of the classroom. Whipping around, he glared at the pair of ugly humans and bared his sharp teeth at them, but this only seemed to increase their mirth.
Seriously, literally every single other student in his classroom was blatantly sprawled across their desks and snoring heavily, but the scrawny little wrigglers just had to single him out to use as a textbook-target? They must have a grudge against trolls, just like every other stupid human in this crackpot castle.
The teacher continued to drone on, still resolutely oblivious. Snarling under his breath, Eridan dug his wand out of his pocket and turned bodily around in his seat, holding it out in front of him. The kids were still giggling, the snarky little assholes. He was about to blow them into the next millennium, but then reconsidered.
Blank eyes. Magenta blood.
I'm sorry, Eridan.
He held the wand up high. He didn't have to kill them. Just scare them shitless.
A moment later, he swung his wand down, and the desk the two students were sitting at exploded into white flames. Melodious screaming ensued, and Eridan stuffed his wand back into his pocket and fell face-first against the desk in faked sleep as the teacher finally looked up from his lecture notes and drowsily berated the students in the back for not paying due attention to righteous Historical Facts. He smiled into the crook of his arm.
Revvenge wwas f***in' swweet.
Maybe the rest of the students would admire him for giving them the least boring History of Magic lesson they would experience in their entire lives. There was nothing like a little fire to spice things up.
Who was he kidding. Admiration. The day he got admiration would be the day something infinitely more substantial than a desk exploded in a ball of fire. Maybe blowing up the planet would get him some attention.
Then again, maybe not.
And Now With Draco Malfoy (Yes He Does Still Do Things) In Seventh-Year Double Potions With Gryffindors:
On the chalkboard at the front of the classroom were written the words:
Day one Pre-Evaluation: Concoct, to the best of your ability, a potion that will improve nighttime vision.
As Draco started laying out potions ingredients on his table, he could hear a certain group of Gryffindors complaining very loudly about the lack of definitive instructions on the chalkboard. Tuning them out, Draco pulled out a sheet of parchment and a quill, and began to make notes to himself. Eyesight was a tricky thing... could nightshade work in small doses with an antidote? But it wasn't hallucinations they were looking for, it was actual magical modification of the functioning of the eye's light receptors. So dried root of karoton? And maybe if he could use a targeted poison to accelerate the body's chemical processes...
Draco glanced up, and noticed that most of the students were still in varying stages of gaping at the board, complaining, and setting up ingredients. Only Granger appeared to be doing anything of actual worth - she, like him, was scribbling furiously on a clean piece of parchment. That was a good sign. As much as he hated to admit it, everybody with a brain worth two knuts knew that if you were doing what Hermione was doing, you were that much closer to aceing the class.
By the time class was half up, the students who hadn't started already had begun to throw random ingredients into the bottom of their cauldron with the hope that something good would come of it. Many of them were trying to copy Granger (unsuccessfully, as she was notoriously uptight about self-integrity), which still bothered Draco immensely. But at least nobody's cauldron was exploding yet. After seven years of experience, it would seem as though everyone had enough sense to avoid complete meltdowns.
BANG!
Draco cut up a karoton root and rolled his eyes. Apparently he'd been wrong. Big surprise.
He tipped the roots into his cauldron and took another look at his notes. Really, he didn't see what Slughorn was looking for in these potions. They were all bound to be disastrous or worse. The best anyone could hope for was that they assembled the most intelligent array of ingredients and theories possible.
Fifteen minutes until class was over, and the potion in front of Draco had not done anything unexpected except turn a sudden shade of hot pink. He quickly threw in a speck of mint (usually harmless), in the hope that he wouldn't have to turn in something so painfully girly. It immediately turned dark green. Thank God. From the other side of the class, however, a voice yelped with surprise. He glanced up.
Weasley, through some miraculous combination of ingredients, had produced a pot of resolutely gelatinous and luminous green slime. Everything else he tried to add in simply floated on top, refusing to blend in. Even Potter was holding back laughs and bouncing small lumps of ragweed against the top of his friend's potion.
Yeah, that was a bad sign. Sucks to be him.
Feeling much better about his day in general, Draco turned back to his own potion and kept working.
"Alright then everybody!" Slughorn boomed, five minutes before the end of the period, "Bring up a sample of your potion and any notes you wrote about how you made it!" A few students glanced at each other in panic and ripped out clean sheets of parchment. Draco sneered at them. Idiots.
Just then, the door of the dungen slammed open behind them, and everybody turned in their seats to stare at who'd arrived.
Gamzee Makara strode in at a leisurely pace, carrying what appeared to be an unconscious Karkat Vantas on his back, and walked up the rows until he stopped beside Ron Weasley, who'd been just about to vanish the remainder his miserable cauldronful of green goo.
"Excuse me?" Slughorn asked, "What is your business here, young man?"
Makara tore his gaze away from Ron's cauldron to glance up at the Professor. He then hitched up the slowly slipping troll on his back, smiled, and said,
"MoThErF***InG mIrAcLeS, sIr."
And without another word, he picked up Ron's cauldron in one hand and casually walked out the way he'd come.
Simultaneously:
"And how the f*** do you know they'll be here today?" Karkat snapped, crossing his arms, "We've been waiting here for AGES."
"Tomorrow's newspaper!" Aradia said cheerfully, holding up said newspaper.
"OF COURSE. HOW COULD I HAVE NOT THOUGHT OF THAT?" he shouted, slapping himself sharply in the forehead.
"Just to be clear," Rose said calmly, "This newspaper is from tomorrow, if we take the reference point of 'today' to be this day, the one in the past we are currently standing in, is that correct?"
"OBVIOUSLY," said Karkat with exasperation, rolling his eyes hard enough to strain muscles all the way down to his toes, "And why are you even asking questions? I thought you were the high f***ing mighty SEER who apparently KNOWS EVERYTHING TO COME?"
Rose leaned against a clean patch of alley wall and raised one eyebrow with the utmost delicacy.
"I was merely phrasing something I knew to be fact in the pretense of a question, for your comfort of course. You were complaining of the way I was speaking my knowledge absolutely, so I believed that using an audible question mark would help ease your discomfort. Apparently I was... mistaken. I continue to overestimate your intelligence at an alarming frequency, but that is to be expected."
Karkat glared at her for a few moments.
"I see what you did there, don't pretend like you think I didn't. Stop f***ing trying to make me... no, PRETEND to make me prove my stupidity. Stop it with the psychiatrist baby-time mindgames, it gets REALLY F***ING OLD. How about I say this in a way that you OBVIOUSLY 'SEER' COMING, and you just shove your voice spout up your f***ing smug little pustule of a nook?"
"Karkat, now is not the time for black banter," Kanaya said, glancing over her shoulder at the busy street behind them.
"As much as I don't appreciate your unnecessary auspitizing, I really just dislike Rose. There is such a thing as intense, non-calignious dislike."
"And you're living proof of that, aren't you Karkat?" Rose cut in snidely, "Otherwise you'd be flirting up the whole world with that demeanor."
"Damn f***ing straight. Now shut that ugly little mouth so we can-"
"GUYS!" Aradia hissed, "Come on, it's time!"
Later That Day, Gryffindor Common Room:
After having a nice, slave-cooked, wholesome dinner, Harry, Ron, and Hermione clambered through the portrait-hole and made a beeline for their usual seats by the fireplace.
Already sitting there were Karkat and Nepeta. The former appeared to be sleeping, and the latter was holding a half-filled cauldron in her lap and was pouring spoonfuls of green potion over Karkat's face at odd intervals of time. She glanced up and smiled as they flopped down in the armchairs around her, and dribbled some more slime over his eyes.
The three humans stared at the spectacle for a moment, and then looked at each other questioningly. Ron shrugged.
"Nepeta, is that Ron's cauldron?" Harry asked calmly, pulling out a textbook from his bag and cracking it open.
"Oh, pawssibly. Gamzee just told me to keep the slime on Karkat's face."
"And where did Gamzee go?" Hermione asked, looking slightly worried.
Nepeta shrugged and dipped the spoon back into the slime.
"I thought you trolls had issues with buckets? Why aren't you afraid of the cauldron?" Ron asked, watching Nepeta ladle the potion and dump it on Karkat's face again. Harry shot him an alarmed look.
She shrugged. "Equius wouldn't tell me about what pails are for," she said, eyes wide and innocent.
"Figures," snorted Ron.
And then the group settled down to do some studying. After a few hours of glorious productivity, Karkat woke up suddenly and jerked upright in his seat, spitting green slime over everybody's homework. Hermione heaved a sigh and cleaned it off with a spell.
Karkat wiped his face off roughly with the sleeve of his robe and glanced around at Nepeta, his gaze falling to the almost-exhausted cauldron of slime in her lap. She smiled brightly at him.
"Nepeta. Were you just taking Sopor Slime out of a PAIL and pouring it on my FACE?" he demanded, voice wavering between deadly quiet and hysterically loud.
("Here we go," Ron whispered to Harry from the corner of his mouth, "Five silver sickles that he busts someone's eardrum."
"In the next thirty seconds? You're on," Harry whispered back.)
"Gamzee said I should. I think he drank half of it first, though."
For about twenty seconds, a vein pulsed hard in Karkat's temple as he fought down a scream. He then let out an extended wheeze and shook his head hard.
"F***ing typical. Where did he even get Sopor?" he growled, managing to keep his voice down.
(With great reluctance, Ron dug five sickles from his pocket and handed it over to Harry. Hermione looked on with great disapproval. "Next thirty seconds?" Ron asked. Harry nodded, grinning like a person who thinks he's got a sucker on the line.)
"I brewed it by accident in Potions class," said Ron.
"Can I have the recipe?" Karkat asked calmly, taking the cauldron from Nepeta and examining its contents.
Ron glanced at Harry, and then glanced back to Karkat.
"Er...? What? Huh? I don't..."
"DO YOU NEED ME TO F***ING SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU, WORD BY F***ING WORD? IS YOUR THINK PAN COMPOSED OF CRYSTALLIZED ESSENCE OF DUMBASS ON A PLATTER OF SHIT?"
("That's cheating," Harry whispered, and unhappily flicked the sickles back over to Ron, who pocketed them with joy.)
"I mean, yeah, sure, you can have the recipe. Why though?"
"It suppresses nightmares and horrorterrors if you sleep in it," Karkat said.
"...Sleep in it?"
He gave Ron the most withering glare ever glared by any mortal, and Ron made an intelligent choice: he shut up.
Hermione, however, made the opposite choice. For a long time now, she'd kept quiet, as though mulling over how to enter the conversation, and now she seemed to have decided to simply interject.
"Karkat, what happened before breakfast today, between you and McGonagall and Filch? Why was there blood on your sickles?"
He squinted at her slightly, as though trying to figure out what she was saying. A moment later, his expression cleared.
"That's right, I forgot to clean them." He pulled the sickles out from thin air and examined the still-wet blades. Hermione breathed in sharply.
He calmly wiped the blades off on the arms of the armchair. "Anyway, I was walking around last night and got cornered in a room by this crazy old human and his mangy little cat. It was weird. I'd been lost, and the room appearified out of f***ing nowhere on the wall, and inside was this map of the castle." He let go of the sickles and they vanished before they fell to the floor. A moment later, Karkat pulled a card down from above his head and violently shook a neatly folded sheet of parchment out of it, which fluttered to the floor. Replacing the card into thin air, he picked up the parchment and held it up for everyone to see. Delicate lines of ink spiderwebbed across its surface, depicting a detailed map of the castle's floor plan.
"Wait," Harry inturrupted, "This room, was it on the seventh floor? Across the hall from a tapestry of dancing trolls?"
"Yes?"
Harry let out a disbelieving laugh and held up one hand to high-five the troll. Karkat looked at the palm quizzically, and then glanced over at the other humans as though asking for instructions. Still snorting, Harry dropped his palm and shook his head, clearly impressed. Ron's eyes suddenly widened, and he glanced over at Hermione.
"Hermione, he's talking about the Room of Requirement!"
"I know," she snapped, clearly not distracted from her question, "But-"
"That has got to be some kind of record," Harry laughed, "You stumbled across the Room of Requirement on your first night after classes. Holy F***!"
"Harry. Language!" Hermione snapped. He waved his hand at her in a shooshing motion.
"That's one of the magical jackpots of this school, Karkat. The Room of Requirement will give you just about anything you ask it to, if you just walk in front of it three times thinking of what it is you want. And you found it on your first-" He burst into another round of disbelieving snickers.
"Yes, Harry, that's all very interesting, but please be quiet and let him finish," Hermione snapped.
Karkat shrugged. "There's not very much to tell. The old human waited for me to come out all night, and by morning, I'd had enough of the boredom chamber and made a break for it. Of course, he caught me after I f***ing fell down half a billion flights of stairs..."
He pulled a disgusted expression and gingerly touched a greyish bruise on his cheekbone.
"This is just classic," Ron said in awe, "Fred and George would've been jealous as hell."
"I tried to escape from his dumbf*** ugly bulgeass face, like any sane person would, but he f***ing trips me with a broomstick so I pull my sickles on him. I nearly did get away, too. But then McGonagall snuck up behind me like some wrinkled old ninja from hell, and you know..." he waved his hand a bit in the air "Punishment, ect, you know the rest..." He paused for a moment. "Well, f***."
"What?" Ron asked, stifling snorts of mirth.
"I've got detention with Filch for a month. What does that mean?"
Ron fought down another laugh. "It means you're neck-deep in what we here on Planet Earth like to call, 'shit.'"
"You need to see Filch in his office right away! Use your map," Hermione instructed, "And go!"
Groaning irritably, Karkat got to his feet and left the common room.
Terezi opened the common room portrait-hole and immediately came eye-to-nose with Karkat.
"H3LLO NUB3TT3! Smelling delicious as always."
"Terezi. I'm ordering you to cut out those f***ing useless, irritating, pan-crushing nicknames. And yes, you heard me, that's an order."
She grinned at him widely in a way that communicated her all-consuming interest in disobeying his orders. Seeing this, Karkat sighed and nudged her to the side of the portrait-hole.
"Okay, nevermind," he snarled, "Just let me through."
He pushed passed her and started down the hallway.
Terezi traipsed happily into the common room and inhaled deeply. She LOV3D this room. It was just so delectably red. And where the candy walls and soft squishy seating arrangements were obscured by human bodies, those human bodies were covered neck to toe in mouth-watering black licorice. Man, this was the life. It was a f***ing candy store up in here.
She suddenly heard her name called from across the room, and immediately made her way over to the fireplace.
"Hehehe, hello there everybody!" she greeted, leaning on her cane and giving a nod each to Nepeta, Harry, Hermione, and Ron.
"Terezi," Hermione started seriously, "I would have preferred to have this discussion with as many trolls as possible present, but seeing as Karkat is unavailable and Gamzee is unlikely to show up anytime soon, we should probably start anyway... Besides, it's probably better to have this discussion first outside of Gamzee's presence."
"Huh?" asked Harry and Ron, clearly not in on Hermione's plans.
She ignored them. "Yesterday I received a book from Luna Lovegood; it was a thick black book with a variety of what appeared to be colored paint spattered across it. Upon further inspection, however, the paint proved to be blood."
She paused, probably for dramatic effect, and ran one hand through excited mane of chocolate hair. Nepeta shifted uncomfortably in her seat and let out an almost inaudible mew. The humans didn't seem to notice, but Terezi's fine olfactory senses could scent guilt from light years away, and her cute little kitten friend reeked of it. Terezi grinned. This was bound to get interesting sooner or later.
"Every color on the hemospectrum you described was represented, and Karkat's mutant color as well. However, there was no indigo blood on this book. Inside was about a hundred pages covered in the word HONK, and then the rest were filled with computer-generated photograph frames and pages of text, apparently documenting the lives of you trolls, as well as a group of humans."
Hermione allowed another dramatic pause.
"However, last night the book vanished from my beside table, and I have not been able to find it. I attempted a Summoning spell, but it did not seem to work. So, I have two questions for you, Terezi and Nepeta." She held up two fingers. "One: what do you know of this book, and two: do you know where it is?"
Terezi sniffed. Nepeta had sunken deep into the squishy cherry cushions of her armchair, and was silently stewing with discomfort, guilt, and worry.
Grinning, Terezi took the initiative to explain, "Hehe, you have nothing to worry about, Hermione. That book was probably from a Doomed timeline or something. We haven't all been ravaged by a batshit Makara, I assure you."
"Doomed timeline?" Hermione asked, confused.
"It was an aspect of the game we all played. Doomed timelines existed to support the main one in various ways, and to allow for any number of disastrous things to occur without permanently affecting the Alpha timeline. Hehe, pretty convenient if you ask me! If in one of them, our dear, sweet Gamzee happened to go randomly insane and kill everybody in sight, it probably just means that I did the same thing in another! Actually, the existence of this book is comforting."
"Comforting?" the humans exclaimed. Both Harry and Hermione were starting to look a little worried, but Ron, surprisingly, seemed to be taking things in stride.
"Yep. HONK is a section of the genetic code of our planet's first guardian. I myself contributed HEAD, Vriska contributed BREAK, Aradia TOCK, and Tavros TICK. We only found out about this very late in the game, from Aradia in the Dream Bubbles in the Outer Rim, but basically it's just another paradox to ensure the closure of a smooth, uninterrupted time loop that could not exist otherwise. You don't have to worry about it, seriously."
Terezi noticed that Nepeta had relaxed a bit. Interesting. She knew something about this book, and was relieved to see the humans being placated.
"But..." Hermione's voice dropped a little, "What about all the pictures inside? There was so much bloodshed between you trolls." She pulled out a picture from her bag, and showed Terezi the image of Kanaya sawing Eridan in half.
Terezi took the picture and dragged her tongue across it, tasting the burst of grapes and smooth, green basil. Almost immediately she started to laugh.
"H3H3H3H3H3H3H3 HOLY F***, K4N4Y4? Man, this is hilarious! I'm so sorry to have missed seeing that! Look at all that grape purée! Hehehehehe!"
Hermione and Harry were now looking quite alarmed.
Giggling, Terezi handed back the image. "Hermione, don't waste your time worrying about it. I understand that you humans don't have the same upbringing that we do. A few wrigglers flinging chainsaws at each other is nothing. If you're worried that we're going to kill you..."
She paused, and then snorted again with laughter.
"Hehe. Seriously, just because a couple of us are liable to be a little trigger-happy doesn't mean we're out to get you in your sleep. If you're scared, just don't engage in any kissmessitudes or initiate any violence and you're good to go."
"But..."
"You probably don't have anything to worry about," she said firmly, and got to her feet. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some interrogation to do. Don't come into the dormitories if you hear tortured screaming or anything."
She grabbed Nepeta by the hand and started to drag the girl upstairs. She then stopped, turned around, and took a good whiff at the terrified looks on the humans' faces.
"Jegus, that was a f***ing joke. Grow up and get a sense of humor. Come on, Nepeta."
End of Chapter 14
Note: It was strange. About halfway through the words started to peter out. NOOOOOOOO. But we're good now.
I think I might have gone overboard with Rose. Oh whelp. Sorry if it's confusing.
I'm not sure if I'll be able to update again very soon, sorry. D: Lots of stuff irl, you know the drill.
But yes. Thank you to everybody in general. :D You have no idea how joyous I am to have so many of you reading. This story has hit OVER 9,000! hits, and it's soon to cross the 10,000 threshold. Holy almighty shit. I don't even know anymore. It's mindblowing. So thanks to all of you. :'D
Review? :D
Also, thank you anon for pointing out the felonious OOC of dear Professor Bins. It has been rectified. May such a sin never be committed again.