Rose gathered her breath, her energy and her carefully prepared script. "Jade..."

"Not set up yet!" Jade interrupted. Rose rolled her eyes, only to find a stuffed jellyfish shoved in front of them. Jade shook the mess of tentacles in her face. Rose laid further back into the protective, plush embrace of the dolls she used as bedding, fully aware that some of them were jellyfish as well.

"Do I... have to?"

"Uh huh!"

Rose looked about. All these dolls looked the same to her. "...All right, where's the other one?"

"Right there!" Jade said, pointing with the Squiddle. She and Rose were lying on opposite ends of the plush pile, head-to-head not unlike the night Rose had slept in Gamzee's horn pile with he and Terezi. Jade's pile was simply too small to facilitate a face-to-face conversation. Rose plucked up the other Squiddle doll and lifted it over her own head. Between the two girls' heads, the dolls met in a tangle of limbs, magic and the violent crack of two earth magnets strong enough to sever a finger between them.

"I cannot believe you're still putting stock in these... things," Rose said. She settled an arm behind her head as a pillow. Jade settled down the Tangle Buddies on the peak of the pile, but they tried to roll down at once. Rose spent Jade's multiple attempts elaborating. "Considering what they were a part of I would give them a much wider berth."

Jade had begun digging the Squiddle couple a small cup at the top of the pile to hold them still. "Rose, maybe you were too busy pointing out what's wrong with my shows, but the Squiddles were still the good guys at the end of the episode!"

"Hardly the point, they were produced by the exact same team with the exact same intent!"

"Shhhhh..." Jade cooed, her prize's purchase secured. She reached about Tangle Peak and took the hand Rose had already tied up behind her head. "Only trust now."

Rose wondered if intentionally dislodging the Tangle Buddies would get her out of this ridiculous physical position. "You still think this is about me, don't you?"

"Isn't it, Rose?" Jade patted Rose's palm with the tips of her fingers. "Sometimes we repress our personal problems by pressing them off onto others! Why don't you tell me about it? From the beginning."

Rose was not so stubborn as to miss that she was trapped in a hole of her own digging. "At what point in this psychoanalytical farce does Strider burst out of your closet with a coolly timed 'I told you so?'"

"I'm not here to judge, Rose!" Jade said, almost muffling her initial giggle.

Rose sighed. "I'll try again. Have you talked to Terezi lately?"

The motion in the pile implied that Jade had shrugged. "Sort of. I went to visit Gamzee and she was reading him a fairy tale that ended: 'And then the big Troll ate all the children.'"

"Yes. A lot of them end like that, actually." Rose had perused a few during a previous visit to Terezi's room. "Most of them. As a matter of fact... Look, that's not the point. I guess I have to step back. You know how Terezi and I hang out sometimes, right?"

"Oh yeah!" Jade said. "How's that going?"

"It's... fine?" Rose vaguely recalled having once attempted to psychoanalyze Jade's behaviour considering that she had been raised by a dog, and had concluded that Jade's attention span was indicative. Now it was just annoying.

"That's good, because she still seems really down. She needs a good friend."

Because I almost killed her other friend, Rose thought. Pushing her self-doubt aside, she realized she had lost her original approach and so staggered: "You noticed that too?"

"Yeah," Jade said. "It's been weeks since I was charged with anything more than jaywalking. I'm still not sure how that works! Could you ask her?" Rose shook her head. "So what's the matter? Do you know?"

Rose was not about to violate a associate's confidences, but the subject was not so divorced from the one she actually wanted to discuss. "Terezi's mood isn't actually recent. She started being upset when she and Dave... broke up."

"'Broke up?'" Jade propped up on her elbows to look over the Squiddles. "I didn't know they were going out. It explains a lot, though."

How to approach this? Rose was no teacher, certainly not about extra-terrestrial relationships. Karkat should be the one doing the talking, though preferably with a less personal example than that of Terezi and Dave. "...The short way to put it is that Terezi was getting the wrong signals just when she and Karkat were having trouble. Dave must have looked like a great opportunity, to hook up with an interested friend. I-I... I told him to talk to her, and by the sounds of it, it went badly."

"Oh no, Rose! Don't feel bad!" Jade rolled over entirely and sat a comforting hand on her friend's shoulder. "And let's be serious: that was probably Dave's fault."

Rose laughed. "Poor Strider. Cool and nonchalant is not a good break-up attitude. Especially if you don't realize what's happening. ...So back to that." Could she just say it? "Jade, Trolls don't tend to have long-term friends."

Jade returned to her back with a thwump. "Uh-huh!"

"But what they do have is short-term, 'trial' relationships." Rose swallowed, dreading a reaction that did not come. "Like me and Kanaya," she added for clarification. "We were friends for a while until... well, 'finally,' we picked a quadrant."

"Ooh, how is that going, by the way?"

Since she was on her back, Jade had left Rose with no target to swat with the newspaper she wished she had on-hand. "We're both fine!" Rose said, trying to sound more cheerful than exasperated. "But tha-"

"That's great!" Jade interrupted without realizing it. "You're spending lots of time together, and we're all really happy for you! Have you kissed yet? Rose..." Jade threw an arm back over her shoulder, landing atop a pile of rag dolls just aside from Rose. "Now I know that you're not me! But I think, knowing you, that kissing would be a big step in your relationship, so I understand if you'd be nervous!"

"Jade..." Your friend loves you. You're not allowed to be mad just because she loves you.

"But I want you to know," Jade said, the very sound of honesty in her voice. "I want you to know that when you're both ready and you do kiss, I think - and I haven't been there! - I think that you'll both be so happy about it! And you'll be at a new level, you know! And you can express your emotions in a whole new way that you totally couldn't before, and I think that's really-"

"Jade!" Rose was blushing and glad the lighting was not bright enough to let Jade see. As accurate as it would be to say that she had her girlfriend had not kissed, Rose had a an intimate set of memories - Kanaya's perfume, the brush of bladed teeth just, precisely off of the skin of Rose's neck, another conversation bled off into murmurs - that said Jade was still as psychic as ever. "Thank you, but this isn't about me and Kan!"

"Okay, Rose," Jade said, not exactly offended by a little put-off. Rose reached up and brushed at Jade's hair. "I'm just trying to be here for you when we get to the real problem, whatever it is."

Ugh. Rose retracted her hand, and Jade took that as a sign to once more return to the opposite side of the pile. "My point is: Terezi thought she had a trial friendship with Dave, that had progressed to matespritship. I know, because she has one with me and with Gamzee, too."

"Really? You and Terezi?" Jade seemed to ponder this for a moment. Rose could not blame her when she asked the obvious question. "Do you...?"

Rose already had her answer, though she wished it could be more concrete. "Not yet." It had been a month since the hot dogs, not indistinct from Terezi and Dave's relationship, but Karkat's films told Rose she had a much longer timeframe if she did not send mixed signals, and she had done her best. "I mean, I already have a matesprit, and I'm not attracted to Terezi, per se. As for the rest... well, that's what the friendship is for. And right now, that's what we both want."

Jade seemed to agree and understand, so Rose did not go deeper into it, except to jump to the end. "But one day," she said, "if we don't find a quadrant, we're going to have to... say, well, goodbye."

Silence: not out of shock but simply because Jade had applied her own leash. She rolled over again. "Is that... what's bothering you?"

"Sort of," Rose admitted, in that it was something that bothered her. Her mind stuck on the image of dominant Terezi on the roof of the lab, brought low by the primal fear of her species at being left for the Drones, twisted to Jack. Rose knew that it would bother her for some time yet.

Jade's hand was soon back by Rose's side. "Rose... not all the Trolls feel that way, you know. About friends. Karkat has a bunch of friends, and..."

Rose, hearing a waver on her friend's voice, reciprocated her gesture by setting her hand over her head and into hers. "Jade, this isn't about me." She turned her head up to meet Jade's quivering green eyes, inverted but obvious as ever. "I think... I mean, I'm not sure and I just wanted you to be aware, unlike Dave, but..."

"Oh nooo..." Jade made a whimpering sound and fell away to bury her face in the pile. Only her hand remained, clutched in Rose's. "Are you sure?"

"N-no, 'I'm not sure'!" Rose repeated. "Have you ever talked about this with Nepeta?"

"No!" Jade squeaked. "I mean... maybe she licked me, once? On the cheek? That just seemed like the sort of thing she would do! And then she gave me this look. It was the sort of look Bec used to give me if I had something new and he was trying to figure out if he could play with it? Except..."

"Except when you didn't go with it, she just backed off like nothing happened?"

Jade seemed to nod. "Yeah."

"That's a cat thing," Rose confirmed with a nod. "It means... well, it's just something they do." Rose could clearly picture Jaspers tumbling to the ground with a carton of milk, scattering down the hall and then bathing with the utter nonchalance only a cat could manage. She decided she did not want to press in that it was that look cats only put on such a cover for a mistake.

Jade was already having trouble enough on her own. "Why wouldn't she tell me about this?"

"Well..." Rose said, "maybe she's just concerned for your feelings?" Or maybe she doesn't know you don't know, like Terezi. "Jade..." Rose clutched at her friend's hand until she had her full attention, which did not happen all at once.

"Rose, what am I gonna do? I don't want to stop being her friend! Nepeta's really fun! And I love hanging out with her, and I know you guys don't like the same stuff we do. But she already has a moirail, and she loves him and I don't hate her or... or... and I still don't even know what an auspistice even is!"

Jade calmed down after that outburst, and so Rose took her opportunity. "I know you're not ready to date right now, Jade, not right this minute, but... is there any chance that you might... maybe...?"

Jade's response, this time completely face-down into the dolls, almost sounded like words.

"Pardon?"

Jade sulked, and replied only above a mumble. "...I don't like girls. Ugh." She returned to the pile. "I'm the only one in existence who doesn't like girls."

Rose, who had once worried what sort of passive-aggressive response her mother would have in store for her sexuality, found this inversion not entirely disagreeable. Still, Jade was her friend. "Well that's just not true," Rose said, before further thought proved her quite wrong. "There's... Jack?"

"No, Jack had a girlfriend," Jade said, to Rose astonishment. "Karkat told me."

"Well is that still true?" Rose asked, the question now a riddle begging for an answer. "Since he's a demon now. What about Bec? Did he like girl dogs or was his being a First Guardian-"

"No, that didn't change anything. Remember?" Jade interrupted, and then simply reminded: "Doc Scratch liked girls."

"Oh," Rose said, and she and Jade shuddered as one, the pile shaking about them.

"But that's not the point!" Jade threw up her free arm in disgust, and Rose wondered if she was now feeling the pain she had cast on Rose earlier in the conversation. Before Jade could elaborate, the door slid open.

"Hey girls!" said John as he stepped in, all grin and preparation. "What's up?"

Jade sniffled. "Nepeta's going to stop being friends with me because I'm not attracted to her and there's nothing I can do!"

It took Rose a while to bleed out any of Jade's unintended references to emotional blackmail. For what it was worth, by the time she had finished, John was fully informed.

"Well geeze," he said, fully embodying the decisiveness that made him their leader. "I don't know what to say at all!"

Neither did Rose, at least as far as Nepeta was concerned, but as to her panicking friend she did have a potential remedy. "Well..." she said to John, "if you want to help, you can't start until you join the feelings jam and touch the Trust Squiddles."

"I... buh? Can't I just..."

But Jade laughed, and that made it worth it. "Ah, ah, ah! Touch the Trust Squiddles! Touch 'em!" She pointed, and John responded with nothing but his standard, adorable bafflement. "Iiiii said touch 'em!"

Instructions followed, John came to settle in, and with his lead they began to explore hypothetical dead end after dead end. An hour passed, and the lights in the Humans' chambers dimmed to encourage a day/night cycle.

"The way I see it," John said, "right now, you and Nepeta are still buddies, and that's important on its own! And when you're ready, you should talk it out and... well..."

They were deflated, drained by the lack of so many failed exists, and lay in their exhaustion. John laughed. "I guess... I don't really know how this works, huh?"

"You're doing fine, John," Rose said. She tapped on the pile beside him. On the other side of the Trust Squiddles, she heard Jade do the same. "I suppose none of us really know how to approach these sorts of romantic situations. It was the sort of thing we would have expected to learn from our parents."

Jade gave a soft affirmative, then a sigh, as deep as any of the ones she had given at the head of the hour.

"Yeah," John said. "I mean, my Dad wouldn't have understood all the Troll stuff... and if he did, he'd probably try to explain it with cruellers. But he'd still know what to say."

"I suppose we always figured our parents would be here for these early, interpersonal steps," Rose said. "I, for one, always expected my Mother to address the subject of my first date or major teenaged sleepover by mining the house with hidden caches of beers and coloured liquors, to chide the typical adolescent's desire to sneak some for such an occasion. My prepared counterattack was to reorganize the bottles in a chromatic structure, perhaps a pyramid, while consuming some between myself and my date. Well below the legal limit, of course, or I'd ruin my point. Naturally she would leave us unsupervised to achieve the same effect, so if my date consented I would respond with a closed circuit recording of the two of us having a contact-free evening of polite and pleasant conversation over dinner."

Jade whistled out a low note. "Wow, I was never going to bring a boy to my house. Date or otherwise. No offense, John, but Grandpa would have wanted you to meet The Houseguests. And Bec would probably teleport you to the Sahara just to be protective."

"Yeah," John said, taking it all with a laugh. "Those are totally second date things!"

Rose agreed. "Deserts are strictly fourth for me."

"I'm not much better," John said. "I bet, if I had ever brought a girl home, Dad would have baked a cake to welcome her to the family." Rose and Jade both laughed at that, so he insisted: "I'm serious! He had a wedding cake recipe and he was itching to use it!"

Rose smirked at the ceiling. "And imagine Dave's Bro?"

"Oh my gog," Jade said, and scoffed. "She wouldn't know if he liked her or not for years!"

"It's a beautiful June day," John said, to paint a scene, "we're all trying to get some sleep before we dress up and start getting ready for the wedding, when Dave's fiance's door opens a crack and zing!. Ninja star in the pillow. And she meets his eyes, and he meets hers, and then Bro is like: '...something borrowed.' And he shuts the door!"

Jade stopped laughing long enough to add her own touch: "And then goes to dress Cal up in a little suit!"

"Ugh, not the doll!" Rose protested. "Don't get me wrong, I would have gone. But of all of our houses, I'd take mummfied house guests and cheese danishes over that doll showing up in the bathroom in the middle of the night."

"Or staring out of the trash can," John suggested.

"Or," Jade said, "he could have come to one of our houses, and his Bro would have somehow packed Cal in Dave's bag!"

And they all laughed. Rose could not help but be a little proud at how they had grown into their new world so well that they had set aside the niggling fact that, once upon a childhood imagining, the "he"s and "her"s in these examples might have had very familiar names indeed. Instead they laughed as friends, united in the eccentricities of their Guardians, who they had always known would have plagued them deep into adulthood. Then, all at once, John stopped and shattered it with a question.

"...Now what'll we do without them?"

And then no one knew what to say. Still reigned, and for some time the only sign that they were together was Jade's persistent hands, outstretched toward her friends for comfort. Rose and John took one and extending the same to one another; a circle about the dolls. A happy tour of the past had crashed into the harsher present, and Rose tried to murder the fact that she had last seen her mother's face worn by a demon.

"Does... anyone wanna talk about it?" Jade asked. "I'll go. I mean, I guess I always knew we were gonna play the game... and I guess I knew a few things that would happen, but... well... I guess I figured that when the game was done, Earth would go back to normal, and... I'd have Bec back, if something went wrong? And you'd all have any other friends? And..." Rose passed a squeeze along her friend's hand, but that was never going to help her find the words, which she only did in her own time. "But they were never going to come back, were they?"

John shook his head. "Not Earth. Not our friends. Not our parents."

"Wishful thinking," Rose said. "I suppose we were allowed to hope."

"Where's Dave?" John said suddenly, sounding just a little like he was covering up a choke on his voice. "I'm pretty sure he should be here being sad too!"

Rose and Jade laughed, just once. Dave was assuredly out on patrol, however, and Rose did not know if Jade knew and was not going to risk telling her. Still, she thought. He and Aradia are out there day after day. "He's still hoping," she said. John, who understood, chuckled, but Jade, who did not follow, started to cry. "Oh no... Jade..."

It didn't take all that long to coax Jade back to calm, just hugs and a few comparisons to her shimmering, green spriteself, who was remembered with far less fondness and only earned Rose a glare. But she stopped crying, and soon John had coaxed out a smile with a poor magic trick performed with a set of Alternian cards.

"Karkat said our cards were porn, Rose!" he said when she inquired. "And I don't get it, because like, it's just the relationship's sign, right? I don't get all flustered if I see someone going by 'Mr.' and/or 'Mrs.'"

"I'm more surprised by your backing down," Rose said. "It shows either a submissive relationship towards Karkat or a rather juvenile fear of being associated with sexuality!"

"Or as Dave would put it," Jade said, "you're a pussy, John!"

John, deciding to feign utter terror at her choice of adjective, and Jade took the opportunity to playact Dave. And while Rose could not help but laugh as she watched them, a tear slipped out of her eye to see them play. It was the laughter, not the pain that choked it out. Watching her friends being idiots together was a luxury she had once only imagined. Somehow, past death and ruin, the meeting she and her online friends had once hoped and begged for had snuck up on them, unawares.

As evening drew to its formal close, the lights as dim as they were going to get, conversation slipped back to Rose.

"So what's it like, really?" Discussion of scam artists in the Anthropomorphic Fauna community had somehow led to Vriska. John clarified. "Auspistizing her?"

"Auspisticing," Rose corrected. "And if I may be eloquent: 'Ugggh.'"

"That bad?"

"I don't even know. It's kind of hard for me to find an analogue without naming... well... the two of them. ...Wait, I have it. Here, try this: stretch your minds and imagine that Strider says the same stuff he does normally except he's serious."

"He knows you said that, Rose," Jade said. "You can't say something that uncool without him knowing."

"Well then he's suffering for the sake of my comparison, he should be flattered. Now imagine. You've had to put up with this douchebag for years. He keeps poking into your conversations, hacking into your Trollslum, and unlike all the others, he's not pretending to be an alien. 'Pretending.'" John snickered, and Rose continued: "He's just a jerk. One day, you meet in person by accident. Once you find out who he is, what do you do?" The wavering responses from her friends reminded Rose exactly who she was speaking to. "Imagine you're more aggressive."

"Maybe I'd... punch him?" John asked more than proposed. "Geeze, Rose, I don't think I could punch Dave, even if he was Evil Dave. He'd be mad at me."

"Yeah..." Jade said. "Maybe if he got me mad I'd tell him to stop being a jerk?"

"Okay, punching. Or a reprimand. Both reasonable or semi-reasonable options." Rose could roll with thes. "Now: how would you respond if he asked you to do it again?" Capitalizing on the silence, Rose continued: "What would you do if he gave you his phone number and told you to call him up if you were ever interested in punching him again?"

"Well..." Jade peeped over the pile. "I guess I get what you mean, but the Trolls must be a little masochistic, right?"

"That's where I have to disagree," Rose said. "I've never actually seen any of them be masochistic. Sadistic, yes. And so I assumed that a kismesissitude would be like Equius and Aradia's, in a sort of... emotionally charged game of King of the Hill. But Eridan, Eridan keeps taking it on the jaw! 'Like a chump!' And that's Vriska's term. I mean, Eridan can be a masochist all he wants. I will auspistice the metaphorical crap out of that if that's what they both want! Except I don't actually think he likes it!" Rose shook a fist. "He complains, he gets angry, and he just keeps doing it!"

John shrugged. "Well it is Eridan! I mean, he'd go through a lot for Tavros, don't you think he'd go through a lot for Vriska?"

"I do!" Rose insisted. "It's just thought it was spectacularly unbalanced, and I didn't know: should I be doing something? Should I not do anything, assuming this sort of sadomasochistic relationship just a thing? Do I ask them?"

"Well... I dunno, Rose." Jade once again returned to Rose's shoulder, which was becoming almost expected. "You're the expert here. We can guess if you like but it's kind of different than we're used to."

"Vriska wouldn't talk to me," Rose insisted, the memory of the two meetings that led up to the relationship still fresh in her mind. "...I should talk to Eridan," she declared aloud. "I... admit it's going to be an uncomfortable conversation, but could you both hold me up to it?"

"Sure, Rose," John promised.

"Well that's good," Jade said, "but Rose? If everything's so rough, I gotta ask: are you happy with it?"

"Oh. Yeah, definitely," John said. "I mean, I don't want Vriska or Eridan tearing each other apart any more than anybody else, but there's no reason for you to be there if you don't want to."

This Rose had not thought about. She talked it out. After all, she was with friends, and not entirely afraid of putting out her unedited thoughts where they could hear them. "Well... it's not really what I expected," she started. "I mean, they fight, they look to me, it's nice to be sort of in charge... but like I said, I don't know how I've been doing."

"But... is that good? Bad?" John asked. "I mean, I never figured I'd know what I was doing on my first few dates but this isn't really the same kind of thing! And it's been a month."

"I know. I know. But, at the same time, it's only been a month." Rose held up her hands as though measuring a length, not sure if anyone was actually looking or even able to see. "Trolls have their test friendships, but Humans just date strangers and try the relationship out for a time to see if it... fits." She tried to show that the lengths were comparable in her mind. "I guess that's what I'm doing. Is it working? Well..." Rose ran over what little she had learned from months of conversation with Kanaya and Karkat. "It's not what I expected. Frankly, it's less intimate and more... professional. They're like my patients."

John and Jade did not seem all that impressed at that, so Rose tried to clarify. "I-it's more than that." She was surprised by her own urgency. "I mean, I watch Karkat's movies and some of the ashen subplots make me go 'Aww' like a sycophant, at least now that we're out of the grub films. Vriska and Eridan don't do that for me, yet. And I don't think that's a problem! I mean... how long does it take you to fall in love? Not the length of a movie. Not a month. I don't..." She cleared her throat. "I don't 'love' Kanaya. It's not the... it's not the nicest thing to say out loud but I'm mature enough not to spoil my relationship with dishonesty and a rush. It comes... right?"

Having to admit that she was not sure brought back the stale tang in the air that had come when they remembered they were facing these sort of emotional hurdles without their parents. All John and Jade could do was to once again reach over and lend physical support to convey what they could not put into words. And while Rose appreciated, her inner introvert had had well enough of the attention, and decided to change the subject. "So I'll talk to Eridan," she repeated, to use as a segue. "By the way, John, did you happen to see him today?"

"Eridan? Can't say I did!" John scooted back up onto the top of the pile from where he had sunk, and Rose looked over to see that he was wearing his old, white slime ghost shirt. She wondered where he had left the ensemble Vriska had been talking about.

"Huh..." Rose outlined Vriska's newest game in brief, and while John didn't seem to catch on to why Karkat would be so annoyed, he seemed to think it was a hilarious plan. Rose rolled her eyes, and then rolled about the pile to his side. "You know," she said, not interrupting his chuckling, "maybe I should have you ask Vriska about my auspistice for me. Obviously the two of you are on a much closer wavelength."

John just shrugged, but Jade seemed to pick up on Rose's angle with a glance, and rolled over on her own. "I think she's right! I bet Vriska would agree too."

"What do you mean?" John said, suddenly becoming aware that he was wedged in between two girls.

"Well," Jade said, "if I were a Troll, and I had a crush on a guy, I think what I'd do would be to send a guy I hated to steal the first guy's shirt."

"It's perfect, overcomplicated schoolyard flirting," Rose said with a tip of her hand.

"Wait, what are you guys talking about?" John asked. "You're not honestly saying that-"

Rose interrupted him with a snap of her fingers. "And it's a prank!"

Jade gasped. "Of course it is! Ooh, it's so obvious! Adorable!" She lay her head on John's shoulder. "John, don't worry about asking her about Eridan, really, you two have so many important things to talk about! Don't you think, Rose?"

John, incredulous, looked from one of his friends to the other while sputtering half-complaints like "Wha-" and "Buh-", all to no avail.

"I think so, Jade," Rose said. "Hey, let's get her on pesterchum right now!"

"Wait, no!" John dove after Rose, with Jade fast on his heels, pulling him back to the pile. "No!" he protested again, "Trust Squiddles! Help me! I'm being betrayed!"

As it happened, Vriska was not online. She was probably with Tavros, who was online, but that seemed a touch too far. Instead, conversation tapered off of crushes and relationships to a new one about fashion. From there it went sublime, as teenaged conversations tend towards as the night draws on. They were interrupted only once, when they heard footsteps outside and Rose checked to see if they could catch Dave off-shift and in their net. Unfortunately, the hall was empty: if anything, he had been heading out on an emergency. As reality remained unsundered, Rose trusted her friend to his business after only a sombre pause, and then returned to the others.

Rose had wrangled her friends into a conversation about the Allegory of the Cave, which they actually seemed to enjoy, when they were interrupted by the sound of echoing voices.

"...unbelievable...foot-scumming horsebeast-shit!"

"Oh... So high and mighty...'s how you feel, why don't you say it to my face?"

Though the pile had been devastated by their impromptu wrestling match and the Trust Squiddles had rolled off to the side, Rose still had to lift herself up a ways to sit upright. Her friends stared up at her.

The voices continued, incomprehensible through the floor or two that separated them, and then: "Tavros, I swear to gog, shut up, this is between me and Eridork."

Rose rubbed at her eyes. "Goddammit, they're at it again. I will kill them. They were happy this morning and now they're at each other's throats in less than twelve hours. I will kill them. It is for the common good. Surely you can see that?" She got to her feet and wandered groggily to the door. "Anyone wanna come watch the magic? Meet me there, I mean?" Neither of her friends seemed keen to follow, especially when Vriska vaulted a decibel. From the sounds of things, Rose charges were at Tavros', and Tavros' meant Gamzee. The only thing reason she could face up to her stoner friend was his weakness and exhaustion, as little as she would admit it, and surely an Eridan and Vriska fight of this magnitude would wake him. Perhaps sensing her hesitation, Jade and John glanced at one another and stood up.

"Thanks guys," Rose said at a whisper, and it was not really clear if they heard her as they joined her at the door. Rose headed out and kicked open the old, stubborn hatch that she used after getting up each morning. She ducked in without waiting for the others to reach the transportalizer. She had never been to Tavros' this route, only to and from the lab, and for all she knew it could take some time. Not that she had any chance of getting lost, that was. After all, all she had to do was to follow the screaming.