A/N: There was a small section of Rose's walkthrough that I had to leave out completely as it was just links to "screencaps" she had taken of the SBRUB gameplay. But if you're interested in seeing them you can always check out the original comic at MSPA! End of author's note.
In the bathroom, John checked the cabinet under the sink for imps or other useful items. But there were no imps, just a lot of shaving cream.
Dads loved shaving. It was basically all they did (when they weren't baking that is.)
John captchalogued two cans of shaving cream just in case. He never knew when he'd need to bust out a hilarious shaving cream beard to ratchet up his prankster's gambit.
The telescope, expelled from the deck in the process, went flying out the window.
Seeing the pogo ride in the tub, John thought about hopping on and riding, but it was a little cramped in here for any sort of proper reckless pogoing. He would just grab it and hang on to it until the right moment presented itself.
As it left the deck, the towel floated back down to the rack.
The circle of stupidity was complete.
Meanwhile, on her laptop, Rose checked up on Nannaquin to see what was cookin'.
The entire kitchen was filled to the brim with freshly baked cookies.
A nearby imp ventured in and attempted to grab one off the table, but Nanna was quick to notice and zapped it with a laser from her right eye, destroying the pest.
Upstairs, John attempted to make his way to the study, but there were two pesky imps blocking his path to the stairs.
In fact, the entire living room below was crawling with imps. And it looked like they had taken a shining to the Cruxtruder. Cruxite and black goo. Everywhere.
But John wasn't having any of it.
He hopped on the Slimer pogo and prepared to one-up the imps. Well ok, it wasn't a Slimer pogo, but he mounted it anyway and brandished his deadly armaments, also known as a can of shaving cream and a hammer.
He bounced over the two imps and attacked them as he went, defeating them easily.
Then he bounced his way down the steps, continuing to attack the imps. This was incredibly dangerous!
Once he got to the living room, John was flipping the fuck out on these imps.
"Let's see how they like the old doublebarrel latherblaster- whoops! Oh shit!" He exclaimed.
The pogo ride had landed on an overturned totem of cruxite and rolled beneath him, causing both he and the pogo to take a rather nasty tumble.
John lay on the floor for a moment and stared at the ceiling, trying to get his bearings.
'mister john, respectfully ask that you please stand up.' The voice seemed to be back.
Jumping back up, John grabbed the pogo ride and pointed the shaving cream at it threateningly.
"Don't move or the pogo gets it!" He shouted at the imps.
They shrieked in horror.
'now sir boy, flee from this boorish rabble post haste.'
With the imps caught off guard, John took this as his chance to abscond. He ran up the wall by the fireplace a ways and did a little flip, allowing him to escape into the study.
In a last minute effort to help, Rose dragged the refrigerator to the living room and dropped it on an imp.
For slaying the imp, the refrigerator skyrocketed up the Echeladder to a new rung: Fivestar General Electric and earned 25 Boondollars. Things were really looking up for this feisty appliance.
'well done, john. polite congratulations.'
For some reason, John felt a sense of positive reinforcement. Wherever that feeling was coming from, it sure was a welcome change from his erratic moods earlier.
'now my civil fellow, i have a well-mannered query to ask.'
TT: I blocked the entrance to the study to give you some space to work with the Designix.
TT: John, imps behind you.
But John had his back to the imps in the room and was completely oblivious to the current situation.
TT: Should I take care of it?
TT: You trapped your PDA again, didn't you.
TT: Why did you have to pick up all that stupid shaving cream?
TT: So pointless.
Rose took Dad's safe that was sitting in the far corner of the room up to the roof and dropped it. The weight of the safe caused it to crash through the roof and eventually back down to the study where it crushed one of the imps.
Upon impact, the safe had burst open, dumping out its secret contents – some papers and a very old looking copy of Colonel Sassacre's daunting text.
'john might i bother you for a can opener?'
Still oblivious to the commotion behind him, John suddenly found himself pondering the whereabouts of a can opener.
He thought there was probably one in the kitchen, but his path was blocked by the refrigerator.
Rose sighed at her computer. John was completely unresponsive.
What the hell was that nincompoop doing? And was that an…arm in the wall? She must have been seeing things now.
Years in the future…but let's not get totally carried away here, a studious eye darted about a page like a honeybee gathering the nectar of wisdom.
The Wayward Vagabond was flipping through the book on human etiquette, tearing out pages as he went...
And eating them. Surely this was the way to absorb the book's knowledge.
Getting back to business, Rose was constructing a loft above John's room. She started doing so by first copying the chimney and using the copies to make four columns, on top of which she built another platform. Then she copied one of the railings from the balcony and rotated and dragged it out to make a ladder up to the new platform.
TT: Ladders seem to be a bit cheaper than stairs.
'fellow john, it appears we have reached an impasse.'
Yes, it seemed so. John was still standing in front of the doorway puzzling over the whereabouts of a can opener and was unaware of the imp standing directly behind him.
'the opener dilemma remains unsettled, most unfortunately.'
"It is unfortunate, I guess. What were we talking about again?" John spoke to the strange voice.
Meanwhile, behind him, Rose had drug a shelf from the kitchen over and smashed the imp with it.
'but it has been a pleasure nonetheless.'
"Thanks for the courtesy. It's not really necessary, but thanks anyway."
The PDA began to go off in John's sylladex as Dave pestered him.
'oh, but thank you.'
"Okay." Said John.
Rose began to hit John with a nearby hat as she too attempted to get in contact with him but to no avail. She screamed into her pillow, letting out her frustration.
The fact that Dave was continuing to pester her as well did not help the situation.
'thank you so very very much, dear favorable small primate. i shall take my leave now john. until next time.'
Finished conversing with whomever that even was, John turned around and saw all the grist scattered in the room along with the new objects.
'Wait, where did all this sweet loot come from?' He thought. 'And why is there suddenly a crumpled hat on my head?'
Feeling especially economical with his behavior suddenly, John scooped up all the grist in the room, and turned his attention to the Punch Designix all in one fell swoop.
The device featured a countertop station design with a keyboard setup, not unlike an old-fashioned computer. There was also a blinking red light and a diagram etched into a panel.
The diagram showed what looked to be both the front and back side of a captchalogue card with an arrow pointing to a photo of the keyboard, followed by a picture of said captchalogue card then being inserted into some sort of slot.
In the mausoleum, Rose got back to Dave.
TG: ok wait hold on why am i getting this stupid game for you
TG: youre the one who should be wrist deep in puppet ass
TT: What is the specific problem?
TG: the problem is i am up to my goddamn neck in fucking puppet dong
TT: You know you like the mannequin dick. Accept it.
TG: i am enrobed in chafing, wriggling god fucking damned puppet pelvis
TG: an obscenely long, coarse kermit cock is being dragged across my anguished face
TT: Let's put this into perspective. You put up with the puppet prostate because you love it.
TT: Also, coarse is a good word.
TG: you dont seem to harbor any sympathy for the fact that ive burrowed fuck deep into lively, fluffy muppet buttock
TG: im whirling in the terrible cyclone at the epicenter of my own personal holocaust of twitching foam noses
TG: its like a fucking apocalypse of perky proboscis here
TG: like
TG: the proboscalypse i guess
TT: Are you going to start rapping about this?
TG: what no
TG: no listen
TT: Prong of flesh bereft of home
TT: Found solace 'twixt a cleft of foam.
TG: no oh jesus
TT: Of apocalypse your thoughts eclipse
TT: A painted pair of parted lips
TT: That dare through kiss to stir the air
TT: That teases tufts of orange hair.
TT: And though faces flush in lovers' fits,
TT: Hands snug in plush as gloves befit.
TG: ok dickinson if you can shut your perfumey trap for a half second
TG: this is serious
TG: i am just saying
TG: if i see one more soft bulbous bottom being like
TG: kind of jutting out and impudent or whatever
TG: im gonna fly off the handle
TG: im gonna do some sort of acrobatic fucking PIROUETTE off the handle and win like a medal or some shit
TT: Then let's hope there will be a squishy derriere somewhere below the handle to break your fall.
John flipped over his top card containing the pogo ride. Any time he captchalogued something, a new code appeared on the back of the card. He'd always wondered what the code was for.
Damn, these things were hard to read. But then, he'd never really found any reason to decipher them. Until now, perhaps?
Next he examined the reverse side of the hammer card in his strife specibus. It looked like cards from his strife deck had codes too.
John decided he would enter the code from the pogo ride into the machine to see what would happen.
He entered, "DQMmJLeK" into the keyboard. At least that's what he thought the code was.
When he completed typing the code, the red light switched off and a green light began blinking.
He inserted the pogo ride card, and heard the machine make a sort of punching noise, and then the card popped back out of the slot.
It seemed that it had punched a series of holes into the card!
In the interest of due diligence, John entered the other code from the hammer card and repeated the process with that card too.
Both cards were now punched with different hole patterns.
Out of curiosity, he tried to retrieve the pogo from the card, but it looked like it was trapped now. He didn't see how he could access the item anymore, or store a new item there for that matter. These cards were pretty much useless now, and the items they contained were toast!
But maybe all was not lost. Recalling from his experience with the Pre-punched Card, he thought that he may be able to use the cards to replicate the items in question. Assuming he got the other codes right, that was…
Not quite through with his cowboy empiricism just yet, John mashed at the keyboard to generate a random code.
He had entered "dskjhsdk." The Designix stopped him after eight characters, which appeared to be the maximum length for a code. The green light went on signaling its readiness for a card.
He figured he might as well burn the shaving cream since the product was not exactly at a premium in his household. He also figured he might as well merge the two cans on to one card
John was a little sad that his dad wasn't around for this. He had a feeling Dad would get a real kick out of the idea of duplicating more shaving cream.
He proceeded to punch the card with a pattern that was in no way related to the code for the item it contained. This would make for an interesting experiment.
Mad science was a lot of fun.
Unfortunately, he had burned another card in the process, leaving him with only three cards. His deck was really dwindling now. Maybe he should have thought this through a little better.
On the plus side, he had freed up his PDA, which was overflowing with the pent-up chatter of anxious pesterers.
Outside, an imp peered into the window of the study.
But it began to notice a looming shadow approaching, and turned around.
As it turned, it was met with a flying bathtub that sent it crashing through the wall. John jumped in alarm.
The tub had broken through the wall between the study and the kitchen as well when it landed; the imp leaving behind a nice bounty of grist.
John turned away from the scene and checked the PDA.
TG: PUPPETS
TG: AWESOME
TG: THATS REALLY ALL THERE IS TO SAY ON THE MATTER
- turntechGodhead [TG] changed his mood to RANCOROUS –
TT: John, I'm about to throw a bath tub through your wall.
TT: Watch out.
John stepped over the rubble left from the broken walls and looked out the gaping hole that now led to his yard.
EB: wow, that was so totally unnecessary!
TT: I made a shortcut upstairs. I thought it would be a good idea to get up there and try the cards as soon as possible.
TT: Also, you weren't being terribly responsive.
EB: you mean these stairs?
EB: man, look at these shitty stairs...
EB: they're so narrow! i'm supposed to climb those?
TT: They're perfectly navigable.
TT: I'm saving on grist for now.
TT: If you keep slaying foes, collecting grist, and expanding the cache limit, we may not need to be so economical with our resources in the future.
He looked up to see a big hole in the ceiling which the safe had made in its earlier descent and could see one of the gates high above him.
EB: so why didn't you just build a way up through that hole into my dad's room?
TT: Have you ever been in there?
EB: no.
TT: Exactly.
EB: huh?
TT: I'd rather not get sidetracked.
TT: I'm more interested in further exploring the mechanics of the game than watching you discover what sort outlandish harlequin decor your father keeps in his room.
EB: oh come on. what's the big deal, i'll just climb up and go right through!
TT: Will you?
EB: yeah, why not?
TT: Are you saying you've never wondered what's in there? Or why it's been kept a secret from you?
EB: well, i mean yeah...
TT: Then trust me. You won't be going "right on through."
EB: wait, are you saying there's something, like...
EB: troubling in there?
TT: I don't know.
EB: what do you mean? what do you see in there?
TT: I can't see in there.
EB: oh.
TT: But I don't have a very good feeling about it.
EB: pfff...
EB: whatever!
EB: i think i can handle a few more stupid clown paintings.
Meanwhile, Rose moved the punched cards up to John's room, along with a bunch of cruxite dowels.
And John made his way to swoop up the bountiful supply of grist generated by his co-player's recent exploits. From now on it would probably go without saying that he would nab any grist laying around without making a big fuss over it.
He also checked out the busted safe, which had made a noble sacrifice in battle. Some of his father's odds and ends had spilled out, including some old newspaper clippings, and two rather hefty tomes. It was a fair bet that these books comprised at least half the weight of the safe.
One of the books was another copy of Colonel Sassacre's Daunting Text of Magical Frivolity and Practical Japery. But this one looked pretty old, perhaps an original printing. Could it have been the same one involved with his grandmother's unfortunate accident on that fateful day? Dad would never speak a word about it, but maybe Nanna wouldn't be so tight-lipped.
John gave the book a creepy perusal. It appeared to be similar to his reprinting, listing all the japes and chicanery he had come to know and love. He captchalogued it, thinking he may give it a closer look later.
He took a look at the other book, The Fatherly Gent's Shaving Almanac. He was sure Dad thought this was a scintillating read, but it looked pretty boring to John. Maybe he'd crack into it someday when he was old enough to shave.
Everything in this safe was obviously very important to his father. John wondered why he kept it locked away from him.
Some things about him John would never understand.
It also seemed he had been collecting the newspaper scraps for years. The articles, mostly about meteor incidents, went back decades.
As he put the papers down, John noticed a piece of paper taped to the wall that the safe used to sit in front of. It read:
SON.
IF YOU ARE READING THIS, IT MEANS YOU ARE NOW STRONG ENOUGH TO LIFT THE SAFE. YOU ARE NOW A MAN.
AS SUCH, YOU ARE ENTITLED TO TAKE WHAT IS INSIDE. I KNOW YOU WILL TAKE THIS RESPONSIBILITY SERIOUSLY.
I AM SO PROUD OF YOU.
He flipped the card over and saw the numbers 02-49-13 written there. He guessed this was the combination to the safe. This was completely useless now.
On the floor John noticed a captchalogue card as well. He looked at the back of it, '0000000,' or he guessed these were all zeros? Or were they capital O's? Zeros would probably make more sense for an empty card he thought.
He captchalogued it, ejecting the totem from the deck and through the hole in the wall and over the cliff.
John then proceeded to enter the code on the back of the card containing the blank card into the Designix and punched it.
TT: Wait, John, before you punch that.
TT: Oh.
TT: I was about to say.
TT: If you first took note of the code, then removed the card from the card, you could have punched the blank one.
TT: You would have only burned one card instead of two.
EB: oh yeah, you're right.
EB: dammit!
He threw his hat out over the cliff in disgust.
Without thinking, he then captchalogued the punched card onto one of two cards in his deck. This caused the PDA to be jettisoned out and it almost fell over the cliff as well, but luckily Rose was able to quickly grab it with the cursor before that happened, and she laid it at John's feet.
"What?" He asked, wondering why the PDA was suddenly being put before him.
As he took the PDA, the ancient Sassacre text flew out, albeit not far due to its incredulous weight. It fell short of the cliffs edge, crushing a nearby imp that had been standing there.
The two-card sylladex: inventory of dumbasses.
John was now able to level up on the Echeladder from Champ-Fry to Pesky Urchin, bringing his Boondollar total to 740.
Colonel Sassacre leveled up for slaying the imp as well, and soared to new heights on his Echeladder, reaching the rung: One Man Julep Vacuum and pocketed 9550 Boondollars.
Chump change for the genteel, aristocratic southern colonel.
Even the bathtub surged heroically, surpassing the rung Archimede's Aquacradle, proceeding directly to vaunted rung: Taft-Jammer. The tub made off with a cool 490 Boondollars.
But the tub's basin capacity remained unaffected.
Not to be forgotten was the safe, which was slain in battle. A great flaming nautical pyre carried it off to Vaulthala.
John made his way to the outdoor stairs Rose had built and looked at them with uncertainty. They seemed pretty precarious to him. But he'd been assured the stairs were perfectly navigable.
He scrambled up the steps as quickly as he could, but this was his mistake, as he had tripped after making it only about halfway up the first staircase. He fell over and nearly tumbled off the stairs completely, but managed to grab on to one of the steps and hung on for dear life.
"Lousy goddamn stupid stairs!" He grumbled.
Not far behind him, at the cliff's edge where the Sassacre text lay, something was climbing up to the yard…