History & Personality
Character: Rose Lalonde (IM handle tentacleTherapist)
Age: 13
Sex/Gender: F
Canon Role: Sidekick/secondary protagonist.
"Real" Name: Lisa Higsby
History:
Rose Lalonde, unbeknownst to herself at the time, being an infant, arrived on Earth by riding a meteor down after being genetically engineered out of slime thirteen years in her own future. She was adopted by a woman standing nearby, who was (unbeknownst to both of them) her genetic mother. Rose's relationship with her mom was always rocky; her mother was an alcoholic, more interested in her own life than being a mom. Her house is full of beautiful, kid-unfriendly things, and closely resembles Fallingwater. Passive-aggressive competitions were the primary way in which they demonstrated emotion for each other.
How much of this is truly irony and competition on her mother's part and how much is Rose's youthful rebellion is unclear; Rose's journal is full of a fantasy story full of wizards, but she derides her mother's omnipresent wizard decorations as being both ironic and awful.
When Rose was little, her cat, Jaspers, died. Rose requested a funeral. Her mom took it one step further, having Jaspers embalmed and building a small mausoleum in their back yard. Rose, from then on, pretended, even to herself, that she'd never really cared much for Jaspers.
Rose grew into an internet-savvy pre-teen, and somewhere along the line became friends with three other kids, all about her age. The kids lived nowhere near each other -- Rose in upstate New York, Dave somewhere in Texas, John in suburban Washington State, and Jade on an island in the South Pacific. They chat via Pesterchum, an AIM-like chat program, and all of them are also occasionally harassed by a bunch of kids claiming to be trolls and being obnoxious and strange.
On her 13th birthday, John gives her a set of knitting supplies; she scoffs at the present as a "facetious sentimental gesture", but she also takes to the hobby. Whether or not this is just in order to knit him an overly-sentimental present in return, she does seem to honestly enjoy it as well as using it as another way to be sarcastic.
A few months later, just in time for John's birthday, a new computer game came out in beta. Rose pesters each of the other kids until John agrees to play Sburb with her. None of this seems to be out of the ordinary for the kids -- they all like computer games, and Rose tends towards a juvenile sort of emotional manipulation to get what she wants on a regular basis. Part of her eagerness may stem from a cryptic conversation with Jade, several months prior, where Jade implied that playing Sburb could bring Jaspers back, which Rose scoffs at, but may be at least a little curious about.
Once the discs go in the computers, everything changes. The game, which initially appears to be a Sims-like setup except that one player (the server player) is able to manipulate the environment of another (the client player), moving real-world objects with the click of a mouse. When the first session starts, Rose is John's server player, and they begin playing.
After some basic experimenting with the controls and some childish antics on both her and John's parts (toy chest on the roof, toilet on the lawn), Rose deploys a piece of equipment called the Cruxtruder, which shows an ominous countdown. None of the walkthroughs get through the countdown, and when John gets upstairs, he finds what the countdown is for -- a meteor is on its way targeted direct to his house.
Rose scrambles to use what little information about Sburb she's gathered to help John escape, but just after they find this out, the thunderstorm where Rose lives gets worse, and her power goes out. This takes out her wifi, but her laptop is running on battery power, so she calmly sneaks up to the observatory on top of her house and leeches a signal from the nearby laboratory. She reconnects with 41 seconds remaining to impact, and gets John through the final steps just in time.
During the countdown, Rose vows to write her own walkthrough, since all of the ones on GameFAQs are almost useless and cut off before figuring out how to escape the impact. She starts this next. It's a comprehensive and accurate, if a bit wordy, at least at the beginning.
With her battery power running low, Rose tries to do the next thing suggested by the few meager walkthrough bits she has -- drop an item into John's kernelsprite (a game construct which provides cryptic hints, assuming the player prototypes it by throwing in an item at least once before and after impact). The things she tries show a lot about how she usually operates -- first she grabs some Betty Crocker cake mix, which John associates with his dad and resents. But the second thing she grabs is his favorite book ever. She goes for irony first on several occasions, but as soon as it matters switches to genuine helpfulness. She keeps trying with the book until the sprite crashes into an urn containing the ashes of John's dead grandmother, which prototypes it again.
At this point she and John start trying to get his copy of the server disc back so they can reverse roles, but her laptop battery cuts out at what seems to be the worst possible point, and she's forced to try to get out to the backup generator by Jaspers' mausoleum. She kicks Jaspers' casket out of the way unceremoniously and gets back to gaming. The rain of meteors has set the area around her house on fire, and the mausoleum is dangerously close, but it's the only way she can get online.
The place where John's house has moved, out of the way of the meteor, is called the Medium, and both she and John, having given up on getting his server disc, pester Dave to get Rose set up. He's having disc trouble of his own, and before he can get set up, the fire hits the backup generator. Offscreen, Rose's mom flips a switch, opening a trap door in the bottom of the mausoleum, leading underground. How Mom knows of its existence is unclear, and Rose doesn't know she is the one who opened the door, but she heads in anyway. It leads to an immense underground lab, where an accident leads to her dropping Jaspers' corpse on a strange platform, whereupon it vanishes.
But dead cat and inventory management shenanigans aside, there are several important things in the lab. Rose finds, in order, a portable power and wifi source for her laptop, a countdown timer with only a few minutes left, and a giant map showing massive numbers of both Sburb sessions and future meteor impacts all over the country. She zooms in over her house -- two impacts, one centered on her house and one on the lab, are incoming, and incoming fast.
Even with the clock ticking, the first thing she does on regaining full use of her laptop and access to Sburb is to check on John, rather than looking to see if Dave has logged in and can help her. John is deep in the midst of his first real boss battle -- Rose jumps into the fray, flinging refrigerators and other furniture around to help him, and even stops to congratulate him and tell him what she's learned about the game.
Then she goes back to investigating, finding a mutant three-eyed cat, a bunch of pink little-girl toys, and an appearifier locked on to Jaspers in the past. Tiny little Rose is on the screen, attempting to psychoanalyze her kittycat. Present Rose attempts to teleport Jasper in, causing a time paradox, but that fails. What is important is that she remembers the rest of that day, when Jaspers whispered a single word in her ear. That word? MEOW. The importance of this will be explained at the end of this history. Then he disappeared into thin air, i.e. being appearified away, but not by Present Rose. (Homestuck is an in-progress series, and where Jaspers goes at this point is unclear, but the body that little Rose found a week later was very likely the embalmed one just dropped onto the platform, looping in time somehow.) The machine also lets her figure out, with only seconds left to spare, that the platform she dropped Jaspers on does not vaporize things but transportalize them, and she blinks out with ten seconds to spare.
She lands in her Mom's room, which she decides not to freak out about, and watches the meteor hit the lab (and start to set her house on fire) before retreating to her room with her computer and the mutant cat. Dave is still nowhere to be found, so she goes back to helping John build his house upwards, towards the first game objective (a gate in the sky above his house). She finishes it, and Dave finally logs in, racing her through the basic items needed to create her key item for entry into the Medium. Where John's was an apple, with all the symbolism that implies, hers is a bottle, which is knocked into the river running through her house before she can grab it, necessitating a leap of faith off the balcony. She grabs it, and is saved by her kernelsprite, into which she'd thrown Jaspers' body and Dave had thrown a tentacle princess doll. Jaspers drags her up by the tentacle in time for her to smash the bottle like christening a ship and whisk her into her world in the medium.
Rose's world is the Land of Light and Rain (LOLAR), and her house now sits on an island in a rainbow sea, awash in light. She is now the Seer of Light, and has begun her own quest. She explores for a bit, unable to find Jaspers, but finding an abandoned martini on the dock along with a rope; her mom made it to the Medium, but has already left. The faint voice she kept hearing, guiding her along, stops. The entire story is a coming-of-age tale; she has just taken a big step towards independence. She sips the martini. Bluh. Not that big of a step towards adulthood. But, basically, after this point she and the other kids play the game normally for a while, with John furthest along, Rose next, and Dave working on getting into the Medium with Jade acting as his server player. They all have a little breathing room, which, aside from chatting with each other, they mostly spend talking to the trolls. (Who make at least a little more sense now, since they're clearly kids from another planet playing their own version of Sburb; what once sounded so impossible as to be clearly lies now are more plausible.)
The next turning point comes when one of the trolls convinces John to try to skip ahead and battle a high-level boss. He believes her, and runs off and gets himself killed. With him dead, Jade never makes it into the Medium, and presumably dies when the meteor hits her island. Rose and Dave spend several months leveling and examining the game, knowing that they can never win, and that they are doomed. Their plan is simple -- learn as much as they can, and then Dave, whose power includes time travel, will travel back and stop John, and then prototype the earlier Dave's kernelsprite with himself before he dies. (Time travelers going back from doomed timelines die shortly after travel in this universe -- just long enough to pass a message or get blood on the carpet.) Dave suggests to future doomed Rose that she go to sleep just as he travels back, and perhaps some of her memories will pass to her earlier self's dreamself. He travels; Rose sleeps, and her dreamself awakens with some of the memories. Dreamselves are an extra life and a source of information; when the kids start playing, only Jade has the ability to remember and control her dreamself. Each of them will have to "wake up" and then will be able to work in both worlds -- the regular one and the dream world. Rose wakes up as soon as the memories merge in, and her dreamself flies over to where Dave's dreamself is to point out to him that his dreamself has always been awake, he just spent all his time jamming in his dream room.
She can't go find the other two yet, as dreamers are separated into two groups, and their dream rooms are on two different planets. Rose and Dave are Derse dreamers, which means that their dreamselves have spent their whole lives being whispered to by the horrorterrors, mystical, Lovecraftian beings dwelling in the furthest ring. Dave never noticed because his music was up too loudly, but Rose has filled her dream room (and her waking room, though she cannot see it) with a genetic code they whispered to her, using the letters MEOW instead of GCAT. This is why she was so shocked when Jaspers meowed at her; she didn't understand it then, but her subconscious has been working through this genetic code her entire life. It is the genetic code for Jade's pet dog, who is not actually a dog but an ancient First One, whose powers are yet unclear.
This is the point at which she's being taken from, but a little more explanation is needed to talk about her personality, so I will summarize what happens next.
After waking up with these memories, the two Daves do talk John out of jumping to the boss battle, and the kids continue to play along for a while, Rose and Dave just with a bit of an advantage from her memories and his self-prototyped kernelsprite. John also gets less-deadly hints from the trolls, indicating that they had to learn all this the hard way, but for some reason, despite not liking the human kids, they're helping them out.
It turns out that the point of the game is to sacrifice one world to create an entire universe, and players of winning sessions get to go be effectively gods of their new universe. The trolls created the kids' universe, but as they were about to head over themselves, something happened. A rift, or Scratch, appeared between the universes, and broke their session. So they're hiding out in the belt of meteors that haven't yet headed off to rain down on anything, and trying to figure out if there's any way to make both sessions not be completely screwed. They're not very optimistic about this, but they don't have anything else to do but wait around and eventually die. They can see the kids' entire timelines up until the Scratch, which means they watch their actions do nothing but recreate the problem in the first place. The biggest issue comes from Jade's kernelsprite being prototyped by her dog/First One, since the enemies also gain power and attributes from the things used to prototype kernelsprites before entering the Medium. What exactly this does aside from make Jack Noir, one of the enemies, immensely powerful (he goes and slaughters most of the rest of the big bosses himself in order to take control), is unclear.
Once the kids know their session is doomed to lose, Rose starts hacking. She blows up her first gate and starts taking her planet apart, in ways likely similar to the research she and Dave did on their doomed future timeline. She grows more jaded and cynical, but is still mostly herself. Then she is contacted by Doc Scratch, a near-omniscient being who wants to commit suicide and bring Lord English, a demon, into being by ending their universe with his death. This is likely the Scratch, and Rose tries to pry information from him without committing to anything. He shows her how to use her sight, and then she uses her crystal ball (which is not actually her sight but regular Sburb magic) to see that her mother and John's dad have just been killed by Jack Noir. She does not quite flip out completely at this, but allows Scratch to urge her to look and See what the horrorterrors really are; she has always thought them a force for good. At this point she does flip out and go grimdark, and runs off seeking revenge on Jack Noir. She also goes dark to the trolls' view at this point, even though this is before the Scratch. This is as far as the story has gotten; whether or not someone (likely John, if it happens) will be able to bring her back from her grimdarkness is unclear.
Personality:
All of her life, her role model for adulthood is her mother, who is aloof, passive-aggressive, but does deeply love her daughter. In fact, all of the adults she meets so far are nigh-faceless authority figures (or quite literally faceless in the case of Doc Scratch), who lie, distort the truth, and are generally sarcastic. She takes this model and emulates it.
She often feels the need to deny things she loves to avoid seeming sentimental or juvenile -- she really loves wizard stories, but she pretends to hate them; she loves her cat Jaspers and is sad when he dies, and she's also implied to care more about the pony Maplehoof that her mom got her than she outwardly shows. The same is true of her love for her mother; their relationship is outwardly founded on trying to ignore each other except for sarcastic, over-the-top statements of affection. For example, Rose drew a picture of Jaspers as a small child. Her mom bought a $15,000 frame for it and hung it on the fridge, enshrining her terrible kid-artwork and love for her cat forever. (Or at least until the end of the universe, which will likely be very soon.)
She isn't in the slightest bit above playing dirty when necessary -- she harasses John and Dave into playing Sburb with her. Once set up as John's server player, she pretty much completely ignores his suggestions and does what she wants, although she does help keep him from getting killed by imps and other enemies when necessary.
She can be extremely secretive -- the first time we see her in person, we get a brief description and then watch her hide both a purple package (which turns out to contain John's half-finished birthday present) and then hide her writing journals. She can also seem callous at times, though she tries not to do so visibly. Just after hiding both package and journal, she pulls out her violin and plays a tune while John is in mortal peril. Later, she admits to Jade that she was ignoring Pesterchum messages from the other kids at times, because Jade calls her on it after gaining the ability to see whatever people are doing, and sees that Rose is sitting at her computer ignoring Jade's message.
At the same time, she enjoys being a know-it-all -- she gloats over different things in her first two conversations with John. First, that she knows him well enough to know he's wearing a ridiculous disguise, and second, that she knows what his birthday present from Dave is, despite never explaining directly why she knows. This also explains why she enjoys writing FAQs -- while she sometimes gets annoyed at the other kids when they don't know things that seem obvious to her, she also enjoys teaching people things.
She has an unusual attitude towards money; after all the ironic battles with her mother, she tends to think of expensive things as relatively worthless, and free items as being without value. When talking about items in Sburb early on, she says "According to the Atheneum, it is a free item. This speaks to its importance, in my view." She is right, but other important items are expensive in-game, and she tends to dismiss price as a concern while playing unless she can't actually build what she wants at that moment. Her birthday gift to John is hand-knitted, and she claims it is entirely a facetious sentimental gesture, but even as it is ironic it is a sentimental gesture; she just doesn't show sentiment in any other way.
Finally, she's thirteen, and can sometimes be a bit silly. Whether it's a refrigerator magnet as a fake mustache, or alchemizing the same magnet along with some of her mother's vodka to make magnetic vodka for absolutely no reason except that it is funny, she does have an age-appropriate sense of humor. She just tends to only let it out when she thinks no one is watching.
Canon Point:
Rose is taken from just as she wakes up from the nap in which the doomed timelines memories merge into the main timeline and her dreamself woke on Derse.
This, like just about any other point in the story, is on April 13, 2009.
Age: 13
Sex/Gender: F
Canon Role: Sidekick/secondary protagonist.
"Real" Name: Lisa Higsby
History:
Rose Lalonde, unbeknownst to herself at the time, being an infant, arrived on Earth by riding a meteor down after being genetically engineered out of slime thirteen years in her own future. She was adopted by a woman standing nearby, who was (unbeknownst to both of them) her genetic mother. Rose's relationship with her mom was always rocky; her mother was an alcoholic, more interested in her own life than being a mom. Her house is full of beautiful, kid-unfriendly things, and closely resembles Fallingwater. Passive-aggressive competitions were the primary way in which they demonstrated emotion for each other.
How much of this is truly irony and competition on her mother's part and how much is Rose's youthful rebellion is unclear; Rose's journal is full of a fantasy story full of wizards, but she derides her mother's omnipresent wizard decorations as being both ironic and awful.
When Rose was little, her cat, Jaspers, died. Rose requested a funeral. Her mom took it one step further, having Jaspers embalmed and building a small mausoleum in their back yard. Rose, from then on, pretended, even to herself, that she'd never really cared much for Jaspers.
Rose grew into an internet-savvy pre-teen, and somewhere along the line became friends with three other kids, all about her age. The kids lived nowhere near each other -- Rose in upstate New York, Dave somewhere in Texas, John in suburban Washington State, and Jade on an island in the South Pacific. They chat via Pesterchum, an AIM-like chat program, and all of them are also occasionally harassed by a bunch of kids claiming to be trolls and being obnoxious and strange.
On her 13th birthday, John gives her a set of knitting supplies; she scoffs at the present as a "facetious sentimental gesture", but she also takes to the hobby. Whether or not this is just in order to knit him an overly-sentimental present in return, she does seem to honestly enjoy it as well as using it as another way to be sarcastic.
A few months later, just in time for John's birthday, a new computer game came out in beta. Rose pesters each of the other kids until John agrees to play Sburb with her. None of this seems to be out of the ordinary for the kids -- they all like computer games, and Rose tends towards a juvenile sort of emotional manipulation to get what she wants on a regular basis. Part of her eagerness may stem from a cryptic conversation with Jade, several months prior, where Jade implied that playing Sburb could bring Jaspers back, which Rose scoffs at, but may be at least a little curious about.
Once the discs go in the computers, everything changes. The game, which initially appears to be a Sims-like setup except that one player (the server player) is able to manipulate the environment of another (the client player), moving real-world objects with the click of a mouse. When the first session starts, Rose is John's server player, and they begin playing.
After some basic experimenting with the controls and some childish antics on both her and John's parts (toy chest on the roof, toilet on the lawn), Rose deploys a piece of equipment called the Cruxtruder, which shows an ominous countdown. None of the walkthroughs get through the countdown, and when John gets upstairs, he finds what the countdown is for -- a meteor is on its way targeted direct to his house.
Rose scrambles to use what little information about Sburb she's gathered to help John escape, but just after they find this out, the thunderstorm where Rose lives gets worse, and her power goes out. This takes out her wifi, but her laptop is running on battery power, so she calmly sneaks up to the observatory on top of her house and leeches a signal from the nearby laboratory. She reconnects with 41 seconds remaining to impact, and gets John through the final steps just in time.
During the countdown, Rose vows to write her own walkthrough, since all of the ones on GameFAQs are almost useless and cut off before figuring out how to escape the impact. She starts this next. It's a comprehensive and accurate, if a bit wordy, at least at the beginning.
With her battery power running low, Rose tries to do the next thing suggested by the few meager walkthrough bits she has -- drop an item into John's kernelsprite (a game construct which provides cryptic hints, assuming the player prototypes it by throwing in an item at least once before and after impact). The things she tries show a lot about how she usually operates -- first she grabs some Betty Crocker cake mix, which John associates with his dad and resents. But the second thing she grabs is his favorite book ever. She goes for irony first on several occasions, but as soon as it matters switches to genuine helpfulness. She keeps trying with the book until the sprite crashes into an urn containing the ashes of John's dead grandmother, which prototypes it again.
At this point she and John start trying to get his copy of the server disc back so they can reverse roles, but her laptop battery cuts out at what seems to be the worst possible point, and she's forced to try to get out to the backup generator by Jaspers' mausoleum. She kicks Jaspers' casket out of the way unceremoniously and gets back to gaming. The rain of meteors has set the area around her house on fire, and the mausoleum is dangerously close, but it's the only way she can get online.
The place where John's house has moved, out of the way of the meteor, is called the Medium, and both she and John, having given up on getting his server disc, pester Dave to get Rose set up. He's having disc trouble of his own, and before he can get set up, the fire hits the backup generator. Offscreen, Rose's mom flips a switch, opening a trap door in the bottom of the mausoleum, leading underground. How Mom knows of its existence is unclear, and Rose doesn't know she is the one who opened the door, but she heads in anyway. It leads to an immense underground lab, where an accident leads to her dropping Jaspers' corpse on a strange platform, whereupon it vanishes.
But dead cat and inventory management shenanigans aside, there are several important things in the lab. Rose finds, in order, a portable power and wifi source for her laptop, a countdown timer with only a few minutes left, and a giant map showing massive numbers of both Sburb sessions and future meteor impacts all over the country. She zooms in over her house -- two impacts, one centered on her house and one on the lab, are incoming, and incoming fast.
Even with the clock ticking, the first thing she does on regaining full use of her laptop and access to Sburb is to check on John, rather than looking to see if Dave has logged in and can help her. John is deep in the midst of his first real boss battle -- Rose jumps into the fray, flinging refrigerators and other furniture around to help him, and even stops to congratulate him and tell him what she's learned about the game.
Then she goes back to investigating, finding a mutant three-eyed cat, a bunch of pink little-girl toys, and an appearifier locked on to Jaspers in the past. Tiny little Rose is on the screen, attempting to psychoanalyze her kittycat. Present Rose attempts to teleport Jasper in, causing a time paradox, but that fails. What is important is that she remembers the rest of that day, when Jaspers whispered a single word in her ear. That word? MEOW. The importance of this will be explained at the end of this history. Then he disappeared into thin air, i.e. being appearified away, but not by Present Rose. (Homestuck is an in-progress series, and where Jaspers goes at this point is unclear, but the body that little Rose found a week later was very likely the embalmed one just dropped onto the platform, looping in time somehow.) The machine also lets her figure out, with only seconds left to spare, that the platform she dropped Jaspers on does not vaporize things but transportalize them, and she blinks out with ten seconds to spare.
She lands in her Mom's room, which she decides not to freak out about, and watches the meteor hit the lab (and start to set her house on fire) before retreating to her room with her computer and the mutant cat. Dave is still nowhere to be found, so she goes back to helping John build his house upwards, towards the first game objective (a gate in the sky above his house). She finishes it, and Dave finally logs in, racing her through the basic items needed to create her key item for entry into the Medium. Where John's was an apple, with all the symbolism that implies, hers is a bottle, which is knocked into the river running through her house before she can grab it, necessitating a leap of faith off the balcony. She grabs it, and is saved by her kernelsprite, into which she'd thrown Jaspers' body and Dave had thrown a tentacle princess doll. Jaspers drags her up by the tentacle in time for her to smash the bottle like christening a ship and whisk her into her world in the medium.
Rose's world is the Land of Light and Rain (LOLAR), and her house now sits on an island in a rainbow sea, awash in light. She is now the Seer of Light, and has begun her own quest. She explores for a bit, unable to find Jaspers, but finding an abandoned martini on the dock along with a rope; her mom made it to the Medium, but has already left. The faint voice she kept hearing, guiding her along, stops. The entire story is a coming-of-age tale; she has just taken a big step towards independence. She sips the martini. Bluh. Not that big of a step towards adulthood. But, basically, after this point she and the other kids play the game normally for a while, with John furthest along, Rose next, and Dave working on getting into the Medium with Jade acting as his server player. They all have a little breathing room, which, aside from chatting with each other, they mostly spend talking to the trolls. (Who make at least a little more sense now, since they're clearly kids from another planet playing their own version of Sburb; what once sounded so impossible as to be clearly lies now are more plausible.)
The next turning point comes when one of the trolls convinces John to try to skip ahead and battle a high-level boss. He believes her, and runs off and gets himself killed. With him dead, Jade never makes it into the Medium, and presumably dies when the meteor hits her island. Rose and Dave spend several months leveling and examining the game, knowing that they can never win, and that they are doomed. Their plan is simple -- learn as much as they can, and then Dave, whose power includes time travel, will travel back and stop John, and then prototype the earlier Dave's kernelsprite with himself before he dies. (Time travelers going back from doomed timelines die shortly after travel in this universe -- just long enough to pass a message or get blood on the carpet.) Dave suggests to future doomed Rose that she go to sleep just as he travels back, and perhaps some of her memories will pass to her earlier self's dreamself. He travels; Rose sleeps, and her dreamself awakens with some of the memories. Dreamselves are an extra life and a source of information; when the kids start playing, only Jade has the ability to remember and control her dreamself. Each of them will have to "wake up" and then will be able to work in both worlds -- the regular one and the dream world. Rose wakes up as soon as the memories merge in, and her dreamself flies over to where Dave's dreamself is to point out to him that his dreamself has always been awake, he just spent all his time jamming in his dream room.
She can't go find the other two yet, as dreamers are separated into two groups, and their dream rooms are on two different planets. Rose and Dave are Derse dreamers, which means that their dreamselves have spent their whole lives being whispered to by the horrorterrors, mystical, Lovecraftian beings dwelling in the furthest ring. Dave never noticed because his music was up too loudly, but Rose has filled her dream room (and her waking room, though she cannot see it) with a genetic code they whispered to her, using the letters MEOW instead of GCAT. This is why she was so shocked when Jaspers meowed at her; she didn't understand it then, but her subconscious has been working through this genetic code her entire life. It is the genetic code for Jade's pet dog, who is not actually a dog but an ancient First One, whose powers are yet unclear.
This is the point at which she's being taken from, but a little more explanation is needed to talk about her personality, so I will summarize what happens next.
After waking up with these memories, the two Daves do talk John out of jumping to the boss battle, and the kids continue to play along for a while, Rose and Dave just with a bit of an advantage from her memories and his self-prototyped kernelsprite. John also gets less-deadly hints from the trolls, indicating that they had to learn all this the hard way, but for some reason, despite not liking the human kids, they're helping them out.
It turns out that the point of the game is to sacrifice one world to create an entire universe, and players of winning sessions get to go be effectively gods of their new universe. The trolls created the kids' universe, but as they were about to head over themselves, something happened. A rift, or Scratch, appeared between the universes, and broke their session. So they're hiding out in the belt of meteors that haven't yet headed off to rain down on anything, and trying to figure out if there's any way to make both sessions not be completely screwed. They're not very optimistic about this, but they don't have anything else to do but wait around and eventually die. They can see the kids' entire timelines up until the Scratch, which means they watch their actions do nothing but recreate the problem in the first place. The biggest issue comes from Jade's kernelsprite being prototyped by her dog/First One, since the enemies also gain power and attributes from the things used to prototype kernelsprites before entering the Medium. What exactly this does aside from make Jack Noir, one of the enemies, immensely powerful (he goes and slaughters most of the rest of the big bosses himself in order to take control), is unclear.
Once the kids know their session is doomed to lose, Rose starts hacking. She blows up her first gate and starts taking her planet apart, in ways likely similar to the research she and Dave did on their doomed future timeline. She grows more jaded and cynical, but is still mostly herself. Then she is contacted by Doc Scratch, a near-omniscient being who wants to commit suicide and bring Lord English, a demon, into being by ending their universe with his death. This is likely the Scratch, and Rose tries to pry information from him without committing to anything. He shows her how to use her sight, and then she uses her crystal ball (which is not actually her sight but regular Sburb magic) to see that her mother and John's dad have just been killed by Jack Noir. She does not quite flip out completely at this, but allows Scratch to urge her to look and See what the horrorterrors really are; she has always thought them a force for good. At this point she does flip out and go grimdark, and runs off seeking revenge on Jack Noir. She also goes dark to the trolls' view at this point, even though this is before the Scratch. This is as far as the story has gotten; whether or not someone (likely John, if it happens) will be able to bring her back from her grimdarkness is unclear.
Personality:
All of her life, her role model for adulthood is her mother, who is aloof, passive-aggressive, but does deeply love her daughter. In fact, all of the adults she meets so far are nigh-faceless authority figures (or quite literally faceless in the case of Doc Scratch), who lie, distort the truth, and are generally sarcastic. She takes this model and emulates it.
She often feels the need to deny things she loves to avoid seeming sentimental or juvenile -- she really loves wizard stories, but she pretends to hate them; she loves her cat Jaspers and is sad when he dies, and she's also implied to care more about the pony Maplehoof that her mom got her than she outwardly shows. The same is true of her love for her mother; their relationship is outwardly founded on trying to ignore each other except for sarcastic, over-the-top statements of affection. For example, Rose drew a picture of Jaspers as a small child. Her mom bought a $15,000 frame for it and hung it on the fridge, enshrining her terrible kid-artwork and love for her cat forever. (Or at least until the end of the universe, which will likely be very soon.)
She isn't in the slightest bit above playing dirty when necessary -- she harasses John and Dave into playing Sburb with her. Once set up as John's server player, she pretty much completely ignores his suggestions and does what she wants, although she does help keep him from getting killed by imps and other enemies when necessary.
She can be extremely secretive -- the first time we see her in person, we get a brief description and then watch her hide both a purple package (which turns out to contain John's half-finished birthday present) and then hide her writing journals. She can also seem callous at times, though she tries not to do so visibly. Just after hiding both package and journal, she pulls out her violin and plays a tune while John is in mortal peril. Later, she admits to Jade that she was ignoring Pesterchum messages from the other kids at times, because Jade calls her on it after gaining the ability to see whatever people are doing, and sees that Rose is sitting at her computer ignoring Jade's message.
At the same time, she enjoys being a know-it-all -- she gloats over different things in her first two conversations with John. First, that she knows him well enough to know he's wearing a ridiculous disguise, and second, that she knows what his birthday present from Dave is, despite never explaining directly why she knows. This also explains why she enjoys writing FAQs -- while she sometimes gets annoyed at the other kids when they don't know things that seem obvious to her, she also enjoys teaching people things.
She has an unusual attitude towards money; after all the ironic battles with her mother, she tends to think of expensive things as relatively worthless, and free items as being without value. When talking about items in Sburb early on, she says "According to the Atheneum, it is a free item. This speaks to its importance, in my view." She is right, but other important items are expensive in-game, and she tends to dismiss price as a concern while playing unless she can't actually build what she wants at that moment. Her birthday gift to John is hand-knitted, and she claims it is entirely a facetious sentimental gesture, but even as it is ironic it is a sentimental gesture; she just doesn't show sentiment in any other way.
Finally, she's thirteen, and can sometimes be a bit silly. Whether it's a refrigerator magnet as a fake mustache, or alchemizing the same magnet along with some of her mother's vodka to make magnetic vodka for absolutely no reason except that it is funny, she does have an age-appropriate sense of humor. She just tends to only let it out when she thinks no one is watching.
Canon Point:
Rose is taken from just as she wakes up from the nap in which the doomed timelines memories merge into the main timeline and her dreamself woke on Derse.
This, like just about any other point in the story, is on April 13, 2009.