app
Player Information ;
Your Nickname: Carolyn
OOC Journal: kadath
Under 18? nope
Email/IM: green.and.dying@gmail.com/time held me (AIM)
Characters Played at Singularity: theuserabides, spacebased
Character Information ;
Name: Iris* "Mom" Lalonde
*First name is not canonical; I just picked it because I doubt people who aren't Rose call her Mom.
Name of Canon: Homestuck
Canon/AU/Other Game CR: Canon
Reference: Mom
Guardian
Paradox clone
Sburb
Rose's house
SkaiaNet Laboratory
Rose Lalonde
A list of all Mom's appearances
Canon Point: On Skaia with Dad Egbert immediately pre-stabbination
Setting:
Homestuck is the story of a most singular game. It occurs in many universes under many names, but it is always about the eternal battle between light and darkness, and the destruction of one world to create countless others. In a universe much like our own, on an Earth much like our own, themselves brought into existence by the game, it was called Sburb, and it was played by four children who doomed the world.
Which is all very dramatic, but it's just as easy to see Homestuck as a webcomic that started out poking fun at text adventures and absurd video game inventory systems, and then promptly spiraled out of control and into a disorganized yet compelling mess.
So. We have the drama and we have the humor, and you can't really separate them, which is why you can have stories of sacrifice, betrayal, and redemption side-by-side with jokes about being able to carry a car around as long as you've got the inventory slot for it. It explains much of the appeal, but it also contributes to the whole thing frequently not making a lot of sense.
Welp.
Begin on this Earth-much-like-our-own. We have four children, mutual friends, scattered about the globe, not realizing they're anything but normal, each raised by a single guardian with whom they have a fraught relationship. These children are destined to play Sburb, end the world, and create a new one or die trying. They have various advantages: sylladexes, that aforementioned inventory joke, which allow them to store any number of ridiculous items in some kind of pocket dimension. Strife specibi, which let them catalogue and fight with any weapon matching the template they've chosen. An upbringing by caregivers who (likely) know what's in store for them. And a stupidly high tolerance for things that really should blow their minds.
Installing Sburb and beginning a game session starts a countdown timer to the end of the world. Once the game is afoot, the players' only choice is to complete the challenges--half sandbox, half turn-based combat--with which Sburb presents them, unless they want to be pounded out of existence by the meteors that their own actions will eventually cause to be launched through time to fall on them. Beating Level One, as it were, transports the player and their immediate surroundings off the ill-fated planet, out of the path of the meteors, and into a vast void called the Medium, itself part of a larger universe called the Incipisphere. Floating at the center of the Incipisphere is Skaia, "a source of unlimited creative potential," which is orbited by Prospit, the Kingdom of Light, by a planet for each player, and in the distance, outside the Medium and beyond the meteor-filled Veil, by Derse, the Kingdom of Darkness.
Skaia is doomed.
In the neverending war between Prospit and Derse over the fate of Skaia that happens in every session of the game, Derse always wins, defeating the armies of Prospit and triggering the Reckoning, a hail of meteors from the Veil that eventually overwhelm Skaia's defenses--unless, of course, the players can build and fight their way from their planets to Skaia in time to turn the tide of the battle and spawn the new universe that is the goal of Sburb. Through a complicated alchemy setup and the game's mysterious and infuriating information source, the kernelsprites, "prototyped" in the image of whatever a player throws into the proper machine at the proper time--shaping the adversaries in the game in the process--players learn the rules and gain the experience and resources that enable them to defeat the Black King of Derse and save Skaia.
The kids can't. Their session is sterile, cursed by the actions of the players from another universe, an alien race called trolls, whose game session created the childrens' Earth. All is not lost, however. The players have the option of restarting, "scratching" their session to begin the game anew by rewinding the universe to the distant past, where it will develop again, possibly in an entirely different direction, with the chance that the new game will be winnable. The trolls' session was scratched at least once, and it's possible the kids' session was too, but that isn't yet known. As I write this, the children have just managed to scratch their session, and what comes now promises to be every bit as complicated.
The kids' broken game, as with all sessions, is inextricably linked to the session which created it, but unlike the usual one-way influence, their session reaches back through time to affect its parent. Not only can the children not win, but the trolls' game was also derailed by a session-hopping NPC, Jack Noir, from the children's game. In an ordinary session, the antagonist is not so terrifying, but one of the kids' kernelsprites was irresponsibly prototyped with their guardian, which also happened to be the immensely powerful First Guardian of Earth, whose powers spring from the mysterious Green Sun which hangs in the darkness of the Furthest Ring beyond Derse, along with Dark Gods whose mere existence threatens sanity. Does that sound suitably ominous? It should.
So yeah, this unwise prototyping granted whoever controls Derse--in this case, Jack Noir--a set of truly ridiculous powers. Oops.
Ordinary guardians are not remotely as strong, but arguably weirder. One of the phases of the game involves temporal shenanigans whereby the players create themselves sui generis with a special kind of cloning that involves a whole lot of paradox. As Derse launches the Reckoning, two sets of infant clones ride the meteors from the cloning laboratory in the Veil back to various points in time to land on the players' planet, routed there by Skaia's defense portals. One set of clones is the players. The other set is their guardians, who arrive before the children, grow to adulthood, and then are reunited with their later-landing charges.
The game tends to have very tidy time loops, and thus it's likely the guardians never had a choice but to be what the children needed to give them a chance to succeed at the game. How much the guardians are aware of their responsibilities in raising the players isn't known, but nothing that happens in the story appears to faze them, and there is the strong implication that they are directly responsible for creating the game within the session. At any rate, in the kids' session, at least, once the Reckoning began and the duty of guide was handed over to the sprites, the guardians were freed strike out into the Incipisphere themselves, and take whatever mysterious steps they saw necessary to support the children and aid Prospit against Derse.
Personality:
[Mom is a bit character with no lines. She was introduced to help define Rose, early in the series when the guardians were mostly a joke. Their role expanded later as the scope of Homestuck also expanded, but we still know very little. Correspondingly, most of this is extrapolation.]
Rose thinks her mother is a madwoman, and says so at least once. She's not entirely wrong. Sburb has shadowed Mom's entire life, shaping her interests, her skills, and her outlook. Mom's always known that she was to have an important role to play, but not the most important, which is reserved for her daughter. For a woman of her immense accomplishments, this is a source of both pride and resentment--she knows better than to toy with fate, but at the same time, there's a part of her that wonders why she isn't the one destined to play Sburb, why that honor and doom went to Rose. And when you're enmeshed in immutable time loops up to your immaculately-coiffed head, down that road lies madness. The guardians are made of sterner stuff than to completely lose their sanity before an onslaught of unanswerable existential questions, but put a creative mind under enough pressure and everything squirts out the sides into a mess of ironic housewifery and 20-foot wizard statues. Mom herself has lost track of what's affectation and what's truth. When you've done that long enough, the difference stops mattering, and it's all real.
The irrevocable constants in her life all come from Sburb. The game made her a computer programmer. The meteors made her an astronomer. Traveling the world because of both made her a cosmopolitan.
And the crushing responsibility made her a drunk. A destiny seems like a good idea until you actually have one. Growing up with the knowledge that the world is going to end and that you are going to be responsible for raising one of the people who ends it simply doesn't make for an entirely stable personality. Which is why Mom drinks. A lot. As coping mechanisms go, it's lousy, but it never got in the way of her doing her job. In fact, whether her alcoholism, like the end of the world, is one of those predestined things she couldn't escape if she tried keeps her up nights. Does her mother being a conflicted, neurotic drunk give Rose an edge in the game? Does it mix with the flaws of the other children's guardians in the way that the impurities of carbon are what turn iron into steel? If so, how? Why?
Easier, all those years, just to have another drink and try to ignore the countdown timer ticking away in the back of her mind. Rose is there. Rose is her daughter and must be protected and cast loose. Rose is her greatest achievement and the anchor around her neck. She would do absolutely anything for Rose, loving her and hating her all the while. Some bonds can never be broken, and Mom will never try. Maybe it's because of this, because Rose and not Mom is the one willing to spit in the face of destiny that Rose is the one who's playing the game.
But too late for that question. The Reckoning has begun, the children have entered the Incipisphere, and suddenly fate has no further use for Mom. Freedom is not something to which she's accustomed, and she's not sure if the giddy rush is delight or nausea--or infatuation with that charming Mr. Egbert. Now that she has the choice, Mom's been pleasantly surprised to find out that she chooses to walk into the fire for the greater good.
Though perhaps it's inescapable still. Sburb created them all, and holds them yet.
It feels like freedom. Good enough, and good enough company in Dad to experience it with. On Skaia, in the middle of a war for the totality of existence, for the first time in her life, Mom doesn't dread the future.
Abilities, Weaknesses, and Power Limitation Suggestions:
+classy dame
+astronomy
+computer programming
+sylladex (fetch modus unknown)
+strife specibi: riflekind, karatekind (She's shown taking down a monster 10x her size barehanded)
+plot-determined levels of ass-kicking
-a functional alcoholic is still an alcoholic
-still pretty much human despite it all
-plot-determined levels of ass-kicking
I don't think any limitations are needed, but if necessary, the space available in her sylladex could be smaller than in canon, and she could be less awesome at fighting.
Inventory:
Worn/carried:
a Sixties Lady Scientist dress and accessories
a long pink scarf
a hip flask (straight gin)
Captchalogued:
A truly ridiculous amount of alcohol and bartending paraphernalia. You don't even know.
A portable telescope.
A tablet computer and power hub.
A smartphone with bluetooth accessories.
A few changes of clothing.
Toiletries.
Rifles. With how a sylladex works, she could have hundreds, but let's say three or four.
Assorted insignificant crap.
Appearance: A tall, slender blond woman with a 60s flip and a martini welded to her hand. The guardians aren't actually faceless; that's a symbolic representation of how the kids perceive them as ciphers.
Age: Who knows? Let's say she looks like she's in her 30s, but is actually...uh, 63. One guardian was "born" (arrived on Earth via meteor) in 1910 and was still completely healthy and spry at the turn of the next century, so it's likely guardians have a longer life span than normal. She dresses like a refugee from the 60s, so it stands to reason she came of age in that decade. Homestuck takes place in 2009, so that puts her "birth" in 1946.
OC/AU Justification ;
If AU, How is Your Version Different From Canon, and How Will That Come Across?
If OC, Did You Run Your Character Through a Mary-Sue Litmus Test?
And What Did You Score?
Samples ;
Log Sample:
It was a dark and stormy night. --Victorian poet, politician, and novelist Flavor Flav
And the world was ending. One of the only people who understood what was happening watched it from her hall window. No need to brave the rain to reach the observatory; seeing the meteors through gaps in the clouds as they streaked across the sky would tell her nothing new. The burning man has no need of a thermometer.
Knowing the end had always been coming didn't make it any easier. Knowing the sacrifice of everything and everyone save four children would make possible a whole new creation brought scant comfort. Knowing was overrated.
Some say the world will end in fire. --American Poet Laureate Chuck D
From across time and space, the Reckoning had arrived, and the woods were burning. In orbit, the satellites she had helped launch noted with their impassive, glassy eyes the Skaian defense portals blooming in the darkness, routing the Dersite attack where it would do some good. It was all very tidy and horrifying, and she forgave herself the hollow twisting in her guts, because she was only (mostly) human, and it proved she wasn't entirely numb from drink and determinism.
Outside, the generator powering Rose's laptop would run out of gas soon--as planned, to drive her underground and into the laboratory, where clues awaited. Rose needed better shelter than a mausoleum, needed more information than the game would give her before she had her sprite.
Her mother needed a drink.
Raise the roof because it's all on fire
Not done by the sun or electrical wire
Not done by sons striking matches with daughters
But done by scratches so save that water
--Nobel Prize-winning modernist poet T. S. Eliot
The motions to mixing a martini were automatic. Though she scarcely thought barwarekind was a likely strife specibus, she wiped down and put away the shaker and stirring spoon out of habit. Better not to give the game any ideas...assuming she hadn't already. Over the years, she'd gotten good at heading off those thoughts, and she sipped her drink, letting unanswerable questions wash away with the gin.
There was not much she could do to spare Rose, but a few more minutes thinking that her mother, at least, was exactly as she appeared was a gift it was in her power to give. A few more minutes for sentiment's sake...she'd waited this long. She'd wait a little longer, holding Rose's fate in her hands as the world ended.
Network Sample:
I confess to some confusion, which I flatter myself to be a normal reaction to involuntary appearification. Still, one deals with the world as it is, not as one wishes it to be.
The world as it is appears to be a sizable space station, which comes as something of a shock to one who had thought herself done with plying the Veil for the time being. I would take it as a courtesy if some kind soul could explain how I might go about reaching Skaia from here. I had made other plans for my afternoon, and would quite like to resume them.
Your Nickname: Carolyn
OOC Journal: kadath
Under 18? nope
Email/IM: green.and.dying@gmail.com/time held me (AIM)
Characters Played at Singularity: theuserabides, spacebased
Character Information ;
Name: Iris* "Mom" Lalonde
*First name is not canonical; I just picked it because I doubt people who aren't Rose call her Mom.
Name of Canon: Homestuck
Canon/AU/Other Game CR: Canon
Reference: Mom
Guardian
Paradox clone
Sburb
Rose's house
SkaiaNet Laboratory
Rose Lalonde
A list of all Mom's appearances
Canon Point: On Skaia with Dad Egbert immediately pre-stabbination
Setting:
Homestuck is the story of a most singular game. It occurs in many universes under many names, but it is always about the eternal battle between light and darkness, and the destruction of one world to create countless others. In a universe much like our own, on an Earth much like our own, themselves brought into existence by the game, it was called Sburb, and it was played by four children who doomed the world.
Which is all very dramatic, but it's just as easy to see Homestuck as a webcomic that started out poking fun at text adventures and absurd video game inventory systems, and then promptly spiraled out of control and into a disorganized yet compelling mess.
So. We have the drama and we have the humor, and you can't really separate them, which is why you can have stories of sacrifice, betrayal, and redemption side-by-side with jokes about being able to carry a car around as long as you've got the inventory slot for it. It explains much of the appeal, but it also contributes to the whole thing frequently not making a lot of sense.
Welp.
Begin on this Earth-much-like-our-own. We have four children, mutual friends, scattered about the globe, not realizing they're anything but normal, each raised by a single guardian with whom they have a fraught relationship. These children are destined to play Sburb, end the world, and create a new one or die trying. They have various advantages: sylladexes, that aforementioned inventory joke, which allow them to store any number of ridiculous items in some kind of pocket dimension. Strife specibi, which let them catalogue and fight with any weapon matching the template they've chosen. An upbringing by caregivers who (likely) know what's in store for them. And a stupidly high tolerance for things that really should blow their minds.
Installing Sburb and beginning a game session starts a countdown timer to the end of the world. Once the game is afoot, the players' only choice is to complete the challenges--half sandbox, half turn-based combat--with which Sburb presents them, unless they want to be pounded out of existence by the meteors that their own actions will eventually cause to be launched through time to fall on them. Beating Level One, as it were, transports the player and their immediate surroundings off the ill-fated planet, out of the path of the meteors, and into a vast void called the Medium, itself part of a larger universe called the Incipisphere. Floating at the center of the Incipisphere is Skaia, "a source of unlimited creative potential," which is orbited by Prospit, the Kingdom of Light, by a planet for each player, and in the distance, outside the Medium and beyond the meteor-filled Veil, by Derse, the Kingdom of Darkness.
Skaia is doomed.
In the neverending war between Prospit and Derse over the fate of Skaia that happens in every session of the game, Derse always wins, defeating the armies of Prospit and triggering the Reckoning, a hail of meteors from the Veil that eventually overwhelm Skaia's defenses--unless, of course, the players can build and fight their way from their planets to Skaia in time to turn the tide of the battle and spawn the new universe that is the goal of Sburb. Through a complicated alchemy setup and the game's mysterious and infuriating information source, the kernelsprites, "prototyped" in the image of whatever a player throws into the proper machine at the proper time--shaping the adversaries in the game in the process--players learn the rules and gain the experience and resources that enable them to defeat the Black King of Derse and save Skaia.
The kids can't. Their session is sterile, cursed by the actions of the players from another universe, an alien race called trolls, whose game session created the childrens' Earth. All is not lost, however. The players have the option of restarting, "scratching" their session to begin the game anew by rewinding the universe to the distant past, where it will develop again, possibly in an entirely different direction, with the chance that the new game will be winnable. The trolls' session was scratched at least once, and it's possible the kids' session was too, but that isn't yet known. As I write this, the children have just managed to scratch their session, and what comes now promises to be every bit as complicated.
The kids' broken game, as with all sessions, is inextricably linked to the session which created it, but unlike the usual one-way influence, their session reaches back through time to affect its parent. Not only can the children not win, but the trolls' game was also derailed by a session-hopping NPC, Jack Noir, from the children's game. In an ordinary session, the antagonist is not so terrifying, but one of the kids' kernelsprites was irresponsibly prototyped with their guardian, which also happened to be the immensely powerful First Guardian of Earth, whose powers spring from the mysterious Green Sun which hangs in the darkness of the Furthest Ring beyond Derse, along with Dark Gods whose mere existence threatens sanity. Does that sound suitably ominous? It should.
So yeah, this unwise prototyping granted whoever controls Derse--in this case, Jack Noir--a set of truly ridiculous powers. Oops.
Ordinary guardians are not remotely as strong, but arguably weirder. One of the phases of the game involves temporal shenanigans whereby the players create themselves sui generis with a special kind of cloning that involves a whole lot of paradox. As Derse launches the Reckoning, two sets of infant clones ride the meteors from the cloning laboratory in the Veil back to various points in time to land on the players' planet, routed there by Skaia's defense portals. One set of clones is the players. The other set is their guardians, who arrive before the children, grow to adulthood, and then are reunited with their later-landing charges.
The game tends to have very tidy time loops, and thus it's likely the guardians never had a choice but to be what the children needed to give them a chance to succeed at the game. How much the guardians are aware of their responsibilities in raising the players isn't known, but nothing that happens in the story appears to faze them, and there is the strong implication that they are directly responsible for creating the game within the session. At any rate, in the kids' session, at least, once the Reckoning began and the duty of guide was handed over to the sprites, the guardians were freed strike out into the Incipisphere themselves, and take whatever mysterious steps they saw necessary to support the children and aid Prospit against Derse.
Personality:
[Mom is a bit character with no lines. She was introduced to help define Rose, early in the series when the guardians were mostly a joke. Their role expanded later as the scope of Homestuck also expanded, but we still know very little. Correspondingly, most of this is extrapolation.]
Rose thinks her mother is a madwoman, and says so at least once. She's not entirely wrong. Sburb has shadowed Mom's entire life, shaping her interests, her skills, and her outlook. Mom's always known that she was to have an important role to play, but not the most important, which is reserved for her daughter. For a woman of her immense accomplishments, this is a source of both pride and resentment--she knows better than to toy with fate, but at the same time, there's a part of her that wonders why she isn't the one destined to play Sburb, why that honor and doom went to Rose. And when you're enmeshed in immutable time loops up to your immaculately-coiffed head, down that road lies madness. The guardians are made of sterner stuff than to completely lose their sanity before an onslaught of unanswerable existential questions, but put a creative mind under enough pressure and everything squirts out the sides into a mess of ironic housewifery and 20-foot wizard statues. Mom herself has lost track of what's affectation and what's truth. When you've done that long enough, the difference stops mattering, and it's all real.
The irrevocable constants in her life all come from Sburb. The game made her a computer programmer. The meteors made her an astronomer. Traveling the world because of both made her a cosmopolitan.
And the crushing responsibility made her a drunk. A destiny seems like a good idea until you actually have one. Growing up with the knowledge that the world is going to end and that you are going to be responsible for raising one of the people who ends it simply doesn't make for an entirely stable personality. Which is why Mom drinks. A lot. As coping mechanisms go, it's lousy, but it never got in the way of her doing her job. In fact, whether her alcoholism, like the end of the world, is one of those predestined things she couldn't escape if she tried keeps her up nights. Does her mother being a conflicted, neurotic drunk give Rose an edge in the game? Does it mix with the flaws of the other children's guardians in the way that the impurities of carbon are what turn iron into steel? If so, how? Why?
Easier, all those years, just to have another drink and try to ignore the countdown timer ticking away in the back of her mind. Rose is there. Rose is her daughter and must be protected and cast loose. Rose is her greatest achievement and the anchor around her neck. She would do absolutely anything for Rose, loving her and hating her all the while. Some bonds can never be broken, and Mom will never try. Maybe it's because of this, because Rose and not Mom is the one willing to spit in the face of destiny that Rose is the one who's playing the game.
But too late for that question. The Reckoning has begun, the children have entered the Incipisphere, and suddenly fate has no further use for Mom. Freedom is not something to which she's accustomed, and she's not sure if the giddy rush is delight or nausea--or infatuation with that charming Mr. Egbert. Now that she has the choice, Mom's been pleasantly surprised to find out that she chooses to walk into the fire for the greater good.
Though perhaps it's inescapable still. Sburb created them all, and holds them yet.
It feels like freedom. Good enough, and good enough company in Dad to experience it with. On Skaia, in the middle of a war for the totality of existence, for the first time in her life, Mom doesn't dread the future.
Abilities, Weaknesses, and Power Limitation Suggestions:
+classy dame
+astronomy
+computer programming
+sylladex (fetch modus unknown)
+strife specibi: riflekind, karatekind (She's shown taking down a monster 10x her size barehanded)
+plot-determined levels of ass-kicking
-a functional alcoholic is still an alcoholic
-still pretty much human despite it all
-plot-determined levels of ass-kicking
I don't think any limitations are needed, but if necessary, the space available in her sylladex could be smaller than in canon, and she could be less awesome at fighting.
Inventory:
Worn/carried:
a Sixties Lady Scientist dress and accessories
a long pink scarf
a hip flask (straight gin)
Captchalogued:
A truly ridiculous amount of alcohol and bartending paraphernalia. You don't even know.
A portable telescope.
A tablet computer and power hub.
A smartphone with bluetooth accessories.
A few changes of clothing.
Toiletries.
Rifles. With how a sylladex works, she could have hundreds, but let's say three or four.
Assorted insignificant crap.
Appearance: A tall, slender blond woman with a 60s flip and a martini welded to her hand. The guardians aren't actually faceless; that's a symbolic representation of how the kids perceive them as ciphers.
Age: Who knows? Let's say she looks like she's in her 30s, but is actually...uh, 63. One guardian was "born" (arrived on Earth via meteor) in 1910 and was still completely healthy and spry at the turn of the next century, so it's likely guardians have a longer life span than normal. She dresses like a refugee from the 60s, so it stands to reason she came of age in that decade. Homestuck takes place in 2009, so that puts her "birth" in 1946.
OC/AU Justification ;
If AU, How is Your Version Different From Canon, and How Will That Come Across?
If OC, Did You Run Your Character Through a Mary-Sue Litmus Test?
And What Did You Score?
Samples ;
Log Sample:
It was a dark and stormy night. --Victorian poet, politician, and novelist Flavor Flav
And the world was ending. One of the only people who understood what was happening watched it from her hall window. No need to brave the rain to reach the observatory; seeing the meteors through gaps in the clouds as they streaked across the sky would tell her nothing new. The burning man has no need of a thermometer.
Knowing the end had always been coming didn't make it any easier. Knowing the sacrifice of everything and everyone save four children would make possible a whole new creation brought scant comfort. Knowing was overrated.
Some say the world will end in fire. --American Poet Laureate Chuck D
From across time and space, the Reckoning had arrived, and the woods were burning. In orbit, the satellites she had helped launch noted with their impassive, glassy eyes the Skaian defense portals blooming in the darkness, routing the Dersite attack where it would do some good. It was all very tidy and horrifying, and she forgave herself the hollow twisting in her guts, because she was only (mostly) human, and it proved she wasn't entirely numb from drink and determinism.
Outside, the generator powering Rose's laptop would run out of gas soon--as planned, to drive her underground and into the laboratory, where clues awaited. Rose needed better shelter than a mausoleum, needed more information than the game would give her before she had her sprite.
Her mother needed a drink.
Raise the roof because it's all on fire
Not done by the sun or electrical wire
Not done by sons striking matches with daughters
But done by scratches so save that water
--Nobel Prize-winning modernist poet T. S. Eliot
The motions to mixing a martini were automatic. Though she scarcely thought barwarekind was a likely strife specibus, she wiped down and put away the shaker and stirring spoon out of habit. Better not to give the game any ideas...assuming she hadn't already. Over the years, she'd gotten good at heading off those thoughts, and she sipped her drink, letting unanswerable questions wash away with the gin.
There was not much she could do to spare Rose, but a few more minutes thinking that her mother, at least, was exactly as she appeared was a gift it was in her power to give. A few more minutes for sentiment's sake...she'd waited this long. She'd wait a little longer, holding Rose's fate in her hands as the world ended.
Network Sample:
I confess to some confusion, which I flatter myself to be a normal reaction to involuntary appearification. Still, one deals with the world as it is, not as one wishes it to be.
The world as it is appears to be a sizable space station, which comes as something of a shock to one who had thought herself done with plying the Veil for the time being. I would take it as a courtesy if some kind soul could explain how I might go about reaching Skaia from here. I had made other plans for my afternoon, and would quite like to resume them.