Fill out the following form for each character you intend to play and post it in the comments below (or link to an outside source, if you prefer). Applications are always open. Also note that there is no reserve system in place; characters are taken as they're applied for.
Name: DW Journal: Contact: Current Characters:
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Name: Emily DW Journal:revolutionary Contact: aim @ spark memories, user name=weaponize site=plurk.com Current Characters: none.
Character Name: Vriska Serket Canon: Homestuck Age: uuuhhh. Depending on how you frame it, she's either 13 yrs/6 sweeps, or maybe 15/7, or maybe 3498637948673483/?. It's hard to tell. Technically it's the second one, going by the alpha timeline. Gender: Female
8luh 8luh huge 8itch. The stereotypical four words used all too frequently to describe Vriska really do seem to fit her pretty well, at least on the surface. Often playful in her mockery (if never precisely capricious), Vriska is given to frequently needling her friends and, well, anyone and everyone, really. Mockery, mind games, and cutesy cagey bullshit are her forte, and she engages in all three with relish. She seems to take great fun out of her ploys and plots and plans, of which she always has many, describing herself as always having all the irons in the fire. (All of them!) Prone to describing herself as "the 8est" and the greatest, whether it be at fighting or playing the game or at just plain existing, Vriska is certainly not one to want for self-esteem.
That's what she'd really like you to think, anyway. Sure, once she enters the game -- and especially after she attains god tier, regaining her organic eye and arm -- she's basically all awesome all the time, gaining all the levels (all of them!) and, of course, being the first of the trolls, by quite a long shot, to attain god tier. You'd think that someone so on top of her game couldn't possibly be shaken, and is 100% confident in her belief that she really is the best.
Vriska's dark and maybe-not-so-secret secret is that she doesn't really believe that at all. Vriska is plagued by doubts, fears, and worries, constantly haunted by the guilt of her crimes and truly a little insecure of what the others think about her. Or rather, she's insecure of what they would think of her if she ever let it slip that she has these deep down fears. (EB: well, how do you feel? AG: Horri8le!!!!!!!! AG: If any of my friends knew that, they would think I'm weak.)
Truthfully, Vriska never liked her life back home. (AG: The life I left 8ehind wasn't so hot, to 8e honest.) SGRUB, for her, was an escape into something much better, much greater. Though she openly admits to never feeling any guilt over the many thousands of lives she took to feed her lusus, she also describes herself as a "slave" on the food chain to keep that lusus alive. Finding sacrifices required engaging in FLARPing, extreme roleplaying, and working with other trolls (particularly Eridan) to secure the lives she needed. When you work that hard for that long at something so often -- well, when you're Vriska Serket, you develop something of a cavalier attitude towards it, and you move on and you deal. But she mentions taking a "precocious" view to killing -- of trying much too hard to be the best. In the end, the desperate drive to keep her lusus placated became both a gift and a curse - it granted her a ruthlessness and the edge she needed to triumph, but it also silenced her.
After all, Vriska never talks about feeling weak. She never talks about her feelings very much at all. So when things start to go wrong, and a man in white text starts courting her with hideous ideas she can't resist .... it goes poorly for her. She cripples Tavros, engineers Aradia's murder, and through a complicated psychic double reacharound of powers, makes Terezi go blind. Her inability to speak, to say no, to ever back down from a challenge (for she can never be weak) leads her to commit awful crimes, and no longer against faceless multitudes, but against the friends she should be cherishing. Hurting people is reflexive for her. When something goes wrong, or she feels threatened, or there's simply a need to compete and never be less than number 1, she lashes out - which we see as she makes her friends pay for their "crimes" over and over. (What crimes? Aradia visited ghosts upon her, Terezi meddling caused her to loser her left arm and eye, and Tavros - things just never go right with Tavros. Not until long after her death.)
Whether or not Vriska would have hurt her friends as badly as she did without the influence of Doc Scratch is hard to say. He always claimed that she was going to do it all anyway, and he was just giving her a push; and that, perhaps, is true. His presence allows her to blame him, at any rate. But whatever her true motivation, the deep down guilt she feels, especially at first over Aradia's death and later over Tavros's, never leaves her. Vriska may hurt people, but when it comes to her friends, she pretty much always feels bad about it later. Though the conversation turned out to be with Aranea, Terezi does in fact have a memory of speaking to Vriska just after their part in the cycle of revenge - with Vriska still bleeding freely and Terezi blind, Vriska cheerfully comments that now they can be friends again with all of that out of the way. In fact, as early as we see her in canon, we know Vriska is plotting with Equius to deliver a robot body to Aradia - to make everything all better. (AG: No! It had to go the way we said it would. I was going to give you the present I convinced him to m8ke for you. Me! It wo8ldn't have got m8de if not f8r me! AG: And then you could have a 8ody again and everyth8ng would 8e fine. Then we could go 8ack to 8eing friends again.)
And that's the thing about Vriska - deep down, very, very, very, very deep down, she seems to actually, genuinely mean well. Some of the things she does to/for her friends are actually gifts, in her warped perception of such things. She tries to gift Aradia with a new robot body. (Her "gift" of Terezi's blindness is, er, inadvertent.) She tries to give Tavros the gift of confidence - and when he fails, she cliffs him, but that doesn't stop her from continuing to try. She gives him another, real chance later - after Aradia beats her to within an inch of her life - refusing to control him and begging him to kill her so she can reach god tier without slowly bleeding to death. She lets him make that choice, that most critical choice, without trying to do anything to force him - believing he'll come through for her. Believing in him! Vriska seems to really actually enjoy having friends, and she puts more faith in them than she ever really lets on except in moments of extreme vulnerability. She cares for Aradia (even if it manifests in anger when her robot body plan falls through), she cares for Tavros (until he fails her, at least), she cares for Kanaya (to whom she admits missing all that meddling and bugging and fussing).... it seems she cares for Karkat and Terezi too, admitting near the end of her life that they are among her friends and she wants to fight Jack to protect them.
Serketly, Vriska wants to care for and help her friends as much as the other goody two shoes do. Though the way she helps John out begins as a contest, it morphs into something genuine - so genuine that when the time comes, she actually asks his permission to put him to sleep. Despite constantly professing that it's better to ignore people's 8itching and do what's right for them, in the critical moment, she respects him, truly wants to help him, and offers him the choice of sleep instead of forcing it on him. From her, it is an act of respect and genuine care. But so warped is she by her life serving her lusus, warped by all that murdering, and most of all warped by the journal of Marquise Spinneret Mindfang, that her good impulses do not manifest in a good way. It's doubtful she'd be all sunshine and roses without these influences, but if she'd be as destructive is open to debate.
Mindfang, yes, does form a huge part of who Vriska is. The girl finds Mindfang's journal early in her life, in a FLARP campaign, where she also discovers the Flourite Octet, a legendary set of very powerful eight-sided dice. She claims to model her life as closely to her ancestor's as she can - which means becoming a sea grift opposite Eridan and trying to live up to the grandiose, elegant infamy that her ancestor maintained and thus would require of her descendant. Being powerful and feared - able to easily destroy Neophyte Redglare, challenge His Honorable Tyranny with only one arm, take and leave Orphaner Dualscar as she pleases - this is the cuttingly ruthless example to which Vriska aspires, so much so that "Marquise Spinneret Mindfang" becomes her FLARP character. This certainty (or perhaps need) that she'll follow in the footsteps of her ancestor leads her to be very ambitious indeed -- and may also have influenced her perception of Tavros, descendent of her ancestor's fated matesprit.
Though her journals, Mindfang makes it clear she was gifted with a power of telekinetic manipulation - a power Vriska shares and liberally abuses. Vriska's personality, too, is very controlling - as mentioned above, she fancies herself a manipulator and will do whatever it takes to string people along into her web. However, she's honestly not very good at it, and she seems to possibly envy Terezi her ability to manipulate others so naturally. (CG: YOU WERE ALWAYS JEALOUS SHE COULD MANIPULATE PEOPLE SO WELL WITHOUT RESORTING TO CHEAP MIND TRICKS.) Vriska tries early on to play Equius and Aradia against each other to become the leader of the blue team, only to be thwarted in all her ambitions when not only is she not the team leader, she ends up on an entirely different team instead. When it comes to petty things or blackmail, Vriska can manipulate with the best, but the bigger, more (or most) important things require her to rely on her powers - as when she controls Sollux and Tavros. In a weird in-between place is the way she influences her session's future Exiles in order to bring about the creation of Bec, and subsequently Bec Noir. Though she describes the kids' session as being on "full Serket lockdown" and claims to have a hand in everything in their universe, it was really more a matter of inserting herself into events that she knew were going to occur anyway. (EB: why should i calm down when you just said you deliberately sabotaged all of us? AG: Relaaaaaaaax. AG: Listen, John. AG: Regardless of what I did, he is already here.) Simply because, as she says to Tavros, she wanted to have a hand in creating her own ultimate nemesis - to have the sole honor of destroying him later. Simultaneously a petty, worthless and largely symbolic act, yet still in a way fundamental to the kids' session, it amounts to Vriska's greatest coup, even if it really changes nothing. In her lifetime, she never even is able to challenge Jack - never able to even try her mettle at the challenge she set for herself. It speaks again to the sort of troll she is - that her biggest, most dramatic gesture is ultimately the most useless and empty, done simply to serve her ego. (It's her biggest gesture during her life, anyway. She gets up to arguably even greater shenanigans in her death, but I wouldn't say that's during her "lifetime." She also goes about those gestures slightly differently.) The only gestures that really matter are the comparatively smaller ones, the ones driven not by her blind ambition but by her emotions, be they good or bad.
This has changed somewhat after her descent into the endless, empty realms of death, the point from which she will be taken. The escalation of her challengers - from Black King, to Jack/Bec Noir, to Lord English himself - has finally reached its final tier, a thing she not only realizes but appreciates for its vast enormity. And far be it from her not to meddle - though her attitude has mildly cooled off in death, she is unable to resist the urge to exert control. She claims to Tavros that they need to get involved and "fuck shit up" - and fuck shit up is precisely what she ends up doing, coming up with a plan that involves enticing Lord English to destroy reality in order to assist her in finding the "ultimate treasure" that will bring him down. Even in death, she has to have an active hand in the greatest and grandest workings of the adventure that now spawns four incarnations of two separate universes - in fact, she has to be the one to help lead the charge against the final enemy, the biggest bad of them all. (VRISKA: Really, everyone's pretty lucky I died so I could do all the dirty work on this. Let's get real, no8ody's 8etter prepared to take on the treasure hunting duties than I am.)
Though it's in Vriska's nature to be kind of loud and overdramaaaaaaaatic, she seems to mature quite a bit by the time of her canon point. Her many talks with John allude to this growth, especially her many admissions about how she wants to help her friends, about her trying-too-hard recklessness when she was younger, and even about her doubts concerning whether she really has aaaaaaaall the luck. Even further, she admits to Tavros that it was a bad idea to kill him, and apologizes - and even gets some dating experience under her belt in the two years (in alpha timeline reckoning) since her death. Some things about Vriska don't change - her final conversation while alive is full of her usual quips and banter, her razor sharp smiles and her a-little-too-pleased-with-herself mockery. Conversations after her death are not much better, full of her usual mockery, though perhaps somewhat more tempered by the Vriska Explains It All explanatory deluge that occurs before her showdown with Meenah. (Expository rambles are things that, you could say, run in the family.)
But through her talks with John and the very long, very introspective time she spent wandering the wastes of the Furthest Ring in death, she's become able, for the first time in her life, to speak. Where before she had always been silenced by her own awful actions, by the scorn of her friends, by the desperation instilled in her by her lusus, by the inflated sense of pride granted to her by Mindfang, and most of all by her own compulsive need to never show weakness, ever - now, and only now, can she talk freely. Finally. In front of the one person in paradox space she believe won't find her weak - because, being a squishy pink human, John already is weak. And, simply put, she trusts him - when trust has been hard to come by in her short but brutal life. John was never able to change Vriska - the way she goes out, both in the alpha timeline and in her own doomed timeline, make it quite clear she dies as headstrong as she lived. This fact doesn't change in her post-death exploits. But simply by being her non-judgmental ear, he let her be herself in a way she was never before allowed to be. So yes, it matured her - just not enough to save her life or fundamentally change her nature. However, it's very likely that those talks, and John's influence on her during her life and during her death (she chilled with his doomed dead version for some time, after all), are a fundamental factor in leading Vriska to apologize to Tavros when she finally reunites with him. As well as, perhaps, her slightly more chilled out in general attitude. (Not to say she isn't still spunky. "Chilled out," in terms of Vriska, just mean she is noticeably less vicious, cruel, and mean. She is a far cry from the girl who tortured Tavros and demanded he apologize to her for being crippled. But just because she is no longer outright hideous doesn't mean she isn't terrible. See: sending multitudes of ghosts to their double doom because she perceives them to be pointless, extraneous chaff, despite the fact that they are all legitimate people in their own right. Try convincing her of that, though.)
So what's her deal? Vriska cares. Much, much more than she should, about all of her friends, and it constantly manifests in damaging ways due to her spidery nature and her decidedly difficult upbringing. So she's controlling, very controlling, always trying to prove her strength and make others do what she wants them to do, because it's what's best for them and it's what she wants to happen. So she conquers, and she triumphs, and she gains all the levels, even if she hates herself a little bit for the things she's done to her friends. She learns, too - learns voraciously and quickly, takes advantage of what she learns, and isn't afraid to share it with the less ignorant. There's a sharp (and perceptive) mind hiding behind those sharp words, and maybe if she stopped trying so hard, Vriska could be a genuine and perhaps even talented strategist. And sometimes, when she stops trying so hard or she decides to actually respect somebody, she can actually be pretty pleasant, a genuine help and maybe, actually, just sometimes, a good friend. Really, even despite all the weird crazy contradictory shit that goes on in her head, Vriska seems to try to have fun. Messing with people, always laughing, playing cruel jokes and basically fucking around - though said fucking is always with a purpose, towards an end, calculated to further her many plans and keep her many irons in the fire. But if this is what her life is gonna be, well hell, she sure as shit is going to enjoy herself along the way.
VRISKA: I'm going to have to insist. VRISKA: You are going to join me and together we are going to fuck shit up.
Powers: Vriska has a stupidiculous amount of powers. On tier 1 are the abilities gifted to her by her hemocaste, which are: an extended life span, and one may well assume enhanced physical strength and endurance, as well as potent psychic abilities. These abilities function by allowing her to bodily control others. She can apparently also influence their wishes and desires. Basically, assuming she CAN control somebody, she can make them do whatever she wants them to do. But her control isn't universal, and at least during Hivebent, she is unable to control highbloods or more psychically-gifted lowbloods. But anyone who is weak-minded or impressssssssionable is susceptible to her shenanigans. This power works on humans as well, giving her the ability to put anyone she likes to sleep at will. Of course, this was across dimensions and universes, so her power in person to control humans has never been canonically settled.
Tier 2 are her God Tier abilities. Vriska is a Thief of Light, which is easily one of the most literal titles of any player of Sburb/Sgrub that we meet. The aspect of Light translates frequently to mean "fortune," and a thief is a thief is a thief. Vriska can literally steal luck, making her enemies very unlucky (she steals luck from one monster, causing the floor to fall out form beneath it so it plummets to its death), and making herself very lucky (on a ridiculous order of magnitude, making a 1 in 8^8th chance actually happen whenever she wants it to). When she rolls her 8-sided dice to get eight 8's, she can "power up" into a sort of mini version of her ancestor, Marquise Spinneret Mindfang. She is absurdly powerful in this form, able to take on in an equal fight the second most powerful enemy in the comic, Jack Noir. (And this is a guy who can blow up whole planets without batting an eyelash and murders just hundreds of motherfuckers in his time.) Aside from all that awesome shit, her God Tier form gives her wings, so she can fly, and apparently leaves a trail of sparkly fairy dust behind her? What's up with that, actually.
Tier 3, and the final tier, is just her dead person powers. Dead people aren't spectacularly gifted in Homestuck, outside of the ability to ALSO fly. So basically being dead just lets her fly without all the magical fairy wing crap going on. And also gives her spooky white eyes. 0u0
Obviously she is ridiculously overpowered in basically every way, so this shit's getting toned down. She will completely lose access to her God Tier abilities. And also the dead abilities. What she will retain is some access to her psychic powers, though they won't work nearly as well. She might be able to control one or two limbs for somebody for a short amount of time, or be able to slip a suggestion into their head of something she might want them to do. But nothing too major and nothing that a person couldn't fight off if they realized what was going on. (Basically, think less "mind controlling some dude into blowing up his girlfriend and also her entire house" and more "stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself, har har har.") She will have somewhat elevated strength and endurance (as well as the horns and fangs that are part of her physiology), but nothing incredible.
OH and she'll have a cutlass on her person when she arrives (because she had it in hand the moment she left). It just won't be blue and kickass. It will be a normal cutlass. Just, you know. What's up, cutlass here, being all cutlass-y.
(Question, what will happen to her dice? Since her strife specibus is dice kind, it could be surmised those will come with too. Not that they'd do much now, just curious.)
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SO THIS WAS TOO BIG FOR ONE COMMENT. SORRY. 1/2
DW Journal:
Contact: aim @ spark memories, user name=weaponize site=plurk.com
Current Characters: none.
Character Name: Vriska Serket
Canon: Homestuck
Age: uuuhhh. Depending on how you frame it, she's either 13 yrs/6 sweeps, or maybe 15/7, or maybe 3498637948673483/?. It's hard to tell. Technically it's the second one, going by the alpha timeline.
Gender: Female
Canon Point: [S][A6I3] MINISTRIFE!!!
History: yo yo what up.
Personality: k but you asked for it.
8luh 8luh huge 8itch. The stereotypical four words used all too frequently to describe Vriska really do seem to fit her pretty well, at least on the surface. Often playful in her mockery (if never precisely capricious), Vriska is given to frequently needling her friends and, well, anyone and everyone, really. Mockery, mind games, and cutesy cagey bullshit are her forte, and she engages in all three with relish. She seems to take great fun out of her ploys and plots and plans, of which she always has many, describing herself as always having all the irons in the fire. (All of them!) Prone to describing herself as "the 8est" and the greatest, whether it be at fighting or playing the game or at just plain existing, Vriska is certainly not one to want for self-esteem.
That's what she'd really like you to think, anyway. Sure, once she enters the game -- and especially after she attains god tier, regaining her organic eye and arm -- she's basically all awesome all the time, gaining all the levels (all of them!) and, of course, being the first of the trolls, by quite a long shot, to attain god tier. You'd think that someone so on top of her game couldn't possibly be shaken, and is 100% confident in her belief that she really is the best.
Vriska's dark and maybe-not-so-secret secret is that she doesn't really believe that at all. Vriska is plagued by doubts, fears, and worries, constantly haunted by the guilt of her crimes and truly a little insecure of what the others think about her. Or rather, she's insecure of what they would think of her if she ever let it slip that she has these deep down fears.
(EB: well, how do you feel?
AG: Horri8le!!!!!!!!
AG: If any of my friends knew that, they would think I'm weak.)
Truthfully, Vriska never liked her life back home. (AG: The life I left 8ehind wasn't so hot, to 8e honest.) SGRUB, for her, was an escape into something much better, much greater. Though she openly admits to never feeling any guilt over the many thousands of lives she took to feed her lusus, she also describes herself as a "slave" on the food chain to keep that lusus alive. Finding sacrifices required engaging in FLARPing, extreme roleplaying, and working with other trolls (particularly Eridan) to secure the lives she needed. When you work that hard for that long at something so often -- well, when you're Vriska Serket, you develop something of a cavalier attitude towards it, and you move on and you deal. But she mentions taking a "precocious" view to killing -- of trying much too hard to be the best. In the end, the desperate drive to keep her lusus placated became both a gift and a curse - it granted her a ruthlessness and the edge she needed to triumph, but it also silenced her.
After all, Vriska never talks about feeling weak. She never talks about her feelings very much at all. So when things start to go wrong, and a man in white text starts courting her with hideous ideas she can't resist .... it goes poorly for her. She cripples Tavros, engineers Aradia's murder, and through a complicated psychic double reacharound of powers, makes Terezi go blind. Her inability to speak, to say no, to ever back down from a challenge (for she can never be weak) leads her to commit awful crimes, and no longer against faceless multitudes, but against the friends she should be cherishing. Hurting people is reflexive for her. When something goes wrong, or she feels threatened, or there's simply a need to compete and never be less than number 1, she lashes out - which we see as she makes her friends pay for their "crimes" over and over. (What crimes? Aradia visited ghosts upon her, Terezi meddling caused her to loser her left arm and eye, and Tavros - things just never go right with Tavros. Not until long after her death.)
Whether or not Vriska would have hurt her friends as badly as she did without the influence of Doc Scratch is hard to say. He always claimed that she was going to do it all anyway, and he was just giving her a push; and that, perhaps, is true. His presence allows her to blame him, at any rate. But whatever her true motivation, the deep down guilt she feels, especially at first over Aradia's death and later over Tavros's, never leaves her. Vriska may hurt people, but when it comes to her friends, she pretty much always feels bad about it later. Though the conversation turned out to be with Aranea, Terezi does in fact have a memory of speaking to Vriska just after their part in the cycle of revenge - with Vriska still bleeding freely and Terezi blind, Vriska cheerfully comments that now they can be friends again with all of that out of the way. In fact, as early as we see her in canon, we know Vriska is plotting with Equius to deliver a robot body to Aradia - to make everything all better.
(AG: No! It had to go the way we said it would. I was going to give you the present I convinced him to m8ke for you. Me! It wo8ldn't have got m8de if not f8r me!
AG: And then you could have a 8ody again and everyth8ng would 8e fine. Then we could go 8ack to 8eing friends again.)
And that's the thing about Vriska - deep down, very, very, very, very deep down, she seems to actually, genuinely mean well. Some of the things she does to/for her friends are actually gifts, in her warped perception of such things. She tries to gift Aradia with a new robot body. (Her "gift" of Terezi's blindness is, er, inadvertent.) She tries to give Tavros the gift of confidence - and when he fails, she cliffs him, but that doesn't stop her from continuing to try. She gives him another, real chance later - after Aradia beats her to within an inch of her life - refusing to control him and begging him to kill her so she can reach god tier without slowly bleeding to death. She lets him make that choice, that most critical choice, without trying to do anything to force him - believing he'll come through for her. Believing in him! Vriska seems to really actually enjoy having friends, and she puts more faith in them than she ever really lets on except in moments of extreme vulnerability. She cares for Aradia (even if it manifests in anger when her robot body plan falls through), she cares for Tavros (until he fails her, at least), she cares for Kanaya (to whom she admits missing all that meddling and bugging and fussing).... it seems she cares for Karkat and Terezi too, admitting near the end of her life that they are among her friends and she wants to fight Jack to protect them.
Serketly, Vriska wants to care for and help her friends as much as the other goody two shoes do. Though the way she helps John out begins as a contest, it morphs into something genuine - so genuine that when the time comes, she actually asks his permission to put him to sleep. Despite constantly professing that it's better to ignore people's 8itching and do what's right for them, in the critical moment, she respects him, truly wants to help him, and offers him the choice of sleep instead of forcing it on him. From her, it is an act of respect and genuine care. But so warped is she by her life serving her lusus, warped by all that murdering, and most of all warped by the journal of Marquise Spinneret Mindfang, that her good impulses do not manifest in a good way. It's doubtful she'd be all sunshine and roses without these influences, but if she'd be as destructive is open to debate.
Mindfang, yes, does form a huge part of who Vriska is. The girl finds Mindfang's journal early in her life, in a FLARP campaign, where she also discovers the Flourite Octet, a legendary set of very powerful eight-sided dice. She claims to model her life as closely to her ancestor's as she can - which means becoming a sea grift opposite Eridan and trying to live up to the grandiose, elegant infamy that her ancestor maintained and thus would require of her descendant. Being powerful and feared - able to easily destroy Neophyte Redglare, challenge His Honorable Tyranny with only one arm, take and leave Orphaner Dualscar as she pleases - this is the cuttingly ruthless example to which Vriska aspires, so much so that "Marquise Spinneret Mindfang" becomes her FLARP character. This certainty (or perhaps need) that she'll follow in the footsteps of her ancestor leads her to be very ambitious indeed -- and may also have influenced her perception of Tavros, descendent of her ancestor's fated matesprit.
Though her journals, Mindfang makes it clear she was gifted with a power of telekinetic manipulation - a power Vriska shares and liberally abuses. Vriska's personality, too, is very controlling - as mentioned above, she fancies herself a manipulator and will do whatever it takes to string people along into her web. However, she's honestly not very good at it, and she seems to possibly envy Terezi her ability to manipulate others so naturally. (CG: YOU WERE ALWAYS JEALOUS SHE COULD MANIPULATE PEOPLE SO WELL WITHOUT RESORTING TO CHEAP MIND TRICKS.) Vriska tries early on to play Equius and Aradia against each other to become the leader of the blue team, only to be thwarted in all her ambitions when not only is she not the team leader, she ends up on an entirely different team instead. When it comes to petty things or blackmail, Vriska can manipulate with the best, but the bigger, more (or most) important things require her to rely on her powers - as when she controls Sollux and Tavros. In a weird in-between place is the way she influences her session's future Exiles in order to bring about the creation of Bec, and subsequently Bec Noir. Though she describes the kids' session as being on "full Serket lockdown" and claims to have a hand in everything in their universe, it was really more a matter of inserting herself into events that she knew were going to occur anyway.
(EB: why should i calm down when you just said you deliberately sabotaged all of us?
AG: Relaaaaaaaax.
AG: Listen, John.
AG: Regardless of what I did, he is already here.)
Simply because, as she says to Tavros, she wanted to have a hand in creating her own ultimate nemesis - to have the sole honor of destroying him later. Simultaneously a petty, worthless and largely symbolic act, yet still in a way fundamental to the kids' session, it amounts to Vriska's greatest coup, even if it really changes nothing. In her lifetime, she never even is able to challenge Jack - never able to even try her mettle at the challenge she set for herself. It speaks again to the sort of troll she is - that her biggest, most dramatic gesture is ultimately the most useless and empty, done simply to serve her ego. (It's her biggest gesture during her life, anyway. She gets up to arguably even greater shenanigans in her death, but I wouldn't say that's during her "lifetime." She also goes about those gestures slightly differently.) The only gestures that really matter are the comparatively smaller ones, the ones driven not by her blind ambition but by her emotions, be they good or bad.
This has changed somewhat after her descent into the endless, empty realms of death, the point from which she will be taken. The escalation of her challengers - from Black King, to Jack/Bec Noir, to Lord English himself - has finally reached its final tier, a thing she not only realizes but appreciates for its vast enormity. And far be it from her not to meddle - though her attitude has mildly cooled off in death, she is unable to resist the urge to exert control. She claims to Tavros that they need to get involved and "fuck shit up" - and fuck shit up is precisely what she ends up doing, coming up with a plan that involves enticing Lord English to destroy reality in order to assist her in finding the "ultimate treasure" that will bring him down. Even in death, she has to have an active hand in the greatest and grandest workings of the adventure that now spawns four incarnations of two separate universes - in fact, she has to be the one to help lead the charge against the final enemy, the biggest bad of them all.
(VRISKA: Really, everyone's pretty lucky I died so I could do all the dirty work on this. Let's get real, no8ody's 8etter prepared to take on the treasure hunting duties than I am.)
Though it's in Vriska's nature to be kind of loud and overdramaaaaaaaatic, she seems to mature quite a bit by the time of her canon point. Her many talks with John allude to this growth, especially her many admissions about how she wants to help her friends, about her trying-too-hard recklessness when she was younger, and even about her doubts concerning whether she really has aaaaaaaall the luck. Even further, she admits to Tavros that it was a bad idea to kill him, and apologizes - and even gets some dating experience under her belt in the two years (in alpha timeline reckoning) since her death. Some things about Vriska don't change - her final conversation while alive is full of her usual quips and banter, her razor sharp smiles and her a-little-too-pleased-with-herself mockery. Conversations after her death are not much better, full of her usual mockery, though perhaps somewhat more tempered by the Vriska Explains It All explanatory deluge that occurs before her showdown with Meenah. (Expository rambles are things that, you could say, run in the family.)
sorry i'm not sorry.
So what's her deal? Vriska cares. Much, much more than she should, about all of her friends, and it constantly manifests in damaging ways due to her spidery nature and her decidedly difficult upbringing. So she's controlling, very controlling, always trying to prove her strength and make others do what she wants them to do, because it's what's best for them and it's what she wants to happen. So she conquers, and she triumphs, and she gains all the levels, even if she hates herself a little bit for the things she's done to her friends. She learns, too - learns voraciously and quickly, takes advantage of what she learns, and isn't afraid to share it with the less ignorant. There's a sharp (and perceptive) mind hiding behind those sharp words, and maybe if she stopped trying so hard, Vriska could be a genuine and perhaps even talented strategist. And sometimes, when she stops trying so hard or she decides to actually respect somebody, she can actually be pretty pleasant, a genuine help and maybe, actually, just sometimes, a good friend. Really, even despite all the weird crazy contradictory shit that goes on in her head, Vriska seems to try to have fun. Messing with people, always laughing, playing cruel jokes and basically fucking around - though said fucking is always with a purpose, towards an end, calculated to further her many plans and keep her many irons in the fire. But if this is what her life is gonna be, well hell, she sure as shit is going to enjoy herself along the way.
VRISKA: I'm going to have to insist.
VRISKA: You are going to join me and together we are going to fuck shit up.
Powers: Vriska has a stupidiculous amount of powers. On tier 1 are the abilities gifted to her by her hemocaste, which are: an extended life span, and one may well assume enhanced physical strength and endurance, as well as potent psychic abilities. These abilities function by allowing her to bodily control others. She can apparently also influence their wishes and desires. Basically, assuming she CAN control somebody, she can make them do whatever she wants them to do. But her control isn't universal, and at least during Hivebent, she is unable to control highbloods or more psychically-gifted lowbloods. But anyone who is weak-minded or impressssssssionable is susceptible to her shenanigans. This power works on humans as well, giving her the ability to put anyone she likes to sleep at will. Of course, this was across dimensions and universes, so her power in person to control humans has never been canonically settled.
Tier 2 are her God Tier abilities. Vriska is a Thief of Light, which is easily one of the most literal titles of any player of Sburb/Sgrub that we meet. The aspect of Light translates frequently to mean "fortune," and a thief is a thief is a thief. Vriska can literally steal luck, making her enemies very unlucky (she steals luck from one monster, causing the floor to fall out form beneath it so it plummets to its death), and making herself very lucky (on a ridiculous order of magnitude, making a 1 in 8^8th chance actually happen whenever she wants it to). When she rolls her 8-sided dice to get eight 8's, she can "power up" into a sort of mini version of her ancestor, Marquise Spinneret Mindfang. She is absurdly powerful in this form, able to take on in an equal fight the second most powerful enemy in the comic, Jack Noir. (And this is a guy who can blow up whole planets without batting an eyelash and murders just hundreds of motherfuckers in his time.) Aside from all that awesome shit, her God Tier form gives her wings, so she can fly, and apparently leaves a trail of sparkly fairy dust behind her? What's up with that, actually.
Tier 3, and the final tier, is just her dead person powers. Dead people aren't spectacularly gifted in Homestuck, outside of the ability to ALSO fly. So basically being dead just lets her fly without all the magical fairy wing crap going on. And also gives her spooky white eyes. 0u0
Obviously she is ridiculously overpowered in basically every way, so this shit's getting toned down. She will completely lose access to her God Tier abilities. And also the dead abilities. What she will retain is some access to her psychic powers, though they won't work nearly as well. She might be able to control one or two limbs for somebody for a short amount of time, or be able to slip a suggestion into their head of something she might want them to do. But nothing too major and nothing that a person couldn't fight off if they realized what was going on. (Basically, think less "mind controlling some dude into blowing up his girlfriend and also her entire house" and more "stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself, har har har.") She will have somewhat elevated strength and endurance (as well as the horns and fangs that are part of her physiology), but nothing incredible.
OH and she'll have a cutlass on her person when she arrives (because she had it in hand the moment she left). It just won't be blue and kickass. It will be a normal cutlass. Just, you know. What's up, cutlass here, being all cutlass-y.
(Question, what will happen to her dice? Since her strife specibus is dice kind, it could be surmised those will come with too. Not that they'd do much now, just curious.)
ACCEPTED
Go ahead and join
Mod Note: Vriska's dice can be on her person. They'll be reduced to normal, albeit very pretty, dice.