CONSIGNMENT; application

[hypertoxic]

PLAYER INFO.
✖ Handle: Emily
✖ Contact: PM at my character journal or my plurk: skywards
✖ Are You Over 16: Y!
✖ Other Characters Played in Consignment: N/A

PLAYER INFO.
✖ Character Name: Serket, Vriska
✖ Canon: Homestuck, page 8649.
✖ Character Appearance: She's the one on the right. Here is an image of her while she's still alive, here is an image of her alive and in god tier duds, and here is a more recent sprite version. (Note: as you can see from the god tier image, she got her robo-arm and destroyed eye "fixed" during the course of the game. This, of course, was prior to her death.)
✖ Character Age: Physically 13; in reality her age is indeterminable. She has existed for possibly thousands of years at this point.
✖ Pick A Number: 8 and 256. (4+4 and 4^4!)

✖ Canon Setting: The most important thing about Vriska's canon setting actually comes before her planet. The dominant overarching framework in which all of Homestuck takes place is a game, called Sburb by human players and Sgrub by troll players. The canon is quite literally one gigantic, immersive video game, with all the trappings: inventory systems, weapons and armor, powers, the ability to level up, monsters that drop money and items, the whole shebang. Vriska's homeworld has been destroyed as of her canonpoint, but it was a planet called Alternia. Alternian years are double the length of earth years - one Alternian sweep is two years on earth. It was a harsh and brutal planet with a sun so fierce it would instantly blind you to look at it and major swaths that were utterly inhospitable. Because of this, all trolls are actually nocturnal. The driving law on Alternia was really just brutality - after all, there was a planetwide monarchy ruled by an insane despot of an empress. Only children lived on Alternia; all adults were sent off-world to conquer new galaxies for the empress, and thus kept separated in order to hamstring any attempts at rebellion.

Trolls are a violent and physically tough race, and murder for them is far more normal and accepted than it would be for a human. Serious violence, the kind that leads to maiming or permanent crippling, is also common and culturally accepted. Trolls differ from one another not by skin or hair color - they are all gray and they all have black hair - but by blood color in a caste system called the hemocaste, also called the hemospectrum. (They can also be visually told apart by their candy corn horns, and each troll's horns are different. But they don't serve much, if any, practical purpose. They just look cool. Or get caught in doorways.) The higher on the hemocaste a troll is, the greater the endurance, physical strength, and longevity he or she is granted.

Powers are typical in Homestuck, even outside of the Sburb/Sgrub framework. No humans have innate powers, but trolls do depending on the color of their blood. Blood powers include telekinesis, telepathy, animal telepathy, and massive energy blasts. Then the game itself grants powers by assigning its players both a class and an aspect. Class refers to a role (like knight, mage, witch, etc) and aspect refers to an element or power (like light, time, space, hope, wind, etc). Class influences the way in which an aspect can be wielded. All players, human or troll or other species entirely, are granted such powers by the game, powers which can be leveled up over time to become stronger. There is also a god tier level each player can reach that far exceeds the original skill/level up tree, quite literally putting the player who reaches it on the same level of power as a god.

Finally, of some importance to note is that concepts of gender and sexuality are quite different on Alternia, at least from a human perspective. "Incest" is common, since troll genetic material is just put into one massive vat and mixed into, as canon states, an "incestuous slurry." There is zero concept of being gay or straight because neither gender nor sex has any bearing on the ability to contribute genetic material. Because trolls do not get pregnant (and actually are more insectoid than mammalian in their major traits), they cannot have children directly of their own, and thus there is no such thing as family on Alternia. The concept is alien to trolls, whose only remotely similar relationship is the one they share with their lusus. Lusii are strange monsters that raise all young trolls until they are strong enough to fend for themselves, and each lusus chooses which troll it would like to protect. This system forces all trolls to become self-reliant and self-sufficient very quickly as otherwise their lusus could kill them, their lusus could die and leave them without protection, or the empress could simply send drones to cull them at any time for basically any reason she feels like.

So tl;dr: video game constructs dictate pretty much everything about how players in Homestuck can act and live, Alternia is a hellish and brutal place to live, blood colors grant powers and different social positions, the only law is "obey your empress or die," and romance, sex, gender, and procreation are waaaaaaay more complicated than is strictly necessary.

✖ Character History: chicka chicka boom boom.

✖ Character Personality: Vriska Serket is a girl who contains within her several distinct levels. She is built from them, defined by the ways in which they dissonate, and made whole by the combination of their structure. She is a girl of contradictions and impossibilities, thriving on willful cruelty one minute and careful kindness the next.

Above all, Vriska Serket does not know how to keep it simple.

Layer one is what you see when you look at her. And even her surface is not straightforward. Vriska predominantly tends towards drama, and it seems to follow her wherever she goes, whether she's manufacturing it or it's simply happening to her. (Though, to be fair, if it "simply happens" to her, it's probably out of retribution for something she did in the past.) She's an adventuring spirit, bold and completely fearless (which is not to say courageous), loud and bratty and bossy and unbelievably obnoxious. She can and will fuck around with people for her own amusement, and will employ an incredibly dry, genuinely ironic sense of sarcastic humor in order to needle people. In fact, she can get so deadpan it becomes genuinely difficult to tell if she's being sincere or not. (This is a personal opinion not stated in canon, but I believe she employs irony more effectively than all the Striders put together. After all, she actually uses it according to its definition. See:)

VRISKA: Oh my god. That leprechaun stuff? Soooooooo good.
VRISKA: Right guys?

She truly believes - or believed, in fact - that she is a natural born leader. She tried to lead her team in her Sgrub session, commandeered the human session, got herself killed trying to pull a gratuitous and self-congratulatory Big Damn Hero moment, and even in death makes herself captain of an infinite ghost navy army-on-boats in order to put herself in prime position to be the sole party to destroy the ultimate bad guy. In so doing, she even takes credit where credit is not due, confessing later that controlling that army was almost entirely Aranea's doing and her contributions were token. Vriska feels compelled to take center stage, to be important and strong and in control at all times. The game is played her way or it is not played at all. The players move the way she wishes them to, or she simply removes them from play. She gets shit done. Or so it seems on level one.

Level two complicates matters slightly. Beneath her surface, Vriska is actually cuttingly intelligent, and cunning in her own way. While not precisely known for making logical and thoroughly-considered decisions, she does have an iron grip on endless petty minutiae others would quickly lose track of. She spins endless webs, bringing together dozens upon dozens of tiny little strings of action and narrative and weaving them all into her own, personal plan. Managing and (poorly) manipulating various and many different parties all at once while (poorly) keeping her cards to her chest requires an exacting and formidable attention to detail. She figures out the rules of the game faster than any of the other players in her session, resulting in her being the first by quite a significant margin of time to go god tier. She devises a plan from whole cloth to get the weapon that can take down Lord English - and actually successfully executes it, locating the macguffin and claiming it as her own. (Though whether she'll be able or even want to use the spoils of her Pyrrhic victory is another matter entirely.) She's a doer, she's a fixer, she's a mover. She does get shit done. It's just with varying levels of success.

Level three is where you start to see her unravel. Beneath the play pretend, beneath the bossy leadership, beneath her perhaps underutilized intelligence, is a great big stormy ocean of insecurity. Vriska talks a big game for much of her life, but it is almost entirely for show. It's possible she never, not once in her life, actually believed she was as awesome as she always claimed she was to others. Early in her life, she strongly suppressed any doubt, and successfully managed to convince herself she was fine. But it was always an act, all along - just one good enough that she believed in her own acting. The plain, bald truth is that Vriska is an insecure attention-seeker who desperately needs validation. She is constantly concerned with how she comes off, and all of her plans, no matter how often she claims to be a leader or acting for the greater good, truly center on how they make her look to others - and how she feels about herself.

VRISKA: I was always invested as hell in the consequences of everything I did, and how it made me look.
VRISKA: And how it made me feel a8out myself especially.

On this level, everything Vriska has ever done has always come back to herself. Every action she ever took, every thing she ever did, was for her own selfish gain. It was all always for her. Even when she attempted to help other people, it was never for them. It was to make herself feel better about them. (See: trying to get Aradia her Aradiabot, bullying the shit out of Tavros in attempts to make him stronger, so on and so forth.) She has never, not once in her life, displayed anything resembling true altruism, even if the token overtures were there. (Perhaps you needs to be secure in yourself - okay with yourself - before you can truly help others. And Vriska is neither secure nor okay.)

Level four, of course, comes out swinging in direct contradiction to that single-minded self-aggrandizement (and preservation). Vriska may needle and mock; she may be petty and order others around; she may be insecure and somewhat self-loathing; but deepest down of all, Vriska very genuinely cares about other people. She cares about them desperately, and physically needs to be cared about in return. It shows in little bits and flashes throughout her life. Expressing genuine remorse over the death of Kanaya's lusus; trusting Tavros to be the one to kill her (even if that backfired on her); talking John through his session, and eventually holding him in high enough esteem to allow him (oh so generously) to make his own decisions. They're all small things, stunted in the way that her own growth as a person has always been stunted, but they are all real gestures. In her off-shoot timeline where she fights Jack, she does so in a fit of enraged horror over finding the bodies of her friends. She wanted to save Karkat and Terezi; she wanted to protect them. Undoubtedly she was also doing it just to make herself look great - after all, she freely admitted to anyone who asked (and sometimes to people who didn't ask) that she created Jack just to be her nemesis. Taking down bad guys was nearly always just for the glory.

VRISKA: May8e the truth is I don't even care all that much if anyone stops Lord English.
VRISKA: I think all I really cared a8out was getting to do it myself.

But there was always more to it than that. Even all those impulses never buried the part of her blood pusher that cared, that liked, that loved, that wished to befriend. Vriska always wanted friends. And what friends she did have, she cared about fiercely. She was just bent and broken and all kinds of fucked up, and her genuine feeling for others got warped and twisted into something awful and selfish. Vriska is the living, breathing embodiment of the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

On the deepest level of all - level five, all the way down at her core - Vriska is a good person. Or, if not good, decent. Or if not that - then she had all the potential to be a good person, the best sort of person, and was warped by her circumstances. This is not to say she hasn't done terrible things, and done them willfully - to excuse her wrongdoings is to fundamentally misunderstand the fact that she was absolutely complicit in all of them, and was mean-spirited besides. She cannot be condoned. But she can be understood. And Vriska wants to be good. She wants to be the hero. She wants to do the right thing, and help others. She wants to be popular and liked and brave and strong and interesting and great! She wants to be a person that is so much better in every single way than she actually is. She is capable of remorse and regret, she is capable of painful introspection, she is capable of genuine overtures of friendship, she is capable even of love. She is capable. But a life spent bathed in murder, twisted by her own compulsive need to never show weakness (because then her lusus would eat her; because then her friends would laugh at her; because then she'd be culled; because then she couldn't respect herself; because then she'd never be Mindfang), led her to manifest all her good desires and intentions in harmful and fucked up ways. Wanting to be Mindfang, having the most blood on her hands of any of the Alternian trolls by several orders of staggering magnitude, sent her down a path where the only way she could express that she cared about other people was in ways that ultimately served herself. (Self-defense - and rationalization thereof - is a powerful motivator.)

VRISKA: And you don't have to 8e a good person to 8e a hero.
VRISKA: You just have to know who you are and stay true to that.
VRISKA: So I'm going to keep fighting for people the only way I ever knew how.
VRISKA: 8y 8eing me.

Vriska, ultimately, is a teenager. She has a lot of feelings about absolutely everything, but she has the most feelings about herself. She plays at manipulator and is shit at it because she feels she needs to have control, but she lashes out or serves only herself or just bungles it completely due to a complete lack of finesse. She's not as clever as she thinks by half and is jealous of people who are cleverer. (This is why she can be cunning but not clever, and why she can handle such a volume of information but not weaponize that information properly. Her set-ups are solid and her executions all fall to pieces.) She thinks she wants to be useful, but deep down maybe all she wants is to be recognized. She loves, and she cares, and she expresses it in broken ways. Even when she says everything she's ever done is self-serving (and of course it was), it could be that even now she is still deceiving herself, pinning onto her reputation a kind of villainy that perhaps makes her feel justified in her guilt and removing any potential goodness. (Because when you can deny the seeds of virtue, when you claim utter moral bankruptcy, then it's less complicated, isn't it? It's not really your fault, or your moral failure. It's just the way you are, and thus, of course, cannot be changed. Cannot be held against you.)

When she's not trying to be the hero, she's trying to be the martyr, and still she's blind to the irony of it. Even when she goes through a series of epiphanies, realizing how atrocious and annoying and smug her behavior was for much of her life, she still focuses on herself. She gets it half-right: people did hate her childish attitude and grandstanding bullshit. The half she's missing is that other people were never included in her thoughts, and even now, they still aren't. She's still making herself center stage. She's still not recognizing the damage she actually did to those around her. To brand her myopic would be to understate the matter entirely. But she does, at least, at last, realize her behavior truly was reprehensible.

Vriska evolves. She evolves from a precocious brat who pretends at piracy and greatness because she's been nigh-brainwashed to believe it's her destiny into an introspective and insecure young woman, carrying a mantle of power she does not deserve and did not earn, who is only just beginning to understand the roles that other people play in her life - and what impact she has, in turn, on them.

When Vriska is good, she's good - caring and thoughtful and driven by a genuine desire to help. But it's always so hidden, so hard to see. And when she's bad, she's so, so bad. She is a destroyer. She is a terror. She is a kid. She is, simply, herself.

✖ Character Powers:

1. Troll: Vriska, being a different species, is granted some physiology that rather sets her apart from other humans (even discounting the horns and the skin and all that). Trolls are stronger or weaker according to their blood colors, and Vriska, just on the cusp of troll nobility as a Cerulean blood, is physically very strong for her size compared to a human of the same age. She's also got a mouth full of sharpened teeth, not entirely unlike a shark. She'll have more stamina and endurance than a human, and her skin may even be slightly tougher. (Though not significantly so - she bleeds just as easy as anybody else.)


2. Cerulean-blood: Vriska's position on the hemocaste grants her access to a particular set of telekinetic and telepathic powers. She can use her ability to puppeteer the thoughts and bodies of others, forcing them to feel certain ways or do certain things. Her strength seems to lay primarily in the former: after all, by manipulating someone's mind, she can then in turn influence their actions without having to puppet their limbs directly. She can also, apparently, read people's minds to some small extent, an ability her same-blooded dancestor shares (and is able to employ much more effectively). Vriska keeps her focus on simply using her powers to make others do her bidding, and thus basically amounts to mind control. It's also been demonstrated that she can put humans to sleep.


3. God tier: This is the big one. Vriska is a fully realized Thief of Light, which translates roughly into Thief of Fortune. Her powers as a thief allow her to steal a concept as nebulous as luck and keep it for her own. Essentially, she can gank the luck of her enemies, causing horrible fates to befall them while also making herself exceptionally lucky. She in turn uses these incredible luck stores to power her Fluorite Octet, a set of eight 8-sided die that execute different attacks depending on how the numbers fall. So, of course, she brute forces the luckiest possible scenario, and can get all eight dice to roll eights every single time, despite the astronomical improbability of rolling that combination even once. Also, going god tier replaced her lost arm and eye, and also gifted her with a lovely set of blue fairy wings. Finally, it granted her the ability to fly. (And leave sparkly fairy dust in her wake. Sooooooo 8adass.) Also it maybe gives her the ability to wardrobify on the spot? It's sort of ambiguous what precisely grants the wardrobifying power. But yeah, she can do that too, just instantaneously swap in and out of various outfits without having to physically change. It's pretty rad. In Consignment she'll only be able to do that from whatever outfit she's wearing into her god tier duds and back.
   
   Note: In Consignment her luck abilities will be power-capped. She'll no longer be able to seriously injure or incapacitate any of her allies using these powers, nor will she be able to cause a large amount of general area damage with them. She cannot influence mission outcomes or circumstances. Her powers will mostly be reduced to only working on herself, her immediate area, and her enemies. For instance, she'll still be able to bring her luck powers to bear on her dice in order to ensure she can fight well. But she won't be able to, say, terraform a large swathe of land by luckily triggering an earthquake that was already on the way, or cause a sudden landslide to luckily occur. TL;DR: the amount of luck she is able to steal has been capped, and thus she has less luck with which to influence events around her, so she can no longer have as great an effect.


4. Dead: This is technically a thing, but sort of not really. If she had been unable to fly before, she would have been granted the ability to do so upon her death. Also, it gives her 2pooky white eyes.

CHARACTER SAMPLES.
✖ First Person POV: Boom!

✖ Third Person POV: "Shell, I gotta piss again. BRB, Serk. Don't keep braidin' without me, you'll do it wrong."

Vriska waved her friend off with only a slight twist of her mouth, then leaned back against the chest on which Meenah had been sitting with a sigh. The two long braids in her hair felt strange and new, but then, so did everything at this moment. Her attitude, the planet around her, her life - or death, as it were. Everything felt like ill-fitting clothing, meant for a body that wasn't hers. Even her breath sacs, when she let them expand her chest to its fullest capacity, felt like they belonged to someone else. Alien. Unreal.

Everything felt unreal and more than a little pointless.

Meenah was a good friend. But she still wasn't enough to keep Vriska from wandering into the depths of her own mind, into her memories and her regrets, into the vast and troubled sea of all her stupid, terrible, reprehensible mistakes. Getting lost in this mire was what prevented her from realizing she was no longer alone until it was far too late to do anything about it.

"What a sorry sight you make."

It wasn't so much the voice itself that took Vriska off guard. It was the fact that the voice was male. In an instant she was up - in the air, having instantly sprung up several feet and stayed there, a snarl curling across her features. "What the fuck do you want?" she hissed, too startled to catch up with the discrepancy that getting a good look at him made obvious.

This man - with his hooded, hidden face - was very obviously not a troll.

"To talk. Nothing more. Will you please calm down? You're making me tense."

"I fucking should be!" Vriska uncurled a little, the snarl on her face transforming into a haughty glower as she nudged at her powers with her mind. Her clothing changed in the blink of an eye, from her dark-colored duds to her cheerily orange god tier regalia. Her hands, at least for now, remained empty. "How did you get in here? Where is Meenah? Who are you?"

"Ugh." The man took a seat on the floor, cross-legged, and waved an impatient hand in her direction. "Look, this is all really typical and expected, but I've got a headache. Shut up and come down from there and we can talk like civilized people, alright?"

Now Vriska's expression decided to stop being angry for a few seconds - just long enough to allow some indignant confusion to join the mix. Slowly, she descended to the floor, lightly touching down without a sound, though she did not join the man (human?) in sitting. Now that she wasn't focusing so much on the attack, something else occurred to her. Something strange.

"... are you even dead?"

The man paused, and the tilt of his hood seemed to indicate he'd lifted his head. His voice sounded a little bit like a smile when he spoke again.

"There you go. Now you're starting to ask the right questions. Do you always do that? Act in stupid and impulsive ways and only think later."

Vriska's eyes narrowed, and she folded her arms over her chest, not stopping to think how defensive it would look.

"If it's such a good question, maybe you should answer it, creepy mysterious not-troll scumbag!"

"Alright, alright. Fine." The man put his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "Sit down and I'll tell you everything." Once Vriska grudgingly complied, the man reached into one of his pockets and pulled out what looked like a white paper tube. It was not a cigarette; though that had always been a stupid and particularly human vice, she knew what they were. The man picked at it as he spoke, apparently with no particular aim.

"My name doesn't matter. What does is the organization I work for. You might have some familiarity with the way they operate, though I can promise you we haven't had, ah, any hand in. What's gone down in your ... universe," he finished, after a pause, the word chosen carefully. "We destroy worlds."

Vriska's eyebrows shot up. She opened her mouth, and the man lifted a hand to stop her.

"Keep on shutting up. I'm here to recruit you. We want you to work for us. What's in it for you? Well, normally, with the hero types, we tell them their world is at stake. That if they don't work for us, we'll blow up their home next. Or maybe we play on their sympathies. Pretend there's this great danger, and we need them to help us save everyone we can possibly save."

The man stopped fiddling with his paper and leaned forward.

"But you're not a hero type, are you? Vriska."

Vriska sat very still, her expression completely blank, and did not respond.

"And you don't have a planet anymore. You're dead. You don't have a horse in this race. So what am I offering you? A way out."

"From what." It was a token protest. Her lips felt numb.

"This."

He didn't need to gesture, to elaborate, for Vriska to understand what he meant. Though the information had come in a deluge, it was simple to understand. Yes or no. And why put any stock in him at all? Why care about any so-called deal he had to peddle? Because he was here. Though he was not a troll and apparently somehow alive whilst not seemingly traveling by dreambubble, he'd managed to reach her out here in the wastes of death. To talk to her despite the seeming impossibility of doing so. He knew who she was. Knew at least something of her past, of the grievous misdeeds that had again and finally cost her people she had cared about. People she'd wanted to love. He knew secrets.

(How does he know these things? whispered a corner of her mind. Notes, ideas, plans, thoughts of all kinds to track down how he'd found all that out - all this filtered into a carefully tucked away place in her mind for later examination. Her conscious thoughts were too preoccupied at the moment to give the matter much scrutiny.)

He knew she was capable of the kind of darkness it took to destroy worlds. After all, if murdering endless clones was nothing to her, what would be the death of nameless worlds? No, but. Hadn't she just been working to save zillions of unknowable future aliens from the death that Lord English would bring? Isn't that what she'd said?

Or had she just said that to make herself feel better? To make herself seem better? How much did she actually care about the zillion billion unknowable future aliens? Would she ever have been able to help them at all?

Maybe you did have to be a good person to be a hero after all. Maybe monsters couldn't also be saviors. And Vriska? Well.

"... what if I say no? What if I don't want to?"

The man stood, tucking his little piece of paper back into his pocket. "I can't make you come with me. You say no, you stay here, and you never see me again." As if her question had been official answer, he stood, turned, and began to leave.

"Wait!"

Her voice rang out too loud in the echoing, empty, cavernous room, here at the top of the tower. One of many on Meenah's grand palace. The man stopped, though he did not turn. Vriska, unknowingly in her sudden panic, had risen to her feet, one hand outstretched towards him. Embarrassed, she put it down once she realized how pathetic she looked.

"... me, personally? I'm blowing up worlds by myself?"

"What? No." His hood shifted and bent a little as he looked back over his shoulder at her. "You'll be working with others. People we recruit. Teams. Planet destruction is a big job."

"... why--"

"If you ask me 'why me,' I'm pretty sure I'll vomit on your shoes."

Vriska hissed in annoyance and open aggravation. "No, you dumbfuck! Let me finish! Why you?"

The man kept still for a minute. Then he turned to face her fully, face still hidden in the darkness of his (dum8 stupid dum8) cowl.

"You wanna know why they sent me to get you?"

"Yes. What made you the best weirdo for the job?"

"Well, from what we knew of you, we knew bullshitting wouldn't work. Nor would appealing to your malformed sense of heroism. We needed to just be straight with you. Am I right?"

Malformed?

Vriska lowered her chin, eyes narrowing thoughtfully as she stared at the ground. "Yes," she said simply, offering no defense against his unflattering characterization. "When you're dealing with moral reprobates, it's best to be reprehensible yourself. Probably."

"You are smart. I was hoping you wouldn't turn out to be some slack-jawed idiot."

"Urgh. Spare me. I don't care what you're trying to do at this point." Vriska waved an irritated hand and tilted her head back now, staring at the ceiling. After a contemplative minute of silence, she shut her eyes with a quiet, careful sigh through her nose. In that moment, she looked old. Much older than her thirteen year old body would have lead a casual watcher to believe. But the man standing opposite her - this Recruiter - knew better. And he could spot the lines on her face, the paleness beneath the ash gray of her skin. She was tired. So tired, and so very defeated.

"Your answer."

"Don't you know it already?"

"Need a verbal confirmation. Rules."

Vriska lowered her head and fixed the man with a steady look. It was the first time she'd looked at him without some kind of guile or guise - and it was the single most piercing look she'd yet offered. For the first time, the man began to appreciate, if only a little, what sort of creature she was.

"My answer is yes. I will work for you. Anything to get me out of this ... this."

The man did not smile. Not that Vriska would have been able to see if he did. Instead he simply walked toward her, paused, and held out a hand.

"Welcome to the Cosmic Demolition Crew. We call ourselves the CDC."

CHARACTER ITEMS.
✖ Pick a Team: 8lue Team.
✖ Mission Freebie: She'll be requesting her sweet rocket boots.
✖ Personal Item or Weapon: Vriska will have a weapon: her Fluorite Octet.
✖ Character Inventory:

• Clothing: shirt, pants, underthings, those rad red shoes. Her glasses. She took off her badass pirate jacket. Same as what she's wearing here.


• Money: she might have a few boonbucks on her person, which obviously won't be worth anything as they are video game currency.


• ... that's it. Maybe some lint?