It took me a long time to think of something to write about Porrim, but I eventually barfed out something when I started thinking of what 'Maid of Space' even means. I read a bit of a theory where Maid is understood as 'provider of' and started thinking of Porrim as the first version of the Dolorosa, who creates much more than she could imagine, and eventually, stuff. I don't know if it's anything but nonsense yet but thanks for the prompt >u< I'm glad I got something written. I've been struggling with that lately. Spoiler: Made of Space "Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that." -the Last Unicorn In the universe where Porrim Maryam rises again as the Maid of Space (it was no troll who killed her, not a rampaging Kurloz or Cronus, not a vicious Meenah or Aranea, but an awful accident, a mistake of logistics causing her to be crushed by a falling hive, an error in building. A terrified Mituna, visiting to help with frog-catching, since he might succeed in being willing to touch the slippery bastards when Kankri wasn’t, had to mentally drag her to her stony questbed in the glade) she ends up learning quite a lot about space. But none of that now, because she has a mission. She has to birth the universe. In the universe where Porrim Maryam rises again as the Maid of Space, she is able to answer ‘I will’ to that question that, millions of years later, Kanaya would have no choice but to answer ‘that’s impossible’ to. Echidna, pleased with her response, granted her the power to fulfill her own promise. The question was this: Will you birth the new world yourself? As the Maid of Space, newly arisen, she feels like she can. The truth is connected to her mind with fragile strings, tugged and spinning, but it’s there; though she hasn’t reached it yet, she’d sure she will. She can feel it, a little space away. Maybe it was false pride that caused her to answer ‘yes’ to Echidna’s question, but it felt like the truth. It was false pride, however, that caused her to fly to the forge without telling anyone, not even Kankri or Mituna, what she was on about. With their help—and bless them both—she had already gathered all the frogs she would have to, with the exception of the final one—the universe frog. And, naturally, Echidna’s message could only mean one thing—all her attempts to find the frog before, though wholehearted, were futile, because it did not exist yet. It had to be made, and she had to make it herself. She had to birth it herself. Not any other troll—not any highblood’s command or psionic’s power—could do it. It had to be her. It might, she thought, fluttering to the rim of the forge, whose heat fanned up in the air to her legs, be her role as a rainbow drinker that allowed her to do this, or to see how to do this. Over time, she had tasted every color of blood, and though they each tasted nothing but salty and dark, inside her, like a pearl in an oyster, they brewed something else, on virtue of being together. Just like how, through ectobiology, she was supposed to take a bit of each frog—like a bee taking pollen from each flower—and find another world within them. A world, a universe, is necessarily amalgamated of many things, containing each. In the void are things of substance, in the things of substance are liquids and stones, things hot and cold, bright and dark, light and heavy—inside things of substance are atoms compact or loose, radioactive or stable, separate in the air or chained together to make the complex molecules of life. A universe is made, Porrim reasoned, when inside of the bounds of one thing, there is too much for it to naturally contain, and so it expands. As she peered into the depths of the forge, bubbling and bright red, trying to reason what actions she had to take to make what she knew into what she could feel, her communicator buzzed. Torn between ignoring it and answering, she checked to see who it was, and saw bright red. “Kankri,” she said fondly, accepting the call. “How are you?” “Though I am loathe to interrupt your duties, which I accept as important both for bringing our session to a close and furthering our race, I’m afraid I need your help.” “With what?” asked Porrim, seeing if she could get just a bit closer to the lava. “I alighted on Meenah’s world despite my misgiving about its terrain when I finally accepted Latula’s request that I mediate—which, by the way, I still find highly inappropriate, and I hope that you wouldn’t suspect me of being someone who would do this sort of thing without much protesting and reservation—“ “Heavens forbid,” Porrim said, finding that, no, she could not get much closer to the lava. At all. “And despite her generally contentious attitude—which I fully understand her developing in light of the pressures of social conforming she grew up with though I neither condone nor fully understand the way she has reacted to them—“ Porrim landed on the edge of the forge, where the little ferns and mosses stopped growing because of the heat. She felt the warmth on her face, on her hands and on her feet, seeping into her through the rock, and she saw the clouds turning above her in the sky, always circling. The reason the Hero of Space was always entrusted with the forge, it turned out, was that the forge and Space were much the same—they were places of possibility, rich with what life needed to propagate. They were places to begin existing in—they held, they enclosed, they gave space, time, and chances to begin. Like a mother grub. “…which, by the way, I can never condone. Whether or not he has his reasons, and assuredly he does, considering the stifling environment he grew up in—though against my general feelings of goodwill, I find it against my better sense to assume he is telling the exact truth about everything—especially the friendly giant with the magical umbrella—though again, I can see his reasons for fabricating an existence he seems more fit to excuse his mentality than the one he actually grew up in—” “Wild,” said Porrim, squinting her eyes, as if a narrower view of the forger would tell her more about it. She couldn’t help but be suspicious that there was something hiding deep with in it, but which she could not get to, because of the confines of her natural mortality. …Ah. How easy it was to forget. Giving herself a little whack on the side of the head for forgetting that she had blessed risen from the dead as a god, she floated up into the air again. “I’m not sure you need my help with this, Kankri. I don’t see why you couldn’t handle a little scuffle like this on your own.” “I wouldn’t say it’s a little scuffle, considering the larger ramifications of the sort of—” “Well, that’s true, but in the end, isn’t it just an argument among friends?” she asked. “They might not ever agree about this sort of thing, but that’s fine, really. No one ever agrees about everything. Isn’t it more important to… just laugh about it? I mean, to just get along, in general, rather than keep each other perfectly in line? We’re always going to have differences.” “…I’m not certain what your drift is, Porrim, but if you’re implying that I simply let something like this go, I’m not sure that we can agree on this.” “Well, cool? Fine. That’s my point. We’re probably never going to. To me…” she struggled to stay aloft in the air above the burning heat of the forge, and decided that being a bit higher up would serve her better anyway. “It’s all about being comfortable with each other, you know? Not being afraid of each other. Not being out to hurt each other and trying to understand when someone is hurt. To me, that’s better evidence of actual accord, of actually having a harmonious society, than being sure that everyone is right about something. Or that everyone even understands it. We’re not trying to build a world where we’re all right, anyway. Just where we’re all able to live.” “…I’ll take that under consideration, though I’m not sure I understand,” said Kankri in the voice of someone who was sure he did understand and would not take into consideration. Porrim smiled. “It’s optional. But I have to go, sweetie. I have something to do.” “Your habitual use of demeaning pet names aside, do you really have something to do that’s more important than—” “Yes, I sure do,” said Porrim lightly. “I’ll catch up with you on the other side, alright?” “Call me back when you can,” said Kankri, sufferingly. “Pity you,” said Porrim, and ended the call. Only letting the breeze hang her in the air for a moment, soft and slow, she hovered. Then, she shot like an arrow into the forge. The darkness and heat of the forge were singularly painful. Her skin tore off—but there it grew again. She couldn’t see—and then she could. With her blood thrumming in her veins—blood of all colors—inside, outside, she stretched her arms through the heat of the forge, and opened herself up like she would open a pocket of space with her powers. What had been in her—her knowledge, her space, her blood—was outside, and all around. That will do it, she thought, this is the forge. For a brief moment, she saw colors—all around—and then she saw, though it might have been just spots in vision going black, a dark night, with the two moons out, and the desert wind blowing all around her—and the sound of a grub crying, ringing in her ears. For a split second, all she knew was that she had to find it. In the darkness of her vision, she saw the darkness of the forge, and there—that’s where the universe frog should be born. In the cradle of heat and blood, somewhere inside her bones. Whether it was simply the fate of a null session declaring that the frog could not be born or another fault of hers, something else in the big picture that she failed to grasp or didn’t have yet, she would never be able to say. But she woke up somewhere in the caverns of her world, deeply below the surface, to the hissing and cracking of Echidna, who said in a voice like thunderclouds on the horizon, you did not manage it yet, I see. A dead timeline dies off, eventually, once hope is lost. Accord is splintered, trolls give up on working together, an important item is lost forever, or a frog simply isn’t born. Perhaps this timeline was only doomed because all of them had to be until the scratch. Perhaps it was missing something that could have broken it out of its confines of being doomed. Perhaps both of those things have to be true. Whatever happened to that Porrim, and however, eventually, a doomed timeline is lost, she dwindled away wondering what it was that had to be born, of space and blood, and whether she would even be the one to birth it. And if so, when, in what space, and how.
Fair enough. I'm really more annoyed at the story getting dropped than about mistreatment of a character who did do a lot of ill-advised things.
Ooooooooooh. Ooooh. I really like that. A lot. I've never really done much thinking about Porrim's role as a Maid of Space, myself. Save like once for rp and still even then not too much. I've usually focused on her relationships or her social views. That is really pretty though. And it makes me sad because she failed. BECAUSE PARADOX SPACE SUCKS. It's just really tragic to think that her realizing things and properly growing damns her because it's just not how the cards are supposed to fall. Really just that with the Beforans in general.
I'm glad you did like it >u< I was very much in the 'does this even make sense' zone with that one and a little Frustrate about it. Glad I wrote it, though. It forced me to look up Critical Homestuck Concepts again and think about them a bit.
I wish I could remember where I put the shit I wrote about jadeblood religion ;-; That and I swore I wrote some shit about Handmaidism. my lovely new textfile of chaos about mythstuck could use both but i do not know where they are
Started working on fic. Basically had an idea that just kind of spiraled into a derealization fit. Which are the most fun things. One theory I am fond of with the dream ghosts is not just that they moved on but also that they sort of...Solidified. All coming together with all the timelines converging to form that ULTRA SUPER UNIVERSAL JADE. But with like. The ghosts. Which must be really fucking weird to have happen. Though I guess you just kind of get used to it or forget about it over time given Rose. If Space is the loneliest of aspects because it really taps into that aspect of paradox space then being Maid of Space must be a fucking experience if all of the things just come into one thing. A terrifying thing. Some of those Porrims had to have figured out the spacey thing. Some didn't. But all are Porrim. Forming big Porrim. Wow. How do you walk off a cliff but also not? And when you don't want to but also want to. She's made of it though. Which I suppose might also make her most apt to wield the Sword. Though I feel she'd be the least likely to want to cut through. Being individual and free and different is very big for her. That I feel probably played a good deal into why alpha Porrim failed. How do you accept that to be free and individual is to not be those things? At least as how they were originally conceived. You have the Sword. You're just scared of losing yourself with it.
So is the jadeblood lifespan long enough for Kanaya to watch the offspring of seven trolls and two sets of four related humans reach extinction from hideous inbreeding? Yet another thing that was never explained was how to repopulate with that as a factor. Even if one assumes paradox clones are created with no recessive genetic defects to pass on even if they fuck their twins, deleterious mutation in the offspring would be a thing.
Did they bring the meteor with them? They could use it to steal genetic samples from random people on Earth and Alternia.
I'm pretty sure they can ectobiology up some genetic diversity. Anyways I don't think trolls HAVE inbreeding? The slime is said to be incestuous, right...
Do they have access to the ectomachines anymore? Even if they do have ways round it, I really feel Hussie should have said so.
Well, there were some on the meteor, Jade could've shrunk it. Or Roxy could just un-void one up. And then I think they have all of human-troll history to get samples from, as well.
Just reading a review of a particularly awful manga which had a storyline open with an important battle scene and intense buildup, then had the heroes confront and defeat the big bad in one panel and suddenly skip to their domestic life afterwards. Sound familiar? (It's the das-sporking review of Taklamakan Zoo, which is primarily a loli manga, so don't go looking up the originals if you're squicked by that.)
... Eeeh. They have some good points, but it's way, way too prescriptivist and relying on hard and fast rules, as if storytelling were a science and not an art.
Ayup, that's my problem with it too. Even if you didn't like the ending, homestuck being non-formulaic and busting all those sorts of rules is not a flaw, it's a good thing.
Yeah, I do agree about that - Homestuck's always been about breaking traditional rules. I meant more things like 'if you tell a plan out loud it's not going to work,' and that LE gets defeated too late in the story, kinds of things. eta: oh, and the thing about how GO doesn't work as a darkest hour because it just gets erased, and how Vriska's character development gets erased and the version that didn't learn a thing gets to be the big hero.
See, @Mercury, breaking those rules one at a time I would be absolutely behind. Suddenly breaking them all at the point of the story which should be most important results in a mess.
