Player Information
Name: Gira
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bossbattles Age: 16
Contact Info: giragiragira @ plurk; breloomasaurus@gmail.com
Other Characters Played: John Egbert and Ienzo.
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Character Information
Character Name: Equius Zahhak
Character Series: Homestuck. His AU is a fanfic called
Red Dead Virgo.
Character Age: Six solar sweeps; roughly thirteen human years.
Character Gender: Male.
Alternate UniverseCanon Point: Shortly before being killed by Feferi.
Background Link: Homestuck,
the original EquiusAU Background: The planet Alternia exists in a faraway galaxy, centuries and lightyears away, and for what it’s worth they are pretty good at modeling themselves after humans. Or, as it were, they are pretty good at modeling humans after themselves. Alternian society was basically a blueprint for the human race to follow… but that’s a story for another universe. Our focus lies on the home planet, where all of the children and adolescent trolls have their own little society while the adults live off-planet, conquering out in the vastness of space. Trolls are vaguely humanoid in appearance, with rounded noses (almost to the point of being snouts) and gray skin. Their eyes are black with yellow sclera (in childhood, anyhow), and this color is shared with the tips of their horns, which are dark orange at the roots.
Trolls have no concept of ‘family’ as humans know it; there are no adult trolls as parents. And in fact, most trolls don’t even come from a father and a mother; all troll couples (we’ll get into that soon) contribute genetic material to a great big pile in a cave, guarded and fertilized by a creature called the Mother Grub. There, they become eggs, and eventually hatch into grubs – which look exactly how you would expect them to. They grow humanesque bodies later. Based on their blood color (which covers basically the entire spectrum), the trolls will meet up soon with a lusus; a ghostly white creature that serves as their guardian up until adulthood. They also get a symbol for themselves; the styles range vastly, but each blood color has its own ‘set’ of symbols, and trolls will rarely get a symbol that doesn’t work with their blood color.
Romance for humans is a simple matter of love; it needs no explanation. But the trolls have a very different idea, and their romance encompasses much more than human love does – in fact, they will often mock the humans for how restricted they are. The troll romance is put into four quadrants; matespritship, moirallegiance, auspiticism, and kismesism. They all have a symbol assigned for them too; these symbols translated into human society in the form of the four suits of playing cards, and their colors. Heart and diamond are red, as matespritship and moirallegiance are red romance (based around pity); spade and club are black, as kismesism and auspiticism are black romance (based around hate). Furthermore, each one has a pale and a flushed variant; the more vivid the color, the more intense the relationship. Moirallegiance and auspiticism are weaker, and therefore they are pale and ashen; matespritship and kismesism are stronger, and therefore are flushed and calignous.
Matespritship is the closest to human love; it is two trolls who have devoted themselves to the other in displays of affection, though they may be violent. In fact, if the violence gets too bad, the relationship may devolve into kismesism, wherein the psychology goes like this: two trolls hate each other so much that their psychologies perform a total flip and they end up having sex (called ‘contributing genetic material’). Likewise, moirallegiance is a platonic version of this, where the two trolls have a mutually beneficial relationship regarding personalities; usually, there is one troll who pacifies the other’s more violent urges, and one troll who in turn helps their mate get over emotional shortcomings. Moirails must be careful, though; they may get into an auspitism set, which is basically taking a kismetic relationship and pushing a moirail in the middle of it in an attempt to keep things from getting Really Bad between them. Trolls have no concept of homo- and heterosexuality; essentially, on this planet, Everyone Is Bi because genders have no difference in who can be in a quadrant with who.
Since pity and hate are not opposite emotions, it is not hard for one quadrant to flip over into the other one, as you can see. It may sound odd to humans, that the trolls focus their relationships on such depressing ideas. However, the fact of the matter is that trollkind is just a very violent race; they are led by a troll named Her Imperious Condescension, which should illustrate nicely how the society feels about others. The Condesce (as she is frequently referred as) is a troll of tyrian purple blood; in the color spectrum, this is magenta. Tyrian purple is the rarest of the blood colors, and only one or two are ever alive at any given time; since the magentabloods live longer than any other color, the chances of this happening are even rarer.
The trolls’ society is based around a caste system called the hemospectrum. As you can guess, the blood color of a troll is everything for their society. If you are red, brown, or yellow, you are the lowest rung of the ladder; not necessarily the most common, but the lowest nonetheless. From there, it goes through the greens (neutral territory; the middle class) and up through bluebloods, which are considered a nobility, if the name didn’t tip you off. (This is another way that the trolls rubbed off on humans.) Higher still are the purplebloods, which live underwater, and the tyrian purplebloods themselves; bridging the gap is the beach-dwelling indigobloods, who don’t really fit in with either one. They are too land-dwelling for the seadwellers, and too sea-dwelling for the landdwellers. Most trolls agree with this caste system, but like with any government, there are the occasional ‘radicals’ who think that every blood color should be equal or something silly like that.
Unfortunately, we don’t get much of an opportunity to explore troll culture, because as of the beginning of the story Alternia is basically doomed.
The universe in which Equius was taken is different than the canon we see in Homestuck; Red Dead Virgo takes the blood colors of all the trolls and shifts them five slots on the hemospectrum, meaning our blueblooded friend now sits in the not-too-lofty hemogree of ‘yellow’. But the plot remains basically the same: twelve young trolls happen upon a video game called Sgrub, which all of them play together, and as a result will be the only trolls who survive the death of Alternia.
Before Sgrub happened, Equius was a yellow-blooded troll who lived in a hivestem (basically apartment building) typical to his caste. He was one of those trolls who followed the hemospectrum, in his case almost religiously; he allowed the knowledge that he was completely worthless to invade every aspect of his life, and as a result didn’t think very highly of himself. He was Internet friends with a bunch of other trolls who he communicated with on the chat client Trollian; there was one troll in that circle from every blood caste, including a mutantblood, Kanaya Maryam. Kanaya was constantly on the run from the Empire, who wanted to kill her because of her bright red blood; one of the safe houses she used was Equius’. It was hard for her to get in, and he constantly spoke down to her, making her reluctant to work with him; but he always pulled out all the stops and treated her as an extremely revered guest when she came. His intention was to “remind her of her place, show her how it’s DONE”.
And then, suddenly, Sgrub.
The purpose of Sgrub, it seems, is to keep the world chain going. Every time it appears in a world (no one knows how or why) it will be played, and as a result of the game, the planet in question will be crushed beneath meteors. You see, the idea of the game to save Skaia, the sacred battlefield, which is currently sitting in the middle of a war between two planets, Prospit and Derse. Upon loading, the game fires up its first issue: meteors, lots of them. Meteors will come flying towards Skaia, and as a self-defense mechanism, Skaia will redirect the meteors through portals so that they will come out in a distance space-plane – headed right for the client planet, in this case Alternia. It’s then up to the trolls to flee the planet before everything suffers a rocky, explodey doom. However, this is only the beginning of the game, as the trolls will soon find out.
Each troll, after escaping Alternia, will find themselves on their own unique Land – for Equius, it was the Land of Lotus and Frogs, or LOLAF. In it, he tried to fulfill his role as Prince of Space, but found it extremely difficult. The whole world was so dirty and full of life, it was making his neat-freak mind having a little nervous breakdown… and worse yet, he couldn’t just avoid it. Because as it turns out, his role as Prince of Space?
Catching frogs. He was very close to giving up at that point, because he had no right or power to be doing
anything so important as giving birth to the new world. As far as Equius could be concerned, he should be dead by now, and if he wasn’t then he certainly couldn’t handle anything so important. So he sat around for about a day and a half, baking massive amounts of mind honey cookies as a form of therapy, and finally got down to business… and did a pretty good job, considering that he was constantly repelled by mud and lilypads the entire time.
Eventually, he and the other trolls all banded together and ‘won’ the game; they defeated the Black King, ruler of Derse and the established final boss, and saved Skaia. Unfortunately, right afterward they were assaulted by a new enemy – Jack Noir, a Dersite rebel of unimaginable power, who had fled from the next session down the line and now came to wreak havoc in their world. Terrified out of their wits, the trolls fled for their lives and eventually ended up on an abandoned laboratory, hidden inside a meteor on a satellite belt called the Veil.
A little later, a teal-blooded troll named Feferi suddenly heard the voices of the horrorterrors – ancient eldritch abominations who live on the edge of consciousness, in the deepest darkness that the universe can offer. She began going on rampage, under the assumption that killing everyone would put them into their dream-bubbles, which would protect them from the impending destruction of the world as they knew it. As it turned out, Feferi was actually
right, but she was still slaughtering trolls left, right and center. Soon she enlisted the help of a highblood named Sollux Captor, whose violent alternate personality was soon taken under the influence of the Deep Ones. The two of them set out together to kill every troll left in the Veil.
When they ran into Equius, he was already kind of running around the Veil in a panic, with Nepeta. Eventually they decided that the best course of action would be to stay in the main room, where everyone else was -- Gamzee was there, anyway, and they all needed to be working together. Even if he wasn't the STRONGest fighter in the Veil, having the grassblood as an ally was better than nothing. So the three of them sat there and waited. Gamzee and Nepeta started talking in hushed tones, and every so often one of them would try to get Equius in on the conversation as well, but he was too busy having a long, internal panic attack. So it stood to reason that when Sollux appeared, currently in the mindset that made him totally axe-crazy, Equius was the first one to flip out and reach for the arrows. The three of them managed to fell Sollux, but only barely, and it had sickened them all; so they dragged his body against the wall and turned away from it. No one spoke this time -- and most importantly, no one was looking at the vents.
Midway through that last bit is where he’s taken to the Tower.
Personality: Anyone familiar with the ‘original’ Equius Zahhak would almost certainly flip right the fuck out upon being greeted by the new one.
Externally, of course, he doesn’t seem much different. He still speaks with much reverence to those above him on the hemospectrum, regardless of whether they’re one or nine spaces above him. Likewise, he hates speaking with Terezi, Vriska, and Kanaya (the last one especially), because they are lower than even him on the system. It isn’t as immediately obvious, but he acts mostly the same; the change comes from the fact that Equius now has many more characters above him, when before he had only a few. Equius also tries to speak more like he would imagine a highblood should; his vocabulary is vast, even though he has a nasty habit of saying “Uh” all the time.
The most glaring effect on Equius has been his birth into the yellowblood caste; he still keeps his nigh-religious views on the hemospectrum, even though he now cannot enjoy any of the perks of being on the higher end of the spectrum. In fact, he firmly believes that he is not worthy of making any of his own decisions, or doing anything that sounds even remotely important – someone of higher blo—ahem, better qualifications should be doing it, not… not him. In fact, Equius sees himself as almost laughably pathetic in everything he does; sucking up to his hemospectral betters is one of his only talents, and whenever he tries to combat his usual “I am worthless, kill me now” state of mind, a second later he will chastise himself for allowing himself ‘pathetic shivering self-defense’. However, there is one thing that he will allow himself to pride upon, and that is not being ‘a sweaty meat-handzed brawling freak’. He’s only a regular freak, which is much less objectionable, in his opinion.
In one of his biggest throwbacks to both the True Equius and Sollux, the original yellowblood, Equius is a creature of paradox – and duality. As mentioned before, he completely detests trolls lower than him on the hemospectrum, most of all the mutant candyblood Kanaya Maryam. However, when Kanaya is forced to stay in his apartment for a few days while hiding from the Empire, he pulls out all the stops for her – cleaning her usually dirty clothes, fixing up her weapon, giving her the only ‘bed’ in the house, and generally treating her like royalty. He justifies this by saying that it’s a way to put Kanaya in her place by showing her how it’s DONE, but come on, that’s a really flimsy argument no matter which way you look at it. Adding more to the paradox issue, Equius apparently second-guesses himself quite a lot, and has difficulty picking sides – the RDV narrative notes that, concerning Sgrub, he is “as always, of two minds on the topic”.
He apparently has difficulty with dropping the constant stilted formalities, and even more so with picking up social cues; after giving Kanaya a particularly obnoxious comment on her competency related to the blood mutation, and receiving a sarcastic message of agreement in response, Equius was apparently pleased that she had accepted her station for once. Needless to say, he can provide hours of entertainment for anyone with a mean streak and some time to kill. This last point is where his moirail, Nepeta, comes in. Equius’ contribution to the moirallegiance was showing Nepeta that the hemospectrum wasn’t everything (in a strange, roundabout way, of course) and her way of returning the favor is by watching out for him, and ensuring that no one takes advantage of his very fragile nature.
Another prime example of his ‘fragile nature’: Equius has a pretty big issue with his perceived safety at any given moment. He’s almost always anxious for some reason or another, and it doesn’t take much to get him into full-on panic mode. Pretty much whenever things get too hot to handle, or when he needs to do something that he considers out of his league, he tends to go through several stages of mounting panic, and often it seems like he will flee a scene whenever he’s too scared. And most of the time, he actually is fleeing. But if there’s someone in that scene who he cares about – like, say, Nepeta – then chances are he’s going to keep watching until his psyche takes a total reacharound, and he pops up again later to throw a flaming arrow or something through your chest.
Abilities: Unlike most trolls who share his blood, Equius has absolutely zero psychic power; this means he can eat the mind honey without consequence, also unlike most trolls who share his blood. Nor, for that matter, is he terribly STRONG; as a matter of fact, he's pretty laughably WEAK, only powerful enough to carry around bags of flour for a short distance. This makes his life a pretty unfortunate one when the culling days come around. To combat this, Equius has taken up a few other hobbies; he's a very good shot with a bow and arrow, and what little money he makes for himself is spent on parts for his many robots. ...Well, either that or ingredients for food. Though of course this does nothing to help him in the eyes of the Empire, Equius is a notably good cook -- his specialty is baking, but he can also make a fantastic grubloaf. --A proper grubloaf, mind you, unlike how that brownblood makes it.
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