Daisy // Rose Lalonde (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
threadspinner) wrote2013-12-04 11:22 am
threadspinner) wrote2013-12-04 11:22 am
Tu Shanshu Application
Player Information:
Name: Aaron
Age: 21
Contact: AIM: portaling | GChat: cheerypapercut
Game Cast: None!
Character Information:
Name: Rose Lalonde
Canon: Homestuck
Canon Point: End of Act 5 Act 2 — immediately after Cascade.
Age: 13
Reference: Rose Lalonde | Homestuck
Setting:
Homestuck is set on Earth, and it’s mostly like our regular everyday earth -- the same places and landmarks exist, and it’s assumed that everything else is the same as it was in April 2009. This includes things like pop culture references and other popular culture items, like Snoop Dawg, Nicholas Cage, etc, which feature heavily in the comic’s jokes.
Rose is first shown as the best friend of three other kids, all who talk to one another and share their friendship almost exclusively through the internet. Their names are: John Egbert, Jade Harley, and Dave Strider. Rose makes friends with them through a series of time travel shenanigans started by Jade, and through mutual interests in video games and other silly things (like books, knitting, and practical jokes). By the time the comic has started, they have been friends for presumably at least a year -- flashbacks are shown that place Rose in conversations with Dave during the winter, and John sends Rose a package on her birthday (December 4th), thereby assuming they have been friends for long enough that they feel comfortable sharing addresses. Rose easily considers them her best (perhaps only) friends.
However, there is a critical difference between the Homestuck world and ours: the fact that the entire world is predicated upon a video game, and that one day, that video game is going to destroy everything.
In fact, Rose and her friends weren’t actually born like normal humans - turns out, the video game that they play (SBURB) has had them in mind from the beginning. It’s not chance that they were born and raised to play. They were created within the game itself, using a process called ectobiology, and then sent back in time (on meteors!) to be raised by their guardians (who were also sent back in time via meteor, completing the time paradox/circular time loop). Rose crash-lands in the middle of a large lake in upper New York, becoming the daughter of a mysterious figure named Mom. Together with her mother, they live in a large, modern mansion in the middle of a forest, not far from an extremely large science facility (that, we find out later, connects to their house). She’s actually a pretty normal girl, aside from the strange storage devices used in Homestuck called Sylladices. Much like a computer, people in Homestuck can store information (or in this case, physical items) in card form. These cards are then placed in the sylladex, which can be structured in any number of different forms, or modii. Rose uses the tree modus, which is structured like this: the root card forms the top of the “tree” with its first letter — for example, Mascara > M. M then becomes the dividing line for the tree itself: everything lower than M in the alphabet goes to one side, and everything higher goes to the other. When you take the Mascara out of the tree, the entire thing falls apart — things go shooting everywhere, making sylladex mastery an art (and also, a potential weapon!).
Another thing that’s slightly different than earth is the distinct lack of outside communication between the four friends (Jade, Dave, Rose and John) and the rest of the world. It’s as if people simply don’t exist, unless they’re a guardian or someone online (such as the trolls). The four kids know each other only through pesterchum, an online instant messaging program. They don’t really have friends outside of their group. Their world is fairly small, partially because they’ve been chosen to play SBURB from the start. Their entire lives have been designed around the game.
As the kids start playing SBURB, meteors fall from the sky, destroying surrounding areas (and eventually, destroying all civilization on the planet). In order to stay alive, the four kids are forced to play SBURB, rather than just toy around with it, as seen in Act 1 and somewhat in Act 2. It’s a narrow escape into the alternate reality that the game creates for the players. Each player gets their own separate land and title, tailored to what some could consider their destiny. It’s a challenge, to complete the quests set down in your land and become a person that’s true to the title. This is another distinction from Earth (what earth? it was destroyed when the meteors hit). Rose is the second person to enter the session, becoming the Seer of Light in the Land of Light and Rain, or LOLAR. We eventually find out that a Seer is expected to help her friends navigate the intricacies of the game; a player of Light is someone who can see both good and bad endings, or “fortune” as it may be, and then use it to their advantage. When Rose finally comes into her powers at the end of Act 5 Act 2, she becomes an ultimate clairvoyant: she can see beyond what’s currently happening to an infinite amount of futures, and then choose the most optimal one to lead her friends along.
The players' worlds surround the planet called Skaia, the chessboard planet in the center of the Incipisphere (or the universe that the game exists in). Skaia is the ultimate goal for players of SBURB - they are literally told to "build up to Skaia," that is they build their houses high enough up that they can leap through the final gate of the game and fight the Big, Bad Boss. The point of the game is to create another universe - and this universe is created only through cooperation between players.
The players of SBURB also have another self, called their dreamself, that lives on one of two moons: Prospit or Derse. Prospit is the moon closest to Skaia, big and golden -- the people that dream there are given access to visions of the future via clouds that float around Skaia. The other moon, called Derse, is a purple moon that exists near the furthest ring, allowing the people that live there to listen to the whispers of the horrorterrors. Rose is one of two players who “dreams” on Derse — meaning that she has access to the horror terrors, gigantic tentacled monsters that look quite a lot like Cthluhu. They provide Rose with dark and dangerous power in exchange for helping them free themselves from the furthest ring, and Rose accepts: basically, they infect her soul with their dark magic, giving her a dark aura and the ability to shoot scary lightning from her knitting needles. She also can go “grimdark,” letting them completely control her while her angry and sorrowful emotions rage uncontrollably. This happens in the comic when Rose finds out that Mom has died — she lets the horror terrors take over, and attempts to fix everything by….well, going completely insane and blowing things up. If you would like a map of Prospit, Derse, and Skaia (with added furthest ring as well), you can look here.
As mentioned before, Earth and the kids in Homestuck have also been in contact with a series of alien lifeforms called ‘trolls,’ a group of 12 alien kids who have also played the game SBURB (to them, SGRUB) and are convinced that Rose and her friends have messed up their game session in some way. Through a series of conversations between Jade, Karkat (the leader of the trolls), Rose, and Kanaya (Rose’s “mentor” troll), we find out that the worlds are actually connected to one another: the “new universe” that you can create as the end of SBURB is what earth actually is. It’s the prize of the trolls, for completing their session. Ultimately, all of the problems that Rose and her friends face are caused by Karkat’s inability to complete SBURB fully — and for that, their entire world is doomed to fail. This fact - that their game session can never be completed - is what drives most of Rose’s plot throughout Act 5 Act 2, and is what eventually one of the main components that leads Rose, Dave, John and Jade to leave their session and restart it. This ‘restart’ allows them to remix the variables of their own universe to produce a better session, one that can actually succeed…supposedly. If Rose and co. had not found a way to take themselves out of their game universe entirely — Rose and Dave by flying into the furthest ring where the horrorterrors live, and Jade and John by literally breaking the fourth wall — they would have been erased, to let another set of four kids take their place. Instead, they live on — and at Rose’s current canon point, they have not yet met any of the kids that have taken their place: Roxy, Jane, Dirk, and Jake.
Personality:
Mature and refined, Rose is the only kid to type with correct grammar and syntax in Homestuck, something that belies her personality better than one might think. She prides herself on her elegance, often using an extensive vocabulary to display her intellect. Intelligence is something that Rose Lalonde has in spades, and she's not afraid to admit it: she read Lovecraftian horror stories at the age of thirteen, and has a deep interest in writing. She dabbles in psychoanalysis, often joking with her friends that she's writing all their interesting quirks and habits down in a notebook to keep for future publication (no one actually knows if this is true or not). Certainly, she seems to have insight into her friends' behavior more than any other person in the game, befitting of a Seer; she spies on her friends and their whereabouts, while keeping her own actions cryptic and mysterious. Rose is also the person that orchestrates most of the game, becoming the first server player and directing John through the game while simultaneously keeping a verbose game guide such as the ones found on GameFAQs. She is meticulous in her planning and orchestrating, detailing every section of her journey through the game until the results of the game prove that there is no way they can win. Her intelligence ekes out here as well -- it's her prosaic rendering of the game that initially attracts Kanaya's attention and gains her affection, and her witty repartee that keeps it. She uses her intelligence like a weapon in conversations, spinning clever metaphors and turns of phrase in order to fool and confuse her friends when she wants to keep something hidden.
In addition to her intelligence, it's clear that Rose is a very secretive person. She hides things from her friends -- secrets about both serious things like SBURB and trivial things like her wizard slash (which is written so elegantly that it's actually quite difficult to parse). This frustrates people, and sometimes gets her into tense conversations, but she persists despite that. While the other kids are content to tell most of their ideas straight out, Rose prefers to hide her master plan until it benefits her to reveal all the steps. And when she doesn't have a plan, she doesn't like flying high unless she can shift the conversation back around to something safer.
Rose is led by the forces of the outer ring in SBURB, persuaded by their power and their attractive allure. Rose fully believes in the power that information holds, and will destroy things to gain it -- she rips apart the seams of the game and her world in order to unearth the secrets of the Green Sun, flagrantly disregarding the warnings of the trolls. Knowledge is useful, and Rose knows how to distribute it for her personal gain. Taking risks is simply part of the game, and she will play the game to its fullest -- death is not a deterrent to her…at least her death. Other deaths are a completely different story -- she takes them hard and can't let go, going crazy over her Mother's death and flying to revenge John when he dies. She purposefully listens to the gods and creates her Thorns (dark magic-fueled knitting needles) with the intent of following their orders on the promise of knowledge and a successful game session. Rose doesn't like losing in anything, be it SBURB or a simple conversation. She must always get the last word, frequently having verbal spars with her ectobiology sibling Dave. Her ability to analyze other people's tactics makes her a formidable foe where passive-aggressive tactics are concerned. She knows just how to annoy or frustrate whoever she's speaking to.
But Rose isn't a cold, emotionless person. Sure, she likes to appear as such, but she's human like the rest of the kids, and experiences the same sorts of things. However, Rose believes that it's inefficient to go around spewing emotions all the time -- she only expresses her sorrow or anger when it's so great that she can't hold it in any more, like after her Mom is killed by Jack Noir, the game’s ultimate bad guy. She actually cares a great deal about her family and friends, despite seeming occasionally detached. While her sort of affection is a little lopsided and strange, she does wish all the best for them, and works towards success with their interests in mind. In her mind, she hides information to help them, as well as better herself -- even though people have recently been trying to talk her out of it, she's continuing to persist. Rose would never purposefully hurt any of her friends, and despite being a little chilly, she does admit that they are her best friends, and she loves their company. She's also very compassionate towards animals; Rose loved her cat, Jaspers, dearly before he passed away. She made her first friend in him, and this sort of tender affection for pets seems to translate over to not only her pony, but also her new (mutant) cat and the consorts of SBURB. This same sort of affection and desire to take care of things for her animals is a variation of the protection she feels for her friends, only more readily apparent. She doesn't want to seem weak, though, so most of the time she hides what she feels and presents the calm, reasonable exterior that most are used to seeing. She has gotten so good at this facade that it's her natural reaction -- excessive displays of emotion are uncomfortable for her, and she would much rather talk about things calmly than display hysterics. Sometimes, however, her feelings get the better of her, and she will tear apart the game in order to get revenge for the people she loves.
Rose can also be fairly silly -- she rides Maplehoof into the sunset to the tune of western music, wearing her mother's scarf and letting it blow in the wind. She uses a magnetic 'w' for the refrigerator for a fake moustache, grinning at her new evil accessory. While she adores the erudite and the scholarly, Rose is also a normal thirteen year old at heart, capable of having great fun when the occasion arises. However, this is another thing that she keeps hidden -- it's not seemly for someone who wants to become a famous psychologist and author to be seen holding green Ws up to her nose. But the desire to do ridiculous things is still there, and she occasionally lets her crazy, teenage side out when she's by herself…or in Aather, when she's with Dave. There's a lot less pressure to do what's expected (or what she thinks is expected) when she's by herself or with a close friend, and Rose revels in the solitude that being an only child gives her. She's had ample time to explore her interests, and cares for her precious free time, as it allows her to be a real person, rather than some sort of emotionless weird kid (which she's not, she is quick to remind her friends). Rose just doesn't want people to think less of her -- power lies in the exterior presented as well as the interior knowledge behind the words, and Rose leaves nothing to chance.
Because Rose is the type of person who doesn’t necessarily need to see to believe, I have no doubt that she will, at least outwardly accept that Tu Shanshu is the place between life, dreaming, and death. However, she is a skeptic, especially when people older than her tell her something that is ‘good for her,’ so I also have no doubt that she will attempt to poke her nose into the infrastructure of the city and attempt to figure out as many secrets as she can, even if it leads her into trouble. Death is a realm, in Homestuck, that coincides very closely with dreaming and life, so it won’t necessarily be that aspect that causes her to poke around. Instead, she is just never satisfied with the base level of information about a world and its inhabitants, and so she’ll attempt to learn as much as she can in order to perhaps find a way home.
Appearance: Right here!
Abilities:
Rose has two sets of abilities: her pre-god tier abilities and her post-god tier abilities, which are very different and so godmode-y that even without a power cap, I am going to keep a strict reign on them.
Human Abilities:
• Needlekind fighter: Rose is extremely proficient at fighting with magic (and ordinary) knitting needles. She uses them like sharp knives, really.
• Knitting: Rose can knit pretty much anything you can think of. Masterful needle fighter, masterful knitter.
• Extremely Intelligent: Rose is very intelligent, reading books far beyond the thirteen year old level (things like extremely dense tomes of dark Cthulhu literature) and speaking primarily in circular language in an attempt to obscure her true meaning on most occasions. She is very adept at wordplay and passive aggressive conversations, reveling in the art of language.
• Writer: Rose loves to chronicle things, like her friends’ journeys, but she also likes to write rather scandalous and extremely dense wizard smut.
• Technology prowess: Rose has at least a working knowledge of different parts of computer science — she understands sorting with the tree function and the way that computer games can interact with their environment, at the very least. She also knows how to work handless communication devices (like ones you operate with your eyes, she has one in canon at some point) and a lot about river power-operated machinery, because her house is built over one.
• Sylladex: A subspace storage system accessible only by Rose, since it is equipped to her. She can store large and small things in there (though not TOO large, for example, she can’t store a house-tall statue, because that’s Just Too Big).
• Wikipedia Certificate of Psychoanalysis: Rose is an armchair psychologist, equipped with many books and the ability to surf the internet to diagnose her clients. While she has a lot of knowledge from books, she’s not trained in it or anything — she just takes a natural liking to it and attempts to use the internet/her own current knowledge to diagnose her friends for fun.
• Cat Caretaker: Rose can take care of cats fairly well. She also has a natural inclination to have animals follow her around (she’s very persuasive, and gives them all cute outfits, what more could you want?).
God Tier Skills:
• Conditional Immortality: Rose is immortal — meaning she can’t die, she will literally pop back up in a colorful rainbow glitter transformation sequence and heal herself (and her clothes!) completely. There are only two exceptions to this: one, that if she dies a heroic death, she will die for ‘good’; two, that if she is killed justly at the hands of another person/other people, she will die for good as well. Heroic and just are very nebulous terms in canon — for example, Jade appears to have been killed “justly” after being mind controlled into being evil, although it was not necessarily her own fault, and Vriska dies after being stabbed by her best friend, though one could argue that she did nothing wrong at the current moment.
• Flight: All god tier levels can fly and float, much like Superman.
• Seer Powers: Rose can look into the future and determine the most fortuitous paths for her friends and her. She can then help push them onto this ‘path’ so that this future comes true. Basically she can look at all possible “instances” of an event and then guide people so that they come to the one that is best for their general circumstance. In a way, she is the ultimate advisor and guide — when combined with a more active person, she can also become the best strategist for things like warfare (if she really wanted) or strategy games.
• Also she gained the power to talk very vaguely about almost everything and confuse everyone even moreso than she did before. Yay!
Inventory:
Nothing except knitting needles (no special powers, just…knitting needles), yarn, and her BRIGHT ORANGE god tier outfit.
Suite: Metal (maybe ME-2A or ME-3C? Anywhere, really.). Rose is certainly the intellectual and the ‘thinker’ of her group of friends — she is interested in progress, and tends to be insular when throwing herself into a big project or idea. Not that she isn’t friendly, but she’s certainly more prone to looking suspiciously on outsiders than her other friends are. In addition, Rose is quite used to living in a utilitarian, modernist building — her own home is like that, to a certain extent. She’d feel quite at ‘home’ living there.
In-Character Samples:
Third Person:
Rose was, of course, never satisfied with what she could see from the street level. She’d wandered the streets around her apartment in as circular a pattern as she could, stretching ever outwards, until she had memorized them all. It was strange, she thought, being in a city with so many people, with the threat of violence as a potential factor in where she could or couldn’t walk. Even on Earth, she had lived in the rural area of New York, a far cry from the gangs of the City. So being told that certain things were taboo now that she was living in a metropolitan area seemed downright ridiculous.
Instead of following people’s suggestions — “Why don’t you go back inside, or somewhere safer?” most often — she decided to do things her own way. Making sure no one was around, Rose gently lifted off from the ground, floating up between two buildings in a narrow alleyway. If she couldn’t go exploring wherever she wanted, the least she could do was get purchase on a roof near her apartment to look over the city. Was it really curved, she wondered? The land seemed at least somewhat curved, gently sloping over certain areas, but it did seem strange that any land would exist on the back of a turtle, or even on top of anything sentient.
She realized as she flew upwards to sate her curiosity that perhaps this wasn’t the most well thought-out of plans. What if there was a barrier above the buildings? What if the residents of this city had developed a force field to keep excited, wandering super powered teens from flying about on the rooftops? It hadn’t necessarily occurred to her that anything as trivial as a roof may be off limits, but then again, this place had all sorts of rules that she hadn’t quite memorized yet. She wouldn’t put it past them to ban rooftops, too.
“…well, there’s nothing like risk taking.” She was too far along to stop now. Looking up towards the top of the building, she continued to rise.
Network:
I’ll admit that this certainly wasn’t what I was expecting when I was told I was in the literal ether. I’d say one generally expects a certain level of nothingness to come from hiding between realms. Either that, or some sort of romantic hideaway — more akin to a novel than anything normal. Perhaps I was wrong on all counts.
In any case, three days into living here and I’ve already managed to accrue a fine. I’d say it’s my good luck, but really, how was I supposed to know all of these laws? Say a good “pish posh” to the local authorities and continue whistling like a miscreant on Sundays?
This is ridiculous.
If anyone has any advice on how to pay it off, I’d be grateful. Considering I’ve already gotten a small criminal record within a week, I’d say I’m off to a great start in my new life on the middle nether turtle.
Name: Aaron
Age: 21
Contact: AIM: portaling | GChat: cheerypapercut
Game Cast: None!
Character Information:
Name: Rose Lalonde
Canon: Homestuck
Canon Point: End of Act 5 Act 2 — immediately after Cascade.
Age: 13
Reference: Rose Lalonde | Homestuck
Setting:
Homestuck is set on Earth, and it’s mostly like our regular everyday earth -- the same places and landmarks exist, and it’s assumed that everything else is the same as it was in April 2009. This includes things like pop culture references and other popular culture items, like Snoop Dawg, Nicholas Cage, etc, which feature heavily in the comic’s jokes.
Rose is first shown as the best friend of three other kids, all who talk to one another and share their friendship almost exclusively through the internet. Their names are: John Egbert, Jade Harley, and Dave Strider. Rose makes friends with them through a series of time travel shenanigans started by Jade, and through mutual interests in video games and other silly things (like books, knitting, and practical jokes). By the time the comic has started, they have been friends for presumably at least a year -- flashbacks are shown that place Rose in conversations with Dave during the winter, and John sends Rose a package on her birthday (December 4th), thereby assuming they have been friends for long enough that they feel comfortable sharing addresses. Rose easily considers them her best (perhaps only) friends.
However, there is a critical difference between the Homestuck world and ours: the fact that the entire world is predicated upon a video game, and that one day, that video game is going to destroy everything.
In fact, Rose and her friends weren’t actually born like normal humans - turns out, the video game that they play (SBURB) has had them in mind from the beginning. It’s not chance that they were born and raised to play. They were created within the game itself, using a process called ectobiology, and then sent back in time (on meteors!) to be raised by their guardians (who were also sent back in time via meteor, completing the time paradox/circular time loop). Rose crash-lands in the middle of a large lake in upper New York, becoming the daughter of a mysterious figure named Mom. Together with her mother, they live in a large, modern mansion in the middle of a forest, not far from an extremely large science facility (that, we find out later, connects to their house). She’s actually a pretty normal girl, aside from the strange storage devices used in Homestuck called Sylladices. Much like a computer, people in Homestuck can store information (or in this case, physical items) in card form. These cards are then placed in the sylladex, which can be structured in any number of different forms, or modii. Rose uses the tree modus, which is structured like this: the root card forms the top of the “tree” with its first letter — for example, Mascara > M. M then becomes the dividing line for the tree itself: everything lower than M in the alphabet goes to one side, and everything higher goes to the other. When you take the Mascara out of the tree, the entire thing falls apart — things go shooting everywhere, making sylladex mastery an art (and also, a potential weapon!).
Another thing that’s slightly different than earth is the distinct lack of outside communication between the four friends (Jade, Dave, Rose and John) and the rest of the world. It’s as if people simply don’t exist, unless they’re a guardian or someone online (such as the trolls). The four kids know each other only through pesterchum, an online instant messaging program. They don’t really have friends outside of their group. Their world is fairly small, partially because they’ve been chosen to play SBURB from the start. Their entire lives have been designed around the game.
As the kids start playing SBURB, meteors fall from the sky, destroying surrounding areas (and eventually, destroying all civilization on the planet). In order to stay alive, the four kids are forced to play SBURB, rather than just toy around with it, as seen in Act 1 and somewhat in Act 2. It’s a narrow escape into the alternate reality that the game creates for the players. Each player gets their own separate land and title, tailored to what some could consider their destiny. It’s a challenge, to complete the quests set down in your land and become a person that’s true to the title. This is another distinction from Earth (what earth? it was destroyed when the meteors hit). Rose is the second person to enter the session, becoming the Seer of Light in the Land of Light and Rain, or LOLAR. We eventually find out that a Seer is expected to help her friends navigate the intricacies of the game; a player of Light is someone who can see both good and bad endings, or “fortune” as it may be, and then use it to their advantage. When Rose finally comes into her powers at the end of Act 5 Act 2, she becomes an ultimate clairvoyant: she can see beyond what’s currently happening to an infinite amount of futures, and then choose the most optimal one to lead her friends along.
The players' worlds surround the planet called Skaia, the chessboard planet in the center of the Incipisphere (or the universe that the game exists in). Skaia is the ultimate goal for players of SBURB - they are literally told to "build up to Skaia," that is they build their houses high enough up that they can leap through the final gate of the game and fight the Big, Bad Boss. The point of the game is to create another universe - and this universe is created only through cooperation between players.
The players of SBURB also have another self, called their dreamself, that lives on one of two moons: Prospit or Derse. Prospit is the moon closest to Skaia, big and golden -- the people that dream there are given access to visions of the future via clouds that float around Skaia. The other moon, called Derse, is a purple moon that exists near the furthest ring, allowing the people that live there to listen to the whispers of the horrorterrors. Rose is one of two players who “dreams” on Derse — meaning that she has access to the horror terrors, gigantic tentacled monsters that look quite a lot like Cthluhu. They provide Rose with dark and dangerous power in exchange for helping them free themselves from the furthest ring, and Rose accepts: basically, they infect her soul with their dark magic, giving her a dark aura and the ability to shoot scary lightning from her knitting needles. She also can go “grimdark,” letting them completely control her while her angry and sorrowful emotions rage uncontrollably. This happens in the comic when Rose finds out that Mom has died — she lets the horror terrors take over, and attempts to fix everything by….well, going completely insane and blowing things up. If you would like a map of Prospit, Derse, and Skaia (with added furthest ring as well), you can look here.
As mentioned before, Earth and the kids in Homestuck have also been in contact with a series of alien lifeforms called ‘trolls,’ a group of 12 alien kids who have also played the game SBURB (to them, SGRUB) and are convinced that Rose and her friends have messed up their game session in some way. Through a series of conversations between Jade, Karkat (the leader of the trolls), Rose, and Kanaya (Rose’s “mentor” troll), we find out that the worlds are actually connected to one another: the “new universe” that you can create as the end of SBURB is what earth actually is. It’s the prize of the trolls, for completing their session. Ultimately, all of the problems that Rose and her friends face are caused by Karkat’s inability to complete SBURB fully — and for that, their entire world is doomed to fail. This fact - that their game session can never be completed - is what drives most of Rose’s plot throughout Act 5 Act 2, and is what eventually one of the main components that leads Rose, Dave, John and Jade to leave their session and restart it. This ‘restart’ allows them to remix the variables of their own universe to produce a better session, one that can actually succeed…supposedly. If Rose and co. had not found a way to take themselves out of their game universe entirely — Rose and Dave by flying into the furthest ring where the horrorterrors live, and Jade and John by literally breaking the fourth wall — they would have been erased, to let another set of four kids take their place. Instead, they live on — and at Rose’s current canon point, they have not yet met any of the kids that have taken their place: Roxy, Jane, Dirk, and Jake.
Personality:
Mature and refined, Rose is the only kid to type with correct grammar and syntax in Homestuck, something that belies her personality better than one might think. She prides herself on her elegance, often using an extensive vocabulary to display her intellect. Intelligence is something that Rose Lalonde has in spades, and she's not afraid to admit it: she read Lovecraftian horror stories at the age of thirteen, and has a deep interest in writing. She dabbles in psychoanalysis, often joking with her friends that she's writing all their interesting quirks and habits down in a notebook to keep for future publication (no one actually knows if this is true or not). Certainly, she seems to have insight into her friends' behavior more than any other person in the game, befitting of a Seer; she spies on her friends and their whereabouts, while keeping her own actions cryptic and mysterious. Rose is also the person that orchestrates most of the game, becoming the first server player and directing John through the game while simultaneously keeping a verbose game guide such as the ones found on GameFAQs. She is meticulous in her planning and orchestrating, detailing every section of her journey through the game until the results of the game prove that there is no way they can win. Her intelligence ekes out here as well -- it's her prosaic rendering of the game that initially attracts Kanaya's attention and gains her affection, and her witty repartee that keeps it. She uses her intelligence like a weapon in conversations, spinning clever metaphors and turns of phrase in order to fool and confuse her friends when she wants to keep something hidden.
In addition to her intelligence, it's clear that Rose is a very secretive person. She hides things from her friends -- secrets about both serious things like SBURB and trivial things like her wizard slash (which is written so elegantly that it's actually quite difficult to parse). This frustrates people, and sometimes gets her into tense conversations, but she persists despite that. While the other kids are content to tell most of their ideas straight out, Rose prefers to hide her master plan until it benefits her to reveal all the steps. And when she doesn't have a plan, she doesn't like flying high unless she can shift the conversation back around to something safer.
Rose is led by the forces of the outer ring in SBURB, persuaded by their power and their attractive allure. Rose fully believes in the power that information holds, and will destroy things to gain it -- she rips apart the seams of the game and her world in order to unearth the secrets of the Green Sun, flagrantly disregarding the warnings of the trolls. Knowledge is useful, and Rose knows how to distribute it for her personal gain. Taking risks is simply part of the game, and she will play the game to its fullest -- death is not a deterrent to her…at least her death. Other deaths are a completely different story -- she takes them hard and can't let go, going crazy over her Mother's death and flying to revenge John when he dies. She purposefully listens to the gods and creates her Thorns (dark magic-fueled knitting needles) with the intent of following their orders on the promise of knowledge and a successful game session. Rose doesn't like losing in anything, be it SBURB or a simple conversation. She must always get the last word, frequently having verbal spars with her ectobiology sibling Dave. Her ability to analyze other people's tactics makes her a formidable foe where passive-aggressive tactics are concerned. She knows just how to annoy or frustrate whoever she's speaking to.
But Rose isn't a cold, emotionless person. Sure, she likes to appear as such, but she's human like the rest of the kids, and experiences the same sorts of things. However, Rose believes that it's inefficient to go around spewing emotions all the time -- she only expresses her sorrow or anger when it's so great that she can't hold it in any more, like after her Mom is killed by Jack Noir, the game’s ultimate bad guy. She actually cares a great deal about her family and friends, despite seeming occasionally detached. While her sort of affection is a little lopsided and strange, she does wish all the best for them, and works towards success with their interests in mind. In her mind, she hides information to help them, as well as better herself -- even though people have recently been trying to talk her out of it, she's continuing to persist. Rose would never purposefully hurt any of her friends, and despite being a little chilly, she does admit that they are her best friends, and she loves their company. She's also very compassionate towards animals; Rose loved her cat, Jaspers, dearly before he passed away. She made her first friend in him, and this sort of tender affection for pets seems to translate over to not only her pony, but also her new (mutant) cat and the consorts of SBURB. This same sort of affection and desire to take care of things for her animals is a variation of the protection she feels for her friends, only more readily apparent. She doesn't want to seem weak, though, so most of the time she hides what she feels and presents the calm, reasonable exterior that most are used to seeing. She has gotten so good at this facade that it's her natural reaction -- excessive displays of emotion are uncomfortable for her, and she would much rather talk about things calmly than display hysterics. Sometimes, however, her feelings get the better of her, and she will tear apart the game in order to get revenge for the people she loves.
Rose can also be fairly silly -- she rides Maplehoof into the sunset to the tune of western music, wearing her mother's scarf and letting it blow in the wind. She uses a magnetic 'w' for the refrigerator for a fake moustache, grinning at her new evil accessory. While she adores the erudite and the scholarly, Rose is also a normal thirteen year old at heart, capable of having great fun when the occasion arises. However, this is another thing that she keeps hidden -- it's not seemly for someone who wants to become a famous psychologist and author to be seen holding green Ws up to her nose. But the desire to do ridiculous things is still there, and she occasionally lets her crazy, teenage side out when she's by herself…or in Aather, when she's with Dave. There's a lot less pressure to do what's expected (or what she thinks is expected) when she's by herself or with a close friend, and Rose revels in the solitude that being an only child gives her. She's had ample time to explore her interests, and cares for her precious free time, as it allows her to be a real person, rather than some sort of emotionless weird kid (which she's not, she is quick to remind her friends). Rose just doesn't want people to think less of her -- power lies in the exterior presented as well as the interior knowledge behind the words, and Rose leaves nothing to chance.
Because Rose is the type of person who doesn’t necessarily need to see to believe, I have no doubt that she will, at least outwardly accept that Tu Shanshu is the place between life, dreaming, and death. However, she is a skeptic, especially when people older than her tell her something that is ‘good for her,’ so I also have no doubt that she will attempt to poke her nose into the infrastructure of the city and attempt to figure out as many secrets as she can, even if it leads her into trouble. Death is a realm, in Homestuck, that coincides very closely with dreaming and life, so it won’t necessarily be that aspect that causes her to poke around. Instead, she is just never satisfied with the base level of information about a world and its inhabitants, and so she’ll attempt to learn as much as she can in order to perhaps find a way home.
Appearance: Right here!
Abilities:
Rose has two sets of abilities: her pre-god tier abilities and her post-god tier abilities, which are very different and so godmode-y that even without a power cap, I am going to keep a strict reign on them.
Human Abilities:
• Needlekind fighter: Rose is extremely proficient at fighting with magic (and ordinary) knitting needles. She uses them like sharp knives, really.
• Knitting: Rose can knit pretty much anything you can think of. Masterful needle fighter, masterful knitter.
• Extremely Intelligent: Rose is very intelligent, reading books far beyond the thirteen year old level (things like extremely dense tomes of dark Cthulhu literature) and speaking primarily in circular language in an attempt to obscure her true meaning on most occasions. She is very adept at wordplay and passive aggressive conversations, reveling in the art of language.
• Writer: Rose loves to chronicle things, like her friends’ journeys, but she also likes to write rather scandalous and extremely dense wizard smut.
• Technology prowess: Rose has at least a working knowledge of different parts of computer science — she understands sorting with the tree function and the way that computer games can interact with their environment, at the very least. She also knows how to work handless communication devices (like ones you operate with your eyes, she has one in canon at some point) and a lot about river power-operated machinery, because her house is built over one.
• Sylladex: A subspace storage system accessible only by Rose, since it is equipped to her. She can store large and small things in there (though not TOO large, for example, she can’t store a house-tall statue, because that’s Just Too Big).
• Wikipedia Certificate of Psychoanalysis: Rose is an armchair psychologist, equipped with many books and the ability to surf the internet to diagnose her clients. While she has a lot of knowledge from books, she’s not trained in it or anything — she just takes a natural liking to it and attempts to use the internet/her own current knowledge to diagnose her friends for fun.
• Cat Caretaker: Rose can take care of cats fairly well. She also has a natural inclination to have animals follow her around (she’s very persuasive, and gives them all cute outfits, what more could you want?).
God Tier Skills:
• Conditional Immortality: Rose is immortal — meaning she can’t die, she will literally pop back up in a colorful rainbow glitter transformation sequence and heal herself (and her clothes!) completely. There are only two exceptions to this: one, that if she dies a heroic death, she will die for ‘good’; two, that if she is killed justly at the hands of another person/other people, she will die for good as well. Heroic and just are very nebulous terms in canon — for example, Jade appears to have been killed “justly” after being mind controlled into being evil, although it was not necessarily her own fault, and Vriska dies after being stabbed by her best friend, though one could argue that she did nothing wrong at the current moment.
• Flight: All god tier levels can fly and float, much like Superman.
• Seer Powers: Rose can look into the future and determine the most fortuitous paths for her friends and her. She can then help push them onto this ‘path’ so that this future comes true. Basically she can look at all possible “instances” of an event and then guide people so that they come to the one that is best for their general circumstance. In a way, she is the ultimate advisor and guide — when combined with a more active person, she can also become the best strategist for things like warfare (if she really wanted) or strategy games.
• Also she gained the power to talk very vaguely about almost everything and confuse everyone even moreso than she did before. Yay!
Inventory:
Nothing except knitting needles (no special powers, just…knitting needles), yarn, and her BRIGHT ORANGE god tier outfit.
Suite: Metal (maybe ME-2A or ME-3C? Anywhere, really.). Rose is certainly the intellectual and the ‘thinker’ of her group of friends — she is interested in progress, and tends to be insular when throwing herself into a big project or idea. Not that she isn’t friendly, but she’s certainly more prone to looking suspiciously on outsiders than her other friends are. In addition, Rose is quite used to living in a utilitarian, modernist building — her own home is like that, to a certain extent. She’d feel quite at ‘home’ living there.
In-Character Samples:
Third Person:
Rose was, of course, never satisfied with what she could see from the street level. She’d wandered the streets around her apartment in as circular a pattern as she could, stretching ever outwards, until she had memorized them all. It was strange, she thought, being in a city with so many people, with the threat of violence as a potential factor in where she could or couldn’t walk. Even on Earth, she had lived in the rural area of New York, a far cry from the gangs of the City. So being told that certain things were taboo now that she was living in a metropolitan area seemed downright ridiculous.
Instead of following people’s suggestions — “Why don’t you go back inside, or somewhere safer?” most often — she decided to do things her own way. Making sure no one was around, Rose gently lifted off from the ground, floating up between two buildings in a narrow alleyway. If she couldn’t go exploring wherever she wanted, the least she could do was get purchase on a roof near her apartment to look over the city. Was it really curved, she wondered? The land seemed at least somewhat curved, gently sloping over certain areas, but it did seem strange that any land would exist on the back of a turtle, or even on top of anything sentient.
She realized as she flew upwards to sate her curiosity that perhaps this wasn’t the most well thought-out of plans. What if there was a barrier above the buildings? What if the residents of this city had developed a force field to keep excited, wandering super powered teens from flying about on the rooftops? It hadn’t necessarily occurred to her that anything as trivial as a roof may be off limits, but then again, this place had all sorts of rules that she hadn’t quite memorized yet. She wouldn’t put it past them to ban rooftops, too.
“…well, there’s nothing like risk taking.” She was too far along to stop now. Looking up towards the top of the building, she continued to rise.
Network:
I’ll admit that this certainly wasn’t what I was expecting when I was told I was in the literal ether. I’d say one generally expects a certain level of nothingness to come from hiding between realms. Either that, or some sort of romantic hideaway — more akin to a novel than anything normal. Perhaps I was wrong on all counts.
In any case, three days into living here and I’ve already managed to accrue a fine. I’d say it’s my good luck, but really, how was I supposed to know all of these laws? Say a good “pish posh” to the local authorities and continue whistling like a miscreant on Sundays?
This is ridiculous.
If anyone has any advice on how to pay it off, I’d be grateful. Considering I’ve already gotten a small criminal record within a week, I’d say I’m off to a great start in my new life on the middle nether turtle.