Tower of Animus

[dubiousdisc]

Player Information

Name: Gira
Personal Journal: murkrows
Age: Sixteen
Contact Info: breloomasaurus@gmail.com; startropics @ plurk
Other Characters Played: Equius Zahhak (AU), Beat (OU)
Do you need an invite? Nope

 

Character Information

Character Name: Sollux Captor
Character Series: MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck
Character Age: Six solar sweeps
Character Gender: Male
Alternate Universe
Canon Point: In the alpha timeline, just before his death and merger with Alpha Sollux.
Background Link: Homestuck, OU Sollux
AU Background: Sollux's world is an AU called Hingelocked.

The twelve Western astrological signs can have one of three qualities; mutable, cardinal, or fixed. In particular, the cardinal signs are those which mark the turning point into a temperate season -- this is why they are called cardinal, because it comes from the Latin word for 'hinge'. So in the spirit of fucking everything up (because that's what hinges do, right?), this Homestuck AU is based around the four trolls with cardinal signs (Karkat Vantas, Aradia Megido, Terezi Pyrope and Gamzee Makara) becoming the new Homestuck Kids. The original Homestuck Kids have been turned into trolls and shuffled into a bloodswap with the other canon trolls. The new Homestuck kids are not Egberts, Striders, Harleys or Lalondes; they are Vantases, Megidos, Pyropes and Makaras still.

The Hingelocked trolls proceed thusly. Davias, Jaedre, Jonett, and Roslin are Dave, Jade, John and Rose, respectively.

Sollux Captor (Mutant) → Davias Treepe (Red) → Nepeta Leijon (Brown) → Vriska Serket (Yellow) → Tavros Nitram (Olive) → Jaedre Hekata (Jade) → Jonett Laerca (Teal) → Eridan Ampora (Cerulean) → Feferi Peixes (Blue) → Kanaya Maryam (Indigo) → Equius Zahhak (Purple) → Roslin Toumou (Tyrian Pink)

Something very important to note. None of these trolls were born in the normal way, conceived in the breeding caverns. They were created in an ectobiology lab by mixing and matching genes from certain other individuals, and sent down to the surface of their home planet (Alternia) via meteor. From there, they will all eventually come into possession of an entity called Sburb; it changes in form for each world it enters, and for Alternia, it is in the form of a computer game to be downloaded from the Internet. Each player of Sburb -- in this session, it's the twelve trolls highlighted above -- will gain a title from Sburb, a Class and an Element. The Element is the power which the player may someday gain control over, if they play their cards right, and the Class determines the way in which they will be guided to use it. Sollux here is the Heir of Time, which means he will use the element of Time to protect himself -- not necessarily his friends. The weapons he fights with are throwing stars of assorted size and variety, which is abbreviated as thrwstarKind in his Strife specibus (basically a hammerspace exclusively for weapons).

Sburb (or, as it's called in this world, Sgrub) would eventually destroy all of Alternia, and the first task of the players would be to escape before the inevitable Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies ending that the rest of the planet will get. From there, they have to work together and move through twelve Lands -- one for each player -- to complete the quests, find the secrets, and have some fun. But in true Homestuck tradition, it doesn't quite work that way, and they kind of have to omit the "fun" part.

...But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Every troll, of course, had a life before Sburb entered into their lives at six solar sweeps (thirteen years) of age. Sollux Captor was no different.

As mentioned, Sollux was a mutant in this timeline. This means that he has blood that is considered lower than the low of the hemospectrum; he is literally below consideration. The Alternian Empire does not take nicely to mutants like him, so he has no hope of ever living like a normal troll would. If anyone should happen to find out that he was an impostor to the 'pure' blooded trolls of Alternia... well, he would almost certainly die on the spot.

For the first three sweeps (that's seven human years) of his life, Sollux lived in almost complete isolation. Sollux was not born in the way most trolls are, logged by the Empire; this is why he managed to survive past the breeding caverns, for if there had been a natural mutant, they would have been spotted and killed. He was sent to Alternia's surface on a meteor, landing near the ruins of a castle; this very same castle once belonged to his ancestors, the Signless, but they were both long dead by his time. There had been an error in the ectobiology process that created Sollux, his ancestors, and the rest of the trolls mentioned up there. The whole group would pay for that later.

The castle was built on a very unfortunate hill; its geographical location made it a veritable portal to the Furthest Ring, a plane outside of time and space where Lovecraftian beings called the Horrorterrors lived. This meant that the castle's lower levels were extremely dangerous to traverse, and the entire place seemed to have unusual shadows running along the walls. Young Sollux thought nothing of it, though; he had never known anything more than the eldritch horrors crawling on the edge of his vision. They soon took on the job of raising him, enamored by his thirst for understanding and the fact that he didn't seem intent on leaving the castle any time soon.

As one could expect, he grew up in need of more than a few attitude adjustments. He essentially grew more and more sure of himself living inside the castle, overcome by hubris with no one really able to temper him; the horrorterrors could not communicate with him directly, since if any of them opened their mouths to speak, his brain would break (or worse) listening to their voices. Eventually he began to explore the castle further, moving into the wings and corridors where it was made clear he was not supposed to go, hungry for more knowledge.

Well, long story short, there was a very good reason that the castle was kept deserted. Beneath it, occupying no less than three basement floors and at least half of the aboveground rooms, there was an extremely large and ornate machine which, when operated, was supposed to bet he catalyst that released Sburb into the world in its first form. This machine was supposed to be found and run by Davias (the resident mechanic), several sweeps later. But Sollux had been looking at the thing for years, bits and pieces of it that surfaced in the corridors and rooms he was allowed to enter, and he started to practice his own tinkering on it. This meddling, in addition to the fact that it was initiated years before it was supposed to, meant that the resulting Sburb session would be 'premature' -- not all of the essential components were in place yet, meaning Sollux had just doomed them all.

The horrorterrors never really liked Sburb all that much, but they understood the impact it had on the universe. They also understood that Sollux had just messed everything up in massive, unfixable ways. The horrorterrors decided that the sentimentality they had felt towards this child was no longer strong enough to hold back the fact that he was stupid and quite dangerous. So as punishment, the horrorterrors attempted to kill him. They picked him up from his perch in the castle and thrust him towards the rest of Alternia, hoping that the crash-landing would do him in; if not, the rest of society almost certainly would.

Three-sweep old Sollux Captor woke up in a ditch similar to the one an ectobiology meteor would be found in; it wasn't caused by a meteor, though. It was caused by him. His body, more durable than a human's by virtue of being a troll, survived the ordeal; but just barely. He was found unconscious by a secluded oliveblood named Tavros, and during that time, he was cleaned up and healed. Upon waking up, Sollux realized that he had lost his memory; the horrorterrors had wiped it so he wouldn't come back. But of course, he did not know this. In the process of nursing, Tavros became the only other troll to know Sollux's blood color; fortunately, he was a good enough soul not to hand Sollux in immediately. Our mutant friend left soon after, without bothering to tell Tavros his name. They would meet again later, Tavros having no idea of who he was -- Sollux did not have his symbol or grey anonymity at the time. (He made it up later, based upon the vague memory of a familiar glyph; he didn't know this, but it was the Gemini symbol etched all over the castle's walls.)

At the same time, in a rustblood slum, a three-sweep-old troll named Davias won a symbol-covered cube of rock in a fistfight. (He was supposed to have received it from the Signless' machine.) Realizing only afterward that he had no idea what to do with it, Davias realized that one of the glyphs on it was the symbol of a troll he knew, so he sent it off to her; Vriska Serket studied the cube for two years, and laid down the framework of the game that would be called Sburb, before she was turned into a living energy generator for the Alternian Empire. For the next two years, with psychic energy being siphoned from her mind and rendered completely immobile by the biomachines that encase her legs and lower torso, she sat in front of a computer screen and finished it.

Meanwhile, other people in other places did magical things that they... probably weren't supposed to. It didn't really matter all that much in the end, considering everyone was going to die anyway, but it made the situation that much harder.

Sollux never really found himself a hive again; he instead became a wanderer, letting his mercurial nature and/or paranoia get the better of him whenever he considered staying someplace permanently. Most of his money was gained doing odd jobs for less-than-respectable employers, but he did well enough that he was able to snag a portable device he could at least use to connect with others on the Internet, even if he couldn't in real life. This is how he met most of the other trolls he entered the session with, bar one; he was a huge giant asshole and refused to speak to him on principle of being lower caste, even though no one actually knew what his caste was. In a twist which surprises no one familiar with Homestuck canon, it was Equius, the nigh-religious hemospectrum supporter. He only entered the game at all because of the intervention of Roslin, the only troll higher than him on the spectrum.

Being constantly on the move, he amassed a lot of possessions in his life, and as a result held a very large captchalogue deck (another kind of hammerspace, this time for everything that isn't a weapon). A significant amount of it is occupied by various handheld video game systems; it's basically Sollux's favorite pastime... aside from being a massive sleazeball. He became very adept at manipulation and conmanship, using his considerable linguistic gift to talk people out of their prized possessions or to distract them while he relieves them of the things in their back pocket. Some of it he sold the next town over for some extra cash, but if a trinket particularly caught his eye, he kept it.

Sollux bought his first set of throwing stars after very nearly getting in a street fight, which of course he needed to avoid at all costs; a drop of blood spilled was as good as death for him. Throwing stars were a convenient means to snipe people at long range. But sometimes long range just wasn't that practical; he learned to use blades as well, though not nearly as well as the shuriken. Because most of his life was focused on survival -- and he was pretty good at it, too -- his body adapted to fit; whereas canon Sollux was weak and scrawny because he adopted a sedentary lifestyle (and depended on his psychic powers to do everything for him, even walk) this Sollux actually looked healthy, muscular even. So he pitched along, spending the three sweeps after his 'amnesia' attack wandering Alternia, trying not to get culled.

Now, here's where the story gets a bit complicated... and explaining why will require going into more details on the nature of Sburb and the universe. You see, any given universe is split up into 'timelines'. Whenever an important event transpires, the timeline splits in pieces; one for a 'right' answer, and others for all the possible 'wrong' answers. The multiverse can handle any amount of splinter timelines only because, inevitably, the 'wrong' timelines will all eventually cease to exist; this removes them from weighing down on the multiverse, like cutting off branches that weigh down a tree. The Hingelocked trolls are all living in a doomed session, where the definitive event was Sollux's premature operation of the Signless' machine. Somewhere, there is a successful timeline with Sollux, Roslin and all the others, but Davias stumbled across the machine when he was supposed to and repaired what Sollux had broken.

Meanwhile, on Earth, there was a second session of Sburb that was due to launch on December 9, 2009. The four players were to be thirteen-year-old humans named Karkat Vantas, Gamzee Makara, Aradia Megido, and Terezi Pyrope. This session was in almost the same scenario, and here's how.

The trolls' session is flawed in another way, past the color of blood. To be successful, a session requires one player with the power of Time and one player with the aspect of Space; this is the bare minimum, which means all sessions that have only Time or only Space are doomed to fail. Sadly, the trolls' session was of the former case; they were missing a Space player, and instead had two Mind players. This was another way the session would fail; repeating elements is not good either. Basically, nothing but a complete rearranging of the elements would make the troll session successful -- and coincidentally, if the blood was changed, that is exactly what would happen. The kids were in an opposite situation; they had been shuffled into existence with a Space player, but no Time player. Both sessions were essentially doomed.

There was a troll in the session that realized this; her name was Roslin Toumou. She learned of her session's inevitable death by speaking telepathically with her lusus, a monstrous deep-sea monster that was an emissary to the Horrorterrors. It was also a turncoat. The horrorterrors in each universe are aware of all details regarding their session of Sburb, but they are generally against it; being weakened to the point that they cannot enter the 'real' world, however, they are powerless to stop it. Roslin's lusus did not agree with this, and unbeknownst to the horrorterrors, it explained the unfortunate truth about their session to Roslin, out of a desire to at least honor her death with the awareness of why she was to fail.

Unfortunately, Roslin decided to do something about it.

For several sweeps, a few of the trolls had been connecting to the human Internet in order to talk to the four kids. Most of them generally used the opportunity to be gigantic assholes to the kids, but Roslin had actually struck up a friendship with one Aradia Megido, who also had... some knowledge of what was about to transpire because of prophetic dreams; her 'dream self' was conscious on another planet called Prospit, and there she looked into the clouds to see visions. Roslin offered her answers as to what she saw, and eventually they discovered a bit more about the game together; they eventually realized, by watching the super-powered God Tier kids use their magic in a doomed timeline, that she was actually a Space player without a Time.

Seeing a chance to possibly save both of their sessions, Roslin offered Aradia a proposition; instead of playing in their doomed little four-person session, why not join the troll session to make sixteen? Their planets would be destroyed anyway and everyone would be pulled into an alternate dimension called the Iciphisphere, so it wasn't as if the distance was going to be much of a problem. It would mean the success of both sessions as one, and they could all come together and hopefully get over their collective douchebagginess enough to be friends.

In the end, it would not have mattered what Aradia responded with. She was Time-less in her own session if she didn't, and had multiple players of the same element if she did. Aradia didn't know this, though; she thought that, based off what Roslin had said, a combining of the sessions would save them both.

So for the timeline we're following, she picked yes, and signed up her three unknowing friends to partake in a sort of frankensession with twelve alien jerks. She did not mention any of this to Karkat, Terezi or Gamzee, except for in the form of extremely cryptic hints; she was too afraid of telling them too much, and somehow ruining the plan.

...She was sleeping in the backseat of a car when it crashed. Killed herself and her mother. It was very sad.

Now, when a player dies prematurely, their dreamself is stuck in the state they were in when they died; and since a dreamself is awake when a realself is asleep, Dream Aradia became an insomniac. She was an activist on Prospit for many years, friend to every citizen of the glowing yellow planet and trusted friend of its Queen. Dream Aradia, now unable to fall asleep, was finally able to take the benevolent Queen's long-standing offer of being the royal advisor; before, she could not, due to being asleep at unusual hours and generally unable to attend to important Prospitan matters. Thanks to her newfound knowledge of the game and what was about to happen, she was able to ease the Queen and the citizens into the period of upheaval that would come from six new Dream Spires popping up on Alternia (courtesy of the sleeping Prospitan trolls).

Shortly beforehand, in the human world, Aradia had foreseen her death in the clouds of Prospit and held an extremely cryptic conversation with Karkat. He followed her instructions. Terezi and Gamzee spent the rest of their session thinking she had just moved to a foreign country with no Internet, and even though Karkat had significantly less peace of mind, none of them knew that Aradia had died; only Karkat tried to find out what happened, but since he knew next to nothing about her (literally, all he had was her first name), he was met with little success. Meanwhile, another troll in on the plan -- Kanaya Maryam -- began keeping tabs on the three remaining kids, having realized that Sburb would take the form of a commercial computer game in their world. Her job was to make sure the kids didn't receive their own session of Sburb before they could receive the trolls', and if they did, prevent them from playing at all costs.

Back on Prospit, with the arrival of the new Spires, Aradia was reminded that there were people who needed her back on the waking world; she was the Space player, after all, and without her the whole operation would fall apart. So she began working extensively to find a way to return to Earth. Unfortunately, the Prospitans had never heard of this 'Earth', and nor had the royal archives, so Aradia devised a last-ditch plan. She went to the White Queen, with all of her infinite magical power, and asked her to force Aradia asleep. The White Queen did so.

It worked.

Real Aradia woke up in her grave. From there, she managed to get out using some handy and panic-sparked Space powers, and arrived home in time to receive the file for Sburb from Roslin and pass it along to Karkat, who then passed it to Terezi, who then passed it to Gamzee, who then passed it to Kanaya. And so it went. To enter into Sburb, a player must be within proximity of the machine they initially downloaded or installed it on. The program will then uproot the entire house (as well as some of the land around it), dropping it into the player's first location. Being hive-less, Sollux installed it on his tablet and ended up taking an empty patch of earth with him into the Iciphisphere; this patch of earth was edited and managed by Vriska.

He used punch-card alchemy to create a lot of cool stuff, most of it formed by combining his video games with things. Perhaps most relevant to his title and duty are the Time Gears, two bracelets which Sollux wears in conjunction with a type of oddly-shaped clock; he adjusts the pendulum, and uses the teeth on the 'gear' of the bracelets, to control time in a similar manner to canon Dave Strider's turntables and Aradia Megido's music box. Other highlights include a helmet that looks like a green glob of slime with eyes (imaginatively called a Sopor Slime Helmet), a sword-sized paper fan (Tails of Eternia), this awesome backpack with a skull shaped like the Time symbol on it that fires energy blades (Dante's Inferno), a set of cyberpunk throwing stars (Dubious Discs), and a neat glowy blade that most definitely is not a beam katana (Touchdoun). Really, it's almost a tradition for players of Sburb to use item-combining to make a whole lot of stuff they're never going to need, but at least he's prepared!

Sollux spent most of the early game ignoring his own planet, the Land of Mist and Clocktowers, in favor of checking out everyone else's. They were much more interesting than his, to be honest. However, after spending some quality time with Feferi and helping her feed the little earthworms on her planet, he eventually realized that his own world was in just as bad a state of disarray, if not worse. He then stopped neglecting LOMAC and actually worked to explore its mysterious depths, completing quests and earning the adoration of the society of pyromanders. He never actually completed all of the quests on his planet due to the late start, but dedicated himself a lot more to them, and learned about his Time abilities as a result. Predictably, knowledge of time brought in knowledge of timelines, so he did a bit of homework and finally realized what had happened to their session... and because he couldn't resist the temptation, before heading off to he traveled back past three sweeps and finally learned what his early life was like.

In his isolation, Sollux had begun to lose touch with the rest of his session; and unfortunately, it was rapidly beginning to deteriorate in his absence. The players had always kept to their little groups of two or three, so it wasn't that common to share news anyway. Only late in the game did anyone remember to tell him what was happening -- it was Kanaya, who contacted him just after he returned from his trip into the past. He was already in a terrible and volatile mood from everything he had found out back there, but his indigo friend soon became another bearer of bad news. She informed him that... something had snapped in the cerulean-blood of their session, Eridan. He had been a threat before due to his almost mindless lack of mercy, and had always been regarded as someone to keep at arm's length; but according to Kanaya, he had gotten into a few contracts with the wrong types of people and had just learned knowledge that no troll was ever meant to learn.

Essentially, Eridan had undergone a bizarre and rather unsettling process that was described best in Homestuck canon: he went off the deep end in every conceivable way. Recall those things that a person did, three sweeps ago, that they really ought not to have been doing? That was Eridan, and he had been engaging in some dealings with Sollux's old friends, the horrorterrors. It had finally caught up to him. He went too deep into his involvement with them, and had finally gotten them to tell him the secret of their power. But unfortunately, his mind flat-out broke under the pressure, and his body went to match; black skin and white hair, deathly black aura, vastly improved magical power. This sensation had the highly scientific name of 'going grimdark'. He had made short work of Jonett, Jaedre, Tavros, Vriska, Nepeta, and Davias in their own lands; according to the pattern, Kanaya could only guess that Sollux was next on his hit list. And if not, he was pretty close.

Well, that really killed his mood. So Sollux began scouring the Land of Mist and Clocktowers using both his feet and his powers, the intent being to kill Eridan before he fucked anything else up in this already-doomed session. Eventually, it turned out Kanaya was right, as Eridan soon appeared; the two of them faced off, and it soon began apparent that Eridan was definitely as powerful as his track record would imply, as he beat Sollux to within an inch of his death. Literally, Eridan's gun was resting on his forehead before he realized what was going on. Touching the gun triggered Sollux's Vision Null, which displayed to him a very brief, very sick image of what he could only assume was the Black King, their final enemy. Eridan had tried to face off against him alone, and predictably, the Black King crushed him like a flea, causing the collapse of the universe.

That had to be it. The session was doomed.

Thinking quickly and letting his escape instincts take over, Sollux fled through time and never came back, regardless of the other doomed timeline it would stem. He made a shameless dash for the point in time where he was a child, ensuring that he would never run the Signless' machine; from there, he ran further into the Alpha Timeline, dying soon after. His memories merged with the alpha Sollux's, giving him insight on the details of the game and exactly what Eridan was doing that was so damn secretive, enabling him to stop Eridan's rampage before it even begun and saving the alpha session from the same fate as his own.

Personality: Essentially, mutant Sollux is what would happen if you took a textbook Gemini and placed them in a worst-case scenario: intelligent and knowledge-thirsty but with dubious ideals, full of curiosity that could kill felines on a regular basis, charismatic and talkative for the sake of manipulation, and cunning for harming others and helping himself. He's... he's getting better.

Not with any semblance of quickness. But he's getting better.

As someone who woke up at three sweeps of age with almost no knowledge of the world at large, Sollux has been on the defensive from the very beginning of his current 'self'. He had no lusus and no money to his name, as well as a very unfortunate mutation which would get him killed if he so much as pricked a finger in public. As such, he's developed a fair bit of an outer shell; he does not appreciate others prying into his business, and if the other person is biting, he'll bite back. In this respect, at least, he's very similar to the original Sollux; but in most other respects, they're quite different.

Canon Sollux has lived his entire life with many other voices screaming in his head, pleading for mercy from their impending death; this has had a marked effect on his psyche, and not even being able to hear himself think. It was enough to give him a very short temper (rendered only shorter by the constant sparring with Karkat) and an unbelievably fatalist attitude, among other things. Anonlux never experienced any of this. As such, he took the much more Gemini-like attitude of complete detachment from everything; though he can't resist a debate when his skills are questioned, Sollux tends to look at both sides of every story, and often seems remarkably apathetic unless he himself was in danger.

For the longest time, he treated life as a particularly nasty child would, having essentially raised himself in a very harsh environment. Staying in one place was not suited for him; his attention span was too short, and his paranoia too great, to even consider settling down in any one place. He didn't care much for large concepts like responsibility or morals, preferring to make fools of everyone he met. Even though he was an aberration of the highest degree, he delighted in running circles around others, befuddling them for his own benefit or just delivering a good, healthy sucker punch. He became adept at putting on airs, and eventually began to believe them; despite being constantly aware that he ran a fine and dangerous line, Sollux began to get more and more daring, confident that his skills meant no one could touch him. Geminis are extremely adaptable and mold to whatever environment they find themselves in, so it was very simple for Sollux to look out for no one but himself as most other trolls did.

That changed upon entering the game, though. As mentioned, he initially shirked all of the work he had to do in his planet, in favor of walking around and seeing everyone else's stakes. He basically loitered and did nothing for a significant amount of time, watching them do their thing while pointedly neglecting his own. When he eventually did come back to the Land of Mist and Clocktowers, he found himself completely immersed in it -- this was possibly the first time he felt that way about anything, ever. According to the scriptures of the land, the consorts were waiting for the legendary Hero of Time who was supposed to come and bring the LOMAC civilization to their golden age. Sollux saw that as a challenge, and he always welcomed a challenge. But as it turned out, he ended up learning quite a bit more than just about the history of LOMAC. Exploring the planet led to him finding out a lot more about his powers and duties as an Heir of Time, as well as about managing the countless (and extremely confusing) timelines that make up the universe. He spent almost all of his time for the rest of the game in there, working with his consorts to rebuild the world.

Coming out of it, he now appears to have 'grown up' considerably. He's much calmer than his canonical self, and not as quick to jump to conclusions. He has much more of a sense of responsibility, a willingness to help people who are not himself. Consequences are now a very real, tangible thing, where before they were another enemy to evade. It wasn't a complete change -- he is still easily in the grey area of the morality zone, tilting towards black -- but it was what was necessary for this Heir to grow up and inherit his legacy.

Abilities: Sollux has a laundry list of abilities he can put to use, some of them useful, and others... not so much.

As mentioned, Sollux is an accomplished con man and pickpocket. He's more than happy to engage you in some friendly conversation while relieving you of your money with the other hand, or make those goods mysteriously disappear from your shelf without a single boondollar more in your pocket. He's not above manipulation or sucker punches to get what he wants, and above all, he will go to any length to ensure that he does not bleed -- he will fight, but he just won't bleed. Of course, recently he's gotten better about such underhanded tactics, but he's still perfectly capable.

He has an interesting little power called Vision Null, a result of his mutation which was not shared with canon Karkat. In contrast to canon Sollux's massive reserve of energy, this mutation is actually fairly weak, not even able to muster much more than simple telekinetics. Instead, Vision Null enables him to see an apparition of the past, present, or future of an object or person -- as long as he's touching it. It can be only visual, only auditory, or both. This means that his eyes are not yellow and black but a solid charcoal grey; because of the extremely dark glasses he wears, though, no one can even see.

He can't interact with the vision directly, of course, but what he can do is use his other power to access it; this one was gained much later than the first, though. As mentioned, Sollux is the Heir of Time, and over his character arc he learned both to manage the timestream and utilize it for the sake of others, not just himself. This is significant because the 'Heir' class, to which Sollux belongs, seems to be dedicated to using the element to protect oneself; i.e., the non-God Tier Heir of Breath creates cyclones only when he is in danger, and the Heir of Void is invisible to omnipotent forces. Sollux uses the Time Gear (bracelets and pendulum -- 'gear' as in 'equipment', not quite 'cog') to hop around in the timestream. Every time he does so, he needs to make a stable time loop, or else the doomed timeline where he decides to take a temporal trip will become another splinter destined to run itself into the ground.

Sample Entry: The first thing that viewers were treated to was a pair of dark glasses over grey skin; anyone who had been in the Tower for more than a couple of days could tell easily that it was a troll. He leaned back in his chair, head tilted and expression stuck in a thoughtful frown. He had four small, orange horns, sticking out from the top of a black shrub-shaped object that was probably supposed to be the boy’s hair. He had similarly-shaped teeth protruding from his mouth; they clacked and hissed against his tongue when he spoke.

His question was simple: “To everyone else here: where are we? …And, more obviously, do you recognize me?”

Sollux had done some exploring of his own before he turned to these terminals. He could tell already that it was a tower of some kind, with a singular staircase running throughout – it was literally the only thing holding the place up, in some cases. Definitely not supposed to be physically possible, and as much an indicator of magical tampering as anything else. Almost every floor seemed to be decorated for a specific purpose, and even the empty ones were slightly different. There was one universal constant, though, and that was that all of them were creepy as fuck.

Even that cute little meadow. Sorry, he doesn’t trust meadows. Not anymore.

“So,” he continued. “I’d like to talk to whoever wrote this letter, whoever you are.” He held up the letter in question, the one that had been found beside his bed. “I’ve seen the kind of operation you’re running, and I’m sure you’re very busy. But I’ve got a few questions about the nature of this establishment, specifically which universe exactly you’ve decided to destroy, among other things. Thank you.”

The feed cut off. Without missing a beat, Sollux stood up and turned around, walking into the shelves of the library; there had to be some more clues here. Or maybe he just couldn’t resist the siren song of all those books, free for the taking. But whatever it was, he had no intention to come on out before the end of the day.