Zoostuck 2

the terrible price is that every time you shape shift into something, you sell your soul to the devil, and god knows you're running out of those


Fortunately, as an art critic, you can steal souls! that's what they do, right?

That sounds... sort of correct? You don't think you lose your soul entirely, but you do lose part of it.

Unfortunately, you have no idea how to steal souls, even if that is an art critic ability. Anyways, you've vowed never to transform again, so you wouldn't be doing that. But what can you do?

Step into a cheap painting (not worth the $10, and that's already a TERRIBLE PRICE for it badumtsh)

Oh, right, as an art critic you can step into a painting in order to criticize it. You've never brought anyone else in with you, but it's worth a shot. You ask if anyone has any paint, and a canvas.

It turns out they do. You tell them to hurry up and paint something, it doesn't matter what. They do. You tell them to dangle the painting out the window, then promptly start critiquing it and shove all the other passengers in, with the painter last, followed by yourself. The painting falls out the window as the train proceeds to its doom.

You've saved everyone! But man, this painting is so banal. You're very disappointed in the artist.

Also, it turns out that you never learned how to get anyone out of a painting. This could be a problem.

You are now a pair of fake arms. You are sentient, which does not surprise you in the slightest. What you do not realize is that you are only sentient when you are contained within someone's inventory; you lose sentience once removed to the real world and have no memory of events once you return to the inventory.

This is not actually a problem for you, as the owner of the inventory you are contained within no longer exists. He was destroyed in a failed effort to rewrite the universe in order to replace a stupidly-named alternate version of himself. Fortunately for you, his inventory survived, although he's not really in any position to put anything else in it.

That latter part is a problem for you, because you're trying to build a civilization in this vast void that you don't realize is an inventory. And it's hard to build a civilization when you're by yourself.

That's why you've decided to run a mental adventure that transcends time and space, because you somehow know about a hat that did that. At first your adventure is about a creepy skinny guy going on a quest of some kind, but you soon lose interest and in the very next mental update you shift focus to an enormous planet-eating entity trying to become vegan.

As you start working on your third update, you get bored with that and try to come up with a new idea, but nothing comes to mind. You conclude that you'll have to break the third wall to get a decent idea.

What exactly does breaking the third wall mean, though?