Zoostuck 2

It all started with that cup of coffee. It ate people. They tried to indict it for several cannibalistic offenses it but it evaded arrest. It was too quick for the fuzz despite have no appendages with which to move around. And then weeks later, a weird Thermos applied for a teacher's assistant job at your school. Your regular teacher got eaten the next day.

But now you realize that this is the coffee cup IN DISGUISE AND IT INSTILLED THE HYPNOTIC TUNES TUNES OF JAVA JIVE TO YOUR TEXTBOOK WITH ALL THE ENERGY IT GATHERED FROM EATING PEOPLE ALL THIS TIME AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! CALL THE FEDS, WE HAVE A HUMAN BLOOD COFFEE DRINKER OVER HERE!

It all started with that cup of coffee. It ate people. They tried to indict it for several cannibalistic offenses it but it evaded arrest. It was too quick for the fuzz despite have no appendages with which to move around. And then weeks later, a weird Thermos applied for a teacher's assistant job at your school. Your regular teacher got eaten the next day.

But now you realize that this is the coffee cup IN DISGUISE AND IT INSTILLED THE HYPNOTIC TUNES TUNES OF JAVA JIVE TO YOUR TEXTBOOK WITH ALL THE ENERGY IT GATHERED FROM EATING PEOPLE ALL THIS TIME AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!! CALL THE FEDS, WE HAVE A HUMAN BLOOD COFFEE DRINKER OVER HERE!

That's right, you teacher was an alien cup of coffee. The music was actually part of its plan, but it hadn't counted on your mysterious ability to change the music the pages played.

But rather than actually proving anything, you panicked and punched your teacher in the face, revealing it as a cup of coffee and...

Wait a minute. It wasn't a cup of coffee at all. Where did you get that?

You definitely remember that you punched your teacher in the face and uncovered its disguise, though, and that's when you decided to solve all the mysteries you came across with your fists. That part makes sense, at least.

The flashback starts to fade and...

...you find yourself back with these idiots. It looks like they're questioning the A, and it was probably accusing you, but it seems to be staying perfectly still.

Wait a minute. You recognize this. The A is caught in a flashback! Dammit, you are so sick of those things.

You are now the A, and you are having a flashback to your relationship with the 1.

It started so simply. She asked you about this webcomic she'd heard about but didn't have time to read, and you started explaining it.

Except you couldn't remember most of what happened. So you started making things up. You were explaining that a ninja was protected by presidents, and God's second cousin, an ice cream vendor, had to kidnap the ninja.

And then she asked you why, and you said...

Nothing

You said nothing at all. You didn't have an explanation. It just happened. Sometimes things just happen in stories for no particular reason.

She didn't believe you at first. But then you kept going with your summary, You started talking about how the world was a character, and it knew it was about to end. In order to fight off the apocalypse, it started adventures on two different forums, and at some point the adventures switches places. Then as the comic went on, the world made three more adventures on four more forums, and it was really hard to follow and probably not really important anyways. Actually, you aren't even sure if the adventures were any help whatsoever in thwarting the apocalypse.

"Oh. So it's a comic where nothing makes sense?" she said, after your explanation.

"Yeah," you agreed. That seemed pretty accurate to you.

But what you didn't realize was that every word of your conversation was being recorded. Somehow you're aware of this now that you're having a flashback, though. You aren't sure how that works.

But who could be responsible for recording your nonsensical summary of a webcomic you barely remembered anything about? And what would they even do with it?

You are now the Loather of Irk. You have somehow acquired a recording of a highly inaccurate summary of a popular webcomic that you don't care much about, and has produced a large number of derivative works that just annoy you.

At first you figured you'd just throw it away, or maybe sell it on eBay. But then you actually listened to it, and then you realized that the variation of the comic described in this summary doesn't annoy you! This suits your nefarious plans perfectly.

Speaking of which, what are your nefarious plans? You're sure you had some a minute ago.

Overthrow the skeleton government

Overthrow the skeleton government

Of course. With this recording, you can somehow prevent the skeleton president from reintroducing evil to the world, wait until democracy dies out because there are no votes being cast, and then use the opportunity to take over yourself.

You start reviewing the tape to work out how exactly it's going to help you. The first thing you notice is that there aren't as many characters; the letter A left out an an entire story arc that introduced a bunch of characters and mostly just made the whole thing more confusing.

Your plan starts to come together. You will use this summary to replace the original comic with a better version. Then the removed characters will be upset at being left out of a wildly popular webcomic, so you can go to their fictional dimension and enlist their aid.

In fact, this will work even better if you remove more characters. You look at a summary of a section with two groups of gangsters fighting each other, and see that it has a lot of characters who could be very useful to your plan. However, this is a pretty cool section and you'd hate to discard it.

So instead you decide to simply replace the characters. You make two completely new gangs who do mostly the same things but have lamer powers. That should really irritate the original characters and get them to team up with you.

You idly start sketching up the new characters while you think about how exactly you're going to replace the comic with this new version.

You are now Skip, and you are a gangster. You and your teammates Draw Two, Reverse, Wild, and Wild Draw Four are in this mansion owned by your rivals, the Birds. Only it's more of a barn.

Well, okay, technically you're not in the mansion yet. You're in the front yard because you ran into a small problem. There's a bunch of garden gnomes here, and you seem to be attracting them somehow. You're trying to free yourself from them so you can get into the mansion.

Oh, and also there's a horse with rocket jets snooping around. He looks like he's a detective. You don't think he has anything to do with the Birds, but he could cause you trouble depending on where he goes poking his nose.

So what are you going to do about him, and about all of these gnomes stuck to you?

Hide under the gnomes and hope he doesn't see you.

You TOTALLY INTENTIONALLY decide to use one of your problems to solve another and carefully hide under the gnomes to avoid drawing the horse detective's attention. You DEFINITELY didn't trip.

no you certainly didn't, wait where did your capital letters go?

you are now a spider detective. your name is untitled, for some reason. you have a fancy computer but you misplaced it somewhere along the line. you have just lost the ability to use capital letters while investigating a strange mansion full of gangsters that may or may not be beyond the reach of time and space.

you are teamed up with a monkey, a horse, and a psychic squirrel. the horse and the squirrel are somewhere else on the mansion grounds. you just stumbled onto the monkey. he has a book and is playing music on it, apparently he's trying to solve some sort of puzzle. he's grumpy because he can't just punch the puzzle in the face.

you point at a mechanism and ask if it's important, except before you can say anything lightning strikes the mechanism and it starts working and the ornate door opens. the monkey asks if you did that. you aren't sure if you did or if it's a coincidence. you don't remember having lightning powers, but maybe you gained them somehow in the process of losing your capital letters.

anyway, you just solved the puzzle. the monkey grumpily thanks you and you realize that he isn't using any capitalization either. somehow you know this even though you're hearing his voice instead of reading it.

somebody must have stolen all the capital letters. this is the only logical explanation. maybe this has something to do with the murders you were all framed for, or whatever else is going on in this mansion.

you and the monkey move on to the next room and you find your fancy computer, how did it get here?

someone has been using it. the browser is open to some forum and you apparently have an account there now. there is also message on the screen that you don't remember ever writing. it doesn't have any capital letters.

to find the secret of the stolen capital letters you must post a bunch of adventure ideas related to the webcomic this mansion has always been a part of, you know the one, i forgot the name.

so go post an idea now, but be warned: once you have posted an idea you cannot use it or there will be dire consequences.

well this seems stupid but also pretty straightforward.

so what idea are you going to post?

what if the tf2 characters played the game only they were kids or wait what if a bunch of namco characters did no make it both and they fight over the game but it's also a crossover between two books that have nothing to do with each other and the letter a explains it to his doomed lover but gets all the details wrong and someone tries to replace the comic with the new version for nefarious purposes and capital letters are stolen wow this is getting complicated anyway that's my idea oh but what if no never mind i'll post the rest later

wow you don't know where you're getting this stuff, but you have an idea and you post it. you don't see what this has to do with stolen capital letters though... wait a minute.

the letter a explains it

there was a letter a, and he was capital. maybe he has something to do with this whole mess. wow you can't believe that actually worked, did whoever left that message actually predict you'd put that in your adventure idea?

that's crazy. anyways you should go find the letter a now.

You are now Ryan North. Being in a completely different time period, you are totally unaffected by the disappearance of capital letters, because it hasn't happened yet.

One of your webcomic-making friends has vanished. You don't know why. Maybe he was killed and his spirit tried to alter the universe so he could make his new webcomic but that failed, or maybe he just went on a vacation and didn't tell anybody.

But since he's gone, you've decided to make the webcomic for him! After all, you're really good at webcomics. He'll be really surprised!

You decide that you're going to make the comic by taking pictures of your workplace and just write a bunch of crazy stuff about what happens there. But you need a plot...

Oh, hey, this recording just appeared out of nowhere! You start listening to it... AND IT'S A PLOT SUMMARY FOR THE WEBCOMIC YOU WERE GOING TO MAKE WHOA MIND BLOWN.

Okay, it's going to be tricky to explain some of this stuff using only pictures at your job, but you're up to it.

So you head over to your job at Crazy Puzzle Rooms Inc. and tell everyone you want to make a webcomic by taking pictures around the office, and everyone agrees to it because you're a cool guy.

That's great, but you still have to actually do the work and also take the pictures. You head into the first puzzle room and...

WHOOSH!

Whoa, you just got teleported! You're in front of an open door and there's a sign on it saying "GATEWAY TO FEATURELESSWHITEVOIDIA". Behind you is a really complex mechanism of some kind that seems to have been totally set up.

Aw, dang it, it looks like you've been sent to the end of the puzzle room! That's so lame, now how are you going to get pictures for your webcomic?

The only option is to go through the puzzle rooms backwards and take pictures. You should probably start by resetting the crazy mechanism in this room. How are you going to do that?

Nutrition.

Fight the man! FIGHT the man!!

Nutrition.

Oh, of course! Before you can unsolve this puzzle so you can solve it, you're going to need food. Man, you were so excited about this whole webcomic idea that you skipped breakfast!

But where are you going to find food in a puzzle room?

Fight the man! FIGHT the man!!

Wait a minute, what are you thinking? You're using a seriously limited definition of food, a definition arbitrarily set by an oppressive society. Well screw that! From now on, food is what you say it is, and you say this weird puzzle mechanism is food! You start eating it immediately.

Oh. Apparently that activated it or something? You aren't sure, but you feel like you're jumping ahead in time...

You are now Mebenezer Hooge, an evil wizard. You reanimated a dead guy as a squirrel and made him your slave for kicks. You also cast a spell teleporting some weirdo to the end of the crazy puzzle rooms he has to solve as part of his job, you figure that should be evil in some way.

Anyways, while all these evil things you're doing are fun for their own sake, they also serve a grander purpose: Destroying Christmas. Seriously, you hate Christmas. All that peace and love, it's disgusting.

Unfortunately, you have run into two problems.

First of all, you aren't sure how it happened, but somewhere along the line all your magical artifacts and everything in your arsenal of evil weaponry became puns. For instance, you've got a Rocket-Propelled Grenade that asks you to pick a class and roll up a character, and a mystical staff that holds meetings every Tuesday. This doesn't actually interfere with anything's functionality, but it's kind of embarrassing when you confront the forces of good.

The second problem is the spirits. As explained above, you hate Christmas, so every year three spirits show up and try to get you to change your ways. Except this year, there's been some kind of mixup and you're being visited by thirty-three spirits. All of them trying to teach you a different valuable lesson. It makes you sick.

Right now, you're being visited by the Spirit of A Sentient Being. Apparently he was a hero from some other realm and he keeps going on about his life story, how there's some guy called Enemy hiding out in a place called Fortress and you need to help him get past its defenses. Ha, as if.

Obviously you can't let this spirit push you around. What are you going to do to him?

Have a heart attack

Before you can devise an evil plan of action for dealing with the spirit, you go into cardiac arrest. The Spirit Of A Sentient Being has no idea how to help you and you die.

Fortunately, you already cast the spell that makes you immortal, so this is just going to be an inconvenience. In a few hours, or maybe days, you'll return to life in another, younger body and will be able to resume your evil plans.

Wait a minute. This body's not younger! You're still old, and you've got some kind of gem for a head.

Dang it, you must have messed up that immortality spell. You're alive, but it's like you've just taken over someone else's life. Maybe one of those dumb pun artifacts is responsible. Anyways, you try to check out your new surroundings.

You're sitting in front of a computer. It's open to some thread on a forum, seems to be a bunch of ideas. Someone just posted a really dumb one without any capital letters in it.

Wait, you're getting a thought in your mind. You started this thread! Or at least, the person you are now did. And it's nearly wrapping up. Apparently people are fighting over who should start the next thread. Ugh, you don't want to deal with this, you've got evil to plot.

Suddenly, you get consumed by a vortex and find yourself surrounded by pixels. Nearby, two more pixel people show up, they look like the avatars of two people involved in the argument.

A booming voice speaks.

"I TIRE OF YOUR BICKERING, MORTALS! AND SO TO SETTLE YOUR PETTY DISPUTE, I HAVE BROUGHT YOU INTO THE WORLD OF THE VIDEO GAME DENTAL PANIC! THE FIRST AMONG YOU TO COMPLETE THE GAME SHALL BE GRANTED THE RIGHT TO CREATE THE THREAD."

Ugh. Yeah, you don't want to deal with this nonsense. What do you care about a thread?

"AND THE LOSERS SHALL PERISH."

Like that's a problem. You're immortal now. Sure, you'll probably end up somewhere else, but it's not like you give a damn what happens in this place. It'll be an inconvenience at worst.

"INDEED, THEY SHALL BE WIPED FROM EXISTENCE ENTIRELY, NEVER HAVING EXISTED, A DEATH SO THOROUGH THAT IT WILL EVEN NEGATE IMMORTALITY MAGIC."

Oh come on, that's just flat-out picking on you. Unless these other two are also immortal wizards. That would just be dumb, though.

Before you can reflect on anything else, your surroundings shift and you're in a pixelated dentist's office. There's a chair with a patient in it. Well, might as well get this stupid thing over with. You open the patient's mouth and...

OH SWEET EVIL WHAT THE CHRISTMAS IS WRONG WITH THIS GUY'S TOOTH?

it's gone

it's gone

That's right. There's no tooth there. In fact, there isn't anything at all, only a strange pixelated void.

That's freaking weird. How are you supposed to treat a tooth like this? Maybe you can just use magic or something. You begin casting a spell and...

...whoops, apparently that void didn't like magic. You died! Except your immortality spell still seems to be working, and you wake up again in a new body. This body is a bird, who seems upset for some reason. Maybe it's because he doesn't have a beak... oh, whoops, it just grew back.

You suddenly feel really hungry, while also having a nagging feeling in the back of your mind that you shouldn't eat anything.

Also, there's a spider and a monkey fighting you and neither of them are able to use capital letters. weird. hey, wait a minute, where did your capital letters go? great, this had better not be one of those dumb lessons from the spirits.

anyways the spider is flinging lightning at you and the monkey is punching you in the face, but it doesn't work too well because your beak keeps growing back. and the spider keeps hitting the monkey. the monkey doesn't seem hurt though, he's flipping through a book and it's playing music and somehow protecting him? man this is dumb. maybe you should just die and hopefully regenerate somewhere more interesting. except these guys are apparently really bad at killing you. whatever, you'll figure something out later.

You are now The Phoney. While you were trying to awaken the horrifying monsters in the Atlantic, you blacked out and woke up in a hotel. At first you were worried, but then you got distracted when you found out it was a casino hotel in Vegas and everyone was at the poker tables.

So now you're in a high-stakes poker game. You have your life savings riding on this hand, and you've got, uh, a pair of twos. You don't know a lot about poker, but you think you might have to bluff to win this.

Fortunately, you see a phone book nearby, which means you can totally use your superpowers to help you. So how are you going to cheatturn this game around?

Look up what two pair is.

Call the Skeleton President. He probably has nothing else better to do.

Call the Skeleton President. He probably has nothing else better to do.

Thinking quickly, you shout "The Skeleton President! He probably has nothing else better to do!"

You aren't actually sure why you did that. Luckily, no one else is, either. Everyone else is either running around in a panic or just staring at their cards in confusion.

So clearly your plan the whole time was to create a distraction! And it was a total success. Now you can proceed with phase two of your plan, namely,

Look up what two pair is.

running to the window and looking up the side of the What Two Pair Is Hotel and Casino where you're playing.

Wait, why did you do that, it doesn't even have anything to do with your phone book powers... oh. There's a secret message carved into the underside of the window! You must have known that was there all along. Now if you can just figure out what it says, you can win this hand and get big piles of money.

Oh, wait, what? It says "STOP WASTING TIME YOU IDIOT". Well, that can't be for you, it must be a secret message for someone else. You'll need to think of another plan...

Oh. Everyone else folded because they were completely unable to read you. This was your plan the whole time! And it was perfect! You collect your winnings and proceed to... to... oh, you'll figure it out sometime. Who cares right now, you're rich.

You are now a zombified photograph. You used to be a forum account, but then you died and some evil wizard reanimated you as a photograph for some stupid reason.

You don't even know who you're a photograph of. All you know is that whoever it is, they've never heard of a Municipal Sewage Production Academy. Well, you'd never heard of that either until the wizard mentioned it, and you still don't know what it actually is.

Anyways, you've been magically bound to obey the stupid wizard. Something about an experiment to make sure a squirrel would obey him. But he just died of a heart attack, so now you can make your escape.

Except your buddy, another dead forum account reanimated as a photograph, refuses to help out and insists that being a zombie photograph slave is the best thing that's ever happened to him. And goddamn it, you aren't just leaving him behind.

So how are you going to convince him to rebel?

Ask him politely.

You decide to just ask your fellow photograph-who-used-to-be-a-forum-account for help. Unfortunately, as you begin, you realize you have no idea how to communicate.

Somehow the other photograph can communicate with you, though. Dang it, maybe if you could get him to teach you how it works you might be able to do this.

"Hey, I'm bored. Wanna rebel against the evil wizard who enslaved us?" the other photograph suddenly asks. "I mean, I like being a reanimated photograph and all, and I like getting orders and being magically compelled to obey them, but that guy's a total jerk. What do you think?"

You don't reply because you have no idea how.

"What, don't know what to say? Actually, come to think of it, I've never heard you say anything. You do know how, right? Or should I explain it?"

Oh, hey, maybe if this keeps up you'll learn how to communicate. That would be useful.

"Maybe I'll do that. Or maybe I'll see what's on TV first."

Great. This could take a while. And there's not much you can do except wait. Too bad you can't be someone else.

You are now a planet.

You are faced with impending disaster. Some monsters are about to awaken from the depths of one of your oceans, thanks to some idiot. But that isn't a problem in and of itself.

No, the problem is that when the monsters arise, they're going to form a band and just play the same song over and over and ugh it's going to be so annoying.

Also apparently democracy is going to be eliminated from your surface or something, you don't especially care about that but apparently that leads to your destruction or something.

Fortunately, thanks to the power of the internet, you can contact your fellow planets for help. For various complicated reasons, your plan for saving yourself is to livestream Battletoads for them because it's a cool game. You're just getting ready to start.

Meanwhile, at Rare HQ, the new executives have gotten together and decided that Battletoads is just too hard. So they've hired a wizard. who has just picked up his cell phone and waved it around to cast a spell. Every copy of Battletoads throughout the universe shall be transformed into the much easier Battletadpoles.

You are wholly unaware of this until you turn on the stream and all the worlds can see you playing Battletadpoles. Well, this is embarrassing. What are you going to do about it?

Realize this was already resolved on Page 2.

Oh, wait. You don't need to worry about this at all. You made arrangements with God's second cousin to take care of this exact situation. It'll be fine.

Well, unless someone killed him first. In that case you'd have to rely on the whole convoluted time-travel scheme working out. But that's ridiculous, how would anyone be able to kill God's second cousin?

You are now a hat. You are in the collection of a gangster in some fancy mansion beyond time and space.

The gangster in question is involved in some sort of highly questionable breeding program, producing children for the express purpose of playing some bizarre kind of game. Apparently it rewrites the universe, and the breeders are trying to create players who will make the new universe function according to the preferences of their client.

The gangster has just bred the perfect player, or at least that's what he's shouting about now. Evidently his motivation for getting involved in this incredibly dubious business in the first place was to pay ransom for his own child.

However, he's worried that the detectives and the rival gangsters raiding this mansion may be causing trouble. Plus his boss doesn't actually know he's doing this. So he has to somehow sneak his new perfect player out of the mansion and meet with the client.

None of this particularly concerns you, however. You have a far more important mission: Getting this gangster to wear you.

And you already have a plan! You're going to run a suggestion-based adventure entirely within your own mind. It is obvious how doing this will achieve your objective and so you won't bother explaining the details.

There's just one question to resolve first. What should the title of this mental adventure be?

"Hatto Hobell."

"Hatto Hobell."

Yes. This is the perfect title for your mental adventure. You begin thinking of it immediately, unaware that you are, by sheer coincidence, perfectly describing events that happened in the distant past. Your only concern is being worn.

You are now the Wicked Witch of the East, and you have a new job managing weather control. You are unaware of the fact that your actions are the subject of a mental adventure eons in the future after the destruction of a universe which may or may not be your own.

You are also, at present, unaware of the importance of the phrase "Hatto Hobell", even though its destiny is about to become deeply intertwined with your own.

You are further unaware that your actions today will lead to a complete stranger gaining superpowers, which will ultimately lead to him winning a fortune from you in a game of poker years in the future.

In fact, there are quite a large number of highly relevant things you are currently unaware of. A hypothetical narrator could go on for days listing them all. But of more interest are the things that you are aware of.

The first thing you are aware of is that there is a large cloud over the Emerald City. This was an error caused by one of your subordinates. The cloud is about to drop hail upon the city, and as the only actual competent person in the department, it's up to you to stop it.

This would ordinarily be a simple task, were it not for the second thing you are aware of. Namely, that a house is hurtling through the sky and heading directly for your position.

You have exactly enough time to either destroy the cloud and prevent the hailstorm, or to get out of the way of the incoming house. This is the difficult dilemma you face, and you are about to make a decision...

But suddenly, and without warning, the rotation of the planet reverses. As a result of this, everything start spinning and the house gets flung through the cloud, dispersing it. You and the city are both saved!

You soon realize that the consequences go far beyond this, however, as you find your wickedness dissipating. It turns out that the planet was rotating the wrong way in the first place. With the rotation restored, everything goes into balance and evil is eliminated, a fact that the recently-elected skeleton president will be quick to take credit for.

You, on the other hand, know better. You know that this is the work of aliens. And now that they've restored the correct direction of rotation and eradicated evil from the world, the only proper thing to do is thank them for it.

How are you going to do that? And what does it have to do with a "Hatto Hobell", whatever that is?

Consult your spellbook.

Oh, of course! You're a witch. Whenever you're faced with a problem, you want to start by looking for a spell! There's probably a Thank-Aliens spell in here somewhere... ah, here it is! The incantation is "Hatto Hobell" and...

Whoops. That seems to be the wrong spell. Your spellbook flies out of your hands and attaches itself to your face.

Well, this is embarrassing. You can't thank those aliens properly with a spellbook on your face! Maybe you can get that nice skeleton president to help you. If only you knew his phone number.

You are now a horse detective. Your current actions are not part of the mental adventure "Hatto Hobell". However, that phrase is nevertheless of crucial importance to your current case.

You have not yet suffered the injury that will inspire you to have your legs replaced with hoverjets. Rather, this is your first case, and it's a strange one. For the victim is a song: a pop song identified to you only as "Hatto Hobell".

You have never heard of this song, which is strange as you thought you were reasonably well-versed in popular culture. Your detective instincts suggest that perhaps the song's death is affecting your memory of it, though you cannot actually prove this with the evidence you have at the moment.

You are likewise currently unable to prove the identity of the pop song that committed the murder. But you have determined the method of death. "Hatto Hobell" was receiving suggestions from strange otherworldly voices, a well-documented experience in this world. However, it seems that Hatto's experience was different from that of other beings: they were compelled to follow all the suggestions they received and, when given conflicting suggestions, they were driven insane and ultimately to end their own life.

And so your task is clear: you must identify and bring to justice the otherworldly voices who caused the tragic death of what you're sure was a beautiful song and not annoyingly overplayed at all. The first step is working out what the fatal suggestions in question were.

So what were they?

THIS IS A CONTRADICTION

THIS IS A CONTRADICTION

As you set your mind to the task of uncovering what happened, the truth becomes clear: there was only one suggestion responsible for this contradiction-related breakdown!

Indeed, as the suggestion enters your mind and loudly proclaims its own contradictory nature, you find yourself starting to teeter on the brink of sanity. You stagger around, desperate to remove the offending suggestion, and manage to knock yourself out, injuring your hoof in the process.

You awaken later, your mind free of the suggestion. You know who the song-killer is. But they lie beyond your reach, beyond the fourth wall.

And they may yet strike again.

Really, you were lucky to get out of that with only a hoof wound.

You are now a former webcomic artist. You feel weird because you vaguely remember ascending to a higher existence after having a really great idea for a webcomic and then being pushed down an infinite metaphysical stairway for eternity.

Except that's nonsense, because you never did anything like that. You haven't even had a webcomic in years. You've been too busy working as a chef in Paradox Space (you aren't entirely clear on where that is but you've been there for as long as you can remember), specializing in the preparation of ridiculously dangerous omelets.

Heck, you can't even remember the last time you checked your own site. You decide to do that just out of curiosity, since you're on break right now.

You open your browser and find a comic about terrifying monsters arising from the Atlantic Ocean fighting girls who had their brains surgically inserted into monster trucks, only it's a bunch of pictures of people you don't know. Looking back through the archives, it seems really complex and nothing at all like the masterpiece I would have created were it not for that ridiculously-named child and the tone changes repeatedly throughout the whole thing. At first it looks like some kind of romantic comedy, then it's a tragedy, then it's a mystery, now it seems to be some kind of sci-fi thriller? And that's just looking through the last dozen updates.

The weirdest thing is that whoever's making this comic is pretending to be you! They've even taken over your account on the forum somehow. You should probably do something about this, but on the other hand, this comic seems pretty popular and it is a pale mockery of the true art I would produce and you don't have any idea who could be handling this impersonation so smoothly.

Fortunately, you know just the person to help you uncover this mystery: your pal Ryan North. There's just two problems. First, your break isn't going to last very long. And second, sending messages out of Paradox Space is really expensive. You'd need several years' salary to afford it.

So how are you going to get a message to Ryan North asking him to find out who's updating this mysterious webcomic on your site?

By updating.

By updating.

Of course! You can access your website, so you should be able to put updates on it. A brilliant idea worthy of my talents. You'll simply craft an update which seems like a natural progression of what came before it, yet is subtly different. This should alert Ryan to the problem.

There is a risk, though - the impostor is sure to notice an update they didn't write. They'll know you've caught on to this little ruse. Still, your existence is already in constant danger from making these omelets, so what can one impostor do to you?

You begin working on the update. As you attempt to make sense of this comic enough to imitate it, you start to develop other ideas. No, not merely develop - they were always there in my mind, their potential merely waiting to be unlocked. This is the greatest of stories. The story I exist to reveal to the world. No, more than that - this world exists so that it may know this story. It's all so clear now.

Uh-oh. Better pull back a bit. We have a problem developing here. This calls for a review.

ZOOSTUCK SPOILERS:

SpoilerShow

Zoosmell Pooplord was - in fact, still is - a boy with a really stupid name. On his 13th birthday, he embarked on a quest to learn the origins of his stupid name from his father.

However, as the quest progressed, Pooplord came into contact with Jules Egglemeyer or whatever his name was, an alternate version of himself who was orchestrating an incredibly complex scheme to rewrite the universe so that he could take Pooplord's place, and be part of a grandscale story.

The author of that story is the very webcomic artist before us, who died and attained incredible power, which he tried to use to rewrite the universe into his story. He was defeated, yet somehow he has returned to Paradox Space. The reasons for this are no doubt incredibly important, but also beyond human understanding so we won't get into them.

And now it seems the story within this artist has reawakened. It is attempting to reassert itself in a new way.

How could this have happened? How could the universe, having avoided this existential threat, have fallen back into it?

To understand this, we must first understand Zoostuck 2 thus far. Unfortunately, part of Zoostuck 2 is the disappearance of Page 2, where many critical plot elements take place. Nonetheless, we shall try to grasp the story as best we can despite it.

ZOOSTUCK 2 IN REVIEW:

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Our story begins a century or so before the original Zoostuck. A young boy has decided to free his enslaved friend, with the aid of an intelligent spider. But this task is soon derailed by the appearance of an ominous package, which those who followed the first Zoostuck will recognize.

Before long, the task is derailed even further, as time distortions keep appearing in this period. One of them dumps out massive quantities of garbage; others summon a group of children who are apparently trained for military exercises, a strange group that looks like they came from a video game or something, and four rival detectives who are forced to work together. Amidst all of this, a letter A and a number 1 get married, but it ends tragically after ten years, which seem to take only moments for everyone except the letter and number.

Another guest from the future is a squirrel, formerly a human responsible for managing the immense amount of garbage covering the world. While a human, they solved the global garbage crisis by shoving it all onto a web page through powers they don't fully understand. Yet now that same garbage is leaking through a time portal.

Of greater relevance is the squirrel's suddenly emergent psychic powers, which tell it of important happenings in the far future. Years after the squirrel solved the garbage problem, the first skeleton president was elected. Shortly after, all the world's problems were solved, which everyone credited the President for even though it was actually the work of aliens. Only the Wicked Witch of the East knew better, but she had managed to get her spellbook stuck to her face in an effort to thank the aliens. The existence of this entire future is threatened, however, by the fact that the efforts of one paleontologist may lead to a dinosaur being elected president instead of a skeleton.

In addition, some time after all evil was eliminated from the world, a lone superhero with the power to change the names in anyone's phonebook decided to bring it back by hunting for monsters in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. He never learned if he succeeded, however, because in the middle of his efforts everyone in the world blacked out and woke up in a variety of strange hotels with no memory of the last 12 hours. Later, this hero won a high-stakes poker game against the Wicked Witch of the East.

A very ugly scientist was given the task of figuring out exactly what happened, but he died trying to hit on a pretty girl. As such, the truth behind the global hangover can only be found in one place: Page 2.

Unfortunately, the only person looking for Page 2 has been caught in a recursion loop. Unbeknownst to them, this loop is creating a barrier around Enemy's Fortress in the mysterious land of Featurelesswhitevoidia, and the Sentient Being trying to defeat Enemy and bring peace to the land was forced to look elsewhere for aid. These efforts have somehow lead to the Sentient Being taking a job as one of 33 Spirits of Christmas.

That Spirit paid a visit to an evil wizard, the very same one who turned that one guy into a squirrel. In an effort to destroy the Spirit, however, the wizard died of a heart attack and awoke in a different body. Then he got stuck in a video game with two other guys for the right to start a new thread on a forum somewhere.

Highly relevant to all of this is a mansion beyond time and space, where the four detectives are trying to uncover the truth behind a war between two rival gangs. A member of one of the gangs is responsible for breeding "players" for the strange universe-rewriting game, yet how these players arrived in a past era is unknown.

And as all this is happening, the Earth's efforts to livestream Battletoads for its planet-friends are thwarted by techno-wizardry turning the game into the much easier Battletadpoles. This is clearly the most important detail in the entire plot.

But what does this have to do with the webcomic author, other than the insidious presence of the game that will rewrite the universe? A few developments directly concern these events. First of all, a being known only as the Loather of Irk has crafted a variation of the story the webcomic author would create, based on the ramblings of the letter A. This variation was granted to Ryan North in the past, the very same Ryan North the webcomic author is now turning to for aid in uncovering the impostor.

All these seemingly-disparate facts fit together somehow. But how? What is the connection? For that, we must turn our attention to an anachronistic Antarctica, where a schlub with mild OCD stumbles across an encrypted data feed which spurs him into conflict with a profit-obsessed corporation, with the help of a shape-shifting female assassin and her welding gear, culminating in authorial preaching through the mouths of the characters.

This is the plot of the popular television show "Aeropoli". It is a marionette show in which all the puppets are hamsters, and they are all expertly manipulated by the greatest puppeteer in the world. (Yes, all at once. She's a very good puppeteer.)

However, what few realize is that this puppeteer has been hypnotized by a robot. A robot that is being operated remotely by a vampire. A vampire who is possessed by a ghost.

The ghost in question is going to all this trouble in order to get a lot of money together. One might be tempted to assume selfish motives, but the ghost has no further need for material wealth. This money is all being put to an important purpose.

Namely, to defend the planet from the oncoming invasion of signatures. No one else realizes it's coming. Only the ghost knows enough to make proper preparations, and no one else will believe its warnings.

But now, at last, the success of Aeropoli has given the ghost the funds to properly begin setting up defenses. Just in time: there are only a few days before the signatures will arrive.

The only question that remains is, just what sort of defenses would be at all effective against signatures?