Zoostuck 2

Red tape.

Red tape.

Ah, it's so obvious now. By putting layer after layer of bureaucracy in the way, the signatures will have to sacrifice large numbers of their troops to get past. It might not stop them, but it's sure to slow them down. You begin funneling your vast wealth into the project of making all transactions more pointlessly complex. This will be inconvenient for everyone, including you, but it's still an improvement over a signature-dominated world.

You are now a hat beyond time and space conducting a mental adventure. Due to cosmic forces you do not understand, your adventure has changed its nature. It cannot be updated by you at all. Rather, you can only provide suggestions. and other inanimate objects throughout time and space will construct the updates. They will then conceal these updates somewhere in your mind and leave you with only cryptic clues pointing to where the updates are hidden.

At first this seemed strange, but the update you've just uncovered makes it clearer. This is part of a ritual for you to find a compatible inanimate object and breed with it to produce a stronger item. You don't know how the actual process works, but it's probably going to help you be worn somehow, so you're going with it.

Apparently your most compatible item-mate is a piece of candy that's been stolen from one too many babies and wants revenge on everyone who's ever stolen it. You don't really get it yourself, but since the breeding process seems to only involve shuffling your thoughts around, you aren't really complaining.

Regardless, the candy has just posted an update-clue to your mind. The clue is an image of four insects with musical instruments playing a game that will remake the universe. Wow, you sure see that game in a lot of clues. It's almost like it's important somehow.

Anyway, it's obvious what the clue means, at least on the surface. The more interesting question is, how does this clue further the candy's plans for revenge?

The remaking of the universe will be devoid of babies.

The remaking of the universe will be devoid of babies.

Oh, that's probably it. No babies means no one to be stolen from. It makes sense, you suppose.

Well, with that settled you can continue hunting through your mind for the next update. This adventure really wasn't this confusing when you started it, you aren't sure what exactly happened. It's like a singularity of complexity spontaneously formed in your mind.

You are now the singularity of complexity in a hat's mind. Of course, you did not spontaneously form - your the result of deliberate actions, deliberate actions you will take now that will have effects in the past. Because it's more complex that way.

Your current schemes revolve around gathering together a particular group of individuals. They are: a sentient character within a video game who is only now beginning to realize his true nature; science itself, caught in a heated battle between scientists; a German network worm gathering information; and the weakest god in a pantheon of 11, governing over the aspect of "Suggested Aspect Here".

In order to facilitate your own creation, you must maneuver these four beings to join forces on one single task: forming a band whose only instruments are rocks and then winning a Battle of the Bands.

This will be incredibly complex, but ultimately the intricate series of events necessary to make it occur depends on one key decision. Namely, you must select one individual throughout all of time and space to lead this band. But who, or what, can possibly gather these disparate individuals together, and ensure their victory?

an evil wizard to transform them into detectives

also, his pet chimp that seems to be controlling him from behind the scenes, and then the evil wizard is making him think he's being controlled from behind THOSE scenes.

Rock music.

an evil wizard to transform them into detectives

Rock music.

Ah, of course. An evil wizard, who with proper motivation will transform them into detectives with no memory of their past existence, and can easily manipulate them into joining a band. But the wizard must also be rock music - fortunately, your manipulations have already created an evil wizard who constantly regenerates into an entirely new role. You need only arrange his demise in the proper way so that he returns as you need him. What is his current status, for a highly relative value of 'current' given that you are operating outside time and space?

Ah, hmm. This is troublesome. He's caught in a simulation which will destroy him entirely if he is defeated within it. You can resolve this by destroying his two opponents, assuming they are not crucial to your plans. If they are, then you will need to disrupt the simulation entirely.

Ah. It seems this will be particularly complicated. One of the other two must survive, but the third must be destroyed within the simulation. Fortunately, you are complexity incarnate and therefore entirely capable of resolving this matter. You review the two opponents in order to formulate your plan.

One of them was a young girl in a relationship with a vampire. However, she aspired to be a lonely young girl who didn't fit in, and in her efforts to do so, she ended up dying. Now her ghost has inadvertently possessed a football star's body immediately before the playoffs; she needs to return from the simulation before the halftime break ends so she can win the game somehow.

The other player is a sentient bicycle from a planet of sentient bicycle who always does things strangely. His human avatar in the game is currently attempting to stand on his hands and sit on his knees at the same time. He must be destroyed here, both because he threatens to disrupt your plans for the bicycle planet and because his death within a simulation will lead to the discovery of the bicycle planet by other forces.

The plan soon becomes clear. You shall simply alter the universe so those within video game worlds enter the real world, and vice versa, with the exception of this one bicycle. Then the only task that will remain is destroying him within the game world, as well as killing the wizard in the real world and regenerating him as rock music.

What needlessly convoluted process will you use to accomplish these goals?

You will use seven(5) of the following items:

NES cartridges with dust on them
Jam-flavored jelly in a pudding cup
A void full of very full voids
1 EXP point

enter the game as a fifth contestant

You will use seven(5) of the following items:

NES cartridges with dust on them
Jam-flavored jelly in a pudding cup
A void full of very full voids
1 EXP point

You begin tabulating the necessary materials you'll need for this plan. You're also going to need to alter a few numerical systems and probably defy a few laws of physics, but that's easy enough.

enter the game as a fifth contestant

You also conclude that you've done what you can inside a hat's mind. It's time to take a more active role by manifesting as the fifth contestant in the game. Of course, in order to do that, you'll need to get three more contestants in there, but that will be a simple enough matter.

You manifest into the body you need. You are a nefarious villain, complete with nefarious mustache to twirl. You have captured an artist and are forcing him to work on an adventure based on some really dumb idea about a prison guard getting his hair done. Between your evil genius and his artistic talents, however, the adventure is very high quality and almost certain to win the contest you've entered it into.

However, at this very moment, a train is headed for your evil lair, and someone on it is attempting to rescue your artist. This was, of course, part of your plan because you are the physical manifestation of a singularity of complexity. The next phase of your plan - or rather, this specific branch of it - is to destroy the train track and ensure no one survives the ensuing crash. This is such a simple matter that it actually bores you. Sadly, there is no time to add fourteen additional steps into this process, so you will simply have to settle for activating the Derailer 5000 and focusing your attention on other, more complex branches of your plan.

You are now an art critic. You are also a shapeshifter, though you stopped shapeshifting when you learned of the TERRIBLE PRICE it exacted upon you. You have been following an adventure with marvelous illustrations, painted by a famed artist.

However, you recently realized that the illustrations contained a secret code informing you of the fact that the artist was being held captive and leading you to his location. You are currently on a train headed there so you can rescue him.

But there's a problem. A giant robot has appeared further down and started tearing up the tracks. You could probably save the train with your shapeshifting powers, but you cannot use them - not now that you know of the TERRIBLE PRICE. You must save the train using your abilities as an art critic - it's the only chance.

How are you going to do that? Also, what is the TERRIBLE PRICE? The exact details of it have slipped your mind.

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?

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

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?

breaking the third wall causes the third inventory slot to become heavier

breaking the third wall causes the third inventory slot to become heavier

This is correct, but you have no idea that this is the effect because you have no concept of an inventory. Anyways, you're in a dead guy's inventory, so what does it matter?

In any case, you break down the third wall and an idea strikes you for the next update. This update features Enemy, who is invading the land of Featurelesswhitevoidia and terrorizing its Sentient Beings.

Except that Enemy is actually imaginary (well of course he is, he only exists in your mind, but you mean imaginary within the context of the story) and also the world of Featurelesswhitevoidia is a stage and Enemy plays all the roles. Except for the Sentient Beings, which is why he's trying to get rid of them.

However, Enemy is trying to make sure that the rest of his roles, which are all him and all imaginary, don't realize that he's imaginary. He also doesn't want the Sentient Beings to find out because that would reveal his weakness, but long term he's aiming to destroy them anyways.

You are now Enemy, and you have a problem. Everyone in your imaginary world is a wizard except for you. You're a comedian and you're in charge of the space program. Your job is to put a man on the moon, but you've run into a small snag: during your routine, you made fun of everyone else's problems and now a bunch of secretly imaginary wizards who are also you are after you.

Fortunately, you have one chance to escape this. A magical fairy, who is also secretly imaginary and also you explained that you're ugly, stupid, and smell bad but she's granting you the chance to fix two of those three problems. Obviously this will allow you to escape the wrath of the imaginary wizards and get back to planning a ridiculous way to put someone on the moon, which will somehow help you destroy these pesky Sentient Beings once and for all.

So which two problems will you ask her to fix?

fix smell bad. that's two wordsm two problems right?

You could fix the football match.

fix smell bad. that's two wordsm two problems right?

That isn't correct at all, but being stupid, you don't realize that so you tell the fairy that you want her to fix "smell bad". She waits for a few minutes and then asks what the second thing you want her to fix is.

Being stupid, you just kind of sit there in a daze, not sure what she means, until something pops into your head.

You could fix the football match.

You ask her to fix the football match while she's at it, too. You didn't know the football match was broken, but that's probably because you're stupid.

The fairy stares at you like you're stupid, which you are, then shrugs and waves her wand.

"There, you will always smell good now and the Giants will win against the Roughriders. I hope you appreciate your new gifts."

She then vanishes, except since she's you and doesn't actually exist this isn't really meaningful. Regardless, you can now get back to your pointless hatred of Sentient Beings. You haven't been very effective at getting rid of them, largely because you're stupid. Really, if it wasn't for this weird barrier around Fortress, you'd probably have been vanquished by now.

Anyways, you are now the Bear Pope. You're annoyed for a couple of reasons. First off, everyone keeps asking if you're Catholic and/or shit in the woods, as if you haven't already heard those jokes a million times each. Ugh, if you weren't committed to peace you'd have mauled someone for that by now, and you still might.

But the second thing bothering you is this adventure contest. You thought you had a pretty decent idea, about these five aliens who start in different places on their planet and all five follow the exact same commands. They all have different designs, you made them all up by picking three random words from the dictionary, searching for images of each, and then mixing the results together in Photoshop.

That part's fun. Your adventure is actually pretty popular! You think you have a good chance of winning... except for the problem of THAT adventure, the really dumb one about a prison guard getting his hair done.

That idea is so stupid, and yet it's probably going to win because it's really well-written and drawn - painted, in fact! - by a professional artist. Really what bugs you the most is how stupid the idea is, seriously, an idea that bad doesn't deserve to win.

As it turns out, though, your adventure is the only serious competition. And that means you've got to outdo that adventure, barring some scandalous revelation that the artist was being forced to do it or something ridiculous like that. So you need to make this update extra-amazing.

As a result of the previous command, your five aliens have all colonized a planet and started a new civilization. In this update, though, one of the aliens is startled when some kid appears out of nowhere and starts babbling about a game.

It's time to come up with this kid. You're going to do that the same way you came up with all your other characters - picking three random words, searching for images, and then merging the images together.

So what are your three words?

word, word and word.

foaming, orange, religious

word, word and word.

Ah, yes, you check the random words you picked from the dictionary and...

Wait, they're all "word"? How did that happen? Must have been a bad roll. You should try again and not even concern yourself with this result, it's not like the beings created through this process come into existence somewhere in some far corner of the multiverse.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the multiverse, a W with the power of three Ws forms. This has nothing to do with your adventure, though, so you choose to ignore it.

foaming, orange, religious

Your reroll goes much better. It even has religious, which as Bear Pope is one of your favorite words! You do an image search and see a bunch of water, three oranges one of which is sliced open, and a bunch of religious symbols.

You promptly combine them to make this new character. Now you just need to work out how to explain his backstory. Too bad this game doesn't actually exist, otherwise you could consult with someone who's played it for help. Then again, if the game did actually exist, it would have grave consequences for the universe and would most likely make a mockery of God, so it's probably just as well.

You are now someone who has been playing a game with grave consequences for the universe that makes a mockery of God. Specifically, you are a time-traveling alien being who regenerates into a new form upon your death and you have been playing this game with other versions of yourself.

There's a problem, though. Apparently this game has titles that include "Time" and "Space" and all of you are "Time". You probably need "Space" players in order to keep the game from being even more disastrous for the universe, so you've been trying to contact some. You were working on a device to make contact and were just finishing it up by painting it silver, but you spilled the paint all over yourself and have no idea how to clean it up.

That problem was soon overshadowed by the fact that the device worked... sort of. You made contact with another game session, but it's somehow running with zero players. Which means you haven't found any Space players to help you out.

Between this and the paint, you're pretty stumped on what to do next, so you took your time machine to a beach and started making a sandcastle to relax a bit. Surely you'll come up with better ideas after a little unwinding.

You are now a crab. Some jerk with a time machine just showed up on your beach and he's making a sandcastle right over the turtle's home.

You can't let this stand. You raise your claws and signal to the seagull to help you put an end to this act of cruelty.

Wait, what exactly are you signaling him to do?

> Seagull: eat him. the crab. The crab wants you to eat him

your signal tells a tale of a thousand lives, all ended swiftly by this sandcastle builder. revenge must happen

your signal tells a tale of a thousand lives, all ended swiftly by this sandcastle builder. revenge must happen

Well, that's a bit exaggerated, it's more like one life seriously inconvenienced, but then the signal code's never been very good at subtleties. It's the best you can do.

Of course, it occurs to you that you're not sure just how well the seagull understands your signal code, you've never really practiced it or anything. Oh well, nothing you can really do about that right now, you'll just have to send the signal and hope he gets it right.

> Seagull: eat him. the crab. The crab wants you to eat him

You are now the seagull, and you think that crab down there is signaling you to eat it. But you aren't sure. You remember that you made a specific decision to leave crabs out of your diet, though you aren't actually sure why right now, and you feel conflicted.

If only there were some sort of advice column you could send a question into.

You are now a big tub of lard. Your greatest dream is that one day you will be put in a sandwich.

That day is not today, however. Well, probably not, at least. Not if the last few days are any indication. You spent them all falling. You aren't even sure any more where you were than when you started falling.

You've decided to start a new civilization as you fall, because this new civilization will surely have sandwiches and then you can realize your dream. In order to accomplish this, you've started a newspaper advice column, because surely where there are advice columns, civilization will inevitably follow. And then sandwiches will follow that.

Anyways, you have some questions to answer. You don't know how you're aware of them, maybe this is one of those mental adventure things inanimate objects sometimes have and you somehow know about.

So here's the first question!

Dear Lard,

I have a difficult dietary question. I've sworn off crab meat for reasons I don't remember, but a crab is signaling me to eat him. (I'm pretty sure that's what the signal means.) Should I eat him or not?

Struggulling With A Tough Question

The second question is just as tricky.

Dear Lard,

Recently, a past version of myself established a connection with a session of a game with universe-spanning consequences, only to discover that it had zero players. I have since learned that this session is a placeholder; each planet that ever gets involved in this game has two planets connected to it through dreams. The null session is a safeguard to prevent those two dream-planets from triggering the game and developing their own two dream-planets, which would develop their own two dream-planets, and so on. Obviously the resulting recursion could destabilize the universe, but even more drastically, it could bring into being a terrible sitcom about some kids playing the game.

However, I only learned of this through my past self completely screwing it up and unleashing the problem. Should I risk a time paradox by telling him about it before he actually does it, knowing full well that the paradox could wipe out the universe or create the sitcom anyway?

Troubled Time Traveler

Oh man, these two questions are so tough you just aren't going to be able to handle any more in this column. So what are the answers?