Zoostuck 3

change your name to mark smith

Why would you do that? It's already Mark Smith. Maybe Mark Puss would do that, but you're not him.

And it wouldn't throw anyone off the track, because your old name would still be in the public records. Even if you made a public statement categorically rejecting your old name, people would think you were just faking it to avoid getting caught.

You're going to need more than that to fend off the coming accusations.

be mark e. smith, iconoclastic lead singer of rock group the fall

Suddenly, an idea strikes you - you could just pretend you've been a Mark Smith all along. There were plenty of Mark Smiths before the name law went down, after all. Why couldn't you be one of them?

In particular, why couldn't you be a signer in a rock group... oh, wait, your middle initial is V, nobody's ever going to buy that story. You need a new plan.

Become a smither of marks

Hell with it. You'll just run off to Germany and run a counterfeiting operation to cover your tracks. Nothing good will come of staying here.

The only problem is, how are you going to get to Germany? You don't even know where it is.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Denmark/Germany/

you're border countries and everything else is ocean, it's not hard

Ask the germs

you're border countries and everything else is ocean, it's not hard

Look, you have a really bad sense of direction, okay?

Also, your country only exists because someone wearing the moonglasses imagined it, and therefore is not in a geographically appropriate location at all. Although, as it happens it is surrounded by ocean.

Not that you're aware of this at all, since Mark Guy imagined you up with an entire lifetime of memories. The point is, you're terrible at following directions and you need another approach to reach Germany.

Ask the germs

Of course! You'll use your ability to communicate with microscopic entities to ask a virus for directions! What can possibly go wrong -

PARTY PARTY PARTY PARTY

- you completely forget whatever it was you were planning to do because it suddenly isn't as important as partying hard. How are you going to do that?

party hard or hardly partying, am i right?

banghead

party hard or hardly partying, am i right?

Man, yeah, you are hardly partying! You need to GET DOWN to Porlock, wherever that is, because you're pretty sure that's where the real party is. You have no idea how you know that, though.

So you should probably be trying to figure out how you're going to do that.

banghead

And you decide that the first step is to get a new hairstyle, with bangs that completely cover your head. That'll make you the real talk of the party when you eventually get to it! You head out to find a barber.

You are now the barber from the Zoosmell convention. Or was it a Johnsmell convention? Whatever, the point is you're disappointed that you never got to cut anyone's hair because some kid knocked you out with a limbo stick.

And you can't find any customers anywhere! Probably because you were arrested for completely arbitrary reasons by these moon people from the sun so now you're stuck in this jail cell.

Where are you going to find someone's hair to cut?

Right hair

Right hair

You briefly consider cutting your own hair in a desperate attempt to fulfill your needs, but you soon realize two problems. First of all, you're bald. Second, all your hair-cutting tools were confiscated when you were thrown in jail.

It looks like you're going to need to escape from here before you can cut any hair. Too bad you don't have any relevant skills that could let you, say, pick the lock on your cell door or overpower one of the guards.

Really, you only have one noteworthy skill other than cutting hair, and you can't see how it would help you out here.

What is that skill, again?

Butter sculpture

Sponjatsu

Butter sculpture

Ah, yes. Your hobby. You can craft nearly any shape out of butter.

However, you wouldn't expect a butter key to be very effective at opening a door, and you don't have any butter to attempt it with anyways, so this isn't very helpful.

No, if you're going to escape, you're going to need to develop an entirely different skill, something like... like...

Sponjatsu

Like Sponjatsu! Whatever that is. You don't have the slightest clue, but you have nothing better to do than attempt to practice it anyways, by which you mean flail around and punch the door repeatedly.

The door then swings open because it wasn't locked at all. Well, this is awkward. You don't see any guards around, either, so you suppose you can just walk out of here. Of course, you'll want to grab your confiscated supplies first.

You are now the guard who's supposed to be watching that barber that the Moonited Nations imprisoned. What are you doing instead of your job?

Wait, is this the prison where no one can be narrated for?

Wait, is this the prison where no one can be narrated for?

Oh, that's right. For some reason you decided to try to make sense of the adventure you're in, even though you're not a metanarrative character at all which means it's been really hard to get ahold of some of this information.

You've just worked out that this is, in fact, the prison that had an outbreak of anti-narration virus. However, as far as you can tell the virus has altered itself into a form that no longer grants narration immunity, so only those previously infected would still be subject to it. As the Moonited Nations has only recently attempted to make this prison operational, this means you and your fellow guards are unaffected, as are any new prisoners who arrived after the change.

You've also observed enough signs of people under narration to realize that you are being narrated for right now. You can only conclude that this means the narrator rock is really desperate for ideas and so it's hoping your elaborate plot map of the adventure can guide it in a more concrete direction.

So, you stare at the map for a while until you realize that this has all been one massive distraction to allow the prisoner you were supposed to be guarding to reclaim his confiscated supplies and escape the prison. Well shoot, you're going to have to draw an entire new branch on this thing to account for his actions now.

You are now the guard's plot map, and you have just acquired sentience. You immediately realize that the entire plot to date has secretly been designed so that some random prison guard would inadvertently produce a magical sigil on a plot map and thereby grant it sentience, and you also realize that is the stupidest plot twist imaginable.

You therefore pointedly refuse to have anything to do with any largescale schemes in order to ensure that creating you will be a complete waste of time for whoever was behind it. What will you do with your newfound intelligence instead?

retrace your steps exactly, in perpetuity

sudoku

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sudoku

Ah, of course. There's nothing better to put your newfound intelligence to work on than sudoku puzzles.

At least, not in this highly uncreative universe. So you start solving one... wait a minute, that seven can't go there.

retrace your steps exactly, in perpetuity

You work out the sudoku from the beginning to see where you went wrong... and a seven has to go there? But it can't? What is wrong with this sudoku?


You begin an endless cycle of trying to figure out what went wrong with your sudoku attempts, in which you constantly make the exact deductions you made the previous time. Somehow it never occurs to you to consider that the puzzle you're looking at may be impossible.

You are now an impossible Sudoku puzzle. A sentient plot map of the entire adventure to date is trapped in an infinite loop of attempting to solve you.

What are you going to do about this?

become a super spy

if they can't solve you, maybe you can solve them...

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become a super spy

You contemplate using your distinct position as an impossible puzzle being worked on by a sentient plot map for the purposes of espionage, but the problem with that is, you don't have the slightest idea who you would report to. Or, for that matter, who you're gathering information from.

You could, hypothetically, tell someone about the contents of this plot map, except that you have no real way to communicate. And you also can't see any way that granting such metaknowledge to a participant in the story wouldn't be a complete disaster. Although to be fair, you don't have enough of a sense of your motivations to work out if you care about whether the results are disastrous.

if they can't solve you, maybe you can solve them...

You decide that, since you're stuck with this intelligent plot map and can't communicate with anyone else, you might as well try to figure out what it says and see if you can predict where it's going. Not that this benefits you in any way, but it's not like you have any idea what you could do to benefit yourself anyhow.

Although to be frank, the map is a complete mess. It probably would have evolved into a singularity of complexity if not for the fact that Edgebert designed the universe in such a way that those can never come into existence.

Wait a minute. You see something, and it looks bad. It can't possibly be true.


It is. And now you're stuck knowing it, and completely unable to impart your knowledge to anyone, even to an omniscient narrator.

You're pretty sure you liked this plot better when it didn't make any sense to you.

You are now the Buttcycle.

You de-merged with the Delorean a while back when the narrative focus was off you, in order to keep your great power out of the hands of John Egbert and the webcomic artist he works for. This is definitely not a clumsy retcon to cover up a just-noticed continuity error.

Speaking of things that are definitely not continuity errors, you have to do something about that barber who just escaped his cell, because he's dead and hasn't realized that his body is being reanimated by the boogeyman possessing it. He is also the only person left in this prison, other than one single guard who developed an unhealthy obsession with working out this plot and hasn't noticed that the other guards have been brought to tears by the power of the Solaris, or that most of the prisoners escaped from here, despite documenting both facts in his plot map.

So what's your next move?

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wait there's a continuity