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Ruby City App
PLAYER
Name: Asher
Age: 27
E-mail: ash -dot- sofman %at% gmail.com
AIM/etc: AIM - asherdashery;![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
asherdashery
CHARACTER
Name: Dave Strider
Canon: Homestuck (Dangan Roleplay CRAU)
Age: 18
Timeline: [S] Game Over --> Christmas Day one year post-DRRP Round 3
Items with character at canon point:
- A sturdy winter outfit, complete with coat and tattered knit wrist-warmers
- One (1) boot knife
- A ball of purple yarn
If playing another character from the same canon, how will you deal with this?: N/A
Personality: If Mowgli were a feral child raised within internet bro-dude culture rather than in the jungle, he might have turned out to be a lot like Dave. Dave is a mouthy, self-aware, resourceful nineties kid whose entire worldview seems to run on memes and storytelling tropes, but he's also deeply loyal, blindingly insecure, and just a little bit (and by a little bit, I mean unstoppably) self-martyring. That may not be surprising given that the title his canon gives him is the Knight of Time--a hero who must face death and inevitability so that, most of all, he can protect. For all Dave's claims that he only ironically appreciates things, when the chips are down, what he shows is love and valor, not distance.
He buries his chivalrous core beneath a trash heap of pop culture references and pithy commentary. Like many Homestuck characters, he likes to hear himself talk, and his favorite game is wordplay: He's a self-described rapper but strangely well-read, and his comments are often as clever as they are obfuscatory. He strings ten-dollar words and facts through his logorrheic babble like he's trimming a Christmas tree, for the simple joy of shiny word baubles.
He doesn't even need an audience; Dave is perfectly content to talk to himself should no conversation partner be available. If that sounds a little lonely, well. As chill as he makes himself out to be with his lot, he's an apocalypse survivor, and isolation shapes a lot of how he interacts now with his universe. With the living population of his immediate world reduced to six, and less than half of those six willing even to speak with him, he's had a lot of time alone to internalize unhealthy ideas--namely, that 1) if he's not going to frickin' kill it, he might as well not try; and 2) if anyone's going to suffer, it might as well be (or probably is going to be, whether he wants it or not) him.
Some of this hopeless fatalism stems back to the way Bro Strider, Dave's legal guardian and only family, alternately neglected and whaled on him in the name of "irony". In another timeline, he admits he can only think that Bro actively hated taking care of him and thought of the exercise as some kind of game. The neglect has made Dave weak to positive attention; he'd do most anything for anyone who so much as talks to him. As Bro took his frat nerd lifestyle to ridiculous degrees, so too does Dave ride his loyalty and misplaced self-worth to dangerous--often fatal--extremes. To borrow from hiimdaisy: You made friends with Dave! Dave will now die for you.
A lifetime spent waiting for the next blow has also made Dave expect antagonism as a matter of course, but he hates it; he'd rather avoid conflict and pain than engage, even if in the long run the avoidance might backfire. He chooses to distract himself instead of face most problems, particularly emotional ones; and when he can't distract, he dissociates himself from the situation. He can't be hurt if he's not there, emotionally. Sometimes the only illusion of agency he's had is to play along with a bad situation, to put his feelings away and run on autopilot to minimize how much he has to hurt, how many painful truths he'll have to confront.
On the other hand, when no attack comes, he responds to genuine kindness like a flower turning to the sun. He's starved for affection. It's unbearably easy to get Dave to like, or at least tolerate, anyone who pays attention to him, and the emotionally stunted boy lets just about anyone boss him around for it. At heart, he's a people-pleaser. More than that--and despite his upbringing--he carries a strong, chivalrous sense of right and wrong. His nature as a Knight makes it hard for him to turn down requests or ignore people in need, particularly if they're right in front of him. He has little sense of justice in the world at large, but on the personal level, he can't stand to sit idly by.
Both before the apocalypse and after, Dave was cut off from genuine teaching or emotional connection, so he gathered most of his ideas on How Things Work from movies and media. That means that not only does he lack an adult understanding of basic science, history, and the other bases of knowledge required to function in society, he also has trouble forming real interpersonal bonds. Banter and games of one-upmanship? Fine, he can roll with that in his sleep. But confront him with emotional honesty and he's likely to hiccup, even if the attention is positive. After thirteen years with Bro, being orphaned, and then tossed into a space can with a bunch of other traumatized teenagers, Dave has no idea what being cared for responsibly actually looks like--and he doesn't know how to show others he cares, either, except through stupid and often pointless acts of sacrifice that they never wanted from him.
That's not to say he's not clever in other ways. While he's no Rose or Jade, Dave can be surprisingly resourceful, particularly when it comes to exploiting loopholes for stupid gains. He's good at noting what's available in his environment and working around obstacles in unexpected ways rather than ramming through. Some of these innovations arise from a vaguely scientific curiosity to test boundaries and see just how stupid things can possibly get. The rest comes from his quick, intuitive way of thinking; Dave's used to working on instinct and has a good head for when things do or don't feel right. He's also a creative force. Verbally, musically, artistically (if we're using a broad definition of art)--what Dave lacks in intra- and interpersonal intelligence, he makes up for working in more sensory, expressive media. Things he doesn't consciously understand come more naturally when he stops trying to think them through. His instincts when it comes to body language are particularly good, after a childhood spent trying to read an unreadable jackass upon whom he was entirely dependent.
Dave's got a fairly high-level ability to take what the world presents him and just accept that that's what's going down. It's not exactly that he's chill; he's just resigned to never understanding anything, ever. He bears a sense of miserable obligation to everything being both a) stupid and b) awful, so that when bad things happen, he just goes on and concentrates on the things he CAN do--which sometimes just means he's distracting himself rather than facing the problem. This also means he doesn't often say no to people, even when he's uncomfortable with their requests.
On those occasions that events overwhelm Dave's ability to go with the flow--confronting his own mortality, for instance, or the death of someone important to him--he doesn't seem to know how to work through his emotions. He often freezes up and his thought process gets a little erratic, his choices lean towards recklessness and self-destruction. It's under greatest duress that he most falls back on the ideas of heroism and sacrifice he picked up from popular culture and his innate sense of justice, and that road leads to dead Daves.
He also doesn't really know how to deal with other people's feelings (at least, not pre-Dangan Roleplay). Dave often responds to distress with platitudes or wipes his hands of responsibility entirely, too unsure of his footing in the emotional field to risk messing up.
Many of his problems come back to that intense insecurity, actually. He's terrified of messing up, and he won't commit to action without knowing that it's the right thing to do, as if there's a code or model on which he can base his life. He doesn't want to disappoint people. He constantly seeks validation. That and his distraction are what make him so easy to manipulate. He just wants people to tell him he's cool because he's scared, constantly, that he isn't.
But when the chips are down, Dave lives up to his Knightly title. As emotionally vulnerable as he is, as scared as he can get, the boy is very, very brave, and he will give everything for what he thinks is right: his friends, through thick and thin.
Personality Development:
One of the major changes Dangan Roleplay has wreaked upon Dave is that--after repeated loss after loss, each worse than the last, through which he could only stand by helplessly--he's become extremely sensitive to any perceived loss of power or agency. He's no control freak, but in situations he doesn't fully understand or in which he can't just "fix" things with liberally applied time powers, he whips from brittle and irritable to panicked fury lightning fast. He's aware of his triggered behavior, but as it has not yet proven to be an impediment to Getting Shit Done, he doesn't feel like curbing that reaction is worth working on.
He's also come to cut a lot of the bullshit when it comes to emotional sincerity. Life is short, you never know when someone will be taken from you, so better to be honest sooner than later so no time is wasted. He's grown to shamelessly enjoy fluffy PDA like holding hands walking down the street, cuddling with members of his eclectic post-murdergame family, and actually telling people he loves them. Out loud. With words.
It also means he doesn't shy away as much from confrontation, which is both good and bad because he's less terrified of his own powers now, too. If pressed just the wrong way, Dave can be a very dangerous force to contend with.
On the other hand, for all his need to steer his own life, he has a codependency streak a mile wide and tends to rely on his murdergame family--particularly Meridiana--to provide a kind of constancy in his life. As long as they are there, there's something dependable and predictable in the world. He even has trouble sleeping alone, after waking up so many Friday mornings in a row with the person at his back gone.
Oddly enough, his self-esteem is better than it was going into Dangan Roleplay. He's decided to pursue a career he actually likes and allow himself to want and go after nice things, like a girlfriend he loves and trusts and a home that welcomes him. He's still reckless and unthinkingly brave, but not from a place of sacrifice or low self-worth. He simply takes action before he really thinks about it.
Background: Dave on the MSPA Wiki | Homestuck on the MSPA Wiki
Dave comes from the Game Over timeline, which means everything sucked and then he died.
Previous Game History:
Dave woke up trapped in the Hotel Monofornia with nineteen other "guests," all drawn from different worlds and times. He had no memory of his death or the events leading up to it, so at first, he treated these circumstances as yet another inexplicable series of incomprehensible events in his fucked-up computer game of a life.
He quickly decided he liked these people, especially his fellow teens, the two burly, adorkable space soldiers who adopted him, the indomitable Maya Fey, and, particularly, Meridiana Everett, a gentle, faint-hearted girl whose Victorian upbringing in no way prepared her for the Life of Mutual Killing Monobear set up. From the get-go, he and Meridiana found each other charming, and as time went on and they learned more about each other, they only grew closer, found more deeply routed personal tragedies and feelings in common, and found comfort in each other's presence.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that weeks spent locked to a limited space with feelings running high teaches a kid a lot about people. As the murders began and the terrible reality sunk in, the remaining guests immediately began taking care of one another. Dave, who'd never had a real support network before, found himself being taken care of physically and emotionally for the first time in his life and began learning how to share vulnerability with others, how to connect beyond surface camaraderie. He learned how to trust others with his sincerity, learned what it felt like to be valued.
And every week, he lost more of those people who valued him.
By the beginning of the fifth week, he and Meridiana--who'd supported each other through rough memory regains and bad motives, through harrowing school trials and executions--were going steady. Then, Dave ate poisoned gummy bears and spent most of the week in a fevered daze. It was in that state, with everyone fussing and worrying over him, that he realized--this was what living was supposed to be like. People were supposed to care about him. That realization changed his entire worldview and made him look on his past with something like horror. He'd never realized before that he was a victim.
And at the end of that week, one of his adoptive space dads was killed so that Monobear would stop starving them.
At the end of the next week, his other space dad was gone. Someone he'd thought was a friend tricked a dying girl into killing Agent Washington and led his fellow guests on a merry wild goose chase in the trial until the truth after horrible truth came out:
Meridiana was the killer. She'd died already twice before, been experimented on and puppeted and used in a contest of horror between men, had to live with the guilt of Jack the Ripper murdering young women to keep her alive--and now she was going to die, having found some spot of happiness with Dave.
Dave tried to stop her execution, but all he got for his troubles was blood splatter all over himselfand this lousy T-shirt. He retreated into a dissociative haze for a weekend, and then promptly got the memory back that he'd been dead all along, too. Which, somehow, was liberating.
He dedicated all his efforts from there through endgame to trying to get the rest of them out alive and simply moving forward. By the time the Mastermind revealed herself to be a lonely, fucked up little girl trying to build a new army of Despair-spreaders so she wouldn't have to be alone, Dave could recognize that he pitied her, but ultimately, would be moving on with his friends to the future.
And then a miracle happened and he got every dead member of his new family back. He and Meridiana could be together. They could go somewhere new, be someone new.
They moved to Kalos in the Pokémon world, where Dave signed up to help stop more murdergames from happening and Meridiana opened a bed and breakfast, and they have lived there for over a year with the other members of "the teen polyblob," generally being domestic in bizarre ways and giving one another all the affection and support their worlds denied them. Dave got regular therapy and also decided to study Poképaleontology. Around midnight December 24th, 2016, Dave proposed marriage to Meridiana, who happily accepted.
And then he woke up on the train to Ruby City.
Abilities:
✗ Knight of Time
Dave can manipulate the flow of time for himself and others in a number of ways:
- Creating stable time loops, in which he travels back in time but does not create a paradox, thus leaving the timeline intact. I.e., if you were looking back from a point further along that timeline, you would see that he had gone back; therefore, his backwards travel was, is, and always will be part of the timeline.
- Creating doomed timelines, in which he travels back in time and changes a decision, thus causing the timelines to branch. The branch he came from would then be a doomed timeline and collapse on itself, while the changed timeline continues. He will not be using this power in Ruby City, ever.
- Slowing an opponent, seen as part of the Adagio Redshift combined fraymotif in his and Jade's first battle against Jack Noir.
- Speeding something up, seen in Act 7 when he effectively fast forwards the development of Earth C.
- Skipping ahead, seen as he brings the whole party ahead five thousand years in the Homestuck Snapchat post-story material. He will likely never use this in Ruby City, either.
- His powers can also be combined with other Homestuck characters' in fraymotifs, whose effects would vary depending on the elements thrown in.
Homestuck powers seem to be tied into their users' personal development and character. Since DRRP Dave grew in a lot of the ways he needed to, but also is scarred and stalled in certain areas, his control over time is not as complete as Act 7 Dave's would be.
✗ God Tier
Dave can fly and can only be killed if his death is heroic or just. It also comes with some sweet pajamas, but he doesn't actually have those on him as of entering the city.
✗ Combat
Dave is primarily a swordsman and is deadly and swift with a blade in his hands. His greatest assets in combat are speed and reflex honed through long years of training and cleverness that just don't quit. He doesn't pack much of a punch unarmed, though. Not enough weight on him for that.
✗ Monotranslate
A side effect of his time in Dangan Roleplay is that Dave hears any language spoken around him as English.
(Another side effect is that he may or may not bleed pink. It's. It's a thing.)
✗ Turntabling
He's also an experienced D.J. and has been keeping the music up weekly ever since Maya Fey made him promise to during his time in the murder can.
Network/Actionspam Sample: Test Drive Threads! (12/6/2016)
Prose Log Sample:
Eighteen.
It was December 3rd, 2016, and while if he were counting calendar years from the earthfall of the meteor bearing his diapered ass he'd be something ridiculous like twenty-one, the truth was that eighteen was mind-blowing enough. Eighteen years, he'd been alive. Mostly. Eighteen years, and now he'd have been a legal adult. Something he'd never really thought about being.
Sure, he'd considered the usual question of "What are you going to be when you grow up?" But he'd never thought about it concretely, never imagined how he'd actually fill out to fit the cartoon images he came up with. D.J. Skater. Internet celebrity. Famous, definitely, though he never was sure what it'd be for.
He'd imagined all those things, and never imagined himself as them. He'd imagined all those things and mostly seen some kind of younger, jankier Bro.
Dave breathed out in the crisp December air and wondered if he'd never thought he'd survive this long.
There was a box in his pocket. He rubbed the pad of his thumb over the velvet and felt the anticipation buzz through his chest like the measure right before the beat dropped, raising goosebumps all over his skin. He wasn't going to propose to her on his birthday, of course, then it'd be like he was asking her to be his present, she wouldn't be able to say no without breaking birthday boy code.
Not that he thought she would say no. If he had any doubt, he wouldn't be trying this at all. It was the principle of the thing. But still, he had to swallow hard and press his thumb hard against one soft corner of the ring box.
All signs pointed to her saying yes, and that prospect was terrifying, too. Terrifying and unbelievable. He felt alive.
He couldn't have imagined this, even for awesome, internet cartoon D.J. fake Dave Strider. Couldn't have imagined he'd stand on the brink of something so vast and awe-inspiring. Couldn't have foreseen he could fucking love like this.
Dave cleared his throat and checked his watch. 3:14 P.M.
"Okay. If I'm gonna fuck this up, now's the time to come back and stop me," he said to his empty backyard, rocking back and forth on his heels. "Olly olly oxen-free, dude. I've been good all year and all I want for Christmas is spoilers, come on, Santa, baby."
He waited. Neither dejected, rejected three-weeks-from-now Dave Strider returned from the future to tell him the bad news, nor did some alternate version of him--maybe a D.J., maybe alpha Dave, who even knew what happened to that guy, maybe the ghost of Christmas paradox--no one came to stop him. No one came to tell him what he couldn't--or had to--do. He was an adult. The choice was his.
What had he said, Jesus, a lifetime ago? I'm going to the future!
Dave stood alone behind his girlfriend's bed and breakfast (his home) as nothing continued to happen and broke out into a doofy, lopsided, utterly genuine grin.
Name: Asher
Age: 27
E-mail: ash -dot- sofman %at% gmail.com
AIM/etc: AIM - asherdashery;
CHARACTER
Name: Dave Strider
Canon: Homestuck (Dangan Roleplay CRAU)
Age: 18
Timeline: [S] Game Over --> Christmas Day one year post-DRRP Round 3
Items with character at canon point:
- A sturdy winter outfit, complete with coat and tattered knit wrist-warmers
- One (1) boot knife
- A ball of purple yarn
If playing another character from the same canon, how will you deal with this?: N/A
Personality: If Mowgli were a feral child raised within internet bro-dude culture rather than in the jungle, he might have turned out to be a lot like Dave. Dave is a mouthy, self-aware, resourceful nineties kid whose entire worldview seems to run on memes and storytelling tropes, but he's also deeply loyal, blindingly insecure, and just a little bit (and by a little bit, I mean unstoppably) self-martyring. That may not be surprising given that the title his canon gives him is the Knight of Time--a hero who must face death and inevitability so that, most of all, he can protect. For all Dave's claims that he only ironically appreciates things, when the chips are down, what he shows is love and valor, not distance.
He buries his chivalrous core beneath a trash heap of pop culture references and pithy commentary. Like many Homestuck characters, he likes to hear himself talk, and his favorite game is wordplay: He's a self-described rapper but strangely well-read, and his comments are often as clever as they are obfuscatory. He strings ten-dollar words and facts through his logorrheic babble like he's trimming a Christmas tree, for the simple joy of shiny word baubles.
He doesn't even need an audience; Dave is perfectly content to talk to himself should no conversation partner be available. If that sounds a little lonely, well. As chill as he makes himself out to be with his lot, he's an apocalypse survivor, and isolation shapes a lot of how he interacts now with his universe. With the living population of his immediate world reduced to six, and less than half of those six willing even to speak with him, he's had a lot of time alone to internalize unhealthy ideas--namely, that 1) if he's not going to frickin' kill it, he might as well not try; and 2) if anyone's going to suffer, it might as well be (or probably is going to be, whether he wants it or not) him.
Some of this hopeless fatalism stems back to the way Bro Strider, Dave's legal guardian and only family, alternately neglected and whaled on him in the name of "irony". In another timeline, he admits he can only think that Bro actively hated taking care of him and thought of the exercise as some kind of game. The neglect has made Dave weak to positive attention; he'd do most anything for anyone who so much as talks to him. As Bro took his frat nerd lifestyle to ridiculous degrees, so too does Dave ride his loyalty and misplaced self-worth to dangerous--often fatal--extremes. To borrow from hiimdaisy: You made friends with Dave! Dave will now die for you.
A lifetime spent waiting for the next blow has also made Dave expect antagonism as a matter of course, but he hates it; he'd rather avoid conflict and pain than engage, even if in the long run the avoidance might backfire. He chooses to distract himself instead of face most problems, particularly emotional ones; and when he can't distract, he dissociates himself from the situation. He can't be hurt if he's not there, emotionally. Sometimes the only illusion of agency he's had is to play along with a bad situation, to put his feelings away and run on autopilot to minimize how much he has to hurt, how many painful truths he'll have to confront.
On the other hand, when no attack comes, he responds to genuine kindness like a flower turning to the sun. He's starved for affection. It's unbearably easy to get Dave to like, or at least tolerate, anyone who pays attention to him, and the emotionally stunted boy lets just about anyone boss him around for it. At heart, he's a people-pleaser. More than that--and despite his upbringing--he carries a strong, chivalrous sense of right and wrong. His nature as a Knight makes it hard for him to turn down requests or ignore people in need, particularly if they're right in front of him. He has little sense of justice in the world at large, but on the personal level, he can't stand to sit idly by.
Both before the apocalypse and after, Dave was cut off from genuine teaching or emotional connection, so he gathered most of his ideas on How Things Work from movies and media. That means that not only does he lack an adult understanding of basic science, history, and the other bases of knowledge required to function in society, he also has trouble forming real interpersonal bonds. Banter and games of one-upmanship? Fine, he can roll with that in his sleep. But confront him with emotional honesty and he's likely to hiccup, even if the attention is positive. After thirteen years with Bro, being orphaned, and then tossed into a space can with a bunch of other traumatized teenagers, Dave has no idea what being cared for responsibly actually looks like--and he doesn't know how to show others he cares, either, except through stupid and often pointless acts of sacrifice that they never wanted from him.
That's not to say he's not clever in other ways. While he's no Rose or Jade, Dave can be surprisingly resourceful, particularly when it comes to exploiting loopholes for stupid gains. He's good at noting what's available in his environment and working around obstacles in unexpected ways rather than ramming through. Some of these innovations arise from a vaguely scientific curiosity to test boundaries and see just how stupid things can possibly get. The rest comes from his quick, intuitive way of thinking; Dave's used to working on instinct and has a good head for when things do or don't feel right. He's also a creative force. Verbally, musically, artistically (if we're using a broad definition of art)--what Dave lacks in intra- and interpersonal intelligence, he makes up for working in more sensory, expressive media. Things he doesn't consciously understand come more naturally when he stops trying to think them through. His instincts when it comes to body language are particularly good, after a childhood spent trying to read an unreadable jackass upon whom he was entirely dependent.
Dave's got a fairly high-level ability to take what the world presents him and just accept that that's what's going down. It's not exactly that he's chill; he's just resigned to never understanding anything, ever. He bears a sense of miserable obligation to everything being both a) stupid and b) awful, so that when bad things happen, he just goes on and concentrates on the things he CAN do--which sometimes just means he's distracting himself rather than facing the problem. This also means he doesn't often say no to people, even when he's uncomfortable with their requests.
On those occasions that events overwhelm Dave's ability to go with the flow--confronting his own mortality, for instance, or the death of someone important to him--he doesn't seem to know how to work through his emotions. He often freezes up and his thought process gets a little erratic, his choices lean towards recklessness and self-destruction. It's under greatest duress that he most falls back on the ideas of heroism and sacrifice he picked up from popular culture and his innate sense of justice, and that road leads to dead Daves.
He also doesn't really know how to deal with other people's feelings (at least, not pre-Dangan Roleplay). Dave often responds to distress with platitudes or wipes his hands of responsibility entirely, too unsure of his footing in the emotional field to risk messing up.
Many of his problems come back to that intense insecurity, actually. He's terrified of messing up, and he won't commit to action without knowing that it's the right thing to do, as if there's a code or model on which he can base his life. He doesn't want to disappoint people. He constantly seeks validation. That and his distraction are what make him so easy to manipulate. He just wants people to tell him he's cool because he's scared, constantly, that he isn't.
But when the chips are down, Dave lives up to his Knightly title. As emotionally vulnerable as he is, as scared as he can get, the boy is very, very brave, and he will give everything for what he thinks is right: his friends, through thick and thin.
Personality Development:
One of the major changes Dangan Roleplay has wreaked upon Dave is that--after repeated loss after loss, each worse than the last, through which he could only stand by helplessly--he's become extremely sensitive to any perceived loss of power or agency. He's no control freak, but in situations he doesn't fully understand or in which he can't just "fix" things with liberally applied time powers, he whips from brittle and irritable to panicked fury lightning fast. He's aware of his triggered behavior, but as it has not yet proven to be an impediment to Getting Shit Done, he doesn't feel like curbing that reaction is worth working on.
He's also come to cut a lot of the bullshit when it comes to emotional sincerity. Life is short, you never know when someone will be taken from you, so better to be honest sooner than later so no time is wasted. He's grown to shamelessly enjoy fluffy PDA like holding hands walking down the street, cuddling with members of his eclectic post-murdergame family, and actually telling people he loves them. Out loud. With words.
It also means he doesn't shy away as much from confrontation, which is both good and bad because he's less terrified of his own powers now, too. If pressed just the wrong way, Dave can be a very dangerous force to contend with.
On the other hand, for all his need to steer his own life, he has a codependency streak a mile wide and tends to rely on his murdergame family--particularly Meridiana--to provide a kind of constancy in his life. As long as they are there, there's something dependable and predictable in the world. He even has trouble sleeping alone, after waking up so many Friday mornings in a row with the person at his back gone.
Oddly enough, his self-esteem is better than it was going into Dangan Roleplay. He's decided to pursue a career he actually likes and allow himself to want and go after nice things, like a girlfriend he loves and trusts and a home that welcomes him. He's still reckless and unthinkingly brave, but not from a place of sacrifice or low self-worth. He simply takes action before he really thinks about it.
Background: Dave on the MSPA Wiki | Homestuck on the MSPA Wiki
Dave comes from the Game Over timeline, which means everything sucked and then he died.
Previous Game History:
Dave woke up trapped in the Hotel Monofornia with nineteen other "guests," all drawn from different worlds and times. He had no memory of his death or the events leading up to it, so at first, he treated these circumstances as yet another inexplicable series of incomprehensible events in his fucked-up computer game of a life.
He quickly decided he liked these people, especially his fellow teens, the two burly, adorkable space soldiers who adopted him, the indomitable Maya Fey, and, particularly, Meridiana Everett, a gentle, faint-hearted girl whose Victorian upbringing in no way prepared her for the Life of Mutual Killing Monobear set up. From the get-go, he and Meridiana found each other charming, and as time went on and they learned more about each other, they only grew closer, found more deeply routed personal tragedies and feelings in common, and found comfort in each other's presence.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that weeks spent locked to a limited space with feelings running high teaches a kid a lot about people. As the murders began and the terrible reality sunk in, the remaining guests immediately began taking care of one another. Dave, who'd never had a real support network before, found himself being taken care of physically and emotionally for the first time in his life and began learning how to share vulnerability with others, how to connect beyond surface camaraderie. He learned how to trust others with his sincerity, learned what it felt like to be valued.
And every week, he lost more of those people who valued him.
By the beginning of the fifth week, he and Meridiana--who'd supported each other through rough memory regains and bad motives, through harrowing school trials and executions--were going steady. Then, Dave ate poisoned gummy bears and spent most of the week in a fevered daze. It was in that state, with everyone fussing and worrying over him, that he realized--this was what living was supposed to be like. People were supposed to care about him. That realization changed his entire worldview and made him look on his past with something like horror. He'd never realized before that he was a victim.
And at the end of that week, one of his adoptive space dads was killed so that Monobear would stop starving them.
At the end of the next week, his other space dad was gone. Someone he'd thought was a friend tricked a dying girl into killing Agent Washington and led his fellow guests on a merry wild goose chase in the trial until the truth after horrible truth came out:
Meridiana was the killer. She'd died already twice before, been experimented on and puppeted and used in a contest of horror between men, had to live with the guilt of Jack the Ripper murdering young women to keep her alive--and now she was going to die, having found some spot of happiness with Dave.
Dave tried to stop her execution, but all he got for his troubles was blood splatter all over himself
He dedicated all his efforts from there through endgame to trying to get the rest of them out alive and simply moving forward. By the time the Mastermind revealed herself to be a lonely, fucked up little girl trying to build a new army of Despair-spreaders so she wouldn't have to be alone, Dave could recognize that he pitied her, but ultimately, would be moving on with his friends to the future.
And then a miracle happened and he got every dead member of his new family back. He and Meridiana could be together. They could go somewhere new, be someone new.
They moved to Kalos in the Pokémon world, where Dave signed up to help stop more murdergames from happening and Meridiana opened a bed and breakfast, and they have lived there for over a year with the other members of "the teen polyblob," generally being domestic in bizarre ways and giving one another all the affection and support their worlds denied them. Dave got regular therapy and also decided to study Poképaleontology. Around midnight December 24th, 2016, Dave proposed marriage to Meridiana, who happily accepted.
And then he woke up on the train to Ruby City.
Abilities:
✗ Knight of Time
Dave can manipulate the flow of time for himself and others in a number of ways:
- Creating stable time loops, in which he travels back in time but does not create a paradox, thus leaving the timeline intact. I.e., if you were looking back from a point further along that timeline, you would see that he had gone back; therefore, his backwards travel was, is, and always will be part of the timeline.
- Creating doomed timelines, in which he travels back in time and changes a decision, thus causing the timelines to branch. The branch he came from would then be a doomed timeline and collapse on itself, while the changed timeline continues. He will not be using this power in Ruby City, ever.
- Slowing an opponent, seen as part of the Adagio Redshift combined fraymotif in his and Jade's first battle against Jack Noir.
- Speeding something up, seen in Act 7 when he effectively fast forwards the development of Earth C.
- Skipping ahead, seen as he brings the whole party ahead five thousand years in the Homestuck Snapchat post-story material. He will likely never use this in Ruby City, either.
- His powers can also be combined with other Homestuck characters' in fraymotifs, whose effects would vary depending on the elements thrown in.
Homestuck powers seem to be tied into their users' personal development and character. Since DRRP Dave grew in a lot of the ways he needed to, but also is scarred and stalled in certain areas, his control over time is not as complete as Act 7 Dave's would be.
✗ God Tier
Dave can fly and can only be killed if his death is heroic or just. It also comes with some sweet pajamas, but he doesn't actually have those on him as of entering the city.
✗ Combat
Dave is primarily a swordsman and is deadly and swift with a blade in his hands. His greatest assets in combat are speed and reflex honed through long years of training and cleverness that just don't quit. He doesn't pack much of a punch unarmed, though. Not enough weight on him for that.
✗ Monotranslate
A side effect of his time in Dangan Roleplay is that Dave hears any language spoken around him as English.
(Another side effect is that he may or may not bleed pink. It's. It's a thing.)
✗ Turntabling
He's also an experienced D.J. and has been keeping the music up weekly ever since Maya Fey made him promise to during his time in the murder can.
Network/Actionspam Sample: Test Drive Threads! (12/6/2016)
Prose Log Sample:
Eighteen.
It was December 3rd, 2016, and while if he were counting calendar years from the earthfall of the meteor bearing his diapered ass he'd be something ridiculous like twenty-one, the truth was that eighteen was mind-blowing enough. Eighteen years, he'd been alive. Mostly. Eighteen years, and now he'd have been a legal adult. Something he'd never really thought about being.
Sure, he'd considered the usual question of "What are you going to be when you grow up?" But he'd never thought about it concretely, never imagined how he'd actually fill out to fit the cartoon images he came up with. D.J. Skater. Internet celebrity. Famous, definitely, though he never was sure what it'd be for.
He'd imagined all those things, and never imagined himself as them. He'd imagined all those things and mostly seen some kind of younger, jankier Bro.
Dave breathed out in the crisp December air and wondered if he'd never thought he'd survive this long.
There was a box in his pocket. He rubbed the pad of his thumb over the velvet and felt the anticipation buzz through his chest like the measure right before the beat dropped, raising goosebumps all over his skin. He wasn't going to propose to her on his birthday, of course, then it'd be like he was asking her to be his present, she wouldn't be able to say no without breaking birthday boy code.
Not that he thought she would say no. If he had any doubt, he wouldn't be trying this at all. It was the principle of the thing. But still, he had to swallow hard and press his thumb hard against one soft corner of the ring box.
All signs pointed to her saying yes, and that prospect was terrifying, too. Terrifying and unbelievable. He felt alive.
He couldn't have imagined this, even for awesome, internet cartoon D.J. fake Dave Strider. Couldn't have imagined he'd stand on the brink of something so vast and awe-inspiring. Couldn't have foreseen he could fucking love like this.
Dave cleared his throat and checked his watch. 3:14 P.M.
"Okay. If I'm gonna fuck this up, now's the time to come back and stop me," he said to his empty backyard, rocking back and forth on his heels. "Olly olly oxen-free, dude. I've been good all year and all I want for Christmas is spoilers, come on, Santa, baby."
He waited. Neither dejected, rejected three-weeks-from-now Dave Strider returned from the future to tell him the bad news, nor did some alternate version of him--maybe a D.J., maybe alpha Dave, who even knew what happened to that guy, maybe the ghost of Christmas paradox--no one came to stop him. No one came to tell him what he couldn't--or had to--do. He was an adult. The choice was his.
What had he said, Jesus, a lifetime ago? I'm going to the future!
Dave stood alone behind his girlfriend's bed and breakfast (his home) as nothing continued to happen and broke out into a doofy, lopsided, utterly genuine grin.