Homestuck

The midnight crew has been on a rampage. Well mostly Spades Slick. But he and Diamond Droogs, Clubs Deuce, and Hearts Boxcar are now back together. They are in front of a huge safe. This safe was the target of the whole mission. All the dead members of The Felt, and all the smashed clocks are just a bonus. Spades is a bit annoyed that his safe cracker failed to actually open the safe. Hearts had called for some help from Clubs and never got it. Spades seems to have to do everything himself. Clover(4) is one of the last members of The Felt still alive. He’s not a threat to the Midnight Crew, he’s tiny and doesn't seem to fight. He just wants them to answer his riddles. He’s very obsessed with riddles. He mentions he can open the safe in exchange for humouring his riddles.

It seems Clovers(4) ability affects luck. Attempting to shoot him would result in a jammed gun. The attempt to convince him by just batting him with a rolled up newspaper instead. Also still alive is Cans(15). We hadn’t seen this one yet but he’s just charged through a wall kool-aid man styled and knocked Droogs into next week. Literally, Droogs is now one week into his own futures in a grocery store and very confused. He’s overwhelmed by the Prices and Values in the store (another SBHJ reference). Honestly grocery stores seem like a nightmare sometimes and I hate them. The amount of times I’ve just zonned into reality while buying food is astonishing.

Hearts attempt to placate Cans(15) by throwing the headless body of eggs at him. This is a reference to problem sleuth. Also it fails terribly Cans(15) is a friggin giant even to Hearts. Hearts gets punched into a different calendar about horses. This apparently means he will become a horse farmer for the next year. This means the midnight crew is down by half in the span of about 10 seconds. Spade, seeing his odds, decides to use his Crowbar's(7) crowbar on the safe. The safe itself was a temporal artifact, opening it sent Spades to an alternate timeline. In this one everyone is dead except for himself, Sn0wman, and Lord English. Even Clubs died off screen somehow :( . The mansion and all the clocks got destroyed. It’s is just Spades and an opened vault.

The vault only contains a floor panel. It has a spade painted on it and a keyhole/barcode scanner. We saw way back at the beginning of this intermission that Spades had a spades key. He’s always had it, and considered it a good luck charm of some sort. The key is the Rules of Blackjack cards with a barcode on the back. Before he can use the card it’s shot by Sn0wman.

It seems Spades no longer cares that she is the universe itself and charges at her with her own cigarette brand. She has a whip called “the black inches”. With this she rips Spades arm off. Taking her brand back she locks Spades in the vault. Though he now only has one arm and no key he is a caprician. He has a barcode on his wrist like all the others. Just the Wayward Vagabond (WV), or that Jack Noir guy he is branded. He scans his wrist and the door opens to a hatch. This is a similar hatch to the one found by WV, it even has a similar bunker. The bunker has a monitor set-up only instead of 5 displays this one has 12. One in the top left has a weird grey skinned kid with horns on it. Spades seems to know what is happening here. He mentions he’s seen this before and that it's been a long time. Much like WV could be a voice in John Eggberts head, Spades is a voice in the grey kids head. He’s bleeding out but decides to chat with this kid anyway. It seems there isn't much else he can do right now.

Thus ends the intermission. I’ll sum up my thoughts on it. I love the characters, I have always been a fan of the film noir motif. When I first read this it was nice to get a taste of Problem Sleuth. But honestly I didn't enjoy this departure from the main story. It was really hard to read the first time around. I only had so much time per week to catch up on it. Keeping track of timelines, and time skips all the time nonsense was painful. Even during this re-read I had to go back a few times to understand what was happening. I also didn’t think the ending made much sense. I got it set up for some stuff later on, but we never learned what happened in Spades original timeline. There’s a few ways the story could have wrapped up and still allowed for the integration into the main story.