>Connect

Hahahah. I wish I could say yes, but when we started worldbuilding this shit, we hadn’t met any of the Alpha Kids as kids yet when we planned it. Our first two chapters went up around when Cascade and the Start of Act Six did, so that it worked out that way is really cool if totally not intentional.

Actually, I think we did it because before we met Jane and Jake, it kind of seemed like Nanna and Grandpa had got each other’s kid, because she —well, Dad—got the boy and he got the girl. Which totally wasn’t what happened, but oh well, it works even better as an analogy for Roxy and Dirk, especially since they and the blue team are Derse Dreamers.

But yeah! Even though we didn’t do it the way you thought, we did try to do Ancestors as Guardians kind of systematically? Because there’s really three kinds of relationship that (non-dog) guardians have with their respective kids: grandparent, parent, and sibling. So I decided that since there were three kinds and twelve trolls, we could have four of them for each kind: two boys and two girls, half from blue and half from red. And then I switched the blue boys with the blue girls in each same relationship group.

(Although for all practical purposes, because the blue team guardians ended teamed up together for the child-rearing—either because they were married or close siblings—what ended up happening is that the members the blue team sort of got two guardians raising a pair of them, while the red team members were sort of only children. Except not quite for some of them, because of hippies. And the commune.) 

~Bii

SO MUCH WOULD CHANGE. No matter which one or ones survived, so much would change and it would be really complicated to get all those variations. So we shall just get into one, which is: what if ALL of them made it to the end and the Scratch still went wonky?

Because if that happened, all of them might of assumed it was another stage of the game—a really weird one—and so obviously the best thing to do is to get the fuck away from these weird creepy human custodians. And since, due to circumstances, most of them are where they can team up…

Well. The plan, which is very simple, is to wait a couple of days and sneak off in the middle of the night when the humans are asleep and regroup as soon as possible, at a suitable hiding place for everyone. Which is probably fairly close to where most of them are, too bad for the poor douchebags stuck on different sides of the continent or not even ON the same fucking continent.

So Karkat, Tavros, Sollux, Equius, Nepeta and Gamzee run off together in a random direction and end up in Seaside, where they find a metric shit ton of abandoned barracks and buildings from when Fort Ord closed down and so they end up hiding out in the defunct barracks. They have to beat up some of the adult hobos squatting there, but they are troll kids. They can do this shit. Many midnight raids upon the Dunes Shopping Center are made and Sollux ends up actually rigging up wifi for everyone using the stuff they stole from Best Buy.

Meanwhile, Vriska and Terezi have stolen Octavia’s sports car and are having a wild roadtrip down the Pacific Coast. They get stopped more than once and also crash the car they are in a LOT. Which pretty much necessitates stealing ANOTHER car. They go through many, many cars by the time they reach Seaside. 

Meanwhile, Aradia and Feferi wait a couple days until they are being dumped aboard the seaplane to Betty’s island in the Gulf of Mexico and then con the pilot into taking them to California. They also max out a bunch of D.S.’s credit cards via ATM so they will be flush with cash.

Kanaya… is stuck on Hellmurder Island. She tried to get off via the seaplane there, but is stymied in every attempt by her friendly new devil dog lusus, who she has dubbed Jacob after the werewolf in that book her Human Self had been reading at the time of the switch-over. Grandma Dolores is Suspicious.

Eridan… well. Um. Let us just say that there is a reason that the tabloids and papers are all about the POOR LITTLE RICH BOY TURNED PSYCHO KILLER ON THE LAM. It’s not that he went out intending to shoot up a bunch of random European policemen. It’s more like he’s kind of paranoid and twitchy and DAMN IT WHY DID THEY HAVE TO PUT HIS UGLY HUMAN FACE ON THE WANTED POSTERS AND NOT HIS REAL ONE?

He steals a yacht, sets out to sea, then washes up on Kanaya’s island a couple weeks later and ten pounds lighter.

What happens when the Human Ancestors (eventually) track down the rest of them we shall leave to your imaginations.

Yep. By now they do, anyway. A lot of the time they get inducted into the People In The Know when younger members of the family land. So Betty knew it since she was a kid and Dolores showed up. Dolores knew it ever since D.S. showed up. D.S… took a while to be brought into the whole thing because he was at his fancy prep school when Goat (then Milton) showed up and then was under the impression that Betty very sneakily concealed a pregnancy. He assumed the same thing when he came home and there was Nemo and (as he was by then a College Man) went off at Dolores about it and that was when HE got shit explained. For Goat, Nemo, Dee, Mags, and Carmine, however, the jig wasn’t up until Rufio arrived since they were too little to really care when the others of their rough age group showed up and when Octavia got adopted they all assumed she was D.S.’s bastard. Minds were BLOWN.

Octavia, Rufio, Virginia, and Thomas didn’t get to find out until with the Year With All The Meteor Babies. And of course the Crocker family kids know nothing until Sburb. (And some of them are pretty sure that the “adoptions” are cover-up for more scandalous stories.)

But the whole Meteor Baby Origin Story thing really is something that honestly most of the family would rather not think about most of the time.

Oh hell yes. You’ll get a little bit of Human Eridan’s back in my—Biichama’s—Feferi sidestory when it goes up, albeit expressed through Feferi’s viewpoint and there’s a story from his perspective on the docket too, although we don’t know when it’ll be written, since me and Roach are both busy dudes! But he’ll be showing up more in future chapters of Even If/Connect proper, anyway!

First of all, you should be happy to know that you may have convinced me and Roach—this is Biichama—that we may need to write a Troll Kids prequel :D

So yeah, we’ve been talking about this and sort of have an idea of what it would be like. The situation would be a little different for each of them, but John and Jade is pretty similar so we’ll start with them.

Anyway, if it had been John or Jade, it would kind of like having to wrangle Vriska for the other three. Their trolls selves were kind of like Vriska in that they wanted to be good but by human standards they were kind of bad? Anyway, it would be exhausting for the other three, but doable.

If Rose had died… well, she’d be high-handed murdermode Rose pretty much ALL the time and the others would have to get into her romantic quadrants stat. (Dave as her matesprit, John as her moirail, Jade as her auspitice and tyrannicalConsanguinity was already her kismesis.) Anyway, she’d still take them on as bondstrolls, but she’d be much more controlling and less willing to listen to arguments from the others.

With Dave, he’d have a GIANT RAPPING FREAKOUT over the fact that these kids a) know he’s a mutant, b) don’t care, and c) are actually alien replacements for his friends. And yeah, Alien John is claiming that their trollselves wouldn’t care about him being a mutant, but how does he KNOW? It’s probably only that they’re aliens. Only aliens wouldn’t care about his mutation. (Troll Dave has the same kind of core of defensiveness and self-loathing as Karkat does. But he still types in red as an ironic misdirection.)