Chapter Text
The first board you visit on troll 4chan is /mc/ - Mediaconflagration, because Kar’s nerdy hatefriend put you onto real, mil-spec field command simulators as being a thing that exist. Of course, he hadn’t told you that you’d need a new system to run them. He’d let you tie yourself into royal knots trying to get things to work by yourself, before offering to do you a custom build that would fix all your problems. In exchange for your old computer, of course—and that was your first foray into troll 4chan. Trawling /mc/ for stripped-down scene releases of the software you wanted, with Sol in the next window being obtuse at you on purpose.
He’d been pretty vague about the particulars of the website you were scouring for files. “Wwhat the shit is this” had netted you the sort of totally transparent non-response you used to get from Vriska when you’d gotten a handle on one of her particularly important irons, so you’d made a note to yourself to come back at some point, especially since the site portal had mentioned something about doomsday devices that Sol had /rolls eyes at and hurriedly glossed over.
So, in between deeply satisfying bouts of simulated warfare on your new machine and running around winning at extreme sports outside in the moonlight, that was what you eventually did. Your first foray onto the site proper was predictably baffling, though you did eventually find /d/ - Doomsday Devices (after several startlingly pornographic wrong turns). And everything was fine for a while and you saved a lot of pictures, until you’d read one impenetrably inane comment too many…and found the box you could use to respond to people with.
You first start posting on troll 4chan in a manner that still sort of makes you cringe to think about. In fact, you flinch away from the thought so strongly that it’s impossible for you to look back on it even indirectly here through narrative convention. For all intents and purposes, you are and always have been a fully-fledged, socially-acceptable, and usefully-contributing member of Hemonymous, the sort who’d never dream of arguing heatedly & repeatedly for perigees about his own blood superiority until people cracked his tripcode, copied his quirk, and stormed unrelated boards throughout the site with thread after thread of ridiculous evvo psych arguments even you came to recognize as being pretty shoddily put together.
Yeah. You’ve got no connection at all to that guy.
The first picture you post is, thankfully, as properly calculated a venture as any you will admit to actually having taken on this website. So one morning you’re perusing a conspiracy thread on /d/ - Doomsday Devices after a hard night of FLARP, and the OP is spinning some ridiculous yarn about a second Emissary to the Horrorterrors lurking at a certain set of coordinates, unplacated and just waiting to glub you all into oblivion. The alleged site is no more than half an Imperial Measurement Unit out from your hive, it turns out, maybe four hours’ journey if you leave Dad home asleep and just fin it, and you don’t have to worry about the sun if you leave from one of your undersea escape hatches.
So you tell Fef that you’re gonna go swim your property line, and the rest of the thread that you’re gonna swim down to double-check this troll’s claims, and that second thing is what you end up doing. You don’t stick around for the free-for-all that inevitably follows even the most obliquely inferred claim of high blood on /d/; nothing comes across worse on this website than talking yourself in self-defensive circles. That aside, OP is a fag and it is your duty to show them up. This particular /d/espondent’s been a thorn in your side for nights with their shitty theorizing, and now that they’ve finally posted the coordinates you can deliver your final strike.
You’ve been around enough to know EXIF data is a thing, even if not precisely what kind of thing it is. Your camera’s Planetside Positioning System will apparently make each photo speak for itself more eloquently than any painstakingly quirkless argument you could construct, so you take enough pictures of there not being anything down here to prove your point, and then a few more besides, because it was a damn long way to get here and you’re bored. Also a little video, because you can. Scenery’s nice enough, even if benthic is pretty much synonymous with boring, bar the odd hot vent or marauding predator you passed along the way.
When you make it back, you start the very first troll 4chan thread that you are actually going to count towards your lifetime total. No name, no trip, no quirk, just the make and model of your camera alongside your first picture. For a thread title, nothing but the coordinates in question. Austere and refined, no weak points to strike at. The fact that only a seadweller could have taken these pictures lends them all the extra flash they need, being as objectively uninteresting as they are otherwise. You post two more of the set in quick succession before you get your first response.
Hemonymous
>What, original content on /d/?
Another pic, another pointedly bland absence of comment in the comment section. Your hair is going to dry funny if you don’t get up and at least towel off, but you’ve got to finish this.
Hemonymous
>can we get some EXIF verification up in this
Hemonymous
>d0 it ur2elf, layab0ut
And so on and so forth, until you’ve posted them all, at intervals calculated to keep the thread on the front page for as long as possible.
Hemonymous
>EXIF data checks out. Looks like the Emissary theory’s tanked. Good, I hated that guy. But more importantly…we appear to have a blood traitor among us, my frien/d/s.
Hemonymous
>could be a camera strapped to a lusus or something
suomynomeH
>Would you give a camera like that to your fucking lusus? Get real.
Hemonymous
>yyeah tthat’s ttotally aa sseadweller aall rright, aanyway tthey’re tthe oonly kkids wwho gget llusii tthat ccan ggo ddown tthat ddeep rregaradless
For a final touch, you link the video. You’re not in it, same as you’re not strictly in the pictures, but the diffuse light of your bioluminescence is. Somebody out there is probably already inspecting the fucking wavelength for validity but you don’t care, you’re just waiting for the old OP to show up and start blustering about rogue Emissaries again. If they pick new coordinates for their alleged monster deeper than you can go—which is what you’d do, in their situation, if you didn’t want to lose—you’ll just turn around and get Fef to help you out, because some things are important.
Hemonymous
>SHIT ITS A HIGHBLOOD ABANDON THREAD
End Dayz !arENAIuszqqp..
>get the fuck off troll 4chan and go order something from a catalogue, apex predadouche
Oh, here we go. You hide both of these posts and also the next few. Things continue on in much the same vein as you were resignedly expecting, until:
Hemonymous
>WOW you guys seriously? Seriously? There’s attention-whoring highbloods doing their level best to lord it over the rest of us and then there’s hemanons who just so happen to have hatched out with high blood. sufferer’s scarlet nook but you hypocritical little shits disgust me.
What. That…that wasn’t even you, you didn’t type that. They didn’t even type it in your quirk, which would have meant that they were kidding. And then the thread goes on in the new direction:
Hemonymous
>yeah guys a seadweller can be hemonymous if they want I see absolutely no contradiction in terms here
Hemonymous
>TuRn AgAiNsT a HeMoNyMoUs SlUrRyBrO? DiE, fAiThLeSs sCuM! (uvu)
dreadPrognosticatrix .comeATmeBr0..llkyr
>yeah what are you casteist or something lol
Hemonymous
>”(uvu)”, seriously? Get off this board, and take your shitty quirk with you. The seadweller can stay.
Hemonymous
>~we’re all hemonymous here dunno what yr problem is with the OP~
Hemonymous
>OP said they would go forth and then return, and so did they deliver. Some things are sacred. 69 my frien/d/s
Hemonymous
>troll 4chan /d/ is 100% peace love and understanding. the intolerant will be purged from our ranks with cleansing flame :V
Hemonymous
>HEY OP HORNS OR GTFO
They’re defending you. And for scores of similar posts they go on defending you. Okay it’s thinly-veiled ridicule, but holy shit. In minutes the mood of the thread has turned from slavering pile-on to self-congratulatory absurdity. You know intellectually that you’re just a convenient punchline, that you probably would at least fantasize extensively about culling any given one of them in disgust if you ever did meet (though it’s not like you’re in the habit of skulking around in other people’s basements, so the likelihood is low, hah), but. But.
Of course things devolve soon enough into a bitterly self-aware circlejerk over how quickly and thoroughly the black knight brigade of presumably-not-so-high-bloods showed up to fight for your right to post on troll 4chan. But for that little while, a threadful of complete strangers had been wholly focused on you; not the shop you were talking, not the conversation you were furthering, not whatever strongly-worded opinion on resonant crystal lattices you were putting forth. Some of them had even sounded dumb enough to have really meant it, and you know from dumb enough to be really meaning things. You’d started an actual good on-topic thread about doomsday speculation, and then a bunch of people had shown up and fought each other to the post limit in it for your sake, instead of closing ranks against you and attacking.
You maybe scroll up and read the comments left by hemonymous users leaping to your defense, again. Okay a bunch of times. Okay, so you follow that damn thread all the way off the edge of page 15, at which point you screencap it and save it to your desktop. The old OP never showed and you don’t even care. You’ll get them the next time they dare pollute your favorite board with their completely transparent attention-seeking ploys.
Eridan: Well, that was successful! Start another thread about it! ==>
Holy shit, no, have you even been paying attention? That would be a completely transparent attention-seeking ploy. The whole point of this website is keeping your own horns down while cluckbeastpecking other people into line as viciously as possible. Which you find hypnotically compelling for some reason, on par with the actual doomsday content of this board. You’ve been lurking long enough now to know which end is up about these things; if you want more of the right kind of attention for your original content, there’s only one way to get it without turning yourself into a(nother) shitty running joke: you’re gonna have to wait for the exact right time to strike, same as every other campaign you’ve ever been in.
You decide to take a break from /d/ - Doomsday Devices, before you fail to resist your next mysterious urge to fuck things up beyond repair. You shut down the overclocked beast of a hybrid hiveframe you did eventually wrangle out of Sol, peel out of your salt-stiff swim clothing, and plop at last into your recuperacoon for the day, stretching and kicking and shifting your sore limbs. You drift off, like always, to the distant whispers of fight and flight in the back of your head—and you’d like to imagine that, today at least, the dreams soothed away by the slime would have been mostly of crushing your foes.
Just before you slip away entirely, the very last couple of posts that snuck in before your thread expired return to you for some reason.
Hemonymous of the Bathypelagic | Condy is my !SHARKPUP..bdsypdkvl
>Fish thread?
>Ah, too late, and past the image limit. Never mind.
Hemonymous
>HOW DOES HE ALWAYS KNOW
-
When you wake up, you take your Dad out for his evening constitutional. Then you troll twinArmageddons on your palmhusk under the table during breakfast, while strifing briskly with your father in an on-going dispute about your piss-poor dining etiquette.
-- caligulasAquarium [CA] began trolling twinArmageddons [TA] --
CA: hey sol wwhats a fish thread
He answers you immediately.
TA: iit’2 funny becau2e you thiink ii’d ever actually tell you the an2wer two that que2tiion.
CA: look you piece a shit i knoww its some dumb troll 4chan thing
CA: but all i get when i try to look it up is actual fuckin fishin line in vvarious tensile strengths an gauges
TA: okay, ii would liike two take thii2 moment two iinform you of my 2tandiing poliicy regardiing not under any ciircum2tances 2erviing a2 troll google for other people.
CA: an wwhos hemonymous of the bathypelagic
A long pause.
CA: sol
CA: sol are you still there
CA: do i havve to pretend something electronic of mine is broken because i wwill
CA: sol is this a dead pixel
CA: sol i think i got a dead pixel on this screen wwhatevver shall i FUCKIN do
TA: ehehe 2hut up 2hut up ehehehe oh my god ii can’t BREATHE.
Oh, there he is.
TA: where the 2HIIT did you hear that name?
TA: no, on 2econd thought ii re2ciind that query.
TA: ii don’t thiink ii really want two know.
TA: ju2t, PLEA2E tell me you haven’t been po2tiing piic2 of your2elf, then let u2 never 2peak of thii2 again.
CA: i havvent
Pics? What?
TA: ok good, are we done here or diid you actually have a dead piixel?
TA: becau2e you can’t really do anythiing about tho2e except get a new moniitor and let me have the bad one 2econdhand.
TA: ii’ve never miinded them, at lea2t not on non-e22entiial dii2play2.
CA: no sol i do not in actual fact havve any fuckin dead pixels
CA: im on my palmhusk anywway i dont think these kindsa chitinous screens evven havve pixels
CA: and by the wway stop panting so obvviously after my stuff havve i evver told you howw unnattractive that is
TA: then ii for one am two hundred percent done wiith everythiing even periipherally a22o22iiated wiith thii2 conver2atiion.
-- twinArmageddons [TA] has blocked caligulasAquarium [CA] --
Huh.
He’d blocked you without responding to a single one of your jabs. Ordinarily, you’re able to keep up the back-and-forth for at least as long as it takes you to do the dishes. The last time you’d gotten this degree of evasiveness from a person, it’d been Vriska frantically backpedalling after having accidentally whistled at your ass on the battlefield less than a week after your breakup (you’d completed your final subadult molt a little early, and hadn’t bothered to tell anyone before showing up to FLARP).
But Sol’s seen you before. There’s something you’re not getting, possibly from being distracted by the mechanics of texting while aggressing your Dad for the right to keep doing so while up to your elbows in device-shorting dishsoap (it’s not like you aren’t being careful!). Why’s Sol flustered about pics now? Hell, he’s already been in your hive, even, to bring over your command simulation system. He’d been just as unflappably businesslike and docile then as Kar had sworn up and down he would be, probably thanks to sweeps of tech support hivecalls teaching him how not to be a target. In all this time the two of you have idly kept up contact, he has never once been so obviously put off-balance as you just saw.
Okay, you think, clattering the last bit of silver into the drying rack. Substitute thread for thread and seadweller for fish and it being some sort of degenerate pornography thing, probably, for Sol’s attitude when pressed on it. Though why any of that would involve posting pictures of yourse—
The noise you make when you finally figure it out is another thing from your past you’d prefer not to be associated with, if only because you haven’t squawked a laugh that badly since you were four.
He’d thought you might have been doing WHAT?
Why?