After three years out of contact, John and Karkat can finally talk again. The conversation doesn't go quite the way they were expecting. Now the three weeks it will take the golden ship to match velocities with the asteroid seem like three million. Why are the laws of physics so unkind to desperate teenaged boys? [an antidote to sadstuck! if this is not the fluffiest, most sentimental xenoporn ever written, i will eat my writekind specibus.]

In which a mutant too famous to cull is dropped like a grenade into the midst of the peace process, a foolish monarch proves himself secretly shrewd, the power of friendship functions as a force multiplier, and it is discovered that in the Great Game of espionage, the dealer does not always win.

Those fucking humans. You remember. They won. They won everything. They even won you. Won all of you back from your dead-end fucking universe and took you with them into their reality-spraining victory. Cheating nookstains didn’t even fight; they won by ‘shenanigans’, that peculiarly human trick of winning-by-not-playing. And in that inside-out, backwards way of theirs, they never even considered keeping all the spoils for themselves.

- carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling ectoBiologist [EB] - CG: THE INEVITABLE HAS OCCURRED. CG: SOME MICROORGANISM ENDEMIC TO THIS FECULENTLY OVERCROWDED PLANET HAS MUTATED SUFFICIENTLY TO COLONIZE MY DEFENSELESS BLOODSTREAM. CG: MIMICKING PRECISELY THE SCENARIO FROM THE HUMAN LITERARY CLASSIC ‘WAR OF THE WORLDS’ CG: EXCEPT THAT INSTEAD OF SAVING THE HUMANS FROM DESTRUCTION AT THE GRUESOME APPENDAGES OF MINDLESS GENOCIDAL MONSTERS, THIS HEROIC MICROBE HAS SAVED YOUR PATHETIC ASS FROM MY COMPAF;DS’ CG: COMPARATIVELY MILD WRATH AT YOUR COMPLETE FUCKING INABILITY TO EVER DO DISHES EVER. CG: SO BASICALLY NOTHING LIKE THE BOOK AT ALL EXCEPT THAT I’M DISEASED.