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.

Sollux Captor is 22 years old, a successful freelance web designer, and an avid player of the wildly successful MMORPG, Grubquest. Karkat Vantas is 19 years old, a cranky CS-major freshman, and an avid player of the wildly successful MMORPG, Grubquest. Sollux and Karkat are the worst best friends and one of the top player-pairs in the game. In a month, they're meeting for the first time and it's exciting... and terrifying.

You're a late bloomer at nine sweeps, and you don't yet have a concupiscent quadrant filled. This leaves you alone and self-pailing for the duration of your mating cycle—at least, that was the idea. When Karkat bursts in on you, it sort of throws off your plans for the week.

"But he had seen the eggs Sollux chose, plain white and faux-chitinous. They were only objects. He had seen no elaborate pulsing, vibrating tubes concealed around the hive, no geometric anomalies or live creatures in the egg jar, and with growing disbelief Karkat began to wonder if Sollux was inexplicably on the vanilla side of what was turning out to be an entire subculture of oviposition." Sollux picks up some jelly and a dozen eggs.