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.]

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.

The kids and remaining trolls stop by Jane Crocker's house to meet up with the new players and end up getting more than they bargained for when she realizes how much they could use some time to recuperate.

Your name is ROXY LALONDE, and you think that your mother hates you.

Terezi Pyrope is a Neophyte Legislacerator looking to lease an administrative assistant. She was not expecting to find Dave Strider, a secretarial asset with a sense of integrity as strong as her own. Dave Strider is a secretarial asset with "personality problems" that would have gotten him culled if not for his otherwise exemplary administrative abilities. He finds himself drawn into the quadrants of the would-be social reformer who leased him. He finds he is surprisingly Okay with this. Both their lives become interesting (in the curse sense) when the Heiress retains Pyrope and her team.

Your wriggling day is in three days, and while you normally celebrate this event with the apathy it deserves, this particular sweep is different. That’s because it will be your eighth sweep, and it happens to coincide with the arrival of the imperial drones. This is a milestone that every troll looks forward to with a heady combination of excitement and terror. For most trolls, when they reach their eighth sweep, they become adults. Not you. When you reach your eighth sweep, you will die.

In which all of Gamzee's complicated relationships, with his lusus, with sopor and with Karkat, come to a head.