"The first watch keeps the correct time. Always. Terezi tried starting out of sync the third time they played this game, but without that one thread of the right beat to cling to, the grating wrongness of the other watches knocked Dave out of the mood long before he could hit trance state." Terezi/Dave, idiosycratic forms of bondage.

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.

'There's a whole other story, about that, a girl with mirrors over her eyes and a man who was scared to care about anything.'