Sharpie

The Homestuck Archives - Episode 1 - Gray

Ahh! Oh! Yes! Its spinning! Is this uhhh recording now?

If I was doing this show in-character as some parody of The Archivist, slowly losing my mind, I would start off by trying to pass this off as some kind of warning. The Fears weighing down on me at last second, my body trying to give me one last chance to make the choice to not go down this one-way road.

But I'm just myself. And I just bought this hunk of junk at the thriftstore after binging 150 episodes of a spooky podcast.

Anyway. I'm Skyplayer. I run Homestuck.info.

Over my years as a self-proclaimed archivst under the "Homestuck.Info" brand, I've collected a number of.. statements. Accounts from individuals in the fandom with some... unusual properties to their experiences. I had no clue what to do with these until Aysha recommended me "The Magnus Archives". A horror podcast that has been the center of a recent fascination from the Homestuck fandom. It seemed a fitting format to recount these. I won't end up having to fight malevolent beings from higher dimensions or becoming a monster myself, but these should be entertaining to say the least.

Let's get to it then?

Statement of Tarry, no second name given, regarding an ill-planned make-up treatment. Original statement given June 10th, 2018, committed to tape October 14th, 2019 by Skyplayer, Head-- Only Archivist at Homestuck.Info.

Statement begins.



TARRY:



I've wanted to be this way since I first saw them. It was around 2010. I've always gone to comic and anime conventions, the kind with thousands of people crowded in one big room, unshowered bodies in a mass huddle, trying to buy trinkets and see celebrities. If you went upstairs and looked down upon the convention floor it looked like an anthill of very angry frantic ants going this way and that. And I found myself stood in the center of it all. Completely alone.

I've always been a bit of a loner. Never had a lot of friends. Never took up anything like Drama club or a sport. Sometimes I'd go to anime club, hoping to meet someone that would go to a convention with me. But I always ended back up in the middle of that massive crowd all by my lonesome. Absent mindingly pacing the artists alley, spending too much on anime merch.

Then it... yeah it was in 2010. I saw a large group of teenagers, about my age, making a ruckus. There must have been a couple dozen of them. They looked more like a large family than a group of friends. They all shared the same black hair, the same plain t-shirts with weird symbols. The same brightly colored horns. The same. Gray skin.

I assumed it was a new flavor-of-the-summer anime I hadn't heard of, so I worked up the courage to talk to them. I say that casually like it didn't take me over an hour, but I'm proud of myself that I did. Although, I couldn't begin to comprehend the impact that choice would make on my life.

Homestuck.

They were dressed as characters from a webcomic called Homestuck.

None of them even knew each other. And these gray-skinned kids kept appearing , more and more, and each one joined the growing crowd and every single one of them meshed in with the group immediately. Like they shared a common enough trait that they were instantly part of the family.

I wanted nothing more than to join them. To be gray with them.

So I read that damned comic. Only took about a month. It wasn't as long back then, about half of what it is now. It enraptured me. I couldn't think about anything else other than Homestuck. Every other aspect of my life just.. slipped away.

The next con I managed to bunk with a couple people from anime club. Not anyone I would call a friend though. They hadn't read Homestuck. They weren't part of the Family. Nonstucks, We called them. They didn't understand. They couldn't understand what I did.

In hindsight, I can't explain what overtook me. Its nothing I would have done as my rightminded self. At least, as my self before... reading. But that obsession. That NEED to join the family. To be one. of. them. I had to be gray.

Our hotel room had a bath. Rather unusual for one, but I had pooled my resources with the Nonstucks and we had gotten a nicer room. Just had the one bathroom though. I called dibs on it first, I knew it would take some time to... transform.

I turned the bath faucet on. A nice warm temperature. I waited until the mirror had begun to cloud with steam. As I lowered myself into the water, I was... enveloped in its heat. My body cried out but I made no attempt to leave the water or to cool it down. I needed it to be hot. I needed it to melt.

I reached for the container I had brought in with me. A big tupperware tub. I pulled out of it, a gray sharpie marker. I took off the cap. I held an end in each hand. And twisted and pulled and the cheap glue holding it together snapped. Liquid ink oozed from it like bloody wound. A beautiful silver ichor. It overflowed from my hands, dripped down my arm, and began tinting the water with the same beautiful gray.

Another sharpie. Cap off. Snap. Gray.

Another. Another. Another. Beautiful beautiful gray. A silver ink encompassing my body. It was a Baptism. I was becoming part of the family. I would finally have friends. Real friends. Who understood. Who shared my experience. Real. Gray. Friends.

I plunged myself under the water. It tasted like.... metal. Like blood. And it enveloped me completely.

I don't remember beyond submerging. Or I do, but, I didn't feel any gap in time where others claim there was plenty. I just... resurfaced... and I was in the hospital.

I had to pay the cleaning bill for the hotel room. My fake friends I went with refused to speak to me. I missed the meet-up. I had some skin problems. I was lucky it wasn't cancer. But nothing a few years of ointment didn't clear up, other than the obvious. The psychological damage was negligible. After plenty of tests, I was still a fine, healthy, teenager. A bit of the usual teenager depression but nothing thats followed me into adulthood.

I still... Like Homestuck. I can't blame it for what I did. I've often asked myself if I was acting of my own accord, or under some horrible compulsion caused by that comic. But... its just a comic right? Maybe I should get some more therapy sessions in, now that its been a few years. At least I have friends now. It may only be in online chat rooms, but I'm a Homestuck. Still... part of the family. Still.... gray.

STATEMENT ENDS



Wow that... it does feel good. Feeding the eye or whatever. I'm sure Jon has fun recording these. The actor I mean, the character has been having some trouble lately huh?

Aside from recieving this statement first hand at Anime Expo last year, I've spoken to a witness. One of Tarry's aquaintences that stayed in the hotel at the time of the incident. Paired with talking to the hotel, which can confirm the clean-up job and the still-enforced skin-paint cosplay ban, it all checks out.

But then there's the real reason I'm using the Magnus Archives format. At this point you're still listening to this web show, enjoying a short horror story. Probably a fan of Magnus too, you're used to this. You can listen to this with the comfortable knowledge that it's all just a fictional show, nothing but fancy fanfiction. And I envy you.

I saw Tarry when she told me this story. Long before Aysha had told me about the Magnus Archives and the idea that crazy lore can be built around higher-being gods that cause this all to feed off our fear. To bring it to a similar level of Homestuck itself, interweaving plots and theories and characters.

When I met Tarry, it had been... 8 years after she took that bath. And I had nothing but her word for it, nothing to compare it to. Just this story. And the fact that her skin was still gray.

End Recording.