The Heir of Speed (short snippet of a sburb speedrun idea)

[lavendersiren]

Been thinking about the concept of speedrunning SBURB and came up with this. Prolly not gonna continue it since I don't exactly have the advanced enough know-how to write up an optimized speedrun for a game that essentially does not exist/was never exactly described close enough to find the best time-saving exploits in homestuck proper.
Figured it would be short and sweet enough to post over here though.


The Heir of Speed

This isn't the first time, and it surely won't be the last.
Countless iterations behind me, unknown beyond me. Each one a step closer to our ultimate destiny.
My name is あ and I am a sburb speedrunner. It's pronounced like Ah.

I've arrived at the reset construct on my land, the Triangle of Doom. Legend has it that if one were to strike the massive percussion instrument with the Scepter of Calamity, the world would collapse around it.
Legends like that tend to be true in these parts.

My session has gone past the target time, rendering true victory impossible. The only way to win is to pass the baton to the next iteration.

But with that comes the ultimate price: the end of my life.

This game has an odd way of molding its players. It seems as if my quest was built to prepare me for this very moment. Your average person would likely despair over their own fated expiration, especially at the tumultuous age of 13.
I'm not exactly an average person though.

Just as this game has shaped me, it is also what created me. I was always destined to play. I have been primed for this destiny.

I feel no fear as I approach the Triangle. This is what is supposed to happen.

I un-captchalogue the Scepter from my swift modus. I hold it in my hands, feeling the weight, but carry it with expert strength.

I bring down the scepter upon the triangle. It rings out in an ominous tone which rattles me to my core.
It is the beginning of the end, for now.

I send one last transmission to my server, a veritable library of Alexandria for all of my iterations to learn from.
A transmission containing my last batch of discoveries and optimizations. Somehow despite having played this game in 20 different successive timelines, there's still new discoveries to be made that my predecessors never noted down.
I take one last look up at Skaia before it all tears itself apart, myself included.

"May those who come after me improve upon my methods and reach victory..."



It is January 1st, 2000 and it is your 13th birthday.

You are very nervous for this day, if the texts you've read online are accurate. Your parents regret ever showing you that scroll that was found with you after you apparently fell from the sky. From that day on three years ago, you've been obsessed with speedrunning, to the point that you've come to only answer to the shortest possible name you could think of: あ. You're considered ridiculous in your passions, but you don't care.
This world is too slow to contain you.

You've been called a spaz, a problem child, a spider monkey, a speed demon, and countless other insults designed to make you feel ashamed for your quickness. You can't wait to see everyone you ever met all die from the meteors destined to destroy the world today.

You've been anticipating and training for this moment. You've spent countless hours honing your body’s potential for peak athletic performance. You could probably complete that famous obstacle course on tv in record time if you really wanted to. You've been approached by talent scouts wanting you to join their youth sports teams. You've declined most of them. You'd rather not get distracted from your goals.
The distraction of sports would only slow you down.

Your name is あ and you are destined to play the fastest game of SBURB in all of paradox space.

 

[Remi_Chan]

Damn I thought i was the only person with a history of homosuck here :0

The thing about Sburn is it's built to be borderline impossible to beat because it is a universe creation program, and creating and managing a universe is a process that requires some immense traits, in many articles of the comic, particularly in the ominiscient doc scratch's responses to rose, he states that failure in Sburb is very common. We have no statistics but the SHEER amount of potential for things to go awry shows just how fucked it is that we've seen an actual damn beat of the game.

Between double-dealing agents that the "players" are likely to meet only after things have gotten to a point of no return, the utter cluelessness most players have in regards to prototyping, not to mention the absolute seemingly necessary existence of a god-like entity in just about every player's homeworld in which they usually end up proto-typing that said godlike item meaningfully or not- and just the large variables of session parameters like null, void and dead sessions.

When you're playing Sburb you're doing so ALWAYS against the clock, in the alpha timeline it was an early reckoning so the limited time they had already was utterly unpassable thus they had to pull some merger with an alternate universe and collude the two. The alternate universe meanwhile, had essentially no 'clock' in the usual sense, in that the battlefield was locked in eternal stalemate due to a lack of pre-entry prototypings, but a much more dangerous time bomb was ticking, the patience of several derse agents, the dersian monarchy's new head of office, while they got in by the skin of their teeth, they then were basically just waiting in a void session for salvation to arrive because their session was a doomed one before they entered.

This is why Sburb' is hard to do a speed run of, because in most cases you can't win because in the majority of cases, failure is decided, and in the FEW cases of success we've seen the players have been running the very brink of existence to make it work. Usually having to resort to contact with alt-universe beings just to find a way out of a session doomed to fail.

Like the three sessions we saw that were legitimately beaten were Caliborn's dead session (and this one runs the line between legitimate and just bashing through the game's systems), the combined A and B universes, which took 3 entire versions of sburb worth of experience and cascading bullshit to finally beat, not to mention several exploits of the "game's" mechanics in order to achieve this, including a scratch which itself is monstrously difficult to pull off without completely disintegrating all that was already achieved or even the players of that present session.

The third I'm referring to was 'beaten' in a sense, in that they were only one doorknob turn away from the ultimate reward.

The trolls session, which was compromised years before it began and yet also years after it was "finished" due to weird time shit.

They had a very difficult final boss, their black king was egregiously superpowered courtesy of Feferi plopping her aquatic horroribleterrible devilbeast of a lusus in, but even with that shit to manage they succeeded, however they were BRED for the game, Doc Scratch himself personally superceded troll culture into the society it would become in order to build a hardened crew of fighters that would be able to feasibly complete a session, the reason he wanted them to succeed was of course, entirely for the benefit of him and his master.

Sorry, i sure did go on a tangent there, saw this thread and I'm like OOOOH HOMESTUCK TRASH MY FAVOURITE KIND! and now here i am rambling like a lunatic about it lmao

 

[lavendersiren]

Yeah, it is very much a game with a lot of things out to get its players. The kicker is that it has high reward to its high risk, which makes a lot of things possible, if you know what you're doing.
Thank you for reading my short story btw.