jade harley

PLAYER INFO.

name: anna
age: twenty-four!
timezone: eastern standard.
journal or handle name: apocryphal
methods of contact: godtiertits on aim, wrinklefucker on plurk.
characters you currently play: none! :3

OPTIONAL i am apping my character from another game: lies.



CHARACTER INFO.

↪ basic.
character name: jade harley!
character age: nineteen.
canon: homestuck!
au: acts of absolution.

↪ depth.
canon history: jade on the mspa wikia.
au history: Okay so the biggest difference between canon and Acts of Absolution is that Jack Noir didn't completely screw up the kids' session beyond all repair. The next biggest difference is that the session is one huge conglomerate session instead of being the troll's session on one plane of existence and then the kid's session on a completely different one and yet still closely interrelated. The third biggest difference is the Title and Aspect changes that happen amongst the kids. John goes from the Heir of Breath to the Seer of Doom, Dave from the Knight of Time to the Thief of Space, Jade from the Witch of Space to the Knight of Hope, and Rose from the Seer of Light to the Heir of Time.

For the most part, things stay the same up until a certain point. Jade still grew up on an island basically with naught but the guardianship of a huge crazy white dog with the power to muck with the time/space continuum (she was initially raised by her grandfather, but due to a freak accident involving a one Tavros Nitram, he died when Jade was very young). She and the other beta kids are still best friends forever and always. She's still a bit of a dabbler in crazy science, and she's still probably the singlemost excitable kid you'll ever meet. She still can't play the flute for crap. She still uses small colorful rubber bands on her fingers to remember things-- the colors represent the people in her life and the fingers she puts the bands on the events, and it somehow leads to a relatively sane progression of mental events to her. She is still narcoleptic, and still sees things in dreams she doesn't always understand until much later. Becquerel still self-prototypes himself into her kernelsprite as she enters the game, leading her second prototyping of her stuffed dead dreamself (which still died saving John who had yet to wake up on Prospit) to still result in Jadesprite. This leads her to still be what is affectionately called "Dog Tier" when she hits God Tier, in that the sequence of prototyping resulted in her having a pair of fluffy white ears atop her head like her dog's. It's largely untouched as to whether or not these ears are functional as a second set or not, but I like to believe they are.

Now, due to the lack of fucking everything up on the part of Jack Noir, their session progresses almost entirely successfully. Up until the point, that is, that Dave and Jade mistakenly encounter the Black Queen while Rose and John are on Vriska's planet with Vriska and Terezi, letting the troll Seer train John on how to use his Seer powers further to the advantage of the session. Rose grabs John's attention, as John is Dave's server player, in time to show the Black Queen attacking Jade, as she is the Prospit dreamer and thus the Black Queen's threat. Dave unthinkingly takes the hit for Jade, forgetting that the terms of God Tier lead them to be immortal unless their death is Just or Heroic. Seeing as he took the hit from the Black Queen to save Jade since the Hope player was absolutely essential to a session lead by a Seer of Doom, his death counted as Heroic. Jade all but annhialates the Black Queen, securing a partial victory their session, but while Rose and John try their hardest to arrive in time to help Dave, he bleeds out in Jade's arms.

Jade will wind up in Prolecto while she waits for John and Rose to arrive as Dave's body cools in her lap because I am terrible and will destroy everything she loves.

canon personality:
Jade is sort of a hot mess on the best of days.

She grew up mostly under the guardianship of only a dog, as her grandfather was killed when she was young (despite this, she frequently refers to the man as intense and charismatic and avoids his dead stuffed body for fear of being lectured), and on an otherwise uninhabited island. This results in her actions around other people being vaguely skewed, but it's never really overly noticeable in canon. She is narcoleptic, though this is partly based on Vriska's frequent use of her mind powers on Jade who is easily impressionable. She doesn't usually remember having fallen asleep when she reawakens, leading her to be rather quirky and confusing when one first meets her. This narcolepsy problem has become more or less of a not-problem since she ascended to God Tier. Tieing in to her forgetfulness, Jade wears a slew of colorful bands on her fingers to remind her of things and events that she has deemed important at some time or another.

Jade is also pretty much tough as nails. While she is prone to acting younger than the other kids despite being the same age as them, she also Doesn't Take Your Shit, and won't let anything cause harm to her friends. When Jack Noir disconnects Prospit's moon from the planet and it threatens to crush John's dreamself who had yet to awaken on the planet, she shoves her ecto-sibling out of the way and is crushed herself, thus basically sacrificing herself for him. She is a skilled markswoman, and will basically fuck your shit up with a variety of rifles, despite overall being a pacifist.

Somewhere in this, she's also a furry but not a gamer like the rest of the kids, has strangely confusing prophetic dreams which she swears are in no way supernatural (really, she just sees things in the clouds in Skaia, that's completely normal!!), and a ridiculously excitable creature. Her speech and mannerisms greatly resemble John's on a semi-regular basis, though she is completely lacking in his pop culture references due to her isolated lifestyle as a child and types with many, many more emoticons and exclamation points.

personality extension:
Seeing as Jade is older due to the nature of Prolecto and the AU from which she comes, Jade will...

...actually be pretty much no different at all. A little older, a little less of a child, maybe a little calmer. Even more proficient with her rifles. A little more up-to-date on the times, though she still doesn't really care about pop culture or John's movies. She listens when he talks about them anyway, simply because he's become so jaded with the Doom aspect that she relishes the glimmers of his old self.

Acts of Absolution, however, will result in her being a direct foil of her brother due to her Hope aspect. She also has a much closer relationship to both Karkat Vantas, as her aid on mastering the Knight title, and Eridan Ampora, as her aid on the Hope aspect (although really, nobody likes Eridan for long spells, and Jade is relatively prone to punching him in the gills when he whines too much. wweh). She is basically the hope of their session personified, and takes the concept very seriously. She and John are very close siblings and she acts a bit like a mother to him mostly due to the hope aspect. Being that John is the Seer of Doom and until he properly masters the ability has to sleep to see doomed timelines, Jade tends to support his tendency to not sleep in their session with energy drinks and the like. She is constantly keeping a close watch on John, and when he starts to show signs of his aspect weighing too heavily on him-- usually rambling about one timeline or another, or how many people he's seen die --she either hugs him into submission or just paps him until he shuts up. She has, on occasion, nearly shoved the nose of one of her rifles up his nose (or sometimes her fingers, because it immediately makes him stop freaking out because ew, jade, that's his nose.). Basically whatever it takes to chill him out. Jade's shooshpapping of her brother was actually a trait she picked up from Karkat, who performs the same soothing act on Gamzee to keep him from doing as he did in canon and going on a murderous rampage and killing half the troll population. This sort of a huge bonding point for the pair of Knights.

A big difference between canon Jade and Acts of Absolution Jade is the fact that she pretty solidly hates SBURB. Mostly because of what it did to her brother. He went from being this sweet buck-toothed nerdy kid that played pranks on everyone to a wreck of insanity and horrific visions. She also hates SBURB for taking Dave from them, and while she has never said as much to any of them, the Thief's death weighs pretty heavily on her. She will never not fault herself for it, despite the fact that she is fully aware of why it happened and that it couldn't have not happened. This returns, full circle, to her hatred of SBURB, for making her the more important foil to her brother and making the decision to lose their Space player an unavoidable one.

There's a reason she will likely never play another video or computer game as long as she lives.

abilities:
Fetch Modus/Sylladex: Everyone in Homestuck has a Sylladex. It's basically their inventory system, as you will find in any video game setting. Jade has a total of twelve Fetch Modi, because I hate myself and chose to write the girl with more of these things than is healthy. They are all based on unpopular board games. Jade also has a total of 52 captchalogue cards, which is more than the other players and the usual number of cards in a standard playing card deck. When she has no Fetch Modus selected they arrange themselves in thirteen stacks of four.

Jade starts off with the Memory Modus, which is her preferred modus due to her proficiency in precognition. It is based off the game of matching identical sets of cards, and has an even number of captchalogue cards which are purple. She then uses the Jenga Modus, which is based off that annoying as hell game where you have to pull a stupid little wooden block out of a stack of them and hope the entire thing doesn't crash to the ground and make an awful mess. This is a particularly annoying game when it involves your sylladex, since if you pull the wrong block to get something out and everything falls your entire inventory scatters everywhere. Jade's narcolepsy makes this modus completely useless to her. She then moves to the Pictionary Modus, which is what she will be using most in Prolecto. This modus is pretty much hilarious because when used, it summons a Captchalogue Scribblepad, which allows Jade to scribble on it and captchalogue an item. It doesn't matter how horribly any given item is scribbled, the Scribblepad will always associate it with an item (though sometimes not the item Jade is intending). If a scribble is done of an item that is not nearby to Jade, a ghost image will be created. Ghost images are not usable, but hold the same captchalogue code as the actual item, allowing a SBURB player with use of an alchemical device to create them. This will likely not be an ability usable in Prolecto. The Rest of Jade's Fetch Modi have yet to actually be seen in the comic, but there are speculative colors and functions of them through that link. They include Boggle, Monopoly, Yahtzee, Clue, Connect Four, Battleship, Ouija, Guess Who, and Operation.

Strife Specibus: Also along the lines of video game logic, every character in Homestuck is given a particular Strife Specibus. This basically amounts to their weapon, which is generally narrowed to one type of weapon. In Jade's case, she wields Riflekind, which was also used by her grandfather, Eridan Ampora, and Rose's mother (it is mentioned on the wiki that Roxy Lalonde is also a user of this Strife Specibus; however due to the nature of the Acts of Absolution AU, I chose to not mention this, as Roxy is not a character that exists in the AU due to the success of the troll and kid session leading to the lack of an Alpha session as seen in canon). Jade's initial weapon is a simple Hunting Rifle, which she then alchemizes with various other things throughout the course of the game to give her a variety of rifles. Ahab's Crosshairs is a rifle that Eridan makes Jade alchemize soon after she joins the session, but she discards it as being a "Legendary Piece of Shit". Despite this, Ahab's Crosshairs is said to be "about the most powerful weapon the kind abstratus will allow", suggesting it may be the ultimate weapon for the Riflekind specibus. Jade's particular favorite weapons are the Girl's Best Friend and Green Sun Streetsweeper. The latter has not been seen very much in canon, so the full extent of its powers is largely unknown. Since it is the most recent weapon alchemized by Jade, it will likely be the weapon she uses in Prolecto.

In canon, Jade also briefly wielded Paperkind, which amounted to a rolled up newspaper she used to reprimand Bec Noir after he killed a bunch of the frogs she alchemized. Since the very nature of Bec Noir does not exist in Acts of Absolution, Jade has never wielded this specibus in this AU session.

God Tier: Basically exactly what it sounds like. Reaching God Tier means you have ascended all the levels, you have received all the achievements, you are basically a motherfucking God. This renders the player nearly immortal-- though the Catch 22 of God Tier is that should a player be killed under circumstances considered Heroic or Just (such as in the case of Dave Strider in this session-- his death was deemed Heroic since he took a sword to the chest for Jade, and therefore he was not revived as most generic deaths to God Tier players are), they stay dead. God Tier, one can also assume, means that the player has maxed out and reached the full potential of their titles (though this is uncertain, as all of the God Tier players have since "leveled up" additionally).

Knight of Hope: Since the Knight is classified as a warrior, Knights tend to use their aspect in the form of a weapon. Since Hope is not exactly something one can use as a weapon... Jade's power manifests more in morale than anything else. She is, as previously mentioned, sort of the session's personification of Hope, and her brother's stability besides. With this in mind, Jade uses her ability to essentially keep morale up as a weapon in the form of with her around, and John's ability to see what could potentially screw up their session and thus avoid it, they cannot fail. Hope is a feeling, and one that Jade basically envokes in the people around her. This isn't to say she is in a perpetual state of optimism, but simply by virtue of her aspect personifying hope, she keeps her chin up and therefore the chins of everyone else.

weaknesses:
Primarily, John.

Jade has always had a very strong sense of loyalty-- to all of the kids, and the trolls besides, but John in particular strikes a chord. Because the game has changed him so much and left him so jaded and vulnerable, and because of her foiling Hope aspect that basically is what keeps the shreds of who he used to be in tact, she is quicker to make a rash decision when it comes to John than she is when anyone else is involved. He is her only brother, whether via backwards ectobiological shenanigans or otherwise, and she cares deeply for him and, as with the other kids, would do anything for him.

Another point of weakness with Jade is that she has a relatively short temper and a very small tolerance for bullshit. This is why she has such a hard time dealing with Eridan, despite him being her guide on her hope aspect. If you do something wrong she doesn't not forgive, but she will most certainly not forget, and she will make a point of not putting you into a position to make the same mistake again. This returns once again to her overprotectiveness of John-- she is constantly keeping an eye on him and everyone else to ensure that no one, John included, poses any form of threat to him. This is both in duty as his sister and as part of her foiling hope aspect.

Comically enough, one could also view Karkat as a weakness of Jade's. Him being her fellow Knight player, Jade started spending a good amount more time around the ornery troll than she did most of the others (basically if she's not around John, she's around Karkat and sometimes Eridan). With this in mind, she and Karkat grew to be relatively close, leading Karkat to be one of the few in their session to know of Jade's intense hatred of both SBURB and the pecking order it has given to the group of them. He is the most likely of any of the session's players to know how heavily she blames herself for Dave's death, and how manic she could easily become in a situation to protect John.


other information:
Woof.

↪ samples.
first person sample:
[She sits on her knees with her hands poised above her lap like they had been cradling something for barely a full second before she starts and stares down at her lap, wide-eyed. The tears on her cheeks stop abruptly.]

...

so maybe i'm wrong, but i'm actually pretty sure i'm not in this case. dead people aren't realy supposed to just disappear, right?

weird.

[She continues to sit for a moment, before rocking onto her knees and then back onto her feet, stiffly. She is covered in more blood than could be her own.]

so i guess, my question... is has anyone seen a guy in a lot of black wearing sunglasses? he, uh. probably has a big blood stain on the front of his shirt, and wacky striped boots. his name is dave...

[She bites her lip.]

...and he might actually be dead.

[She swipes the back of her hand over her eyes and stands a little straighter.]

also, i'm jade harley, and i'm missing some people. i'd appreciate anyone that can help.

third person sample:
She figured the strangest part was that she wasn't bothered by the blood making her pants stiff in strange places.

Dave hadn't said much-- he never did, really, unless he was rapping or rambling because he was nervous about something. He'd taken the hit, made a sound that, had he not just been run clean through with a sword, would have been marginally comical, and dropped to his knees as the Queen reclaimed her blade.

Jade hadn't thought, she'd only acted.

When the Queen was gone, Dave had slid, carefully as he could it seemed, onto his side, and was smiling at her, his shades skewed. She adjusted them so they sat right on his face, and picked him up, cradling him to her lap and smiling. He'd said something about the animalistic shriek of rage she'd let out as she attacked the Queen. She shushed him, and kept her finger against his lips until the sporadic rising and falling of his chest stopped entirely.

She didn't need to tell Rose and John. John could see them anyway.

His body had started to cool before she allowed the tears.