Act 1: The Note Desolation Plays
Homestuck begins with JOHN EGBERT, a thirteen-year-old boy standing in his bedroom on his birthday. He likes terrible movies, amateur magic, paranormal nonsense, and computer programming he is not very good at.
Before anything important can happen, he spends a while fighting with his absurd SYLLADEX inventory system and getting pestered by his online friends.
John is waiting for the beta of a computer game called SBURB to arrive in the mail. Unfortunately, DAD has already brought the mail inside, which means John must brave the kitchen and survive a messy STRIFE involving hammers, cakes, and pies before escaping with his packages.
One package, a birthday gift from turntechGodhead (TG), contains the stuffed bunny prop from Con Air. Another contains the Sburb beta. Two more parcels remain inconveniently locked in DAD’s car, including John’s copy of the SERVER software.
John installs Sburb and connects with tentacleTherapist (TT) as his server player. Through the server interface, TT can manipulate John’s house like a game board: moving furniture, modifying rooms, and deploying a collection of increasingly suspicious machinery.
The new machinery includes a CRUXTRUDER, TOTEM LATHE, and ALCHEMITER, which seem to turn punch-card data into physical objects.
Opening the Cruxtruder releases a glowing KERNELSPRITE. TT, following the game’s instructions to “prototype” it, drops John’s maimed harlequin doll inside and turns the sprite into a one-eyed, one-armed jester.
The Cruxtruder has also started a countdown. John soon discovers what it is counting down to: a meteor headed directly for his house. He and TT race to make sense of the machines, carving a strange cruxite totem while TT’s internet connection repeatedly fails.
The perspective finally switches to TT in person: ROSE LALONDE, John’s friend on the opposite side of the country.
Her house has lost power in a violent storm, severing her connection at the worst possible moment. Rose carries her laptop up to the observatory and reconnects through an unsecured wireless signal coming from a mysterious laboratory nearby.
Rose reconnects just in time. John uses the carved totem to alchemize a tree bearing a blue apple. With seconds left on the countdown, he takes a bite. John’s entire house vanishes a moment before the meteor obliterates the neighborhood.
END OF ACT 1.
Act 2: Raise of the Conductor’s Baton
John and his house have been transported to a strange realm called the MEDIUM, where the house now sits atop a towering column above a blanket of clouds. The Harlequinsprite’s kernel hatches and splits apart, sending two copies flying away while the ghostly sprite remains behind with John.
A mysterious voice begins issuing commands directly into John’s head. It belongs to the WAYWARD VAGABOND, a black-shelled wanderer living years in the future.
WV has found a strange underground station whose terminal displays John like the protagonist of a text adventure. Its keyboard lets him submit commands.
Rose’s attempts to help John go increasingly wrong. The Harlequinsprite accidentally absorbs his Nanna’s ashes, then Rose tries to retrieve the Sburb server disc from DAD’s car so John can connect to her. Her laptop dies mid-lift, and the car plummets into the abyss along with the disc and the remaining packages.
With John’s server disc gone, he asks TG to connect to Rose instead. TG is finally introduced in person as DAVE STRIDER, an impossibly cool thirteen-year-old in an apartment full of swords, turntables, and deeply troubling puppets.
His own Sburb discs are promptly stolen by a rambunctious crow, which Dave impales with a sword and accidentally launches out the window with the discs still attached. He now needs BRO’s copies.
Meanwhile, meteors are falling around Rose’s home and the surrounding forest is on fire. After a STRIFE with MOM, Rose heads through the rain to the mausoleum of her dead cat JASPERS, where a portable generator gives her laptop one last source of power and internet.
Rose reconnects to find that the second prototyping has transformed the Harlequinsprite into NANNASPRITE, complete with John’s grandmother’s appearance, personality, memories, and alarming enthusiasm for baked goods. At last, John has someone who seems to know what the hell this game actually is.
Nannasprite explains that beyond the Medium, at the center of the INCIPISPHERE, lies SKAIA. Forces of light and darkness fight there, and the light side is destined to lose.
John’s adventure will lead him through seven gates toward Skaia and, somehow, toward something Nannasprite calls the ULTIMATE RIDDLE.
First, Rose has to build John’s house upward toward the FIRST GATE. Meanwhile, harlequin-costumed IMPS climb up from below and swarm the house. Killing them produces GRIST, which Rose can spend on construction and John can use for experiments with Sburb’s alchemy system.
John and Rose discover that the codes on captchalogue cards can be punched into new cards, carved into totems, and fed back through the Alchemiter.
Better yet, two item codes can be combined. John uses this breakthrough to fuse his claw hammer with the Green Slime Ghost pogo ride to create the POGO HAMMER.
The new weapon arrives just in time. Two CRUDE OGRES begin climbing toward the house, and the forest fire finally overwhelms Rose’s generator, cutting her connection again. John heads for the highest point of the house to face the much larger underlings alone.
Dave, meanwhile, searches BRO’s apartment for the missing Sburb copies, navigating a gauntlet of swords, smuppets, LIL CAL, and layer upon layer of weaponized irony. He finds no game. He does, however, find a note summoning him to the roof. Dave arms himself accordingly.
Years in the future, WV has more immediate concerns. He finds a pantry full of canned food but no can opener, establishes the thriving democracy of CAN TOWN, and consumes several things no reasonable creature should eat, including a chunk of uranium.
After locking himself out of John’s terminal, WV discovers an APPEARIFIER, a machine that can retrieve objects from elsewhere in space and time, so long as doing so would not create a paradox.
He uses it to free a firefly named SERENITY from a block of amber. Another mysterious countdown is almost finished, so the two make a break for the exit.
Act 2 closes with a FIVE TIMES CLIFFHANGER COMBO: WV’s command station blasts out of the ground and flies west, a white-shelled PEREGRINE MENDICANT discovers another station, MOM opens a secret passage beneath Jaspers’s mausoleum, DAD escapes his imp captors, and Dave meets BRO on the rooftop.
WV finally lands beside a set of mysterious frog ruins.
END OF ACT 2.