Rewind and Repeat

I stood in the center of the largest square in Mutationis. There were crowds of highbloods around me, coldblooded blues and even colder purples, and there was the yellowblood standing in front of me. He was covered in his own blood, his mouth agape and drooling blood, but when he pointed at me I looked down to see I was only in my grey leggings and was covered in my own blood too.
Bright, candy red blood dripped from my knuckles onto the mosaic covered ground below me, betraying my mutation for the entire square to see.
The yellowblood’s arm dropped and he gave a sympathetic smile before crumbling onto the ground, dead.
I looked up to see rows and rows of trolls stand, and one by one they ran toward me, but I felt an arrow pierce through my back, snapping my spine and-

I woke up screaming from a dream I can’t remember.

======

There was a marketplace that was closer to my hive cluster that had a price range more suitable to the trolls around here, yellowblood and lower. The merchants were mostly olivebloods, but there were a few yellowbloods too. It was only a hour or so walk there, but I left early. I slept fitfully, having a nightmare some time around noon and not really sleeping after that, so I made a list of groceries I needed to get and set out.
It was a clear night, the moons hanging in the sky with thousands of stars in between, and the wind wasn’t nearly as strong as the other night. It was still cold, as it was still warming up from first winter, so I grit my teeth and kept moving.
Most of the way to this settlement, Principium, cut through a forest and was lined by trees on both sides and under a canopy of leaves during the perigees that weren’t absurdly cold. There were enough leaves to count as an attempt toward a canopy, but it was still too cold for there to be a proper flush of leaves.
There were also enough leaves to block the moons’ light in some places, so light washed the floor in patches, and shadows covered the rest. I probably would have been able to give more of a shit if I wasn’t exhausted and if I cared about aesthetically pleasing environments in the first place.
I kicked the dust on the path as I walked, my gastric sac tied in a knot. Anxiety and paranoia had it’s hold on me, and I spent most of my walk there with a hand on my sickle. I tried practicing with two of them last night, but spent more time looking like an idiot than anything else. I’ll get it, eventually.
I got to Principium and took one of the main roads to get to the marketplace, unlike usual where I just take side roads cause it’s faster, and stop at a corner to dig my list of shit I needed to get out of the satchel I carried for food runs. It wasn’t long seeing as after getting the new sickles I didn’t have much money left, but it had food on it that could last me awhile.
I rounded the corner and started weaving my way around the trolls that were also in the marketplace. They weren’t nearly as tall as the highbloods, but they were still taller than me so it was still annoying trying to find the stalls I needed to go to, especially since I came into the marketplace from a different place than usual.
I dodged rushed trolls and swerved around younger trolls, couldn’t be any older than wrigglers, that were being shoved around in the crowd.
There were always more trolls in the lowblood marketplaces because there was a higher population of lowbloods on this planet than highbloods and they were more likely to band together in settlements than highbloods, who thought they were too good to live near anyone of warm blood. They still had marketplaces and settlements, but those were almost completely populated by highbloods except for the slaves and servants.
I looked down to my list again, which only had grubloaf, coffee, rice, and any sort of meat I could get my claws on on it, and when I looked up to try and see where the hell I was going I ended up walking into someone and whacking my face on their horns.
“What the hell are you doing in the middle of the fucking pathway? Do you want to get knocked over and trampled like a crumpled up piece of cardboard?” I snapped. The troll didn’t move and when I was done rubbing my face I looked up to a familiar set of horns.
It was Aradia.
What the hell was she doing all the way out here?
“Aradia? You don’t live anywhere near this shithole, what are you doing out here?” I asked. She still didn’t move or respond, just stared off into the distance.
“Hello? Alternia to Aradia, is your thinkpan functioning at all?” I crossed my arms over my chest. She was blank faced, slightly pale, and non-responsive.
I waved a hand in front of her face, “Are you going to respond like a normal troll or are you going to stand there like one of those stupid troll porcelain dolls all night?” She still didn’t move.
I sighed, exasperated, “Fine, I’ll talk to you later I guess, if you don’t get trampled by all these unfortunately existing nubsuckers.” I step around her to walk past but suddenly her claws were digging into my shoulder and her head had snapped to stare at me dead in the eyes. All the overheated blood in my body froze when I saw that her eyes were starting to change color to burgundy. If hers is beginning to change, then mine will be soon as well. I’ll have to find some way of concealing them, or I was as good as dead.
She stared at me for a few moments before I snap, “Now you realize I’m here? What the fuck?”
Aradia didn’t respond fore another few moments before speaking in a hollow voice that I didn’t recognize, “You will be the turning point in the tide of our society, and even our race itself. You cannot fail.”
I stared at her. First Terezi’s creepy, cryptic warning and now Aradia’s being cryptic too? My eyes narrowed and my lip turned up in a snarl, “What is with these cryptic message bullshit? First Terezi and now you? Will someone with half a thinkpan tell me what is going on?”
Her face returns to being as still as stone and she said nothing more. Her claws stopped digging into my shoulder and she turned and walked away. She avoided the other trolls with ease, mostly due to the fact that they didn’t appear to be moving. At all.
In fact, the entire marketplace had gone silent since I had walked into her, but I hadn’t processed that until now. The entire marketplace was frozen. At least until she disappeared from view as I stared after her. If I hadn’t known any better I would have thought that time had frozen.
I kept staring until another troll walked into me, yelling, “Watch it!”
I shook my head to clear it and looked at my list again. Between they fact that I was having a hard time figuring out where I was exactly and the weird stillness from Aradia, I was dazed and distracted. I found the first stall and almost bought the wrong kind of grubloaf, shaking my head again and glad I caught it before I actually bought it, and the second took me ages to find but I managed to get the right coffee.
I got to the third stall only to find it wasn’t the right one, this one sold meat from the sea, which was disgusting. I backed into the crowd again and spent another ten minutes trying to find the meat stall that I normally went to.
I managed to buy some cheaper meats and started heading back to my hive. It barely registered to me that it was late in the night until I was walking through the forested trail and it was much darker than it was when I had gone through it the first time. I was more focused on Aradia’s message.
I had no idea what she was talking about. I was an insignificant troll that was likely going to meet his end soon if he couldn’t figure out how to conceal his eyes as they changed color. I wasn’t a turning point for anything, this made about as much sense as Terezi’s warning.
I walked back into my hive, dropped everything in the mealblock, and all but ran up to the ablutionblock. I slammed the door shut behind me and almost literally pressed my face to the reflectionpane. I stared straight into my eyes, looking for any tinge of red that would give me away.
I wasn’t sure if it was my eyes going slightly bloodshot from paranoia, but I noticed a very faint tinge of red around my pupils that would very soon fill my irises and show off the mutant color that pulsed through my veins.
I was really going to need to figure out how to hide that, and quickly. Contacts possibly, if I could find someone who knew how to make them that wouldn’t cull me on sight. I was listed as a burgundyblood in the Imperial records along with every other burgundyblood on this planet, so trying to get contacts that would pass as burgundy would be incredibly suspicious, and there was no way I would be able to trust anyone with this. I was going to have to do this on my own.
But how?
I turned on the water and splashed it all over my face to try and clear my thinkpan, but only succeeded in making me cold. Turning around, I grabbed a towel and dried my face and hair. I stood there with my face in the towel for a moment or two before tossing it over the towel rack and heading back downstairs to the mealblock to put groceries away. I was hungry, but nothing sounded appealing. I stared in the thermal hull for a good five minutes before shutting it and heading upstairs.
My respiteblock had clothes everywhere and a few nutrition plateaus so, groaning, I cleaned. It didn’t get my mind off anything, especially my eyes changing color.
I ran a hand through my hair as I walked up the stairs, stressed. I had a few reviews to do, maybe doing one of those would get my mind off this shit. I grabbed one of the books I had started reading and sat against the wall to read it. This one so far wasn’t the best I had read, but it was alright. The plot was pretty typical, two trolls that started red and flipped black. The main character’s moirail ends up auspisticing and their moirallegiance disintegrates, and the main character’s matesprit/kismesis ends up going pale with her former moirail so naturally the main character flips her shit. I was about three-fourths of the way through it, I could probably finish it tonight if I didn’t get distracted.
I was still distracted, but I managed to focus enough on it to finish it after about an hour. Dawn had to be two hours away minimum, so I figured that I could try to get at least some of the review written.
I tossed the book on my desk and woke up my husktop to find a Trollian window flashing at me. Sollux had decided to troll me, but it appears to have been from a few hours ago.

—twinArmageddons began trolling carcinoGeneticist—

TA: karkat have you heard anythiing from aa toniight?
TA: 2he'2 deciided two drop off the face of alterniia and ha2n't repliied two me or kn
TA: you talk two her 2ometiime2, diid ii pii22 her off or 2omethiing?
TA: karkat an2wer your damn trolliian we both know you don't get off thii2 2tupiid thiing.
TA: 2he ha2n't trolled me at all 2iince la2t niight, whiich ii2 unu2ual.
TA: 2he'2 fuckiing dii2appeared, have you 2een her?