Character canon: Homestuck Fancharacter (in continuity with the AU fanfiction Miracle Child, although she has not actually appeared in the story).
Canon point: Shortly after Miracle Child Ch. 36
Physical Description: Jetshard is a physically mature jadeblooded troll - humanoid, but with slate-grey skin and horns that shade from deep orange at the base to golden yellow at the tip. Horn shape varies from individual to individual; Jetshard's are symmetrical, gently curved, and forked near the tips. She's about 75 years of age (35 solar sweeps, by Alternian reckoning), although as troll lifespans vary dramatically by blood-caste, she would appear to be in approximately her early thirties by human standards.
Jetshard stands a little over six feet tall, not including her horns, and has an athletic build. Like all adult trolls, her eyes have golden sclerae and irises that reflect the color of her blood, although Jetshard habitually wears glasses, goggles, or visors with tinted lenses that make it difficult to pick out exactly what shade of green her eyes are. She wears her black hair in an undercut with enough length on top that, if not intentionally slicked back, it falls into her face. Her voice is a somewhat rough alto.
Her makeup is typically simple, lipstick and eyeliner both in stark black; she never wears her blood color in cosmetics, and sometimes she does not bother with cosmetics at all. She favors close-fitting, androgynous clothing worn in multiple overlapping layers of different materials and opacities - usually shades of black and dark grey, with occasional accents of bright red or, more rarely, a brighter tint of her blood color. Her sign - one of several astrological symbols for Pluto - is generally visible somewhere on her person, although it's often rendered in grey or black rather than her blood color. The overall effect is generally a kind of grungy cyberpunk - although it should be noted it's grungy in the sense of hard-worn and mismatched, not in the sense of dirty, as Jetshard is meticulous about her personal hygiene and the cleanliness of her effects.
About the Character: Jetshard's early life was unremarkable, as troll childhoods go - she made it through the brooding caverns as a grub, was adopted by a large non-troll animal (in Jetshard's case, her lusus was a large, mothlike creature she called Mothmom, which may be recognizable to human cryptozoologists). The cavern attendants named her Lithah Melane, based loosely on the vocalizations of her lusus. She pupated and settled down on the outskirts of an urban area populated entirely by other juveniles to grow up. As a child, she had an interest in medicine that was as much practical as it was academic. On a less practical note, she also had an avid, if skeptical, interest in conspiracy theories, and from a young age her taste in media tended toward spacefaring action-adventure thrillers.
When the time came for Lithah to join adult society, she and the other jadeblooded adolescents were separated out from the general population; although she was not one of the very rare individuals given into the care of a virgin Mother Grub as a child, Lithah was nonetheless a member of the caste entrusted with the running and maintenance of the brooding caverns. As is the Alternian norm, she took a new name as she entered adulthood: along with the rest of her cohort, she was given the title of Prentice; personally, she claimed the name Jetshard.
Of course, the newly-named Jetshard had always known that this was the role the Empire had in store for her, but she still was restless and resentful of being sequestered beneath the surface of her natal planet while most of her peers were instead taken away to join the interstellar ships of the Imperial fleet. Her superiors in the caverns were not entirely unsympathetic, but neither were they able or inclined to offer her any real option other than to get over it. Her early interest in emergency medicine segued naturally into high achievement in the medical training offered in the caverns. And if she had a reputation for being somewhat suspicious and sullen, it didn't significantly impact her ability to socialize with the other jadebloods in the caverns. Most of her interpersonal relationships from this time are inconsequential to her later life; she made casual friends, and had the kind of vaguely overwrought romantic affairs one might reasonably expect of a young person. The one relationship worth mentioning was a deeply dysfunctional kismessitude with a young woman a couple of sweeps her senior. Dayflame was a vampire, and hiding it poorly, feeding exclusively off her immediate social circle and paranoid about the news spreading, a paranoia which Jetshard intentionally stoked. Although Jetshard survived the relationship, in the short term it took a heavy toll on her physical health – and one of Dayflame’s friends was not so lucky.
A cautious rainbow drinker is tolerated in the brooding caverns; the condition is not unheard of among jadebloods. A rainbow drinker responsible for the death of a living troll is another matter. Jetshard’s kismessitude ended when Dayflame was culled.
As Jetshard gained seniority in the caverns, she became increasingly discontent with life there. She managed to work her way up to one of the few off-planet postings available to Auxilliatrices, overseeing the operation of the Filial Drones which collect samples of genetic material from trolls in the fleet for use in the brooding caverns.
At the first opportunity, she abandoned her post.
Jetshard affected tinted lenses that obfuscated her exact caste and a title, Sawbones, which indicated skills as a field medic, relying on the usefulness of the latter to outweigh the suspicion of the former in the empire’s criminal underworld. The gamble paid off. Jetshard spent the next dozen sweeps employed on a series of vessels engaged in business of varying degrees of illegality – everything from salvage to smuggling to outright piracy.
She was working on a particularly poorly run smuggling operation when a barely-adult ceruleanblooded girl with a distinctive ocular mutation approached her and several of her crewmates in a drinking establishment on a disreputable station. The smugglers were only too willing to allow Marquise Mindfang the Younger (later, Marquise Lightweb, once someone convinced her lifting her ancestor’s name was tacky) to attempt a coup against their deeply unpopular captain, figuring that the dumb kid would get herself killed but might do some damage in the process. What they didn’t account for was the girl (secretly having escaped, along with the rest of the team, from a doomed SGRUB timeline via some handy universe-hacking, and therefore a God-Tier Thief of Light) actually succeeding and then claiming the ship in the name of her friends’ revolutionary movement.
Not everyone on board, was, well, on board with this. Jetshard, while not having any particularly strong rebel leanings, also bore no real good will toward the empire at this point, and furthermore was not keen to directly oppose the eight-sweep-old who had just executed most of the ship’s command with improbably precise rolls of a dice-based quantum weapon. She was a little surprised to find that, when the smoke cleared and they’d joined up with the rebels, she was entirely at home with the politics of the rebellion’s leaders, a mutant with semireligious connections who called himself the Unsigned, and a remarkably independent reformer of an Imperial Heiress operating under the title of Heritrix Lifetide.
Jetshard is still, fundamentally, more interested in making life difficult for the authorities than she is convinced that this particular rebellion has a real chance of succeeding, but over the past several perigees she’s grown attached to the young rebels, and comfortable in a setting which values her for her medical expertise and doesn’t make a fuss about her tendency to obfuscate her true blood color (although most of the rebels are aware by now). Maybe she’s a little lonesome for real adult company; the rebellion skews very young, with most of them under the age of ten sweeps. And her attitude toward the several flavors of pacifist and egalitarian cults that are represented in the rebellion can best be described as “indulgent amusement.” But on the balance, she likes the other rebels. They’re good kids.
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Character name: Sawbones Jetshard
Character canon: Homestuck Fancharacter (in continuity with the AU fanfiction Miracle Child, although she has not actually appeared in the story).
Canon point: Shortly after Miracle Child Ch. 36
Physical Description: Jetshard is a physically mature jadeblooded troll - humanoid, but with slate-grey skin and horns that shade from deep orange at the base to golden yellow at the tip. Horn shape varies from individual to individual; Jetshard's are symmetrical, gently curved, and forked near the tips. She's about 75 years of age (35 solar sweeps, by Alternian reckoning), although as troll lifespans vary dramatically by blood-caste, she would appear to be in approximately her early thirties by human standards.
Jetshard stands a little over six feet tall, not including her horns, and has an athletic build. Like all adult trolls, her eyes have golden sclerae and irises that reflect the color of her blood, although Jetshard habitually wears glasses, goggles, or visors with tinted lenses that make it difficult to pick out exactly what shade of green her eyes are. She wears her black hair in an undercut with enough length on top that, if not intentionally slicked back, it falls into her face. Her voice is a somewhat rough alto.
Her makeup is typically simple, lipstick and eyeliner both in stark black; she never wears her blood color in cosmetics, and sometimes she does not bother with cosmetics at all. She favors close-fitting, androgynous clothing worn in multiple overlapping layers of different materials and opacities - usually shades of black and dark grey, with occasional accents of bright red or, more rarely, a brighter tint of her blood color. Her sign - one of several astrological symbols for Pluto - is generally visible somewhere on her person, although it's often rendered in grey or black rather than her blood color. The overall effect is generally a kind of grungy cyberpunk - although it should be noted it's grungy in the sense of hard-worn and mismatched, not in the sense of dirty, as Jetshard is meticulous about her personal hygiene and the cleanliness of her effects.
About the Character: Jetshard's early life was unremarkable, as troll childhoods go - she made it through the brooding caverns as a grub, was adopted by a large non-troll animal (in Jetshard's case, her lusus was a large, mothlike creature she called Mothmom, which may be recognizable to human cryptozoologists). The cavern attendants named her Lithah Melane, based loosely on the vocalizations of her lusus. She pupated and settled down on the outskirts of an urban area populated entirely by other juveniles to grow up. As a child, she had an interest in medicine that was as much practical as it was academic. On a less practical note, she also had an avid, if skeptical, interest in conspiracy theories, and from a young age her taste in media tended toward spacefaring action-adventure thrillers.
When the time came for Lithah to join adult society, she and the other jadeblooded adolescents were separated out from the general population; although she was not one of the very rare individuals given into the care of a virgin Mother Grub as a child, Lithah was nonetheless a member of the caste entrusted with the running and maintenance of the brooding caverns. As is the Alternian norm, she took a new name as she entered adulthood: along with the rest of her cohort, she was given the title of Prentice; personally, she claimed the name Jetshard.
Of course, the newly-named Jetshard had always known that this was the role the Empire had in store for her, but she still was restless and resentful of being sequestered beneath the surface of her natal planet while most of her peers were instead taken away to join the interstellar ships of the Imperial fleet. Her superiors in the caverns were not entirely unsympathetic, but neither were they able or inclined to offer her any real option other than to get over it. Her early interest in emergency medicine segued naturally into high achievement in the medical training offered in the caverns. And if she had a reputation for being somewhat suspicious and sullen, it didn't significantly impact her ability to socialize with the other jadebloods in the caverns. Most of her interpersonal relationships from this time are inconsequential to her later life; she made casual friends, and had the kind of vaguely overwrought romantic affairs one might reasonably expect of a young person. The one relationship worth mentioning was a deeply dysfunctional kismessitude with a young woman a couple of sweeps her senior. Dayflame was a vampire, and hiding it poorly, feeding exclusively off her immediate social circle and paranoid about the news spreading, a paranoia which Jetshard intentionally stoked. Although Jetshard survived the relationship, in the short term it took a heavy toll on her physical health – and one of Dayflame’s friends was not so lucky.
A cautious rainbow drinker is tolerated in the brooding caverns; the condition is not unheard of among jadebloods. A rainbow drinker responsible for the death of a living troll is another matter. Jetshard’s kismessitude ended when Dayflame was culled.
As Jetshard gained seniority in the caverns, she became increasingly discontent with life there. She managed to work her way up to one of the few off-planet postings available to Auxilliatrices, overseeing the operation of the Filial Drones which collect samples of genetic material from trolls in the fleet for use in the brooding caverns.
At the first opportunity, she abandoned her post.
Jetshard affected tinted lenses that obfuscated her exact caste and a title, Sawbones, which indicated skills as a field medic, relying on the usefulness of the latter to outweigh the suspicion of the former in the empire’s criminal underworld. The gamble paid off. Jetshard spent the next dozen sweeps employed on a series of vessels engaged in business of varying degrees of illegality – everything from salvage to smuggling to outright piracy.
She was working on a particularly poorly run smuggling operation when a barely-adult ceruleanblooded girl with a distinctive ocular mutation approached her and several of her crewmates in a drinking establishment on a disreputable station. The smugglers were only too willing to allow Marquise Mindfang the Younger (later, Marquise Lightweb, once someone convinced her lifting her ancestor’s name was tacky) to attempt a coup against their deeply unpopular captain, figuring that the dumb kid would get herself killed but might do some damage in the process. What they didn’t account for was the girl (secretly having escaped, along with the rest of the team, from a doomed SGRUB timeline via some handy universe-hacking, and therefore a God-Tier Thief of Light) actually succeeding and then claiming the ship in the name of her friends’ revolutionary movement.
Not everyone on board, was, well, on board with this. Jetshard, while not having any particularly strong rebel leanings, also bore no real good will toward the empire at this point, and furthermore was not keen to directly oppose the eight-sweep-old who had just executed most of the ship’s command with improbably precise rolls of a dice-based quantum weapon. She was a little surprised to find that, when the smoke cleared and they’d joined up with the rebels, she was entirely at home with the politics of the rebellion’s leaders, a mutant with semireligious connections who called himself the Unsigned, and a remarkably independent reformer of an Imperial Heiress operating under the title of Heritrix Lifetide.
Jetshard is still, fundamentally, more interested in making life difficult for the authorities than she is convinced that this particular rebellion has a real chance of succeeding, but over the past several perigees she’s grown attached to the young rebels, and comfortable in a setting which values her for her medical expertise and doesn’t make a fuss about her tendency to obfuscate her true blood color (although most of the rebels are aware by now). Maybe she’s a little lonesome for real adult company; the rebellion skews very young, with most of them under the age of ten sweeps. And her attitude toward the several flavors of pacifist and egalitarian cults that are represented in the rebellion can best be described as “indulgent amusement.” But on the balance, she likes the other rebels. They’re good kids.