PLAYER INFORMATION
Your Name: Skai
OOC Journal: None
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: Not under 18.
Email + IM: harasogyatei @ AIM
Characters Played at Ataraxion: None

CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: Equius Zahhak
Canon: Homestuck
Original or Alternate Universe: Original flavour, make no substitutions!
Canon Point: Just before his death.
Number: 056

Setting:

Here is the main wiki page; the trolls' story, where Equius appears, takes place during Act 5.

The ultra-condensed version: Homestuck is the tale of several universes hopelessly entangled in each others' timelines and alternate existences.

History:

Equius (presumably) grew up in a fairly standard blueblooded manner, building his huge castle-like hive high in the mountains after emerging from the Trials all trolls go through after pupating. He lived there with his lusus (a type of monster-like guardian -- in Equius' case, a mustachioed centaur), dreaming of growing up to join the upper echelons of the Alternian military.

But to abbreviate a very long and complicated tale, Equius and eleven other trolls ended up teaming up to play a very important game; their universe would be destroyed, but if they won the game, they would become effectively gods of a new one of their own creation. During the planning stages of the game, the twelve trolls set up two teams, Red and Blue. In a double-triple-quadruple-cross manoeuvre during the early stages of game setup, Equius had been conspiring with Vriska to take over co-leadership of the Blue Team, but privately he planned to double-cross Vriska and join up with Aradia as co-leader before the final touch of double-crossing her and ending up as the 'rightful' team leader of Team Blue.

In fact, Vriska had been planning to doublecross him right back, and had been counting on giving the now-ghostly Aradia a sweet robot body (which Equius had built) to "make up" for her past wrongdoings. And then doublecross her too. What she didn't realize was that Equius had feelings for Aradia from the start, and when he entered the game, presented her with it as his own gift -- resulting in hijinks worthy of a trollish romantic comedy. See, Equius had added his own special touch: a romance chip, hoping that this would make Aradia fall in love with him. She ripped it out, pounded into smithereens, screeched at him, smacked him around... and kissed him. A match made in hatelove heaven, really.

With himself nominally leader of the Blue Team (but actually deferring to Aradia as his 'secret leader'), Equius eventually joined up with the rest of the trolls... and in time eventually accepted Karkat as the leader of both teams. They won the game, defeated the Black King and Queen, but were cheated out of their victory at the last moment and fled to an abandoned laboratory on an asteroid deep within the space of the Medium. With few options left, the trolls were left to figure a way out of their situation. When Aradia's robotic body exploded (for more reasons far too complicated to explain in this space), Equius was devastated and left to mope and talk about his feelings with Nepeta until he was contacted by Karkat. With the news that Gamzee had snapped and was on the rampage, Equius went on Karkat's orders to try to deal with the situation. Unfortunately for him, lifting a finger against Gamzee was something he couldn't bear to do, and he died (with a smile on his face) at Gamzee's hands.


Personality:
Equius is not really the kind of guy who makes a great first impression. He's disgustingly sweaty, becomes furious over trivial things, unironically enjoys paintings of nude musclebeasts, has no sense of humour (minus a few horsey puns), and possesses a sometimes, no, pretty much always creepy obsession with the trollish blood-caste system and being ordered around.

See, Equius takes being a member of the (literally) blue-blooded nobility very seriously. He tries, he really does, to be what he sees as a 'proper' member of the upper crust, eschewing foul language, dabbling in the fine Alternian art of slam poetry, engaging in appropriate treachery with other bluebloods... and lectures others on how they should behave, who they ought to associate with, according to their position on the trollish hemospectrum.

Despite (or maybe because of) his feelings on social stratification, it's also not-so-secret that Equius has a fetishistic fascination with being ordered around, and not just by the higher-spectrum indigo-bloods. In fact, the greater the class difference the more uncouth and depraved, and the more likely Equius is to get sweaty at the very thought of being told what to do by someone else.

With all of that said, Equius isn't really as bad as he sounds at first. He's in a close moirallegiance (a type of romantic relationship with a troll of complementary personality) with Nepeta -- and while he tries to keep her on the straight-and-narrow, she helps pacify his more furious rages. He has a reasonably good sense of judgement (as long as the situation doesn't cater to his personal fetishes), is often helpful (building robotic prostheses for others), and a huge (though admittedly VERY misguided) romantic at heart.

His trollish typing quirk is more complex than many of the others: he replaces instances of "ool" "loo" (or words with similar sounds) with the numbers 001 and 100, and the letter x, the sounds "chs" and "cks", and the word "cross" with the % symbol. He also prefaces every line with a bow and arrow like so: D -->


Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:

Equius is freakishly strong. VERY STRONG. We're talking the leaps-tall-buildings-in-a-single-bound, punching-ogres-heads-clean-off kind of strong. He accidentally breaks/bruises things even when he's trying to be gentle, much to his frustration. But despite being incredibly STRONG, Equius can be quite passive (and sweaty) in the face of being forcefully ordered around, in one particular case to the point of dying rather than resisting.

He's also a very mechanically talented troll. Aside from regularly building robots to fight, he's also constructed artificial limbs for a couple of the other trolls, and his piece-de-resistance was a robotic body for a ghost to inhabit.

Archery would probably be something he would excel at if he could ever find a bow that wouldn't shatter in his hands, but he does try to express an interest in anything he thinks nobility should: ie, 'fine art' appreciation and the art of slam poetry.


Inventory:

Cracked HUD sunglasses
Strife specibus (containing Fistkind, Bowkind, and 1/2Bowkind) [the Homestuck universe's versions of weapon proficiencies... as vaguely physical objects]
Extra towels



Appearance:



Equius had the same grey skin, black hair, horns the colors of candy corn, and pointed teeth as all other trolls. One of his horns is broken off from violent deathmatch sparring/beating-the-shit-out-of his robots, but the other is a sharp arrow-headed point. He has shoulder-length straight hair and typical troll-yellow eyes behind his cracked sunglasses -- his irises are grey now, but in a few years they'll become the same deep blue as his blood color. Equius is perpetually missing a few of his small sharp teeth from frequent bursts of violence. They tend to grow back. Mostly.

Age: 6 Alternian solar sweeps (~13 Earth years). Life as a troll youth is a bit more intense than growing up on Earth: murder and gratuitous smooching aren't really newsworthy, and considering Equius' weird and sometimes off-putting predilections... I'm pretty sure that he himself counts as mildly disturbing.

AU Clarification: N/A

SAMPLES
Log Sample:

Equius watched the human displayed in the tiny viewport window on the terminal and drummed his fingers on the metal counter, oblivious to the tiny indentations he was leaving in the surface. He'd had some misgivings about bothering with the humans in the first place, but Karkat's order had been to troll them, and so he had been, in as professional a manner as possible. But after his most recent discussion with the one with the red text, he was beginning to suspect that once again he had been hornswoggled, leaving his personal curiosities about the human social hierarchy unanswered.

Feeling his ire rise, he glanced to the side where Nepeta was sleeping peacefully on the floor. It was pleasant that she wished to be nearby at least, but at the same time it was a little unseemly, to be frank; she could have at least had the decency to take a nap on a suitable pile of objects.

On the other hand... Equius didn't need to crane his neck around to see the horrendously loud horn pile that the highblood had dumped across the room. In the end, he supposed it was preferable to that.

And further away, a bank of computer terminals down, he could see the back of Aradia's head, the light glimmering off the high-grade steel he's lovingly crafted each part from. They hadn't spoken much since they fled to this meteor, and she was jacked in directly to the system. He supposed it would be inappropriate to approach her right now, especially in light of certain (true) rumours. Certainly the thought of Karkat going off on another tirade about kissing robots... well, the thought made him feel a little sweaty, and he dabbed at the back of his neck with his towel.

It was already rather damp. He'd have to go alchemize another batch soon.

Comms Sample:

D --> 100k
D --> I'm in no mood for the crass deception and misdire%ion
D --> Both of which I am aware are common human practices
D --> However
D --> My patience for sifting through endless communications is running out
D --> You'll inform me of the e%act nature of our current circumstances at once