Vriska Serket

Name: Vriska Serket
Gender: Lady
Source: Homestuck
Canon point: A sweep after Sgrub would have occurred
Age: A little over 7 Alternian solar sweeps
Colour: Cerulean (#005682)
Chumhandle: arachnidsGrip

History: Mostly kind of unfortunate, if for other people as much as for Vriska. She grew up on Alternia, a horrible planet where everything eats everything else and the sun can kill you, as a part of a species who, when they are not murdering the inhabitants of distant star systems in their relentless campaign of galactic conquest, are usually murdering each other. Her chief influences as a child were her lusus, or custodian, a monstrous spider who needed to be fed other young trolls on a regular basis, and the diaries of her ancestor, Marquise Spinneret Mindfang, an ancient troll pirate who spent most of her time being completely unabatingly awful, like, professionally. They were pretty bad influences! Between completely idolising Mindfang and needing to keep Spidermom fed, Vriska's childhood has so far been kind of messed up, but she managed to balance both of these factors with her chief hobby, "FLARP", a kind of immersive role-playing game with often unpleasant real-life consequences. The game allowed Vriska both to indulge in piratical fantasies, and to procure a steady supply of slaughtered opponents to feed to her lusus.

Her earliest FLARP partner was Terezi Pyrope, a tealblood who was content to believe that what she and Vriska were doing was dispensing vigilante justice through FLARP, and that the trolls they were steering into the maw of Vriska's lusus were guilty and deserving. (Vriska was less discerning – many of their victims were innocent.) They made a formidable team, or at least they did until Vriska seriously injured one of their mutual friends, Tavros Nitram, during a FLARP campaign when they were five or six sweeps old, leaving him permanently paralysed from the waist down. Tavros was uterly wet and a wede, in Vriska's opinion, and as far as she was concerned, dropping him off a cliff was all in good fun. His partner, Aradia Megido, didn't see it the same way, and retaliated by summoning the ghosts of the trolls Vriska had fed to her lusus to haunt her. Vriska couldn't deal with this, so she mind controlled Sollux Captor, a powerful psychic and close friend of Aradia's, into killing her with his psionic eye beams. It was at this point that Terezi decided this was unacceptable, and lured Vriska into a FLARP campaign that got her arm blown off in an explosion that also took out her left eye, depriving her of her Vision Eightfold. Vriska's reaction was to mind control Tavros (whose abilities allowed him to control animals) into mind-controlling Terezi's lusus (a telepathic dragon) into mind controlling Terezi into walking outside during the day; when she opened her eyes, a brief glance at the sun was enough to permanently blind her.

Vriska obtained a cybernetic replacement arm as a favour from her neighbour Equius Zahhak, who worked with robotics, but her relationships with Terezi, Tavros and Aradia (who was hanging around as a ghost) were irreparably damaged. And she still needed to feed her Spidermom. That, at least, was easily enough taken care of when she teamed up with Eridan Ampora, a member of the aquatic troll aristocracy who was more than content to collude with Vriska on mass slaughter. The two of them became kismeses, a sort of hate-based rivalry considered a romance by trolls, although Vriska's main investment in the kismesissitude was that Mindfang had been in a similar relationship with Eridan's ancestor. Vriska is kind of bored of him by now, if anything, but she doesn't really have any better prospects, to her dismay. Honestly she's tired of a lot about her life – sometimes she feels like something important should have happened a while ago, and she's missing out. What she really wants is to win back the respect of Terezi and Aradia, but she can't see any way to do that without sacrificing her pride. It's okay, though! Soon she'll leave Alternia to join the intergalactic troll military and her life will begin for real, and then it won't matter if those losers like her or not because proper trolls off-planet will recognise her for the awesome specimen of trollhood she is!


Personality: Vriska is kind of a terrible person! Gosh. She's a pretty good troll, though, or at least she tries really hard to be – she'd be a "better" one if she wasn't like horns deep in insecurity and guilt. She's done a bunch of really sincerely horrible things to both strangers and people she would have liked to consider friends, and she is unrepentant about a lot of them, but the thing is that none of them are things that troll society would hold against her – trolls are expected to kill or be killed, and, as a blueblood, Vriska is considered more than within her rights to maim and murder those of her peers who fall lower on the haemospectrum than herself. This kind of thing is what's generally expected of a troll of her age, but, specifically, Vriska wants desperately to live up to the example set by her ancestor, who basically sailed the seas of Alternia in centuries gone by and gleefully murdered the shit out of everyone who crossed her, as well as using her mind powers to force herself on unwilling sexual partners and being generally thoroughly terrible in every direction.

Vriska fundamentally craves approval, whether in the form of admiration or hatred, and she often doesn't actually understand why her deplorable behaviour doesn't get her the respect she wants. She's been taught that if she asserts her violent aristocratic superiority, everyone should just acknowledge that she's better than them, and either hate her the way she wants them to, or want to be her friend, because that's how it's supposed to go, because she's a blueblood! At the same time, she can recognise that it's not working that way, but she doesn't really know what she should do differently – even her attempts to make amends usually come out either accusatory or showoffy.

She is tremendously boastful about the things she knows she is good at, and in Sburb she will be an absolute terror. She will disregard the concerns of NPCs, ruthlessly pursue level-ups and boss battles, and constantly flaunt her superior RPG cred over the other players like the grandstanding braggart she is.

But inside she will be lonely and sad.


Abilities & physical limitations: Vriska has telepathic abilities that allow her to exert a limited influence over the minds of others; some trolls are susceptible to her powers, as are consorts, Dersites and Prospitians, but the only thing she can do to humans is wake them up and put them to sleep. She also possesses "vision eightfold", which is a sort of X-ray vision – she currently has only one eye, but her dream self lacks the injuries her waking self has sustained, and so her vision eightfold will be restored should she make use of her extra life.


Appearance: A grey-skinned teenage girl with long black hair, fangs, and asymmetrical orange horns. She wears glasses with one lens blacked out to conceal the nasty scar where her left eye used to be. Her left arm is also missing, but she has a perfectly functional robotic replacement. She typically dresses in a t-shirt, scuffed jeans and a frayed jacket – trolls as a species think fashion is stupid, but Vriska is particularly scruffy.


Strife Specibus: Dicekind. Vriska uses a set of eight eight-sided dice, the Flourite Octet; they can produce an enormous variety of effects depending on the number rolled. Sometimes these are really fortunately convenient! Sometimes they are not.

Title: Thief of Mind.

In-game abilities: Mind control! Which, sure, she could already do that, but if she ever reaches god tier she will be able to do it to the max and it will be really terrible. More on this later, probably.

Planet: The Land of Swash and Buckle, a planet of desert islands and marooned ships. The consorts, sword-toting corgis who prize honour and fancy hats above all else, sorely wish to be able to set sail again, but as long as the Denizen has stolen the planet's wind they are doomed to be becalmed.