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[whoseesbynight]

Character Name: Nepeta Leijon
Series: Homestuck
Gender: Female
Age: 6 Alternian sweeps (~13 years)
Species: Troll

Appearance: For all that that trolls are generally humanoid, no one would ever assume Nepeta to be human, even from a distance. For one thing, there’s the fact that she - like all trolls - has gray skin as well as a lovely pair of horns. Hers are shaped almost exactly like cat ears, a fact she uses to great effect when combined with the hat she habitually wears (which is designed to look almost exactly like the face of cat, minus the ears). In keeping with the pattern, she is also never seen without a cat’s tail as well. This is the same shade of blue as her hat, and given that trolls are generally not creatures possessed of tails, it can probably be assumed that this is some manner of costumery (canon never explains it one way or the other). Apart for this however, Nepeta’s choices of clothing are fairly simple - a gray shirt with her symbol (♌) marked on it in the same olive green as her blood, black pants, and an olive coat that is somewhat oversized.

In addition to this, there are also several minor details of note to come from the the fact that trolls come from a somewhat less mammalian origin than humans (if anything, it seems to be somewhat insectoid). The most obvious of these are that she has pointed teeth and yellow sclera. There are of course, other differences between troll biology and human biology, but as these are the sort of thing that are generally hidden underneath clothes, we will leave unremarked upon for the time being. Instead, we will simply note that her eyes themselves are gray (as are the eyes of all young trolls), and her hair - which falls roughly to her shoulders - is black (a common feature among trolls).

Personality: Before we get down to the finer details of personality, we must first take a look at the nature of life on Alternia and the resulting cultural pressures. First and foremost, is the fact that by and large trolls are a rather warlike race, and one to which violence comes surprisingly easy. As a result of this, there are no adult trolls present on Alternia - all adult trolls are essentially sent to conquer new planets. As such, young trolls grow up in the care of a “lusus,” which often resembles one of the native fauna of Alternia. In addition to this, troll culture is very strongly hierarchized by blood color (there are twelve blood colors trolls can have). In addition to serving as something of a natural caste system, this also helps define certain biological aspects of a troll’s life (trolls higher on the hemospectrum can expect to live longer than those lower, for example).

Along with this, the idea of violence is very tightly interwoven into troll culture at large. Not only is there a very real threat of being culled for failing to do any of a number of things, or for being generally weak or infirm, but survival of the fittest is the rule of the day. In fact, given that Alternia’s wildlife can be just as violently inclined as the trolls themselves, learning how to defend oneself is vital for a young troll’s survival. Better still, and just in case thing weren’t already bad enough as they stood, the higher on the hemospectrum a troll is, the more likely they are to be either psychopathic or exceedingly violent, and possibly both. This is accepted as simply part of life by most trolls and their culture has, as such, learned to adapt to it.

Of the trolls we come to meet over the course of canon, Nepeta is one the few who understand the rule of survival of the fittest more than most. Of them all, her home is far more like a cave than anything, and she has a tendency to go out and hunt the great beasts of the wilderness (which she then takes home to eat). However, this doesn’t mean that she’s particularly inclined to display herself as violent. Quite the opposite in fact: both in person and over the chat client the trolls use to speak with each other, she comes across as remarkably upbeat and generally friendly. Of course, this doesn’t mean she always gets along with the other trolls - she mentions a couple of trolls that she’s less than fond of at one point - but she’s at least generally willing to at least offer the benefit of the doubt under most circumstances.

However, the fact that she leads - or at least, can generally be assumed to lead - a relatively isolated existence has resulted in her particular set of interests being somewhat more internally focused. In particular, she is fond of friendly roleplaying - a vital distinction when the more extreme forms of troll roleplay can be just as deadly as the rest of Alternia - as well as creating wall paintings out of blood, soot, and ash. These are often either tales related to her hunts, or stories about herself and her friends (most of whom she only really knows through the troll-internet). In addition to this, her rather isolated adolescence means that she doesn’t care about either the hemospectrum or her own blood color - she even goes so far as to admit that she doesn’t think it shouldn’t mean anything to anyone else either. Given that she never seems to make too much a fuss about it however, and that it comes up all of once, it’s probably more of a personal belief than any real desire to change the status quo. At the same time, she sometimes come across as one of the few sane and relatively stable trolls. Whether or not this is connected to her blood status is never mentioned, but neither can it be denied that she falls squarely into the middle of the hemospectrum - low enough to avoid the possibility of potentially violent insanity and high enough to avoid the risks inherent to being a low-blood (many, but not all, of which are sociopolitical in nature).

And then there’s the matter of her moirallegiance. One of the four romantic quadrants trolls must deal with, moirallegiance is one of the two non-sexual quadrants and can best be translated as the trollish equivalent of being best friends forever. Along with offering what is likely to be one of the few non-hostile, non-sexual relationships any given pair of trolls is likely to experience, a successful and healthy moirallegiance also serves as an emotional counterbalance. Nepeta’s moirail is young indigo-blooded troll by the name of Equius, and apart from being the troll Nepeta has most likely known the longest, he also helps keep her interest in roleplay from getting her into anything too dangerous. In return, she keeps him from turning to the natural fury and violence of all highbloods. She also reacts exceedingly violently to Equius’ death, and presumably the reverse would also be true.

Finally, it should be noted that between her roleplaying and her habit of littering her speech with cat puns, the best way to describe her is to say that she’s very much the badass adorable type, with heavy emphasis on the adorable. She’s so much so, in fact, that most people (be they troll or human) are rather hard-pressed to see the troll who does, in fact, hunt and kill her own food underneath the sheer amount of adorable she manages to put out. For her part, Nepeta never really seems to see a need to call attention to the fact. It’s simply part of who she is, and that is enough.

Abilities: As mentioned above, Nepeta is a skilled huntress, and her time spent in Sgrub only added to that proficiency. In addition, she can also be assumed to have some manner of heart-based abilities, as befits a Rogue of Heart. However what these abilities are and what they might be capable of doing are never shown in the course of canon itself, though she does have a significant interest in shipping.

Returning to abilities that are actually somewhat well-defined by canon, there’s the matter of her sylladex. This is the rough equivalent of your average video-game inventory, albeit modified for personal use, and is something that all of the protagonists of Homestuck are shown to have, even before ever entering their respective games. Most of the time, this serves as something like a combined backpack/pockets, but the upper limits of what can be stuck inside one’s sylladex seems to follow standard video game logic. However, despite the fact that it would not be outside the realm of possibility (if not very common) to put a car in one’s sylladex, sylladices cannot hold an infinite amount of things. How much each sylladex can hold varies, but Nepeta’s is likely of about average capacity (read: has enough space to get her through most of a video game).

Finally, it should be noted that she’s capable of speaking to the human protagonists over a chat client without appearing to need a translation program. What this means linguistically is never explored.

Items:
>One set of retractable claw-gloves (currently equipped)
>One set of clothes (also currently on her person)
>The contents of her sylladex, which are as follows:
==>A couple sets of spare clothes
==>A box of chalk
==>A tablet computer and the stylus for same


History: You could say that Homestuck is about a group of kids who play a game and (accidentally) destroy their world, and this wouldn’t be entirely wrong. However, this is only a tiny portion of story. An important part, yes, but not one that tells the whole of the tale. As such, our story begins on a world called Alternia. In particular, it focuses on a group of twelve young trolls. One of these young trolls was Nepeta, and by and large, her life was fairly unremarkable as far as these things went. And then one day, one of her friends decided they should all play a game. This game was called Sgrub, and had had been created by technology yet another of her friends had found in some old ruins. More to the point, it was believed that not playing Sgrub would, in fact, have the side-effect of destroying their world. Being generally inclined to avert this fate, it was decided that the twelve of the them would split into two teams - a red team and a blue team - and compete for the right to claim the ultimate reward.

At first, Nepeta is approached is members of the red team, but she insists that she can’t without first talking to her moirail. The conversation that follows basically boils down to the fact that he has already joined the blue team and that Nepeta is to join him. She complains, but eventually she relents. With the teams thus decided, the game itself begins. Unfortunately, it turns out that the nature of the game is decidedly different than had been expected. Rather than playing it being the way to save the world, playing it sets into a chain of events into motion that will doom the world. The most immediately visible side effect of this is the death of the children’s lusii; Nepeta’s dies in an unfortunate cave-in. With the end of the world now looming over their heads in more ways then one the only option is to get everyone into the game. As such, Nepeta becomes the server player for Aradia (the same friend who had explored the ruins that held the technology that would become Sgrub). It’s in this process that she learns that her friend had been dead all along (naturally, she’s more than a little surprised by this revelation). And, in time, she too is brought into the game medium proper, serving as the Rogue of Heart, in the Land of Little Cubes and Tea.

As one might expect, however, even then things don’t exactly go as planned. Part of this is due to the fact that throwing a group of teenagers into anything and expecting perfection is setting the bar a bit high and more so when said teenagers also happen be both socially and cultured conditioned towards violence. Thankfully, Nepeta manages to avoid any real interpersonal drama, most likely as a result of being both entirely too adorable for her own good as well as generally level-headed. In addition to this, it becomes apart fairly early on in the game that for all that the trolls had arranged themselves neatly into two teams, Sgrub itself saw them more as two extensions of the same group, as actions performed by one team affected the others instead and vice-versa. So it was that time passed, and eventually, the twelve of them managed to defeat the game’s final boss - if only just. With the ultimate reward finally within their grasp, however, things once again take a turn for worse - moments before they can actually claim their reward an unwinnable boss breaks into their session from a session going on in the universe they had just created (our universe, for those playing along at home). With the game now unwinnable, and the ultimate reward similarly unreachable, the kids only just barely manage to escape to a meteor outside of the game construct itself.

Needless to say, this doesn’t really help matters much, because the only thing than violently-inclined teens in a relatively small amount of space is frustrated teens who also happen to be violently inclined. Nor is there really much to do there, given that they’re effectively banned from their own universe and barred from entering ours on account of not having claimed the ultimate reward. Inevitably, some of them take to trolling the kids in the universe they had just created. By some odd convenience, these same kids would later take part in their universe’s version of Sgrub (called Sburb this time, though it’s really the same game when you get down to it). Nepeta, on the other hand, doesn’t so much troll the other kids as she simply speaks to one of them. In particular, she speaks to a young woman by the name of Rose, or rather, she speaks to Rose’s guardian sprite, who takes the form of a cat and happens to remind Nepeta of her dear departed lusus.

All good things must come to an end, however, and things once again a turn for the worse. At first, it looks like the only side-effect of is the explosion of Aradia’s soulbot, which, while inconvenient, is only slightly so. And then the murderous rampages start to break out. Somewhat simultaneously, as a matter of fact. It’s during the middle of what is arguably the worst of these that the nominal leader of the trolls contacts Equius for assistance in tracking down and subduing the highblood in question. He has his qualms about the situation for a number of largely personal reasons, but agrees to help once Nepeta’s safety is seen to. One explanation of the situation later, the two of them part ways, although Nepeta’s curiosity leads her to sneak into the airducts not long after Equius leaves. Surely a little curiosity can’t go amiss, after all? It’s shortly after climbing into the ducts that she finds herself unexpectedly in the Realm of Dreams.