It started the summer of 2014
The comic was not on mspfa; the creator wanted to be 'different', this has incidentally lead to difficulties with webarchives
The unnamed creator had odd preferences for everything, calling it 'wanting to be different', we'll go into this more later, but it started early in the comic, very early
Such preferences included using photos of paintings for his untitled fan adventure, as well as seemingly arbitrarily formatting 'good guys' as having right aligned text and 'bad guys' having left aligned text
(The difference between good and bad formatting becomes very muddied later in the comic - again, we'll get to that)
The comic started pretty innocuously at first, with an Untiled (spelling mistake) title followed by a photo of a painting of a kid in a room, narration, and all narration prefaced by 6709
The plot seemed to be your average start up for your typical early fandom mspfa, even if the creator was a bit late to the fandom, kids are going to play SBURB, one of the kids is somewhat aware of how the game's played, and they get into the Medium
All's well that goes well, creator even has some pretty decent characterization for the kids to start with.
Two boys, two girls
The first boy, Jack, was a fan of retro video games and felt very Johnish for a while. There was no relation to the homestuck character whatsoever
The second boy, Bret, was an oddball with many interests, and dressed in overalls. Very not Dave, but a dorkish guy, so you can take that as you will
First girl, Dora, was... Dora the explorer, at first anyway. She liked exploring the jungle her house was near, but the initial joke impression faded over time
Second girl, Suzy was a total girly girl, a real princess type. High fashion and style, but she had a twist: she and her family were lower-class, as she called it.
A decent set up of kids, all in all, but like I said, things changed, especially when they entered the medium
Entering the medium ramped up the poetic prose of the narration to 11, with the creator going fully into the minds of the kids, their histories, their family's histories, their ecto histories and the beta and gamma kid's histories
The creator actually had beta and gamma kids, apparently he wanted to be different by having SBURB work 'like an Irish Knot instead of a Lemniscate'
What this means, exactly, was never exactly specified. With the addition of a third earth, the sessions essentially worked parallel to each other, albeit with a second alternative to the scratch being present in the beta timeline
It should be noted that Jack, Bret, Dora and Suzy were in the alpha timeline, for whatever reason
That aside, entering the medium, in any timeline, always meant that the narration would become incredibly intense and esoteric, with some updates being more than five thousand words describing a kid's perspective on the current events, and little to no plot progression occurring
In later Books (creator's name for Acts), this narration would become meta-textual, with the character or characters becoming aware of and wishing to interact or communicate with the reader in some way, typically benign, but from 'bad guys' not always so
This is actually how we learn about the distinction of bad guys and good guys in 6709;
The main antagonist of Book one, The Unkillable Man, revealed quite succinctly that he was a good guy, and that one could tell by his text being left aligned. Matching this to other characters caused confusion as to whether he'd been right, as many worse and horrible things in the comic had right aligned text, and even moreso due to the alpha kids also having right aligned text
Thus the distinction of 'good' and 'bad' being unclear in the comic becoming readily noticeable
All pages after this revelation are thus renamed Sixty Seven Ought Nine, with the numbers removed post photographs
This change was also accompanied by a new plot point - the Irish Knot Pulling
Announced in narration from the perspective of half of all twelve kids, and six of the Xenos (6709's alien race, imagine dnd changelings and you've got the mental image), the Irish Knot Pulling was spelled out quite clearly as a multiverse level end of existence event that was supposed to retcon all of the games that had taken place in Sixty Seven Ought Nine to that point
Over the course of three individual narrations, one from TUM, one from Jack, and one from Telias (the alpha Xenos leader) it's slowly revealed through implications and misdirection from the three of them what didn't cause the Irish Knot Pulling.
These include: any one game starting/ending, any quest started/incomplete/finished, any kinds of sexual, platonic, antagonistic or otherwise 'healthy' relationships between any player on any one given game, any denizens being alive/dead, or the Tabula Rasa being destroyed, which, to much confusion, has no context in the comic.
The comic seemingly ended with a series of paintings with no followed narration. There were sixty paintings, each seeming to be an iteration of a particular event of the Irish Knot Pulling, all of them primarily consisting of combat.
The twelve main events are summarized, but it should be noted that there were 'transition' paintings between each event, making the paintings 'animated', in a flipbook kind of way
- Every 'good guy' gathered in a mustered line up.
- Every 'bad guy' gathered in a motley, unorganized line up.
- The 'bad guys' and 'good guys' clashing, with none of the figures being given any significant detail except for TUM and Jack
- TUM and Jack primarily dueling, TUM using an as of yet unseen, but oft described magic spear, and Jack using his God Tier powers over Life to 'overheal' TUM
- The Beta and Gamma kids fighting the rest of the Alpha kids, with the 'bad' Alpha kids seemingly controlling the fight very well
- The 'good' Xenos and 'bad' Xenos fighting each other
- A closer portrayal of the 'good' Xenos as well as their Ancestors
- A closer portrayal of the 'bad' Xenos as well as their Dancestors. This term never came up in 6709, but you get the point
- The various iterations of the time denizens superimposed over the four characters associated with time, two kids, the Xenos Kuphen and the 'bad guy' The Blind Woman
- The various iterations of the space denizens superimposed over the four characters associated with space, Dora, the Xenos Coliav and the 'good guy' The Gambling Man
- An artistic depiction of all characters gathered and fighting in a grand melee, but with the stage of combat, Skaia, visible
- The genesis frog, but with a werewolf, headless knight, mermaid, vampire and large black cat almost menacingly looming over it. Of note is an Irish Knot which is behind all of the figures portrayed
Creator barely ever shilled it and I only stumbled upon it by chance via a now long gone skype contact. What do you think? Do any of you remember this mspfa? Let me know and have a good one
