In that brief but eternal moment when Love engulfed the world, everything whited out. It was only Adam and Karkat again, floating in the Ether of All Creation. It felt like they could ask anything and receive the Truth.

"It's probably better not to know too much," Adam said. "I've been here before, and I think I made myself forget everything I learned."

"What the fuck's the point of being a god or son of a god or whatever if we don't get to know shit?" Karkat asked.

Adam shrugged. "I think of it as being a knight or something, protecting the existence of the world and whatnot. It's better than being those types of gods, like we saw out there."

"Ick."

"Very ick."

"Well," Karkat said. "I'm still going to ask. You made yourself forget, so I bet I can do that too if it comes down to the worst."

"It might be different for you, though. You're... Jesus, right? I don't think it's in the best interests of the world if Jesus gets successfully tempted by the son of the Devil, which I reckon is me in this case."

"You're not tempting me. You're trying to sway me to not ask questions and remain in ignorance, which is what stupid fucking tofu-brained cults do to keep their sheeple in attendance."

"Or is that reverse psychology," Adam retorted. "What if I want to tempt you into asking questions like the serpent, but I'm telling you not to because you're rebellious and will do whatever I say I don't want you to do."

"...No. That way lies madness. I'm not eating your poisoned layer cake, you Gap-wearing douche. I'm going to ask because there are prophecies and shit concerning me, and also, because I fucking care even though god knows I shouldn't, let me give you a piece of advice: you suck at pretending to be human, so please ask your human friends how to fix that."

Karkat then proceeded to ask.

Karkat then proceeded to regret.

"WHAT. I mean, WHAT?!"

"I told you," Adam said.

"NO YOU DIDN'T! NOTHING YOU SAID WAS A PROPER WARNING FOR THE FATAL LEVELS OF DISTURBING THAT I HAVE JUST COMPREHENDED. WHAT! FUCKING AZATHOTH THE BLIND IDIOT GOD IS OUR CREATOR? FUCKING GOD AND SATAN ARE THE SAME FUCKING THING?"*

"Ah, stop! Stop! Don't make it all come back for me!"

"HE'S THE BLIND IDIOT GOD! HE FUCKING JUST CRAPS US OUT IN HIS SLEEP WHEN HIS POWERS RANDOMLY MANIFEST? WE'RE NOTHING BUT SLEEP FARTS?"**

"Stoooooop," Adam whined.

"NO I WILL NOT STOP. WHAT IN THE NINE CIRCLES OF HELL. DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS? DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS THAT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN US IS THAT YOU'RE A SLEEP FART AND I'M A SLEEP BURP?"

"It means we're brothers?"

"IT MEANS ALL OF THIS WAR SHIT IS POINTLESS!"

"Well, duh," Adam said. "War is always pointless. And life is pointless except for what meaning we give it ourselves. You've always known this, haven't you? Deep down, everyone knows it. Some people just have a harder time accepting it, so they pretend very hard that they don't know it and spend their whole lives looking for meaning where there ain't none."

Karkat had opened his mouth and taken another deep breath, prepared to yell some more. He stopped at this, because Adam made too much sense.

Adam poofed a copy of the Woegothic Grimoire of the Zoologically Dubious into his hands. "There are apparently Elder Gods out there, in other dimensions. Extra-dimensional horror-terror things. And they're at war with Azathoth, or so this book says, and that's how our Squiggly Sky-father got turned from Creator to sleeping Devourer. He rebelled against them, I guess. I'm not gonna ask the Ether any further 'cuz I'm not dumb enough to have all this knowledge seared into my soul. But I bet that war's pointless, too."

"Oh. Great. It's a fuck-train," Karkat said. "It never ends, does it? Some god creates a child who rebels and becomes a god in his own right, who does the same brain-damaged thing. Over and over. Forever. The gods have had eternity to solve their problems and instead of doing that they ended up ass-fucking themselves on everything they touched. What chance do humans have? Fucking none."

"It's okay. At least we care, so that's gotta count for something."

"I guess..."

"Well. You gonna forget this?"

"YES."

"Good. Let's put the world back together."

Karkat promptly forgot, and the world was rebuilt.

In the aftermath, almost everyone forgot almost everything about Friday.

It would have been lonely for Adam if nobody knew anything about him, so his friends and acquaintances were left out of the mind-wipe. He expected Brian and Wensley to give him a call any moment now, asking about the 'crazy moon last night that nobody seems to remember'.

The witches, too, were granted an exception because Adam rather liked the energy they brought to his neighborhood. Also, Adam had come to an agreement with Karkat that this was a love story, so of course Rose and Jade had to remember the dramatic fashion in which they confessed! They were witches; they seemed like sensible people. Adam figured they could handle a bit of abyssal knowledge.

Rose Lalonde's fans were disappointed that she never showed up to the midnight book signing. Her agent offered many apologies all around and explained that the flight had met an unexpected delay. Rose offered free copies of her new book to everyone who had been waiting, and the book signing was rescheduled for Saturday.

Jade and Grandpa Harley were of course in attendance. Ah, poor Grandpa! Jade had apologized to him many times, and the good Colonel, in tears, wailed how much he loved his brilliant granddaughter.

Damara and Feferi stayed for moral support. Feferi's cuttlefish familiars were great hits with Rose's fans. They lent the book signing a nice... squirmy tentacle atmosphere, so to say.

Adam surveyed all of this, his creation, and was satisfied. "Good," he said, and he and his crew proceeded to drive back to Lower Tadfield.

Outside the Earthly realm, Angels forgot they had responded to an Apocalypse; Demons forgot they had instigated one. Among the Dukes and Duchesses of Hell, Nyarlathotep and Shub-Niggurath had started Saturday off by sucking face, and they had no idea what prompted this. There had never been much attraction between them, previously. Had they possessed some humans who left changes upon their psyches? Who knows? Who cares? They were enjoying each other's tentacles too much to make that much of an effort.

Hastur sort of remembered that he'd been about to do something very important. This information niggled in the back of his mind as he paced in his office. It was about to come to him any moment now...

Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you

"Bless this computer! Bless this office! Bless all technology in the world! Aaaaaargh!"

Some of Sollux's Rick-Roll triggers were still active in Hastur's office. And Hastur had completely run out of new souls he could tap for tech support. None of them had been able to work under that sort of pressure. Needless to say, Hastur lost his train of thought.

Sollux's computer, now safely relocated to Aziraphale's (dust-free, thank the bees) bookshop, pinged with the notification that Hastur had been trolled once more.

"Heheheh," he sniggered.

"Bzzbzzbzz," the bees followed suit. They rubbed their forelegs together gleefully.

Eridan, too, was in the bookshop on this day. He was sitting across from Sollux, Science Boomstick balanced delicately on his upper lip.

The two of them had called a meeting in order to discuss their current predicament. While Heaven and Hell had forgotten about the failed Apocalypse, they hadn't forgotten the new apprentices/interns they had sent to the mortal realm. They still had to report their progress once in a while. This was a problem because, as had been agreed upon between themselves and their mentors, Sollux wanted to be an angel, and Eridan wanted to be a demon.

"What if..." Eridan spoke carefully so as not to drop his wand. His face was turned upward, and his lips curled unattractively to keep the wand in place. "What if you say you're just infiltratin' Heaven's operations? Like you say Crow sent you over to prove your worth an' you've tricked me an' Az into thinkin' you've swapped sides, an' I'll say the same, but the other way 'round."

"You mean we pretend to be spies."

Eridan dropped his wand back into his hands. "And also counter-spies, since we've gotta convince both sides of our loyalties to them."

"But in actuality we're loyal to neither, even if we do more things for one side than the other. We're mostly just in cahoots with each other."

"Exactly. That's about what the old folks already do. We'll just add a few more layers to it."

Sollux shrugged. "Okay."

As for their other predicament, The Flirty Thing, Eridan stared and waggled his eyebrows meaningfully.

Sollux returned the stare with a deadpan expression of his own. He considered Sales Douche for a moment. He considered dating Sales Douche for another moment. Eridan was a genuine douche. Nothing they'd done on this afterlife adventure had changed Sollux's mind on that front. This guy was a douche who liked smiting way too much and was full of himself and didn't even know how to science properly, goddamn it.

But, well, he was a pretty good guy under all of that. And, luckily for him, Sollux was a douche, too.

"Okay," Sollux said. "That too."

They didn't call it an Arrangement. Because Sollux was obsessed with binary, and Eridan was obsessed with sex, they decided to call it the Double Reacharound.

A bit further away, at the Usual Location, Crowley and Aziraphale were feeding naan to the ducks.

There were empty containers of take-out curry beside them. It had been the especially delicious kind, since Mr. and Mrs. Vantas had gotten into a huge row about what to put in the restaurant's new display case. Mr. Vantas was of the opinion that they should order some acrylic model foods. Mrs. Vantas wanted to sell some of the mystical knick-knacks she'd just brought back from her recent trip to see her parents. For 'authentic Indian flair', she had said.

"We're the authentic Indian flair!" Mr. Vantas had shouted.

"And curry all looks the same!" Mrs. Vantas had countered. "Nobody chooses curry based on looks! You can't tell what's in there based on looks!"

Ducks weren't supposed to have bread at all, but Crowley and Aziraphale's miraculous influence had kept them healthy regardless. Blessed naan seemed to be doing wonders for their plumage.

"I'm really not a fan of Apocalypses," Crowley said. "I hate them more with each passing one."

Aziraphale hummed in agreement. "Let's eat at the Ritz tonight. I think we've earned it."

The angel and the demon leaned into each other, and they stayed that way for quite some time, shoulders touching, surrounded by the soft quacks of ducks.

Meanwhile, some days later and many miles away...

It was a bright and sunny Apocalypse-free day in Hollywood, home of American movie magic and all things glitz, glamor, and plastic. One figure stood out over the rest of those on the set of SBaHJ: Teh Movie, fifth installment in the Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff movie series and spiritual sequel*** to its predecessors The Moive, The Movovie, The The Film, and The Movle. It was the director of this cinematic farce, Dave Strider, dressed smartly in his crimson crushed velvet tuxedo and sunglasses.

To be fair, everyone on set stood out quite a lot, or they would if they were surrounded by average people and not others who were dressed in similarly absurdist costumes as themselves. In front of the green screen, Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller were dressed as giant bananas, repeatedly hug-bumping each other. That is, they would both leap as gracefully as possible into the air, collide awkwardly, regain their footing, and repeat.

Every minute or so, Donald Glover, dressed as an apple, would crab-walk across the screen while hoisting aloft a string of gently jingling arcade tokens and shouting, "No cash value!"

This scene would later be superimposed over a pixellated background video of cute baby animals, silhouettes of couples enjoying romantic sunsets, and Keanu Reeves being surprised at knowing kung fu. Once in a while, the background video would flicker into a stark black and white still image of an Escher-esque staircase.

It would be analyzed by some film critics as a deeply profound commentary on the pitfalls of modern excess. Stiller and Wilson, in their roles as incompetent stoners Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, respectively, would be seen as "giddily naive in their safe bubble of suburban middle-class white male privilege". Meanwhile, Glover, in his role as Geromy the token black friend, "boldly confronts the audience with his intentionally marginalized role", while his chanting of 'no cash value' is espousing "millenials' ennui and pessimistic thoughts of life being but a game halfway lost by previous generations before the controllers were unceremoniously shoved into their hands only for their elders to blame them for losing the final battle they were ill-equipped to face" and somehow also truly the "warcry of the generations of inner-city poor who have been exploited and ground under the heel of unchecked corporate greed". The staircase interrupting the background video was of course the "nightmare reality of spiraling global injustice intruding into the fantasy world of the privileged".

Just as many other critics would simply say, "It's shit."

Mr. Strider, like any good artist, welcomed both interpretations of his work.

Dave Strider, founder and poster boy**** of the Neo-Neo-Dadaist movement*****, was an impeccable method actor himself. His entire life was a performance art. He was in-character at all times whenever he left his house, and everyone he encountered was roped into becoming a supporting character in his perpetual one-man show******. Despite howling with laughter on the inside, he was able to maintain a perfectly straight face as he spoke into his megaphone, "Great job, just like that. Keep it up after the break, guys. Fifteen minutes."

Setting the megaphone aside, he said to his assistant, "The critics are gonna eat this right up."

"Of course, Mr. Strider. A phone call for you." She handed him his secondary phone, designated for unpleasant business.

The caller ID said "Goffick Spawn of Freud". This was code for his twin sister, Rose.

"Sup," Dave said in greeting. He sauntered over to a quiet corner, leaning against a broken vending machine.

"Dave," Rose said in the tone that meant he was in trouble, "did you really put in a bid to produce the Complacency of the Learned movies?"

"Well, yeah. 'Course I did. Like I'm not gonna try to be a part of my sis' masterpiece? What kinda sibling you take me for? You wanted a movie made, but whoa what a coincidence. There's a director right in the family. Family's important. I'd absolutely let you handle the novelization of SbaHJ. Please turn it super dark and goffick and stuff, thanks."

"I would never touch your... creature. Just as you will never touch mine."

"Harsh."

"Indeed," she said wryly. "But what you will do is produce an Oscar-worthy romance based on the work of a friend of mine. Wouldn't it be the height of irony if, after an entire career spent purposely creating cinematic excrement, you suddenly made something conventionally good?"

Dave's eyebrows rose sharply. Rose was bossy sometimes, but she rarely outright told him what to do.******* "It would piss off absolutely everyone, and I would immediately proceed to produce more heinous shit afterwards. It'd be one of my best trolls, probably. This a prophecy type of thing?" he asked. Being from a family of witches, he had learned to ask important questions.

"You could say that."

"And...?"

"I've sent him over to you. He thinks I scheduled a meeting, which is what I'm informing you of right now. Your 3:00 is here to see you. Be nice."

Click.

The bitch hung up on him.

Dave glanced questioningly at his phone, then looked up when he heard shouting coming from the direction of the set.

A short man was red in the face from flailing and screaming obscenities at the crew. He waved what looked like a script in the air as he loudly insisted that of course he had an appointment, you fucking numbnuts, what kind of braindead asshole walks onto the set of a film without a fucking appointment, do you think people fly halfway across the world just to stalk your shitty meme-filled trashy "art" film?

"Oh sweet Jesus, yes," Dave said.

Just then, he'd fallen a little bit in love.

* Ah, the secret's out. God's ineffable game comes without rules or a board or game pieces because He's not playing at all. He's not conscious at all, but because His children have such deep-seated abandonment issues, we're all making up our own rules in His place.

** Being a Tentacle Thing's sleep emissions explains the fearsome true faces of angels. Every time angels appear in scripture, they must begin by saying, "Be not afraid", which doesn't really help much when they're fiery creatures with loads of eyes and multiple faces. That's why they've learned over the years to take on human corporations instead.

*** None of the movies had anything resembling a plot in the conventional sense of the term. They were all spiritual sequels of each other in a convoluted circle-jerk of trolling.

**** Literally so. He had a handsome face and gleaming blond hair – very photogenic. He posed for many surreal posters. Sometimes he was in a suit and tie, holding a baby crocodile. Most famously, he recreated a series of iconic 1950s pin-ups, polka-dot dresses and stockings and all. The only constants throughout all of these posters were Dave's sunglasses and completely stoic expression.

***** Like Dadaism and Neo-Dadaism before it, Neo-Neo-Dadaism rejected conventional asthetics and was as much about radical leftist political protest as it was about art. However, it was native to the internet age in that it challenged the notion of art as separate from "units of cultural transmission", which is the scholarly definition of memes. It was also, like, so meta. Everything was about layers of abstraction. Unbeknownst to the gushing film critics, the core layer was that it was all just a very long and dedicated joke at their expense.

****** "Man Pretends to be Hotshot Movie Director, Gets Hollywood to Believe It Too" and its sequel "Capable Movie Director Pretending to be a Shit Movie Director Pretending to be a Capable Movie Director"

******* The last time she'd done so (that he could remember clearly) was when he was 13 and relentlessly hitting on Jade over the internet because she was the only girl gamer he knew.