We are now Rose. Months in the past. Her home’s covered in a thick blanket of snow. Her room is a little less messy, there is a lack of knitted goods laying around.

This is because Rose has opened her birthday gift from John, and it is the knitting set. Rose is talking to the mysterious 4th friend GardenGnostic[GG]. GG seems to have uncanny knowledge of things about the other kids both past and future. They are also not good at hiding this from Rose who picks up on every one of GG’s abnormally accurate assumptions.

GG tells Rose she will soon find a game that will give her the ability to resurrect her recently deceased cat. Though she had no idea what game and wasn’t able to provide much else. Very weird! I loved my cat friend but would absolutely not resurrect them. Rose claims she only had a “lukewarm” relationship with her cat. Also a convenient flashback to someone who was just writing about Sprite prototyping.

Now back to Dave, in the present, who is prepping for his encounter with his big brother. It’s shown that Dave lives on the top floor of a massive highrise. The bird he slew is on the roof of another building across the street. Also meteors are falling like crazy around him. This makes sense. Dave is in a much denser urban area so there must be a lot more players getting into SBURB. This is triggering doomsday events. Also how the hell does Dave afford a penthouse. He must be richer than Rose.

I’m going to totally ignore whatever the hell Dave is quoting here.

Dave enters his living room. This is also potentially his brother’s bedroom. I’ve had to do this before myself, city living is rough like that. Dave mentions his brother has “gigs” implying that he does shows with Little Cal. While explaining his brothers various puppets Dave mentions he has a lot of respect and envy for him. Also Dave’s layers of irony come up here, He takes a lot of comfort with living in layers upon layers of irony. That’s an important part of his character which will come up a few times. Anyway, Dave is finding it odd that his brother is not around.

Little Cal appears directly behind Dave seemingly out of nowhere. Dave just assumes he hadn’t noticed him until now.