General things to ponder (van pls break up this post ok)
Denizens. The choices they present. Who will talk first, and who will fight first? Zack will be an interesting case--he's a hardcore gamer so the boss battle instinct is ingrained into him, but he's also a person who prefers to avoid conflict.
I think I do want that alternate session. Elly, Em, Kit/Cally, Jesse. Maybe toss in someone random like Neal or Birdget somehow, and maybe Anna or whoever Jesse's friend was? Leaning toward Kit being in this session so that when session crossover happens, Chrissy can meet Susie and Joseph--but, you know, they need to work for it. Same with Em and Mel. Note that Jesse was a year or two older than Jason who is two years older than Elly. Mel is three years older than Jason. It's not unreasonable for him to know Mel or especially Em. I'm really starting to get behind Cally as Player A6, Sam as Aubrey's guardian, and Kit as a player in Session B.
Someone finds Rose's walkthrough. Who?
Even if Mel doesn't dream on a moon, I think I want her to at least get to visit Derse, and like it there.
Kit is a drama kid; that multiplicity makes him a good fit for Derse.
Initial session "crossover": because both groups are playing, they ain't dead yet, and internet is constant throughout, so they can still IM. For a long time it's just that--then eventually they figure out 1) that their sessions are null and 2) that all sessions are located within one paradox space and that there is a way to navigate through it and cross over, through canonlike crazy bullshit means but probably with less Green Sun.
If you're really doing two sessions, and if they're both sessions of 6, then you're probably going to want to have every aspect covered. That means no more dancing around it--those pain in the ass aspects will have to go to SOMEBODY so don't just dump them all off on session B.
Things to keep in mind: your idea was for this to be one of the FAILED sessions concurrent with canon. Also that means that their Skaia has the Tumor--since it was a property of the genesis frog if affects ALL sessions launched from that universe.
No scratching. Scratching is too complicated and requires ectobiology. I guess maybe you could come up with a non-ectobiology alternative but that seems dumb. Or you have six in each session and there's an ancestor session vs descendant session that just are concurrent here? But then scratching either session would reset both. Okay also if we're going to be technical, the canon scratch should have affected these kids too, right? But this all should be happening pre-canon Scratch.
If it isn't YOUR Scratch, then it doesn't screw with your lineage or whatever. The only thing that would change post-Scratch is that, say, they'd play the version of Sburb released by Crockercorp instead of Skaianet... or rather, they wouldn't play Sburb, because Jane and co seem to have gotten their hands on it before anybody else.
Their session would just flicker out of existence when the canon kids scratch, right? (Hard to say for B1 because Jade took the session along with her, but maybe ) Maybe go with a crack-in-the-universe, things-just-gradually-stop-existing style 'flickering' if you write up to that.
Session A should maybe go as far as discovering The Tumor. Session B is obviously null because they have no Space player.
A Seer, Knight, Mage, or Witch of Void might be really good at navigating between sessions--so maybe one of the Session B kids actually brings their party/session to A instead of the reverse. That would also be suited to the fact that Session A has the frog planet. So maybe they don't actually pop open Skaia (using Prince of Space shit) until after both parties are there--maybe they even succeed in defeating the Black King, only to find the Tumor waiting for them instead of their reward?
Time passes differently between sessions, especially once the Scratch beings to effect them. Over a course of years, the players and other elements of the Incipisphere disappear one by one; those who remain wonder about the empty towers (which might for some time contain stuff but supposed never were inhabited) on the moons and Jackie at least finds them very eerie.
Things erased from existence via Scratch are erased from Skaia's oracle clouds, but are not erased from the memory of the horrorterrors.
Within the construct of paradox space, all existing "non-Homestuck" AUs (e.g. Sublimation, EBverse, the AUs where Zack/Jason/Jackie's relationships are different) can exist. Sburb doesn't not exist in them; it simply hasn't been played in those universes yet at the point in time that those stories take place the pertinent characters just don't know about it. Consider that Sollux just crafted the game and shared with his friends; it's probable that the game actually being mass-marketed is rarish. However, under paradox space rules, time travel does not cause new/fracturing universes; universes are defined here as chronologies, and time travel (at least Sburb-based time travel) actually permanently overwrites history; someone crossing through the Furthest Ring into another universe/session can only have access to a single chronology. It's probably possible for the horrorterrors to retain knowledge of multiple chronologies per universe. Scratching actually creates a new universe based on the pre-scratch one, so parallel universes with small differences (like whether Zack and Jason get back together, whether Ozy wins the election) are probably the results of scratching by unrelated characters, causing butterfly-effect shifts in political feeling or in formative experiences.
No, the Scratch actually does wipe the original universe out of existence. The reason that the beta kids still exist is that they left the universe BEFORE the Scratch--Rose and Dave were already outside in the Furthest Ring, and Jade took all the planets/Skaia and picked up John as soon as his scratchwork was done and started crossing the Yellow Yard BEFORE the Scratch completed (so maybe even in the world of origin it is a slow process after all). The only reason the pre-Scratch trolls weren't wiped out of existence is because they were ghosts, and ghosts exist in the Furthest Ring, and in the Furthest Ring all timelines coexist so nothing can be erased from is (unless Lord English does his thing). And thus you still cannot travel between "alternate choice" style AUs.
Are both incipispheres and astrological universes distributed throughout paradox space, bordered by the Furthest Ring in the same way--such that travel through the Furthest Ring could allow passage between the two? Or are an astrological universe and its corresponding incipispheres all bounded by one shared Ring?
In which case, it may be even easier than what Rose and Dave did to travel between sessions. In canon, they had to cross ASTROLOGICAL UNIVERSES--pre- to post-scratch--but here they need only travel from one incipisphere to another, based on the same home planet.
Read up on how the Condesce traveled.
