The Last Roomies! Story Ever, Promise: Page 7
on December 23, 2021 at 1:01 amTHE FINAL RERUN UPDATE!
I had never actually shown Ruth’s grave before. I’d shown Dina’s. And nobody cares about Tony’s. But when it came to write The Last Roomies! Story Ever, Promise, I figured, look, let’s finally go there. And so we have a lot of our major Walkyverse players here, paying tribute to her on the fifteenth anniversary of her Heroic Act Of Integrity, looking all grown up and with children. Joyce, grow your hair back out again! Walky, try to age sometime, you still look twelve. Howard, feel free to stab Danny in the neck, it’s right there, you know you’ve got that shiv in your pocket, avenge your sister!
Machete’s just pooped.
Did you know this story is the reason Dina pops out of the Soggies Portal at the end of Shortpacked! instead of Ruth? I was thinking about doing Ruth, but then I remembered, whoops, this story happens, and I wasn’t sure if this happens AFTER the end of Shortpacked!, somehow (Soggies MAY rule), and so I went with Dina. I think Dina was the better choice, but it coulda gone the other way.
The important thing we’ve learned is that if you republish the entire non-Shortpacked! Walkyverse every day, it’ll run out in about nine years. Learning this trivia has made doing these updates every night worthwhile.
Anyway, this was it! Goodbye! You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here!
(you can stay here)
(read through again a few times, give me some adviews)
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It’s over, isn’t it? Isn’t it over?
If there was some amazing force outside of time
To take us back to where we’ve been
And hang each moment up like pictures on the wall
Inside a million tiny frames so that we can see it all
It would look like
Will happen, happening, happened
Will happen, happening, happened
And there we are again and again
‘Cause you and I will always be back then
You and I will always be back then
Why can’t I move on?
I just finally finished reading this as I had a huge backlog to catch up on but I think maybe your problem is that you’re clearly the head alien and that guy can never move on!
[Strong Bad voice] It’s over!
[Strong Bad voice] It’s ov– [normal voice] oh goddammit.
You’re still here?
It’s over. Go home.
Go.
Pooped as in messed himself? Seems appropriate somehow
Now I’m picturing Ruth fighting the soggies with Becky.
… hot.
And then Ghost Ruth walked in from offscreen, knelt right next to DJ, and said, softly:
“I fucked your mom.”
Somewhere, Mike shed a single tear, though he knew not why.
And on that note… and since you asked earlier and I didn’t see it until just now.
One last one for the road.
So. Several years ago, sometime during the time when both DoA and Shortpacked were running at the same time, I decided to run an It’s Walky game for my wife and a few friends. I bought some miniatures and painted them up to look like the main cast, plus a few aliens (Reaper had a set that looked the part). And I did pregen names and backstory/personalities. My players could choose among a selection of characters and I would run everyone else in SEMME.
My wife ended up choosing to play Joyce. To prep, I had her read the first two DoA books. And then I said ‘her, but mind-wiped. You still have skills and speech, but your memory starts when you wake up.”
I also made one small continuity change – the encounter with Head Alien happened slightly earlier – a day before the Danny/Ruth accident. Instead, Joyce gets mindwiped and taken by SEMME early and someone makes up an explanation – she got into a car accident and died, sorry. Danny blames himself… and Ruth goes on with her life unscathed.
In SEMME, no one chose to play Mike, and… well, he seemed more like a disruption to the party dynamic that I was planning, so I swapped Mike for Robin, joining the team early. Plus, Robin is the perfect DM NPC – she’s powerful enough to help, but unreliable enough to wander off and let the PCs handle things.
We did the Day 1 Adventure, with several of the PCs running mind-controlled versions of them selves for a bit of non-lethal PVP. From there, I followed the comic fairly closely mission-wise, but left plenty of room for RP and living-together comedy to ensue, often prompted by Robin (and sometimes Mike who was still around just in on a different Squad).
The character dynamics I have spoken about before – my wife’s version of Joyce was free and uninhibited, valuing friendship and love above all. When Robin flirted with her, Joyce responded rather more easily than Robin was expecting, perfectly happy to make out with her friend.
Then Joyce heard about all the sex everyone else was having and decided she needed to get on that too, so she asked around about who was ‘the best at sex’ and landed on Joe – who was there early because someone wanted to play him as a techie. Joyce was like ‘I heard you’re the best… so sex now please?” And Joe was very much willing to oblige.
Having tried the sex with Joe, Joyce decided to try out Robin. That took longer and was more involved due to Robin’s own uncertainties about her sexuality and Joyce’s desire to be more than just physically intimate.
MEANWHILE, Joyce was also crushing hard on another team member… Jason. She quietly hated Sal. She wasn’t jealous of Sal, exactly – more like she was angry because if someone looked at her the way Jason looked at Sal, then she’s be super happy, but Sal was being a jerk about it. Joyce got close to Jason by offering to help with team morale. This gave her an excuse to ask around about everyone’s likes and dislikes – my wife had picked up on Joyce’s manipulative side, and I loved every moment of it.
Anyway, at some point during all this sexy dating stuff, Head Alien dropped a truth bomb on Joyce about how all the people she cared about, her family and friends, thought she was dead. And how it was her fault for mind-wiping herself. Joyce was upset by this, but mostly she just wanted to go see them and fix things. She didn’t want anyone thinking she was dead.
Eventually, she managed to do so. She returned to Indiana with Joe (who had a story about being in an Engineering college) and claimed that there was some silly mistake – of course she hadn’t died in a car accident. Pssh. She reconnected with Danny (who she had no interest in having met Jason) and Billie… and Ruth. And while interacting with the three, she noticed that Ruth seemed to have feelings for Billie. So she encouraged Ruth to tell Billie how she felt. And, having a good persuasion skill, she succeeded. By the time she left Indiana to head back to SEMME, Ruth and Billie were a couple.
Time passed. Joyce seduced Jason by dressing up as Moneypenny (having learned that he was a fan of James Bond). Having been seduced, Jason’s affections for Sal dwindled in the face of happy Joyce and the two started dating.
Joyce also started dating Robin, kinda. She made sure everyone was aware of both relationships. Neither Jason or Robin were exactly thrilled about the other, but that was more to do with their conflicting personalities than jealousy.
Time passed – years in universe. Both relationships got more serious but in entirely different ways.
Also Sal went Booster Rod insane and tried to kill everyone, as in the comic, and got put down by Joyce, also as in the comic, with some assists from Robin and Joe (Jason was on the ground with Walky and Dina, I think?). Sal got put in what I described as ‘that white prison where they put Magneto in the X-men movies’ but Joyce and some others lobbied to get her visitation rights from Danny… and Joyce quietly makes certain that Jason’s other love-interest is now occupied by Danny. Checkmate.
I think I forgot Anti-Joyce somewhere. Seems like she should’ve happened already? Anyway, since my wife’s version of Joyce was openly bi, completely unashamed about her sexuality, and just completely comfortable in her own skin, anti-Joyce was instead her worst self – bigoted, repressed, angry, and the one trying to kill her. Joyce took her down safely and anti-joyce ended up in teh Magento prison with Sal.
More time passed. Head Alien plots got thwarted.
Ruth and Billie got engaged. Joyce threw them a party and was the maid of honor at their wedding.
There’s more, of course – I went all the way into Joyce and Walky territory, except it was Joyce and Jason getting married while Robin just sort of lived with them too – Robin serving as the Sal since Sal was still in prison for attempted genocide. Or, no, wait, maybe she got time served after getting released to fight the Martians? Eh, whatever.
The point is, this was my answer to the ‘what if’ question someone asked yesterday. This is how I ‘what if’ed the entire Walkyverse by letting my wife run a Joyce freed from the constraints of her upbringing. It was a great game and we still speak of it fondly.
Very interesting to me that there’s absolutely no mention of Walky in any of this.
Walky was… there.
His player liked playing him as a goofball, so that’s where he stayed – early game Walky through the end. I honestly can’t remember if he got into any relationship drama at all.
That’s AMAZING
I miss RPing =( but our DMs have moved away (not that I didn’t also)… at least I got a whole book out of it that has taken me over ten years to finish ¬.¬;
I feel like I’ve asked this when you’ve brought it up before but can’t remember the answer, so… what system did you use for the game?
8 months late, but… Mutants and Masterminds.
Thank you for sharing this wonderful read about your campaign.
Huh, so that’s how it ended up! I remembered your talking about that game back during the Year Zero reruns, it’s neat finally getting to hear about how it wound up!
It’s always a little sad when a webcomic ends, even a rerun. But it was fun to walk down the memory lane with all of you on this little corner of the internet. It all aged better than I remembered it.
Now on to the shortpacked rerun!
Huh, it’s going to be weird. I’ve been reading Willis’s stuff since 2006 and there’s ALWAYS been a second site to check, even if it was just reruns with new commentary.
Y’know what that hadn’t occurred to me but yeah that’s gonna be a weird change!
I’ve been mentally preparing for it since the beginning of this storyline, but yeah.
…Oh shit, that’s Howard?!
Maybe it’s just me, but I think he looks like a non-evil Blaine…
Howard was a non-evil Blaine the whole time! Blaine was actually created part of a time-travel-evil-duplicate plot that was abandoned when Head Alien II realised even he didn’t entirely understand what he was thinking when he set it up.
I feel as though Head Alien not entirely understanding what he was thinking when he set something up is a frequent feature of his plans.
Well that’s it. See you all in a few years for the Martian return maybe probably not don’t hold your breath.
Farewell, Walkyverse. You may have had some regrets, but you were always the best you could do.
I like to think that Ruth got her comeback one day. Sure, the Resurrection Chambers were set aside for the very rich and the very powerful, of which Ruth was neither. But maybe one day, after the Soggie war was over, and after someone told Galasso that bringing back characters with iconic death scenes was a sure way to raise profits… maybe she had another chance.
It’s not perfect, and it never will be… but It’s Walky. And for that, I’ll always be glad.
Did Joe or Rachel even know Ruth? I’m pretty sure Rachel didn’t but can’t remember if Joe did. He would’ve known *of* her, since his roomie Danny probably talked about her, but did he ever meet her?
They interacted a bunch!
You will see a flashback to one of those interactions if you hit the previous button a handful of times
Yup! http://www.itswalky.com/comic/the-last-roomies-story-ever-promise-page-3/
Also not shown in that flashback, but easily findable if you do a tag search, is also a scene where Ruth is the one who told Joe he should try majoring in engineering (and so setting him on the path that would take him to the Walkyverse); it was the last interaction Joe and Ruth had, in fact: https://www.itswalky.com/comic/whats-your-major/
He’s also the one who coined the term “the Great Shit Shower of 1999” for the night she died, since it was also the night Joyce mindwiped herself and ended up disappeared by SEMME.
I’ve said it before but I may as well repeat it here: the Walkyverse has meant more to me than I can probably articulate. I started reading probably twenty years ago and followed daily until it ended (and have since moved on to reading Dumbing of Age). It was nice getting to relieve it in reruns but… all things have to come to an end (even when they’ve already ended years ago).
So… thanks, I guess!
I find it weirdly poetic that in spite of all the cast changes and going from slice-of-life to epic alien battles, Danny still ends up with the first and last words of the entire comic archive.
It’s like poetry, it rhymes.
Just like Kevin Conroy as a Gotham City Police Blimp Operator!
“Why not? After all, that’s how it all started…”
It’s been a pleasure following along with the reruns! I’m gonna miss ’em.
It’s been a pleasure reading this. Thank you for running this as updates.
It was spring of 2005 when a friend introduced me to Roomies! and It’s Walky! I was working my way through the archive slowly, and then I got into a car accident. It wasn’t major, nobody was significantly hurt, but I was a little bruised and a little out of sorts, and even though I showed up to my shift at Starbucks, the boss told me to go home. So I spent the rest of the day binging through the remainder of the It’s Walky! archives, Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” album playing on repeat the whole time.
I thought I’d have something more important to say about that, but I don’t. I guess I just wanted to tell that story, just to mark that I’m here.
Just want to thank you for sharing that
I’ve said my goodbyes some time ago, but this still hurts. Thank you Willis, for all of this.
Also, it’s about 9 years and 3 months; that’s actually a fair amount of content to be running daily!
Yeah, seriously, Joyce. Why the hell are you mimicking your mother’s hairdo?
Maybe there was a Machete-related incident and that’s the best she could do to salvage it.
Thats it? No more It’s Walky like, ever? Damn you Willis! Seriously tho, thank you so much for all the time and effort that’s gone into these reruns. Lifes going to feel strange for a while as I get used to the fact it’s run it’s course but at least there’s still DOA. There IS still DOA, right? Right??
Thank you, Willis.
I was wondering if Willis will also include the Soggie conclusion in this run, but this look like a better final and a direct link to it in the commentary seems like it’ will be doing the trick nice enough anyway.
I had put myself to wait for the whole thing to be posted before actually rereading it, when Willis started this project, but I couldn’t help myself catching with the last final strips (It’s Pregnancy was what drag me in earlier than I had planned). I’ll soon start my binge-reading anyway.
It’s strange, how, after years of Shortpacked and Dumbing of Age, this still is, to me, the core story of the Willis multi-verse and still can’t help myself but feel like SP and DoA are just spin-off. I guess they technically are.
Guess it’s time for me to finally embrace them as the new Core-willis work, if that make sense to anyone, but only after my binge-reading is over. There still will be the April 1rstand other irregular updates for the Walky-verse peeks anyway.
Thanks for your comic, David, it entertained a lot of my adult early years.
All the feelings!
:_(
😀
Thank you Willis, it was a great ride.
Now, what? Some possibilities, not for the near future, but maybe for later:
– The re-run of the re-run (now with random ordering, periodical insertions of random Shortpacked! and DoA strips, and new commentary trying to make sense of all the madness).
– The Martian Return (we will have to wait some years for that, maybe less if there is some kind of prologue).
– The Inverse Project: commenters collaborate to draw and post their version of the Walkyverse, one strip a day. Willis reads it every morning and makes hundreds of comments adopting several alt-identities.
– The gradual arrival of Head Alien to DoA and the blurring of the alt-universes borders. Big reveal that DoA is the Soggyverse, but we all knew that.
OK, now to today’s DoA.
…Should I dread the possibility of a “Shattered Glass” Walkyverse?
I am contemplating the hilarious glory of SG!Ultracar/Carla and now I desperately need ‘Shattered Glass’ Walkyverse to be a thing.
I might do the rest of the “Originally Posted” dates.
Probably not. But maybe!
But probably not.
I’m not.
Stephen stares into the camera as he ponders that he’s named after a dead man who betrayed humanity.
I don’t have anything profoundly heartfelt to say because gushing about how much I like It’s Walky! is my sidegig in these parts.
It’s a story of the world being saved at the hands of ruinous incompetents, one of whom quite literally cannot tie his shoelaces, and it all works out because their main villain is as big a ruinous incompetent and when handed godlike power still needed to brag about it and there was no other way he’d go out.
It’s a work of fiction that helpfully reminds me that stories aren’t a linear line to the most optimal conclusion; they’re about people, and people can be pretty fucking dumb.
Well, it’s been fun.
Gonna be SO weird without a second Willis comic of any sort to check, just, wow.
I think I did all my gushing in the Shortpacked stuff, since ultimately my heart will always be with Leslie and Robin, but I’ve so appreciated this look back at the Joyce/Walky stuff, especially the commentary. There’s something interesting about seeing an author revisit stuff that’s, oh, fifteen years old and sometimes coming from a place of college and early adulthood demon exorcising.
I definitely think Dina popping out of the portal for Shortpacked was the right choice overall – if only because multiversal constant Dina/Becky is adorable, and Dina works better for exposition and filling so many excess diversity varieties at once – but it would be interesting to see a version of Walkyverse Ruth emerge in the Soggie War. That weird combination of Ruth still being Ruth and Walkyverse Ruth post-death becoming this whole moral compass for Walky thing would definitely be something to see against a bunch of Soggies. But I think that’d probably require its own comic to explore to everyone’s satisfaction, and the thing about Soggies Maybe Ruling is that giving a definitive answer before the Martians come back just isn’t as funny. So, alas. There’s always fanfic, I suppose.
Well, it’s been quite a ride, especially for someone who was barely there the first time. (As I may have mentioned before, I got into the free Joyce & Walky strips via Shortpacked!, but never checked out the archive or anything.) And now there’s just DoA, and … random Shortpackeds sometimes?
Thanks for posting all of these. It was a nice walk through memory lane of my undergrad (I think I first found your comics sometime around 2000 or 2001 or so).
I guess I’ll have to re-read Shortpacked now.
Thank you for doing this. I especially liked your comments on each strip. I’m sad to see the end of it, but it’s been an enjoyable trip.
I’ve enjoyed reading these reruns, and the commentaries for them.
I’ve been reading these comics since middle school, and the Walkyverse will always have a special place in my heart. Hope we see it again someday.
Roomies is.. very nearly as old as I am, I definitely was not reading these as they came out (I think I caught up to Shortpacked not long before it ended). I found Willis’ work through DoA and started reading through these reruns out of curiosity more than anything. But after checking this website has been a daily part of my life for almost a decade, it’s going to be very strange for it to be over. Maybe one day the Walkyverse will return, and I can be there for it this time around. But if not, thanks for sharing these, Willis, it was good while it lasted.
Really enjoyed rereading this on a daily schedule, your comments on each one was a big driving force for me coming back again and again as well. I was also grateful that you added all the stuff I never saw back when this was your current comic (Started at itswalky sometime after the underwater martian base mission). This is the first time I got the full experience though. I just wanted to say thanks for throwing it all up like that, it was pretty cool.
I wasn’t sure if this happens AFTER the end of Shortpacked!, somehow.
For what it’s worth, I think it happens before that. 15 years after 1999 is 2014. The end of Shortpacked! happened in 2015.
Wow, feels weird having this comic finally done (for the second time). It has been a part of my life for a long time, not having this to read will take some getting used to. Although, thanks to the rerun, I got to read the comics that were paywalled the first time, at a time I couldn’t afford to subscribe and get them, and getting the author’s commentary was really interesting. Thanks for this Sir Willis.
When I started reading Roomies/It’s Walky!, IW! was still in its early infancy and I was still pretty much a Joyce myself. Seeing Joyce have a soft break up with religion (and Scott Kurtz from webcomic PVP have a hard one around the same time) was somewhat eye-opening and it definitely helped plant the seed of doubt that would eventually grow into a full-fledged agnosticism several years later.
I learned later that she was Willis’s own voice going through all those things, so it explained the sense of kinship I felt for her all this time.
I’m grateful.
I started reading Roomies/It’s Walky for a profoundly inane reason. I randomly stumbled upon a Transformers fan page run by a user named Tengu. There was a feature called the ‘Badass Transformer of the Month’, or maybe it was ‘Badass Robot of the Month’. I read through the archives of that, eventually getting to the crossover with Walky’s ‘Dumbass Transformer (or Robot?) of the Month’. So I went to Walky’s Transformers fan page and read all of that.
But I didn’t read the comic at that point, just the Transformers section. But that part stopped updating, and I still checked it out periodically, and FINALLY I checked out the comic when I realized there would probably be no new Dumbass updates. I believe ‘Depth Perception’ was the story arc running at the time.
As we’ve gotten towards the end of this I’ve been struggling to remember how I first found It’s Walky. I wanna say it was through one of the Keenspot ad boxes, but then I can’t remember what I was reading on Keenspot before It’s Walky. (I also wanna say it was the animated ad box with Sal behind bars but maybe that’s just because that one has stuck in my head for years.)
I found it through the best friend of my then online gf (it was the early 90s, all the cool kids were doing it, ok!?) He got me into webcomics, particularly IW!, Bob & George, 8-Bit Theater, Sluggy Freelance, and El Goonish Shive. Interesting to see 4 of those 5 are still making comics 20 years after, btw.
Thing eventually (inevitably?) fell through with the gf, but he and I kept being good friends after that.
The ad box I specifically remember was:
“Billie.” “Walky.” “You got a haircut.” “You have a man’s head between your legs.” “Don’t change the subject.”
That might have actually been before Depth Perception, so maybe I saw it but didn’t start reading it, or the ad box just continued to run later, I don’t recall how those worked, no real reason it needed to be a brand new comic.
Oh YEAH I distinctly remember seeing that before I read the comic. Ha ha now I’m getting weirdly nostalgic for ad boxes, sheesh.
This is the kind of epilogue every good story should have. I started reading webcomics at xkcd, and got from his “also good comics” to “sam & fuzzy” to Shortpacked! And DoA. For years those were the three sites I’d visit daily and I picked up on these reruns, adding a fourth (with a few to check monthly or so) . A whole world opened up with the whole backstory in the world of SP! It took a while before the first Robin/Mike interaction in Shortpacked made sense (how are you alive!?). Then S&F ended their story and I tried a few new comics but nothing hit like that. Then the ending of Shortpacked came and I lost another one of my favorites. And now this story ends as well, but the emotion is mixed. Of course the story ends, it has to at some point, the fact we’re feeling sad over it means we should rejoice having read it in the first place and besides, I could not have wished for a better epilogue.
thank you, Willis
Grown-Up Danny looks like Christopher Randolph, kinda.
Being so used to checking this every morning, I’d forgotten it had ended. Now I’m sad.
Oh well. Merry Christmas (Eve morning) everyone.
I loved this comic.
Wait, no. That’s a lie.
I love this comic and I likely always will.
Damn you Willis!
But really, thank you for making these, David.
til all are one
i guess
Wow. That was a powerful ending. I am glad I stuck it through the whole saga.
I’m gonna have to train myself to not check this site every time I check DoA
I did the same thing. Autopilot is gonna take time to relearn.
Yup. :\
This.
(Also, thank you so much, Willis! I came into the worlds of your comics with Dumbing of Age, binged Shortpacked! till I was caught up & followed it to the end, & binged Roomies till it bottomed out in Joyce & Walky strips behind a paywall. I was really grateful for the chance to re-experience the Walkyverse straight through with you as our guide. I still wish you’d re-run Shortpacked! with new commentary! I’ll miss getting to read your authorial takes—& won’t you be bored without two strips to run? 😉 But I can’t complain. See you in the Dumbiverse! Fan for life!)
I’m still coming here every day automatically.
* Tips hat *
The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.
So that’s that, huh? It was a fun ride!