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The Wheel of Fortune
Stella doesn’t believe in chance.
She understands implicitly as she contemplates this card that she drew it from a deck of dozens just like it; she could have drawn so many other arcana and yet this was what appeared.
But is it truly so random? She was the one who shuffled the deck, she set herself up for this outcome, regardless of whether she had been conscious of it or not.
Things don’t just happen, no matter how improbable they may seem.
She flips over the next card.
Reversed Justice
But events ought to have a reason behind them, shouldn’t they?
Stella looks up at the night sky. Shimmering streaks of light ribbon across the starry canvas, party streamers hung up for the world’s cruelest celebration. The stars look down upon her world with blithe indifference. There is one gleaming pinprick up there which has grander intentions for this planet.
What reason is there for any of this? Because somewhere, millions of light years away, a collision of some big hunks of rock resulted in one of them setting on a course that would one day lead to it crashing into the planet she calls home?
It’s a joke is what it is, and the punchline is going to be the extinction of everything that she knows. No dinosaur could have done anything differently to avoid this outcome. In the end, all that reducing and recycling would be for nothing.
Next.
Two of Wands
She stands up from the iron table and walks around the yard. There are familiar furrows etched into the grass from her tail dragging behind her. The earth is cool and inert beneath her feet. What would it feel like for it to erupt beneath her, bursting into a fiery conflagration?
She wonders what difference it might make if she were to leave home right now. Hitch a ride along the highways as far as she can go. She wishes more than ever that she had been born a pterosaur instead of a stegosaur, so she could just fly away from here.
There haven’t been any announcements about where the asteroid might hit. It could be right in the middle of Caldera Bay, incinerating everything for miles in every direction even before the catastrophic impact. It could be somewhere on the other side of the world, sparing her and those close to her of instantaneous annihilation but dooming them to a slow suffocation as the planet chokes on its own atmosphere. Moving elsewhere could stall or just as easily hasten her fate, but it would ultimately be the same no matter what.
She settles wearily back into her seat before drawing another card.
Knight of Cups
It’s still better to act than to sit idle.
Stella raps her knuckles on the table as she thinks, and the cards rustle faintly. At the very least, it wouldn’t hurt to get away from home for a while. Perhaps she could pack a bag with the intent to go for a long hike through the pines, and if she just happens to decide to keep on walking then that’s simply the way things go.
She leans back, staring listlessly up at the sky, and for a few moments she feels satisfied, the urge to scrutinize her untold future absent.
But then she considers that leaving here would entail everything she knows behind. Everyone she knows. Her friends. Even her parents. The idea of venturing through the unknown with no one else to fall back on weighs heavily on her. It’s enough to get her to draw again without thinking about it.
Reversed Two of Cups
She has to suppose that she isn’t surprised. Her friends…well, sometimes, when she’s in a dour mood, as she is right now, she hesitates to even think of them that way. Sage is the only one in that group who regularly checks in on her, and lately he’s been increasingly preoccupied, frittering away in the kitchen to distract himself from his anxiety. Perhaps it can be said that all of them are similarly afflicted at the moment—the band doesn’t seem to be holding together from what she’s observed, in spite of their recent success. No one is taking things well, unsurprisingly.
She didn’t grow up in Caldera Bay like the rest of them, has yet to fully put down roots no matter how much she’s tried to. She’s too used to packing up and moving to get completely invested in a new group of friends each time. What reason does she have to be so invested in anything that happens here?
King of Wands
Stella clasps her palms over her face and massages her forehead. Her scales feel hot, like her brain is overheating. With her eyes closed, she takes a step back and contemplates. How much of it is really on them and how much is on her? No one ever invited her to Reed’s tabletop campaign, but she can’t recall ever expressing interest in joining. She could have tried harder to be their friend.
Three of Pentacles
She can understand quite readily that what they need is to stay together. No one’s going to accomplish anything by themselves. Maybe leaving town would functionally be no different than sulking in her room. Or in the backyard, for that matter.
She rubs her fingers slowly on top of the deck of cards.
Page of Swords
All Stella wants is to be able to understand what’s happening around her. She enjoys using tarot to tell others their fortune. The experience is different when she’s doing it for herself. There are no expectations upon her, leaving her to contemplate for as long as she needs to. She can tease out meaning from anything.
Reversed Ace of Swords
“Chaos,” Stella mutters under her breath.
But there is order in chaos.
There is order in chaos.
Order in chaos.
The Devil
She flings the card away from herself as soon as she sees the leering horned face. It flips through the air until landing on the grass. Face-up, but now it is reversed. She can’t remember for sure if it had been like that when she drew it. She decides that this is satisfactory enough.
Still, though…
Nine of Wands
She brushes the velvety surface with her thumb before holding the card to her chest, feeling the dull thumping of her heartbeat under the surface. Again she stands, and she walks to the edge of the yard to look out over the fence, over the rooftops sloping down toward the bay. Far in the distance, the rippling of the waves casts a reflection of moonlight, mirroring the ghostly auroras in the sky. She crosses her arms over herself and shivers, feeling chilly in spite of her long-sleeved sweater (not like her shorts are helping).
As much as Stella thinks that it would be fun for the whole lot of them to pack up and leave—she knows that Fang already intended to do that after high school anyway—it’s clear that they can’t leave now. Caldera Bay is where they belong. It’s their home. It’s a part of them just as much as any individual dinosaur is.
She takes out her phone and takes a scroll through her contacts. Sage is on do not disturb. She won’t try texting him, but maybe she can walk over to visit him. Maybe she can see all of them. She won’t go out of her way to insist that they need to patch things up and band together, but she feels that if she can at least spend some time with each of them then they’ll gradually converge. It’s all they can hope for at this point.
Back to the table, she sets the card down on the stack of drawn cards that she’s accrued. She only scarcely stops herself in the process of reaching over to draw yet another one. Her arm trembles, fingers slowly clenching, and she bites her lip. Anguish wells up in her soul at the thought that she simply cannot be satisfied. “What’s wrong with me?” she whimpers.
That is the question that prompts her to draw one last card.
Reversed Sun
Stella stares at the card for a long time—not really thinking about it, for she understands it completely; just thinking—and she sighs.
Eventually, she pools all the cards together, reshuffling the deck with her eyes closed as she’s practiced dozens of times, before leaving them on the table and walking away. She suspects she’ll come back for them sooner or later, but just for tonight she wants to act on her own power, without trying to tease out what the future might hold. Whatever happens, that will simply be what happens.
She doesn’t believe in chance, after all.
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Content warning:
Vent art
Depression
Dark themes
The Wheel of Fortune
Stella doesn’t believe in chance.
She understands implicitly as she contemplates this card that she drew it from a deck of dozens just like it; she could have drawn so many other arcana and yet this was what appeared.
But is it truly so random? She was the one who shuffled the deck, she set herself up for this outcome, regardless of whether she had been conscious of it or not.
Things don’t just happen, no matter how improbable they may seem.
She flips over the next card.
Reversed Justice
But events ought to have a reason behind them, shouldn’t they?
Stella looks up at the night sky. Shimmering streaks of light ribbon across the starry canvas, party streamers hung up for the world’s cruelest celebration. The stars look down upon her world with blithe indifference. There is one gleaming pinprick up there which has grander intentions for this planet.
What reason is there for any of this? Because somewhere, millions of light years away, a collision of some big hunks of rock resulted in one of them setting on a course that would one day lead to it crashing into the planet she calls home?
It’s a joke is what it is, and the punchline is going to be the extinction of everything that she knows. No dinosaur could have done anything differently to avoid this outcome. In the end, all that reducing and recycling would be for nothing.
Next.
Two of Wands
She stands up from the iron table and walks around the yard. There are familiar furrows etched into the grass from her tail dragging behind her. The earth is cool and inert beneath her feet. What would it feel like for it to erupt beneath her, bursting into a fiery conflagration?
She wonders what difference it might make if she were to leave home right now. Hitch a ride along the highways as far as she can go. She wishes more than ever that she had been born a pterosaur instead of a stegosaur, so she could just fly away from here.
There haven’t been any announcements about where the asteroid might hit. It could be right in the middle of Caldera Bay, incinerating everything for miles in every direction even before the catastrophic impact. It could be somewhere on the other side of the world, sparing her and those close to her of instantaneous annihilation but dooming them to a slow suffocation as the planet chokes on its own atmosphere. Moving elsewhere could stall or just as easily hasten her fate, but it would ultimately be the same no matter what.
She settles wearily back into her seat before drawing another card.
Knight of Cups
It’s still better to act than to sit idle.
Stella raps her knuckles on the table as she thinks, and the cards rustle faintly. At the very least, it wouldn’t hurt to get away from home for a while. Perhaps she could pack a bag with the intent to go for a long hike through the pines, and if she just happens to decide to keep on walking then that’s simply the way things go.
She leans back, staring listlessly up at the sky, and for a few moments she feels satisfied, the urge to scrutinize her untold future absent.
But then she considers that leaving here would entail everything she knows behind. Everyone she knows. Her friends. Even her parents. The idea of venturing through the unknown with no one else to fall back on weighs heavily on her. It’s enough to get her to draw again without thinking about it.
Reversed Two of Cups
She has to suppose that she isn’t surprised. Her friends…well, sometimes, when she’s in a dour mood, as she is right now, she hesitates to even think of them that way. Sage is the only one in that group who regularly checks in on her, and lately he’s been increasingly preoccupied, frittering away in the kitchen to distract himself from his anxiety. Perhaps it can be said that all of them are similarly afflicted at the moment—the band doesn’t seem to be holding together from what she’s observed, in spite of their recent success. No one is taking things well, unsurprisingly.
She didn’t grow up in Caldera Bay like the rest of them, has yet to fully put down roots no matter how much she’s tried to. She’s too used to packing up and moving to get completely invested in a new group of friends each time. What reason does she have to be so invested in anything that happens here?
King of Wands
Stella clasps her palms over her face and massages her forehead. Her scales feel hot, like her brain is overheating. With her eyes closed, she takes a step back and contemplates. How much of it is really on them and how much is on her? No one ever invited her to Reed’s tabletop campaign, but she can’t recall ever expressing interest in joining. She could have tried harder to be their friend.
Three of Pentacles
She can understand quite readily that what they need is to stay together. No one’s going to accomplish anything by themselves. Maybe leaving town would functionally be no different than sulking in her room. Or in the backyard, for that matter.
She rubs her fingers slowly on top of the deck of cards.
Page of Swords
All Stella wants is to be able to understand what’s happening around her. She enjoys using tarot to tell others their fortune. The experience is different when she’s doing it for herself. There are no expectations upon her, leaving her to contemplate for as long as she needs to. She can tease out meaning from anything.
Reversed Ace of Swords
“Chaos,” Stella mutters under her breath.
But there is order in chaos.
There is order in chaos.
Order in chaos.
The Devil
She flings the card away from herself as soon as she sees the leering horned face. It flips through the air until landing on the grass. Face-up, but now it is reversed. She can’t remember for sure if it had been like that when she drew it. She decides that this is satisfactory enough.
Still, though…
Nine of Wands
She brushes the velvety surface with her thumb before holding the card to her chest, feeling the dull thumping of her heartbeat under the surface. Again she stands, and she walks to the edge of the yard to look out over the fence, over the rooftops sloping down toward the bay. Far in the distance, the rippling of the waves casts a reflection of moonlight, mirroring the ghostly auroras in the sky. She crosses her arms over herself and shivers, feeling chilly in spite of her long-sleeved sweater (not like her shorts are helping).
As much as Stella thinks that it would be fun for the whole lot of them to pack up and leave—she knows that Fang already intended to do that after high school anyway—it’s clear that they can’t leave now. Caldera Bay is where they belong. It’s their home. It’s a part of them just as much as any individual dinosaur is.
She takes out her phone and takes a scroll through her contacts. Sage is on do not disturb. She won’t try texting him, but maybe she can walk over to visit him. Maybe she can see all of them. She won’t go out of her way to insist that they need to patch things up and band together, but she feels that if she can at least spend some time with each of them then they’ll gradually converge. It’s all they can hope for at this point.
Back to the table, she sets the card down on the stack of drawn cards that she’s accrued. She only scarcely stops herself in the process of reaching over to draw yet another one. Her arm trembles, fingers slowly clenching, and she bites her lip. Anguish wells up in her soul at the thought that she simply cannot be satisfied. “What’s wrong with me?” she whimpers.
That is the question that prompts her to draw one last card.
Reversed Sun
Stella stares at the card for a long time—not really thinking about it, for she understands it completely; just thinking—and she sighs.
Eventually, she pools all the cards together, reshuffling the deck with her eyes closed as she’s practiced dozens of times, before leaving them on the table and walking away. She suspects she’ll come back for them sooner or later, but just for tonight she wants to act on her own power, without trying to tease out what the future might hold. Whatever happens, that will simply be what happens.
She doesn’t believe in chance, after all.
Stella is a bit of an odd character in the context of Goodbye Volcano High. She is probably one of the characters the average player will see the least of on their playthrough of the game, requiring more effort to go out of one's way to interact with than the likes of Trish or Reed. She is the only character who never appears at the L&L sessions, not even getting a last-minute addition like Naser does. She isn't likely to get much development beyond "likes tarot" and "hangs out with Sage". And yet at the same time, she has reach far beyond any actual scene she appears in. Her tarot cards are a recurring thematic element in the game, between being the icon used for saving the game and her tarot readings weighing heavily on Fang's decisions. It really surprised me that she was the first character to really get angry at the bonfire scene at the end of the game, inciting the discord between the other characters. It had also struck me as surprising that, out of all the characters, Stella was one chosen for a design to put front and center when there was a promotion going with the Yetee back when the game came out. I feel like the devs had a particular attachment to this character, presumably left over from earlier drafts of the game when she might have been more prominent.
Anyway I was feeling down a while ago and I felt like channeling that through dinogoobers. It ended up being more work than was probably worthwhile since I had to research tarot and try to come up with suitable explanations and I'm sure I still fucked something up somewhere. I'd like to be able to write about GVH more but it's difficult when the drama with the characters is so intrinsically tied to being in high school.
Goodbye Volcano High as a whole is owned by KO_OP.
If you enjoy my work, consider supporting me on Patreon or Ko-Fi!
I still haven't actually done a playthrough to see Stella's scenes and I couldn't find much of them on the interwebs so I'm largely flying by the seat of my pants, oops.
Where does anyone live?
Anyway I was feeling down a while ago and I felt like channeling that through dinogoobers. It ended up being more work than was probably worthwhile since I had to research tarot and try to come up with suitable explanations and I'm sure I still fucked something up somewhere. I'd like to be able to write about GVH more but it's difficult when the drama with the characters is so intrinsically tied to being in high school.
Goodbye Volcano High as a whole is owned by KO_OP.
If you enjoy my work, consider supporting me on Patreon or Ko-Fi!
I still haven't actually done a playthrough to see Stella's scenes and I couldn't find much of them on the interwebs so I'm largely flying by the seat of my pants, oops.
Where does anyone live?
Category Story / General Furry Art
Species Dinosaur
Gender Female
Size 120 x 120px
i cant fucking trust anything GVH related anymore thanks to those fucking 4chan users. And it sucks, because it makes it so much harder to find actually good fan works for the game itself. Thanks for writing this, dude.
For real. Intensely frustrating any time I see art of the characters and then I see Snoot Game in the tags or Fang denoted with she/her pronouns. Need more art of Sage, best boy, because he was not corrupted by the channers.
i thank whatever gods are listening they weren't aware of him. I don't think I could have handled what fuckawful things they'd have done.
I've had this very same frustration. I likened it to wondering if a nice picture was AI or not. Such an acidic stain.
Honestly, I always felt that the Snoot Game iteration of Stella manages to make her more of an interesting character to follow in comparison to her presence in GVH.
I mean, like them or not, I'd say that basically all the snoot versions are more interesting than their "real" selves. Its a shame that the devs weren't more willing to take risks and be a bit more creative with their writing, its a super fun setting but the characters were all so basic and predictable.
Loath though I am to give it even the meagerest of shakes, I still have not played Snoot Game so I can't claim to say anything entirely definitive, but like...seriously?
I can't check the TVTropes page for Snoot anymore because it got fucking deleted, lmao, but I remember barely anything being listed there for Stella. I can't imagine much going on with her or Rosa, being far more ancillary characters to the central plot. Snoot is all about wooing Fang into heteronormativity, not about interaction and relationships like GVH is, all the other characters are functionally little more than set dressing. Naomi and Trish and Naser are there to be talked down to for their bullying and backwards behavior, Reed is there for funny weed jokes, Stella and Rosa are the token gays because lesbians are hot so they're the only LGBT content allowed to exist.
I wouldn't have written this if I didn't think that there was anything interesting about Stella in GVH, and I didn't even care about her that much when I played the game! She was my least favorite of the cast! But in reflecting on her I came to realize the tragedy of her character, the futility she faces in trying to make sense of the world around her and guide others toward happiness. The one scene I was able to find when I was looking up footage about her was about explaining her philosophy regarding order in chaos, which is something that a lot of people, teenagers especially, are going to have to grapple with. It's a character I can relate to a lot; perhaps the writing and presentation for her could have been better, but vibes matter far more than quality.
I can't check the TVTropes page for Snoot anymore because it got fucking deleted, lmao, but I remember barely anything being listed there for Stella. I can't imagine much going on with her or Rosa, being far more ancillary characters to the central plot. Snoot is all about wooing Fang into heteronormativity, not about interaction and relationships like GVH is, all the other characters are functionally little more than set dressing. Naomi and Trish and Naser are there to be talked down to for their bullying and backwards behavior, Reed is there for funny weed jokes, Stella and Rosa are the token gays because lesbians are hot so they're the only LGBT content allowed to exist.
I wouldn't have written this if I didn't think that there was anything interesting about Stella in GVH, and I didn't even care about her that much when I played the game! She was my least favorite of the cast! But in reflecting on her I came to realize the tragedy of her character, the futility she faces in trying to make sense of the world around her and guide others toward happiness. The one scene I was able to find when I was looking up footage about her was about explaining her philosophy regarding order in chaos, which is something that a lot of people, teenagers especially, are going to have to grapple with. It's a character I can relate to a lot; perhaps the writing and presentation for her could have been better, but vibes matter far more than quality.
Absolutely phenomenal storytelling here. Stella is a beautiful but tragic character - she tries acting like the mom of the group, always so supportive and using Tarot as a guide to help them, but deep down, she's still just an anxious teenager trying to make sense of the world and cope with their impending end. You did a wonderful job capturing both her character and her feelings, great work.
Thanks! I'm glad I was able to convey her character effectively even without having a complete grasp of her in-game appearances.
Short n Sad, I do wish we got to see more of stella's thoughts in the game
Also one detail i remember about her that u didnt brought up (not sure if intentional or not), but shes kinda nosey on a romantic sense, there's a few scenes of her saying she likes looking into Sage's love life and she herself has a crush on Naser, which she brings up to Fang's face and even asks if hes dating Naomi
Maybe there's something there u could have added, iunno
Also one detail i remember about her that u didnt brought up (not sure if intentional or not), but shes kinda nosey on a romantic sense, there's a few scenes of her saying she likes looking into Sage's love life and she herself has a crush on Naser, which she brings up to Fang's face and even asks if hes dating Naomi
Maybe there's something there u could have added, iunno
I wasn't aware about the crushing on Naser part, as mentioned I haven't actually seen a lot of her scenes and I couldn't even find very many of them on the net.
Having more of the romance aspect might have been fun but I was focusing primarily on personal anxiety since that's what resonated with me.
Having more of the romance aspect might have been fun but I was focusing primarily on personal anxiety since that's what resonated with me.
I dont think there is "x all scenes" type video on youtube for the game yeah, best u can do there is watch a full lp on youtube and skim till u find scenes with her, there arent that many
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