I guess as long as I’m revisiting my old Fiamet speculation I should properly get into it… it seems a foregone conclusion at this point that what we’ve been calling the “first guardian axolotl” is Fiamet’s lusus. which should make us think even harder about Jude’s drawings:
the pencil shading of the character could lead one to think this is one of the monsters, but the eyes are a detail none of the other monsters possess… whether this means it depicts the actual salamander or a monster very clearly cloned from it is ultimately irrelevant: either the creature was on Earth at some point, or a cult from Earth were able to get to it…
to risk pointing out the obvious, this new locale teased at the convention seems like a pretty clear candidate for the location of another, much older cherub portal… notably the Skaianet Systems background - which I’ve noted before seems to play into Jude’s conspiratorial tendencies - has Jake spending his time sailing the Pacific in search of ancient temples; something explicitly flagged up in Hiveswap itself. in the context of Homestuck’s mythology it’s obvious what Jake’s looking for is the frog temple; but divorced of that mythos, and keeping in mind the likelihood that Jake imported that cherub portal for the purpose of looting Alternia the same way he looted the Incipisphere, having cherub portals strewn around various ancient temples would be an interesting way of keeping that part of Jake’s character embedded in Hiveswap’s story without having to tie it into extraneous Sburb nonsense.
though part of me also ponders whether it would make sense for this hypothetical ancient cherub portal to lead to Earth… the portal to take Joey back home is back in Dammek’s basement. why shouldn’t these portals lead all over Paradox Space? if one were to choose to believe Fiamet’s lusus is literally a first guardian, and in the knowledge that all planets have one, having a portal from Alternia to another planet and back again would no doubt be convenient. and I always thought it would be a shame to introduce us to a world that ships all able bodied adults off to fight interplanetary wars without showing us at least a little bit of one of those other planets…