Raised on the road by his siblings Rick and Marissa, as well as the Signless, the Psiioniic, and the Grand Highblood (aka “Big B”), Dave has been aware of and able to use his powers of time since he was very young—about seven or so, around the same time he became friends with John Egbert, Jade Harley, and their family members. After the Alternian War, the group dispersed, leaving only Dave, Rick, and Big B to wander as they pleased in their government-provided RV trailer.
Sometime before his eighteenth birthday, Dave commissioned a fake I.D. from an outside source and, with Strider street smarts and a much more detailed understanding of Alternian culture than most “Earth-born” trolls, left the roaming nest to take roost in Dallas. He started as a smalltime couch-hopping DJ until he eventually met a pair of anarchist hackers, Sollux and Captor, who later became his moirails. After a series of failed romantic endeavors on his part, Dave accepted Captor as his “boyrail.” Much to his delight, around the time Dave met the duo, he caught the eye of Club Skaia’s owner/manager, Doc Scratch.
For a while, Dave was damned sure he had it made, living life as the king of the Dallas club scene. He met and befriended people like Feferi, Eridan, and Gamzee. But then his sense of wanderlust came knocking around the end of June 2011, and with his moirails constantly absent due to having to “lay low” whenever their hacking endeavors caught too much attention, Dave loaded a car or two up with friends and set out to embark on a rather impromptu road trip. His intended destination was Washington state, as Dave hoped to reunite with his childhood friend John.
Other plans got in the way, however, and the caravan of misfits Dave was traveling with never reached its destination.
A sense of incompleteness haunted Dave, nagged at him constantly, and he slowly became more and more reclusive, sleep deprived, and unstable. In secret, Dave began manipulating his time abilities to commit “quantum suicide” out of “boredom,” which fractured the reality and flow of time within his apartment.
And then along came a “horrorterror” called Danger.
Dave became the being’s host, and, though he has long since passed on the parasitic entity, retains many abilities and traits left by Danger’s influence.
The DJ stepped out of the spotlight of Skaia’s club scene, pushed away his friends and lovers, strained all of his relationships—even with John, who had recently moved to Dallas, (though Dave did develop a “kisrail” relationship with Karkat, albeit one originally from a different timeline who was “adopted” by Clubstuck’s timeline.)
Dave, in attempt to escape his own thoughts, would slip away to visit any large body of water he could find, and, sometimes, attempt to drown himself in hopes of triggering his own rebirth. That was the beginning of his hydromania.
During this time period, his “friends with buckets” relationship with Gamzee got more and more complicated, as both the junglist and Dave were developing not-red/not-black feelings for one another. This was once of several factors that contributed to Gamzee’s eventual flight to New Orleans. Dave followed him for a variety of reasons—without, of course, telling Captor, who had been avoiding the apartment because of his ability to “see” the doomed, dead Daves.
In Louisiana, Dave met Aradia, reunited with Gamzee, and began to dream of Derse and of his dream-self, who seemed set on taking Dave out of the picture.
Within a short time, Dave experienced two major deaths: his fight with his dream-self, which ended with the two merging, and Dave ascending to God Tier. Dave’s ascent was caused by a series of subsequent events, although the deal-sealing kill was made by the hands of a crazed Gamzee in the late Calvin Strider’s mausoleum. During the second death, both Dave and Aradia used their time abilities to avoid fatality.
This was how “Dario,” a split-off alternate of Dave, was “born.” For a while, only Gamzee was aware Dario even existed, and for good reason, since Dave had a policy of swiftly snuffing out any of his alternates that stuck around for too long, fearful they would cause him to be less than whole and even more unstable. This ended up being the case.
On Dave’s twentieth birthday, Captor, after engaging in an online spat with Dave, arrived in New Orleans and was quickly murdered by an Azure-blooded troll who had previously stalked Gamzee to New Orleans for some less-than-savory reasons. Dave did not take the news well at all, and vanished into Derse, where he finally confronted his dream-self.
Shortly after his revival, Dave discovered Dario’s existence and the closeness shared by the not-ghost and Gamzee. Dario displayed all the good and redeeming qualities Dave once had but was now without. Consumed with jealously and delusions to the point of insanity, Dave swore to kill everyone he cared about to keep them loyal to him and him alone.
Karkat was the first and, luckily, only victim of this mania, burned alive in Dave’s apartment while the youngest Strider watched.
Dave retreated to his Medium, the Land of Coast and Tempo, to plot his next move. While there he received a visit from a special guest, called the White Raven, who existed as one of the Guardian creatures endowed with power from the Green Sun. This led to a weeks-long quest on Dave’s part to rescue his brother, who had been missing since October, from an alternate-dimension “hell” in Dave’s now charred apartment, The Splatterhouse.
Eventually, the two made it out in somewhat-whole pieces, but they quickly parted. Dave resumed his quest to killing off his close friends, and sought out Dario. The two, on advice they knew subconsciously, as well as some given by Gamzee, arranged to duel, knowing either way they would remerge with one another. For a month or so, there was no word from either until Dave emerged on the beach he had first drowned himself at months ago.
With new confidence, though still plagued by periodic bouts of dismal mood swings, Dave now seeks to set things right in any way he can. This motivation has brought him to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he is currently situated.
Dave is most firmly affiliated with house culture, although he dabbles in all kinds of music.
More information about this character can be found here.
