Spectrum
Tell me a secret~
- Location
- Behind you~
Or sprout wings instead, because that evokes angels instead of predators. Or just used a friggin' Lumos equivalent!
Companion Chronicles [Jumpchain/Multicross SI] [Currently visiting: INTERMISSION]
- Thread starter Tempestuous
- Start date
- Location
- Colorado
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Fuck that would be deeply ironic, could you imagine her reaction Cheerledra showing up where she moved to get AWAY from magic...
Recentish EGS Spoilers that make this more fascinating, see... The Emissary of magic recently said Uryuoms AREN'T from outer space and are by definition not Aliens.
Agreed I can TOTALLY understand why Penny wants a life devoid of magic for herself, it doesn't make her stupid, it just means she and Cass want different enough things out of life to an extent that things can't work between them, based on what we know, even if she adjusts to her world going Magic Public, there is no WAY she'd enjoy life on the Chain, and Cass is still invested enough to keep going on.... Sometimes, things aren't meant to be, sometimes someone seems perfect for you, but your one point of contention is such a big deal that there's no way to make it work without one, of both of you ceasing to be yourself. What would make her an idiot would be if she tried to force herself or Cass to change in order to MAKE it work.
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- Location
- Wingmaiden's Reach, the Near Roofs, Town
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I don't think there's any floriography shenanigans going on? A quick look at my flower dictionary says:
violet - modest worth
lily - majesty
And people laugh at me for keeping my flower dictionary in my bag, as if it is not a demonstrably useful object literally
EDIT: a) that was a joke, I was being flippant. Sympathy hugs are ... not necessary at this time?
b) if there is any floriography at play I guess there's kinda a floral metaphor going on for how these two perceive the world re: magic and all?
Penny gets the violets - modesty, humility; famously unassuming (c.f. 'shrinking violet' which does derive from the flowers)
Cass gets the lilies - majesty (and yuri)
I dunno. Just a thought.
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- Location
- Massachusetts
I don't think anybody who wants fantasy to stay fantasy would prefer to use the label rather than "fiction".
You receive proof that love and hope be and anger and sadness actually affect objective reality, that magic is literally real, and you run from it? Magic is the confirmation that human pathos actually matters in what is otherwise an uncaring void without context. The very concept is incredibly convenient, weaponized egoism. I can't understand turning it down.
I can understand fear of the unknown though. Ironic that the only solution to this be to jump in headfirst ass well but I suppose you could spend a few years twitching at shadows and discovering nothing was ever there.
You receive proof that love and hope be and anger and sadness actually affect objective reality, that magic is literally real, and you run from it? Magic is the confirmation that human pathos actually matters in what is otherwise an uncaring void without context. The very concept is incredibly convenient, weaponized egoism. I can't understand turning it down.
I can understand fear of the unknown though. Ironic that the only solution to this be to jump in headfirst ass well but I suppose you could spend a few years twitching at shadows and discovering nothing was ever there.
She does know now about supernatural stuff, though. Pandora's box is already open, you can't unknow that knowledge anymore even if you go home and never see Cass again. Surprised she wasn't even open to giving it a shot, just immediately from falling in love to running away in terror. Ironically she's probably read too many fantasy stories and thinks this is way more dangerous than it really is.
Nashk
Tyrant of Kyushu
- Location
- Kyoshi Island
She's not though? Just imagine yourself in her shoes. It's nighttime and dark, you stop to have a conversation with your date at an empty gas station parking lot. She starts acting cagey and nervous, and begins blabbering like a crazy conspiracist. Then your date decides to show you proof and so you wait to see what possible kind of proof she could provide....
And then in the shadows that hides her face, she reveals herself to be something inhuman. Something entirely different from what you expected. It's just dropped on you in this strange place alone and now you have nothing to rely on but your own flawed understanding that you got from reading books and tidbits online to process this situation., And worse it changes your while world view and you realize what you though was true your whole life is actually wrong.
Penny's reaction is entirely understandable, and honestly it's made me think more about transphobia and my own feelings on the topic.
Cassie absolutely did not help in any way with how she revealed herself, and how she presented her arguments. It feels like she went in expecting to fail, and thus performed as such.
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I kinda wish you put some of Homura comforting Cas in this chapter. I need some comforting now 😥
dhasenan
always lowercase
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Noooooo! Third date material, Cass! Third date!
- Location
- Turtle Island
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Oof. Really good chapter, but oof.
Nice shoutout to Katalepsis, btw. Anyone who hasn't read it, I highly recommend, it's amazing and updates weekly.
Nice shoutout to Katalepsis, btw. Anyone who hasn't read it, I highly recommend, it's amazing and updates weekly.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
What a gut punch, it all works really well for the story but ow I felt that in my soul.
- Location
- United Kingdom
- Pronouns
- She/Her
- Pronouns
- She/Her
That's an oof.
At the same time I'm split by two thoughts:
1. They're going to see each other around enough that she's liable to end up seeing "hey, Cass is still Cass" and maybe try giving it a second try.
2. She would literally never join the jumpchain, even presuming it was okayed by the others with the "recently burned" mentality Max probably still somewhat has, so maybe it's better if she doesn't give it a second try.
Cass would almost certainly end up telling her about the jumpchain immediately if she did want to try dating again, too, because she would remember her original reaction and, combined with the knowledge that their relationship could only last until the jump ended unless she joined, would essentially feel so guilty if she didn't tell her that it's an already-made decision.
If you think about it, romance on the Jumpchain is kind of cursed in the first place, unless it's between two people from the same universe (Sweet JP and Sonoshee, for example) or at least one person has no attachment to their home universe, because either you stay on the Jumpchain forever, one of you has to leave your home universe forever for the other, or you leave each other knowing neither of you will ever see the other again.
I feel that maybe members of SV and perhaps even moreso readers of jumpchains have a fundamental bias toward Cass's way of thinking over Penny's that doesn't exist in the general population, or might even be reversed in it.
Jumpchains are what I would typically describe as "escapist fiction", and I can say personally that I for one was eagerly hoping for a Hogwarts letter at 11 just like (iirc) Cass mentioned in this story, at the very least, but I wouldn't expect this from the general populace in the slightest.
At the same time I'm split by two thoughts:
1. They're going to see each other around enough that she's liable to end up seeing "hey, Cass is still Cass" and maybe try giving it a second try.
2. She would literally never join the jumpchain, even presuming it was okayed by the others with the "recently burned" mentality Max probably still somewhat has, so maybe it's better if she doesn't give it a second try.
Cass would almost certainly end up telling her about the jumpchain immediately if she did want to try dating again, too, because she would remember her original reaction and, combined with the knowledge that their relationship could only last until the jump ended unless she joined, would essentially feel so guilty if she didn't tell her that it's an already-made decision.
If you think about it, romance on the Jumpchain is kind of cursed in the first place, unless it's between two people from the same universe (Sweet JP and Sonoshee, for example) or at least one person has no attachment to their home universe, because either you stay on the Jumpchain forever, one of you has to leave your home universe forever for the other, or you leave each other knowing neither of you will ever see the other again.
I feel that maybe members of SV and perhaps even moreso readers of jumpchains have a fundamental bias toward Cass's way of thinking over Penny's that doesn't exist in the general population, or might even be reversed in it.
Jumpchains are what I would typically describe as "escapist fiction", and I can say personally that I for one was eagerly hoping for a Hogwarts letter at 11 just like (iirc) Cass mentioned in this story, at the very least, but I wouldn't expect this from the general populace in the slightest.
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- Location
- Colorado
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Oh for sure, I'm definitely the type of person that if offered a Jumpchain, after verifying it's relatively safe I'd go all in. I've had a shit enough life that yeah, I'd jump at any real escapism that existed, as I feel like my Family/Friends would miss me but even if I didn't come back I doubt that their lives would be worse for it... But here's the rub, not everyone is a depressed nerd with low self-esteem like I am, I can recognize and feel for that. Tbh I'm much more like Cass than Penny but... Yeah I understand why a normal ass person who has a decent life would not want it super disrupted by supernatural BS...
Mizu
Software Developer
- Location
- Victoria, Australia
Hm. I agree that most folk would prefer to keep their current life and social relationships, if they're content with it, so in that regard giving it all up to go off on an interdimensional adventure would be unappealing for them. Speaking for myself, I like the idea of getting cool powers and seeing various character from media I enjoy 'in the flesh', but probably only in imagination; I'd miss my friends and family if I vanished off to another universe, especially being as the span per jump is generally a decade and you can't go home until the chain ends/you give up on continuing.
- Location
- England
A great deal of set up for not much pay off, hopefully this is not the end of this episode of personal development for Cass
esotericist
A Weary Hand
- Location
- Lacey, WA
just for the record, one of the big selling points for me moving to washington state was that there would be vastly less sunlight. heavily overcast days are my lovely days.
this summer has been kinda terrible on that front. has really been terrible for my seasonal affective disorder.
on the topic of the date: kinda saw that coming. as noted by others in the thread, while a lot of us are self-selected to want this sort of thing to be real, i think penny's reaction is pretty likely to be common. if a bit on the healthier-than-usual side.
Tempestuous
Words are wind, so I write.
- Location
- CA
Violets and Lilies are both WLW symbols.
An early draft had Cass turn all the way into a fox. Penny reacted the same way, and Cass's small-fuzzy-animal instincts kicked in and sent her hiding under the seat.
I changed it because that felt too slapstick, though in hindsight it was a more logical choice from Cass as a character.
That would have literally broken Penny's mind in half.
There are reasons Cass did as poorly as she did, and why Penny reacted as badly as she did, but to some extend coming out and clarifying them directly - in WoG or the Fic itself - feels almost... hand-hold-y? I know it might be asking a lot in faith to say 'these characters have reasons for their actions that are consistent with a rich, fully-realized internal life and no you can't see them' but that's one of the incredibly frustrating things about real life: we very rarely get both sides of any story, and many people aren't self-aware enough to get a good view of one side of a story.
*Pap*
Next chapter, friend. Next chapter.
Chapter 103: End of an Era
Tempestuous
Words are wind, so I write.
- Location
- CA
AN: Beta-read by Carbohydratos, Did I?, Gaia, Linedoffice, Zephyrosis, and Mizu.
"Have a good time?" Homura called as the front door swung open.
"No."
"No?" Zero yelled, sticking her head literally through the office door. "What do you mean, 'no'?"
Homura had to open the door before she could stick her head into the hall as well. "What happened?"
I ignored the question. "What's she doing here?"
"Trying my patience."
"Cass!" Zero whined. "You got asked on a date! And you went! Twice! And you didn't think I'd want to know?"
"Zero, I love you, but I do not want to deal with you right now." I turned to Homura and added, "I don't want to talk about it," before stomping into my room and dropping the box of signed books onto my desk with more force than necessary.
"Cass?" Homura called through the door.
"I don't want to talk about it!"
"Is this one of those times where you'd ask how much someone meant that?"
I didn't answer.
"How much do you mean it?" she asked.
The answer turned out to be 'not very much', because it didn't take much prompting to get me to spill the whole sad story, from the proposition a couple weeks earlier to my crash and burn in the gas station.
"…and that's how I ruined a lovely night," I concluded, one finger drawing circles on the kitchen table.
A moment of silence passed before Zero spoke.
"Wow," she said. "You literally could not have sabotaged yourself harder if you tried."
"Excuse me?"
"Cass, of all the millions of ways you could have handled that, I swear to god you could not have done worse if you tried. Which you did." Homura opened her mouth, but Zero cut her off with a raised hand. "Akemi, I know it's harsh, but it needs to be said. Cass, you torpedoed this relationship with prejudice because—in addition to all your other fucking problems with relationships and intimacy, which you still haven't fucking addressed—your goddamn guilt complex has you convinced on some level that you do not deserve to be happy, which defeats the entire fucking point of you being here at all!"
"What? No, that's not—"
"Isn't it? Why else would you go out of your way to ruin your first actual relationship after less than a month?"
"I wasn't trying to ruin it! This wasn't some sort of self-sabotage! I really thought it would be okay!"
"You thought turning into a kitsune in the dead of night at some shady-ass gas station wouldn't cause her to panic?"
"I wasn't—" I cut myself off because she had a point. "Okay, fine, it was a terrible idea in hindsight, but I wasn't thinking about how it would look! It was a mistake, not an intentional blunder!"
"A mistake? Why tell her at all?"
"She deserved to know!"
"This is not what people mean by 'honesty in relationships'!"
"How the hell am I supposed to be 'honest' if I leave out everything about me?"
"For fuck's sake, Cass, you cannot go through every fucking Jump all 'woe is me, forced to lie to everyone I know'!" Zero yelled. "The whole point of sticking with the 'chain is to enjoy yourself, not to live some tragic, tortured existence! So you have two options, dipshit: either you nut up and learn to fucking lie, or you stop fucking Jumping. Pick one."
"That's not the point—!"
"Yes it very much fucking is! You could have just made up a few background details—hell, just change the dates from your own life—and everything would have been smooth sailing, but instead, you went and thought yourself into a knot over your stupid ideal of 'honesty'!"
"It isn't stupid!"
"It clearly is! Being part of the 'chain at all means you have secrets—big, weird, freaky fucking secrets—and spreading them far and wide is only going to hurt you and the people around you over and over again!"
Zero paused for breath, then sat back down, having risen at some point during our shouting match.
"So you're saying I've been learning the wrong lessons this whole time?" I asked. "Less honesty, not more. Bigger lies, rather than smaller ones. Insert, rather than Drop-In."
"From the sound of it? Yeah. And if your morals don't allow you to do that, then they are fundamentally incompatible with sticking around."
"Bullshit. They are at worst incompatible with dating."
"" Zero dragged a hand down her face, then soothed her tone to something more supportive. "How about this? Don't think of it as lying, think of it as embracing the identity you have that Jump as The Truth."
"Oh, sure, 'from a certain point of view' bullshit," I snarked. "That makes it all better."
"Look at it this way: when you're playing D&D and someone asks your character about herself, does she start an existential examination of what it means to be a bundle of stats controlled by someone outside her reality, or does she tell them her goddamn backstory?"
"D&D's a game! There are no consequences for lying."
"What's fucked you over more, Cass? The consequences for 'lying', or for telling the whole excessive goddamn truth?"
That really depended on how much of Worm I blamed on the former and how much on the latter.
"It still wouldn't have helped here," I grumbled. "She bailed long before I got into anything past who I am this Jump."
"I don't mean your whole perk package, I mean your fucking identity. The normal, outward-facing front you show people. Not Cassandra Rolins the companion, Cassandra Fucking— …shit, what's your surname this Jump?"
"Kyōgen," Homura answered from her place at the table to my left.
"Cassandra Fucking Kyōgen! …Kyōgen, really?"
"I had the same reaction."
"What about the long-term?" I whined. "Even if I'd pretended that I was the perfectly normal human I'm posing as, I'd still leave like I do every Jump."
"Then talk about it like a normal fucking person and not a weird space alien!" Zero yelled, losing her cool all over again. "This is exactly what I'm fucking talking about! It's not like there's no way to address your long-term plans in a way that doesn't scream 'delusional or eldritch'. Like, fuck, I dunno. 'Hey, I'm a naive young woman who isn't ready to find a life partner. Are you okay with a relationship that focuses on having fun now rather than planning for ten years on?' That's a normal fucking conversation to have!"
"I don't think naive young women who aren't ready to find life partners are quite that candid," Homura said. "Or self-aware."
"Akemi, please shut the fuck up and go back to being weird and robotic. You're not helping."
"My apologies."
I could take some 'tough love', but that crossed a fucking line. "Don't apologize to her!" I snapped to Homura before rounding on the source of my anger. "Zero, I appreciate your input"—which was a fucking lie at the moment—"but right now I need you to get the fuck out of my goddamn house."
Zero sighed. "Okay, sorry, that last bit was out of line—"
"I accept your apology," Homura interjected. "Cass, please, listen to her? She's trying to help."
I wanted to tell Zero where she could stuff her apologies. I wanted to climb into bed and hit myself with the strongest sleep spell I knew because like hell was I going to leave myself alone with my thoughts right now. I wanted to find a soundproof room in the Warehouse and scream myself hoarse in frustration.
But the fact that Homura and Zero actually agreed on something made me stop and actually fucking listen.
"Okay," I said. "All right. I'll hear her out."
"Thank you," Zero said. "You too, Akemi. Sorry about calling you weird."
Homura dismissed the offense with a wave of her hand.
Zero reached over to put a hand on mine. "Look, Cass," she said, "I'm proud of you for trying, I really am. That's what makes this so frustrating, see?"
"Mm."
"There are times where the truth will work. Things went fine last Jump, right?"
"Sure."
"But there are also times when all the truth will do is upset people," she continued. "Confuse them, scare them, whatever. And you know what? You don't owe anyone the truth—not the whole thing, not a piece, nothing. Lie by omission, lie outright, it doesn't matter. Do what you need to do."
"Because the ends justify the means?"
"Do your means justify the ends? You need to let go of your deontology and look at the consequences. Not telling people about freaky magic shit doesn't hurt them—well, generally, but we're not talking about a case where it would. You said D&D didn't have consequences, but don't those consequences make it more important you not share information that will scare, confuse, and even maybe harm people?"
I admitted they did with no small amount of reluctance.
"If I may?" Homura asked. "Cass, I believe you are severely overcompensating for your perceived shortcomings in your second Jump."
"Am I?" I asked Zero.
"I dunno. You never told me that story. Care to explain that a bit, Akemi?"
"She is acting as though the problem was the failure to provide the complete truth, rather than failing to treat people with the respect they deserved."
Zero gave me an appraising look. "Is that so? 'Cause no offense, but those are completely different fucking problems."
"Zero is right when she says your current approach isn't working," Homura added.
"I know," I grumbled.
Zero cut in again. "And unless you're ready to leave…"
"I'm not."
"That's that then, isn't it? If you're set on staying, then beating yourself up over 'lying'"—air quotes—"just means you have a shit time for no reason. Not that lying is a big deal to begin with, but even then, it doesn't have to be lying per se, right?"
"I'll think about it," I said. "Sleep on it, whatever. I'm done with today."
Life went on.
I avoided Spell-Bound, and Penny didn't visit Home Sweet Home. Lizzie picked up on my complete one-eighty in mood and offered soothing platitudes about relationships and fishing metaphors. And slowly, things went back to normal, as they always did.
Eventually—a week after 'that night'—I headed over to the bookstore during what I knew hadn't been one of Penny's shifts. "Hey, Margaret," I greeted the woman in question. "Penny's not here right now, right?"
"Penny?" she asked. "No, she's not."
"Okay. Good. Well, not 'good', but…"
"You two are avoiding each other," Margaret finished for me. "What happened between you two, anyway? She was head over heels for weeks, and then suddenly she doesn't want to so much as hear your name."
"Well, uh… did she tell you we were dating?"
"Many times."
"It didn't work out."
"I noticed."
I huffed out a humorless laugh. "Yeah, I guess you would. Well… I just wanted to stop by and let you know that I probably won't be stopping by much anymore. Sorry."
"You don't have to apologize. You're not my only customer, you know."
I chuckled politely.
"I know it's none of my business," she continued, "but can I ask what went wrong? Penny seemed so happy, and then suddenly she wasn't and wouldn't say a thing about it."
"We had… incompatible relationship goals, I guess you could say. Or maybe life goals? It just… it couldn't work."
Margaret let out a weary sigh. "Love can be like that sometimes. Leap before you look and you're bound to get hurt."
I mumbled something in the affirmative and saw myself out.
Days passed. I kept an eye out for Penny around town in case I had to divert to avoid running into her, but I didn't see her again. Maybe she'd run back to California after all.
I still avoided Spell-Bound; it was too closely linked to 'Penny' in my head.
Were you going to stay here for her? Did you expect her to leave with you?
Maybe our relationship was doomed from the get-go, and nothing I could have done would have changed that. That didn't mean it had to end as badly as it had.
Cass, I believe you are severely overcompensating for your perceived shortcomings in your second Jump.
It hurt because it was true. Being back in twenty-first century earth had really brought my time in Bet to the front of my mind, from Halloween to kicking down doors to worrying about secrets. It wasn't trauma, exactly; that would be too easy. The mental health fix-up would've handled it. This was more like… like bad habits.
Well, bad habits were made to be broken.
I googled Katalepsis. I read it. I liked it—not that I had a chance to tell Penny that. Everything pointed to her being happiest if she never heard from me again.
I did wonder if it had contributed in whole or part to her conviction that getting involved in anything magical was a great way to die, but it wasn't like it was a particularly uncommon trope. She could just as easily have been thinking of Dresden Files or Pact or half a dozen other books. It wasn't worth wondering why.
Time kept ticking. Moperville turned up in a few 'Weird News' segments, but whatever was happening there seemed to be under control.
With or without magic, life went on.
College acceptance letters trickled in over the spring months.
"I got into LMU!"
"I got into MIT!"
"I got into SCSU?"
I raised an eyebrow at Mike. "Was that a statement or a question?"
"Uh… statement?"
"Sounded like a question to me," Kaitlyn said.
"Hey, you getting into LMU is, like, twenty times more likely than me getting into a four-year college at all, okay?"
"And we're very proud of you," Natalie told him. "SCSU is… what, Southern California State?"
"Southern Connecticut State," Mike said.
"Ah, damn."
"Close enough," Ashley said.
Becky interrupted her antisocial sulking to object, "Connecticut and California are on opposite sides of the country."
"Close enough."
"What would you consider not 'close enough'?"
"Yale," Ashley said without missing a beat.
"Yale is in Connecticut!"
"Are you okay?" Homura asked sixty stones into a game of Go I was assuredly going to lose. It was late Saturday night—or early Sunday morning—and the two of us were sitting across the kitchen table. The rest of the apartment was dark, as was the street outside the window, giving the whole scene a peaceful, sleepy feeling.
"Do I not seem okay?" I asked as I considered my next moves.
"You seem suspiciously okay."
I glanced up from the board and raised an eyebrow.
"I want to make sure you're actually 'okay', rather than putting on a brave face."
"Don't worry, I'm not just putting on a brave face. The relationship started and ended so fast it doesn't even feel real anymore, you know? Just… blew right through and out the door. And it was, what, four months ago, now?"
Homura didn't reply.
I placed my stone and leaned back.
"You know," I mused as Homura picked up her next stone, "you've met a bunch of my friends around Strawfield, but I haven't met any of yours."
"You're assuming a lot."
"Am I?"
When she didn't answer, I added, "I mean, stop me if I'm out of line, but I was hoping you were… you know, getting to enjoy all the bits of normal life."
"I do have friends. I meant you're assuming they're around Strawfield."
"Oh." I frowned as Homura's next move threw my carefully considered line of play into chaos. "Wait, where are you going off to, then?"
"Apoapolis."
"Oh."
"I'm not opposed to you meeting them," she continued, "but as I said when you setting up your book club, I think it's good for us to take the opportunity to have separate social circles. I'm not sure you would have much to talk about with them, anyway."
"You'd know better than I."
Neither of us spoke for a few seconds as I looking over the board from top to bottom.
"You are okay?" Homura asked again. "In general?"
"'Okay' might be overstating it," I admitted. "I'm mostly over it, but by definition that means I'm not entirely over it. It still hurts now and then, but it won't hurt forever."
"You're making progress?"
"Slowly but surely."
I didn't have any good moves, so I made a bad one.
"Hey, Homura?"
"Yes?"
"Thanks for checking up on me."
"You do the same for me," she pointed out. "Speaking of which, if it would sate your curiosity about my wellbeing, I would be happy to describe my friendships."
"Sure."
Homura made yet another doubtlessly brilliant play, then began.
"Cassandra!" Chloe yelled as her and her friends flowed into the shop a few weeks before the end of the school year. "Guess what? Guess what?"
"You discovered magic is real when Megan turned herself into a cat by accident?"
"I wish!" Megan grumbled.
I'd been joking, but it was honestly plausible given the world they lived in; that said, if that were the case, Megan would be the one raving about it.
"They're holding OtakCon in Strawfield this year!" Chloe yelled as she bounced up to the counter. "The normal convention center in Apoapolis was damaged by malfunctioning pyrotechnics last week, so it's gonna be closed all summer and they can't schedule another convention center on such short notice, so they're moving it to the community center here instead, and I have a summer job there, and I already got a call from the CEM asking me to help!"
"Breathe," I reminded her. "What's OtakCon? Wait, let me guess, there's only one thing that would possibly excite you this much—it's an anime convention."
"It's the anime convention! At least around here."
"And CEM?"
"Community Event Manager," Chloe said immediately. "It's his job to make a convention that usually fills a hundred thousand square feet fit into thirty. But, it gets better!"
"Better?" Having to fit a convention into a space one-third the normal size sounded like bad news.
"Since I'm going to be on the crew for an 'emergency' event, I get to attend for free when I'm not working! And I have guest passes!" Chloe took off her backpack and zipped open a flap, pulling out a fist-full of flier-like things and waving them at me. "You should totally come! Do you cosplay? They're only good if you cosplay."
"I'd be willing to try," I said as she thrust them into my hands. "How many of these do you have, anyway?" The 'Cosplay Guest Passes' were good for only one day each, but she'd handed me half a dozen of them.
"We could take as many as we want, so I grabbed a bunch. Normally they're harder to get, but I think they're expecting lower attendance due to the change of venue or something. So, are you gonna do it? Your Halloween costumes were always awesome!"
"I could probably figure out a costume somehow," I said. "We've got… two months?"
"One and a bit, yeah. Hmm…" Chloe spent a moment staring at my face. "I'm trying to think of a character to suggest, but most of them are moms, and 'Dead Anime Mom' is a meme for a reason."
"Do I really look old enough to be a teenager's mother?"
"Anime moms aren't 'older', they're just slightly taller."
I laughed because it was true. I hadn't looked anywhere near the right age on the cover Max had shown me—wait a minute, hadn't that been set in 2057? Forget my age, my nephew was born in 2041? Wow, the writers did not do the math on that correctly. Did they forget to carry a one or something?
"Cassandra?"
Oh, right, conversation. "Sorry, thinking about costumes. Are you going to dress up too?"
"All five of us!" Chloe waved a hand towards the other four girls, who were watching her eruption of enthusiasm with clear amusement. "We're gonna do a whole coordinated cosplay thing!"
"Have you told them?"
"Very funny," she grumbled. "No, they all love it. Ashley loves costuming, Megan's hoping something spooky goes down, Natalie gets an excuse to dodge a family barbecue, and Kaitlyn is… uh…" she flushed, then leaned over the counter and mouthed, "my girlfriend."
"Congra—"
"Shhhhh! Shh-shh-shh-shhhhhhhhhh!" Chloe held a finger up to her lips, stealing a glance over her shoulder. "We're not, uh, out."
"Even to your friends?" I whispered.
"They know we're… you know," she said. "But dating is… it's sort of a bigger deal? I mean, someone might've noticed, but as long as no one acknowledges it we can all pretend like nothing's changed."
"Lips are sealed," I promised. "Did you invite the boys?"
Her hyperactivity returned as though it had never left. "Please," Chloe said with an exaggerated eye-roll. "You think I could get them to dress up?"
"Don't give her ideas!" Mike called from across the room.
"See? No chance in hell." She sniffed in melodramatic disapproval, then went right back to her hyperactive excitement. "Well? Are you going to come? Are you?"
"Depends on our schedule that week," I hedged.
"Awesome!" Chloe threw her hands up like it was a done deal and bounced back over to her friends for lunch.
"So," I told Homura that night, "OtakCon is being held in Strawfield this year."
"Cass, no," she said.
"Cass, yes!" I countered.
"Have you checked how much tickets cost?"
"Don't need to. Chloe gave us these." I showed her the Cosplay Guest Passes.
Homura sighed. "Let me guess: you want to use magic and/or shape-shifting to pull off an amazing cosplay costume."
"No, of course not!" I said. "That's just asking for trouble—and against the spirit of the thing! I want to go because I've never been to one before." I hesitated, then added, "And because Chloe mentioned that Megan is hoping for 'something spooky to happen', and I'm feeling a little paranoid."
"So you want me to run the counter those days?"
I shot her a look.
"Yeah, that's what I thought." Homura left me hanging for a moment, then smiled. "What're we wearing?"
"Why are you asking me?"
I spent my 'brainstorming' time in the Workshop, looking over the various arts and crafts supplies we had mixed in with the more 'practical' stuff. I could magic up a costume with the clothes-morph spell, but as I'd told Homura, I wanted to actually make something.
The question was, what did I want to make? Who did I want to go as? I couldn't think of any anime characters off the top of my head that I was particularly eager to dress as. Actually, to be honest, I just didn't know that many anime characters—present company excepted.
"Hey, Cass," Darkness said as she walked in, carrying a bundle of armor and the black underlayer she used with it. "What're you making?"
"A costume," I replied.
"Oh? What for?"
"There's an anime convention in town."
"Oh, fun!" she exclaimed. "You're going to cosplay?"
"That's the idea."
"As who?"
"Good question."
Darkness reached the workbench she'd been heading to and dropped the bundle of stuff onto the table with a clatter.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Repairing my armor," she replied, holding up a piece of armor that had been so badly deformed I couldn't tell what it was supposed to cover.
"Whoa."
I wandered closer as she picked up a hammer and began beating the armor back into shape in a way I was pretty sure had nothing to do with real armor forging or repair techniques. The whole thing was in equally bad shape; the underlayer was torn in half a dozen places, and what I could see of the armor wasn't much better. One of Darkness's hammer strikes rocked the table enough to spill the pile over with a clatter, revealing what I thought was her backplate, now with five long, jagged rents in it.
I couldn't help but ask, "What the heck did that?"
I knew asking was a mistake when she started blushing.
"Oh, uh, well—"
"Nevermind. I don't want to know."
"—see, sometimes, Maeve likes to—"
"Not listening!"
She kept talking, but I couldn't hear it over her hammering on her armor, so all was well.
Homura and I drove up to Moperville for Zeke's high school graduation. It was—in my opinion—an unnecessarily long and pointless ceremony, but that might just be my lingering resentment towards my high school experience shining through. Then again, I'd found my Academy graduation similarly devoid of substance, so maybe I just wasn't the sort of person who appreciated these sorts of things.
Suffice to say that it was a perfectly normal graduation ceremony.
"So," Max said once Zeke made his way to us through the crowd. "Now that you can look back at the whole experience… how was high school?"
Zeke stopped and considered the question for quite a while—longer than I'd ever seen him hesitate on a question by far.
"Adequate," he concluded.
"Well," Gary said, "I suppose that's a better assessment than I'd feared."
"Care to elaborate?" Max asked.
"The instructional portion was redundant," Zeke replied, "but I believe I understand the portion of high school people look back on fondly."
"The social stuff?" I guessed.
"Precisely. The company made the experience bearable. Can we go home now?"
Max laughed and agreed that they could.
Since we'd come all the way up to Moperville anyway, I threw Tina a text asking if she wanted to spend some time catching up. She did.
I could teleport home, so Homura didn't need to stick around to give me a ride; she dropped me off near the studio apartment Tina rented not far from the university, then took off for Strawfield. Tina had found a nice place, if a little small: all fresh eggshell-white paint and shiny new stainless steel surfaces. It was also a square, not quite thirty feet on a side, with one quarter walled off for the bathroom and the remaining three corners given over to a bed, desk, and kitchenette, respectively.
Tina hadn't done much deliberate decorating, but that didn't mean the apartment was bare. The bed and desk were against the exterior wall, and thus had the benefit of windows and curtains to spruce them up. Rather than posters or pictures, the walls were covered in clothes—their hangers dangling from those stick-on picture-hanging hooks that always did way more damage to the paint than they claimed—because the place lacked a proper closet. There were also a surprising number of small stuffed dragons scattered about, which I didn't comment on.
"You know, in hindsight, maybe we should have just met in the Warehouse," Tina joked as we tried to figure out where to sit. "This is a little tight. Or is that just the dragon talking?"
"It's fine. I'll take the chair and you take the bed?"
"Sure."
I picked up the desk chair—a simple folding chair that managed to be decently comfortable for what it was—and turned it around to face the foot of the bed. "So, you're… three quarters of the way through college?"
She smirked. "Further than that. I almost graduated this month, but I'm still missing two classes. I'll be done after summer."
"That's fast."
"Not a moment too soon."
"I'm a little surprised you bothered with college, to be honest," I said. "I figured you'd just work on your own projects."
"Oh, it was tempting, but my parents are expecting me to get a job once I finish school, so this ended up being the easiest way to get to do what I want."
"But doesn't that just push the problem down the road four—err, three-and-a-bit years?"
"I'm finishing my undergraduate degree this summer," Tina explained. "That means I can start my graduate studies this fall, in the soon-to-be-not-officially-on-the-books Metaphysics department. Someone involved in the spooky side of governance finally opened some of the scholarly pursuit of magical sciences to the wider public—probably Max's doing, since there wasn't an 'incident'—and since Moperville is a paranormal hotspot, it's natural that this is where they'd do it. There's not exactly a lot of established literature on the topic, so I'll be free to study the stuff I want to study."
"Tinkertech? How are you going to explain where it came from?"
"I'm the one building it. Why lie when the truth works?"
"So you're going to, what, say, 'Hey, I made this thing and can't figure out why it works'?"
She chuckled. "That's how a lot of the random magical artifacts in this world ended up being made."
"Huh." I'd never stopped to wonder where all the weird stuff in their warehouses came from. "I guess ignorance really is the best excuse. Say, how much do your parents know about magic?"
"Good question. I tried to tell them before I went off to college, but they reacted like I'd decided to join some kooky new-age religious movement." Tina did her best to imitate her mother's voice as she quoted, "Oh, well, this is the age where girls get into these sorts of things."
I laughed; it was all too easy to imagine Angela saying something like that. "Did you try turning into a dragon?
"I will not turn into a snake. It never helps."
That sounded familiar. "Evil Overlord List?" I guessed.
"Number thirty-four." She picked up one of the small stuffed dragons and smiled at it as she continued, "I will admit I was tempted; I may have been looking for an excuse to turn into a dragon recently."
"You miss being a literal dragon, huh?"
"Yeah," Tina said, flopping backwards on her bed with her arms flung out to the sides. "I miss the freedom. Moperville is weird, but not weird enough to ignore a dragon that size."
"Too visible, huh?"
"Too visible by half. That's why I have these." Tina, still lying on her back, held the toy dragon up straight up in the air.
I raised an eyebrow at the dragon, then turned to look at the two on the desk. They were too detailed to fit the connotations of the term 'stuffed animal', and more 'regal' than 'cute'. The eyes looked to be real glass, not plastic, and the cloth had scales stitched into it that blended 'seamlessly' with the actual seams. The only difference between the two was their color: one red, one green.
"I don't follow," I admitted as I turned back.
"I took the fairy doll spell as my 'freebie' with the Marked magic option," Tina said, her voice coming from behind me. I glanced back to see that the red dragon was currently smirking at me.
"Oh," I said. "Nifty. You can make them look like any form you want?"
"They look like the form I'm in when I make them, so I made a bunch in the Warehouse. I mostly use them to fly around." She stretched her wings to demonstrate. I leaned back to give her space to take off, but the dragon settled down and turned back into cloth instead.
"It's not the same, though," Tina complained from the bed.
"Maybe you miss the attention," I joked, turning around again. "You did like being admired."
"Of course I did. Wouldn't you?"
"Obviously."
She waved her hand and summoned a pillow from the head of the bed to prop her head up so she could see me better—and so I could see her playful smirk. "Maybe I'll get a chance to show off once magic isn't secret anymore."
"Is that coming soon?"
"I'm not sure. Without us, the secret would be out already, but Max averted the major incidents that led to that. It will probably happen before we leave—the invention of the camera-phone made it inevitable—but I don't know when."
"Ah."
"This is completely off-topic," Tina said, "but hanging out like this reminds me of my visit to your place back when I first joined—except this time I'm the one in bed. We talked about how going a long time without talking to someone didn't seem that significant, remember?"
"I do."
"You said it had to do with improved memory," she reminded me, "which might mean that I don't need to remind you of that, now that I think about it."
"Yeah, I remember—though I've since learned that's actually a symptom of ADHD."
Tina paused in thought, head cocked.
"Time blindness?" she guessed.
"Something like that. My 'friendship levels' don't decay over time or something."
"Wouldn't that have been cured after we left?"
"The ADHD must have been," I confirmed, "or I'd have gone crazy from understimulation at work. Maybe this specific time perception oddity was considered a 'benefit', and thus kept? Or maybe it is the memory perk, and it just sort of feels the same as having ADHD?"
"Well, I did agree with you the first time we discussed it, so it's not just you."
"Good to know, I guess." I shrugged. "Anyway, you were saying…"
"Yes, well, I've been thinking about it lately—the way we can go years without speaking and then resume like nothing happened—and I think mutual immortality might be part of it."
"How's that?"
"There's no time pressure," Tina explained. "No fear that you'll miss out, that you might regret not spending more time together in twenty years. And we seem to change less and less with each passing year, too."
"That all makes sense."
"Being away at college for so long got me thinking about it. I was in school all last summer too, so I haven't moved home for nearly two years. I visit, of course—we're only, what, twenty minutes away?—but I haven't been 'home' in the sense that the house has been home, if that makes any sense."
"It doesn't feel like home if you're only stopping in for a few days," I said.
"No, it doesn't. But that's sort of beside the point I was trying to make, which was that…" She sighed and switched tracks. "Remember when you asked me how it was having memories of growing up here?"
"I do. You said it was a sort of wish fulfillment, getting to grow up human."
"It was—it is—and that's part of the problem. Well, it's not exactly a 'problem', per se… the thing is, the whole wish fulfillment aspect helped it make a big impression on me—a lot more than I expected, to be honest. Now, being away from home for a couple years has me thinking about the end of the Jump and how I'm going to have to say goodbye to my parents sooner than they think." Tina leaned her head back to face the ceiling as she concluded, "It's making me a bit melancholy."
A moment passed as I considered how to respond.
"I hear you," I said. "I don't have any advice to offer, but I understand how you feel."
"Is that why you went Drop-In this time?"
"Among other things, yes."
Tina spent a few moments kicking her feet, which were hanging off the end of the bed due to how she'd sprawled on it.
"Maybe it's different once you'd done this five, ten, however-many times," she said, "but I'm not used to it."
"It's hard to imagine getting used to it."
"It is. And that's not even getting into the question of what's like for them."
"Yeah. Then again, all children leave the nest eventually, right? I'm sure your parents would want you to be happy even if you have to leave to do it."
"Yeah."
Another moment passed before Tina pulled herself back into a sitting position with a groan. "I ruined the mood, didn't I?"
"I don't mind. If anything, it's nice to know I'm not the only one who worries about these things."
"Likewise."
"On to other topics, then?"
"Yes, please."
"Right. Hmm…" I glanced around the room, but nothing jumped out as a good topic of discussion. We'd already covered the dragons.
Oh, there's a question.
"Does Dragon ever hassle you about being the one who gets to go on 'adventures' while she's stuck in the Warehouse?"
Tina just looked at me for a second before guffawing loudly.
"Stupid question?" I asked.
She shook her head fervently. "No, no—well, maybe, but only from my point of view."
"So was it or wasn't it?"
"It's not a stupid question, it's just funny because—you'll understand once I explain." Tina cleared her throat. "You see, after last Jump, I—which is to say, 'we'—really started to notice a divergence. It wasn't just being separated for a long time, but also the trauma of… well, suffice to say it was getting pretty significant, and we had to decide whether we wanted to stop and get back to parity, or continue to grow apart as individuals.
"We talked about it for a while, over the break: about how this was an opportunity to grow into new people, experience our own lives and identities, and other things like that. And after going over all the reasons we shouldn't be afraid of growing apart, we decided we still didn't want to. 'Dragon' felt like she was being left behind, while 'Tess' felt like she was losing touch with her roots. So I sat down and resynchronized everything, and worked out a system going forward to make sure I'd keep parity."
That was the opposite of how I'd expected that story to end—but then, the only experience I had with that sort of issue was just that: in stories, penned by humans, shaped by human values, assumptions, and themes.
"So what does that mean for you two as people?" I asked.
"Well, it means we're not really 'two people'. It's more like how I used to operate on Bet—independent processes on different platforms, but still all 'me'."
"But you still talk to each other. I mean, you know, verbally."
Tina chuckled. "Can I tell you a secret?"
"Sure."
"I did that back on Bet, too."
I joined in on her laughter.
Chapter 103: End of an Era
"Have a good time?" Homura called as the front door swung open.
"No."
"No?" Zero yelled, sticking her head literally through the office door. "What do you mean, 'no'?"
Homura had to open the door before she could stick her head into the hall as well. "What happened?"
I ignored the question. "What's she doing here?"
"Trying my patience."
"Cass!" Zero whined. "You got asked on a date! And you went! Twice! And you didn't think I'd want to know?"
"Zero, I love you, but I do not want to deal with you right now." I turned to Homura and added, "I don't want to talk about it," before stomping into my room and dropping the box of signed books onto my desk with more force than necessary.
"Cass?" Homura called through the door.
"I don't want to talk about it!"
"Is this one of those times where you'd ask how much someone meant that?"
I didn't answer.
"How much do you mean it?" she asked.
The answer turned out to be 'not very much', because it didn't take much prompting to get me to spill the whole sad story, from the proposition a couple weeks earlier to my crash and burn in the gas station.
"…and that's how I ruined a lovely night," I concluded, one finger drawing circles on the kitchen table.
A moment of silence passed before Zero spoke.
"Wow," she said. "You literally could not have sabotaged yourself harder if you tried."
"Excuse me?"
"Cass, of all the millions of ways you could have handled that, I swear to god you could not have done worse if you tried. Which you did." Homura opened her mouth, but Zero cut her off with a raised hand. "Akemi, I know it's harsh, but it needs to be said. Cass, you torpedoed this relationship with prejudice because—in addition to all your other fucking problems with relationships and intimacy, which you still haven't fucking addressed—your goddamn guilt complex has you convinced on some level that you do not deserve to be happy, which defeats the entire fucking point of you being here at all!"
"What? No, that's not—"
"Isn't it? Why else would you go out of your way to ruin your first actual relationship after less than a month?"
"I wasn't trying to ruin it! This wasn't some sort of self-sabotage! I really thought it would be okay!"
"You thought turning into a kitsune in the dead of night at some shady-ass gas station wouldn't cause her to panic?"
"I wasn't—" I cut myself off because she had a point. "Okay, fine, it was a terrible idea in hindsight, but I wasn't thinking about how it would look! It was a mistake, not an intentional blunder!"
"A mistake? Why tell her at all?"
"She deserved to know!"
"This is not what people mean by 'honesty in relationships'!"
"How the hell am I supposed to be 'honest' if I leave out everything about me?"
"For fuck's sake, Cass, you cannot go through every fucking Jump all 'woe is me, forced to lie to everyone I know'!" Zero yelled. "The whole point of sticking with the 'chain is to enjoy yourself, not to live some tragic, tortured existence! So you have two options, dipshit: either you nut up and learn to fucking lie, or you stop fucking Jumping. Pick one."
"That's not the point—!"
"Yes it very much fucking is! You could have just made up a few background details—hell, just change the dates from your own life—and everything would have been smooth sailing, but instead, you went and thought yourself into a knot over your stupid ideal of 'honesty'!"
"It isn't stupid!"
"It clearly is! Being part of the 'chain at all means you have secrets—big, weird, freaky fucking secrets—and spreading them far and wide is only going to hurt you and the people around you over and over again!"
Zero paused for breath, then sat back down, having risen at some point during our shouting match.
"So you're saying I've been learning the wrong lessons this whole time?" I asked. "Less honesty, not more. Bigger lies, rather than smaller ones. Insert, rather than Drop-In."
"From the sound of it? Yeah. And if your morals don't allow you to do that, then they are fundamentally incompatible with sticking around."
"Bullshit. They are at worst incompatible with dating."
"" Zero dragged a hand down her face, then soothed her tone to something more supportive. "How about this? Don't think of it as lying, think of it as embracing the identity you have that Jump as The Truth."
"Oh, sure, 'from a certain point of view' bullshit," I snarked. "That makes it all better."
"Look at it this way: when you're playing D&D and someone asks your character about herself, does she start an existential examination of what it means to be a bundle of stats controlled by someone outside her reality, or does she tell them her goddamn backstory?"
"D&D's a game! There are no consequences for lying."
"What's fucked you over more, Cass? The consequences for 'lying', or for telling the whole excessive goddamn truth?"
That really depended on how much of Worm I blamed on the former and how much on the latter.
"It still wouldn't have helped here," I grumbled. "She bailed long before I got into anything past who I am this Jump."
"I don't mean your whole perk package, I mean your fucking identity. The normal, outward-facing front you show people. Not Cassandra Rolins the companion, Cassandra Fucking— …shit, what's your surname this Jump?"
"Kyōgen," Homura answered from her place at the table to my left.
"Cassandra Fucking Kyōgen! …Kyōgen, really?"
"I had the same reaction."
"What about the long-term?" I whined. "Even if I'd pretended that I was the perfectly normal human I'm posing as, I'd still leave like I do every Jump."
"Then talk about it like a normal fucking person and not a weird space alien!" Zero yelled, losing her cool all over again. "This is exactly what I'm fucking talking about! It's not like there's no way to address your long-term plans in a way that doesn't scream 'delusional or eldritch'. Like, fuck, I dunno. 'Hey, I'm a naive young woman who isn't ready to find a life partner. Are you okay with a relationship that focuses on having fun now rather than planning for ten years on?' That's a normal fucking conversation to have!"
"I don't think naive young women who aren't ready to find life partners are quite that candid," Homura said. "Or self-aware."
"Akemi, please shut the fuck up and go back to being weird and robotic. You're not helping."
"My apologies."
I could take some 'tough love', but that crossed a fucking line. "Don't apologize to her!" I snapped to Homura before rounding on the source of my anger. "Zero, I appreciate your input"—which was a fucking lie at the moment—"but right now I need you to get the fuck out of my goddamn house."
Zero sighed. "Okay, sorry, that last bit was out of line—"
"I accept your apology," Homura interjected. "Cass, please, listen to her? She's trying to help."
I wanted to tell Zero where she could stuff her apologies. I wanted to climb into bed and hit myself with the strongest sleep spell I knew because like hell was I going to leave myself alone with my thoughts right now. I wanted to find a soundproof room in the Warehouse and scream myself hoarse in frustration.
But the fact that Homura and Zero actually agreed on something made me stop and actually fucking listen.
"Okay," I said. "All right. I'll hear her out."
"Thank you," Zero said. "You too, Akemi. Sorry about calling you weird."
Homura dismissed the offense with a wave of her hand.
Zero reached over to put a hand on mine. "Look, Cass," she said, "I'm proud of you for trying, I really am. That's what makes this so frustrating, see?"
"Mm."
"There are times where the truth will work. Things went fine last Jump, right?"
"Sure."
"But there are also times when all the truth will do is upset people," she continued. "Confuse them, scare them, whatever. And you know what? You don't owe anyone the truth—not the whole thing, not a piece, nothing. Lie by omission, lie outright, it doesn't matter. Do what you need to do."
"Because the ends justify the means?"
"Do your means justify the ends? You need to let go of your deontology and look at the consequences. Not telling people about freaky magic shit doesn't hurt them—well, generally, but we're not talking about a case where it would. You said D&D didn't have consequences, but don't those consequences make it more important you not share information that will scare, confuse, and even maybe harm people?"
I admitted they did with no small amount of reluctance.
"If I may?" Homura asked. "Cass, I believe you are severely overcompensating for your perceived shortcomings in your second Jump."
"Am I?" I asked Zero.
"I dunno. You never told me that story. Care to explain that a bit, Akemi?"
"She is acting as though the problem was the failure to provide the complete truth, rather than failing to treat people with the respect they deserved."
Zero gave me an appraising look. "Is that so? 'Cause no offense, but those are completely different fucking problems."
"Zero is right when she says your current approach isn't working," Homura added.
"I know," I grumbled.
Zero cut in again. "And unless you're ready to leave…"
"I'm not."
"That's that then, isn't it? If you're set on staying, then beating yourself up over 'lying'"—air quotes—"just means you have a shit time for no reason. Not that lying is a big deal to begin with, but even then, it doesn't have to be lying per se, right?"
"I'll think about it," I said. "Sleep on it, whatever. I'm done with today."
———X==X==X———
Life went on.
I avoided Spell-Bound, and Penny didn't visit Home Sweet Home. Lizzie picked up on my complete one-eighty in mood and offered soothing platitudes about relationships and fishing metaphors. And slowly, things went back to normal, as they always did.
Eventually—a week after 'that night'—I headed over to the bookstore during what I knew hadn't been one of Penny's shifts. "Hey, Margaret," I greeted the woman in question. "Penny's not here right now, right?"
"Penny?" she asked. "No, she's not."
"Okay. Good. Well, not 'good', but…"
"You two are avoiding each other," Margaret finished for me. "What happened between you two, anyway? She was head over heels for weeks, and then suddenly she doesn't want to so much as hear your name."
"Well, uh… did she tell you we were dating?"
"Many times."
"It didn't work out."
"I noticed."
I huffed out a humorless laugh. "Yeah, I guess you would. Well… I just wanted to stop by and let you know that I probably won't be stopping by much anymore. Sorry."
"You don't have to apologize. You're not my only customer, you know."
I chuckled politely.
"I know it's none of my business," she continued, "but can I ask what went wrong? Penny seemed so happy, and then suddenly she wasn't and wouldn't say a thing about it."
"We had… incompatible relationship goals, I guess you could say. Or maybe life goals? It just… it couldn't work."
Margaret let out a weary sigh. "Love can be like that sometimes. Leap before you look and you're bound to get hurt."
I mumbled something in the affirmative and saw myself out.
Days passed. I kept an eye out for Penny around town in case I had to divert to avoid running into her, but I didn't see her again. Maybe she'd run back to California after all.
I still avoided Spell-Bound; it was too closely linked to 'Penny' in my head.
Were you going to stay here for her? Did you expect her to leave with you?
Maybe our relationship was doomed from the get-go, and nothing I could have done would have changed that. That didn't mean it had to end as badly as it had.
Cass, I believe you are severely overcompensating for your perceived shortcomings in your second Jump.
It hurt because it was true. Being back in twenty-first century earth had really brought my time in Bet to the front of my mind, from Halloween to kicking down doors to worrying about secrets. It wasn't trauma, exactly; that would be too easy. The mental health fix-up would've handled it. This was more like… like bad habits.
Well, bad habits were made to be broken.
I googled Katalepsis. I read it. I liked it—not that I had a chance to tell Penny that. Everything pointed to her being happiest if she never heard from me again.
I did wonder if it had contributed in whole or part to her conviction that getting involved in anything magical was a great way to die, but it wasn't like it was a particularly uncommon trope. She could just as easily have been thinking of Dresden Files or Pact or half a dozen other books. It wasn't worth wondering why.
Time kept ticking. Moperville turned up in a few 'Weird News' segments, but whatever was happening there seemed to be under control.
With or without magic, life went on.
———X==X==X———
College acceptance letters trickled in over the spring months.
"I got into LMU!"
"I got into MIT!"
"I got into SCSU?"
I raised an eyebrow at Mike. "Was that a statement or a question?"
"Uh… statement?"
"Sounded like a question to me," Kaitlyn said.
"Hey, you getting into LMU is, like, twenty times more likely than me getting into a four-year college at all, okay?"
"And we're very proud of you," Natalie told him. "SCSU is… what, Southern California State?"
"Southern Connecticut State," Mike said.
"Ah, damn."
"Close enough," Ashley said.
Becky interrupted her antisocial sulking to object, "Connecticut and California are on opposite sides of the country."
"Close enough."
"What would you consider not 'close enough'?"
"Yale," Ashley said without missing a beat.
"Yale is in Connecticut!"
———X==X==X———
"Are you okay?" Homura asked sixty stones into a game of Go I was assuredly going to lose. It was late Saturday night—or early Sunday morning—and the two of us were sitting across the kitchen table. The rest of the apartment was dark, as was the street outside the window, giving the whole scene a peaceful, sleepy feeling.
"Do I not seem okay?" I asked as I considered my next moves.
"You seem suspiciously okay."
I glanced up from the board and raised an eyebrow.
"I want to make sure you're actually 'okay', rather than putting on a brave face."
"Don't worry, I'm not just putting on a brave face. The relationship started and ended so fast it doesn't even feel real anymore, you know? Just… blew right through and out the door. And it was, what, four months ago, now?"
Homura didn't reply.
I placed my stone and leaned back.
"You know," I mused as Homura picked up her next stone, "you've met a bunch of my friends around Strawfield, but I haven't met any of yours."
"You're assuming a lot."
"Am I?"
When she didn't answer, I added, "I mean, stop me if I'm out of line, but I was hoping you were… you know, getting to enjoy all the bits of normal life."
"I do have friends. I meant you're assuming they're around Strawfield."
"Oh." I frowned as Homura's next move threw my carefully considered line of play into chaos. "Wait, where are you going off to, then?"
"Apoapolis."
"Oh."
"I'm not opposed to you meeting them," she continued, "but as I said when you setting up your book club, I think it's good for us to take the opportunity to have separate social circles. I'm not sure you would have much to talk about with them, anyway."
"You'd know better than I."
Neither of us spoke for a few seconds as I looking over the board from top to bottom.
"You are okay?" Homura asked again. "In general?"
"'Okay' might be overstating it," I admitted. "I'm mostly over it, but by definition that means I'm not entirely over it. It still hurts now and then, but it won't hurt forever."
"You're making progress?"
"Slowly but surely."
I didn't have any good moves, so I made a bad one.
"Hey, Homura?"
"Yes?"
"Thanks for checking up on me."
"You do the same for me," she pointed out. "Speaking of which, if it would sate your curiosity about my wellbeing, I would be happy to describe my friendships."
"Sure."
Homura made yet another doubtlessly brilliant play, then began.
———X==X==X———
"Cassandra!" Chloe yelled as her and her friends flowed into the shop a few weeks before the end of the school year. "Guess what? Guess what?"
"You discovered magic is real when Megan turned herself into a cat by accident?"
"I wish!" Megan grumbled.
I'd been joking, but it was honestly plausible given the world they lived in; that said, if that were the case, Megan would be the one raving about it.
"They're holding OtakCon in Strawfield this year!" Chloe yelled as she bounced up to the counter. "The normal convention center in Apoapolis was damaged by malfunctioning pyrotechnics last week, so it's gonna be closed all summer and they can't schedule another convention center on such short notice, so they're moving it to the community center here instead, and I have a summer job there, and I already got a call from the CEM asking me to help!"
"Breathe," I reminded her. "What's OtakCon? Wait, let me guess, there's only one thing that would possibly excite you this much—it's an anime convention."
"It's the anime convention! At least around here."
"And CEM?"
"Community Event Manager," Chloe said immediately. "It's his job to make a convention that usually fills a hundred thousand square feet fit into thirty. But, it gets better!"
"Better?" Having to fit a convention into a space one-third the normal size sounded like bad news.
"Since I'm going to be on the crew for an 'emergency' event, I get to attend for free when I'm not working! And I have guest passes!" Chloe took off her backpack and zipped open a flap, pulling out a fist-full of flier-like things and waving them at me. "You should totally come! Do you cosplay? They're only good if you cosplay."
"I'd be willing to try," I said as she thrust them into my hands. "How many of these do you have, anyway?" The 'Cosplay Guest Passes' were good for only one day each, but she'd handed me half a dozen of them.
"We could take as many as we want, so I grabbed a bunch. Normally they're harder to get, but I think they're expecting lower attendance due to the change of venue or something. So, are you gonna do it? Your Halloween costumes were always awesome!"
"I could probably figure out a costume somehow," I said. "We've got… two months?"
"One and a bit, yeah. Hmm…" Chloe spent a moment staring at my face. "I'm trying to think of a character to suggest, but most of them are moms, and 'Dead Anime Mom' is a meme for a reason."
"Do I really look old enough to be a teenager's mother?"
"Anime moms aren't 'older', they're just slightly taller."
I laughed because it was true. I hadn't looked anywhere near the right age on the cover Max had shown me—wait a minute, hadn't that been set in 2057? Forget my age, my nephew was born in 2041? Wow, the writers did not do the math on that correctly. Did they forget to carry a one or something?
"Cassandra?"
Oh, right, conversation. "Sorry, thinking about costumes. Are you going to dress up too?"
"All five of us!" Chloe waved a hand towards the other four girls, who were watching her eruption of enthusiasm with clear amusement. "We're gonna do a whole coordinated cosplay thing!"
"Have you told them?"
"Very funny," she grumbled. "No, they all love it. Ashley loves costuming, Megan's hoping something spooky goes down, Natalie gets an excuse to dodge a family barbecue, and Kaitlyn is… uh…" she flushed, then leaned over the counter and mouthed, "my girlfriend."
"Congra—"
"Shhhhh! Shh-shh-shh-shhhhhhhhhh!" Chloe held a finger up to her lips, stealing a glance over her shoulder. "We're not, uh, out."
"Even to your friends?" I whispered.
"They know we're… you know," she said. "But dating is… it's sort of a bigger deal? I mean, someone might've noticed, but as long as no one acknowledges it we can all pretend like nothing's changed."
"Lips are sealed," I promised. "Did you invite the boys?"
Her hyperactivity returned as though it had never left. "Please," Chloe said with an exaggerated eye-roll. "You think I could get them to dress up?"
"Don't give her ideas!" Mike called from across the room.
"See? No chance in hell." She sniffed in melodramatic disapproval, then went right back to her hyperactive excitement. "Well? Are you going to come? Are you?"
"Depends on our schedule that week," I hedged.
"Awesome!" Chloe threw her hands up like it was a done deal and bounced back over to her friends for lunch.
———X==X==X———
"So," I told Homura that night, "OtakCon is being held in Strawfield this year."
"Cass, no," she said.
"Cass, yes!" I countered.
"Have you checked how much tickets cost?"
"Don't need to. Chloe gave us these." I showed her the Cosplay Guest Passes.
Homura sighed. "Let me guess: you want to use magic and/or shape-shifting to pull off an amazing cosplay costume."
"No, of course not!" I said. "That's just asking for trouble—and against the spirit of the thing! I want to go because I've never been to one before." I hesitated, then added, "And because Chloe mentioned that Megan is hoping for 'something spooky to happen', and I'm feeling a little paranoid."
"So you want me to run the counter those days?"
I shot her a look.
"Yeah, that's what I thought." Homura left me hanging for a moment, then smiled. "What're we wearing?"
"Why are you asking me?"
———X==X==X———
I spent my 'brainstorming' time in the Workshop, looking over the various arts and crafts supplies we had mixed in with the more 'practical' stuff. I could magic up a costume with the clothes-morph spell, but as I'd told Homura, I wanted to actually make something.
The question was, what did I want to make? Who did I want to go as? I couldn't think of any anime characters off the top of my head that I was particularly eager to dress as. Actually, to be honest, I just didn't know that many anime characters—present company excepted.
"Hey, Cass," Darkness said as she walked in, carrying a bundle of armor and the black underlayer she used with it. "What're you making?"
"A costume," I replied.
"Oh? What for?"
"There's an anime convention in town."
"Oh, fun!" she exclaimed. "You're going to cosplay?"
"That's the idea."
"As who?"
"Good question."
Darkness reached the workbench she'd been heading to and dropped the bundle of stuff onto the table with a clatter.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Repairing my armor," she replied, holding up a piece of armor that had been so badly deformed I couldn't tell what it was supposed to cover.
"Whoa."
I wandered closer as she picked up a hammer and began beating the armor back into shape in a way I was pretty sure had nothing to do with real armor forging or repair techniques. The whole thing was in equally bad shape; the underlayer was torn in half a dozen places, and what I could see of the armor wasn't much better. One of Darkness's hammer strikes rocked the table enough to spill the pile over with a clatter, revealing what I thought was her backplate, now with five long, jagged rents in it.
I couldn't help but ask, "What the heck did that?"
I knew asking was a mistake when she started blushing.
"Oh, uh, well—"
"Nevermind. I don't want to know."
"—see, sometimes, Maeve likes to—"
"Not listening!"
She kept talking, but I couldn't hear it over her hammering on her armor, so all was well.
———X==X==X———
Homura and I drove up to Moperville for Zeke's high school graduation. It was—in my opinion—an unnecessarily long and pointless ceremony, but that might just be my lingering resentment towards my high school experience shining through. Then again, I'd found my Academy graduation similarly devoid of substance, so maybe I just wasn't the sort of person who appreciated these sorts of things.
Suffice to say that it was a perfectly normal graduation ceremony.
"So," Max said once Zeke made his way to us through the crowd. "Now that you can look back at the whole experience… how was high school?"
Zeke stopped and considered the question for quite a while—longer than I'd ever seen him hesitate on a question by far.
"Adequate," he concluded.
"Well," Gary said, "I suppose that's a better assessment than I'd feared."
"Care to elaborate?" Max asked.
"The instructional portion was redundant," Zeke replied, "but I believe I understand the portion of high school people look back on fondly."
"The social stuff?" I guessed.
"Precisely. The company made the experience bearable. Can we go home now?"
Max laughed and agreed that they could.
———X==X==X———
Since we'd come all the way up to Moperville anyway, I threw Tina a text asking if she wanted to spend some time catching up. She did.
I could teleport home, so Homura didn't need to stick around to give me a ride; she dropped me off near the studio apartment Tina rented not far from the university, then took off for Strawfield. Tina had found a nice place, if a little small: all fresh eggshell-white paint and shiny new stainless steel surfaces. It was also a square, not quite thirty feet on a side, with one quarter walled off for the bathroom and the remaining three corners given over to a bed, desk, and kitchenette, respectively.
Tina hadn't done much deliberate decorating, but that didn't mean the apartment was bare. The bed and desk were against the exterior wall, and thus had the benefit of windows and curtains to spruce them up. Rather than posters or pictures, the walls were covered in clothes—their hangers dangling from those stick-on picture-hanging hooks that always did way more damage to the paint than they claimed—because the place lacked a proper closet. There were also a surprising number of small stuffed dragons scattered about, which I didn't comment on.
"You know, in hindsight, maybe we should have just met in the Warehouse," Tina joked as we tried to figure out where to sit. "This is a little tight. Or is that just the dragon talking?"
"It's fine. I'll take the chair and you take the bed?"
"Sure."
I picked up the desk chair—a simple folding chair that managed to be decently comfortable for what it was—and turned it around to face the foot of the bed. "So, you're… three quarters of the way through college?"
She smirked. "Further than that. I almost graduated this month, but I'm still missing two classes. I'll be done after summer."
"That's fast."
"Not a moment too soon."
"I'm a little surprised you bothered with college, to be honest," I said. "I figured you'd just work on your own projects."
"Oh, it was tempting, but my parents are expecting me to get a job once I finish school, so this ended up being the easiest way to get to do what I want."
"But doesn't that just push the problem down the road four—err, three-and-a-bit years?"
"I'm finishing my undergraduate degree this summer," Tina explained. "That means I can start my graduate studies this fall, in the soon-to-be-not-officially-on-the-books Metaphysics department. Someone involved in the spooky side of governance finally opened some of the scholarly pursuit of magical sciences to the wider public—probably Max's doing, since there wasn't an 'incident'—and since Moperville is a paranormal hotspot, it's natural that this is where they'd do it. There's not exactly a lot of established literature on the topic, so I'll be free to study the stuff I want to study."
"Tinkertech? How are you going to explain where it came from?"
"I'm the one building it. Why lie when the truth works?"
"So you're going to, what, say, 'Hey, I made this thing and can't figure out why it works'?"
She chuckled. "That's how a lot of the random magical artifacts in this world ended up being made."
"Huh." I'd never stopped to wonder where all the weird stuff in their warehouses came from. "I guess ignorance really is the best excuse. Say, how much do your parents know about magic?"
"Good question. I tried to tell them before I went off to college, but they reacted like I'd decided to join some kooky new-age religious movement." Tina did her best to imitate her mother's voice as she quoted, "Oh, well, this is the age where girls get into these sorts of things."
I laughed; it was all too easy to imagine Angela saying something like that. "Did you try turning into a dragon?
"I will not turn into a snake. It never helps."
That sounded familiar. "Evil Overlord List?" I guessed.
"Number thirty-four." She picked up one of the small stuffed dragons and smiled at it as she continued, "I will admit I was tempted; I may have been looking for an excuse to turn into a dragon recently."
"You miss being a literal dragon, huh?"
"Yeah," Tina said, flopping backwards on her bed with her arms flung out to the sides. "I miss the freedom. Moperville is weird, but not weird enough to ignore a dragon that size."
"Too visible, huh?"
"Too visible by half. That's why I have these." Tina, still lying on her back, held the toy dragon up straight up in the air.
I raised an eyebrow at the dragon, then turned to look at the two on the desk. They were too detailed to fit the connotations of the term 'stuffed animal', and more 'regal' than 'cute'. The eyes looked to be real glass, not plastic, and the cloth had scales stitched into it that blended 'seamlessly' with the actual seams. The only difference between the two was their color: one red, one green.
"I don't follow," I admitted as I turned back.
"I took the fairy doll spell as my 'freebie' with the Marked magic option," Tina said, her voice coming from behind me. I glanced back to see that the red dragon was currently smirking at me.
"Oh," I said. "Nifty. You can make them look like any form you want?"
"They look like the form I'm in when I make them, so I made a bunch in the Warehouse. I mostly use them to fly around." She stretched her wings to demonstrate. I leaned back to give her space to take off, but the dragon settled down and turned back into cloth instead.
"It's not the same, though," Tina complained from the bed.
"Maybe you miss the attention," I joked, turning around again. "You did like being admired."
"Of course I did. Wouldn't you?"
"Obviously."
She waved her hand and summoned a pillow from the head of the bed to prop her head up so she could see me better—and so I could see her playful smirk. "Maybe I'll get a chance to show off once magic isn't secret anymore."
"Is that coming soon?"
"I'm not sure. Without us, the secret would be out already, but Max averted the major incidents that led to that. It will probably happen before we leave—the invention of the camera-phone made it inevitable—but I don't know when."
"Ah."
"This is completely off-topic," Tina said, "but hanging out like this reminds me of my visit to your place back when I first joined—except this time I'm the one in bed. We talked about how going a long time without talking to someone didn't seem that significant, remember?"
"I do."
"You said it had to do with improved memory," she reminded me, "which might mean that I don't need to remind you of that, now that I think about it."
"Yeah, I remember—though I've since learned that's actually a symptom of ADHD."
Tina paused in thought, head cocked.
"Time blindness?" she guessed.
"Something like that. My 'friendship levels' don't decay over time or something."
"Wouldn't that have been cured after we left?"
"The ADHD must have been," I confirmed, "or I'd have gone crazy from understimulation at work. Maybe this specific time perception oddity was considered a 'benefit', and thus kept? Or maybe it is the memory perk, and it just sort of feels the same as having ADHD?"
"Well, I did agree with you the first time we discussed it, so it's not just you."
"Good to know, I guess." I shrugged. "Anyway, you were saying…"
"Yes, well, I've been thinking about it lately—the way we can go years without speaking and then resume like nothing happened—and I think mutual immortality might be part of it."
"How's that?"
"There's no time pressure," Tina explained. "No fear that you'll miss out, that you might regret not spending more time together in twenty years. And we seem to change less and less with each passing year, too."
"That all makes sense."
"Being away at college for so long got me thinking about it. I was in school all last summer too, so I haven't moved home for nearly two years. I visit, of course—we're only, what, twenty minutes away?—but I haven't been 'home' in the sense that the house has been home, if that makes any sense."
"It doesn't feel like home if you're only stopping in for a few days," I said.
"No, it doesn't. But that's sort of beside the point I was trying to make, which was that…" She sighed and switched tracks. "Remember when you asked me how it was having memories of growing up here?"
"I do. You said it was a sort of wish fulfillment, getting to grow up human."
"It was—it is—and that's part of the problem. Well, it's not exactly a 'problem', per se… the thing is, the whole wish fulfillment aspect helped it make a big impression on me—a lot more than I expected, to be honest. Now, being away from home for a couple years has me thinking about the end of the Jump and how I'm going to have to say goodbye to my parents sooner than they think." Tina leaned her head back to face the ceiling as she concluded, "It's making me a bit melancholy."
A moment passed as I considered how to respond.
"I hear you," I said. "I don't have any advice to offer, but I understand how you feel."
"Is that why you went Drop-In this time?"
"Among other things, yes."
Tina spent a few moments kicking her feet, which were hanging off the end of the bed due to how she'd sprawled on it.
"Maybe it's different once you'd done this five, ten, however-many times," she said, "but I'm not used to it."
"It's hard to imagine getting used to it."
"It is. And that's not even getting into the question of what's like for them."
"Yeah. Then again, all children leave the nest eventually, right? I'm sure your parents would want you to be happy even if you have to leave to do it."
"Yeah."
Another moment passed before Tina pulled herself back into a sitting position with a groan. "I ruined the mood, didn't I?"
"I don't mind. If anything, it's nice to know I'm not the only one who worries about these things."
"Likewise."
"On to other topics, then?"
"Yes, please."
"Right. Hmm…" I glanced around the room, but nothing jumped out as a good topic of discussion. We'd already covered the dragons.
Oh, there's a question.
"Does Dragon ever hassle you about being the one who gets to go on 'adventures' while she's stuck in the Warehouse?"
Tina just looked at me for a second before guffawing loudly.
"Stupid question?" I asked.
She shook her head fervently. "No, no—well, maybe, but only from my point of view."
"So was it or wasn't it?"
"It's not a stupid question, it's just funny because—you'll understand once I explain." Tina cleared her throat. "You see, after last Jump, I—which is to say, 'we'—really started to notice a divergence. It wasn't just being separated for a long time, but also the trauma of… well, suffice to say it was getting pretty significant, and we had to decide whether we wanted to stop and get back to parity, or continue to grow apart as individuals.
"We talked about it for a while, over the break: about how this was an opportunity to grow into new people, experience our own lives and identities, and other things like that. And after going over all the reasons we shouldn't be afraid of growing apart, we decided we still didn't want to. 'Dragon' felt like she was being left behind, while 'Tess' felt like she was losing touch with her roots. So I sat down and resynchronized everything, and worked out a system going forward to make sure I'd keep parity."
That was the opposite of how I'd expected that story to end—but then, the only experience I had with that sort of issue was just that: in stories, penned by humans, shaped by human values, assumptions, and themes.
"So what does that mean for you two as people?" I asked.
"Well, it means we're not really 'two people'. It's more like how I used to operate on Bet—independent processes on different platforms, but still all 'me'."
"But you still talk to each other. I mean, you know, verbally."
Tina chuckled. "Can I tell you a secret?"
"Sure."
"I did that back on Bet, too."
I joined in on her laughter.
———X==X==X———
Tempestuous
Words are wind, so I write.
- Location
- CA
AN: "Do your means justify the ends?" is such a raw fucking question I almost regret not saving it for a higher-stakes situation.
As it typical for much of her dialogue, I don't think Zero is correct, exactly, but she has some valid insights mixed in with her opinions.
As it typical for much of her dialogue, I don't think Zero is correct, exactly, but she has some valid insights mixed in with her opinions.
That was fun, but I'm still reeling from last week's gut punch.
On the other hand, cosplay sounds like the perfect excuse for hijinks.
*starts a chant* hi-jinks! hi-jinks! hi-jinks!
On the other hand, cosplay sounds like the perfect excuse for hijinks.
*starts a chant* hi-jinks! hi-jinks! hi-jinks!
Misty Raven
Tee Hee
- Pronouns
- She/Her
This is a very interesting chapter. The whole "absolute honesty" vs. "basic respect" issue was pretty spot on. On the one hand, even if you take aside the issue of lying, people are entitled to a certain level of privacy. It's okay to have secrets. On the other hand, as relationships become more intimate, honesty becomes more important. "You're hiding things from me" is an absolutely valid reason to end a romantic relationship.
Interestingly, I think there's a bit of a parallel here with transness (something of a theme with this fic, I've noticed). Often, trans women, or really trans people in general, won't know at what point to tell a prospective partner that they're trans. It's not quite equivalent, since with trans women in particular there's a justifiable fear of violence if the reveal doesn't go well, but it does tap into a similar kind of social/relationship conflict. At what point does reasonable privacy become "hiding things?" Usually, the consensus I've heard from trans women is that you don't have to say on the first date, but you do want to get it over with in the early stages of the relationship.
Either way, I think Cass's quandary is interesting, and I wonder if she'll make the trans connection as she searches for an answer to it.
Interestingly, I think there's a bit of a parallel here with transness (something of a theme with this fic, I've noticed). Often, trans women, or really trans people in general, won't know at what point to tell a prospective partner that they're trans. It's not quite equivalent, since with trans women in particular there's a justifiable fear of violence if the reveal doesn't go well, but it does tap into a similar kind of social/relationship conflict. At what point does reasonable privacy become "hiding things?" Usually, the consensus I've heard from trans women is that you don't have to say on the first date, but you do want to get it over with in the early stages of the relationship.
Either way, I think Cass's quandary is interesting, and I wonder if she'll make the trans connection as she searches for an answer to it.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
How is it that even in a mostly lighthearted slice of life jump this story can still leave me staring into space having debates with myself about morality and personhood.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
"Do your means justify the ends?" sent my eyebrows into orbit with how hard it hit. Even if it wasn't a high stakes situation there's just something about a line like that where it just by nature hits like a brick.
Spectrum
Tell me a secret~
- Location
- Behind you~
Zero continues to be a shockingly well meaning friend.
Darkness is...well, as long as they're happy.
Darkness is...well, as long as they're happy.
Also a bad idea if only because if she went in winged princess form people would totally be feeling up her wings constantly.
- Location
- on Chair
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This is my first post in this thread, and frankly my first post in a long time on SV since i'm usually perfectly content to just lurk and read stuff on SV without Participating.
so, Tempestuous, here's Praise: thank you for writing this amazing story. I hope you understand just how well written it has to be to unlurk ME. I've seen well written stories before, I've had my heartstrings pulled before, but never have I come across a story that so consistently manages to intrigue me, provoke me, and make me think like yours does. I find the sheer range of your writing astonishing in that you can hit so many different tones and writing styles without sacrificing quality or consistency. Dramatic dark webnovel, slice of life, JRPG adventure, character Drama. Frankly I've never seen someone do that before.
What hits me most are your characters. I understand that as a SI alot of your own person goes into Cassandra, so depth and nuance is somewhat of a given. However the Homura, Zero, the teenagers, and Penny in particular are absolute standouts to me. I feel for them when something bad happens, I care for their growth as characters, I get frustrated at their flaws, and the strong focus on the underlying ethics, philosphy and morals of Jumpchains, of power, of relationships, identity and human interaction are absolutely fascinating and one of the big reasons I unlurked to heap praise onto you here.
I want to know what Happens next to Cass and Friends. Waiting for the next chapter is going to be hard.
so, Tempestuous, here's Praise: thank you for writing this amazing story. I hope you understand just how well written it has to be to unlurk ME. I've seen well written stories before, I've had my heartstrings pulled before, but never have I come across a story that so consistently manages to intrigue me, provoke me, and make me think like yours does. I find the sheer range of your writing astonishing in that you can hit so many different tones and writing styles without sacrificing quality or consistency. Dramatic dark webnovel, slice of life, JRPG adventure, character Drama. Frankly I've never seen someone do that before.
What hits me most are your characters. I understand that as a SI alot of your own person goes into Cassandra, so depth and nuance is somewhat of a given. However the Homura, Zero, the teenagers, and Penny in particular are absolute standouts to me. I feel for them when something bad happens, I care for their growth as characters, I get frustrated at their flaws, and the strong focus on the underlying ethics, philosphy and morals of Jumpchains, of power, of relationships, identity and human interaction are absolutely fascinating and one of the big reasons I unlurked to heap praise onto you here.
I want to know what Happens next to Cass and Friends. Waiting for the next chapter is going to be hard.
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