Companion Chronicles [Jumpchain/Multicross SI] [Currently visiting: INTERMISSION]
- Thread starter Tempestuous
- Start date
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
I'd like to move there.
ExNihilo
SPACE!
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You want to deal with people spending hundreds of dollars whaling for Anna Sanchez in the inevitable Gacha games? Think of the pain you're putting her through.
Chloe Sullivan
Subdefective
- Location
- 1630 Revello Drive, Sunnydale CA
If it means not having to deal with people telling me how great fate is, yes.
Tempestuous
Words are wind, so I write.
- Location
- CA
Oh, you.
Yup! I'm happy with how the 'confirmation' is presented.
Are you confusing Megan (obsessed with magic) with Chloe (obsessed with anime)?
The question indeed.
If you find me a timeline where gacha games were never invented you can talk to me about Fate as much as you like.
ExNihilo
SPACE!
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Maybe a little bit? I guess if it was an anime card game, she would have already told Chloe.
Chapter 109: Contrast
Tempestuous
Words are wind, so I write.
- Location
- CA
AN: Beta-read by Carbohydratos, Did I?, Gaia, Linedoffice, Zephyrosis, and Mizu.
For one reason or another, I'd been spending gradually more time in the Warehouse, particularly during the seven hours I would be sleeping if I still needed eight hours of sleep. Rita caught me practicing the naginata in the sparring area of the gym one such evening. I'd naively assumed that an unfading memory of nearly a decade of practice would prevent me from growing rusty, but my recent practice sessions implied otherwise; everything I did felt wrong.
I was so distracted I didn't notice she was watching me until she spoke.
"Cass."
"What?" I asked. "Oh, hey, Rita. How're you doing?"
"Well enough. Yourself?"
"Antsy, but healthy."
She nodded in acknowledgment and sent a look at my naginata. "Still using that old thing, I see."
"This 'old thing' served me faithfully for years." I tapped the butt of the weapon on the ground for emphasis. "I learned to use it pretty well, if I do say so myself."
Rita walked over and pulled a wooden staff out of a box. Her smile was all teeth.
"Show me."
I didn't. I wasn't just 'rusty', I was downright clumsy.
"Your footwork is terrible," she said as I climbed to my feet for the third time in as many minutes. "I'm surprised you survived the Jump fighting like that."
"Ouch," I whined. "I swear I wasn't this bad last Jump, but I don't know what I'm doing wrong. It's like my muscle memory is all messed up—actually, hold on." I swapped to my Lina form, then took up a stance again. "Yeah, this feels a lot better for some reason."
Rita didn't roll her eyes, but the look she gave me conveyed much the same reaction. "It's your wings, Cass. Your balance is off because you're used to fighting with a counterweight on your back."
"Oh." I pouted as I wiped my forehead with the back of one hand. "I'm going to have to learn how to use a naginata all over again, aren't I?"
"Depends on how well you can apply your new training to your old techniques. Or you could wait until you get a perk for it."
"Nah, fuck that. I learned it the hard way once and I can do it again."
She nodded in approval. "Need help?"
"Clearly," I deadpanned. "Err, if you don't mind, I mean."
"Not at all. Lose the feathers and we'll go back to basics."
So I did. Rita put me through my paces on (re)learning proper balance and footwork over the next few hours, knocking me over every time I fell back into old habits and put my weight too far out in front. It was not fun; I knew intellectually that learning skills took time, but I felt that I had already learned this one and was incredibly frustrated that I'd backslid.
"You'd think Transformation Mentat would apply to stuff like this," I complained after Rita demonstrated another error by knocking me on my ass with her wooden stick. "It's supposed to handle body-shape-coordination issues, right?"
She nodded as she pulled me to my feet. "I would think so."
"So why isn't it? Is it because I'm using a big stick rather than just my body? Or is the problem that I didn't have it when I originally learned these skills? Or maybe it'd let me adjust moves for a normal body to accommodate extra limbs, but not vice versa?"
"Practice makes permanent," she observed. "Again."
I did the form again, paying particular attention to how my body worked through each motion. Rita sat back and watched this time, and I made it through un-toppled.
"Looks like it does," she said.
I didn't follow. "What does?"
"Your perk. You did everything correctly, just like when you showed me how you do it with wings."
"Seriously? How does that make sense? It only works if I know it should?"
Rita shrugged. "Well, it's working now." It was dismissive, but there was an argument to be made that trying to understand the inner workings of anything Management did was a fool's errand. I was absolutely the type of fool to try, but this wasn't the time or place for it: case in point, Rita was already raising her practice polearm into a ready stance.
"Come on," she said. "Let's see how you do in action."
I still lost horribly, but they were among the most instructive losses I'd ever suffered.
"I should get going," I said when my watch hit 4 am—and not just because I was oh-for-twenty-something by this point. "Thanks for the help—I'd still be practicing the same wrong moves if you hadn't noticed."
"I enjoy teaching," Rita replied. "If you have time, we should keep this up. Might save your life some Jump."
"In that case, I'd be a fool to turn you down. I'm usually in here overnight—"
"Time isn't linear between the Warehouse and the outside world," she reminded me. "Just ask Dragon to page me if you want help, and if I'm not busy, I'll come over."
"Okay. See you… at some point in the future, then."
School started up for the fall like it did every year, which I mostly noticed because teenage foot traffic past the windows went from an all-day thing to a 7:30 am thing. The shop remained quiet. No highschoolers stopped by to make a table 'theirs'.
I really missed the kids.
"Going to dress up this year?" Homura asked as we watched the evening news, more for the ritual than anything else. It wasn't even October yet and the talking heads were already going on about this year's Christmas.
"I don't know," I replied. "I skipped last year out of solidarity…"
"Solidarity?"
"Strawfield High banned Halloween costumes."
She let out a single, quiet laugh.
"This Halloween?" I continued, returning to the original topic. "I don't know. If I think of something, maybe."
"You miss the kids."
"Am I that obvious about it?"
"I am very observant," Homura deadpanned.
"And you know me too well," I quipped. "Yeah, I miss 'em. I'll adjust. People sitting around and drinking tea is nice when it happens."
She nodded, then demonstrated that she really was 'very observant'.
"Is there something else bothering you? You've been spending more time in the Warehouse over the past month."
"I'm not sure," I admitted. "I'm feeling kind of… bored, I guess."
"With your job?"
"All of it, I think." I waved at the apartment. "The whole Jump. I mean, I don't regret how we've spent the last few years at all. I'm glad we did it. But… well, it reminds me why I wasn't happy with the world I was born into in the first place."
Homura, sensing an incoming rant, grabbed the remote and muted the TV.
I took a deep breath and leaned back into the couch. "Like, I got rid of all the things holding me back from having a 'normal' life—and I'm thankful for all the magic bullshit remedies that made that happen, seriously—but I didn't really want a normal life in the first place. I'm glad I got to experience it for comparison's sake, but… I dunno. I'm not satisfied."
"Maybe you'd feel better if you weren't working forty hours a week."
"Well, on the one hand, part of me is proud that I can work those forty hours. I was really insecure about not working after I dropped out of college."
"Capitalist cultures tend to categorize people as either 'productive' or 'defective'," she observed.
"Yeah. On the other hand, I'm not against working less. Even after all the things stopping me from working a generic 9-to-5 job magically disappeared, it's not a particularly great experience, and I've seen enough over the last couple decades to throw that sort of thinking in the bin."
"Is that why you're getting tired of running the shop?"
I grimaced and waggled a hand. "Not… exactly. My problem right now isn't that I'm overworked or don't have enough leisure time. It's… something else."
"Satisfaction?"
"Something like that. Satisfaction, fulfillment, whatever you call it. What's the capstone of the hierarchy of needs again?"
"Self-actualization, for the original model," Homura replied promptly.
"Yeah, that. My job is… I'm basically an interface for people to exchange money for goods. It's not filling that need."
"Well, what would?"
"Hell if I know."
I'd asked myself that question already. I'd lived three lives in the past three jumps: professional superhero, engineering officer, and royal knight. What was it that I'd gotten out of those lives? Authority? Fame? Power?
I didn't relish authority because I didn't particularly like being the one responsible for things—the place the buck stopped, as it were—though I was more comfortable with it than I had been. Fame was a double-edged sword and more trouble than it was worth—especially in 'modern' societies. As for power, I had more than enough at my fingertips right this moment.
But there was a common denominator to be found there.
"I mean, I have some ideas," I allowed.
"Oh?"
"I think, to some degree, I want… not 'respect' exactly. What's the word…"
A few seconds later, I snapped my fingers as I found it.
"I want acclaim," I said. "I want to be known for being good at something. No, more than that; I want to be held up as an example of someone who is great at something. I think I always have—wanted that, I mean."
"That would be 'esteem'," Homura noted. "The level below 'self-actualization' on Maslow's original hierarchy, if it matters."
"Well, maybe it's that, then—and I don't think it does."
She nodded once and moved on from semantics. "What did you want to be good at? Was there something specific you wanted to be good at as a child?"
"I don't think so. I daydreamed about being a great scientist, or author, or musician… but I never seriously considered pursuing any of those things. I could imagine myself in those roles, but I couldn't see myself getting there." I harrumphed. "I think that's one of the things that drove me to such despair at home: I wanted acclaim, but I didn't feel like I had any chance of success."
"Why not?"
A frustratingly easy question.
"I gave up too easily," I answered. "I don't mean in hindsight—even back home, I knew I gave up too easily. I knew, intellectually, that expecting to get something right on the first try every time was unreasonable. But I'd gotten so used to things coming easily as a kid that when I grew up and faced problems that needed more effort, I wasn't able to keep going in the face of adversity.
"I think understanding the problem hurt more than it helped, to be honest. I knew with perfect clarity that the thing standing between me and my dreams was me. Is it any wonder I had such terrible self-esteem?
"The cherry on top of that whole depressive sundae was that I felt powerless to 'fix' myself. How was I supposed to do anything about it when any attempt to change needed the same sort of effort I was trying to address my unwillingness or inability to put into anything? The key was behind the lock."
"You've hardly been idle since you joined us," Homura pointed out. "Has everything you've done since you joined been easy?"
"No, of course not—but being powerless to 'fix' myself hardly matters when there's literal reality-warping bullshit that will do it for me. I took a perk right out the gate that helps me deal with psychological issues with only a bit of introspection—and a different perk that helped prevent me from having a goddamn nervous breakdown twenty times in my first month as an 'adventurer', but that's neither here nor there."
"Was struggling to apply yourself a psychological issue, then?"
"A learned one, I think," I agreed. "Like I said, I didn't really face any challenges until high school, and… well, I read once that praising kids for putting in effort encourages them to try harder, while praising them for being smart or athletic means they'll tend to give up if they don't do well the first time because they fear proving those statements wrong by failing again. I'm pretty sure my parents praised me for being smart."
"Because you struggled with persistence?"
"Well, yes, but I'm not basing that solely off my life problems. They valued intelligence—especially my dad."
I took a deep breath because I knew damn well I was about to start something just shy of a rant.
"The thing about my dad is… he's brilliant, maybe even 'a genius', and he was proud of that. He took pride in his accomplishments, of course—he was one of the top names in his field when he was younger, and he was proud of the work he'd done and the contributions he'd made—but he also put a lot of value in being smart enough to do those things, not just the doing itself.
"That's probably where I learned what to want in life, you know? When I was growing up, I learned—by example, to some extent—that the thing to strive for in life was to be great at something, and for people to know you were great at that thing. Maybe not everyone, but the people who mattered, at least, however that might be judged. That's why I wanted acclaim, even awe if I could get it. I wanted people to recognize my name, for them to want to meet me just because of who I was and what I'd done."
Homura hummed as she considered my rambling.
"You wanted fans," she summarized.
"I… yeah, I guess I did. It sounds kind of conceited when you put it like that, though."
"Would you prefer it if I said you wanted to be the nexus of parasocial relationships?"
"No."
"I didn't think so." Homura held her usual stern expression a moment longer, then gave me an encouraging smile. "Regardless, it wasn't a criticism. I only pointed it out because I wanted to ask why you were so uncomfortable learning that you have them."
"You mean fans of my 'character'?" I asked, finger-quotes on full display. "That's not really the same thing. Like, Jenn wasn't a fan of what I've done, she was a fan of what I might have done someday. Don't get me wrong, I'm incredibly flattered that she looks at me as someone like that, but it doesn't feel like she's really impressed by me, if that makes sense.
"Actually, come to think of it, that's one thing about last Jump that was a real drag: I had importance handed to me by virtue of being a princess, and god that sounds so lame to complain about out loud." I sighed and rested my face in my hand. "I mean, to some extent, that's true of everything I've done since I got here—I didn't earn the skills that let me survive my Generic Fantasy Roleplaying Game adventure, or the superpowers and interpersonal magic that got me through Worm—but those weren't as bad because at least I had to use what I got to make people pay attention to me, you know?"
"You might have gotten a head start from perks, but you still had to achieve something with them."
"Yeah," I agreed. "Though now that I think about it, I did put in the full, proper amount of work in Trek."
"With the shuttle?"
"And my work on transwarp in general. No perks—well, Max's super-teaching and my memory perk are borderline, but…"
"You had to put in work to gain and use all the skills you needed."
"Yeah, and I did it. I earned my respect that Jump. Like, the day I boarded Voyager, the captain approached me and told me he'd read the paper I wrote in the academy—and not just him, because the engineers responsible for designing the new Voyager-class cruisers had used it to make some final adjustments to the hull. That one moment of recognition was exactly the thing I'd always wanted, I think."
She nodded. "It's what your father did, isn't it? Become known for being very good in a specific field."
"Yeah, I—bleh." I pulled a face. "That kind of tarnishes it a little."
"Why?"
"Because it feels less like I made my own way and more like I'm following the path set out to me. I feel… railroaded?"
"But it's what you wanted, isn't it?"
"Maybe? I don't know anymore."
"Cass," Homura said gently. "Don't think too hard about it. You respect your parents, right?"
"Sure."
"Then why does it matter if your parents wanted the same thing in their own lives? Following in someone's footsteps because you look up to them doesn't make the choice not your own."
"Yeah, I know. I mean, I guess I didn't know, but you're right."
Homura glanced at the remote, then at me. The unspoken question: Shall we go back to watching the news?
"How are you doing?" I asked. "Eager for the Jump to end, or still savoring the simple pleasures?"
"A little of both," she replied. "It's bittersweet having such a nice life, but not being able to share it with my oldest friends."
I moved my hand onto hers and gave it a squeeze.
"Someday," I promised.
"Someday," Homura agreed. She worked her jaw for a moment before continuing, "I've been thinking about 'when'."
"To go home?"
"Yes. I mentioned that I was concerned I wouldn't have enough power—or powers—to do the job."
I nodded. "You said that after Max decided to bring Zion on."
"I did; however, my concerns regarding my abilities were—and are—an excuse. Barring exceptional circumstances, the upgrades I receive from staying with the 'chain will be incremental at best."
She paused. "I will admit to… trepidation regarding the 'point of no return', so to speak. There are a great many unknowns. I don't know what sort of contingencies the Incubators have in place or what they can do if I push them hard enough. All I can do is take as many tools as possible with me to manage situations as they happen, and I'll never know if I have enough to handle the unknown unknowns."
"When you say 'unknown unknowns', it sounds like you mean 'outside context problems'."
"And if I do?"
"Then I'd like to remind you that one of the major benefits of joining the 'chain is that you get to be the outside context problem."
Homura did her best to give me a stern look, but her lip twitched upwards against her will. "Perhaps. Regardless, that isn't the reason I'm still here."
I raised an eyebrow as an invitation to continue.
"The truth is that there's really only one more thing that I nee—that I want," she corrected herself. "Something I'm less and less hopeful I'll ever find."
Of course.
"Among infinitely many universes—" I began.
Homura shook her head hard enough to swing her hair into her face. "We will never have visited infinitely many universes."
She took a second to pull her hair back into place with a flick that send it fluttering like a sheet—in total defiance of both physics and the limiting factor of sitting on a couch—before continuing, "No matter how long I stay, I will only ever have visited a finite number of worlds—a literally infinitesimal slice of those 'infinitely many universes'—and many of those I've already visited are among the places I would have chosen to look were I given the choice. I have perks for breaking pacts and ignoring rules. I've had more than one literal God look at my 'condition'"—she raised the hand I wasn't holding to display the ring—"only to scratch their heads and admit they can't help. So I began looking for loopholes: unintended applications of perks and abilities, like Shard Administration. Ways to cheat reality itself. None of those worked either. Maybe nothing will."
I squeezed her hand again in lieu of a response because I had no idea what to say; my first instinct was to say something like, "Of course there's something that will do it," but we'd both know it was an empty platitude. I didn't want to suggest she stop hoping, but I didn't want to invalidate her concerns, either.
Are you okay with not having a solution? I discarded that response as well; whatever her reply, it wouldn't bring her any comfort.
"I don't know if there's anything I can do to help," I said, "but if there is, I'll do it. I promise."
"Thank you." Homura removed her hand from mine so she could slip her arm around my shoulders. "Don't worry. I'm not giving up yet."
"I'm not sure you know how to give up."
"By your own admission, you would be the ideal teacher."
I barked out a bitter laugh. "I know you're joking, but it's still a part of myself I…"—hated—"…I never thought I'd escape, you know?"
"I understand."
Homura slipped her hand free of my shoulders so she could reach over and pick up the remote, but she didn't unmute the television just yet.
"I've said it before, but thank you for this." She waved at the apartment around us. "I may not know how to give up, but this life has reminded me why I started in the first place, and why it's worth it. So: thank you."
"Well, thank you for sharing it with me."
I let out a relaxing sigh and leaned my shoulder against hers, and she leaned into mine as well. I expected her to unmute the television, but the silence continued.
"You remember you said something about how we're put into lives whose personalities match our own?" I asked.
"We were discussing what to do this Jump," Homura recalled. "Why?"
"I was just thinking that the more you relax, the easier it is to see how my memories of 'Emily' fit you."
"I could say the same of you…"
She paused, then raised her hand and flicked my forehead.
"Doofus."
"Goddamn it Emmy, you've been doing that since we were five!"
"Cassandra?"
"Yeah?"
"Remember when you said people sitting around drinking tea in here was nice?"
It was the middle of October, and Homura and I were nearly finished closing the store the same way we did five days a week.
"Yeah," I answered. "You thinking about a promotion or something?"
"Or something," she echoed. "I considered surprising you with it, but I didn't think you'd appreciate having it sprung on you."
"Uh oh."
"Don't give me that," Homura chided me. "You'll like it."
"What is it?"
"I'll show you when we're done."
Sure enough, once the last few chores were done, she led me back to the storage room. The last time she'd 'surprised' me like this, it had been with the taiyaki pans, so I wasn't particularly concerned as I watched her pull a drape of another large, flat 'not-surprise'… which turned out to be a new drink menu printed on some sort of thick acrylic, all set to be hung behind the counter and featuring tea, tea, tea, and tea, in four times again as many varieties than the simple boxed teabags we'd been serving for years.
There was only one problem I could see with the idea.
"I don't actually know how to make any of this stuff."
"It's tea, Cassandra. The biggest change is that you'll give them a teapot of boiling water instead of pointing them at a dispenser."
"I'm pretty sure Jasmine Pearls don't come in a teabag," I noted, pointing to the offending item.
"You won't be responsible for preparing them."
"All right. When were you planning to get this started?"
"We'll launch it as soon as everything gets here," Homura answered. "The teapots should arrive tomorrow, but we won't receive the new furniture until next week."
"New furniture?"
"I ordered proper coffee shop-style wooden tables and metal chairs to replace the cheap plastic ones we have now."
"Cool."
"I had a new sign made, as well." Another sheet came off a much larger object to reveal that our bakery now had a subtitle:
"Nice," I said as I admired the revised sign. "Makes me wonder why we didn't do this earlier."
Homura sighed. "The town wouldn't let us build a greenhouse on the roof, remember?"
"Oh, yeah." I chuckled at the memory.
…
"Wait, hold up—"
Homura had not, in fact, built a greenhouse somewhere in town; she'd 'merely' taken the time to find some good specialty tea suppliers (or built the greenhouse in the Warehouse; I elected not to clarify.) I helped myself to some under the guise of 'quality control' and confirmed it was, indeed, good.
We launched our new offerings on schedule, and the shop gained both a new crowd and a persistent aroma of tea. Our tea cakes sold like never before.
In fact, it may have worked a little too well.
The break room in the shop had been a deliberate afterthought in the original floor-plans, back when Homura and I had been operating under the assumption that we'd be the only employees. It was serviceable for two people and a little tight with three. With Homura, Lizzie, Albert, George, Ron, and I all crammed in for a meeting, cramped didn't even begin to describe it.
I called the meeting to order. Then I walked over and paused the dryer cycle so people could hear me call the meeting to order. (It wasn't so much that the dryer was 'that loud' as much as the room being 'that small'.)
"So I'm sure you've all noticed that business has been picking up," I began, "and having only one person behind the counter at a time is leaving us a little overworked."
There were murmurs of agreement. The stream of customers wasn't 'overwhelming', but it was steady enough that the one behind the counter rarely had time to take care of the rest of the shop.
"As such," I continued, "we're planning to move to two-person shifts, at least during the busiest parts of the day."
"Is that going to change how much we make?" Ron asked. "We share our profit according to hours worked, so if people work more hours…"
"Are you going to make less per hour?" I finished for him, then smiled as I answered, "Not a chance. We're only having this 'problem'"—airquotes—"because we're doing such good business. The plan is to add about half again as many hours to the schedule, and the increase in revenue from our new service is well above that."
"Sweet—uh, no pun intended."
The rest of the meeting was simply working out the details of who'd pick up the double-up hours.
"Guess this is goodbye to Don's," Lizzie said as we headed out into the hall.
"Right?" Al agreed. "I'll be making just as much money with half the hours worked!"
"I'll be making twice as much with the same number of hours worked!"
They high-fived.
I shared a glance with Homura, who merely noted, "Employee morale seems high."
Halloween happened, then Thanksgiving; we drove up to visit Max and Gary in Moperville for the latter, though—privately, in my own mind—I almost wished we hadn't. Even six months later, Zeke's disappearance loomed large, and conversation around the dinner table was stilted and awkward as we all tiptoed around the elephant in the room.
Max's cooking was fucking incredible, though. She was the model chef for the food we got from the Palace, so you could argue I'd been eating her cooking for years, but that didn't make it any less amazing.
I also got to meet Abby, Zeke's gray housecat, who came to rub her head against my ankles as we got ready to eat. "Hello," I cooed. "Do you want me to pet you?"
"Zeke?" she asked.
"No, I don't know where Zeke is."
Abby immediately lost interest in her visitor.
"It's weird not having Zeke around," Tina said. "I didn't spend a lot of time with him after I headed off to Uni, but we still talked often enough that I feel the difference."
Since we were in Moperville already, it seemed like a good time to check in on Tina in person. She was home for Thanksgiving, and thus only a few houses away from the mess that had been the Vahn's family holiday. Neither of us minded the cold, so we decided to sit on the front steps to chat rather than try to find privacy in the house.
"What did they tell everyone?" I asked. "I was going to ask Max about it, but she's still fuming, and it didn't seem smart to bring it up."
"The truth, more or less: he's missing and no one knows how to find him. Tedd leaned on me until I admitted it was probably magic-related, which might have been a mistake. They took his disappearance kind of hard."
"The group, or Tedd specifically?"
"I meant the latter; I'm not sure about the others."
"Ah."
"Looking back on it," Tina continued, "I think Tedd projected on Zeke a bit. Think about it: you had a really shy, anxious, avoidant kid find friends and come out of their shell, only to realize that this whole time there was another shy, anxious, avoidant kid going to school right alongside them."
Mrs. Redding smiled and waved through the window, and I returned the gesture before turning back to Tina.
"Zeke did say Tedd was determined to be his friend," I recalled. "You think that's why?"
"That's my theory."
"So what does 'kind of hard' mean?"
"They got into a yelling match with their dad over the investigation," Tina explained. "Mr. Verres tried to settle them down by promising he'd tell them if he learned anything, but I think what Tedd heard is 'We have no idea, so it's up to you.' They spent the next month and half performing increasingly outlandish magiscientific experiments to try to figure out where he'd gone until Max came over and told them to knock it off herself. And of course, Pandora's been poking around a bunch too, since she's gotten curious…"
"Is that bad?"
"Well, Zero's had to stay scarce."
"Why?"
"You didn't hear?" Tina asked. "She managed to piss off Pandora enough that she's been trying to kill her whenever they cross paths."
"Pandora is trying to kill Zero, or…"
"Yeah, sorry, Pandora is the one who wants Zero dead. Zero might be able to beat her in a fight—I'm not sure how strong Pandora is, but that's the impression I got from Max—but Max doesn't want Pandora dead, which is how Zero tends to end fights, so now that she—Pandora—has been getting more involved, Zero's been avoiding the area. Well, again, that's what Max said; I've barely spoken to Zero since I joined, so this is all second-hand."
Sounded like that 'Immortal Enemy' drawback was a bit more inconvenient than Zero had expected.
"But back on topic," Tina continued, "Tedd is still looking for a way to solve the problem, and I'd be surprised if their friends weren't helping out as much as they can. Unfortunately, given the situation…"
"They can't."
"Yeah."
Bummer.
I sighed, stretched, and changed the topic. "So, what're you doing these days?"
"Grad student stuff at MVU. I'm also a TA for the two metaphysics classes that don't officially exist."
"How does that work?"
"More or less like most urban fantasy stuff," she replied. "They're only there if you're supposed to know about them."
"Literally or just bureaucratically?"
"The latter. They're 'unlisted', not 'in a lecture hall that only opens to the worthy'."
"You could have just said 'by invite only'," I pointed out.
"That's not as dramatic, though."
I shook my head and sighed. "Magic and its drama."
"Quite."
We sat and watched a sprinkling of lazy snowflakes drift down onto the Redding family lawn, where they immediately melted and disappeared without a trace. It made me feel like the weather was waiting for the Christmas season to arrive properly before dumping snow all over the countryside.
"Oh, right!" I exclaimed. "I keep forgetting to ask: what happened with your project? The tinkertech thing?"
Tina huffed. "In a word? Frustration. I was half right—there is cheating going on, but it's in the 'build' stage, not the finished product, which is not what I wanted to learn."
"Why?"
Her eyes narrowed in annoyance. "Because it means my 'superpower'—and maybe all tinker powers—isn't knowledge of advanced technology, it's the ability to create that technology with the 'wrong' steps."
"Is that worse than it just being cheating and not technology at all?" I asked.
"Yes! If it wasn't technology at all, at least the problem wouldn't be that I don't 'get' it!"
"Oh. Yeah, I can see why that would be an unpleasant discovery."
"It hit me right in the pride, Cass."
I considered cracking a joke—Well, it is a big target—but elected to go for a simple "Ouch" instead.
"Yeah," Tina agreed. "It's not what I wanted to learn, but that's science for you sometimes."
"Any other interesting stories from grad school?"
Tina rubbed her chin and hummed as she thought. "Oh, this is a good one. I had a funny encounter back in September, not long after classes started up."
"Oh? What happened?"
"A freshman showed up to one of the metaphysics labs with a cat."
I facepalmed. Seriously, Megan?
Tina cracked up at my reaction. "Hold on, it gets better. I, obviously, told her that pets aren't allowed in class, so the girl says to the cat, 'You said you were invisible!', and the cat replies, 'I said "invisible to normals". You're the one who brought me to magic class!'"
I couldn't decide whether to laugh or sigh and ended up splitting the difference. "So, you met Megan."
"I did indeed. Did Jenn introduce you?"
"Other way around, actually…" I gave her a brief account of the last couple years' worth of interactions with Megan and her friends. "I guess I'm not surprised you ran into each other."
"I'd think not," Tina replied, "given that you more or less aimed her right at me."
"You say that like it's a bad thing. So, did you let the cat stay?"
"I told her that if she looked like a cat, she was going to be treated like a cat."
I frowned. "That feels vaguely discriminatory."
"Oh, don't you start!"
I teleported home, as planned, then ducked into my Warehouse bedroom and dialled 000 on my cell. Management picked up immediately, as always.
"Management speaking."
"Hi," I said. "It's me, obviously."
"Ms. Rolins. What do you want?"
"I wanted to ask about Zeke."
"Of course you do," they grumbled. "Fine. What is it?"
"How is he doing?"
"You can ask him about it when he's done."
"Okay, then, how long is he going to be in there?"
"Five years, as far as you're concerned."
That's what I'd been afraid of. "Why five years?"
"He'll be back at the end of the Jump," Management said, then headed off my line of questioning by clarifying, "I'm not going to bring him back early for your convenience."
"What about for his convenience?"
"Also no."
"What about 'in the interest of not being a dick'?"
"It's amusing you think I care, but the answer is still no, and that is final."
"Would it really take that much effort to bring him back sooner, from our perspective?"
"'Final' means final, Ms. Rolins," they snapped.
"Fine. Can you at least tell me why?"
Management responded by hanging up on me.
Chapter 109: Contrast
For one reason or another, I'd been spending gradually more time in the Warehouse, particularly during the seven hours I would be sleeping if I still needed eight hours of sleep. Rita caught me practicing the naginata in the sparring area of the gym one such evening. I'd naively assumed that an unfading memory of nearly a decade of practice would prevent me from growing rusty, but my recent practice sessions implied otherwise; everything I did felt wrong.
I was so distracted I didn't notice she was watching me until she spoke.
"Cass."
"What?" I asked. "Oh, hey, Rita. How're you doing?"
"Well enough. Yourself?"
"Antsy, but healthy."
She nodded in acknowledgment and sent a look at my naginata. "Still using that old thing, I see."
"This 'old thing' served me faithfully for years." I tapped the butt of the weapon on the ground for emphasis. "I learned to use it pretty well, if I do say so myself."
Rita walked over and pulled a wooden staff out of a box. Her smile was all teeth.
"Show me."
I didn't. I wasn't just 'rusty', I was downright clumsy.
"Your footwork is terrible," she said as I climbed to my feet for the third time in as many minutes. "I'm surprised you survived the Jump fighting like that."
"Ouch," I whined. "I swear I wasn't this bad last Jump, but I don't know what I'm doing wrong. It's like my muscle memory is all messed up—actually, hold on." I swapped to my Lina form, then took up a stance again. "Yeah, this feels a lot better for some reason."
Rita didn't roll her eyes, but the look she gave me conveyed much the same reaction. "It's your wings, Cass. Your balance is off because you're used to fighting with a counterweight on your back."
"Oh." I pouted as I wiped my forehead with the back of one hand. "I'm going to have to learn how to use a naginata all over again, aren't I?"
"Depends on how well you can apply your new training to your old techniques. Or you could wait until you get a perk for it."
"Nah, fuck that. I learned it the hard way once and I can do it again."
She nodded in approval. "Need help?"
"Clearly," I deadpanned. "Err, if you don't mind, I mean."
"Not at all. Lose the feathers and we'll go back to basics."
So I did. Rita put me through my paces on (re)learning proper balance and footwork over the next few hours, knocking me over every time I fell back into old habits and put my weight too far out in front. It was not fun; I knew intellectually that learning skills took time, but I felt that I had already learned this one and was incredibly frustrated that I'd backslid.
"You'd think Transformation Mentat would apply to stuff like this," I complained after Rita demonstrated another error by knocking me on my ass with her wooden stick. "It's supposed to handle body-shape-coordination issues, right?"
She nodded as she pulled me to my feet. "I would think so."
"So why isn't it? Is it because I'm using a big stick rather than just my body? Or is the problem that I didn't have it when I originally learned these skills? Or maybe it'd let me adjust moves for a normal body to accommodate extra limbs, but not vice versa?"
"Practice makes permanent," she observed. "Again."
I did the form again, paying particular attention to how my body worked through each motion. Rita sat back and watched this time, and I made it through un-toppled.
"Looks like it does," she said.
I didn't follow. "What does?"
"Your perk. You did everything correctly, just like when you showed me how you do it with wings."
"Seriously? How does that make sense? It only works if I know it should?"
Rita shrugged. "Well, it's working now." It was dismissive, but there was an argument to be made that trying to understand the inner workings of anything Management did was a fool's errand. I was absolutely the type of fool to try, but this wasn't the time or place for it: case in point, Rita was already raising her practice polearm into a ready stance.
"Come on," she said. "Let's see how you do in action."
I still lost horribly, but they were among the most instructive losses I'd ever suffered.
"I should get going," I said when my watch hit 4 am—and not just because I was oh-for-twenty-something by this point. "Thanks for the help—I'd still be practicing the same wrong moves if you hadn't noticed."
"I enjoy teaching," Rita replied. "If you have time, we should keep this up. Might save your life some Jump."
"In that case, I'd be a fool to turn you down. I'm usually in here overnight—"
"Time isn't linear between the Warehouse and the outside world," she reminded me. "Just ask Dragon to page me if you want help, and if I'm not busy, I'll come over."
"Okay. See you… at some point in the future, then."
———X==X==X———
School started up for the fall like it did every year, which I mostly noticed because teenage foot traffic past the windows went from an all-day thing to a 7:30 am thing. The shop remained quiet. No highschoolers stopped by to make a table 'theirs'.
I really missed the kids.
"Going to dress up this year?" Homura asked as we watched the evening news, more for the ritual than anything else. It wasn't even October yet and the talking heads were already going on about this year's Christmas.
"I don't know," I replied. "I skipped last year out of solidarity…"
"Solidarity?"
"Strawfield High banned Halloween costumes."
She let out a single, quiet laugh.
"This Halloween?" I continued, returning to the original topic. "I don't know. If I think of something, maybe."
"You miss the kids."
"Am I that obvious about it?"
"I am very observant," Homura deadpanned.
"And you know me too well," I quipped. "Yeah, I miss 'em. I'll adjust. People sitting around and drinking tea is nice when it happens."
She nodded, then demonstrated that she really was 'very observant'.
"Is there something else bothering you? You've been spending more time in the Warehouse over the past month."
"I'm not sure," I admitted. "I'm feeling kind of… bored, I guess."
"With your job?"
"All of it, I think." I waved at the apartment. "The whole Jump. I mean, I don't regret how we've spent the last few years at all. I'm glad we did it. But… well, it reminds me why I wasn't happy with the world I was born into in the first place."
Homura, sensing an incoming rant, grabbed the remote and muted the TV.
I took a deep breath and leaned back into the couch. "Like, I got rid of all the things holding me back from having a 'normal' life—and I'm thankful for all the magic bullshit remedies that made that happen, seriously—but I didn't really want a normal life in the first place. I'm glad I got to experience it for comparison's sake, but… I dunno. I'm not satisfied."
"Maybe you'd feel better if you weren't working forty hours a week."
"Well, on the one hand, part of me is proud that I can work those forty hours. I was really insecure about not working after I dropped out of college."
"Capitalist cultures tend to categorize people as either 'productive' or 'defective'," she observed.
"Yeah. On the other hand, I'm not against working less. Even after all the things stopping me from working a generic 9-to-5 job magically disappeared, it's not a particularly great experience, and I've seen enough over the last couple decades to throw that sort of thinking in the bin."
"Is that why you're getting tired of running the shop?"
I grimaced and waggled a hand. "Not… exactly. My problem right now isn't that I'm overworked or don't have enough leisure time. It's… something else."
"Satisfaction?"
"Something like that. Satisfaction, fulfillment, whatever you call it. What's the capstone of the hierarchy of needs again?"
"Self-actualization, for the original model," Homura replied promptly.
"Yeah, that. My job is… I'm basically an interface for people to exchange money for goods. It's not filling that need."
"Well, what would?"
"Hell if I know."
I'd asked myself that question already. I'd lived three lives in the past three jumps: professional superhero, engineering officer, and royal knight. What was it that I'd gotten out of those lives? Authority? Fame? Power?
I didn't relish authority because I didn't particularly like being the one responsible for things—the place the buck stopped, as it were—though I was more comfortable with it than I had been. Fame was a double-edged sword and more trouble than it was worth—especially in 'modern' societies. As for power, I had more than enough at my fingertips right this moment.
But there was a common denominator to be found there.
"I mean, I have some ideas," I allowed.
"Oh?"
"I think, to some degree, I want… not 'respect' exactly. What's the word…"
A few seconds later, I snapped my fingers as I found it.
"I want acclaim," I said. "I want to be known for being good at something. No, more than that; I want to be held up as an example of someone who is great at something. I think I always have—wanted that, I mean."
"That would be 'esteem'," Homura noted. "The level below 'self-actualization' on Maslow's original hierarchy, if it matters."
"Well, maybe it's that, then—and I don't think it does."
She nodded once and moved on from semantics. "What did you want to be good at? Was there something specific you wanted to be good at as a child?"
"I don't think so. I daydreamed about being a great scientist, or author, or musician… but I never seriously considered pursuing any of those things. I could imagine myself in those roles, but I couldn't see myself getting there." I harrumphed. "I think that's one of the things that drove me to such despair at home: I wanted acclaim, but I didn't feel like I had any chance of success."
"Why not?"
A frustratingly easy question.
"I gave up too easily," I answered. "I don't mean in hindsight—even back home, I knew I gave up too easily. I knew, intellectually, that expecting to get something right on the first try every time was unreasonable. But I'd gotten so used to things coming easily as a kid that when I grew up and faced problems that needed more effort, I wasn't able to keep going in the face of adversity.
"I think understanding the problem hurt more than it helped, to be honest. I knew with perfect clarity that the thing standing between me and my dreams was me. Is it any wonder I had such terrible self-esteem?
"The cherry on top of that whole depressive sundae was that I felt powerless to 'fix' myself. How was I supposed to do anything about it when any attempt to change needed the same sort of effort I was trying to address my unwillingness or inability to put into anything? The key was behind the lock."
"You've hardly been idle since you joined us," Homura pointed out. "Has everything you've done since you joined been easy?"
"No, of course not—but being powerless to 'fix' myself hardly matters when there's literal reality-warping bullshit that will do it for me. I took a perk right out the gate that helps me deal with psychological issues with only a bit of introspection—and a different perk that helped prevent me from having a goddamn nervous breakdown twenty times in my first month as an 'adventurer', but that's neither here nor there."
"Was struggling to apply yourself a psychological issue, then?"
"A learned one, I think," I agreed. "Like I said, I didn't really face any challenges until high school, and… well, I read once that praising kids for putting in effort encourages them to try harder, while praising them for being smart or athletic means they'll tend to give up if they don't do well the first time because they fear proving those statements wrong by failing again. I'm pretty sure my parents praised me for being smart."
"Because you struggled with persistence?"
"Well, yes, but I'm not basing that solely off my life problems. They valued intelligence—especially my dad."
I took a deep breath because I knew damn well I was about to start something just shy of a rant.
"The thing about my dad is… he's brilliant, maybe even 'a genius', and he was proud of that. He took pride in his accomplishments, of course—he was one of the top names in his field when he was younger, and he was proud of the work he'd done and the contributions he'd made—but he also put a lot of value in being smart enough to do those things, not just the doing itself.
"That's probably where I learned what to want in life, you know? When I was growing up, I learned—by example, to some extent—that the thing to strive for in life was to be great at something, and for people to know you were great at that thing. Maybe not everyone, but the people who mattered, at least, however that might be judged. That's why I wanted acclaim, even awe if I could get it. I wanted people to recognize my name, for them to want to meet me just because of who I was and what I'd done."
Homura hummed as she considered my rambling.
"You wanted fans," she summarized.
"I… yeah, I guess I did. It sounds kind of conceited when you put it like that, though."
"Would you prefer it if I said you wanted to be the nexus of parasocial relationships?"
"No."
"I didn't think so." Homura held her usual stern expression a moment longer, then gave me an encouraging smile. "Regardless, it wasn't a criticism. I only pointed it out because I wanted to ask why you were so uncomfortable learning that you have them."
"You mean fans of my 'character'?" I asked, finger-quotes on full display. "That's not really the same thing. Like, Jenn wasn't a fan of what I've done, she was a fan of what I might have done someday. Don't get me wrong, I'm incredibly flattered that she looks at me as someone like that, but it doesn't feel like she's really impressed by me, if that makes sense.
"Actually, come to think of it, that's one thing about last Jump that was a real drag: I had importance handed to me by virtue of being a princess, and god that sounds so lame to complain about out loud." I sighed and rested my face in my hand. "I mean, to some extent, that's true of everything I've done since I got here—I didn't earn the skills that let me survive my Generic Fantasy Roleplaying Game adventure, or the superpowers and interpersonal magic that got me through Worm—but those weren't as bad because at least I had to use what I got to make people pay attention to me, you know?"
"You might have gotten a head start from perks, but you still had to achieve something with them."
"Yeah," I agreed. "Though now that I think about it, I did put in the full, proper amount of work in Trek."
"With the shuttle?"
"And my work on transwarp in general. No perks—well, Max's super-teaching and my memory perk are borderline, but…"
"You had to put in work to gain and use all the skills you needed."
"Yeah, and I did it. I earned my respect that Jump. Like, the day I boarded Voyager, the captain approached me and told me he'd read the paper I wrote in the academy—and not just him, because the engineers responsible for designing the new Voyager-class cruisers had used it to make some final adjustments to the hull. That one moment of recognition was exactly the thing I'd always wanted, I think."
She nodded. "It's what your father did, isn't it? Become known for being very good in a specific field."
"Yeah, I—bleh." I pulled a face. "That kind of tarnishes it a little."
"Why?"
"Because it feels less like I made my own way and more like I'm following the path set out to me. I feel… railroaded?"
"But it's what you wanted, isn't it?"
"Maybe? I don't know anymore."
"Cass," Homura said gently. "Don't think too hard about it. You respect your parents, right?"
"Sure."
"Then why does it matter if your parents wanted the same thing in their own lives? Following in someone's footsteps because you look up to them doesn't make the choice not your own."
"Yeah, I know. I mean, I guess I didn't know, but you're right."
Homura glanced at the remote, then at me. The unspoken question: Shall we go back to watching the news?
"How are you doing?" I asked. "Eager for the Jump to end, or still savoring the simple pleasures?"
"A little of both," she replied. "It's bittersweet having such a nice life, but not being able to share it with my oldest friends."
I moved my hand onto hers and gave it a squeeze.
"Someday," I promised.
"Someday," Homura agreed. She worked her jaw for a moment before continuing, "I've been thinking about 'when'."
"To go home?"
"Yes. I mentioned that I was concerned I wouldn't have enough power—or powers—to do the job."
I nodded. "You said that after Max decided to bring Zion on."
"I did; however, my concerns regarding my abilities were—and are—an excuse. Barring exceptional circumstances, the upgrades I receive from staying with the 'chain will be incremental at best."
She paused. "I will admit to… trepidation regarding the 'point of no return', so to speak. There are a great many unknowns. I don't know what sort of contingencies the Incubators have in place or what they can do if I push them hard enough. All I can do is take as many tools as possible with me to manage situations as they happen, and I'll never know if I have enough to handle the unknown unknowns."
"When you say 'unknown unknowns', it sounds like you mean 'outside context problems'."
"And if I do?"
"Then I'd like to remind you that one of the major benefits of joining the 'chain is that you get to be the outside context problem."
Homura did her best to give me a stern look, but her lip twitched upwards against her will. "Perhaps. Regardless, that isn't the reason I'm still here."
I raised an eyebrow as an invitation to continue.
"The truth is that there's really only one more thing that I nee—that I want," she corrected herself. "Something I'm less and less hopeful I'll ever find."
Of course.
"Among infinitely many universes—" I began.
Homura shook her head hard enough to swing her hair into her face. "We will never have visited infinitely many universes."
She took a second to pull her hair back into place with a flick that send it fluttering like a sheet—in total defiance of both physics and the limiting factor of sitting on a couch—before continuing, "No matter how long I stay, I will only ever have visited a finite number of worlds—a literally infinitesimal slice of those 'infinitely many universes'—and many of those I've already visited are among the places I would have chosen to look were I given the choice. I have perks for breaking pacts and ignoring rules. I've had more than one literal God look at my 'condition'"—she raised the hand I wasn't holding to display the ring—"only to scratch their heads and admit they can't help. So I began looking for loopholes: unintended applications of perks and abilities, like Shard Administration. Ways to cheat reality itself. None of those worked either. Maybe nothing will."
I squeezed her hand again in lieu of a response because I had no idea what to say; my first instinct was to say something like, "Of course there's something that will do it," but we'd both know it was an empty platitude. I didn't want to suggest she stop hoping, but I didn't want to invalidate her concerns, either.
Are you okay with not having a solution? I discarded that response as well; whatever her reply, it wouldn't bring her any comfort.
"I don't know if there's anything I can do to help," I said, "but if there is, I'll do it. I promise."
"Thank you." Homura removed her hand from mine so she could slip her arm around my shoulders. "Don't worry. I'm not giving up yet."
"I'm not sure you know how to give up."
"By your own admission, you would be the ideal teacher."
I barked out a bitter laugh. "I know you're joking, but it's still a part of myself I…"—hated—"…I never thought I'd escape, you know?"
"I understand."
Homura slipped her hand free of my shoulders so she could reach over and pick up the remote, but she didn't unmute the television just yet.
"I've said it before, but thank you for this." She waved at the apartment around us. "I may not know how to give up, but this life has reminded me why I started in the first place, and why it's worth it. So: thank you."
"Well, thank you for sharing it with me."
I let out a relaxing sigh and leaned my shoulder against hers, and she leaned into mine as well. I expected her to unmute the television, but the silence continued.
"You remember you said something about how we're put into lives whose personalities match our own?" I asked.
"We were discussing what to do this Jump," Homura recalled. "Why?"
"I was just thinking that the more you relax, the easier it is to see how my memories of 'Emily' fit you."
"I could say the same of you…"
She paused, then raised her hand and flicked my forehead.
"Doofus."
"Goddamn it Emmy, you've been doing that since we were five!"
———X==X==X———
"Cassandra?"
"Yeah?"
"Remember when you said people sitting around drinking tea in here was nice?"
It was the middle of October, and Homura and I were nearly finished closing the store the same way we did five days a week.
"Yeah," I answered. "You thinking about a promotion or something?"
"Or something," she echoed. "I considered surprising you with it, but I didn't think you'd appreciate having it sprung on you."
"Uh oh."
"Don't give me that," Homura chided me. "You'll like it."
"What is it?"
"I'll show you when we're done."
Sure enough, once the last few chores were done, she led me back to the storage room. The last time she'd 'surprised' me like this, it had been with the taiyaki pans, so I wasn't particularly concerned as I watched her pull a drape of another large, flat 'not-surprise'… which turned out to be a new drink menu printed on some sort of thick acrylic, all set to be hung behind the counter and featuring tea, tea, tea, and tea, in four times again as many varieties than the simple boxed teabags we'd been serving for years.
There was only one problem I could see with the idea.
"I don't actually know how to make any of this stuff."
"It's tea, Cassandra. The biggest change is that you'll give them a teapot of boiling water instead of pointing them at a dispenser."
"I'm pretty sure Jasmine Pearls don't come in a teabag," I noted, pointing to the offending item.
"You won't be responsible for preparing them."
"All right. When were you planning to get this started?"
"We'll launch it as soon as everything gets here," Homura answered. "The teapots should arrive tomorrow, but we won't receive the new furniture until next week."
"New furniture?"
"I ordered proper coffee shop-style wooden tables and metal chairs to replace the cheap plastic ones we have now."
"Cool."
"I had a new sign made, as well." Another sheet came off a much larger object to reveal that our bakery now had a subtitle:
Home Sweet Home
Tea and Pastry Cafe
"Nice," I said as I admired the revised sign. "Makes me wonder why we didn't do this earlier."
Homura sighed. "The town wouldn't let us build a greenhouse on the roof, remember?"
"Oh, yeah." I chuckled at the memory.
…
"Wait, hold up—"
———X==X==X———
Homura had not, in fact, built a greenhouse somewhere in town; she'd 'merely' taken the time to find some good specialty tea suppliers (or built the greenhouse in the Warehouse; I elected not to clarify.) I helped myself to some under the guise of 'quality control' and confirmed it was, indeed, good.
We launched our new offerings on schedule, and the shop gained both a new crowd and a persistent aroma of tea. Our tea cakes sold like never before.
In fact, it may have worked a little too well.
The break room in the shop had been a deliberate afterthought in the original floor-plans, back when Homura and I had been operating under the assumption that we'd be the only employees. It was serviceable for two people and a little tight with three. With Homura, Lizzie, Albert, George, Ron, and I all crammed in for a meeting, cramped didn't even begin to describe it.
I called the meeting to order. Then I walked over and paused the dryer cycle so people could hear me call the meeting to order. (It wasn't so much that the dryer was 'that loud' as much as the room being 'that small'.)
"So I'm sure you've all noticed that business has been picking up," I began, "and having only one person behind the counter at a time is leaving us a little overworked."
There were murmurs of agreement. The stream of customers wasn't 'overwhelming', but it was steady enough that the one behind the counter rarely had time to take care of the rest of the shop.
"As such," I continued, "we're planning to move to two-person shifts, at least during the busiest parts of the day."
"Is that going to change how much we make?" Ron asked. "We share our profit according to hours worked, so if people work more hours…"
"Are you going to make less per hour?" I finished for him, then smiled as I answered, "Not a chance. We're only having this 'problem'"—airquotes—"because we're doing such good business. The plan is to add about half again as many hours to the schedule, and the increase in revenue from our new service is well above that."
"Sweet—uh, no pun intended."
The rest of the meeting was simply working out the details of who'd pick up the double-up hours.
"Guess this is goodbye to Don's," Lizzie said as we headed out into the hall.
"Right?" Al agreed. "I'll be making just as much money with half the hours worked!"
"I'll be making twice as much with the same number of hours worked!"
They high-fived.
I shared a glance with Homura, who merely noted, "Employee morale seems high."
———X==X==X———
Halloween happened, then Thanksgiving; we drove up to visit Max and Gary in Moperville for the latter, though—privately, in my own mind—I almost wished we hadn't. Even six months later, Zeke's disappearance loomed large, and conversation around the dinner table was stilted and awkward as we all tiptoed around the elephant in the room.
Max's cooking was fucking incredible, though. She was the model chef for the food we got from the Palace, so you could argue I'd been eating her cooking for years, but that didn't make it any less amazing.
I also got to meet Abby, Zeke's gray housecat, who came to rub her head against my ankles as we got ready to eat. "Hello," I cooed. "Do you want me to pet you?"
"Zeke?" she asked.
"No, I don't know where Zeke is."
Abby immediately lost interest in her visitor.
———X==X==X———
"It's weird not having Zeke around," Tina said. "I didn't spend a lot of time with him after I headed off to Uni, but we still talked often enough that I feel the difference."
Since we were in Moperville already, it seemed like a good time to check in on Tina in person. She was home for Thanksgiving, and thus only a few houses away from the mess that had been the Vahn's family holiday. Neither of us minded the cold, so we decided to sit on the front steps to chat rather than try to find privacy in the house.
"What did they tell everyone?" I asked. "I was going to ask Max about it, but she's still fuming, and it didn't seem smart to bring it up."
"The truth, more or less: he's missing and no one knows how to find him. Tedd leaned on me until I admitted it was probably magic-related, which might have been a mistake. They took his disappearance kind of hard."
"The group, or Tedd specifically?"
"I meant the latter; I'm not sure about the others."
"Ah."
"Looking back on it," Tina continued, "I think Tedd projected on Zeke a bit. Think about it: you had a really shy, anxious, avoidant kid find friends and come out of their shell, only to realize that this whole time there was another shy, anxious, avoidant kid going to school right alongside them."
Mrs. Redding smiled and waved through the window, and I returned the gesture before turning back to Tina.
"Zeke did say Tedd was determined to be his friend," I recalled. "You think that's why?"
"That's my theory."
"So what does 'kind of hard' mean?"
"They got into a yelling match with their dad over the investigation," Tina explained. "Mr. Verres tried to settle them down by promising he'd tell them if he learned anything, but I think what Tedd heard is 'We have no idea, so it's up to you.' They spent the next month and half performing increasingly outlandish magiscientific experiments to try to figure out where he'd gone until Max came over and told them to knock it off herself. And of course, Pandora's been poking around a bunch too, since she's gotten curious…"
"Is that bad?"
"Well, Zero's had to stay scarce."
"Why?"
"You didn't hear?" Tina asked. "She managed to piss off Pandora enough that she's been trying to kill her whenever they cross paths."
"Pandora is trying to kill Zero, or…"
"Yeah, sorry, Pandora is the one who wants Zero dead. Zero might be able to beat her in a fight—I'm not sure how strong Pandora is, but that's the impression I got from Max—but Max doesn't want Pandora dead, which is how Zero tends to end fights, so now that she—Pandora—has been getting more involved, Zero's been avoiding the area. Well, again, that's what Max said; I've barely spoken to Zero since I joined, so this is all second-hand."
Sounded like that 'Immortal Enemy' drawback was a bit more inconvenient than Zero had expected.
"But back on topic," Tina continued, "Tedd is still looking for a way to solve the problem, and I'd be surprised if their friends weren't helping out as much as they can. Unfortunately, given the situation…"
"They can't."
"Yeah."
Bummer.
I sighed, stretched, and changed the topic. "So, what're you doing these days?"
"Grad student stuff at MVU. I'm also a TA for the two metaphysics classes that don't officially exist."
"How does that work?"
"More or less like most urban fantasy stuff," she replied. "They're only there if you're supposed to know about them."
"Literally or just bureaucratically?"
"The latter. They're 'unlisted', not 'in a lecture hall that only opens to the worthy'."
"You could have just said 'by invite only'," I pointed out.
"That's not as dramatic, though."
I shook my head and sighed. "Magic and its drama."
"Quite."
We sat and watched a sprinkling of lazy snowflakes drift down onto the Redding family lawn, where they immediately melted and disappeared without a trace. It made me feel like the weather was waiting for the Christmas season to arrive properly before dumping snow all over the countryside.
"Oh, right!" I exclaimed. "I keep forgetting to ask: what happened with your project? The tinkertech thing?"
Tina huffed. "In a word? Frustration. I was half right—there is cheating going on, but it's in the 'build' stage, not the finished product, which is not what I wanted to learn."
"Why?"
Her eyes narrowed in annoyance. "Because it means my 'superpower'—and maybe all tinker powers—isn't knowledge of advanced technology, it's the ability to create that technology with the 'wrong' steps."
"Is that worse than it just being cheating and not technology at all?" I asked.
"Yes! If it wasn't technology at all, at least the problem wouldn't be that I don't 'get' it!"
"Oh. Yeah, I can see why that would be an unpleasant discovery."
"It hit me right in the pride, Cass."
I considered cracking a joke—Well, it is a big target—but elected to go for a simple "Ouch" instead.
"Yeah," Tina agreed. "It's not what I wanted to learn, but that's science for you sometimes."
"Any other interesting stories from grad school?"
Tina rubbed her chin and hummed as she thought. "Oh, this is a good one. I had a funny encounter back in September, not long after classes started up."
"Oh? What happened?"
"A freshman showed up to one of the metaphysics labs with a cat."
I facepalmed. Seriously, Megan?
Tina cracked up at my reaction. "Hold on, it gets better. I, obviously, told her that pets aren't allowed in class, so the girl says to the cat, 'You said you were invisible!', and the cat replies, 'I said "invisible to normals". You're the one who brought me to magic class!'"
I couldn't decide whether to laugh or sigh and ended up splitting the difference. "So, you met Megan."
"I did indeed. Did Jenn introduce you?"
"Other way around, actually…" I gave her a brief account of the last couple years' worth of interactions with Megan and her friends. "I guess I'm not surprised you ran into each other."
"I'd think not," Tina replied, "given that you more or less aimed her right at me."
"You say that like it's a bad thing. So, did you let the cat stay?"
"I told her that if she looked like a cat, she was going to be treated like a cat."
I frowned. "That feels vaguely discriminatory."
"Oh, don't you start!"
———X==X==X———
I teleported home, as planned, then ducked into my Warehouse bedroom and dialled 000 on my cell. Management picked up immediately, as always.
"Management speaking."
"Hi," I said. "It's me, obviously."
"Ms. Rolins. What do you want?"
"I wanted to ask about Zeke."
"Of course you do," they grumbled. "Fine. What is it?"
"How is he doing?"
"You can ask him about it when he's done."
"Okay, then, how long is he going to be in there?"
"Five years, as far as you're concerned."
That's what I'd been afraid of. "Why five years?"
"He'll be back at the end of the Jump," Management said, then headed off my line of questioning by clarifying, "I'm not going to bring him back early for your convenience."
"What about for his convenience?"
"Also no."
"What about 'in the interest of not being a dick'?"
"It's amusing you think I care, but the answer is still no, and that is final."
"Would it really take that much effort to bring him back sooner, from our perspective?"
"'Final' means final, Ms. Rolins," they snapped.
"Fine. Can you at least tell me why?"
Management responded by hanging up on me.
———X==X==X———
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Tempestuous
Words are wind, so I write.
- Location
- CA
AN: I put a lot of myself out on display in this fic, and that is rarely more true than when Cass bares her soul through heartfelt rambling. To be honest, I wish the conversation between Cassandra and Homura had fallen at the end of the chapter because it's important enough—and real enough—to me to earn a full stop. Alas, things didn't line up right. (I did try rearranging scenes to force it, and probably would have regretted it if I'd gone with that version.)
Across all my hypothetical future careers, my daydreamed ambitions always came down to wanting—as Homura puts it in this chapter—'fans'… and now, with this work, I think I can say I have them. It's incredibly sappy to type out but it's so sincere it can't be any other way: every read, every like, every comment and compliment make my dream that much more true. It's a hard feeling to put into words because it's a complicated thing, pride and validation and accomplishment and vanity and appreciation and I matter all mixed into a heady cocktail I can't get enough of. It's not the legions of adoring fans I may have dreamed of as a kid, but we always dream big. It doesn't need to be; that I have any readers at all is a blessing I can never be too thankful for.
We can write as many words as we want; a story does not exist until it is read.
There are costs, of course. The pleasure of having something is the fear of losing it; and so I've put a lot of pressure on myself to perform to the standards I attribute my success to, to write quantity and quality, and the stress builds up. I hadn't realized just how stressful this story had become until I put myself on break again last month and felt the pressure ease off. But I don't want to quit because as long as I'm not overdoing things, the stress is worth it. The payoff is a glowing sort of satisfaction I can't find anywhere else and won't go without.
Thank you for reading.
Across all my hypothetical future careers, my daydreamed ambitions always came down to wanting—as Homura puts it in this chapter—'fans'… and now, with this work, I think I can say I have them. It's incredibly sappy to type out but it's so sincere it can't be any other way: every read, every like, every comment and compliment make my dream that much more true. It's a hard feeling to put into words because it's a complicated thing, pride and validation and accomplishment and vanity and appreciation and I matter all mixed into a heady cocktail I can't get enough of. It's not the legions of adoring fans I may have dreamed of as a kid, but we always dream big. It doesn't need to be; that I have any readers at all is a blessing I can never be too thankful for.
We can write as many words as we want; a story does not exist until it is read.
There are costs, of course. The pleasure of having something is the fear of losing it; and so I've put a lot of pressure on myself to perform to the standards I attribute my success to, to write quantity and quality, and the stress builds up. I hadn't realized just how stressful this story had become until I put myself on break again last month and felt the pressure ease off. But I don't want to quit because as long as I'm not overdoing things, the stress is worth it. The payoff is a glowing sort of satisfaction I can't find anywhere else and won't go without.
Thank you for reading.
- Location
- Elsewhere
Kinda like forgetting you have something on your character sheet, so the DM ignores it.
This might actually be beneficial, especially when you get to the mental stuff.
Saying "I feel like this because of perk A" is nicer than "My mind is curated by a cluster of effects."
As long as you overlook something, it isn't a factor.
I have a similar problem.
Another side of the issue is that I just don't care about most of the pursuits to put in the work.
I did the assigned 1/2 hour homework for band practice, but I didn't care enough about the trumpet to really listen to what I was playing and seek to perfect it.
Even if I tacked on an extra 2 hours, I wouldn't necessarily get better.
It's why I'm always annoyed by career councilors saying things like "do something you love."
What if you don't have something?
"Do something you love."
"I love video games... but not any of the professional league types."
"Love something more profitable."
"..."
Excellent reason to build a giant robot.
Considering the way "your" loop went, there's an excellent chance you could get Management to send you through it "for real" if you wanted to live up to the hype.
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JayTar
Idea briefcase
You deserve every bit and more.
There are times that I wish this was what we read in my English class because I could write essays and essays on it and it wouldn't even be work. And I really hate writing essays.
Like I know that some of it is because you are writing to a more specific audience.
It is the inverse of how pandering to the lowest common denominator ruins stories. Even a mediocre fanfic can still be an enjoyable read.
But then along comes a story like this that blows out the entire scale. Because its not mediocre, its not merely good, it exceeds excellent and surpasses amazing. It needs no such benefits to stand, but it receives them anyway sending it to heights I hadn't even though possible.
You have the shiniest facets of a dozen narratives mixed with essence of the human experience bound with amazing storytelling and refracted into an absolute gem of a story.
So congratulations. I rate you impossibly good.
Thank you for writing.
There are times that I wish this was what we read in my English class because I could write essays and essays on it and it wouldn't even be work. And I really hate writing essays.
Like I know that some of it is because you are writing to a more specific audience.
It is the inverse of how pandering to the lowest common denominator ruins stories. Even a mediocre fanfic can still be an enjoyable read.
But then along comes a story like this that blows out the entire scale. Because its not mediocre, its not merely good, it exceeds excellent and surpasses amazing. It needs no such benefits to stand, but it receives them anyway sending it to heights I hadn't even though possible.
You have the shiniest facets of a dozen narratives mixed with essence of the human experience bound with amazing storytelling and refracted into an absolute gem of a story.
So congratulations. I rate you impossibly good.
Thank you for writing.
Chapter 110: The Night Before Christmas
Tempestuous
Words are wind, so I write.
- Location
- CA
AN: Beta-read by Carbohydratos, Did I?, Gaia, Linedoffice, Zephyrosis, and Mizu.
Zero dropped in on me during the wee hours of Christmas Day.
"Valkyrie Core?" she asked over my shoulder.
"Hi, Zero," I said, doing my best to pretend I hadn't nearly jumped out of my seat from her sudden and unexpected presence. "I heard you got banished from North America or something."
"I wasn't banished," Zero whined. "I was just laying low. Letting the heat die down. Not rocking the boat. Which route are you doing?"
"Hmm?" Ah, right, the game. "Oh, I don't think I've hit a decision point yet. Not sure how much longer I'm going to keep playing, to be honest."
"So you didn't decide to practice dating 2D girls before going back on the market?"
"Very funny."
"Just 'cause Zeke got shanghaied, then."
"Yeah."
Putting aside my thoughts about that whole 'Management chucking Zeke into another Jump' situation didn't mean I'd actually forgotten about it. I couldn't do anything to affect it, and I accepted that, but I still wanted to know what was happening to him and what he was going through, and that curiosity had led me to the original source material.
"You said he was in the Enhanced Visual Novel continuity, and I started wondering how different the VN was from the anime, so I decided to take a look myself." I quit my current game and spun my desk chair around to face Zero, whose current outfit resembled a Valkyrie frame for obvious reasons. "I see why you said it does a good job adapting the VN. They didn't change much."
"They did stick Anna into the main cast," Zero pointed out. "She ended up being super popular with the fans, so the anime featuring her is pure fanservice."
"And you're a fan."
"Well, duh. Stone-cold badass who's stronger than an entire army, hash-tag relatable."
"Does she even appear in the VN as anything other than the name on top of every sim scoreboard?" I asked. "Or was it just a case of people memeing about her ranking?"
"She does, for your information, but only in Shuri's route. Oh, and if you beat enough of her scores, but that's so fucking hard it's practically an easter egg."
"Yeah, I'm not even going to try."
She scoffed. "I've done it; it's not worth it. It did kick off twenty different urban legends about her having a route, which is always fun." Zero caught sight of herself in the mirror above my dresser and tried a few 'action poses' in front of it. "Is it wrong that I hope he brings back a bunch of extra cores?"
The question was so quintessentially 'Zero' I didn't even sigh. "He's stranded in a world going through a weird eldritch bug war and has almost certainly been drafted to fight in said war, and you want souvenirs?"
"Hey, if he's stuck there anyway…"
"I hope he brings you a t-shirt."
She clutched her hands to her heart as though in pain.
"Besides, don't the frames have personalities or intellect or something?" I asked. "Seems kinda iffy to just up and grab a bunch of 'em."
"Pretty sure that's only the anime—but that'd be fun, though! Imagine Jumping in as someone's frame. You could indulge in a bit of that 'consensual possession', eh?"
"Zero!"
"Wha-a-at? I told you, there ain't much our band of immortal perverted dumb-asses can't do safely, sanely, and consensually. Unwind a little, sheesh. Shit, I wonder if we've been to Kill La Kill yet—"
I didn't know where she was going with that and didn't care to find out. "Were you around for the Warframe Jump?"
She switched topics as readily as I'd hoped. "I wish!" Zero mourned. "No, I haven't been here that long, so I missed a lot of great Jumps. Why?"
"Your aesthetic reminds me of Warframe a little."
"Ah." She glanced down at her fake Valk frame, then back at my monitor, which was still displaying the Valkyrie Core DX main menu (and cast). "Yeah, I guess I mixed a bit of that in. Anyway, what'd'ya think of the flight sim portions?"
I relaxed as the topic switched to something I was very comfortable discussing: games. "I didn't expect it to have 'flight sim portions'," I admitted. "I was amused when the game reacted to me not being ready for it, though." Valkyrie Core was a pretty pure talk-sprites-and-text visual novel for the first hour or so, so suddenly switching from 'dialogue slide-show' to 'full 3D action game' was a rather shocking swerve—one I was pretty sure the game fully intended.
Zero grinned as she remembered the joke. "Yeah, that's a good gag. You didn't answer the question, though."
"They're… okay?" I hedged. "The controls are a little janky, and the HUD gets way too cluttered sometimes."
"If you think they're bad in the Enhanced Edition, you'd have lost your shit trying to play the original."
"Probably." Sitting when the only other person in the room was standing—well, floating in a standing position—was starting to feel weird, so I finally got up and took a spot leaning against the wall.
"Definitely!" she insisted. "The old controls gimbal locked all the fucking time. It made getting to the end of some routes a total pain in the ass."
"It amuses me that how well you do at the flight sim portions affects the routes."
"Well, they had to make it relevant somehow, right?"
I shrugged, and neither of us spoke for a few seconds until Zero's grin suddenly doubled, making it clear she'd just had a thought. "Say, you liked Darksiders, right? I bet you'd get a kick out of Soulhunter. It's a 3D stylish-action RPG where you level up by romancing your weapons."
More dating games? "I assume they're all moe-anthropomorphized?"
"Less than you'd think! Every weapon has a 'spirit', but they're mostly just so they can have facial expressions in dialogue. The actual 'dates' you use to build affection for dialogue events involve hacking demons into tiny pieces." Zero was now waving around a variety of melee weapons as she spoke, which would have worried me more if I couldn't tell they were just as intangible as she was.
"And they get jealous if you use another weapon instead?" I guessed.
"Nah, you're supposed to max them all and score a harem. Even the yandere one is down for it. Damn, it'd be hilarious to Jump that with Darkness—there's a battleaxe who's the only weapon whose affection goes up when you get hit."
"Instead of losing affection?"
Zero shook her head. "Nah, damage just interferes with whatever you're supposed to be doing. Messes up your combo count and shit like that. You should play it—the writing's great, and the combat isn't half bad either. You'd like it."
"Or I could play another, different game that doesn't involve dating."
"Well, yeah, but why?"
"Because even if I like it, I'd like it despite the premise rather than because of it?"
"No, I meant, 'Why avoid games that involve dating'?"
"Dating sims weird me out," I answered. "Actually, romance in video games weirds me out regardless of how large a component of the game it is. The whole setup makes me vaguely uncomfortable—"
"All dating does that!"
I rolled my eyes.
"Sorry," Zero said. "Go on."
"The thing that weirds me out about romance options in games is that for the most part, they exist to be 'caught'. It's particularly bad in dating sims because all of the girls—and-slash-or guys, I guess—exist for the sole purpose of falling in love with the player character. It feels weird to pursue a romance option when that pursuit is so…"
"Artificial?"
"No," I said. "Well, maybe. Dating sims definitely feel 'fake', but I was thinking more along the lines of… guaranteed, I guess? Like, if you do the right things, they will fall for the player character one hundred percent of the time. That's not a romance, it's a puzzle."
"Romance movies never change at all," Zero argued.
"In movies, the script plays out without you. The interactivity changes the whole setup, especially for dating sims that don't draw a particularly thick line between the player character and the player as participants. It feels weird enough guiding an established character like Geralt from The Witcher through a romance side-plot because you're participating in—and controlling—someone else's love life, but at least there you're seeing two fully fleshed-out characters fall in love. The less defined the player character is, the less they can explain why someone would like them back, so when you've playing as a more directly, uh, 'project-able' character, it just feels… you know…"
"Masturbatory?"
I facepalmed. "There is such a thing as being too literal, Z."
"You should definitely play DDLC."
"Is that another dating sim?"
"Yes, but it's relevant!"
"Why?"
"Spoilers."
I rolled my eyes again. "Whatever. That's hardly the only issue. I don't really play dating sims"—I ignored Zero's 'duh'—"so I'm more familiar with 'romance options' in, like, RPGs—and the thing is that romance-able characters in RPGs often lack… agency? Like, the way the romances tend to be written is that the player character is always the one taking action every step of the way. I guess it's to keep the other characters out of your way when you don't go that route, but it's off-putting no matter how good a reason there is for it.
"But I think my biggest problem with dating in games is that I can't see the characters, dating-sim or otherwise, as anything other than written to be dated. They're designed to appeal to certain players in certain ways, right? 'Oh, this will appeal to the players who like shy, quiet girls.' 'This one's for the people who like tomboys.' That kind of thing. It makes me feel… fuck if I know. Judged and categorized, I guess? It definitely doesn't help the whole 'feeling fake' issue."
"So knowing it's fake means you can't immerse yourself in it?" Zero huffed and crossed her arms. "You just can't turn your brain off, can you?"
"Not for this, I guess."
She didn't reply, so I ventured, "Uh, I assume you didn't show up just to chat about dating sims…"
"Eh, kinda?" Zero threw out a full-arm shrug. "I'm here to shoot the shit. I don't have an agenda or anything."
"That's a relief. I was worried you were here to give me some sort of incredibly life-complicating Christmas present."
My joke got a hearty laugh. "Oh, good idea! Gimme a bit to think of something."
"Zero, no!"
"Zero, yes!"
"To be clear, we are joking, right?" I asked. "You aren't going to actually afflict me with some sort of major life complication, right?"
"Aw. Fine, I couldn't think of anything anyway." She pouted for a second before a literal, visible lightbulb appeared over her head. "Wait, no, I do have an idea. You've been sparring in the Warehouse lately, right?"
"You want to spar?"
Zero made a face. "Eh, we could. I hope you don't expect me to go easy on you, though."
"Right, no sparring." I had no illusions about how that would go. "What were you thinking, then?"
"Well…" She grinned and changed her outfit from sci-fi flight armor to something more reminiscent of Breath of Fire. "I could unlock your Aura."
"Aura? From RWBY, I'm guessing?"
"Yeah, duh. How about it? It'd get you a little closer to my level." Zero's grin turned mischievous. "Rita's already training you, so you can just add that to your lessons or whatever."
"That could've saved me a lot of trouble last Jump."
"Nah, 'Max not being a shit' would've saved you a lot of trouble."
"Fair," I allowed. "Still, why is that not part of the standard on-boarding package?"
"What'd'ya mean?"
"Why isn't that something you just do for people when they join?"
She shrugged. "Why would we? A lot of people join up as a form of retirement—like, shit, there are probably half a dozen of us who joined because the alternative was literally fucking dying. 'Course, you're not the only person who joined for adventure—most of the long-term members did, since the retirees tend to settle down sooner or later—but most of them were adventure-y before they joined up, too. Like me! Yeah, I could've spent a hundred years training up Aura, Potterverse Magic, crazy martial arts bullshit, Force sensitivity, six interchangeable JRPG magic systems, Diablo-style wizardry, or whatever, but I'm already fucking awesome, so fuck that. I didn't sign up to go to school for a century."
I'd already raised a hand halfway through her list. "Wait, hold on, back up. You can just 'learn' Force sensitivity?"
"Yeah, just like you learned Potterverse magic. There are a bunch of perks that let you teach normally unteachable shit, and if you don't have one to hand, the Magic School area of the Warehouse lets anyone teach anyone else any form of magic at all."
"Oh. So that's why I learned magic in a discount Hogwarts set."
Zero laughed. "What did you think you were doing?"
"I thought that was just Jenn being Jenn." Though with a place like that, I could teach Megan other types of magic, though it would mean reading her in on at least some of the 'chain-weirdness—
And now I'd missed some of Zero's rambling. "Sorry, what was that?"
"Hmm? Oh, I was saying you were a bit of an outlier in terms of 'adventure readiness', so things like that seem cooler to you than normal. Well, maybe not 'normal'… whatever, point stands. Besides, just 'cause you can learn stuff the old-fashioned way doesn't mean it's not a lot fucking easier to just get perks as you go. Like, yeah, you could spend twenty years studying to be a Jedi… oooor you could wait for us to visit Star Wars again and get it without all the bullshit."
I sighed. "Yeah, I feel that. I'm still trying to get my naginata skills up to par with my swordsmanship."
"Well, at least you can say you earned your skill the hard way?"
"Yeah, that's what I thought when I started."
She waited a moment for me to continue. "But?"
"Turns out that contrary to what society wants me to believe, working my ass off for something isn't always more rewarding than just getting it."
"Bummer."
"Yeah." I shrugged. "I mean, it's not bad, but it's not better than the easy way, either."
"Well, at least it doesn't suck. How's it going?"
"Pretty well. Had a weird problem with muscle memory fouling me up, but Rita helped me figure out what I was doing wrong."
"Which was?"
"I learned to use a naginata when I had wings." I stepped forward and took a stance. "I was used to having a pair of counterweights on my back, so I was putting my weight too far forwards." Bouncing on my toes demonstrated how far forward my center of gravity was.
"Why is that weird?"
I relaxed back against the wall again. "Because I took a perk that's supposed to help me adapt to changes in my body—"
"Which one's that?"
"Transformation Mentat, from this Jump. Anyway, the weird part is that as soon as I remembered I had the perk, it solved the problem."
Zero cocked her head, brow furrowed. "Okay, yeah, that's fucking weird."
"So there's no rule that you need to remember your perks exist for them to work or anything?"
"No, that'd be fucking dumb. This isn't a damn tabletop game where we have to track all our stats and shit ourselves. Do you know the exact wording?"
"Of the perk? No, I don't—wait, actually, let me check." I summoned my Journal to hand and flipped through to the page it had on me. Sure enough, all my equipped perks were listed.
"Frequent shapeshifting involves a certain degree of mental acuity," I quoted, "in order to adapt to the changes in your body. While this mainly makes it easier to use new forms, there are also fringe benefits: specifically, fantastic mathematical ability and short-term memory."
Zero nodded in satisfaction. "Ah, that's the problem: alt-forms aren't shape-shifting."
"They're not?"
"No, they're like…" She waved a hand. "They're totally different bodies. Like… gah, I'm fucking ass at explaining this shit. Uh, if shape-shifting is like editing a document, alt-forms are loading a whole different file?"
"And that's why I can't use my alt-form slots like 'save slots' for forms," I added, then held up a hand as something occurred to me. "Wait. Wounds transfer, though."
"Management doesn't want us using alt-forms like extra health bars, I guess. No clue how it works under the sheets, shit's weird."
"Yeah." 'Shit's weird' was probably the best explanation of Jump Fiat Bullshit I was likely to get. At least my naginata practice made a little more sense now: it wasn't that the perk had started working because I'd invoked it, but because I'd then focused on the specifics of my body as it existed in its current shape as opposed to swapping alt-forms and expecting things to just work.
Maybe shape-shifting the wings on and off a few times would have done the same.
"Is the rest of it useful at all?" Zero asked. "I mean, the math and shit?"
"Yeah, actually. Better short-term memory stacks with my current memory perk really well, and the math helps with some of the magic I learned in Breath of Fire. Like, I learned how to make teleportation spells, since there's no single multipurpose teleport spell in that system…" I went through an entire explanation of why that was and most of the way through the whole process before I realized I'd gotten badly off track. "…Uh, anyway, it takes a lot of math-adjacent magical theory to do, and now I can do it way faster."
"Cool."
"Yeah." I glanced away and fidgeted with a button on my blouse. "Sorry for the, uh, tangent."
Zero shrugged. "Eh, whatever. Don't sweat it! You getting all excited about shit is cute."
"Cute?"
"Yeah, cute." She winked at me. "Deal with it."
"Uh… okay, I guess I will."
Her grin turned into a pout. "Damn it, Cass! You didn't react at all. You would've been blushing like a tomato a few decades ago."
"It helps to know that you're just trying to get a reaction," I said. I was definitely not smug.
"Well, I was that time, but you are pretty cute."
"Thanks."
"And I would love to drag you into bed." Her outfit was a barely-opaque nightgown now. "I wasn't offering a pity fuck back then, you know? Okay, maybe I was, but now I've gotten to know you and—"
"Too far," I interrupted, yanking my eyes away from the sudden strip-tease.
"Shit, sorry." Zero facepalmed, already back to a normal, street-appropriate blouse-skirt-coat outfit. "Fuck, I knew I was going too far and I did it anyway—"
I held up my hands to halt the apology in its tracks. "It's okay. I'm not mad."
"'Course you're not, you don't get mad."
"No, I mean, it's fine," I insisted. "Really. That stuff doesn't bother me as much as it used to."
"What, just like that?"
"Well, it certainly took a while, so… no?"
"How'd that happen?"
I shrugged. "Gradually? I think growing up in a totally different culture last Jump helped a little, but mostly I've just been thinking about it after the dressing-down you gave me a couple years ago, which is apparently all it takes because perks are crazy?"
"Got yourself a 'get over your problems' effect?"
"Yeah. 'Faster with introspection', I believe the text goes."
"Ah. Well, that's, uh, good?" Zero offered. "But if you're cool with that shit, why was that still 'too far'?"
"Honestly, the biggest problem is that it's tempting—"
"How is that a problem?" she interrupted. "I'm not a tease, Cass, I am legitimately down to fuck."
"Of course you are—"
"Hey!"
"—but it's still a bad idea for all the same reasons it was a bad idea the last time we talked about it," I continued, not quite keeping the exasperation out of my voice. "I'm looking for a long-term relationship, and you are very much not."
Zero nodded along happily. "Uh huh. Uh huh."
She paused for effect.
"Bullshit."
"Excuse me?"
Zero rolled her eyes and adopted a lecturing posture, left hand on her right elbow, right index finger held high. "There is nothing about wanting a 'long-term relationship' that would keep you from having healthy sexual encounters on the way there. Maybe you feel more comfortable with sex in the abstract, but you're still just as fucking terrified of your own sexuality as ever—you've just swapped awkwardness for denial. You're more fucking repressed now than we were when we first met! At least back then you could properly fucking ogle someone."
"That's a good thing?"
"It's better than whatever the hell you're doing now. I'm not in your head, but I've got a theory, so tell me if I'm close. When you Jumped into MGQ, you suddenly not only had a body you were actually interested in using, you were also surrounded by a ton of hot monster-girls who would fucking kill and eat you if you got distracted, so you just wadded it all up in locked it in the deepest, darkest part of your brain to the point that I, with the powers of a literal goddamn emotional lust-vampire, honestly started to wonder if you were asexual. Sound about right?"
"Nope."
It was her turn to blink in surprise. "Nope?"
"Nope. Not that I was in any way okay with the situations we blundered through back during my first tenth-of-a-Jump, but I 'locked it all up' years before I had to deal with that bullshit."
"Why?"
"I wonder," I snipped. "Why on earth would I not want to deal with sexual attraction?"
"Because you're a prude?"
"Because I was—am a trans woman," I corrected myself. "Do I really have to explain why arousal might have been just a teensy bit unpleasant pre-everything?"
Zero grimaced hard enough I could see every ligament in her neck.
"I feel like we've been over this before," I grumbled.
"Uh, I know you mentioned not dating as a man, but you weren't, you know, specific. And that definitely fucking sucks, but it doesn't explain why you're more skittish now than you were twenty years ago. You got the body you wanted, right?" She waved a hand up and down 'me'. "I mean, you're a fucking shape-shifter, so I assume…"
"Weren't you just saying I was harder to tease?"
Zero rolled her eyes. "'Harder to tease' doesn't mean you're less fucking repressed, it just means you don't rise to the same bait. Now are you going to answer the question or not?"
Because I had a brief hope I was actually getting somewhere, I guess.
"I want you to answer a question first," I told her.
"Shoot."
"How much of your interest in my sex life is about my health and happiness and your desire therefor, and how much about you seeing a challenge you want to conquer?"
To my dismay, she didn't even hesitate. "I'm gonna go with forty-sixty?" she ventured. "Obviously I want you to be happy and healthy and all that shit, and I'm not gonna do anything that isn't good for you, but I'll admit my 'persistence' is largely down to you being an unbelievably tough nut to bust."
"I think you mean 'crack'," I said without thinking. More than half? I'd suspected, sure, but I was still shocked by how brazenly she admitted it.
Zero smirked. "I think I did not."
I shook my head and refocused on the actual topic. "But you admit that more than half of your desire to sleep with me is purely as a sexual conquest?"
"No!" she snapped. "No, that's not what I meant! It doesn't have to be me! The challenge is getting you to fucking unwind enough to get laid at all."
"I'm not sure that's better."
"It's completely different," Zero insisted. "And I'm still waiting for an answer to my question. Why are you getting more repressed?"
I scowled and leaned my shoulder against the wall, staring into the corner of the room while I grumbled out, "Well, maybe it's because my brief little tease of a romantic relationship made me fully cognizant that I am romantically lonely and sexually frustrated, and if you keep wandering in and offering to deal with my needs in the worst possible way, one of these days I'm going to take you up on it, and I'm worried our friendship won't survive that."
"Romantically lon—you can deal with those problems separately, for fuck's sake," she bit out. "You are a grown-ass woman, Cass, not a blushing teenager. The only reason something like that would damage our friendship is if we somehow fucked up on consent."
"Catching me in a moment of weakness and convincing me to do something I'd regret doesn't count as 'fucking up on consent'?" I shot back, pushing off the wall to face her.
Zero pouted. "So you're going to preemptively 'not consent' on the basis that if you do consent you're not capable of it?"
"It's not a bad fucking approach with you, is it?"
"It's the opposite of a fucking approach," she countered. "That's, like, a fucking retreat—no, that just sounds like a fancy way to describe sex tourism. Or an orgy—"
"Are you going somewhere with this?"
"If I was, would it be a fucking journey?"
I smacked my hand over my face and mumbled "Oh my god Zero." into my palm.
"Fine. It's not about me, anyway—the point is that you're not actually looking for a long-term relationship." She crossed her arms, waiting until she'd caught my eyes with hers to continue, "Emphasis on 'looking', present tense."
I sighed and slumped back against the wall. "Not at the moment, no, but that's a whole different issue. I still have no idea how to properly handle dating someone who's, uh… damn it, 'mortal' has some really troubling connotations—"
"So? It's not inaccurate."
"The counterpoint to 'mortal' is generally 'god', not just 'immortal'."
"So?" Zero repeated. "It's not inaccurate. You could probably take over your whole world easily enough."
"Would you be happy if people started calling you a goddess, Miss Intoner?"
A scowl flashed across her face before being replaced with a look of understanding. "Right, sorry, dropping that subject like a dead pigeon."
Zero rubbed her hand across her chin as I settled back into a lazy slouch. "If 'mortals' isn't right," she mused, "then how about 'natives'?"
"That works, I guess. There are a lot of problems with dating a 'native', and I expect everyone on the 'chain who wants a long-term relationship has already found one."
She tittered. "I doubt the first bit, but the latter is obviously false."
"Why do you say that?"
Zero's face split into a hundred-watt grin to see that I'd taken the bait. "Because we know there's at least one person on the 'chain who wants but does not have a long-term relationship!" She paused for dramatic effect, then pointed right at me. "You! Ergo, QED, et cetera."
I grumbled something vaguely insulting.
"The point stands! This is a group that snowballed together over a long time, not some fixed, unchanging social… thingy. You're not even the newest member, for fuck's sake! Yes, obviously some of us have found stable relationships, or polycules, or fuckbuddies, or whatever, but there's no reason to think you've wandered into a system at minimum romantic entropy."
"I think you mean maximum romantic entropy," I corrected her. "Or minimum romantic energy—"
Zero waved away my correction like an annoying fly, still beaming. "What-fuckin'-ever, wise-ass! Point is, it's totally possible. There's bound to be someone who'd date you. What about Homura? You two spend so much time around each other alrea—what's with the face, Cass?"
"We're sisters!" I huffed. "Or as good as, anyway."
Her grin became thoroughly shit-eating as she sing-songed, "Not blood relatives."
"No!" I drew myself up to my full height to glare at her, not that it helped much when the other party was flying. "That's not even slightly funny, Zero."
"Awww. You're sinking my ship, Cass."
"Do you seriously—" I really didn't need to ask. "No, that does sound like something you would do. Nevermind."
"It's not just me!"
I chose to assume that meant 'I'm not the only one who ships people' because I didn't want to keep thinking about the alternative. "It's not funny, it's not happening, and I don't want to hear about it ever again."
"Sure, if it bothers you that much." Zero gave a half-hearted shrug. "Hey, are you just gay, or bi, pan, or what?"
"Why?"
"So I know who I can set you up with, duh."
"I appreciate that you're trying to help," I said, "but, uh, please don't."
"Why not?"
"Because, as you already noticed, I'm not looking for a date."
Zero sighed. "Yeah, you're clearly a lot less 'over' your shit than you claim."
"I only claimed to be less uncomfortable about the topic of sex. That doesn't mean I'm not still an awkward, fumbling lesbian with next-to no dating experience."
"Then the obvious thing to do is get some damn experience, right? "
"I'll think about it." I scowled at the skeptical look Zero was giving me. "Look, it's not just that I'm intimidated by the thought of dating in general. I'm extra intimidated by the thought of dating someone on the 'chain. Like—pardon the example, but even if you decided you wanted to date me rather than just seduce me, well, you're you, and I'm some random citizen from the 2010's with an interesting hypothetical future forty-odd years out."
She scoffed. "You gotta be shitting me, Cass. You're a superhero, a Starfleet lieutenant, and an honest-to-God princess knight wizard. Where's your fucking self-esteem?"
"Hey, I've spent the last five years working as a cashier, okay?"
"At a business you own!" Zero shot back, waving one arm in the general direction of the shop's front doors. "Hire someone else if it's going to crater your sense of self-worth like this!"
I rolled my eyes. "That wasn't a serious answer."
"Then what is?"
"I don't know!"
I paced across the room to my dresser and leaned forward, hands propped on the smooth wooden surface while I looked into my reflection like it held the answer. It didn't; instead, I found myself imagining my other lives crowded behind me—the adventurer, the superhero, the lieutenant, the 'princess knight wizard'—looking over my shoulder into the mirror with me, all equally lost.
"I guess… none of those things feel real," I mumbled. "They were things I played at—less so the Starfleet thing than the others, maybe, but still… fake. I'm not 'someone' because of what I do, I'm 'someone' because I get to order a bunch of nigh story-breaking powers off a menu every decade."
Zero harrumphed. "You just said earning things wasn't any better than having them fucking gift-wrapped for you. What's it gonna take to make this shit feel real to you?"
"I don't know." I pushed off the dresser with a sigh and paced back across the room, barely noticing that I walked straight through Zero as I did. "It's kind of hard to reconcile 'this is real' when so many of these places are literally fiction to me, you know? Like, I did some really cool things as a Starfleet officer, but it still feels like…" I caught sight of my monitor and waved at the menu screen it still displayed. "It's like something cool I did in a game, not real life. 'Yeah, I contributed to scientific and engineering breakthroughs… in Star Trek The Zachlike.' No one's impressed by what you've accomplished in a game."
"Where is your fucking self-esteem?" Zero repeated, throwing her hands and eyes toward the heavens in exasperation.
I shrugged. "You pointed out yourself I'm not on the same level of 'awesome' as the average companion."
"Yeah, you weren't when you joined. You've had four fucking fully-fledged adventures since then." She held up that many fingers for emphasis.
"I know. I know I have, it's just… fuck." I rubbed a hand against my forehead in frustration. "My self-image is weird, okay?"
"Kind of unavoidable, really," Zero agreed, flickering through half a dozen different 'guises' to drive the point home by example. "Just… try not to let yourself slip back to who you were when you joined, you know? Take it from me, it's a huge fucking waste of personal growth and shit."
"Thanks."
"Problem solved, then?"
It was not. "No, I—okay, sure, I'm cooler than I give myself credit for. What about the age issue?"
"What age issue?"
"The issue where I'd be hundreds of years younger than my prospective date?" Obviously?
"Who fucking cares?" Zero asked. "It's not like you've matured much in the last twenty years anyway."
"That makes it worse."
"No, that's the point. You reach full maturity at… what, twenty? Twenty-five?"
"People say twenty-five for brain development," I said, "but even if that's right—"
"And you've been through your twenties, what, three times now?"
"Four if you count starting at twenty-eight."
"Then you're done, right?" she insisted. "You've a full, mature adult. How much does how long you've been an adult really matter?"
"A lot?"
"Why?"
"Experience?" I suggested. "Wisdom? Power dynamics?"
"Cass, you literally get off being around ludicrously overpowered women."
"Zero!"
"I call it like I see it," Zero drawled. "Come on, Cass, you're just making excuses at this point."
"And I will continue to make excuses until I'm damn well ready."
"You'll never be ready if you don't work on your confidence. Maybe dating sims strike you as 'false' because you can't believe anyone would actually be interested in you!"
The wind fled from my sails in a heartbeat. I wandered back to my chair and dropped into it like a sack of potatoes.
Fuck, that one hit close to home.
"What," Zero asked, "no snappy comeback?"
"No, I think you might be right, actually," I admitted. "I can suspend my disbelief when I'm doing anything else."
"Seriously? Fuck's sake, Cass!"
I shrugged. What did she want me to say? It hurt because it was true.
The quiet humming of my computer fan filled the silence while I chased that thought down. I hadn't sabotaged my budding relationship with Penny consciously or subconsciously, no matter what Zero thought—but in hindsight, that insecurity could have contributed to my sudden decision to 'come clean' at the worst time and place. If I didn't believe anyone would actually be interested in me, the fact that someone was meant something was wrong and needed fixing, and my 'secrets' were the problem foremost in my mind.
And the rest, as they say, was history.
"You did say the problem with player-stand-in-main-characters was that they couldn't explain why anyone would date said character," Zero recalled.
"Yeah, but I stand by that bit. I have attractive qualities… probably. Blank slates don't."
"You're supposed to assume the characters are dating you for your attractive qualities," she reminded me, "and don't think I didn't hear you mutter 'probably', there."
I didn't reply.
Zero floated over and 'sat' down next to me with no regard whatsoever for the fact that she was sitting on nothing and clipping through the arm of my chair, wrapping an arm around my shoulders in a platonic, consoling hug. "You'll get there," she told me. "You've got that mental whatever perk to clean your shit up, right?"
"Therapy might be easier."
"As long as you're doing something."
"Yeah, I know."
"And don't go in with big expectations, you know?" she continued. "I know you want to find someone you really connect with, but if you aim for 'forever' on your first try you're just gonna get yourself hurt."
"Right."
I glanced up from where I'd been boring a hole in my lap with my eyes to find that Zero had put her face right next to mine, an inviting smile on her lips.
If I thought it'd accomplish anything, I'd have given her a hard shove off the hypothetical chair she wasn't sitting on.
"Are you expecting me to kiss you?" I deadpanned.
"A girl can hope!" She laughed at her own joke, then gave up her 'seat' and swooshed back towards the center of the room. "It's almost impressive, you know, how completely you shut it out."
I had a feeling I knew what she meant, but I ended up asking, "What?"
"Lust! Desire, lechery, horniness, arousal, thirst—"
I tuned out, spinning slowly in my chair as she prattled on.
"—randiness, temptation, eroticism—"
Oh my god she's still going.
"—carnality, harlotry—"
"I get it," I snapped. "Yes, I have a talent for ignoring things. Can we move on to a topic that isn't going to circle back to my sex life?"
"If you've got one." Zero lay back and arranged herself into a portrait of indulgent lounging: lying like she was sunning herself on a beach chair, hands behind her head with her elbows winging out to the sides. "What other shit's going on in your life?"
Way to put me on the spot, asshole.
"Nothing?" she asked, probably ready to jump right back into a discussion I was getting thoroughly tired of.
"I read an interesting bit of historical trivia recently," I offered.
"Oh?"
"Yeah. About a siege in medieval… France, I think?"
"Probably a lot of those, right?"
"Well, this one's notable because a duke's son was killed."
"That can't be that rare."
"Because of how he was killed," I corrected myself peevishly. "The besieging forces slaughtered the peasants who hadn't fled into the keep in time—because that's what they did back then, apparently—and the attacking commander got the bright idea to take their severed heads and fling them over the walls with catapults to demoralize the defenders, and maybe spread disease, I guess? At any rate, one of the heads just happened to hit the prince as he was looking out at the enemy camp, and it knocked him clean off the wall. It was a long drop, and, well, splat.
"Anyway, it's an interesting historical note because it was the first recorded use of a serf-face to heir missile."
Zero stared at me for almost a full minute.
"We aren't friends anymore," she informed me.
Chapter 110: The Night Before Christmas
Zero dropped in on me during the wee hours of Christmas Day.
"Valkyrie Core?" she asked over my shoulder.
"Hi, Zero," I said, doing my best to pretend I hadn't nearly jumped out of my seat from her sudden and unexpected presence. "I heard you got banished from North America or something."
"I wasn't banished," Zero whined. "I was just laying low. Letting the heat die down. Not rocking the boat. Which route are you doing?"
"Hmm?" Ah, right, the game. "Oh, I don't think I've hit a decision point yet. Not sure how much longer I'm going to keep playing, to be honest."
"So you didn't decide to practice dating 2D girls before going back on the market?"
"Very funny."
"Just 'cause Zeke got shanghaied, then."
"Yeah."
Putting aside my thoughts about that whole 'Management chucking Zeke into another Jump' situation didn't mean I'd actually forgotten about it. I couldn't do anything to affect it, and I accepted that, but I still wanted to know what was happening to him and what he was going through, and that curiosity had led me to the original source material.
"You said he was in the Enhanced Visual Novel continuity, and I started wondering how different the VN was from the anime, so I decided to take a look myself." I quit my current game and spun my desk chair around to face Zero, whose current outfit resembled a Valkyrie frame for obvious reasons. "I see why you said it does a good job adapting the VN. They didn't change much."
"They did stick Anna into the main cast," Zero pointed out. "She ended up being super popular with the fans, so the anime featuring her is pure fanservice."
"And you're a fan."
"Well, duh. Stone-cold badass who's stronger than an entire army, hash-tag relatable."
"Does she even appear in the VN as anything other than the name on top of every sim scoreboard?" I asked. "Or was it just a case of people memeing about her ranking?"
"She does, for your information, but only in Shuri's route. Oh, and if you beat enough of her scores, but that's so fucking hard it's practically an easter egg."
"Yeah, I'm not even going to try."
She scoffed. "I've done it; it's not worth it. It did kick off twenty different urban legends about her having a route, which is always fun." Zero caught sight of herself in the mirror above my dresser and tried a few 'action poses' in front of it. "Is it wrong that I hope he brings back a bunch of extra cores?"
The question was so quintessentially 'Zero' I didn't even sigh. "He's stranded in a world going through a weird eldritch bug war and has almost certainly been drafted to fight in said war, and you want souvenirs?"
"Hey, if he's stuck there anyway…"
"I hope he brings you a t-shirt."
She clutched her hands to her heart as though in pain.
"Besides, don't the frames have personalities or intellect or something?" I asked. "Seems kinda iffy to just up and grab a bunch of 'em."
"Pretty sure that's only the anime—but that'd be fun, though! Imagine Jumping in as someone's frame. You could indulge in a bit of that 'consensual possession', eh?"
"Zero!"
"Wha-a-at? I told you, there ain't much our band of immortal perverted dumb-asses can't do safely, sanely, and consensually. Unwind a little, sheesh. Shit, I wonder if we've been to Kill La Kill yet—"
I didn't know where she was going with that and didn't care to find out. "Were you around for the Warframe Jump?"
She switched topics as readily as I'd hoped. "I wish!" Zero mourned. "No, I haven't been here that long, so I missed a lot of great Jumps. Why?"
"Your aesthetic reminds me of Warframe a little."
"Ah." She glanced down at her fake Valk frame, then back at my monitor, which was still displaying the Valkyrie Core DX main menu (and cast). "Yeah, I guess I mixed a bit of that in. Anyway, what'd'ya think of the flight sim portions?"
I relaxed as the topic switched to something I was very comfortable discussing: games. "I didn't expect it to have 'flight sim portions'," I admitted. "I was amused when the game reacted to me not being ready for it, though." Valkyrie Core was a pretty pure talk-sprites-and-text visual novel for the first hour or so, so suddenly switching from 'dialogue slide-show' to 'full 3D action game' was a rather shocking swerve—one I was pretty sure the game fully intended.
Zero grinned as she remembered the joke. "Yeah, that's a good gag. You didn't answer the question, though."
"They're… okay?" I hedged. "The controls are a little janky, and the HUD gets way too cluttered sometimes."
"If you think they're bad in the Enhanced Edition, you'd have lost your shit trying to play the original."
"Probably." Sitting when the only other person in the room was standing—well, floating in a standing position—was starting to feel weird, so I finally got up and took a spot leaning against the wall.
"Definitely!" she insisted. "The old controls gimbal locked all the fucking time. It made getting to the end of some routes a total pain in the ass."
"It amuses me that how well you do at the flight sim portions affects the routes."
"Well, they had to make it relevant somehow, right?"
I shrugged, and neither of us spoke for a few seconds until Zero's grin suddenly doubled, making it clear she'd just had a thought. "Say, you liked Darksiders, right? I bet you'd get a kick out of Soulhunter. It's a 3D stylish-action RPG where you level up by romancing your weapons."
More dating games? "I assume they're all moe-anthropomorphized?"
"Less than you'd think! Every weapon has a 'spirit', but they're mostly just so they can have facial expressions in dialogue. The actual 'dates' you use to build affection for dialogue events involve hacking demons into tiny pieces." Zero was now waving around a variety of melee weapons as she spoke, which would have worried me more if I couldn't tell they were just as intangible as she was.
"And they get jealous if you use another weapon instead?" I guessed.
"Nah, you're supposed to max them all and score a harem. Even the yandere one is down for it. Damn, it'd be hilarious to Jump that with Darkness—there's a battleaxe who's the only weapon whose affection goes up when you get hit."
"Instead of losing affection?"
Zero shook her head. "Nah, damage just interferes with whatever you're supposed to be doing. Messes up your combo count and shit like that. You should play it—the writing's great, and the combat isn't half bad either. You'd like it."
"Or I could play another, different game that doesn't involve dating."
"Well, yeah, but why?"
"Because even if I like it, I'd like it despite the premise rather than because of it?"
"No, I meant, 'Why avoid games that involve dating'?"
"Dating sims weird me out," I answered. "Actually, romance in video games weirds me out regardless of how large a component of the game it is. The whole setup makes me vaguely uncomfortable—"
"All dating does that!"
I rolled my eyes.
"Sorry," Zero said. "Go on."
"The thing that weirds me out about romance options in games is that for the most part, they exist to be 'caught'. It's particularly bad in dating sims because all of the girls—and-slash-or guys, I guess—exist for the sole purpose of falling in love with the player character. It feels weird to pursue a romance option when that pursuit is so…"
"Artificial?"
"No," I said. "Well, maybe. Dating sims definitely feel 'fake', but I was thinking more along the lines of… guaranteed, I guess? Like, if you do the right things, they will fall for the player character one hundred percent of the time. That's not a romance, it's a puzzle."
"Romance movies never change at all," Zero argued.
"In movies, the script plays out without you. The interactivity changes the whole setup, especially for dating sims that don't draw a particularly thick line between the player character and the player as participants. It feels weird enough guiding an established character like Geralt from The Witcher through a romance side-plot because you're participating in—and controlling—someone else's love life, but at least there you're seeing two fully fleshed-out characters fall in love. The less defined the player character is, the less they can explain why someone would like them back, so when you've playing as a more directly, uh, 'project-able' character, it just feels… you know…"
"Masturbatory?"
I facepalmed. "There is such a thing as being too literal, Z."
"You should definitely play DDLC."
"Is that another dating sim?"
"Yes, but it's relevant!"
"Why?"
"Spoilers."
I rolled my eyes again. "Whatever. That's hardly the only issue. I don't really play dating sims"—I ignored Zero's 'duh'—"so I'm more familiar with 'romance options' in, like, RPGs—and the thing is that romance-able characters in RPGs often lack… agency? Like, the way the romances tend to be written is that the player character is always the one taking action every step of the way. I guess it's to keep the other characters out of your way when you don't go that route, but it's off-putting no matter how good a reason there is for it.
"But I think my biggest problem with dating in games is that I can't see the characters, dating-sim or otherwise, as anything other than written to be dated. They're designed to appeal to certain players in certain ways, right? 'Oh, this will appeal to the players who like shy, quiet girls.' 'This one's for the people who like tomboys.' That kind of thing. It makes me feel… fuck if I know. Judged and categorized, I guess? It definitely doesn't help the whole 'feeling fake' issue."
"So knowing it's fake means you can't immerse yourself in it?" Zero huffed and crossed her arms. "You just can't turn your brain off, can you?"
"Not for this, I guess."
She didn't reply, so I ventured, "Uh, I assume you didn't show up just to chat about dating sims…"
"Eh, kinda?" Zero threw out a full-arm shrug. "I'm here to shoot the shit. I don't have an agenda or anything."
"That's a relief. I was worried you were here to give me some sort of incredibly life-complicating Christmas present."
My joke got a hearty laugh. "Oh, good idea! Gimme a bit to think of something."
"Zero, no!"
"Zero, yes!"
"To be clear, we are joking, right?" I asked. "You aren't going to actually afflict me with some sort of major life complication, right?"
"Aw. Fine, I couldn't think of anything anyway." She pouted for a second before a literal, visible lightbulb appeared over her head. "Wait, no, I do have an idea. You've been sparring in the Warehouse lately, right?"
"You want to spar?"
Zero made a face. "Eh, we could. I hope you don't expect me to go easy on you, though."
"Right, no sparring." I had no illusions about how that would go. "What were you thinking, then?"
"Well…" She grinned and changed her outfit from sci-fi flight armor to something more reminiscent of Breath of Fire. "I could unlock your Aura."
"Aura? From RWBY, I'm guessing?"
"Yeah, duh. How about it? It'd get you a little closer to my level." Zero's grin turned mischievous. "Rita's already training you, so you can just add that to your lessons or whatever."
"That could've saved me a lot of trouble last Jump."
"Nah, 'Max not being a shit' would've saved you a lot of trouble."
"Fair," I allowed. "Still, why is that not part of the standard on-boarding package?"
"What'd'ya mean?"
"Why isn't that something you just do for people when they join?"
She shrugged. "Why would we? A lot of people join up as a form of retirement—like, shit, there are probably half a dozen of us who joined because the alternative was literally fucking dying. 'Course, you're not the only person who joined for adventure—most of the long-term members did, since the retirees tend to settle down sooner or later—but most of them were adventure-y before they joined up, too. Like me! Yeah, I could've spent a hundred years training up Aura, Potterverse Magic, crazy martial arts bullshit, Force sensitivity, six interchangeable JRPG magic systems, Diablo-style wizardry, or whatever, but I'm already fucking awesome, so fuck that. I didn't sign up to go to school for a century."
I'd already raised a hand halfway through her list. "Wait, hold on, back up. You can just 'learn' Force sensitivity?"
"Yeah, just like you learned Potterverse magic. There are a bunch of perks that let you teach normally unteachable shit, and if you don't have one to hand, the Magic School area of the Warehouse lets anyone teach anyone else any form of magic at all."
"Oh. So that's why I learned magic in a discount Hogwarts set."
Zero laughed. "What did you think you were doing?"
"I thought that was just Jenn being Jenn." Though with a place like that, I could teach Megan other types of magic, though it would mean reading her in on at least some of the 'chain-weirdness—
And now I'd missed some of Zero's rambling. "Sorry, what was that?"
"Hmm? Oh, I was saying you were a bit of an outlier in terms of 'adventure readiness', so things like that seem cooler to you than normal. Well, maybe not 'normal'… whatever, point stands. Besides, just 'cause you can learn stuff the old-fashioned way doesn't mean it's not a lot fucking easier to just get perks as you go. Like, yeah, you could spend twenty years studying to be a Jedi… oooor you could wait for us to visit Star Wars again and get it without all the bullshit."
I sighed. "Yeah, I feel that. I'm still trying to get my naginata skills up to par with my swordsmanship."
"Well, at least you can say you earned your skill the hard way?"
"Yeah, that's what I thought when I started."
She waited a moment for me to continue. "But?"
"Turns out that contrary to what society wants me to believe, working my ass off for something isn't always more rewarding than just getting it."
"Bummer."
"Yeah." I shrugged. "I mean, it's not bad, but it's not better than the easy way, either."
"Well, at least it doesn't suck. How's it going?"
"Pretty well. Had a weird problem with muscle memory fouling me up, but Rita helped me figure out what I was doing wrong."
"Which was?"
"I learned to use a naginata when I had wings." I stepped forward and took a stance. "I was used to having a pair of counterweights on my back, so I was putting my weight too far forwards." Bouncing on my toes demonstrated how far forward my center of gravity was.
"Why is that weird?"
I relaxed back against the wall again. "Because I took a perk that's supposed to help me adapt to changes in my body—"
"Which one's that?"
"Transformation Mentat, from this Jump. Anyway, the weird part is that as soon as I remembered I had the perk, it solved the problem."
Zero cocked her head, brow furrowed. "Okay, yeah, that's fucking weird."
"So there's no rule that you need to remember your perks exist for them to work or anything?"
"No, that'd be fucking dumb. This isn't a damn tabletop game where we have to track all our stats and shit ourselves. Do you know the exact wording?"
"Of the perk? No, I don't—wait, actually, let me check." I summoned my Journal to hand and flipped through to the page it had on me. Sure enough, all my equipped perks were listed.
"Frequent shapeshifting involves a certain degree of mental acuity," I quoted, "in order to adapt to the changes in your body. While this mainly makes it easier to use new forms, there are also fringe benefits: specifically, fantastic mathematical ability and short-term memory."
Zero nodded in satisfaction. "Ah, that's the problem: alt-forms aren't shape-shifting."
"They're not?"
"No, they're like…" She waved a hand. "They're totally different bodies. Like… gah, I'm fucking ass at explaining this shit. Uh, if shape-shifting is like editing a document, alt-forms are loading a whole different file?"
"And that's why I can't use my alt-form slots like 'save slots' for forms," I added, then held up a hand as something occurred to me. "Wait. Wounds transfer, though."
"Management doesn't want us using alt-forms like extra health bars, I guess. No clue how it works under the sheets, shit's weird."
"Yeah." 'Shit's weird' was probably the best explanation of Jump Fiat Bullshit I was likely to get. At least my naginata practice made a little more sense now: it wasn't that the perk had started working because I'd invoked it, but because I'd then focused on the specifics of my body as it existed in its current shape as opposed to swapping alt-forms and expecting things to just work.
Maybe shape-shifting the wings on and off a few times would have done the same.
"Is the rest of it useful at all?" Zero asked. "I mean, the math and shit?"
"Yeah, actually. Better short-term memory stacks with my current memory perk really well, and the math helps with some of the magic I learned in Breath of Fire. Like, I learned how to make teleportation spells, since there's no single multipurpose teleport spell in that system…" I went through an entire explanation of why that was and most of the way through the whole process before I realized I'd gotten badly off track. "…Uh, anyway, it takes a lot of math-adjacent magical theory to do, and now I can do it way faster."
"Cool."
"Yeah." I glanced away and fidgeted with a button on my blouse. "Sorry for the, uh, tangent."
Zero shrugged. "Eh, whatever. Don't sweat it! You getting all excited about shit is cute."
"Cute?"
"Yeah, cute." She winked at me. "Deal with it."
"Uh… okay, I guess I will."
Her grin turned into a pout. "Damn it, Cass! You didn't react at all. You would've been blushing like a tomato a few decades ago."
"It helps to know that you're just trying to get a reaction," I said. I was definitely not smug.
"Well, I was that time, but you are pretty cute."
"Thanks."
"And I would love to drag you into bed." Her outfit was a barely-opaque nightgown now. "I wasn't offering a pity fuck back then, you know? Okay, maybe I was, but now I've gotten to know you and—"
"Too far," I interrupted, yanking my eyes away from the sudden strip-tease.
"Shit, sorry." Zero facepalmed, already back to a normal, street-appropriate blouse-skirt-coat outfit. "Fuck, I knew I was going too far and I did it anyway—"
I held up my hands to halt the apology in its tracks. "It's okay. I'm not mad."
"'Course you're not, you don't get mad."
"No, I mean, it's fine," I insisted. "Really. That stuff doesn't bother me as much as it used to."
"What, just like that?"
"Well, it certainly took a while, so… no?"
"How'd that happen?"
I shrugged. "Gradually? I think growing up in a totally different culture last Jump helped a little, but mostly I've just been thinking about it after the dressing-down you gave me a couple years ago, which is apparently all it takes because perks are crazy?"
"Got yourself a 'get over your problems' effect?"
"Yeah. 'Faster with introspection', I believe the text goes."
"Ah. Well, that's, uh, good?" Zero offered. "But if you're cool with that shit, why was that still 'too far'?"
"Honestly, the biggest problem is that it's tempting—"
"How is that a problem?" she interrupted. "I'm not a tease, Cass, I am legitimately down to fuck."
"Of course you are—"
"Hey!"
"—but it's still a bad idea for all the same reasons it was a bad idea the last time we talked about it," I continued, not quite keeping the exasperation out of my voice. "I'm looking for a long-term relationship, and you are very much not."
Zero nodded along happily. "Uh huh. Uh huh."
She paused for effect.
"Bullshit."
"Excuse me?"
Zero rolled her eyes and adopted a lecturing posture, left hand on her right elbow, right index finger held high. "There is nothing about wanting a 'long-term relationship' that would keep you from having healthy sexual encounters on the way there. Maybe you feel more comfortable with sex in the abstract, but you're still just as fucking terrified of your own sexuality as ever—you've just swapped awkwardness for denial. You're more fucking repressed now than we were when we first met! At least back then you could properly fucking ogle someone."
"That's a good thing?"
"It's better than whatever the hell you're doing now. I'm not in your head, but I've got a theory, so tell me if I'm close. When you Jumped into MGQ, you suddenly not only had a body you were actually interested in using, you were also surrounded by a ton of hot monster-girls who would fucking kill and eat you if you got distracted, so you just wadded it all up in locked it in the deepest, darkest part of your brain to the point that I, with the powers of a literal goddamn emotional lust-vampire, honestly started to wonder if you were asexual. Sound about right?"
"Nope."
It was her turn to blink in surprise. "Nope?"
"Nope. Not that I was in any way okay with the situations we blundered through back during my first tenth-of-a-Jump, but I 'locked it all up' years before I had to deal with that bullshit."
"Why?"
"I wonder," I snipped. "Why on earth would I not want to deal with sexual attraction?"
"Because you're a prude?"
"Because I was—am a trans woman," I corrected myself. "Do I really have to explain why arousal might have been just a teensy bit unpleasant pre-everything?"
Zero grimaced hard enough I could see every ligament in her neck.
"I feel like we've been over this before," I grumbled.
"Uh, I know you mentioned not dating as a man, but you weren't, you know, specific. And that definitely fucking sucks, but it doesn't explain why you're more skittish now than you were twenty years ago. You got the body you wanted, right?" She waved a hand up and down 'me'. "I mean, you're a fucking shape-shifter, so I assume…"
"Weren't you just saying I was harder to tease?"
Zero rolled her eyes. "'Harder to tease' doesn't mean you're less fucking repressed, it just means you don't rise to the same bait. Now are you going to answer the question or not?"
Because I had a brief hope I was actually getting somewhere, I guess.
"I want you to answer a question first," I told her.
"Shoot."
"How much of your interest in my sex life is about my health and happiness and your desire therefor, and how much about you seeing a challenge you want to conquer?"
To my dismay, she didn't even hesitate. "I'm gonna go with forty-sixty?" she ventured. "Obviously I want you to be happy and healthy and all that shit, and I'm not gonna do anything that isn't good for you, but I'll admit my 'persistence' is largely down to you being an unbelievably tough nut to bust."
"I think you mean 'crack'," I said without thinking. More than half? I'd suspected, sure, but I was still shocked by how brazenly she admitted it.
Zero smirked. "I think I did not."
I shook my head and refocused on the actual topic. "But you admit that more than half of your desire to sleep with me is purely as a sexual conquest?"
"No!" she snapped. "No, that's not what I meant! It doesn't have to be me! The challenge is getting you to fucking unwind enough to get laid at all."
"I'm not sure that's better."
"It's completely different," Zero insisted. "And I'm still waiting for an answer to my question. Why are you getting more repressed?"
I scowled and leaned my shoulder against the wall, staring into the corner of the room while I grumbled out, "Well, maybe it's because my brief little tease of a romantic relationship made me fully cognizant that I am romantically lonely and sexually frustrated, and if you keep wandering in and offering to deal with my needs in the worst possible way, one of these days I'm going to take you up on it, and I'm worried our friendship won't survive that."
"Romantically lon—you can deal with those problems separately, for fuck's sake," she bit out. "You are a grown-ass woman, Cass, not a blushing teenager. The only reason something like that would damage our friendship is if we somehow fucked up on consent."
"Catching me in a moment of weakness and convincing me to do something I'd regret doesn't count as 'fucking up on consent'?" I shot back, pushing off the wall to face her.
Zero pouted. "So you're going to preemptively 'not consent' on the basis that if you do consent you're not capable of it?"
"It's not a bad fucking approach with you, is it?"
"It's the opposite of a fucking approach," she countered. "That's, like, a fucking retreat—no, that just sounds like a fancy way to describe sex tourism. Or an orgy—"
"Are you going somewhere with this?"
"If I was, would it be a fucking journey?"
I smacked my hand over my face and mumbled "Oh my god Zero." into my palm.
"Fine. It's not about me, anyway—the point is that you're not actually looking for a long-term relationship." She crossed her arms, waiting until she'd caught my eyes with hers to continue, "Emphasis on 'looking', present tense."
I sighed and slumped back against the wall. "Not at the moment, no, but that's a whole different issue. I still have no idea how to properly handle dating someone who's, uh… damn it, 'mortal' has some really troubling connotations—"
"So? It's not inaccurate."
"The counterpoint to 'mortal' is generally 'god', not just 'immortal'."
"So?" Zero repeated. "It's not inaccurate. You could probably take over your whole world easily enough."
"Would you be happy if people started calling you a goddess, Miss Intoner?"
A scowl flashed across her face before being replaced with a look of understanding. "Right, sorry, dropping that subject like a dead pigeon."
Zero rubbed her hand across her chin as I settled back into a lazy slouch. "If 'mortals' isn't right," she mused, "then how about 'natives'?"
"That works, I guess. There are a lot of problems with dating a 'native', and I expect everyone on the 'chain who wants a long-term relationship has already found one."
She tittered. "I doubt the first bit, but the latter is obviously false."
"Why do you say that?"
Zero's face split into a hundred-watt grin to see that I'd taken the bait. "Because we know there's at least one person on the 'chain who wants but does not have a long-term relationship!" She paused for dramatic effect, then pointed right at me. "You! Ergo, QED, et cetera."
I grumbled something vaguely insulting.
"The point stands! This is a group that snowballed together over a long time, not some fixed, unchanging social… thingy. You're not even the newest member, for fuck's sake! Yes, obviously some of us have found stable relationships, or polycules, or fuckbuddies, or whatever, but there's no reason to think you've wandered into a system at minimum romantic entropy."
"I think you mean maximum romantic entropy," I corrected her. "Or minimum romantic energy—"
Zero waved away my correction like an annoying fly, still beaming. "What-fuckin'-ever, wise-ass! Point is, it's totally possible. There's bound to be someone who'd date you. What about Homura? You two spend so much time around each other alrea—what's with the face, Cass?"
"We're sisters!" I huffed. "Or as good as, anyway."
Her grin became thoroughly shit-eating as she sing-songed, "Not blood relatives."
"No!" I drew myself up to my full height to glare at her, not that it helped much when the other party was flying. "That's not even slightly funny, Zero."
"Awww. You're sinking my ship, Cass."
"Do you seriously—" I really didn't need to ask. "No, that does sound like something you would do. Nevermind."
"It's not just me!"
I chose to assume that meant 'I'm not the only one who ships people' because I didn't want to keep thinking about the alternative. "It's not funny, it's not happening, and I don't want to hear about it ever again."
"Sure, if it bothers you that much." Zero gave a half-hearted shrug. "Hey, are you just gay, or bi, pan, or what?"
"Why?"
"So I know who I can set you up with, duh."
"I appreciate that you're trying to help," I said, "but, uh, please don't."
"Why not?"
"Because, as you already noticed, I'm not looking for a date."
Zero sighed. "Yeah, you're clearly a lot less 'over' your shit than you claim."
"I only claimed to be less uncomfortable about the topic of sex. That doesn't mean I'm not still an awkward, fumbling lesbian with next-to no dating experience."
"Then the obvious thing to do is get some damn experience, right? "
"I'll think about it." I scowled at the skeptical look Zero was giving me. "Look, it's not just that I'm intimidated by the thought of dating in general. I'm extra intimidated by the thought of dating someone on the 'chain. Like—pardon the example, but even if you decided you wanted to date me rather than just seduce me, well, you're you, and I'm some random citizen from the 2010's with an interesting hypothetical future forty-odd years out."
She scoffed. "You gotta be shitting me, Cass. You're a superhero, a Starfleet lieutenant, and an honest-to-God princess knight wizard. Where's your fucking self-esteem?"
"Hey, I've spent the last five years working as a cashier, okay?"
"At a business you own!" Zero shot back, waving one arm in the general direction of the shop's front doors. "Hire someone else if it's going to crater your sense of self-worth like this!"
I rolled my eyes. "That wasn't a serious answer."
"Then what is?"
"I don't know!"
I paced across the room to my dresser and leaned forward, hands propped on the smooth wooden surface while I looked into my reflection like it held the answer. It didn't; instead, I found myself imagining my other lives crowded behind me—the adventurer, the superhero, the lieutenant, the 'princess knight wizard'—looking over my shoulder into the mirror with me, all equally lost.
"I guess… none of those things feel real," I mumbled. "They were things I played at—less so the Starfleet thing than the others, maybe, but still… fake. I'm not 'someone' because of what I do, I'm 'someone' because I get to order a bunch of nigh story-breaking powers off a menu every decade."
Zero harrumphed. "You just said earning things wasn't any better than having them fucking gift-wrapped for you. What's it gonna take to make this shit feel real to you?"
"I don't know." I pushed off the dresser with a sigh and paced back across the room, barely noticing that I walked straight through Zero as I did. "It's kind of hard to reconcile 'this is real' when so many of these places are literally fiction to me, you know? Like, I did some really cool things as a Starfleet officer, but it still feels like…" I caught sight of my monitor and waved at the menu screen it still displayed. "It's like something cool I did in a game, not real life. 'Yeah, I contributed to scientific and engineering breakthroughs… in Star Trek The Zachlike.' No one's impressed by what you've accomplished in a game."
"Where is your fucking self-esteem?" Zero repeated, throwing her hands and eyes toward the heavens in exasperation.
I shrugged. "You pointed out yourself I'm not on the same level of 'awesome' as the average companion."
"Yeah, you weren't when you joined. You've had four fucking fully-fledged adventures since then." She held up that many fingers for emphasis.
"I know. I know I have, it's just… fuck." I rubbed a hand against my forehead in frustration. "My self-image is weird, okay?"
"Kind of unavoidable, really," Zero agreed, flickering through half a dozen different 'guises' to drive the point home by example. "Just… try not to let yourself slip back to who you were when you joined, you know? Take it from me, it's a huge fucking waste of personal growth and shit."
"Thanks."
"Problem solved, then?"
It was not. "No, I—okay, sure, I'm cooler than I give myself credit for. What about the age issue?"
"What age issue?"
"The issue where I'd be hundreds of years younger than my prospective date?" Obviously?
"Who fucking cares?" Zero asked. "It's not like you've matured much in the last twenty years anyway."
"That makes it worse."
"No, that's the point. You reach full maturity at… what, twenty? Twenty-five?"
"People say twenty-five for brain development," I said, "but even if that's right—"
"And you've been through your twenties, what, three times now?"
"Four if you count starting at twenty-eight."
"Then you're done, right?" she insisted. "You've a full, mature adult. How much does how long you've been an adult really matter?"
"A lot?"
"Why?"
"Experience?" I suggested. "Wisdom? Power dynamics?"
"Cass, you literally get off being around ludicrously overpowered women."
"Zero!"
"I call it like I see it," Zero drawled. "Come on, Cass, you're just making excuses at this point."
"And I will continue to make excuses until I'm damn well ready."
"You'll never be ready if you don't work on your confidence. Maybe dating sims strike you as 'false' because you can't believe anyone would actually be interested in you!"
The wind fled from my sails in a heartbeat. I wandered back to my chair and dropped into it like a sack of potatoes.
Fuck, that one hit close to home.
"What," Zero asked, "no snappy comeback?"
"No, I think you might be right, actually," I admitted. "I can suspend my disbelief when I'm doing anything else."
"Seriously? Fuck's sake, Cass!"
I shrugged. What did she want me to say? It hurt because it was true.
The quiet humming of my computer fan filled the silence while I chased that thought down. I hadn't sabotaged my budding relationship with Penny consciously or subconsciously, no matter what Zero thought—but in hindsight, that insecurity could have contributed to my sudden decision to 'come clean' at the worst time and place. If I didn't believe anyone would actually be interested in me, the fact that someone was meant something was wrong and needed fixing, and my 'secrets' were the problem foremost in my mind.
And the rest, as they say, was history.
"You did say the problem with player-stand-in-main-characters was that they couldn't explain why anyone would date said character," Zero recalled.
"Yeah, but I stand by that bit. I have attractive qualities… probably. Blank slates don't."
"You're supposed to assume the characters are dating you for your attractive qualities," she reminded me, "and don't think I didn't hear you mutter 'probably', there."
I didn't reply.
Zero floated over and 'sat' down next to me with no regard whatsoever for the fact that she was sitting on nothing and clipping through the arm of my chair, wrapping an arm around my shoulders in a platonic, consoling hug. "You'll get there," she told me. "You've got that mental whatever perk to clean your shit up, right?"
"Therapy might be easier."
"As long as you're doing something."
"Yeah, I know."
"And don't go in with big expectations, you know?" she continued. "I know you want to find someone you really connect with, but if you aim for 'forever' on your first try you're just gonna get yourself hurt."
"Right."
I glanced up from where I'd been boring a hole in my lap with my eyes to find that Zero had put her face right next to mine, an inviting smile on her lips.
If I thought it'd accomplish anything, I'd have given her a hard shove off the hypothetical chair she wasn't sitting on.
"Are you expecting me to kiss you?" I deadpanned.
"A girl can hope!" She laughed at her own joke, then gave up her 'seat' and swooshed back towards the center of the room. "It's almost impressive, you know, how completely you shut it out."
I had a feeling I knew what she meant, but I ended up asking, "What?"
"Lust! Desire, lechery, horniness, arousal, thirst—"
I tuned out, spinning slowly in my chair as she prattled on.
"—randiness, temptation, eroticism—"
Oh my god she's still going.
"—carnality, harlotry—"
"I get it," I snapped. "Yes, I have a talent for ignoring things. Can we move on to a topic that isn't going to circle back to my sex life?"
"If you've got one." Zero lay back and arranged herself into a portrait of indulgent lounging: lying like she was sunning herself on a beach chair, hands behind her head with her elbows winging out to the sides. "What other shit's going on in your life?"
Way to put me on the spot, asshole.
"Nothing?" she asked, probably ready to jump right back into a discussion I was getting thoroughly tired of.
"I read an interesting bit of historical trivia recently," I offered.
"Oh?"
"Yeah. About a siege in medieval… France, I think?"
"Probably a lot of those, right?"
"Well, this one's notable because a duke's son was killed."
"That can't be that rare."
"Because of how he was killed," I corrected myself peevishly. "The besieging forces slaughtered the peasants who hadn't fled into the keep in time—because that's what they did back then, apparently—and the attacking commander got the bright idea to take their severed heads and fling them over the walls with catapults to demoralize the defenders, and maybe spread disease, I guess? At any rate, one of the heads just happened to hit the prince as he was looking out at the enemy camp, and it knocked him clean off the wall. It was a long drop, and, well, splat.
"Anyway, it's an interesting historical note because it was the first recorded use of a serf-face to heir missile."
Zero stared at me for almost a full minute.
"We aren't friends anymore," she informed me.
———X==X==X———
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Tempestuous
Words are wind, so I write.
- Location
- CA
AN: Ho boy. Lot to unpack here, huh?
We learn a bit about (my multiverse's interpretation of) Valkyrie Core, for starters. It sounds like a pretty fun game, though I'm not sure I'd actually play it through for obvious reasons. The characters making frequent references to the franchise's various continuities is my way of insulating myself against any mistakes I may have made in my knowledge of BAHHSCQ. No, that's not an inconsistency, the Quest follows the anime continuity and I'm working with the VN! Genius.
Soulhunter is not a real game to the best of my knowledge, but I hear Boyfriend Dungeon is similar-ish in concept? Not my cup of tea so I haven't looked into it at all.
In not-particularly-autobiographical news, the 'magic school' detail re: Potterverse magic is technically a retcon, but I don't think I ever addressed it outside of Author's Notes before, so it's not exactly a retcon? Maybe? I'll call it a gray area.
In particularly-autobiographical news… well.
I've had some people describe Cass as a 'sexless' narrator because her descriptions of people are almost entirely void of any sort of 'gaze'. Some of the narratorial sexlessness is my general wish to avoid the many Gaze tropes that pop up in fiction (fan- and amateur fiction in particular), but as or more important is the fact that I have spent a long time actively working to avoid arousal—not for exactly the same reason Cass raises here, but close enough—which means, in practice, straight-up ignoring most anything that could lead me astray like some horrid parody of pious celibacy. There's a line earlier in the story when Cass is checking Penny out that implies this little detail while at the same time tiptoeing around it:
Cass-the-narrator then proceeds to continue being sexless because the closest I've come to writing Gaze is a parody of the concept back in chapter fucking six—
—and because I, the author, am still damn well doing my best to avoid arousal from any sources, my own writing included—and after so long avoiding any and all… 'stimulation' in that area, it does not take very much.
Alas.
Moving on to Cass's issues with self-esteem: while I definitely have some issues in that department, I can't say her experience matches mine particularly well because I have not been a superhero, Starfleet Officer, and/or princess knight wizard. (I mean, outside of video games, but while she uses that as a point of comparison it's hardly the same thing.) But over the countless edits to this chapter, I came to understand why I'd written it that way.
Over the past two years, I've spun out nearly three quarters of a million words (quite a bit more if you count author's notes, upcoming chapters, and unpublished stuff), and the reception it's received… well, I think the last AN covered my thoughts on that well enough. Suffice to say I've done something, no? And yet—and yet—it's not something I get to brag about. It's something that 'no one's impressed by'. It's not 'real' writing, it's fan fiction, the soap-scum of literature that accumulates from the sloughed-off elements of real stories. It's something few people who haven't tried it understand as worthy of respect and something few people who self-identify as 'respectable' will admit to having tried. Or maybe they would and it's my own self-consciousness and the internalized view that fanfic is 'childish' and 'embarrassing' that hold me back. The result is the same.
So I take all this work, all this accomplishment, all the success and praise… and tell no one. Because it doesn't 'count'. Because it's not 'real' writing. And it's really hard to take pride in something you're used to seeing dismissed so readily.
Cass's issue may be fantastical, but the symptom, that element of derealized accomplishment… that resonates.
We learn a bit about (my multiverse's interpretation of) Valkyrie Core, for starters. It sounds like a pretty fun game, though I'm not sure I'd actually play it through for obvious reasons. The characters making frequent references to the franchise's various continuities is my way of insulating myself against any mistakes I may have made in my knowledge of BAHHSCQ. No, that's not an inconsistency, the Quest follows the anime continuity and I'm working with the VN! Genius.
Soulhunter is not a real game to the best of my knowledge, but I hear Boyfriend Dungeon is similar-ish in concept? Not my cup of tea so I haven't looked into it at all.
In not-particularly-autobiographical news, the 'magic school' detail re: Potterverse magic is technically a retcon, but I don't think I ever addressed it outside of Author's Notes before, so it's not exactly a retcon? Maybe? I'll call it a gray area.
In particularly-autobiographical news… well.
I've had some people describe Cass as a 'sexless' narrator because her descriptions of people are almost entirely void of any sort of 'gaze'. Some of the narratorial sexlessness is my general wish to avoid the many Gaze tropes that pop up in fiction (fan- and amateur fiction in particular), but as or more important is the fact that I have spent a long time actively working to avoid arousal—not for exactly the same reason Cass raises here, but close enough—which means, in practice, straight-up ignoring most anything that could lead me astray like some horrid parody of pious celibacy. There's a line earlier in the story when Cass is checking Penny out that implies this little detail while at the same time tiptoeing around it:
We sat down across from each other, and I found myself looking at her in a way I hadn't looked at anyone for a long time. In a way that I had, perhaps, not allowed myself to look at anyone for a long time.
Cass-the-narrator then proceeds to continue being sexless because the closest I've come to writing Gaze is a parody of the concept back in chapter fucking six—
I'm not a car person. When it came to my own car, the only things I cared about were comfort, and it turning on when I wanted it to. I couldn't tell you the first thing about makes or models, what different engines or transmissions meant, or anything like that. All I knew was that this car… this car was one of the most beautiful machines I had ever seen. It was a convertible, sleek, painted a deep, vibrant red that seemed to glow from within. I traced my eyes over it longingly, starting at the front bumper, over the smooth curves of the hood where it accommodated the wheel wells, up the crystal clear windshield, into the voluptuously upholstered interior, back to the harsher yet still graceful angles of the rear body, and, lastly, down to the gleaming ruby taillights. Simultaneously angular and elegant, it made only a gentle purring sound as it idled in front of us; yet something about the shape of it promised speed and noise, like a runner on the starting blocks, like a lion opening its jaws to roar.
—and because I, the author, am still damn well doing my best to avoid arousal from any sources, my own writing included—and after so long avoiding any and all… 'stimulation' in that area, it does not take very much.
Alas.
Moving on to Cass's issues with self-esteem: while I definitely have some issues in that department, I can't say her experience matches mine particularly well because I have not been a superhero, Starfleet Officer, and/or princess knight wizard. (I mean, outside of video games, but while she uses that as a point of comparison it's hardly the same thing.) But over the countless edits to this chapter, I came to understand why I'd written it that way.
Over the past two years, I've spun out nearly three quarters of a million words (quite a bit more if you count author's notes, upcoming chapters, and unpublished stuff), and the reception it's received… well, I think the last AN covered my thoughts on that well enough. Suffice to say I've done something, no? And yet—and yet—it's not something I get to brag about. It's something that 'no one's impressed by'. It's not 'real' writing, it's fan fiction, the soap-scum of literature that accumulates from the sloughed-off elements of real stories. It's something few people who haven't tried it understand as worthy of respect and something few people who self-identify as 'respectable' will admit to having tried. Or maybe they would and it's my own self-consciousness and the internalized view that fanfic is 'childish' and 'embarrassing' that hold me back. The result is the same.
So I take all this work, all this accomplishment, all the success and praise… and tell no one. Because it doesn't 'count'. Because it's not 'real' writing. And it's really hard to take pride in something you're used to seeing dismissed so readily.
Cass's issue may be fantastical, but the symptom, that element of derealized accomplishment… that resonates.
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Oh god, what would a DDLC jump look like. I'm trying to imagine this and I'm not sure whether the mechanics of the jump would be fascinating or horrifying.
Also, this is a totally weird thing about my own personal psyche, but I got bizarrely sad when Zero sold Cass on DDLC so poorly. Like, "is that another dating sim?" "yes, but it's relevant" "why though?" "spoilers!" is the kind of conversation that would literally never convince someone to play a game and I really like DDLC and wanted Zero to sell it well because I'm incapable of reading without subconsciously treating every character as if they're a real person (oops?).
Anyway, thanks for the chapter. I always love chapters like this and I can only imagine how genuinely personal they are for you. I imagine writing them feels pretty close to rubber duck debugging your own psyche then posting the result for the world to read, which is probably about 10x more vulnerable than I've ever been capable of being, so I super respect every one of these chapters.
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I agree, and it gets even funnier/creepier when you see fanfics set in the same world.
Even if they avoid the "romance" their meta-knowledge is weird.
"Okay, so I have to go to the library via the back door to run into them at the right moment, then above all else, don't mention the duck."
In my experience it makes you more reluctant to part with it.
If you had some reason to drop either sword skills or polearm, and no expectation of needing either, which would you choose?
Which chapter was this?
Omakes: Zeke's Return / Homura's Departure
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Zeke returns from Valkyrie Core
"How was your jump?""It was... interesting. I got a lot of data."
"When you say 'data' do you mean..."
"In an 'Entity' sense, yes. It was an entire culture of similar individuals using similar powers to develop divergent skillsets and proficiency. It was interesting to see how some were more or less successful. The Entity Cycle developed organically to produce large quantities of data, but our signal to noise ratio was terrible."
"What did you think of Anna?"
"She was... vindicating."
"Vindicating?"
"She had something much closer to the 'Entity-style' power acquisition. Trauma, challenges, stress, and she was a order of magnitude more growth and effectiveness than the 'Human-style' training. So vindicating. On the other hand, I was also able to recognize the costs of those gains. Here I was, just out of 'being human boot camp' and I was somehow still better at being human than she was."
"Did you feel sorry for her?"
"Not as such. We weren't close. It was more a feeling of frustration. Why did she have to lose all her humanity to become stronger? Why were the others so much weaker? Why couldn't we have both? Perhaps I'll be able to find a way in a future jump."
"Well maybe... no. Or perhaps... no. I'm not sure Jumpchain locations are places to find 'mental stability' and 'high power' combined..."
Cassandra goes with Homura
"Do you want me to come with you?"
"Would you?"
"Sure! Hmm... I just thought of something."
"What?"
"Well this won't really be a traditional 'Jump' so I won't have the various insertion options. I won't be able to be a Magical Girl."
"Good."
"Oh, I know. I wasn't really suggesting it. But... I don't really have any teenager alt-forms. I've been avoiding adolescence for obvious reasons. Extended lifespan or not, my youngest form is still mid-twenties."
"Wait..."
"That means I get to be the 'big sister' this time! In front of all your friends too!"
"Maybe this was a bad idea..."
"I can be the 'Cool Adult In The Know!' You guys can hang out at my place when you need to and I can give all the paperwork and excuses and- Oh! I can be a crazy inventor-type! Making all the tools you need! Like Urahara but not a jerk!"
"You're not allowed to build a giant mecha."
"Uh... I'm not sure I can promise that. Remember that one Macross Jump where I was a musician? That Mecha just sorta happened. I don't know why..."
"Wait, I think it might be your Innate Perk."
"Wasn't that about talking to people?"
"That too. Here it is, [Rolins Recycling]."
| 400 cp Rolins Recycling: |
Building a Mecha in a secret base in the desert requires some creativity. Nothing can go to waste. Those aluminum cans? Scrap metal for a mecha. Organic waste? Composted to bio-fuel. Traumatized teenagers? One good talk away from being a pilot! Any resource that can be turned into Mecha components, will be turned into Mecha components. Whether they like it or not! |
"Okay, I always avoided reading that jumpdoc because I was disturbed by the implications. Learning what it actually is makes it even worse!"
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Echo
Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before
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Eesh. Every time Cass and Zero have a Serious Conversation about Sex Stuff I come away with the feeling that Zero was basically correct but in the worst and most absurdly counterproductive way possible.
I'm half expecting her to show up and rebut the "Cass doesn't think she has attractive qualities" by harvesting the internet for R34 smut starring Doctor Rolins or something.
I mean, on one hand a "literally AU fanfic with the serial numbers filed off" story has not only achieved mass market popularity but even gotten a series of successful movie adaptations. On the other hand, it's maybe not the kind of example you'd prefer...
I'm half expecting her to show up and rebut the "Cass doesn't think she has attractive qualities" by harvesting the internet for R34 smut starring Doctor Rolins or something.
I mean, on one hand a "literally AU fanfic with the serial numbers filed off" story has not only achieved mass market popularity but even gotten a series of successful movie adaptations. On the other hand, it's maybe not the kind of example you'd prefer...
Mainstream culture doesn't ascribe Youtube credibility either, despite the massive amount of quality content on there in education and entertainment.
Youtube doesn't ascribe gaming credibility either, despite being one of the strongest sections of the site, capable of providing thousands of hours of quality entertainment and millions of dollars in donations to worthy causes.
Mainstream culture is pretty often balls. Some of my absolute favorite writing is fanfiction. Being able to immerse yourself in a world and use it to communicate ideas to other people who understand the same world. It's just the same as puns or double entendre, poetry and indeed fiction, taking the language that both people know and twisting it to send a message. That's art, and art can be good or bad, but it's still art. People who dismiss that can fuck off.
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I had a random thought for a future jump: Evangelion.
Cassandra can try out being a Giant Robot technician.
Max can usurp Gendo and assign him toilet-cleaning duties.
Mordin can go in and reinvent the entire Metaphysics field proving everything they know wrong.
Ace can reveal Seele.
Zeke can discuss the philosophy of the human condition with eldtrich monstrosities.
Deanna can therapize everyone.
The RP group can be entirely in dark rooms with everyone competing in Gendo Poses.
Cassandra can try out being a Giant Robot technician.
Max can usurp Gendo and assign him toilet-cleaning duties.
Mordin can go in and reinvent the entire Metaphysics field proving everything they know wrong.
Ace can reveal Seele.
Zeke can discuss the philosophy of the human condition with eldtrich monstrosities.
Deanna can therapize everyone.
The RP group can be entirely in dark rooms with everyone competing in Gendo Poses.
Do you mean a jump on this chain, or the writing of a base jump to go into? Because there's a Gauntlet for it, which I know because Mizuki_Stone's junpchain fic did it.
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Gonna be honest, I completely forgot that jumpchains are, like, a Thing with, like, Documents as opposed to just a story format. Gosh, that's embarrassing.
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Most people try to forget jumpdocs are a Thing That Exists.
Don't feel bad for succeeding.
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Ahhh, then I regret to inform you that the reminder they exist has lead me down a rabbithole of actually reading them for the first time.
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I actually get the exact opposite reaction.
Reading jumpdocs makes me lose all interest in the series or fics.
Something about how generic they are, and the way they reduce a world to a handful of moving parts just kills my imagination.
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It doesn't bother me too much, honestly. Mostly because they're the entry point to the jump rather than anything over the course of the jump. In the context of Companion Chronicles for example, I chock it up to Management basically being a lazy asshole who doesn't really care about these worlds or you, so here's this entire setting's abilities boiled down to a point-buy document, but that doesn't mean that meaning can't emerge once you've started the jump.