"Jump-chan will see you now."
I frowned slightly; I must've misheard something. No way in hell a serious man in a serious suit would say that exact phrase. I wiped my frown from my face, standing up and following him to the interview room. I could not afford to blow this interview; it was the first one I've gotten after I graduated. 'Go into tech' they said, 'there's tons of good jobs.' Apparently not for people who go to community college.
I sighed, steeling myself, before I walked through the door and closed it behind me, before laying eyes on the person sitting at the desk.
I blinked, and twisted the handle to leave again. No amount of money was worth this.
"Before you do that," Jump-chan, whose name I did not mishear, began, "Consider the following: if this is real, you know you can milk this situation for a lot of wish-fulfillment. And if it isn't real, then neither are you. And you know what happens to characters who walk off the stage, and heroes who try too hard to refuse the call."
I let go of the handle slowly, and eased myself into the chair across from her desk. She was... indescribable. There was something there, conveying those words to me, along with a vaguely-feminine impression, but I couldn't perceive anything more than that. Well, aside from the fact, emblazoned on her soul, that she was Jump-chan, and she wanted me to know it.
"Good boy," Jump-chan said. "Or perhaps good girl would be more appropriate, Miss Norman?"
Well. Of course God knows I'm a closeted trans woman. Fantastic.
"So, this is a... call to adventure, of sorts?" I asked. "And, given that I have the correct sort of internet brainrot, I am assuming the adventure in question is a Jumpchain, that peculiar admixture of crossover fanfiction and point-buy character creation divorced from any of the other rules you'd find while playing a real RPG."
"You've got a brass set, explaining what Jumpchain is to someone named Jump-chan," she said.
"I don't suppose you've read any fiction where two characters have entirely different understandings of what a word means, have you?" I asked. "Or just... in general had to communicate with people who don't have exactly the same subcultural context you do?"
"Why would I want to do that?" Jump-chan asked.
"Sometimes, in life, we have to do things we don't particularly want to," I said. "For example, I'm currently humoring a deity and their inexplicable obsession with some particular dumb internet bullshit."
"You're not the only one who doesn't want to be here," Jump-chan said. "And on that note, congratulations, Joe Norman, my idiot Jumper, Skip, took a Drawback that means I'm contractually obligated to give you a ten-Jump Chain of your own, so that in Skip's next Jump- which I'm strongly considering making a Gauntlet after this stunt- you can fight him."
"...That... raises some questions," I said. "First of all, why is there a Drawback that means I in particular get a Jumpchain? Are you saying I'm a major character from some story that was popular enough with nerds to get a Jump Doc written?"
"In fact, you're the protagonist of Chain of Thorns," Jump-chan said. "Or, you were supposed to be."
"Obviously, I have never seen that show," I said.
"You should, it's pretty good," Jump-chan said. "Some nice harem stuff, although it is mixed in with a lot of really annoying politics." I rolled my eyes and she kept going, oblivious. "Speaking of harem stuff, Skip took your harem, in case you needed motivation to kick his ass. In fact... hang on, his video message is in here somewhere." She started digging through the desk's drawers.
"I don't think you understand me," I began.
"Don't care," Jump-chan said. "Aha, here we go." She pulled out a laptop, opening it up and turning it to face me. On the screen was some incel's idea of an attractive man, a tower of glistening beef, wearing the most punchably smug expression I'd ever seen in my life. And he hadn't even started talking.
"You didn't hit play," I pointed out.
She reached around to press the space bar, and the video started to play, the camera immediately zooming out to reveal that he was sitting in a throne that was not nearly as impressive as he thought it was, being fawned over by four attractive women I didn't recognize. One of them was an elf with pointy ears and black hair, and another was pretty clearly some kind of succubus, but the other two were just... humans.
"Recognize these?" the man who thought he was sexy asked. "That's right, cuck, they're mine now. Drink it in. They certainly have."
"This is just vulgar," I said.
"Even your little Maisie, too," Skip said, as a fifth woman, this one with red hair, walked onscreen, carrying a sandwich on a plate for him.
"Who the hell is Maisie?" I asked.
Jump-chan paused the video. "Maisie? Your first crush, who you met in elementary school?"
"My first crush was a blonde girl with freckles named Margot," I said. "I have a very good memory for names, and I have never been acquainted with anyone named Maisie."
"...Knew we shouldn't have skipped the boring episodes in our rewatch," Jump-chan muttered. "Whatever, he still took the rest of your harem. Doesn't that piss you off?"
"Not really, because I've never met those people in my life," I said. "See, the basic fact of the matter you two ass clowns don't seem to understand is that I have obviously never seen that show, because it doesn't fucking exist here. This is the show, and unless it pulled a Spaceballs and brought out a DVD copy of itself for a gag, the show doesn't exist in the show. Because from where I'm standing, it's not a show. It's just life, and I led a very different one from this hypothetical Canon Joe. So no, I don't know who you're talking about. I don't know what the fuck I'm supposedly missing out on. All I know is that you're wasting my goddamn time."
"Hrm," Jump-chan said, frowning. "...Well, there's how Skip supplanted you as the protagonist. He certainly didn't knock you off track to becoming a harem protagonist by making your life better."
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
"...I'm starting to have regrets," I said.
"See, Skip actually exacerbated your mental issues, stopped you from taking those martial arts classes you wanted in high school, started a global pandemic to keep you indoors even after you finished community college-"
"He what?!"
"-and even transed your gender in the hopes that you, Rose Corcoran, wouldn't count as Joe Norman anymore," Jump-chan said. "Now, there's two things that went wrong with this plan. One, in his quest to make you as noncommittal and fearful as possible, he made it so that you would never come out publicly and actually transition, and so you are, in ways that matter, still Joe Norman. And two..." Jump-chan shrugged. "I'm not stupid, and the drawback pretty clearly states that no matter what is done to Joe Norman in the Jump itself, he gets his chain. You were meant to be the protagonist. He took that from you. You get a ten-Jump chain to get powerful enough to take your revenge. Simple as that."
"Go back to the part where Skip caused a global pandemic just to fuck with me."
"It seems self-explanatory to me," Jump-chan said. "Unless you mean 'why would I allow this?' in which case I'd like to say I'm not Jehovah, and I don't feel obligated to play nice with my dolls. I'm here to entertain myself, and sometimes, I like to see some blood."
"A pandemic isn't terribly interesting to watch," I pointed out.
"Yeah, learned that one the hard way..." Jump-chan waved it off. "I must say, you're taking the news that you're a fictional character rather well."
"I am currently setting aside this earthshaking revelation that does not actually mean anything in practical terms, in favor of focusing on the fact that Skip committed a crime against humanity just to inconvenience me, and you let him," I said.
"You're just never going to let that go, are you?"
"I don't see why I should."
"Wow," Jump-chan said. "You are annoying."
"Fuck you."
"I'd have entertained the prospect if you were more like the canonical gigachad you were supposed to be, but no," Jump-chan said. "You're getting the bare minimum Benefactor experience. I already picked your first Jump, but after that, you're on your own. Pick your own off the Drive or whatever."
I blinked. So, being annoying made her withdraw her attention and control, enabling me to pick whichever Jumps I wanted to power-game for maximum benefit.
Iiiiiinteresting.
"Which Jump?" I asked.
"I was hoping to train up another Skip," Jump-chan said. "I like my harem stories, after all, and you're made from the ashes of a harem protagonist. Maybe, just maybe, if you're less annoying by the time your ten Jumps are up, I'll let you keep going, whether or not you won against Skip."
"The Jump," I prompted her, knowing that, no matter what, I wasn't going to like what I heard.
"It's a harem anime you'll be very familiar with," Jump-chan said. "Have fun in Sekirei."
----------------------------------------
Jump-chan kicked me out of her office after that, and instead of the office building, I found myself in an empty warehouse. Or, rather, Warehouse. The Cosmic Warehouse, a common device in Jumpchain, the answer to the question "where am I going to put all my stuff?"
Right now, though, the only things in this warehouse were me, a door, and a laptop that looked a lot like my first laptop, a big black chonky boy with a nice blue pattern on the lid. Ah, Asus. You don't make 'em like you used to. Which is a shame, because I would pay inadvisable amounts of money on a modernized version.
I sat down on the floor, pulled the laptop into my lap, and began to fill out some forms.
Step one, Warehouse and Body Mod. Basically, each one was a list of options you could buy using a given point budget. Warehouse let you pick out options for a big but boring pocket dimension that existed solely to be a place where you can put all your big mountains of accumulated crap without thinking about it, and Body Mod let you pick out basic, undetailed, and unexciting options that related to your general physiology- making you a bit stronger or taller or prettier or what have you. These were... honestly, the default vanilla ones, I didn't give two shits about. They were serviceable, I guess. Inoffensive. But they were neither necessary nor fun to play with, and so they were worthless to me.
Naturally, I loaded up some more involved replacements that were fun to play with, and found something curious while opening up the new Warehouse document:
Jump-chan had set the Warehouse budget to be unlimited.
Fuck knows why. Maybe she, like me, thought the vanilla Warehouse was boring and simply set its budget to unlimited because none of the choices were interesting, and maybe she also didn't think it was capable of being turned into anything more than a cozy, readily-accessible place to keep all the stuff that's actually powerful. Now, the Personal Reality Warehouse replacement, that could be made into something impactful on its own, but she clearly hadn't accounted for that.
Out of curiosity, I opened up Essential Body Mod, and... found that she did not make the budget for the body mod unlimited. Because obviously, modifying my baseline human capabilities is something that can directly, on its own, impact the story of a Jump, and let's just set aside the part where plenty of Jumps have single hundred-point perks that do more than the Body Mod ever could even when maxed out. Jump-Chan's flawed idea of balance meant that the Body Mod was not as unlimited as the Warehouse, and semi-fortunately for her idea of balance, she accidentally ended up being correct, as I could've managed some properly potent things with a maxed out Essential Body Mod.
Oh well. I'd live.
I breezed through EBM, trying to distract myself from the upcoming disaster with the simple, meditative joy of playing with rules toys that make funny noises when I squeeze 'em hard enough. Because I was transgender, I beelined for the option that let me shapeshift, took a few free perks that came with the Shapeshifter Essence, and then found myself with an interesting question: does the Body Mod stack with my existing human capabilities? Or does it replace my existing human capabilities? If I'm already unusually smart, and don't take the Be Smart options, would I become dumber when I finish the document? The lack of a "you have ordinary human strength" option led me to believe it just stacked on top, but I wasn't willing to risk it, and besides, spending a few extra points to sharpen my mind a little more wasn't the worst idea in my build.
No, that would be the extra points that I didn't know what to do with after I bought immortality and even better shapeshifting, which I didn't spend on skill-gain-multipliers because there were too many of them and they were all too narrow for me to feel like any of them were worth the cognitive load. Instead, I dropped those points into being a hundred times stronger than peak human, because why the hell not?
My Warehouse was a lot simpler to build, seeing as I didn't really need to make choices. I turned it into a hugely sprawling pocket empire full of all sorts of specialty shops and weird person-like soulless constructs who spawned to staff those shops. And, most vitally, around me formed my estate, with me sitting in The Library.
The Library, tucked away in a corner of my new giant house that looked like it was designed by an apathetic Sims player, consisted of a long desk with three chairs and three laptops, a big furniture-like object that could seat a dozen adventurous souls if they could figure out how to sit on it, and a row of psychoresponsive bookshelves that would show the sections you wanted the next time you looked at them. The Library had been described, in the revised Warehouse doc, as containing copies of every work of fiction in the multiverse that I had ever visited, all available in both digital and analogue form. If this meant I could get a VHS copy of James Cameron's Avatar, I would laugh and then put it back, and probably wash my hands.
Lying down on the big weird cushion thing, and propping my laptop up on some books for airflow- the version I'd owned melted its plastic bottom because I set it on my bed and the whole thing had godawful airflow- I proceeded to step two.
The Sekirei jump.
I tried, in vain, to slot a different Jump in its place. No dice. I couldn't even unselect the scenario Jump-chan had chosen for me.
"This is a mean joke," I said. "Skip ruined my life so he could take my place, and now, here I am, changing the course of someone else's life so I can take their place." I grimaced. "Well. Sorry, Minato. At least you get to go to college now."
I hit the submit button, and everything went black.