Weekend Wondering
The weekend turns out to be powerfully productive for me. Having a full forty-eight hours where I can devote every waking moment to honing my mastery of my odd abilities, coupled with my peculiar array of perks, is fantastic when it comes to training.
On Saturday I begin the day by carefully honing my actual, pre-chain skills. I cook a quick, but real, breakfast, and in doing so make a minor error when it comes to cooking some bacon. This allows me to experience the effects of one of my good boy perks "I Get Knocked Down Again", as I gain the knowledge of how to avoid repeating my mistake. This is the first time I have felt the perk and it's certainly humbling but at the same time it's a bit exciting. Even mistakes can serve as learning opportunities for the truly wise but with this so long as I am humble even I can learn from my fuck-ups.
After breakfast, I continue to practice using my abilities. I find that it is considerably easier to use my telekinesis even after practicing it just a few dozen times yesterday. I think my perks are mixing together, they have to be really, for me to improve so much.
I find that I can roll much larger objects but I can even lift something like a remote control and move it much easier than I could move a pencil yesterday. I don't dare try to do something as fine as actually press a button, not yet, but still, even this is a marked improvement compared to what I could do before.
My "Morphic Form" ability continues to be handy. As I practice this particular ability I imagine a number of ways I could deftly utilize this ability to work around the plot of the film…
Andrew's descent into madness and fairly short-lived villainy comes at the hands of his father. The abusive asshole routinely berates and beats his son, and without him, the film would go radically differently. If I become strong enough I could easily mix my two abilities and murder the man before the events of the film even truly begin. Hell, even right now I already have enough tools in my arsenal to kill the man if I can just create an opportunity to get him alone, and I think I could pretty easily get away with it all things considered.
I throw myself quite fiercely into training my abilities. I practice doing a range of things with my telekinesis, mostly focused on manipulating objects of various weights. I don't have enough raw power to get really creative with this ability just yet, plus for now if I could just do something as fine as lift a pencil and successfully write a sentence that'd be a freaking miracle.
I practice my shapeshifting and delight in taking the form of various celebrities. This is definitely the niftiest way to utilize this power for mischief, and I could easily use it to go wild and have a ridiculous amount of fun if I felt like embracing the potential of the low tier of this ability that I happen to possess.
The thing about the first tier of "Morphic Form" is that as radical as it is, there are strict limits to it. I can't add or remove limbs, and I can only modify my height and weight by a quarter of my base form. Since I'm a nice six feet tall that still gives me a lot of wiggle room, but it's hardly all-encompassing. I can't impersonate anyone below four and a half feet tall, and I can't impersonate anyone who has a number of physical disabilities, and if I could that'd radically open up the sort of mischief I could get up to. Still, even now this ability is very powerful.
I also have the television in the living room on in the background. I have the television turned to international, non-English news. I am listening to a European anchorman talk about events in Greece in Greek.
Two things I appreciate about the assassin essence are two of its three "Mastery" perks. The essence's freebies when it comes to the mastery perks are "Social", "Subterfuge" and "Martial". The "Martial" mastery perk makes a lot of sense when it comes to being an assassin, after all an assassin needs to be good at combat for when the time comes to complete the tasks they are hired to do. The social and subterfuge mastery perks also represent logical facets of being an assassin.
Social skills are good for getting assassination contracts and otherwise profiting off of one's work. Subterfuge skills are fantastic when it comes to setting the exact conditions that are best for any particular assassin to apply their life-ending skills. That said there's an uncanny power to where these two facets of assassin work and life in general meet. I can do a lot with their intersection, especially since I can not only shapeshift it's a part of my body-mod. I can shapeshift even in jumps where I take drawbacks that reduce me to my in-jump abilities and my body mod, so long as I'm not in a gauntlet!
I spend the entire day practicing my powers, and I even train my actual body. I go into my backyard and I diligently run laps around it to get some cardio in. I only stop to make dinner, and afterward, I resume practicing again. I go to bed at around eleven at night, and I again dream of fantastic places and incredible powers. The multiverse is waiting for me…
When I awaken on Sunday it is roughly seven in the morning. I get up and feel the subtle effects of "Even Bad Guys Need Sleep" a perk derived from Andrew's part of the story. This perk subtly improves my ability to sleep by guaranteeing my safety when I sleep and allowing me to rest more fully.
I glance at my darkened room and I realize that I need to do minor, school-related things today. I get out of bed and I quickly go and make breakfast. I apply what I learned from yesterday's mistakes and I am delighted to successfully make a delicious breakfast.
When I begin my training for the day, I am seated in front of a small dining room table and have my papers spread out before me. They consist mostly of assorted syllabi, all of which a parent needs to sign. I do so in their place, coming up with names for them on the spot since by now I am as sure as I can be that in this world I don't have parents.
I reach out to my surroundings with my telekinesis and this time I do practice things that require some level of finesse. I start off by doing something as simple as lifting an apple into the air and spinning it while holding onto the thing. This requires the equivalent of multiple hands due to the nature of how my telekinetic abilities are manifesting so far, and while it's a bit taxing I know how important training like this is for fine manipulation.
Telekinesis in any form is a strong, fine ability to have. That said, there are more effective and creative uses for telekinesis than chucking trucks at someone, and if I only ever focus on honing my upper limit for telekinetic manipulation and ignore the idea of fine, dexterous manipulation then I will only ever be a bruiser.
I eventually switch out what I am doing for telekinetic exercise and go from manipulating one thing in multiple ways at the same time to manipulating multiple things that are not close to each other. I do this by placing small objects like silverware and paper plates in different parts of the kitchen and living room, and lightly grabbing and moving them with my telekinetic abilities.
This is taxing, but I quickly adapt to it. I want to be an adaptive, flexible telekinetic warrior and to do that I plan to develop an array of exercises to push my abilities.
I spend a brief portion of the afternoon exercising, and to do that I actually go for a run around the neighborhood I live in. This is a rewarding exercise for me on a mental level because it is something I used to do as a teen but lost the ability to do in college. Being able to just go for a run without experiencing truly debilitating pain is… remarkable, after around a decade of enduring a slowly worsening physical disability.
Just feeling the rush of moving quickly across the pavement without an iota of pain wracking my knee is something astounding when for years even subtle movements caused me to experience flashes of pain. I know I have these incredible superpowers but given how rough my last few years on my homeworld were, health-wise, I think the happiest I've felt since I arrived in this world is how I feel when I'm on the sidewalk just casually jogging.
Given the decade-long duration of standard-length jumps I'll only be approaching the end of my third jump when I'll have been jumping for a length of time as long as I was confined to my home world. I wonder what I'll think of the disability that made my last few years on the version of Earth I come from when I have more jumps under my belt…
When I return home from my run I immediately make a small dinner. It is nothing special, I don't care to try and eat highly nutritious meals right now, but it'll get the job done as far as food goes.
After dinner I continue to hone my abilities further still. I decide to experiment and see what's the heaviest thing I can now lift, and I begin by lifting an apple. I am delighted to find that it is easy for me to do so. This is not a huge achievement by any means but it's a strong start.
I continue to experiment with larger and denser objects of various shapes. I am especially delighted when I find that I can lift things like knives with no serious difficulty, though it is considerably harder to lift a larger knife than it is for me to lift an apple. I ultimately find that I struggle to lift things as large as some decently sized fruits, and I can barely move anything heavier or thicker than a cutting board. It's a decent limit, given that I've only one afternoon, and two days to really practice this ability.
When I am laying in bed, shortly after having taken a shower, I find myself lost in thought. I contemplate the bizarre realities of the situation that I'm currently in… Being on a chain is incredible, and terrifying.
Over the course of the last few days a part of me has been slowly coming to terms with what it means for reality itself that jumpchains are actually real. I have been trying to process what it means for history and science that benefactors are real, and that it is possible for a human to be shunted into a new universe and survive.
This is forcing me to redefine my relationship with my favorite media, since now I have to consider that even the simplest games are at least aspects of some universe somewhere. It has me questioning what it even means to be someone who makes jump documents in the first place! Do jump documents exist in a platonic sense, independent of humans and through some esoteric process suffuse the jump maker who creates the jump document in a given universe, or are jump makers somehow able to allow benefactors to send jumpers on journeys to an infinite number of settings with wholly original jump docs ahead of time?
It is bizarre to have to seriously think of these things as fully real, but it is necessary if I am to survive. A real jumpchain seems like a grand journey, and it is, but it's also more than that. A lot more.
Right now in a few years I could, if I had a death wish, decide to go to the SCP-verse and contend with metaphysics and pataphysics beyond my current ability to properly conceive. I could visit all sorts of Backrooms continuities and deal with things like the fascinating if perhaps a touch convoluted, concept of limspace systems in the Liminal Archives continuity, which has a wholly original jump document separate from the more generic Backrooms jump document I made and shared in the universe I come from.
I have no desire to die again so I, of course, won't be visiting anything Backrooms or SCP related until I have something like the sort of protections afforded to me by the likes of Generic Cartoon World, or some other decently high-power setting.
That said, I already have some powerful stuff in my toolkit. My telekinesis is growing at an impressive pace, and in months I don't doubt that I'll be able to match the feats performed by Matt, if not Andrew's own chemically and emotionally enhanced abilities, at the end of the film. Plus I have some decently powerful meta-knowledge of a wide range of settings which could allow me to punch above my weight class so long as I don't fuck around.
Going further beyond my explicit, external powers like shapeshifting and telekinesis I have… what could be described as a "Noblebright" ability in the form of "A Helpful Hand". I have a berserker power in the form of "Misery Loves Company". I have an uncapper and a superpower-specific creativity booster in the forms of "Lifting Yourself Up" and "Supernatural Savant". I also have an underrated gem in the form of a powerful social perk named "The Game Of Life".
For someone like me, as in someone doing more than theory-crafting some build for a game, social perks are worth way more than the points they'd cost. My ability to befriend people and to use my words as weapons is more dangerous than my telekinesis is, both right now and in general.
Any jumper with the right superpowers or eldritch pet can scare someone into doing their bidding but that just means that someone scarier could get the frightened supplicants to turn on the tyrants they swore to obey. Real power, in a very meaningful sense, can be found on the tongues of the cunning, the charismatic, and the ones who can persuade you to join them without fear or coercion, but through words, presence, and their ability to inspire belief.
If Steve had survived the events of the film and lived to grow up he would have been terrifying. He was more than a superhero, he was popular, and while some folks may struggle to recognize the real power of that, every superhero who has some level of popularity passively benefits from it.
I fall asleep thinking of the critical, life-changing nature of some perks that on a jump document may not sound particularly worthwhile but in a real jumpchain are positively transformative. I have more dreams of what I could be and could do in the future. When I awaken I will quickly get ready for school, use telekinesis to deftly manipulate my backpack, and make a quick breakfast before I run out to the bus stop and get whisked away to do more learning and to have chances to further befriend Andrew and Matt.