The character creator did not arrive as a collection of menus.
The black glass beneath Jinx's feet brightened from somewhere below, thin veins of silver spreading outward until he stood at the center of an enormous circular platform suspended among the stars. Something moved through the darkness opposite him, first no more than a distortion in the distant lights, and then a human silhouette rose slowly from the floor as though invisible hands were sculpting it upward from liquid glass. It possessed no face, no hair, no sex, no distinguishing marks at all—only the smooth proportions of an unfinished mannequin waiting for somebody to decide what kind of person it ought to become.
Jinx walked around it before touching anything. The movement alone nearly distracted him from the interface, because his bare feet made the faintest sound against the polished surface and he could feel a subtle change in temperature whenever he passed through the pale light drifting around the model. Etheria's first great technological miracle, apparently, was making a man forget for several seconds that his real body was lying perfectly motionless in a bedroom in Vermont because he had become preoccupied with how convincingly imaginary flooring felt against the arch of an imaginary foot.
Then the scan began.
A pale ring appeared above his head and passed downward through him without heat or pressure, leaving translucent lines hanging briefly in the air where it traveled. Etheria requested permission to access the biometric profile gathered during calibration, and after Jinx accepted, the featureless model opposite him began changing in small increments: height first, then shoulder width, limb proportion, facial dimensions, musculature, skeletal structure, and dozens of measurements he recognized only because of his medical education. The System seemed less interested in reproducing his actual appearance than establishing a biological starting point from which it could determine what alterations remained physically and neurologically comfortable.
More information unfolded beside the mannequin. BIOLOGICAL BASELINE ACQUIRED. MOTOR PROFILE ACQUIRED. VISUAL SELF-PERCEPTION MAPPING COMPLETE. PSYCHOLOGICAL COMPATIBILITY ANALYSIS COMPLETE. The last one held Jinx's attention longer than the others, partly because he disliked the phrase psychological compatibility analysis on principle and partly because there was no explanation of what it had analyzed or how deeply it believed it had been invited to look.
"Nosy little thing, aren't you?" he murmured, and the interface offered no defense of itself.
The cosmetic controls blossomed outward in response to his attention, arranging themselves in several concentric layers around the unfinished body. There were conventional adjustments for height, face, body shape, skin, hair, eye color, voice, scars, tattoos, piercings, and innumerable smaller features, but the deeper he looked, the stranger the options became. Etheria allowed asymmetry rather than forcing mathematically perfect faces, offered hundreds of regional facial structures rather than vague ethnic presets, and even let players decide things as trivial as whether their nails naturally chipped, whether their hair curled differently in humidity, or whether old scars became irritated in cold weather.
Jinx found himself unexpectedly pleased by that. Whoever had built the creator understood that imperfection was part of recognizability, which meant whoever had designed it possessed more artistic sense than the committee responsible for most games he had played. He was still browsing the absurdly detailed hair physics options when another portion of the interface quietly unfolded several feet to his right.
Unlike the cosmetic menus, this one had not waited for him.
A vertical procession of symbols hovered in the darkness, each accompanied by a name and a short description. Jinx turned toward them and realized, after reading the first few, that the System had already begun recommending starting classes based on whatever it had learned from the scan, his account questionnaire, his physical history, and perhaps that vaguely threatening psychological assessment it had refused to explain.
Most were exactly what he would have expected. Swordsman sat near the top, its description emphasizing adaptable melee combat, weapon fundamentals, and physical growth; beneath it waited Pugilist, Hunter, Rogue, Craftsman, Scholar, Apothecary, and Mage Initiate, each one accompanied by starting affinities and the kinds of early Skills the class made easier to acquire without actually locking a player into them. Jinx had apparently qualified for so many mundane classes that the list continued beyond the visible edge of the interface and required him to scroll.
The advanced recommendations were more interesting. Arcane Artificer had appeared because of his combination of engineering knowledge, craftsmanship, and magical aptitude; War Surgeon combined medical knowledge with close combat and battlefield support, which sounded sufficiently irresponsible that Jinx briefly considered it on name alone. Spellblade, Rune Smith, Combat Alchemist, and Beast Scholar followed, while one unusually specific recommendation called Choreographer of Steel seemed to have emerged from the uncomfortable intersection of his dance training, sword experience, and whatever Etheria thought it had learned about how his body understood motion.
None of them felt like Mira.
That was the thought that eventually made him stop reading.
Jinx leaned back slightly and surveyed the glowing procession again, remembering the line in her note about a gift he would recognize when he found it. Mira had known enough about him by the end of those three weeks to understand that simply handing him an overpowered starting class would bore him almost immediately, and she certainly knew him well enough to predict that he would examine every suspicious corner of the interface before choosing anything conventional.
His eyes drifted beyond the recommendations.
There was something there.
Not beneath the list exactly, but farther away from it, almost beyond the reach of the light. Jinx narrowed his eyes and walked several steps to the side, causing the class interface to rotate with him, yet the faint mark remained tucked behind its outer edge as though it had been deliberately placed where someone browsing normally would never notice it.
He moved closer.
The symbol was barely illuminated. There was no ornate crest like Spellblade, no illustrated weapon like Swordsman, no animated sigil like Arcane Artificer; only a small black tile whose edges could be distinguished from the surrounding darkness because the stars behind it seemed unwilling to shine through. Across its surface, written in letters so dark they became visible only when Jinx changed his viewing angle, was a single word.
CURSED
Jinx waited for the usual description to appear.
Nothing happened.
He brought his hand near it without touching, expecting perhaps an information panel, compatibility percentage, warning, prerequisite list, anything that would explain why an apparently hidden class had appeared among his starting recommendations. The other classes immediately responded when examined, offering histories, progression tendencies, suggested attributes, initial equipment, and broad descriptions of what a player might become through them.
Cursed remained silent.
There was not even a class icon.
Jinx's first thought was that Mira had done this deliberately.
His second came with a memory of her voice three weeks earlier, using that exact word in a way he had not understood at the time.
The stars of the character creator remained around him, but his attention had already slipped somewhere else. The black tile beneath his fingers became the dark edge of a library shelf, the artificial chill of Etheria giving way in memory to the smell of old paper, dust, pencil graphite, and rain tapping against tall windows in a building that should have been empty.
Three weeks earlier, Jinx had gone to the Marlowe Library because there were days when even Mara's house felt too populated.
The town library was larger than Marlowe had any reasonable need for, an old stone building erected when wealthy New England families still donated architecture in hopes that carved names might produce a kind of civic immortality. Tall arched windows faced the street, oak shelves formed narrow corridors beneath a mezzanine, and several reading rooms occupied the older back wing where cellular reception became unreliable enough to discourage everyone under twenty-five. Jinx loved that particular flaw in the building.
Technically, the library closed at eight.
Technically, Jinx should not have possessed a key.
Mara, however, had once spent several months sleeping with the library's owner, and somewhere during that relationship the woman had decided lending Mara an emergency key was safer than asking why Mara occasionally needed access to municipal reference books after closing. The relationship ended amicably enough that nobody remembered to ask for the key back, and Jinx inherited its existence through the natural process by which Mara's questionable privileges eventually became family property.
He used the place as a hideaway.
That night he had occupied one of the long tables in the back reading room with enough paper, drawing equipment, reference books, and convenience-store food to suggest he planned to survive a siege. His tablet sat propped between two thick volumes on historical Japanese clothing, while several finished pages were spread beneath small brass weights so the ventilation system would not move them. A half-empty bottle of peach tea had gone warm beside his elbow hours earlier.
Across the top of the working document was a title he and his old friend Koyoharu Gotouge had argued about for nearly an entire evening before finally settling on it.
Kimetsu no Yaiba.
The project had begun partly as friendship and partly as Jinx failing to mind his own business.
Gotouge had been one of those long-term friends with whom Jinx could go months without speaking and then resume an unfinished argument without either acknowledging the missing time. He had conceived much of the central story, several of its characters, and the emotional backbone beneath it, but recently his attention had been divided by a new girlfriend and the uncomplicated fact that being happily distracted made writing deadlines considerably less interesting. When Gotouge complained that he was falling behind, Jinx made the mistake of saying he could help.
The word help became expansive very quickly.
Jinx had started drawing chapters.
Then rewriting panels.
Then creating visual concepts.
Then discussing how the combat system should actually function until he became irritated by vague supernatural sword techniques and designed one himself.
Breathing Techniques began as an adaptation of something much older.
Jinx's grandfather had served through three major wars and returned from each with increasingly unpleasant opinions about people who romanticized combat. Vietnam had been the one that changed him most severely, though he rarely discussed the country itself; what survived instead was an art he had created there around the conviction that hesitation killed more reliably than weapons did.
He called it Slaughter Art.
Its central doctrine was brutally simple: every strike was the finishing strike.
Not could be. Not should be. The practitioner entered every attack with the absolute conviction that this blow, this cut, this kick, this thrust, this shot, would end the confrontation. If it failed, the next attack was not treated as an extension of the previous attempt; psychologically it became another complete ending, even if it happened to be the hundredth strike thrown.
Jinx had learned it young enough that the philosophy settled somewhere beneath conscious technique. His grandfather also taught him that killing intent changed with experience, becoming denser and more precise as someone accumulated enough death to understand the difference between wanting to kill and knowing how killing actually happened. Jinx had taken the more survivable portions of those lessons, stripped away what would make Gotouge's heroes resemble traumatized infantrymen, combined the principles with controlled respiration and historical swordsmanship, and transformed them into the foundation of Breathing Techniques.
The demons required something different.
That became Blood Demon Arts, supernatural abilities shaped by personality, trauma, desire, obsession, and whatever remained of the person beneath monstrosity. Gotouge had loved that concept immediately because it made powers extensions of character rather than interchangeable spells, and between them they divided the major demons roughly in half so neither would be trapped designing every antagonist alone.
By that evening Jinx had reached chapter ten and finished nearly every major design assigned to him.
Only one had remained.
Kokushibo.
The unfinished figure dominated his tablet when Jinx finally leaned back and flexed cramped fingers. Six eyes stared from the face he had spent far too long balancing between beauty and something subtly wrong, while the sword at the character's side incorporated organic details that made weapon and wielder feel uncomfortably related. Jinx had revised the clothing three times, discarded an overcomplicated silhouette, rebuilt the sword markings, and finally developed a Breathing Style that felt worthy of someone positioned so high above almost every other swordsman in the setting.
Moon Breathing.
Its forms borrowed visual language from crescent blades while deliberately breaking the clean predictability of conventional sword arcs. Jinx wanted an opponent watching Kokushibo to understand intellectually that a sword had been swung and still find themselves incapable of determining where safety existed afterward. He filled the attack patterns with overlapping crescents and irregular trajectories, making beauty itself part of the threat.
When the final design settled into place, Jinx stared at it for nearly a minute before deciding Gotouge was either going to love it or accuse him of deliberately making everyone else look inadequate. Either outcome was acceptable. He saved the file, backed it up twice out of habit, and was reaching for the peach tea when he heard something beyond the reading room.
At first he assumed the building was settling.
Old libraries spoke constantly after dark. Wood clicked as temperatures changed, pipes shifted behind walls, and the heating system occasionally produced noises that sounded remarkably like a Victorian child dying somewhere in the basement. Jinx had spent enough nights there to recognize most of those sounds.
This one breathed.
He stopped with the bottle halfway to his mouth.
The sound came again, distant enough that he could not place it precisely but human enough that the hair along his arms tightened. It was not loud crying, not the dramatic sobbing of someone hoping to be found; it sounded strangled, repeatedly forced quiet and then escaping anyway.
Jinx looked toward the dark doorway.
Nobody else was supposed to be inside.
He considered calling Mara before deciding that explaining why he had been illegally occupying a municipal building after closing while she possessed the key through an ex-lover would create several conversations he was not emotionally prepared to have. Instead he took his phone, left the tablet where it was, and followed the sound through the shelves.
The library changed at night when only one lamp remained on behind him. Aisles that seemed harmless during the day stretched into strips of darkness between high shelves, and every reflective protective cover caught enough light to imitate movement at the edge of vision. Jinx moved slowly through the first floor, checked the public bathrooms, found nothing near the reference desks, and finally heard the crying more clearly from the older back wing.
He followed it past local history and genealogy.
At the end of a narrow aisle, where two shelves formed a pocket hidden from almost every direct line of sight, someone was sitting on the floor.
For a moment Jinx mistook her for an overturned pile of dark clothing. Then she lifted her head slightly, and the faint violet spill from an emergency light reached a pale face behind crooked glasses and hair so long that black and deep-purple strands had gathered around her body like fabric. Several books lay nearby, one open facedown in a way that offended Jinx almost independently of the situation.
She was beautiful.
That registered because Jinx possessed eyes, not because beauty seemed particularly relevant to what was happening. Her cheeks were wet, her nose had gone red from crying, dark makeup had blurred beneath her eyes, and the oversized black sweater slipping from one shoulder made her look less glamorous than exhausted. She held herself with both arms wrapped around her middle, not protectively so much as though some part of her might otherwise come apart.
Jinx stopped far enough away not to crowd her.
The woman saw him and tried to wipe her face with the heel of one hand, an attempt at dignity rendered hopeless by the fact that she was sitting on the floor of a closed library surrounded by tissues she had apparently stolen from a nearby desk. "Sorry," she managed, her voice rough enough to suggest she had been there awhile. "I thought nobody came back here."
Jinx looked behind himself at the empty aisle before lowering himself carefully onto the floor several feet from her. He did not ask why she was inside, partly because his own presence was equally illegal and partly because there were moments when demanding chronology from someone who could barely breathe seemed obscene. "Good news," he said instead, settling his back against the opposite shelf. "You picked probably the best building in town for a breakdown. Very respectable atmosphere. Lots of dead authors. No witnesses with useful social skills."
For several seconds she simply stared at him.
Then something escaped her that was half sob and half involuntary laugh.
Jinx took that as sufficient reason to continue. "There's also a terrible vending machine downstairs if you want to complete the experience. I bought peach tea from it four hours ago, and I'm increasingly convinced the peach died before manufacturing."
That got another broken little sound from her, and this time she covered her mouth because laughing apparently hurt. Jinx did not celebrate the success or tell her things were going to be fine; people had said both kinds of nonsense to him often enough that he had developed a private hatred for comfort requiring predictions nobody could make.
He sat with her instead.
Minutes passed before either spoke again.
The woman finally introduced herself as Mira Kurosawa, though she gave the name with the distracted hesitation of somebody unsure why names mattered at the moment. Jinx offered his own and nothing more, resisting the social instinct to demand an explanation as payment for staying beside her.
Mira eventually supplied one without being asked.
At first the story came in fragments. She worked for a technology company; she had been there for years; there was a project that mattered to her more than anything she had ever made, and the company had taken it. Jinx initially assumed she meant intellectual-property theft in the ordinary corporate sense, but the longer Mira spoke, the stranger the scale became.
She had built a world.
Not alone in every technical detail, but the architecture beneath it had been hers: the central systems, the design philosophy, the strange interaction between progression and understanding, the insistence that people inside the world remember instead of reset conveniently, the underlying structures other developers had later built upon. She had spent years turning the idea into something functional, losing sleep over it, rewriting pieces everyone else insisted could not work, and watching it become large enough that executives finally began paying attention.
Then paying attention became ownership.
Her name disappeared from places where it should have been.
People who had joined later became the public creators.
Decisions were made above her.
She received money, technically, but nowhere close to what the project became worth and nowhere near the authority she should have possessed over something built from so much of her life. Worse than the money was being treated inside the company as difficult, obsessive, territorial, unstable—the strange woman who could not understand that success required letting more reasonable people take control.
Jinx gradually stopped leaning against the shelf.
Mira spoke faster as the story came loose. Words accumulated faster than she could organize them, years of humiliation trying to exit through a single conversation with a stranger she had met ten minutes earlier. At some point the project became Etheria, and Jinx felt the peculiar sensation of discovering that the crying woman on a library floor was describing the most technologically impossible game on the planet as though it were a child taken from her house.
Mira eventually reached the reason she was there.
She had used nearly all of her paid time off simply to disappear from work for a while. She had driven without much of a destination, slept badly, stopped answering messages, and found herself in Marlowe because one road led into another until distance became easier than deciding where she actually wanted to go. The library had been open when she entered; she hid in the back after closing because going to the hotel room she had rented meant being alone with thoughts that frightened her.
Her hands had started shaking again.
"I don't think anybody would actually miss me," Mira said, staring at them rather than at Jinx. The confession arrived quietly after everything else, without drama, and that quietness frightened him more than if she had screamed it. "They'd miss what I know. They'd panic because of the systems only I can fix, and somebody would probably make a statement about how tragic it was, but that isn't the same thing."
Jinx moved before deciding to.
He crossed the small space between them and crouched in front of her, catching her face gently between both hands because Mira had spent the last several minutes refusing to look anywhere except down. Her skin was cold beneath his palms, and her glasses had slipped low enough that he pushed them carefully back into place with one thumb.
"Look at me," he said, with none of the joking softness he had used earlier. Mira's eyes reluctantly found his through the lenses, wet and exhausted and slightly bewildered by the beautiful stranger holding her face as though they had known each other longer than half an hour.
Jinx did not tell her that suicide was selfish.
He did not tell her everything happened for a reason.
He did not tell her to think positively, count her blessings, consider how fortunate she was compared with someone suffering elsewhere, or endure any of the other phrases people sometimes offered when they wanted another person's despair to become simpler than it actually was. Instead he sat down in front of her and told her something he almost never told strangers.
He told her about Vesper.
He told her enough about Vivienne.
He spoke about the weekend without giving every detail, because the details were less important than the point at which he had realized people he loved could reinterpret his pain until it became convenient for them. Then he told her about the six months afterward, not everything there either, but more than Mara had received and more than he understood why he was giving to someone whose surname he had learned less than an hour before.
"There were months when I wondered whether I was the problem," he admitted after a long while, one shoulder against the shelf beside her. His voice had gone quiet, not brittle the way it became when Mara approached those memories but tired in a more honest fashion. "Not whether I deserved everything. I'm too arrogant for that conclusion. I kept wondering whether my pride was the reason every betrayal felt like proof that something fundamental had been broken."
Mira listened without interrupting.
Jinx stared toward the dark ceiling between shelves. "I'd think maybe if I were less proud, I could forgive people easier. Maybe if I expected less loyalty, nobody could betray me. Maybe trusting somebody and then getting angry when they used it against me was just another version of believing I deserved special treatment." He exhaled slowly before giving a small, humorless smile. "I'm also too proud to kill myself, which might be the first useful thing my ego has ever done for society."
Mira made a wet, startled laugh and immediately began crying harder.
This time Jinx did not try another joke.
She leaned into him first.
He wrapped both arms around her and settled against the shelf while Mira buried her face against his shoulder, long black-and-purple hair spilling over his arm and across both of their laps. Neither of them said anything useful after that.
Hours passed.
The library heating shut itself down sometime after midnight, leaving the older wing progressively colder while they sat on the floor beneath an emergency light. Jinx eventually pulled off his jacket and spread it across Mira's shoulders without asking, and she eventually stopped crying hard enough to fall into the occasional exhausted tremor instead.
They talked again only in pieces.
Childhood came first.
Then games.
Then books.
Mira discovered that Jinx had been playing tabletop RPGs since childhood and immediately demanded to know his preferred class, only to become irrationally offended when he explained that he rarely played the same thing twice. Jinx learned that Mira once ruined an entire Dungeons & Dragons campaign by deciding the villain's economic policy made enough sense that her character joined him, and she defended the choice for fifteen minutes before admitting the Dungeon Master had been her cousin and remained angry about it years later.
Anime followed naturally.
That was where Mira became dangerous.
Jinx made the mistake of mentioning that he sometimes worked in manga and animation because they were hobbies he enjoyed more than most things associated with his formal education. Mira's entire posture changed, exhaustion momentarily displaced by the unmistakable intensity of a nerd discovering previously hidden loot.
She wanted names.
Jinx gave her several.
Then several more.
Manga he had helped storyboard. Manhwa where he had designed combat systems because a friend complained theirs felt boring. Anime productions where he contributed creature concepts, backgrounds, weapon designs, choreography, or music without caring enough about public credit to attach his name prominently. Some projects involved weeks of work and others a drunken afternoon in which somebody called him because they needed an idea by morning.
When he eventually mentioned Kimetsu no Yaiba, Mira stared at him long enough to make Jinx wonder whether he had said something offensive.
Then she demanded to see it.
They returned to the reading room at nearly two in the morning.
Mira stood bent over his tablet with her glasses reflecting the pages while Jinx scrolled through the chapters completed so far. She became increasingly animated as he explained Breathing Techniques, interrupted him three times to ask whether different breathing styles could branch from common origins, then made him open his design notes when he mentioned Blood Demon Arts.
Kokushibo ended any remaining hope of sleeping.
Mira sat in his chair without permission and spent nearly ten minutes zooming in on the six eyes, sword, clothing, and crescent motifs while Jinx leaned against the table eating stale crackers from a vending-machine packet. She told him the design was disgusting in a tone so reverent that he understood it as the highest possible compliment.
That was the first night.
The second involved dinner.
By the fourth, Mira had met Mara and somehow survived.
By the end of the first week, Jinx knew what kind of tea Mira ordered when she was pretending not to need caffeine, and Mira knew that Jinx reorganized books on other people's shelves if left unsupervised. During the second week they discovered enough overlap in childhood interests that entire evenings disappeared into conversations about tabletop campaigns, old RPGs, obscure anime, mythological systems, speculative biology, fantasy economies, terrible adaptations, and which fictional governments would collapse within a year if subjected to actual logistics.
Mira learned how Jinx's imagination worked.
That seemed to fascinate her more than the famous projects.
She would give him a premise and watch the answer multiply. Ask what he would do with a fire spell and Jinx would begin by discussing combustion, oxygen displacement, heat transfer, smoke, pressure, visibility, terrain denial, metallurgy, and the philosophical question of whether magically generated flame required fuel. Ask him to design a monster and he would start wondering what it ate, how it reproduced, whether farmers viewed it as a pest, which predators evolved around it, and what kind of religion a village might create after living beside it for five hundred years.
Mira stopped merely listening and began taking notes.
Jinx noticed.
He chose not to ask why.
Somewhere between the library floor and the third week, the strangeness of their meeting became familiarity with frightening ease. Neither pretended the first night had not happened, but they also refused to make despair the foundation of everything that followed; they cooked badly together, argued over game mechanics, watched anime until sunrise, visited a used bookstore three towns away, and once spent nearly four hours designing a D&D dungeon neither of them had any intention of actually running.
Jinx trusted her.
That fact should have bothered him more than it did.
Six months of learning not to trust anyone had not disappeared because a beautiful woman cried beside him in a library, nor had three weeks somehow become sufficient evidence that Mira could never hurt him. His mind knew all of that perfectly well.
Something beneath it ignored the argument.
Maybe it was because Mira had first met him without asking for anything. Maybe it was because she knew what it felt like to have something deeply personal taken and then explained back to you by people who believed their interpretation mattered more than yours. Maybe two damaged people had simply recognized the shape of the other's exhaustion before either had enough time to construct the usual defenses.
Then Mira's paid leave ran out.
She told him two nights before she left that she had to go back.
Jinx did not ask her to stay.
Mira did not promise she would return immediately.
They had both become suspicious of promises large enough to sound beautiful.
The Etheria system arrived after she was already preparing to leave Marlowe.
On their last morning together, Jinx had helped load her luggage into the back of a dark rental car outside Mara's house while autumn wind drove leaves along the gravel. Mira wore oversized glasses, a black sweater slipping lazily from one shoulder, and enough black-and-purple hair to make the wind an active logistical problem; she eventually gave up fighting it and let the long strands blow around her while Jinx checked for the third time that she had not forgotten her charger.
She had hugged him before getting into the car.
Not the careful hug of two people politely acknowledging intimacy, but the kind that tightened halfway through because neither person knew when they would be in the same place again.
When Mira finally stepped back, she kept both hands around his wrists for a moment. "I left you something," she told him, and when Jinx asked what, she smiled with an expression that immediately convinced him further questions were useless.
"The setup should arrive soon," she continued. "Use it. Actually use it, Jinx. Don't spend three days taking the chair apart because you want to know how the pressure system works."
He had been offended by the accuracy.
Mira opened the driver's door, then paused with one hand resting on it. Something changed in her expression at the last second, humor becoming quieter while she looked at him across the roof of the car.
"Meeting you might have been the greatest gift I've had in years," she said.
Jinx remembered that part clearly.
He remembered what followed even better.
"Or," Mira added, stretching the word strangely as amusement returned behind her glasses, "the greatest curse."
She had put far too much emphasis on it.
Jinx noticed at the time, because Jinx noticed nearly everything. He assumed she was being dramatic and filed the odd pronunciation somewhere inside the vast warehouse of details his brain collected without permission.
Now he understood.
The memory dissolved.
Stars returned around him.
Jinx stood once more before the character-creation platform, one hand hovering inches away from the nearly invisible black tile at the edge of the class menu.
CURSED.
Still no description.
Still no listed starting abilities.
Still no attribute recommendations, equipment information, progression route, difficulty rating, or warning explaining what choosing it might actually do. Every rational piece of game design suggested that selecting an undocumented class hidden outside the normal interface was an idiotic way to begin a character in a world where choices could carry permanent consequences.
Jinx considered all of that.
Then he remembered Mira standing beside the rental car.
The greatest gift.
Or the greatest curse.
A quiet laugh escaped him, not because the joke was especially good but because she had planted the answer directly in front of him three weeks ago and trusted his brain to keep it until the question finally appeared. She had known exactly what he would do once he noticed the class.
More importantly, Jinx realized, so had he.
Trust still felt unnatural after the last six months. He distrusted kindness, examined gifts for hidden costs, and had become skilled at imagining every possible way affection might eventually be weaponized, yet somehow the woman he had known for three weeks had found the single place where suspicion did not immediately win.
Perhaps that should have frightened him.
Instead it felt almost peaceful.
Jinx placed his palm against the black tile.
He did not ask for more information, search for hidden warnings, or reconsider one of the perfectly respectable advanced classes glowing beside it. For once, he allowed a decision to rest on something other than proof.
"I trust you, Mira."
His fingers closed around CURSED.
He chose it without hesitation.
The instant Jinx touched CURSED, the class tile did not brighten the way the others had. Instead the stars around the platform seemed to draw inward, their cold light narrowing toward a single point until something small and square dropped out of the darkness and came to rest on the black glass in front of him with absurd gentleness. It was a gift box, black paper tied with a violet ribbon so precisely folded that Jinx knew before touching it whose idea of humor this had been.
He crouched in front of it and smiled despite himself. Mira had never struck him as the kind of person who believed in giving something quietly when she could instead arrange for the gift to arrive wearing a second, more theatrical gift as a hat. When he untied the ribbon and lifted the lid, light spilled upward in a widening circle and assembled itself into a roulette table floating at knee height, its rim surrounded by five dark boards bearing nothing except large question marks.
For a few seconds he only watched it settle into readiness. The wheel itself looked more ceremonial than gaudy, black lacquer broken by fine silver markings, the sort of thing a less restrained game would have accompanied with explosions, fanfare, and some shrieking announcer demanding that he appreciate how lucky he was. Etheria allowed the object to sit there in the silence instead, while a small silver ball appeared beside his right hand and hung patiently in the air.
Jinx picked it up and rolled it between finger and thumb. Whatever Mira had arranged here, he doubted she had simply hidden five absurdly powerful items behind a button and expected him to accept them without friction; she could be reckless in almost every other respect, but her opinions about game design became strangely severe whenever fairness entered the conversation. If she was going to cheat for him, apparently she intended to retain enough ceremony around the cheating that she could still sleep at night.
He flicked the ball onto the wheel. It caught the outer track and rattled around it in quick metallic bursts, circling once, twice, three times before losing speed and falling among the numbered pockets, where it bounced hard enough to threaten several possibilities before finally settling on four. One of the five boards trembled at once, its question mark splitting down the middle as the darkness peeled apart.
The object that emerged made Jinx forget the roulette for a moment. A katana hung vertically in front of him, its proportions and grotesque beauty so immediately familiar that recognition arrived before the information panel did, and his eyes followed the organic markings along the blade with the peculiar satisfaction of seeing something he had once only drawn given weight and three-dimensional form. Kokushibo's sword rotated slowly beneath an artificial moonlight that did not exist anywhere else on the platform.
The description confirmed what his eyes already knew and then added considerably more. The weapon was identified as a key to Moon Breathing, capable of changing its length and, at higher expressions of its ability, sprouting three additional blades from the primary weapon so that its attack geometry could cease behaving like anything a conventional swordsman expected. Jinx read that portion twice, remembering hours spent designing Kokushibo's sword, breathing forms, and crescent patterns for Gotouge, and a laugh slipped out before he bothered containing it.
Perhaps Mira's principles were not quite as indestructible as he had credited them with being. Somewhere during those three weeks in Marlowe she must have found time between crying in libraries, arguing with him about fictional governments, going back to work remotely, and generally pretending she was not still exhausted to code one of his own creations into Etheria. He could picture her hunched over a laptop with that troublesome curtain of black-and-purple hair falling across the keyboard, silently pleased with herself because she knew exactly how long it would take him to recognize what she had done.
The sword folded into violet light once he accepted it, and the roulette remained. Jinx reached for the second ball with more enthusiasm than dignity, sent it skittering around the wheel, and watched it make several circuits before settling into another numbered slot. This time the corresponding board opened upon an unfamiliar emblem rendered in black and pale gold.
GODSKIN CELEBRANT
That name lifted one of his eyebrows. Godskin carried associations he did not particularly cherish, mostly involving an old game called Elden Ring, a pair of bosses he still regarded as an unnecessary act of hostility toward the player base, and enough irritated late-night attempts that hearing the music from those fights could probably still raise his blood pressure. Celebrant, however, was not something he recognized from the game, and whatever Mira had made here seemed to have borrowed an idea rather than copied one.
The description was irritatingly evocative instead of useful. It spoke of ritual black flame, sacred slaughter, flesh treated as vestment, ceremonies conducted over the dead, and a form of magic that regarded divinity less as something worthy of worship than something capable of being killed. By the time Jinx reached a reference to god-slaying flame, he accepted the class with the quiet satisfaction of a man discovering that someone had remembered exactly which parts of an old game interested him most.
Receiving another class did not trouble him nearly as much as it probably would have troubled a conventional player. Etheria treated classes less like permanent identities than recognized disciplines, giving access to affinities, abilities, training directions, and conceptual foundations while allowing people to acquire others if they actually met the requirements. Most players would almost certainly choose one or two and specialize until those paths became frighteningly refined, whereas Jinx had spent most of his gaming life combining things respectable build guides insisted should never be placed near one another.
The third ball eventually stopped on FROST WITCH, a title that immediately dragged his thoughts toward Ranni despite the description never mentioning her. What followed made the comparison feel less ridiculous than it initially sounded: ice, snow, cold air, raw frost magic, and an unusually deep affinity for manipulating cold itself rather than merely producing frozen projectiles. Jinx imagined half a dozen combinations with Moon Breathing before the information panel had even finished displaying, which was usually a reliable indication that he was keeping something.
His fourth reward resisted interpretation more stubbornly. UNDERWORLD MAGE appeared over a dark sigil that seemed to shift whenever he tried focusing directly upon it, while its sparse description referred to chthonic magic, deathly currents, passages between states of existence, and forces moving beneath the ordinary architecture of life. It did not sound exactly like necromancy, nor quite like spirit magic, and Jinx eventually accepted it for the simple reason that not understanding something had always made him want to take it apart.
By the fifth spin, he no longer seriously believed the roulette represented ordinary luck. The last board divided into two sections rather than one, each revealing the silhouette of a weapon before the details sharpened, and both received the same gleaming EPIC classification. Jinx stared at the result and silently revised his estimate of Mira's moral restraint downward by several floors.
"If I ever see you again," he told the empty stars, examining the two weapons while they rotated slowly before him, "remind me that I owe you either dinner or ritual foot worship. I haven't decided which."
His words vanished into the strange open quiet of the creation space, but the thought left him smiling even after the two weapons dissolved into his newly created inventory. Five spins had given him Kokushibo's katana, three additional classes, and two Epic weapons, which meant either Mira had increased the odds drastically or probability itself had developed an inappropriate attachment to him. Knowing Mira, the former remained more likely, though he made a mental note never to exclude the possibility that she had somehow programmed the latter because she thought it would be funny.
The roulette collapsed once the final reward had been accepted, five emptied boards folding toward the center until the entire structure compressed into a bright point and winked away. Jinx turned toward the waiting character model expecting to finally finish creating himself, only for another box to appear directly in his path. This one was smaller than the first but wrapped in the same black paper and violet ribbon, with a luminous card tucked beneath the knot.
He removed the note rather than opening the present immediately. Mira's handwriting appeared across it in pale strokes, preserving all the little irregularities he had learned during those three weeks, including the narrow loops and the tendency for her lines to begin neat and become increasingly impatient toward the end. This one is different. It's probably the most guarded project I ever put into Etheria. If you accept it, you won't only be getting one yourself; you'll authorize the system, and more can begin appearing throughout the world under the right conditions. Think before you touch it. P.S. I hope you liked the first gift :)
The stupid smiley face warmed something in him before he had the opportunity to be annoyed by it. Etheria reproduced the physical sensation with unsettling precision—a lightness around the ribs, warmth behind the sternum, an almost unconscious softening of his shoulders—and for several seconds Jinx found himself wondering whether the interface was generating the bodily response or merely translating one already happening in the chair upstairs. He suspected the distinction mattered less than the fact that Mira could apparently still reach through a screen and make his carefully refrigerated heart behave inconveniently.
"Mira," he called into the dark, lifting his head toward the artificial stars. "If you're actually listening, I need to ask you something."
Nothing answered him immediately. The stars continued moving at their impossible distance while the blank mannequin waited beside the cosmetic interface, and Jinx gradually became aware that he had expected more than he had admitted to himself; some embarrassingly hopeful part of him had imagined Mira leaving an administrator window open at work just to watch his first login. He was already regretting speaking aloud when new writing began tracing itself through the air above the unopened gift.
Yes. I'm here.
Jinx read the four words twice. He could almost hear her saying them, and whatever complaint he might have made about her spying on him died before it reached his mouth because he was far too pleased to discover she actually was.
"Can you check something for me?" he asked, looking toward the floating handwriting as though enough concentration might let him see through it to wherever Mira was sitting. "Did Imu make an account? Nerona Imu."
No answer came.
Jinx waited, at first assuming Mira was simply searching. Half a minute passed, then another, and the absence of even a hold on began bothering him enough that he walked a slow circle around the present before stopping where he started. Only then did another possibility occur to him, accompanied by the memory of his sister appropriating a nickname he had given her years before and using it whenever she could get away with being annoyingly minimal.
"Try MU," he said. "All capitals. That was my nickname for her, and she stole it for half her usernames because apparently being my older twin gave her ownership rights over things I invented."
The handwriting did not answer instantly, but the delay this time was shorter. After perhaps a minute, several new lines appeared beneath Mira's first response: Found one. Active Etheria account under MU. Identity verification matches Nerona Imu.
Jinx stopped moving.
A username should not have been enough to make a year collapse so quickly, yet suddenly Imu felt less like somebody preserved somewhere behind unanswered calls and old photographs. She had registered for Etheria, chosen the same stupid little name he had once started calling her because shortening two syllables to one apparently amused him, and was somewhere close enough to this world that he might eventually encounter her inside it.
Memory supplied her with brutal generosity once the door opened. Imu leaning over him simply because being six-foot-six gave her opportunities she considered morally irresponsible to waste; Imu stealing food from his plate despite having an identical order; Imu introducing herself as the eldest child whenever thirteen minutes could conceivably provide social authority; Imu standing beside him at funerals, graduations, hospital rooms, parties, and the countless unimportant days that only became precious after enough of them disappeared.
His eyes dropped toward Mira's second gift.
"If this thing is what I think it is," he said after a while, "can you give one to her too?"
The request sat in the artificial night without receiving an immediate response. Jinx rubbed his thumb slowly across the ribbon, uncomfortable now in a way no combat system could have accomplished, because asking Mira to give his sister some unknown treasure was easier than admitting why the request mattered.
"We haven't spoken in a year," he continued. "She tried. I didn't." He could already feel the temptation to turn the confession into a joke, and for once he let the opportunity pass untouched. "When I disappeared, I disappeared from everyone, but Imu kept calling longer than most. I'd see her name and think I'd answer once I knew what the hell I was supposed to say. Then I waited so long that answering meant explaining why I hadn't answered before, so I waited again."
He looked away from Mira's handwriting and toward the stars, where there was nothing human enough to return his gaze. Imu had always loved him loudly, with very little elegance and even less respect for personal space; she could turn concern into an insult, affection into an argument, and protection into something requiring an attorney afterward. Jinx had never once wondered whether his sister would come if he called, and perhaps that certainty had made avoiding her worse because there had been no convenient betrayal upon which to blame the distance.
"She's the one person I never really had to wonder about," he said quietly. "Even when we hated each other for a day, or a week, or however long twins are legally allowed to be homicidal before it becomes a family problem, I knew where she stood. When everything happened, I think that made talking to her harder, because I knew she'd still love me afterward and I didn't know what to do with that."
His hand tightened slightly around the violet ribbon. For months he had told himself that silence was easier for everyone, that Imu had her own life and would eventually become tired enough of chasing him to stop, but the thought had never survived contact with the version of his sister he actually knew.
"I don't know if she'd answer me now," Jinx admitted. "Maybe she would. Maybe she'd tell me to go fuck myself first and then answer, which would honestly be more like her. But if you can give her one of these, I want her to have it."
The words nearly ended there, yet something about Mira waiting on the other side made stopping feel cowardly. He looked back toward the hovering script and let the rest come without polishing it into something prettier.
"I want her to know I still think about her," he said. "I want her to know that when I got something impossible, something that might never exist anywhere else, my first thought wasn't about keeping it for myself. It was that Imu should have one too. I'm not ready to call her yet, and I know that makes me a coward in a completely different direction, but she's still my sister. She's still my other half, even if I've spent the last year pretending cutting people off meant I stopped carrying them with me."
Mira did not answer.
At first Jinx remained standing, then eventually sat on the edge of the raised platform with the unopened gift between his boots. Minutes accumulated strangely in the character-creation void, without clocks, changing light, or any bodily discomfort to mark them, and he found himself imagining Mira somewhere in the real world considering not only his request but what accepting it meant for whatever secret project waited in the box.
Nearly twenty minutes passed.
Jinx spent them badly. He paced once, sat again, reread Mira's original note twice, resisted a third reading because even his tolerance for his own sentimentality had limits, and briefly considered telling her to forget the whole thing before recognizing that doing so would merely convert vulnerability into cowardice with extra steps. When Mira's handwriting finally returned, it appeared more slowly than before.
All right. MU gets one too.
Jinx stared at the sentence until its edges blurred slightly—not because he was crying, he decided with the sort of reasoning that would have convinced nobody, but because an artificial star had probably done something irritating to his eyes. He lowered his head, smiled at the black glass between his boots, and stayed there long enough to let himself feel grateful without immediately searching for some way to make the emotion less embarrassing.
"Thank you," he said.
There was no joke attached to it.
He reached for the second present.
The violet ribbon loosened beneath his fingers and the black wrapping disintegrated into hundreds of tiny motes, revealing a fruit suspended above his palms. Its shape carried the unmistakable visual language of a Devil Fruit from One Piece: swollen, unnatural curves covered in spiraling patterns, a twisted stem rising into a crescent, and an overall appearance suggesting that ordinary botany had been consulted only so its rules could be deliberately insulted. White and midnight blue wound through the skin in elaborate swirls while a thin aura of blue flame licked around it without producing heat.
Recognition came first, confusion second. Jinx knew the series far too well to mistake what category of object he was seeing, but the fruit itself belonged to nothing he remembered from canon, which meant Mira had either created an original one or altered something so radically that recognizing its source would require more information. He leaned closer and laughed softly, his earlier gratitude acquiring a different flavor.
"You absolute fucking nerd," he murmured, and affection turned the insult almost gentle. The idea that Mira had hidden an entire Devil Fruit framework inside the same MMO her company had taken from her suddenly made perfect sense in the particular irrational way Mira herself had begun to make sense.
The information beside it refused to identify the fruit. There was no name, type, listed ability, rarity, or hint beyond the fact that accepting it would activate whatever system Mira had described in her note, and Jinx briefly considered whether that ignorance was another of her principles asserting itself. Whatever power he was receiving, she apparently intended him to discover it the same way the rest of Etheria expected discovery to happen: by living with the consequences long enough to understand them.
Jinx touched the fruit.
It dissolved through his hand in a rush of blue-white light, spiraling once around his arm before sinking through the false skin and vanishing beneath the black platform. A message appeared where the fruit had been, spare enough to raise more questions than it answered: UNIQUE PROJECT ACCEPTED. WORLD SEED AUTHORIZED. ADDITIONAL INSTANCES MAY NOW EMERGE UNDER APPROPRIATE CONDITIONS.
He read the final line several times. Somewhere beyond this character-creation space, whatever rules Mira had written were now becoming part of Etheria itself, which meant other players might eventually discover Devil Fruits without knowing who had placed them there or why. Somewhere else, perhaps before she even understood the significance of the thing appearing to her, Imu would receive one because her brother had asked.
That thought remained with him when he turned back toward the mannequin.
The cosmetic interface brightened around the blank body as he approached, unfolding in translucent layers responsive to his attention. Character creation had always interested Jinx more than most people admitted it should, because the moment between being given a blank body and deciding what it ought to become revealed peculiar things about the person making the choice. Some players built themselves exactly; others built the person they wished mirrors gave them, while still others created something deliberately alien because living inside a body they would never possess was half the reason virtual worlds existed.
Etheria went much further than the games Jinx had grown up with. Sex, gender, anatomy, voice, hormonal profile, secondary sex characteristics, reproductive configuration, presentation, and social identity had all been separated into related but independently adjustable categories, avoiding the old design assumption that selecting one word should automatically determine every feature beneath it. There were conventional male and female configurations, intersex variations, and other biological arrangements recognized by the world Jinx had grown up in rather than treated as novelty options buried beneath comedy.
That mattered because the real world itself had changed over the previous century. Roughly a hundred years earlier, children had begun appearing unpredictably with a stable sex configuration that older medical language had struggled to categorize, most commonly presenting outwardly as female while possessing both female and male sexual anatomy; popular culture eventually settled on futa, a word that had started crudely before being reclaimed and normalized by many of the people it described. They appeared across every ethnic population, though historical circumstance, genetics, and demographic concentration eventually produced an unusually high prevalence among people of African descent, approaching ten percent in some descendant populations.
Acceptance had not followed discovery. For decades futa people had been subjected to many of the same ancient human cruelties previously inflicted along racial, sexual, and gender lines: exclusion, fetishization, medical abuse, segregation in certain regions, employment restrictions, violence, and the endlessly inventive habit societies possessed for constructing philosophy around whichever group they currently wanted permission to mistreat. Black communities had often been among the earliest to organize beside them in countries where the two histories overlapped, and that shared experience left political, cultural, and familial ties that lasted long after laws began improving.
Equal rights had arrived unevenly and much later than anyone liked admitting. Etheria had become an unexpectedly important part of the newest cultural shift because Mira's underlying character system refused to make those bodies exotic, hidden, penalized, or automatically sexualized; millions of people entering the same world encountered the options with no mocking text and no mechanical disadvantage attached. Jinx suspected most players would click through character creation without considering how much argument must once have occurred behind closed corporate doors for the menu to look this effortless.
His own selection was simpler. Jinx chose male, then shaped a body that would be read unquestionably as female by almost anyone seeing him dressed, a combination close enough to his real existence to feel familiar without requiring him to recreate himself exactly. The system accepted the choice with complete indifference, which was perhaps the most respectful response software could have offered.
From there his attention became artistic.
He lengthened the avatar's hair until it fell to her ass, black at its roots and upper lengths before deep violet began threading through it in increasingly vivid streaks. The purple gathered heavily toward the bottom without ever forming a clean gradient, appearing instead like moonlight somehow trapped inside strands of ink, and whenever the model moved the long hair separated into thousands of individually simulated pieces before falling back together.
The face took longer. Jinx kept the delicate structure that caused so much confusion in real life but sharpened it slightly, refining the jaw, adjusting the nose by millimeters, making the eyes luminous violet beneath long dark lashes, and giving the mouth enough natural softness that neutrality could be mistaken for amusement. He refused the creator's symmetry correction when it attempted to smooth tiny differences between the two sides of the face; perfect symmetry interested mathematicians more than artists, and Jinx had spent enough years drawing people to know that beauty frequently lived in the tiny departures from perfection.
The body developed around the same principle. He kept the shoulders narrow, drew the waist inward, lengthened the legs, and gave the overall silhouette an unmistakably feminine grace without sacrificing the ability to move like someone who knew how to fight. By the time he finished, the figure carried a dangerous sort of beauty Jinx had always understood instinctively, not merely attractive but disarming enough that someone might waste the first few seconds of an encounter deciding what they were looking at instead of asking whether it could kill them.
He stepped back and let the model turn slowly before him. The result looked less like an idealized version of his real face than something drawn from the same hand, recognizably related yet deliberately transformed, as if Jinx had been asked to illustrate himself after being given permission to lie beautifully. Long black-and-purple hair drifted behind the figure while violet eyes watched him with an expression close enough to his own that looking at it became faintly uncanny.
The cosmetic interface dimmed once he confirmed his choices. Light passed from the crown of the model's head to its feet, recording the final configuration, and for the briefest moment the finished avatar remained naked beneath the false stars before black cloth began assembling against the skin.
The clothing arrived in layers rather than appearing all at once. Fitted undergarments and close black trousers came first, followed by wrapped sections around the waist and forearms, then a long dark outer garment whose deep violet lining showed whenever the fabric moved. Bronze-black ornamentation traced the shoulders, waist, boots, and hems in patterns somewhere between court decoration and protective armor, while cords and tassels gathered around the belt with just enough ceremonial richness to make the clothing feel intentional rather than practical.
A sword settled at his hip once the final layer closed. The entire silhouette reminded Jinx of some impossible retainer serving a Heian emperor after dark: too elegantly dressed to be mistaken for a common assassin, too heavily armed to be mistaken for an ordinary court noble, and beautiful enough that the contradiction felt deliberate. He turned the model once, watched the long coat and violet panels trail behind it, and decided the System had stumbled into something he would have taken hours to design manually.
"Ninja for the Heian imperial court," he murmured, studying the finished avatar from boots to violet eyes. "I can work with that."
The model looked back at him from beneath the artificial moonlight, one hand resting naturally near the sword at its hip. Behind it waited Moon Breathing, Cursed, Godskin Celebrant, Frost Witch, Underworld Mage, two Epic weapons, an unknown Devil Fruit, and whatever else Mira had buried beneath the surface of a game the rest of the world still believed it understood.
Jinx smiled at his new face.
For once, he left it there without changing anything.