this should be interesting! let's see how this goes
hi everyone, call me book, my main blog is @theoriginalcrossjumper and you can find me posting all kinds of random stuff and art and such there.
....but if you're interested in any of my writing, this is where you're going to want to be going forward!
(or my ao3, which is also theoriginalcrossjumper)
essentially, this is going to be a blog centering around my writing - this includes the numerous fanfics i'm sort of working on as well as the at least three (3) original stories i'm trying to write. hopefully, making this blog will help incentivize me to actually make progress on them. and if not it gives me somewhere to ramble to the three people who might be interested about the worlds living rent free in my head!
mainly i'll be working through my list of wips after a friend asked about Every Single One Of My Thirty-Plus Dedicated Wips during an ask game on my main blog, but i'll also be using this to store references and other notes and snippets for my original stories. a lot of my art for these associated stories and fics will also be posted here. we'll see how this goes!
list of discussed stories/fics under the cut (links & more wips and such will be added after i actually talk about them):
(note: as far as the names go, anything in Title Case are set titles; anything in undercase hasn't yet been set in stone)
I already gave some background on my oldest story, so how about next we do the one that's given me the most brainrot ever, overall?
Namely: the Crossjumper Profiles.
The short explanation of the plot of this first book is "accidental kidnap victim gets peer pressured into an internship saving the multiverse-cubed and then gets found family'd into never leaving", but that sounds a little more threatening than it actually goes, and calling the Oversphere the "multiverse-cubed" is kind of underselling the sheer scope of it.
So here's the long version under the cut!
BACKGROUND: The Oversphere
So to really understand the scope of what I'm putting together here, we're going to do a little thought exercise. First, picture the standard multiverse sort of map: you have one timeline that runs in a mostly straight line. This is a timeline, also called an alternate or possible dimension.
Now, as with most thought exercises, sometimes you have a bunch of different timelines split off from that first one after various choices and events that go differently. These run more or less parallel to the first timeline; these are usually considered parallel or alternate universes, depending on how they run. Altogether this segment is called a multiverse.
This is where most franchises dealing with time and dimensional travel tend to cut off.
But let's keep going!
Let's imagine that we have this multiverse, which all stems back to one particular timeline. However, there are also other versions of that first timeline, all of which spawn their own alternate universes and dimensions, and all of which have their own prime timelines. This network gets complicated very quickly, but you don't need to sweat the details. Just focus on picturing the point or theme that defines this entire set of multiverses. (In fanfic terms: you could, for example, consider this theme essentially the media that it's representing, with a canon timeline and hundreds on thousands of AUs.) All of these multiverses connect back to this singular point, this Singularity.
And if you draw a biiiiig circle around this whole collective set of connected multiverses, you get what's called a sphere!
Essentially, one (1) discrete multiverse-plus unit.
...Except that one (1) discrete multiverse unit isn't the only one out there, is it? There's going to be more - different Singularities instigating different timelines and multiverses, more than anyone can realistically comprehend. Infinite spheres, out into the infinite reality and the ever-infinite spaces between realities, overlapping in more directions and planes than any entity can see all at once.
And that infinite group of infinite realities and spheres is, collectively, called the Oversphere.
So what does this have to do with saving the universe? Well, consider this: spheres are entirely, completely, distinct. There is no overlap between them. Travel between them, too, is practically impossible: anyone Local to one sphere trying to punch a hole through the multiverse, no matter how overpowered, is only going to punch through the multiverse, and not into another sphere. So getting between spheres requires 1) knowing that it's possible and 2) combining the three factors of interspheral travel (Time, Space, and Dimension) in the right way so as to get past that intangible barrier.
...Unless you trip and fall through one of the natural tears in the barrier, and wind up in a sphere you do not belong in. Or, for example, if something winds up in a very dangerous location: like a missile launcher falling into a high fantasy world, or a horse winding up on a planet that does not have horses (or, perhaps, the environment to let horses survive). And that is when the Crossjumpers are called in!
Basically, the job of a Crossjumper is to collect these Breaches and return them to the sphere they came from. Generally they're only called in for difficult Breaches; there's an organization spread throughout innumerable spheres (generally referred to as the Local IMG) that deals with the simple Breaches that fall into their spheres, like rocks or plants or sometimes animals or other items. When the Breaches are difficult (which could mean they're people who don't want to cooperate, items collected by Locals who don't want to give them up, or simply landing in dangerous situations like warzones), the Crossjumpers come in as the resident elite agents and retrieve the Breach to get it back to where it's supposed to be.
Generally Crossjumpers are organized into Guilds or other groups who work in teams, and rarely do you see more than two or three of them in one place together - that tends to be a Big Deal that needs a lot of attention.
There's a lot more that goes along with the Crossjumpers, including how their Circuit of travel works and how interspheral travel works, but that's going to be another ramble for another day I think.
First up we talk about the actual plot, such as it is!
STORY: The Plot
The Crossjumper Profiles series will, eventually, hopefully, become a series of relatively shorter stories focusing on each individual member of a specific (currently nameless) Guild of Crossjumpers (hence, Profiles). The first book is going to set up the whole thing and follow a character named Micki, who accidentally gets kidnapped by a pair of active Crossjumpers and dragged across to a different sphere. Instead of calling in the Local IMG to get Micki home (which would get them in trouble for bringing her across the Circuit in the first place), the two Crossjumpers decide to apprentice Micki instead, and proceed to drag her around on a whirlwind tour of the Oversphere for several months, introducing her to how Crossjumping works and letting the rest of the Guild cameo. Eventually, they bond so quickly into found family (and over how amazing the job is) that when they go to return her home, Micki decides she'd actually rather stay with the Guild, and talks them into pulling her in full-time instead of going back to her comparatively more boring life.
I don't have any snippets of this story, because most of my effort has gone into the sheer volume of worldbuilding around the Oversphere (i have the worlds of each of the eight crossjumpers in this guild built out in pretty good detail), but I can give a quick overview of the eight Crossjumpers! I'll go into detail about them in a later post probably because I'm so incredibly normal about them, but at least this way if anyone is interested in reading my rambling abt wip fics later, you'll at least have a reference for who the hell I'm talking about.
Crossjumper Quick Reference List:
Eridanus Tierney: number one asshole in the Guild. Aristocracy (or at least fake aristocracy, real conman) from a steampunk-esque Victorian-lite world; inadvertently conned his way into essentially a warlock bond with a Great Old One, and now has telepathic and empathic powers he can't turn off, and hates it. Snazziest dresser of the Guild, very good at manipulating people and talking his way into and out of places, but also just kind of a dick in general.
Brii Elbin: healer of the Guild, holder of All The Braincells. Avian-like alien (has enormous feathered wings, but he can hide them from the physical plane and thus pass as human) from a planet with an advanced society that invested in fucking around with Time, and got itself wiped off the map in the process. Healer and medic with entirely too many certifications and experience, Always Tired, reluctant Mom Friend, common sense source, and in the rare occasions where he's not needed to help someone/supervise bad ideas, is an absolute troll.
Katrrna "Kit" Alliera: the epitome of the Horny Bard, if the Horny Bard was not a joke and also was terrifyingly competent at her job. She's a black panther morph nym from Animelia, but for personality, think somewhere between River Song and Capt. Jack Harkness: she's flirting as much as she's breathing (and will follow through with anyone's willing consent), but also she can and will get shit done with alarming competency before going back to flirting again. She's an agent of chaos who despises being tied down, and joined the Crossjumpers mostly so she would never be caged again and would have a chance to see the world (and then some).
Jinx Travaela: disaster human being of a mage. She has an extremely rare kind of magic that the magical academy system in her home sphere banned on pain of death, because it allows the user to manipulate raw magic directly instead of actually weaving spells. She's used this to, among other things, dye her hair permanently pink, accidentally turn herself immortal, and prevent herself from saying any true names of literally anyone she meets. Paranoid and very slow to trust people, but outwardly bubbly and friendly; she's soulbound to Echo, who's probably the only person she trust with absolutely everything.
Echo Travaela (nee Soman): half-wolf shapeshifter who was so stubbornly set on staying with her moon-assigned soulmate that she joined the Guild by sheer spite. She's fairly quiet, used pretty well to using body language to communicate, but she's very insightful and an absolute troll who loves to turn into a giant wolf and scare the shit out of people because she thinks it's funny. She's more trusting than Jinx, but she's also extremely protective of her people, and can and will defend them with everything she has.
Micki Taylor: the newest member of the Guild and one of the most gung-ho about it. Vigilante-slash-thief turned accidental kidnappee turned Crossjumper turned Guildmaster; she's an engineer/inventor who uses a Casting that lets her shrink anything she touches to do terrifying things with technology, and regularly builds physics-breaking support tech. Reckless, stubborn, damn near impossible to scare, and overall a force of nature, she's an excellent choice for Guildmaster, even if she never would have chosen to do that.
Lynn Aurelius: unwilling genetic experiment assassin, given the ability to manipulate their own body down to an extreme degree; they can change their appearance, turn invisible, and phase through solid objects. They escaped the facility that imprisoned them with the Guild's help and never looked back. They're generally pretty distrustful and paranoid, but for their rare few people, they'll do anything if only asked.
Pixel: freelance hacker who ran afoul of a tech company trying to create a "new breed of human", wound up with the ability to astral project themselves into computers in a VR sort of way, and then wound up with her body destroyed less than an hour later. Now stuck largely on the digital without a body, she still helps the Guild out wherever she can. She's kind of an asshole, and never sugarcoats anything, but she cares more than she lets on.
(if you look on my other blog, there's quite a few tags with these characters mentioned; the tags "cjp [character]" are associated with the Crossjumpers, e.g. #cjp eri )
