Chapter 177: Cheating for Myself
The transit nausea hit the moment he arrived, the way it always did — a sharp, disorienting wave that started behind the eyes and worked its way down, the physical cost of moving between realities that his body had never fully learned to absorb without complaint.
Jake sat up straight, breathed through it, and waited for the world to resolve.
He was in an office.
Small, tidy, the kind of space that communicated counselor or advisor through its furniture choices alone — two chairs angled toward each other across a low table, a desk pushed against the wall, shelves with the specific combination of academic texts and personal objects that said I work here and this is who I am. Natural light coming through a half-open blind. The sound of a large building in session outside the door — footsteps, distant conversations, the ambient hum of a university mid-afternoon.
Jake looked down at his clothes.
He was wearing the outfit from the shoot — the one Marcus had picked for the cameo, a well-fitted button-down in a muted blue, the sleeves rolled to the forearm, the kind of quietly professional look that communicated approachable faculty without trying too hard. He recognized it immediately.
He pulled out his interface.
The dimensional access system had loaded the film's world around him, placing him in the role he'd occupied in the film itself — the brief cameo appearance, the student counselor scene, the three minutes of screen time that had been his intentional footprint in the story. He'd written himself into the film specifically for this moment: a character who existed in the world with a full complement of in-world identity, memories, and context, waiting for him to arrive and inhabit.
Two avatar images appeared on the interface screen.
One: Jake before the super soldier serum. The baseline version — capable, trained, the product of years of accumulated skill and dimensional experience, but operating within human parameters.
Two: Jake after. Fifteen centimeters taller, every physical system rebuilt to the upper limit of what enhanced human biology could sustain.
Below the images, a prompt:
Same actor detected across instances. Merge profiles?
A countdown timer. Sixty seconds to decide, default to yes.
Jake looked at the two versions of himself side by side and thought about Mia.
When Mia had first transited into the Catwoman world, the merge had happened automatically — her real-world self and the Catwoman profile combining into something that took the best of both. The result had been comprehensive: Catwoman's physical capability and fighting instinct layered onto Mia's existing skills, the combined package stronger than either component alone. She'd been operating at that enhanced level ever since.
He hadn't had the option available to him before. His cameo in the film gave him an in-world anchor, and the in-world anchor now gave him the merge prompt.
The question was straightforward: did he want his enhanced physical profile — the post-serum version, everything Birkin and Ashford's compound had built — integrated into his dimensional identity in this world?
He tapped Yes before the timer hit forty seconds.
The change was subtle from the outside — no dramatic light show, no physical reconstruction, just a brief sensation like two signals finding a common frequency and locking. But the internal register was immediate and complete. The in-world profile synced: his body was the post-serum version, fully present in this reality. And layered over it, from the character he'd been merged with, a full backstory — years of working in student counseling, a graduate degree in psychology from a mid-tier state university, a particular way of listening that the in-world character had developed through genuine practice.
He flexed his right hand once, feeling the familiar precision of the enhanced musculature, and confirmed that the serum's effects had translated cleanly.
Then he accessed the character's memory stack and thought through the implications.
If the merge worked this way — if playing a character with specific abilities and then transiting into that world allowed him to integrate those abilities into his own profile — then the system was more flexible than he'd understood. He could, in theory, engineer access to capabilities he didn't currently possess by building them into characters in future films before making the transit.
The range of what that meant took a moment to fully process.
He was still processing it when someone knocked on the door.
"Come in."
The door opened and a young woman stepped inside — early twenties, the particular combination of confidence and anxiety that characterized students who had worked up the nerve to seek help with something they found difficult to articulate. She had a notebook tucked under one arm, held in the way people held things when they needed something to do with their hands.
Her name was Emma, according to the character notes Jake had written into the film's supporting cast. The female lead — the emotional anchor of the story's first act.
"Hi," she said, with a slight self-consciousness. "Are you — is this a good time? I can come back—"
"Now is fine," Jake said, gesturing to the chair across the table. "Sit down."
She sat. Arranged herself. Looked at the low table between them rather than at him.
Jake waited. The in-world character's instinct was to give the silence room to breathe — not to fill it, not to prompt, just to hold the space open until she was ready to use it. He found, somewhat to his own amusement, that the instinct felt natural. The merged profile wasn't a foreign overlay. It had integrated cleanly enough that he was accessing it the way you accessed something you'd actually learned.
Emma started talking.
Jake had written this scene. He'd been in the room when Marcus shot it. He knew every beat of it — the academic pressure, the social situation with a persistent classmate, the specific flavor of overwhelm that came from being a person who was good at managing expectations for everyone except herself. He'd heard the dialogue at least thirty times between development, rehearsal, and post-production review.
Hearing it now, in a real world, from a person who was actually experiencing it rather than performing it, was different.
He listened. Nodded at the right moments. Asked the two or three questions that moved the conversation forward without redirecting it. The counseling instinct — the in-world character's years of genuine practice — translated to actual competence in the room.
Emma looked up at him twice during the first few minutes, both times with the slight recalibration expression of someone who had come in expecting a bureaucratic interaction and was getting something more substantive. By the middle of the conversation she'd stopped holding the notebook and set it on the table beside her.
She was talking about what she'd actually come to talk about, rather than the version she'd planned to present.
That was the job working.
The session ended just before noon.
Emma left with the specific quality of movement that meant something had shifted — not resolved, not fixed, but usefully reframed. Jake watched the door close and sat for a moment in the quiet of the office.
He stood, took his jacket from the hook behind the chair, and went out.
The university campus was mid-day active — students moving between buildings, the particular dense social ecosystem of a place where a few thousand people were all nominally doing the same thing while actually doing completely different things. Jake walked through it with the unhurried pace of a faculty member who had nowhere urgent to be for the next forty minutes.
The parking lot held the usual faculty mix: practical mid-range sedans, a few older imports, the occasional conspicuously modest hybrid driven by someone who wanted you to know they'd thought about their choices. Jake found the bicycle rack.
He stopped.
He owned a bicycle. The character owned a bicycle. His in-world transportation was a mid-range commuter bike with a combination lock, and the combination was the same as his first apartment's door code, which was the kind of detail that got written into a character's background to make them feel real and which he had not expected to now personally experience the consequences of.
He unlocked the bike and stood there for a moment.
The merged profile was comprehensive. He knew that. He'd integrated the in-world character's memories, his professional training, his daily habits and routines. That had been the point — a real, functional identity in this world, not a surface-level costume.
What he hadn't fully anticipated was the experiential texture of it.
He sat on the bike and started pedaling toward the campus exit, and the motion felt completely natural — the muscle memory of a person who commuted this way every day, the specific efficiency of someone who had navigated this particular route in every variety of weather for three years.
He reached the front gate and stopped.
Students passing. The sound of the city beyond the campus perimeter. Afternoon light at the angle that turned ordinary streets into something briefly cinematic.
Jake reached into his shirt pocket.
His hand found a pack of cigarettes that absolutely should not have been there. A lighter in the front pocket of his slacks. The in-world character smoked — a detail he'd given the character because it had seemed right for the slightly melancholic teacher archetype at the time, and which he was now experiencing as a literal physical reality.
He looked at the cigarette in his hand.
He didn't smoke. He never had. It was one of the few vices he'd never found occasion to pick up.
But his hands had already gone through the motion of lighting it with the automatic ease of someone doing something they'd done ten thousand times, and now he was standing at the campus gate with a lit cigarette between his fingers and the deep, involuntary satisfaction of someone who had been waiting for this since nine in the morning.
He took a drag before he'd consciously decided to.
Exhaled.
Watched a group of students cross the intersection.
Then he stopped.
He looked at the cigarette. Looked at his hand. Looked at the street.
"Why am I standing here being contemplative?" he said, to the air, quietly.
He was not a contemplative bicycle commuter who stood at campus gates smoking and thinking about the nature of things. That was not who he was. That was a character he'd written.
Except currently, at a neurological level that he was having some difficulty clearly delineating, the line between those two descriptions was not as clean as he'd expected it to be.
The merge was supposed to be an optimization. Skills, physical capability, institutional knowledge. He had not accounted for the possibility that it also included the in-world character's particular flavor of introspective melancholy, which appeared to be more deeply integrated than the professional skills were.
He felt the distinct sensation of two separate selves occupying the same space — his own clear, operational, goal-directed identity, and underneath it, like a second signal on the same frequency, a person who commuted by bicycle and smoked and sometimes sat by the window in his office after the last appointment of the day and thought about paths not taken.
Jake stood at the campus gate for a moment with a cigarette he hadn't intended to be smoking and tried to determine which thoughts were his.
This, he acknowledged, was a complication he hadn't modeled.
He dropped the cigarette, stepped on it, and got back on the bike.
He needed to think about this carefully.
But first — the in-world character had a two o'clock appointment, and the muscle memory was already pointing him toward the route back to the counseling center, and apparently that part of the merge was not optional.
He pedaled.
[Chapter Rewards]
500 Power Stones unlock 1 chapter
10 Reviews unlock 1 chapter
Hope you enjoyed the chapter.
20+chapters ahead on P1treon Soulforger