The room in front of me was impossibly large given the dimensions of the tent. I was no genius, far from it in fact, but I knew enough about physics to be fairly certain that the room in front of me shouldn't have been able to exist. As I studied the room I grew increasingly certain of that. And then the old man who had invited me into the room began to laugh. His laughter wasn't derisive, but it was loud and a bit... humiliating to hear. 

"Are you done gawking on the floor there, sunny?" The old man asked, a bright smile on his face as he watched me. He stepped over to me, doing so at a speed that was hard to believe given his appearance, and knelt down to offer me a hand up. I took it and he lifted me off of my knees and onto my feet with a sort of fierce strength. 

"Whoa... This place... You..." I uttered, still taking it all in. He beamed at me, his smile surprisingly disarming, and chuckled. 

"Yeah... I tend to have that effect on you Earth humans." He told me, cockily. Some of the words he uttered he said with a special emphasis. The one that stuck out the most to me was the way he said "Earth". He didn't say it like how I might have, instead, he uttered it like there were multiple "Earths" rather than just this one. 

He silently backed away from me and walked back to the table he had stood in front of before. When he reached the piece of furniture he turned back to face me and leveled a cocky smirk in my direction. 

"Welcome to my essence shop! I am the humble owner of this establishment, Ben E. Factor, and I like you kid." The man told me, his voice taking on a level of youthfulness that made him sound younger than me. I heard his name and had to work to stifle a laugh. Ben E. Factor? What a name he had chosen for himself! 

"I know you're probably weirded out by all of this stuff, but you see I have a son and he has this wacky idea for a bar. He wants to create a bar for gamers and for people who enjoy fantasy and stuff, and he is using me to try and get taste-testers for his drinks." The man explained, weaving a rather silly tale that a not small part of me wanted to believe. I knew better though and wasn't convinced by his obvious lies. 

Ben stopped talking and grabbed one of the bottles on the table next to him. He glanced at the thing and studied its eerie green contents for a few moments. Eventually, he nodded at himself and glanced up at me, a smaller and less confident smile on his face. 

"So you see, Andrew, I need customers. And before you ask I'm gonna level with you; if I told you how I made this weird tent or these drinks you wouldn't believe me. I want us to skip that part of our relationship." The old man said, apparently leveling with me. I hated to admit it but he was right. I could tell that if he told me whatever weird... reality-breaking secrets he had knowledge of I wouldn't have believed him, though I could also sense that there was something otherworldly to the man before me. Something that was affecting me. 

"You're affecting me somehow aren't you?" I asked, even as he took a step towards me. He nodded at me, and his smile regained some of its former spirit. 

"Yes, I am. I am using some of my power to speed up parts of our interaction. You see, my young friend, I am older and wiser than you. And I have been a lot of experience running these kinds of stores. I know how humans tend to be when they are given a chance like the one I am giving you." The man told me, his voice somehow assuaging any sort of concerns I knew I should have been having about him and what he was saying. He took a step towards me with a predatory smile on his face.

"So... In that case why lie to me?" I asked, not especially upset by the lie or anything just wondering what the point of it was. He stopped and laughed when I asked him about that.

"Ahh fuck. I've been omnipotent for so long that I sometimes forget that I wasn't very good at lying before my ascension." He told me, with the sort of smile an embarrassed child might have when they'd been caught and called out on a lie they told me. 

"Fine, I'll level with you. For real this time. Being omnipotent, for someone as aimless as me, is fairly boring. I want to empower someone and watch them embark on their own journey. Heck, that's why I chose that name. Ben E. Factor... I like to think it's clever." He revealed, and I sensed his power and influence telling me to believe him. His power was urging me to think he was telling me the truth, and even though I was aware of the influence I couldn't help but believe him, try as I might to be skeptical. Being controlled this way didn't feel good.

I did not think his chosen name was clever, but I knew better than to audibly state that. I also knew better than to think that I could somehow hide what I really thought of the name from him, but that didn't mean I needed to blurt it out. Instead of saying something stupid about the name I was able to bite my tongue and stay focused on the matter at hand. 

"So what's with the... potions?" I asked, after pausing to wrack my brain for a fancier word than "Drinks". I had never been a big fan of fantasy so I had to give myself a second to find the appropriate vocabulary. The creature chuckled and he placed the drink in my hand. 

"These are 'Essences'. They are mighty, fiat-backed drinks that bestow you, or anyone else who happens to drink them, with a wide variety of superpowers and other incredible traits." The creature explained, his eyes beginning to glow as he urged me to look at the drink. 

"And before you ask, 'fiat-backed' means that they will work no matter what rules and physical laws constrain wherever you happen to be. They are powered by me, and will continue to be powered by my omnipotence until the day you either surpass me or become mighty enough to power them on your own." The man told me, and no doubt thanks to his power I felt myself believing him. 

"There is a whole glossary of terms that you ought to know to really get you up to see with regards to the world you're about to step into." The man told me, confidently. I could hear his certainty that I was about to step into whatever weird new world he was referring to. 

"What makes you think I'm going to drink this?" I asked him, curiously. He chuckled at me and rose his hand. One of the little slips of paper that were positioned in front of the beverages flew to it, causing me to step back in shock. He crumpled it up and began to speak.

"I know you're going to make a choice to drink at least one of these beverages. It is plain as day to me that you'll be brave. I can feel courage coming off of you in waves. You're feeling a lot of things... But you aren't afraid. Not of this, anyway." The old man told me. To my annoyance, the old man was right. I was feeling a mixture of emotions but I wasn't afraid. Not one of the feelings in the depths of my soul was fear. 

"You want to read this." Ben told me, his eyes filled with mirth as he saw me accept that he was right about how I was feeling. He threw the paper at me and I reached out and grabbed the note as it sailed through the air. I dexterously messed with the paper and unfurled it so that I could read it. 

"Essence of the Jumper;" The note began, causing me to look up at the old man, half expecting him to have vanished mysteriously. He was still there and looking at me impatiently. 

"What is a jumper?" I asked, causing him to shake his head in annoyance. 

"Keep reading!" He told me, urgently. My eyes narrowed in annoyance at him and I turned back to the slip of paper in my hand. 

"This essence gives those who imbibe it the ability to withstand the mighty void that separates the fictional from the nonfictional. By drinking it one gains the ability to venture into other worlds, even fictional ones, and gains a soul that can absorb and utilize powers from throughout all of fiction. This essence sends those who drink it on a journey that will eventually culminate in them dying, choosing to stay in one setting forever, going home, or becoming omnipotent themselves." I whispered, reading the contents of the note. Ben began to grin at me. 

"Oh yeah, that's one of the good ones right there. It's a shame all of the other drinkers perished." The man revealed, with a casualness that frightened me even through the fog of his powers. His eyes widened when he sensed the jolt of fear running through me, and he motioned for me to wait a second before responding so that he could get a word in. 

"Wait, wait. I know that's a scary thing to hear but I did not do my research with them. That is not the case with you. With you I was much more careful and even now I am being cautious. I created all of these essences, and I even made a generic first jump for you! I'm determined to see it so that you don't die." He told me, a frantic look on his face as he hurriedly explained that to me. 

"Heck, I even made it so that you can freely decide whether you want to spend time in your 'Chain' or at home. Trust me, I did my research this time." He said, almost embarrassedly. 

"What you're saying... Listen, Ben, your words are not as comforting as you think." I told him, a second later, though what he was saying made his offer kind of tempting. He relaxed when he heard me say that, and I had the feeling that he was able to sense my feelings thanks to whatever powers he had and was using on me.

By now the reality of those powers was sinking in, either he was real and so were his powers or I was somehow going crazy and experiencing a sort of psychotic break. Either way, I was in this now and in some respects, the only way out was through. 

"So you're still listening huh? Good. Now... I am offering you a chance to go on a very special sort of jumpchain, a series of journeys that allow your soul to soak up power from other universes, multiverses, and pleniverses until you can handle one final true apotheosis and become a being on my level of power. Normally when someone becomes a jumper it is an immediate thing and they get nabbed from their homeworld and thrown into a jumpchain immediately. That is... not what I am going to do to you, should you drink that vial of essence." Mr. Factor informed me. He wasn't done either and he continued to speak even as I did my best to absorb what he was telling me. 

"I have created a new kind of chain. A kind of jumpchain that is meant to be easier to undergo and survive. In it you begin by drinking any or heck, even all, of these essences. And then when you go to 'sleep', whenever you decide to do that, your soul will be thrown into whatever setting you are currently working your way through for as long as you were awake, after you drank that essence. The very first jump you'll be doing is my 'Generic First Jump'." Ben told me, and I sensed that he was being real with me right now. He had dropped the pretenses from before and was trying to convince me to go on this weird journey. 

"The 'Generic First Jump', or GFJ, is meant to be survivable. It is a bit weird because it's ten different settings thrown at you one after the other, but each setting is supposed to be something you can make it through and each setting gives you powers and perks that are handy for jumpers. It's a good first jump. A safe first jump." Ben assured me. Before he could talk anymore I sighed and decided to cut him off. 

"And let me guess... You're gonna ask me to drink this first, before I drink any of the others?" I asked him, opting to move this along. He chuckled at my directness and nodded. 

"I..." I responded, quietly. I sat down and gazed at the two objects in my hands. I laid against the surprisingly solid wall of the tent and debated what to do here.

Ben was offering me adventure, power, and more. He was offering me the chance to become a being who was beyond extraordinary. But he was also offering me a certainty of conflict, of adventure, and of chaos. If I accepted this offer I'd probably never again know peace, in any real sense. Or at least I wouldn't know peace for a very long time. 

Though... for all I knew I had lost my mind and was imagining this. There was a very real possibility that this was just some weird sort of insanity, perhaps just one long hallucination, and if that was the case... Did I really have anything to lose? 

Almost as soon as I wondered that the more analytical part of my brain began to describe what I stood to lose by listening to Ben if he was in fact some sort of eerie hallucination. I chuckled at the work done by the more logical part of my brain and I decided to ignore it. I got up and glanced at Ben. 

"You know... I've had some really shitty luck lately. It hasn't been anything too devastating, yet, but it's been a lot. I... I think it's time that I decide to take control of my luck." I told him, before putting the note detailing the essence in my pocket and unstopping the vial that held the essence. I kept looking at Ben, and asked him just one more thing.

"When I drink this I can drink any or all of the other essences?" I asked the enigmatic figure. He began to grin at me and nod. I laughed and poured the drink down my throat. 

The thing tasted weird, like some sort of thick cough syrup. As I drank it I felt my senses sharpen and my muscles tense. Ben laughed quietly as he watched me drink the potion. I chugged the thing, and only a matter of seconds after I put it to my lips it was empty. I put it away from my lips and my hands closed, reflexively, when the vial vanished. I looked at Ben and was silent for a second. 

"I think... I think I'll be greedy and drink all of the vials." I told the man, smiling as I spoke. He nodded at me and motioned for me to join him in front of the table he was standing beside. I did so, a greedy smile on my face as I wondered if any of this was real, and also what sort of essences he was going to offer me.