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Language:
English
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Published:
2024-04-03
Completed:
2024-04-04
Words:
69,016
Chapters:
22/22
Comments:
29
Kudos:
61
Bookmarks:
9
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1,694

JUMIN'S ROUTE, BUT WITHOUT THE INSANITY

Summary:

This is a book-length (70,000-word) chaptered novel of Jumin's route, but instead of Jumin losing his mind and most of his character traits, as he does in the official MM route, here Jumin remains himself: a deeply introverted, entitled, brilliant billionaire who approaches his life as if it were business and who works so much that business is largely his life.

During the course of this route, Jumin falls in love, and he reacts to this crisis exactly as his business background has trained him to react. Boring? Maybe! But I love Jumin's "boring" character, so I had a lot of fun with this.

Notes:

I played Mystic Messenger because a young relative of mine became obsessed with it, and I really loved the first several routes. But I was bothered by how abusive Jumin is in his route. It doesn't seem like his character at all.

So I wrote a route true to the Jumin I know—still in many ways a hard character to handle, and even at times a hard character to like, but not one who is by nature abusive. I based my story on the plot framework of the route, and I kept all of Jumin's most extreme actions in my story because I wanted to try to make them believable in the context of a healthier relationship.

Since this story was written for a teen, it isn't explicit, and since it's based on MM, it's conversation-heavy. My MC has the name Cho Ara, and she's as reserved and traditional as Jumin himself. I didn't do this because I love unspoiled virtue. I just couldn't see Jumin allowing an experienced, worldly woman (like me!) to get anywhere near him. He would have to respect a woman as a person first before he got to know her as a romantic partner, and I felt that he was most likely to respect a woman who seemed to hold many of the same values he did. Thus, my MC is as cautious about men as Jumin is about women. She doesn't trust them, and she hasn't let them get close to her.

I've broken canon in 3 ways.

1) Elizabeth the Third is a ragdoll cross. I did this because I love a ragdoll's character and because I'm not that fond of Persians.

2) The bomb has a 10-second delay instead of a 5-second delay.

3) Carolyn is not Jumin's mother. I never could believe in her myself. Jumin's mother is never mentioned in the early routes, and as devoted as Jumin is to the idea of family, I'm sure he would have been trying to interact with his mother in some way if he knew who or where she was.

Chapter 1: THE STORY SO FAR

Chapter Text

What follows is bare summary.

At the start of the route, Han Jumin’s father, Chairman Han, head of C&R Corporation, invited Jumin to lunch and surprised him by introducing him to the Chairman’s new girlfriend, Choi Glam. The Chairman seemed especially taken with her and talked about divorcing his current wife and marrying Glam, a big move to take in divorce-unfriendly Korea. Then a woman, Choi Sarah, came to see Jumin and got past his security into his penthouse. She announced that she was his new fiancée. When asked, the Chairman himself confirmed this: he wanted Jumin to marry this girl in order to please Glam, Sarah’s friend (actually her sister under a new identity).

Jumin first ignored the situation as just another nuisance resulting from his father’s relentless womanizing. But two things made the situation much more serious. First, a tabloid-style media site began publishing inflammatory rumors about Jumin and Sarah and about the Chairman and Glam, clearly using information from an inside source. This information pushed both pairs closer to matrimony.

At the same time, the Chairman began exhibiting dangerously irresponsible behavior at the company. Wanting to show investors that all was well, Jumin called a board meeting and was running it efficiently when Sarah barged in, demanding to participate. Jumin attempted to have her put out, but the Chairman came in and backed her up, even though Sarah hadn’t even been asked to sign confidentiality forms. Jumin canceled the meeting at this point and went home.

After that, Jumin refused to come to work. His assistant, Kang Jaehee, was unable to reach him for the most part, and when she did reach him, he talked in vague, bitter, and slightly unhinged terms about the harm his father’s women had done to him over the years. Jaehee, a relatively unimaginative and insensitive woman, didn’t know how to respond, and she was desperate to get Jumin to come back to work. Rumors were mounting both within the company and outside of it, bad press was continuing to come out, and with both Hans acting irresponsibly, C&R’s stock price was falling.

In fact, Jumin had left the office to create a layer of privacy for what he was actually doing: sending professionals out to investigate the Chois and forestall their plan to take control of C&R by taking control of both Hans. Jumin didn’t allude to this in chats or phone calls because he didn’t want Jaehee to find out about it. He knew his father wouldn’t want him to proceed with the investigation. Since Jaehee ultimately answered to his father, the chairman of the company, Jumin didn’t want to jeopardize her standing or cause her an ethical crisis by putting her in opposition to his father. And he also had concerns, based on the bad press that kept coming out and the fact that the Chois had questioned Jaehee personally, that there might be leaks inside his own division.

So Jumin played Hamlet for a few days, acting unstable in order to deflect attention and lull the Chois into a false sense of security. In doing this, he was following the advice of Sun Tzu: “Pretend to be weak, that [your enemy] may grow arrogant.” Jumin, like any number of business executives, was a devotee of The Art of War.

But Jaehee didn’t know this, and without guidance from her boss, she didn’t know how to proceed.

Cho Ara had joined the RFA only the week before, but she had shown a gentleness and a sensitivity in dealing with Jumin that he had seemed at times to respond to. Jaehee thought that Ara might be able to talk to Jumin about the things that were troubling him in ways that she herself could not. She also hoped that Ara could persuade him to come back to work.

So Jaehee reached out to Ara and asked her for a favor: to please go see if she could talk to the gloomy, irritable Jumin about his problems and help him reach a more positive and (hopefully) productive frame of mind.

In other words, Jaehee asked Ara to cheer Jumin up.