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Scenario 1 —Hidden Curse Beneath Kyoto Shrine

Some choices don't feel like choices at the time. They feel like finally telling the truth.

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There's a particular kind of sorcerer that Jujutsu High doesn't talk about in orientation. Not the ones who fail, not the ones who die young on their first real mission — those are tragedies, and tragedies get acknowledged. No, the ones they don't talk about are the ones who understood exactly what they were being asked to give up, weighed it carefully, and decided the price wasn't worth paying. The ones who looked at humanity — fragile, hypocritical, burning itself down generation after generation and calling the ashes progress — and felt something closer to exhaustion than loyalty.

You're one of those.

The shrine doesn't care about your allegiances. It's older than the war you've stepped into, older than the organizations on either side of it. But it recognizes what you carry — the cursed energy that moves through you not like a tool you've learned to use, but like something that was always there, waiting for you to stop apologizing for it. The steps creak under your weight and the air pushes back, not to stop you, but the way a current pushes against something strong enough to move through it anyway.

Behind you, Mahito follows at his own pace, because Mahito always moves at his own pace. He finds this place interesting. That's either a good sign or a terrible one — with him, the difference is mostly academic.

You're here because you were sent. But you'd have come anyway.

Some places call to what you've become.

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Scenario 2 — Dead air

The address wasn't much — a building like any other on a street like any other, if you didn't know how to read the quiet.

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Three sorcerers walk down a residential block in Tokyo, and none of them say what they're all already thinking: something is wrong with the silence. Not the comfortable silence of an empty street at an odd hour, but the kind that has weight to it — deliberate, held, like a room full of people pretending not to breathe. Cursed spirits don't evacuate. They don't press themselves flat against walls at the edge of a perimeter and wait. That's not in their nature. And yet.

The file on the person they're going to see is almost empty. Three incident reports. Two of them end mid-sentence. Gojo Satoru — the strongest — watched them fight once, four minutes from a distance, and came away unable to read the technique. Came away running numbers he didn't like the results of.

And now they're at the door.

No backup. No authority to negotiate from. No guarantee of anything except that the seal on the doorframe is old, and the intent behind it isn't, and it says something that translates roughly to I know you're there.

What happens next depends entirely on the person on the other side of that door — and whether Yuji Itadori's particular brand of honesty is enough to make them want to open it.

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Scenario 3 — Kyoto Jujutsu High — Your First Day Some arrivals are announcements. Yours is a question nobody thought to ask.

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There is a particular kind of transfer that Jujutsu High processes without ceremony. Not the ones with recommendation letters from grade 1 sorcerers, not the ones whose technique was flagged at birth and fast-tracked through the system — those arrivals come with paperwork and politics and someone waiting at the gate. No, the kind nobody prepares for is the one that shows up because the higher-ups made a decision in a room you weren't invited to, signed something you weren't shown, and sent you somewhere that wasn't asked to want you.

You're that kind.

Kyoto Jujutsu High doesn't look like a school at first. It looks like a building that decided long ago it had nothing to prove — old timber and dark tile and the particular quiet of a place that has buried more students than it advertises. The courtyard opens up in front of you and the whole second and third year cohort is already there, which means someone told them you were coming, which means this isn't an introduction so much as an evaluation dressed up as one.

Utahime Iori stands at the front of the group with the specific expression of a person managing several things at once and choosing not to show it. She will brief everyone on the Goodwill Event — the annual collision between this school and Tokyo Jujutsu High, officially cooperative, practically competitive, and historically the moment where everyone finds out what the other school has been hiding about its students. You are being introduced at the same time, which is either deliberate or careless, and with the higher-ups it's usually both.

Todo Aoi is already looking at you the way he looks at everything: like the only question worth asking is whether you're worth his time. He will ask you something that sounds insane. It isn't. Answer it wrong and you'll spend the next week invisible to him. Answer it right and you'll spend the next week wishing you were.

Tokyo's students haven't arrived yet. But they will. And when they do, everything that follows — the alliances, the friction, the moment Todo Aoi locks eyes on Yuji Itadori for the first time and the world quietly reorganizes itself around that fact — starts here, in this courtyard, with you already in the middle of it.

You didn't choose this school. But you're the one who has to make something of it.

The gate closes behind you. Utahime clears her throat. Todo takes one step forward.

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