yootie

Part 1 of the NSFW side story is up!

Not linking directly to the smut, but you can find it on the Side Stories page on sunspot dot gay. For a little extra security, the page is password protected (shouldn't need an account). The password is:

hyenis

Around 4000 words. Part 2/2 should be about the same. Happy reading!

Arc 4 Progress Update (good news!)

TLDR: Discount code to read 4.01-03 early; Arc 4 begins Nov 16, maybe 23; smutty side story this week.

Hi readers of Sunspot! It's the start of November, which means I've overshot my predicted "mid-October" timeline for when arc 4 would start releasing. Thanks for your patience; I've been really busy! Good busy, but busy all the same.

We're getting there. 4.01, 02 and 03 are all already done and available for patrons, and when 04 joins them, 4.01 will become public on RR/Shub/sunspotdotgay. In the meantime, as an apology for the delay, I've made a discount so you can read those first three chapters early for $2 instead of the usual $5. Here's the code:

F8926

This code can be used when signing up for Radiance tier and will be available for the next week. Enjoy!

As for the timeline: firstly, before arc 4 launches publicly, I really want to get that public smutty side story done and released. I'm aiming for this week. It'll be posted only on the official site, not here or RR/Shub because I don't want to run afoul of puritanical moderation on these other platforms, but there will be a post here letting you know when it's up and how to access it.

In turn, I'm aiming for arc 4 to begin publicly sometime after that but before Thanksgiving, most likely Sunday, November 16 or possibly Nov 23 depending on how far I want to write ahead of the Patreon-available buffer. So mark your calendars, I guess? I wish I had some art to share to tide you over in the meantime, but all the current commissions have been going VERY slow.

So yeah. I really appreciate your patience, it means the world to me that I have a community that doesn't make me feel rushed to compromise on quality for speed. I'll keep writing, and when I feel like the story is ready to start doing public posts again, I'll give a more exact timeline. I'm happy to answer questions about the delays or whatever else in the comments or in the Discord (discord.gg/sunspot).

That's all from me. Thanks for your patience, and if you're impatient, take advantage of the discount while it's available!

4.03 Patreon Release

One could say that my venture into the umbilical abyss of the hallway to reach my synthetic body was a reflection of the Flame-woven bridge across that solipsistic void my mind had crossed yesterday…but that would be over-dramatic. What I actually did was go over to the hallway and find the light switch.

Once the shadows were banished, it was an unintimidating walk down to the correct room. I passed the meeting room and the dojo beside it and took note of some of the others that I’d ignored the first time I’d gone to the doll: a more conventional weight room to complement the dojo, a few utterly uninteresting storage areas that looked to be filled solely with cardboard moving boxes, another meeting room. Some doors had no label or window, and many that I could see into were simply empty. This much space remained redundant for five people, and my addition had made no dent given my precious few belongings.

I arrived at the room dedicated to the doll and the slightly nightmarish “pod” that had connected my mind to it. The big hallway was U-shaped, imitating the layout of the apartments directly above, and the doll’s room was just about in the middle, directly opposite from the kitchen with respect to the elevator shaft.

The mannequin-like body had been moved from where I remembered leaving it last night, unplugged from the pod and stored lying flat and face-up on a table in the back of the room. The effect was slightly cadaverous, sparking childlike fears that the body would sit up and lunge at me or, more creepily, simply stare. The threat of that was made slightly more realistic by the idea that Sugawara’s spirit was still out there—what if he had infiltrated the building and the body and was lying in wait to take me by surprise when I drew close? My spear tattoo itched in readiness.

I humored it for a moment, summoning the wooden weapon and resting its butt against the floor. I looked at it seriously. “You and I both know that’s not what’s gonna happen. It’s just metal. Er, probably more plastic than anything else by volume?” I sighed, realizing I was hedging even with an imaginary conversation partner. “Point is, it’s not gonna move. I’ve got my lattices in there still,” I confidently informed my spear. Then I dismissed it back to the tattoo.

The pod and doll both contained control lattices I’d woven out of my Flame, which we knew was somehow inimical to Sugawara, so I had no reason to be suspicious or nervous of the conveniently empty body. Toxic to him, just like the Vaetna, came the intrusive thought—I swatted it aside. My Flame had emanated pure repugnance and disdain for the thing Sugawara had become, my feelings mixed with its own and manifested in pure magic; my admiration for the Vaetna was a near-perfect opposite of that, so it was difficult to imagine the same reaction occurring with my heroes and idols. I supposed that if that unlucky Flame-sibling of mine in Poland had felt that way about the Vaetna, and then Kat had shown up…I shook off that line of thinking. It was entirely too speculative and, as Alice had pointed out, not really something I could act on, and therefore only tormented me for no benefit.

I instead opted to approach the doll, and despite all my rationalizing, I was still relieved when it didn’t do anything creepy. It simply lay there, unsouled and inert, plated in that same charming turquoise as Ebi’s shell. I actually hadn’t seen Ebi herself in days. She’d even been absent from the chatroom. Ai had insisted she was fine, and I believed her because the building’s operations didn’t seem affected, but she didn’t seem keen on explaining what exactly was wrong, if anything. I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to pry right now, and it was honestly probably for the best that the AI wasn’t around to comment on the similarities between the body I had liked so much and her own.

I tentatively ran my fingers along the shell. To call it armor was entirely aspirational; it was really only there to bulk out the form to more closely resemble the proportions of a human body, rather than a spindly and skeletal assemblage of motors like in one of those animatronic horror games. Even if there was a certain appeal in the functional simplicity of such a form, I suspected inhabiting it would make me feel very naked without any protective carapace. I now knew with certainty that I enjoyed having a shell of some sort. That was old news; Vaetna-like carapace had been on the wishlist long before anything else. I wasn’t entirely sure what that would mean for a mantle or even my physical body down the line, but in the meantime, that need was supplemented by my hoodies, at least the ones Hina hadn’t stolen.

My more private fantasies concerned anatomy beyond the surface layer; my seven-year longing was for the Vaetna’s figures, which were all fairly conventional human forms covered in their interlocked white armor, obscuring all but the most essential proportions, vaguely muscular and mostly sexless—but the longer I looked at the doll’s figure, the more I had to admit that I preferred what I was seeing here. Narrower shoulders, the slender, gently curving contours of its forearms, everywhere slimmer and more graceful than either the Vaetna or my own body; aesthetics that reminded one that this was a testbed for mahou shoujo, not high-tech angel-superheroes clad head to toe in futuristic armor. A nervous prickle of embarrassment and shame oozed over my neck as I realized that the doll’s form wasn’t really androgynous—yes, there was no flare to its hips or softness of fat to round out its chest or rear, but it was feminine nonetheless, the Radiances’ bodies taken to their least common denominator. The body that had felt right for me was on the girl side of neutral, if only barely.

This wasn’t a completely new notion for me. Hina and Star had opened Pandora’s box when they’d tag-teamed me about whether I thought the Radiances’ various appealing features would look good on myself. Ever since, when I got naked to bathe, I would look down at my body and try to picture what I might prefer more than my current proportions. I was doing my best to give serious, non-avoidant thought to those brief first-person glimpses of Alice’s bust from her mantle cam, wondering how that weight on my chest might feel, and wonder further about narrow shoulders or wider hips and how much femininity my figure was allowed to have before people would start defaulting to treating me as the woman I was not.

It had thus far been difficult and emotionally draining to interrogate those shower thoughts for too long. The idea that I might prefer this slimmer shape instead, rather than “true” androgyny with the suggestion of muscle, brought the familiar tug of shame, the urge to fall back on the plausible deniability of the Vaetna’s warrior physique. But where the Ezzen of even a few days ago had invariably cringed and shied away, I was now armored by the joy and belonging I’d felt yesterday. I imagined Hina’s voice in my ear, something along the lines of “if it feels good, cutie, who gives a shit?”

That helped me realize the obvious: wanting to look like a girl wasn’t the same as wanting to be a girl. Indulging and exploring my interest in a more feminine form didn’t inherently compromise my claims of being nonbinary. The pronouns I’d impulsively requested yesterday were easy evidence of that: they…and it. Both felt right for me, and the latter was exciting in a way I didn’t know how to categorize. Dehumanizing, alien, objectifying, yet thrilling for all those reasons too, an open claim of separation from humanity as a flamebearer. I didn’t know if that one would stick, especially with it being so much less conventional than the other gender-neutral alternative, but it felt real, something of the experience that would last even outside of the doll and reassured me that my gender identity was more complex than “enby on the way to girl,” that I was still moving in the transhuman direction I’d always wanted.

In the privacy of this secluded room in the middle of the night, standing over the evidence of my expanding horizons, such reasoning was enough to overcome my anxieties. For a moment, I let myself drop into more daring fantasy, imagining more overtly feminine features overlaid onto the doll, drawing on what I’d become familiar with. Hina’s bare hips and tight belly came to mind first, which was relieving, in a weird way; when tasked to imagine a hot girl, my subconscious had leapt straight to my girlfriend despite her not being close to the most voluptuous of the team. That made me a good boyfriend, I reasoned. Enbyfriend. Dollthingfriend?

The other Radiances were also familiar touchpoints. Most recent in my memory was Alice showing off her sculpted, borderline-unreal figure to me, which was the kind of event I was sure millions of other young men and women would have paid a fortune to experience and I’d gotten for free out of some kind of trans camaraderie. Star would have had a stroke, driven mad with gender envy and/or regular thirst; personally, I felt like I wanted to look at Alice more than I wanted to be her. This went double for her tail; I didn’t want one myself, but there was something undeniably appealing to my lizard-brain about its bulk and the way her hips flared to accommodate it. I felt I understood Hongo a little.

However, when it came to the proverbial elephant in the room, I still had to permit myself a healthy dose of respectful shame: did I envy Yuuka’s chest rather than simply find it distracting? I looked at the doll’s smooth, flat front, then down at my own, and tried to picture having such a rack, trying to be analytical rather than vulgar as I considered how they shaped the silhouette of everything Yuuka wore, impossible to ignore, a center of attention so potent as to be strategic, as Alice had described. Did I want people to look at me like that, now that I had a better understanding of Yuuka’s constant and eminently reasonable paranoia, and how she wielded her appearance to assert control over that? Would it be affirming or terrifying to be desired in such a way? Both?

I backed out of the fantasies for the time being. The important thing was that even without those curvier elements, the doll still appealed to me, and had still felt more comfortable than the flesh I was wearing right now. I hadn’t freaked out at the lack of a face or breathing, and my subconscious and the lattice had successfully filled in the absence of all the little sensations of the human body, all the secondary muscles involved with balance, the gurgles of my digestive tract, the fleeting aches and pains that evidenced my poor posture. I couldn’t quite remember whether or not I’d literally hallucinated those things to compensate. The brain was weird enough without adding pink-strung lattices into the mix.

In part, my comfort with the doll was simply a matter of contrast; after being completely divorced from the very notion of form in that liminal void of transfer, stripped of all sense of self and proprioception, any body was better than none at all. But when I’d looked in the mirror, my reaction had been much more viscerally positive than mere gratefulness to have the bare minimum.

I felt echoes of that as I moved up toward the doll’s head, looking at the blank face with fascination. No eyes, no mouth, a total mask. This was a fair bit more spartan than my private, embarrassing fantasies of a Vaetna-fied version of myself, which still had eyes. But realistically, as long as I was still able to see, I rather liked the idea of an entirely featureless face that gave away nothing except for the general direction of my head. I didn’t exactly envy that about Amethyst’s chosen form, but it was worth experimenting with.

The mouth, on the other hand, could definitely go. Facial expressions were such a burden. I frequently had no idea what to do with my mouth when people were talking to me, and eliminating that problem altogether would also lend me that air of unreadable mystique the Vaetna often projected when they weren’t making an effort to be affable. As it was, I’d get rid of my mouth right now if I could, at least as long as I still had the option to enjoy food.

Then, in a moment of rare sensibility, I remembered that masks existed, the half-face sort that covered the nose and mouth and rendered one’s silhouette vaguely snout-like. Nobody wore them outside of an operating theatre in the UK, but in Tokyo, I’d seen a few each time I’d gone out. Intrigued, I pulled out my phone and did a little googling, and learned that they were popular here, both for the sake of public health and as a more general fashion trend. They came in different shapes and colors, so it was even possible to accessorize with them. Could I picture myself wearing one as a default part of my appearance?

I could. Interesting. Surely, one of the girls owned some, or failing that, there were bound to be some among the medical supplies on the eighteenth floor. The reasonable thing to do would be to ask tomorrow, or order some online now so they’d be here by the morning.

But a desire for more immediate do-something-about-this was kindling in my chest. Alice had told me to focus on what was actionable. I wasn’t about to use that as an excuse for more late-night, ill-advised magic driven by inscrutable egg mania—I fully intended to hold true to my promise that I wouldn’t mess around with the doll unsupervised. But that convenience store across the street was 24-hour, wasn’t it? And they had masks, didn’t they?

—

It was the smallest of adventures, the simplest possible indulgence, as safe as could possibly be for being alone outside of Lighthouse Tower—the convenience store lay literally in its shadow, or would have if the sun was still up to cast one.

I was jittery with nervous energy as I rode the elevator down to the first floor. The lights were still on in the building’s spacious lobby, though the front desk was unstaffed. I wasn’t sure whether the building actually had staff at night at all, other than maybe some janitors—at least when it came to security, Ebi had direct control of the whole building’s systems. She was the reason I could essentially come and go as I pleased without carrying any kind of access card or fob, a privilege I was only truly exercising for the first time now.

It occurred to me that she controlled the building while ostensibly being secret from the public and presumably also the front-desk employees of Todai. Did they think she was just a building management program? I had no clue. But I did know she was watching me as I walked through the empty lobby, because as I approached the doors, my phone buzzed.

ebi-furai: pretty late at night to be touching grass

I stopped in front of the doors.

ezzen: Just going to the convenience store across the street.

ezzen: You wouldn’t lock me out, would you?

ebi-furai: bah

ebi-furai: i mean i could

ebi-furai: but youre exercising your free will and in my opinion thats pretty poggers

ebi-furai: so i would rather live vicariously through your adventure rather than fucking with you

ebi-furai: besides, sapphire will be back soonish, and if i locked the doors behind you i know shed just grab you

I considered commenting on the android’s use of “poggers,” but I didn’t want to risk burning through the goodwill she was extending.

ezzen: ty lol

ezzen: Anything I should know about visiting a convenience store at night?

ebi-furai: you could not be asking a wronger person

ebi-furai: ive never left the building

Oh. Right. I felt bad for forgetting about that. There was only one sensible thing to say.

ezzen: Do you wanna come?

ezzen: I mean, if you can, Ai claimed you were feeling better but it’s been weird not having you around.

ebi-furai: good where i am

She didn’t elaborate on that, which I took as my cue to push through the glass doors in the front of the building and out into the chilly air of an early March night in Tokyo. I braced for the familiar ache in my scarred hand—and was surprised when it took a few seconds longer than usual to kick in. The thicker, harder plates that had developed there, so tantalizingly and intriguingly and worryingly reminiscent of Vaetna carapace, apparently provided better insulation to my joints. Neat.

The rest of me wasn’t so well insulated. It was cold and windy enough that even my heavy hoodie couldn’t completely keep the chill from reaching up my back, so I hurried down the sidewalk toward the nearest crossing, guided by my phone’s map in my right hand. My other hand gripped the stabilizer module in my hoodie’s pocket, fidgeting with it. I wondered what I’d do with my hands when I had my full prosthetic and the little tuna can was no longer necessary. I supposed there was nothing stopping me from carrying around an actual tuna can instead. It could double as an emergency snack for Hina or Alice.

Even at this late hour, the sidewalk was fairly dense with faces side-lit by the buildings that still had lights on, little vignettes of life coming in and out of the shadows: office workers freed from overtime; students making their way back home after a long evening hitting the town after school; disheveled young adults who had only thrown on enough clothes to make it to the convenience store for late-night food, like me. Many of them were politely rushing as much as I was, and nobody spared me a second glance despite my garish orange hair and clear not-from-around-here-ness, which made me feel less self-conscious; everybody out here on the street was just trying to get to late night errands or get home and out of the cold. That common human experience we were all enduring allayed the creeping fears in the back of my mind that I would be instantly beset by either Todai fans or a PCTF snatch team as some kind of karmic punishment for having the audacity to go out on my own.

I hurried across the street and along the next sidewalk until I arrived at the bright, welcoming facade of the convenience store, the tell-tale glowing green stripe a beacon of refuge. The cold overrode any social anxiety about entering a new and unfamiliar space alone, sweeping me through the automatic doors and into the compact aisles before I even had the chance to lose my nerve. The sound of the wind was replaced by the jingles and beeps of Japanese consumerism, a discordant spell of modern comfort that prevented the primal, folkloric demon of cold from following me in.

Now that I was safe from the elements, I did stall a little, retreating to my phone rather than immediately beginning to browse. Remembering Ebi’s wording—“living vicariously”—I switched from the map to the main chatroom to share my experience…and, frankly, to get a bit of moral support.

ezzen: Liveblogging my convenience store run.

starstar97: uh ez

starstar97: its like midnight there isnt it

starstar97: thats konbini privilege i guess

starstar97: what are you there for

ezzen: surgical masks, ideally

ezzen: maybe snacks?

My stomach had opinions on that latter item. There was the fried food warmer next to the register, which reminded me of how juicy that chicken Hina had shared with me had been—but it sat dark and empty, apparently one of the few parts of the store that wasn’t fully 24-hour. A shame; warm fried chicken would have been fantastic to bring home and eat once I got out of the cold.

By contrast, though the refrigerated shelves of heat-and-eat meals were more sparsely populated in the middle of the night, populated they were nonetheless. And that was just the “real” food, the pasta and curry and rice balls; moving deeper into the store also revealed approximately one million varieties of rice crackers, and one of the aisles had a small cooler of energy drinks and jelly pouches for the truly desperate. I found myself most drawn to a shelf of unhealthy-looking baked goods, advertising custard or red bean paste or chocolate fillings. I was pleased to discover that almost everything had at least part of the label in English, though it was sometimes enigmatic; several pastries were labeled simply “Cheese” with no further description of what exactly they were.

I initially resisted the urge to simply take the lot; an adolescence of wobbling atop the poverty line had trained me to shy away from buying food that wasn’t “essential.” But then I saw something that had been on my bucket list for years, something so familiar as to induce nostalgia even though I’d never had one before, and that tipped the scale toward indulgence. I backtracked toward the front of the store to grab a basket, filled it with pastries and crunchy things with my prize at the top, then snapped a photo and sent it to the group chat.

ezzen: “And none under its shadow shall starve.”

ebi-furai: im POSITIVE that the na vva kiiycaseiir was not written with “loading up on ten thousand calories of empty carbs and sugar” in mind

I was pleased, albeit unsurprised, that Ebi caught my reference to the Spire’s foundational document of universal guarantees to its citizens—but rather annoyed that she didn’t seem to catch why I’d made it. Neither did Star, apparently.

starstar97: o hi ebi!!

starstar97: doesnt the spire kind of have insane pastry game now tho

starstar97: like on the same level as japan and including stuff like melonpan

starstar97: so the nvk could include most of these after the fact

starstar97: e do they have like cheesecakes in the fridge section

twilitt_: cheesecake mentioned

twilitt_: logging on

ezzen: guys

ezzen: the specific thing in the pic

ezzen: oTL

starstar97: oh wait

starstar97: e is literally referencing it because theres a heung cock on top of the basket

ezzen: NO

ezzen: its a CORNUCOPIA

ezzen: or, if you must use a nickname, a COPIA, thank you very much

starstar97: >:P

ezzen: or i guess “Spire Corn” according to the packaging on this one :\

ezzen: thanks japan.

ezzen: with red bean filling, not corn

ezzen: …

ezzen: I think.

What Star was cruelly calling a “Heung cock” was just a long cone of fried pancake batter stuffed with sweet red bean paste, a Japanese take on one of the Spire’s more notable cultural exports. One not descended from the Vaetna themselves, too, which was rare.

The story went that it was invented by Spire immigrants on the first anniversary of the end of the firestorms, and it was supposed to roughly resemble both the megastructure’s shape and a cornucopia. Since Clear Skies Day happened to fall right in the middle of Autumn, very near many immigrant cultures’ harvest festivals, it had become one of the Spire’s major unifying holidays. The cornucopia pastry’s role had grown to match, becoming a central festival food one could find with every kind of sweet and savory filling imaginable from across the cultural melting pot of the Spire’s citizens. A marvelous example of food as a keystone of culture, as Dad would have been quick to point out.

Bristol was not a great place to find affordable foreign pastries, so I’d never gotten to try a cornucopia of any flavor. I’d attempted making one myself once, but without the specially shaped hot metal cones they were supposed to be cooked in, it hadn’t really worked out. So finding one was a delight, and a welcome bit of familiarity in a country that still felt rather foreign…though the fact that it was in stores at all right now was rather strange.

ezzen: Kind of out of season.

starstar97: yeah its february????

starstar97: jp convenience stores love limited time stuff from what i understand but usually that matches seasonal things

starstar97: and this is not the season

ebi-furai: they sell them year round here

ebi-furai: its just a thing

ebi-furai: theyre basically just thicker crepes and we love crepes here so

I eyed the pastry in its plastic wrapper. It was indeed a little more frail than I’d always seen them, and it was indeed out of season, and the conical shape was a bit smushed—but it was a cornucopia nonetheless, and I considered that a win. And I couldn’t help but be a little excited at the idea that they were available year round; it occurred to me that if there were crepe stands, there might also be cornucopia stands somewhere in the city. I resolved to look that up later.

Right now, though, I wanted to infodump about the Na Vva Kiiyaseiir. It wasn’t a formal operational plan for the Spire’s guaranteed goods and services, but seven years of rolling my eyes at billionaire-owned media attempting hit pieces on even the tiniest perceived holes or hypocrisies in the allotment’s catalog had left me with quite a few opinions on the intent and wording of the document.

ezzen: These ARE a pretty funny corner case for the NVK, since it was written before they were invented ofc

ezzen: But they’re an official seasonal inclusion in the allotment now (they dedicate some gastrosynth space to it during the season to keep up with demand) so retroactively they’re totally part of the intent of that line and the spirit of the document as a whole.

ezzen: I guess if you really split hairs and went by the literal meaning of NVK you could say that only the flavors available in the allotment (peach/cream/pistachio iirc? feel like I’m missing one) are part of “The People’s Fundamental Needs Being Met”

ezzen: But that would make you an asshole lol

starstar97: people’s fundamental right to heung cock

ezzen: AUGH

starstar97: and google says its saffron and pistachios together, thats probably what you were missing

starstar97: aka kesar pista, indian dessert

ezzen: right the indian

ezzen: fuck you beat me to it

ezzen: Damn you and your full mobility in both hands!

ezzen: Anyway, either way this particular cornucopia in my basket isn’t part of the NVK’s guarantee because it’s not part of the Spire-produced allotment lol.

ezzen: Very much wrong side of the planet. So not exactly “under its shadow.”

ebi-furai: masks

ezzen: right right

ezzen: on it

A little embarrassed at how completely I’d zoned out of my surroundings, I slid my phone into my pocket and began to search the convenience store. I was hardly alone in here, and the aisles were narrow enough that I occasionally had to yield to another person coming around a corner or reroute around somebody browsing. The food sections obviously didn’t have masks, but looping around the back and squeezing behind an exhausted-looking office lady staring at the selection of beers brought me toward writing supplies and toiletries. I scanned up and down for anything with a picture of a mask, feeling rather like a tourist.

Nothing that looked mask-ish. Mild embarrassment began to build up to humiliated frustration as I looked and looked while people shuffled through the narrow aisle behind me. Their eyes bored into my back.

After the fifth time running my eyes along that section of shelves, my self-consciousness got the better of me and I gave up, turning around and pretending to browse the magazines directly opposite to save face. Then I realized that some of the magazines were porn mags and I aborted that pretense as well, shuffling down the aisle to appear as though I was doing anything but that—

And there they were. A little plastic pack of white masks, hanging on a peg at the end of the aisle, far enough away from where I’d been looking. I grabbed it in relief and took a photo.

ezzen: got

starstar97: !!

ebi-furai: vaetna white

That was true. I would have taken any color, but white was very welcome, the milky pale of Spire and Vaetna dermis. These ones were also a little nicer than the surgical masks I was familiar with, smooth fabric and a closer mesh with the contours of the cheek. It appealed to me very much.

ezzen: Any purchasing parameters I should know about

ezzen: I’ve never bought these before, so

ezzen: Kinda nervous it’ll make me come off as edgelord-y or something, you know?

twilitt_: does it have anime references on it

ezzen: no?

starstar97: then youre fine lol

twilitt_: yeah

twilitt_: it would be pretty cool if you could do a mask as a standard part of an outfit though right

starstar97: i mean you can, nobody’s stopping you

starstar97: especially since e is a flamebearer

starstar97: who’s gonna make fun of them

I resisted the urge to reply “Yuuka”. I didn’t want to get into that with the chat this late at night, and in light of what I’d just learned about her, I was wary of saying anything at all. I half-expected Ebi to say it anyway, but she stayed quiet.

twilitt_: yeah but i mean like. us mortals too

twilitt_: youd probably need a pandemic or something to bring them into fashion first though

twilitt_: no shot the vaetna would let that happen lol

ezzen: I’m gonna stand out so much

ezzen: orange hair is bad enough

ezzen: >.<

starstar97: dont be dumb

starstar97: its like two bucks right, just get it and see if it works

starstar97: and if it sucks

starstar97: hit da brix

starstar97: and also the hair is cool i think? you gotta send more pictures later

That helped a lot. 

ezzen: thanks

ezzen: buying it

I took the pack, tossed it atop the pile of pastries in my basket, and hurried toward the register, wanting very much to get out of here. I disappointedly brandished my card at the uniformed cashier, a girl maybe four or five years older than me, in the universal language of a shopper ready to pay. She took the card placidly—then suddenly, her customer service autopilot juddered to a halt as she hesitated, first squinting at the very expensive-looking card and the Todai logo marking it, then looking up at me and seeming to process who I was. I wondered then how I looked—a foreign flamebearer standing across the counter from her at near midnight, basket full of nothing but pastries and a pack of masks. It must have been an absurd image.

She seemed torn for a minute, and I was worried she would ask for my autograph—which I didn’t have—or something else celebrity-ish, but to her credit, she moved right along with the transaction, stuffing my pastries into a plastic bag and offering it to me.

“Houseki hikare!” she chirped with an awkward smile.

“Uh. Thanks,” I muttered, not knowing how the Radiances would respond. I gave her an awkward nod and hurried out the front door, trading the discomfort of the interaction for that of the biting cold. Or rather, I made it about five steps out before registering a flash of color and motion to my right.

A shot of unwarranted adrenaline pumped through me as I turned to face my assailant, flashing back to my first encounter with Takagiri, spear tattoo itching—but this time, the surprise was entirely a welcome one.

Next to me, shining out of the dark, was a pair of sapphire eyes. And they looked hungry.

4.02 Patreon Release

CONTENT WARNINGS: Objectification, human trafficking, implied rape (in backstory, not on-screen)

--------------

“Amane?” Alice called.

I heard the scuffling of a chair moving in the other room and turned to see Amethyst, almost three meters of gemstone mecha, looming in the doorway of her gamer cave. She waved at me. I waved back up at her. She said something in shimmering tones to Alice, who nodded and replied in rapid Japanese. They exchanged a few more phrases before Amane swung her massive, spike-snout head to look at me. She seemed to hesitate. Then there was a flash of purple light, and Amane stood there, clothed in flesh and carbon fiber and a bathrobe, now merely my height—though that was still tall, especially for a Japanese woman. She walked over to Alice with the faintest shadow of a limp and sat next to her, smiling thinly at me. That made me nervous; I had a vague idea of where this was going, and it was dark. Alice took her hand and looked at me seriously.

“Ezzen. Yuuka has…a whole shitload of trauma. Trauma around men especially, to be frank. Which you’re not one of, I know, believe me, but this is still context you deserve to have.”

“…As opposed to having it two weeks ago?” I couldn’t help but ask.

Alice looked guilty. “Well—yes, maybe we should have just opened with this on day one, given you some pointers ahead of time. But we really thought you wouldn’t set her off so badly.”

I bristled on reflex. “Because I’m—”

“No, not because you’re so hideously masculine or anything. It’s your Flame and her eye—she depends on it to feel safe, and since she can’t see you properly, you automatically put her on edge. But it seemed like she’d warmed up to you, and I know she was trying, and I’m proud of her for that, but…for you two to coexist, you need to know why she’s…like that.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling very uncomfortable. “Um, lay it on me.”

Alice hesitated and looked over at her girlfriend, who nodded at her, looking…impatient? Alice gathered herself, shoulders hunched, then breathed out. “Okay. Well, about…six years ago, Amane was kidnapped by Sugawara. Human trafficking, since this was back before flamebearer trafficking was really an established industry. Yuuka was her best friend, and we weren’t in the picture yet, so when Amane disappeared, Yuuka started looking. She found them.” Alice’s voice was low and serious, and she spoke without drama or embellishment. “But she was far weaker as a flamebearer than she is now. This was before the flame donation that made us strong, no mantle—glyphcraft barely existed yet—and she didn’t have the eye. She could defend herself, but she couldn’t blow down the door. So when she eventually hit a dead end, she…got herself trafficked. As a fifteen-year-old foreign girl, not a flamebearer. To evade suspicion.”

Alice was looking down at the floor, not directly at me, and I couldn’t blame her. She didn’t have to describe anything more; I understood the broad shape of it, what Yuuka must have endured for Amane’s sake, and it made me begin to feel physically ill, the spectre of nausea looming. I had to say something to fill the silence. “Oh God.” Then another layer of horror revealed itself to me, and I stared at Amane. If it had happened to Yuuka, then it would also have…

Amane looked less moved than either of us. She shook her head and said something to Alice, who translated with a wince. “Amane doesn’t…remember much of her own experiences from that time.” That felt like a lie, or at least a half-truth, but there was no way I was going to press on it, and Alice seemed antsy to move on besides. “Anyway. That’s the part of it that you should know. I wanted to let Yuuka tell this herself, when she was ready to share it with you, but if she won’t, I think it’s too important for you to stay in the dark about. She witnessed men at their very worst from all too close. That’s where it comes from.”

“Fuck,” I said. “I’m…sorry.”

I didn’t really know what else to say; it was both the expected expression of sympathy and a deeper sense of penitence on the behalf of my erstwhile gender. But then I started to think about it more, the way Alice was talking about it. This did explain Yuuka’s standoffishness and misandry, and I couldn’t blame her for reflexively reacting to me as poorly as she did at first—but how did this actually help me treat her better? Especially if Yuuka wasn’t the one to say it, and Alice was doing it in her stead—and apparently without her permission? That made me terribly uncomfortable in a way that I didn’t know how to bring up.

I opted to instead try to keep it practical. “Um. Okay, so what do I do to not set her off?”

“You’ve honestly done a fine job of it without being told, because most of it is common sense. Er…men touching her, that’s arguably the biggest. Being around people she perceives as men isn’t too much of an issue anymore, as long as they’re not flamebearers, then they make her skittish. I think you have a feel for this already, yeah?”

“I’m a flamebearer.” And she thinks of me as a man, was the part that went unspoken.

Alice picked up my subtext and shook her head quickly. “I don’t think she perceives you as male anymore. You rode her jetbike yesterday, yeah? Then you’re probably fine in that aspect now. If she cited Hina as the issue, then that’s a whole other set of behaviors you need to watch out for. It depends on if her eye is acting up, and whether it can see you—” Alice was interrupted by Amane, who said something sharp in Japanese that made her eyebrows go up a little. “Amane says—”

“Iwaseteyo,” Amane huffed at her, emerald eyes narrowed in a mild glare as she drew her phone from a bathrobe pocket. Alice muttered an apology and shot me a pained glance. I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I just averted my eyes and awkwardly scooted the ball I was sitting on a little closer to them so I could read what she wrote, translated through a machine in a bid for a little independence rather than having Alice interpret.

Amane: Yuuka feels unsafe when her eyes can’t see.

Amane: Yuuka told me that it still can’t clearly see you, so please be careful. It’s sufficient that she can see the future circumstances around you, but she can still be scared by you.

“Um. Got it, I’ll be careful. Are you…?”

Amane waved me off and quickly produced a response.

Amane: I’m doing well. The past doesn’t scare me.

She hesitated, glancing back at Alice, then quickly tapped something else in.

Amane: I think Alice is blundering by telling you this. I thought she would be more respectful.

Alice, oblivious, rubbed her forehead, where horns certainly weren’t growing. “Alright. That history is all very dark, and I’d much rather talk about practicalities. This stuff is compounded by her issues with Hina, as you well know. Exes. I’d avoid being overly flirty with each other while she’s around, mostly because Hina’s brand of affection is…you know.”

I nodded, confused by the mixed signals I was getting between the couple.  “I’m—yeah, I’m intending to do that. That was a big fuckup of mine last night, and, um, I’ll talk to Hina.” I glanced at Amane. “And, um, red ripple. We’ll be responsible.”

Amane frowned back at me. She raised her phone again, flesh and mechanical fingers flying across the screen.

Amane: Thank you, but it’s not only your responsibility. Yuuka is afraid and her soul has scars, but she shouldn’t be harsh to you for doing normal things. She should talk about this with you so you can agree. This isn’t Alice’s concern.

Alice, leaning forward to peek around the phone to see the screen as well, frowned. “Yuuka’s having an immensely difficult time right now, what with all the portents of war. The least we can do is help Ezzen understand how to interact safely with her. Itawatta hou ga ii yo ne?”

I didn’t have to understand that last part to agree. “Um, yeah. I mean, the way I acted yesterday was shit, and I ought to do better. If I’m the one making her uncomfortable, that’s on me, isn’t it?” Amane watched me and nodded slightly, silently encouraging, urging me to continue. I took a breath, looking at Alice’s nose rather than right in her eyes. “But, um…I don’t think you should have told me about this.”

“What? I know it’s horrible, but it’s really—”

Amane’s viridian eyes flashed with anger at Alice as she snapped an interruption that made her girlfriend recoil. “Uh, whoa, hey,” the dragon girl said, voice full of surprise and worry, before switching to Japanese. “Senpaikaze wo fukashiteru wake ja nai no yo.” Her gaze flickered to me. “I’m—trying to keep the team on the same page. That’s not being patronizing. Is it?”

I cringed a little when that earned her another frustrated reply and wave of the hand from Amane. Alice winced. “Okay, sorry, gomen. I just don’t think Yuuka should be the one who has to come meet Ez in the middle on this.”

Amane jabbed more text into her phone in response and showed it to me, pushing it close to my face so Alice couldn’t get a peek.

Amane: I’ll talk to Yuuka about it later so she won’t get mad. She’ll listen to me. Don’t let Alice make you think it’s all your fault.

Then she lowered the phone, turned to Alice, and began to chew her out. I was glad to not be privy to the exact content of the conversation; the vibes were bad enough on their own, with Amane’s height making her loom over the dragon girl and her voice clipped and reprimanding. She didn’t seem furious, but clearly she felt that Alice had overstepped and was coming at this the wrong way. The only time she slowed down was when her breath hitched in a gasp that made Alice reach toward her with alarm—but Amane pushed the hand aside, and after a moment, steeled herself and continued like it hadn’t happened.

Other than that moment, Todai’s leader sat there and took it. She didn’t bristle, no wash of heat pulsed off her; she just endured Amane’s chastisement with a wince, hunched shoulders, and growing guilt in her eyes like it was a physical lashing. She glanced between her irate girlfriend, the wrinkled bedsheets, and me, clearly humiliated to be chewed out with an audience. I didn’t dare interrupt.

Eventually, Amane stopped and looked over her girlfriend, who was hanging her head in shame. She reached out to Alice’s chin with her prosthetic hand and raised her face gently—Alice looked like she was very close to crying, which I hated. Amane took her hand again and said something much softer. Alice hesitated, brought her other hand over to join the embrace, and let out a rattling sigh, like she was trying to master her emotions. After a slow breath very much like the ones she’d instructed me to take, she looked down again and spoke.

“Sorry, Ezzen. I’m…meddling. I thought I’d keep it light on details, but it still wasn’t my story to tell, and Amane is right; you shouldn’t be the only one who has to adjust your behavior. Yuuka being a bitch isn’t okay, and I’m sorry I treated it like that was your problem to solve.”

I was gripped by paralytic secondhand embarrassment even watching this, so I struggled to formulate a reply. “Uh. It’s—I mean, she’s right to be upset about how I acted yesterday. I do need to do better, less gross. Yuuka wasn’t the only one who was put off by that; it made Ai uncomfortable too, she’s just nicer about it.”

“Oh, hell,” Alice sighed, rubbing her face. “Yes, we’ll still help you work on self control?” She pitched it up like a question, directing it to Amane, who nodded encouragingly. “I just—didn’t want Yuuka to be upset, and you came in here freaking out and needed specific things to do to pull you out of the self-toxicity pit, and that made me want to do this all from your direction without rocking her boat. I probably need to apologize to her too. Or—Amane and I will do it together, I guess. Tomorrow. It’s late.”

The sun had already been down when I’d first come in. I nodded, taking this as a cue to get out of here and escape the awkward atmosphere; the way Alice was rubbing her face seemed painfully familiar. “Um, yeah. Okay.”

Amane waved me to sit back down, which made me pause uncertainly. “Hold on,” she said in English, then directed something else to Alice, who removed her face from her hands to give Amane a questioning look, then interpreted. “Um, well, as long as we’re here, it’s okay to at least talk about some of Yuuka’s behavior as it stands right now, anything she does that bothers you, so Amane can bring it up with her. It’s only fair.”

I hesitantly returned to the purple yoga ball; what a faintly ridiculous prop for this emotional clusterfuck. Amane, seemingly satisfied with Alice’s understanding of what she’d done wrong, gave her girlfriend a make-up hug while I thought about what to ask. Yuuka was really abrasive, but I found I’d grown tolerant of much of it, at least in the sense that I’d become able to distinguish the friendly ribbing from the self-defensive biting remarks, or at least I thought I had.

I did hit on one odd thing. “She’s called me Ezza a few times,” I realized, an emotion mounting in my chest that was either anticipation or dread. “Which, um, I thought was a nickname? But foresight, right. So…don’t tell me that’s because I’m destined to change my name again in the future, to make it more feminine?”

Alice stared, then looked to Amane, who was apparently taking notes. “Um, I don’t know for sure. I thought it was an Australianism. But I guess it could be foresight, or just an assumption—a sign she already sees you as less masc, which is good, but is assigning you a fem nickname, despite you currently going by it/they, which is bad. I’m—oh, I don’t know,” she moaned. “I don’t want to make more assumptions, or put words in her mouth, since apparently that’s all I’ve been good for.”

“I’ll ask,” Amane added for my benefit, in English.

“Thanks. Um, also, what is with the Australian-ness? It’s pretty…almost a caricature?” I hazarded.

Amane replied to that one, which Alice interpreted. “Oh, she’s from Japan. Just spent a lot of time in Australia during the summers, so that’s where the accent comes from. She really sounds much more normal in Japanese.”

“Oh, okay.” I wondered how she’d sound with my prosthetic’s translator; Amane and Ai sounded pretty different between the languages, as the least fluent English speakers. Both sounded more casual in Japanese, Amane more peppy and Ai more vulgar. I thought Yuuka might be the same despite being fully bilingual, but maybe the switch would be reversed, more polite with her wording in Japanese, though perhaps no less biting in meaning. Not a completely different person, but projecting different vibes in different contexts. Like how I had felt while mantled up in the doll. Huh.

Thinking of mantling gave me one more thought. “Er. Maybe this one’s too much, but I really don’t want to ask her directly; she’d cut my head off.”

Alice looked nervous, then suddenly didn’t as she realized where I was going with it. “Oh. Is this about her style?”

“Um, yeah. Her…appeal.” I gave Amane a cautious glance, but she didn’t seem to think this topic was an overstep, so I continued. “She seems…very willing to put her…chest…on display for somebody who hates, um, attention from men. At least on your promotional material and stuff, and her mantle outfit.” Her outfits around the penthouse and what she wore to her classes seemed much more modest—still fashionable, not frumpy, and nothing could entirely hide her figure, but a far cry from the intentional sex appeal of her professional image.

Alice hesitated and glanced at Amane, who thought for a moment, then dictated a reply in pieces. “Okay, we’ll be blunt about this: knowing she can jiggle her tits at guys to make them do what she wants is a form of control over her situation. It puts her in the pilot’s seat for a lot of interactions. And I know that sounds contradictory, but it also literally streamlines the possibilities of an interaction with a man as far as her eye is concerned, and that gives her more confidence, especially when it’s backed up by a mantle and her affinity for magical traps. Nobody’s ever tried anything, but it seems to help her deal when there’s a lot of attention on her, so that’s how she’s styled herself.” Amane added something else that made Alice frown slightly. “Um, yeah, it also helps business, I suppose—er, I want to make clear that we aren’t forcing her to do that,” she hastily clarified, looking wary. “It’s all her. I, um, don’t want to make any assumptions about how victims deal with their trauma, but…well.” A tinge of sadness entered her voice at the end.

Amane added something else. They went back and forth for a moment; it sounded like they were negotiating phrasing. “And she’s also the most…extralegally active of us, and being ‘the bimbo’,” she emphasized with air quotes, “makes accusations of those activities look more ridiculous in the public eye. A girl can’t have fat knockers and violently actionable ideologies, as far as the average fan is concerned. I benefit from that one too,” she admitted, looking down at her own chest, which was still voluptuous by any standard that wasn’t Yuuka. “Though as the leader, I need to be taken seriously by the powers that be, so I split the difference a bit more. Current attire notwithstanding.”

“Right,” I said, thoroughly red in the face. This was equal parts enlightening and entirely TMI; I hadn’t thought the topic of breasts would have such profound political implications, though in hindsight that had been silly of me. But it was weirdly gratifying to know that Yuuka handled me with the same abrasion and directness she used with her female teammates, rather than stupefying me with a flash of cleavage—though that probably had as much to do with me being an unfamiliar and unpredictable flamebearer as my status as a nonbinary Vaetnathing. She likely considered me a much more real risk to her safety than a random nonmagical man, which was sobering.

Amane pulled me out of those troubled thoughts with another comment, this one with an adorably impish grin at odds with both her anger and elegance. Alice snorted in response, seeming to return to more of an emotionally stable state by way of mild exasperation. “Oh, well, yes, her strategy doesn’t work on every man. Hongo, Hikanome’s other male flamebearer in a leadership role, remember him?”

“Yeah?” I did; he had been affable during lunch, the least enigmatic of the three, and then taken charge of protecting and evacuating Hikanome’s faithful who had been most wounded by the inferno. Public faces for organizations like a Flame cult could be incredibly slimy, but he struck me as a true believer in a more down-to-earth way than Miyoko’s prophetess vibe, and moreover, Amane and Yuuka had seemed outright amicable with him. “Oh, yeah, I guess he didn’t seem to bother her all that much, huh.”

“You noticed! That’s partially because they have a good history from during the schism—he’s one of the people who was instrumental in deposing the person responsible for all her suffering, after all—and partially because he doesn’t even glance at her rack, which even I have to admit can be terribly challenging. But that’s because he only has eyes for me, ugh. Wants to slay the dragon.” She looked a little put-upon, but it gave way to a wry grin directed to her girlfriend. “But he can’t have me, can he?” she asked her girlfriend playfully. Amane reached over and squeezed her bare thigh, and I heard a distinct whap from Alice’s tail on the sheets behind her as she leaned into the taller girl and a much more genuine smile washed over her face.

Talking about boobs had apparently gotten the lesbians warming back up to one another, which felt like my cue to leave. I didn’t belong, and I had no more questions besides. “Um, okay, I think that’s it.” I began to stand.

Alice waved me away. “Yeah. Sorry about…all that, I really put my foot in it. Leave it to my amazing girlfriend to set me right.” She gave her teammate a distinctly sapphic look, heart-meltingly adoring despite the rebuke she’d received—or maybe because of it. She turned to me, covering the attraction with some of her professional air as Radiance Opal. “I appreciate you coming to talk to me when you were freaking out about the Vaetna stuff. Talking’s good, and I appreciate being trusted with that. Though, I do have to ask: you’re not going to immediately start hyperventilating once you leave my line of sight, are you?”

“Um. I don’t think so?”

She nodded, trusting my judgment on that. “Good. Have a nice night, Ezzen. Let’s do another session with the doll tomorrow—I’ll help you troubleshoot your euphoria and we can talk more about the design.”

“Okay.”

I retreated from the room, Amane waving to me with her prosthetic arm as I left. Once I was in the hall, though, I got a text from her.

Amane: Thank you for taking my side. Alice can be frustrating.

Ezzen: No problem?

Ezzen: I think you did most of it, I might not have said anything if you hadn’t called her out

Amane: Teamwork!

Amane: I’ll talk to Yuuka. Good night

Ezzen: Good night

—

When I got back to my room, I got straight into bed; even though I was technically behind on mantle work, having spent most of the day in a guilty and dysphoric haze, I couldn’t muster the willpower to hop on my computer and rectify that tonight. It was looking like a chatroom-and-YouTube night, with no glyphcraft. Perhaps a more responsible version of myself, one who was free from the universal mental penalties imposed by dysphoria, would have mustered the will. Or maybe I just needed ADHD medication. After all, I hadn’t even bathed today, and that had a far lower mental and emotional barrier than designing the inner workings of my speculative ideal body.

It wasn’t just dysphoria. Though Alice had talked me down from the worst of it, and I wasn’t immediately overcome with a new wave of adrenaline, I was still reeling from the possibility that I was poisonous to my heroes. I felt some kind of abstract pressure about the broader possibility that the Peacies were already taking steps to investigate whatever had happened to Kat, to replicate and refine it, to forge a weapon that could cut down even the Vaetna. Even if Todai somehow resisted all PCTF encroachment in the coming weeks, I felt I would still be party to that horror simply by inaction. If something about my Flame was inherently inimical to the Vaetna, and that knowledge was soon to be dragged out of Pandora’s Box regardless, then I ought to learn and understand the mechanism behind it, so that we—meaning myself as well as Todai if they’d participate—might find an…antidote? Vaccine? I was thinking of it in terms of disease, though there was no particular evidence for that.

There was very little evidence for anything. That should have excited me, the suggestion of further horizons of magic that I was uniquely positioned to explore and document, but the circumstances made it feel bleak and burdensome. Sharing my work with the wider magical community would only hasten the development of the perfect weapon, and I was under no illusions about my ability to go the other way and try to mislead the entire PCTF’s research apparatus via a few papers, not when they already had one of the others whose Flames matched mine in hand.

So I lacked the will to work the myriad problems as of that evening, instead busying myself with the chatroom and aimlessly scrolling for videos that might take my mind off of it instead. I was great at avoidance, at lying in bed and staring at a bright rectangle a few inches from my face and trying very hard to think about how much I wasn’t doing.

But not everything could be avoided, nor ought to be. I was forcibly reminded that I’d barely eaten today when my stomach began to growl, and that biological demand forced me out of bed, out into the common area, down the stairs, and into the main common space, where I was grateful to find nobody to intrude on my alone-in-the-kitchen time. I dug through the fridge, found one of the many convenience store heat-and-eat meals Alice and Ai favored, and popped it into the microwave. These came in many varieties; this one wound up being spaghetti in a red sauce that more resembled ketchup than bolognese or marinara—long-ingrained sensibilities about food presentability had me searching the fridge for elements to make it better resemble an appealing dish and less like pure carbohydrate body fuel in a vaguely noodlesque form factor. I found an almost-spent rind of a hard cheese and a grater, and atop that snowy mountain, I added dabs of hot sauce, vaguely surprised to find that name-brand Tabasco was living in the spice cabinet alongside the more exotic chili oils and pastes. I wished we had a basil plant or something that would give me an easy way to put a little green on top—not that it would really make the meal any healthier, but this was less about nutrition and more about the psychology of eating. I’d found myself inheriting Dad’s love of plating and garnishing now that I was living with others, even when none of them were around.

I sat alone in the kitchen and ate my upgunned pasta. It was quiet in the penthouse, and when there were no people around, it was easy to pick out all the mechanical sounds: air moving around from the heating system as the building breathed, the steady rumble of the fridge, the hum of the microwave I cut off before it could beep at me. The ding of the elevator, which I kept anticipating but never arrived. The world outside the penthouse was silent, both the lower floors of the building and the wider Tokyo cityscape beyond the windows, present only to my eyes as a background for whatever was happening among the Radiances’ bubble of domesticity, not as a vast assemblage of real places I could go and explore.

Since arriving at Todai, I’d hardly ever had reason to leave Lighthouse Tower, except for that one outing with Alice and then Hina, the ill-fated Hikanome festival, and going with Yuuka to the shrine where Sugawara would next appear. Oh, and the haircut. I had no outdoor obligations short of flamebearer duties—all the care for my amputation and prosthetic was being taken care of in-house, Todai’s lawyers had apparently managed to get me some kind of visa or asylum status without me needing to face a single official, even groceries just kind of appeared in the fridge. I didn’t even know where the convenience store this pasta had come from was. Somehow, that last one was a bridge too far, making me pull out my phone’s map and hunt, which taught me that there was a Family Mart immediately across the street.

It frustrated me that I had access to essentially infinite money in the heart of one of the biggest cities in the world and had still barely ever left these two floors, let alone the building, and never voluntarily or for fun. In Bristol, I’d at least had the excuse of being broke, and that it was Bristol. Here, I only had myself to blame; my interactions with Amane had demonstrated that the language barrier wasn’t really all that much of an obstacle, and that would go double once I had the final version of my prosthetic with its built-in translator.

I hoped that maybe the emotional pressure cooker of living with the Radiances would be less intense if I left the house more, if I were to form some social bonds with even a single non-flamebearer…somehow. I’d had very little idea of how to do that even in England, let alone in a country where I didn’t speak the language.

Besides, the penthouse felt like it wanted to keep me here. Most of this lower floor was still and dark, my small island of lights in the kitchen reaching out toward the distant windows and dying before they got there, drowned in the furniture in the sitting area. Even more forbidding were the hallways leading around the back of the floor, which denied the light almost entirely past the first few meters.

In that abyss, somewhere in one of the further rooms, lay the doll. For a moment, I entertained the idle fantasy of going down there and ditching this meat body for a while. That was easy enough to dismiss with reasonable counterarguments like “I don’t know how to set it up” and “if something goes wrong with the transfer I’ll be alone and helpless” and “I don’t deserve to feel good.” Then even I had to admit that that last one wasn’t so reasonable, and that I might feel a little better about everything if I at least went over and gazed upon it; if nothing else, maybe looking at it from the outside would help me pinpoint what I found so comfortable about inhabiting it, which would inform the design of my actual mantle.

So with my stomach full and my steps light, I ventured into the dark.

4.01 Patreon Release

Hi public readers! 4.01 to 4.03 will release for patrons before 4.01 goes public, so if you want your fix of Sunspot a few weeks early, it's only $5!

The public NSFW side story is still coming! It might go up this week or next.

-----

After euphoria came shame.

My first time in the doll had been eye-opening, a singular experience that had been far more viscerally impactful than I’d anticipated. Nobody, including me, had expected the mantle calibration doll to be so enjoyable, so freeing, such a reset. I’d been braced for it to be novel but not actually make me feel like a different person—what I’d gotten instead was a disassembled, deep-cleaned, and reassembled version of myself, with all the soul-muck temporarily scoured away. I hadn’t understood how debilitating the grip of dysphoria and shame was, how it gummed up every level of my cognition, paralyzing emotion and poisoning my thoughts. Now I had tasted the alternative, and it felt incredible.

It wasn’t quite right to say that the Ebi-like body of the doll was perfect for my sensibilities, that it was exactly the thing I had always dreamt of; it lacked the Vaetna’s killing shapes, the flow of their armor and the…knightly presence, the energy they carried that I never quite could put into words. And I did eventually need to answer whether having different hips felt nice. The benefit to being in the doll was half in the smoothness and the facelessness and half as a result of the mental and spiritual disrobing my anima had undergone in the split second of transfer. I hadn’t been working properly before, like my soul had been suffocated and overheating; in the doll and after, I was running at my proper operating temperatures, able to access a more complete emotional spectrum. Excitement, happiness, a general desire to keep living and live more than the shadow of a person I’d been until this point—

And horniness, to put it bluntly. Feeling so emotionally activated had come with a near-complete collapse of my inhibitions; I’d repeatedly escalated Hina’s lewd provocations while making dinner and only resisted the urge to abscond from dinner and rut with her until the sun came up because I was also having so much fun cooking—and sex and food prep for a crowd shouldn’t mix. While lost in the equally vivacious and endlessly enticing energy of my girlfriend, who had been so happy we were finally on the same wavelength, I’d had no regard for the other girls. But in the harsh and sin-exposing light of day, I remembered their discomfort with far too much clarity, the faint hunch of Ai’s shoulders when my hand went directly from a cooking utensil to Hina’s waist and back to the food I was making for everybody. I’d barely respected basic hygiene.

We should have just ditched and indulged our urges immediately instead of being nasty in front of the others; they wouldn’t have had to put up with us, and maybe we’d have actually been able to follow through on all those whispered promises and roaming squeezes. Instead, when we did eventually flee for my room, she’d channeled my energy toward mantle design, urging me to continue self-actualizing through the endless panels and tables of GWalk. She still hadn’t been able to resist getting a little handsy; I suspect that if we’d stayed up, I’d have eventually gotten pulled away from the keyboard into a tangle of limbs and teeth. Which would have been problematic because her definition of sex was not survivable for my fragile meat body.

Problematic. Bad. Yep. I did, in fact, need a certain amount of blood to live. For now.

So it was probably for the best that the glyphcrafting went on for barely fifteen minutes before my surge of energy ebbed and the soul-stripping took its toll. The sudden but predictable wave of exhaustion hit right as Hina had been starting to growl in my ear, and I barely had time to yawn before she bodily hauled me over to bed—and then left right before sleep took me. Did that count as a success of boundaries? I hadn’t exactly enforced anything.

The next morning, I was dismayed to find that I’d slept off the euphoria and returned to my familiar, muted self. Extra muted, in fact, accented by contrast—and because I was plagued by guilt. My sense of propriety, freshly returned from its brief vacation, was holding me accountable. Its verdict: my conduct in front of the Radiances last evening was unacceptable, the exact kind of disgusting offense I’d been so afraid of committing the whole time I’d lived here. That, combined with the return of my dysphoria, made me somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of actually going through with anything lewd with Hina now, and I’d felt obligated to go around and apologize for my actions.

Ai laughed awkwardly in response to my stammering and waved her hands hurriedly. “I wasn’t really paying attention to you, so I didn’t notice. You made dinner and then went to your room. I’m glad the test platform worked so well for you. Did it give you any new ideas for the layout of your model?”

The sex-repulsed Emerald Radiance seemed like she’d struck it from the record of our interactions entirely, for which I was grateful, but I couldn’t wipe away the guilt so easily. Even when I accepted her invitation—conversational diversion, really—to nerd-babble about magic theory, it wasn’t enough to distract me from my overall sense of filthiness, which was how I knew it was especially bad.

Yuuka, on the other hand, was much more acerbic. “Fuck me, I’m glad I left before all that. Looked over the railing while you were cooking, saw you with your hand on her ass, went right back to my room. Why are you even apologizing? Didya even realize that I wasn’t there, or were you too busy thinking about how you’d crack her ribs?”

That last part was so surprising that it broke me out of my contrite cringing. “Crack…her ribs?”

“Yeah. I bet she made you use the fuckin’ poultry shears.”

“We—what?” I was thrown; I could tell what she was implying, but it was totally unprompted. I wasn’t about to admit that things not too far from that had crossed my mind just last night and went on the offensive instead. “You are describing sex, yeah? Is that seriously the kind of stuff Hina wants? Has she asked you—”

Heliotrope pushed a twintail over her shoulder. It was incredible how she could somehow look down at me from a full head height below. “Don’t involve me in your butchery fantasies.”

“You’re the one fantasizing! I was apologizing for…being stupid in a normal way, not whatever the hell you’re talking about, fuckin’ hell.” My contrition was dwindling, replaced by a little bit of strange schadenfreude. Yuuka was telling on herself, and that somehow righted the emotional boat for me. “Seriously, shears? Did you two take ‘scissoring’ that literally?”

Yuuka stared at me for a long moment with her human eye, then reached up to remove her eyepatch to reveal its twin, that baleful gem of prophecy. It didn’t glow or hum, but I could tell she was looking at my future, or some small fragment of it. She crossed her arms. “We stopped because I didn’t feel safe around that monster. Don’t let her make you one too.”

She left me impaled on that thorn as she left for school.

—

I spent the rest of that day dissociating. I no longer had the bravery to finish my round of apologies with Alice and Amane; my whole real-life social situation was put on pause as I retreated to the social bunker of my room and, within it, the chatroom. I hadn’t given my friends nearly enough of my time over the last few weeks, too preoccupied with vacillating between life-and-death flamebearer nonsense, the interpersonal struggles that came part and parcel with that, and gender discovery via mantle work. Until the sun went down, I paid it all back by simply curling up in bed, watching videos, and talking to the little people in my phone. There, at least, I didn’t disgust anybody.

The “99+” notification icon in the chatroom and the “500+” on the forums indicated that there was a lot to talk about, from large to small, and for once, I had the drive to go through every single one, an ideal distraction. My friends helped me curate; we started with the biggest bits of global flamebearer news, which were almost always new flamefalls; since my own, there had been two more, one in India and one in China, and both by all accounts had been far more typical than mine. The Vaetna had made no efforts to show up for the others like they had with me. The one in India had yielded two flamebearers who had immediately become part of the coalition of northern splinter kingdoms that still skirmished with Tibetan forces. The one in China had only found a single host, who had gone inferno.

The other notifications were just friends and colleagues pinging me whenever they wanted me to see something related to my interests. New YouTube videos about glyphcraft abounded, more than I could ever catch up on in one day, and that wasn’t even accounting for the endless torrent of reporting, spin, and misinformation about the world’s various VNT groups and other media-savvy flamebearers, some sent my way to be informative and some simply to be laughed at for their absurdity. Between the discussions, my friends’ lives went on, no less interesting than mine for all their relative lack of violence: Moth had finally gotten laid off and was relieved about it, Twili had a haul of nature photos from a hiking trip he’d been on, and Mnmnm’s grant application had been accepted.

I deflected and in some cases outright refused to answer questions about what was going on at Todai. The chatroom made it easy for me; nobody was dumb enough to ask directly what had happened at Sugawara’s hospital or about the whereabouts of Kimura, so I didn’t have to say much other than repeat assurances I was doing well. In the continuing wake of the Barbecue Inferno, I had no idea if or how I was ever going to bring up that I was dating Radiance Sapphire. I didn’t particularly want to think about her right now anyway.

On the forums, meanwhile, there was something Todai-related I did have liberty to talk about. Yesterday, one of the prosthetic teams—Team 3, who had put a phone inside my foot—had made the entire design open source, from the physical construction of the foot to the glyph diagrams, and since anybody with a brain and awareness of what I’d been up to could figure out it was for me, this had led to an enormous surge of discussion that made up two-thirds of my notifications on the forums. Moth and Dendrite spent an hour helping me comb through the thread for stuff that was worth responding to, and we crafted a general update post on my experiences with it as well. I regretted that I’d fallen out of the habit of checking the forums multiple times per day; there was a lot of speculation that I could have headed off immediately with a little more proactivity. Such was the nature of minor celebrityhood.

And, of course, there was news about the Vaetna. I’d missed a total of sixteen streams since arriving at Todai, a little under one per day, but none had been especially interesting or notable, just a mix of Spire maintenance work and what was essentially close drone footage of missions, plus two of the weekly State of The Spire streams that were a broad overview of the nation’s operations and projects. I’d used to do regular analysis posts for each maintenance stream—I stopped about a year ago but no longer remembered if there had been a specific reason. Depression, probably. And I tended to avoid watching the direct mission footage, preferring recaps, since it stressed me out to watch one of the Vaetna issue ultimatums to petty flamebearer tyrants threatening to turn a million people to glass, even knowing that those situations only ever ended one way. Skimming the recap videos, I didn’t think I’d missed anything particularly Spire-shaking.

I was disabused of that notion when I started picking through the rumor mill. Their latest bone to gnaw on was responsible for much of the remaining third of my forum notifications: the announcement that Katya, sixth of the Vaetna, was taking a break from public appearances. I’d been tangentially aware of the news but not thought anything of it, busy and extremely stressed as I had been with the coffin and Sugawara and all the fallout and recovery from that, so it had fallen out of my mind in the time since, filed in the “unprecedented but not alarming” section of my brain. In that regard, I, Ezzen, famous Vaetna expert, had been derelict in my duties, since I hadn’t taken into account a critical detail: the last time she’d been seen had been containing an inferno from my flamefall in Poland, over two weeks ago.

Theories had been proposed and shared as more evidence came in, and the collective diagnosis was dire.

starstar97: so to conclude

starstar97: somethings fucky with kat, and maybe the vaetna as a whole

starstar97: judging by bri ditching the rig

starstar97: and maybe involving yoru flame?

starstar97: *your

starstar97: the price of rawdogging without autocorrupt oTL

ezzen: She just hasn’t been around? I’m not up to speed, fuck.

My mouth was dry. They had put together the pieces days ago but elected not to message me directly about it, knowing I was already under a lot of pressure from many directions and assuming I’d get to it when I got to it. Thoughtful of them, but I wished they’d told me immediately.

moth30: yeah and its like… this is all they have to say?

moth30: cancelled her public events for a week before giving any explanation

moth30: like she never existed

That sent me into a bit of a panic spiral. One of the principal impossible-to-our-current-understanding-of-magic-but-maybe-viable things that could harm the Vaetna was an infomancy weapon retroactively deleting them from the timeline somehow.

ezzen: INFOVORED??

Of course, that was a silly conclusion to jump to, even as a nervous half-joke. Clarification arrived before I could tangent into terrified conspiracy babble.

skychicken: no.

skychicken: irresponsible wording, moth

moth30: soz

skychicken: she’s still on twitter and stuff like that

skychicken: i suppose that might just be a sockpuppet and not actually her, but theres no reason to jump to that conclusion

I was running the numbers.

ezzen: I can’t check right now but the longest time we’ve ever had any of the Vaetna be absent without explanation was maybe

ezzen: Four days? But that was during all the referendum stuff and it was Mayari, which feels a lot less weird

ezzen: Maybe there’s one I’m forgetting.

DendriteSpinner: Ez, do you think your flame core is the same way?

starstar97: “the same way” as what

starstar97: fundamentally dangerous to the vaetna? cause theres no proof thats actually the sitch and jumping to that conclusion is kinda like problematic ish

starstar97: flamefall infernos are fucky  wucky and even the vaetna could be blindsided by stuff

starstar97: and even if it has to do with something unusual about e’s flame creche

starstar97: for all we know kat just has, like, a bad cold, and bri was wary of catching the same thing until they understood what it was

starstar97: doesnt mean shes dead or dying

DendriteSpinner: I concede that.

DendriteSpinner: Not to rehash all the backscroll from the other day, but a version of events where it IS related to the products of that flamefall is plausible, and the PCTF almost certainly is going forward with that assumption.

DendriteSpinner: Ez, did you see those videos with the C-17?

I hadn’t and was quickly linked the discussion thread where the video had been posted. It was only a few seconds of cell phone footage, but it showed a military air transport with fighter escorts climbing overhead. The original post had claimed it was taken outside Chicago, and several other bits of footage had shown up elsewhere on the internet a few days later, including a conspiracy video from a Zero-Day influencer that had racked up significant attention. The consensus in the thread was that the air convoy had been flying west and that it was an express shipment from the civilian magic research labs at Argonne toward the more secret and infamous military facilities in Nevada. And by “shipment,” the signs pointed to…

moth30: we already had leaks that ana baker was at argonne, and this could be them moving her to area 52

moth30: in which case they think the anti-vaetna theory holds water

moth30: this is all speculative!! sorry if we’re freaking you out!!!

skychicken: yeah yall thats enough infodump at once i think

skychicken: dont re-traumatize ezzen please

ezzen: I’m good.

I was not good. Rather, I’d had a terrible lurch in my stomach for the past few minutes.

Anti-Vaetna; the term was upsetting enough in abstract, doubly upsetting if it applied to me specifically like I was the butt of some cosmic joke, and outright terrifying for what it implied about the PCTF’s arrival in Tokyo any day now. Each link in the chain of speculation, from the cause of Kat’s absence to Brianna abandoning Thunder Horse to the contents and destination of that C-17, pointed in the same direction: when the Peacies came for me, they wouldn’t take no for an answer. They would use me to kill the Vaetna.

ezzen: Gonna go talk to the Radiances.

—

“Okay, Ezzen, the first thing I want you to do is calm down. We’re prepared for this, don’t worry,” Alice sighed, sounding thoroughly confident despite the fact that she was craning her neck up at me, splayed facedown over a purple yoga ball, her tail extending straight behind her like a crocodile’s.

I’d walked in on her mid-workout; she was stretching the poor, tormented muscles around the base of the tail. Sporting similar athleisure to what she’d been wearing when I first met her, sports bra and compression leggings, she was leaving a lot of skin exposed. There was a part of me that salivated at this scantily clad, gorgeous dragon woman, the part I hated myself for that had reared its head last night and made Yuuka feel unsafe around me. At this particular moment, though, that part was easy to drown out with the keyed-up state of the rest of my mind, the cocktail of geopolitical they-will-start-a-war-over-me panic and the deeper dread that I was innately toxic to my heroes.

I fidgeted as Alice continued. “Yes, we did put two and two together and figured that your Flame might have properties that make the Peacies aggressively covet you. But that doesn’t really change much, does it? We’ve been planning for them to show up and try to snatch you since the day you arrived. They already wanted your brain, now they want your brawn as well.” She slid backward off the ball to stand, then stepped around it to sit more conversationally and do some twists. “So as for whatever is going to go down between us and them, I don’t see how this changes things.”

“But—it’s anti-Vaetna,” I almost whimpered. “That’s their, their—their holy grail, the only way to have a bigger stick than the Spire. The US will fucking…annex Japan or something if it means getting me.”

Alice didn’t believe me. “Slow down. So, knowing that the Peacies are coming for us anyway, the second thing I want you to do is focus on that. Banish any thought that you are somehow now doomed to be culpable for the fall of the Spire and…I don’t know, the sun exploding or whatever else you’re catastrophizing.”

“I don’t…not the sun exploding.”

“Pretty telling omission.”

“I mean, what the hell are the odds that I, of all people, am poison to them? That’s a bad fuckin’ joke,” I fumed. “It’s—even if we somehow get the Peacies to leave us alone, I’m never gonna be able to even visit the Spire.” I could see it clearly in my mind’s eye, being turned away from the Gate at bladepoint, Heung’s tone faintly apologetic but heavy with uncompromising finality. I was on track to be the first person ever banished from the Spire.

Alice wasn’t a telepath, but I was pretty easy to read. She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Come off it, Ez, being all Yuuka doesn’t suit you. Take five deep breaths, three seconds in, three seconds out.”

I felt the faintest sense of heat and winced, unsure if I was pissing her off or if that was just my blood running hot from embarrassing panic. For a moment, I considered petulantly ignoring her advice, upset at being treated like a child throwing a tantrum—then realized that was exactly the treatment I deserved. I stared at the floor of her and Amane’s doorway, turning red with shame, and took the requested breaths. When I finished, Alice sighed again. “Your emotional spectrum is still all fucked from last evening, yeah? Rubber-banded the other way?”

I caught her use of profanity, a sign she’d shifted out of Radiance Opal mode and was now talking to me as my friend. “…Yeah. Is that a side effect of pumping my soul through a lattice?”

“Not a magical effect. Not to go armchair therapist on you, but you’re crashing down from a euphoria high, and it’s making you treat things as a bigger deal than they are.” She pre-empted my objection that this was indeed a big fucking deal, world-shaking in fact, with a raised finger. “I’ve been there! Happened to me all the time when we were first developing the mantles. I’d give myself, uh, these,” she said, hefting one of her breasts slightly with one hand, “And then when they were gone, I’d be super emotionally fragile for a few days.”

“I…how did this turn into talking about your…chest?” The hesitation in that protest was undercut somewhat by the way my eyes automatically followed the gesture before I wrested them away to look at literally anything else; I settled my gaze on the corner of Amane’s streaming setup visible in the next room, which was bathed in a soft purple glow that helped flush my visual cortex.

Alice stood slowly, her tail squishing the ball quite a lot as it slithered off. No wonder she had to stretch so thoroughly and frequently; the thick, scaled slab of muscle and fat was an insane amount of additional weight for a pair of human legs to be lugging around, even accounting for her muscular thighs and wide hips. Its bulk drew my eyes right back over almost as easily as any pair of—I bonked myself before that thought could continue and stared harder at the corner of Amane’s desk over there. I instead made myself consider that it was also generally good self-care to stretch regularly—and that made me remember that I hadn’t done any spear training in days, and I became more crestfallen still. Alice frowned sympathetically.

“Look, you’re experiencing a big mood swing from being back in a body you don’t like. Brain’s dumping even more cortisol than usual, and it’s making it hard for you to rationally categorize danger and what you can do about it. You’re latching on to anything that will make you feel worse.”

I ground out a noise somewhere between a sigh and a growl, frustrated at being read so easily; having my feelings guessed was a sign I was known and understood and seen, and while that should have been a source of comfort and camaraderie coming from Alice, it also made me feel exposed. I shrugged my hoodie, one of the big ones in a nice earthy green I’d gotten with Hina, a little higher around my neck. “It…yes, rationally, that makes sense, but they’re some big fuckin’ problems and you’re sweeping them aside to talk about gender.”

“Aha! Because they share a solution, or at least a first step. Sit down and think about it while I use the loo.” She gestured at the yoga ball and made for the bathroom.

I hesitantly did as instructed and found that the ball was warm enough for me to feel it through my pants. It was a miracle Alice didn’t bake Amane alive in their bed. I turned my mind to the so-called shared solution.

It wasn’t much of a riddle; I found the answer immediately, and then spent the rest of the time hemming and hawing over what it meant.

Alice stuck her head out of the bathroom. “Well?”

“I…” I closed my mouth after the false start and took another deep breath, then delivered my solution in a rush. “I’ve got to use the doll more, haven’t I.”

Alice nodded and came out, wiping her hands with a towel that she then balled up and launched across the room into the laundry bin. “Good start.”

I felt pressured to defend my reasoning. “I need a mantle to, well, fight, if it’s gonna come to that, and I need to…what, microdose gender euphoria? I don’t know if it works like that.”

“Worked for me.” She raised her arms behind her head and posed, Instagram thirst-trap style, hips forward. “And look at me now! Fifty-four kilograms of sexy babe. The system works!”

That weight definitely didn’t include the tail, I noted, but I had other objections besides, darting my eyes away from her again. “I don’t want to become a sexy babe. And would you stop doing…that?”

She dropped her arms. “Designing this body took hopping into my mantle after adjusting how it looked, dozens of times over months, and then I had to have a very upsetting talk with my Flame to convince it to rebuild my actual body to spec, so I’d say I’ve earned the right to flaunt it. Not to mention keeping it looking like this despite my appetite.” She prodded her stomach with a finger. “Anyway, to figure out the body you want, you’ll have to do the same, and that means getting used to a mantle, and that means getting into the doll, Shinji.”

“What? Oh.” In hindsight it was obvious Alice and Hina would share anime references. Not very mahou shoujo to reference a mecha show—though Amethyst demonstrated that there could be some significant crossover, and mantles in general were bipedal, cutting-edge weapons of war that protected their pilots…maybe there was something there. I hadn’t yet watched enough anime to know. “That’s—yes, that’s all correct. But…using the doll made me worse. I don’t like who I was last night.”

“You mean how you were almost willing to bite one of Hina’s fingers off? That’s between you and her; I don’t care, done it before. Unless you want tips.”

I started. “You too? Has everyone but me mutilated my girlfriend? Am I being pranked?”

“You did punch her chest in, I’m told.”

“Yeah, but that wasn’t intended…” I trailed off, realizing I couldn’t quite defend that line of reasoning, and backpedaled a little. “You and Hina?”

She rolled her eyes. “Come off it. She’s my best friend and the girl who helped me hatch, and I am a lesbian. I’ve bitten parts of her you don’t even know exist yet.”

“…Huh.”

“Yes. So your lecherousness last night with her, while a little too public, was…within parameters, I guess you could say. I certainly wasn’t surprised, just worried you’d get some of her fluids into the food. You didn’t, I hope?”

I raised my hand solemnly. “Nothing made it into the food, I promise. I think. Um. But I don’t think that’s a good enough standard for, er, defining acceptable PDA.” I rubbed at my spear tattoo. “I think we really freaked out Yuuka”

“Ah.”

Some of Alice’s good mood, so rare for her to begin with, visibly wilted. I immediately felt bad. She walked over to the bed and sat on it—a maneuver that required raising her tail, sitting sideways, then scooting until the tail laid flat on the sheets. There was something appealing about its bulk, how it flowed out of her spine, to say nothing of the glitter of her scales—I caught myself from staring at her body. God, was I gross. I put my gaze back where it belonged as she templed her fingers. “Yeah, yep. What did she say, exactly?”

“Uh…basically that Hina makes her feel unsafe, and that I might too. Probably already did. She was kind of harsh about it. I know I should have some thicker skin about all the ‘monster’ stuff now, but…”

“That’s Yuuka, she’s harsh, but based on last night…Hina’s not the only…” She trailed off. The tip of her tail thumped softly and steadily on the linens, a paff-paff-paff metronome for her thoughts, whatever she was deciding. Then she sighed heavily. “Hell, alright, let’s head this off before it gets worse.”

3.12 Patreon Release

Yuuka took me to the rooftop.

It was a cold, clear afternoon in Tokyo, the kind I’d become somewhat used to by now, those pale-blue winter days that made the cityscape feel as though it were simultaneously looming straight over me as well as impossibly far away, floating somewhere in the sky, an endless vertical assemblage of glass and steel that presented no hints as to what might lay beyond, neither western mountains nor eastern ocean anywhere to be seen. That sense of isolation was aided by the fact that the usual sounds of the Tokyo streets—the rumble of cars, the blare of obnoxious advertising trucks, the various chimes and dings of convenience stores and crosswalks and all the infrastructure of a city, and of course the ubiquitous sounds of people walking and talking—were completely inaudible from twenty stories up. It was only me, Yuuka, and the wind, which was cold and hostile, grabbing at my ears with icy fingers and sending that familiar, aching chill seeping into my hand. She had donned a long, heavy coat, though it was unzipped. I’d thrown on a hoodie and was sort of wishing I owned a more significant outer layer.

Yuuka’s jetbike, a dark and angular thing closer in scale to a speedboat than a motorcycle, sat redundant in its space near the top of the roof stairwell, available for her use but dwarfed by the magic circle launchpad that dominated the rooftop, standing ready for the Radiances to deploy high above the skyline at a moment’s notice. Painted indicator lines and hazard stripes framed the precise zones and distances of safety that one could stand from a mantle’s explosive takeoff sequence. It was mostly for noise cancellation; only a full-force emergency launch produced enough backblast to harm those standing nearby, and even then, you would have to be standing within arm’s reach. 

In fact, I was standing within arm’s reach of a Radiance, but not for imminent takeoff. Both of Yuuka’s eyes stared at the roiling pulses of too-white Flame emanating from my arm as I held it aloft. Even in the harsh winter sunlight beneath a clear sky, the light of my Flame flung odd, hungry shadows off our bodies.

“It’s still really fucked up,” Yuuka opined.

“How so?”

“Just, y’know. In general.”

“Huh. Not in the sense that it’s damaged, you mean?”

“By fighting Suga-shitfucker? Nah, looks the same as it did before then. Burned the fuck outta him, didn’t ya?”

I cast my eyes down to the border of my burn scars, the spot where they blended against the regular skin of my upper forearm, where the flames cut off abruptly. “Something like that. He kind of ran from it when I touched him.”

Something sharp flitted across Yuuka’s face. “Good. Maybe it’ll be enough to put him down next time.” She turned away from me to cast her gaze across the skyline, craning her neck up at the glittering skyscrapers around us. “Maybe. I don’t like ‘maybes’.”

“That’s what the eye is for, isn’t it? Is, uh, this helping at all?” I asked, gesturing with my normal hand at my makeshift torch. Yuuka had used the word “searchlight,” which felt a little inaccurate to the omnidirectional spray of my Flame’s ripple-light. I had to begrudgingly admit that “lighthouse” fit better in spirit. Mechanically, though, we were more like a radar system, with me casting ripple—or perhaps somehow amplifying that which was already there, which made more sense than me putting off enough “Light” to illuminate all of Tokyo by myself—and Yuuka interpreting the silver echoes on return to see into the future.

“Yeah,” she confirmed. “I’m looking. Stay mad.”

She didn’t mean it as an invective or taunt; I was doing my damnedest to channel the anger I felt that something like Sugawara was running free and feed it into my Flame, stimulating it enough to keep it lit. I’d felt the direct, corrosive presence of his thoughts, the threadbare remains of his malice, during those moments of direct contact, and even the memory was so repulsive that I found it easy to summon up some righteous wrath. Nothing like that should be permitted to exist. The Vaetna would not allow it, and neither would I.

There were some holes in that thinking, of course. The Vaetna had never assisted the Radiances in toppling Sugawara. But this was a rare case where it behooved me to ignore that clever and reasonable voice in my head and instead focus on the fiery and raw emotional drive to make right what had been set wrong. So I held my Flame aloft and illuminated the future for Radiance Heliotrope. I wasn’t sure exactly what her crimson eye saw in the unborn silver echoes, but she definitely saw something as she scanned toward the east, where my shaky knowledge of Tokyo’s geography told me the bay was.

“Yep,” she sighed. “They’re still coming.”

“The PCTF,” I guessed. “How coming do you mean?”

She skewered me with a glare for the accidental innuendo, making me shrink. She let out a little tsk. “Two weeks, call it. Not ready for an open fight, but…” she leaned forward a bit as she stared eastward. I imagined that her gemstone eye would have squinted if it could. “Well, there will be fighting. They want Sugawara’s remains, I think, leading me…oh, fuckin’ hell. They want you, too.”

I crossed my unused arm over my chest to support my raised torch, feeling a little small versus the sheer scale of the PCTF. Todai’s twenty-story building suddenly felt dwarfed in more ways than one. I tried to put on a brave face, remembering the newspaper clipping in their head lawyer’s office that said they’d beaten them and gotten away with it before. “We sort of already knew that, didn’t we?”

“Yeah, but not like how I’m seeing. There’s a guy on his way, who…we’ll kill. Alice will, I think.”

“So it’ll come to blows?” I looked in the same direction she did with trepidation. You could see a little further in this direction, some of the buildings giving way to a park-like strip of green below us that was punctuated with more skyscrapers. “More murder.”

“That’s not the point. Murder’s whatever with these fuckers; we’ll kill as many as we need to.” In the corner of my vision, she crossed her arms in the same way I did. I tried to ignore how her chest rested atop them compared to my own flat front. It was a stupid thing to be thinking about during a conversation like this. “But Alice killing them, over you, means they want you bad. As in, more than I’d expect. Stop looking at my tits.”

“S—sorry.” My face was hot even in the chilly air. “Why? Uh, not why should I stop looking; I get that, promise. Why would they want me?”

“Aside from the fact that you’re some kind of glyph genius?” She almost laughed the last words, not exactly incredulous but certainly irreverent. “Probably because your Flame’s all fucked up. Don’t know how they would know that, though. We don’t have a spy, I don’t think. You had others in your group, right? Two others? Three?”

“Three, but one went inferno, so two. You think their Flames could be all…like mine? Whatever that means,” I added.

“Probably. So if the Peacie shitlords got ‘em…”

“Ah. So in terms of consequences…war?” The word was heavy and thick, too big to be coming out of my mouth. “With Todai?”

“Maybe. I’ll keep an eye out. I come up here every day, but I should start bringing you as the day gets closer. If you can stop staring at my tits.”

“I’m not! I swear!” I stared out at the skyline instead, pointedly removing her from my field of vision.

“Uh huh.”

“I’m just…it’s not sexual,” I babbled. “I’m not coveting your flesh or whatever. I don’t mean to be gross.”

“If you were being gross, I’d’ve pushed you off the roof. A little envy’s fine, I’m used to it, just control your eyes better than your girlfriend.”

“Envy? That’s not—”

A jolt of urgency in her tone wiped the confusing comment off the map. “Hold that. I think I found Sugawara.”

—

By “found Sugawara,” what Yuuka really meant was that she had found a place where he would be in the future, a single point ahead of us in the timeline where he might appear again. Technically, it was discovery by proxy; the thing she actually foresaw while staring east was a conversation between two people she could only identify as PCTF-related, who would actually be the ones to find Sugawara with their own detection methods and would mention the approximate location to one another while planning to collect him.

That was good information. It did admittedly make my head hurt a little; as I understood the time travel-y implications of Yuuka’s power, it seemed likely to me that us knowing this information would somehow lead to those PCTF people having that conversation in a few weeks, and therefore things would never have come to pass at all if Yuuka hadn’t foreseen it coming to pass. It felt like cheating. Magic was confusing. Yuuka tried to explain that the flow of events wasn’t so set in stone, and that what she’d foreseen was only one version of events that may or may not actually come to pass, so we weren’t entering into some kind of guaranteed time loop. The one thing that was confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt was that Sugawara’s soul had not dissipated into incoherent ripple as we’d been holding out hope for; we’d have to put him down ourselves when the time came. But that was what Yuuka and I wanted anyway.

Getting to the area in question meant taking Yuuka’s jetbike, as it was on the outskirts of metro Tokyo, where the skyscrapers and apartment blocks gave way to rolling hills of densely packed single-family homes. My last experience flying over Tokyo had been one of screaming in Hina’s arms and then almost vomiting when we landed, and I had little desire to repeat the experience, but that was where the bike had shown its value; it turned out to be an improvement in every conceivable way. Even though the seats were open to the elements—Yuuka deployed a second one behind the first, backrest and all, saving me from having to hold on to her waist and invite further admonishment vis-a-vis her proportions—the ride was silky-smooth and near-silent, much more like one of the armored limousines we’d taken to Hikanome’s ill-fated barbecue than a flying motorcycle. It was quiet enough that I could ask questions. Magic ones, of course.

“Is this what it’s like flying with a mantle? Like, quiet and smooth?”

“Sort of. You’re building one, right? They haven’t put you in the test rig yet?”

“Test rig?”

“Y’know, right, the thing with the sensors and the brain-plugs. The analog version of the pod where your body goes.”

“The pod…?”

“Oh, c’mon. The space-folder contraption your body goes to when your consciousness is plugged into the mantle?”

I made a quiet, embarrassed sound that can only be described as “???”.

Yuuka twisted in her seat to look at me like I was stupid. It was a powerful expression on her, one that demanded I immediately do whatever it took to make the pretty girl less mad at me. Her voice was caustic and mocking, like when she’d cornered me in the penthouse’s gym. “You made upgrades to all of our mantles and you don’t know how they work? Dumbass. Boke. You coulda folded us up into little chunks of meat!”

“Look at the road—the sky,” I whimpered, acrophobic panic overriding my embarrassed confusion until Yuuka shrugged and complied. Then I found the wherewithal for some indignation. “I mean—I know how they work: it’s an LM construct shaped like your body with a bunch of combat and sensory tech, and it feeds all that info back to you. And your real body just gets, um, folded up and away into fourspace?” I winced, realizing how unsure I was about that part, and rushed to defend myself. “Listen, all the modifications I’ve made have been to do with the LM and combat capability side. That’s what Alice wants me around for. I haven’t looked at the neural and psychomotive stuff, that’s not my wheelhouse.” To regain a little control of the conversation, I added, “And you’d have known if my changes were dangerous, right? Precog.” 

“Magic genius,” she taunted back. It didn’t sound nearly as hostile, though. Maybe I was speaking her language.

—

Even without me acting as a future-lamp from the backseat, Yuuka managed to zero in on the exact building where she foretold Sugawara’s reappearance by spotting none other than Izumi down below. Apparently, she was easy to spot with Yuuka’s eye now that her nature was understood; near-identical ripple changing the future in two places at once was a dead giveaway, enough so that Yuuka seemed kind of annoyed at her past self for not putting the pieces together before.

Izumi herself had been perched on a house’s rooftop, her flesh body standing down on the street corner below. She hopped down in one graceful leap while Yuuka put down the jetbike right in the narrow street; I was a little worried about obstructing traffic but was waved off. Izumi greeted Yuuka in Japanese and nodded to me, laughing while Bloodstone grumbled, but grew somber as she led us down residential streets to where she’d correctly guessed Sugawara might go—where Yuuka’s eye claimed he was supposedly destined to appear.

It was a shrine, not much more than a small building nestled behind a foliage-lined pathway. It loomed derelict and untended despite sitting in the middle of a residential neighborhood, half-overgrown into a miniature jungle of vines and ferns. Within, the shrine looked as though it had survived a fire, timbers charred black but still standing. Between that and the foreboding shadow cast by the canopy, it was dark and unwelcoming, a memory of violence smuggled into the otherwise-placid landscape of dense suburbs.

I had a guess about the significance of this place, one I didn’t like. “Is this where…?”

“Where Hikanome began,” Izumi confirmed.

Neither of the flamebearer women dignified the ruin with any more discussion except to plan and lay traps. Yuuka wove quickly and with controlled anger, building something that looked like a net, harkening back to the thing she’d warned Hina to avoid at Sugawara’s hospital-compound, something to detect and trap the rogue spirit of a dead man. Blood-red shimmering fibers of thread spun together and shot into the darkness, anchoring themselves against every surface of the shrine and its patch of overgrowth.

Izumi took a different approach, walking over to the concrete wall that separated the burnt shrine from the neighboring house and slamming her lattice-manifest palm against it. When she removed her hand, the palm-print was scorched into the wall.

“That’s not glyphcraft,” I guessed.

“It is.” Izumi grinned, pointing at the scorch-mark. “That’s an {INDICATE} lattice. I can feel what happens here now. I’m a mantle, you should remember. I wove these when I made this body, but now I can just think and use them. Easy.”

That trivial ease had such appeal. That was how magic should be, easy and intuitive, designed in advance but deployed with just a thought, rather than an adrenaline-tangled mess of gestures and roasted fingers. I was not a Vaetna, not blessed with such deep intuition and talent that weaving was only necessary for the most bleeding-edge magic; for somebody mortal like me who found weaving under pressure deeply impractical, the pre-loaded tricks of a mantle struck me as a much more sensible marriage between clever design and elegant execution.

“I want to do that,” I thought, then realized I had said it out loud. Both of the girls looked at me, Izumi smiling and Yuuka letting out an amused hmpf.

“You can,” Izumi agreed. “Now, I think. Or…” she looked at Yuuka, trailing off.

Yuuka nodded. “We’re pretty much done. We can go back and do your mantle stuff, if you want.”

 I blinked in surprise; we’d only been here for maybe ten minutes. “Wait, that’s it?”

“For now, yeah. We’ll shore it up and refine it if I have useful visions. Problem?”

“I…just not much closure, I guess. I wanted to hunt.” I glanced down at my chest. “My flame’s not much satisfied either, I think.”

Izumi the assassin smiled dangerously, like I’d seen Hina do on occasion but with altogether more malice. It wasn’t directed at me; she turned it toward the handprint she’d left. “We are already hunting. If your Flame isn’t satisfied with that, then maybe it reflects your heart, and actually wants something else. I know how that feels.”

“You do?” This was a little cryptic for me.

“She’s saying getting inside your mantle will probably make you feel better,” Yuuka translated. “Not a fan of how much like the bitch you two are sounding. Let’s go home so I can watch you fumble around in the doll.”

—

“The doll” was a simple, mannequin-like mechatronic body that acted as the physical counterpart to “the pod” Yuuka had described. It was immediately apparent that it descended from the same lineage of design as Ebi’s body: familiar teal paneling covered its frame and its back had the same visible spine. It diverged from Ebi by trading much of her four-dimensional complexity for configurability; its limbs could be adjusted in length, since the proportions of the body’s various joints needed to match mine closely if I were to have even the faintest hope of doing anything more than flailing around like a newborn in the synthetic body.

Of course, Izumi and Amane had significant size mismatches between their bodies and their mantles, so there was wiggle room in what I could do for the final product, but they had both taken years to acclimate and become used to switching. For this very first test run, I would remain exactly at my usual 180-cm-when-not-slouching. That filled me with some small amount of ennui I had yet to properly interrogate.

Aside from that, though, this design suited me fine. Better than fine, even—the doll’s figure was smooth, slender, and faceless, all properties I’d kept returning to in my idle fantasies about what my ideal form might look like. I had even gained the self-awareness to admit that I found the androgyny appealing. Plus, it even had its right toes, which Hina was confident—and Amane and Ai more cautiously so—wouldn’t cause any problems for me, because for the most part I’d never quite become used to my 1.5-footed status thanks to the stabilizer module.

By contrast, the pod was something out of an old horror movie’s prop room, somewhere between the exposed-wiring aesthetic of the coffin and an electric chair. A plush seat contrasted nightmarishly with the spiked metal halo mounted above, which was supposed to go over my head to transmit my thoughts and senses into the doll. The transfer logic for that was the one part of this whole thing that I had to actually weave with magic: a red-and-pink data bridge made out of my own Flame. Given that this would be directly interfacing with my mind, I was extremely nervous about the possibility of making a mistake, messing up the tension or crossover in one glyph that would instantaneously render me brain-dead—or worse—when the device was switched on.

Fortunately, I had no shortage of assistance. All five Radiances understood both the delicacy and significance of this and had pulled themselves away from their various work to pack into a lower-level room in the penthouse that apparently existed solely for the purpose of this kind of mantle R&D, around the corner from the gym and firmly out of sight from the common area. There was a certain spirituality in the air, like I was engaging in a coming-of-age ritual. That still wouldn’t make me a magical girl, though.

“I mean, yeah, it was dicey at first. We didn’t have any of this stuff! It’s a miracle Alice didn’t fry her brain,” Hina chirped from my lap. She had her delicate, clawed hand clamped around mine, guiding me through the exact motions of weaving a {REFRACT} glyph without error, showing me how to twist the thread and pull my thumb under for one of the more challenging axis crossovers. Her presence and closeness helped soothe my nerves even more than the hands-on assistance.

“Not very reassuring, Hina,” Alice sighed. She’d also found a lap to sit on, cradled atop one of Amethyst’s massive legs, a surface that didn’t seem terribly comfortable to me but did let her tail drape over and down in a way that relieved some of the perpetual pressure on her lower back.

“But it’s true! We coulda ‘sploded your whole mind. Which makes it even crazier that smoky over there figured all this out by herself!”

She pointed at Izumi, who was standing a little removed from the cluster of magical girls, uncharacteristically shy. Her flesh body was nowhere to be seen; I got the sense that she felt it didn’t deserve to be here for this. Todai’s erstwhile enemy bashfully muttered something in Japanese that drew a scoff from Ai. I couldn’t help but grin; it was kind of satisfying to see that she was as bad at fielding compliments as I had been earlier today.

Hina growled against my neck. “Hey, focus. I’m serious, cutie, this could really fuck you up, and not in a hot way.”

“Sorry, sorry,” I replied, returning to my attempts to visualize the next maneuvers of thread. We’d been at this for half an hour already; it was the exact kind of unglamorous, tedious work that made even the fizzing, eye-searingly glowing thread between my fingers feel distinctly and disappointingly unmagical. “Trying to keep my eyes on the prize, right.”

“It’s a good prize,” she whispered into my ear. “You’ll love it. If you don’t fuck it up.”

“Yeah. I hope so,” I chuckled just as quietly, trying to give this conversation what little privacy I could. “It’s not really, uh, ‘Ezsuka’ or whatever you were calling it, is it?”

She rubbed my head. I’m not sure how; both of her hands were accounted for. “Look at you, admitting you want that!”

“Well, I just meant…I don’t know what I meant,” I admitted. “Maybe. It’s not LM, though, just kind of…robot body. Which is cool, don’t get me wrong, but not, er…”

“Magical transcendence?” Alice put in. “I wouldn’t worry about that. Not all it’s cracked up to be,” she groused, rubbing her forehead.

Yuuka laughed at that. “Aww, danchou, are you pissy about your horns? Now you’re the one not sounding encouraging. I thought you’d be excited to get the number of boys in this place back down to zero.” She slammed her mouth shut as all sets of eyes turned on her at once. Yuuka’s head swiveled around the room, fully deer-in-the-headlights before settling on a target. “You were all thinking it too! You especially, kemono, I know you’re just waiting to jump on whatever new version of Ezza comes out of this.”

“I don’t have a problem with cutie being a boy.” Hina replied flatly, leaning forward off of me. Then she flashed a fanged grin at her shorter teammate. “That’s a you problem, babe. I’m flamebearersexual and cutie-oriented, doesn’t matter to me how any of you identify as long as it makes you happy, don’t pretend you don’t know that. But if you’re waiting for a piece of Ezzen until after…”

Amane added something else in twinkling Japanese that made Yuuka stiffen and drew chuckles from all the other girls.

“This is beneath me,” Yuuka huffed, and stomped toward the door, stopping to twist around for one final verbal jab. “I’m no monsterfucker, and I’m not interested in one, either.” She fled the room, steps retreating down the hallway.

“Anymore,” Alice teased after her.

Izumi raised a hand to cover her mouth daintily, faux-scandalized. “So the rumors are true, the fox and the chuuni…?”

I was a little lost and had elected to back out of whatever web of drama was going on here to focus on my weaving; Hina’s hand had remained steady the entire time she was trading quips, and I didn’t much care if Yuuka was present or absent as long as her eye wasn’t screaming alarm bells that I was about to turn my brain into spaghetti. But I did look up after skimming my limited japanese vocabulary for that last word. The atmosphere in the room had shifted: Alice had a certain done-with-this-shit expression on her face and Ai looked peeved. Amethyst’s spike-face was unreadable as ever, but she was shaking her head slightly. I glanced at Hina’s sapphires out of the corner of my eye.

“Wait, what? You and Yuuka? Even though she, uh, hates you?”

“Old stuff,” Hina sighed against me, sounding not at all happy. “Not anymore. Hate, love, one big jumble with her. Don’t wanna talk about it. Focus on the thread, cutie.”

I filed this moment away for later analysis and got back to work.

It took twenty more minutes for me to finish the lattice and thirty after that for all of the remaining Radiances to be satisfied that I’d dotted my “i”s and crossed my “t”s. This was one of those cases where the thread remained visible even once the weaving was done; strands of my Flame extended between the pod’s headpiece and the head of the doll like the puppet-strings they were, magic bridging physical mechanisms so my soul—insofar as such a thing existed—could ride those gossamer highways to animate the shelled form of the doll. With the drudgery of weaving out of the way, my excitement was building once more; that was real magic.

The thumping of my heart overrode my trepidations about the pod’s mild torture-device aesthetic. Hina and Ai helped too, encouraging and explaining as they got me situated, seemingly on the same page and working in sync. For once, their goals aligned, and it made me happy to see them both so energized, especially after that awkward moment when Yuuka had left the room.

“It’ll feel suuuuper weird,” Hina warned. “Like you’re falling. Uh, y’know, like going outta realspace and into the w-axis soup.”

“Like at the barbecue,” I reasoned. “Can’t say I loved that.”

“Sorry for that,” Izumi sighed, bowing slightly in belated contrition. I waved it off hurriedly; I hadn’t actually meant to make her feel bad about it.

“That’s not what will actually happen,” Alice clarified from the sidelines. “But it will feel that way.”

They had sat the doll-body down in the same pose as I was sitting in the pod, facing away from me, since apparently it was a bad idea for me to see my body from the outside immediately. Ai fiddled with a small handheld LCD readout, connected by a long wire to the back of its head. Hina had quipped that that was called “the leash,” but that was even more unofficial than the names for the other elements of the setup. Ai smiled at me reassuringly. “It’ll only be for a moment, then you should just feel normal. Once the transfer happens, the important thing is to not think about what you can’t do. Act like normal.”

Hina poked my chest seriously. “No blinking, no breathing, no mouth to move if you have to talk, but don’t try to adapt to that. Just act like everything still works as normal and your brain—and the weave—should fill in the rest. We’ll slam the eject button if you start to freak out, okay?”

“Okay,” I nodded. “No face, but act like I still have a face.”

“No face good,” she agreed, dazzling me with a toothy grin and those beautiful eyes. “If everything seems like it’s going good, we can bring in a mirror, that helped for Amanyan. Uh, other risks…we think your hair won’t interfere with this stuff, but we won’t know until it’s turned on. Kind of a first.”

“It won’t turn your brain into scrambled eggs, at least, we know that for sure. If it breaks anything it’ll be before the transfer even starts, during the handshake process,” Alice reassured.

“Yep!”

“What about Sugawara?” I asked. “He was looking for a host, right? When I’m not, uh in my body, could he show up and grab it?”

Hina blinked, having apparently not considered this. “I mean, we’d gut him for trying, but…” She twisted to glance at Izumi, who shook her head.

“No. Whatever your Light is, he fears it too much to try that, I think. And…I think he would not want your body anyway. It may be male flesh, but you aren’t a man. Not a woman either,” she was hasty to correct herself, eager to show that she understood, “but I think there is too much…hate in him. He only tried to take my other body as a true last resort, and only because he was already connected.”

“Enbies stay winning,” Hina hummed.

With all possible failure modes addressed and my worries assuaged, the halo was lowered over my head in short order. Once out of sight, it just felt like a weird hat, which was a little undignified for the occasion. Hina squeezed my hand one last time before drawing away to stand with the others.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

Ai hit the button, a hum filled the air, and I fell. The stomach-dropping sense of being pulled downward, pulled away, was unmistakable, a tug at the bottom of my chest that made my organs slosh around and my sinew creak with strain. It was no fiery blossom of pain like so many of my other experiences with my Flame, just inexorable motion.

Then the world shut off. It’s wrong to say that the world went dark, or that my ears went quiet, or that the sensation of the halo and chair vanished from beneath my body—the senses were just gone, and the very intuitions that rode upon them vanished along with. It was not darkness, it was emptiness. It was not silence. What even was silence? I reached for the concept and found nothing. There was nothing.

There was only me. And what was I, really, when I was denuded from the meat, from any shape at all? Surely this was what a soul was, if I could continue to exist like this, boiled down into something abstract rather than the firing of electrical neurons inside a wet lump. Was this liminal nature endowed by my Flame? Was this what the Flame was like before it reached its host? Was I my Flame, and the gap between it and I only imagined through the presence of flesh to call “me”? Was I something at all, or simply another part of the nothing, a fraction of zero?

It wasn’t so bad, in a static and infinite sort of way. Whatever I was, it was simply me and the nothing, and that was…well, it simply was. I simply was, or was not, and the difference didn’t matter much to me. I’d spent so much of my life barely existing that this could even be an improvement. No frustrating, confusing desires of the flesh, no loneliness, no smoldering dreams or imagined legacy or uncertain future. There was nothing to miss out on, nothing to do, nothing to be. Perhaps there had never been anything other than this, just momentary dreams fluttering to life in the nothing and vanishing just as quickly. That made me sad in a way that I was no longer equipped to understand. Perhaps I would stay a while. Why had I cared?

Then everything reminded me it existed. I crashed hard back into reality. Nothing became light as I reached the end of the tunnel. Nothing became sound and touch and shape and an entire world, worlds upon worlds, a reality infinitely broader and deeper than we had ever understood. Fire and blood, the transcendent forms of the Vaetna, Hina’s eyes, a chair under my butt and a wall in front of me and hard teal carapace and motor-actuated ball joints sheltering my fragile soul and its passenger and bright lights—

I remembered what it was to stand and did so as quickly as I could, tearing myself out of the chair, stumbling forward. I had never been so happy to feel the steady weight of gravity pressing the world up against my soles.

“I’m alive,” I said with a mouth I didn’t have. “I’m here. It’s all here.” I looked down at my hands, then up at the wall, then remembered everybody else was here. I turned around and there they were. “It’s me.”

“It’s you!” Hina giggled, purest cerulean acknowledging that I was, then she launched herself at me. There was a chorus of yelling, people telling her to get off me, but I didn’t care. I was here and she was here and until this moment I felt like I had been dead. I lifted her up, feeling her flesh deform under the surfaces of my body. She laughed and kissed my not-face. “How do you feel?”

Like a rainbow shearing through the clouds. The dull haze that had clung to every thought, every feeling, had been scrubbed away, unable to thread the needle and pass into the new body. Even without rushing blood or a beating heart or skin, I felt life pulsing through me. Perhaps it was actually because I lacked those things, but I felt there was more nuance there. It wasn’t so much that this new body was perfect as that I felt freed from the cage of the old one. I ought to be outside, feeling the sun on my shell.

“I’m alive,” I repeated. “I can—I’m whole. I’ve never felt alive before. I want to—I don’t know what I want, but I want. Holy shit, how was I supposed to…to accept not being?” Through the edges of Hina’s mane of brown hair, I saw Alice’s eyes glimmer with tears. Lacking a face or eyes, I pointed in her direction to acknowledge her. “Alice. Is this what it’s like? Is this what it’s supposed to be?”

“Yeah,” she sniffled. “Yeah, it is.” I heard Izumi agree in chorus. “Are you—Ezzen, you have to understand that you can’t stay in this body. I know you want to, I know what this is like, but you can’t—”

“I know, I know,” I insisted, trying to figure out how to transmit the enormity of what I was experiencing. “It’s not—it’s not only gender euphoria or whatever. This is good, it’s so good, it’s great, it’s more correct than I’ve felt ever, but it’s not just that it feels better, it’s not just this body. It’s having a body, it’s being instead of not being. I want to keep being. I’d never felt that before, I don’t think. I feel high, but it’s not just from the body, I think, I don’t know.”

“It’s good,” Amane warbled.

“It is! I need that mirror.”

Hina brought it out with a flourish and I stared at myself. This face was less sophisticated than Ebi’s—in fact, it had nothing at all, it was just a smooth plate. It felt like me. I stared at it for several long seconds, taking in the shapes, then angling the mirror to look down my body. “I look good. Cyan’s not for me, but this…yeah.”

I was startled by Ai suddenly entering the frame and hugging me as well. “I’m happy,” was all the explanation she gave. I hugged her back. Ai was arguably the most removed from this experience of all the women in the room, but that made it sweeter.

“Dollthing,” Hina quipped.

I glanced at her and shrugged. “I…yeah. Maybe.” Then I had a thought, something that had whispered at me for years but I’d never been able to crystallize into the volition to ask. But right now I felt like I could do anything. “Um. I’m not a boy. We’ve established that, I think, yeah? But, um, can you try calling me something that isn’t ‘he’? Like ‘they’ or, um, even ‘it’.”

“Trying ‘it’ on for size, hey, cutie?”

I stared at Hina for a moment before I parsed the pun, then laughed hard and loud, without lungs or shame. Everything felt real and not real at the same time.

“They’re happy,” Alice ventured to humor me.

“I am! We need to fuckin’ do something,” I declared. “Soon. Now. Put me back in my old body and let’s go out and…I have no idea. Party? But just…I need to do something before this feeling wears off. I need to feel alive. Or, Hina, we could, y’know…” I filled in the end of the sentence by miming my finger going through a hole. I giggled stupidly at the naughty thing I’d just done.

“Whoa,” she purred. “Okay, you’re definitely high.”

Alice’s expression soured a little. “Being uninhibited is normal for the first time you really feel gender euphoria, Ezzen, but slow down. Let’s get you back in your normal body before we keep talking.”

“Awwww, but—”

—

The return trip back to my body skipped the sojourn in solipsistic hell. Everything shut off and turned back on, and I was back in the meat, sitting in the pod, and very tired. Returning to my squishy meat-body did bring a certain numbness, but it only blunted the razor edge of my euphoria. Perhaps it would have been far more agonizing if I was still covered in thousands of tiny, horrible hairs, so I was thankful beyond words at my prior stupid, blood-soaked decision to do away with that. Going from smooth carbon fiber shell to smooth skin wasn’t nearly as bad of an experience as I’d been braced for.

The rest of that evening was characterized by craving. Even as we debriefed, I was practically launching myself into the penthouse’s kitchen. I wanted to make and enjoy food; I was shocked that my time in a synthetic body had imbued me with a refreshed desire for the gurgling processes of biology rather than disgust. I savored the knife’s handle in my grip as I blazed through vegetables; I briefly wondered what it would be like to bring the blade down on my fingers, just out of curiosity. I didn’t, but I was riding the edge.

Hina clung to me practically the whole time as we threw together a huge dinner, and several times, my hands wandered where they probably shouldn’t have. Sanitation-mindedness was the only thing that stopped me from sliding my hands between her legs; I wasn’t going to be that gross when there were mouths to feed. She was receptive, which made it harder to resist. She whispered some absolutely sordid things into my ear, including at one point the words “fuck me open.”

But I think she wasn’t really expecting me to follow through on it; by the time we were done with dinner, my manic energy had begun to crash, and no celebratory sex was had. She simply brought me to my room, deposited me in my chair in front of the computer, and hopped onto my lap.

“I’m so proud of you.” She kissed my neck.

“Thanks. So am I.” I was too glowing to be self-effacing. “But I also…what if I wake up tomorrow and I don’t feel like this anymore? I want to feel like this all the time. I don’t want to go back to…the haze. The emptiness.”

“The other body’s right there, whenever you want it. Now that we know it’s safe, you can indulge.” She drawled the word, clearly relishing the thought almost as much as I did. “But I think you get it now. You’ve seen what you can be. What it’s like to be, at all.” She twisted and pointed at the PC. “Now. We’re gonna work on your actual mantle until you pass out. We’ll make you perfect. And then tomorrow I’ll show you how to live. And the day after that, and after that, and after that. As much time as you need. I want to be there for it.”

And that’s what we did. We designed a future for me until I fell asleep.

Then, once I was freed from my body once more, I dreamt of the Vaetna.

(That's a wrap on arc 3! Thanks for reading! Big author's note post to come tomorrow.)

3.11 Patreon Release

“Thank you for saving my life.”

Takagiri’s expression of gratitude was difficult to face directly. She bowed to a perfect ninety-degree angle, arms against her sides, black ponytail hanging over her shoulder, delivering the words with crisp clarity as though she’d been rehearsing them for days, which perhaps she had while in her extended sleep and recovery from driving out Sugawara’s ghoul. She looked down at the cold concrete floor, yet even without eye contact, I struggled not to cringe and shift awkwardly. Expectant silence stretched across the room, paralyzing me until Ai kicked my calf gently from my right.

“You’re welcome,” I managed. “It was the, uh, the right thing to do, yeah. But anybody who was there would’ve…”

Takagiri rose from the bow, mild brown eyes meeting mine. Her mantle’s face was soft and smooth, a far cry from the masculine edges and aging wrinkles of her flesh body. “It’s not something you should take lightly. You stopped him. You stopped him, even if somebody else could have. I don’t think they could. Not with this,” she gestured at the coffin, now powered down, “or with a Light that wasn’t yours. You reminded him that he should be afraid,” she spat, a bitter and wrathful expression twisting her features for a moment, a face I recognized from when we’d traded blows at Hikanome’s doomed barbecue. She took a deep breath, letting the emotion out, then broke into a thin, relieved smile. “So I must thank you. I must. I’m free because of you, and I don’t know how to repay such a debt.”

I swallowed, loathing how I had begun to sweat. “Okay. Uh. You’re welcome,” I said again, glancing at Ai. “Uh, if we’re talking quid pro quo, I’m not really the person to ask, probably? Alice is in charge. But, like, you don’t owe me specifically much of anything, I figure? Cause like I said, it was the right thing to do. And most of the credit for the coffin goes to Ai and Amane, not me.”

Takagiri chuckled, her smile becoming lighter and more amused. She turned to Ai and bowed to her as well, delivering another formal message of thanks, this time in Japanese. Ai bowed in return, which made me wonder if I should have done the same. They exchanged a few words and relieved smiles before Takagiri turned back to me. “And yes, I owe the rest of you my thanks and support as well. But you performed a miracle of magic to save me, something deeper than your expertise. Please allow yourself to believe that.”

I opened my mouth to deflect, to deny, to declare that I’d done no such thing—then realized I couldn’t. My Flame’s violent judgment, its unilateral assertion that the essence of Sugawara’s soul was repugnant, had been as potent as it was mysterious. At first, the temptation was to say that it wasn’t me, merely my singularly weird chunk of the Frozen Flame, but at some level, I knew that wasn’t completely true. I had thought the same and been the first to intervene, after all. My Flame had followed through on my actions to save Takagiri.

I felt the ghost of my own smile tug at my lips. I tried to force it back down, to remain somber and respectful in the face of Takagiri’s earnest thanks. “I’m glad you think so.”

Takagiri spread her hands, shedding more formality and growing more animated. “You did something befitting a Vaetna! You aspire to be like them, from what I understand, but what you did for me wasn’t in their shadow, it was of their level. It was real magic!”

At that comparison, my smile wriggled its way onto my face as I blubbered an obligatory denial I didn’t really mean. Takagiri matched it with an even wider and far more shameless grin. “See? It’s good, isn’t it? You drove away a monster.” She looked down at her hands, turning them over as though inspecting them. “Right now, it doesn’t feel real. I have never been able to be in this body without feeling him there, hand on my neck. But it’s mine now. I’m alive and free from the most horrible monster Japan has known since the Light first fell. That’s thanks to you, Ezzen, and is worthy of the comparison to the Vaetna. Or a mahou shoujo, if you prefer.”

Giddiness hit me like a truck. I realized I’d spent the last few days compartmentalizing exactly the implications of what I’d done, initially too exhausted and then too distracted by my escapades with Ai to fully process it. I’d saved Takagiri’s life, but I’d also set her free and denied a horrible soul-rapist ghoul access to the land of the living. It was as morally clear-cut as it got, with none of the horrible aching guilt that had followed our actions at Thunder Horse. I’d acted in the Vaetna’s image, saved somebody in a way I could have only fantasized about less than a month ago.

“Uh—wow, thanks, um—sorry, I’m just—haha,” I blushed, making an immense fool of myself. “It’s…thanks. Vaetna-like, yeah, thanks for saying that. But I’m not a member of the team—Todai, I mean. I’m kind of…provisionally hanging out indefinitely. I don’t know what the long term plan is, but I’m not a Radiance.”

I had to clear this up with her. Takagiri was as close as it got to a non-Radiance Radiance, having clearly been inspired by them in the construction of her body, so she might have formed some misconceptions about my status as a team member and my own personal aspirations toward magical girlhood. Maybe she’d been too sleep deprived to remember our brief talk about my gender identity, where I’d asserted that my tentative nonbinary status wasn’t just a stopover on the way to full femininity.

Even though I was getting dangerously close to making a mantle. But mine wouldn’t have any of the magical girl bells and whistles, so it really didn’t count. It was just operating on the same technical base, a different make and model using the same chassis.

Takagiri nodded quickly. “I understand. And—ah, I don’t mean to make it about you. I just…I’ve been thinking, while I was asleep. Dreaming of what comes next. And I still need your help.”

Her brow furrowed. She wobbled in place for a moment, and I reflexively stepped forward, worried she’d fall. But she raised a hand to stop me before a zip hissed through the air and her male body, the Kimura body, stood next to her. One mind, two bodies, a trick the Radiances hadn’t cracked—or at least had never had a real reason to explore. She sighed. “I want to be done with this life. Free from this body, free from leading Hikanome. I just want to be a normal girl.”

I stared. “You want to get rid of your Flame?”

She hesitated, her two bodies looking at each other. “I don’t know. I do want this body, my female one, to be my real body, as LM or as flesh, and to get rid of the male one. And after that…maybe I won’t need my Light anymore. I must be held accountable, and it would be a fitting punishment.”

I didn’t need to ask why. Over the years, under Sugawara’s orders, she’d hurt a lot of people. Exactly how many and how badly, I didn’t know, but she hadn’t been pulling her punches against me and Yuuka. The Radiances had called her an assassin, too, which was damning. And that was to say nothing of her involvement in the human trafficking that had taken Amane and probably others. That part was all quite hush-hush among the Radiances, so I was still light on details, but Kimura’s role as a key organizational and logistical head in Hikanome during that era implied at least awareness and facilitation.

My gut said Takagiri was not a monster, nothing near the scale of Sugawara’s rapacious, egoist malice. And maybe she had already personally suffered enough to atone; I didn’t know how to begin thinking about that. I glanced at Ai uncertainly, hoping she’d take the lead as the conversation turned toward more official Flamebearer-y stuff.

She took my cue, looking up and down both of Takagiri’s bodies. “I’m not comfortable being the judge of what you deserve,” she said, carefully enunciating the word. “Not on my own. I believe that that is a discussion we should probably all have together, all of Japan’s flamebearers, Todai and Hikanome and the others.”

“The others?” I asked. Per my initial Wikipedia trawl when I’d first arrived, Japan did have other flamebearers, but I’d completely skimmed over their sections, having been motivated to orient myself within Lighthouse first and foremost by my initial encounter with Hina. But it had been weeks since then, and I felt stupid for abdicating my responsibility to research my situation more deeply in that time.

Evidently, Ai also seemed annoyed at herself for the oversight. “Oh. We never mentioned it, did we? Sorry: Japan has two flamebearers who are affiliated with neither of our groups. One in the north, in Hokkaido, and one in Shikoku. They’re…” she looked to Takagiri for assistance.

“Strange,” the possibly-ex-Hikanome-leader filled in. “But you’re right; my fate should be held to my peers, including them.”

“Yeah, we’re obviously not turning you over to the cops,” I said. Ai blinked at me, genuinely surprised. I returned the look. “What? Aren’t we agreeing? Isn’t Todai already basically telling the government to fuck off about what we did the other night?”

“Yes…I don’t know why I’m surprised. Vaetna philosophy.”

“Pretty much.” I shrugged, feeling oddly put-upon. “Flamebearers gotta hold each other accountable, right? I don’t know about Japan specifically, but your average government will always opt to just siphon a flamebearer’s power for military shit if you submit to the courts, yeah? We saw tons of that in the first couple years before the Peacies cut out the middleman and went straight to abductions. So if they arrest you or whatever, then that’s not a fair trial no matter what you’ve done, cause the incentives are all fucked up.”

Ai’s surprise morphed into an approving nod that set my heart aflutter with pride. “That’s exactly how it is. Takagiri-san—Izumi?”

“Izumi,” she confirmed. “Yoroshiku.”

Ai looked between her counterpart’s two bodies, adjusting to the given name—or rather self-given, as the case was. I wondered what was so special about “Izumi Takagiri” in meaning for her to have chosen it. The request to use her first name was an indication of trust, as I understood it, one which Ai seemed to accept without objection. “Yoroshiku wa ne, Izumi-san. Yes, we were going to arrange a meeting anyway. The PCTF are coming soon, for Ezzen, and we were already going to seek Hikanome’s support to drive them away.”

“For Ezzen.” Izumi repeated, seeming unsurprised. “This makes it even more important that we kill Sugawara. If they can find him, they will bottle him and use him against us.”

She delivered the statement flatly, all business, and Ai shifted uncomfortably. So did I; neither of us had invested our technical abilities in the hunt for Sugawara’s ghost. Hina had been doing laps of the city with Yuuka in tow, trusting their innate abilities to pick up his scent, but that hadn’t turned up a trail; he’d vanished into the wind that night. We should have been helping. Until now, I hadn’t realized we were on a timer to find him.

“Shit. We’ll keep looking,” I hedged, glancing at Ai. “How long until we get my mantle running, you think?”

Ai’s voice was tinged with worried disagreement. “Ezzen, no. I know you want to be the hero, be the Vaetna, but you’ve done enough. Don’t give in to bloodlust. Let us finish him off.”

“Why not?” I asked, annoyed. Takagiri’s praise of my efficacy spurred me on. “I want to do this. Let me hunt an actual monster. With backup and in my mantle, I mean, let’s not be stupid about it, but I want to be there for it.”

Ai grimaced, reaching up to rub her neck, kneading the scar tracing down her chin with the heel of her hand. “I don’t want to argue about this when I’m hungry. Let’s talk about it over lunch. Izumi, would you like to join us?”

“No. I’m going to go search for him.”

“Now? Has Ebi-tan cleared you for—”

Before Ai could finish interrogating her, both of Izumi’s bodies dissolved into smoke and streamed out the door, taking a left down the hall toward the garage. We both flinched as the ripple siren blared in a violent shriek—for all of half a second before it clicked off. Ebi’s voice crackled through the intercom.

“Let her go.”

As my blood pressure settled back down, I gestured at the open door. “See? I’m specifically trying to not just run off like that.”

—

Despite my quip, I had to admit that letting Takagiri run off on her own when Todai was under police scrutiny seemed like a bad idea, and I couldn’t blame Ai for fretting over it as we went back up to the penthouse. The topic of what to do was raised to the other Radiances via group chat, which I was quickly added to despite the fact that most of the messages were in Japanese. Messages flurried up the screen for two hectic minutes before it was settled in person by Yuuka, who leaned over the upper-level staircase banister and delivered a casual prophecy.

“She’s fine, Ai. Not gonna get caught.”

Apparently, this was all the reassurance necessary, because Ai dropped the subject as she made a beeline for the fridge, hunting for an energy drink or one of those weird calorie jelly foil pouches. I wasn’t fast enough to intercept her on my mutilated foot, still a little bit unsteady despite weeks of acclimation and the stabilizer module, so I called her off with an assurance that I’d make some real food, waving her over to the sitting area. As she crashed on one of the sofas, Yuuka came downstairs to join us for lunch.

I was a little surprised to see the Heliotrope Radiance around the house; she was a university student, and it was Friday according to my phone, so I would have expected her to be in class. But I’d never attended university—indeed I was a secondary school dropout—so I had been surprised to find that the Radiances’ shared calendar listed only two full days of classes for her, plus one half-day. That was enviable until I remembered that I didn’t really have a schedule at all and hadn’t for years.

I found her presence cautiously welcome as I threw together a low-effort lunch for the three of us. By my assessment of the historical trend, the risk that she’d start being needlessly cruel toward me had steadily declined ever since the mess last Saturday and seemed lowered further to effectively nil by Ai’s presence; Radiance Bloodstone respected her Emerald teammate quite a lot. I could agree with her on that. And when Yuuka wasn’t being an ass, she was even fairly pleasant to be around. With her help, I assembled some basic toasted sandwiches for the three of us within only a few minutes.

“Good bread,” I noted, inspecting the remainder of the loaf as I bagged it back up. It was perfectly golden, with an open crumb and pleasant yeasty aroma. “Doesn’t really come to mind when you think ‘Japan’, does it? Rice country and all. At best I’d’ve been expecting that fluffy white stuff you see on YouTube, not, er, real bread. Is this an expensive, celebrity-exclusive import? Should I be honored for the privilege?”

Yuuka squinted at me with her real eye. The crimson gemstone in the other socket continued its baleful, lidless stare. “Don’t talk shit about shokupan where Alice can hear you. And nah, Tokyo has plenty of really good bakeries.” Yuuka tapped at the toasted exterior of her sandwich with a long fingernail. “Why’re you good at this?”

“Your stove’s easy to use,” I deflected. I was proud of my handiwork, having nailed the browning on all three of the sandwiches, but I still didn’t know how to accept compliments. “And Hina stocks good cookware. These pans distribute heat pretty well, no hot spots.”

“Hmm,” Yuuka replied slowly, as though searching for an imperfection on the surface of her sandwich that she could twist into a barb to prod my self-confidence with. “Yeah, nah. I mean, that’s all true, but you’re also a good cook.”

“Cause of my dad.” I was getting some deja vu; Alice, Hina and I had had a similar conversation last week when we’d made gnocchi. “Was a chef. Taught me stuff.”

“Accept the compliment, shitass.”

I flinched. “I. Uh. Thanks? It’s just toasting bread. What kind of, uh, power play is this, exactly?”

Yuuka turned her head away from me in a petulant flick of her twintails. “Hmpf. Just testing something.”

Ai called out to us, what sounded like a reprimand, and Yuuka faltered slightly.

“Ugh, fine. I wanted to see how my eye reacts to you. You’re still kind of slippery and it bugs me. It’s all weird. Your Light’s weird and you’re weird.” She did the twintail flick again.

I wasn’t sure if that was actually supposed to be an insult; not only had there been at least two attempts at a genuine compliment in there, I was also still riding high on what Takagiri—Izumi—had said about me, and any comments calling my Flame unusual just wound up stroking my ego. It was weird, yes, but in ways that seemed distinctly positive so far.

A gear clicked in my brain. My Flame was weird in a good way—could I not also be weird in a good way?

That thought came just a little too close to genuine self-reflection, and she’d also just dangled a very interesting magical tidbit, so I filed it away for later. “Uh, about that. Does that mean you can normally foresee…most stuff? Including, like, sentence-by-sentence conversations?”

She looked at me like I was stupid. “Depends. I’m seeing ripple, remember, so it all depends on how much the shit in question matters.”

“…Meaning you expected a conversation about my culinary abilities to matter? Like, capital M, big-picture ‘matter’ ripple-wise in the way an inferno does?”

“That’s why I was checking.”

“Your testing system needs work.”

Ai sighed. “Stop arguing and let’s eat. The sandwiches are getting cold.”

—

After lunch, the conversation turned to Izumi. When we explained that she wanted the flamebearers of Japan to collectively pass judgment on her, Yuuka scoffed.

“She doesn’t have anything to ‘atone’ for.”

I raised a hand tentatively. “Um, what exactly has she done? Aside from, uh, hitting you at the inferno and trying to…kidnap me, or whatever she was actually doing there. There’s more history than that, right? You all keep using the word ‘assassin’, and if we’re going to be judging her crimes or something…”

Yuuka nodded. “Takagiri was the muscle. Good at it, too.”

“Izumi,” Ai corrected. Yuuka raised her eyebrows but nodded.

“So not murder?” I asked, hopeful.

Ai took a swig of the water I’d given her in lieu of energy drink. “Sometimes murder. When Sugawara actually wanted people dead, sometimes that was her.” she explained. “Because she was the perfect killer. No history, no identity, disappeared—” she snapped her fingers. “Like that.”

“Oh.” My heart sank. “As in taking out his political enemies, you mean. That’s why you call her an assassin.”

“Yes. It wasn’t all…terrible. Sugawara was a large presence when he was the leader, and he made enemies of everybody, not just Hongo and Miyoko or the Japanese government. Yakuza, other organized crime in Asia, they were his enemies too, especially if they had their own flamebearers. Izumi-san killed human leaders in organized crime, made it too dangerous to work in Japan if you didn’t respect Hikanome. Which was good for Japan, overall, I think.”

“Damn right,” Yuuka added.

“But she also hurt police and people in the media who tried to interfere with Hikanome. Politicians, too. She sent the message that you couldn’t oppose them.”

“She killed reporters?” I squawked. Political assassinations I could understand—if not condone—and regular criminals who decided to face down Flame-wielding groups sort of deserved what they got. Power had gotten bloodier in the age of magic. But going after the media felt beyond the pale to me, at least in a civilized country that was still nominally ruled by regular humans and not flamebearer god-kings. Maybe that was what Sugawara would have eventually gone for if he hadn’t been deposed.

Yuuka chuckled. “She tried. We stopped her. She didn’t try again after that.”

“That’s still fucked up.”

“Mm. I mean, we don’t exactly love the paparazzi, but the investigative journalism folks? Those are my people. We didn’t let Sugawara touch them. That’s mahou shoujo.”

“Absolutely,” Ai agreed. “Izumi was…dou ittakke…” She said a word to Yuuka, who nodded sagely.

“Acting under duress,” the goth explained in her still-weird-to-me Australian accent. “Like, knowing what we do now, it’s tough to really be mad about much of what she did. And I think she was already going rogue sometimes, avoiding carrying out hits or really giving it her all where she could, especially near the end. When we really got close to getting Amane back…” I swore I saw some of the crystals in her eye glow for a moment, perhaps looking into the future—or an emotional tell like when the air heated around Alice. Hard to say. “Well, she stepped out of my way when she didn’t have to. Dunno if we’d’a found Amane if she’d fought me there.”

“Oh,” I recalled. “Yeah, that, you said something about that at the barbecue after we took her down. Or Alice did, or somebody,” I hedged.

“Yeah. On the other hand…fuck, it’s still weird for me. That’s all only half of it, because she’s Kimura. And he, well…”

“She?” Ai interrupted. “Sorry. English grammar. Is that how it works if we’re talking about past gender? She wanted to be Izumi already from then?”

Yuuka flinched. “Ah, shit, I think so, that’s how it works with Alice…yeah. Okay, she knew about Amane’s abduction and other trafficking like that. Aided and abetted, even, since she was, y’know, kind of the logistics person for Hikanome.”

My blood ran cold. Something about Yuuka’s nonchalance sat wrong with me; of all of us, she was by far the most devoted to Amane, and I’d come to understand that she had also sacrificed the most in finding and rescuing her, though not the details thereof. This was just as heinous as the murders, but the Radiances somehow didn’t seem overly concerned with either. “That’s fucked up, it is.”

Yuuka snorted. “It is? You’re so British when you’re not being weirdly American. Listen—I don’t know how much she was actually involved in that. It’s possible she didn’t know until after the fact, and…part of me’s still mad at her. But even before all this shit came out, she did turn on him. We’re the ones who put him in that coma, but she’s the one who sent some of his other lieutenants out of Tokyo before the coup. Flame-imbued fuckers, scary stuff. It made a difference. And she helped steer the whole cult out of the schism intact, and they’re pretty cool now. So it’s sort of water under the bridge, we think.”

I wondered: who did “we” entail? Sure, Yuuka might not hold a grudge—remarkable for her disposition—but she said it as though she was speaking for the whole team. And she wasn’t the one who had been most wronged, that was Amane…who, it occurred to me, had come right down to the basement to help me with the coffin, and then stood beside me against Sugawara. With only one functional arm, in the middle of a vicious storm of ripple, she had helped literally drag Izumi’s body to the coffin.

The stiff plates of my mutated forearm were rough under my fingers as I thought this through. “And even though Amane runs on anger, she’s just brushed it off too? Total unconditional forgiveness?”

Yuuka looked at me carefully, then glanced at Ai. “You told him?”

“She told him,” Ai explained. Then she sounded alarmed. “Ezzen. You said you wanted to feed your Flame with…the feeling of justice?”

“Yeah?”

“Whoa,” Yuuka said.

“What?”

“Your hand.”

I looked down at where my hands met on the table. A white glimmer was running up and down the crevasses between my burn scars. Not full ignition of my Flame, but a clear indicator that it was riled up, stimulated by my anger.

“Pretty active,” Yuuka observed. “You’re pissed?”

“I—yeah, a little.” I was surprised by that; intellectually, I agreed with Yuuka’s reasoning, and moreover, it was a little shameful for me to be mad on Amane’s behalf when the woman herself had chosen forgiveness. I searched for an explanation. “Not…not at Amane or you,” I clarified. “But…a little at Taka—Izumi, I guess?” My eyes traced the shine in my right hand. “Even though I think I nominally agree with your reasoning that she was acting under duress. And besides, I wasn’t even there, right…but I’m still sort of mad, like there’s a loose end.”

Ai looked at me sympathetically; Yuuka looked a little exasperated.

“Feedback loop, I’d bet. You prolly get that from Hina, total lack of control she’s got. Take a breath and let me talk you around.”

I took the requested breath. “Feel a little manipulated when I’m being told what to do by a precog,” I admitted, surprised that I was running hot enough to voice that kind of thought.

“Ezzen,” Ai chided.

I winced. “Sorry.”

Yuuka sighed. “I’m about to express some vulnerability, you cunt. Shut up and listen, because you’re not gonna get much more out of me.”

“Oh.” That did indeed shut me up.

Yuuka took a breath. “After…the other night, when I was hanging out with Alice and Amane in their room, our great leader asked if I was gonna have any more issues with Izumi, after I said that shitty thing at dinner. And we talked a little, whether it was all evened out and we wanted to keep protecting her now that she was out from under the evil, rotting thumb of that fucker. And I voted yes, we stay on her side. The slate is clean enough, and she deserves our help. Amane agreed, Alice agreed, she agreed,” she nodded at Ai, “and your bitch turned around on her before we had even cleared the field at the barbie anyway. As far as we’re concerned, by first helping depose Sugawara and then, uh, half-killing him, it’s all good now.”

Ai put her hands on the table, gently touching mine. “Izumi-san has done bad things and good things, but we’re not going to judge it as just a balance; it’s not that simple. I think she’s still basically a good person, or trying to be. What matters is whether she’ll hurt more people from now, and I don’t think she wants to.”

“As far as I can tell, she won’t,” Yuuka added. “And I can tell pretty far, trust me.” She looked down at my hand, voice dropping to a mutter. “Maybe even further.” Her eyes came back up to mine. “That make you feel better? I still can’t fuckin’ tell,” she complained, bopping her temple in mild annoyance.

I tried to reason it out. The vague sense of injustice was much more external than internal, buoyed along by the emotional link with my Flame even past where it should have been sunk by Yuuka’s excellent points. My Flame demanded justice, almost growling for it in my subconscious as a thrum below my throat and down into my arm as an aimless desire. It was primal and emotional, not a specific list of grievances and punishments. If anything, it felt far closer to the animal desire for revenge, albeit on another’s behalf rather than my own. And that was sort of unsettling in a stupid way. I sighed. “Okay. Yeah, yeah, you’re totally right. But I’m still mad, and I think it is from my Flame, you’re right. So, uh, what do I do about that?”

I felt like Hina would tell me to work it off in a cathartic release of undirected violence—probably involving her—but Yuuka simply stood, drawing up to her full 150-something centimeters and peering down at me with that baleful gemstone eye. “Wasting it would be stupid. Point it at a more useful target.”

“I’m already gonna go after Sugawara once I can,” I clarified.

“Yeah, and that means we have to find him.” She beckoned toward the stairs, gemstone eye glinting. “Come on. I’m putting you to work as a searchlight.”

Poster Comm Series #5: Yuuka

The fifth and last of the main Radiances in this series! Main version, eyepatch, and alt with her eye at full power.

Don't worry, we'll also be doing Ebi and Ezzen. Maybe Takagiri too. Also maybe redoing Hina's since I feel we can do better on it with more experience now. In other words, I'll be continuing to give Mjeow a lot of business.

Info on Delays, Yootie Life Update, Second Story

[TLDR: I'm moving! Expect some more delayed chapters for the rest of August, and afterward, I'll be starting a second story.]

Hi readers! Sunspot has had a lot of delayed chapters recently, and I wanted to shed some light about what's causing it and what it means for the story, since I'll be too busy for the next couple of weeks to dedicate meaningful time to Sunspot.

What's going on: I'm moving! This is a pretty complicated and labor-intensive process, of course, and extra draining when I'm running around Tokyo in the summer heat. It's been very smooth sailing overall (compared to the clusterfuck it could be), but the amount of effort necessary has nonetheless made it challenging for me to find both the time and energy for regular updates of Sunspot at a chapter length and quality I'm happy with. I was hoping to at least be done writing Arc 3 before now so I wouldn't have to worry about the story while I deal with life stuff, but here we are.

The good news is that we're more than halfway there at this point. At time of writing, the actual move is taking place in 12 hours, and then it'll be about two more weeks until I'll be fully situated in the new place with my PC properly set up again. Until then, I'll be writing on my laptop when I'm able to -- which is suboptimal, and I won't have much in the way of a writing routine, but I'm still aiming to get chapters out sporadically. Arc 3 should finish for public readers by about the end of September if everything goes well.

This is a pretty big life change (I've lived in my current place for over two and a half years!) but not caused by any kind of disaster in my life, so don't worry, I'll be safe and healthy and comfortable once the dust settles. I'll hopefully be moving again in a few more months (early next year, maybe), which will bring a similar level of disruption on my end, but I'm going to try to be more prepared for it then and have it minimally impact Sunspot's update schedule.

This brings me to the second point of this post: In those months, I'm also hoping to start a second story! I've actually already started drafting it, and while I don't want to say too much yet, I will reveal that the working title is Punch the Hurricane. What I can tell you so far:

• It's about sky islands and pirates and such.

• I'm hoping to give it a semi-regular release schedule for supporters here on Patreon as I write it, before the public RR/Shub/site launch.

• It won't be as long as Sunspot. I don't have a specific length locked in yet, but it'll probably be shorter overall than Sunspot is now. Don't hold me to that, though, since webserial authors are famously terrible at following through on our promises of shorter stories.

• Sunspot will continue at its current schedule while I write PtH, barring any more disruptions to my life.

• Unlike Sunspot, PtH may eventually stub for publishing if it performs well. Money's nice.

• Fair warning: it'll be less gender and more RR-typical than Sunspot. Still with some gender, still with lesbians, just not the eggtastic yuri extravaganza of Sunspot.

I'll say more about it once I make more progress on drafting, but overall I'm excited about it!

So yeah, that's what's up with Yootie! Give me a few more weeks to get my life back into a stable routine and the words shall flow once more, and in even greater quantities (and hopefully quality!) than before. Thank you to everybody who's still supporting me while updates are intermittent -- it's making a pretty huge difference to both my morale and the financial realities of this process. Sunspot's success has brought a seismic change to the trajectory of my life, and that's directly thanks to you guys. The best is yet to come, I hope.

3.11 Delayed One Day, Yuuka Poster WIP

Hi patrons! I'm super busy, so 3.11 won't be coming out for you guys until tomorrow. To tide you all over for those grueling 24 hours, I've elected to share the nearly-complete WIP of Yuuka's entry in the poster series. All hail the Yuubs.

3.10 Patreon Release

None of the prosthesis prototypes were ideal. That wasn’t really the fault of the students who had made them; it was legitimately hard to come up with useful features to cram into the space of the front half of a person’s foot, and they’d put a truly admirable amount of effort into coming up with novel solutions and a wide range of features that I might have liked.

Ai and I took our time working through the remaining feet. I couldn’t think of use cases for the combination taser-lighter when I had access to actual magic, a spear for self-defense, and no interest in smoking, but Team 4’s deliverable redeemed itself by having a USB charger and ripple battery with enough capacity to fully recharge my phone several times over. That was the kind of thing that could legitimately be useful, albeit only in scenarios that took a lot of discussion and hypothesizing to torture into even distant plausibility. Perhaps if I were for some reason camping out in reality’s fourth-dimensional backstage and needed my phone to photograph the novel and mind-bending sights out there? But that was certainly a stretch.

Meanwhile, Team 5 had initially conceived an active camouflage system, then quickly ran into a number of issues that meant the effect in this prototype only reached halfway up my shin. They’d adapted admirably, though, and flickering through the various illusions of different types of boot they’d come up with to cover my foot was mildly entertaining, but there was simply no way this feature could prove useful for my needs. It didn’t even get points back for being especially funny, not compared to the howling laughter of the foot-phone. We had briefly descended into another fit of giggles when I’d posed the image of facing down some Peacie exo-suit and then balancing on one foot to take off my shoe and take a call right in the middle of the standoff.

Team 6 was Kyle’s, making it the other team to include a matching sock for mobility. They’d kept the features remarkably less overboard than the others, opting to focus on extracting as much extra utility from the booster’s kinetics-focused lattice as they could. The fruit of their labor was a remarkably easy-to-use and high-power telekinesis module; I didn’t dare fling too much stuff around the expensive lab, but I could definitely appreciate the multipurpose nature of the device, putting it through its paces with carrying simple objects and jacking furniture off the ground. It certainly wasn’t a match for the extreme precision Amane had demonstrated with her far more advanced bionic limbs, but Ai nonetheless opted to award them high points for mirroring her own design decisions in focusing on a feature that could actually help a person with disabilities do common tasks.

The fun took us from mid-morning past noon, and by the time Ai had finished assigning grades to each team and I’d assembled a tentative list of features I’d most like to see, it was verging on one in the afternoon. I had tentatively pinpointed the booster sock, the translation module, the telekinesis apparatus, and of course, the phone as viable features for further prototyping, in descending order of preference. My reasoning was that those all had practical applications and were difficult to match with snapweaving at my current skill level. Ai wasn’t particularly happy that I was insisting upon the translation module, warning of dependency, but in my opinion, it had already shown its value in that brief discussion with Amane, and having the option was certainly better than not when shit really hit the fan. To appease her, I promised not to rely on it when I didn’t need to.

I wouldn’t even have access to it for the time being; for now, all the prototypes had to go back to the workshop so the students could iterate on the designs. Ai stacked them all in, appropriately, a shoebox, and left briefly to store them somewhere. When she returned, though, she had a frown on her face, which was a little disappointing after how much fun we’d been having since that first burst of relieved, long-overdue laughter.

“What’s up?”

“Alice wants us for a moment before lunch. I can’t quite remember, have you met Otaki-san?” Upon seeing my brow furrow as I tried to consult my fragile database of Japanese names, she waved her hands quickly. “It’s fine if you haven’t. Good, even. He’s in charge of Todai’s legal things,” she explained.

“Ah. He’s probably been pretty busy since I showed up.” I swallowed, suddenly feeling self-conscious as I looked down at myself, adorned in sweatpants and a hoodie. I was in no condition to meet with a big-shot lawyer about anything, especially not being accomplice to murder or any of the smaller crimes I’d probably abetted in the Radiances’ night operation. “Um. Dress code?”

Ai grinned reassuringly, though it was tinged with stress. “Don’t worry. We’ve all had very serious conversations with him dressed worse than that.”

Thus I was taken to a new part of Lighthouse Tower: the 10th floor, home of Todai’s in-house legal counsel. As Ai explained it, the department was broken into two key components that could roughly be summarized as dealing with the “celebrity” and “VNT” sides of Japan’s magical girl squad. The former team did things like licensing and took up two thirds of the floor’s space. The latter helped the Radiances navigate—and exploit—the many, many grey areas of Japanese and international law that had suddenly popped into existence along with the fourth dimension, the Spire, and people who had no true checks on their power except for one another.

Ai brought me directly into Otaki-san’s office without so much as knocking; I immediately noticed how the general noise and bustle of the wider office space outside quieted to nothing. This room was aggressively soundproofed and probably had many other measures for confidentiality besides. Ebi had once told me that the Radiances’ personal documents had some terrifying infomantic seals on them, and it was easy to imagine that their chief lawyer’s office was equipped similarly.

Otaki-san was old enough to have significant gray streaks in his hair, had a heavily lined and textured face, and all in all looked exactly what I would have expected for a Japanese high-power corporate lawyer—deeply intimidating as he pored over the thick binder on his desk. But the frightening impression only lasted as far as his person and his heavy walnut desk, because the rest of the office was cozy and heavily decorated, with pictures of his wife and kids on one bookshelf and a framed baseball jersey—absolutely covered in signatures—hanging on the same wall as his various degrees and certifications.

What really gave him away as somebody the Radiances trusted, though, was a much smaller framed set of newspaper clippings next to the jersey. Most of them were in Japanese, but the one I could read said it all: PCTF Drops Case Against Japan’s ‘Magical Girls’.

Alice was in here too, waiting for us in a big, plush chair with a gap between the seat and back that had clearly been procured specifically to accommodate her tail. She stood when we entered the room and made swift introductions between me and Otaki-san—or “Mr. Otaki,” he claimed to not have a preference—which on my end consisted mostly of nodding and half-bowing a lot, trying not to hunch my shoulders too much as she spoke, and remembering Dad’s advice about a firm handshake when he reached across the table.

The meeting turned out to be little more than an introduction. I was now deep enough in the Radiances’ shit that it seemed prudent for me to at least meet my main legal representative—and because apparently, I had been mentioned by name when the authorities had come knocking just this morning.

“They wanted to know your whereabouts and intimated that you might be staying here under duress,” Alice explained. “They didn’t quite threaten us directly, but I think the Peacies are after a face-to-face meeting with you.”

“Which we’re not doing,” I guessed.

“Not until we’ve solidified where we stand with Hikanome and can trust we have their backing, no,” she agreed. “And just to be safe, in case the monsters make an actual abduction attempt or something, we don’t want you leaving the building without one of us escorting you. I don’t know why you’d do that in the first place, since you’re not exactly the type to go out for solo tourism, but that’s the policy.”

“Sounds good,” I agreed. “Yeah, not too interested in wandering around Tokyo by myself. You really think they’d try to scoop me right off the street in basically your backyard?”

“They shouldn’t,” Otaki-san put in. “Todai will object in the strongest possible terms if something happens to you.” His wide face broke into a grin that reminded me of the one I’d seen on Amane’s face when she’d opened fire on Sugawara’s ghost. “And a large part of our relationship with the PCTF hinges on the fact that if things come to violence, we cannot guarantee we can keep Ms. Suzuki from retaliating.”

“So you’re threatening them with…death by Hina if they do anything, uh, untoward,” I surmised. “Not unlike the barbecue, feels like.”

“More or less,” Alice confirmed. “Hina’s good at playing the heel when she needs to, the bad cop to Amane’s or my good cop. You aside, the government knows they can’t reasonably bring a murder case against us, and we’re in a holding pattern of playing dumb about everything but our rescue of Kiriya-san—she’s doing fine, by the by, stable and they’re going to transfer her to a more local hospital soon. It’s admittedly kind of a delicate dance, since, well, it’s always sort of wild west between us and the government, but I think things are firmly in our control for now. That might change depending on how far they escalate when Yuuka’s prophecy comes true.” She rubbed her forehead, more due to definitely-not-horns than stress, it seemed. “I recognize that’s a lot of information at once, but for the most part it’s not really your problem. For now, just don’t talk to the cops and you’ll be fine, yeah?”

It was a relief to know that we’d apparently gotten away with what we’d done last night, if only because the Japanese government didn’t have the teeth to even level charges against Todai. That was the power of flamebearers; when enough of them—us—managed to band together, the only real leverage a government had over us was in bringing flamebearers of their own and making it a nuclear standoff. That went double for the Radiances, who also wielded significant cultural cachet in their own right. Of course, with the PCTF foretold to be on their way, that escalation would come in time—just not that day.

In fact, the rest of that day was rather relaxed once that meeting concluded. Ai, Alice, and I went back to the penthouse for lunch; my cerulean-eyed girlfriend had prepared a big vat of thick curry in the morning, which Alice flash-reheated with magic and we eagerly helped ourselves to, gorging on cubed carrots and potatoes and chunks of chicken thigh. It was the same curry formulation that I’d now had a few times here, only slightly modified from the package-recommended recipe on the packet of curry roux; variations on this were a staple in the penthouse. It wasn’t necessarily something Dad had ever served while catering, even the cheaper events, but it was definitely in the same vein, something easy to make in huge quantities and reheat in individual servings as people came and went. That made it comforting, though my recently reemerged culinary sensibilities were suggesting a number of further modifications that might make it tastier. Galangal, maybe, to bring it closer to a Thai red curry.

We had a good time filling Alice in on what we’d been up to with the prosthesis prototypes; she didn’t quite see the absurd humor in the foot-phone. You had to be there, I supposed. In turn, she talked about work, giving me a rare window into what she actually did all day outside of the special circumstances brought on by my arrival. In this case, she regaled us with the difficulties of negotiating her own and Yuuka’s appearances as guest hosts on talk shows next month. The network had really wanted a segment focusing on the inconveniences of living with Alice’s thick tail, playing it for slapstick comedy, and then something similar for Yuuka’s breasts. As Alice explained it, she had practically breathed fire at them until they’d walked those suggestions way, way back.

It was sometimes insane what regular humans tried to get flamebearers to do, given the inherent power disparity—of course, such things would be completely unacceptable even if they were human celebrities, but you needed some serious lack of basic self-preservation to pitch it to somebody who could unmake you. This was also a valuable insight into how the Radiances operated as celebrities; my prior understanding of showbiz had been that there were supposed to be agents acting as intermediaries for this sort of thing, and Todai did have those, but Alice was a bit of a control freak about vetting the team’s public appearances. And in the context of that specific anecdote, I couldn’t blame her.

Ai and I shared a few nervous glances across the table as Alice kept periodically rubbing her forehead, but ultimately, neither of us dared bring up the dragon in the room, even with the topic of her tail already having come up. The closest we got was Ai trying to pivot the conversation away from work and toward the topic of my budding mutations, but by that point, Alice was already getting up to clear her spot and return to work. Once she was gone and we had washed the dishes, Ai yawned.

“I might take a nap.”

“Alice could learn something about that,” I ribbed, before yawning reflexively as well. “Oh, damn.”

Ai grinned, stretching in a way that pulled up her shirt to show her abs, then letting out a breathy little grunt. “Want to join me?”

The view plus the proposition made me freeze up. “Uh—I kind of wanted to keep poking at my mantle,” I stammered. “Or do some weaving practice, or something, or—”

“You don’t have to,” she interrupted with a chuckle. “I just think it would be healthy for you to have more exposure to us as…the piles of meat and bone that we are, rather than pretty girls who you’re scared of. Last night was nice.”

“I just—you won’t be uncomfortable? It’s kind of different when it’s just two people instead of one big group. More…culpable?” I wasn’t sure if that was the right word, so I tried again. “Like, er, isn’t it sort of cheating on Hina to…”

“Ezzen. I’m comfortable with you. Do you really think she would be upset that two of her favorite people took a nap together? We could have sex and she’d probably celebrate instead of being mad.”

I flushed at that. “Uh.”

Ai flinched, then shook her head hurriedly, turning red herself and suddenly seeming as embarrassed as me. “Oh, no, I wasn’t—no, we’re not going to do that. It was an intentionally absurd example, because I don’t, etto, do…sex,” she explained bashfully. “Or, ah, I can do it, but I don’t feel the desire to do it with people, and…” she trailed off helplessly, having massively derailed from her original point into too intimate of a topic, from trying to be clinical and helpful to oversharing some very intimate details. She buried her face in her hands. I was similarly paralyzed, having no idea how to respond. She’d technically just come out to me as some kind of asexual, I thought, but I didn’t know what to do with that information that wouldn’t lead to me shoving my foot deep into my mouth. After what felt like forever, but was probably more like twenty seconds, she squeaked. “Just nap. Normal nap?”

“Okay,” I agreed. That really seemed like the only reasonable course of action at this point. “Normal nap. Yeah.”

—

Despite all the awkward nonsense the two of us were capable of injecting into an interaction, it turned out that having a normal nap together was quite pleasant. Ai’s room was, predictably, as much of a secondary workshop as it was a living space, but it was laid out such that the bed was separated from the work space by a heavy curtain, as a way of enforcing some work-life balance. She also had a speaker system that played some ambient rainfall sounds that added to the sense of cozy seclusion and helped put me to sleep shockingly quickly despite my overwound nerves and my habitual checking of my phone to keep up with the chatroom.

By the time I woke up, darkness had fallen outside. To my credit, I had once again managed to not grope anything inappropriate in my sleep; it seemed my body knew that Ai was not for limb-entangling the way Hina was. When I groggily reached for my phone, which had wound up half-wedged under Ai’s insensate body next to me, I was slightly shocked to see the time.

“Oh, shit.”

It was four in the morning; our afternoon nap had knocked us out cold for over twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep. Apparently, we had both needed more rest than we’d gotten in the Todai Cuddle Puddle, and it had come at the price of a sane sleep schedule. I felt gross, too—thankfully not in the moralizing way like I’d done something wrong by spending the night with a girl who wasn’t my girlfriend, rather the physical and musculoskeletal results of a nap that had gone on way too long. In the dim light of my phone, I could see where the folds of the bedsheets had impressed themselves on my skin, and overall, I felt rather oily and unwashed. I sat up groggily to locate Ai’s bathroom and quietly scrub my face of the worst gunk.

By the time I returned, she was also awake, lying on her side with her phone shining directly into her face from three inches away. I’d never seen how that looked from the outside—not good.

“Mm,” I grunted by way of acknowledgement.

She paused her video and rolled over halfway to grunt back at me. She looked as groggy and disheveled as I did, perhaps more so; in that regard, she had succeeded in making me less intimidated by her. In this pre-dawn darkness, we were two cave creatures freshly emerged from hibernation, no pretense of being illicit paramours or any other nonsense my anxiety could brew up.

It bears mentioning that I wasn’t completely immune to Ai’s physical charms, and I couldn’t help but sneak a few respectful-as-possible glances. Her extensive back tattoo tantalizingly peeked out from where one of her T-shirt’s sleeves had gotten rolled up, and an animal part of me did still respond to the strip of exposed skin above the waistband of her shorts, less slender than Hina’s and instead bolstered by sculpted muscle. And her hair, though neither as long nor glossy as Amane’s and messily splayed out over her pillow, did inspire envy in me. I wanted to brush it, or her to brush mine, or some combination. That seemed nice. I wasn’t going to ask.

Still, the closeness was very different from my mornings with Hina, which were always about grasping and rubbing and nibbling, gratuitous contact for contact’s sake. She thrived on that, and it had wound up being sort of the only love language I knew. With Ai, by contrast, it was just nice to exist near one another. I turned over what she had shared about her own proclivities, or rather lack thereof, in my head; knowing she wasn’t interested in sexual relations with anybody somehow made it easier for me to discard my own fears of coming off as thirsty in this intimate situation. There was probably something to unpack there.

At this point, there was no chance I was getting back to sleep. Normally, I would have pulled out my phone for an hour of watching videos before actually getting out of bed, but that wasn’t really an option when Ai was also watching videos of her own; we’d naturally irritate each other with the audio, even with the insulating ambience of the artificial rainfall, and I didn’t want to be a nuisance. So instead, I just sat on the bed and looked out the window, gazing down at the lights of central Tokyo, ranks of cars trundling along the roads even at this ungodly hour. Eventually, Ai paused her watching, and I heard her sit up and shimmy closer to me.

“It’s nice in the dark.” Her voice was soft; a little raspier and deeper from overnight disuse, which I didn’t mind at all. If anything, it made her sound a little more like Hina, though maybe that was just my only point of comparison for girls sounding like that in the dark.

“The city?”

“Yeah.” She shifted until she was sitting next to me. “What Alice said yesterday, about you not going out alone. Is there anywhere you want to go?”

“In Tokyo? Uh…honestly, I don’t really know what’s out here. Star keeps pestering me to go out and do stuff, but she hasn’t really given me specifics. Tokyo’s like…I know there’s fashion stuff, but Hina already took me clothes shopping.” I thought for a moment, then realized I was being silly. “Oh, uh, food, obviously.”

“We could do food,” she agreed, letting her legs dangle over the edge of the bed as she looked down on the city with me. “Very easy for us to get reservations at any of the big restaurants. I mean, I don’t go much, but Hina-san would like to go with you, I think. She really wants to take you around.”

She pressed her shoulder against mine, and I stiffened before forcing myself to relax. “I…guess we could? Other than her job, is anything stopping that?”

“No.” She gathered her hair loosely over one shoulder, running her hands through it. “I’m glad you like her so much.”

“Uh. So am I?” I shifted a little bit. This felt surreal, and I vaguely wondered if this was a dream. “Ai, I don’t want to be reading into anything, so I, um. Directness.” I took a deep breath. “Is this a really weird and roundabout…confession? You’re not, um, jealous of Hina?”

She pulled away from me slightly and leveled with me, eyes glinting in the dark. “No. I’m not trying to kiss you, if that’s what you mean. I’m just happy I like you as much as I hoped I would when you first arrived. And I want to be friends who can do this kind of thing together. Without—not romance,” she clarified. “No kissing, no sex, not lovers. I don’t want what Hina-san wants with you—well, touching you is nice, but I don’t want anything that has…fluids,” she stammered. “I just like that you’re here. I don’t know if there are words in English for it, but there aren’t really any in Japanese, so…”

“Oh. I like it too,” I replied, not needing to deliberate on it at all and a little embarrassed about that. “Um, yeah, I think that’s just…close friends? Not friends-with-benefits, certainly, that would have implications specifically against what you mean.”

“Then can we be friends?”

“I’ll…try.” I looked over at her. “That’s what I’m supposed to say, right?”

“Yes,” she chuckled. “Thank you. You’re more restrained than Hina-san. She tries to be this kind of friend, too, but she can sometimes…forget that’s where it ends with me. I don’t want more than this.”

The conversation trickled down to comfortable silence as I chewed on this. It was nice to be liked. And it was nice to officially be friends with Ai—of course, we’d already been friends, but now it was official, the terms spoken aloud and verified between all parties. That was helpful for people like us. In-person friendship was very novel to me, and I was finding that I liked it, if this was what it entailed.

There was only so much city one could watch from our vantage point. Lighthouse Tower, for all it housed some of the most important people in the country, was still only twenty stories tall, and many of the buildings out the window towered above us, blocking sight lines to the wider city. This also wasn’t an especially interesting part of town this late at night; sure, there were still plenty of cars and trucks moving down the street, but Todai’s corner of Tokyo, Akasaka, was more business-oriented than a place where youths gathered to party into the wee hours of the morning. I had no practical experience with that lifestyle, but I wondered if the Radiances ever did that, shed their literal and metaphorical mantles of power to just be young women for a night. Hina did seem to go out quite a bit on her own, and I could somewhat picture Amane or even Yuuka partying, but Alice and Ai seemed far too married to their jobs. Ai in particular was enough like me that I could scarcely imagine her at a bar or club.

“Recreation,” I blurted. “How do you…have fun? As a team?”

Ai grabbed her phone, scrolling what looked like a news site. “We do…movies, sometimes. Here, in that middle area. Amane and Hina play games. Hina cooks, of course.”

“You don’t…go out? I’m not sure what I’m asking,” I admitted.

“For fun? Ah…” she put the phone down, thinking and counting it out on her fingers. “Alice and Hina go shopping. Sometimes they bring Amane. Amane and Yuuka go to bars and comedy shows. Yuuka has other friends at school, too. Alice and Amane go on dates, obviously. Yuuka and Hina do, mm, mahou shoujo things. Like what we did last night, but smaller or further away. We all do it sometimes, but never all together.”

That sounded more or less like what I expected. They’d seemed not only practiced, but quite at ease with last night’s strike, aside from the relatively high stakes in the rescue portion. Mr. Otaki had seemed quite unworried that any of this would reflect on them, and naturally, that meant they had done things before. “Against who?”

“Traffickers. PCTF-related people. Yakuza, sometimes. We don’t kill them, just break things and be a little scary. So not as extreme as the Vaetna’s…” she searched for a word for a moment. “Ultimatums. And we stay mostly within Japan. Only Yuuka and Hina try to enter other countries’ airspace.”

“And, to be clear, you’re still talking about recreation? Fighting isn’t work?”

Ai shrugged, taking a sip of a massive water bottle on her nightstand. “For me, I don’t think it’s fun, but I think the others do. It makes things better for people.”

“Makes sense. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t like it.”

“Do you?”

“Uh.” I thought about the chaos of last night, and the Barbecue Inferno before that. “Not really? Er, fighting is kind of fun, when it’s friendly and sparring and stuff. I want to do more of that. But VNT stuff? Not all it’s cracked up to be, at least when you’re not a Vaetna, I’m finding.” I flexed my scarred and newly plated hand for emphasis. “This won’t cut it.”

“But a mantle might,” Ai pointed out. “We can work on it now, if you want.”

“It is four in the morning,” I pointed out, but a smile was spreading across my face. “But I don’t really have a bedtime.”

“Me neither.”

And, predictably, neither did Hina. As we entered the kitchen in search of brain-fuel, she was already there, happily chopping away at various vegetables and nurturing a large stock pot on the stove. She waved at us as we descended the stairs. Her work was illuminated by only the trio of overhead lights over the kitchen island, which cast stark shadows all around the rest of the penthouse’s first floor and set her vivid sapphire eyes pleasingly near-aglow. She blinked over to us, gave us a snuggly hug, and then returned to her work as we set about procuring our own breakfasts; I thought she would have insisted on sitting us down and letting her cook for us, but she must have read the goblin energy we were putting off and simply waved us toward the fridge. For Ai, her idea of minimum-effort nutrition was a reheated deli container of leftover bulgogi, and for me, after some deliberation, it was…another deli container of leftover bulgogi, as we both thanked Hina for her foresight in making a truly frightening quantity.

After we gobbled down meat and peppers and rice under the kitchen’s spotlights, it was time to get to work. I’d been expecting Ai to take me back down to the basement, but instead, we just went right back to her room, where she had another glyphcraft-oriented workstation ready to go. She booted up GWalk, loaded in my files, and we started getting the most barebones version of the mantle up and running. This v0.1 prototype would have none of the aesthetic features I’d discussed with Hina; it was very close in appearance to a mannequin, or perhaps the most streamlined and human-baseline-shaped versions of a suit of Vaetna plate. Either interpretation served me fine.

By the time the lazy winter sun had fully come up, we’d finalized the design, and I was excited to get the substrates printed and woven so I could hop in and get a feel for what it was like to pilot an entirely artificial body. But just as we sent the design’s central lattice substrates off to Ai’s trio of personal 3D printers, she got a notification in the bottom right of her screen. She turned to me, looking relieved, additional stress unwinding out of her expression and posture beyond what I had thought was the minimum, finally free of a burden she’d been carrying for almost a week now, in some form or another.

“Takagiri is awake!”

Radiance Tier Perma-sale

Hi patrons & readers! Thanks for supporting Sunspot! This post is to notify you that I'm dropping the price of Radiance tier (the main advance chapters tier) back down from $10 to $5.

Why: Back in May, I raised the price of Radiance tier from $5 to $10 (only for members who signed up after that, of whom there are about 30), in accordance with tripling the chapter backlog. Now that we've had a few months of that, the numbers say that it hasn't really worked out, and I feel kind of bad for having raised the price at all. $10/mo works for some stories, but $5 seems to be better for the specific ones that have audience crossover with Sunspot, such as Katalepsis.

So I'm putting the tier on... permanent sale, I guess you could call it, effective immediately. This is good news for you all! Radiance tier will still get the same number of advance chapters and other rewards, this is purely a price reduction.

For those of you who are supporting at the current $10 price, I believe Patreon will automatically lower your pledge, but if it doesn't, make sure to change it yourself or reach out to me. There's no pressure to stay at the current pledge; I've already calculated that I'll be fine taking the minor immediate hit to income (around $130/mo after taxes) if all of you were to lower your pledge.

That's pretty much the whole announcement. Thanks to everybody who supports Sunspot and my ability to write it, it means the world to me.

Arc 3 Cover Raw Art

You might have noticed that Arc 3 now has a proper cover everywhere you can read the story! I figured I'd post the full, title-less art here with a little director's commentary; I'm still working on a gallery page for patrons where all the art I commission for the story can be available to download. For now, here'll do.

This lovely piece was commissioned from Togekko, who was a true joy to work with. She was incredibly professional, easy to work with, fast to respond to feedback, and was willing to go through lots of iterations as we changed little details. Her art absolutely rocks, and if you want really high quality art with cute characters and detailed, cozy environments, I highly encourage you to commission her.

As for the art itself, there's tons of little details, from the half-eaten Famichiki to the little circle on the mantle diagram's foot. Ezzen is the real star of the show, though, and I think he came out wonderfully. Came out. Get it? We were actually considering putting a whole design on his shirt, but it felt too busy and I didn't want to commit to figuring out a whole shirt design (though the eyes shirt depicted in 1.12 is still on the docket for eventual apparel!) Plus, I didn't want to put Togekko through that much work.

Despite me saying that, she did draw a whole mini version of the Hina poster! We probably could have gotten away with just using the actual art with some digital posterization effects because it's mostly covered by the logo, but I think doing it the authentic way has really added a sense of quality to this textless version. This poster is not canonically in Ez's room (yet) but it's easy to imagine that Hina herself put it there to claim her territory or something. Maybe I should have had Hina's actual signature scrawled across it or something.

You may also note that the poster to the left of that is a lexicon of the various glyphs, a sort of periodic table arranged by the five main ripple colors and three orders. Don't take the symbols or number of glyphs per section as gospel. Maybe someday I'll figure out symbols for every single one so you can get a real, authentic version of this poster, but that day is a long way away. What we have here sure looks pretty, though, doesn't it?

That's pretty much all I have to share about this cover, other than that I'm super happy with it. I've really been on a spree of getting art made for the story, and while that's starting to slow down now, I'm definitely going to keep getting covers and supplemental art made as we go forward. If there's an artist who you'd particularly like to see me commission, let me know in the comments!

[Repost] Side Story + Info

Hi folks! I haven't used Patreon for this kind of outreach before, but hopefully this will reach a bunch of readers who aren't in the Discord to see announcements there.

To the point: Did you know that the old side story I wrote back in December 2024 is available for everybody to read? It seems like a lot of people missed it or thought it was exclusive to paying patrons back when I posted it the first time, so here's a reminder that it's totally free to read.

Read it here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/119224378

Or on the site: https://sunspot.gay/side-story/side-story-1-pet-store/

I'd like to write more of these -- I have plenty of ideas -- but my writing time is pretty limited these days, and I can't justify the effort right now. When I find the time, I'd like to let you guys choose the topic via a poll or something.

Thanks for reading! Sunspot will be back on the 18th!

3.09 Patreon Release

(Sorry this is late! I think it came out strong, though)

---

Ai’s students had been divided into six teams for the purposes of working on my prosthetic. Each team was a mix of undergraduate and graduate students, four to seven people, and had come up with their own prototype. She arrayed the prototypes before me on an open space of her desk; the first thing I noticed was that two of the designs consisted of more than just the half-foot prosthesis.

“Are these…socks?”

“Yes. Kyle Muller mentioned you asked him for those, and his team quickly learned that it just wasn’t feasible to put one on only one foot. So the sock goes on the other foot; it has the same direct impulse unit as the prosthetic does, for even movement. Jumping, hovering, and impact reduction on landing. No actual flight.” Ai paged through the project documentation. “Then there was some espionage, which is why Team 1 also wound up doing the same thing, though the other features are pretty different between the two. Obviously, the substrates are just prototypes and would need to be miniaturized in the final version.”

Kyle Muller…it took me a moment to locate the name, and when I did, I put my face in my hands in embarrassment. He’d stopped me in the hall on the way to get my current prosthetic and pressed me for any features I was interested in; I’d blurted “boosters” almost at random, regretted it immediately, and then promptly erased all memory of the incident until now. That request had come from a desire to move unchained by gravity, like the Vaetna and my then-brief exposure to Hina; since then, I’d also learned about Ai’s tattoo, briefly supercharged my own body in combat, and begun to work on my mantle, so having boosters now seemed somewhat redundant.

“Cool,” I hedged. “Uh, any other stand-out…Hina, what are you doing?”

My girlfriend had squatted in front of the lineup of magitech tools and was carefully inspecting them one by one. She peered across the table’s surface, leaned forward to sniff them, and even tilted her head and put her ear right up to each prosthetic in hopes of…I wasn’t quite sure. She turned back to me.

“Just checking!”

“For…what, exactly?”

“I dunno. I’ll know it if I see it.”

I shot a confused glance at Ai and Amane and saw that they were both facepalming. Evidently, this was a familiar behavior. Ai caught my glance and did her best to explain. “She’s…sometimes she notices things in prototypes that wind up being major issues when we investigate. We were making some batteries, she licked one, and said they would explode. And then they did.”

Hina looked proud. “I don’t know how I do it either. Sometimes stuff just feels wrong!”

“Huh,” was all I could really say to that. I looked down the row again. “And all of these are passing?”

“Think so. Might be different when you put them on.”

I looked over at Ai. “Any recommendations? You called some of them ‘overboard;’ what exactly does that mean?”

Ai pointed to the second-leftmost one, which looked fairly unassuming, lacking a paired sock or other auxiliary equipment.

“Team 2. Kasegawa Ryo, Chen Junjie, Amala Redi, Solomon Saikal. This is…it started very normal and simple.”

“Huh.” I pulled off my shoe and sock and detached my current foot prosthetic, placing it on the desk next to it for comparison. All of the prototypes were clear upgrades from my current prosthetic in resembling an actual human foot; they didn’t all have five individually articulated toes, but this one at least separated the big toe from the others, and the overall sculpting seemed a little more in line with the shape of my remaining foot than the relatively low-resolution planes of the one Ai had put together for me.

I also put the cat-food-can stabilizer module next to my old foot and raised it questioningly toward Ai. She nodded. “Yes, these all have integrated stabilizers.” She tilted her head in Hina’s direction. “Thanks to her, again. The effect should feel the same as your current one.”

“Wait, it’s your Flame?” I asked Hina.

“For these, yeah. It should be yours in the final version. Now hurry up and put it on, I wanna see this one in action!”

“Why?” I asked as I slid it into place. “Oh, and, uh, still thread-tug {AFFIX}?”

“Yes.”

I gingerly touched the prosthetic to my foot’s stump and reached out with my mind, or my Flame, or whatever sixth sense we flamebearers developed to interface with the bound magical energies of glyph-based technology. It helped to run my thumb along the top of the prosthetic until I found a place that just…felt right, which was a rather imprecise way of going about it considering the precision with which both the physical prosthetic and the glyphs themselves had been crafted. Nonetheless, it was the right spot, and I tugged on the edge of the Flame that I felt there to {AFFIX} the prosthetic to my foot.

Ai nodded. “How does that feel? Can you move your toes?”

I was surprised to find that I could, which was a very weird sensation after leaving the muscles in the sole of my foot somewhat unused for the past few weeks. Indeed, it wasn’t even really my muscles actuating the toes; that part was just detecting my intent to move it, the most surface-level sort of bionic control upon which any more complex system could be built, like the far more integrated and invasive controls of the mantles.

Physically, the fit was slightly different from my old one, which was to be expected, and the pressure of the {AFFIX} against my stump also reminded me of something she had said weeks ago. “Fine, I think? A little different, maybe. Wasn’t there supposed to be an, uh, elastic sleeve or something for the seam? Though, uh,” I looked at Amane’s exposed shoulder, where the mounting point for her arm was fused into her flesh, “I guess not in all cases.”

Amane grinned back at me, flexing her repaired arm in a bicep curl as she tested its range of motion.

“It’ll be easy to add,” Ai assured me. “Stand up? Is the stabilizer working? It’s very important for this one especially.”

I obligingly got to my feet and was pleased to find that the integrated stabilizer felt like my old one; I’d grown accustomed to its compensation. I shifted my weight from leg to leg. “Yeah, that works. Isn’t it bad for me to become dependent on that?”

“You’ll grow out of it!” Hina purred. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but the enticing way she said it promised some kind of superhuman mobility that transcended the need to walk entirely. She blinked her big blue eyes at the new prosthetic. “Okay, now bring out the spear!”

“What? Like, er…” I took a few careful steps away from the desk, toward the open middle of the room, and summoned my spear from my arm. “This? Is something supposed to happen?”

Hina shook her head, and Ai facepalmed. Amane said something to them, which made Ai’s fingers clench harder around her face. “I’m realizing how stupid this is. Not you, Ezzen, the…” she gave up and huffed. “This prosthetic is one of the silly ones. It has its own spear in it.” She groaned something in Japanese after that, which made Hina frown at her.

“Hey, babe, this is still important!”

“Uh?” I prompted.

Hina patted Ai’s shoulder while she answered me. “She feels like this is a waste of resources. Bad use of her students’ time. But she also doesn’t want to be mean about their effort, because she’s a good teacher.” She prodded the back of Ai’s hand covering her eyes. “Hey, stoppit, it’s okay that these are goofy.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I mean, at a glance, these don’t seem like anything to be ashamed of, unless I’m missing something.”

Ai sighed and crossed her arms instead, looking at me apologetically. “Never mind. Sorry.” She looked down at my foot. “For this one, they know you’re a fan of the Heron, and even though they were there to see that you already had your own spear, they thought they could do it better.”

“That’s…fine?” I decided, feeling like I wouldn’t have done any better with ideas for features had I been in their position. I hefted my own spear, looking at it with a little amusement. “I mean, this one was carved from a two-by-four. It’s not a real weapon, and there’s room for improvement. If this team wanted to use the prosthetic as a pretext for making me a better one, I think that’s fine.”

Ai’s expression looked a little bleak. Hina tilted her head. “Wait, carved?”

“Yeah? Took a whole summer with a whittling knife,” I explained. “Before that, I used a broom handle, but it just wasn’t the same.” I loosened my grip to let gravity slide the haft through my hands until I reached the now-burnt tip. “Upgraded-ish now, maybe, but still just a piece of wood.” I stowed it in a flickering twist of space, distinctly pleased with how easy and natural that had become. Was that near what it was like for Hina to move through fourspace? “How do I get the foot one out?”

“Cutie, hold on, back up, you carved an entire spear out of a plank of wood?”

“Yeah?” I wasn’t sure why that was a big deal. “Can we get on with the actual prosthetics, if Ai feels time is being wasted?”

“Yeah, yeah, sorry, it’s just—you’re such a veeb, jeez. Commitment is attractive, I guess. Spear should come out if you curl your toes and stomp. They thought a blue trigger would make more sense than needing to tug the weave in the middle of combat.”

I supposed that made sense. I followed the directions, commanding the toes and softly stomping with a clack of plastic on tiled flooring, and suddenly, my foot got much heavier. The second and third toes had disappeared in a moment, and in their place was maybe…one foot of spear, made of what looked like orange LM. I frowned and stomped again, wondering if I’d done it wrong, but no more spear emerged from my foot. I’d envisioned a fully separate weapon like my wooden spear, not…this. “Wait, that’s it?”

Ai slumped in her chair. “Yes.”

“More of a dagger than a spear, isn’t it. Much more like Reggie’s blades,” I judged against my nearest point of comparison within the Vaetna. Reggie had vaet that could extend from his feet and a very acrobatic fighting style, which I’d always felt clashed somewhat with his image as the Vaetna’s Plants Guy.

“Yes. Sorry. They realized they couldn’t do a full-length spear, and they thought that since you were a fan of the Vaetna anyway, you wouldn’t mind this instead.”

I experimentally raised the foot and turned my ankle a bit, getting a feel for the extra weight, holding onto the edge of the desk behind me for support. “And I just…kick with it?”

“You really don’t have to.”

“Do it!” said Hina.

I didn’t dare try to imitate Reggie’s style; I’d never been one for kicking-based martial arts; the legs were mostly for stability and generating force to drive the spear. For a slightly more mortal reference frame, I thought back to when I’d watched Ai absolutely annihilate that training dummy. She’d included kicks, knees, and sweeps. I tried to picture a basic roundhouse kick, drew my leg back, and swung my foot through the open middle space of the room. For an instant, I was worried that the centrifugal force might overwhelm the force attaching the prosthetic to my foot, but to Team 2’s credit, they’d calibrated the force accurately, and it stayed firmly attached.

That didn’t make my kick graceful. It was embarrassingly amateurish and disjointed, forces failing to properly transmit through the kick well enough to deliver motion. I didn’t even manage to keep the mini-spear’s tip facing the right direction as my foot twisted. The one point in my favor was that I had inadvertently raised my leg much higher than I’d been intending; I’d have struck somebody in the face, at least. I hurriedly lowered my leg, blushing.

“Whoa,” said Hina, making me redden further. “Flexy!”

“Thanks,” I muttered, looking firmly down at the floor. “This, uh, won’t work.”

“I agree.” Ai sounded relieved.

I detached the foot with the mini-spear still deployed, turning it over in my hands once and inspecting its features as though to soften my rejection. “Sorry—” I immediately covered my mouth. I’d resolved not to speak to objects with the girls around.

Ai nodded as she took the foot from me. “It’s alright. This is what I meant by overboard, too much—just bad ideas. I hope you’ll like some of the others more.” She scrolled down her digital dossier of designs, typing some notes.

“Should I, um, give feedback?”

“I have plenty,” Ai sighed. “This one was never going to work, but I’m glad that at least the foot part is working, since that part is pretty similar between them all. Try…Team 1.” She pointed to the first prosthetic in the row, one of the two that had a matching sock. “It would be good to know if you like having the mobility options. That’s probably the most important feature.”

“This one also has a translator!” Hina added. “So you wouldn’t have to learn Japanese!”

“No, he would,” Ai countered, looking away from her teammate in annoyance. “This was Hina being uniquely clever, and it has big limitations: No text, not your own speech. And it’s not engineered and tested for durability. That’s not a substitute for learning.” She sounded a little snappy.

“So it’s not a universal translation thing like the Vaetna have got,” I reasoned, wondering why she sounded so hostile. “But still an improvement without Ebi around, though. Would have been nice to have this back at the barbecue.”

Hina rubbed her neck nervously. “That’s actually why I came up with it, when I was thinking about how much of a chaos situation I put you in without being able to talk to most of the people there. So I just put it into one of the feet while I was working on it, kind of as proof of concept? It’s not super fancy like a Vaetna one, but it was still a lot of work! These things aren’t universal, it only works because you’re a flamebearer, and I’ve never made one before—I only figured out how to key it to you after the inferno, once I got a better read on your Flame from sniffing around while I was cleaning up my pocketspace, and then it was still really hard to actually do. I kind of just stapled shit together until it worked. Sorry if that bothers you, I know you really like to have diagrams and graphs and stuff.”

Her rambling was kind of cute, but she didn’t need to be apologetic. Was I supposed to be mad that she’d done something incredibly impressive for me? Did I have such a reputation? “What, because you were winging it instead of planning it all out first? That’s fine by me; you don’t need to apologize. Cool magic is cool magic, and it’s actually kind of cooler that you were just doing what felt right until it worked. I want to be able to do that,” I admitted. “Just tell me—how does it work? Like, big picture. It’s definitely pink, but is it actually changing the words you’re speaking in the air or is it operating on my brain? Or something else?”

“Something else. It’s more like it’s getting your Flame to do the translation…I think that’s what the {ASSIGN} and {IDENTIFY} are trying to do, anyway, they kind of go through and in and crisscross to re-squish the concepts…ugh. If I knew how to explain it better I would, sorry. I just know it works.” She looked genuinely disappointed.

I was admittedly fiending for more details, but if she had none to give, that was fine—a magical puzzle to unravel together at a later date, if anything. “Hey, no, it’s still…incredible. Thanks for doing it for me.” I looked over to Ai, who still looked sort of frustrated. Maybe she was jealous that Hina had solved a famously difficult problem on intuition alone, and in turn, that was why Hina was being apologetic about not being able to explain. I wasn’t sure I wanted to poke that bear. “Uh—Ai, you said the mobility stuff was jumping and hovering?”

“Yes.”

“Cool,” I replied, focusing on that instead, feeling excitement build. The idea that I could once again experience some of the freedom I’d felt while fighting Takagiri, purely on demand, was enticing. I removed the sock from my complete foot and put on the one that came with the prosthetic. It felt like a normal, short cotton sock and fit pretty well. The only difference I could feel was the presence of a thin pad under the ball of my foot. “How’d they make this?”

“Our 3D printers are really nice,” Hina chirped. “And the jumpy bits are all in the pad.”

“Small work space.”

“I’m good at what I do,” replied my prodigal girlfriend. As the words left her mouth, a flicker of a cringe passed over her face, and a scowl over Ai’s. Definitely some history there about natural ability.

I put on the prosthetic as well and wiggled the toes again. “Seems to work at a basic level.” I glanced up toward the ceiling, which was concrete and not especially high. This room was big enough for Amane’s mantle to stand comfortably, but we were still in the basement, and this certainly wasn’t the cavernous space of the main workshop. “Uh, what are the odds I slam right into the ceiling and break my neck by accident? Or if not part of my body, at least one of the extremely expensive bits of equipment in here? I assume there’s dampening, so I don’t have to worry about the impact on my legs themselves just from the impulse?”

“No worries,” Hina said confidently. “Just do a little jump like this!” She bounced on the balls of her feet, then hopped a few inches into the air…and didn’t come down, just hovered there. “I mean, you’d come back down, but I’m just showing the height you’re aiming for. It should send you about twice that much. And if something goes wrong, I’ll catch you.” She stepped forward off of nothing toward me, offering a hand. I took it, unable to help myself from also taking the opportunity to admire her sapphire eyes at the same level as mine.

“Okay,” I said. I did a little hop and got way more spring than I ought to, like jumping from a trampoline at just the right moment. I went visibly higher than Hina’s hover-height, maybe a full foot off the ground, far enough that I was instinctively worried about the shock to my legs on landing—but it felt like landing on a pillow. Something giddy raced through me, the joy of freedom of motion. “Oh. Wow.” I did it again before I realized how stupid that must look.

Hina squeezed my hand. “Hey, no shaming yourself. Revel in it!”

Ai barked an objection. “No, quit that, don’t go off the damn rails!”

I frowned at how harsh her language was—then I realized she sounded different from normal. “Wait, was that Japanese?”

Ai’s eyes widened, and she hunched her shoulders in a mildly ashamed manner that I found very familiar.

“She can be a bit of a pottymouth,” Hina said. “Hey, Ameowne, say something! You’ve been pretty quiet.”

“Ameowne?” I asked.

Amane snorted. “Oh, is that how the module translates it? That’s hilarious!” Her voice sounded almost exactly like Ebi’s interpretive imitation of her. “Hi, Ezzen.”

“Uh, hi. Wow, this is weird, just talking straight to you without our phones or having Ebi around,” I admitted. I looked down at my prosthetic foot. “Wait, why don’t your prosthetics do this too? If it needs a Flame, I mean, you’ve got one, and I imagine Hina’s got a good enough read on you for whatever mystery magic she did with mine.”

“I can understand spoken English just fine! Translating outgoing speech is a real doozy by comparison, and I don’t usually need to do that as a Japanese celebrity in Japan, you know? If I really need it when we’re away from home and Ebi, that’s why we have interpreters. But I’m glad we can talk like this.” She smiled. “Hina, thanks for bringing me into the conversation, but I was actually about to check out. You don’t need me here for this, and Sugawara won’t kill himself, you know.”

“C’moooon!” Hina pouted. “Alice has the Ministry breathing down her neck, we can’t scour the entire city or country for a ghost like that!”

“Breathing down our necks,” Amane corrected her. “And that’s exactly what I’m going to go help with. I’m not stupid enough to go out looking for Sugawara alone when my mantle isn’t even fully repaired. Ai is within her rights to help Ezzen with this, it’s important, but we have actual duties to carry out too.”

“Maybe you should go too,” Ai put in, looking in Hina’s direction but not straight at her. Her tone felt a little harsh, like maybe she just wanted Hina gone rather than the more practically minded allocation of Radiances Amane had proposed.

Amane came over to us, putting her bionic hand on Hina’s arm gently. “See? She’s stressed out because we’re all in here. Let’s help Ai relax by giving her the space to nerd out with Ezzen and dealing with the mess we made last night, okay? And I’m sure Alice would appreciate the help. Please?”

“But—” Hina’s blue eyes drifted from Amane’s to mine, then down to look at our clasped hands. “Mmmm,” she groaned, sounding very unhappy.

I didn’t like seeing her torn like this, but on a practical level I agreed with the others. I hadn’t exactly been checking the news, but it felt wrong for Alice to be the only one dealing with the consequences of last night. Was this the right moment to pull on my girlfriend’s leash a bit, like she’d asked me to? I decided to make her a little offer. “Hina, the sooner you can clear things up with the government about the, uh, extrajudicial killing…” I faltered, realizing how insane that sounded, “the sooner we can go hunting for Sugawara.”

The sapphires flashed briefly in recognition of what I was doing, and she took a deep breath, nodding resolutely with only a little bit of a pout. “…Okay.” She squeezed my hand. “Damn, you’re right, I gotta go. Take care of Ai for us, okay? Don’t let her bury herself in work.”

“Um, sure.”

Hina’s hand slipped out of mine as Amane practically escorted her to the door. As it shut behind them, Ai sighed.

“Sorry.”

“Stop apologizing,” I replied, a little too harshly. “I mean, um…I don’t know. Is this a waste of your time?”

“No! I’m just…still tired, and…you know what, maybe. I just—it feels like everything’s been sort of disjointed and rushed and busy since Hina brought you here. I never feel like there’s enough time for anything. I haven’t had time to sing once since you showed up. None of that is your fault, but it’s…I need a break.”

“I think this is supposed to be the break, from what Amane said.” I looked her up and down. She wasn’t bone-deep exhausted, but she also didn’t seem to be having fun. “But if this feels like work, we can…do something else? God, I really don’t know what you all do in your free time. I’m seeing your point,” I admitted.

Ai brought her hands to her face and patted her cheeks solidly, as if the motion would kickstart a better mood. “I’m good. I envisioned this more like us just sitting around and talking more in depth about features, not trying to decipher Hina’s intuition-based nonsense and entertain her at the same time. Let’s continue.” She managed a smile.

“Nonsense? That’s not very fair,” I blurted reflexively, then felt the need to justify it. “She’s unbelievably clever. Just because her intuition takes her places we can’t follow doesn’t mean it’s not intelligent.”

Her smile turned to a confused frown. “I didn’t say ‘nonsense,’ I said something that means more like ‘not systematic.’ Take off the foot for a second.”

“Huh? Wait, have you been speaking Japanese this whole time?” I belatedly realized that a lot of her word choice had been different, a little more casual; I felt stupid for not picking up on it sooner. I sat down to pull off the prosthetic, and its matching sock, and put them back in the row. “What did you say?”

“Detarame. You can look it up, I didn’t mean to insult her intelligence.”

“I believe you! Just surprised me, was all.”

The conversation fell to a lull for a moment. Ai leaned back in her chair, looking at the ceiling, maybe as embarrassed about the gaffe as I was, despite it being neither of our faults. After a few long seconds, her eyes came back down to me.

“I know how smart she is, in her own way.” She pointed at the foot that had provided the awkward translation. “But that’s a good example of how the technology she makes can be unreliable, and why I really think you should take the time to learn the language. You don’t want to rely on ripple tech to communicate in an inferno when you can’t predict what it’ll actually say even when it’s working.”

“…Like Ebi,” I couldn’t help but point out.

Ai looked like a deer in the headlights for just a moment, then rolled her eyes in what really felt like an imitation of the android—or perhaps the origin of the behavior. “That is a conversation for later,” she declared. “But even if I didn’t mean to be that harsh, Hina-san is frustrating to work with when it comes to magic, yes. I can admit that. And it…makes me annoyed that you get along so well with her, despite that. I thought I would be more similar to you than she is.”

I gave this a moment’s consideration, then shrugged helplessly. “I mean…we’re similar, yeah. We’re nerds. But you have to remember that, uh, a lot of my obsession with magic is because I wish I was able to do it on instinct, like she can. Like the Vaetna can.” I winced a little, having not meant to go that personal. I looked over to the row of prostheses. “Um. Feet.”

This brilliant demonstration of elegant locution proved my nerd status, both with my choice of topical refuge and the crippling lack of tact.

Ai smirked. “Feet, yes.” She pointed at another prosthetic and read off her report: “Team 3. Hideki Kasegumi, Touko Oda, Richard Bailey, Camila Muñoz. Features: Anchor unit, a ward setup they were calling the ‘Achilles Ward,’ and VoIP phone.”

The anchor unit I understood; if there was only room for one mobility function, that honestly made more sense than the booster, fun as it was. A ward also seemed sensible, given how frequently I was getting into situations where I’d needed to defend myself, and it beat wearing those awful sleeves and patches, plus the naming was intriguing. However, my attention was stolen by the last part. “Sorry, a phone? Like, a cell phone?”

Ai was back to looking defeated. “Overboard, like I said. Overdesigned.”

I picked up the half-foot and turned it over in my hands, looking for anything that might resemble a speaker, microphone, buttons, or screen, and saw none.

“It only takes incoming calls right now. It’s more like a proof of concept. They have some sketches about a projected UI, but didn’t make it that far in prototyping.”

I nodded, {AFFIXING} the foot like all the others. “Uh, cool. What’s an ‘Achilles Ward’?”

“Bailey-san and Touko-san are ward…” she snapped her fingers for a moment, looking for a word, then pointed at the translator-foot I’d just discarded. “Hold that.” Once I picked it up, she said: “Enthusiasts.”

“I thought you didn’t want me to use it?”

“I’m fine with it as a language learning tool. What did it translate it to?”

“Enthusiast. What did you say?”

“Aikouka. Enthusiast, hm. Now we’ve both learned a word.”

“Aikouka,” I repeated, trying to be a good student.

“Yes. Good pronunciation.” She looked genuinely pleased with me before turning back to the project report. “Back to the Achilles Ward, it’s really quite impressive for two students, especially because it all comes from those two, not Hina’s implementation. They’re my two cleverest students when it comes to wards and other kinemancy, and I’m really glad they’ve found a way to use their strengths here. As for the name, it comes from the myth…”

As Ai settled into a familiar and comfortable ramble, my mind wandered to the idiosyncrasies of the translation module. It was definitely imperfect, and that probably warranted investigation, because Hina had said that really it was my Flame doing the translation. I wanted to bring this up with Ai, and talk more about all the weird things about my Flame, especially its behavior last night—I wasn’t sure if she knew that Hina might have predicated this technology on my Flame’s ability to talk to me in the first place—but that sounded like more of the mysterious and hard-to-quantify intuitive side of magic, which we were specifically trying to avoid, especially since she seemed to have finally found a groove.

“—which is a trade-off you get from any directional ward, but realistically, the heel is a great place to pick as the weak spot. Who would aim for the heel? And including a ward is much more practical than most of these other designs, so I think they get extra credit for that, especially with how well they documented it.” She glanced at me. “You weren’t listening.”

“Not enough,” I admitted, embarrassed at being caught out.

“That’s fine. I didn’t notice, so it’s my fault too.” The conversation died for a moment, then she added, “I talk too much sometimes.”

“Talking’s good. My fault for not paying attention.” I searched for something that showed I’d at least kind of been listening. “Sounds like you’re a fan of your students’ work?”

“Mm. You kind of have to be.” We shared a weird moment of eye contact, then both hurriedly looked away, me down at my prosthetic and her at the project report. “Those two are both on the forums, by the way. Bailey-san is ‘3punch’, Touko-san is ‘glassy’. If we’re talking about being fans, my students love you. Daifan. That means ‘big fan’, if it’s not obvious.”

“I’ll make a mental note of that,” I promised, hoping it wouldn’t fall through the sieve that was my brain when it came to non-magic information. “Big fans. Daifan. Real fans. That’s still so weird,” I admitted, thinking back to when they’d clustered around me while using the workshop’s computers. “Uh, whenever things get more…normal, will I be expected to give guest lectures or something?”

She grinned with actual excitement. “Not expected, but I’d like that a lot. They would, too. If things ever do get more normal, which they will. Eventually.” It seemed like she was mostly trying to convince herself of that. “What would you want to talk about?”

“I don’t know. I guess ripple propagation and pigeonholing are the closest I come to having specializations? Those are mostly theory, though. And LM, I guess, but honestly, I feel behind the curve on that compared to all of you.”

“You’re still very qualified. It’s why you’re even here,” she pointed out. “And you will definitely get experience with your mantle. Have a little more confidence.”

“I’ll…try. Uh, should we be testing the ward or something?” I looked around the room. “I assume that would happen somewhere you’ve got actual equipment for that. It’d be easier for me to be more confident if I actually knew all the magitech stuff you’ve got down here in the basement. I mean, how many random rooms have stuff like the coffin in them?”

“More than you think, though most of it is junk. You’ll be seeing more of the testing equipment as you work on your mantle, I think. But let’s do the things we can do right here first. Shall we try the phone?”

“Sure?”

She pulled out her phone, scrolled through the contacts, pressed one, and then raised it to her ear.

My foot began to buzz, which felt intensely weird and sort of unpleasant—though not painful, more like a too-invasive tickling of my bones. It was certainly an effective way of notifying me I was receiving a call. Without really thinking about what I was doing, I propped myself against the desk, raised my right leg, grabbed it, turned it in a way a human leg probably shouldn’t be turned, and brought my toes to my ear to pick up the phone. The buzzing stopped.

“Hello?”

Ai stared at my ridiculous contortion for a long moment, then burst out laughing, clutching her phone to her chest. It began as a strong snort, which blossomed into a guffaw, then a howling cackle that wracked her body and sent her into a fully bent-over fit of wheezing laughter. The whole affair bore a strong resemblance in both sound and appearance to a violently deflating balloon, and it was beautiful. She covered her mouth as the giggle fit continued, but that did nothing to halt it.

I hurriedly put my foot down and sat in my chair as her hysterical mirth spread to me as well and I began to chortle. We sat there together, laughing. It almost bounced between us; Ai would settle down somewhat, then meet my eyes, and despite me not doing anything ridiculous she’d immediately burst into laughter again, which would set me off once more. It wasn’t even all that funny, really, but it was needed—something was needed after all the constant stress we’d been under over the past few weeks. So we laughed, and things were better.

Eventually, we collected ourselves.

“Fuck,” I wheezed. “That was so stupid.”

There were tears in the corners of her eyes as she nodded repeatedly before she could gather her voice. “Yeah. Thank you, Ezzen. I needed that.”

“Me too. Very stupid,” I repeated. “But I’m a fan. A daifan, if you will.” That earned an adorably grinning double thumbs-up from her. “And with that, I have my decision: we’ve got to put that in the final prosthetic.”

3.08 Patreon Release

The nature of the Todai “cuddle puddle,” as Hina affectionately referred to it later, was that most of its participants would leave in stages throughout the early morning, so I didn’t wake up in as much of a tangle of limbs as I had been expecting.

Alice, workaholic that she was, got up bright and early at 6:30 AM; her phone alarm pulled us all out of hibernation for less than three seconds before she silenced it and crawled out of bed, which was an extra complex task when her tail had been completely ensnared by Hina, who had wound up wrapping her entire body around the thick limb and was apparently unbothered by sleeping in direct contact with its uncomfortably warm scales. Hina had made some disgruntled murmurs before Alice managed to extract herself and set about washing up and dressing as quietly as she reasonably could.

The next alarm went off at 8:00—or it would have, had Yuuka not lurched upright and grabbed her phone with prescient precision. I was vaguely relieved that I hadn’t somehow instinctually slithered my way to a position touching her, and that instead, she had taken a position near the edge of the pile, at the foot of the massive bed, near Amane’s ankles and on the opposite side from me. She did have to extract herself from Hina, though, like Alice had; in her draconic teammate’s absence and lacking my own inhibitions, the puppy had wound up spooning her instead, which caused quite a lot of grumbling and shoving in the moments after waking until Yuuka fled the room.

At that point, Hina switched to cuddling me, squirming against my front until she was comfortably ensconced, giving Amane some space of her own—if not for the fact that Ai had somehow wound up in the bed as well, and was holding her gently, completely passed out and drooling onto a plushie of a character I didn’t recognize. Alice and Amane had at least a dozen stuffed animals and plushes on the bed, who had wound up distributed all across the cuddle puddle in various girls’ arms by morning. There was a seal—which might have been Hina’s—a giraffe, a hedgehog, a shark, and a bunch of mascots, none of which were recognizably Todai-themed.

The remaining four of us got up more naturally. At maybe a quarter past nine, Hina got out of bed in a way I can only describe as slithering over me, planting a kiss on the back of my neck, and whispering that she was going to get a start on breakfast before a puff of air signaled that she had exited the room via the fourth dimension rather than the door. I fell back asleep for a while until she reappeared and began to shake each of us in turn, cajoling us to partake in breakfast. It was only once we were all sat around the low table with waffles in front of us that I fully woke up.

“Um. Ai. Bed?” A strong showing of linguistic mastery from me, to be sure.

“Ebi did that,” she explained. She looked a lot better than she had the previous night; maybe not 100% re-energized, but she had certainly recovered both her energy and her mood well enough that she met my inquiry with a grin.

“Ebi okay?” Hina asked. “She’s been a little, uh, fuzzy, face-wise. What’s with that? Is she gonna be okay? Where is she, anyway? Oh, no, when you guys were fighting shitfucker did she somehow get hurt?”

Hina’s observation mirrored my own worries; the robot was nowhere to be seen, despite her usually being stationed over Amane’s shoulder at meals. Her condition last night hadn’t seemed too awful, and I’d expected her to have been fully repaired by this morning—maybe that was a bad assumption. Either way, her absence was a little unnerving.

“She’s taking a day off.”

“She can do that?” I asked, before realizing how insane I sounded. Sure, she was an android, but I’d always thought of her as omnipresent and unsleeping. I looked over to Hina to gauge her reaction, trying to intuit how normal this was, and was worried to see her brow furrowed with concern, a mighty frown scrunching her face toward the center.

“That’s new. I mean, I can’t blame her, I guess, but…is that fine, though?” she asked, exposing her concerns far more bluntly than I ever would. “Like, things were bad yesterday, and cutie and Amanyan both got hurt, and let’s face it, Alice too! She might not be showing it but she’s been having these killer headaches, and—”

Amane smoothly interrupted her with what I could reasonably infer was something like “we’re fine, let her rest.” She’d put the backup arm back on after taking it and her leg off in the night, though she still wasn’t wearing her eyepatch, and seemed unworried or at least unbothered by her caretaker’s absence. I decided to take my cues from her, rather than Hina’s perpetual state of worry over her various teammates’ well-beings.

“Hina,” I started, trying to sound reasonable. “If you care about their wellbeing, you should care about hers too, yeah? I know she’s not a flamebearer per se, but if anything, I’d sort of expect you to treat her with the same dignity as you do your Flame.”

Hina’s worry melted away and was replaced by something I didn’t quite recognize as she turned to me. “I do respect her, cutie…and wow, I like it when you call me out like that. Keep doing it.”

“Uh.” I hadn’t quite anticipated this reaction, which was now resolving toward something like attraction. The gears in my brain slipped; she seemed genuinely willing to drop the topic just like that. Did she trust me that much? “Noted? Wait, did you call her Amanyan?”

Hina nodded happily, then shrank slightly from Ai, who had pinched the bridge of her nose in record time from this exchange. She sighed. “Souda, Alice no zutsuu no koto. Ezzen, do you think she’s growing horns?”

“Oh, um, yeah. Seemed kind of obvious to me yesterday, what with all the magic at the barbecue, and I imagine what happened last night only aggravated it further. Did we reach the same conclusion independently?”

“I think so,” she muttered, looking unhappy. “If this is anything like the other dragon-ka, she will be annoying and irritable about it, right up until they actually come out and she can’t deny it any longer. Then expect a lot of crying.”

“Wait, horns?” Hina’s voice went shrill with excitement. “That’s so fuckin’ cool! Like, right on her forehead, Fatalis style, or more like some giant Nergigante ones on the sides, real big and beefy?”

Her references were lost on me—and Ai, apparently, who shared my look of befuddlement. Amane was the one to bail us out, reaching up to her forehead with both hands and miming horns coming up and a little forward. “Fatalis-fuu.” She then frowned, reorienting her hands a few different ways as she tried to solve the logistical challenges brought on by the differences between Alice’s currently human skull anatomy and that of a fantasy dragon. She gave up and shrugged.

“Gotcha,” Hina nodded, mirroring the miming. “Yeah, she’s gonna be kind of pissy about it.”

I glanced at her. “Wait, Ai was down in her workshop for the past four days and she still noticed enough to guess. How did you not notice how much she’s been touching her forehead?”

“I’ve been busy too!”

“Not with work, apparently, or you would have noticed.” Ai sniped, which made Hina pout, stuff an entire waffle quarter into her mouth, and lean against me forehead-first as if silently asking me to back her up.

“She did do a televised apology.”

Ai’s eyebrows went up. “Ah. Good job, Hina-san. Though I wonder how much that will matter once the public learns about what you all were doing last night. Which you should probably go help Alice with.” The Emerald Radiance looked to me as Hina’s pout intensified and her chewing accelerated. “As for you, Ezzen, Alice-chan isn’t the only one who has been having mutations.” She directed her gaze down to my arm. “You’re overdue for a scan. Also, my teams have prototypes for you to test.”

“…Of what?” I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Your foot prosthetic. It’s been two weeks!”

—

The first thing we looked at in my long-overdue medical check-up was my right hand, which had been rendered somewhat gruesome by my intervention against Sugawara. When Ebi had wrapped it, the skin had been raw and seemed like it was going to blister, giving me serious reservations about how gross it might become overnight, soiling Alice and Amane’s enormous bed even if I kept it away from the girls. But by the time I took off the gauze to check before clambering into bed with everyone, we’d all been a little surprised to see that, in one short hour, the skin had begun to look much better.

Come this morning, my arm had mostly healed overnight, which confirmed some manner of enhanced regeneration, but the skin was coming back different than before. The rough surfaces of my seven-year-old burn scar tissue were turning smoother and thicker, with distinct seams and crags forming between the old spiderwebbed patterns across the surface of my hand and forearm. Ai watched me twirl a pen between my fingers experimentally.

“Your mobility seems good.”

“Yeah. I mean, same as it used to be, which was already worse than my other hand. It feels sort of weird, since everything is like a millimeter or two off, but…” I grasped the pen in my fist, then scribbled a few glyph symbols on a piece of scrap paper Ai had provided. “Yeah, no new issues with mobility at all. What do you think about the…plating?”

Ai looked at one of the monitors on her desk, where she’d pulled up the results of the scans we’d just done. “Do you want me to say it looks like Vaetna armor?”

I shifted. “I guess, yeah. I know that’s really hard to say for certain, but…” Excitement buzzed in my chest as I trailed off. It was absolutely an unwarranted jump of the gun to assert that my Flame was turning me into a Vaetna, making my dream come true, but I was only a little ashamed to admit I wanted to hear it anyway.

She nodded. “I don’t know. It does look like armor, but dermis has too many unknowns; it’s not like we have a scan of it. But you are definitely mutating somehow.”

Hina would have started gnawing on something with excitement, had she been here for that diagnosis. But she’d guiltily gone off to support Alice with…whatever the Radiances did to run their company day-to-day. I was honestly still very hazy on the details; maybe if we stopped getting into catastrophic crises every few days, I’d eventually learn.

At any rate, Hina hadn’t come with, but Amane had. The three of us were down in the basement prosthetics lab. Today, the tentacles hanging above the surgical-grade spell circle were not the star of the show; that honor went to an unassuming-looking box on the wall, which Ai had revealed was the main antenna of a high-resolution main-spectrum ripple scanner. Once I was told about them, I could also spot several smaller boxes mounted on the walls and ceiling elsewhere in the room, secondary nodes that created a set of triangles through the space of the room that all intersected at a particular point on the floor a few meters to the right of the spell circle, marked with a little red square. I’d stood in it, Ai had hit a button, and just like that, we had detailed information about the ripple distribution in my body.

The eighteenth floor usually had some ripple-scanning equipment that was in some ways superior to this, able to do silver and white ripple in addition to the main five colors. That would have been Ai’s first choice of workspace, since we also wanted more insight into why my Flame interfered with Yuuka’s eye, but all of Todai’s units were on loan to hospitals around the city for the victims of the Barbecue Inferno—God, that name sucked. So those secrets would remain secret for some time yet. Still, this scanner was of very, very good quality otherwise, and we had all the data we could ask for when it came to the main spectra of ripple.

My results were mostly unsurprising, and they told the story of my tumultuous and often violent relationship with magic in short form. Red and green tinged most of my skin, the lingering proof of my near-full-body epilation with blood magic. There was a bright orange and softer red line on my left forearm where my spear was stowed, and a big cluster of green all along my right hand and forearm, where the new, carapace-like skin was forming and where my Flame liked to manifest. There was also some green in the tricep and shoulder muscles from when I’d caved in Hina’s chest with a punch.

My last remaining hair follicles, the ones now home to a shock of bright orange hair, lit up with fittingly orange ripple and the more expected green. Ai wasn’t a hundred percent sure that the LM wig had turned into real, naturally growing hair, but the scalp seemed like my real skin, with all the nerve endings and sensitivity from gently poking my scalp and tugging the hair as one would expect. That kind of contact felt weird and uncomfortable, as though I were breaking some kind of rule.

I tried to confront that feeling; I wanted to work on that sense of shame, and this particular thought was so patently ridiculous and juvenile that it invited challenge. Yes, I found Ai attractive, with her pretty face and toned arms and razor-sharp intellect, but that didn’t make it inherently wrong for her to touch me for something so simple. Yes, the pretty engineer lady could touch me; that was okay. Grow up, I told myself, we literally slept in the same bed together, platonically, and neither of these girls seemed bothered by that, so it would only be weird if I made it weird. I just had to not make it weird.

How to not make it weird? My usual: talk about magic. “So if this is now my real scalp, what happened to my old hair under the wig?”

“I’m not sure,” she admitted, rubbing a few strands between her finger and thumb. “Somewhere in space-folding limbo, maybe. Hina-san might be able to find it.”

“Could she? It’s not out, uh, outside, backstage, however you want to call it. The wig’s lattice was compression, like my tattoo.” I raised my arm for emphasis, tapping the inked spear. “Can she…get in there?”

“Not directly, but she can weave a spell to look inside much more easily than the rest of us. Ask her about it later. As for the hair itself, we should take some samples for Ebi. Your skin, too, I think, both the hand and some of the places where you removed body hair. I can’t do that kind of analysis myself.”

The idea of a skin sample sounded a little grisly at first, calling to mind a hole-puncher to fully remove some of my erstwhile follicles, but all Ai really meant was a little scraping of the epidermis. I wondered if that was to minimize the pain for my sake or Amane’s. As for my hair, rather than plucking a few strands from my head directly, she pulled a hairbrush from her pocketspace and handed it to me. I eyed it, feeling suddenly guilty.

“I know I need to brush it more.”

“You do,” she agreed, no sugarcoating. “A little effort would make it look quite nice. I’ve been told your last time with our hairdresser was terrible, and I’m really sorry for that, but we should take you back sometime to get it very thoroughly washed, and maybe try out a few styles—without cutting it this time,” she clarified in response to my visible panic.

I took a deep breath. “Yeah. Okay.” I dutifully raised the brush to my head and pulled it through the sheet of orange hair, extracting many of the loose and stray strands that last night’s shower hadn’t gotten out; Hina hadn’t really helped with the hair washing, and I’d been a little hastier than I maybe ought to have been. Ai put the various samples into little baggies for future analysis.

Blue and pink ripple were entirely absent from my body beyond the universal baseline—which was good, since the former usually meant catastrophic injury and the latter tended to cause cancer or more esoteric ripple illnesses.

The one surprise we found was only a surprise to Ai and Amane, not to me: my trick to lunge at Takagiri in Hina’s pocketspace hadn’t imbued me with enhanced musculature other than that already present in my arm, and instead, its only result was my newfound flexibility, indicated by traces of green ripple appearing in most of my joints. I pushed the fingers of my non-burnt hand almost completely backward to demonstrate to the girls; Amane made a grumbly, queasy sound from her desk in the far corner of the room, and I stopped.

Ai looked between me, the table of data, and the color-coded diagram of my body we’d generated. She rested her mouth in her palm, thinking, then shrugged. “I was prepared to be more upset than I am. Aside from the muscles, all of your mutations came from necessity, not very Hina-like at all.”

“Yokarou,” Amane agreed. She was dissecting her burned-out primary bionic arm, extracting the parts her quadruple laser attack had ruined with a tiny screwdriver and occasional flashes of magic for telekinesis. AI’s eyes kept flicking over to her in concern, but she hadn’t commented or offered to help.

“Um, you’re making it sound like you are at least somewhat upset, though?”

“I think you could have probably dealt with the body hair without sanguimancy,” Ai sighed. “But you already know that, so I won’t say more.”

By this point, I’d done enough blood magic that I was starting to become unsure what Ai’s big problem with it was. Before being flametouched, my main bias against it had been about its imprecision and a vague moral argument about its more sinister applications, but in the contexts I’d been finding myself using it, those were usually non-factors. As long as nobody was too nearby for the burst of red ripple, especially Amane, the only person being harmed was me, not even my Flame like when contorted to weave. I was starting to entertain the idea that it had something to do with Ebi or Amane.

Regardless of her reasoning, she was right that blood magic was imprecise and wasteful of perfectly good body parts when regular weaving would do the trick. Plus, it was often incapable of truly complex tasks and constructs, like all the manifestation and control circuitry of a mantle. So I definitely needed to get better at weaving. I rubbed the new, stiff plates of my hand nervously, feeling the ridges.

“Less sanguimancy, yeah. Could really use some lessons on the actual mechanics of weaving, actually. I don’t think winging it is a good idea. How do I learn, like, techniques?”

Ai smiled, delighted that I was finally showing interest in actually leveraging my magical knowledge directly. “By weaving a lot. You already know everything about glyphcraft, so you’ll learn fast, I think.”

I frowned. “But there’s no, like, tricks or techniques to make sure you’ve got the right tension and twist and to keep everything neat?”

“We normally use substrates anyway, when we’re not in the middle of a fight,” she pointed out. “For snapweaving, there are tricks, but there’s not a reason to learn those instead of just practicing the most useful fighting glyphs themselves.”

I didn’t love that answer. Substrates made most things easy, to be sure, at least in the context of working on my mantle; just print the design and follow the grooves, like I had done to make my wig. All hail the 3D printer. But weaving without a substrate seemed like an inevitability given how frequently I’d been getting into dangerous situations since getting flametouched, to say nothing of all the little things in life that minor telekinesis and other simple magic made easier, as Amane frequently showed. And beyond the practical, snapweaving just seemed so much more magical than the engineering of GWalk, as much as I loved that; the Vaetna didn’t need substrates.

“Okay,” I agreed. “So just practice. Sure. But, like…it’s all just by feel?” I held up my newly-armored hand. “What if these get thicker and I lose dexterity? Wouldn’t that throw off all my muscle memory?”

Amane immediately made me feel stupid without saying a word: she smirked, lifted up her fancy prosthetic with the lower-quality one and engulfed both in a brief puff of purple flame.

“Oh. Fair.” I lowered my head, conceding the point. Amane used slightly different arms all the time, sometimes on very short notice, and was able to weave fine with all of them. “Okay, yeah, I’ll learn.”

“Do you have a project you want to learn with?” Ai asked.

I realized I hadn’t actually told them about my mantle yet. “Oh—um, yeah, I do. A mantle, or the start of one. Er—” I rapidly began to backpedal. “Not, like, a real serious full thing, and not with all the Radiance bells and whistles, I just felt like, um, I could use a kind of blank-slate template to try different looks. Gender, you see,” I added lamely, as though that one word could communicate everything about my face and body I didn’t like.

She looked amused. “Gender. I see.”

Amane pierced me with a calculating look. She asked me in halting English: “Vaetna body? Girl body? Mecha body?”

I should have anticipated a question like that. “Uh. Well, most of your mantles are based on your own bodies, right? Using them as templates, so I figured I’d start there and kind of jiggle settings and proportions around. Face specifically, since I…I don’t want this to be my face on TV,” I admitted. It came out all on its own. “Uh. Gender, again, but also, like, the transhumanist side too. You get that, right? Since you don’t use your real face or body at all in your mantle. Would it be okay to just…do a version of my body without the face, or with some kind of static mask?” I felt the need to justify further with practical reasons rather than just my own whims about appearance. “And if we’re going to be getting in more fights—since Sugawara’s still out there, and the Peacies are going to show up soon according to Yuuka and honestly at this point I’m under no illusions about that resolving in a totally diplomatic way—I guess giving it some weapons and stuff would be a good idea. Maybe I’m not turning into a Vaetna, but an LM construct would be the next best thing, yeah? Sounds a little like scope creep, I know. Is that too hard for a beginner?”

Ai shook her head. “It’s an ambitious first project, but you would make it work. And of course we’d be able to help you. I think doing one without a face would be a fine place to start. It simplifies things.”

Amane nodded in agreement. “No face, no problem.”

Their support was incredibly exciting, but some anxious part of me was held back by the fear that this was too big of a leap. Being on camera with my own face was horrible, but being on camera with no face at all would send an impression of its own. “Um, are you sure?”

Ai smiled at me. “Yes, I’m sure. This is a whole body for you, Ezzen, you’re allowed to make it look however it makes you happy. And there are many options. Think of Ebi; she has a face, and we could have given her a properly sculpted and articulated physical one, but she didn’t want that. The screen one she has is a good middle ground to give her options, but she’d still clearly be herself without it.”

“Huh.” I hadn’t thought of that either. The idea of emoting with things other than facial expressions, like Ebi did, seemed very natural to me; that was the fault of years spent talking almost exclusively in the chatroom and on the forums. “Okay, yeah. A screen-type face would be kind of interesting.”

“Share the designs with us and we’d be happy to help,” Ai added. “Any of us. It would be so interesting to see what you do for a mantle from no basis. You already have the schematics for all of our mantles in their current forms, but let me see if I can find any older designs that might be helpful.”

“Yeah, thanks, that’d be awesome.”

Silence fell for a little while as she did that. Amane seemed to have fixed the issues in her defunct arm and was now starting to put it back together, placing tiny screws back in their original spots and clicking external panels back into place. She summoned a thread of her Flame and began to weave. That reminded me of something else I had wanted to ask.

“Um, Ai?”

“Yes?”

“How do I manifest and manipulate my Flame without pain? Doesn’t contorting it to make the glyphs hurt it automatically? How do you two do it?”

“Ah.” Ai sat back in her chair. She summoned a spark of viridian fire from her forefinger, twirling it around the digit. “We didn’t talk about this since…your first day here, I think? And I told you that pain is powerful.”

“Mhm?” I grew slightly suspicious. “Were you oversimplifying?”

“Sort of. For most flamebearers, pain—physical and emotional—is easy because it’s naturally so intense, and so many of us experience a lot of it in our first few minutes and hours after being flametouched, so it becomes familiar to use very quickly. And it comes included when you use sanguimancy, even though the blood price is its own, separate fuel. But there’s nothing making pain the default. The Flame is interested in all strong emotions, and will get used to whatever you feed it.”

I nodded. That much made sense to me; I remembered lunging at Takagiri with desperation as she went to finish off Yuuka. It seemed like so long ago now, even though it had been less than a week. And Sugawara’s Flame-ghost had been animated by his desires to control and dominate, as I’d felt when I’d touched it. “Okay. So what do you use? Because I remember, back when we first talked about this, Ebi made some sort of intimation that you, um, weren’t necessarily using all good emotions.”

“Me? I like to help people,” Ai asserted. “And that’s a stronger emotion than it might sound. It’s a kind of love, in my opinion. And…duty. I think that’s the word in English. But…” she sighed, leaning forward as though she were about to confess a crime, suddenly looking very tired. “It’s two-sided, and there is a kind of pain in it. Grief, frustration, guilt. That’s what keeps me up at night, as you’ve seen.”

“You do your best work when you’re guilty,” I quoted Hina.

“Yes.”

The conversation lulled again. Ai didn’t seem willing to offer any more on the matter, and I was busy chewing on this revelation. It was obvious, in a sense, that you could use anything. What could I use? I liked to think I had a surplus of belief in helping people, the same as Ai, though mine was more rooted in the Vaetna’s own philosophy and ethos rather than her mix of philanthropy and self-flagellation. Would that work?

Amane popped off her temporary arm and put the new one back on. The indicator lights flashed on as she tested the digits. Then she looked at me. “I use ikari.”

I didn’t know that word, though something in my memories of my brief, Hina-enforced foray into Evangelion was pinging it as familiar. I looked to Ai for a translation, whose expression had soured a bit. “I don’t want to translate that,” she sighed. “But I will. Anger.”

I looked at Amane, somehow unsurprised. “Anger? Rage, fury, all that?”

“Hai,” Amane replied. 

“That…tracks,” I admitted, remembering how she had looked last night. Granted, fighting Sugawara was probably about as personal as it got for her, and anybody would be angry under those circumstances, but this also contextualized the massive explosion she’d performed against the Peacies on the Thunder Horse oil rig from the other side of the world. Amane was beautiful and sweet and I absolutely believed she was capable of the kind of rage necessary for that, at least against the people who had kidnapped and mutilated and probably tortured her. But for everything else? “Even for regular weaving, not just fighting? Like, I definitely powered my Flame with what I’d call desperation or anger when I was fighting Takagiri in the inferno, but that was the emotions of that singular moment, not…”

Then I remembered the single word my Flame had said during the fighting last night. Repugnant. It had encountered Sugawara and surged in…righteous disgust? That was definitely an emotion I’d occasionally felt when thinking about the worst kinds of flamebearers, the self-made god-kings and cult leaders, and it had resonated with my Flame strongly enough to incinerate the briars of his concentrated id. Suddenly I understood where Amane was coming from.

“Hai,” she repeated, this time as an affirmation to my question about her using it all the time. She went for her phone to type something into the translator app, unwilling to make Ai interpret for her further. She held up the translated message.

Amane: Do you think it’s inherently evil?

“Um, no, no, of course not,” I clarified. “I think I get it, actually. Just…you were using it just now, yeah? That means it’s always there for you to call upon it. You don’t show it.”

She shrugged. “Sorry.”

“Nothing to apologize for. Thanks for telling me. I think…I think I’ve got something similar that might work. Maybe not for all the time, but when it really matters, and for the mantle. I don’t really know how to describe it. Like, um. The desire to destroy evil. Wait, shit,” I realized, “the moral imperative to destroy evil is both a Vaetna and Radiance thing, isn’t it.”

“Mahou shoujo desu ne,” Amane chuckled, grinning at Ai, who was looking at me judgmentally. I winced.

“Sorry?”

Ai caught herself and waved her hands hurriedly. “I’m sorry. That’s good, if it will work for you. I was just thinking about what you told Amane. You don’t show it either.”

“Um, it’s sort of new. And it might not even work, I’ll have to see.”

“Try love!” said Hina’s voice behind me. I swiveled my chair, this time ready for her customary greeting as I was pounced on. For once, it was a relatively chaste hug and nuzzle, and Hina made no attempt to squeeze herself into the chair with me, possibly out of respect for Ai’s apparent dislike for even her non-masochistic displays of affection.

“For powering my Flame?”

“Huh? No, it was general advice. Try love!” She repeated it, this time with a wink that made me suspect it was innuendo.

“I meant for magic,” I explained, blushing despite myself. “For my mantle. Uh, please don’t start arguing with Ai or Amane about pain.”

“Wasn’t gonna! Hi, Ai, Amane!”

“Hina-san,” Ai replied. Amane waved with her mechanical arm and asked a question.

“Oh, it’s lame, so I ditched. Bureau fucks are being all ‘we know you were connected to last night’ and we’re all ‘we’ll pay for their hospital bills and also it was self defense’ and I’m not sure they’re buying it. Alice doesn’t need me there for that part, so I came here to see you guys! Ai, you mentioned toys, I wanna see toys.”

“Toys?” I asked. “Oh, the new prostheses for my foot?”

Ai brightened at that and lurched out of her chair, so much more human and weighed down than Hina despite being more muscular. “Oh, yes, toys. And for once that’s accurate, I think, because some of my students overdid it a little.”

3.07 Patreon Release

“An actual fucking ghost. Made of his Flame.” My head was buzzing with adrenaline from the last two minutes as I stared at the point in space where Sugawara had disappeared.

“Sure looks like it,” Ebi agreed. “Right back from the dead, a Flame facsimile of who they used to be. Who’d’ve thunk?”

“And he—and he went through the camera, like my Flamefall, and—holy fuck, my nose is bleeding,” I remembered. I wiped the back of my hand against my nose and was relieved to see less blood than there could have been. “This is just capillary blood, right? I’m not about to keel over from frying my frontal lobe and it’s just taking a while to catch up? Ebi?”

“You’re doing better than anybody else in the room, Ezzen.”

She was right: our shit was rocked.

Takagiri’s very soul had been put through the crucible, and though she was now finally getting some well-deserved sleep, it was impossible to say what kinds of effects the experience would have when paired with the extreme sleep deprivation she’d endured. I shuddered to think of the nightmares she might have been having; I expected that my own would feature twisting brambles and that hateful, incinerating desire to consume. I’d only made surface-level contact with what remained of Hikanome’s former cult leader compared to what Takagiri had gone through.

Amane had burned out and discarded her arm in the fighting, and now that we had a moment to breathe, the concentrated ripple we’d endured was leaving its mark on her. She had started coughing in the wet, phlegmy way that meant something was definitely wrong inside and had hurriedly sat down. Ebi immediately moved in to interface with her charge’s bionics.

As for me, the mania of combat and survival had me too jittery to focus on speculation as to the magical mechanics of what Sugawara had wrought; my senses were consumed by the real and present environment around me, still a little in fight-or-flight mode. In an effort to calm down, I sat down awkwardly next to the Radiance and her android doctor, far enough that I wouldn’t crowd them but close enough that I could feel like I was providing moral support with my presence, for whatever little that counted. I took a few deep, slow breaths in an effort to convince my body that the danger had passed—though I couldn’t prove it really had.

“She okay?”

“I’m fine,” Amane confirmed in thickly accented English, trying to sit up. She only made it halfway before she was consumed by another coughing fit. Ebi tutted at her and made her lie back down on the concrete floor.

“I’m keeping her stable,” Ebi answered for me.

I peeked shamefully at Amane’s exposed midriff, the area that had a bunch of silver ports and black plastic embedded in it, the bionics that were probably more important to her survival than her replacement limbs or eye. All five of Ebi’s fingers had found interfacing points, plunging into her abdomen. It wasn’t gory, but the edges of the implant were oozing blood, and even outside of that, it was distinctly skin-crawling for me to watch the maximally invasive medical hardware at work. I shifted my gaze to Ebi’s face instead; it was still scrambled into static.

“Are you good?” I asked.

“Hear that?”

“What? No? What am I listening for?” Then I realized I was hearing something distant, the very edge of a rising and falling wail. “Oh, shit. Sirens? Ripple alarms?”

“Yep. None in here, but they’re on every aboveground floor of the building. And I can’t turn them off.”

“And normally you can?” I inferred. Being so integrated into the systems of Lighthouse Tower, Ebi should have had seamless access to those systems, like how I’d been able to call for her earlier today. “Fuck. Shit. Should we clear out? Is it safe down here for…” I darted my eyes meaningfully in the direction of the not-quite-surgery she was performing.

“We’re already through the worst of it, and you’re all flamebearers. So it’s…fiiiiiiine, probably.” The vowel dragged out at a perfectly even pitch, like a program that had momentarily frozen, which was worrying.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“It’s a symptom of the bigger issue. I’m a little scrambled right now, pretty much stuck within this body until…well, until things settle down and/or Ai gets a chance to pop me open and fix me up. Also means I can’t turn off the sirens—remotely, anyway, and as you can see, I’m kinda occupied—or pull in some of my bigger tools, and, most importantly, I can’t get back in touch with the girls. Call them.”

My heart dropped into my stomach. Our own battle had been so intense I’d temporarily forgotten that the last we’d seen of them had been them springing a trap of unknown magic in the middle of hostile territory. And he’d jumped through Alice’s eye, or at least that of her mantle, to get here. I had an awful image of Alice writhing on the ground, being assaulted by the remnant briars of Sugawara’s malice while Hina and Yuuka were beset by secret assassins of Takagiri’s caliber, Yuuka’s eye failing her and Hina immobilized by the “net” they’d been talking about.

I rushed to pull my phone out of my pocket—my right pocket, which was a challenge when my right hand was in even worse condition than usual. The fingers were sluggish to respond, and my sense of touch was muted, the nerves’ limited capacity taken over by throbbing pain that came from the remaining red ripple floating around—and having absolutely roasted the skin of my arm with an extreme-intensity manifestation of my Flame. I’d kind of tuned that part out. It really should have been hurting more, and I silently thanked Ebi for the shot of painkillers she’d given me. I also suspected that my arm’s healing would involve some level of mutations; the pile of medical checkups that we’d already been meaning to do had grown to a rather ridiculous scale. I needed to stop getting into fights.

I gave up on using that arm to grab my phone and reached awkwardly across with my left, hurriedly scrolling through my phone. Suzuki Hina came up before Takehara Alice in alphabetical order, so she was the first one I called. The dial tone lasted only a tenth of a second before my girlfriend picked up.

“Cutie, holy shit, you’re okay?” Her voice was raspy, like she was winded from fighting hard. “When the call went dead after that fucker went through, we thought—oh, shit, are those the ripple sirens?”

“It’s—yeah, but we’re fine—how can you hear those through the phone? I can barely hear them here!” Next to me, Ebi made a little “get to the point” swatting motion with her free hand, the one not interfacing with Amane’s midsection. I coughed awkwardly. “Um, okay, no, we’re not completely fine. Sugawara came here when he went through the camera, but we got rid of him. Things are stable,” I assured them with confidence I didn’t quite feel. “Are you okay?”

“Chillin’! I was scared when he jumped through Alice but she’s fine, we’re fine, and we’re cleaning up now, lots of fun, everybody left is just humans so it’s—yeah, okay, Alice, fine.”

A few clicking noises heralded that the phone had been handed over, and Alice’s voice came through. “Ezzen, he came into the tower? Alive?”

“As—a Flame spirit or something, I don’t know what to call it. Does that mean we don’t have to have our, um, ‘honest debate about the existence of the soul,’ or…?”

“Is that a joke? A Flame spirit?”

“Um, yeah? I was sort of hoping you knew what that was, because I don’t.”

“Well—you’re burying the lede, Ezzen. Are you saying you killed him?” 

I bit my lip, knowing they wouldn’t be happy about this part. “He got away. Blinked out.”

There was silence on the other end of the line for a few moments. Then I flinched as yell came through the speaker. It was too muffled to make out the words, but from the tone, I could tell that it was a roar of frustration from…I presumed Yuuka. Alice spoke over her teammate’s rage, softly but urgently.

“Can you track him?”

“No! Things are a mess here, and we’re all too roughed up. Sorry,” I added, feeling genuinely ashamed.

Hina shouted out. “But you beat him! Yuuka, calm down, they still beat him. Babe, should I go back and look around?”

“He’s…I think he’s long gone,” I sighed. “Sorry, again.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Alice assured me, “This is way outside anything I could have imagined from this. Splitting himself out of his whole body…insane, but we can figure out what exactly he did and how to find him later. Let’s declare mission success for the night, in terms of getting our people back and eliminating the old Hikanome’s last stronghold. Ezzen, how bad is it over there, other than the sirens?”

“Uh…Takagiri’s safe, asleep in the coffin, and I don’t think he’ll be coming back to haunt her. No bomb, it turns out. He…tried to take control of her, but I did some stuff with my Flame and burned him out, and then he ran away when we tried to capture him in the coffin.”

There was a pregnant pause before Alice replied. “And by ‘stuff with your Flame,’ you mean…”

“No blood magic! I think. I mean, there’s blood, but I didn’t sacrifice anything, and, um—”

“Awww,” Hina interrupted, sounding terribly disappointed. “But you’re okay?”

“I think so. Um—I don’t want to take all the credit, it was a team effort between me and Takagiri. Ebi and Amane helped too, and, uh…fuck,” I blurted, realizing the mistake I made even as the other end of the call got very noisy. Amane wasn’t supposed to be down here. Yuuka and Alice, at least, had made it quite clear they wanted her as far as possible away from Takagiri, and that had been under circumstances far more mild than the combat I’d just described. I heard some scattered, staticky muttering from the other end, and then a new voice came on the line: Yuuka. Hina’s phone must have been on speaker. “What do you mean Amane helped?”

I cast a panicked glance over at Amane, who was squeezing her eyes shut as Ebi performed what seemed an awful lot like internal surgery. It briefly crossed my mind to lie, to tell them that she had been helping in some indirect way and any injury was because she’d been rocked by the ambient ripple that had set off the wailing sirens even way up in the penthouse—but realistically, that jig would be up as soon as they got back anyway. Honesty was the best policy.

“She was—she came down here to help with the coffin. And got caught up in the fighting. But she’s fine, really, I swear.” I briefly lowered the phone and hit mute to talk to Ebi. “She is fine, right?”

“Tell them she’s at a five.”

“Out of ten?” That honestly didn’t sound as bad as I had expected.

“Her scale is lower on both ends than yours.”

“…Oh.” I unmuted the phone. “Ebi says she’s at a five.”

Alice’s response was instant. “We’re coming back right now.”

“Fuck fuck fuck, I knew there had to be a catch.” Hina whined, a response that worried me more about the severity of the situation than the actual state of the room around me.

Yuuka growled. “You put her face to face with him and didn’t even fucking kill him?”

“Yuuka, no,” Alice cut in. “That’s not fair and you know it. Ezzen, we’re on our way back. Sit tight for a few minutes, yeah?”

“Um, yeah.” Then I noticed that Amane was making a grabbing gesture in my direction with her good arm. “Wait, hold on, I’m giving the phone to Amane.”

I passed it over. Amane raised the phone to her ear, hissed something at her teammates, and then jabbed the “End Call” button with her thumb, glaring at the phone. She handed it to Ebi, who gave it back to me.

I accepted the phone with a skeptical look at the grumpy Radiance. “…Not made of glass, I take it?”

She snorted and looked up at the ceiling, seeming more exasperated and exhausted than in pain. Ebi interpreted as she began to speak. “I wasn’t going to get into an argument over the phone. You saw upstairs how hard it is to get them to listen when the weather is good, and when it’s bad? I’d rather just do what has to be done and ask for forgiveness after.”

“Mm,” I replied sympathetically. My good hand picked at the singed skin on my other wrist. I realized what I was doing and stopped. “Yeah. That sounds…tedious.”

Amane nodded, tensed up for a moment as Ebi wriggled a finger in her midsection, then shifted a bit, raising her remaining hand to use it as a pillow against the concrete. “They’ll forgive me. It wasn’t even that bad.”

“This isn’t that bad?” I waved my burned hand in the general direction of the coffin.

“Building’s still standing,” Ebi pointed out in her own voice. “And not only did I not have to open either of you up, I think you’ll even get to sleep in your own beds tonight instead of in the medical ward. Compared to the barbie, I’d say that’s a solid success, even if we didn’t kill the fucker.” She had inserted “the barbie” as a soundbite of Yuuka’s voice.

Amane tilted her head to look at her kneeling caretaker with her one vivid green eye and said something Ebi didn’t translate. It sounded like a joke, but that would be sort of weird given what I understood of Amane’s history with Sugawara. I looked between the two of them. “Uh?”

Ebi replied to her in Japanese, then turned her head to look at me, which was a little unsettling when she didn’t have a face. “Nothing.” She retracted her fingers from the ports in Amane’s belly, the pinky and ring fingers telescoping back down to reasonable lengths while the others, far more wicked and invasive-looking, folded out of our plane to be replaced by regular digits. She patted her hands together with a soft clack. “Okay, let’s see if I can’t get you two cleaned up by the time the girls get home.”

We spent the next few minutes doing just that. Amane’s discarded arm would need repairs, but for now, her one-armed status was easily resolved by Ebi, who disappeared Hina-style and reappeared a moment later holding what looked like a slightly older version of the bionic limb and helped her fit it on. This version had an audible whirring to its movements as she tested its range of motion. Satisfied, she stood with Ebi’s help and went over to a panel on the wall. She hit a button, and her voice began to echo over the PA system, speaking surprisingly crisply and evenly, and soon, the sirens finally stopped wailing.

That was a mask all the Radiances were experienced in putting on in crisis situations, I imagined, and I felt some envy at their ability to enter that mode. I had fantasies of being able to entirely take command of a situation, like the Vaetna could, but in reality, I knew that I’d become a fumbling mess the moment I had to actually start giving orders.

“Is that the all-clear?”

“To use the weather metaphor, she’s saying it’s still overcast, but not actively raining anymore.”

“…You can use technical terminology with me.”

“I can,” she agreed. “Arm.”

By now, my face-holes had stopped bleeding, which was great, so my freezerburnt arm represented the bulk of the external damage I’d endured. I held it out dutifully, and she sprayed it with some kind of gel before wrapping it in gauze.

“All self-inflicted again,” she noted. “Could have probably made it work with the spear instead of frying your hand.”

I was too tired to contend that I hadn’t immediately passed out like the last few times, making this an improvement. “How long til it heals? Same recovery timeline as my foot?”

The android shrugged. “Hard to say. That was your own Flame doing that, so all bets are off. I’d give it 80-20 odds it heals way faster than it should.”

“You can’t tell how much green there is?”

“My gauges are fried, dawg, and you’ll probably get a full physical tomorrow anyway. Just take off the gauze before you go to bed, and we’ll see how it is in the morning.”

Before I could interrogate the fact that an android had just called me “dawg,” I heard a sticky buzzing sound to my right, like a zipper coated in fresh glue, and reflexively turned to face the sound, fearing it was somehow Sugawara returning. Instead, my sapphire-eyed girlfriend stepped out from behind nonexistent curtains.

“Cutie! Ebi! Amane! Uh, Izumi too, I guess!” Her nose crinkled. “Oh, fuck, yeah, I can smell him.”

A pump of adrenaline shot through my system. “Fuck, where—”

Hina waved her hands hurriedly. “No, I didn’t mean it like he’s still here. But he definitely was. Let me get his nastiness out of my nose real quick.”

She bounded over to us, kneeling behind me to hug me across the shoulders and bury her nose in my hair. Animal relief at her return spread through me; I felt her smile infect my face as well. Her joy was transmissible by touch, and it was so very welcome after the brief but harrowing experience I’d just been through. “Hey.”

Hina purred into my back by way of reply, then stood as quick as an arrow to move over and hug Ebi as well before darting across the room to greet Amane in a flurry of cheerful Japanese. She was back by my side a moment later, peering at my freshly wrapped arm.

“Barbecued,” she observed.

“Hey, no,” I snapped. Ebi’s reference earlier had already been in poor taste, but I had come to expect that sort of thing from her—especially with the soundboard she had for a mouth. I drew the line when it was coming from the person who’d been directly responsible for the disaster; I really felt Hina should know better.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t drool,” Ebi chided.

Hina wiped her mouth theatrically. “I’m so happy you guys are okay! The others are coming back the slow way, so they’re a couple of minutes behind.”

“Youre just leaving the cult?” I couldn’t help but wonder. “I mean, I know you didn’t go in intending to make arrests or something, but there’s still got to be a bunch of his loyalists there, yeah? You’re not gonna…clean them up?”

“Meh, I think they’re done for, cops were starting to come in when we left. The nice thing about cults that form around us is that they don’t do so good once they’re headless. Heh, headless. We got rid of the body just in case, but I’m pretty sure that was their one shot.” She looked over to the coffin. “And that one shot was…possession? Talk me through how it happened.”

“Tried to hijack her through their connection, I think. But we forced him out.” At that, Hina’s expression turned a little hungry; I sensed she wanted the gory details of flamebearer-on-flamebearer combat. I hated to disappoint. “I, um, don’t really feel up to recounting exactly how that went down right now, sorry. It was rough.”

The barest flicker of disappointment raced across Hina’s face, gone as quickly as it had arrived. I was relieved that she recognized the boundary I had set with that statement. She took my good hand in hers. “Okay. You okay? You have to at least tell me if you’re not okay, okay?”

“I’m okay, just…just tired.” That was true enough; I was very ready to wrap this up, go to bed, and deal with all of this tomorrow, and was starting to consider ways that I could turn the conversation toward what we had to do to reach that goal. “Um, how much of this can we leave for the morning?” I asked, gesturing at the room around us.

“Depends on whether he’s gone,” Hina sighed. “How badly did you beat him?”

“We did win…I think. It felt like he was beaten, not retreating and planning to counterattack.”

We’d driven him off, certainly, but for all we knew, he might loop back on us at any moment, diving right back into Takagiri’s body. Whatever sort of ghost, spirit, phantasm, or ghoul he had become, it was all outside the realm of scientific knowledge, and we had no idea what he was capable of. We had to confirm he wasn’t waiting in the wings for us to let our guard down.

Ebi tilted her head and attacked my confidence directly. “You don’t have the experience to say he’s gone.”

“Listen—it’s a vibe, alright? I was…okay, yeah, if I’m wrong and he does come back tonight, the coffin won’t protect her,” I admitted. “All those wards face inward, and the top ones are fried anyway.”

Hina thought about this for a moment; I could practically see the gears turning behind those beautiful blue eyes. “Hm. Sounds like I gotta go hunting. Know where he went?”

“No,” I sighed. I followed her gaze to the laptop acting as the coffin’s brains, feeling guilty. “I could have been looking at the activity graphs when he blinked out, tried to at least triangulate his direction from the relative ward pressures, but things were happening fast, and—”

Amane limped back over toward us, favoring her bionic leg, and said something curt to Hina, who frowned and began to bicker back. “Hey, we have to do something about him, I’m not letting him just float around out there—no, it’s not about you specifically, babe, iraira shinaide yo!” I glanced at Ebi in a wordless plea for translation and explanation; Hina caught the look and switched fully into English. “Just, uh, I don’t get why Amane doesn’t want me to go after Sugawara.”

Ebi cut to the chase. “Because he’s not coming back. Not tonight, at least.”

Amane wordlessly gestured at her caretaker in a “See? She gets it!” kind of way.

“Why’s that?” I asked. “I mean, I want to believe it, but I feel like I’m missing context. He seemed incredibly desperate to me.”

Ebi crossed her arms. “Yeah, he’s desperate, starving animal style, and desperation is hella dangerous, but he’s also a coward. Amane and I weren’t in his head like you, Ezzie, but we knew him, and he’s probably even more distilled down to his worst qualities now that he’s a Force ghost or whatever, and that means survival at any cost. Do you really think he’s stupid enough to think he could slink back here in the dead of night, hijack Takagiri again—if he even can anymore—and then make his escape without us catching up to him? What he cares about right now is survival, and he’s smart enough to know that his best odds of surviving involve staying far as hell away from us.”

This seemed sensible to me. I didn’t particularly want to replay everything I’d felt in his head; the corrosive touch of his soul was all thorns and sharp edges that I really didn’t feel like cutting myself on with detailed recollection. But looking at what I remembered of him at the most broad level, Ebi’s analysis did seem to track: survival was his primary concern, and while rage and consumptive greed were what animated him, he did seem the type who’d prefer to live to fight another day—insofar as “live” applied to his new state of existence.

“We still can’t just leave him out there!” Hina protested.

“We can for tonight,” said a new voice from the doorway. Alice stood there, looking rather windswept; her hair, usually carefully styled, was in complete disarray, with parts sticking in every direction like the spines of an indecisive silver hedgehog. She’d probably flown back here unmantled. Yuuka was with her, still in the even-darker variant of her mantle.

“Babe!” Hina pouted. “I thought we were gonna fuckin’ end this tonight, though? How am I the voice of reason here?”

Alice pinched the bridge of her nose and paced toward us, the tip of her tail scraping on the floor behind her with a hiss that made me hope her scales were harder than the concrete. Her movements didn’t suggest injury; whatever effects Sugawara’s imitation of my flamefall had had on her seemed limited entirely to her mantle. “Having heard the arguments—well put, Ebi, by the way—I think we’re good for tonight, and we could all use a full night’s rest. And besides, we’ve got Yuuka.”

“Who’s been unreliable as shit recently,” Hina pointed out, doing something with her body that looked like shifting her weight between her legs impatiently but which I suspected was closer to a cat’s butt-wiggles as it wound up for a pounce.

“Hey, kemono, I’m fine for this,” Yuuka riposted, scanning the room with her crystalline eye. “He’s not coming back tonight, and I’ll sign that in blood once we get Ezza out of here and I can take a better look.”

Hina brightened. “Hey, if your eye’s up to it, then we can do a classic Sapphire-and-Heliotrope murder date! We could probably find and kill him by morning!”

Alice drove the heels of her hands against her temples in frustration—and probably to alleviate the ache of budding horns, if I was being honest. “Hina. The last thing we need is another clusterfuck right now. We have no idea what he’s capable of, and the one thing we do know is that he does not have to be tonight’s problem.”

Hina looked around her team for support, seemingly at a loss.

“Hey,” I interrupted softly, tugging on my girlfriend’s shirt. “Listen to them. Can we be done for tonight?”

Hina turned and looked at me, then threw her hands up. “Fine, sure, yeah. Okay. Yeah! Sure. No hunting, just letting our worst enemy wander around Tokyo. Awesome. I’m cool with that. Cutie, we need a shower.”

“We?”

—

We did not make half as snappy of an exit as that line implied; no being simply being whisked through fourspace directly to my bedroom. In fact, not only did Hina and I walk out of the coffin’s wrecked lab and down the hall to the elevator like normal people, we were actually accompanied by the rest of the team as we piled into the elevator, sans Yuuka, who stayed behind to see if she could glean any foresight from the tides of ripple our battle had wrought or might yet wreak. Awkward silence loomed throughout our ride to the top of the building; any collective desire to debrief the night’s events was overruled by exhaustion and simply being done with this shit. Alice had an arm wrapped around Amane, who neither reciprocated nor protested. Even Ebi didn’t seem in the mood to quip.

We dispersed on the 20th floor. Alice and Amane went to their shared room, Ebi to Ai’s with its digital readout that confirmed that she was in there and had slept through it all, and Hina followed me into my suite, through the still-mostly-unfurnished anteroom and into my bedroom.

“So…‘shower’, you said?” I hadn’t had the nerve to ask whether that was innuendo until it was just the two of us alone together, but now I was trying to rally the last dregs of courage from my depleted supply. “Because, um, not to turn you down or disappoint, but if you mean, er, copulation, I really don’t have the wherewithal tonight for—”

“Cutie. Babe. You’re limping, sweaty, and still have some dried blood on your face.”

“I thought pain was, like, your whole thing?” I twirled a finger in front of my face. “This isn’t doing it for you?”

“Oh, no, it totally is, but if we’re gonna fuck, we’re gonna fuck hard when you’re feeling your best. And that’s not you tonight. Shower means shower, let’s clean up and go to bed, for reals.”

And we did just that. Even in my exhausted state, it was still a little titillating to see Hina casually strip down, but she did it quickly and without ceremony, nary a shake of her hips nor sultry look as her underwear came off. She did smile at me, but it was just one of encouragement.

“Hey, it’s just me.”

“It is,” I agreed. “Sorry, just—not used to you being naked.” I looked down at myself, still yet to undress at all. “And, um, normally I want you to look at me when I’m naked, but right now…”

“No worries!” She hopped toward the bathroom. “Gonna get the shower warmed up. Come in when you’re ready.”

The white noise of the shower’s spray brought a welcome layer of insulation from everything.

Now given some measure of privacy, I set about undressing, pulling off my shirt—Hina was right about the sweat. The garment was positively soaked through, and I hadn’t even noticed. I sniffed my armpit hesitantly and crinkled my nose at the stench, suddenly very embarrassed that I had shared an elevator with three women who had absolutely been able to smell that. And Ebi, but she didn’t have a nose. Or maybe she did, but she regularly encountered far grosser stuff than my body odor anyway.

As I pulled the shirt’s sleeve over my gauze-ensnared hand, I realized I wasn’t sure what to do about the bandages. Ebi had seemed confident the skin on my arm would heal fast, and had told me to take off the gauze before bed; was I supposed to take it off now, hardly ten minutes after it had been applied? I reached for my phone and messaged her. Then waited. My concern deepened as five seconds dragged to ten. The android usually always replied instantly.

“Hey, Hina?”

“Yeah?” Her voice was muffled by the shower door as she called over the shower’s noise.

“I’m not sure what to do about my hand’s bandages, and Ebi’s a little weird after the fight, so I can’t text her. Gonna go ask her in person what to do really quick…if that’s okay,” I added awkwardly.

“No prob!”

I grabbed a fresh shirt and set off toward Ai’s room, but as I closed my room’s door behind me and looked down the row of the team’s rooms, I saw Yuuka standing there—and not in front of her own door, instead in front of Alice and Amane’s room, hand on the doorknob. She was looking in my direction, not surprised in the slightest. I nodded briefly at her, averted my eyes, and began to route around her through the central common space, hoping to avoid a conversation when I was just trying to get past.

“Don’t get it wet, scrub it, or pick at it,” she told me.

I paused, looking at her. “Are you relaying that for Ebi?”

“Don’t need to. It’ll get nasty if you take off the gauze and try to wash it, so just try to keep it dry and then take off the gauze when you get in bed.”

“…Thanks for the prophecy. Cool. Right.” I turned around to go back to my room; the chances that Yuuka was intentionally trying to sabotage my recovery for some reason were very low, and if I didn’t have to bother Ebi, awesome.

As I turned to go back to my room, Yuuka continued, “And as for this, yeah, I’m sleeping with them tonight. Amane’s safer that way. So what?”

I furrowed my brow, wondering why she’d bothered to bring it up. Surely, she could foresee that I didn’t really care, or at least had no interest in judging her for it. “Um—good for you? Not my business, your prerogative, et cetera. Good night?”

“Night,” she said, pushing her way into Amane and Alice’s room.

Confused by that interaction, I went back into my own room and got back to undressing. I took off my foot prosthetic and was relieved to see that, despite how my foot had hurt while fighting Sugawara, it didn’t seem visibly injured, no blood or other gross biomatter. I also realized that we were probably due to look at the prototype prosthetics Ai had ordered from her underlings the day I had woken up at Todai. Would any of them be waterproof?

Those sorts of thoughts kept my mind occupied enough to not think about how I was now fully naked and about to present myself to my girlfriend, who was still waiting in the shower. I resisted the urge to wrap a towel around my waist, given that it would be discarded immediately, and limped to the closed glass door separating the toilet and basin from the unit shower.

“Okay, um,” I called out. “Ready?”

“Yeah, yeah, just come in! Don’t gotta make an event out of it.”

I pulled open the door and saw Hina lying directly in the middle of the shower floor, spread-eagle and face up, the shower’s spray aimed directly at her chest. She raised her head and an arm to wave at me. I was at a loss for words for a moment; she had somehow managed to pick one of the only possible poses that would make someone as attractive as her seem unsexy in this situation. As that minor amazement passed, I was instead filled with mild disgust at the hygienics of the arrangement. “Hey, no. That cannot be clean; it’s a shower floor.”

Hina begrudgingly got up, reddish-brown hair matting against her shoulders like a rag under the water. Then she grinned at me. “You look great! So smooth!”

“Um.”

“Aw, no good?”

I tried to put the burst of discomfort into words. “Just—no, it’s good, but…I don’t know,” I admitted. “I just don’t know what to say to that. You…look good too, I guess? Am I allowed to say that?”

She put her hands on her hips, still grinning. “Hey, thanks! It’s fine if you don’t want to talk, we’re just getting cleaned up. Like I said, this doesn’t have to be an event.” Her arm snapped outward to pluck the showerhead from its mount and brandished it upward like a firearm. She stepped toward me in one graceful step and extended her other arm invitingly as support for my clumsy, disabled self. “Shall we?”

I took the hand, blushing hard despite my valiant attempts to be unembarrassed and not think of it as “an event.” Hina sat me down on the little fold-out seat and began to gently hose me down with hot water. She’d procured a very large, blue loofah from her own bathroom, which I used to scrub myself down, trying not to look directly at her nubile form. At some point, we traded loofah and showerhead, and she did the scrubbing while I directed the water, which I expected to be more sensual but honestly just felt like…scrubbing. After a little while, I had a hunch.

“Um, the fluffy thing. Are you using that specifically so you don’t touch me directly?”

Hina wrung out her hair, looking a little guilty. “Um, yeah. Figured you’d be more comfy that way.”

“Thanks,” I muttered. “I—yeah, I know we’ve already touched each other plenty, but that’s…right now, that’s good.”

“Yay! I’m glad that’s comfy for you. What are you afraid of?”

I frowned at her. “A little direct, that.” Before her expression could collapse into disappointment, I reached out to touch her forearm gently. “It’s okay. Uh—I just don’t want to be a…lecher? A horny weirdo? Feels like that’s kind of my default.”

“Cutie, aside from some totally-within-reason wandering eyes, you’ve been pristine. Between the two of us, I have enough horny weirdo to go around, ‘kay? I’m trying really hard to respect your pace here.”

“Mm.” The affirmation was nice to hear, and at some level, I believed it, enough that I didn’t argue. It emboldened me to try to put my feelings into words. “I think you’re doing a good job, then. I feel…I don’t know, taken care of? Not like an intruder for once.”

She suddenly looked nervous. “Really? Good! That’s good. I’m glad you’re comfy.”

“What’s with the face?”

“Being in here with you feels like hiding from dealing with Sugawara.”

I stared at her. “Hiding? We all told you that we weren’t going to deal with that tonight.”

“I know! It’s stupid! ‘Cause I feel like I’m doing shitty, like I’m not really taking care of them if I’m letting Sugawara run around out there.”

“You don’t trust Yuuka’s eye?”

“I do, mostly! She’s great, I love her, and she’s so important. But it’s been so off lately, and I’ve had this itch, like I need to cover for if she’s really wrong. Don’t feel comfy putting all our eggs in that basket. You know?”

“Uh.” I glanced at my arm, which I’d been careful to keep dry per Yuuka’s instructions. “Yeah, I guess. My fault, I suppose, since I seem to be the source of the interference.”

“No, cutie, you can’t be blaming yourself, that’s stupid.”

“Right back at you.” I felt very clever after that.

She entirely stopped moving for a second, then giggled. “Damn, you got me. I know it’s stupid, I just…okay, can you hear me out for a second?”

I eyed her, dread rising within me. “Are you about to pitch that we dry off and go out to find him alone, in the middle of the night?”

“No…”

I waved assent, relieved. “Then go on.”

“Can we sleep with the others tonight?”

Now it was my turn to entirely pause, my hand still half-raised from the gesture. “Like. In Alice and Amane’s room? In the same bed? Just making sure we’re on the same page here.”

“Mhm! We used to do it all the time when we got Amane back. Actually, with how tonight has gone, Yuuka’s probably already in there with them.”

“…She is, yeah. I saw her go in when I went to talk to Ebi,” I confirmed. “And I think she’d object rather stringently, even if the others were okay with it, which I’m not sure they would be.”

“She won’t!”

“Which you know how, exactly? Also, um, could you give me that and turn around, please?”

“Huh? Oh, sure.” She passed me the showerhead and dutifully spun around in place as I washed my crotch. It had been theoretically exposed this whole time, but I wanted to do as little as possible to draw attention to it, especially since I needed a second to familiarize myself with the freshly completely hairless state of my body. Hina continued while she was turned around. “Yuuka thinks you’re chill, don’t worry.”

“I’m worrying,” I admitted. “I mean, thinking I’m chill is one thing, but sleeping in the same bed? What if I, like, flail around in my sleep and wind up with a hand on her…” I trailed off.

Hina snorted. “Nah. Also, think about it: if there was a chance that we were gonna wind up in a cuddle pile tonight, and she wasn’t open to the idea, do you think she’d’n’t’ve done anything to make sure that didn’t happen? Like not sleeping in Amane and Alice’s room to begin with?”

It was good logic, a reminder that Hina was more calculating than she sometimes acted—or at least that she could back up her impulses with intelligent reasoning when she cared to. But there was a problem. “Weren’t you just pointing out that her foresight has been unreliable? Oh—you can turn back around now.”

“Hmpf,” she said as she turned back to me, and absolutely blasted me with those damnable puppy eyes at full force, leaning down toward me and doing an incredible impression of a pathetic, sopping wet mutt left desolate and abandoned in the rain. “Please? I promise she won’t get mad, and neither will the others, and it’ll be team bonding after everything we did tonight! And it’ll make me feel better but it won’t if it’s just me there and not you too, so please?”

I sprayed her in the face with the showerhead. Hadn’t Ebi once recommended I keep this girl away with a spray bottle? I now understood why; this upgunned version was very effective in warding off that overwhelmingly cute visage. Hina recovered quickly, wiping off her face and pouting. “Alice is so warm,” she added. “In the winter, with the room heating off and the window cracked, it’s so nice.”

Incredibly, that was what won me over. I sighed. “Sure. That does sound nice. But if they freak out, I’m pinning it on you, yeah?”

“Mhm! I’ll scape your goat, cutie.”

We finished the shower soon after and got dressed; Hina threw on some of my clean nightclothes, claiming she could still mildly smell my scent on them. I have to admit I was a big fan of seeing my garments on her smaller frame. I put my prosthetic back on and let Hina lead me to the other room, feeling quite like I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to, like sneaking down into the kitchen past midnight for some leftover pie even though Dad told me that was bad for you.

It wasn’t an entirely unpleasant feeling at first, but each step along the row of doors made me more stressed. This was a far more direct and uninvited intrusion upon a girl’s space—girls, plural, in this case, which was even worse—than anything I’d done so far. I pictured how wrong this could go, all the tentative trust and goodwill I’d built up shattered in a single moment of Hina-induced disrespect of boundaries as Yuuka unloaded a torrent of expletives I’d never even heard of before. I’d gone through multiple life-or-death magical disasters in the past week, and this was engendering a very similar sort of fear in my belly. But I pressed on, sticking to Hina; she’d given me permission to use her as a shield, and I wasn’t above taking that literally if disgruntled magical girls started shooting at me.

We reached the Opal-and-Amethyst-adorned double doors, and Hina cracked the Amethyst one open unceremoniously. It was dark within, the lights already extinguished, and a faint warmth beckoned me inward, the barest caress of Alice’s aura at this distance. But immediately, Yuuka raised her voice, and my heart dropped into my stomach.

“Hina!”

“Oh fuck,” I whispered, more to myself than to Hina. Yuuka knew we were coming and was wasting no time in kicking us out.

“My eye works fine!”

“Does that mean we can come in?” Hina called back, giggling.

“Of course,” Alice said. She was laughing too, and I realized that yes, we’d been foreseen—and the girls in the room had pre-agreed to let us in. Relief washed through me as Hina turned back to face me, a big smile on her face.

“Told you!”

Poster Comm Series #4: Amane

Another poster by Mjeow! Her mech is not normally anywhere near this big but she's taken some liberties for the photoshoot.

Part of an in-progress series of seven: Hina, Alice, Ai, Amane, Yuuka, Ebi, & Ezzen.

3.06 Patreon Release

Content warnings: Possession/spiritual violation

---

I’d repeatedly heard Sugawara referred to as “comatose.” This was true, but what everybody had left out was that he was also mangled. His body was a patchwork of burn scars, and there was no hair left on his head. His nose was destroyed. He was surrounded by beeping and humming medical equipment: a forest of IVs and intubation surrounding the central megalith of a heart bypass machine. He was effectively already dead, even though the vitals signs insisted he was alive.

“No boss at the end of the dungeon,” Hina quipped, leaning over the bed. “Looks like him, smells like him.”

A buzzing sound pulled my attention away from the screen. I looked over at the source: Amane, clenching her bionic fist so hard the tiny actuating motors in its joints were crying out in protest. Her delicate features were twisted by an emotion I couldn’t name and had never known, something in that bitter space between terror and profound loathing.

On-screen, Yuuka made a similar face for just a moment before her mantle’s mask dropped to neutral impassivity. A spike of jealousy crawled through me at her ability to simply choose not to emote within her mantle. Alice caught the expression.

“Yuuka? I need you to give us an honest answer, disregarding your own feelings. Is it safe for us to kill him right now?”

“Yes.”

Hina frowned, squatting at the side of the bed to look at Sugawara’s ruined visage in profile. “You absolutely sure, babe?”

“The sooner the better for Takagiri,” Ebi pointed out.

“Barring the bomb,” I couldn’t help but insert. I knew the Radiances onscreen couldn’t hear me, but I felt like I had to bring it up to the others in the room with me. “We still don’t know if—”

“Ezzen,” Ebi interrupted. “C’mon.” She said something in Japanese to Amane, who replied curtly and instantly. Ebi made an ‘OK’ symbol with a robotic hand. “If there is a bomb, Amane will handle it. We’re out of time.”

I was in no position to argue that. We were out of time, and there was absolutely no chance I was going to be able to convince any of the Radiances to delay. I took a deep breath and decided to trust Amane on this one. “Fine. Can we at least put her in first?”

“No,” Takagiri broke in, the first English words she’d said in what felt like hours. “I—I want to…” she blinked too slowly. “See him die.”

“…Fair enough,” I conceded, feeling rather overruled. Everybody else here had much more investment in this moment than I did; for them, this was the killing of one of their old monsters.

“You don’t have to watch it yourself,” Ebi pointed out. “You didn’t do so good with the last murder.”

I found I agreed with that and tried to focus on the coffin’s final checks. Some indicator lights had come on and were holding steady, which said we were as close as possible to turning it all the way on short of engaging the main wards. The coffin might have wound up being redundant, but it was something to do instead of bearing witness to Todai’s latest crime. I didn’t even want to know which of the three girls present would be the ones to do the deed.

“All good on our end,” I heard Ebi say.

As my hands traced along the coffin’s ward emitter mounts one last time in a final sanity check that everything was installed where it ought to be, I heard some shuffling and quiet discussion from the Radiances on the screen, which fell into silence as final deliberations concluded and the moment of execution came. I heard a hiss like a valve releasing air, then a wet noise that suggested a horribly manual and mundane killing, blade through flesh and sinew rather than any sort of magical annihilation. Then Amane exhaled, and I knew it was over.

The next few things happened very quickly.

The first is that Yuuka shrieked. “Ami ga—”

The second is that her voice was muffled, drowned out by a sound not unlike the sensation of one’s ears being waterlogged. At the same time, there was a flash of light on the screen, and in the moment that my eyes were reflexively drawn to the commotion, I saw that she had drawn her cloud of crimson glitter around herself and was in the middle of frantically weaving silver thread.

The third was that Sugawara’s freshly beheaded corpse sat up.

Faster than a blink, Hina punched it in the chest with such force that her fist went clean through. Gore splattered onto the bed and medical equipment behind the exit hole into a shape that was too perfect—a glyph, one I knew intuitively.

{TRANSPOSE} ignited into harsh yellow Flame, and burning brambles blasted out from the corpse, a sickly yellow slithering and whipping out through the room, attacking the girls, attacking everything. A part of it came directly at the camera—directly at Alice—

Directly at us. The video feed cut out from Alice’s end; the static dripped out of the projected screen like sap, taking on a branching, thorny aspect as it traveled and pooled on the floor. Then something rose up from the malformed transmission, there in the room with us, having made the same impossible leap as my flamefall.

The thing that entered our basement room of Lighthouse Tower was a nest of brambles in the shape of a man, blazing with the same sick yellow fire that had illuminated the glyph, and it stood wide and hunched, arms dangling beneath it. It had no hands and no face, but as it raised its head, I felt it see me, inspect me. Agony lanced up from the stump of my foot, freezing like icicles were spearing through my veins. The pain made me stumble for a moment before the stabilizing unit in my foot caught me. My spear was in my hand.

To my right, Amane blubbered an awful noise of pain that indicated she was feeling the same or worse, but she didn’t stagger. Instead, something glimmered around her bionic arm, shapes crystallizing from nowhere as the indicator lights along its shell flickered from their usual purple to a violent red. Her mantle was still in a state of ruin—but evidently, she still had contingencies, magical firepower spooling into existence around her arm even as she raised her clenched fist in the apparition’s direction and squared her stance.

Takagiri’s mantle was similarly ruined, and she made no attempt to weave any magic as she stared at her tormentor. But her eyes were full of hate—and fear. This entity was no glowing specter or bedsheet-covered figure, but it was unmistakably Sugawara’s ghost. He stepped toward her unnaturally quickly, as though on fast-forward—

Ebi reacted before any of us. In the same moment that her physical body stepped forward to stand between Takagiri and Sugawara, something deployed from pocketspace over her shoulder and launched itself forward. It unfolded from nowhere into the vague impression of a polyhedron before it flashed outward into an emerald-green bubble, surrounding the spirit.

I raised my spear, finding that I wasn’t feeling so squeamish about murder at this particular moment.

Amane barked something, which Ebi interpreted with a seamless shift of her synthesized voice: “We’re killing him here and now.”

The bramble figure turned his head to look at Amane and reached a burning arm out to the bubble, pressing his twisted fingers against the barrier. He began to push on the barrier, extending an arm against it, straining the barrier and stretching it like taffy, his unsettling yellow Flame angrily scattering along the surface. The way he was reaching out, the strain of the bubble—why did that look familiar?

“Ez, get your Flame out,” Ebi said, shaking me from the odd moment of deja vu. “Amane, you ready?”

Amane grunted confirmation as her gun finished manifesting. It wasn’t the same weapon as the one typically embedded in her mantle’s arm; instead, it was a surprisingly familiar shape, a gemstone version of the enormous energy beam weapons that came on a Peacie AC-130-R heavy gunship, absolutely comical against the regular size of her human frame as its four barrels bristled above her shoulders, hovering as though fixed to an invisible armature.

Without any further indication from Ebi, the bubble vanished. In the same moment, four lines of purple energy ignited the air between Amane and Sugawara. The weapon emitted an awful, teeth-aching whine as she held the searing beam for several seconds, trying to burn through his chest and head. She was yelling invectives at Sugawara, voice breaking in what could not have been anything but rage—was she literally powering the attack with her fury?

Maybe, but that wasn’t an option for me. While Amane unloaded on her kidnapper, I called on my Flame the only way I knew how, biting my lip and attempting to will it forth. It sputtered for a moment before a sensation like heartburn splashed through my lungs and my Flame ignited within me. Frigid energy lanced through my arm and bubbled to the surface of the scars on my right hand, which I clenched into a fist as the pure white of my shard of the Frozen Flame made its presence known. I didn’t know what exactly to do with it yet, but that was answered for me by observing Amane’s own attack.

For all her weapon’s power, its impact on Sugawara was underwhelming. The weapon’s effect was blue ripple, and Sugawara’s spirit, whatever it was, was certainly not a physical thing, some amalgam of raw Flame. For the most part, the beam passed straight through him and ate away at the wall behind him, blasting through the drywall and sending sputtering globs of magmatic concrete onto the floor but failing to meaningfully interact with the thorns. The yellow of his Flame shone through the purple as if to taunt us. It did slow him down some, resisting his movements like the barrier from before—still damnably familiar—but that was all.

He shuffled forward through the beam until it flickered and then failed, the barrels of the weapon fracturing and decohering above Amane’s shoulders. The indicator lights on her arm died, and the limb flopped uselessly downward as some operating limit was overwhelmed by the surge of magic she’d summoned, her contingency expended for naught. Sugawara’s spirit was not a complete person, lacking a face and speech, but as the last dregs of purple energy faded, the vomit-yellow fire pulsed a few times, and I saw his ‘shoulders’ shake as he laughed at us. Then he blazed toward us, far too quick to make sense, an impossible burst of speed just as one of his cultists had performed dozens of kilometers away and hardly a minute earlier. He covered five meters in a step—panic found me in a critical moment of indecision, unsure whether to brandish my Flame itself or to grip the haft of my spear and bring its warped and heat-blackened tip around to face him.

That moment of hesitation had a terrible cost. The brambles twisted and writhed past me before I could act, tongues of yellow fire passing so close to my skin that some of it tried to cling to me, grasping and stabbing in a blind desire to possess, to control, to grasp and devour everything. But the moment a tendril of thorny flame actually touched my skin, it recoiled, jumping back as though startled, and Sugawara avoided me as he passed me by—

But I was not Sugawara’s prize. The brambles lunged at Ebi, who was shielding Takagiri with her body. The spirit of malevolent Flame would rush straight through Ebi and fry the fragile magical circuitry that made up her being as a simple side effect of seeking his true target, and she stood poised to accept that fate if it meant buying her patient another moment of time—

Takagiri shoved her aside. It was a sleepwalker’s motion, half intentional and half inevitable, impossible to tell whether it was defiance or acceptance. The mass of twisting thorns loosened and spun into a torrent of grasping Flame that blasted directly into her chest as she met her tormentor head-on.

The way Sugawara entered Takagiri’s body could only be described as violation. The brambles wrapped around her limbs and dug into her flesh, rising up around her head and forcefully trying to infest her mouth and nose and ears and eyes, clawing and digging, demanding access to her body and soul as they tightened around her. She remained standing, but not under her own power, instead animated to plank-stiffness by the constricting force of Sugawara’s will.

I tore my eyes away from the sight as I scanned the room, trying to understand what to do. Time slowed to a crawl. My gaze alighted upon the whiteboard; if I could only intuit the sick processes animating Sugawara, allowing him to cling to the realm of the living, then I could formally describe them and crack the code; obliterate him utterly through glyphcraft where Amane’s brute firepower had failed. But that was an absurd notion, desperation asking me to reduce the work of hours down to minutes or seconds, however long Takagiri’s already-failing mind could resist before it collapsed, and he slithered in to claim lordship over the ruins.

There was no time for all that; there was only one reasonable option. I found myself stepping toward the effigy of nightmare and pushing my hand to ignite some more.

“He avoided touching me just now,” I explained to the room as I moved—mostly trying to psych myself up for what I was about to do. “Because of my Flame!”

“Christ almighty, Ezzen—” Ebi began.

I ignored her, reaching toward Takagiri with my blazing hand and searching for a relatively non-spiny segment of the brambles that were constricting her arm. My fingers, or at least the Flame wreathing them, found purchase on the magical emanation of Sugawara’s twisted desires, and I tried to tug.

I felt an emotion that was not my own. Something wicked and covetous flowed through me, a vile and potent desire. I wanted—Sugawara wanted—to have his way with Takagiri in a far more sickening way than even that phrase would suggest. He sought to devour her, to supplant her, to dominate her Flame and puppeteer her body as his own, the final parasitic effort of raw malice attempting to claim a new mind and body before it dissipated forever. He already had a doorway into her soul, the same one we’d been holding shut by forcibly keeping her awake and had been hoping to bar by using the coffin. And he craved to pry that doorway larger, to flay away her already-tattered defenses and scoop out all that was her to replace it with him.

Sugawara’s raw, unbound emotions surged into me and made to seep deep, infest and control me just as it was doing to Takagiri, because that was all he was now—blind want, not only to keep existing but to continue exerting the power over her that he’d had for years, first in the abstract binds of a poisoned friendship and then in a more literal sense as he’d dug his thorns of Flame into her and made her his slave. That avaricious, solipsistic egotism was all that remained of him, what passed for thought in this remnant shadow of the man he’d been. Somewhere beneath the weight of his basal ego, I could feel Takagiri fighting back, but it was a losing battle. Her mind was like layers upon layers of kindling for his rapacious Flame, unable to truly resist the overwhelming desire to dominate, half-ruined as she already was by the extreme exhaustion. She couldn’t even muster her own magic in any meaningful sense.

For a teetering moment, I felt that I might also be ensnared and devoured, paralyzed and reduced to so much soul-meat for the carnivorous beast Sugawara had become by simple contact with its consumptive nature. He had become a singularity of such concentrated malice that it seemed impossible for the delicate, fractal complexity of any wholly formed human soul to persist under the conditions of his presence.

But I was more than just a human soul. A knife-flash of clarity pierced through me, a frigid cold from the backstage of the universe that cut deep into the brambles and drowned the sickly yellow Flame in blinding white. Something rang in my head, a voice I’d only heard a handful of times until now.

Repugnant, declared my shard of the Frozen Flame.

Sugawara may have lost almost everything that he once was, but he still had a capacity for pain. I felt him hurt as the brambles under my grip wilted and then withered, dissipating away. I sensed something buried within the nest of brambles move where it had previously been restrained. Emboldened, I thought to reach toward Takagiri’s chest, where Sugawara’s thorny presence had tightened most thickly, hoping to break his hold on her there. I reasoned that her mind may have been ostensibly in her head, but if my experiences with my own Flame were any indication, the chest was what housed a Flamebearer’s soul, their final redoubt of selfhood alongside their Flame.

All this happened in the time it took the nerves in my arm to reach my brain and report an explosion of pain. It was from many sources—both Takagiri and Sugawara were radiating their own kinds of agony from their struggle, my own Flame was scorching my hand with frostbite, and the whole storm of magic we were creating was only amplifying the soup of red ripple. My mouth was filling with the tang of iron, and my face was wet. Nonetheless, I tried to move my arm further in, but some part of my subconscious simply wasn’t having it and said no more, overruling my conscious desires. I instinctively jerked my hand back, then shuddered and collapsed to the ground.

I felt arms on my shoulders as someone—Ebi—pulled me back, away from my goal.

“That’s enough.”

“It’s—not,” I blubbered, realizing the wetness on my face was a mixture of tears and blood. Had I been bleeding from my tear ducts? Certainly from my nose, at least. My Flame sputtered in my hand—the pain was keeping it fed as embers, but my concentration and willpower had reached their limits.

“It is,” Ebi insisted, wiping off my face with a rag she’d produced from somewhere. “She’s fighting it now. Don’t gotta explode yourself any further.”

I blinked away the remaining residue of bodily fluids and squinted through my wobbling vision at Takagiri. Bright white dots of my Flame still smoldered on the brambles, and she was now visibly struggling against the brambles with her limbs—and more importantly, something was flickering in the air around her. Her mantle had been destroyed in our battle, but something remained, and that she was calling on it was all the proof I needed that I’d helped weaken her attacker, or empowered her, or both. Either way, what had been a one-sided ravaging now seemed to be more of a struggle of wills.

And Amane was walking—limping, really—closer to the struggle. I only had a view of her left side, so it took a moment for me to figure out that she’d entirely removed her fried right arm, which made it all the more insane that she clearly intended to mimic what I’d just done.

“What’s she doing? Amane! What are you doing?” I looked up at Ebi. “Why aren’t you stopping her?”

“Because she’s not doing what you’re doing.”

“Ezzen,” I heard Amane say. “The coffin.”

“What?”

She held up her remaining fist, the flesh one, and clenched it. “Hold the…tamashii ga…” she faltered, glancing at Ebi, and started rapidly spouting Japanese. Ebi listened for a moment, then picked up.

“She’ll beat him, push him out. But she can’t destroy him, and he’ll just try again, and he’ll never stop. But if we put them in the coffin, once she kicks him out the first time, we can pull her out while keeping him trapped. Then we find a way to kill him.” She mimicked Amane’s pointing at the coffin. “Help us get them in there.”

“By…what, lifting her? Neither of us are at what I’d call—” I coughed, and the taste of iron in my mouth thickened, “carrying capacity.”

I glanced down at my own right arm, which neither looked nor felt great after being the contactor for a terrible collision of arcane wills. My fingers only weakly responded to my attempts to close them into a fist, and it hurt like hell to do so, cracking the abused skin. It felt like the scar tissue might flake right off. That was still a degree more useful than Amane’s now-removed arm, but it meant we effectively only had two and a half arms between the two of us to try to lug Takagiri’s still-mostly-bound-or-otherwise-unresponsive body into the coffin. And that was before considering the psychic onslaught I’d endured.

“Terrible pun,” Ebi quipped. “Carrying capacity? Really?”

“Sorry,” I groaned.

“Don’t worry. I’ll help with the lifting.”

“I thought you couldn’t let him touch you or…bad stuff.”

“Before, probably. But he’s reeling now, and he’ll have to split it four ways. Besides, I’m built for bad weather.” She reached out a hand. “Up!”

She delivered that last part with such authority I found myself using my good hand to reach out and take hers. She pulled me to my feet with almost contemptuous ease. As she helped me find my footing, something pinched my neck.

“Ow!” My yelp only lasted a moment before relief washed through me. “Oh, that’s nice. Morphine?”

“And other stuff.”

We went over to stand an arm’s length from Takagiri. Ebi released me to join Amane on Takagiri’s other side. For a moment, I felt the absurdity of how we were solving this problem—three flamebearers and a cutting-edge AI in the room and we were reduced to literally dragging a person with our bare hands, a far cry from anybody’s image of magical warfare. It was ridiculous. But as I prepared to grab hold and Amane held up three fingers to count us in, I figured that it maybe wasn’t that much more brutal or inelegant than the blood magic I’d recently been so fond of. The last of Amane’s fingers lowered, and we all reached out to Takagiri.

Without the direct protection of my Flame, I’d been bracing myself for another helping of the crushing weight of Sugawara’s desperate desire, but Ebi had been right—he was weakened, and now his attention was split four ways, unable to smother any one of us individually. Where previously he had been an overwhelming force of concentrated, avaricious desire to dominate, now the pulse of emotion I got was tinged with the animal need to survive. Still not fear, per se, but he was recognizing the danger he was in.

That wasn’t to say this close contact was safe. Hopped up on morphine, I arguably fared better than either of the women helping me; Ebi’s motions didn’t falter, but the moment she touched Sugawara’s brambles, her digital face scrambled into static, which was mildly terrifying, and Amane would have probably been screaming if her teeth weren’t gritted in a mask of focus as she did her best to help with her single arm. I hooked my arm under Takagiri’s armpit and we started to drag her stiff, twitching body toward the coffin, step by heavy step.

Our goal was the bench-like cot that was set on rails to allow the coffin’s occupant to be slid in and out easily, and it was only two or three meters in total to carry her there, but it was a struggle all the same. The soul-combat taking place in our arms was a miniature inferno, and the random bits of orange ripple distorted the space of our steps, making a step forward turn more diagonal before we readjusted. Some kind of fungus was growing in the wake of where Takagiri’s feet dragged along the concrete floor. I was too focused on the physical exertion at the time to worry about the long-term ripple effects on my own body.

We managed to lay her down on the bench, Amane and I grunting with the effort. Takagiri’s eyes were open, staring upward, but not focused on anything, instead flickering left and right in something akin to REM sleep; she was presumably battling Sugawara in her dreams now. The flickers of her mantle were intensifying, too, never quite coalescing into recognizable portions of the woman we’d battled but undeniably becoming more present, more real. Ebi pushed the cart into the center of the coffin’s main body, that mangled and haphazard nest of metal and wiring, as Amane and I limped over to the laptop that controlled the whole thing.

“This better work,” I muttered, glancing over the machine, trying to ascertain if there were any last-minute changes we could make in order for this plan to happen as Amane had described. By way of answer, she hit the ‘Start’ button on the program that was supposed to run this whole thing. I crossed my fingers.

Indicator lights flickered on, and power relays hummed. I saw the ward emitters within the cage of scrap metal shimmer, then glow—then go dark, which terrified me for a moment before I remembered that they weren’t supposed to emit light at their operating levels. At the same time, the overall level of aching in my body, and especially the sharper pains in my hand and foot, began to ebb and reduce. It seemed the coffin was containing the red ripple—and presumably all the other colors we’d intended with our modifications.

As if to put that notion to the test, there was suddenly a flash of light in the heart of the machine as the struggle reached its conclusion. Takagiri vomited out a cluster of brambles, the ones that had infested deep into her body. They were rotting and blackening, the shadowy aspect of her own Flame finally asserting its dominance in the struggle for control. Something shimmered over the gaunt, sickly mask of pain—a narrow, feminine aspect, teeth set in defiance. Her own face, her true face.

She screamed something, and the brambles tore off of her body as though scoured by a pressure washer. I didn’t need translation to get the message.

I reflexively braced for another surge of red ripple to come at us…but there was nothing, no more pain. The yellow energy of Sugawara’s soul was ripped off of her body and slammed into an invisible, bumpy barrier at the perimeter of the coffin’s interior, looking like the world’s most repulsive corncob as he attempted to flee from Takagiri in all directions and found he could not. I watched the ward emitters’ readouts on the laptop screen as the strain steadily but evenly rose among all nine nodes. Once it stopped growing, the moment Sugawara was fully expelled, Ebi would yank Takagiri out.

But then all the pressure began to concentrate on one emitter, the one mounted directly above her head and held in place by the clamps we’d used. I was helpless to do anything but watch as the yellow Flame bundled around it and pressed outward. I looked frantically at Amane, who returned the gaze with fear, at a loss for what to do. I opened my mouth to call to Ebi to just pull Takagiri out now as I tried to muster my Flame once more—

The ward exploded upward with the tremendous screech of violated metal into a spray of molten aluminum that splattered against the ceiling. The yellow Flame shot out after it in a stream of brambles, but stopped midair, collecting itself in a flash. Before any of us could do anything, the space around Sugawara’s spirit tore, flattened, and shrank to a dot of nothingness, taking every scrap of that bile-yellow with it. Whatever remained of his intellect had calculated—or even overheard—our plan, decided it didn’t like its odds, and fled the premises of Todai’s domain.

Sugawara had escaped.

But Takagiri was free.

3.05 Patreon Release

Unlike what I’d seen of Ai’s premier magitech—Amane’s bionics and Ebi’s chassis—the coffin was not a pretty thing: a mess of plywood, sheet metal, 3D-printed parts, and exposed wiring. It did resemble a coffin in shape and size, large enough only for a user to lay down inside it, but more like the skeleton of one, affording no privacy to the occupant if there were somebody else in the room. You’d have to rest in full view of all the mess Ai had made—not that that would pose an obstacle for Takagiri, I suspected.

Ai had first thrown it together four years ago as a temporary solution for Amane’s ripple sensitivity, which at the time, had been even more severe, and temporary solutions have a way of becoming permanent. Amane had stopped needing it at some point, so the Radiances had banished the ugly reminder of pain to one of the multipurpose storage-slash-workshop rooms in the second sub-level basement. Now its day had come round once more, but it was in no condition for use. It was surrounded by spools of wiring of various types and thicknesses, wood and metal structural pieces, and various power tools that had been discarded in Ai’s haste. 

The upside of this mess of innards was that nothing was hidden, which made it easy to visually identify which parts went where. The main functionality came from the set of inward-facing ward projectors, of which six were already installed and three were not; they were supposed to be arranged radially in three rows surrounding the occupant, not unlike the spikes of an iron maiden, but the third row seemed to have been abandoned before the mounting bar could be installed, presumably because Ai had been sidetracked by various other problems arising from integration hell. 

My job was simple enough: get it working. But I was way out of my depth.

“…I’m not seeing a hole for the screw,” I admitted, gingerly comparing one of the fifty thousand-dollar ward emitters to the bar it was supposed to mount to. “There’s one on this bracket here, but there’s not another on the bar.”

“If you’re thinking of {AFFIXING} it, don’t,” Ebi warned from the sidelines.

“I wasn’t gonna!” I lied.

“Just clamp it.” She pointed at a pile of wood glue clamps on one of the fold-out tables. That did make more sense given the time pressure; I’d successfully woven {AFFIX} under duress before, but now was not a time to fumble with magic when mundane tools would do the trick, ugly as they were. I reluctantly grabbed a clamp that looked big enough. It took me a moment to figure out how to even open the jaws, then I slid it over where I was pressing the mounting bracket against the wood post. I squeezed the tightening trigger a few times, and then jiggled the expensive equipment experimentally to see if it was bound securely against the bar. To my relief, it didn’t budge.

The clamp was precisely the sort of ugly and awkward solution that characterized everything about this ramshackle project. Proper fasteners or magic would be far more elegant, but this didn’t have to look pretty; it just had to work. With the help of two more clamps, I at least had the ward emitters all on the same bar and facing the same direction.

That was the easy part. The real issue was that each of the three emitters had a bundle of unlabeled cables emerging from the back like a synthetic ponytail, and I had no idea what to attach them to, let alone how to make sure they were getting the right power and signals. At a ripple theory level, I understood that these wards were supposed to generate a fully enclosed field that absorbed and dissipated red and pink ripple, but the hardware was far beyond my ken.

“Uh…”

“Table to your right. See those three breadboards? You do know what a breadboard is?”

“Of course I do,” I snapped, “But I’m not really a…hardware person. Don’t know where to plug any of this in.”

“Use the schematics!” She pointed at my laptop, which was sitting in a cleared region of the nearest of the fold-out tables. The android had sent me all the necessary diagrams and schematics for each individual magical and electrical component, but there was no grand plan for how to put all of it together into a working machine; the closest it came was an absurdly messy whiteboard next to the laptop that bore a mixture of magical notation I understood and electronics diagrams I didn’t. Worst of all, the scribbled notes were all in Japanese, making it all even more impenetrable.

“Sure,” I muttered. “It’s—why aren’t you the one doing this, with your five degrees? Weren’t you here while Ai was working on it?”

In response, Ebi tilted her head meaningfully at the third person in the room.

“It might not look like it to you, but I have my hands full trying to keep her alive.”

Takagiri was looking really quite bad. Her flesh looked even more sickly than before, and she’d developed a distinct set of tremors. Her face was drooping in a way that made me concerned she was having a stroke; I guessed that sleep deprivation this extreme was probably having similar effects. She was having serious issues stringing words together, too, and I’d mostly given up on trying to communicate with her, even for encouragement.

She still insisted on pacing to and fro as a way to keep herself awake and was accompanied in stride by Ebi, who’d already caught her from hitting the floor twice. Those moments of lapsed consciousness were becoming more frequent, which only worried me more as I tried to wrap my head around the mess Ai had made. Supposedly, these moments of micro-sleep weren’t enough for Sugawara to invade her mind; this was a good thing, since it meant that he wouldn’t know that the Radiances were coming for him nor have a chance to set off the still-hypothetical bomb attached to her soul, but I was starting to wonder if that was a worthwhile tradeoff.

The Radiances were supposed to set out in a few minutes, and from there, it was a few minutes’ flight to the hospital-cum-prison where Sugawara hopefully was; even if he were warned right now—which itself made assumptions about how swift and easy his access to Takagiri’s recollections was—could he, as a comatose body in a hospital bed, even do anything? Aside from the bomb, again. And if he wasn’t there, moved by whatever remnants of his faction still clung to him, then maybe the advance warning would cause more of a problem for us. Maybe.

That was to say it really just seemed like a lot of ‘ifs’ and speculation between Takagiri and the sleep she absolutely needed. And given how infuriatingly slowly I was making progress on the coffin, I had half a mind to just make the call to let her sleep and deal with the consequences after the fact. Especially if Ebi wasn’t going to help me.

“Seriously? There’s nothing else you can do to help out?”

Ebi’s voice modulated down to a serious, dire tone. “You do not want me any nearer to this thing if you accidentally turn it on.”

I remembered something from earlier today, how Ai had mentioned offhandedly that the walls had pink and red in them. That’s just Ebi, she’d said.

“Fine,” I shrugged, annoyance building. “But it’s—it’s not going well, if you can’t tell,” I admitted as I hobbled over to the laptop to inspect the ward emitters’ pinout schematics. “If there’s anything you can do, then do it.”

“Overpromised and underdelivered, did ya?”

“If you’re not going to do it, somebody has to,” I snapped, picking up the laptop. My frustration was spilling over toward my low mobility; I was losing precious time ambling back and forth between the coffin and the laptop, with my foot still a little ginger.

At that moment, I heard the room’s doorknob click. I whirled to face it on reflex, tattoo itching with a surge of anticipation. There was no reason for anybody to be down here; it wasn’t that late at night, but Ai’s students and machinists had all cleared out for the day, and the Radiances were all up top, due to head out any minute now. The memory of creepy happenings elsewhere in this basement earlier today caused my tattoo to stir; what if Takagiri hadn’t been hallucinating? What if something was here? What if Sugawara had somehow gotten enough information in those moments of microsleep, and now he was making—

Ebi emitted a digital imitation of a snort. “Ha! The way you jumped!”

I glared at her. “You’re fucking pranking me now? Fuck off!”

“No,” she chuckled. “Somebody more qualified has arrived.”

The door swung open, and there stood Amane, wearing her soft nightclothes and a determined expression. I made it halfway through the first phoneme of objecting to her participation before realizing that she’d most certainly had enough of that. She walked into the room, head held high. A small hitch in her gait betrayed that she was most definitely feeling Takagiri’s radiated pain, but it didn’t slow her down, nor reach her face.

“Um,” I stammered, “I’m guessing the others don’t know you’re here?”

She replied in Japanese, which Ebi was happy to interpret in real time for me. “They’re up on the roof. Fuck knows I’m not going to stay all alone up in the penthouse when somebody needs help down here. I know these systems better than anyone, even Ai-chan.”

I raised an eyebrow in Ebi’s direction about the insertion of “fuck knows,” which didn’t sound very mahou shoujo at all. She met it with a virtual raised eyebrow of her own. Then the relief hit, and I decided I didn’t care about that. I looked back to Amane.

“Okay—um—alright—yes,” I landed. “Please.”

—

A few minutes later, Ebi displayed a video on the wall via the room’s overhead projector. It was a live feed of Alice’s perspective—essentially bodycam footage, which when combined with the cover of night blanketing this mission, left me feeling a little like we were doing something illegal. Which we were.

Alice, Hina and Yuuka were gathered on the rooftop as we were in the basement, making their final checks before setting out. All three were mantled, but they’d changed their costumes to something much less flashy and decorated; instead of whites and vibrant, saturated colors matching their gemstones, dark greys and blues predominated, and where there had previously been decorative brooches and tassels, now there was nothing. These versions of the mantles were lower-profile, stealthy, not for the public’s eyes. If the mantles could generally be thought of as fighter jets, these configurations were more like stealth bombers, complete with radar invisibility and currently inactive camouflage. The girls’ eyes still glimmered in the dark, though, Hina’s impossible blue and the angry crimson crags of Yuuka’s gemstone sharply visible through what we saw of Alice’s gaze.

They launched off the rooftop platform as one, a violent jerk of motion that sent my stomach spinning so badly that I had to avert my eyes from the wall and instead focus on the nest of electronics in my hands. My glimpse of their takeoff was still long enough to glean something of note: in this stripped-down mode, much of the usual artifice was gone, which meant that their flight produced no actual streams of energy in their wake, at least not at these speeds; it was more like rapid Superman-style floating than rocket-powered acceleration.

“Is this two-way?”

“Not in, like, a video call sense,” Ebi explained, reaching out to flick Takagiri’s nose, the latest in an increasingly-dubious set of tricks to help keep her awake for just a bit longer. “They’d freak out if they knew Amane was down here with us.”

I only snuck occasional glances at the screen as they flew; they were low enough that you could still somewhat make out the terrain below, which wasn’t nearly as high as—to pick a random example—a high-altitude Spire maintenance stream where it seemed like they were just floating in a misty void, and that was too low for my acrophobic sensibilities.

Amane’s assistance with the coffin had been transformative. Not only did she know exactly how all the little components fit together, the telekinetic modules in her arm were fantastically suited to the subtle dexterity required to fit the electronics together, just like the screws in my computer case last week. She inserted pins into breadboards and {AFFIXED} together electronics too delicate for clamps with a swiftness and precision that told me she knew exactly what she was doing, which was a huge relief—enough to paper over the envy I felt. Occasionally, my hand and foot would throb and her face would flicker into a mask of pain, but it didn’t slow her down.

The other Radiances were going fast too. The video stream of Alice’s vision included small diagnostic readouts, among which was a speed gauge currently registering well above the speed of sound as the trio of magical girls shot across the sky; an icon on the readout had flickered for a moment as her mantle suppressed the sonic boom to keep a low profile. There was a frankly dizzying amount of information crammed into the corners of what we were seeing, too much to reasonably keep track of; I had to remind myself that this was a sort of debug and diagnostic view, and that Alice herself was receiving much of this information more intuitively through the mantle’s pink ripple channels. She didn’t have to look to know her airspeed or orientation or position relative to her teammates or the ground. I was envious of that quasi-omniscience, the lack of a clunky interface, the data direct to the mind through infomancy. I’d have that with a mantle of my own.

“Ezzen,” Amane prodded me with a bionic finger. “Ugoite.”

I blinked, then flinched, then cringed at my own moment of distraction.

As I clumsily laid the bar of ward emitters into place on Amane’s direction, the away team began to slow and descend, the blob of light that made up Yokohama crystallized into a nighttime skyline twinkling in thousands of distinct lights from the buildings and cars. They descended further, far too rapidly for me to stomach, going away from the densest lights and toward the edge of the city.

They didn’t land all the way, instead slowing to a hover at what the readout said was two hundred meters above the ground. Below them lay Sugawara’s prison, semi-isolated from the rest of its neighborhood by a copse of trees. Acrophobia made my stomach jump a little bit as Alice’s view of the building zoomed in. Like Lighthouse Tower, it had once been a hospital and now served to house a flamebearer—but instead of a home base, it had become a prison. Nominally.

“Not liking this,” Alice muttered. “No guards.”

In reality, the Radiances were going in expecting it to be the final redoubt of Sugawara’s sect, a fortress inhabited by his most fanatic followers and fortified with whatever scraps of magitech they still had from before he had been deposed, like more weapons in the style of Takagiri’s swords or potentially more esoteric weaponry. The layout was also a dark mirror of Lighthouse Tower—where the Radiances’ base was vertical, the prison was no more than five or six floors and distributed much more horizontally, with distinct north and west wings.

Something like envy briefly stole my attention when I noticed Alice’s bust at the bottom of her vision, an entirely unwarranted emotion for this moment. I was spared from having to shove aside the feeling myself when Alice raised her head to look at her teammate.

“Yuuka? Close enough?”

The team’s precog nodded. She would have been hard to make out in the dark if not for the various sensors of Alice’s mantle amplifying the visibility and highlighting Yuuka in the heads-up display. She looked even more goth in this darker version of her outfit, with previously metal-looking fixtures retextured to dark plastics and much of her smooth, pale skin now covered by a dark, skintight bodysuit. My mind wandered somewhere it ought not have for a moment until Yuuka replied to her teammate’s prompt. She stared down at the hospital below.

“Yep. He’s—yeah, he’s down there. And still…konsui,” she muttered, switching back into Japanese for lack of vocabulary.

“Comatose,” Ebi supplied for me. I glared at her, having already figured it out myself from context.

Yuuka’s expression darkened. “But we’re in for a brawl. And…we’re not rescuing Ogawa-san or…oh. We’ll find Kiriya-san.”

“Alive?” Alice’s tone was pessimistic.

Yuuka was quiet for a beat too long. “…Yes.”

“They’re torturing her?” asked Hina, straight to the point. There was a note of contained, anticipatory energy in her voice.

Yuuka replied with only a hollow nod as she tore her eyes away from the prison, too rattled by whatever she was seeing to make a jab at Hina about sadomasochism. That made Hina’s shockingly blue eyes narrow, her fingerless gloves bunching into fists—what I’d interpreted as sadistic anticipation may have actually been rage.

Next to me, Amane’s hands paused on my laptop keyboard. My heart dropped into my stomach, idle fantasies of feminine bodies immediately banished by horror.

“Um,” I asked the room, “Kiriya-san isn’t a flamebearer, right? So there’s no…”

“No reason to do it,” Ebi confirmed. “Maybe blood magic, but more likely just to provoke us.”

Amane raised her wrist to her mouth and whispered something into it, voice tight. Her prosthetic was apparently linked into the mantle comms network, judging by how the Radiances on-screen visibly flinched.

“Go loud,” Ebi translated for my benefit. “Get her back.”

“What if it’s bait?” I asked. It felt awfully convenient for them to leave just one of the two Todai operatives alive.

“Could be. Won’t matter.”

On the screen, Hina nodded as though she’d heard me, though she was probably responding to Amane. “Well, it’s not like we were just gonna walk through the front door.”

“Do you know where exactly she is? Or Sugawara?” Alice asked Yuuka.

“He’s where we left him. She’s…up top, I think; I see a window. North side, I think.” She pointed at the appropriate spot, and a marker appeared in Alice’s HUD. “Start there?”

“Yes,” Alice confirmed, waving to Hina.

The Sapphire Radiance grinned. I recognized that as bloodlust, at least. “Right through the roof?”

“No, they have a hostage; if they have time to react, things could get messy. Blink in, find her, free her. I’ll get her to safety while you two go after him. Then you can go loud.”

“We killing?”

Surprisingly—or maybe not surprisingly at all—that came from Yuuka. Alice sighed.

“Aside from him? Try not to, alright?”

“No promises,” Yuuka muttered. She looked over to Hina. “Well, kemono. Fetch.”

Hina nodded and flipped midair so she was facing downward. Her legs tensed into a crouch, compressing against nothing—then she launched earthward, receding to a speck in an instant with a dull whoosh. I had just enough time for my breath to catch and to be confused, since it looked like she was about to crash straight through the building, the exact opposite of what Alice had said. But instead of a thunderous impact, she just…vanished, shifting into the fourth dimension.

Imagine a box drawn on a piece of paper. From the two-dimensional perspective of a flatlander living in the paper’s world, the box would be closed, the interior inaccessible from any of the possible directions they can move in their two dimensions. But if you, a human, were to put your finger right in the middle of the box from your lofty, transcendent position in the third dimension, you’d find those walls utterly irrelevant. You wouldn’t be phasing through them per se; you’d simply be approaching them from a direction in which they don’t exist.

This is what Hina did, only raised one dimension up, a four-dimensional intruder into the three-dimensional box that was the prison’s interior. She went around the roof of the prison, intersecting our slice of reality again once she was inside. We in the basement of Lighthouse Tower didn’t have a camera feed from her, only Alice, but it was easy to imagine her blinking and dashing through the halls in search of Ms. Kiriya.

Four long, quiet seconds passed, and then the north wall of the prison exploded outward in a sapphire flash. From our lofty perspective, it looked almost comical, a demolition in miniature. But the spark of blue that shot outward and upward back toward us was very real; she had left destruction in her wake and carried in her arms a limp, red body. Bile rose into my throat as I saw in closer detail what had been done to Kiriya; she didn’t have much skin left.

“She’s alive,” Hina confirmed as she flew up to her teammates. “Back home? Ebi?”

“No,” Ebi said, taking in the Todai operative’s grisly, defiled state in a flash and making the executive call. “Too far, and I’ve got my hands full here. I’m calling the next nearest hospital now. On your HUD…now. They’ll take care of her.”

“Agreed,” Alice confirmed urgently. “You take her there, Hina—”

Hina rocketed away before Alice could even finish her sentence, leaving just the team’s leader and precog. It had hardly been ten seconds since Alice had authorized Hina to go in, and that was already one mission objective done: rescue whoever had survived. One Radiance had taken seconds to storm through and rescue a captive and get out untouched.

“They’re not well-equipped,” observed Alice, putting my thoughts to words.

“They can’t stop us,” Yuuka agreed. Something glittered through the air around her as she looked down at the hospital, some sort of half-summoned weapon or preparation for further magic.

Down below, the flicker of flashlights was visible as a handful of cultists began to spill into the area surrounding the hole Hina had blown.

“Yuuka,” Alice said.

“Alice.”

“I know you’re angry. Don’t get stupid.”

Hina’s voice came through the comms. “But give ‘em the what-for anyway!”

“Damare,” Yuuka growled.

“Also, touching down at the hospital now, looks like they’ve already got a stretcher, and—hai, Radiance Sapphire desu—”

As Hina became embroiled in handing over Kiriya, the remaining two Radiances began to plan their own entry, and I forced myself to stop looking at the screen. I glanced at Amane, who seemed transfixed by what we had just seen.

“Amane?” I reached out to poke her, as she had done to me—she almost shrieked when my finger made contact, scrambling away, eyes wild. I retracted my hand hurriedly, cursing my stupidity. This was clearly a reprise of old trauma for Amane, and startling her was woefully insensitive of me. “Uh, shit, sorry. You okay?”

Amane took a deep breath, then glanced at Ebi and Takagiri. Ebi nodded reassuringly at her and said something in Japanese, which convinced Amane to take a deep breath, clenching and unclenching her fists. “Daijoubu.” She strode back over toward the coffin, a slight hitch in her step. We were getting close to being able to turn it on; the wiring was mostly in place, and now, we just had to double check that everything had been hooked up correctly before we turned it on for calibration; if we’d made a mistake, we risked frying Ebi.

I limped over to the whiteboard where we’d assorted the most relevant hardware connections, glancing again at Takagiri. At this point, she’d given up on pacing, and was standing slumped against Ebi, who had replaced one hand with a mechanism I couldn’t identify other than that it had a little electrical arc on the end. She was gently zapping Takagiri awake every ten or fifteen seconds.

“Just—just a few more minutes,” I assured her.

She didn’t respond verbally, but her eyes did flick to me briefly before unfocusing back to staring into empty space. Ebi gave me an encouraging thumbs up with her free hand. “I think you’ll make it at this rate.”

“Great,” I muttered, looking between one of the breadboards and the whiteboard’s notes. I wasn’t quite sure what this part did, to be perfectly honest, but I could at least make sure that everything connected how it was supposed to. “Looks good here,” I called to Amane.

She raised a prosthetic thumbs-up from where she was crouched next to the coffin’s head. It was looking slightly more coffin-like now; one of the big modifications Ai had wanted to make was the addition of some damping panels near the head, which she hadn’t gotten around to installing but Amane and I had managed to finagle into place. In theory, those would help distribute the load to the various wards lower down the body, and they filled out the skeletal structure somewhat, at least near the head.

As Amane rose back to her feet, motion in the corner of my eye made me turn; some part of me was still braced to see a ghost in the corner, but of course, it was just the stream on the wall. Alice and Yuuka were descending, down and down, until they were hovering just above the prison’s center. Alice touched down all the way, dark, slim boots making contact with the prison’s rooftop. She manifested her staff in her hand—again, with no flash or other decorative animation—and pressed the tip to the rooftop. Next to her, Yuuka held up four fingers, then three, then two, then one, then—

A thunderclap came from the stream’s audio, and the roof was no more. Without ceremony, the girls dropped into the last lair of Sugawara’s cult. A man in a sweater and slacks was the unfortunate first contact; he skidded to a stop in front of the sudden cloud of debris, then turned and began to run the other way, shouting furiously. Yuuka shot down the hall and collided with him in a flying kick, sending him to the floor and probably breaking at least a few bones. She was already moving past him, and Alice sprinted after her.

They moved through the corridors at a lightning pace. Nobody could stand in their way at first; all the cultists they encountered were unarmed and unaugmented humans and were either completely ignored or shoved to the side. The Radiances said nothing, moving in easy sync as they advanced.

The first real bit of resistance was when Yuuka held an arm out to signal a halt as they came to an intersection. A moment later, an orange beam of energy shot across the space they’d have run into. Yuuka strode around the corner, and then there was a scream. Alice followed a moment later, revealing that Yuuka had kicked the cultist in the groin and pried the ‘gun’ from his hand.

“Duct tape and hardware store parts,” Alice observed. “But they’ve got a Flame benefactor, at least.”

“Not a very good one,” Yuuka opined. “That wouldn’t have done anything anyway.”

“Still.”

Alice tossed the doohickey into her pocketspace, and they resumed their advance. They ducked into a random, vacant hospital room not unlike the ones on Lighthouse Tower’s eighteenth floor; Yuuka counted them in once again; Alice obliterated the floor, and they dropped down another level. It wasn’t entirely clear to me why they were taking this route, but it seemed like they were encountering relatively few cultists. Or maybe there just weren’t that many to begin with.

Another floor down, resistance became fiercer, and the cultists…weirder. More and more of them were in states of undress, dim mirrors to how so many people at the festival had been topless—some of Hikanome’s practices remained consistent between its iterations, it seemed. These members were more fanatic; one tried to charge Alice, which felt almost like he was underwater compared to how swift the Radiances moved. We viewers got a disgusting up-close shot of open wounds on his chest before she slammed him into a wall. He tried to scramble to his feet, so she hit him again. He tried to get up a third time, and she sighed and shot him in the knee with her staff.

“Yuuka. Sanguimancy.”

“Yep. Not for anything big, I think.”

The next person they encountered made Amane gasp. He was gangly, with close-shaved hair, and was bleeding openly from the stump of his left elbow. I thought her reaction was just because of the gore—but I put the pieces together when Yuuka roared. There was a blur of light and motion, and suddenly, the man was right in front of the Radiances, moving far too fast, laughing at us. The space where his arm should have been shimmered unnaturally as he reared back to swing—

Alice shot him in the head. We saw it so clearly through the stream that I jumped back involuntarily in shock. The beam removed the center of his cranium and he slumped over, dead. She prodded the corpse with the tip of her boot.

“What the fuck,” said Yuuka. “That’s Kazuha.”

I glanced at Amane, then Ebi. Clearly this was somebody from their history with the cult, but I had no idea who. “Who?”

“One of Sugawara’s old lieutenants,” Ebi supplied. “Trust me, he deserved that.”

Amane looked—not shaken. She was actually grinning at the image of the corpse, which was a little disturbing. Then she caught the look I was giving her and turned away from it hastily to keep testing the coffin; we were a handful more checks away from being able to power it on.

“So this is the last of them,” Alice said onscreen. “And they’re not attempting to run.”

At this point, Hina blinked into existence next to them. “Hey! Oh, hey, dead Kazuha!”

“Kiriya is stable?”

“They’re taking care of her! Also, there’s some funky netting in the out-space around here. I think it’s for me. Smells bloody.”

“I’m liking this less and less,” Alice said. “Yuuka, you’re sure this isn’t a trap?”

“Things are getting fuzzier,” she admitted, looking down the hall. “But it’s not a trap. He’s there. Hina, don’t jump any more. The ‘net’ is—”

She fell silent a second before a sword blade came through the wall. It would have struck Hina, but Yuuka shoved her to the side and grabbed the blade in a way that would have definitely cut her hand open if this were her real body. She snapped it off and yelled something at the wall. While Hina strolled through the adjacent doorway to put paid to whoever had just been stupid enough to ambush the precog, Yuuka and Alice inspected the broken-off blade.

“Was phenomenally stupid to grab it like that,” Alice chided.

“It’s like Takagiri’s,” Yuuka defended. “Which we’re specifically proofed against now. I knew it was fine.” She looked directly at the ‘camera,’ addressing me. “Nice one, Ezza.”

“Uh, thanks,” I replied, before remembering that I was the only one here who couldn’t directly speak back to them.

“As I was saying,” Yuuka resumed, “the net isn’t to catch you. I think breaking it will trigger something red or pink, so just don’t touch it, kemono.”

“Whatever you say, babe!”

The Radiances arrived at Sugawara’s room less than a minute after. There were four guards outside, big and burly and carrying what were definitely smuggled ripple rifles; Hina dispatched all four with trivial ease and blinding speed, literally throwing the first into the rest and disarming them in the chaos. These ones didn’t seem like fanatical cult members, more like hired guns, and they didn’t seem keen on spending their lives fighting flamebearers, electing to stay down.

After a quick nod of approval from Yuuka, Hina kicked in the door as well, and the Radiances came face to face with arguably their oldest nemesis.

At least what remained of him.

3.04 Patreon Release

Ai initially seemed confused that everybody was yelling. She opened her mouth, said a few syllables in Japanese, saw me, hesitated, then switched to English.

“I just didn’t want to leave her alone.”

“So you brought her here?” Yuuka almost yelled. She jabbed a finger at Amane. “Red ripple, Ai, fuck!”

My hand throbbed in agreement, like daggers being drawn across the lines of my burn scars. And if it was this bad for me, I could scarcely imagine how badly this must have been affecting Amane—but the Amethyst Radiance seemed more concerned with her friend’s reaction. She reached up to her teammate with her bionic hand and tugged at her wrist. Yuuka frowned, looking down at her, then slowly sat back down.

“Setsumei shinasai,” Amane asked Ai. “No bullshit,” she added in English. Yuuka’s expression flickered slightly at the vulgarity, which had probably been borrowed from her to begin with. I gathered that Amane was asking for an explanation.

Ai hesitated. “I—we need to keep working. Izumi-san needs help, and I thought—I can’t stop working. If I stop, I’ll be too tired to keep going until tomorrow, and we don’t have that much time, so I thought if she was here, it would help me focus, and…”

Alice’s face was in her hands. “Oh my God, is that how I sound?”

“No, you’re not half this bad,” Hina sighed, bouncing to her feet and padding toward the two flamebearers standing awkwardly outside the elevator. “Ai-chan, you know the rules. No overtime at the dinner table.”

“Rules?” Ai spluttered, uncharacteristically upset. “Jikan ga kireruyo! Her mind is about to…unravel and instead of helping her you care about rules? You?”

Hina crossed her arms, resolute. “Yeah, rules. Listen, Ai: you’re overhungry and overtired. You can’t keep working tonight, there’s no point in it. You need food and rest. You know that.”

Ai made a frustrated noise, jabbing a finger at Takagiri. “She needs help, not me.” Her voice broke a little at the end; I might have seen the glimmer of tears welling in her eyes. She was at the end of her rope. “The co—the device isn’t done yet! I just need a few more hours, Hina, we can’t waste any more time.”

A single glance at Takagiri underscored her point—the effects of sleep deprivation had progressed from being purely psychological to an outright physical illness. Her skin had taken on a sickly yellow hue, and she looked a little puffy and bloated, like all the smaller systems of her body were beginning to fail from the lack of proper downtime. I’d never seen somebody standing under their own power and uninjured look so close to death’s door.

Guilt surged through me. I’d spent much of the afternoon chatting with my friends and messing about with the low-priority goal of covering up my face for whenever I might plausibly appear on camera next, when I should have gone straight to the basement to help Ai once I’d finished the mantle patches—the magical equivalent of opting for cosmetic surgery when there was somebody opened up on the operating table. I spoke up. “I can finish it.”

Hina spun and frowned at me. “Not until after dinner.”

“Are you kidding? Look at her! She’s—”

“Listen, it’ll all be fine,” Alice assured, gentler than Hina. “We’ll kill Sugawara tonight, and then Izumi-san will be okay. Ezzen, you’re sure you can pick up where Ai is leaving off?”

“Definitely,” I lied. I had little confidence I could match Ai’s prowess and dive down to the technical depths to which she’d long since acclimated—but I had to try. If worst came to worst, I was sure I could hack together something with blood magic that would at least give Takagiri a precious few hours of safe sleep, a single REM cycle to flush the worst of her deterioration and buy a few more days in the event that this didn’t all end tonight. “Actually, um, I think I’ll just eat downstairs, and—”

“No,” Hina barked. “You’re staying and so is Izumi.”

Takagiri shook her head sleepily. “Iyada. Iku—I’ll go.” She jerkily turned back toward the elevator.

Hina reached out to stop her. “Matte, matte!”

“Hina!” Alice called. “Izumi can’t stay up here, because of Amane. And Ezzen,” she added, treating me as more of an afterthought.

“Sure she can,” Hina replied. “I’ll be a sponge!”

We at the table shared a nervous glance. “Would that…work?” I asked Amane.

She shrugged and made a face that clearly meant yeah, I guess? Then she winced; another splash of pain coming from Takagiri, too subtle to register for me but clearly enough to aggravate her sensitivity. 

“No, it won’t,” Yuuka hissed to Hina, tapping her temple meaningfully.

The Sapphire Radiance shrugged and shimmied over to stand right in front of Takagiri, bodily blocking her off from the rest of us, pressing her back right against our presently male-enfleshed guest to test the theory for herself. The throbbing in my hand lessened considerably—but was replaced by an ache in my chest of an entirely different nature, a juvenile desire to not see Hina sharing such close contact with another person, a patently ridiculous, unfounded, and unfair objection to have under the circumstances.

“How’s that?”

I expressed my opinion by wiggling my hand between a thumbs-up and a thumbs-sideways, trying to keep my emotions off my face and stay objective to the problem that was being addressed.

Alice and Yuuka exchanged another look, then simultaneously leaned toward Amane from both sides to confer with her in whispers. After a few seconds of very rapid-fire discussion, they broke the huddle and Alice shook her head. “No dice.” She followed that up with a longer, apologetic-sounding explanation directed toward Takagiri, who was nodding—or perhaps nodding off. Hina nudged her, which didn’t elicit a reaction, and then poked her hard in the gut, which made her jerk back to wakefulness. Ebi released a digital sigh.

“If you guys aren’t going to actually help her, I’ll just take her back downstairs. Ezzen, be a dear and come help me keep her from dying once you’ve eaten something.”

She patted Amane’s head once and then strode toward the growing cluster of women at the elevator before anybody could object. The android willed open the elevator’s maw, grabbed the wrist of her barely conscious charge, and led her inside. She waved a hand theatrically and the doors slid shut.

Hina sighed, somehow not seeming too put out by Takagiri’s ultimate rejection. She turned to Ai, taking her hand gently. “Hey, listen, come eat, okay? You’ll feel better, I promise.”

Ai sagged into Hina’s arms and began to cry.

—

The food had cooled during this drama, but it was still good. More importantly, it provided an excuse for our mouths, an acceptable silence of chewing that dispelled the lingering awkwardness, making the lack of conversation instead a sign of satisfaction and mutual enjoyment. Full credit to Hina for that; time and again she was proving just how good of a cook she was, and it was difficult to resist the urge to shove mouthful after mouthful of thin, tender beef into my mouth as fast as the mechanics of chewing and swallowing would allow.

Alice made no such attempt to deny her stomach this bounty, which made me wonder again if her dragon-ka was progressing. Yuuka ate slower, but seemed just as satisfied with her shredded tofu as the rest of us were with our meat. More power to her, I supposed. And thankfully, it seemed like the physiological effects of Amane’s ripple sensitivity hadn’t harmed her appetite or digestion. This was the first I’d seen her up and about since we’d passed out in the middle of the battlefield, and any indication that she was doing well was a relief.

For once, Hina was also eating her own cooking—though she hadn’t served herself, instead simply squeezing herself in between me and Ai to pick at my bowl and the communal dish of kimchi, blue eyes wandering the table and narrowing in satisfaction as she watched her friends—perhaps more like family in her mind—partake of her efforts. She was purring faintly enough that only Ai and I could hear it.

It took Ai a little bit of time to really dig in even once she stopped sniffling; she initially seemed too sick with worry and guilt, and only brought food to her mouth out of mechanical habit rather than actual hunger. However, once the first few meager bites had vanished from her bowl, she set upon the beef and peppers with gusto, which visibly lifted her mood from so-drained-as-to-be-barely-functional to merely exhausted. As soon as she indicated she’d had her fill, Hina hugged her around the torso and asked her something in Japanese; Ai responded with a sleepy nod and stumbled to her feet, allowing my girlfriend to take her to bed like a child following her mother, a weird inversion of how I had come to regard their dynamic.

I wasn’t about to be the one to break the collective quiet that had fallen on us, but I did try to catch Ai’s eye one more time to reaffirm my resolve to pick up her work where she left off. She managed a small, sad grin as Hina led her up the stairs and out of view.

Alice cleared her throat, looking across the table as she took a napkin to the post-devouring debris that had accumulated around her mouth.

“Well.”

“That was stupid—ow!” Yuuka yelped as Amane instantly jabbed her in the side with a carbon-fiber elbow, which was good; I would have done it myself if I weren’t sitting too far away. I just tried to make my displeasure known on my face. Heliotrope gave Amethyst an affronted look, then glanced at me and sighed.

“That’s Ai,” Alice sighed. “At least she listened this time.”

“This…happens a lot, I take it?” I guessed.

“Too much,” Yuuka groused. “Fuckin’ insane of her to—oof,” she grunted as Amane elbowed her again and scolded her in angry stacatto. “Fine, yeah, it was a mistake, her heart’s in the right place, all that. But still, she should’ve known better than to bring her up here.”

Something about Yuuka’s tone rubbed me the wrong way. I agreed with the basic assertion, that Ai shouldn’t have brought Takagiri up here, but the way she said it almost felt like a clique of popular girls rejecting the outcast in a teen movie—not that I’d seen any teen movies, but I knew the trope.

“Hey,” I objected, not feeling very confident in myself at all but nonetheless feeling the need to say something. “Chill out.”

Alice raised her eyebrows at me, then nodded. “I feel we could have handled that better. Less exclusionary.”

Yuuka made it halfway through a derisive snort before Amane added something of her own. I didn’t understand the Japanese, but from both Yuuka and Alice’s put-upon reactions, it was incendiary. She punctuated it by slapping the table with her prosthetic hand, sending a clack echoing through the penthouse.

“Uh?” I ventured.

Alice stared nervously at her girlfriend for a long moment, then pursed her lips. “I’m—Amane is insinuating that Yuuka was lying that Hina’s solution wouldn’t have worked.”

“Would it?”

Yuuka looked uncharacteristically uncomfortable. “…I never said I foresaw that.”

“You tapped your eye!” Alice exclaimed. “Why lie?”

Amane added something else that made both of the other girls stiffen. Alice looked unhappy, Yuuka guilty.

“Um,” I prompted, a little afraid of the ire growing on Alice’s face even without it being directed at me.

“Normally she dodges the elbowing,” Alice explained. “She didn’t just now, which indicates that her foresight’s still a little off. Which, in turn, means that Yuuka must have had another reason to want Takagiri gone. Amane suspects that that’s because our guest is in a male body. Which I’d very much hope is not the case.” The air temperature at the table was rising, betraying Alice’s emotions even though her voice was precise and enunciated. “What do you think, Ezzen?”

“Oh. That sounds…bad,” I ventured lamely. “Though—I mean…I’m here in a male body,” I pointed out awkwardly. I immediately cringed at myself—whether because of stating the obvious or because of discomfort about the fact itself, I couldn’t say. Probably both.

Yuuka harrumphed. “Yeah, but you’re…Ezza. You’re fine.”

“But I’m…not a girl,” I clarified. The image of Asuka that Star had sent floated across my mind, which I tried to banish. “I thought we established that. Something nonbinary. But Takagiri’s an actual girl, body or no. And you were fine with her yesterday!”

“I was—I was…” she scrambled for an explanation. “I didn’t fuckin’ mean it like that! It was a real problem for Amane!”

Amane slapped the table again, which made Yuuka yelp. It was followed immediately by the very unhappy-sounding thump of Alice’s tail on the rug. The temperature at the table had risen noticeably; the common spaces of the penthouse weren’t chilly, but the air had gone from distinctly warm to now being like sitting next to an open oven.

“Yuuka, that’s completely unacceptable,” hissed Radiance Opal. “Takagiri might have been our enemy up until a few days ago, but she is suffering more than any of us right now, and the last thing she needs is you being a misandrist shit at her. That is absolutely not conduct befitting a mahou shoujo.”

I expected Yuuka to snap back at that, for this to explode into an argument that would derail the entire evening. Instead, that last part of Alice’s scolding made Radiance Heliotrope physically flinch as though struck.

“Gomen nasai,” she muttered, voice full of contrition. “I didn’t—that’s not what I meant. It’s different when she’s here with us. Fuck, that sounds—not good, yeah. Why the fuck did I do that?”

“We’re going to talk about this more later,” Alice decreed. “I expect you to apologize to her, once she’s in a mental state to accept it and once we’ve delivered justice to the person tormenting her.”

That was the moment Hina returned from upstairs, leaping over the upper-level railing and landing without so much as a crouch to absorb the impact before bounding over to us.

“Yikes,” she said as she felt Alice’s aura of wrath. Then she seemed to lock onto Yuuka’s contrite turmoil. “Hey, babe, you okay?”

“Don’t call me babe,” Yuuka snapped back, some of her usual animosity reigniting. “Fuckin’—shit, yeah, I’ll apologize. Once we kill Sugawara. It’s all his fault anyway.”

“Kill!” Hina crooned, looking at me affectionately. I gave her a hesitant thumbs up, a little jarred by the topic change but relieved to be moving away from whatever the hell that had been. Yuuka clearly had some stuff she needed to work through.

Alice nodded, the mom-voice melting out of her tone as the room cooled back to its normal temperature. “Yeah. Yeah. Let’s—let’s get ready to go for that instead. I didn’t want to set out until at least 10PM, and it’s only 7 now, but with how Takagiri looked to be doing…time is of the essence. Let’s get the mantle changes set up. Ezzen?”

—

“Was that food supposed to re-energize us?” Yuuka groaned as she double checked the silvery thread of her weaving. “I mean, I’m not hungry anymore, but fuck, I don’t feel awake enough to go raid a Hikanome base. If that’s even what we’ll find there.”

“The sleepiness goes away when you’re mantled up,” Alice reminded her. That was news to me at the time.

“Oh, really?” I asked, then felt stupid for opening my mouth. I’d spent hours poring over those very psychomotive systems today; it was pretty important that they limited sensations from the main body. That was the whole reason Amane spent so much time in her mantle, after all. I changed the topic to the other, and arguably more interesting, part of what Yuuka had said. “Uh, never mind. Wait, Yuuka, your eye’s not giving you anything?”

“It’s not so good at long range. Once we’re there I’ll know.”

Amane muttered something that I would have bet money translated to something like “and also not so good at close range.” 

Hina shot me a carnivorous, heart-fluttering grin. She’d been the first to finish weaving the update into her mantle, though she hadn’t tested it just yet. “Who knows what we’ll find?”

She sounded outright excited for that.

“Hopefully nothing out of the ordinary,” Alice said from her spot on the couch, twining thread between her fingers. “Just the prison, with the usual rotation of guards and absolutely no festering remains of the cult.”

But we all knew things wouldn’t be so simple. Two of Todai’s men had gone missing when they’d been sent to investigate, which was why the Radiances were prepared to show up carrying the biggest sticks in Japan, now freshly proofed against the weapons that had posed a problem last time.

The upgrades I’d made could be thought of as a patch in both the software and sartorial senses, functionally for the former and haptically for the latter; the motion of Alice’s hands wasn’t unlike that of a seamstress mending a torn garment. Beyond that, though, physical description became difficult, since not all of the lattice that projected the mantle was in our slice of three-dimensional space. From where I was sitting, it just looked like Alice had a bunched-up tangle of glowing thread in her lap, though in reality, it was a carefully designed and tuned piece of technology, a war machine of sleek power and complexity to rival a fighter jet. For all that power, though, watching the four Radiances at work was a great reminder of how all glyph-based magitech was fundamentally bottlenecked by flamebearers performing the manual and bespoke process of weaving Flame, no true—or at least Turing-complete—automation to be had.

Pontifications on industry aside, the girls were making quick work of the upgrade—including Amane, who wasn’t participating in the mission because she required far more involved repairs to her mantle before she’d be combat ready again. She seemed content to work in parallel to her teammates nonetheless…though “content” was maybe a strong word. It mostly seemed like something to distract her from glaring at Yuuka. The argument hadn’t reignited once Hina had returned, but things felt like they were simmering, and honestly, I was sort of hoping the girls would get out of here soon and take the awkwardness with them.

As for why I was still up in the penthouse with them instead of booking it straight to the basement to keep working on the coffin, I wasn’t entirely sure. In theory, I was in a supervisory role, since these were my designs, but there was honestly nothing to it; surely the girls would be able to work out any kinks on their own. My antsiness to go help a certain snarky android with Takagiri gave me the courage to speak up.

“Um. Can I go? For Takagiri.”

Hina hopped to her feet. “We gotta test!”

“Do I need to be here for that?”

“I want you to see it!”

“See…your mantle?”

“Yep! It’ll only take a minute,” she assured me. “You haven’t seen it yet, right? Somehow.”

She was right: I still hadn’t seen Hina’s mantle up close. My only opportunity had been when she’d been the cerulean meteor that destroyed Hikanome’s festival, and that ruined her mantle along with it. The impact had been so explosive that it had ablated away the LM, leaving her exposed by the time we’d had face-to-face contact.

Alice had told me this morning that it was still in need of repairs, but apparently Hina had made quick work of that once I’d kicked her out of my room. Unlike the way Amethyst’s mantle had been destroyed, apparently Hina’s case had been a much cleaner breakaway. And Hina was unrivaled among the girls when it came to weaving, which probably helped as well.

I didn’t even really know what her mantle looked like, beyond the broadest strokes. When I’d first arrived at Todai and skimmed the girls’ Wikipedia pages, her mantle had been her featured image, but I’d scrolled past it hurriedly, embarrassed to be looking at something so girly. But now I’d get to see it up close and personal, watch as her T-shirt-and-booty-shorts-clad regular body was swapped out for its lattice-manifest warmachine copy.

“Sure.”

Hina’s face split into a huge smile. She pirouetted theatrically, then shouted, “Houseki hikare!”

A flash of blue light washed over everything for a moment, a shadow of how she’d dyed the entire world at the festival. I blinked away the dazzle as her whole body glowed, squinting, trying to see if I could pinpoint the exact moment the swap happened. A swirl of white-and-blue sparkles wrapped around her, settling over her clothes as she stretched her arms out and winked at me. The swirl coalesced into arcing shapes of gemstone that bound themselves around her, seeming to erase the clothes, then they settled into glowing silhouettes of tassels and a short skirt, ridged fingerless gloves that went all the way up her forearms, gemstone brooches on her chest and hips—and when the light faded, there stood Radiance Sapphire.

Honestly, the girly aesthetic wasn’t for me. I didn’t like the frills on the skirt or the ribbon in her hair. But I couldn’t deny that this artificial version of Hina was ludicrously good-looking; the extra twenty-odd centimeters her hair had gained contributed greatly to that, as did the makeup and the more abstract knowledge that this was a form made of pure magic. She put her hands on her hips.

“Well?”

“Um.” It took a moment to get my mouth working again. “Well—uh—when the bands of crystal moved past where your clothes had been.”

“What?”

“Oh my God,” Yuuka sighed. “You were looking for where the swap happened? Live in the fuckin’ moment, cunt.”

I shrugged helplessly. “What do you want me to say?”

“Am I pretty?” Hina asked. She flirtatiously posed and blew me a kiss. “Look aaaaall you like.”

“Fuck’s sake, bitch,” Yuuka grumbled, though it sounded more like it came from obligation than any really strenuous animosity—and out of the corner of my eye, I saw her glance up toward us.

I tried to ignore that and gave Hina another hesitant up-down, feeling wrong for doing so even with an explicit invitation. “I think…I mean, yeah, you look good,” I admitted. To be fair, it was very hard for Hina to look bad in anything, and this brightly colored display did highlight so many of her best parts, hips and lips and bouncy energy and—I noticed something. Two things, actually, and not meaning her chest for once. “Hold on. Your eyes got less blue.”

It was subtle, and you’d probably not be able to tell the difference at a distance, but I’d spent quite a lot of time sneaking glances at those sapphires up close, and I could tell that the supernaturally rich hue had been ever-so-slightly washed out.

“Yeah,” she confirmed, sounding annoyed. “The meat-eyeballs are real special magic. Real Flame, raw. I told Alice that we could totally get them looking closer, but—”

“No, Hina,” Alice sighed in a way that told me they’d had this argument a hundred times before. “Too much overhead.”

“See!”

“Fair enough,” I reasoned; maybe it was something for us to tinker with later. At least she still had her fangs, which were much easier to imitate. She also had an option for regular human teeth, which I was grateful she wasn’t using here. It was vaguely alarming how much I had come to like my girlfriend’s once-terrifying bestial mouthparts. “Um—testing, right? Everything as it should be?”

Hina broke the pose, flapping her forearms experimentally. “Seems good.” Then she startled me by launching into a cartwheel and vanishing. Before I could worriedly ask the other girls whether that was supposed to happen, she popped back into existence. “Yep! All good!”

I gave Alice a probing glance, wondering if that passed her standards. She shrugged. “If Hina says it’s good, it’s good. Good job, Ezzen.”

“Me?”

Hina snorted. “Yeah, cutie. It’s your work! You made this happen! Be proud!”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. My usual coping mechanism kicked in. “…Thanks? What about testing against the pink disruptors in the actual swords?”

“Got it right here!”

Hina announced that far too casually for somebody who had just pulled a katana out of thin air. She proffered the handle in my direction, and I took a cautious half-step backward. “Um. I’m not much one for swords.”

“C’mon, cutie, this is great! You get to hit me and prove your designs are solid, all in one swing! That’s, like, perfect! Have at me!”

I gave a vaguely panicked look to Alice, who snorted and made to get up. “Hina, if he doesn’t want to, I’ll do it.”

Hina responded to that with a whine and puppy eyes, which were damnably effective even in their slightly off-brand hue. “Fine,” I sighed, hesitantly reaching out and gingerly grabbing the sword’s hilt. It was surprisingly light. “Am I just to…poke you with it?”

“Right in the titty,” Hina purred, which elicited an unhappy noise from Yuuka. Hina rolled her eyes. “Fine, just, like, in the hand. Not like the place should matter, right?”

“Right.” I hefted the sword, bringing the blade close to her outstretched hand. Surely, Hina wasn’t actually going to get off on this, I told myself, not with how the mantles worked. Or maybe she will, argued a treacherous part of my mind. The invitation did feel sort of ritualistic.

I told the voice to shut up, steeled myself, and brought the edge of the blade to Hina’s palm. That should have been enough to activate it, but nothing happened—neither catastrophic damage to the construct nor any kind of breathy moan from my pain-loving girlfriend.

“Yay!” She cheered. “Works for me. Hey, babes,” she shouted over her shoulder unnecessarily, “it works for me!”

“Heard you the first time,” Alice acknowledged, a grin in her voice. Yuuka shook her head. Amane, who had been quiet thus far, gave us a bionic thumbs-up.

I sighed in relief, lowering the sword. Despite myself, I was finally starting to feel a little pride in my work; it was distinctly satisfying to see that not only had my edits not broken anything, they’d also solved the problem, and for once, that included practical proof. I immediately knew how I should ride that wave.

“Well, if it works, then can I be done here? Don’t want to delay on the coffin any more. I, um—okay, not that I don’t want to be helpful, and I do want to see how the mission goes, but I really think I should just—”

“Sure, sure, go ahead,” said Alice. “We can take it from here. Go help Takagiri; Ebi can set you up with a video call to watch us downstairs if you want, yeah?”

“Sounds good.” I gave Hina a shy double thumbs-up of my own. “Stay safe? What am I supposed to say here?”

“That works, but no promises,” she teased, leaning toward me affectionately. I wondered if she was about to kiss me, but instead she just reached out and pried the sword from my hand, simulacral fingers pressing under mine in a way that was almost as intimate. “We’ll be back soon. Gotta go kill a monster.”

3.03 Patreon Release

Making a mantle was a lot more involved than the instinctive immediacy of blood magic. I needed a full infomantic scan of my body, custom substrates, a lot of integration testing, and likely days’ worth of weaving for the final implementation once every other step was completed. I certainly wasn’t getting it done today, and I doubted I would get anywhere beyond the basic skeleton of the diagram before I needed the Radiances’ help.

They’d be involved anyway, of course; Alice had stipulated that a mantle would be necessary if I were to eventually go hunting with Hina, presumably for combat capability. But that was secondary to the true appeal: an alternate version of my body, one that I could fully customize to look however I wished, a face I could show the world that wasn’t this.

While I was pondering this, the chatroom exploded

starstar97: thana what the FUCK

DendriteSpinner: Hey maybe don’t be posting that?

starstar97: not cool

moth30: yo

The image vanished from the chat a moment later.

skychicken: @thanasen don’t post irl photos of chat members

starstar97: ^

thanasen: oh sorry

Sky to the rescue.

ezzen: Thanks, Sky.

ezzen: Yeah, please don’t do that.

My curt reply hid the fact that I was so rattled that my hands were shaking. My response to seeing my own face—or more pertinently, to the fact that my face was now public knowledge—was psychosomatic, sending my blood pressure through the roof and making me feel physically nauseous and a little dizzy. I could see sympathetic DMs from Star piling up in the corner of my screen, but I had to turn my chair away from the keyboard for a moment and just squeeze my eyes shut as the revulsion worked its way through my system.

“Cutie? You okay?”

I opened my eyes to see Hina sitting on the edge of my bed. She was in what had been a full black-and-white skirt suit, appropriate formal wear for a TV apology, but she’d shed the jacket, undone the buttons on her shirt, and ditched the skirt. Her cerulean eyes were full of concern and immediately soothed me.

“Uh. I think so. Now that you’re here,” I added lamely. It was sappy and romantic but true. “How long have you been there?”

“Just got here.” She hopped to her feet and hopped over to me while pulling her socks off, never seeming in danger of falling over. She tossed them aside and bent over to nuzzle my face.

I felt my heart slow and reached up to touch her neck; it just felt right. “Okay, yeah, definitely better now. I was just—” I separated from her and pointed at the screen, where the chatroom was angrily buzzing along. “Dealing with stuff.”

“Mm.” The blue eyes traced over to my main monitor. “Mantle patch?”

I blinked. “Uh, yeah. Mostly done now, just routed the pink leak into a water splitter offgas, based on what Takagiri did in her own mantle. Should mean the swords have minimal impact now, if we—uh, you, I apparently can’t come, sorry—run into more on the hunt. Which is tonight, apparently,” I rambled, mouth running on autopilot while my eyes wandered around my girlfriend’s front. God, she was hot, half-undressed like this. A welcome distraction, arrived at just the right moment.

Hina acknowledged my gaze with a teasing little wiggle and a grin, her arms reaching past me to rest on the chair’s backrest, trapping me. “Tonight, hm?”

“Uh, yeah,” I stammered, blushing, “so I really need to get it done. It’s most of the way there, I think.”

Her expression shifted a little. “You weren’t working on it when I came in.”

“I was…dealing with stuff, like I said. Um. I don’t know, just people being idiots and not respecting privacy.” I tried to swallow down the residue of the panic attack. “There’s been some yelling about your apology, too, but I think that hasn’t got much bearing on how it actually went?”

She shrugged. “Went okay. Hate the fucking suit, hate the cameras. Missed you the whole time. Scooch over.”

I complied, making some room in the chair, and Hina happily tossed herself into the gap next to me, cuddling against me. The chair definitely wasn’t meant for two people, but she made it work. A different kind of shudder passed through me. “Um, yeah, I missed you too.”

A purr passed through her body. “Tell me I did a good job. With the apology.”

“I didn’t watch it,” I admitted.

“Doesn’t matter!”

“Okay. Good job? Well done, Hina?”

The purr intensified, which made it easy to dismiss the habitual discomfort at letting somebody else see what was on my computer as I swung our chair back toward the keyboard. I’d been discussing gender stuff with Star, and it was fine by me if Hina saw that.

ezzen: Yeah, I’m okay.

Hina snorted. I rolled my eyes.

ezzen: But that reminded me that my face is out there in public, and I wanna do something about that.

ezzen: Test out bodies and faces with a mantle until I find one that fits me.

starstar97: ooooooo

Hina echoed Star’s intrigue, shifting against me and making a curious noise. “Mm?”

“…I don’t like my face,” I admitted aloud to her. “Which is something we can deal with magically, right?”

“Masks,” Hina confirmed. “Always masks.” She sounded a little sad, and I brought a hand off the keyboard to awkwardly pat her knee. She shifted against me. “You shouldn’t have to care about what they think.”

“Hina,” I warned. We were trying to work on her habit of othering normal humans.

“I—sorry,” she whined, “not trying to be all us-versus-them about it, but it’s just fuckin’ dumb! I don’t want to wear their fuckin’ costumes, their uniforms, and that’s bad enough when it’s just clothes. Stupid suits and big conferences with cameras.”

I nodded sympathetically while I waited for Star to reply. When she did, it floored both of us.

starstar97: ok, gender exploration hypothetical, stop me if this feels unproductive or like its putting you in a box: if you had to look like one of the radiances, which would you pick?

I gaped at the screen, then glanced at my shoulder, where Hina was firmly pressed up against me. The blue eyes darted up from the screen to meet mine, and we shared a long moment of awkward silence.

“Do I tell her I literally have one of them pressed up against me? She’d die of jealousy.”

“I’m actually curious, cutie.”

Oh no. Hina was taking this seriously—I was being tag teamed by my girlfriend and best friend. “Um. None?”

“Bullshit. I see the way you look at all of us. How about Yuuka? Big ol’ titties strike your fancy?”

I leaned away from my girlfriend in what little space I had to do so. “Whether it ‘strikes my fancy’ is beside the point, isn’t it?”

“Lotta overlap between what you’re attracted to and what you want to be.”

“Fine, but—I don’t want big ol’ tit—” I cut myself off before I could finish the vulgar word; it felt horribly offensive to use for somebody I knew. “Fine, no, not Yuuka. Too short, anyway.”

“Hmm. Tell her that,” Hina commanded.

“What, tell Yuuka?”

“No, cutie, tell your internet friend.”

“Oh.”

ezzen: Not Heliotrope. Don’t want to be short.

starstar97: so no big fuckin titties for ez… hm

starstar97: go on (☆ω☆)

I sighed, exasperated. Hina snorted.

“Alice?”

“Are we counting the tail?”

Hina shrugged, which I felt more than I saw. “Ask.”

ezzen: Does Opal include the tail?

starstar97: is there a reason it shouldnt

ezzen: Academic rigor?

starstar97: opal includes tail

“Then no. Huge inconvenience.”

“But she’s massively pretty.”

“She…is,” I conceded. Even saying that out loud, and even when specifically prompted to do so, felt like an overstep. “But that’s not—I don’t look at her face and go ‘God, I wish that were me.’ Which is what Star is after, I think.”

Hina nodded against my chest, which I took as my cue to report these findings.

ezzen: No Opal then, either. Nor Sapphire.

“Hey! Grr.”

“I mean, I want your physicality, but I don’t want to look like you.”

And I definitely didn’t want Star to start talking about my girlfriend’s body in too much depth when she was right here. Even though Hina would probably like that, because it was sure to get me flustered.

starstar97: damn so no boobs AND no hips?

starstar97: really leaning away from the feminine figure then huh

That brought me up short, surprisingly. Yes, I wasn’t particularly enamored with femininity, but I hadn’t considered my dismissal of Alice and Hina to be dismissing the two most…be-hipped…of the Radiances, at least in terms of the proportion to their waists, and now that I was thinking of it in those terms…

Hina watched the gears turn in my head, tantalizing cerulean in the corner of my eye.

“Hips are good,” she prompted.

“Hips…are good,” I realized. Would I feel less inclined to hide my body under layer upon layer of heavy, form-obscuring clothing if I had more of a figure to show off? I wasn’t sure—but that wasn’t an immediate and obvious “no” in the way I had responded to having a chest like Yuuka’s. “Huh.”

ezzen: Raincheck on the hips specifically.

Hitting enter on the message, admitting it to somebody who wasn’t literally pressed up against me, made it suddenly feel real, so strongly that it was an actual sensation, an odd but not entirely unwelcome pressure in my core.

starstar97: OOH

starstar97: that sounds like progress!

ezzen: I guess it is? It’s definitely something. But I still don’t want to BE a girl.

Hina shifted to nuzzle my neck as I typed that out. I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, but it felt nice.

starstar97: ofc ofc

starstar97: does that make sapphire your pick?

“Uh.” I didn’t particularly want it to be.

“Hmmm,” Hina hummed against me. “No love for Ai? Muscles good,” she pointed out.

“Muscles good,” I conceded, “and there’s…nothing wrong with how she looks. She’s quite…quite pretty, actually. Strong and toned, but not too bulky.” I reflexively rubbed my bicep in a futile attempt to dispel the awkwardness of rating somebody I lived with. “But if I’m headed in the direction you are, mutations-wise, then that’s not really a factor, is it? I’ll hardly have any muscle mass at all and still be ludicrously strong, right?”

Hina giggled. “Yep! Sounds like that’s what you want, so that’s what the Flame will give you.”

That gave me something more abstract to latch on to, bigger yet safer to discuss.

“Why’s it such wish fulfillment for you and not the others?” I realized a moment later that that was a slightly stupid question. It had fulfilled Alice’s wish and put a twist on it, and in a way, it had done the same with Hina—her emotional extremes were hardly an unalloyed blessing. I revised the thought before Hina could explain what I’d already figured out. “Is Todai an outlier, or does the Flame select for people who want to change? I mean, you, me, Alice, Sky, Takagiri…”

Could that have something to do with why I was twice-touched? Was my desire to be something else part of why the Flame had chosen me? The first time, I’d been a kid. Now I was…not quite an adult, but in that intermediary phase, right at the cusp, at the boundary of change. That felt significant, based on what I now understood of the Flame’s relationship with emotion and desire.

“Maybe! What about Amane?”

“Oh—yeah, of course she’d want to change too, Christ. Sorry for leaving her out.”

“No, I meant would you want to look like her.”

“Oh. Uh—” I was aware Hina had dodged the question, but I figured we might as well address the last Radiance. “Her hair’s really nice.”

“Mm,” Hina agreed, reaching up to run her hair through my fingers. “You jealous?”

“Uh. A little, now that you say it. Hers is so…well-maintained.”

“You can do that too, y’know. Everything she uses is off the shelf.”

“Yeah, but—” I floundered for a moment, trying to find a less plaintive way to express my objection, then gave up. “It’s work.”

“But you’ll look so good.”

I didn’t have a rebuttal to that. I reached for the keyboard again.

ezzen: Okay, uh, maybe Amethyst too? Human form, not mantle. So something between her and Hina? Specifically hips and hair, if I had to name specific features?

starstar97: hmmmmm

starstar97: fem bone structure, long hair (in your bizarre anime orange), not much in the way of boobs

starstar97: and of course carapace right

ezzen: I thought this was about the Radiances?

starstar97: only as a baseline

starstar97: one sec

“Heh,” Hina chuckled. “She’s got your number.”

“She’s known me a lot longer than you have,” I pointed out.

“Sure, yeah, true. But I love you more!” She wriggled upward to plant a kiss on my jaw. “Glad you got rid of the stubble, BTW, you look better without it. More kissable, too. A little sad I wasn’t the one to burn it away, though.”

“Sorry?”

“Make it up to me in bed.”

I’d had a good streak of staying calm-faced despite our proximity so far, but that’s what finally broke me. I reddened. “Uh?”

“Later, later. You’re busy, right?”

I blinked, realizing I had been supposed to resume work on mantle stuff at least twenty minutes ago. “Oh, shit, I gotta get back to work.”

Before I could make good on that, Star sent an image. It was of an anime girl, with orange hair in twintails like Yuuka’s, but with no such voluptuous chest—a milder figure, closer to Amane’s, clearly delineated by the skintight red suit she wore. Spandex, maybe, and clearly high tech. I found the word after a moment—a plugsuit, hugging her hips and waist and leaving nothing yet everything to the imagination. On those hips her hands rested, and she bore a smug expression.

I didn’t recognize the character, being relatively unplugged from anime culture despite the company I kept, but my anime-inspired girlfriend did. She cackled.

“Oh my god, she’s right, you wanna be Asuka Evangelion. Ha!”

I squinted at the anime girl, then frowned. “No I don’t. I never specified I wanted to keep the neon hair!”

“Neon Hair Ezvangelion,” she whispered.

“And a plugsuit is not armor!”

—

I kicked Hina out because she couldn’t stop laughing and I had to get back to work. She accepted the ejection easily, telling me through her giggle fit that she’d come back later to retrieve me for dinner and to “get in the fucking mantle,” which was a reference I had to look up once she left the room. Apparently, she planned to gather the whole team for a pre-mission dinner, which would also save me the trouble of hunting down all of the participating Radiances to individually work with them on patch implementations.

As I proceeded through the integration work on the mantle patch, accounting for the subtle differences in tuning between the control circuitry of each girl’s lattice-manifest body, I got a better picture of how my own mantle might come together. Star’s thought experiment was useful for defining the aesthetics I wanted, which were admittedly the main point of wanting a mantle at all. We kept chatting as I worked.

starstar97: idk i think i was on the money

ezzen: With her figure? Sure. But twintails are girly.

I was slightly less cross with Star for bringing the anime character up in the first place than I was with Hina. In the privacy of the one-on-one direct message, I could admit that “Asuka” was a useful metric for honing in on the look I wanted.

starstar97: amethysts hairstyle then?

ezzen: Or something like that. That was pretty much how my new hair looked when I got it, anyway

starstar97: what changed

ezzen: Uh

ezzen: Haven’t really been brushing it so it’s kind of tangly now

starstar97: !!!!

starstar97: SHAME

starstar97: will be a little moot either way though if the mantle becomes your default i guess

ezzen: That’s probably a while away even if I had the exact design ready right now .-.

starstar97: yeah but its a GOAL

starstar97: and like

starstar97: one you can actually make progress toward

This was a touchy subject for Star.

ezzen: Sorry

ezzen: Your situation fucking sucks.

starstar97: IT DOESSSS

starstar97: airlift me to tokyo /j

starstar97: /hj actually. pls

starstar97: then at least id be able to grow my fucking hair out

starstar97: fuck this fucking country

Star was living as a man, because the alternative was at minimum being fired from her job and likely actual danger to her life. She loathed it, but lacked the means to escape, and it was frustrating beyond belief.

But that was only half of the unfairness. Even if we could rescue her, bring her to a place where she had the safety and resources to transition to the greatest extent possible, she was still bound by the limits of science and medicine. No mantle for her, no magical full-body replacement like what Alice had undergone. It shouldn’t have to be this way.

It didn’t have to be this way, I realized.

ezzen: I’ll see what I can do.

ezzen: That’s a promise.

starstar97: wut

starstar97: send sapphire to kidnap me too pls??

ezzen: Uhh well I can’t quite promise that, but I also want to like…ACTUALLY follow through on magical transition stuff for regular people. Not fair that it’s an option for me and not for you.

starstar97: oh

starstar97: holy shit yeah thatd be rad if you can find the time and.. permission or whatever you need

starstar97: can todai, like, actually back that

ezzen: I hope so.

Privately, I thought they likely would, at least if we could collectively find the time for research once everything cooled down. It wasn’t a problem of resources, at least—the challenge was mostly one of magical theory.

starstar97: your transition comes first though

starstar97: let me know if you want to brainstorm more stuff for the mantle, asuka

ezzen: argh

I sent that message with a smile, though, and a weird sense of power, a feeling I could do some good beyond what lay in my immediate surroundings.

Star was right, though: mantle work did come first. I minimized the chatroom and set about the fresh challenge of integrating the changes I had designed. I had to get this done by tonight.

—

Dinner went awry.

The Radiances trickled into the penthouse’s common area one by one. Hina was already there, of course, surrounded by a growing pile of used dishes and intermediate ingredients as she concocted a meal that would nourish all of us for the long night ahead, even though only three would actually be heading out. I made to join in with the preparation, but she waved me off and insisted I just go sit down and wait; for this dish, apparently, two cooks was too many for the kitchen.

Honestly, that was frustrating; the sense of looming deadline regarding tonight’s mission made me antsy to do something and help out. I’d gotten the mantle patches done, at least as far as I could within the purely abstract realm of a GWalk file. The next step was for the Radiances to make the changes themselves, and that had been designated as an after-dinner activity, and that couldn’t happen until dinner was done, so I wanted to help with dinner. But Hina had a process, and I wasn’t to interfere.

I instead took a seat at the low table, in the position facing the windows that was apparently becoming my designated spot, and filled the time by continuing to work on my own tentative mantle designs on my phone, purely at the brainstorming and planning level. It was beginning to dawn on me just how complex of a project this was; all I’d managed to do so far was just lay out the most basic skeleton, the framework that said “this is a body made of LM;” the control circuitry was a placeholder, and all the physical details of appearance were locked behind making a scan of my body to use as a starting point.

I put my phone down when the elevator made its characteristic ding, too embarrassed to share or even risk exposing what I was working on. Alice trudged out the elevator, headed straight for one of the sofas, and made it about halfway through opening her laptop to continue working before Hina appeared next to her and snatched the device from her lap.

“No overtime!”

Alice silently accepted the intervention, rubbing her forehead where her not-horns definitely weren’t growing, and splayed herself out face-down on the sofa instead, her tail rising up from her butt like a pale mound and draping off the furniture’s edge in a way that didn’t seem great for her back.

I glanced at Hina with some concern, who shrugged, unworried.

“She’ll be recharged by the time we eat, just let her rest.”

“If you say so.”

Yuuka was next, heralded first by a dull, thrumming roar coming from outside the window, then by a soft thump overhead as her jetbike touched down on the rooftop landing pad, then by the footsteps of her trotting down the stairs to the upper level to take off her shoes, jacket, and accessories. By the time she came into view, she’d stripped down to just a long, high-waisted skirt and an undershirt, much less adorned than other outfits I’d seen her in. It retained the eyepatch, at least, but she was already pulling it off as she sniffed the air.

“Gyuniku?”

“Bulgogi, yeah, but not beef for you,” Hina clarified. “You’re getting those shredded soy-meat things. How were classes?”

Yuuka ignored the question except for a mild grumble as she descended the last flight of stairs to our level and crossed the room to the loveseat next to Alice’s couch, apparently unwilling to make small talk with her teammate. She had words for me when she sat down, though.

“Something about mantle upgrades?”

“Uh, yeah, just making sure Takagiri’s swords don’t mess with your—”

“I don’t want ya fucking around with my body,” she interrupted. She said it with a growl, but a halfhearted one, like it was coming from a place of obligation more than real hostility. “But it’s not like you can slip anything in there without me knowing, I guess.”

“I mean…yeah, you’re the one who has to implement it,” I managed, a little unsure at what kind of tone this conversation was supposed to have. Was I supposed to be offended? “Hina said we’d get to that after dinner.”

“No, you stupid cunt, I’d know because of the…” she began to point at her eye, then just gave up and groaned. “Whatever.”

Alice grunted from the sofa. “Yuuka, you don’t actually hate him. Save your energy.”

The Heliotrope Radiance physically recoiled from the mild rebuke, but didn’t argue against it. Alice hadn’t even deigned to raise her head.

Silence stretched onward for a time, growing more oppressive and cloying the longer it sat, like once-fresh mayonnaise left for too long in the fridge. Yuuka and I both retreated to our respective phones until the elevator announced its arrival with a ding. Amane stepped out, Ebi right by her side.

She looked good, all things considered. She’d clearly not just rolled out of her medical bed to meet us; her long hair was damp and she seemed in good spirits as she came over to the rest of us, plopping herself down in the loveseat next to Yuuka in much the same way Hina had sat with me in my room, though the plush chair had a little more space to share between them. Yuuka visibly brightened with her friend so close by, and the two girls tittered at each other quietly in Japanese, saving me from the awkward distance. Ebi took up her post over her charge’s shoulder.

[Direct Message] ebi-furai: hows your hand?

I gave her a questioning look, though I wasn’t really one to complain if she’d rather talk via text.

ezzen: Fine? Takagiri’s thing was just localized. Is she doing alright?

ebi-furai: no.

I winced.

I spent the next few minutes idly working on my prospective mantle’s diagram on my phone while we waited for the last Radiance to arrive and for dinner to be ready. As the minutes dragged by, it became harder to ignore how hungry I was; I’d mostly forgotten to eat today, and bulgogi was one of those foods that announced its presence loud and clear, filling the air with garlic, ginger, sesame, and all the other things that were good in the world. My stomach rumbled as I shifted in my seat—and Hina must have heard it despite being surrounded by sizzling pans, because she half-turned her head to fix me with a sapphire side-eye of concern. I hurriedly mouthed “I’m good” at her, not wanting her to rush on my account.

At last, Hina finally started plating up piles of grilled meat and veggies over rice and distributing them across the table, drawing the others to take their usual spots. But one of us was still missing.

“Somebody needs to go get her,” Yuuka opined.

“Might have lost track of the time,” I agreed. “Especially if Takagiri isn’t doing great.”

Alice, slightly zombie-like after her power nap, glanced at Ebi. “Well?”

The android shrugged, the interlocking blue plates of her shell shifting hypnotically with the motion. “Am I my mother’s keeper?”

“Yes,” chorused Alice, Hina, and Yuuka.

“Fair enough. She’s already in the elevator.”

Satisfied with that answer, everyone finished settling in at their spots at the table. There seemed to be a silent agreement that nobody was to begin eating until all had arrived, which overrode the growling of Alice’s stomach and my own, despite the tempting, alluringly steaming dish placed right in front of me. We waited a few more seconds in silent anticipation.

Right before the elevator dinged, Yuuka scrambled to her feet. “Aw, cunt.”

The elevator announced one last arrival. A grinding ache crept into my hand, and for a moment, I shared Yuuka’s prescience. Amane’s sharp intake of breath told me she did as well. The elevator doors slid open, and there was Ai—with Takagiri in tow.

Overlapping voices broke into a cacophony, with Yuuka’s rising above all the others.

“What the fuck are you thinking?”

3.02 Patreon Release

[CW: unreality]

------

If one were told that there was something in the corner by someone running on a life-threateningly severe sleep deficit, most rational people would find it easy to dismiss. But Takagiri was a flamebearer, and things are often weird for us, especially when it comes to what we see. The eyes are the window to the soul, after all. So, just to be on the safe side, the first thing I did was yell.

“EBI!”

This didn’t actually summon Ebi like a spirit from the ether; as far as I was aware, she was still up on the eighteenth floor, and we were in the basement, and it still took time to traverse the space between. However, she was hooked into all the CCTV cameras, the PA system, and, let’s face it, probably also my phone. In a split second, she heard me, reviewed the footage, and relayed my panic to Ai. Moments later, the Emerald Radiance charged through the door to join us.

She entered with superhuman physicality, nearly shoving the door off its hinges and launching from the threshold to right in front of us in what felt like a single step. The tattoo on her back was aglow, softly shining through the fabric of her ratty tank top in most places but retina-piercingly bright where it peeked out at her shoulders and the base of her neck. The emerald ink burned near lime as the Radiance stared at the corner Takagiri had indicated.

“Ebi says there’s nothing on the cameras. Izumi-san?”

Takagiri replied in Japanese, sounding unsure enough that it was clear she was saying something along the lines of “I think I’m hallucinating.”

Ai nodded and materialized something into her hand—a pair of what looked like snowboarding goggles, its lens reflecting the room in blue. She pulled it onto her head and stared into the corner.

“Nani mo nai.”

“J—just a hallucination, then?” I asked, uncertain. My non-existent hackles were raised—removed though they were by blood magic—and my skin crawled with the insistence that something was there, despite all evidence to the contrary. I forced myself to relax, trying to focus on the exceedingly awesome tech Ai had whipped out. “What do the goggles do?”

I knew the answer, of course, but this was a self-distraction tactic to force some normality onto the spookiness, not genuine interest.

“Ripple visualizer.” She pulled the headset off and checked the top edge of the padded rim for something. “A little red and pink in the walls, but that’s just Ebi.” She put the goggles back into her pocketspace, apparently satisfied, but cast a suspicious glower at the creepy corner just to verify, as though her unmodified meat-eyes might reveal something the ten thousand-dollar detection equipment hadn’t.

Takagiri, for her part, was alternating between doing the same and rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Kieta,” she muttered. “Gone.”

Ai nodded, at last willing to turn her back on the empty corner and face us. “I’m going to call it a hallucination. Izumi-san, mou daijoubu nano?”

Takagiri nodded several times, a small, jerky, repetitious motion that seemed to be more to reassure herself than to reply to Ai’s question. She muttered something in response, then said it again in English.

“I don’t want to be here.”

“Okay. Ezzen, save what you’re working on, and let’s go somewhere else—my office.”

“Huh?” I blinked. “Oh, yeah, sure.” I scooted my chair back in to reach the keyboard.

As my hand wrapped around the mouse, I felt something wrong. The joints of my fingers ached. That wasn’t the most uncommon thing in the world, but it was usually a product of the weather, and it simply wasn’t cold enough in here for it. And as far as I knew, the only other thing that caused my hand to ache like that was—

“Red ripple.” I turned to Ai and raised my makeshift ripple detector.

She understood my meaning immediately and pulled out the goggles again, tugging them over her head in a hurry, ignoring how the strap caught her ponytail against her head. She frowned. “Nothing.”

As she turned back to me and Takagiri, though, she froze and sucked in a breath. Takagiri looked woozy, blinking repeatedly, and was wobbling on her feet. The ache in my fingers spread to the stump of my foot as Ai and I realized simultaneously that Takagiri was the source of the ripple. Ai reached out and grabbed her wrist, and Takagiri jerked to wakefulness with a scream. She looked around, crazy-eyed and terrified, as though not remembering where she was. 

The pain in my hand spiked to a boiling throb as Takagiri locked eyes with Ai—then began to ebb away as she shuddered and sagged against the wall. She sank into herself, heaving sobs of terror that pulled at my heart. Ai immediately dropped to one knee to console her while I stood there, awkward and unsettled. I wanted to help—but first, I wanted to get the hell out of this room. I turned and cast one more wary glance at the corner that had started all this; still empty. Ai noticed and asked Takagiri something, presumably whether she still saw anything. She shook her head slowly, nonverbal.

We cleared out anyway. I spent the next minute still awkwardly standing there while Ai coaxed Takagiri to her feet, encouraging and soothing, with all the protective care of a big sister despite being easily twenty-five years younger than the Hikanome leader-assassin. As she finally convinced her to get up, the Emerald Radiance shot me a glance full of worry and suppressed panic.

We were running out of time.

—

Ai took Takagiri to the prosthetic fitting room to make sure she was alright—even aside from the psychological effects of whatever she’d dreamt in that micro-sleep, spilling out that much red ripple just by existing was never good. I would have come along, but this wasn’t my specialty; my way of helping Takagiri lay in helping the Radiances bring Sugawara to justice and end his nocturnal assaults on her mind, and that meant I had to keep working on the mantle patch.

I awkwardly wished them luck and returned to my room to keep working, hurrying to get as far away from the creepy encounter as I could. That meant another trip back down the basement hall, some time going up the elevator, and a half-hobbling walk across the landscape of beanbag chairs that made up the upper-level common area. The whole time, I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting yet hoping not to see…something. Sugawara’s ghost, I suppose. By the time I returned to my room, my nerves had settled somewhat, and once I threw off my shoes, disengaged my prosthetic, curled up in the big, padded chair Ebi had gotten me, and booted up my PC, I felt better. At least now I had something else to focus on.

It was wonderful to have my own proper workstation again, and this one was far in excess of anything I’d had access to previously. With three monitors, I had more screen space than ever before; no more splitting my single screen to have a too-cramped GWalk session on the left half and various documentation on the right, or being forced to tab between them for the luxury of full-width windows. Instead, I now had a full, high-resolution screen of GWalk on the center display, all the documentation I needed on the left, and the right monitor gave me space to always be able to see the chatroom. It occurred to me that I could maybe rotate that monitor to a vertical position to have the chatroom on top and something for music on the bottom, but that was a project for later.

Takagiri had given me enough theory to go off of; the swords were straightforward, and I had a solid picture in my head of how they damaged the mantles, so from there, patching the vulnerability in each mantle’s diagram was only two steps: modify the relevant mechanisms and make sure I hadn’t broken anything downstream in the process. The core of the first step was to address the leak on the gyroscope; Takagiri had briefly described the necessary changes for that, so I knew where I was headed.

The gyro assembly as implemented in the Radiances’ mantles was a gyroscope in name only, with no actual mechanical, electronic, or optical assemblies like you’d see in an aircraft. Instead, the same function was achieved with an {ALIGN}:4-{DIFFERENTIATE} block, which was a cheap, high-resolution way to determine which direction was up as well as account for rotational changes by just multiplexing the four spatial cardinal directions and checking for changes in orientation. It was a standard implementation for when precision was important; in this case, to ensure a clean interface with the senses of the piloting Radiance, because a misalignment between their internal sense of orientation and the mantle’s actual position would render the magical construct basically uncontrollable.

In most contexts, the small amount of free pink ripple exuded by this approach was negligible; within the information-altering domain of pink ripple, the particular effect of this leak would usually just pigeonhole into some minor color distortions on nearby photographs, or maybe key changes in music if there happened to be any. But Takagiri’s swords, and any other anti-mantle weapons wielded by other Sugawara loyalists using the same principle, were specifically designed to use this free ripple to damage the gyroscope upstream in the chain and, from there, mangle a bunch of other systems downstream, so this ripple had to be addressed. It was essentially a cyberattack—leak, vulnerability, exploit. So I needed to make a patch.

I could have replaced the gyroscope assembly wholesale with another approach—an LM imitation of a physical gyroscope would be fun to model and wouldn’t have this problem—but that would require testing, which GWalk couldn’t do for this sort of sensory and psychomotive interfacing, not without some extra magical hardware or directly asking one of the Radiances to implement it. And we were still on a time budget here; a full teardown and replacement of a core component of the mantle that might not even work correctly was unacceptable when we had maybe twelve hours. Besides, there was a simpler solution: I could just turn the pink ripple into another color with a glyph that could take the color and do something safer and more predictable with it.

Red ripple was right out, obviously, given Amane’s particular vulnerabilities—and nobody save Hina would want their mantle to produce pain as a side effect where not absolutely necessary, nor other sensory effects that would be just as bad for controllability as the aforementioned gyroscope misalignment. Green was similar—coming from an LM construct rather than an organic body, it couldn’t be trusted to reliably pigeonhole into something non-biohazardous for bystanders. Besides, almost none of the glyphs for that color took pink inputs predictably; that was one of the big issues with biomancy.

Orange, the color of ripple concerned with space and distance, was also a no-go. Orange glyphs tended toward spatial distortion, like pocketspaces or the fourspace storage mechanism for the mantles, as well as a bunch of weaving utility glyphs like multiplexers and tension modulators; control flow, in programming terms. Since the actual implementation of all these diagrams was literally weaving Flame through physical space, arbitrarily routing free ripple into orange was almost always a bad idea because it could mess up the whole lattice. Silver and white had no glyphs; they were theoretical models for phenomena more than anything else—barring Yuuka and Miyoko, both of whom interfaced with them glyphlessly. I still didn’t have a clue how.

So, that left blue, the set of glyphs concerned with kinetics and entropy. I could vent energy as heat or alpha radiation or various kinds of kinetic ‘kicks’, all of which were helpful in some situations. In this case though, for the constraints of the mantles’ function and concerns about collateral damage, the obvious and most widely used candidate was {SEVER}. In the diagram, I stuck it in right after the {DIFFERENTIATE}, and a little tinkering with tension and orientation gave me what I was looking for.

What were we severing? The water vapor in the air. Being able to break hydrogen from oxygen was an enormously important process for modern power generation, one of the key ways that magitech had changed everything at an industrial scale—but for this application, I only cared about getting rid of the pink ripple, and {SEVER} was elegant because it was no awkward kinetics, no heat, and no radiation—just hydrogen and oxygen into the surrounding air, and in fairly negligible quantities.

Implementing these changes was a lot of dragging, dropping, changing numbers in boxes, hitting “Build,” and tweaking the numbers again until everything worked how I wanted it to. The {SEVER} had to lead into the rest of the mantle, like the {DIFFERENTIATE} had originally, so it was important that it didn’t mess with the pink signals that were actually being used, only the leakage we were trying to get rid of. This was something GWalk could optimize for me, with the right constraints in place, but I still felt obligated to give everything an eyeball check.

The downstream effects were slightly different across each of the three mantles I was working on; the gyroscope module was the same, but in Hina’s mantle, it also fed the fourth dimensional position and rotation data directly to her neural link, since her mutated brain could take it, and that needed some extra work to integrate. By contrast, Alice and Yuuka’s mantles had intuitive controls for movement in the third dimension, but they had to traverse the w-axis via instrumentation. I wondered what it would take for me to also be able to freely and naturally move through the fourth dimension the way my girlfriend and the Vaetna could. I’d been helpless when trapped outside reality—locking onto my spear to return to Earth had been a clever bit of magic, but conditional, and it hadn’t been as automatic as just stepping kata-ward back home. I wanted that freedom.

I also wanted to take a break now that the broad strokes of the solution were in place. For the first time in two hours, I relaxed my focus on the GWalk window and datasheets and diagrams and sat back in my chair, letting my other senses and awareness of my surroundings seep back in. My neck hurt, for one; I’d been sitting too far forward. I twisted it this way and that, looking for a satisfying crack, but got none. Instead, I was alarmed to find that my usual range of motion had expanded; I could turn my head well past my shoulder without discomfort; more of the changes to my flexibility that I’d seen previously.

“Hm.”

I experimentally unfolded my legs from under me and hefted my right shin in my still-weak arms. I lifted my foot to my chest easily, knee and hip swiveling easily to accommodate the motion. I went even higher, until my heel touched my chin.

“Wow.”

Giddiness swept through me. It wasn’t super strength, or speed, or four-dimensional freedom, but it was still unmistakable proof that I’d been altered, mutated beyond the old boundaries of my humanity, becoming something more. We really had to document these more properly with Ai once she was less busy trying to keep Takagiri alive.

I took the giddiness with me to the chatroom, pulling it over to my main monitor. It had been buzzing along to my right throughout the process, but mostly fallen outside of my attention as I had become engrossed in the engineering task. Now, though, it was time for a proper check-in. Early afternoon in Japan was late evening for the Americans, and many of us kept poor sleep schedules, so it was pretty active around now. Unfortunately, this meant I happened to walk directly into a topic that was rather close to home.

starstar97: this kind of speculation doesnt help anyone. the official statement from hikanome put it very clearly, they’re not gonna pursue legal recourse, and todai’s paying for everything

ks3glimmer: that doesn’t absolve sapphire of responsibility! she attacked thousands of civilians, and hundreds of them are going to have long term ripple sickness. there have to be consequences beyond just paying fines. that was barely an apology

Glimmer was at it again, I saw, rapping my fingers on the keyboard as my good mood soured; a mild benefit to my sharp reduction in chatroom presence since coming to Todai had been that I hadn’t had to put up with much of their direct, combative nature. Apparently, my luck had run out, and at an especially poor time: Hina’s official televised apology had just concluded. Twenty minutes ago, according to the clock. I hadn’t wanted to watch it anyway, not when I basically already knew what she was going to say. She’d apologized to me already, after all, and promised to do the same with her teammates. Though based on how my conversation with Alice had gone, I wasn’t sure if she’d actually gotten around to it yet.

At any rate, since the televised apology had taken about twenty minutes, and had ended twenty minutes ago, that meant Star had been acting as Hina’s lawyer here in the chatroom for forty minutes; a noble but unenviable task given that Glimmer seemed intent on painting my girlfriend in as poor a light as possible. Sometimes, I wondered why Sky even let such a combative person stick around.

I decided to intervene, mindful to not make Star’s life any harder by accidentally incriminating Hina further.

ezzen: Hey.

moth30: oh its the uh

moth30: ezzen of the hour

My brow furrowed ever so slightly. I liked the gender-ambiguous turn of phrase, but the message itself felt slightly ominous.

starstar97: hi ez

ezzen: Hi. Anything going on other than the apology?

This did not work.

ks3glimmer: hi ezzen

ks3glimmer: whats your take on sapphire, as someone who lives with her

ks3glimmer: i remember you saying she kinda freaked you out?

“Fuck,” I groaned. I’d forgotten that, as far as the chatroom was concerned, I had a fairly negative relationship with Hina, one characterized by the discomfort I’d felt in the first few days with her, when she’d been feeling me out and courting me via repeated intrusions on my personal space. Summarizing my swing from that state of affairs to the current mess of our relationship simply wasn’t going to be possible without breaking opsec; my fingers hesitated on the keys as I tried to figure out how to express how things had changed.

Fortunately, the rest of the chat also felt that Glimmer’s pivot was uncalled for.

moth30: dont be hounding them, glim

moth30: probably kind of a nightmare in lighthouse right now and trying to make ez of all people incriminate them is just unfair

thanasen: ^

thanasen: ngl ive kinda forgotten ezzen was even there

thanasen: might go refresh on that

thanasen: but yeah, lets drop it here

thanasen: slow day in the lab here

ks3glimmer: -_- i dont feel what i said was particularly out of pocket but sure

ks3glimmer: its not like ebi-furai ever talks about what its like working there so i was just wondering

The others were quick to insist on the change of topic.

starstar97: im good! work sucked but i got pizza

moth30: chillin. you missed the other day’s stream, right?

ezzen: uhh

Five seconds of googling later, I figured out what he meant: there had been a Vaetna stream two days ago, while I was out cold, finishing up the work that had been happening the day I’d been flametouched a few weeks ago. I became a little upset at myself for missing it; three weeks ago, I’d not have dreamed of missing a single Vaetna stream, to such an extent that they had defined my sleep schedule. It was upsetting that I was falling out of touch with the circles that had made up my whole life, even though my actual, material conditions had come much closer to realizing my dream of becoming a Vaetna.

Then again, this time wasn’t really my fault.

ezzen: Was out cold, sorry.

moth30: lmao you don’t need to apologize for surviving

moth30: nice hair btw

moth30: why the change? (if thats a comfy topic)

Oh. Right. Even though my new hair had been a steady weight on my head and shoulders, I’d barely given it any thought and had mostly forgotten it was there—I hadn’t even looked in a mirror since the morning of the barbecue. The orange strands, which had begun their lives as a perfectly laminar curtain of dark LM, were now starting to get tangled and messy, as was inevitable when it was long enough to go down my back. I didn’t actually know how to manage that—just brush it in the shower? I wondered if I could avoid asking the Radiances about it and learn entirely through YouTube. Though the idea of Hina helping brush my hair in my spacious shower was…I shook it off.

More importantly, Moth’s message was a reminder that everyone had seen my new hair. My stomach lurched as I thought of all the Hikanome members holding up their phones, recording me and Yuuka opening the tunnel, and then all the drama at the end of our fight with Takagiri. It was global news—which meant my ill-gotten hairstyle had been immortalized on camera and seen by millions. This would have been bad enough in itself, but everyone also knew that the hairstyle was new, since I’d been caught on camera briefly during my escape from the PCTF. I had mostly been a dark lump in the short, handheld video, but that was enough to indicate the change from brown to neon orange, from neck length to back length.

But it was a change I didn’t hate. Being seen for it felt bad, and it made me feel somewhat exposed, but the actual change of hair was growing on me. And these were my friends. I swallowed and decided to be brave.

ezzen: Thanks. It was an accident, blood magic. I got a haircut I hated and used magic to fix it, then screwed up and changed the color.

starstar97: it looks great!

moth30: ^

starstar97: honestly fabulous while you were fighting, blowing in the shockwaves like that

The compliments made me feel shockingly good, a mixture of relief and just…elation. Was this the rumored gender euphoria? Whatever it was, it was nice. I was a little surprised that seemed to be the sum total of reactions, though. Something compelled me to probe.

ezzen: …No comment on the use of blood magic over glyphcraft?

moth30: even the great ezzen feels the irresistible siren song of unsafe shortcuts

moth30: we’ve all been there

[Direct Message] starstar97: OF COURSE I HAVE COMMENT ON THE BLOOD MAGIC

I tabbed over, relieved she was going with the most direct approach—and was promptly met with the last message I had sent her, the one where I had admitted to her both the act and the fact that it may not have been due to solely Vaetna-related dysphoria. That was probably why I’d felt the need to ask that follow-up question; I’d half-put this out of my mind because it had been right between Alice cracking my gender egg and my dealing with Hina’s moping, and I’d been too physically and emotionally exhausted to check if Star had even seen the message, but some part of me must have remembered that I’d never gotten a reply.

Evidently, Star had not seen the message, and took an uncomfortably long time to follow up. My trepidation slowed the passage of time, far more mundane than when I’d tapped into Yuuka’s silversight but equally glacial, each second feeling like minutes as my best friend composed a response to my gender reveal. I couldn’t take it.

ezzen: pls hit send

starstar97: i see

A too-short message for the time she’d spent typing.

ezzen: …you see

starstar97: HOLY FUCK IM PROUD OF YOU E

starstar97: youre really valid and on the one hand its a little ridiculous that being flametouched and literally joining a magical girl team is what it took to finally crack your egg but on the other hand i know things were really hard and dysphoria haze for you before and im really proud of you for seeing it. thanks for trusting me with this

starstar97: howd it happen, other than haircut? was it like a big moment of realization after the haircut or was it like, cooking over the past couple weeks ever since coming to todai and youre only telling me now that the hair is out of the bag? its fine if thats the case btw, no judgment, i get it. youre way braver than me either way

ezzen: uh

This was a lot at once. “How did it happen” was an insanely loaded question, and one I had to tread cautiously about—as much as I trusted Star, if she knew one of her biggest idols was a trans woman like her, and moreover that Kimura was Takagiri and was therefore also trans, she’d explode. So I employed a little white lying.

ezzen: More like moment of realization, I guess?

I told the story from front to back, beginning with the dreadful, agonizing haircut and ending with where we were now, including the Radiances’ support of me after the haircut but leaving out the revelations at the very end of the inferno and the specifics of my egg-cracking conversation with Alice. Instead, I semi-invented a version of events where I enhanced my body with magic during the fighting—which was true—and that led me to the realization afterward that simply transcending my physical limits wasn’t enough, not in concert with my very strong feelings about my body and facial hair.

ezzen: So yeah, it’s all kind of a big mush of Vaetna transhumanism and, like, not wanting to be male? Or at least not liking a male, human body? I don’t really know yet but I’m trying to figure it out between all the political shit going on over here.

Star had been very polite and refrained from interrupting as I worked through the story, but the moment I sent that message, she pounced.

starstar97: so the radiances knew and now youre out to them. and theyre supportive?

ezzen: Entirely. I know what you’re going to ask next, btw, about trying to get them to help research transition magic in an actual lab and the resources they’ve got. Idk yet.

starstar97: …

starstar97: i mean yeah i WAS gonna ask that but first i was gonna ask about your own plans for transition

ezzen: oh

I hadn’t actually given that any thought—I didn’t even know what my ideal form was, let alone how I’d get there. Star was light-years ahead of me.

starstar97: do they prescribe estrogen over there? is it more of a DIY situation? no way todai couldn’t under-the-table you some, worst comes to worst

starstar97: wait

starstar97: holy shit

starstar97: EZTROGEN

ezzen: :\

starstar97: saving that one for when you come out to the chat in proper

starstar97: (no pressure though!)

ezzen: <3

ezzen: this is a lot

ezzen: Idk anything about transition. Does the word even apply here? All the changes I want can come from my Flame, I hope.

Whatever changes those were.

starstar97: can they

starstar97: thats good then

starstar97: and uhhh maybe you havent thought this far ahead yet buuuuuut

starstar97: whats the over/under on “radiance ezzen”? since you’ve kinda already gone through the gauntlet of a whole inferno event and a fight with them

starstar97: not saying you should identify as a girl and not enby, but uh. you said sapphire said trans radiances were on the table

starstar97: (did you ever figure out what she meant by that, historically?)

I had, but I couldn’t tell Star that. Hell, Hina could have meant either Alice or potentially Sky, and I could divulge neither.

ezzen: I think she was just pushing my buttons. She sniffed me out first.

Despite how close we’d become, I still found myself shuddering at that first encounter with the hyena. She’d clocked me immediately, I realized, in my totality—both transgender and transhuman. Also, the idea of Hina sniffing me in a more literal sense—

I received a ping from the main chat.

thanasen: @ezzen damn ez you’re actually really good looking what the heck

ezzen: huh

A moment ladder, the attached image loaded—a zoomed in image of my face from when Yuuka and I had made the tunnel.

thanasen: was curious about the hair so I checked some of the videos but even aside from that you’ve actually just got a great face

My heart stopped. Yeah, everyone had seen my hair, because it was impossible to miss the crazy orange even at a distance. But the cameras had also captured my face—shaven smooth, sure, but still immortalized on the internet. They’d seen my face, in detail. My anonymity had been destroyed in full.

They’d seen my face.

Visceral wrongness crashed through me, the same as when the barber’s shears had chopped off my hair. I hated my face; it had become slightly, barely more tolerable to me after I’d forcibly removed all the beard and moustache hair, but it was still wrong. It still didn’t feel like mine, and there was a heart-borne terror at the idea that anybody—everybody—would associate it with me.

The Radiances were one thing, trustworthy, safe, fellow flamebearers; even beyond Alice’s refleshing, they were all well-versed in the art of mask-making, what it meant to separate the private self from the public persona. They had made it literal with their mantles. I had implicitly extended the same grace to the various Todai employees I inevitably encountered in the halls; they were in on the masquerade too, in a lesser sense. But something in me screamed at the idea of being exposed so completely to the world at large, to the masses who would see the meat I called a face and label it Ezzen when it was not.

I needed to cover it up, to replace it with something else, something that was correctly me, the version of me that was right.

My eyes slid back from my second monitor to my first, to the diagram of an entire LM projection of a human body splayed out before me, a fully customizable facsimile. No need for awful, spur-of-the-moment, horrifically bloody and painful sanguimancy this time; I could design the perfect shell, re-establish the distance, the right way, the way I was good at, through lattice-manifest and ingenuity, until the cameras would capture how I ought to look.

I needed to make a mantle.

Poster Comm Series #3: Ai

Another poster by Mjeow! Her necklace is a carbide cutting insert; not actual jewelry she wears, just a prop for the photoshoot. And how about those sweat patches in the alt?

Part of an in-progress series of seven: Hina, Alice, Ai, Amane, Yuuka, Ebi, & Ezzen.

3.01 Patreon Release

The next day, Alice finally found the time to sit me down and debrief the events of the Barbecue Inferno. It was a pale day; the clear and cloudless February sky held nothing to occlude the sunlight as it washed the Tokyo skyline into harsh, neutral off-whites, spilling through the east-facing window of the penthouse’s meeting room and onto the table, bright enough to overwhelm the warmer LED bulbs overhead.

The weather was similar to four days ago, when I’d gone to Yoyogi Park and everything had gone wrong. My phone said the temperature was roughly the same too. This time, though, instead of being shielded from the chill by a reality alteration field of incredible breadth and potency, it was the simple floor-to-ceiling windowpanes, a mundane barrier manifested from Todai’s money rather than Hikanome’s Flame.

Alice had called me in for a general review of that day’s events, but I was impatient to find a moment for my own objective: convince Alice that it was a good idea for Hina and I to go hunting together.

“For what it’s worth, I think you did great,” Alice declared.

I shifted in my chair, tracing my burn scars and savoring the warm sun, such a far cry from the abyssal cold. “Uh. Yeah, I guess.”

This debrief saw neither of us at our best; even with her first full night of sleep in four days, Alice still looked a little haggard, and I was still nowhere near a hundred percent. I’d practically collapsed into Amane’s padded chair after being summoned by the Radiances’ leader. I rubbed my nose, which made Alice smile.

“No, really. Both for the scheduled stuff and the crisis management, I’m really happy with you. Amane says you handled Hikanome’s introduction well. And the…well, not quite an argument…debate about the Spire was good enough. Shows you believe in something enough to stand up for it; they care a lot about that. I think you made a good impression.”

“…But?” I wanted her to hurry up.

“No but. You did well, really!” She nodded to emphasize the statement—it faltered slightly as her eyes scanned down her laptop’s screen. “Well, we do have some notes for you, but nothing you won’t expect.”

“Notes?”

“Um…well, nothing important enough for us to talk about now. It’s already in your email, actually.”

A new email, a lighthouse.co.jp address they’d provided me in the rush to settle me in prior to my appearance at the festival. I’d actually already had a contact email, but they’d insisted I also have a second one for official communications. I shrank in embarrassment as I remembered I hadn’t been checking it even before the barbecue—nor my usual one, which now surely had hundreds of communiques piled up from fellow academics. Both accounts had slipped through the cracks—work I’d be putting off even further in favor of self-indulgent, bloody activities with Hina.

If I could find a moment to bring it up, that was, and Alice wasn’t giving me an opportunity.

“Don’t worry,” she insisted, mistaking my nervousness for one of my countless other forms of discomfort. “What’s much more important is what happens from now, yeah?”

I nodded. Was this my moment to bring it up? I looked down at my hands, building up the courage.

Before I could commit to it, she went on, sitting forward intently. Her voice changed, a little more hesitant and careful. “The big thing is that although you did great, Hina…”

“Did not,” I finished, drumming a scarred finger on the table with annoyance that I’d hesitated. I tried to segue into my pitch. “No—no need to tiptoe around it with me. I know she fucked up, and she’s got to make it right.” I took a breath. “I’m—”

“Hm!”

Alice’s monosyllabic interruption made me raise my eyes; her eyebrows had gone up. She seemed surprised. “I’m—yes. Yes. Yeah.” She sighed. “It’s honestly quite a relief to hear we’re aligned on that already. After Yuuka said you didn’t end up breaking up…”

I grimaced apologetically. What had been intended as a breakup had instead only redoubled whatever sort of strange bond I had with the sapphire-eyed girl, and Yuuka had not been happy in the slightest to find I was remaining a monsterfucker. But at least I was trying to help keep her accountable—shouldn’t that count for something in even the crystalline, vindictive eye of Heliotrope?

It counted with Opal, at least. She scrolled her laptop with one hand and rubbed her forehead with the other, trying to find her new talk track from her notes now that she knew she didn’t have to convince me of Hina’s guilt. Her eyes glittered beautifully in the sunlight, and I was momentarily caught off guard by just how pretty she was. They were all good-looking, but Alice’s face was practically sculpted—no, literally sculpted, by her Flame, into her image of her ideal self. With some dragon bits regrettably stapled on.

Facial beauty aside, Alice was also…hot. It had somehow become more uncomfortable to admit that to myself now—was I just attracted in the normal sense, or was I really feeling envy? The soup of desire-like feelings was so hard to suss out, even now that I knew the latter option was there. Neither possibility made it right for my eyes to slide down to her chest, though, and I quickly averted my gaze toward the window again.

That was another opportunity wasted by distractions. Alice was the one to fill the silence.

“They want a public apology from her.”

“Yeah. You said that, I think. Yesterday.” I cleared my throat, impatience battling with the more practical need to know what else Hina had to get done to clear her image in the eyes of both Hikanome and her teammates. “Um. That’s it? No new laws or fines or anything?”

I’d known Hina’s actions would have repercussions for her and Todai, of course, but the exact nature was quite murky. When we’d visited Tochou, Alice had hinted that Hikanome could exert significant pressure over them—a public apology seemed awfully light. Admittedly, Todai was in a bit of an odd spot legally; most VNT groups of Todai’s caliber were either more tightly controlled by whatever nation they belonged to, were quasi-religious ‘outside the law’ cults like Hikanome, or were more like states or fiefs in themselves.

Alice shook her head. “Well, I think you already know we’re paying for the damage to the park…and we’re also footing the bill for treatment for those affected by ripple sickness or more direct injury, to the tune of…” her eyes scanned down the spreadsheet. I wanted her to get on with it, even though I was the one who’d asked for details. “We’re still doing spreadsheets for the exact amount. Three or four billion yen, I’d say, to be paid out over the next thirty years. Technically it’s just a big donation to FVI, but I expect Ai will want to be a bit more hands-on in helping out.”

“FVI?”

“Foundation for Victims of Infernos. They’re like the Asian version of the PARC.”

“Ah.” I understood it when she phrased it like that; the PCTF’s Paranatural Aid and Relief Committee was the organization that had paid my welfare and provided my housing in Bristol.

As for the number, I whipped out my phone to convert to a currency I knew, but Alice preempted me.

“Twenty-five million dollars.”

“Jesus.” That was a mind-boggling amount of money to associate with the magical girl sitting across from me. Not much for a major corporation—technically nonprofit in Lighthouse’s case—but it was all effectively Alice’s money, since the others had little interest in the bookkeeping. The casualness with which she tossed around that kind of sum reminded me of just how powerful she was even in a non-magical sense. I spared another glance out the window, reflecting that it was funny how some of the most powerful people in the country lived in a 20-story building and not the 60- or 80-story behemoths surrounding us. An attempt to be humble, maybe. The Vaetna held no such pretensions.

But then, they were the Vaetna.

Alice shrugged when she realized I wasn’t going to continue from my interjection. “It’s the right thing to do. And that’s not all, of course. We’re paying for damages to the park itself—think I said that yesterday—and probably going to bankroll Hikanome’s next similar event. Which isn’t great for our image,” she added as an aside. “But, er, none of this really affects you, I just wanted to assure you that you did well and all of this isn’t your fault. You did commendably before everything turned to shit and made a huge difference after.”

“Even though I was the target and this wouldn’t have happened without me there in the first place.” I couldn’t help but be a little frustrated. I should have called Hina off, or at least checked in with her or something. It was nice to be praised for how I’d done before then, but honestly, that had all taken a backseat in my mind compared to everything that had resulted from what Hina had done. How had the day even begun? I’d been pink and itchy from my impulsive and ill-advised—though still totally worth it—magical epilation, and I’d been confounded by the air temperature bubble, and then Hikanome’s leaders had decided to ambush me—

My thoughts slammed to a halt and my breath caught in my chest as my idle, skimmed recollections of the pre-inferno barbecue brushed up against something I’d somehow almost forgotten.

“My dad. Uh—did I tell you about that?”

“Oh.” Alice blinked, scrolling with the mousepad. “You did, yes. On the phone. But there were bigger matters at the time. You said Miyoko offered necromancy?”

“I don’t… really know what she offered,” I admitted, feeling unsteady. I starkly remembered the disorienting discomfort of the strange space behind her eyes—seriously, what was it with flamebearers and eyes?—but I was having trouble recalling the exact details the trio had given, if any. “His ghost. To learn more about my flamefall. But it’s bullshit, right?”

Necromancy wasn’t real, not in any meaningful sense. It had been demonstrated that bodies could be animated with magitech, but that was just the magical equivalent of making muscles twitch with an electrode, not resurrection, not something with a soul. The idea of a soul in the age of magic was itself a subject of intense debate, and I even privately believed that there was something of the sort, the place where the Flame met its bearer, but the idea that Miyoko could pull my father’s essence back from whatever great beyond it had gone to was still farfetched. And horrifying.

Alice took an uncomfortably long time to answer. She leaned back in her chair and swiveled away from her laptop, turning to face the blindingly bright window and looking out at the skyline. East, I realized, based on the late morning sun.

“Hard to see it in daylight,” she muttered.

East was Tokyo Bay, and in the sky above it, the scar, the grave of where Todai had once fought a Hikanome necromancer.

“Hongo’s…sister?” I recalled dimly. “Failed to bring back her husband. Though ‘failed’ implies there was ever any chance of success. Which there…?”

“Is.” Alice breathed, more grave and careful than a sigh. She turned back toward me, the end of her tail making a soft hiss as it slid along the hardwood. “It’s—Ezzen, you told me when you agreed to join up that you wanted to understand what happened to your father. Miyoko will have answers. Maybe not the right ones.”

My skin crawled. “…You’re not saying it’s bullshit.”

Alice rubbed her face with a hand. No nail polish—too busy, I assumed. She looked at me intently. “I don’t have the energy for this conversation, and I’m honestly not the right person for it. I’ll…when things are a little less stormy, I’ll gather everybody and we’ll have an honest debate about the existence of the soul.” She said it lightly, almost a joke, but there was something uncomfortable in her voice. Her eyes fled back down to her laptop. “More to the point, I’m so sorry they got the jump on you and isolated you like that.”

“Uh. Oh, yeah,” I recalled, accepting the topic change. Whatever Alice was insinuating, it sounded heavy, and I’d had more than enough of difficult conversations in the past 24 hours. “How’d they do that, anyway? Pull the other people out of the car without me noticing?”

I’d almost forgotten that Hikanome’s leaders had isolated me for my audience with them; it had sort of slipped through the cracks since the rest of that day had turned out so insane.

Alice shrugged. “We don’t know exactly. It’s not their first time doing it—but they should know better than to do it to one of us,” she growled. Her brow furrowed. “But Yuuka wasn’t mad about it, I’m told?”

“Uh. No?” Not that I recalled, at least. A little vexed at most.

“Hm. Odd.” Alice typed something into her notes before her fiery irises looked back up at me. Her expression softened from tense and analytical to something gentler. “She’s got a bit of a complex about abductions, especially regarding Hikanome. I’d have thought she’d raise more fuss.”

“Maybe because she doesn’t like me,” I mused aloud.

Alice paused and stared at me. “She likes you a good deal, Ezzen.”

“What?”

My reply made Alice look very tired. “Take my word for it. Back on track,” she waved the topic away, “it sounds like you’re not too rattled about it, either?”

“I’m fine,” I confirmed hurriedly. But even as my mouth moved, a tangential idea was forming. “Wait, if Yuuka should be mad about that, shouldn’t Amane be furious? Being the actual subject of the abduction that kicked all of this off?”

Alice’s shoulders slumped, and I realized I’d stepped on a bit of a landmine. “She’s good at being angry quietly. Let’s just—listen, if you’re fine, then it’s water under the bridge. It has to be, because we’re not really in a position to demand an apology right now.”

“Okay.” After a moment of awkward silence, I added, “Sorry.”

“No worries. As for the offer they made regarding your father—anything else we should know? Timeline? Conditions?”

“Uh.” I racked my brain. The whole encounter felt a bit hazy and dreamlike in retrospect; perhaps that was a clue as to how they’d accomplished it in the first place, and why I’d nearly forgotten it despite how sharp of an emotional punch it had been, both then and just now. “They wanted an answer in…ten days? Though, er, that was before all the stuff with Hina and Takagiri. So I don’t know if that’s changed. Oh, and it was what they wanted in exchange for support against the PCTF.”

Alice nodded as she noted it down. “Fuck. Yeah, figures. You’re going to have to go, if you’re willing.” She raised her eyes to me briefly and I nodded. “Let’s assume the date hasn’t changed, but it’s definitely not the top priority with them right now.”

This was my chance to bring up what I’d discussed with Hina. “Finding Sugawara.”

Alice sat up, squaring her shoulders and looking regal. She met my gaze. “And putting him in the ground.”

I blinked, surprised by the agreement and open declaration of violence. I’d said much the same thing to Hina, but that was Hina, and I’d come into this conversation expecting Alice to preach moderation and realpolitik. But Alice didn’t even sound resigned—there was a determined edge to her voice. She’d abetted our crime at Thunder Horse two weeks ago, after all. Mahou shoujo destroy evil.

That made this so much easier.

“Um, yeah, I agree,” I began, trying to find my footing for the script I’d written in my head. “I mean it just makes sense, right? It’s free real estate when it comes to clearing the air with Hikanome, but even if weren’t, we’ve got Takagiri’s condition—what Yuuka and Ai put together is really just a stopgap until we at least have him in custody to understand how to break their connection, but that’s sort of half-assing it, isn’t it, because we could just instead kill the fucker and be done with it, right, and there’s also those two missing guys you sent, which let’s face it, probably means they’re already dead, but on the off chance they’re not, we should really go in guns blazing—and, um, Hina and I messed up by keeping my stalker—er, Takagiri—from you and we shouldn’t have, and so we wanted your permission to go after him this time, all above-board, which in hindsight doesn’t really seem necessary now that—hurk—”

“Ezzen! Breathe,” Alice laughed, unable to hold her composure entirely. “Yes, yes, we’re in complete agreement. Save the oxygen,” she giggled. “We’re going after Sugawara, that’s not in question. Hina especially—everyone involved knows she’d do it anyway, with or without permission.”

“Yeah, I meant—” I took another breath, “I meant that we wouldn’t do it without permission. That’s an—an agreement we came to. Yesterday.”

“Mm. When you were supposed to break up, supposedly.” Her voice was non-accusatory, even friendly, and I couldn’t really tell if she was upset or not. “Got her on a leash now, have you?”

“…Yeah.” I didn’t have a defense for that one.

“Thank fuck,” she sighed, then reflexively covered her mouth. “Oops.”

My brow furrowed slightly. I’d heard her curse worse, for one, but also, we were in the middle of planning a murder. That that was less of a violation of her personal code than simple profanity was interesting—and so was the reaction in the first place.

“That bad?”

She sighed. “It’s—well, after something like that inferno, I figured you were either done—with her or with us—or you were really stuck in it now. And I figured the only way you were going to stick around was if you found some leverage over Hina. Glad to see I was right. Last time was Jason, and he just left.”

“Ah.”

“But you’re staying. And you want to be on the front lines now, do you?”

“Well—I can’t much keep her on a leash if I’m not actually there when it counts, can I?”

Alice’s eyes narrowed, and her teeth flashed in a grin, more devious than her usual sunny, polite smiles. “If you want to hunt with her, you can just say it.”

I froze, then sighed.

“Oh my God, yes, thank you,” I admitted. Despite my lengthy ramble, I hadn’t been able to find the courage to phrase it like that. But that was silly—I’d come into this conversation expecting to have to make this pitch to Alice Takehara, the leader of Todai as a political entity, but she was also Radiance Opal, the paramilitary magical girl squad leader and Alice, Hina’s best friend. Of course she was both agreeing to it and reading the intentions behind it accurately. I still felt the need to justify myself, though. “I just—I want to help. I ought to.”

“And we welcome your support. But you’re hardly fit for active duty yet, are you?” She raised a hand and began to count on her fingers. “In the span of twenty-four hours, you ripped all the hair off your skin, got caught in the center of an inferno, overloaded on green ripple, and had a little jaunt through the beyond where you almost froze to death. Plus you’re not even on your final prosthetic yet. And that’s just your physical condition—pardon me for saying so, Ezzen, but you’d not be magically prepared for direct combat even at full physical health. No mantle, no snapweaving.”

“I rewove my foot’s {AFFIX},” I pointed out, but it was a poor shield from the truth; she was right, I wasn’t equipped to go out and inflict bloody retribution in the tradition of the Vaetna. I sighed. “I’m probably better off just sticking around and helping from the chair, eh?”

She nodded. “Right on. I’m not ethically opposed to sending you out there when you’re ready, if that’s what you want, but for going straight after Sugawara, getting our people back, all that? Leave it to your girlfriend; she’s a lot less squishy than you.”

“But she still needs supervision…”

“You don’t need to be right there with her to hold her leash,” Alice chided, smiling. “We’ll send someone with her—Yuuka, hopefully myself as well if I don’t get tied up. And we’re going to move fast—it’ll be tonight, once Hina makes her public apology and Yuuka’s out of classes.”

“Not…right now?”

“Life takes precedence, Ezzen” she sighed. “Doing it today is already rushing it. I want to make sure we’re on the same page as Hikanome first, and honestly, the difference between doing it now and twelve hours from now is pretty minor. I doubt he’s even in that hospital anymore, or Yokohama at all.” She rubbed her forehead. “As for you: help us prep, stay here, hold down the fort. We’ve got several things you could help with today. Do you feel up to it?”

A little nugget of annoyance sprouted in my chest. I’d made it abundantly clear I wanted to help and didn’t need to be babied. I met her eyes with a nod. “Sure.”

“Great. The biggest thing is that Hina, Yuuka, Amane, and Takagiri’s mantles are all wrecked. I’ve got slightly different tasks for you with each of them.”

“Hina’s, too? Oh,” I realized. “Right.”

“Shorn apart when she did her idiotic dive-pounce-thing, as you recall.”

I winced. Yeah, I recalled; the way she’d dyed the entire world blue for a moment wasn’t something to be forgotten easily. “Does she even need it?” I mused aloud. “What with the strength and speed and healing factor? She did fine without it for all of the actual fighting.”

“Not necessarily,” Alice agreed, “so she's the lowest priority, and probably doesn’t need your help. I’m sure she wants it, though.” She accompanied that with a wink before going on. “But Yuuka does need hers, and it was mangled by Takagiri’s sword. I want you to figure out how that happened, help her repair it, and patch that vulnerability. If there are more blades like that—and I’d bet there are—I want us to not be instantly incapacitated by them this time. Takagiri should be able to help there, of course, if she’s…lucid.”

Takagiri was coming up on her fifth day without sleep.

I nodded nervously. “Uh, yeah. Shouldn’t be too hard even if she’s not; we’ve still got one of the swords and all. How’s she?”

“Not great. Clock’s ticking, but the coffin’s Ai’s job.”

The coffin was a euphemism for the box Ai had pulled out of storage on Yuuka’s recommendation. It was leftover tech from right after Amane’s rescue, back when her red ripple sensitivity had been off the charts and they’d needed to be able to isolate her. With my help, Yuuka had foreseen yesterday that the device—little more than some basic life support and a whole lot of high-power red wards—could be adapted to help shield Takagiri from Sugawara’s nighttime soul-incursions and thereby give her the chance to sleep unmolested.

Ai had been working on modifying it since yesterday—pulling an all-nighter herself, apparently, which I would have joined in had my healing-exhaustion not caught up to me soon after my conversation with Hina. I had been intending to go help her finish it up after I was done here with Alice, but now it sounded like I had other work to do.

“Bit of a grim name, isn’t it?”

“For grim purpose,” Alice conceded. “But like I said, leave that to Ai. As for your part in helping our guest…her mantle was completely obliterated.” She rubbed her forehead again, clearly unhappy with that outcome given what we had learned about our opponent barely two minutes after that. “Obviously, I eventually want you to get it back up and running—she looks miserable in the old guy body, and I can’t imagine that’s helping her mental state. But more pertinently, she can do independent piloting. I’d love to know how.”

“What about the bomb?”

“What about the bomb?” Alice sighed. “We don’t know if it’s even in there. If you do find something attached to her soul, some last-resort horror Sugawara cooked up, then we’ll stop and reassess.”

“Okay. Uh…to recap, fix Hina and Yuuka’s mantles and get a schematic for Takagiri’s.”

“Yes,” she grinned, apparently pleased with my basic recollection. “This is all in your email too,” she added as a not-so-subtle reminder; I winced a little. She glanced down at her own notes again. “I think that pretty much covers it. Uh, Amane’s mantle needs some reconstruction too, and while I’m sure she’s more than capable of dealing with it herself, lend her a helping hand if she asks, would you?”

Something that sounded like resentment had snuck into her voice near the end there; frustration with her girlfriend’s stubbornness? She reached up and touched her forehead yet again, wincing. Always the same place.

Alice caught the direction of my eyes and lowered her hand hurriedly. “Just a migraine.”

“Uh huh,” I replied, an unpleasant theory beginning to form. “You didn’t wind up getting any more dragon-ka, did you? Um—as long as we’re talking about dealing with it yourself,” I explained. “I did offer to help.”

“Nothing,” she said. “If I have a problem, you’d know. Sort of hard to hide the tail getting longer, heh,” she chuckled mirthlessly.

“I meant…horns,” I clarified, tapping my own forehead in the same place she’d been touching.

Alice stared at me. “No. Nope. Not happening. Nope.” She twitched. “You’ve got a lot more urgent stuff on your plate, so just—don’t worry about me, alright?”

“Are you sure—”

“Really, Ezzen, it’s so nice of you to be concerned, but there’s really much higher priority things going on.” She stood abruptly, slamming the laptop closed. “And we’re out of time for now, anyway—I’ve got to run off to meet with Shibuya’s mayor.” She power walked past me and out the door, leaving me alone.

I frowned slightly at Alice’s retreating form as she exited the room. The glimmer of her tail’s scales shifted from reflecting the greyish blues of the outside sky to the warmer indoor lights as she went down the hall. I squinted past the twinkle and tried to assess the draconic limb as a whole, deciding it looked no more massive than usual; I believed her on that front. I just didn’t trust that she’d not undergone any additional transformations from the magic she’d done during the inferno—Yuuka had certainly been worried when she’d punched the tunnel open, and if the precog had concerns, so did I. It stood to reason that Alice’s Flame was lining her up for horns of some sort. Those were plenty draconic, weren’t they?

I hoped I was wrong, of course—more stress was the last thing she needed. I felt bad for even bringing it up, honestly; if I’d known it’d spook her so badly, I wouldn’t have said anything. Stupid. Should have waited for actual evidence.

I tried to put it out of my mind as I lurched to my feet. Foot and a half, really; in theory, I was due to go through the prosthetic designs Ai’s underlings had whipped up, but neither she nor I had the time right now, and honestly, I was much more looking forward to getting some glyphcraft done. Even though I wasn’t going to come along with tonight’s operation, I still had my own part to play, magic to work, mantles to upgrade—starting by reverse engineering Takagiri’s swords.

—

Thankfully, Takagiri herself was lucid after all. She’d been staving off the ever-encroaching exhaustion by making herself useful, primarily with the coffin itself, but she’d also done me the kindness of actually mapping out how she’d made her swords sometime in the past few days.

We were in another basement room across the hall from Ai’s workshop, a few doors down from the prosthetic fitting room. This one was basically just a computer lab for Ai’s students, maybe thirty computers in three rows of ten. It was empty except for us.

“So it really is pink all the way through,” I muttered. “Hits the control circuitry directly, not the structure.”

“Yes. The parallel {RESONATE} pair here makes the…beginning? The entry on contact.”

“And from there it does a few {INFERENCES}, yeah, and then just hits…” I glanced over at the diagram for Yuuka’s mantle I’d pulled up on the screen. “This part, right? The {ALIGN} before the control manifold. Throws everything out of sync, and then it hits the manifold and…what, crashes the motive connection? Oh, but there’s fallbacks…which don’t land,” I decided, trying to follow the chain of execution in my head. “Or rather, they do kick in, but the gyro module is already done for, so they get the wrong data.” I squinted. “That doesn’t look right.”

“Because it’s not,” Takagiri confirmed, pacing back and forth carefully. She said it helped her stay awake, and who was I to contest that? Her motions were a little jerky and delayed; she looked so bad that it dismissed any residual danger I might have felt around her. She was old and beyond exhausted; in no position to hurt anybody even if she wanted to. But her focus hadn’t wavered, and her voice was steady as she explained. “The gyroscope portion of the manifold leaks pink. Not normally enough to matter, but enough for the sword to overload it. If you fix that, the sword would only cause a momentary interruption.”

I was impressed by her English, at least for this highly technical stuff. I supposed it made sense that if most of the Radiances were fluent in the vocabulary necessary to upgrade, operate, and repair their mantles, then so was she, having effectively copied the design. Maybe it made sense especially for her, since it was—had been—her lifeline to what she considered her true body. How much had she upgraded it, beyond the dual-piloting capability we’d already seen?

“Oh, the gyro. That’s why Yuuka, uh, fell over, and then the control circuitry was all fucked. You’ve already got the fix in your own mantle?”

She nodded. “I just routed the free ripple into {SEVER}. I’m sorry I haven’t recreated the diagrams for the whole mantle. I think if I sit down in front of GWalk for too long, I’ll fall asleep.” As if by nervous tic, she prodded at a patch on her arm—a caffeine drip—fussing with it as if worried the adhesive would come off.

I didn’t really know what to say to that. “Uh. Okay. Yeah, {SEVER} should work,” I affirmed, as I glanced over the diagram of Yuuka’s mantle. If it worked in Takagiri’s, it was good enough for at least this quick patch. “You copied theirs just from observation?” Takagiri didn’t respond, and I looked over at her. “Takagiri?”

She blinked and pressed the patch against her arm more strongly. “Hai—yes.”

“Insane.”

I meant it as a compliment, but she frowned. “I know it’s not normal.”

“Uh—no, I meant I’m impressed,” I clarified. Maybe not the best phrasing to use with somebody slowly losing their grip on reality. “Like, I wouldn’t be able to do that. Maybe a shitty copy of the basic functionality, but not to the same quality, and definitely not with the upgrades you made. It’s not…well, I don’t think ‘normal’ plays into it at all, really. You want what you want, yeah? And from this…you must have wanted it really badly. I—I get that.”

Her eyebrows went up. “You do?”

“Yeah, I mean, like, remaking yourself in the image of something more.”

“Like the Radiances.”

I twitched. “Uh…no. Sorta? But it’s like—not the way you do, I think. The things they’ve got that appeal to me are the things they share with the Vaetna.”

“Not their beauty?”

That brought me to a total halt. “I, uh. I guess? I mean, everybody wants to be attractive, right, and I don’t think most people would mind looking like them.” This was a distinctly uncomfortable topic for me, of course, with how much I tried not to think about how pretty my flatmates were. Even after over a week of acclimating to them, I’d still failed to stop my eyes from wandering between Alice’s most attractive features earlier.

Takagiri paused her pacing and gave me a Look; something between mirth, exasperation, and empathy. She shook her head slowly and emphatically. “No, Ezzen-san, not most people.”

“Oh.” Oh no. “Really?”

“Really. I’m very jealous of them.” She ran her hand over her mouth and flinched at the stubble on her body’s male face. It squeezed my heart. “I made my mantle, let Sugawara do…what he did to me, because I want what they have. The beauty, the youth, the freedom, the…woman-ness. Is there a word for that?”

“Femininity?”

“Femini—femininity,” she repeated, working her way over the repetitious syllables. “Ah, yes, that makes sense. But you came to them without wanting that? Or without knowing you wanted that?”

“I mean, I didn’t have much choice in it.”

“You chose to stay.”

“…Point.” I didn’t like this conversation. “Uh—so just fix the pink leak on the gyro, and your swords—or copies, which I’m assuming Sugawara’s dudes have access to, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation—won’t fuck with the mantles?” I looked at the diagram again. “Well, wouldn’t break them. There’s still the interrupt. Maybe the control circuit needs sheathing.”

“It does. You’re avoiding.”

“Avoiding talking about…gender stuff with you? Being trans? That’s ‘cause—we’re not in the same situation. You want to be like them, sure, that’s your prerogative, but don’t assume I’m the same.”

She raised her hands apologetically. “My mistake. I just thought you’d understand.”

And maybe I did. Maybe I knew exactly what she was talking about. But I didn’t want to talk about it with her—I was far more comfortable talking to the Radiances about this, because…I’d known them a few weeks longer? Just some implicit understanding that had come from living with them? Because they were visibly, irrefutably girls whereas Takagiri was wearing a male face right now? I kicked myself mentally for that last one.

“I…you’re sleep deprived and overreaching,” I declared, trying to separate myself from the conversation by pulling up Alice’s and Hina’s mantle diagrams alongside Yuuka’s to drown the topic under a flood of interesting stimuli for my magic-obsessed brain. “I don’t want to…get into all this until stuff has settled down more.”

I said that instead of “I don’t want to be friends,” which was a bridge too far, unfair, and a little mean. The diagram before me was evidence of her own genius at glyphcraft, and I could acknowledge that, and I did want her as a peer. But she was intruding on an emotional process I wasn’t ready to expose to anyone outside the gaggle of women who’d adopted me, not yet. Besides, she had tried to kill or abduct me a few days ago, and forgiveness only went so far.

Takagiri didn’t say anything in response. I turned to her again, wondering if she was having another sleep-deprived space-out moment—and jumped in my chair at her expression. Her eyes were fixed past me, over my shoulder, peeled wide open. There was terror etched into her face, deepening the lines of middle age into a rictus of awful recognition. My eyes followed her gaze, dragged along, dread and terror building as I saw she was gazing into a far corner, more dimly lit, away from the cold fluorescent lights in the center. From her expression, I was expecting to see a monster perched in that corner, staring us down. My tattoo itched in agreement, and something in the back of my mind was whispering to reach for my Flame, to be ready to snap into action. But there was nothing.

Wasn’t there?

“Takagiri,” I whispered urgently. “Do you see something?”

She said something in Japanese, muttering to herself, then switched to English. She didn’t take her eyes off the murky corner where nothing was. “He’s here.”

Poster Comm Series #2: Alice

A goodie for patrons to tide you over during the hiatus!

Part of an in-progress series of seven: Hina, Alice, Ai, Amane, Yuuka, Ebi, & Ezzen.

Poster Comm Series #1: Hina

A goodie for patrons to celebrate the end of Arc 2.

Part of an in-progress series of seven: Hina, Alice, Ai, Amane, Yuuka, Ebi, & Ezzen.

Blog Thing: Character DNA

In the Arc 1 Author’s Note, we talked about inspirations for Sunspot as a whole. This time, I’d like to instead talk about where individual characters come from, because it’s fun and I think a little peek behind the curtain is a nice reward for all of you who support me financially. This is going to be kind of rambly, as I’m just listing things as they come to mind. Here we go!

To recap, the most key IP the story draws stylistically from is inarguably Katalepsis, and this extends to the characters, so mild spoilers for that story ahead, up through arc 15. I would like to note that that’s as far as I am in the story right now, so please for the love of god do not spoil me on late Katalepsis in the comments. Thanks!

As the main character, Ezzen most directly descends from this literary lineage. Those of you who’ve read Kata should be able to see where he matches and diverges from Heather, especially in their styles of narration and opinions on/approaches to transhumanity. Some readers have observed how he actively pulls himself out of Heather-like descriptions, which is always a lot of fun for me to write.

Of course, where there is a Heather, there is also a Raine. I really like Raine, which should be obvious in Hina. But Hina is really more like a conglomeration of a bunch of Heather’s love interests, with some Zheng (the feral bloodlust and physicality) and Lozzie (the barely-human pixie) in there alongside the Raine for sure. Maybe even a little Sevens? With several of the Kata Girlfriends amalgamated into a single manic pixie dream girl, the Heather comparison then invites the question: will the residents of Lighthouse Tower wind up all entangled in a big, sapphic polycule? To that, dear reader, I say: Read And Find Out! >:3

Aside from those three, Hina’s personality (underneath the transhumanity) is also heavily modeled on a friend of mine who has BPD. Her more over-the-top qualities come from a handful of anime girls who share her feral mindset, bloodthirst and big ‘ol teef:

• Himiko Toga (BNHA)

• Zero Two (DitF)

• Lappland (Arknights)

• Eris (Hades 2), especially for her voice

• Did you know female hyenas have pseudopenises?

Other Kata characters have obvious parallels to various Sunspot characters. Evee and Amane are disabled, Ebi and Praem would get up to shenanigans together, and so on. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this when I’m deeper into Kata.

Moving on. Let’s talk about Worm!

…Actually, let’s not. You are free to draw whichever Undersiders-Todai comparisons you wish, PCTF-PRT, infernos-Endbringers, et cetera. Much of this should be obvious to anybody with even passing familiarity with Worm, and I sort of feel that the less I say, the more fun people can have with this and the less brainpower I have to devote to thinking about Worm.

So let’s talk about Todai’s real world inspiration instead: Hololive!

Like Hololive, the Radiances are a group of idol-like Japanese celebrities who’ve gained a cultural foothold even outside Japan in the wake of a world-altering event (the firestorms/COVID), with the obvious twist that Lighthouse wield significantly more hard power and are orders of magnitude more fucked up. I thought this would be a fairly realistic angle for a group of self-made magical girls set in 2022, and I’m quite happy with how the group as a whole fit into the setting and narrative.

…And when I was first coming up with them, I thought that was all! I figured that the Hololive inspiration would mostly just apply to the group as a whole, and that none of the five (six counting Ebi) would draw from any particular talents. However, as the writing has continued, I’ve realized that there is at least one specific (and in hindsight hilarious) parallel: Alice/Amane have a lot in common with Coco/Kanata, a duo within Hololive back before Coco quit the company. Consider:

• They’re gay. Possibly the most lesbian duo of streamers within Hololive, short of maybe OkaKoro.

• Coco has a massive dragon tail. Yes, this means that Todai sells AsaAlice merch.

• Coco is EN/JP bilingual (though not British) whereas Kanata has good English comprehension but can’t really speak it.

• Kanata is relatively sickly and partially disabled (deaf in one ear). Definitely not as extreme as Amane in this regard, but few are.

• Kanata’s first name is Amane.

Now, I didn’t consciously intend any of this, and I’m reasonably sure neither Coco the character nor her actress are trans. But it’s nonetheless a surprising amount of overlap!

Onward to Ai and Ebi. I don’t want to give away what exactly their deal is, but I’m comfortable saying that Ebi is heavily modeled on Praem from Katalepsis, and consequently has a similar relationship with Ai as Praem does with Evelyn. But Praem exists firmly in the dollgirl/maid/demon-learning-to-be-human trope space, and Ebi diverges from those somewhat with more android-specific themes. There’s probably a little Violet Evergarden in there as well.

Yuuka is weird because I don’t actually have many obvious inspirations for her. Her eye got a lampshaded reference to Worm’s Path To Victory, of course, but aside from that I don’t actually have many inspirations for precog characters, at least not that I can consciously recall. Her voice and accent can be imagined as that of Hakos Baelz, though obviously with less affable mannerisms.

I also need to briefly touch on some not-very-good fiction that is near and dear to my heart. There was a series of fics on 1d4chan (hear me out) about Warhammer 30k (hear me out!) in an alternate no-Heresy timeline starring the Primarchs’ daughters (hear me out!!). 1d4chan is gone now, so these characters are mostly lost to the sands of link rot now anyway, but for completion’s sake, I should observe that every Radiance strongly parallels at least one of those girls:

• Hina: Freya

• Alice: Venus

• Ai: Farah

• Amane: Morticia

• Yuuka: Cora, Furia

Moving on from the Radiances, let’s briefly cover some of the rest of the cast in rapid fire:

• Takagiri/Kimura: Honestly, this is a character who I think I’ve mostly invented wholesale, though her plot beats thus far are generally very classic mahou shoujo. I’ll probably wake up in the dead of night realizing I’ve completely copied her from something, someday.

• Hongo: No particular inspiration, but I want you to imagine his voice and affect as being that of Raymond “Red” Reddington, though they look nothing alike and Red has at least twenty-five years on him.

• Miyoko: Another “no particular inspiration who is definitely inspired by something I just can’t pinpoint”.

• Star: Based on a friend of mine.

• Sky/Jason: Based on another friend of mine.

This post is not comprehensive. There’s inspirations I can’t reveal without immediately giving the game away, and this story as a whole comes from a big soup in my brain containing every story I’ve ever read, so there’s definitely things that I’m drawing from without realizing. No, I still have not read Bioshifter—I’ll get around to it eventually!

That’s pretty much everything from me, so let me close with a thank you to everybody who’s tossing me some money every month. A yootie who can buy food is a yootie who can write more Sunspot!

Arc 2 Retrospective

We made it!

Hello, readers! Welcome to another end-of-arc author’s note slash blog post slash postmortem slash peek behind the curtain. This is the early release of the public one; for you Patreon supporters, there'll also be an exclusive "Character DNA" writeup following this.

This time around, I want to talk a little about writing, and then we’ll get into what’s going to be happening during the hiatus and next arc. I’ll also be posting a writeup about the inspirations for various characters over on Patreon for supporters.

Announcement: Goodies!

Before anything else, I want to highlight that there’s a side story publicly available on the site/Patreon for when you’re done reading this AN. This is part of a larger paradigm shift regarding Patreon content; basically, everybody’s getting more stuff. The short version:

• Side stories are becoming public! They’ll be posted publicly on the Patreon and the site. Right now, there’s just the one, but I hope to write another during the hiatus, and then one every few months going forward. There may still be some paywalled ones, but I’m gonna default to making them public.

• Patreon backlog is increasing from one advance chapter to three starting next arc, and the price is staying the same if you sign up before May 1! That’s 15k-25k words of advance chapters for $5. After that point, the price will be $10, which is still a better deal than now.

See this public post for more details!

The Word Mines

Now, I shall blog a little.

Writing a webserial is hard. Sunspot posts one chapter a week (and I take every fourth week off), but they’re long chapters, 4000-10,000 words depending on the week. The total word count in this arc was 124,930, meaning the average word count per chapter was about 6,250 words. That’s a lot of words! Readers who come from other serials may observe that this is roughly half the weekly output of other authors like Hungry or Thundamoo, and only like a sixth of that of pirateaba, that monster of monsters.

This is something that sometimes weighs on me a bit—but then again, all of those writers have far more mileage under their belts, and are necessarily outliers to be as successful as they are. So I’m not too broken up about it. There’s a universe where Sunspot’s weekly wordcount goes up, or I start a second serial. But we’re a while off from either of those, I think—I’m busy! For example, this arc had a few interruptions in posting around 2.06 and 07; that’s because I was busy graduating from…a bunch of stuff, actually. Hopefully I’m done doing that, because it was really quite a busy time. However, I continue to have Stuff To Do IRL, so it’s possible there’ll also be some interruptions in arc 3.

As I said, it’s hard. Writing at the pace I do is only really possible because of the beta readers. I thank them in every chapter for a reason—their incessant poking and prodding helps me maintain a reasonably steady input so I’m not just cramming for the deadline every week, and their insights into the story are invaluable. I truly could not write this story without their help. If you’re interested in joining the beta reader team, we’ll be recruiting 2-3 more during the hiatus via the Discord.

I’m still growing as a writer. Readers seem to think the back half of this arc was excellent overall, for which I’m very grateful, but I found the action scenes to be quite a challenge. There’s a lot of moving parts! I’ve learned a lot from it, though, and expect it to get easier moving forward. On the flip side, I think the weakest part of the arc was the slice-of-life sections in the first few chapters. I enjoy writing slower paced character stuff, and I’d like to think I’m good at it, but giving them strong momentum is something I’ve struggled with. I’ll do my best to polish that aspect of my writing in arc 3.

Overall, though, I’m really proud of myself for getting this arc done, and I’m blown away by the story’s growth over the five-ish months it took to get here. Between RR and Shub we’ve gained over a thousand followers! The ads I’ve been running on RR have also performed exceptionally well, which is awesome. And the Discord has been, to put it bluntly, popping off—370 members at time of writing is ludicrous relative to the follower count, and it’s been so, so rewarding to see a community form around this little story. The general story discussion, the theories, the live-reads, and especially the fanfic (yeah, we have fanfic now, what the hell) bring me so much joy to witness and participate in. It blows my mind to have fans, and I’m so very grateful.

The Hiatus

Sunspot is on break until at least May 1. I’ve got various IRL errands to deal with, a whole lot of story-related stuff to do, and then a bunch of backlog to write. Here’s some Sunspot stuff that’ll happen before Arc 3:

• The Patreon restructuring mentioned above

• The beta reader applications mentioned above

• Probably one more side story

• More website upgrades. We’re gonna add an RSS feed!

• A Bluesky account for the story

• I’m commissioning character art!

Arc 3 will be titled Threading The Needle. I’m a little embarrassed to say that there’s no new cover in the pipeline yet—I haven’t even picked an artist. If you have artist recommendations, by all means send them my way!

If you enjoy the story, please consider leaving a five-star rating—anything lower hurts the story overall because five-star mean-only rating systems are garbage. If you enjoy the story and also have things to say about it, please consider taking the time to leave a review—I promise that no matter how awful you think you are at expressing your thoughts, you’ll still have done a better job than the one-star reviews, and it’ll be far more meaningful than those both to me and to prospective readers.

That’s pretty much all from me for now. To recap: check out the side story, leave a rating/review, consider joining the Patreon before prices go up on May 1, and lastly, fill out the poll below (it’s vitally important!). If you have questions or further thoughts about the story, I’m always around in the Discord, so don’t be afraid to start a conversation!

See you all in a monthish!

Interlude: Memo Pursuant to PIR 5875

FROM: Adam Eckhart, Retrieval Operations

TO: Members of the Retrieval Panel

SUBJECT: A Chink In The Dermis

DATE: 22 February 2022

CLASSIFICATION: COSMIC TOP SECRET PARANATURAL

The Spire should not exist.

You’ve all heard it. You’ve all said it. An eight-kilometer-tall megastructure appearing out of the North Atlantic helmed by interventionist demigods is a threat to us all.

Of course, the phrase means different things depending on who you ask. The Spire should not exist, say the Consortium, because it is a physical impossibility. The Spire should not exist, says Washington, because the actions of the Vaetna threaten the very concept of international diplomacy. The Spire should not exist, say the Zero-Day nutters, because it should not be possible for ten people to rule a nation composed of tens of millions of refugees, plus dozens of flametouched, without mind control or at least the violence the Vaetna are so known for abroad. The Spire should not exist, say the billionaires to each other on their private islands, because it hurts the bottom line.

All of these are very valid reasons to not want the Spire to exist, which is why we have Eschaton; I’ll loop back around to that in a bit. But the fact remains: the Spire stands, and the world has had to adjust to its presence. In light of that, before getting to the meat of the matter, let me start this memo with a history lesson, because I know many of us try our hardest to not think about the Spire when we can help it, and it will help clarify the importance of PIR 5875 and the situation with V-06.

As early as three weeks after the Spire’s Raising at the end of the Firestorms, HUMINT operators from over a dozen NATO member states were sent amid the countless refugees, hoping to embed long-term and gain a better understanding of life on the inside, the Vaetna’s strategic capabilities, and the advanced magitech that allowed such a society to exist at all. It was assumed that such espionage would be necessary, because nobody could quite believe that the Vaetna’s purported transparency about these things was the full story. The preliminary reports justifying these espionage operations cited the Spire’s geographic isolation and tightly controlled modes of entry as a reason to suspect that there were far more sinister and totalitarian modes of governance at play, especially when taken together with the extreme violence of the Vaetna’s foreign policy.

Within six days, every operator was trivially flushed out, in some cases literally hoisted by the scruff of their necks. It was made abundantly clear they had been made from the moment they’d stepped through their respective Gates. The Vaetna claimed no hard feelings and personally returned each and every operative safely to the office of the leader of their respective agency. To those of you who were around for that, I need not recount how humiliating it was for us all.

The Vaetna then extended personal invitations to take a much more open look at the Spire, top to bottom.

So began the series of studies that would together become the United Nations Cultural and Economic Report on the Spire (UNCERS). These studies ran the gamut, from demographic and quality-of-life surveys of the various refugee cohorts that made up the population, to the technical details of the hydroponic systems used to feed them, to the systems of governance that maintained societal order. This report was concerned primarily with the Spire’s function as a refugee nation running on infrastructure quite literally created ex nihilo and was surprised to find at every turn that things just…worked.

The Spire has all the trappings of a post-scarcity society when it comes to the basic needs of its population. There is money, the suna, but it is reserved for luxury goods; housing, food, and basic household items are all provided. Housing is allotted to encourage different refugee blocs to mingle, though care is taken to not overly separate communities that arrived as a unit. Rations of staple ingredients and spices are distributed to every household, making best efforts to match to their cuisine, all grown from the hydroponic gardens.

The gardens are of note because they form the Spire’s economic backbone. Due to a near-total lack of traditional natural resources, the nation suffers from a critical deficit of raw materials. To combat this, the hydroponic gardens not only produce the nation’s food supply, but also engage in the magically accelerated production of renewable raw materials, especially wood, organic-derived polymers, and cotton for textiles. Metal is especially limited; where required for household objects and electrical systems, it is taken from automated shipbreaking operations on the south face. The Vaetna have displayed a strong preference for buying ships whole and dismantling them themselves or retrieving wrecks rather than buying scrap. Since the initial report, stoneware has also become common thanks to oceanic sediment mining operations within the Spire’s territory.

All of these materials are mostly for household use, and cannot be produced or synthesized in quantities sufficient for the sheer scale of the Spire’s physical infrastructure. For this, the Vaetna leverage the unique solution of lattice-manifest (LM) matter, deployed and integrated at a scale that remains unrivaled. This is thanks to their abundance of Flame energy; upper estimates put the Vaetna at 80% of the PCTF’s stock. Combined with their cutting-edge mastery of magical engineering, this has allowed the infrastructure of the Spire to operate with a labor force of essentially nil; maintenance of the Spire’s physical structure is carried out by the Vaetna themselves and various automated systems.

Thanks to this level of automation and social support, there is no expectation of labor for citizens. People are still permitted to work, and most pursue a craft or education thanks to the Spire’s aggressive poaching of academics worldwide. The 31 flamebearers taking asylum in the Spire at the time of the report did not yet have a clear role; there were loose expectations that they would contribute to the Vaetna’s magical research, but not to commit their Flame resources to infrastructure, and were otherwise treated as regular citizens. This has largely held true to today.

At the time of the UNCERS, it was unclear whether this social order would be sustainable, but thus far, it has stood the test of time, and the current strategic understanding is that there is little leverage to foment internal unrest even if operatives could be inserted without detection. By all accounts, the people of the Spire are happy, the society functions largely headlessly, and the nation enjoys a largely self-reliant economy with low dependence on strategically critical imports.

So, where’s the catch? As far as the UNCERS found, there isn’t one. Per the report, there were no secret sanguimantic engines to provide magical power and no draconian legal system to maintain social order. And, perhaps most tellingly, there have been no cases of the nation’s now 72 harbored flamebearers abusing their power, either in organized attempted coups or as the individual cases of megalomania or instability that seem nearly pathological among flamebearers on the outside.

Of course, it is entirely possible that the Vaetna are simply that good at deception or intimidation, and that there did or does indeed exist exploitation or a fatal flaw in the organization of the society, and we simply didn’t turn over the right stones. But as the years went on and further reports were filed, the initial report has been more and more validated; the Spire seems to be equipped for the long haul as a post-scarcity civilization helmed by the Vaetna, with no smoking guns to suggest otherwise (at least when it comes to their domestic policy; their foreign policy is beyond the scope of this memo).

The main takeaway from UNCERS and its subsequent reports has been that the Vaetna are the lynchpin of the Spire. Their magic quite literally forms its structure and automates so many of its operations that the people are near-redundant. And there are only ten of them.

This brings us to the classified strategic report appended to UNCERS, which was concerned with strategic weaknesses. It was determined that despite the Vaetna’s martial prowess, any attempt to destabilize the nation should target them over the Spire itself.

A successful operation would, at minimum, shake the public impression of their invincibility, and at best, take one out of commission in such a way that allows for their considerable quantities of Flame to be harvested. Taking out one-tenth of the Spire’s infrastructure would both sow internal unrest and weaken their overall military strength. If done in a way that could also allow for harvest, even a single Vaetna’s Flame resources would dramatically shift the global balance of power and set up the Task Force for new frontiers of paranatural research. Most importantly, though, it would hopefully cow the remaining Vaetna sufficiently to reduce their interventionism.

So that was the task: kill a Vaetna, or at least strike a meaningful blow against them. To this end, the Task Force established a classified unit, codenamed “Eschaton.” But despite the expenditure of considerable resources and impressive ingenuity, little progress has been made. Even the Vaetna’s most egregious blunders (Dubai, Jharkhand) have only served to underscore the absurd difficulty of actually bringing one down, and no plan has ever reached a stage where execution was considered. In July 2020, Eschaton estimated that another five years and $800B would be needed to crack the dermis alone.

The situation changed on 11 February 2022, and this brings us to the heart of this memo. At 0512 SST (0712 GMT), a standard-sequence flamefall (Ripple Emanator 1242) abruptly changed heading to launch itself directly at the Spire. It was intercepted by V-02 (“Heung”) and splintered into four segments, which dispersed to four hosts:

• Dalton Colliot, United Kingdom (at large; see attached Paranatural Incident Report 5872 and collated documents on “Ezzen”, as well as Paranatural Actor of Interest 385 “Lighthouse”)

• Noah Gaspard Holton, United States (at large; see attached PIRs 5873 and 5882 and further documents on the Thunder Horse Inferno)

• Ana Baker, United States (contained; see attached PIR 5874 and further documents on PAI 554 “Zero-Day”)

• Artek Konieczek, Poland (decohered; see attached PIR 5875)

Konieczek was a typical decoherence case and was safely eliminated with no casualties by V-06 (“Katya”) in the Polish countryside at 0544 SST, an entirely normal Vaetna response with their usual rapidity and cleanliness when it comes to standard-sequence flamefall. V-06 returned to the Spire without incident after.

Here’s where it gets interesting: her public appearances have dropped off a cliff since. She was present at her next scheduled event the following day, and has since then only been seen once, for a very brief and boilerplate press statement on the events of PIR 5875 on February 15. She has missed fourteen expected appearances between February 11 and the time of writing of this memo. Such absences are not completely unheard of, especially in the wake of Dubai, but it is highly atypical following such an utterly unremarkable inferno cleanup.

The current theory is that she was injured by Konieczek’s ripple emanations, despite how clean the kill was. The implications speak for themselves: a Vaetna being seemingly taken out of commission by a routine inferno control deployment is potentially world-shaking. It remains to be seen whether V-06 will suffer any sort of long term harm, but even if she doesn’t, this is the first recorded chink in the armor.

We have reason to believe that the other flamebearers carrying segments of RE 1242 may also have some quality to their Flame or its ripple emanations that have a deleterious effect on the Vaetna. At time of writing, this is speculative, but strongly corroborated by anomalous behavior documented in PIRs 5872 and 5873; in both cases, Vaetna were on the scene early enough to have complete priority over retrieval teams, but did not intervene. This is especially notable in the case of Colliot, where three(!!) were present but allowed a PAI 385 member to abscond with him rather than intervene, despite his status as a person of interest to both them and the Task Force. In the case of Holton, V-10 (“Brianna”) could have easily evacuated him off of the actively-burning Thunder Horse oil platform, and the fact that she did not is also anomalous.

Taken together, there is evidence that the Vaetna are wary of something about this flamefall cluster. This is the biggest lead Eschaton has had since its formation, and steps are now being taken to capitalize on this information.

Currently, the Task Force only has one member of this cluster in hand, Ana Baker, who entered custody willingly and has been cooperative. She is currently under care and observation at the Center for Paranatural Studies at Argonne Laboratories in Chicago, but plans are now underway to transfer her to Eschaton custody while further plans for testing are drawn up. She may be fit for field work; see the attached psychological report.

Eschaton also aims to retrieve both of the remaining members of the cluster. Holton was rescued from Thunder Horse by an unknown PAI and remains at large; resources are being diverted toward locating him. Colliot’s whereabouts are known with exactitude; he appears to be putting down roots with PAI 385, which complicates operations significantly. His status as a person of interest in paranatural engineering already made him worth diplomatic attempts to retrieve despite our thorny history with Lighthouse, but we are now diverting significantly more resources to guarantee his retrieval.

It would also be desirable to get Lighthouse themselves on an actual leash. They have consistently been a nuisance for Retrieval, and harboring Colliot in light of this new state of affairs is the last straw. February 19th’s “Barbecue Inferno” (PIR 5910) presents an opportunity for significant leverage in bringing them to heel. See attached documents on PAI 114 “Hikanome.”

To conclude, I’m very pleased to say that Eschaton finally has a chance of returning on its considerable investment, and that we already have a critical piece of the puzzle in hand. More concrete plans for analysis and retrieval to come by the end of February.

Adam Eckhart

NATO PCTF Subdirector of Retrieval Operations