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.”
Author’s Note:
Cuddle puddle resolved without incident! Ez finally gets a physical (though not an exhaustive one)! Important talks about the magic system!
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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