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.”
Author’s Note:
Some quality slice of life (to Amane’s chagrin, it seems!) and at last some catharsis for Ai in the stupidest way possible. We’ll get back to the plot soon, I promise!
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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