Last I had seen Izumi Takagiri, formerly Kimura Something—I’d never learned her first name, and since that was presumably a deadname now, that was fine—she had looked like a pretty but entirely unremarkable, ambiguously-twenties Japanese woman. That unremarkability was core to an assassin’s trade, after all; even being able to literally dissolve into smoke, there were times that it was far more useful to be able to simply vanish into a crowd, and that meant being plain enough that it was easy for one’s gaze to slide right past her.
But now she rivaled any of the Radiances at their best in looks—that is to say, she was almost stunningly put-together. Meticulous eyeliner and dark-blue lipstick snagged the eye and almost refused to let my vision drop past her chin for a few seconds. When I eventually managed to look lower, I saw that she was wearing some kind of cropped turtleneck over what looked like a dark bodysuit down her torso and legs, slitted with tantalizing stripes of pale skin around her hips that burrowed under a short skirt. She was wearing long gloves that were fingerless at the index and middle. The fashion was like something between Yuuka and Alice, dark and a little bedazzled but form-fitting and provocative and full of confidence.
I was so busy staring that it took me several seconds to register what she had actually said. New magic. War. The Vaetna, by implication. Conversations I wasn’t ready for.
But before I could respond one way or the other, somebody with absolutely no shame at all decided to step in.
“Ara,” Hina purred, gliding past me and entering sniffing range of Izumi as quickly as she could, shielding me from the ex-Hikanome flamebearer’s focus. “Came here straight from a party?”
“Mmm,” Izumi replied with a grin. “But I’m not only here for you.”
That made her change in look click together for me. Recovered from her ordeal of sleep deprivation, having driven out Sugawara’s influence from her soul, and free from her alter ego’s duties within Hikanome—that latter part was an assumption, but it tracked with what I understood of the situation—Izumi was dressed like she’d fully committed to the life of a mid-20s party girl. And from what she’d just said, a lesbian party girl, though that part was just about the least surprising thing in the world. Nobody in Lighthouse Tower was straight.
What was surprising was that Hina replied with something husky and unmistakably flirty in Japanese, and overall looked just about ready to eat her fellow flamebearer. Izumi said something cheerfully back and Hina giggled—then froze and swiveled to face back toward me, cerulean eyes peeled wide open like she had been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. She hastily scurried back away from Izumi and toward me, looking guilty.
“Sorry, cutie, sorry, I just—I—she’s hot and goth.”
If my girlfriend weren’t Hina Suzuki, that would have been a terrible excuse—but since she was, I understood, or at least I thought I did. “Gimme a sec,” I replied bluntly. The doll was to thank for that candor, probably. “Please hold.”
Ai snorted.
As Hina’s blue eyes searched me for a reaction and seconds ticked by, I pieced out why I didn’t feel particularly betrayed: in the back of my mind, I’d always sort of understood that Hina wasn’t exclusively mine, at least among the Radiances—or wouldn’t be, if any of them propositioned her. We’d never really talked about it beyond the topic of her proclivity for flamebearers and transhumanity, and the near-explicit confirmation that she had once had been some level of intimate with Alice and Yuuka, presumably at different times, but that was enough for words like “cheating” to feel like they just didn’t fit in the framework of our current relationship. And Izumi wasn’t a Radiance, but she was the next closest thing. And Hina probably found her experience with murder attractive—no, I knew she found that attractive, in some way, at least the capacity for violence if not the loss of life. And since I, in turn, was attracted to Hina, it would have been exceptionally hypocritical of me to judge based on that.
It bore consideration that Izumi had also tried to kill or maybe abduct me; I’d never been super clear on which. So maybe it was a little offputting that Hina didn’t find that repulsive, after the two of them had literally traded blows over me at the time. But Izumi had also evidently turned over a new leaf even before this new makeover, and seemed truly committed to abandoning her previous life as Sugawara’s lapdog-assassin-mole-slave. As long as that remained the case, we’d essentially agreed to let bygones be bygones.
Maybe I was being unduly influenced by the combination of a ludicrously pretty woman and the disinhibition of the doll. What was one more thing to unpack during the crashdown once I was back in the meat, after all? For now, I decided to let Hina flirt with the goth girl whose body was an even more advanced work of glyphcraft than mine.
“You’re good,” I muttered to my girlfriend. “We can talk about it later, but for now, you’re good. I think.”
A relieved smile squirmed its way through Hina’s reflexive shame, and she turned back to Izumi, who was now staring right at me. At the doll. And she looked really excited.
I hesitantly raised a plastic arm in greeting. No point in avoiding the topic. “Hi. War?”
“Not in that, I hope. You made it?”
“I made this,” Ai clarified. “Physical, not LM.”
“Pulled it out of storage for cutie,” Hina explained. “Doesn’t it look good on them?”
“It does. Maybe not so good for killing, though. Yuuka-chan says the PCTF will be here this week. Ezzen needs to be able to fight.”
I glanced nervously at Hina. The Peacies being on their way was obviously old news, but the potential scale of escalation should have been something Izumi had little reason to speculate on. “Hina’s been saying that it’ll resolve, um, quickly,” I hedged. “Not peacefully, but it won’t be my fight. Supposedly.”
“And you believe her? What about the Vaetna?”
“…What about them?” I asked cautiously.
“I use the forums too,” she said, matter-of-fact. “I know what people are saying. They won’t stop just because we cut off the first hand they reach out with.”
“Okay, yes, I get it,” I sighed, mentally shifting toward thinking of the whole situation from a bird’s-eye view so as not to feel overwhelmed—a trick I’d have to remember once I got out of the doll. “Let’s dispense with being cryptic, yeah? They want me for my Flame’s supposed anti-Vaetna properties, whatever those are, I know. What are you anticipating that Hina isn’t? Where’s the catch? Do we just not have the firepower?”
Hina snorted. “Firepower, hehe.”
“That’s basically the problem, yes,” Izumi confirmed. “Not enough firepower.”
Ai paced to the back of the room and hefted herself up onto the countertop where the doll had been lying last night. She looked almost annoyed. “I want to talk about mantles. Not this.”
Izumi nodded and spread her hands soothingly. “Gomen, I’m getting there. Ezzen, what makes the Radiances different from the Vaetna?”
“Uh. I mean, they’re not magical girls, but that’s probably not what you mean.” After waiting a moment for her to nod, I continued. “So. Power? No offense,” I added in Ai’s direction, conscious of present company. “By an order of magnitude, so that’s the big one. Overall control of magic matters too, but the, uh, discrepancy of scale…”
Izumi nodded again, approvingly. “Yes. The Spire is safer than Japan. The Vaetna are so powerful, so scary and good at killing, that if they go to war, nobody else would dare strike at the Spire while their back is turned. On the other hand, the Radiances keep Japan safe from everything happening to the south and west, all of China’s pressure and the very bad things in India, just by being here. All Japanese flamebearers are part of that shield, but the Radiances are the ones who would fight. But we are not strong enough to be that shield if we are also fighting the PCTF.”
When she put it that way, it really was quite simple. National security directly correlated with the number of flamebearers available, and though that calculus held for the entire world, it had led to different implementations in different hemispheres. In the West, NATO was afraid of the intrusive supernatural obelisk in the center of its home turf, and almost all the nations involved had consolidated resources to minimize internal threats, maximize Flame yield—that was, propaganda and kidnappings—and present a unified front of military readiness toward the center of the North Atlantic. That was the reason the Peacies had the infrastructure to black-bag me thirty minutes after being flametouched, after all.
But Asia, on the other side of the planet from the Spire, was different, not as unified by the Vaetna’s perceived external threat. Even I, with my intensely Spire-limited interest in global politics, understood that the South China Sea was volatile, that things could get very bad very quickly if North Korea ever got access to a stable flamebearer, and that the perpetual brushfire clusterfucks of the Indian subcontinent had everybody on edge.
And that Japan was caught between these two worlds. Even before the firestorms, it had been America’s bulwark against China’s rising superpower. Now it was nominally the rearguard against that same threat while the bulk of the hegemony’s might faced the Atlantic—but in reality, Todai’s private enmity toward the PCTF had rendered that relationship much shakier. Now we risked a scenario where China would mobilize if they smelled weakness and we’d be crushed by the world’s two superpowers, assuming the Vaetna didn’t also get involved to deal with me before I could present any more problems.
But everything aside from that last part had still been true three or four years ago, when Todai had fought the PCTF the first time, right?
Hina chuckled nervously when I voiced that objection. “Well…kinda sorta?”
Izumi’s expression turned stormy. I’d seen that face before, on Amane. “Four years ago, China was focused on the East India war. They needed all the Flame they could get. Hikanome—Sugawara—sold it to them, sourced from Japan and further. So invading us for territory or Flame wasn’t a priority.”
I understood, my absent stomach turning a little. “Appeasement, yeah, I see the picture. To confirm: that deal is long since dead and buried, right?”
“Now and forever.”
“Worth it,” Hina asserted.
“Worth it,” I agreed, “but I see the problem. It’s a real risk now? They’ll just rock up if we get really busy with the Peacies?” I felt like it would get more complicated than that; for one, a full-on invasion on such relatively short notice seemed impractical, and for two, that outcome seemed like it went against American interests anyhow. “Do we…want that to happen? To Japan? The whole rock-and-a-hard-place you seem to be describing?”
“Not a problem if we win,” Ai muttered. She didn’t sound as confident as Hina had last time we’d had this conversation.
“Okay, right.” I resisted the urge to freak out too much. In hindsight, I suspect that being in the doll was helping me remain more stable, which was a notable reversal from last time’s mania. “So…what would we actually be up against, that would demand for me to personally be going out there and, uh…”
All three women graciously allowed killing people to go unsaid, but we were long past the point of refuting that that was indeed where we were headed. “Well, they have like…thirty real fighty flamebearers? Forty? China, I mean,” Hina guessed. She shrugged. “One on one, they can’t fight us. But there’s a lot of them, and they have ships. A lot of ships. With big magic guns.”
“And regular aircraft, nuclear and ripple weapons. One of the biggest and most advanced militaries in the world even without magitech,” Izumi added, which didn’t make me feel better. “Even if we would survive, Japan would not. Which is not in the Peacies’ interests, but for you…the country might be acceptable casualties.
“Rock and a hard place,” I repeated, getting that awful lurch in my absent stomach again now that the most important numbers were laid bare, the vertigo of the world’s two great conventional powers colliding, with me and my friends in the middle. The situation was now starting to feel impossible. “Great. Great. How—Hina, you said we’d win.” I searched the azure in her eyes for an explanation.
“Mhm! Izumi and I were talking about it last night.”
That derailed me. “…When, exactly?”
“Oh, um—before I met up with you? She didn’t look like that, then, though. Rawr.” She waggled her eyebrows suggestively at the other flamebearer before catching herself and remembering the stakes. “Uh, winning, right. Basically, we do a Vaetna.”
“What, turn this tower into a second Spire?”
“No, the other thing.”
“Apply overwhelming force to high leverage targets?”
“Yeah! I think?”
“Decapitate,” Izumi translated. Her midnight-blue lips twisted into a grin. “We scare them. Let me show you.”
She took a sauntering step forward—and vanished into smoke that fizzled away into nothingness. Her voice blurted from the PA.
“Ningen dewa nai. We are not human. Niku dewa nai. We are not meat.”
Her voice moved, following some invisible source, and I turned to track it until I was facing my body, my flesh-and-blood one, inert in the chair. She reappeared next to it, coalescing first into particles and then once again into a beautiful and lethal whole.
“They are. An exo-suit is powerful, a human is not. Not against us.”
She extended a nail-clawed hand toward my neck.
“They are fragile.”
A surge of imminent danger prickled up my neck, animal fear that would have set my armpits sweating and heart pumping. It met the base of my metal skull and struck a different emotion, one which was equally visceral but not wholly mine. Recognition, the sense that I was understood, rocketed back down the path the fear had come from, shooting down my arm and rushing into—
—where a tattoo was not. My spear could not leap to my hand, no matter how much my trauma-ingrained reflexes insisted that it must. Ai was right; it didn’t live in abstract, always-with-me-regardless-of-body blood-space. It was physically encoded into the tattoo in my arm, the one that hung limp next to my assailant.
But Ai was not completely right. The last time I had faced Izumi, I had broken the rules, or maybe found a loophole. Out in the darkness of the fourth dimension, I had learned that even divided from my spear, my Flame still understood it to be a kind of spatial referent. My emotional anchor carried over to the physical. Even if it couldn’t come to me, I knew, in some ineffable, deeper-than-bone way, how to go to it.
I was already there.
I don’t remember moving. I don’t even remember the disorientation of teleporting, of sudden displacement, nor catching the spear as it fell limply from my flesh-hand. I just shoved Izumi away from my body with a synthetic forearm, my other hand gripping the spear’s haft, already swinging with the blunt end to force her away and create space—
A cerulean blur tackled Izumi before my blow could land. They slammed into the far wall, there was a struggle of limbs and growling, and then both of them appeared to slide and twist out of reality as Hina took the fight outside, with a wet, tearing noise, leaving just tense silence—and Ai standing next to me, green light bleeding through the back of her shirt, a hazy shimmer of something optically cloaked hovering over her shoulder, and a shocked look stamped on her face as she stared at me.
“How did you—”
She was interrupted by the regurgitatory zip-gurgle of the other two crashing back up into reality. Hina had a claw wrapped around Izumi’s face, and Izumi had a knife sunk into Hina’s armpit, but it didn’t look or sound much like fighting; the hyena was giggling. “I’ll kill you,” Hina said quietly in the very bottom of her voice, and I wasn’t sure if it was a growl or a purr. Either way, it was so clearly flirting that it disarmed my sense of imminent danger almost entirely.
“Ato, ne,” Izumi replied quietly, before kicking the more compact woman off of her, tugging the knife free at the same time with a splash of arterial red.
Hina caught herself easily and carried through the momentum to trot over to me, wince-smiling at the wound that was visibly already beginning to close through the rip in her shirt. “Cutie! That ruled!”
“Impressive,” Izumi agreed, blood splattering from her knife onto the tiled floor as the weapon dissolved into smoke. “Very fast. Faster than the fox.”
“Yeah! I mean, I did wait a bit to see what it’d do, but I didn’t even feel it start to move!”
The disoriented moment it took me to puzzle together that “it” referred to me was what it took for me to properly process the whirlwind of stop-and-go violence. I put down my spear, resting the butt on the floor, and frowned at Izumi. “Okay. Processing all this. You’re, er, fight-crazy like her?”
She smiled. Unlike Hina’s eyes, which were so vivid as to appear luminous, hers were dark, notable only thanks to the makeup applied around them. Infinite customizability in this LM body, and yet she opted for the appearance of mundane decoration only. “She makes it fun. Is that more interesting to you than what you just did?”
“What I just—oh, the…spear teleport?”
“The spear teleport?” Ai blurted, completely fed up with the nonsense that had happened in front of her in the last thirty seconds. “Yes, I agree, that is more important than these two doing…whatever that was! Did you modify the weave in your tattoo? Did Hina sneak something into the doll before we got started? How—Ezzen, please explain how you did that.” By the end of that sentence she seemed to have vented most of the initial panic; whatever had been shimmering over her shoulder was gone. “If you are modifying things on either of your bodies, or worse, doing blind sanguimancy again, then you have to tell us, so we can—”
“None of that! No sanguimancy, and I didn’t weave anything at all,” I hastily reassured her. “I—I did this before, back during the inferno, after Yuuka and I blasted you out of Hina’s pocketspace.” I indicated Izumi.
“It was a good hit,” was all she said in reply, not sounding offended in the slightest.
“And you didn’t tell us?” Ai asked. The shrillness in her voice had changed its character, switching from adrenaline-induced anxiety to what sounded like mild offense that I’d done something cool and not shared it with her.
I frowned. “I did! Like, five minutes ago! You said you’d let it slide because my Flame was weird!”
“That’s—I hadn’t seen it,” Ai countered. “You said it was Vaetna-like, but I…assumed that was just you being you, and that you were, I don’t know, lying about not using blood magic so I wouldn’t be mad, but that was in the doll, and it looked exactly like a—”
“—rain step!” Hina finished.
I froze. “What? No, no it wasn’t.”
“It was,” Izumi asserted. “I saw it too. It can’t be anything else. This is—yes, this is good. I said we could use Vaetna tactics, and immediately, you are moving like they do. Instant and untouchable. Mantles do not move like that, even encoded in storage, not without clear ripple.” She pointed to her normal-looking eyes, which doubtless contained full-spectrum ripple detectors. “And I did not see ripple. Did you?” She looked to the others.
Hina sniffed the air while she rotated her shoulder to confirm the stab wound had closed up properly. “Nope. I mean, there’s red, but that was us.”
Ai was looking less incredulous now, as if the idea that I had perfectly executed a Vaetna-exclusive magical combat technique explained everything. “I can’t without my mantle. Ebi?”
“Nope,” rang the android’s voice from the PA.
I started, realizing she’d been watching the entire time. “But—”
“Rain step. Noun. That thing the Vaetna do when they fight that’s like a legally distinct, zero-ripple version of instant transmission from Dragonball. Example sentence: ‘That was a rain step, dipshit, don’t get weird and denial-y about it, we all know you’ve been daydreaming about this since you were fourteen.’ Also, Izumi, Sapphire, if you’re going to do fucked up lesbian courtship rituals outside of threespace, go ana, not kata. You almost hit me.”
“Sorry!” Hina grinned at the PA, then at Izumi, who nodded.
Ebi had skewered me exactly; this was indeed another old fantasy come to life. But it fit with everything else strange and reminiscent of the Vaetna about my Flame, and that helped me get over the initial hump of disbelief. For just a moment, my skepticism slipped, and I found myself getting excited. “Um. What did it look like?”
“Not like Heung’s, if that’s what you’re asking,” Izumi said. I really was that easy to read. “No glowing line, no…afterimage. Is that the word? Yes? Even though you did go to your spear.”
“Actually, nothing in between at all,” Hina added. “But I was, um, kind of looking at Izu-chan. Try it again!”
“Don’t try it again,” Ai chided. “Not without a better testing setup first. And I need to check if that damaged the doll.” She walked over to the diagnostic readout panel she’d set down earlier.
“But it looked fun! Did it feel good, cutie?”
“I…don’t know? It felt natural.” A wobble of giddiness passed through me. “Like it just made sense. Like of course I was there, because the spear was there. Heheh.”
Izumi put a hand on her hip. “I think this means you are becoming a Vaetna.”
“Way to say the quiet part out loud,” I giggled, the insanity finally hitting me. “That’s awesome. It’s—it’s not hopeless.”
“It means we can win, yes, I don’t think they’ll be expecting that.” She looked excited.
“You’re strong!” Hina chirped, hanging off my shoulders. “I told you, cutie! You’re something special!”
“It feels good to be strong,” I admitted, turning to return the hug. Now that the dam of incredulity had broken, I was realizing I felt amazing, and was suddenly struck by the urge to share that feeling with my girlfriend, to kiss her with lips I didn’t have. I made it about halfway into leaning toward her when I remembered the need for restraint, for responsibility, the sting of what Yuuka had said to me after the last time I had felt this way. Hina pouted as I pulled back, and I felt compelled to apologize. “I—sorry, there’s just a lot of stuff going on in my head right now and Ai’s right, we should focus on—”
“If you want to kiss her, then you should. That was impressive, and should be celebrated.” Izumi opined. Ai paused, glanced back at us, rolled her eyes in a resigned, not-my-fight way, and returned to her panel.
I turned on Izumi, suddenly feeling a little defensive. “What’s it to you? I, um, realize there’s something happening with you two, but…”
“She knows how to party! And that means she’s right, kiss me, damn you! I want my celebration kissies!” Hina blinked her big, blue eyes invitingly at me.
“I…Hina, no,” I tutted, trying to inject some authority into it as she splayed her fingers over my synthetic neck. “Once I’m back in my regular body, and once we’re out of Ai’s hair, but not now.”
Izumi chuckled. It wasn’t a particularly happy sound. “Oh, this. I see. I remember what this was like. Feeling good, feeling right, having somebody willing, and being scared, because people like us aren’t allowed to be happy.”
“Oh my God,” I groaned. “Are you calling this a trans thing?”
“Shame? Feeling like your desires don’t matter? Yes. Miss Takehara would agree.”
As Hina nodded enthusiastically, I frowned. “No, she wouldn’t, I talked to her about this. I’m trying to be responsible! This, this thing we’re doing right now, this, um, giggly almost-kissing, it makes Yuuka really uncomfortable—I still have to apologize to her for the night before last, when I used the doll the first time, because of how we were being all handsy! And, and—” I floundered. “And I don’t want random red ripple to cause problems for Amane.”
“Oh. This is for them?” Izumi made a show of looking around, sculpted eyebrows raised in mild challenge. “Are either of them here right now? No, they’re not stopping you. You are stopping you. You may kiss your girlfriend if you want to, because you want to. Or I will do it for you, maybe, if you won’t.”
“It doesn’t matter that Yuuka’s not here right now,” I pointed out, “not with her eye. Listen, she told me she was afraid of me when I was all…happy-stupid. Euphoric. I—Alice spilled what happened to her, and for her benefit, I just…I don’t know,” I sighed, feeling like I was talking myself in circles. “I’m trying to do the right thing.”
The room got very quiet. Ai’s hands stopped fidgeting with the panel and Hina hunched down in shame. “Oh.”
Izumi, on the other hand, reacted much more actively. She crossed her arms and something flickered across her face; sympathy, perhaps, or maybe guilt, it was too quick for me to define before her voice grew steely. “I know what happened,” she said slowly. “To her. Those are her scars, not yours. People like you and I, we cannot let other people’s discomfort keep us from being who we are. Do not run away from your happiness just because she might know that you are happy, that you want to feel good sometimes, and be upset by it for her own reasons.”
“Fuck’s sake, she’s traumatized—”
“By him, not you!” A wisp of smoke rose off her. “Someday I will help her properly kill the man who did this to us, but until then, what he did to her is not your problem to fix, Ezzen. Especially not when your “fix” is to let your own happiness become the new victim of this…this cycle. It is too important for that.”
“It’s not that serious! I mean, it is for her, but for me…” I searched for the justification, the reason I felt like my own desires could be so readily pushed to the side if it meant avoiding being troublesome. All I could find were the embers of the general self-loathing I’d come to live with, and fear of being an intrusive man in this space of women. And from inside the doll, both notions seemed faintly ridiculous when confronted directly. “Fuck. Okay. This has been a…bit of a spiral, I’m realizing.”
“Yeah,” Hina said quietly. “I don’t want Yuuka to be upset. I really, really don’t. But if that’s your problem, cutie, there’s a whole country out there where we can just do whatever and she’d never see, even with her eye. Let’s—we should go on dates, spend time outside of the penthouse, away from her, so everybody can be happy.”
“It doesn’t need to be away from her,” Izumi countered, looking frustrated that Hina would undermine her point. “Just…live like she’s not there!”
“Within reason,” Ai chided. Izumi shrugged in polite disagreement but didn’t belabor the point.
I shook my head. “…Okay, sure. I was intending to get out of the house more anyway, though. Been feeling pretty…cooped-up, I guess. So how about…” I scanned around the room, found the clock, noted the time, then looked down at my synthetic body. “Damn, has it really already been half an hour in this?”
“Yes,” Ai confirmed, a note of concern in her voice. “Does anything feel strange?”
“No, no. I’m just thinking…I wanna go do something. Go somewhere.”
Hina blinked at me, intrigued. “Where?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere fun, be a tourist, like we talked about, you should pick. But I know I won’t feel nearly as, um, gung-ho after I sleep it off. So tonight I want you guys to make me put on a mask and drag me out into the world. And then again, same thing tomorrow. Magic, doll or other mantle work, make me touch grass, every day, until we don’t have that luxury anymore.”
“Aw, cutie! Yeah, yeah!” Hina cheered. “Can Izumi come? She knows all the good places.”
“Will she try to stab me again?” I gestured at my body still sitting in the chair.
“That was for demonstration,” Izumi protested. “But I would understand if you don’t trust me.”
Hina wilted. “Aw. She can’t? But she’s so good at it!”
I turned my head a bit to indicate I was rolling my eyes, which felt very right. Though I did miss the feeling of my hair shifting on my shoulders as I did that; room to improve in the proper mantle. “I mean, she can stab you. As long as it doesn’t freak out the civilians, I guess. Or cause an inferno.”
Hina lit up. “Yay!”
“I can do that,” Izumi agreed. “Thank you for trusting me.”
“I mean, we did basically exorcise Sugawara together. I knew you probably weren’t going to tear my throat out.”
“Yes. I will always owe you a debt for that. And, eto, for letting me flirt with the fox, if I am not misunderstanding.”
“Buh. Yeah, but don’t make it weird,” I replied, a little surprised at how Ebi-like that sounded.
“Ai, you wanna come too?” Hina asked.
“I’ve seen Tokyo before,” she groused, tapping at the readout pad. “And I have to take a deeper look at this data, and there’s still the problem of your new prosthetic, and—”
“Yeah, yeah.” Hina sounded like they’d had this exact conversation before. “Okay, sure. You’ll change your tune when I get some sumo tickets. Or make Alice get them. But that’s later. I was promised a cuddle puddle!”
Author’s Note:
Rain step! Good job to any readers who remembered what this is from the very first chapter before Ebi’s reminder; that was a third of a million words ago! And there’s so much else that happened in this chapter. Geopolitics, some more convincing Ez it’s allowed to have good things, Izumi is hot and maybe also kind of having a thing with Hina…good times. Anyway, beneath these looming threats, our girls and creatures and girlcreatures are determined to experience some slice of life. Let’s see how long they can keep that up.
Thank you to the beta readers! This chapter had a lot of tricky stuff to navigate, but I think it came out great in the end, and that’s in huge part thanks to their contributions.
It’s been a long first week of the year. I’m going to rest up, poke some artists for commissions based on last poll, and return strong on the 19th. In the meantime, join the Discord! Thank you for reading!
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