We were wrong that post-doll me would need any convincing to go out and explore. I’d assumed I’d return to being hesitant and recalcitrant about the idea of spending more time outside Lighthouse Tower after recovering from the euphoria of the doll, but instead, almost the moment I woke from my collective nap with Hina and Ai, I got up and found my mask, spirit energized and eager to be dragged around. My body was a little slower on the uptake; a few restful hours on Ai’s mattress still left me a bit sluggish, and if I hadn’t been so eager to go out and do something, I probably could have slept clean through the evening and night. But I was up and about, and my excitement didn’t wane over the next three days.
Night one was by far the lowest exertion. No parties; instead we went out to eat in Shibuya.
The first new experience was traveling by train. It was much more down-to-earth than the times I’d left the penthouse in Todai-owned vehicles, and I gained a new appreciation for the scale of the city as we went to the station on foot. The metal and glass peaks of urban Akasaka loomed high around us in the dark, glinting down like false starlight. I was pleased to find that my foot could handle the walk, and as a bonus, the warmth of my stabilizer module kept my hands nice and cozy in my hoodie pocket. I followed Hina and Izumi down the streets and into the station, following instructions about how to use my Todai-issued train pass and generally doing my best to be a good duckling as we got on the train without drawing too much attention.
Traversing Tokyo is an exercise in crowds, and nowhere is that more true than the traincars of the subway. We were packed shoulder-to-shoulder, a packed mass of human flesh that tightened and loosened with the pulse of passengers coming and going at each stop like some grand heartbeat. Perhaps the tides were a better comparison. Paranoia whispered that any one of them could have been a PCTF operative, somebody out to get us. And while that was probably a useful way to feel as a flamebearer who was still an active abduction risk, I knew it wasn’t a particularly healthy one.
Two things assuaged my worries. The first was my armor of cloth; it now extended halfway up my face thanks to the mask. It wouldn’t stop a knife or bullet, but that wasn’t the point; it made me feel whole while also simultaneously hiding my face. Second, Hina was nestled right up against my chest, and she’d informed me that she would pull both of us straight out of the train—or anywhere else—at the first sign of trouble. We were prepared to abort at any time, blessed with what was arguably any introvert’s dream ability: to be able to instantly flee any situation, even with all doors sealed.
With so many people in such close quarters, it was inevitable that some would notice our not-completely-unassuming trio. Even Hina could pass for normal as long as her face was nuzzled against my chest, somewhat shielded from the side by my hoodie’s extraneous bulk; she could have been anybody’s girlfriend, especially if you were politely ignoring everybody packed into the train car with you and had your head buried in your phone as so many around us did. It also helped that she was employing her customary—at least supposedly, as I’d hardly seen it myself—illusion magic to hide her fangs, and was carrying sunglasses that screamed “I’m obviously a celebrity, who else would wear sunglasses at night?”
I, on the other hand, could not have been just anybody’s not-boy-dollthingfriend—terminology subject to review—in the eyes of even the most casual observer. I had a mane of unmitigated, fluorescent orange hair, was clearly a foreigner, and stood taller than most people in the fish-tin confines of the train car. More importantly, I had been on the news fairly recently, albeit in a tertiary role within the narrative of the Barbecue Inferno, so I received more than a few glances. No unnerving stares as though we were about to be attacked, though, which was reassuring. The only danger was self-consciousness, and with the mask over my face I was managing to dredge up enough doll-derived disinhibition to fight that off well enough. Add something to go over my eyes and I would have been one step closer to being fully encased, Vaetna style.
Then again, a full mask would have drawn even more attention than I was currently receiving. And if you were to look too long at me, you might also notice that the creature glued to my side was fidgeting with just a smidge too much weightlessness, and the subsequent double take might come at a particular moment where she was scanning the crowd and you’d see how her eyes shone like the sapphires that were her namesake. And then you might incredulously squint at the third member of our party and realize that she was not another of the Radiances but in fact—
But Izumi wasn’t high-profile in the way we were. With makeup on and dressed to party rather than to kill, she looked quite different from how she’d looked in the handful of decent photos circulating in the wake of the Barbecue Inferno. She blended right in with the crowd as we approached the heart of Tokyo’s nightlife. There were countless young women out and about, after all—and I did think of Izumi as young. Older than me, to be sure, but a far cry from the fifty-something of her former identity. Maybe somebody might have connected the dots if she’d been standing right next to us, but once we were out in the street she always managed to fade into the crowd whenever I or Hina attracted attention.
All of the attention we did receive was positive, which was remarkable. Hina attracted much less enmity from the general public than I’d anticipated for the instigator of Japan’s most recent major disaster. But she’d briefed me on that before we’d set out, and it was honestly so simple as to be a little depressing: the Radiances’ reputation as Japan’s heroes was so bulletproof that the average person simply assumed that she’d had good reason for crashing the entire festival.
“Even with the…casualties?” I’d asked. “The official story is no fatalities, but surely…”
Izumi had dismissed my concerns. “There were none. Miyoko is very, very powerful in healing. Or something like it. Necromancy…is also not the right word.”
She’d glanced at Hina, who shrugged, apparently unable to offer better vocabulary. “We got it all under control! I helped! Remember your bed when you first showed up? With the healing acceleration field? I spent a lot of last week weaving up a bunch of them. And with Shiny’s powers on top of that, everybody’s turned out all right and nobody’s too mad.”
That kind of power was well beyond my understanding of magic. Could she fix Alice’s tail and presumably-imminent horns or Amane’s severed limbs or my fondly-remembered toes? Then I reasoned that if Miyoko could work miracles of that caliber, Todai would have been much more eager to play nice with Hikanome, or maybe there were Flame interference issues with healing other flamebearers. “Okay, so that means that even if you’re recognized, we won’t be mobbed?”
“Other than the usual fans? Nah. Which will still be a lot, but they’ll just want selfies and I’ll make some sparklies and say houseki hikare a bunch. Humans are easy to please, usually.” She blinked. “Ah, right, necromancy. Shiny did say that she still wants to talk to your dad.”
“…Oh,” I recalled, shivering as I remembered that vague offer, and the unnerving sense that there was a physical space behind the high priestess’ eyes. I’d been a cynic at the time—and I still was, but I couldn’t pretend that whatever Miyoko could do was purely smoke and mirrors. “Yeah, can’t refuse that, can I?”
“Prolly not.”
“You could,” Izumi countered, “you always have the choice. But it would be a good idea to say yes.”
“Wait, didn’t she say two weeks? It’s been more than that.” I eyeballed Izumi nervously. “You’re not gonna whisk me away again and bring me to her for some dark ritual, yeah? Just checking.”
“No. Of course not. I owe you my life,” Izumi intoned. “Though I understand your mistrust. I did try to stab you today. As for what Miyoko wants with your father—I admit that I don’t know what to expect. That was new to me. When we were speaking to you at the gathering, I was just nodding along and being cryptic,” she admitted. “But I do know that it’s been postponed until we gather for my trial. And Japan’s reckoning with you. But we don’t know when that will be, not yet. Soon, to be sure, but the last two, the fisherman and his wife…they can be…hard to find, and it should not begin without them. But enough about politics,” she spat, distaste thick in her voice. “Let’s not speak of it anymore tonight.”
And indeed we didn’t, not that night. In fact, nobody did; of all the people who recognized myself or Hina, none dared even reference the inferno, or so Izumi claimed afterward. Aside from the diplomatic patching-over, it probably also helped that Hina was so disarmingly charming, full puppy mode, happy to stop and take selfies and be generally amicable as I supposed a magical girl ought to be—which took some effort from her when she had to direct it toward humans rather than the flamebearers she adored. I was sometimes involved too; people were taking pictures of me. Not too long ago, this would have been bad enough to induce a panic attack, but my mask was working. It didn’t make me an extrovert, but with Hina’s encouragement I mustered the bravery to at least face the camera and stand less hunched as she posed against me. I hoped I didn’t look too much like a hostage.
We never lingered. She always was quick to explain that I didn’t speak enough Japanese for an interview and hurry us out of the interaction. It was rather impressive; somehow she managed to keep us moving enough that we were never left becalmed in an ever-growing whirlpool of people seeking access to the mildly undercover celebrity, a phenomenon she described as “the paparazzi pileup.” Frankly, the idea of adding paparazzi to the mix, while anxiety-inducing for “oh god not attention” reasons, was a little laughable for the simple reason that there was no space for them. The streets of Shibuya were dense beyond belief, beyond what I had even thought possible outdoors without any particular event driving the congregation of such a throng.
But the neighborhood itself was the event. This was most apparent right after leaving the station, ascending the stairs and turning around to be greeted by a crosswalk of gargantuan proportions, flanked by skyscrapers covered in so many LED billboards that I couldn’t help but compare to the time Dad had taken me to visit Times Square. I was informed this was Shibuya Crossing and that traversing it was an essential rite of passage, evidenced by the sheer number of fellow tourists with phones held aloft as the crossing signs turned green and the gathered hordes on opposite sides of the street rushed toward one another with no regard for the crosswalks in between.
When our turn came around, I expected it to feel like a disordered stampede, facing down a sea of people coming toward us in and unsure if we would even reach the opposite shore—but instead, where we met the opposite crowd, I found that the two flows of humanity simply met and interlinked in alternating single files, a spontaneous display of fluid dynamics that tickled the engineer side of my brain. I thought back to the Barbecue Inferno, the sheer clusterfuck of panicking crowds that must have occurred in the first few minutes. I’d mostly only seen it after Hongo and his underlings had restored some semblance of order, but if he hadn’t been there…I wondered about how one might repurpose glyphcraft’s fluid flow control toolbox to the task of crowd management. I could picture it: a flamefall gone sour in a crowd such as this first responders using magitech to lead people away from the danger without a stampede, automagically detecting the safe spots of lowest free ripple and optimizing crowd direction through those toward safety. It would take a little doing to convert the physical, blue-ripple redirection to informational pink, but it could be done, in theory. I raised the idea excitedly to the chatroom as soon as we found our bearings on the other side of the proverbial Rubicon. By the time Izumi led us to her chosen dinner spot, we’d managed to cobble together—at a high level—the logic and a few tentative glyph arrangements for such a tool, and then promptly been reminded by Sky that people-directing magic potentially bordered on the kind of mind control that the Vaetna tended to kill people for researching and that we should probably stop.
Then again, maybe the Vaetna would soon be on their way to kill me regardless, so I shelved the idea for later.
Hina made me put my phone away as we actually came up to the restaurant—or rather down to the restaurant—mostly because she was worried about me tripping on the stairs. Down, because the gyoza place Izumi frequented was in the basement of a building barely off one of the tourist-choked roads, a literal dive in a random side alley that had barely a trickle of foot traffic compared to the rush immediately outside, and none of them tourists. It was almost shocking how quickly we had fully separated from the crowd, enough so that I was surprised nobody had followed us out in pursuit of Hina. She laughed and informed me I had completely missed her deploying an illusion to cover our escape. When I looked back, I saw a blue streak rising upward past the skyscrapers.
The restaurant itself was narrow; mercifully, in a way that felt more cozy than claustrophobic. Narrow walls covered in faded signage surrounded us, leaving barely enough room to walk behind the single row of stools at the counter. There was hardly any elbow room as the three of us squeezed up onto stools at the single counter, nearly touching. Hina protectively took the seat closest to the door, while Izumi distributed single-sheet laminated menus and hard plastic cups between the three of us.
“There are two kinds of restaurant in Japan,” she explained to me, grabbing a pitcher of ice water. “Ones that serve everything, and ones that serve one thing. This is a one-thing.”
That was a slight exaggeration—the menu did claim they served dumplings with two different fillings—but it was still very clear that this was a place you came to for precisely one type of food.
“I fear the man who has made the same gyoza ten thousand times,” I joked, then immediately wondered if that twist on the proverb would scan correctly to a Japanese speaker, despite Izumi’s clear fluency in English—and was immediately proven right when her sculpted eyebrows furrowed slightly as she politely tried to parse what I meant. Thankfully, Hina happily jumped in to explain in Japanese and save us both from the awkward silence.
Izumi laughed and did something I never could: she acknowledged the social hiccup. “Ara, I should have asked you to explain! I’m sorry, Ezzen. Should I ask what you mean when you say something that confuses me?”
“Uh.” I suddenly felt very much like a child talking to an adult. “S…sure? Sorry. Was, um, trying to be funny.”
“It was! You don’t need to be afraid of explaining yourself.”
Hina pressed her shoulder against mine from the other side. “Cutie, I know you can handle directness, chill out.”
“Sorry.”
“No more sorry,” Izumi chuckled, shaking her head.
“S…okay.” She was hard to say no to, which was a little dangerous. A trait she shared with Hina, but at least Hina had a certain people-pleaser side to her to balance it out, at least when it came to me and the Radiances. Izumi felt more like the cool girl you wanted to impress. “Uh, what do I order?”
“This one, kurobuta. Only pork filling.”
When the food arrived, Izumi explained that the customization options, such as they were, came in the form of picking and mixing your dipping sauces, and instructed me in my options. I could mix chili oil, a thick soy-based sauce, and vinegar, and could choose between black pepper and seven-spice powder to sprinkle on top. Hina went for an all-of-the-above approach, which struck me as a little childish and maybe even disrespectful of the flavors of the dumpling being dipped. Dad had been a bit of a stickler about that; even for mass catering and other more lowbrow cookery, he’d been of the opinion that you should taste the food itself first and any additives second. With that in mind, I elected to initially refuse all sauces and try the gyoza straight, lifting it to my mouth with the accompanying bowl of rice held beneath it to catch any drippings as I was seeing other patrons do—
I’d completely forgotten I was wearing my mask. Izumi snorted as I hurriedly put down my food; Hina reached over to undo one of the ear straps for me, giggling. “Oh my god, that was cute.”
“Why didn’t you tell me it was still on?” I complained.
“Because I thought it’d be cute, and I was right.” Her eyes glimmered with what looked like honest attraction. “Right, Izu-chan?”
“Oh, yes, very cute.”
This unreasonable pressure sandwiching me was far too much for my faculties to withstand, especially freshly stripped of the emotional protection of the mask. I switched to an offensive mode I had previously reserved for Yuuka and sometimes Ebi. “Hey, I’m not the only one with something between the food and my mouth,” I pointed out, rounding on the mantled woman to my right. “Let’s see how well you handle it.”
That could have come off as incredibly insensitive, given that Izumi’s current body was effectively a prosthetic for her identity; if I’d equivalently questioned Amane’s ability to feed herself with her mechanical arm, it would have been slap-worthy. So I waited with increasing nervousness as Izumi stared back at me unreadably. It was almost a mercy when she at last raised her chopsticks and stuffed an entire gyoza into her mouth, maintaining eye contact with me as she chewed and swallowed. She took a sip of her water, placed the cup down, and then continued to look at me smugly, content to wait for me to formulate a reply.
“…How?”
Izumi opened her mouth to reply, but stopped when Hina waved her arm frantically. I watched in fascination as she wove a sound-deadening lattice in a matter of moments and pressed it onto the bar in front of me. Then she waved for Izumi to continue.
“Stasis chamber. I’ll eat it properly later.”
“Pre-chewed?” I asked incredulously, then caught myself. “Um, okay, no, I’m being an asshole, that’s not my business and I get it if—”
Izumi cut down my stammering with a wave of her hand. “It’s fine. Doing anything in the other body is a chore, I’m here to have fun.”
Hina frowned compassionately. “Izu…”
“Oh, I’m sounding sad, aren’t I,” she sighed. “I’ll stop. Itadakimashou, ne. Let’s eat,” she translated for my benefit. “Gyoza are only good while they’re hot.”
I frowned at her evasion, but she was right about the food, and I was hungry. As it turned out, I did indeed fear the man who had made one gyoza ten thousand times, because these were easily the best dumplings I’d ever had. The bottom was crispy without the rest of the wrapper being dry, and the pork filling was unctuous beyond belief, almost obscenely juicy—which Hina was freely indulging in, making satisfied little noises as the juices dribbled down her chin in a bizarrely attractive way. While there was a wonderful light consomme served alongside, and a small cup of radioactive green pickles there to cut through the heaviness, by the second of the nine dumplings on my plate I had come to understand the need for a dipping sauce to balance the rotation from gyoza to rice to pickles to water. Intuition said vinegar with a bit of chili oil, and my third dumpling confirmed that to be the right move.
By my fifth, though, I was starting to get a little curious. I glanced at Izumi. She was eating, but avoiding the pickles, and had barely touched her soup. And I noticed that for her dipping bowl, she’d selected the heavy soy sauce.
“Can you at least taste them?”
“Yes, of course,” she answered hurriedly.
Too hurriedly. I was starting to construct a model in my head. I looked back down at my food as I thought out loud. “I don’t know much about tastebuds, lots of nitty gritty chemistry stuff in there, but I do basically know what makes food taste good chemically, big picture. And I know how {IDENTIFY} and {ASSIGN} and the other pink categorization stuff tends to work. Answer: not all that well, not with hundreds of volatiles to identify, transmit and recreate. Are you getting anything but fat and salt right now?”
“Sour,” she mumbled, not quite sulking.
Hina leaned over to look at her, whimpering sympathetically. I felt the same, sighing. “Okay, no, we’ve got to do something about that. This stuff is way too good to be bitcrushed like that, it’s a waste. And you eat all your meals like this? Barely tasting anything that separates it from the cheapest microwave version, and then you have to eat it again as chewed-up slop?”
“I have different…palates. I can choose between sweet and savory.” She didn’t refute the rest.
“We can do better than that. We ought to do better than that, fuck me.” I shut my eyes to think more clearly. “Hina, mantles are bound by a pink-blue diffusion limit, right? That was the impression I got while looking at the diagrams, but I’ve never actually asked.”
“Ummm…if you want a number from me, cutie…”
“No, no, just that the principle holds. The physical versus informational complexity compromise before they start interfering with each other.”
“Mm, yeah. Fancy LM, worse senses and stuff, and other way around too. Gotcha. Izu, cutie’s saying you should turn down your graphics to make room for more tongue.”
“Maybe we can do both,” I clarified, “I’d need to look at the diagram, we can probably squeeze more efficiency out of it somewhere. Or maybe not and it’d just have to be a slider. But either way, you should be able to enjoy food as it’s intended to be tasted.”
“You’re offering to help me?”
I looked at her like she was stupid. “I am literally with Todai specifically to help work on mantles. That was Alice’s entire pitch, and despite everything that’s happened, it’s still the closest thing I have to a job here.”
“I’m not a Radiance,” she replied, staring down at her plate of food she had no choice but to underappreciate.
I threw a pickle at her, which was uncharacteristic of me, but the moment called for it. It did the trick, because she looked at me in surprise. I turned to face her more directly. “You were telling me today to stop refusing help because I thought I didn’t deserve it. But, um, fine, if you want to be like that, then think about it this way: I also want this capability for my mantle. Think of it like you’re helping me with that, if it makes you feel better.”
“You do?” Hina asked. I looked at her like she was stupid, which made her grin. “Yeah, of course you do. I love that you love food.”
I nodded. “So do I. Nice to remember that,” I muttered. “In my case, if I used that taste assembly, I’d personally skip on having an actual mouth, which would conveniently lower the LM complexity…though I don’t know how I’d get the food in there.”
“Maybe a seamless mouth,” Izumi suggested, brightening. “No line or lips until it opens.”
I raised my eyebrows. The idea of a mask opening up into a maw was a favorite among a select subset of Vaetna fanartists. I’d never imagined it for myself before, though, and it was immediately growing on me. “Huh…No, hold on, you’re not going to acknowledge anything we just said?”
“Yeah, let cutie help you, Izu-chan, it knows what it’s doing!”
The ex-assassin raised a hand to placate me. “You don’t have to work that hard to convince me! You’re right, I was being a little…not used to people wanting to help me. Or even being able to. So, yes, if you’d be willing. But your mantle is a higher priority—no, really, it is,” she insisted. “And I would prefer to help you with that, if I can. How much of the design do you have?”
“Not…a lot,” I admitted, sharing a glance with Hina. We’d spent a fair amount of late-night time chatting idly about it, but committed depressingly little to sketches or a glyph diagram, let alone proper GWalk modeling. “I think I just decided that seamless mouth idea sounds good, but there’s not too much beyond that. I’ve got this vague picture, much more Vaetna than Radiance, and, um—slimmer, or a little reshaped, but…”
Izumi’s eyes lit up. “Reshaped how?”
“Oh, y’know,” Hina began before I could respond, “Cutie’s been pondering those orbs.”
“I don’t know what that means,” she replied, deadpan.
“Ezzen wants tits!” Hina clarified. I was deeply thankful for the field of silence preventing this conversation from spilling out all over Twitter.
“I’m pondering…tits,” I corrected her. “Just…I don’t know. Don’t knock it til you try it, I guess?” My mouth turned dry; I was proud I’d said it out loud, but we were now in uncharted waters. I reached for my cup of water.
“Ah,” Izumi nodded, comprehension dawning. “Pondering tits. I have some experience with that.” She looked down at her shirt, then up at me. “Would hands-on experience be helpful?”
I spat out my water. “Wh—here? I mean, no!”
Hina kicked my shin from my other side. “Cutie, in all seriousness, I have been wondering when you’d get over yourself enough to ponder my orbs.”
“I’ve seen you naked! And cuddled you naked!”
“That’s not sex!”
“I vividly remember you saying I couldn’t take it!”
“Maybe you can now,” she challenged, eyebrows waggling. “And Izu-chan can be there to play referee just in case. Or just there to play. Didn’t you say you wanted to go and have fun?”
This was happening very fast. Too fast; I felt like they were playing with my emotions in an unintentionally mean-spirited prank. “Okay, hold on, that’s an escalation, right, her offering to show me her boobs doesn’t at all mean she’s willing to—”
“I am,” Izumi purred in a tone that was unmistakably sultry. “Are you, Ezzen?”
“Not with you!” I blurted, panic driving me to put into words what could possibly make me reject a threesome with two supernaturally good-looking women. “I—that’s not how it’s supposed to work, I mean. You and Hina can do whatever, but that’s still awfully new, today new, and I’m not—not built to escalate like that. It’s me and Hina, and you and Hina, and not me and you, even with you as a spectator.”
Izumi pulled away from me, looking a touch confused. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not you, it’s me,” I sighed heavily. The cliche was accurate here. “It’s just—I swear this isn’t me being a prude, or ashamed, or anything. It’s just too much too fast to have you involved—I’d have the same response to any of the Radiances. I think.”
Izumi looked toward Hina. So did I, suddenly apprehensive and shaking a little from the rush of adrenaline. I could see this exploding into a tantrum, or worse, Hina could go into full emotional crashdown mode. I didn’t want our first time to happen out of guilt.
But my girlfriend was grinning. “Don’t look at me like that. I still get to fuck both of you! Just separately, which is all good for me.”
I blinked, relieved and pleasantly surprised. I’d misunderstood what she wanted, or maybe just underestimated her character. “Oh. Good?”
“Good,” she confirmed. “Did I hear you right? You still want to fuck me, right, as long as it’s just the two of us?”
“…Yes,” I admitted. It felt weird to say out loud, and weirder to feel a spike of excitement as her eyes flashed. I swore I saw her fingers twitch.
“Yay! Then we’re gonna fuck tonight, cutie. Orbs will be pondered. But…” she looked past me at Izumi. “If the one place I can’t have both of you is the bedroom, then I don’t wanna go there quite yet. The night is still young!” She stood for emphasis. “Let’s go!”
“You still have half a plate of gyoza left.”
“Oh.”
Izumi chuckled, which was also a relief. “Cute. Both of you. I’d be grateful to speak more about mantles, Ezzen, both yours and mine. No…orbs involved.”
“Okay. I’d like that. We’re good?”
“We’re good. Now, I’ve been very curious about this ever since I first met you as Kimura, so if you don’t mind explaining: long hair is not something I associate with the Vaetna or their Flames. How did that happen?”
Author’s Note:
This chapter was late! I miss Tokyo, if it wasn’t evident from the descriptions. At least Ezzen has good local guides! Who are both interested in having their orbs touched. Izumi’s a lot of fun to write. Thank you to the beta readers for helping me understand what had to happen in this chapter!
Sunspot hit half a million views on RR just before this chapter went up! Thank you so much! I wish I had art to celebrate. Soon.
Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!
Join the Patreon to support the story and read chapters three weeks ahead of public!
