ezzen: Thought I’d poke my head in before we went full piranhas in an hour.
My fingers glided along my laptop keyboard. The screen was the only light in the room, spilling over my bite-bruised flesh. Hina was curled up against me, naked as I was. Sex was good, I’d learned—though this was a much milder session than that first night after our gyoza-seeking outing three days prior, when she’d butchered my virginity and then proceeded to fuck me half to death. It had been awesome and irresponsible and absolutely not sustainable to continue at that level. If Hina needed an outlet for the type of copulation where fighting and fucking were indistinguishable, well, she had Izumi, and compunctions about sharing my girlfriend somehow did not number among all my neuroses.
But I wasn’t dropping into the chatroom to reveal that I’d progressed my relationship with Radiance Sapphire. The internet was still more than sufficiently a-titter with the videos of the two of us out in Shibuya; indeed, we’d been spotted all over Tokyo in the past three days, from the aquarium to the sumo arena in daylight and in bars and boba shops at night. People could think what they liked from there, and even among my friends in a relatively secure channel, what we did to each other’s flesh a ripple-safe distance away from the penthouse was a little too personal to share in detail. I’d told Sky only enough in confidence for him to verify that Hina knew the limits of what a squishy human body could endure, for the next time she wanted to go rough with me. Anything beyond that wasn’t my friends’ concern, as much as I was sure they’d have loved to speculate about how my girlfriend’s healing factor worked.
No, I was here in the main chatroom to talk about something equally personal, but which was solely my own to share. It was probably a little overdue, if anything, but we were congregating for something big anyway, and I wanted to lay this out before that took total priority in the discourse.
ezzen: so the mantle is going pretty well
starstar97: ?????????
starstar97: what does that mEAN
ezzen: To be blunt: it might mean boobs
starstar97: GAWUH AH GFSAKLJ
moth30: wtf this doesnt sound like the ez i know
moth30: who are you and what have you done with them
ezzen: It me!
starstar97: BRUH
starstar97: e booba real??
starstar97: e on e?
moth30: big if true?
ezzen: Not hormones!
ezzen: The nominative determinism isn’t THAT strong
ezzen: But
moth30: better than eztrogen…
moth30: (is it okay to make those jokes? i can stop)
ezzen: all good lol
ezzen: Not impugning my nonbinarezness
skychicken: that pun is on life support
ezzen: indeed
ezzen: But yeah, mantle has boobs. Or it will once it’s done and I can use it.
starstar97: congrats!!!!!!
moth30: can i get a refresher on what a mantle is <- does not know anything about lighthouse
starstar97: lm body they use for their magical girl transformations
skychicken: im body
starstar97: *LM
starstar97: fuck you
starstar97: its really cool! fighter jet shaped like girl!
moth30: whoagh…….
moth30: two of my favorite things
moth30: why didnt you tell me about this before star
starstar97: google heliotrope phoenix amv
ezzen: Yeah, imagine a fighter jet but all the controls are in your head.
ezzen: I’m not at that point yet, though
ezzen: Haven’t actually woven up the LM, using basically a dummy instead for now.
That was why I’d been putting time on the flight simulator in Hina’s room. Ai had modded it specifically for this purpose years ago as a partner to the doll. Where the doll was for the core mind-transfer functionality and gaining comfort in a body not of flesh or necessarily shaped like your own, the simulator was a way to practice laying out a physical control panel for the more advanced motor and sensor functions of a mantle in order to build up muscle memory. Those would map to the more abstract, thought-triggered controls of the actual mantle. Chief among them was the mechanism that would let me directly transfer in and out at will, without the horror-show helmet currently necessary for the doll, but Ai and Amane had both stressed that it was absolutely critical for me to first be comfortable with the basic mental control panel for triggering functions. Apparently Amane had once gotten stuck in her mantle in her novice days, and no matter how much they had improved the automatic release failsafes since then, it was critically important that I have the muscle memory to free myself and get back into my original body.
starstar97: omg youre using the doll??????
I sighed to myself. I’d known this was coming; I’d asked the Radiances ahead of time what I was cleared to share with my friends about this, and had been surprised to learn that the doll was relatively public knowledge. Todai hadn’t even been the first to show the technology to the public, though it had been the first civilian application. At the time it had been primarily publicized as a kind of full-body pain relief prosthetic Amane and Ai had been developing. In a sense, it was still serving that purpose, though for a different kind of pain.
ezzen: okay okay lemme get ahead of this
ezzen: i dont know why its called the doll!
ezzen: its really just a crash test dummy
starstar97: dollzen
skychicken: play nice, star
I waited a few seconds for her to start typing some kind of apology, because it would be funny.
starstar97: ok fair. was just riffing but i can see how it comes
ezzen: She’s not completely wrong
starstar97: im NOT>?
moth30: LOL
ezzen: I’ve been thinking about that actually
ezzen: Because the body IS kinda gender euphoria, but I’m not sure how much the term “doll” is doing it for me. I think it’s mostly just that the plating feels Vaetna-y. I’m armored and it’s a relief.
starstar97: (notes)
starstar97: vaetnez!
starstar97: relevant given the upcoming stream
moth30: (t minus 58 minutes btw ez please come hang out we havent had you around for one since your fuckin flamefall and we miss you)
starstar97: more seriously uh
starstar97: it is a pretty loaded term gender wise
starstar97: hard to decouple it from the fact that its literally slang for a trans woman
ezzen: …
ezzen: I am ashamed to admit
ezzen: that that literally did not occur to me
ezzen: Huh
I marveled at myself for missing that—and was a little annoyed that the Radiances had defaulted to still calling it the doll when they knew my gender preferences. But maybe they actually hadn’t thought about the connotation, or they’d just figured I had been thinking of it along those terms and implicitly consented.
starstar97: okay e that is very you but also valid to be uncomfortable
skychicken: too fem-coded?
ezzen: Maybe? Shit idk now
ezzen: But that’s sort of the conundrum, which is the thing I brought this all up for to begin with
ezzen: Because, putting this on the record, I do feel quite solidly that I am NOT running with the magical girl aesthetic! I’m not becoming a Radiance and I don’t particularly want to be seen as girl.
ezzen: And yet,
ezzen: boobs squishy
starstar97: (true)
moth30: (true)
ebi-furai: (true)
ebi-furai: to cut to the chase, ez put boobs on the doll today
ezzen: My chase! Severed!
moth30: how do you actually do that
moth30: duck tape?
starstar97: its SIX FLAMEBEARERS THEY KNOW HOW TO AFFIX
ezzen: duct* tape
moth30: are you correcting me or is that what you used
DendriteSpinner: ACTUALLY
ezzen: what we used
The chat lay silent for a moment until a small wall of text appeared. We were all nerds, after all.
DendriteSpinner: It is/was called duck tape because it used to be made from duck cloth! Because the whole point of duck tape is that it has a strong fiber weave on the backing that makes it much stronger than a simple cellophane tape, and cotton duck (*not made of real ducks) was the most convenient textile of choice, so it was literally duck fiber tape. The name mostly switched because it was eventually also used for things like duct repair and that sounds more plausible to people than “duck tape” which admittedly does read like a wrong homophone.
starstar97: ??????
moth30: dendrite my goat
DendriteSpinner: so in a sense you could say that the boobs ARE attached by weave 😛
starstar97: what, doll’s too fragile?
ebi-furai: cmon
ebi-furai: wantonly {affixing} pieces of pink3 magitech together is how you end up sorted into your constituent organs by mass
ebi-furai: live onstage
ebi-furai: on international tv
ebi-furai: because you ignored your engineers telling you it would do that because you are, quote, “a different breed”
ebi-furai: and now the moment is immortalized forever on twitter dot com and also my hard drive
moth30: elongate wasnt ripple interference, billionaire meat can do that at any time and is simply waiting for the funniest moment
starstar97: call me billionaire meat the way im exploding with no warning at the funniest time possible
ebi-furai: opal’s flesh must have a terrible sense of humor then
moth30: actually if it can do it at any time then we wouldnt need the vaetna- oh i made myself sad
A notification blip interrupted what I was typing.
[Direct Message] starstar97: okay dude/tte/nby what the hell does ebi DO at todai this is driving me bonkers style
[Direct Message] starstar97: “medical staff” my gosh darned ASS, she talks like she runs the tower
[Direct Message] starstar97: i am this close to believing shes just straight up one of the girls
She’d got it in two, more or less, but I’d been coached not to confirm or deny. I was certain Ebi was surveilling this conversation anyway, end-to-end encryption or no.
[Direct Message] ezzen: She’s not a Radiance! And she does work with Ai! That’s objectively true!
[Direct Message] ezzen: pinky swear
[Direct Message] starstar97: sure, pinky swear, cant argue with that
[Direct Message] starstar97: one of opal’s aides then, or something
[Direct Message] starstar97: just feels like she knows a whole lot about a whole lot of things
I snorted at the idea that Alice had any operational support at all; the woman had a frankly worrying lack of infrastructure between her and the day-to-day operations of Lighthouse as a media nonprofit and tech R&D facility. Hina and Ai had both separately posited that the dragon-ka might be a direct symptom of stress feeding her Flame, and I suspected that theory held some water. Maybe her headaches weren’t a sign of imminent dragon horns, just regular, normal-person stress migraines.
At any rate, Ebi’s nature as a true, thinking person was one of Todai’s secret secrets, one of the things that at the time of my arrival had seemed world-shaking, but now I honestly wasn’t sure how “the magical girls have an AI” could land us in hotter water than we were already in, big picture. Regardless, it still wasn’t my information to share.
[Direct Message] ezzen: Genuinely can’t believe you care more about this than hearing about my adventures with mammaries
[Direct Message]starstar97: sorry! brain has been chewing on it for like weeks now
[Direct Message] starstar97: gimme a little hint?
[Direct Message] ezzen: Medical staff is still basically correct and that’s all I can really share.
[Direct Message] starstar97: fine then
[Direct Message] starstar97: keep your secrets
[Direct Message] starstar97: and share your boobs
I took that as my cue to return to the main chat.
skychicken: on the other hand
skychicken: six flamebearers resorting to taping a set of silicone jigglies to a crash test dummy is an all-timer mental image, right
ezzen: yes it was all rather low-tech
ezzen: but it did work
moth30: and how would you rate your booba (chinhands)
My hand ghosted over my chest.
ezzen: Well I didn’t wake up paralyzed by new flavors of dysphoria, so thats something
ezzen: Actually like the most immediate thing was kinda orthogonal to the gender part
ezzen: So the chassis is all servos and plating and all, right. And that rocks, being made of flesh isn’t all bad but I do, to an extent, crave the strength and certainty of dermis etc etc, I’m finding. And without any clothes on the plating felt like armor so I didn’t feel naked
ezzen: But I felt VERY naked with the boobs on
moth30: because of squishy outside the armor (notes)
ezzen: Exactly!!
ezzen: i had to put on a hoodie
starstar97: aslghslajfk e thats SO gender, robo thing with clear booba bump under the hoodie and no other clothes goes crazy
moth30: frfr
starstar97: im kind of mad you didnt send a pic
starstar97: even though like i get it
starstar97: i want to seeeeeeeeeee
ezzen: oh
ezzen: that i can do
ezzen: gimme a couple minutes
It’s curious that I was able to do that. Just get up, overcome the comforting inertia of my friends in my phone and rise out of bed in the middle of the night, away from the warmth and comfort of my snoozing girlfriend, then shrug on clothes, attach my prosthetic, and creep downstairs into the open space of the penthouse. Less than a month ago, such a thing had been completely impossible for me. The endless vortex of stimulation available in my phone used to be able to paralyze me for days, sometimes weeks on end, before basic maintenance of my body and living space inevitably turned into emergencies that had to be dealt with before returning to my comfortable stupor. Now, I had things I wanted badly enough to get me moving. Or, more accurately, things I wanted to be.
Becoming a flamebearer universally changed somebody, but the version I had always imagined was the most bombastic version of myself, framed as one of the Vaetna or at least on their level. That notional Ezzen was brimming with the desire to change the world, powerful and brave enough to stand up for what he believed in, and armed with some innate wellspring of volition to see it through. The only difference between me and him, I’d fantasized, was that he had the Flame. With that strength, all else would follow; I could finally realize my potential.
It had been sobering for my first few weeks after being infused with magic to instead be dominated by pain, displacement, and doubt. Reality hit me like a truck, even coddled as I was by all of Todai’s wealth and power and kindness. I had been shown the painful truth that I barely knew who I was, that I had barely had a self to begin with.
And now, as I trotted down to the doll’s room and got everything set up unaided, I finally felt like that was starting to change. I was certainly far, far, from the Vaetna expy I had wanted to be, but there was a nugget of volition, a feeling that magic would let me achieve my potential. It just took a slower and more stepwise process between Ezzen-past and Ezzen-future than I had ever dared, or even been equipped to, confront. Perhaps, in time, I could even become the other things I used to imagine for myself—though I’d definitely revised Ezzen-future’s pronouns.
Those kinds of thoughts changed shape as they followed me through the doll’s setup process and through the liminal soul-tunnel that bridged flesh to Flame-imbued silicon. As a human, it all felt very melancholic, all ego-dimming realizations that I had not merely been missing one secret ingredient that would turn me into a hero, a savior, an adult. Whereas in the doll—pending names that clicked any better—I felt potential. And weight on my chest, which was why I was here.
I strode over to the full-length mirror awkwardly propped up against the wall and took a photo of myself. I immediately liked it more than any other selfie I had ever dared to take; it captured the simple geometries of white plastic against the soft shapes of my hoodie, faceless face as the centerpiece. But after a full minute of deliberation, I deemed that one not good enough, mainly because it mostly hid the contours created by the boobs—my boobs—so I took another, then another, trying to find one that would be sufficiently entertaining to my friends while doubling as a sufficiently thorough formal introduction to this latest version of the body I felt comfortable in. It started as an exercise in perfectionism and quickly devolved into play; assured of my privacy at this ungodly hour of 2:12 AM, I tried posing, first in simple offsets of my hips versus my shoulders, then starting to pay more attention to the photo’s framing and the low perspective created by the mirror’s haphazard angle. Before I knew it, I had accumulated dozens of photos alternating between increasingly goofy stances and visual explorations of the doll’s mechanical articulation.
Things took a turn for the gravure when I began to experiment with how to highlight the impact of my breasts. Pulling the hoodie taut would have been downright titillating if I hadn’t left most of my libido in my meat-body; in its absence, and with the boobs not belonging to anybody else, it was refreshingly guilt-free to simply play with them, to grope at their shape experimentally. And like Adam and Eve long before me, being newly aware of where I was uncovered brought a great deal of fun in pulling up the hem of my hoodie and really milking those low angles, until just past the crude edges of duct tape you could see the curve of underboob—
“Having fun?”
“GWAH!”
I dropped my phone. It was fine, thankfully; rubbery corners beat tile, at least at the angle it had fallen at. I hastily scooped it up and turned to face—Yuuka. We were dressed somewhat similarly, actually, at least insofar as we were both wearing hoodies. Except where I was nude below the waist, she was wearing a comfortable-looking pair of sweatpants. No eyepatch; the chunk of prescient gemstone in her right eyesocket stared lidless and unnerving. Her regular eye presented a much friendlier expression, though, at least if you counted a sardonic grin as friendly.
“Hey.”
“…Hi,” I replied uncertainly. “I was, um. You saw that, I assume.”
“Titty pics aren’t really a novel concept ‘round here, Ezza. If anything I’d say you’re late to the trend.”
“Youre not bothered by that?”
“I mean, I knew you’d be doing it, and I came down here anyway. Doesn’t bother me when you’re set up in that thing with those things.” She indicated my body overall and then specifically my chest. “If anything, you’re easier to talk to like this.”
I tilted my head. So that was how it worked with her, it seemed. I wasn’t a threat, even disinhibited and rambunctious, as long as I looked feminine enough. That tracked with how she’d rejected Izumi from dinner high-school-clique-style before we’d attempted to take out Sugawara.
She shifted awkwardly, hands in her hoodie’s pockets. “Look. Amane says I need to apologize for being a bitch. So, sorry.”
“Sure,” I replied, feeling surprisingly forgiving now that I had a read on the situation. She was here to mend bridges—or at least put out the fire—rather than antagonize me. “We’re cool. That, uh, all you came down here for?”
Yuuka raised her eyebrows. “Wow, you really are different in that thing. That was almost sassy.”
“It’s…comfortable,” I hedged. “Maybe not the right word. But better. Less trapped, I guess.”
That earned a look of genuine concern. “You do know what mantles are for, right?”
“Yeah, yeah. Jet fighter, engine of destruction, not a toy. We’re going to war, apparently.” I raised one arm and rapped at the plating with my knuckles. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it, right? If anything, it seems pretty important to enjoy it.” I thought of Izumi hypocritically enduring eating food she could barely taste. “That is where you’re going with this, right? Because I’m not going to stop enjoying it on your account.”
She crossed her arms under her boobs. I wondered how that felt and hesitantly mirrored it. Not bad. She chuckled. “Yeah, not gonna tell you to stop. Amane beat some self-awareness into me. But being too embodied in your war suit can get pretty bad when, y’know, it blows up and you have to eject straight out of fourspace and immediately land on your feet before some fuckin’ kinetics burst pops you in the one-point-four seconds before your wards come back online. If you’re disoriented because your body is a different shape and you just feel worse overall, that can be real bad.”
“All problems Amane currently faces, and I don’t see you lecturing her about it,” I pointed out.
“You don’t see it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.”
“…Fair.” I chewed on that for a moment. “So then what are you advocating in my case, exactly? Not that I take off the boobs, I hope, sounds like you actually like me more with these things. Which means…” I eyeballed her. “You’re not about to pull out a pink, glowing syringe and lunge for my regular body over there, are you? To synchronize how I’m shaped at the other side of the equation?”
“What? No, get your head out of your ass. Alice still has some estrogen in her room if you’re that desperate. Not pink or glowing, though…huh, maybe Todai-branded pink-enhanced estrogen would be a real funny pharma collab, heh, if she’d ever let it fly.” I could have sworn I saw her eye flicker with magical light, as if she were habitually checking the future for the possibility. It occurred to me that perhaps this was how Todai wound up pursuing a lot of their brand deals: decreed by prophecy. She shrugged. “Can’t tell. Anyway, just wanted to point it out. The more your forms diverge, the more risk you’re managing.”
“Can’t I just practice ejecting a bunch? Until I’m used to it?”
“Sure. But you haven’t actually set up the pod yet, and trust me, swapping in and out is a bitch for the first, I dunno, fifty pod hours. We don’t have the time for you to get real good at it, especially if you’re constantly tinkering with how you’re shaped on the mantle side. So just—pick something and stick with it, and be careful, alright?”
I blinked. Well, I would have, had I the eyes to do so. I think the message got across, though. “Aw, was that actual concern I just heard?”
“Fuck off. You sound too much like Ebi, it’s creepy.” She hesitated. “Sure. Fine, if only because you’re the bait. Can’t fuckin’ spring the trap if you get gibbed in a stupid way first.”
I didn’t love the sound of that, but that was partially because I was still in the dark. And usually, I was quite awful at admitting I didn’t know what was going on, but I was different right now. “Er, when does that changeover happen, Miss Precog? When I start being bait for an actual trap, I mean. To be honest, I don’t have a great idea of when diplomatic judo is going to turn into warfare, or what that’ll even look like.”
Her voice turned singsong. “Oh, the sex doll thinks it’s spent the last three days being a tourist by pure accident?”
“Sex doll?” I looked down at my body—which was difficult, past the protrusion of my chest, but even so—and had a horrible realization. “Wait, have some of you had sex in…? Or with…okay, no, back on track. No, it wasn’t by accident, I had a whole discussion with Hina and Izumi—”
“Which I knew you’d do!” She looked smug, which seemed to be her comfort zone when it wasn’t overridden by precognitive anxiety or trauma-induced meanness. “My eye isn’t complete dogshit when it comes to you. Just mostly dogshit. Point is, you being out there, on camera and with your gay polycule, is a statement. The Peacies know we know they’re coming already, but we want them to think we’re not worried about it turning into a real fight in the streets, because if we were, then surely we wouldn’t be putting all those civilians at risk if they decided to make it a fight.”
I tried to follow that. “So me being out there has been…a bluff?”
“Sort of.”
She didn’t explain further; in reply, I did my best to stare at her in a way that signaled my annoyance. Unfortunately, Yuuka commanded an aura of oracular smugness that was completely impervious to nonverbal prompting. Maybe this was where Hina had learned her go-silent-and-stare-at-you-until-you-replied conversational quirk. That might have just been Hina being Hina, considering that Yuuka’s vibe was different. She exuded a sense that she greatly enjoyed being in this conversationally dominant position.
I emitted a digital sigh. “Explain?”
She smiled. “I want to see what they decide to do next. If you’re out there and looking unafraid, eye says a few things could happen. One, there’s a version of events where they honestly just decide to fuck off entirely, if they decide you’re not worth it on top of the chick from your creche they already have. Two, if they stick around and start putting the screws on the government, we can handle that. Three, they start moving stuff from Okinawa…well, things should crystallize after that,” she grinned. “And no matter what, now they really, definitely know what you look like, all up to date with the hair and such.”
“…Yeah,” I agreed hesitantly, not quite following. “And I’m not a particularly big fan of that fact.”
“Correct! You’d way rather be in your mantle. But they don’t know that, right? Rhetorical question, I know they don’t know that. That’ll be the trap, eventually,” she explained excitedly, “Since they do figure that if they were to take the negotiation route—try to win you over with money or holdin’ your friends hostage or what have you—then there’s not a fuckin’ chance you’d actually show up to chat with them in your real body, you’d be in a mantle of some kind, something protective. We’ve got plenty of precedent for that. And they think that mantles pretty much have to be like your real body, not some other shit, especially if we’re putting one together in a hurry.”
“Uh. Sure, I follow that part. How’s that a trap?”
“Because we can have one of us show up in a mantle that looks like that thing over there,” she explained, thumbing toward my insensate body. “They could tell it’d be a mantle, ‘course, but that’s what they’re expecting. They just wouldn’t expect it to not be your mantle.”
“Ah.” I saw it. Then I thought about the plan a moment longer. “But, no, hold on. Why does that need my mantle to look like something else?”
Yuuka steepled her fingers schemingly. “Because they know a Radiance can’t be in two places at once. So if all five of us are accounted for while that’s happening, then it must be you—or Takagiri, but we can account for that—”
“Oh my God,” I interrupted, now fully understanding and a little incredulous. “You want me to shapeshift into one of you? You should have opened with that, that was such a confusing non-explanation. And—that’s barely a step removed from the glowing pink syringe!”
“At least three steps. And it makes setting up a mantle for you so much easier if you just copy one of ours. And clearly you’d be fine with one of us, since, y’know, this,” she waved in the general direction of my duct-taped boobs. “You’ve already joined boobs club, so you could totally wear one of our faces for a few hours and not freak the fuck out.”
That seemed…probably true, I decided, looking down at my chest. It was still kind of a silly plan, though. I had the brief, cruel, intrusive thought that it was no wonder she’d failed to save Amane on her own if that was the extent of her strategy—and promptly kicked myself hard for thinking that, hard enough to feel I should atone by humoring her a little. “Okay. And then once one of you are in the room with them—some notional “them” who I suppose is some Peacie big shot coming in from Okinawa—you spring the trap by shooting them in the face?”
That was apparently such a bad idea that it warranted a huffy twintail flick. “Tch. Of course not! We’d just hold him hostage for leverage.”
“Which we could also do if I was the one there to begin with.”
The moment that left my non-mouth, I knew it wasn’t true, and so did Yuuka.
“Could you?” She looked at me seriously. “In a mantle that looks like your body, no separation between you as yourself and you as the war machine? After you had that meltdown about blowing up an oil rig full of kidnappers, two things that rank near the very top of things that are objectively good to wipe from the face of the fuckin’ earth?”
She had me there. I’d found I was plenty capable of reactive, desperate violence, but a premeditated trap would be a whole other story. It remained a critical difference between myself and future, active-VNT Ezzen. “Fine, yeah,” I agreed. “But this plan doesn’t warrant hopping into one of your bodies. That’d be…I don’t know, invasive.”
“Says the sex doll.”
“Don’t call me a doll,” I snapped, more annoyed than last time.
Yuuka looked surprised. “Alright, sheesh. Not upset about the sex part?”
I took a moment to reflect on that. No, I wasn’t. I was actually sort of curious, but Yuuka was emphatically not the person to ask about what exactly this chassis had been used for. “I’d have thought you’d be the one upset about that, what with you freaking out over me and Hina.”
She raised her hands helplessly. “I thought I’d be too! But the calculus has changed now that you’re in boobs club. My anxieties are weird like that, I don’t know what to tell you. All I know is what the eye tells me, and right now it’s saying you’re chill.”
“Boobs club,” I repeated, having not really heard much of what had come after.
“You do remember the shit you were doing when I came in, don’t ya?”
“I was—okay, sure,” I sighed. “I was just—just curious what it was like. Not used to actually wanting to show off how I look.”
Yuuka put a hand on her hip. “Well, you’ve come to the right girl.”
“You came here,” I pointed out. “Premeditated, even.”
“Bah. Who’s the target audience? These for Hina? Takagiri? Some e-fuckbuddy you’ve been keeping under wraps?”
“My friends on the internet,” I corrected her, begrudgingly turning back to the mirror. She seemed set on helping me, for whatever reason, and I supposed that counted as some kind of win for our relationship. If anything, this felt a lot like Takagiri propositioning me the other day; I really had no clue what I’d done to warrant it.
She blinked with her one eye that could. “Oh. Not nudes.”
“No!”
She collected herself immediately. “Gotcha. Alright, then your job is easy. I can demonstrate.”
That made me turn right back to her in shock. “Not—”
“No, not a fuckin’ bare titties shot. We’re cool, we’re not that cool. I wouldn’t go underboob for this at all, actually, there’s kind of a minimum for it to be, uh, IG-safe, weirdly. And those—wherever you pulled ‘em from—are big, but not Alice-sized, and I’d say she’s around where you’d want for that. So what I’ll actually demonstrate is this:”
She reached behind herself and tugged her hoodie back. The effect was immediate; Hina had done similar things wearing my shirts to tease me and it absolutely had flipped a switch in my brain. In Yuuka’s case, I was grateful that said switch didn’t exist while I was in the doll, because she really knew what she was doing. I pried my non-eyes away, turned back to the mirror, and tried it myself. Sure enough, it left a hell of a contour around my chest, and moreover, where Yuuka’s belly left a faint contour, the hard shell of the doll’s midriff was clearly communicated by the fabric. I liked that a lot. “Oh, dang.” I took a pic, then turned back to her. “This is the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had. Why are you helping me with this? Instead of, I don’t know, sleeping now that you’ve laid out your ridiculous plan?”
She sighed and released her grip on her hoodie. “You want full honesty?”
“Sure? Unless it sucks, I guess.”
“Alright. Because Amane wanted me to make an effort to treat you like you’re one of us. This is the best I can think to do, because my brain is broken and if you’re one of us then that means you need to know how to control your sex appeal.”
That did indeed sound like full honesty, and more than a little vulnerable. I tried to return the energy. “So you’re trying to keep me safe.”
“Pretty much.
“…Thank you. Though, uh…there’s got to be other options,” I pointed out. “For bonding, I mean, that don’t involve pigeonholing me into needing Female Celebrity Survival Skills, all capitalized. No offense.”
She winced. “Yeah. Like I said, my brain is broken. Amane said Alice told you this is how I work, so…here’s confirmation, I guess. Asshole,” she added, seemingly mostly out of some obligation.
“Broken brain comes with the territory for flamebearers, probably. I dunno, my sample size is just you guys. But if it’s about bonding…” I checked my wrist like I was wearing a watch. That was a little bit of muscle memory we’d been trying to incorporate; it pulled up the doll’s most basic HUD. I checked the time. “There’s a Vaetna stream in about twenty minutes. It’s why I was up at this fuckin’ hour in the first place. Word on the street is that Kat’s gonna make her first public appearance since…what kicked all of this off. And that all seems pretty important for how the next few weeks are gonna go. Want to watch with me?”
Author’s Note:
Sorry that this chapter was delayed! Needed a little bit of time to regroup after a pretty brutal week (snowstorms, anybody?). But I’m super happy with this chapter overall, love to write more chatroom. I’ve lampshaded before in the Discord that a certain billionaire died in a very stupid way due to his own magitech, and it’s finally had a moment to show up in the text! Yippee! Also, Ez being cute in the doll (?) is a lot of fun, and we got some Yuuka with it too.
But all that is burying the lede, because BEHOLD:
Drawn by katsutacle, who did a truly magnificent job and I will definitely be commissioning more in the future. Patrons got this art over a week early, and there’s plenty more art in the pipeline, so if you’d like to support the story, there’s a perk!
Thank you to the beta readers. Among all their other work, they’re also pretty fantastic reference for the chatroom’s antics. The main Discord helps a lot with that as well!
That’s all for this week. Tune in next Sunday for onscreen Vaetna!
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