CONTENT WARNINGS

None

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.

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January 21, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

Oblique reference to sexual assault

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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January 7, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

My stabilizer module was still warm by the time breakfast made it to the table. For the sake of expedience, today’s menu was eggs a few different ways and not much else. In a few short weeks, navigating the Radiances’ kitchen had become largely an autopilot task; I knew where the various utensils and more common fridge and pantry items were, and since today was not a day for pushing the envelope regarding more esoteric tools or techniques, my flow was only really interrupted when I couldn’t immediately find an ingredient.

“There has got to be olive oil somewhere in this pantry. I feel like I’m going insane.”

“Uh. Maybe not?” Hina joined me staring into the cupboard. “I usually use the beef fat inste—oh, yeah, there it is.”

“What’s this sorry excuse for a squeeze bottle it’s in?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“There’s no…spout, whatever you want to call it. Nozzle. It’s like a ketchup bottle, no control.”

“Oh. You’re a snob, cutie.”

“Somebody has to be.”

Those most mild of gripes aside, it was very enjoyable to use the Radiances’ spacious stove. I’d spent years stuck with a single barely functional induction unit, one of the many little things that had dampened the love of cooking I’d inherited from Dad, so having six proper gas burners was a treat every time. And though I was rusty, I still managed to come out with three passable plates of eggs: two heaping piles of soft scrambled for my predatory girlfriend and her muscular teammate, and a pair done over easy for myself. Normally, I’d have garnished with chives, but the only appropriate greens I’d managed to find were spring onions.

It wasn’t a big breakfast, but the day was yet young, and I figured if using the doll went anything like it did the first time, then I’d be ravenous afterward no matter what I ate now. Plus, Alice had warned me the first time around that there was a mild chance a failed connection attempt could make me vomit, and I’d rather my stomach be mostly empty in that case. 

Ai had also shyly asked for toast on the side, insisting that I really didn’t have to if it was too much work, which was silly of her. I also brought my haul of convenience store pastries from where I’d left them sitting on the counter last night, grabbing the whole bag and finding a jam-filled pastry for Ai. Hina’s blue eyes tracked me as I came back.

“Not the…whatchacallit…cornucopia? The Spire thing.”

I shrugged, putting the bag in the middle of the table as I sat down. “Thought about it. Kinda wanna save it for a special occasion. Maybe after the doll.” I wasn’t quite ready to admit that I was a little too emotionally fragile about Spire-related paraphernalia after last night’s cry. I desperately hoped that I would get over it before the pastry went bad.

“Eat it now! Lots more where it came from!”

“Spire thing?” Ai asked after some delay. She’d been busy inhaling her eggs at a frankly worrying pace.

“Spaiyapan,” Hina explained. I picked up from context clues that that translated to “Spire bread,” which was more accurate than not, I supposed. “Cutie went on a konbini run last night! Pastries!”

“You can have some if you want,” I added. It probably wasn’t good to encourage Ai’s poor eating habits, but in the light of day, I was realizing I’d gotten too many pastries for me to conceivably eat myself, and sharing was and remains a virtue. “Even the cornucopia, if you’re that curious about it.”

Ai shook her head. “It’s yours.”

Hina tutted. “One of us has to eat it eventually. Before it goes bad. You avoiders.”

I winced at the accuracy. “After the doll,” I promised, pulling the conical pastry out of the bag and setting it on the table so it wouldn’t be forgotten. Then I frowned, digging through the bag. “Hey, hold on, where’s the masks?”

“Right here!” Hina tossed them onto the table from nowhere. “Try ‘em, c’mon, I wanna see how you look.”

“Masks?” Ai asked, lifting the pack to read the label.

I felt unwarrantedly bad for keeping her out of the loop, even though these developments were hardly ten hours old and she was probably already putting the pieces together. I stumblingly explained: “Uh. Doll has no face. I…like that? Or at least I want to see if it makes me feel better to have some of my face covered.”

“Totally will,” Hina predicted with a grin.

“Doll first,” I insisted shyly.

“But then it would be hard to tell if you’re feeling good because of the doll or because of residuals, deshou?” Ai pointed out, grinning. She apparently also enjoyed the idea.

“Mask! Mask! Mask!”

Being outnumbered reinforced my excitement enough to overcome my reluctance. I’d bought the damn things, after all; there was no point in making a big event over it. I tore open the pack of masks and slipped the loops over my ears before I could lose my nerve.

“Yep,” was the first thing I said. The second was “this is definitely going to hurt my ears if I wear it all day.”

“But you do want to wear it all day?” Ai probed.

“Yeah.” I found the admission easy. “It’s good. I’m good.”

“You look good!” Hina said, leaning over to run her finger along the seam where the mask met my right cheek. “Gimme, I can extend the—”

“Matte, Hina-san, hold on,” Ai tutted. “No orange on something he’s—”

“They’re!”

Ai cringed and nodded quickly “—they’re wearing on their face, sorry, Ezzen. We can just get ones with longer straps. We already have some, probably, if you don’t mind the style or color being a little different?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t blame Ai for messing up my new pronouns. It was nice to have them at all; I was definitely feeling quite nonbinary right now. “No worries. I wouldn’t want something that’s stretching distance itself sitting right against my face, probably. And yeah, if you’ve got different ones, a bit lighter on the ears, that’d be great.”

“I can probably also make a clip so they don’t go on your ears at all. Can probably buy those, too, but…”

Hina pouted. “Orange isn’t the point! It’s got plenty of orange already anyway!” She picked up a lock of my sunrise-glow hair for emphasis, then tossed it aside. “I just wanna customize!”

“Like, print something on them?” I suspected she had something more elaborate in mind.

“Sure, if you wanted to be boring. I could probably get it to make it look like you have no mouth at all. That’s kinda the point, right? Ooh, I can see you smiling under there.”

I was having a very positive reaction to that idea indeed—and to the irony of my mouth’s own response to the suggestion of its nonexistence. The same basic problem stood, though. “Any magic at all in the mask still runs into the same problem Ai pointed out, though. And pink is arguably even nastier business. Brain is become scrambled egg,” I delicately and eloquently explained, quoting a meme from yesteryear about the hazards of ripple.

Hina rolled her sapphire, far-beyond-flesh eyes. “It’s literally fine. We’re about to put your brain in a robot and pull it right back out, and it won’t be scrambled egg. Would be yummy if it were, though…” she trailed off for a terrifying second before continuing like she hadn’t just said something insane and kind of hot. “Amane wears fancy masks and eyepatches, I wear filters for my teeth, it’s all the same for us. And admit it, cutie, you do like the idea.”

“I do,” I admitted, feeling the blunted contours of my lips and nose through the mask. “Ai, do you think there’s any actual risks?”

Ai looked up from her phone and flinched guiltily. “Eh? Ah—I mean…fine, yes, probably fine, I don’t want to argue. I can find the designs for Amane’s, and you can work from those.”

“Weaving practice later,” I mused to Hina, who grinned. Then I stood as confidently as I could with the tiny bit of wobble my stabilizer couldn’t fully correct. “Doll first, though; I’m feeling kind of fired up.”

Transferring my mind—sensorium, rather, to be more precise about it, since my mind was still fundamentally in my meat brain in my bone skull in my relatively mundane body—was smoother than last time, and did not in fact turn my brain into scrambled eggs. I still went through the brief void of disembodied emptiness, but my excitement about getting into the new body was strong enough to carry me through, no languishing in solipsistic nonsense this time. I ‘opened’ my ‘eyes’ and hopped to my feet, giving my limbs a few experimental stretches.

“I feel good.”

Ai took a few paces around me before returning to her diagnostic panel. “You look good,” she confirmed. “Everything stable, including your balance. Anything notable?”

“Not really. Felt quicker that time. Mask might have helped me acclimate? But might not have, too. Sorry if that’s not helpful.”

She shrugged. “I’m going by the numbers, and they look good. But they’re never the full story, no matter how much I wish that they were. Ready to test?”

We put the doll through its paces. I was told to touch my toes, to lie down, stand up, balance on each leg; if I could be reasonably expected to do it in my regular body, I found I was able to do it in this one as well. More, the shadow of a limp, the strange and slightly imperfect external adjustments to my right ankle, and the barest hints of aching that I had become accustomed to with my prosthetic and stabilizer were entirely absent; my foot was whole, and my leg was my own, as though it had never been lost. No wonder Amane preferred this.

“I’m a little surprised there’s no limp at all,” I confessed, prodding at my retracted right foot as I stood crane-style on my left. “Isn’t the whole point of blood magic that things the Flame takes can’t easily be gotten back?”

“Mine gets that it’s temporary,” Hina explained, “and fun? For it? Dunno how to describe it, but I think being shaped into a body is nice for it. That’s payment, to it. I think.”

That made sense to me. The Flame broadly rewarded self-actualization, so it stood to reason that it was a fan of being actualized itself. Of course, that really only raised more questions about its fundamental nature. Not quite an animal, not quite a god, and enjoyed being remade in the image of mankind, or at least something in that general vicinity. I wondered about Ebi and shot a questioning glance at Ai—then remembered that she wouldn’t see it in my faceless state.

Or so I thought, but she seemed to pick up on my gaze, if not my meaning. “Blood magic and mantles interface…strangely. Aside from the moral reasons and side effects, that’s one of the biggest reasons we shouldn’t be using it. It causes problems both for the shape of the LM—”

“Like Alice’s tail,” I interjected.

“—Yes, and the functions of non-woven abilities like Yuuka’s eye or Hina-san’s comfort in the fourth dimension.”

Hina peeked over Ai’s shoulder to look at the panel, then chuckled. “Oh, hey, cutie has its own blood stuff, too, right? The spear.”

“Oh, yeah, I guess so,” I mused. I didn’t really think of it like that, but it was technically true. “Gash with a box cutter and a {COMPOSE}. I dunno what I was thinking. Coulda just used an ana offset, or some kind of orange squish to just shrink it down and put it in my bag…stupid way to take it with me.”

Hina disagreed with a purr. “Hot way. You did what felt right and it worked.”

I felt a biological thrum—or rather faux-biological, instinct overlaid onto silicon and Flame—in my body at the look in Hina’s eyes. It wasn’t arousal, not exactly, but it was definitely something in that family of desire, a heightened awareness of my girlfriend’s appealing qualities. Experience told me the feeling would become much stronger once I was again enfleshed. I’d have to keep a tight lid on it or our scheduled naptime with Ai would be thoroughly desecrated by the two of us rutting like animals.

Ai tutted. “No.”

“Sorry?” I apologized, leaning away from Hina out of an abundance of caution and doing my best to shake off the feeling.

“It’s not ‘blood stuff’,” Ai huffed.

I realized she might have missed the tension between Hina and I and was instead just griping about something technical. But I wasn’t sure what she meant. “My tattoo? You redid the weave in place.”

“I fixed it.”

I thumbed at my synthetic left forearm, where my tattoo wasn’t. “I suppose, yeah, it doesn’t bleed anymore. Thanks. But Hina’s saying it’s still blood-space though, right?”

Ai blinked at me, then groaned and shook her head. “Ezzen. Right. I forgot you’re one of the ones who—blood-space doesn’t exist.” She started counting on her fingers. “There’s space compression, infomantic compression, ana offset storage into fourspace—and kata, but that’s not the standard—and that’s it. What people call ‘blood-space’ is always just taking a shortcut to one or more of those things.”

“Ai, babe,” Hina chirped, looking a little peeved; from both their tones, I suspected this wasn’t the first time they’d argued about this. “Y’know that’s not true. I mean, my pocketspace is the 4D offset now, but it used to be different.”

The Emerald Radiance ignored her, lowering the readout panel. “What you did with your spear was just a regular infomantic {COMPOSE} encoding; the only blood magic shortcut is…I’m not sure what the physical encoding actually was. Micro-patterns in your scar, maybe. I should have looked more closely,” she muttered.

“Micro-patterns?” I repeated. I would have rolled my eyes if I could; this interaction had fallen into familiar contours for me now, a longstanding and regularly reigniting argument from the forums about what blood magic was actually doing. “C’mon, would the Flame really make a…meat-QR code instead of just making its own little space for the spear? I mean, just because we don’t understand it and can’t replicate it with glyphs doesn’t mean the Flame can’t, is what I’ve been learning since I got here.”

Ai was starting to look actually upset. “I know that’s how it worked because that’s how I was able to change it when I redid the weave and Ebi applied your tattoo. I expanded on the original {COMPOSE}. I added a spatial compression step before the infomantic encoding. It’s quicker now, and within your body’s pink ripple tolerance where it wasn’t before, which is why it doesn’t tear out of your arm anymore. You had an, eurgh, ‘meat-QR code’ before, and now that’s your tattoo instead. You’re welcome.”

“Babe, calm down,” Hina whispered, gently putting a hand on Ai’s shoulder. “So if we just, like, etch the tattoo into the doll’s arm, cutie could summon their spear to it too?”

“Right, yes,” Ai confirmed. “It should show up in the doll’s hand, not your body’s. I think the decoding would actually happen along the transfer link,” she gestured toward the cables connecting my current head to the dimly grotesque helmet my main body wore, “but it would still work. I can admit your Flame is smart enough for that.”

“Regardless of distance,” I mused. “That’s the advantage, right, the spear doesn’t have to float through fourspace near me at all times for it to be in summoning range. Like when I was out in fourspace.”

“Huh?” Hina asked. Ai looked similarly confused.

I started. “Um. Oh. Did I—shit, I never told you? With the teleportation?”

“No? What? Cutie, cutie, what?” Hina sounded adorably excited. “You came back on your own, yeah, but I thought you just kinda swam.”

“No, I…” I tried to recall how exactly it had gone. “My spear was still out on the ground. And I first thought I could just re-weave my tattoo to locate it and use that to do a teleport, but my fingers just—it was really cold,” I whispered, a psychosomatic shiver running through my mechanical body. I had felt the life ebbing from my fingers and known I was going to die. “Couldn’t weave.”

“More training can help with that,” Ai supplied, but she seemed to regret it as she saw Hina slink toward me and wrap a hug around the carapace of my torso.

“Cutie, I’m sorry. You—you almost died out there, and I was busy fighting, and I—didn’t realize at the time how you’re not built for it. Scary.”

“It’s okay,” I whispered. “And yeah, Ai, we gotta make sure that can’t happen again. But—I did make it out. It was kind of blood magic-y? But not? All conceptual. Vaetna-like. Heung-like,” I admitted, which I never would have in my regular body. “I figured, um, if it’s still part of me, and I could summon it to me, then I could also summon myself to it? And I just…begged my Flame and thought really hard about it until it happened.”

Ai looked unhappy again. “Not how—not how most people’s Flames work,” she ground out. “But yours is strange. I can make exceptions for strange.”

“Like the Vaetna.” Hina said the quiet part out loud, glancing at Ai. “Weird shit, impossible shit. And cutie’s Flame is supposed to fuck with the Vaetna. You know about that part, right, Ai?”

Ai took a little while to respond, giving me a cautious look. “It’s been going around on the forums. I didn’t want to believe it, or upset you by bringing it up, but…I see it. After that. There’s evidence. Flamefall during a Vaetna stream.”

“I know,” I said. “The plates on my arm.” Too many factors to ignore. “But I’m, uh…trying not to think about it? I don’t—okay, I think I know what it means but that’s got to be wishful thinking because the alternative is…I know we should talk about it now that it has to be talked about, and now should be the time while I’m all uninhibited and able to confront scary truths and actually know what I want and—”

There was a knock at the door. Hina’s head swiveled like an owl’s.

“Oh, thank God,” I sighed. “Yes, whoever that is, let them in, I’m not ready for this conversation.”

Ai gave a little nod that I took to mean “me neither.”

“It’s Izumi,” Hina warned. The door had no window, so I have to assume she smelled her or something.

“Fine by me. All the more reason to not talk about it.” I glanced at Ai. “I—yeah, I know avoidance is bad, but—”

“Let’s talk about mantles instead,” she agreed. “Not…new magic and war. I’m tired of those.”

Hina stepped over to the door, undid the lock that I hadn’t noticed was there, and pulled the door open to show Izumi standing there. She was smiling.

“Sorry. New magic and war are exactly what I want to talk to Ezzen about.”

Author’s Note:

Short chapter! I couldn’t find a way to make it longer with the time available to me, and this seemed like the best breakpoint.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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December 28, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

“Cutie!”

Hina practically bowled me over when she pounced on me. I didn’t quite fall, thanks to a feat of acrobatics on her part—she hooked her arms over my shoulders and spun me around, flowing to my opposite side in time to steady me from the very wobble she’d caused. In that brief moment of connection, I felt how she shifted her momentum in ways that were unnatural, coming to a stop too quickly and gracefully after she passed me. The azure of her eyes shone in the half-shadows, the rest of her body silhouetted against the glow from the convenience store’s glass facade. My heart fluttered as she reached for my plastic bag of goodies.

“Sweet stuff! And masks, ooh, babe, I see your angle. Little adventure, little exploration.” She grabbed the pack of masks and pulled away from me, holding them up in front of her as if to superimpose them on my face. “Yeah, good idea. Alice think of this?”

“Hey,” I mumbled, mentally lagging a little behind. I was shivering a little from the combination of the cold and elation at her presence. “Um, not Alice’s idea. I—okay, to be clear, I did tell Ebi I’m out here, this isn’t totally unsupervised—”

“Oh my God, cutie, you don’t need a permission slip to go to the konbini across the street, chillax, ‘s all good.”

I stifled a paranoid complaint along the lines of “but the Peacies,” because Hina was clearly happy I’d taken the initiative at all. I looked back toward the light of the convenience store and flinched as I saw several people, including the cashier, looking out at the pair of flamebearers flirting on the sidewalk. “I, um, wanted to…go do…a thing. Anything, I mean, not a specific thing. Er, I guess a specific thing, that being buying these masks, the food was kind of a welcome accident…I got a cornucopia, that was cool. Would have gotten you one of those fried chicken things if they had any. Guess it’s too late at night.”

“Mm.” Hina had been humming along to my ramble, clearly happy just to hear my voice, but she perked up at that last part. “Oh, Famichiki? Gosh, your instincts are good, I was having a craving earlier.” She pulled two steaming-hot paper baggies that smelled of greasy fresh-fried food from nowhere and handed one to me. “Wanna go home and stuff our faces?”

—

There are few things in life more decadent than hot food immediately after coming inside from a cold night. But, sitting on the floor of Hina’s room, I could now confidently say that one of those rare superlatives is to also have your mostly undressed girlfriend snuggled up to you at the same time. I felt spoiled beyond belief, in a nervous, slightly-too-close-to-that-pride-of-lions way, to have such front-row and skin-on-skin seats to Hina’s dismantling of her first cutlet. The novelty didn’t wear off after her second or third, either.

“Are you even chewing?”

“Meh.”

“Let me rephrase,” I sighed, scrunching up her third wrapper and eyeing the distance to the wastebasket, “Are you savoring the flavor at all? Like, you’re very clearly having a good time with the, er, chomping and the juices and all. Just wondering about the rest.”

She leaned back and twisted to look up at me and roll her sapphire eyes. “I am tasting it, cutie. Chicken’s good, salt rules!” She yoinked another cutlet out of her pocketspace. “Trust me, if I was starving and just needed to get this straight into my belly, it wouldn’t go through realspace at all to get there.”

“How’s that work?” I asked with the slightest bit of hesitation, embarrassed at my ignorance. “Er, I know how the food could just go straight into your stomach without passing through anything, but my experiences with the fourth dimension haven’t suggested that it’s, um, super conducive to keeping food warm and edible.”

“Cold and oily,” she agreed. “Just gotta go fast. I have this little warmer box in my pocketspace, and that’s literally within arm’s reach. And yeah, it gets some space-nasties on it, but I don’t mind that much anymore.”

The space-nasties, the ether, the hypercosmic ocean—just some of the countless terms to describe the weirdness of the fourth dimension. It was well-understood that something had gone terribly wrong with its introduction to our reality; any pre-2015 mathematical model of adding a fourth spatial dimension—or at least those where you twisted physics’ arm enough for reality to not immediately fall apart—pretty much just had it as an extension of the world we were familiar with, not the bizarre, dark and icy void more akin to outer space. Even models where Earth and we Earthlings remained three-dimensional in a four-dimensional world didn’t anticipate such an alien locale so close beyond the veil of three-reality; the math said that moving a few meters ana or kata was supposed to merely be deeply weird and disorienting from a spatial perspective, not a jump into an entirely different universe.

But it was still traversable and survivable. The comparison to outer space was an apt one; you could pilot a craft out into the dark, and the Vaetna had compared their armor to a space-suit. The Radiances put their real bodies out there while mantled, stored in pods that were basically anchored bunkers—some of the comments on the diagrams called them cocoons—too distant from realspace for even the most cutting-edge military hardware to reach. You had to be a flamebearer to reach them, and even then, among the most gifted at navigating and surviving and fighting in that space to have a chance at causing real harm. 

Like Hina. The 160-something-centimeter Japanese girl, with her soft red hair and outwardly human anatomy, didn’t look obviously adapted for that environment of impossible driftwood and colossal dust bunnies floating through oily spatial medium. But looks could be deceiving—and when it came to her, I was really easy to deceive.

“Space-nasties,” I repeated. “It’s so fucky out there. Can’t believe you just stow your actual flesh-and-blood bodies. I mean, you specifically, maybe, sure, but overall, that feels like it adds a whole new layer of danger to fights you guys are usually going to win anyway.”

“Ah, ye of liffle faif,” she replied through a mouthful of chicken, unashamedly wiping some juices off her chin with her finger. “Yeah, I worry about the others sometimes, too, they’re not built like me. But I know they can handle it, and even if I wasn’t sure, you can only listen to Alice yammer about risk-reward ratios and buoyancy gradients for so long before you just throw up your hands and let ‘em do it, y’know?” She reached out to stroke my formerly scarred, now half-armored, hand. “Lemme guess, cutie, you want to try it too?”

I accepted her fingers’ offer to intertwine with mine. “I was…getting to that? I think. What’s it like?”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“Well, you’re all floaty, even here on Earth.” 

“Sure am! It’s fun to be able to move. Y’see my flight sim over there?” She nodded in the direction of her apartment’s antechamber, where the extremely expensive-looking apparatus sat. I’d only ever seen it disused and inert.

“Yeah?”

“Well, I used to spend a lot of time in the shallows. Exploring, generally swimming around, all that. But that made Ai upset—messed with her tools and bothers Ebi—so this was the compromise for when I got the zoomies, modified a bunch for 4d clickies. Haven’t really felt like using it since I dragged you home, though. You can try it if you want.”

“Clickies?”

“Y’know, the scrunch when you go from the surface to the shallows? It makes a clicky sound.”

“Does it?” I hadn’t noticed, but then, my experiences of moving to or from our three-plane usually were accompanied with other things to worry about.

“Yeah. I can show you.”

“Uh—no,” I decided quickly. “Had enough adventure for one night.”

“Kay. Might just be me anyway. B’yeah, if you want some 4d practice that isn’t just me taking you for a swim, lemme know and I can get the rig dusted off.”

“Is that different from, uh, more general mantle operation training? I seem to remember Alice saying something about sims?”

“I dunno. We never really made a real training system? Me and Alice just learned by experimenting, Ai helped us formalize the tech but she still just kind of figured out how to actually use it from, uh, using it. Amane kinda brute-forced it when she was feeling bad. And I think Yuuka cheated the normal trial-and-error with precog shit. So you’re our first, like, normal onboarding? So like, we’ll just show you how to flail around in the doll, then help build your actual prototype mantle, bespoke style—pretty much how we did it but fast-tracked because we can give you tips.”

“Shoulders of giants, I guess.”

“Mhm.”

 We lapsed back into silence. Hina seemed satisfied after her third Famichiki and shifted off of me to splay out on to the blankets that covered her floor. In her position, I would have immediately gone for my phone to idly scroll or watch videos, but she seemed content to just look out the window at the fluorescent twinkling of Tokyo at night. I munched more slowly on my own piece of chicken, crunching through the last few bites while I thought about the fourth dimension, mantles, and the Peacies.

“Hina?”

“Yeah?”

“How does this end?”

She sat up again to peer at me. “Like, with the Peacies?”

“Yeah, I guess. When they ‘show up,’ what will that actually mean? A delegation? The way you all talk about it makes it sound like it’s inevitable it’ll all go to violence eventually—thus the mantles—but I’m just…not really clear on how that’ll start, what happens up until that point.”

Hina grinned. “Wanna know a secret?”

“…Sure?”

“Global politics is mostly emails. And Twitter.”

“Huh.” I supposed that made sense; something had to prelude flamebearers turning cities to glass. “So they’re…sending you emails? Threats? Offers?”

“Yeah. Alice says they’re offering a lotta money for you—which, like, isn’t that basically just emails too, sorta? But they’ll eventually send actual people and demand to talk to our actual people. We’ll say no to that, and then they’ll…dunno. Smear campaign first, then probably start threatening the government? That’s what they did last time.”

“Threatening the government with…what? Full annexation? I don’t know how things…work, on this scale. Before the swords come out.”

“Mostly lasers for us, actually. But neither do I! Ask Alice if you want the deets, but the point is that none of it’ll really work. They can’t control us with emails, and Japan the country can’t really do anything to us as long as there’s no other flamebearers backing them, which is why it’s bad that I fucked things up with Hikanome.” She sounded glum. “But that’s getting better! And as long as everything with Izumi works out okay, I think they’ll be on our side. We’ll find out on…Tuesday. Four days.”

“Tuesday?”

“Yeah, March 1st. That’s when Miyoko wants to chat about Izumi and take a look at your Flame. It’s in the calendar.” She looked proud of herself for knowing that. “But yeah. There’s literally no bite behind the bark without flamebearers of their own showing up in Tokyo, and we’ll know when those show up. Yuuka thinks they’re staging a few in Okinawa this week—I’m not supposed to go check,” she sighed. “But trust me, you’re safe in Tokyo for now, even on your own. It’ll be pretty obvious when that changes. You don’t even have to do much! Yuuka will know, I’ll know, Amane will be lasering people, all before you even have to lift a finger. Go to all the konbini you want, nobody’s gonna grab you. Hell, wanna go on a date tomorrow?”

I blinked. “So is there a time crunch or isn’t there?”

“I mean, you’re only gonna get like three good hours of mantle training per day anyway before you start to feel sick. That leaves plenty of time for extracurricular activities.”

“Still seems kinda…frivolous.”

“Ugh, you sound like Alice. And Jason! Don’t deprive yourself of things that are fun. Didn’t you have fun going out on your own?”

“I mean, yeah, but—fucking war,” was the first thing I could articulate, then I figured out how to say the part that had caused me such grief earlier today. “And just…I don’t want to be irresponsible. There’s a slippery slope there.”

“We’ll keep each other responsible!”

“Will we?” I snapped. “When we were being all handsy last night, in the kitchen, it really spooked Yuuka, and I feel like that’s just a perfect little snapshot of what happens when we fuck around.”

Hina’s shoulders hunched slightly. “Sorry.”

I flinched. “Don’t be. Or, do, but—be sorry at her, not me, I guess. I shoulda—I just got away from myself in the doll. I need to be more careful about that. Was talking to Alice about it earlier.”

It was quiet for a few seconds while Hina thought about this. When she looked back up at me, she was frowning. “That’s not really the same thing, though, right? Like, yeah, be responsible when we’re having fun, but that’s not the same as don’t have fun. And I know having fun at all is kinda new territory for you, but I also know you’re smart enough to know that difference. What’s the real problem, cutie? Why the…I dunno, the focus?”

My heart climbed into my throat. “The stakes are high.”

“Nah. I mean, yeah, but we’ll win! You asked how this ends, right? Well, that’ll be when they give up. They gave up on Amane after the fourth team didn’t come back. Why’d you be any different?”

“Because they want me to be a Vaetna-killing superweapon. I think.”

That brought her up short. Her blue eyes widened as she looked me up and down. Then she stood and paced in a slow circle around me, inspecting me from all directions. She couldn’t literally see my Flame, could she?

“Uh?”

“Mm. Hmmmmm. Mm…cutie, promise not to be mad?”

My hackles rose ever so slightly. This would be a very bad way to find out that Hina had very different opinions of the Vaetna than I did. The worst possible way, even.

“Can’t promise that,” I muttered. “I’ll try.”

“That’s fucking hot.”

I twisted around to glare at her. “It’s—”

She dropped to her knees to interrupt me with a hug. “It’s not good, I know, but—y’know how I am! Power’s hot. Doesn’t mean I want any of that to happen. Are you getting mad?”

I took a deep breath. “A—a little. A little.”

“Sorry. Is it scary? It’s probably scary, right?”

Something in her voice, the earnest and innocent concern for my well-being over any of the ramifications, broke me. The need to cry suddenly manifested as a ball of ache in my throat. I made no attempt to resist it. I twisted into Hina’s hug and returned it, squeezing her tight, seeking comfort in the feeling of her hair draped across my face, a reddish brown blanket to stain with my tears as quiet sobs gently kicked me in the chest.

“Aw, cutie…” Hina muttered, stroking my head. “We won’t let them. We’ll make them fuck off.”

I sniffled. “Can you?” The terror, the weight of what had been thrust upon me, was catching up to me again, only escaped for a scant few weeks that had still been full of danger. I knew in my gut that the Peacies would turn Tokyo to rubble if it meant getting me—and the final fallback I’d kept telling myself I had, the option of going to Tokyo’s Gate and seeking asylum in the Spire, felt impossible now. “If you can’t—then what? Where do we run?”

Hina patted my back. “No. C’mon, cutie, put some faith in us magical girls. We’ll fight and we’ll win,” she growled, a bassy rumble too deep for her chest, before her voice softened again. “Listen—it’s scary as hell to be powerless, but you’re not. You just haven’t seen the limits of what you can do. Neither have I, y’know, but I want to find out. You said superweapon, and that’s a big fuckin’ word, right?”

“Only against the Vaetna,” I mumbled numbly. A second, more horrifying wave of terror was washing over me. “What if they—what if they try to get rid of me before the Peacies can get to me?”

Hina didn’t respond to that immediately, staying quiet for a few seconds too long, kicking my anxieties into nightmare territory. Her giving the prospect actual thought was far scarier than even an uncomfortably hasty and insistent reassurance would have been. Then, when she made up her mind, she leaned back and kissed my forehead.

“Well, I’ve always wanted to fight a Vaetna.”

—

The next morning, I found myself standing about two meters away from Hina in the middle of the dojo, a lattice bound around my hand. I brought my middle finger out and my index forward, twitched my thumb, and the second balloon in Hina’s hands seemed to tear open on its own. The satisfying sound of magic at work echoed through the dojo with a pop.

If you were take a video of what I was doing with a high-speed camera, you’d have found that the balloon had spontaneously developed a hole about three centimeters in diameter, a circle where the mylar had been cut out as though by a little circular punch, before physics took its course and the entire round structure unraveled into ribbons. At regular speed, it just looked like a balloon popping, the exact effect of the magic obfuscated by the limits of the human eye.

I made my next adjustment, staring at the third yellow mylar orb, which she’d taped to her chin. It was one thing to judge the distance and direction between it and my previous target, and another to match it solely with finger-twitch changes to the structure of the glowing thread bound around my hand. It didn’t help that if I was too far off, I could instead hit Hina herself; she seemed to view that as a plus, but it was still absolutely messing with my aim.

Another thumb motion fired off the glyph; this time I got only the small jolt of cold against my skin as feedback, no satisfying pop.

“Close!” she chirped. “That one was all the way inside. Gotta hit the surface, remember.”

I replied with merely a frustrated growl. I hated how fiddly this was. There were dozens of ways to add control structures for targeting, ones which would cleanly pop every balloon in an area or let me pick one simply by eye and trigger it with a thought or specific motion or radio signal—this certainly wasn’t how mantle weaponry was controlled—but Hina was insisting that I at least learn how to do it manually. I twitched my middle finger up and completed the glyph again.

“Nope, about a foot too far right and like six inches ana.”

“Your right or mine?” I huffed.

“Yours.”

If nothing else, I wished I could at least make the lattice project some kind of targeting reticule or visual feedback for where I missed, rather than relying on Hina telling me. Neither of us knew how she could tell where my silent misses were landing when I couldn’t; she’d apparently always been able to do it, which made me very jealous. That didn’t help my aim either. I fired off another cutter that went wide.

“Inside again. Remember the baseball, cutie. Pivot everything together, stop twitching them all in different directions at the same time. If you don’t move your ring finger in sync with the first two then you’re just sliding your target point around some random plane and not through threespace.” She mimed cupping the aforementioned imaginary baseball with her hand, gliding her fingertips smoothly around an invisible axis point. She made it look easy; I didn’t have the same dexterity as I tried to imitate it with my next adjustment. The last twitch of my thumb was met with the silence of failure, and I sighed in frustration, letting the threads of magic dissipate and retreating my hand into my hoodie pocket to warm my frozen fingers with the heat pack.

“Not to go all primary school student,” I groused, “but when am I actually going to use this? Pure, raw, single-glyph offensive snapweaving, no control structures? Shouldn’t I be learning a version of this that incorporates an {ASSIGN} or some other basic targeting?”

Hina shrugged, removing the balloon from her nose and wobbling it around by the stem. “I mean. Yeah, you could. But the baseball thing is more of a general weaving trick, right, works for a lotta stuff that cares about distances and directions and stuff, so you gotta get used to it. We can do something else to practice if this doesn’t feel helpful, though, ‘cause this is about making you feel better about magic as much as it is about making you better at magic, feel me? Don’t want you to be frustrated.”

I squeezed the heat pack, savoring the warmth. “Fair enough. I just—yeah, maybe some other kind of practical snapweaving would be better. A bit redundant to be trying combat stuff that isn’t spear training or mantle fighting, those seem more likely to actually matter.”

“Oh, that’s what’s happening in here,” came a new voice from the doorway. I looked over and saw Ai, who looked like a bear emerging from hibernation, shading her eyes from the dojo’s bright overhead lights, far brighter than the rest of the unlit penthouse or the dark predawn sky outside. Hina had gotten me up and brought me here the moment I’d awoken in her arms, determined to make me feel better with magic and violence.

“We’re being careful!” Hina and I said at the same time. Ai waved away our concerns as she approached.

“I know, it was the pops that brought me here, not a ripple alarm. Thank you. How is your six-in-the-morning snapweaving going?”

“Poorly,” I couldn’t help but grouse. Hina gave me a slightly kicked-puppy look, which made me wince and mouth a sorry.

“Teaching it the baseball trick!”

Ai raised an eyebrow. “Without an actual baseball? To use as a guide? I have one in my room.”

Hina looked like a deer in the headlights. “Oh. Uhh. Shoulda started there.” Her blue eyes flicked to me. “Sorry, cutie.”

I was facepalming. “So it didn’t have to be that hard. Okay, yeah, that’s enough for me for now.”

“Sorry!” Hina whimpered.

“It’s okay. Toss up the balloon, would you?”

Hina tilted her head but obliged, stepping back at the same time, some feral instinct giving her an inkling of what I was going to do. I reached for the trigger end of the lattice in my arm, and in one motion I manifested my spear in both hands and thrust it at the balloon. The charred tip struck true and the balloon screamed a final pop as it died. I lowered my spear, satisfied.

“Okay, revenge taken.” I took a step toward Hina, who was looking amorously at my weapon, and touched her arm. “That did help, really.” I didn’t want to give words to the whole emotional ordeal of the prior night, the sense of looming dread and helplessness, not in the light of day. But I did want her to know that her whispered, soothing promises as we’d cuddled had been entirely correct: this little magical exercise had helped remind me that I was a flamebearer, even a novice one. With practice and training, I would not be helpless when the Peacies came knocking

She brightened immediately and leapt onto me, and I had to stow my spear to catch her hug with both arms. “Yay!”

“Futaritomo,” Ai warned.

“We’re not about to fuck, Ai, relax,” Hina chirped. Then she seemed to second-guess herself, looking at me sidelong. “I mean…”

I separated from her hastily. “I—breakfast,” I diverted, turning to Ai. “Have you even slept?”

She looked guiltily off to the side. “At my desk.”

“For forty-two minutes,” added Ebi’s voice over the PA. Ai heckled back at her in Japanese.

“You do have to sleep sometime,” I sighed.

“Cuddle puddle?” Hina asked.

“Breakfast,” I countered. “Then…hm. Maybe. I want to do a little more in the doll today, but that might knock me right out after, if the first time was any indication. So breakfast, doll, cuddle puddle, if Ai is amenable.”

Holy fuck, what a charmed life I was leading, when it was put like that. Big kitchen, transhuman gender euphoria, and cuddles with beautiful magical girls, all before noon. I really had it made, even by the standards of most flamebearers—if you discounted the imminent arrival of a pseudo-empire at our doorstep, anyway. But I wouldn’t let them destroy this. I’d be ready for anything the Peacies sent our way.

Author’s Note:

Short one, but with lots of Hina and Ez being Hina and Ez! And the Vaetna looming, which is all they seem to ever do. Also some on-screen magic training, which hopefully sheds a little more light on what it’s actually like to freely manipulate glyphs when you’re not just tracing Flame over a drawing on a sheet of paper or through a 3D printed substrate.

I moved again this week! Much less extreme than Japan-America, and it went great, but has played hell with my writing schedule. The new environment is helping, though, and I’m trying to end the year strong writing-wise. Helping me with that are the beta readers: Cass, Chloe, Emma, mirrormatch, Mia, Troll, Zoo, Altrune, Enigma, Penguin, and Zak. I don’t normally thank them all by name here on the site but I figure it can’t hurt once in a while.

Also, we celebrated my half-birthday this week, so merry that to those who celebrate. And Hanukkah or Christmas or any of the others too!

Anyway, we also have new Hina art! This is crossover art with The Drake of Craumont, which is written by a good friend of mine and features many amazing women, including the protagonist (pictured):

Drawn by Mjeow, as is frequently the case. This one was kind of a self-indulgent bonus, but I’m hoping to start more serious commissions by the end of the year! Hopefully including the arc 4 cover!

That’s all for this week. Please consider supporting the story on Patreon; currently we’re only one chapter ahead of public but I’m aiming to start expanding that again as we enter the new year. If you don’t want that financial burden, consider instead joining the Discord! We recently passed 750 members and would love to have you!

Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!

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November 25, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

One could say that my venture into the umbilical abyss of the hallway to reach my synthetic body was a reflection of the Flame-woven bridge across that solipsistic void my mind had crossed yesterday…but that would be over-dramatic. What I actually did was go over to the hallway and find the light switch.

Once the shadows were banished, it was an unintimidating walk down to the correct room. I passed the meeting room and the dojo beside it and took note of some of the others that I’d ignored the first time I’d gone to the doll: a more conventional weight room to complement the dojo, a few utterly uninteresting storage areas that looked to be filled solely with cardboard moving boxes, another meeting room. Some doors had no label or window, and many that I could see into were simply empty. This much space remained redundant for five people, and my addition had made no dent given my precious few belongings.

I arrived at the room dedicated to the doll and the slightly nightmarish “pod” that had connected my mind to it. The big hallway was U-shaped, imitating the layout of the apartments directly above, and the doll’s room was just about in the middle, directly opposite from the kitchen with respect to the elevator shaft.

The mannequin-like body had been moved from where I remembered leaving it last night, unplugged from the pod and stored lying flat and face-up on a table in the back of the room. The effect was slightly cadaverous, sparking childlike fears that the body would sit up and lunge at me or, more creepily, simply stare. The threat of that was made slightly more realistic by the idea that Sugawara’s spirit was still out there—what if he had infiltrated the building and the body and was lying in wait to take me by surprise when I drew close? My spear tattoo itched in readiness.

I humored it for a moment, summoning the wooden weapon and resting its butt against the floor. I looked at it seriously. “You and I both know that’s not what’s gonna happen. It’s just metal. Er, probably more plastic than anything else by volume?” I sighed, realizing I was hedging even with an imaginary conversation partner. “Point is, it’s not gonna move. I’ve got my lattices in there still,” I confidently informed my spear. Then I dismissed it back to the tattoo.

The pod and doll both contained control lattices I’d woven out of my Flame, which we knew was somehow inimical to Sugawara, so I had no reason to be suspicious or nervous of the conveniently empty body. Toxic to him, just like the Vaetna, came the intrusive thought—I swatted it aside. My Flame had emanated pure repugnance and disdain for the thing Sugawara had become, my feelings mixed with its own and manifested in pure magic; my admiration for the Vaetna was a near-perfect opposite of that, so it was difficult to imagine the same reaction occurring with my heroes and idols. I supposed that if that unlucky Flame-sibling of mine in Poland had felt that way about the Vaetna, and then Kat had shown up…I shook off that line of thinking. It was entirely too speculative and, as Alice had pointed out, not really something I could act on, and therefore only tormented me for no benefit.

I instead opted to approach the doll, and despite all my rationalizing, I was still relieved when it didn’t do anything creepy. It simply lay there, unsouled and inert, plated in that same charming turquoise as Ebi’s shell. I actually hadn’t seen Ebi herself in days. She’d even been absent from the chatroom. Ai had insisted she was fine, and I believed her because the building’s operations didn’t seem affected, but she didn’t seem keen on explaining what exactly was wrong, if anything. I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to pry right now, and it was honestly probably for the best that the AI wasn’t around to comment on the similarities between the body I had liked so much and her own.

I tentatively ran my fingers along the shell. To call it armor was entirely aspirational; it was really only there to bulk out the form to more closely resemble the proportions of a human body, rather than a spindly and skeletal assemblage of motors like in one of those animatronic horror games. Even if there was a certain appeal in the functional simplicity of such a form, I suspected inhabiting it would make me feel very naked without any protective carapace. I now knew with certainty that I enjoyed having a shell of some sort. That was old news; Vaetna-like carapace had been on the wishlist long before anything else. I wasn’t entirely sure what that would mean for a mantle or even my physical body down the line, but in the meantime, that need was supplemented by my hoodies, at least the ones Hina hadn’t stolen.

My more private fantasies concerned anatomy beyond the surface layer; my seven-year longing was for the Vaetna’s figures, which were all fairly conventional human forms covered in their interlocked white armor, obscuring all but the most essential proportions, vaguely muscular and mostly sexless—but the longer I looked at the doll’s figure, the more I had to admit that I preferred what I was seeing here. Narrower shoulders, the slender, gently curving contours of its forearms, everywhere slimmer and more graceful than either the Vaetna or my own body; aesthetics that reminded one that this was a testbed for mahou shoujo, not high-tech angel-superheroes clad head to toe in futuristic armor. A nervous prickle of embarrassment and shame oozed over my neck as I realized that the doll’s form wasn’t really androgynous—yes, there was no flare to its hips or softness of fat to round out its chest or rear, but it was feminine nonetheless, the Radiances’ bodies taken to their least common denominator. The body that had felt right for me was on the girl side of neutral, if only barely.

This wasn’t a completely new notion for me. Hina and Star had opened Pandora’s box when they’d tag-teamed me about whether I thought the Radiances’ various appealing features would look good on myself. Ever since, when I got naked to bathe, I would look down at my body and try to picture what I might prefer more than my current proportions. I was doing my best to give serious, non-avoidant thought to those brief first-person glimpses of Alice’s bust from her mantle cam, wondering how that weight on my chest might feel, and wonder further about narrow shoulders or wider hips and how much femininity my figure was allowed to have before people would start defaulting to treating me as the woman I was not.

It had thus far been difficult and emotionally draining to interrogate those shower thoughts for too long. The idea that I might prefer this slimmer shape instead, rather than “true” androgyny with the suggestion of muscle, brought the familiar tug of shame, the urge to fall back on the plausible deniability of the Vaetna’s warrior physique. But where the Ezzen of even a few days ago had invariably cringed and shied away, I was now armored by the joy and belonging I’d felt yesterday. I imagined Hina’s voice in my ear, something along the lines of “if it feels good, cutie, who gives a shit?”

That helped me realize the obvious: wanting to look like a girl wasn’t the same as wanting to be a girl. Indulging and exploring my interest in a more feminine form didn’t inherently compromise my claims of being nonbinary. The pronouns I’d impulsively requested yesterday were easy evidence of that: they…and it. Both felt right for me, and the latter was exciting in a way I didn’t know how to categorize. Dehumanizing, alien, objectifying, yet thrilling for all those reasons too, an open claim of separation from humanity as a flamebearer. I didn’t know if that one would stick, especially with it being so much less conventional than the other gender-neutral alternative, but it felt real, something of the experience that would last even outside of the doll and reassured me that my gender identity was more complex than “enby on the way to girl,” that I was still moving in the transhuman direction I’d always wanted.

In the privacy of this secluded room in the middle of the night, standing over the evidence of my expanding horizons, such reasoning was enough to overcome my anxieties. For a moment, I let myself drop into more daring fantasy, imagining more overtly feminine features overlaid onto the doll, drawing on what I’d become familiar with. Hina’s bare hips and tight belly came to mind first, which was relieving, in a weird way; when tasked to imagine a hot girl, my subconscious had leapt straight to my girlfriend despite her not being close to the most voluptuous of the team. That made me a good boyfriend, I reasoned. Enbyfriend. Dollthingfriend?

The other Radiances were also familiar touchpoints. Most recent in my memory was Alice showing off her sculpted, borderline-unreal figure to me, which was the kind of event I was sure millions of other young men and women would have paid a fortune to experience and I’d gotten for free out of some kind of trans camaraderie. Star would have had a stroke, driven mad with gender envy and/or regular thirst; personally, I felt like I wanted to look at Alice more than I wanted to be her. This went double for her tail; I didn’t want one myself, but there was something undeniably appealing to my lizard-brain about its bulk and the way her hips flared to accommodate it. I felt I understood Hongo a little.

However, when it came to the proverbial elephant in the room, I still had to permit myself a healthy dose of respectful shame: did I envy Yuuka’s chest rather than simply find it distracting? I looked at the doll’s smooth, flat front, then down at my own, and tried to picture having such a rack, trying to be analytical rather than vulgar as I considered how they shaped the silhouette of everything Yuuka wore, impossible to ignore, a center of attention so potent as to be strategic, as Alice had described. Did I want people to look at me like that, now that I had a better understanding of Yuuka’s constant and eminently reasonable paranoia, and how she wielded her appearance to assert control over that? Would it be affirming or terrifying to be desired in such a way? Both?

I backed out of the fantasies for the time being. The important thing was that even without those curvier elements, the doll still appealed to me, and had still felt more comfortable than the flesh I was wearing right now. I hadn’t freaked out at the lack of a face or breathing, and my subconscious and the lattice had successfully filled in the absence of all the little sensations of the human body, all the secondary muscles involved with balance, the gurgles of my digestive tract, the fleeting aches and pains that evidenced my poor posture. I couldn’t quite remember whether or not I’d literally hallucinated those things to compensate. The brain was weird enough without adding pink-strung lattices into the mix.

In part, my comfort with the doll was simply a matter of contrast; after being completely divorced from the very notion of form in that liminal void of transfer, stripped of all sense of self and proprioception, any body was better than none at all. But when I’d looked in the mirror, my reaction had been much more viscerally positive than mere gratefulness to have the bare minimum.

I felt echoes of that as I moved up toward the doll’s head, looking at the blank face with fascination. No eyes, no mouth, a total mask. This was a fair bit more spartan than my private, embarrassing fantasies of a Vaetna-fied version of myself, which still had eyes. But realistically, as long as I was still able to see, I rather liked the idea of an entirely featureless face that gave away nothing except for the general direction of my head. I didn’t exactly envy that about Amethyst’s chosen form, but it was worth experimenting with.

The mouth, on the other hand, could definitely go. Facial expressions were such a burden. I frequently had no idea what to do with my mouth when people were talking to me, and eliminating that problem altogether would also lend me that air of unreadable mystique the Vaetna often projected when they weren’t making an effort to be affable. As it was, I’d get rid of my mouth right now if I could, at least as long as I still had the option to enjoy food.

Then, in a moment of rare sensibility, I remembered that masks existed, the half-face sort that covered the nose and mouth and rendered one’s silhouette vaguely snout-like. Nobody wore them outside of an operating theatre in the UK, but in Tokyo, I’d seen a few each time I’d gone out. Intrigued, I pulled out my phone and did a little googling, and learned that they were popular here, both for the sake of public health and as a more general fashion trend. They came in different shapes and colors, so it was even possible to accessorize with them. Could I picture myself wearing one as a default part of my appearance?

I could. Interesting. Surely, one of the girls owned some, or failing that, there were bound to be some among the medical supplies on the eighteenth floor. The reasonable thing to do would be to ask tomorrow, or order some online now so they’d be here by the morning.

But a desire for more immediate do-something-about-this was kindling in my chest. Alice had told me to focus on what was actionable. I wasn’t about to use that as an excuse for more late-night, ill-advised magic driven by inscrutable egg mania—I fully intended to hold true to my promise that I wouldn’t mess around with the doll unsupervised. But that convenience store across the street was 24-hour, wasn’t it? And they had masks, didn’t they?

It was the smallest of adventures, the simplest possible indulgence, as safe as could possibly be for being alone outside of Lighthouse Tower—the convenience store lay literally in its shadow, or would have if the sun was still up to cast one.

I was jittery with nervous energy as I rode the elevator down to the first floor. The lights were still on in the building’s spacious lobby, though the front desk was unstaffed. I wasn’t sure whether the building actually had staff at night at all, other than maybe some janitors—at least when it came to security, Ebi had direct control of the whole building’s systems. She was the reason I could essentially come and go as I pleased without carrying any kind of access card or fob, a privilege I was only truly exercising for the first time now.

It occurred to me that she controlled the building while ostensibly being secret from the public and presumably also the front-desk employees of Todai. Did they think she was just a building management program? I had no clue. But I did know she was watching me as I walked through the empty lobby, because as I approached the doors, my phone buzzed.

ebi-furai: pretty late at night to be touching grass

I stopped in front of the doors.

ezzen: Just going to the convenience store across the street.

ezzen: You wouldn’t lock me out, would you?

ebi-furai: bah

ebi-furai: i mean i could

ebi-furai: but youre exercising your free will and in my opinion thats pretty poggers

ebi-furai: so i would rather live vicariously through your adventure rather than fucking with you

ebi-furai: besides, sapphire will be back soonish, and if i locked the doors behind you i know shed just grab you

I considered commenting on the android’s use of “poggers,” but I didn’t want to risk burning through the goodwill she was extending.

ezzen: ty lol

ezzen: Anything I should know about visiting a convenience store at night?

ebi-furai: you could not be asking a wronger person

ebi-furai: ive never left the building

Oh. Right. I felt bad for forgetting about that. There was only one sensible thing to say.

ezzen: Do you wanna come?

ezzen: I mean, if you can, Ai claimed you were feeling better but it’s been weird not having you around.

ebi-furai: good where i am

She didn’t elaborate on that, which I took as my cue to push through the glass doors in the front of the building and out into the chilly air of an early March night in Tokyo. I braced for the familiar ache in my scarred hand—and was surprised when it took a few seconds longer than usual to kick in. The thicker, harder plates that had developed there, so tantalizingly and intriguingly and worryingly reminiscent of Vaetna carapace, apparently provided better insulation to my joints. Neat.

The rest of me wasn’t so well insulated. It was cold and windy enough that even my heavy hoodie couldn’t completely keep the chill from reaching up my back, so I hurried down the sidewalk toward the nearest crossing, guided by my phone’s map in my right hand. My other hand gripped the stabilizer module in my hoodie’s pocket, fidgeting with it. I wondered what I’d do with my hands when I had my full prosthetic and the little tuna can was no longer necessary. I supposed there was nothing stopping me from carrying around an actual tuna can instead. It could double as an emergency snack for Hina or Alice.

Even at this late hour, the sidewalk was fairly dense with faces side-lit by the buildings that still had lights on, little vignettes of life coming in and out of the shadows: office workers freed from overtime; students making their way back home after a long evening hitting the town after school; disheveled young adults who had only thrown on enough clothes to make it to the convenience store for late-night food, like me. Many of them were politely rushing as much as I was, and nobody spared me a second glance despite my garish orange hair and clear not-from-around-here-ness, which made me feel less self-conscious; everybody out here on the street was just trying to get to late night errands or get home and out of the cold. That common human experience we were all enduring allayed the creeping fears in the back of my mind that I would be instantly beset by either Todai fans or a PCTF snatch team as some kind of karmic punishment for having the audacity to go out on my own.

I hurried across the street and along the next sidewalk until I arrived at the bright, welcoming facade of the convenience store, the tell-tale glowing green stripe a beacon of refuge. The cold overrode any social anxiety about entering a new and unfamiliar space alone, sweeping me through the automatic doors and into the compact aisles before I even had the chance to lose my nerve. The sound of the wind was replaced by the jingles and beeps of Japanese consumerism, a discordant spell of modern comfort that prevented the primal, folkloric demon of cold from following me in.

Now that I was safe from the elements, I did stall a little, retreating to my phone rather than immediately beginning to browse. Remembering Ebi’s wording—“living vicariously”—I switched from the map to the main chatroom to share my experience…and, frankly, to get a bit of moral support.

ezzen: Liveblogging my convenience store run.

starstar97: uh ez

starstar97: its like midnight there isnt it

starstar97: thats konbini privilege i guess

starstar97: what are you there for

ezzen: surgical masks, ideally

ezzen: maybe snacks?

My stomach had opinions on that latter item. There was the fried food warmer next to the register, which reminded me of how juicy that chicken Hina had shared with me had been—but it sat dark and empty, apparently one of the few parts of the store that wasn’t fully 24-hour. A shame; warm fried chicken would have been fantastic to bring home and eat once I got out of the cold.

By contrast, though the refrigerated shelves of heat-and-eat meals were more sparsely populated in the middle of the night, populated they were nonetheless. And that was just the “real” food, the pasta and curry and rice balls; moving deeper into the store also revealed approximately one million varieties of rice crackers, and one of the aisles had a small cooler of energy drinks and jelly pouches for the truly desperate. I found myself most drawn to a shelf of unhealthy-looking baked goods, advertising custard or red bean paste or chocolate fillings. I was pleased to discover that almost everything had at least part of the label in English, though it was sometimes enigmatic; several pastries were labeled simply “Cheese” with no further description of what exactly they were.

I initially resisted the urge to simply take the lot; an adolescence of wobbling atop the poverty line had trained me to shy away from buying food that wasn’t “essential.” But then I saw something that had been on my bucket list for years, something so familiar as to induce nostalgia even though I’d never had one before, and that tipped the scale toward indulgence. I backtracked toward the front of the store to grab a basket, filled it with pastries and crunchy things with my prize at the top, then snapped a photo and sent it to the group chat.

ezzen: “And none under its shadow shall starve.”

ebi-furai: im POSITIVE that the na vva kiiycaseiir was not written with “loading up on ten thousand calories of empty carbs and sugar” in mind

I was pleased, albeit unsurprised, that Ebi caught my reference to the Spire’s foundational document of universal guarantees to its citizens—but rather annoyed that she didn’t seem to catch why I’d made it. Neither did Star, apparently.

starstar97: o hi ebi!!

starstar97: doesnt the spire kind of have insane pastry game now tho

starstar97: like on the same level as japan and including stuff like melonpan

starstar97: so the nvk could include most of these after the fact

starstar97: e do they have like cheesecakes in the fridge section

twilitt_: cheesecake mentioned

twilitt_: logging on

ezzen: guys

ezzen: the specific thing in the pic

ezzen: oTL

starstar97: oh wait

starstar97: e is literally referencing it because theres a heung cock on top of the basket

ezzen: NO

ezzen: its a CORNUCOPIA

ezzen: or, if you must use a nickname, a COPIA, thank you very much

starstar97: >:P

ezzen: or i guess “Spire Corn” according to the packaging on this one :\

ezzen: thanks japan.

ezzen: with red bean filling, not corn

ezzen: …

ezzen: I think.

What Star was cruelly calling a “Heung cock” was just a long cone of fried pancake batter stuffed with sweet red bean paste, a Japanese take on one of the Spire’s more notable cultural exports. One not descended from the Vaetna themselves, too, which was rare.

The story went that it was invented by Spire immigrants on the first anniversary of the end of the firestorms, and it was supposed to roughly resemble both the megastructure’s shape and a cornucopia. Since Clear Skies Day happened to fall right in the middle of Autumn, very near many immigrant cultures’ harvest festivals, it had become one of the Spire’s major unifying holidays. The cornucopia pastry’s role had grown to match, becoming a central festival food one could find with every kind of sweet and savory filling imaginable from across the cultural melting pot of the Spire’s citizens. A marvelous example of food as a keystone of culture, as Dad would have been quick to point out.

Bristol was not a great place to find affordable foreign pastries, so I’d never gotten to try a cornucopia of any flavor. I’d attempted making one myself once, but without the specially shaped hot metal cones they were supposed to be cooked in, it hadn’t really worked out. So finding one was a delight, and a welcome bit of familiarity in a country that still felt rather foreign…though the fact that it was in stores at all right now was rather strange.

ezzen: Kind of out of season.

starstar97: yeah its february????

starstar97: jp convenience stores love limited time stuff from what i understand but usually that matches seasonal things

starstar97: and this is not the season

ebi-furai: they sell them year round here

ebi-furai: its just a thing

ebi-furai: theyre basically just thicker crepes and we love crepes here so

I eyed the pastry in its plastic wrapper. It was indeed a little more frail than I’d always seen them, and it was indeed out of season, and the conical shape was a bit smushed—but it was a cornucopia nonetheless, and I considered that a win. And I couldn’t help but be a little excited at the idea that they were available year round; it occurred to me that if there were crepe stands, there might also be cornucopia stands somewhere in the city. I resolved to look that up later.

Right now, though, I wanted to infodump about the Na Vva Kiiyaseiir. It wasn’t a formal operational plan for the Spire’s guaranteed goods and services, but seven years of rolling my eyes at billionaire-owned media attempting hit pieces on even the tiniest perceived holes or hypocrisies in the allotment’s catalog had left me with quite a few opinions on the intent and wording of the document.

ezzen: These ARE a pretty funny corner case for the NVK, since it was written before they were invented ofc

ezzen: But they’re an official seasonal inclusion in the allotment now (they dedicate some gastrosynth space to it during the season to keep up with demand) so retroactively they’re totally part of the intent of that line and the spirit of the document as a whole.

ezzen: I guess if you really split hairs and went by the literal meaning of NVK you could say that only the flavors available in the allotment (peach/cream/pistachio iirc? feel like I’m missing one) are part of “The People’s Fundamental Needs Being Met”

ezzen: But that would make you an asshole lol

starstar97: people’s fundamental right to heung cock

ezzen: AUGH

starstar97: and google says its saffron and pistachios together, thats probably what you were missing

starstar97: aka kesar pista, indian dessert

ezzen: right the indian

ezzen: fuck you beat me to it

ezzen: Damn you and your full mobility in both hands!

ezzen: Anyway, either way this particular cornucopia in my basket isn’t part of the NVK’s guarantee because it’s not part of the Spire-produced allotment lol.

ezzen: Very much wrong side of the planet. So not exactly “under its shadow.”

ebi-furai: masks

ezzen: right right

ezzen: on it

A little embarrassed at how completely I’d zoned out of my surroundings, I slid my phone into my pocket and began to search the convenience store. I was hardly alone in here, and the aisles were narrow enough that I occasionally had to yield to another person coming around a corner or reroute around somebody browsing. The food sections obviously didn’t have masks, but looping around the back and squeezing behind an exhausted-looking office lady staring at the selection of beers brought me toward writing supplies and toiletries. I scanned up and down for anything with a picture of a mask, feeling rather like a tourist.

Nothing that looked mask-ish. Mild embarrassment began to build up to humiliated frustration as I looked and looked while people shuffled through the narrow aisle behind me. Their eyes bored into my back.

After the fifth time running my eyes along that section of shelves, my self-consciousness got the better of me and I gave up, turning around and pretending to browse the magazines directly opposite to save face. Then I realized that some of the magazines were porn mags and I aborted that pretense as well, shuffling down the aisle to appear as though I was doing anything but that—

And there they were. A little plastic pack of white masks, hanging on a peg at the end of the aisle, far enough away from where I’d been looking. I grabbed it in relief and took a photo.

ezzen: got

starstar97: !!

ebi-furai: vaetna white

That was true. I would have taken any color, but white was very welcome, the milky pale of Spire and Vaetna dermis. These ones were also a little nicer than the surgical masks I was familiar with, smooth fabric and a closer mesh with the contours of the cheek. It appealed to me very much.

ezzen: Any purchasing parameters I should know about

ezzen: I’ve never bought these before, so

ezzen: Kinda nervous it’ll make me come off as edgelord-y or something, you know?

twilitt_: does it have anime references on it

ezzen: no?

starstar97: then youre fine lol

twilitt_: yeah

twilitt_: it would be pretty cool if you could do a mask as a standard part of an outfit though right

starstar97: i mean you can, nobody’s stopping you

starstar97: especially since e is a flamebearer

starstar97: who’s gonna make fun of them

I resisted the urge to reply “Yuuka”. I didn’t want to get into that with the chat this late at night, and in light of what I’d just learned about her, I was wary of saying anything at all. I half-expected Ebi to say it anyway, but she stayed quiet.

twilitt_: yeah but i mean like. us mortals too

twilitt_: youd probably need a pandemic or something to bring them into fashion first though

twilitt_: no shot the vaetna would let that happen lol

ezzen: I’m gonna stand out so much

ezzen: orange hair is bad enough

ezzen: >.<

starstar97: dont be dumb

starstar97: its like two bucks right, just get it and see if it works

starstar97: and if it sucks

starstar97: hit da brix

starstar97: and also the hair is cool i think? you gotta send more pictures later

That helped a lot. 

ezzen: thanks

ezzen: buying it

I took the pack, tossed it atop the pile of pastries in my basket, and hurried toward the register, wanting very much to get out of here. I disappointedly brandished my card at the uniformed cashier, a girl maybe four or five years older than me, in the universal language of a shopper ready to pay. She took the card placidly—then suddenly, her customer service autopilot juddered to a halt as she hesitated, first squinting at the very expensive-looking card and the Todai logo marking it, then looking up at me and seeming to process who I was. I wondered then how I looked—a foreign flamebearer standing across the counter from her at near midnight, basket full of nothing but pastries and a pack of masks. It must have been an absurd image.

She seemed torn for a minute, and I was worried she would ask for my autograph—which I didn’t have—or something else celebrity-ish, but to her credit, she moved right along with the transaction, stuffing my pastries into a plastic bag and offering it to me.

“Houseki hikare!” she chirped with an awkward smile.

“Uh. Thanks,” I muttered, not knowing how the Radiances would respond. I gave her an awkward nod and hurried out the front door, trading the discomfort of the interaction for that of the biting cold. Or rather, I made it about five steps out before registering a flash of color and motion to my right.

A shot of unwarranted adrenaline pumped through me as I turned to face my assailant, flashing back to my first encounter with Takagiri, spear tattoo itching—but this time, the surprise was entirely a welcome one.

Next to me, shining out of the dark, was a pair of sapphire eyes. And they looked hungry.

Author’s Note:

The cutting edge…of Ez’s self-image! It has many thoughts, and seems determined to collect one pastry for each.

I do want to lay out explicitly, word of god, that Sunspot’s timeline did not have the COVID-19 pandemic. This is one of the biggest butterfly effects of the timeline divergence from our world. I won’t give a specific reason here, though I will note that there’s no big reveal or intrigue about it. Yes, this means that Ez being a complete shut-in for years was entirely self-imposed.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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!

October 28, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

Objectification, human trafficking, implied rape (in backstory, not on-screen)

“Amane?” Alice called.

I heard the scuffling of a chair moving in the other room and turned to see Amethyst, almost three meters of gemstone mecha, looming in the doorway of her gamer cave. She waved at me. I waved back up at her. She said something in shimmering tones to Alice, who nodded and replied in rapid Japanese. They exchanged a few more phrases before Amane swung her massive, spike-snout head to look at me. She seemed to hesitate. Then there was a flash of purple light, and Amane stood there, clothed in flesh and carbon fiber and a bathrobe, now merely my height—though that was still tall, especially for a Japanese woman. She walked over to Alice with the faintest shadow of a limp and sat next to her, smiling thinly at me. That made me nervous; I had a vague idea of where this was going, and it was dark. Alice took her hand and looked at me seriously.

“Ezzen. Yuuka has…a whole shitload of trauma. Trauma around men especially, to be frank. Which you’re not one of, I know, believe me, but this is still context you deserve to have.”

“…As opposed to having it two weeks ago?” I couldn’t help but ask.

Alice looked guilty. “Well—yes, maybe we should have just opened with this on day one, given you some pointers ahead of time. But we really thought you wouldn’t set her off so badly.”

I bristled on reflex. “Because I’m—”

“No, not because you’re so hideously masculine or anything. It’s your Flame and her eye—she depends on it to feel safe, and since she can’t see you properly, you automatically put her on edge. But it seemed like she’d warmed up to you, and I know she was trying, and I’m proud of her for that, but…for you two to coexist, you need to know why she’s…like that.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling very uncomfortable. “Um, lay it on me.”

Alice hesitated and looked over at her girlfriend, who nodded at her, looking…impatient? Alice gathered herself, shoulders hunched, then breathed out. “Okay. Well, about…six years ago, Amane was kidnapped by Sugawara. Human trafficking, since this was back before flamebearer trafficking was really an established industry. Yuuka was her best friend, and we weren’t in the picture yet, so when Amane disappeared, Yuuka started looking. She found them.” Alice’s voice was low and serious, and she spoke without drama or embellishment. “But she was far weaker as a flamebearer than she is now. This was before the flame donation that made us strong, no mantle—glyphcraft barely existed yet—and she didn’t have the eye. She could defend herself, but she couldn’t blow down the door. So when she eventually hit a dead end, she…got herself trafficked. As a fifteen-year-old foreign girl, not a flamebearer. To evade suspicion.”

Alice was looking down at the floor, not directly at me, and I couldn’t blame her. She didn’t have to describe anything more; I understood the broad shape of it, what Yuuka must have endured for Amane’s sake, and it made me begin to feel physically ill, the spectre of nausea looming. I had to say something to fill the silence. “Oh God.” Then another layer of horror revealed itself to me, and I stared at Amane. If it had happened to Yuuka, then it would also have…

Amane looked less moved than either of us. She shook her head and said something to Alice, who translated with a wince. “Amane doesn’t…remember much of her own experiences from that time.” That felt like a lie, or at least a half-truth, but there was no way I was going to press on it, and Alice seemed antsy to move on besides. “Anyway. That’s the part of it that you should know. I wanted to let Yuuka tell this herself, when she was ready to share it with you, but if she won’t, I think it’s too important for you to stay in the dark about. She witnessed men at their very worst from all too close. That’s where it comes from.”

“Fuck,” I said. “I’m…sorry.”

I didn’t really know what else to say; it was both the expected expression of sympathy and a deeper sense of penitence on the behalf of my erstwhile gender. But then I started to think about it more, the way Alice was talking about it. This did explain Yuuka’s standoffishness and misandry, and I couldn’t blame her for reflexively reacting to me as poorly as she did at first—but how did this actually help me treat her better? Especially if Yuuka wasn’t the one to say it, and Alice was doing it in her stead—and apparently without her permission? That made me terribly uncomfortable in a way that I didn’t know how to bring up.

I opted to instead try to keep it practical. “Um. Okay, so what do I do to not set her off?”

“You’ve honestly done a fine job of it without being told, because most of it is common sense. Er…men touching her, that’s arguably the biggest. Being around people she perceives as men isn’t too much of an issue anymore, as long as they’re not flamebearers, then they make her skittish. I think you have a feel for this already, yeah?”

“I’m a flamebearer.” And she thinks of me as a man, was the part that went unspoken.

Alice picked up my subtext and shook her head quickly. “I don’t think she perceives you as male anymore. You rode her jetbike yesterday, yeah? Then you’re probably fine in that aspect now. If she cited Hina as the issue, then that’s a whole other set of behaviors you need to watch out for. It depends on if her eye is acting up, and whether it can see you—” Alice was interrupted by Amane, who said something sharp in Japanese that made her eyebrows go up a little. “Amane says—”

“Iwaseteyo,” Amane huffed at her, emerald eyes narrowed in a mild glare as she drew her phone from a bathrobe pocket. Alice muttered an apology and shot me a pained glance. I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I just averted my eyes and awkwardly scooted the ball I was sitting on a little closer to them so I could read what she wrote, translated through a machine in a bid for a little independence rather than having Alice interpret.

Amane: Yuuka feels unsafe when her eyes can’t see.

Amane: Yuuka told me that it still can’t clearly see you, so please be careful. It’s sufficient that she can see the future circumstances around you, but she can still be scared by you.

“Um. Got it, I’ll be careful. Are you…?”

Amane waved me off and quickly produced a response.

Amane: I’m doing well. The past doesn’t scare me.

She hesitated, glancing back at Alice, then quickly tapped something else in.

Amane: I think Alice is blundering by telling you this. I thought she would be more respectful.

Alice, oblivious, rubbed her forehead, where horns certainly weren’t growing. “Alright. That history is all very dark, and I’d much rather talk about practicalities. This stuff is compounded by her issues with Hina, as you well know. Exes. I’d avoid being overly flirty with each other while she’s around, mostly because Hina’s brand of affection is…you know.”

I nodded, confused by the mixed signals I was getting between the couple.  “I’m—yeah, I’m intending to do that. That was a big fuckup of mine last night, and, um, I’ll talk to Hina.” I glanced at Amane. “And, um, red ripple. We’ll be responsible.”

Amane frowned back at me. She raised her phone again, flesh and mechanical fingers flying across the screen.

Amane: Thank you, but it’s not only your responsibility. Yuuka is afraid and her soul has scars, but she shouldn’t be harsh to you for doing normal things. She should talk about this with you so you can agree. This isn’t Alice’s concern.

Alice, leaning forward to peek around the phone to see the screen as well, frowned. “Yuuka’s having an immensely difficult time right now, what with all the portents of war. The least we can do is help Ezzen understand how to interact safely with her. Itawatta hou ga ii yo ne?”

I didn’t have to understand that last part to agree. “Um, yeah. I mean, the way I acted yesterday was shit, and I ought to do better. If I’m the one making her uncomfortable, that’s on me, isn’t it?” Amane watched me and nodded slightly, silently encouraging, urging me to continue. I took a breath, looking at Alice’s nose rather than right in her eyes. “But, um…I don’t think you should have told me about this.”

“What? I know it’s horrible, but it’s really—”

Amane’s viridian eyes flashed with anger at Alice as she snapped an interruption that made her girlfriend recoil. “Uh, whoa, hey,” the dragon girl said, voice full of surprise and worry, before switching to Japanese. “Senpaikaze wo fukashiteru wake ja nai no yo.” Her gaze flickered to me. “I’m—trying to keep the team on the same page. That’s not being patronizing. Is it?”

I cringed a little when that earned her another frustrated reply and wave of the hand from Amane. Alice winced. “Okay, sorry, gomen. I just don’t think Yuuka should be the one who has to come meet Ez in the middle on this.”

Amane jabbed more text into her phone in response and showed it to me, pushing it close to my face so Alice couldn’t get a peek.

Amane: I’ll talk to Yuuka about it later so she won’t get mad. She’ll listen to me. Don’t let Alice make you think it’s all your fault.

Then she lowered the phone, turned to Alice, and began to chew her out. I was glad to not be privy to the exact content of the conversation; the vibes were bad enough on their own, with Amane’s height making her loom over the dragon girl and her voice clipped and reprimanding. She didn’t seem furious, but clearly she felt that Alice had overstepped and was coming at this the wrong way. The only time she slowed down was when her breath hitched in a gasp that made Alice reach toward her with alarm—but Amane pushed the hand aside, and after a moment, steeled herself and continued like it hadn’t happened.

Other than that moment, Todai’s leader sat there and took it. She didn’t bristle, no wash of heat pulsed off her; she just endured Amane’s chastisement with a wince, hunched shoulders, and growing guilt in her eyes like it was a physical lashing. She glanced between her irate girlfriend, the wrinkled bedsheets, and me, clearly humiliated to be chewed out with an audience. I didn’t dare interrupt.

Eventually, Amane stopped and looked over her girlfriend, who was hanging her head in shame. She reached out to Alice’s chin with her prosthetic hand and raised her face gently—Alice looked like she was very close to crying, which I hated. Amane took her hand again and said something much softer. Alice hesitated, brought her other hand over to join the embrace, and let out a rattling sigh, like she was trying to master her emotions. After a slow breath very much like the ones she’d instructed me to take, she looked down again and spoke.

“Sorry, Ezzen. I’m…meddling. I thought I’d keep it light on details, but it still wasn’t my story to tell, and Amane is right; you shouldn’t be the only one who has to adjust your behavior. Yuuka being a bitch isn’t okay, and I’m sorry I treated it like that was your problem to solve.”

I was gripped by paralytic secondhand embarrassment even watching this, so I struggled to formulate a reply. “Uh. It’s—I mean, she’s right to be upset about how I acted yesterday. I do need to do better, less gross. Yuuka wasn’t the only one who was put off by that; it made Ai uncomfortable too, she’s just nicer about it.”

“Oh, hell,” Alice sighed, rubbing her face. “Yes, we’ll still help you work on self control?” She pitched it up like a question, directing it to Amane, who nodded encouragingly. “I just—didn’t want Yuuka to be upset, and you came in here freaking out and needed specific things to do to pull you out of the self-toxicity pit, and that made me want to do this all from your direction without rocking her boat. I probably need to apologize to her too. Or—Amane and I will do it together, I guess. Tomorrow. It’s late.”

The sun had already been down when I’d first come in. I nodded, taking this as a cue to get out of here and escape the awkward atmosphere; the way Alice was rubbing her face seemed painfully familiar. “Um, yeah. Okay.”

Amane waved me to sit back down, which made me pause uncertainly. “Hold on,” she said in English, then directed something else to Alice, who removed her face from her hands to give Amane a questioning look, then interpreted. “Um, well, as long as we’re here, it’s okay to at least talk about some of Yuuka’s behavior as it stands right now, anything she does that bothers you, so Amane can bring it up with her. It’s only fair.”

I hesitantly returned to the purple yoga ball; what a faintly ridiculous prop for this emotional clusterfuck. Amane, seemingly satisfied with Alice’s understanding of what she’d done wrong, gave her girlfriend a make-up hug while I thought about what to ask. Yuuka was really abrasive, but I found I’d grown tolerant of much of it, at least in the sense that I’d become able to distinguish the friendly ribbing from the self-defensive biting remarks, or at least I thought I had.

I did hit on one odd thing. “She’s called me Ezza a few times,” I realized, an emotion mounting in my chest that was either anticipation or dread. “Which, um, I thought was a nickname? But foresight, right. So…don’t tell me that’s because I’m destined to change my name again in the future, to make it more feminine?”

Alice stared, then looked to Amane, who was apparently taking notes. “Um, I don’t know for sure. I thought it was an Australianism. But I guess it could be foresight, or just an assumption—a sign she already sees you as less masc, which is good, but is assigning you a fem nickname, despite you currently going by it/they, which is bad. I’m—oh, I don’t know,” she moaned. “I don’t want to make more assumptions, or put words in her mouth, since apparently that’s all I’ve been good for.”

“I’ll ask,” Amane added for my benefit, in English.

“Thanks. Um, also, what is with the Australian-ness? It’s pretty…almost a caricature?” I hazarded.

Amane replied to that one, which Alice interpreted. “Oh, she’s from Japan. Just spent a lot of time in Australia during the summers, so that’s where the accent comes from. She really sounds much more normal in Japanese.”

“Oh, okay.” I wondered how she’d sound with my prosthetic’s translator; Amane and Ai sounded pretty different between the languages, as the least fluent English speakers. Both sounded more casual in Japanese, Amane more peppy and Ai more vulgar. I thought Yuuka might be the same despite being fully bilingual, but maybe the switch would be reversed, more polite with her wording in Japanese, though perhaps no less biting in meaning. Not a completely different person, but projecting different vibes in different contexts. Like how I had felt while mantled up in the doll. Huh.

Thinking of mantling gave me one more thought. “Er. Maybe this one’s too much, but I really don’t want to ask her directly; she’d cut my head off.”

Alice looked nervous, then suddenly didn’t as she realized where I was going with it. “Oh. Is this about her style?”

“Um, yeah. Her…appeal.” I gave Amane a cautious glance, but she didn’t seem to think this topic was an overstep, so I continued. “She seems…very willing to put her…chest…on display for somebody who hates, um, attention from men. At least on your promotional material and stuff, and her mantle outfit.” Her outfits around the penthouse and what she wore to her classes seemed much more modest—still fashionable, not frumpy, and nothing could entirely hide her figure, but a far cry from the intentional sex appeal of her professional image.

Alice hesitated and glanced at Amane, who thought for a moment, then dictated a reply in pieces. “Okay, we’ll be blunt about this: knowing she can jiggle her tits at guys to make them do what she wants is a form of control over her situation. It puts her in the pilot’s seat for a lot of interactions. And I know that sounds contradictory, but it also literally streamlines the possibilities of an interaction with a man as far as her eye is concerned, and that gives her more confidence, especially when it’s backed up by a mantle and her affinity for magical traps. Nobody’s ever tried anything, but it seems to help her deal when there’s a lot of attention on her, so that’s how she’s styled herself.” Amane added something else that made Alice frown slightly. “Um, yeah, it also helps business, I suppose—er, I want to make clear that we aren’t forcing her to do that,” she hastily clarified, looking wary. “It’s all her. I, um, don’t want to make any assumptions about how victims deal with their trauma, but…well.” A tinge of sadness entered her voice at the end.

Amane added something else. They went back and forth for a moment; it sounded like they were negotiating phrasing. “And she’s also the most…extralegally active of us, and being ‘the bimbo’,” she emphasized with air quotes, “makes accusations of those activities look more ridiculous in the public eye. A girl can’t have fat knockers and violently actionable ideologies, as far as the average fan is concerned. I benefit from that one too,” she admitted, looking down at her own chest, which was still voluptuous by any standard that wasn’t Yuuka. “Though as the leader, I need to be taken seriously by the powers that be, so I split the difference a bit more. Current attire notwithstanding.”

“Right,” I said, thoroughly red in the face. This was equal parts enlightening and entirely TMI; I hadn’t thought the topic of breasts would have such profound political implications, though in hindsight that had been silly of me. But it was weirdly gratifying to know that Yuuka handled me with the same abrasion and directness she used with her female teammates, rather than stupefying me with a flash of cleavage—though that probably had as much to do with me being an unfamiliar and unpredictable flamebearer as my status as a nonbinary Vaetnathing. She likely considered me a much more real risk to her safety than a random nonmagical man, which was sobering.

Amane pulled me out of those troubled thoughts with another comment, this one with an adorably impish grin at odds with both her anger and elegance. Alice snorted in response, seeming to return to more of an emotionally stable state by way of mild exasperation. “Oh, well, yes, her strategy doesn’t work on every man. Hongo, Hikanome’s other male flamebearer in a leadership role, remember him?”

“Yeah?” I did; he had been affable during lunch, the least enigmatic of the three, and then taken charge of protecting and evacuating Hikanome’s faithful who had been most wounded by the inferno. Public faces for organizations like a Flame cult could be incredibly slimy, but he struck me as a true believer in a more down-to-earth way than Miyoko’s prophetess vibe, and moreover, Amane and Yuuka had seemed outright amicable with him. “Oh, yeah, I guess he didn’t seem to bother her all that much, huh.”

“You noticed! That’s partially because they have a good history from during the schism—he’s one of the people who was instrumental in deposing the person responsible for all her suffering, after all—and partially because he doesn’t even glance at her rack, which even I have to admit can be terribly challenging. But that’s because he only has eyes for me, ugh. Wants to slay the dragon.” She looked a little put-upon, but it gave way to a wry grin directed to her girlfriend. “But he can’t have me, can he?” she asked her girlfriend playfully. Amane reached over and squeezed her bare thigh, and I heard a distinct whap from Alice’s tail on the sheets behind her as she leaned into the taller girl and a much more genuine smile washed over her face.

Talking about boobs had apparently gotten the lesbians warming back up to one another, which felt like my cue to leave. I didn’t belong, and I had no more questions besides. “Um, okay, I think that’s it.” I began to stand.

Alice waved me away. “Yeah. Sorry about…all that, I really put my foot in it. Leave it to my amazing girlfriend to set me right.” She gave her teammate a distinctly sapphic look, heart-meltingly adoring despite the rebuke she’d received—or maybe because of it. She turned to me, covering the attraction with some of her professional air as Radiance Opal. “I appreciate you coming to talk to me when you were freaking out about the Vaetna stuff. Talking’s good, and I appreciate being trusted with that. Though, I do have to ask: you’re not going to immediately start hyperventilating once you leave my line of sight, are you?”

“Um. I don’t think so?”

She nodded, trusting my judgment on that. “Good. Have a nice night, Ezzen. Let’s do another session with the doll tomorrow—I’ll help you troubleshoot your euphoria and we can talk more about the design.”

“Okay.”

I retreated from the room, Amane waving to me with her prosthetic arm as I left. Once I was in the hall, though, I got a text from her.

Amane: Thank you for taking my side. Alice can be frustrating.

Ezzen: No problem?

Ezzen: I think you did most of it, I might not have said anything if you hadn’t called her out

Amane: Teamwork!

Amane: I’ll talk to Yuuka. Good night

Ezzen: Good night

When I got back to my room, I got straight into bed; even though I was technically behind on mantle work, having spent most of the day in a guilty and dysphoric haze, I couldn’t muster the willpower to hop on my computer and rectify that tonight. It was looking like a chatroom-and-YouTube night, with no glyphcraft. Perhaps a more responsible version of myself, one who was free from the universal mental penalties imposed by dysphoria, would have mustered the will. Or maybe I just needed ADHD medication. After all, I hadn’t even bathed today, and that had a far lower mental and emotional barrier than designing the inner workings of my speculative ideal body.

It wasn’t just dysphoria. Though Alice had talked me down from the worst of it, and I wasn’t immediately overcome with a new wave of adrenaline, I was still reeling from the possibility that I was poisonous to my heroes. I felt some kind of abstract pressure about the broader possibility that the Peacies were already taking steps to investigate whatever had happened to Kat, to replicate and refine it, to forge a weapon that could cut down even the Vaetna. Even if Todai somehow resisted all PCTF encroachment in the coming weeks, I felt I would still be party to that horror simply by inaction. If something about my Flame was inherently inimical to the Vaetna, and that knowledge was soon to be dragged out of Pandora’s Box regardless, then I ought to learn and understand the mechanism behind it, so that we—meaning myself as well as Todai if they’d participate—might find an…antidote? Vaccine? I was thinking of it in terms of disease, though there was no particular evidence for that.

There was very little evidence for anything. That should have excited me, the suggestion of further horizons of magic that I was uniquely positioned to explore and document, but the circumstances made it feel bleak and burdensome. Sharing my work with the wider magical community would only hasten the development of the perfect weapon, and I was under no illusions about my ability to go the other way and try to mislead the entire PCTF’s research apparatus via a few papers, not when they already had one of the others whose Flames matched mine in hand.

So I lacked the will to work the myriad problems as of that evening, instead busying myself with the chatroom and aimlessly scrolling for videos that might take my mind off of it instead. I was great at avoidance, at lying in bed and staring at a bright rectangle a few inches from my face and trying very hard to think about how much I wasn’t doing.

But not everything could be avoided, nor ought to be. I was forcibly reminded that I’d barely eaten today when my stomach began to growl, and that biological demand forced me out of bed, out into the common area, down the stairs, and into the main common space, where I was grateful to find nobody to intrude on my alone-in-the-kitchen time. I dug through the fridge, found one of the many convenience store heat-and-eat meals Alice and Ai favored, and popped it into the microwave. These came in many varieties; this one wound up being spaghetti in a red sauce that more resembled ketchup than bolognese or marinara—long-ingrained sensibilities about food presentability had me searching the fridge for elements to make it better resemble an appealing dish and less like pure carbohydrate body fuel in a vaguely noodlesque form factor. I found an almost-spent rind of a hard cheese and a grater, and atop that snowy mountain, I added dabs of hot sauce, vaguely surprised to find that name-brand Tabasco was living in the spice cabinet alongside the more exotic chili oils and pastes. I wished we had a basil plant or something that would give me an easy way to put a little green on top—not that it would really make the meal any healthier, but this was less about nutrition and more about the psychology of eating. I’d found myself inheriting Dad’s love of plating and garnishing now that I was living with others, even when none of them were around.

I sat alone in the kitchen and ate my upgunned pasta. It was quiet in the penthouse, and when there were no people around, it was easy to pick out all the mechanical sounds: air moving around from the heating system as the building breathed, the steady rumble of the fridge, the hum of the microwave I cut off before it could beep at me. The ding of the elevator, which I kept anticipating but never arrived. The world outside the penthouse was silent, both the lower floors of the building and the wider Tokyo cityscape beyond the windows, present only to my eyes as a background for whatever was happening among the Radiances’ bubble of domesticity, not as a vast assemblage of real places I could go and explore.

Since arriving at Todai, I’d hardly ever had reason to leave Lighthouse Tower, except for that one outing with Alice and then Hina, the ill-fated Hikanome festival, and going with Yuuka to the shrine where Sugawara would next appear. Oh, and the haircut. I had no outdoor obligations short of flamebearer duties—all the care for my amputation and prosthetic was being taken care of in-house, Todai’s lawyers had apparently managed to get me some kind of visa or asylum status without me needing to face a single official, even groceries just kind of appeared in the fridge. I didn’t even know where the convenience store this pasta had come from was. Somehow, that last one was a bridge too far, making me pull out my phone’s map and hunt, which taught me that there was a Family Mart immediately across the street.

It frustrated me that I had access to essentially infinite money in the heart of one of the biggest cities in the world and had still barely ever left these two floors, let alone the building, and never voluntarily or for fun. In Bristol, I’d at least had the excuse of being broke, and that it was Bristol. Here, I only had myself to blame; my interactions with Amane had demonstrated that the language barrier wasn’t really all that much of an obstacle, and that would go double once I had the final version of my prosthetic with its built-in translator.

I hoped that maybe the emotional pressure cooker of living with the Radiances would be less intense if I left the house more, if I were to form some social bonds with even a single non-flamebearer…somehow. I’d had very little idea of how to do that even in England, let alone in a country where I didn’t speak the language.

Besides, the penthouse felt like it wanted to keep me here. Most of this lower floor was still and dark, my small island of lights in the kitchen reaching out toward the distant windows and dying before they got there, drowned in the furniture in the sitting area. Even more forbidding were the hallways leading around the back of the floor, which denied the light almost entirely past the first few meters.

In that abyss, somewhere in one of the further rooms, lay the doll. For a moment, I entertained the idle fantasy of going down there and ditching this meat body for a while. That was easy enough to dismiss with reasonable counterarguments like “I don’t know how to set it up” and “if something goes wrong with the transfer I’ll be alone and helpless” and “I don’t deserve to feel good.” Then even I had to admit that that last one wasn’t so reasonable, and that I might feel a little better about everything if I at least went over and gazed upon it; if nothing else, maybe looking at it from the outside would help me pinpoint what I found so comfortable about inhabiting it, which would inform the design of my actual mantle.

So with my stomach full and my steps light, I ventured into the dark.

Author’s Note:

So there’s Yuuka’s traumatic backstory, in the broad strokes. Alice bungled the delivery in terms of how it’s relevant to Ez, but the facts are accurate. Don’t feel bad if you’ve previously joked about Yuuka being a shortstack goth gf, that’s very much the impression she’s trying to give! It’s somewhat telling that Alice focused on this instead of Yuuka’s stated problem with Ez that kicked this off, which is that they’re reminding her of Hina in a bad way. Wonder what that’s about.

It’s also technically Amane’s traumatic backstory by proxy, but she’s much less bothered by it, if you ignore the indestructible inhuman ten foot tall artillery platform she uses as her body more than half the time. Perhaps yuri with a fat tailed trans dragon woman salves the hurt somewhat.

It’s nice to do a little atmosphere in the penthouse to decompress, and with a food scene to boot! Ez’s relationship with food is a pretty good tracker for its emotional state. You’ll hopefully be delighted to hear there’s plenty of meals forthcoming this arc.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter! Their feedback was instrumental in getting the tone right for the heavy stuff.

On a less heavy note, there’s new Hina art, and oh gosh is it new Hina art. Behold!

There’s an extremely spicy version of this available for patrons, too. Just saying!

That’s all for this week. Next week’s chapter will be lighter, I promise!

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!

October 19, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

After euphoria came shame.

My first time in the doll had been eye-opening, a singular experience that had been far more viscerally impactful than I’d anticipated. Nobody, including me, had expected the mantle calibration doll to be so enjoyable, so freeing, such a reset. I’d been braced for it to be novel but not actually make me feel like a different person—what I’d gotten instead was a disassembled, deep-cleaned, and reassembled version of myself, with all the soul-muck temporarily scoured away. I hadn’t understood how debilitating the grip of dysphoria and shame was, how it gummed up every level of my cognition, paralyzing emotion and poisoning my thoughts. Now I had tasted the alternative, and it felt incredible.

It wasn’t quite right to say that the Ebi-like body of the doll was perfect for my sensibilities, that it was exactly the thing I had always dreamt of; it lacked the Vaetna’s killing shapes, the flow of their armor and the…knightly presence, the energy they carried that I never quite could put into words. And I did eventually need to answer whether having different hips felt nice. The benefit to being in the doll was half in the smoothness and the facelessness and half as a result of the mental and spiritual disrobing my anima had undergone in the split second of transfer. I hadn’t been working properly before, like my soul had been suffocated and overheating; in the doll and after, I was running at my proper operating temperatures, able to access a more complete emotional spectrum. Excitement, happiness, a general desire to keep living and live more than the shadow of a person I’d been until this point—

And horniness, to put it bluntly. Feeling so emotionally activated had come with a near-complete collapse of my inhibitions; I’d repeatedly escalated Hina’s lewd provocations while making dinner and only resisted the urge to abscond from dinner and rut with her until the sun came up because I was also having so much fun cooking—and sex and food prep for a crowd shouldn’t mix. While lost in the equally vivacious and endlessly enticing energy of my girlfriend, who had been so happy we were finally on the same wavelength, I’d had no regard for the other girls. But in the harsh and sin-exposing light of day, I remembered their discomfort with far too much clarity, the faint hunch of Ai’s shoulders when my hand went directly from a cooking utensil to Hina’s waist and back to the food I was making for everybody. I’d barely respected basic hygiene.

We should have just ditched and indulged our urges immediately instead of being nasty in front of the others; they wouldn’t have had to put up with us, and maybe we’d have actually been able to follow through on all those whispered promises and roaming squeezes. Instead, when we did eventually flee for my room, she’d channeled my energy toward mantle design, urging me to continue self-actualizing through the endless panels and tables of GWalk. She still hadn’t been able to resist getting a little handsy; I suspect that if we’d stayed up, I’d have eventually gotten pulled away from the keyboard into a tangle of limbs and teeth. Which would have been problematic because her definition of sex was not survivable for my fragile meat body.

Problematic. Bad. Yep. I did, in fact, need a certain amount of blood to live. For now.

So it was probably for the best that the glyphcrafting went on for barely fifteen minutes before my surge of energy ebbed and the soul-stripping took its toll. The sudden but predictable wave of exhaustion hit right as Hina had been starting to growl in my ear, and I barely had time to yawn before she bodily hauled me over to bed—and then left right before sleep took me. Did that count as a success of boundaries? I hadn’t exactly enforced anything.

The next morning, I was dismayed to find that I’d slept off the euphoria and returned to my familiar, muted self. Extra muted, in fact, accented by contrast—and because I was plagued by guilt. My sense of propriety, freshly returned from its brief vacation, was holding me accountable. Its verdict: my conduct in front of the Radiances last evening was unacceptable, the exact kind of disgusting offense I’d been so afraid of committing the whole time I’d lived here. That, combined with the return of my dysphoria, made me somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of actually going through with anything lewd with Hina now, and I’d felt obligated to go around and apologize for my actions.

Ai laughed awkwardly in response to my stammering and waved her hands hurriedly. “I wasn’t really paying attention to you, so I didn’t notice. You made dinner and then went to your room. I’m glad the test platform worked so well for you. Did it give you any new ideas for the layout of your model?”

The sex-repulsed Emerald Radiance seemed like she’d struck it from the record of our interactions entirely, for which I was grateful, but I couldn’t wipe away the guilt so easily. Even when I accepted her invitation—conversational diversion, really—to nerd-babble about magic theory, it wasn’t enough to distract me from my overall sense of filthiness, which was how I knew it was especially bad.

Yuuka, on the other hand, was much more acerbic. “Fuck me, I’m glad I left before all that. Looked over the railing while you were cooking, saw you with your hand on her ass, went right back to my room. Why are you even apologizing? Didya even realize that I wasn’t there, or were you too busy thinking about how you’d crack her ribs?”

That last part was so surprising that it broke me out of my contrite cringing. “Crack…her ribs?”

“Yeah. I bet she made you use the fuckin’ poultry shears.”

“We—what?” I was thrown; I could tell what she was implying, but it was totally unprompted. I wasn’t about to admit that things not too far from that had crossed my mind just last night and went on the offensive instead. “You are describing sex, yeah? Is that seriously the kind of stuff Hina wants? Has she asked you—”

Heliotrope pushed a twintail over her shoulder. It was incredible how she could somehow look down at me from a full head height below. “Don’t involve me in your butchery fantasies.”

“You’re the one fantasizing! I was apologizing for…being stupid in a normal way, not whatever the hell you’re talking about, fuckin’ hell.” My contrition was dwindling, replaced by a little bit of strange schadenfreude. Yuuka was telling on herself, and that somehow righted the emotional boat for me. “Seriously, shears? Did you two take ‘scissoring’ that literally?”

Yuuka stared at me for a long moment with her human eye, then reached up to remove her eyepatch to reveal its twin, that baleful gem of prophecy. It didn’t glow or hum, but I could tell she was looking at my future, or some small fragment of it. She crossed her arms. “We stopped because I didn’t feel safe around that monster. Don’t let her make you one too.”

She left me impaled on that thorn as she left for school.

I spent the rest of that day dissociating. I no longer had the bravery to finish my round of apologies with Alice and Amane; my whole real-life social situation was put on pause as I retreated to the social bunker of my room and, within it, the chatroom. I hadn’t given my friends nearly enough of my time over the last few weeks, too preoccupied with vacillating between life-and-death flamebearer nonsense, the interpersonal struggles that came part and parcel with that, and gender discovery via mantle work. Until the sun went down, I paid it all back by simply curling up in bed, watching videos, and talking to the little people in my phone. There, at least, I didn’t disgust anybody.

The “99+” notification icon in the chatroom and the “500+” on the forums indicated that there was a lot to talk about, from large to small, and for once, I had the drive to go through every single one, an ideal distraction. My friends helped me curate; we started with the biggest bits of global flamebearer news, which were almost always new flamefalls; since my own, there had been two more, one in India and one in China, and both by all accounts had been far more typical than mine. The Vaetna had made no efforts to show up for the others like they had with me. The one in India had yielded two flamebearers who had immediately become part of the coalition of northern splinter kingdoms that still skirmished with Tibetan forces. The one in China had only found a single host, who had gone inferno.

The other notifications were just friends and colleagues pinging me whenever they wanted me to see something related to my interests. New YouTube videos about glyphcraft abounded, more than I could ever catch up on in one day, and that wasn’t even accounting for the endless torrent of reporting, spin, and misinformation about the world’s various VNT groups and other media-savvy flamebearers, some sent my way to be informative and some simply to be laughed at for their absurdity. Between the discussions, my friends’ lives went on, no less interesting than mine for all their relative lack of violence: Moth had finally gotten laid off and was relieved about it, Twili had a haul of nature photos from a hiking trip he’d been on, and Mnmnm’s grant application had been accepted.

I deflected and in some cases outright refused to answer questions about what was going on at Todai. The chatroom made it easy for me; nobody was dumb enough to ask directly what had happened at Sugawara’s hospital or about the whereabouts of Kimura, so I didn’t have to say much other than repeat assurances I was doing well. In the continuing wake of the Barbecue Inferno, I had no idea if or how I was ever going to bring up that I was dating Radiance Sapphire. I didn’t particularly want to think about her right now anyway.

On the forums, meanwhile, there was something Todai-related I did have liberty to talk about. Yesterday, one of the prosthetic teams—Team 3, who had put a phone inside my foot—had made the entire design open source, from the physical construction of the foot to the glyph diagrams, and since anybody with a brain and awareness of what I’d been up to could figure out it was for me, this had led to an enormous surge of discussion that made up two-thirds of my notifications on the forums. Moth and Dendrite spent an hour helping me comb through the thread for stuff that was worth responding to, and we crafted a general update post on my experiences with it as well. I regretted that I’d fallen out of the habit of checking the forums multiple times per day; there was a lot of speculation that I could have headed off immediately with a little more proactivity. Such was the nature of minor celebrityhood.

And, of course, there was news about the Vaetna. I’d missed a total of sixteen streams since arriving at Todai, a little under one per day, but none had been especially interesting or notable, just a mix of Spire maintenance work and what was essentially close drone footage of missions, plus two of the weekly State of The Spire streams that were a broad overview of the nation’s operations and projects. I’d used to do regular analysis posts for each maintenance stream—I stopped about a year ago but no longer remembered if there had been a specific reason. Depression, probably. And I tended to avoid watching the direct mission footage, preferring recaps, since it stressed me out to watch one of the Vaetna issue ultimatums to petty flamebearer tyrants threatening to turn a million people to glass, even knowing that those situations only ever ended one way. Skimming the recap videos, I didn’t think I’d missed anything particularly Spire-shaking.

I was disabused of that notion when I started picking through the rumor mill. Their latest bone to gnaw on was responsible for much of the remaining third of my forum notifications: the announcement that Katya, sixth of the Vaetna, was taking a break from public appearances. I’d been tangentially aware of the news but not thought anything of it, busy and extremely stressed as I had been with the coffin and Sugawara and all the fallout and recovery from that, so it had fallen out of my mind in the time since, filed in the “unprecedented but not alarming” section of my brain. In that regard, I, Ezzen, famous Vaetna expert, had been derelict in my duties, since I hadn’t taken into account a critical detail: the last time she’d been seen had been containing an inferno from my flamefall in Poland, over two weeks ago.

Theories had been proposed and shared as more evidence came in, and the collective diagnosis was dire.

starstar97: so to conclude

starstar97: somethings fucky with kat, and maybe the vaetna as a whole

starstar97: judging by bri ditching the rig

starstar97: and maybe involving yoru flame?

starstar97: *your

starstar97: the price of rawdogging without autocorrupt oTL

ezzen: She just hasn’t been around? I’m not up to speed, fuck.

My mouth was dry. They had put together the pieces days ago but elected not to message me directly about it, knowing I was already under a lot of pressure from many directions and assuming I’d get to it when I got to it. Thoughtful of them, but I wished they’d told me immediately.

moth30: yeah and its like… this is all they have to say?

moth30: cancelled her public events for a week before giving any explanation

moth30: like she never existed

That sent me into a bit of a panic spiral. One of the principal impossible-to-our-current-understanding-of-magic-but-maybe-viable things that could harm the Vaetna was an infomancy weapon retroactively deleting them from the timeline somehow.

ezzen: INFOVORED??

Of course, that was a silly conclusion to jump to, even as a nervous half-joke. Clarification arrived before I could tangent into terrified conspiracy babble.

skychicken: no.

skychicken: irresponsible wording, moth

moth30: soz

skychicken: she’s still on twitter and stuff like that

skychicken: i suppose that might just be a sockpuppet and not actually her, but theres no reason to jump to that conclusion

I was running the numbers.

ezzen: I can’t check right now but the longest time we’ve ever had any of the Vaetna be absent without explanation was maybe

ezzen: Four days? But that was during all the referendum stuff and it was Mayari, which feels a lot less weird

ezzen: Maybe there’s one I’m forgetting.

DendriteSpinner: Ez, do you think your flame core is the same way?

starstar97: “the same way” as what

starstar97: fundamentally dangerous to the vaetna? cause theres no proof thats actually the sitch and jumping to that conclusion is kinda like problematic ish

starstar97: flamefall infernos are fucky  wucky and even the vaetna could be blindsided by stuff

starstar97: and even if it has to do with something unusual about e’s flame creche

starstar97: for all we know kat just has, like, a bad cold, and bri was wary of catching the same thing until they understood what it was

starstar97: doesnt mean shes dead or dying

DendriteSpinner: I concede that.

DendriteSpinner: Not to rehash all the backscroll from the other day, but a version of events where it IS related to the products of that flamefall is plausible, and the PCTF almost certainly is going forward with that assumption.

DendriteSpinner: Ez, did you see those videos with the C-17?

I hadn’t and was quickly linked the discussion thread where the video had been posted. It was only a few seconds of cell phone footage, but it showed a military air transport with fighter escorts climbing overhead. The original post had claimed it was taken outside Chicago, and several other bits of footage had shown up elsewhere on the internet a few days later, including a conspiracy video from a Zero-Day influencer that had racked up significant attention. The consensus in the thread was that the air convoy had been flying west and that it was an express shipment from the civilian magic research labs at Argonne toward the more secret and infamous military facilities in Nevada. And by “shipment,” the signs pointed to…

moth30: we already had leaks that ana baker was at argonne, and this could be them moving her to area 52

moth30: in which case they think the anti-vaetna theory holds water

moth30: this is all speculative!! sorry if we’re freaking you out!!!

skychicken: yeah yall thats enough infodump at once i think

skychicken: dont re-traumatize ezzen please

ezzen: I’m good.

I was not good. Rather, I’d had a terrible lurch in my stomach for the past few minutes.

Anti-Vaetna; the term was upsetting enough in abstract, doubly upsetting if it applied to me specifically like I was the butt of some cosmic joke, and outright terrifying for what it implied about the PCTF’s arrival in Tokyo any day now. Each link in the chain of speculation, from the cause of Kat’s absence to Brianna abandoning Thunder Horse to the contents and destination of that C-17, pointed in the same direction: when the Peacies came for me, they wouldn’t take no for an answer. They would use me to kill the Vaetna.

ezzen: Gonna go talk to the Radiances.

“Okay, Ezzen, the first thing I want you to do is calm down. We’re prepared for this, don’t worry,” Alice sighed, sounding thoroughly confident despite the fact that she was craning her neck up at me, splayed facedown over a purple yoga ball, her tail extending straight behind her like a crocodile’s.

I’d walked in on her mid-workout; she was stretching the poor, tormented muscles around the base of the tail. Sporting similar athleisure to what she’d been wearing when I first met her, sports bra and compression leggings, she was leaving a lot of skin exposed. There was a part of me that salivated at this scantily clad, gorgeous dragon woman, the part I hated myself for that had reared its head last night and made Yuuka feel unsafe around me. At this particular moment, though, that part was easy to drown out with the keyed-up state of the rest of my mind, the cocktail of geopolitical they-will-start-a-war-over-me panic and the deeper dread that I was innately toxic to my heroes.

I fidgeted as Alice continued. “Yes, we did put two and two together and figured that your Flame might have properties that make the Peacies aggressively covet you. But that doesn’t really change much, does it? We’ve been planning for them to show up and try to snatch you since the day you arrived. They already wanted your brain, now they want your brawn as well.” She slid backward off the ball to stand, then stepped around it to sit more conversationally and do some twists. “So as for whatever is going to go down between us and them, I don’t see how this changes things.”

“But—it’s anti-Vaetna,” I almost whimpered. “That’s their, their—their holy grail, the only way to have a bigger stick than the Spire. The US will fucking…annex Japan or something if it means getting me.”

Alice didn’t believe me. “Slow down. So, knowing that the Peacies are coming for us anyway, the second thing I want you to do is focus on that. Banish any thought that you are somehow now doomed to be culpable for the fall of the Spire and…I don’t know, the sun exploding or whatever else you’re catastrophizing.”

“I don’t…not the sun exploding.”

“Pretty telling omission.”

“I mean, what the hell are the odds that I, of all people, am poison to them? That’s a bad fuckin’ joke,” I fumed. “It’s—even if we somehow get the Peacies to leave us alone, I’m never gonna be able to even visit the Spire.” I could see it clearly in my mind’s eye, being turned away from the Gate at bladepoint, Heung’s tone faintly apologetic but heavy with uncompromising finality. I was on track to be the first person ever banished from the Spire.

Alice wasn’t a telepath, but I was pretty easy to read. She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Come off it, Ez, being all Yuuka doesn’t suit you. Take five deep breaths, three seconds in, three seconds out.”

I felt the faintest sense of heat and winced, unsure if I was pissing her off or if that was just my blood running hot from embarrassing panic. For a moment, I considered petulantly ignoring her advice, upset at being treated like a child throwing a tantrum—then realized that was exactly the treatment I deserved. I stared at the floor of her and Amane’s doorway, turning red with shame, and took the requested breaths. When I finished, Alice sighed again. “Your emotional spectrum is still all fucked from last evening, yeah? Rubber-banded the other way?”

I caught her use of profanity, a sign she’d shifted out of Radiance Opal mode and was now talking to me as my friend. “…Yeah. Is that a side effect of pumping my soul through a lattice?”

“Not a magical effect. Not to go armchair therapist on you, but you’re crashing down from a euphoria high, and it’s making you treat things as a bigger deal than they are.” She pre-empted my objection that this was indeed a big fucking deal, world-shaking in fact, with a raised finger. “I’ve been there! Happened to me all the time when we were first developing the mantles. I’d give myself, uh, these,” she said, hefting one of her breasts slightly with one hand, “And then when they were gone, I’d be super emotionally fragile for a few days.”

“I…how did this turn into talking about your…chest?” The hesitation in that protest was undercut somewhat by the way my eyes automatically followed the gesture before I wrested them away to look at literally anything else; I settled my gaze on the corner of Amane’s streaming setup visible in the next room, which was bathed in a soft purple glow that helped flush my visual cortex.

Alice stood slowly, her tail squishing the ball quite a lot as it slithered off. No wonder she had to stretch so thoroughly and frequently; the thick, scaled slab of muscle and fat was an insane amount of additional weight for a pair of human legs to be lugging around, even accounting for her muscular thighs and wide hips. Its bulk drew my eyes right back over almost as easily as any pair of—I bonked myself before that thought could continue and stared harder at the corner of Amane’s desk over there. I instead made myself consider that it was also generally good self-care to stretch regularly—and that made me remember that I hadn’t done any spear training in days, and I became more crestfallen still. Alice frowned sympathetically.

“Look, you’re experiencing a big mood swing from being back in a body you don’t like. Brain’s dumping even more cortisol than usual, and it’s making it hard for you to rationally categorize danger and what you can do about it. You’re latching on to anything that will make you feel worse.”

I ground out a noise somewhere between a sigh and a growl, frustrated at being read so easily; having my feelings guessed was a sign I was known and understood and seen, and while that should have been a source of comfort and camaraderie coming from Alice, it also made me feel exposed. I shrugged my hoodie, one of the big ones in a nice earthy green I’d gotten with Hina, a little higher around my neck. “It…yes, rationally, that makes sense, but they’re some big fuckin’ problems and you’re sweeping them aside to talk about gender.”

“Aha! Because they share a solution, or at least a first step. Sit down and think about it while I use the loo.” She gestured at the yoga ball and made for the bathroom.

I hesitantly did as instructed and found that the ball was warm enough for me to feel it through my pants. It was a miracle Alice didn’t bake Amane alive in their bed. I turned my mind to the so-called shared solution.

It wasn’t much of a riddle; I found the answer immediately, and then spent the rest of the time hemming and hawing over what it meant.

Alice stuck her head out of the bathroom. “Well?”

“I…” I closed my mouth after the false start and took another deep breath, then delivered my solution in a rush. “I’ve got to use the doll more, haven’t I.”

Alice nodded and came out, wiping her hands with a towel that she then balled up and launched across the room into the laundry bin. “Good start.”

I felt pressured to defend my reasoning. “I need a mantle to, well, fight, if it’s gonna come to that, and I need to…what, microdose gender euphoria? I don’t know if it works like that.”

“Worked for me.” She raised her arms behind her head and posed, Instagram thirst-trap style, hips forward. “And look at me now! Fifty-four kilograms of sexy babe. The system works!”

That weight definitely didn’t include the tail, I noted, but I had other objections besides, darting my eyes away from her again. “I don’t want to become a sexy babe. And would you stop doing…that?”

She dropped her arms. “Designing this body took hopping into my mantle after adjusting how it looked, dozens of times over months, and then I had to have a very upsetting talk with my Flame to convince it to rebuild my actual body to spec, so I’d say I’ve earned the right to flaunt it. Not to mention keeping it looking like this despite my appetite.” She prodded her stomach with a finger. “Anyway, to figure out the body you want, you’ll have to do the same, and that means getting used to a mantle, and that means getting into the doll, Shinji.”

“What? Oh.” In hindsight it was obvious Alice and Hina would share anime references. Not very mahou shoujo to reference a mecha show—though Amethyst demonstrated that there could be some significant crossover, and mantles in general were bipedal, cutting-edge weapons of war that protected their pilots…maybe there was something there. I hadn’t yet watched enough anime to know. “That’s—yes, that’s all correct. But…using the doll made me worse. I don’t like who I was last night.”

“You mean how you were almost willing to bite one of Hina’s fingers off? That’s between you and her; I don’t care, done it before. Unless you want tips.”

I started. “You too? Has everyone but me mutilated my girlfriend? Am I being pranked?”

“You did punch her chest in, I’m told.”

“Yeah, but that wasn’t intended…” I trailed off, realizing I couldn’t quite defend that line of reasoning, and backpedaled a little. “You and Hina?”

She rolled her eyes. “Come off it. She’s my best friend and the girl who helped me hatch, and I am a lesbian. I’ve bitten parts of her you don’t even know exist yet.”

“…Huh.”

“Yes. So your lecherousness last night with her, while a little too public, was…within parameters, I guess you could say. I certainly wasn’t surprised, just worried you’d get some of her fluids into the food. You didn’t, I hope?”

I raised my hand solemnly. “Nothing made it into the food, I promise. I think. Um. But I don’t think that’s a good enough standard for, er, defining acceptable PDA.” I rubbed at my spear tattoo. “I think we really freaked out Yuuka”

“Ah.”

Some of Alice’s good mood, so rare for her to begin with, visibly wilted. I immediately felt bad. She walked over to the bed and sat on it—a maneuver that required raising her tail, sitting sideways, then scooting until the tail laid flat on the sheets. There was something appealing about its bulk, how it flowed out of her spine, to say nothing of the glitter of her scales—I caught myself from staring at her body. God, was I gross. I put my gaze back where it belonged as she templed her fingers. “Yeah, yep. What did she say, exactly?”

“Uh…basically that Hina makes her feel unsafe, and that I might too. Probably already did. She was kind of harsh about it. I know I should have some thicker skin about all the ‘monster’ stuff now, but…”

“That’s Yuuka, she’s harsh, but based on last night…Hina’s not the only…” She trailed off. The tip of her tail thumped softly and steadily on the linens, a paff-paff-paff metronome for her thoughts, whatever she was deciding. Then she sighed heavily. “Hell, alright, let’s head this off before it gets worse.”

Author’s Note:

We’re back! Gosh, Ez is already going through it, isn’t it.

Doing Sunspot Sunday for these pre-arc Patreon releases, might also start doing it for public, unsure for now. Thanks for your patience. 4.02 should be up for patrons next Sunday.

Enjoy the temporary arc cover while it’s here!

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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October 12, 2025