CONTENT WARNINGS

Mention of rape

Hot water streamed down my face as I scrubbed vigorously with a wet washcloth. It passed over my eyelids and along the contours of my nose, with special attention toward the most oily and sweaty crevices near the corners of my eyes and nostrils. I had to give myself permission to go to town on this towel; I was used to owning just two little rags for this, neither washed frequently enough. The penthouse, by contrast, had an infinite supply of fresh, clean laundry, one of Hina’s self-imposed duties to the women she loved. And me.

I was cleaning off the sweat and filth that had accumulated while I’d dreamt up a meeting with the Vaetna. Sweat had matted my nightclothes to my skin to such a degree of crustiness that it might have actually evoked Vaetna-carapace euphoria if not for the horrible oiliness and the stomach-churning man-stench of my body odor; none of the girls had commented on the latter, but if I’d been able to smell it, then they also certainly would have, and that amplified the physical unpleasantness even further. My suggestion of a pressure washer had been a joke, but only half of one, driven by a very real and urgent need to reset all the biological membranes and fluids and films of my body, inside and out. Now I’d gotten a liter of water in me and several more scoured over my outer layer and my skin didn’t feel like sticky death, and I knew that that was about as well as I’d be able to do without being opened up like Hina and given a physiologically impossible deep cleaning. I imagined being utterly disassembled, down to each individual component, and each given their own thorough deep cleaning. Rust remover and an ultrasonic bath and careful polishing, or whatever equivalents might be possible for those pieces of the human animal I regrettably was.

Short of that, bathing really did help, as they’d said it would, a lesson that I’d always known but had struggled to implement before coming to Todai. My current bout of tourist activity was a far outlier for my lifestyle, after all; before now, spear training had been pretty much my only meaningful exercise, and that was merely gilding on the otherwise disastrous state of my self care. It had been far, far too long since I’d seen a dentist, for example. Hina had me brushing my teeth now, at least, but little things like that had slipped through the cracks for years and years as I’d slowly decayed, escaping into the logical brainspace of GWalk submenus and the companionship of the chatroom instead. I was deeply ashamed in hindsight of how that had simply become the default of my life, unbathed and unshaven and sickly pale. The only times I’d seriously cleaned up were for my annual check-ins with the PCTF-sponsored aid group that paid my disability checks, and even my efforts in that had been slipping as of last year’s. My final one, now that I thought about it. Strange.

But even compared against the worst of all that time, and even with my recent spate of excursions, I had never felt more physically rotten than I had right before getting into the shower. The steam-hazy, fittingly dreamlike inner chamber of my unit bath provided barely enough solace to make it tolerable. It went deeper than the general nastiness that had accumulated on my skin, manifesting outwardly in how I’d been feeling my face and tripping over my tongue while recounting the dream.

Many old sensations were odd. The bridge of my nose, the for-some-reason-not-orange fluff of my eyebrows, these long-familiar—if resented for how they cast my face as masculine—features of my facade felt freshly alien under my hands. I couldn’t stop seeing my nose at the bottom of my vision, and my tongue felt large in my mouth even after rectifying the mild dehydration. It was a small mercy that the warm washcloth glided smoothly along my jaw and neck with no stubble to catch on, but I was still acutely aware of how it was all soft, squishy meat, how my gut was heavy with organs and blood.

My form in the dream had felt far more graceful. Maybe that wasn’t quite the right word; I had felt optimized…for what? For killing, even though I at least consciously still felt guilt for what we had done at Thunder Horse? It must have been the Vaetna’s presence, or at least my expectation of it, that had done that. My subconscious—and possibly also my Flame, insofar as the two were even separate—had wanted to live up to their great violence, even before witnessing the paranatural, divine truth that they were their vaet in the most literal sense. And I must have taken notes from Amethyst in the mix of the mechanical and monstrous, accenting it with Vaetna-flavored white carapace and a distinct sharpness to my shape, exemplified most in the talons.

That all felt like a fairly natural extension of the revolutions in my identity that I’d had since being flametouched a month prior. The rest was more vexing, especially comparing further against Amethyst: the breasts had been conspicuously present, a far more pronounced signifier of femininity than the gemstone mecha’s mere tight waist, and of course I’d practically had a cloak of my nigh-incandescent hair, which was notable because Amane eschewed simulating her beautiful, glossy locks altogether. She had a near-total split between her attractive, delicate and cultured human form and the war machine, whereas I seemed to be blurring those lines in a way that seemed not very Vaetna. Then again, she wasn’t very mahou shoujo, as I understood it—though that understanding was almost as shallow as it got.

Similarly, the talons were an extension of my foot prosthetic, I figured. Maybe the spear-foot, as silly as it had been in concept, had been onto something? I was stripped of the stopgap one right now; it wasn’t rated for the shower. It really had served me well, given that apparently Ai had thrown it together in two days of design. She was supposed to present to me the integrated prototypes soon, with the translator and other tentative features. The burn had been healing up very well, perhaps preternaturally well, and even without the pain-dampening effects I was doing just fine. If you accounted for the fact that I was benefiting from in-house access to state-of-the-art prosthetic technology,  I really had come out the other end of my first real use of blood magic only a little worse for wear. 

So perhaps a little more couldn’t hurt—that thought came from the part of me that was still unmoored from my flesh. I countered with the assertion that I was putting too much stock in a form the back of my brain had cooked up on short notice, influenced by my especially long time in the doll and the impact of Kat’s reappearance just before. That was what I told myself to dissuade any pervading thoughts about performing just a little blood magic, as a treat. I knew that was unreasonable; short of entirely switching into a mantle or the doll, any magical solutions to realign my sense of self with my flesh were deeply, deeply inadvisable.

Inadvisable, but so very tempting. It took over an hour in the shower to soothe my aching soul enough to assure myself that I wasn’t going to take the leap without precautions or medical backup. I needed to be careful, think through which parts of my shape earnestly felt like me, separate the signal from the noise—how did Asuka, the slender anime waifu, fit into this Vaetna-Amethyst fusion and its decidedly more prominent breasts than hers? What was the ideal Ezzen, these days? I resolved to finish my mantle to trial and refine everything, ask Amane for insight on that meat-mantle divide, and of course consult Alice and Hina for their experiences in discarding and reshaping their flesh. Also, maybe they or the others would enjoy showing me some of the classic mahou shoujo anime, or Evangelion, just to clarify that aspect of it all for myself. It also just sounded nice, which I was getting better at admitting to myself.

All of that was necessary preparation, as I saw it. When I crossed that bridge for real, I would know what lay on the other side, and I would do it right.

I should have known that Izumi was going through the same thoughts—only she had access to true escapism, and as such, she’d let the problem fester until it had hit the breaking point last night and she’d passed out. I didn’t actually see her for the rest of that night, having been coaxed directly from my bed to the shower, but Hina popped in a few minutes before I was done to give an update—directly into the stream of water and naked, which raised some fascinating questions about how exactly she had been caring for her assassin-with-benefits.

Like me, the dual-bodied partygirl was suffering from acute dysmorphia, which she both treated and intensified by using her mantle continuously until it crashed like a computer gone too long without a restart. Unlike me, hers was exacerbated by truly terrible self-care habits ever since we’d driven away Sugawara’s specter, even worse than my own. She had gone to considerable lengths to ignore her original body’s existence, neglecting its well-being entirely in the process. Apparently that body had barely moved in weeks and was simply not getting enough nutrition.

That felt like my fault. I’d failed to follow through on my promise of upgrading her simulated taste buds; it was one of those earnest “let me help you with that” sentiments that fell through the cracks, voluntary responsibility that faded from memory in the span of one night. And the consequences were dire: outside of when we’d shared meals on the town, she’d apparently been subsisting on one or two nearly-pure-sugar convenience store treats a day and nothing else. The Kimura body was woefully vitamin deficient, gaunt and pallid and atrophied. The final form of the room-rotting I’d inflicted upon myself for years, amplified by a level of escapism available only to a flamebearer.

It was untenable. She was alive and stable thanks to an IV drip in the medical wing on the eighteenth floor, but that was a band-aid solution. Hina reported that she’d woken up, rebooted her mantle, and ditched the flesh again as quickly as she could.

The next morning, I forced myself out of bed with the intent of helping her fix her sense of taste as a first step toward at least keeping her body self-sufficient—alone, as I’d slept nearly sixteen hours and the Radiances were long gone. I spent a few minutes checking my phone, finding that I had two hundred chatroom pings—scrambling for the news informed me that in response to the PCTF’s proclamation of intent to kick the sandcastle, the Vaetna had made a big jenga tower of every nuclear submarine in the North Atlantic. The rest was all just fallout from the stream. My friends wanted to know what it was like having a Flame from the future.

The short answer, which I didn’t have the energy to communicate, was that it mostly consisted of loathing the fact that my bones were inside me. I eventually broke the spell by managing to roll over and move my joints enough for my personhood gauge to improve from “mineral tree with meat leaves and cursed with consciousness” to “tired guy,” which advanced to “tired enby shellcreature” after convincing myself that brushing my hair and putting on a hoodie and mask would help. That was enough to get my self-actualization to turn over and my motivation came rumbling to life, and I {AFFIX}ed my prosthetic and went to see the state of Izumi’s body for myself.

Instead, as I walked toward the penthouse’s upper elevator doors and peered over the railing, I saw her actual body—that is, the mantle—sitting at one of the high chairs bordering the gargantuan kitchen island, doomscrolling some social media or another, and generally looking like a million bucks as usual, which I now understood to be on loan from her main body’s health. She waved me down, and wasted no time once I came into earshot.

“Help me get rid of it.”

“Your…body,” I replied pointlessly while navigating the last few steps.

“Yes. I can’t go back to it. I’ve been thinking that I could do what Takehara-san did, and change its shape, turning it into this form instead,” she gestured at her own figure, “or we could simply find a way to move my mind and Flame into this mantle permanently and get rid of the biological body completely. Your thoughts?”

I had a sinking feeling that she would brook no half-measures. “My thoughts are that those are both…really risky, with the Peacies breathing down our necks. You don’t really care about that, do you?”

“Our fox told me you would help me.” There was an edge of nervousness in her voice. “Because you understand what it’s like. Everything becomes suddenly wrong. I don’t want to be that. I don’t want to be him.”

I took a deep breath, looked at her with all the empathy I could muster. “I’m helping you no matter what, yeah. There’s all the, y’know, consequences, politics, all that stuff, whether we or Hikanome need the public figure of Kimura to stick around. But that’s not my wheelhouse—all I’m really good at is magic. That’s what they pay me for,” I managed to joke. They didn’t pay me so much as give me unlimited access to company funds, and I’d hardly even done anything resembling work. “And I will help you with magic, to the fullest extent I know how. Just…can we take a step back from sanguimantic options for a second? And can I sit down?”

She directed a pointed look at my corona of orange hair, freshly brushed over my shoulders. Then she nodded toward one of the seats next to her, extending a delicate shin to shove it out a bit so I could gingerly hop up.

I sighed. “Okay, yeah, I’ve gotten off pretty light when it comes to sanguimancy. My Flame seems to like it when I do st—desperate things to my body. I don’t know if yours is the same. Alice is evidence that transition by incredible gore is a thing the Flame will permit, but that’s…derived from believing really hard in mahou shoujo? Is that the mechanism?” That didn’t sound right, but I didn’t know enough to dispute it. “Do magical girls transform by horrific blood explosion in the shows?”

“…Have you seen a magical girl anime?” She looked vexed. “You’ve been here for a month, living with them, and they haven’t shown you Precure?” She pronounced it in Japanese. “Or, with how this new magic is so…murderous, at least Madoka?”

“No. I mean, I know, um, ‘goretastic’—Hina’s words, not mine—transformations aren’t the norm, it’s usually all sparkles, but since Alice seems to really be into the whole look, I kind of assumed there was some kernel of truth there? Or, if not a kernel, at least, like, something obvious to reference.”

“No, it’s not how it usually works,” she confirmed. “Not the classic ones she loves, at least. She knows that her mahou shoujo-pposa, the one she shows to the world and makes the others live, is fake. Or, not fake,” she corrected guiltily. “Real, because she believes in it, but the Light does not believe in love and purity. It is fire and blood, and I don’t know if it would be as kind to me as it would to her. She is young, and I am…old, Ezzen.” Izumi, gorgeous and trendy twenty-something, looked tired. “That matters to whatever I will do to get rid of that body. Most flamebearers are much younger than me. The Flame wants potential, it wants change, and when I am in that body I feel like I have neither.”

I had no emotional frame of reference for that. I’d decayed my way through my teens, procrastinating life itself, justifying it with the back-burner knowledge that I had plenty of time, that when I finally got off my ass and did something with my life it would be when I still had several good decades ahead of me. I’d still felt like I had infinite potential.

“You’re not that old,” was the first thing that came out of my mouth. That was my earnest reaction, recollected from when we’d spoken at the barbecue. Kimura had come off as stately, not elderly or doddering, and had looked legitimately good for somebody over fifty at the time. If she was even over fifty—I realized I wasn’t sure. It was very difficult to have a conversation about identity when you knew so little about the other person. I resisted the urge to pull out my phone to raid Wikipedia, and instead, the second thing I said was more thought out and empathetic. “Okay, um, let me rephrase that. Why do you feel like you’re old? What was your life like before you were a flamebearer? Uh—I don’t know if there’s a delicate way to ask, so: were you trans before the age of magic? Sorry, I’m realizing those aren’t actually the same question.”

Izumi gave this a long moment’s consideration, staring at her pale and perfect hands. When she spoke, there was regret in her voice. “Transgender and transsexual and those were not concepts that I knew when I was young. In Japan, it’s only a thing people learned about recently. Looking back…yes, I think I was, but I didn’t have a word for it. In high school and college I was a crossdresser, an otokonoko. I wanted to be a girl, but didn’t have…permission? I was a coward. I felt like I would have to throw away my whole life for it to be real, and in the 2000s, when I turned thirty, I just…stopped trying.”

“Until the Flame,” I prompted.

“Until the Flame,” she agreed. “Hi kara no megumi. A blessing from fire—the original kanji was hi as in fire, now it’s hi as in the sun,” she explained. “Branding. For us, for me and Hongo-kun and Miyoko-chan and him, we were suddenly able to do new things, to be new things. And I was a coward, again. Izumi came back to life, but she was secret. I was still Kimura. Still a coward. And then…and then…” she winced and physically recoiled from something only she could see.

I knew what she couldn’t say. Sugawara had essentially blackmailed her with her second identity, pressganged her into his service, and then driven those barbs of control deeper and deeper through magic. It occurred to me that his ability to pillage her dreams had been a twisted evolution of the same phenomenon that allowed me to speak with Holton and the Vaetna. She’d never spoken about the full extent of his control over her, how far it had extended beyond that in magical terms, but knowing what had happened to Yuuka let me fill in the most grievous violations for myself. Izumi’s body and soul had been defiled and desecrated.

No wonder she wanted to part ways utterly with that part of her life. To Izumi, the Kimura body represented failure to self-actualize and memorialized such comprehensive abuse—I kicked myself for ever suspecting that she’d betray us. Amethyst had been right about that; we’d made a ride-or-die ally that night when we’d torched Sugawara and incinerated his magical hold over her.

“Getting rid of that body is the only way you’ll feel truly free from him,” I surmised. “Fuck me, that’s dark, sorry. And presumptuous.”

“It’s correct.”

That immediately brought up a new question. Somebody as violated and as capable as Izumi ought to have been digging two graves and then embarking on an epic quest of vengeance, not partying. “Wait, then if he’s the root cause of all this, why haven’t we gone and found him? Finished the job? He’s still out there, isn’t he? We laid those traps, but…”

“He is already dead.”

“In the sense that he doesn’t have a heartbeat? Yeah, I guess. But like, that was definitely an evil ghost we fought. Are you saying that the thing that escaped from us really isn’t him anymore, magically speaking?”

“I am saying that I wanted him gone, and now he is. Sugawara, the Savior, the founder of Hikanome, the man who raped me and a thousand others, he is dead. That ghost cannot lead any more monsters, and he is not inside me anymore. To me, that means he is dead. What is left is an echo. It has to be. He cannot survive that as himself, it wouldn’t be—fair,” she sighed, slumping forward to rest her forehead on the countertop. “It would not be fair. So he is dead. Does that make me a coward still?”

“Oh,” I whispered, a heavy sadness lodging itself in my chest. I wasn’t going to point out how her reasoning was very motivated, how the thing that was out there could probably still inflict evil regardless of whether or not it was Sugawara in a philosophical sense—she clearly already knew all that. I only answered the direct question, as honestly as I could. “Maybe? You’d rather destroy your past self than destroy him—or your present self, rather, because even if it’s not your body, it’s still the body keeping you alive,” I reminded her. Then I hesitated. “Can I pose a question?”

Still face-down, she motioned for me to go ahead.

I took a deep breath. “…Do you want to be done with all this flamebearer stuff?” For myself, such a notion was absurd, but Izumi’s path was different from mine. “Like, let’s say you do destroy your old body and assume this form permanently. Given the choice, would you rather abandon all VNT activities, or even your Flame completely, somehow? A clean break that lets you abdicate responsibility for Japan’s future and so on?”

That made her sit back up. “No.”

“Quick answer.” And the one I had been expecting.

She leaned back in her chair and stared across the kitchen at nothing in particular. “I thought about it every night he was in my head. Leaving all of this, starting over as a normal, young girl. And perhaps, if we had killed him the first time, four years ago, I might have done that. But—we did not, and I remained his pawn, both from magic and because…I am dutiful,” she sighed. “To Hikanome’s leaders and its people. With him gone I now feel like I can leave that behind. But to Japan, as the PCTF prepare to eat us? To you and those beautiful ones who are going to show them that we are the bitterest poison? I am loyal to that. I won’t leave. I will party like there’s no tomorrow, because I have lost too much of my youth already, but when Toudai goes to war, I will be there with you.”

“Not a coward, then. Simple as.” I felt very clever.

Izumi’s head swiveled, owl-like, to face me. “Oh. Yes, well, ah, when you put it that way—”

“But also, it’s not cowardice to, like, chill out and party for a while, right? I mean, you’ve been through the fucking wringer in a way that blows all my shit completely out of the water. You were pretty much trying to convince me of that a few days ago. I think it’d only be cowardice to avoid dealing with whatever remains of Sugawara if he was actually out there hurting people right now, which he’s not…as far as I’m aware. I don’t keep up with Japanese news—area of growth for me, under the circumstances—but I think I’d still have heard about hauntings or more random ripple stuff via the Radiances, if it was happening.”

Izumi blinked. “You’re very eloquent when you try, Ezzen.”

That shut me down hard. I physically recoiled into my hoodie a bit. “Um, uh. No. What? Back on topic. We started this convo with you asking me to help annihilate your body downstairs. Whatever happens with Sugawara, I intend to help you do that much. So, enough philosophizing about death and cowardice,” I declared. “There’s a lot of questions about the mechanism that would take time to research. I assume you’ve done some of your own already? You laid out those two paths, metamorphosis or transmigration, if I wanted to give them fancy names.”

“I have ideas for both. No diagrams.”

“Because sanguimancy?”

“…Maybe. What did Brianna tell you? ‘Magic is more than glyphs?’ She is right, and I have some ideas.”

“…Okay…” I wasn’t sure where this was going. “Alice is qualified to tell us about the metamorphosis version, or at least as qualified as we’re going to find, I imagine. I think Sky did something similar. But, uh, the transmigration version, fully pulling your soul and Flame out of your body…the only thing that’s coming to mind would be what Sugawara did to himself, and we just established that you consider that, like, actual death, no continuity of identity or whatever people call it. It’s fundamentally different from using a mantle, so I don’t think the Radiances would be much help.” I blinked. “Oops, you said you had ideas.”

She grinned thinly. “And now I don’t need to say them.” As I half-performatively reeled from that, she rapped her fingernails along the countertop. “We will have to speak to Miyoko. She knows souls and death better than anyone else in Japan.”

That sobered me immediately. “Oh. Right. My dad.”

“Yes. I believe we’ve put that off as long as we can—the meeting of Japan’s flamebearers, my trial, it must happen soon.”

“How soon?”

“I don’t know.”

“That…sucks!” I decided. “I’m going to sound like an idiot now: could this meeting be an email instead? Like, with proper infomantic encryption, all that good stuff?”

Izumi hesitated for a long moment, genuinely caught off guard. I had the sense that much of the interaction between Japan’s VNTs was steeped in ritual—but none of those rituals could be more than seven years old, when you thought about it. They were hand-me-downs from culture, fictional expectations about being Important Magical People that were much older than any of their organizations or magic itself. And those didn’t have to actually reflect reality, did they? I would never begrudge Alice her mahou shoujo when it came to her guiding principles in life, but for actually getting stuff done, surely we could do better.

“Not the whole meeting,” Izumi eventually said. “But for my body, yes.”

And just like that, she sent the email. It took about five minutes, flurries of typing separated by long spans of sitting and thinking, then deleting. When she put down her phone, she looked a little sick. “I am still a coward. I sent that as Kimura.”

“She doesn’t know? Wait, what does she think you—either of your ‘you’s—have been up to since the barbecue?”

“…We’ll find out.”

“Actually, you won’t,” came a new voice from overhead. Ebi’s, from the speakers. “First of all, that email was not encrypted enough, so be grateful I sniped it. And I don’t feel like letting you debase yourself like that, Izumi, come on. But more importantly, if you want to ask about souls without bodies, I’m right here.”

Author’s Note:

Sometimes you really do just have to let the characters talk to each other until change happens. Ez and Izumi are two peas in a pod; it’s really no wonder Hina’s into both of them. And boy oh boy, Ebi sure is coming out swinging. Did you miss her? I missed her!

Apologies again for the delayed chapter. I was sick! And then executive dysfunction (and Deep Rock Galactic) got its wretched claws into me. I think the next chapter of Sunspot will skip this Sunday and instead go up the following Sunday, March 23, so I can give myself the time I need to write ahead a little bit. Thank you for your patience, it means the world to me.

Thank you also to the beta readers who helped me navigate what this chapter should be doing. They also helped me refine the next commission — if all goes well, I should be able to release it on the update after we hit 5000 followers between RR and Shub! It’s Amethyst and Heliotrope. I’m very excited.

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March 13, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

Mild dysmorphia

Hina pouted. “So no stabbies?”

“Out of the gutter, kemono,” Yuuka sighed without any real bite. After I’d finished my recap, she had seen fit to drop out of her mantle, from skirt and frills back to frumpy hoodie and shorts. “What I’m hearing—and seeing, though who knows if that means anything anymore—is that we’re on our own. As usual.”

Amethyst chirped a reply above her, looming as the team’s centerpiece as they gathered around my bed. I was sat propped up against a pillow that cushioned my back from the headboard. Hina was the only one on the bed properly with me, lying at the other end and kicking her legs up in a distracting rhythm of soft pwuf thumps as her heels fell back to the bedspread. She’d been very good when I’d stumbled into my room and declared I was going back to sleep for something extremely important, but I guessed that sometime during my dream-meeting she’d been informed that I was heading off the threat of imminent Vaetna combat, because when I’d woken she’d been a bit grumpy. Understimulated, maybe.

“We are enough.”

Nobody contested Izumi’s use of “we.” She stood a bit off from the proper Radiances, also ready for war by definition of what she was. Not a Radiance in any official capacity, and in fact I wasn’t sure what the public status of Izumi the assassin or Kimura the major cult leader was supposed to be, but at least at an unofficial level she’d naturally slipped into being the team’s sixth magical girl. Or seventh, or eighth, depending on how you counted myself and Ebi—the point was that, as a mantle wielder who shared their collective loathing for the great machine to which Sugawara had fed Amane, she was welcome to hear what I had conveyed about the Vaetna and join in on the conversation. She’d swapped her look from the party girl outfit to the dark assassin, hair bound up in a long ponytail. Her eyes glinted with readiness as she looked out the window of my room, watching for what was coming; less gleeful and anticipatory than Hina, but prepared to act in the same vein.

The other Radiances stood at my side, mantled up like they were ready for war, unwilling to entirely take Yuuka’s cue to stand down despite her precognition. Like Izumi, they were in their low-profile forms, the shapes they’d used to take out Sugawara’s hospital-turned-compound. Their signature bright colors and shapes had given way to muted tones and more uniform silhouettes, geometry and flair simplified to fit more complex lattices; all the cosmetic visual and sound effects had been tossed in favor of a suite of infomantic countermeasures and better maneuverability. They were still more garnished than Izumi’s mundane murder outfit, unwilling to wholly forgo the skirts and sleeves and hairstyles that said “Radiance,” but many of the contours that remained were stealthily practical, there to improve radar invisibility or acting as resonance structures in the LM that made it more resilient.

When I’d first paged through the diagrams for these configurations of the mantles, I’d experienced some envy about the cleverness on display, the interdisciplinary engineering and real experience that went into those features. Right now I was mostly just grateful to have that on my side. Was Izumi right that it was enough?

Radiance Opal leaned against her crystalline girlfriend’s thigh, thinking deeply, not answering immediately. Ai was mantled as well, the first time I’d seen this variation of hers; it was relatively straightforward, mostly distinguished from her teammates by green accents, a less-frilly skirt, and a much longer ponytail than her usual, almost a match for Izumi’s except for the tiny bit of cosmetic flair in how it flowed gently from a nonexistent breeze. “On our own,” she agreed. “So what does ‘enough’ mean? Enough for what?”

“It means we fight!” Hina asserted, punctuating it with another leg thump. It was adorable, but belied frustration. “If the Vaetna don’t want to do stabbies, fine. I’m not mad, just disappointed. But I still think the Peacies can’t really say no to a fight. We could just go and do what we did to Sugawara, kill ‘em quick. We can.”

She’d already tried to exit my room via the balcony to do just that less than two minutes into my explanation of what the Vaetna had shared. And then again two minutes later. She’d only agreed to stop when Ai had gently suggested she busy herself getting me some more water and towels; it turned out that my body had been working hard, perspiring through the clothes I’d thrown on to sleep most comfortably as quickly as possible. I’d been parched and needed to stop to sip water every few words, and even now that I was somewhat rehydrated, my tongue still didn’t quite sit in my mouth right.

“We can, in theory,” Alice allowed, “but kill who is the question, and not one I think we should be answering tonight. They’re not going to move tonight for sure—” she looked meaningfully toward Yuuka at that, who nodded confidently, “—and I would really love to get some sleep and actually plan.”

“No—hmgh,” I cleared my throat, “no qualms about the murder?”

Normally I would have qualified the question a bit more, with an acknowledgment that I’d already seen their willingness to spill Peacie blood and this was mostly just to confirm whether they were still willing to do that on their home turf. But my throat didn’t feel up to the challenge, and besides, the nuance got through regardless.

“Yes. Well, I’ve got a spot of worry about the logistics, but mahou shoujo defend Japan, when it’s called for. And at this point it is called for, I’m not seeing any other way out of this, as it sounds like you’d be turned away from the Gate if you wanted to run off to the Spire.”

Hina sat up, indignant on my behalf. “Ally, you don’t seriously think—”

“I might,” I interrupted, rubbing my face. Everything felt a bit off; I found my nostrils objectionable. “Given the choice. If it meant bringing you all out of the line of fire.”

Hina pounced over onto me in a hug. “Mmn. Don’t do that. We like you here.”

“Does Japan?” I asked, raising my hand to indicate I’d continue after I took a sip of water. “I mean, civilians, yeah? Or the government? Just seems to me that Sky—um, Jason, to you guys, probably—put the whole country in a bind by bringing me here. If I wasn’t…” I trailed off, shaking my head, unsure of how to express what I was feeling. I’d had a nice few weeks of being coaxed out of feeling like a burden to the team, but I’d always held onto the subconscious safety net of being able to flee to the Spire if things got too hot for the Radiances, which would hopefully ameliorate the brewing conflict. With that out of the picture, dread and guilt were settling in. “It’s bad,” I tried.

“It has always been bad,” Izumi countered.

Amethyst warbled a sharp noise, heavily filtered Japanese that sounded like agreement. Alice looked up at her, listening, then translated for me. “If you weren’t here, we’d still have eventually had this showdown. The Peacies hate what we represent—the Vaetna said so themselves, if I’m understanding you correctly. We’re not under their thumb, and for that, they would have tried to destroy us as soon as it became convenient for them. Instead, they’re feeling the pressure to do it fast. Not tonight fast,” she repeated, eyeing Yuuka again, maybe trying to prompt her eye to repudiate the claim. When it didn’t, she patted Amethyst’s crystalline thigh. “But faster than they’d like, and you being someone they want to have rather than acceptable losses complicates any of their more violent first strike options.”

“What she’s saying is that with you here, we’ve got the juiciest of all bait,” Yuuka added with a grin. Gone was much of her trepidation and anxiety; it had apparently been something of a literal blockage on her foresight, and with Kat’s stream now past and the all-consuming the Vaetna will kill us premonition managed, it had visibly dissipated from her eye. At a less magical but maybe more significant level, when I relayed what Bri had theorized about the limitations of time travel, she had also brightened; she didn’t like the Vaetna, but after a few probing questions about Bri’s exact wording she seemed to buy it and was cautiously optimistic that we weren’t about to be retroactively wiped from existence by a cascade of time traveling assassins. “I told them about the mantle swap idea,” she informed the others. I felt a little woozy at the prospect of borrowing—really copying—one of the girls’ mantles for the switcheroo ambush plan she had outlined. “We’ll have a window soon, once the fuckers actually offer to negotiate. Couple days of swing on that. Ezza, if you can do your torch thing, I can probably get something exact now.”

I remembered what Bri had said about the connection between silver and white ripple. A bit of determination sparked within me and I obligingly raised my arm, but Hina pushed it back down, locking eyes meaningfully with Alice. The team’s leader shifted.

“We can discuss how to handle that in the morning,” Alice said delicately. “If you want to do a flyby, Yuuka, I trust you. But I think Ezzen has spent all they can, or should, tonight. Is something the matter with your face?” she asked me.

“No. Maybe.” I rubbed my cheekbones. “I wasn’t me in there. In the dream. Or I’m not me out here.”

That provoked more than a little alarm in Alice’s sunset-glow eyes. She muttered something up at Amethyst, who nodded her massive purple head. Ai came over to my side and searched my face with concern. “Do you feel dizzy?”

“No, just sort of…heavy?”

“Ah, fuck,” Yuuka groaned. “Yeah, not gonna ask more from you tonight, you’re cooked. This is what I was talking about, that feeling that stuff doesn’t click between your mantle and your body. I’m a bit surprised it didn’t go off when I was coaching your selfie game, but makes sense that it didn’t happen until you crashed. Sleep’s weird for Flame-brain stuff.”

I saw Alice mouth “selfie game?” at her, but not say it out loud. Hina had no such tact.

“Selfie?”

“Um, took photos in the doll,” I admitted, feeling awfully dysphoric all of a sudden. “Wasn’t much, just wanted to show my friends. Nothing that’s not already public.” I’d only sent one of the more normal, non-silly ones while we’d been getting set up to watch the stream—I was suddenly possessed of the urge to send the others, to declare that that was closer to the real me, or the me that I ought to be, or something along those lines.

Hina was good at reading me. “Would looking at them make you feel better?”

It was a good thought, and I hesitated for a moment, then shook my head. “Um—after we figure out the gameplan.”

Alice gave me a look. Peeved but hiding it well, I thought. “We just got dragged out of bed to fight for our lives, Ezzen, this isn’t a proper strategy meeting. If the coast is clear of the Vaetna, I’m of a mind to go back to bed. The gameplan for tonight is nothing.”

“But shouldn’t it be something?” I asked, grasping for the weight I’d heard in Sani’s words to anchor myself. I’d been issued a mission: send the Peacies a message. “You said they don’t like to rush. We should force them to react, yeah? I mean, it’s not like I would have been the one to go out anyway, so how I’m doing doesn’t really matter, does it? Am I missing something?” I looked between the women. “I mean, what do we gain by waiting?”

“The chance for them to come to the table to negotiate. As a pretense to shoot them under it. If we’re openly hostile, we lose that chance.” Alice’s tone was matter-of-fact, like this was routine. “And there’s more to it than the violence. The Peacies want to get the government on their side, if not the public, so we want to be maintaining business as usual as far as the public is concerned. If we go and hit something right now, say, the USS Abraham Lincoln that’s been hanging out off Fukuoka since a couple days after you showed up, then Hina, Amane, and I aren’t going to get any sleep before our interviews and ad reads tomorrow. We used to do unplanned all-nighters for this stuff back before we were official, but we just can’t afford it now.”

Right then she seemed a far cry from smiles and sparkles, but in fairness, she did have a point; it was an hour when nobody with a day job should have been up. These magical girls traded on their image, and sleep was a critical part of that. I’d had a background awareness that when the girls weren’t in the penthouse, they were doing brand deals and TV appearances and voice acting and all those other things, a black box in my mind labeled “celebrity stuff” that I had considered secondary to their more proper VNT activities like Ai’s magitech R&D and their collective penchant for extrajudicial murder.

Because of my isolation from their cultural presence, it had basically been my assumption that all that soft power paled in comparison to the hard power. They were each more dangerous than a nuclear weapon; that public opinion or the government couldn’t really stop them even if the Peacies did win them over. The Barbecue Inferno had demonstrated that flamebearer conflicts were always a hair’s breadth from turning explosive, and it seemed obvious that this conflict with the largest magitech institution in the world would be decided by the sword no matter what. It was a chilling thought, but it had seemed to me the reality of the situation.

Then I thought of Bri, how she resented being a dagger so much that she had taken on the mantle of a needle instead. And I remembered how I had mourned the way the executioner’s sword reduced all to merely the action of a cutting edge. Even the Vaetna—especially the Vaetna—understood that discarding all notions of influence and negotiation because you had the power of nightmarish butchery was a tragedy, one that ought to be the last resort. Unlike many VNT groups, Lighthouse had the privilege of choosing when to take that step. Yuuka might have been the most literal in how she used her body to curry public favor—albeit a somewhat unpleasant version of it—but all of them had political leverage that correlated directly with physical self-care.

“Okay,” I capitulated. “Not tonight. I get it.”

“I mean, I don’t have to sleep,” Hina pointed out, sitting up with a bounce. I should have seen that coming; she was still activated, and having been denied the promise of a good scrap with the most lethal beings on Earth, she was almost salivating at the idea of another outlet, a coiled spring of anticipated violence. “Yuu-chan, wanna go out? Drink some blood? Have a little fun?”

For a very brief moment, but one long enough for all of us to see it, Yuuka looked sorely tempted. Then she mastered her expression and executed a flawlessly haughty twintail flick. “I have classes tomorrow, kemono.”

Hina blinked her big blue eyes. “Oh, so you’ll bomb a pipeline over lunch, but you won’t hang out with me? Even if we fuck after?”

“Yamete,” Ai cut in before Yuuka could snipe back. “You do have to sleep.” She winced. “That sounds bad when I say it.”

“You can stay with me,” I told Hina. With my initial urge to get out there and take action subsiding, the ennui and body-wrongness were coming to the forefront again. I rubbed my face. “Could use some…company? Dunno.”

Hina gave me a concerned look. She murmured. “You look bad.”

“…Thanks.”

“No, not like that, you’re always a cutie. I mean, um…the displacement thing Yuuka said.”

“Yeah, Ezza, you look like shit. Doll won’t help, don’t get any stupid ideas.”

“I don’t think this is because of the doll,” I confessed.

I’d actually omitted sharing the shape I’d experienced in the dreamscape, the thing with the cloak of bright hair and ice-scraping talons and no gut of organs. I’d been focused on relaying the meeting with the Vaetna and reassuring the girls that the threats facing us weren’t going to come from the Spire or the magically-stapled-back-on-itself future. As long as I didn’t think about that form, being back in this one didn’t bother me as much. But now I was thinking about it, and it sucked. I was wet and dry at once, squishy in many pointless places, and all the protrusions of my face felt wrong. I felt like a screw that had gone in at an angle and could now go no deeper without cracking itself or its housing. Of course, with an actual screw, you could back it out and start again. I wondered if I could do that here, and felt my Flame gather in my chest—

Hina was clever enough, changed enough, and in tune enough with my Flame to pick up on my moment of weakness. She touched my chest to bring me back to reality before I could do something exceedingly stupid. Her voice was soft. “What did you look like?”

“I—should I answer that?” I cautiously asked Ai, no longer trusting my own judgment. “Will that make whatever this is worse?”

“I wanna know,” Hina said. The glimmer in her eyes, that predatory fervor, had now morphed into a hunger for me, or perhaps a hunger on my behalf. It might have been more fair to call them the same thing.

Ai bit her lip. Amethyst crouched down beside her, still almost as tall as she was, and answered for her in slow, crystal-tone English.

“If you say it, it will hurt less,” She added something else in Japanese, directed at Ai, which sounded much more detailed, like two doctors huddled over a patient presenting a new symptom.

Ai sighed. “I don’t recommend listening to our cyborg’s opinions about pain, but she’s right about the other part. You’re desynchronized, and there’s not really a treatment we’ve found. It gets worse the more your mantle diverges from your regular body, so…” she gestured up at Amethyst. “If it was like this…you don’t have to tell us. Whatever you want to share.”

“Ah. Okay,” I managed, now feeling quite bad indeed. My tongue was a dried slug; I drank some water and was all too aware of how it sloshed down my flesh-pipes. “I…yeah. Not quite that much, but…to put words to it. Okay. Doll-Vaetna-sharp.”

I felt very brave for even saying that much. The girls were sympathetic, of course; Alice gave me a gentle smile and Ai nodded in a way that told me she was logging that information to pick at it later. Hina nuzzled my neck, which helped most of all. “Sounds like you, cutie. Can I help?”

With the ice broken—reference to my dream not intended—I felt a little better talking about it. “Doll’s not the word. I was talking about this with Yuuka earlier. Chassis? Just—structural, not fleshy.”

“Other than boobs,” Yuuka guessed. She sounded sympathetic.

“…Yeah. Boobs club.”

“Boobs club.”

“What?” Alice asked, looking between us in confusion.

“Boobs club,” the amethyst mecha offered from above her.

Radiance Opal stared up at her girlfriend, then sighed in defeat, waving a hand at Yuuka. “You know what, sure, whatever. Boobs club. If it means you two are getting along again, I’ll take it, it’s too bloody late for me to parse this. Is talking helping?”

I thought about it. “Sort of. I feel like if you could open me up and hose me down with a pressure washer, that might fix me.”

“Cut…you…open…” Hina mimed writing on an imaginary notepad. “Oh, whaddaya know, I already had that in my calendar for—”

“Stop,” Ai commanded. “You do not want to do anything that changes your body right now. You could lose motor function from the mismatch, or forget how to breathe, or one of many other bad things Amane can tell you about if she wants.”

I sighed, nervously kneading my plated right hand, one of the only parts of me that felt properly alright. “So just…tough it out? This isn’t like, um, gender stuff, that’s all kind of like static in my head, this is…I’m feeling it.”

“This is going to sound kind of insufficient,” Alice warned, “But bathing helps, it really does. Obviously, er, not the pressure washer thing, I can’t recommend that, Hina. But rinse yourself down, use the nice conditioner, wash down your face, feel out where everything is again.”

Amane warbled something else, which drew a scandalized glance upward from her girlfriend. “Sonnano—Fine.” She looked at me, reddening with a blush. “Amane wants me to add that sex can help too. Gets you very, ah, aware of your body, as it were. This feels like a bad recommendation with you two in particular, so let me repeat: Hina, do not cut them open. Honestly, Ezzen, why’d you have to go and put that specific wording in her head?”

“I’m the one suffering here,” I retorted with my gummy lip-flaps and vibrating membranes. “Besides, s’not like I’m the main subject of all that, if she really needs to let off steam, we agreed she can go to—wait.” My heart thudded in my chest. “Where is Izumi?”

“Outta here!” Hina laughed. “She doesn’t have anywhere to be tomorrow. Left when we were talking about waiting.”

Alice joined me in looking around the room in confusion, as surprised as I was that the assassin had vanished. The door and window were both shut. She’d dipped out via the fourth dimension.

“Off toward—-negotiation? Mantle technology?” Yuuka relayed, her eye flaring as worry rose in her voice. “But I can’t see anything else. Fuck. What if she’s selling us out?”

Amane replied quickly and sharply with a reprimand so clear I didn’t need to speak Japanese to get the gist. Hina effectively translated anyway as she crossed her arms. “Yeah, why would she? Too paranoid, Yuu-chan, save it for the bad guys.”

“Did—oh God,” I realized, anxious suspicion spiking as pieces clicked into place. It made too much sense; our hasty forgiveness and acceptance of her would have been the perfect window into understanding the weaknesses of the mantles. Information the Peacies would pay a fortune for. Leverage. “Gathering intel on us the whole time.”

Hina looked genuinely offended. “No, cutie! She hates Sugawara waaaay too much for that. She’s just out and about to scout…prolly.” The tiniest bit of uncertainty crept into her voice at the end; she was unable to find a good rebuttal for what Yuuka had foretold, and was visibly becoming distressed as we were at the sudden possibility that we’d been played for sympathy. “There’s no way she’s a double agent or any shit like that. We helped her with that. You helped her with that!”

Amethyst gave a rumbling reply I couldn’t tonally parse, a much heavier, more scraping sound than the usual tinkle of gemstone. Ai did me the service of translating. “Amane agrees, there’s no way. She fought Sugawara with everything she had when he came here.”

“Everything,” Amethyst added in rock-tumbler English.

Alice’s lashing tail indicated she wasn’t convinced. We all turned to the team’s leader as she thought it out. “…Suppose it is true. Where’d she be going right now? Off to trade that information to the Peacies in exchange for keeping Hikanome or Japan as a whole out of this. Sell us out.” She sounded vexed. “No, that can’t be it. The dark redeemed villain girl doesn’t betray the team after joining up. I don’t think they could actually offer her anything she wants more than she wants to turn them to pulp. Is Japan worth that much to her, after how it’s treated her?” She let the question hang as she looked out the window at Tokyo’s late-night skyline, then made up her mind, her voice taking on an air of urgent command as she faced me again. “We can’t take the risk. Ezzen, I’m sorry, but if you can muster the energy to boost Yuuka’s eye, now is the time, at least enough to verify what she’s doing. Amane, hasshadai e, be ready for an intercept if we have to. Hina, you have her phone number, right? She’s not on the mantle comms, but if you can at least contact her and figure out—”

I tuned out the details of Amethyst’s burst of speed toward my door and Hina scrambling for her phone to focus on dredging up my Flame once more, now motivated by panic rather than dysmorphic wrongness. Fire ignited from the cracks between the plates on my right arm. It was cold as ice; my shell here was incomplete. I tried to shake off that thought with a joke as I held it up toward Yuuka. “Here. Little bit of the future for you?”

“…Damn, you look miserable,” she muttered, then focused on the Flame I had offered. She gasped at the same time as Hina whined at her phone. “Damn, she looks miserable. False alarm!” she called to the others. “Not betrayal, she’s still in the penthouse. Ebi, get out here and help her.”

“What happened?” I asked.

Hina hopped off the bed. “I’m going. I’ll be back when you’re showered, cutie.”

She disappeared with a wet zipping noise while Alice put her face in her hands. Yuuka sighed, waving for me to extinguish my Flame. “Same shit you’re going through, plus a whole lot of neglect. She hasn’t been taking care of her real body at all. Gonna need an IV drip and a real talking-to. And here we thought she’d betrayed us, fuck’s sake. She wasn’t going anywhere, that was a quiet mantle crash.” She looked over at Alice. “Definitely a staying-in night if it wasn’t already.”

“Definitely a staying-in night,” Alice sighed in agreement. “I don’t know if it’s any comfort, Ezzen, but it seems you’re not the only one who needs a better relationship with their mantle and sleep schedule and self-care before we go to war. If we have the luxury of time, anyway; Yuuka, see anything else in that burst?”

“Hm. Not really? What I was seeing as ‘negotiation about mantles’ will just be Izumi talking to Ai and Ezza tomorrow about what just happened, nothing betrayal-ish. Her phone’s floating out there, somebody’s gotta pick that up before the Peacies do. And if I’m seeing something that dim, that’s good, because it’s not the Vaetna killing us. Good job, Ezza.”

“No…problem,” I replied, feeling even gummier now that the clarifying power of my magic had faded, drained from the momentary panic, and guilty about how quickly we’d arrived at suspicion. “We all kinda jumped to accusation.”

“…Yeah,” Alice agreed, tail lashing in self-reproach. “Trust in your teammates is mahou shoujo, so that was a failing on our part. Then again, it is far too late at night for this.” There was a shimmer and a small rush of air as the LM of her mantle dissolved and her pajamaed body redeployed in its place. “I’m gonna check on her and head to bed.”

“Me as well, without the bed,” Ai said as she went for my door. “Take a shower and get some rest, Ezzen. If you still feel bad in the morning, well, Yuuka is right: we’re going to be doing lots of mantle work tomorrow no matter what.”

Author’s Note:

Hasshadai means launchpad. Fortunately it doesn’t seem to be necessary after all! Is it mean and cruel of me to do another fakeout for the actual opening of the conflict? Perhaps! But also, Ez is having a time. On the one hand, it sure is a relief to know you’re not about to be imminently killbliterated by your parasocial idols and instead only have to worry about armed conflict with the entire western military-industrial complex, isn’t it? On the other hand, when your body image issues are now starting to verge into actual disassociation, maybe a bit of murder can help take your mind off things. Izumi knows what I’m talking about!

On that note, I have art to share! Not official, but instead a wonderful bit of fanart of Ezzen that was shared in the Discord by fudgecakedevil (instagram link):

The unidentified fucking thign!!! I love this style and am incredibly grateful there are people willing to take the time to make art purely because they enjoy the story. I am also paying people to make art, of course — if we’re lucky and the timing works out, the next commission will correspond with Sunspot’s 5000 follower (RR+Scribblehub) milestone. We’re 99% of the way there as of writing this!

That’s all for this week, really. Thank you to the beta readers as always. This chapter went up a few days early for patrons, which I’m happy about and aim to keep doing, but otherwise there’s not a lot to report. See you all next week!

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

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March 1, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

The ice is cold. It is the memory of cold, all the times I’ve felt my skin sting and my fingers ache. It crawls up the soles of my feet and attacks my ankles with gnawing teeth. It is so cold that the feeling wraps back around to an unpleasant, viscous heat before the numbness begins to set in.

But this memory of frostbite does not take into account what I have become. My feet are no longer pads of flesh structured around bone, one maimed by panic and desperation. Now I stand upon talons of metal sheathed in white plastic, and the biting numbness cannot reach me. Or perhaps it seeps through me far more completely than before and becomes a part of me. Either way, I am no longer its victim.

The ice stretches flat and dark until it meets an empty horizon. The sky is a blank canvas, no sun to free what moves beneath the ice, the dance of lights that swarm beneath me. They thump and press against the sheet, craving, coveting, or just curious. None of them look like the ones I have come to know, no scintillating gems clustered together in fierce and vengeful love. I suppose it is too much to ask that they join me for this.

I am not here for the ice, nor the lights beneath it. They are not the only domain in this dream; I remember that now with certainty. I turn from the horizon to the forest. The beach lies between me and it, and between me and the beach lies a shape embedded in the ice, a mile marker. I begin to walk toward it upon my talons. As I do, I look down and become aware of the rest of my body. It is metal built skeletal and spindly, sheathed in armor on my upper legs. There is little in my core beyond a spine. Hair cascades down my back, an orange more vivid than anything else in this dream that falls all the way down to my knees. My chest is interlinked carapace, undefined in its patterning or shape until I notice that is the case, and then it has changed without deliberation nor shame. I dare not reach up to learn about my face; to touch is to define, and that is something I am yet afraid of defining.

The shape arrives quickly; I am not sure if it was one step or a thousand, but in that time, I have come to see that the one has become two. Only two, and neither were the one I’d hoped and feared would be here. The tall shape that I had first seen is a straight sword, buried by its blade, and the other is a dagger balanced atop the hilt, a hole gouged through the grip. It points away from me, toward the beach, where the sand wraps around the forest until it passes from view. Both weapons have dull, black blades. Not black as the night sky, but black as darkness; I know a word, and it is eigengrau, the color seen when there is no light at all and the eye must invent something so that the brain need not confront the idea of nothing. Like a dream, in a way. That is the color of the vaet.

I reach out to touch the weapons of something-representing-nothing. They call to me. They always have. I could not answer before. Now it is the most natural thing in the world, and it is a relief to reach out with my gauntlet.

But to touch is to define. The blades are that which cuts. They are that which cuts everything. The lines between everything are severed. The beach and the sky are cut to ribbons, the forest felled and hewn asunder. The ice shatters, and we all fall toward the water beneath. It is not there to meet us at first, severed as everything else, but it crashes back together and swallows us. Only the lights remain whole throughout, watching.

The straight sword is made to fall. It plummets downward toward me, and I witness that it has no piercing tip. The blade of the executioner knows itself to be inevitable, and needs not account for shield nor struggle, ending only in a flat and blunt horizon, the most earnest shape of death. Conflict is for lesser weapons; the guillotine need only fall. The lights know it. It should not be so! I weep, and the blade weeps with me.

The dagger falls point-first beside it. It is the opposite of the sword, its tip sharp and its edge dulled, duller than it ought to be. It has gouged a new loop through its handle, an eye that stares back at the world and at me. It has fashioned itself into a sewing needle, and from there it has learned to mimic the trowel and the plowshare. Great walls rise around it, as high as the great forest, forcing away the water until the space where we are becomes a place. A warm place, a place of safety, a place with a name. The needle weaves while something loved slumbers in its lap. When the needle must be the dagger it began as, it is for them.

Both are more than blades. They are a home I have never visited; they are knights sworn to the highest cause; they are scholars hunched before divinity; they are light that has escaped the ice. But they are still blades, and the path they cut as they fall is straight and stark and silent, even the ghost of a whisper cut apart. That-which-is-not cleaves that-which-is. It is blinding to behold, and all in the deep water is left dumbstruck and drawn into its wake. At last the blades reach me, and then they are through me, shearing root from trunk and dream from reality. It is the nature of these blades to cut all they touch, and I am no exception.

To touch is to define. The horizon-tipped blade, Judgment, slashes me open. The needle, Sanctuary, beholds me with its eye. I pass through like so much thread.

I was standing on the beach. I realized this so suddenly that I thought I had woken up, because things no longer had the dreamlike haze, the abstraction and metaphor. Everything was whole once again, and I felt awake—yet the beach was still here, and I was standing on it. The dream had ended, but I had not woken up.

What-Had-Been-Judgment and What-Had-Been-Sanctuary were now in their more familiar forms as the Vaetna Sani and Brianna. I mentally mapped them as the eldest and the youngest siblings respectively. They had done something to me, and to the dream. Everything felt too sharp, too real. But it felt so alien, unnaturally natural, the sensation I had heard people attribute to white ripple. I could feel them sharpening everything around me as though every color and shape had felt the kiss of a whetstone, every grain of sand its own cragged boulder and each tree behind them a pillar of the heavens. And they had cut it all down at my merest touch.

“So it’s literal,” I heard myself say, my first words to the something-beyond-people I’d built my entire personality around. I’d always hoped I’d be able to present a first impression as somebody cool and knowledgeable, but I was overwhelmed and disoriented, and could only find it in me to speak the closest thing I could identify to a general truth about…anything. “Vaet-na. Blade people.”

Bri raised a hand and waggled it indecisively. I saw that each and every one of the thousands of segments of her carapace was its own intricate masterwork that would consume my vision if I stared too deep. I forced myself to zoom out and realized that they were sitting in…a pair of beach chairs. Cheap ones, at that. A sandcastle also sat between them, waist-high and very sophisticated. I had no clue if they’d done that or if it was part of my dreamscape.

“Eh. More of a side effect, really. Can’t cut without being cut, can’t define without being defined. That’s what the armor is for,” Bri explained with what felt like a grin, rapping her knuckles against her other forearm. “And we like what we see. That’s good news, for you and for us!”

I wanted to believe her, but good news implied there could be bad news, and I was remembering that I was only here because of some very bad news indeed. Mortal terror flowed easily now that this was no longer a dream. “Does—does that mean you’re not going to kill us? That I’m not a threat to you? I answered—I’m here, and that’s supposed to be enough, right?”

Sani leaned forward in his chair. His voice was deep, and he spoke with the same articulation Kat did. “We are not here to kill you, Ezzen. We wanted to learn what we could about your Flame, and we’re relieved to find that it doesn’t want to sting us the way it did Kat.”

Relief surged through me. I had no choice but to believe them; surely if they had planned to kill me, they would have done so already, when they had inspected what was inside me—my Flame, I corrected myself. They had inspected my Flame, and apparently it had been good enough for them, or else I’d be dead, cut apart, annihilated utterly. I looked between the two of them, suddenly gladdened. This wasn’t a death knell; we were to have a conversation. “Thank you. That’s—The Spire Stands, I don’t know how else to say how much of a relief that is. Is that—did you get what you came for? My Flame…”

“Is from the future,” Sani confirmed. “But you knew that already, since you were listening to Kat. And it is Vaetna Flame.”

That sent my heartrate up, even though we’d already strongly suspected it. “I…thought so,” I hazarded. “From you, from the future.”

“Not from us,” Bri corrected. “That’s the tricky part. It’s our Flame, unmistakably.” She looked around the impossible landscape, then pointed past me at the ice. “I’m not a hundred percent on all the metaphor you’ve dreamt up here, but that’s definitely the Frozen Flame, collectively, and you’re up here for the same reason we are, or at least your nugget of it seems to think so. But it’s wild, willful. Unsure, and it wants, so badly. That’s enough reason to think it didn’t come from us at some point in the future.”

There was a lot to unpack there. The Vaetna was implying that their Flame was more passive or obedient. I’d assumed that their proficiency with weaving was a product of pure technique—maybe it was something more fundamental. Something fundamental which I apparently didn’t share. But that didn’t make sense, because:

“Even though it’s turning me into one of you,” I blurted.

“Is it?” Sani asked. “Look at yourself.”

I did, and was surprised, then elated. The feeling of having crashed back to reality, or at least this unreality freed from the dream’s metaphors, had led me to assume that I had been stuffed back into the meat and slapped with the metaphysical label that that was the “real” me. But the Vaetna were armor right now, not fundamental blades, and that should have tipped me off that for all this place was no longer a dream, it still reflected something of my consciousness, or my Flame, or both.

I was something very similar to the doll, covered in rigid plates that lacked the fractal depth of Vaetna dermis. But my form had taken on a more agile structure, and my legs still ended in talons. I had my hair, the orange locks that went down my back. And I had breasts, anonymous and simple, the only softness on my body. This time I did reach up and feel my face. No mouth, no nose, yes eyes. I was something between a Vaetna and a Radiance and something else altogether. Sani could tell I was shocked and confused and fascinated.

“You’re growing, as flamebearers do. But it’s growth toward aspiration, and it’s gradual and uncertain. Sometimes it’s just change for the sake of change. It’s happening fast for you, make no mistake, because you’ve landed in circumstances ripe for it. But that’s not how we took these shapes we wear.”

“So I’m not becoming a Vaetna?”

“You’re not not becoming a Vaetna. You want to—which we find flattering, I would like to add, since Bri is glaring at me—and your Flame seems to want to, but you both also want other things. It’s all quite a work in progress. And as Bri put it, that’s a reason to think that even if it is truly our Flame, something got lost in translation. It did get launched back through time, after all. But if we had done this, it would not have been so haphazard.” He looked past me, across the sea. “But speculating about who sent it is not why we contacted you so urgently. How much do you know about silver ripple?”

“Sani,” Bri cut in. “You’re talking to magic’s number one fan here, don’t waste time.”

He put up a hand to shush her. I boggled at him, unsure of how to answer such an open-ended question and flustered by Bri’s faith in me. “Um. It’s ripple from the future, or many futures, the part that echoes backward and gets muddled together because you can’t discern the color anymore. Probably responsible for overall conservation of energy when it comes to magic, somehow, models disagree. And, um, I know that you know that somebody in Todai can see it, because that’s how you chose to contact me. The—from how you sound, it sounds like you didn’t intend to kill us in the first place? Which means that you can somehow manipulate the silver directly, I guess that’s not all that shocking—”

“If you didn’t pick up, you would have been killed, make no mistake,” Sani interrupted.

My blood ran cold. “…Really? But what we were shown is that it would be one of you, and you just said—you don’t want the power to fall into the wrong hands, but we’re not the problem, the Peacies are, and they have somebody like me, somebody else who also has your Flame. And they’ve had her for weeks! Why me instead?”

“Things are changing. You’ve seen us as we are, Ezzen, so let me tell you a secret: we’re just two of ten, and even if I’m the leader, I don’t control us. We’re not a hive mind. Even Bri and I, our hearts are in different places. Some of the others think that what we’re doing right here, right now, is very stupid indeed. And it may be. They think we should kill all three of you and wash our hands of all of this, just to be safe.” He sat back in the cheap beach chair. I’d never seen him look worried before; it was plain even through the armor. His voice was heavy. “But I believe that this is all happening for a reason. The three of you who have our Flame, you’re positioned too conveniently, too intentionally. Do you see it? You, arguably our number one fan, struck through a camera and immediately whisked away to the other side of the world, to one of the most capable groups outside of the Spire. On the other side, Ana Baker, a loyal and willing weapon for the PCTF. Third, Noah Holton, whose career was outmoded by magic and has no particular love for either side, now…somewhere. And the last, who was burned away. As haphazard as your Flames appear to be, they were given to you with precision.”

My world was spinning. “Somebody’s trying to change the timeline through us?”

Bri shrugged. “We don’t know. You said it yourself, silver ripple shows potential futures, not one solid future that can reach back and mess with us. Maybe this is a time loop to begin with, or maybe it’s all just chaos. Check this thing out.”

She directed my attention down to the sandcastle between her and her counterpart, which had gone unremarked this whole conversation.

“That’s…the Spire? I’d assume.”

Bri reached her leg out and poked it with a boot. “I’m pretty sure this is a sandcastle.”

We stared at each other for a long moment. She tapped her helm’s chin thoughtfully.

“But yeah, let’s say it represents the Spire. Hell, it might be the Spire, in some sense—it’s your dream, mediated by your Flame, and I’m not sure why else it would be here. But it’s hopefully not the actual Spire as it’s known to your Flame’s understanding of the future, because, well,” she flicked her ankle to devastate a curtain wall. “That would be bad, and I’d like to think we do better work than that. We do better work than that, it won’t crumble so easily. But suppose it did.” She kicked the sandcastle down. “Suppose that was all it took, and suppose it’s destined to happen, that your Flame comes from the future where it does. Would you build a new one?”

“I would try,” I ventured.

“And if someone walks up to kick it down again?”

“I’d cut off their foot.” I was startled at my own bloodlust.

The needle looked to her counterpart. “See? Told you they were a good kid. Yeah, that’s where we ended up. And you’d expect that after you do it the first time, people would get the picture and let you build your sandcastle in peace. But it turns out that people practically line up to take a swing and lose their foot, even when they see the guy right in front of them has just traded walking for hopping. And they do it for stuff like money, or patriotism, or just a belief that the sandcastle shouldn’t be there. Do that enough times and, well…you become us, real good at cutting off feet and building sandcastles and not a whole lot else. We’re not sure there’s a fix for it without basically taking over the world, which you’ll notice we haven’t done.”

“And…I don’t follow,” I admitted, puzzled. “I mean, I get the theory, killing people doesn’t necessarily solve systemic issues. How’s that relate to time travel?”

“Well, consider that they—maybe we—sent some of our Flame back, and to here, and now. They didn’t send a person who’s good at kicking, or fancy greaves that can keep us from cutting off their foot, nor did they bulldoze the beach in the first place. They basically just sent more sand—maybe sand that’s secretly bad for building sandcastles, but still just sand. That means that first, there’s limits on what time travel can do. And second, whoever is behind this maybe didn’t intend for it to be weaponized against us, and that might just be a side effect of the whole time travel business. Silver’s not a fun color. But we don’t know that for sure, or what the endgame is—for the moment, all we can do is fortify the castle and keep cutting off people’s feet. You know how hard it is to admit that you’re in the dark when you’re us?”

“…I can imagine,” I empathized. The Vaetna were not human—or at least not anymore, I felt I hadn’t seen their past, only what they were now—but they certainly seemed diminished by the situation. And for me, of course, this was the most terrifying thing in the world, to know that there was something happening around us and them which they could neither control nor explain. We were all floundering, and while I was sure it would comfort Yuuka to know the Vaetna thought that time travel could only do so much, it was still unnerving to feel the ground shifting beneath us. “So—what changed? Why are things suddenly happening now, right during Kat’s stream, and not weeks ago? Things looked…fine, on her end.”

“The Department of Defense tweeted that they’re going to kick the sandcastle. Kat was implying everything was good, and they didn’t like that, so they’re moving up the schedule.”

Dread rolled through me. Since we’d been on my laptop, I hadn’t had the chat up perpetually, and I’d gotten dragged into arguing with Yuuka about how time worked for the last few minutes before she’d seen death, panicked, and ordered me to enter this dream. I reflexively reached for my phone; I didn’t have it here, of course, and it was mostly unnecessary anyway. “Ana Baker,” I breathed, despite lacking a mouth and nose. “You said my Flame couldn’t hurt you. But hers can?”

“We said yours didn’t want to, which may or may not be the same thing. Hers might, though. Or they may be bluffing as usual, we don’t know yet. But if they’re not, then the Spire could be going to war, real war, the first one that may pose a true existential threat, depending on what’s coming. We could be facing a world where the sandcastle can be knocked down.”

My stomach lurched. Despite everything, despite how relatively well this conversation had gone, my worst fears were still being realized. I scrambled for what I could do. “Then—then study me, figure out how the weapon works. Kat said you patched out whatever made her take damage from the inferno, do that again. Bring me to the Spire and take me apart if you have to.”

“Damn,” Bri chirped. “Straight to that?”

“I mean—it would also take the pressure off the Radiances if I’m not here anymore.”

“Oh, altruism. You really are a good kid.”

“We just did study you, and it’s given us some ideas,” Sani reassured me. “But we—Bri and I—believe you’re right where you should be already.”

“Because of whatever plan is making all this happen?”

Sani’s tone changed in an instant. The signature Vaetna storyteller lilt became a thunderhead of dark fable, and the bright clarity of the non-dream began to wilt.

“Because if we are coming to a world where the Spire may no longer stand, they-of-power must not feel like they have won, that we were just a momentary blip before history returned to its natural course, boots to necks. The old order is already broken and burned, and they must remember that that cannot be undone so easily, no matter what they build with the tools we gave them. They have spat in all our good faith and cling to the belief that all who bear the Flame except us are just another resource, like oil, like flesh. I believe you were granted a Flame and placed with those vengeful gems that you might demonstrate the error in those monsters’ judgment. You would teach them that this will not end when we fall.”

Bri put her arm on the executioner’s shoulder. “Sani.”

He sat back, the specter of the final blade fading. “Apologies. I shouldn’t speak in certainties that thrust so much upon you.”

I stared at him and suddenly felt glad. That was the Vaetna I had been wanting to see. This whole conversation had brought on a subtle, creeping fear that the power and certainty I had known them for was just a mask for the sake of the public, that in reality they were as fractured and fearful as any other flamebearer might be under threat of annihilation, as dysfunctional as Todai could be, building a castle out of sand. And those things may have still been true, and that would haunt me for a long while—but the conviction behind Sani’s words rang truer. There was the thing I believed in, what had captured my imagination, what I had been desperate to live up to if only I had the means, that ineffable sense that these people were out to do something truly good with their power. And now I had the means, granted from some unknown origin from on high.

“It’s—I understand,” I said.

“Do you?”

“Sani,” Bri repeated, more forcefully. “I think it’s time to go. To review, Ezzen: we’re not gonna kill you, but we’re also not going to bail you out. Show them that you’re less afraid of losing your foot than they are.”

“Will—hold on, I don’t remember these dreams,” I warned. “I never do. I can’t forget this, it’s too important.”

“You won’t forget,” Sani replied, standing with that Vaetna ease, not so much hefting himself out of the chair as simply rising. “Because this is not a dream. Flame-shared dreams are one of the things we gave up to become what we are. To even come here as anything resembling ourselves, we had to cut this one apart, as you saw, and stitch it back together with white ripple, and broke several rules in the process. And for similar reasons, I don’t believe we’ll be able to contact you again like this.”

“Then—email? Just, anything,” I pleaded. “I understand you can’t risk or just can’t help us over here. But if my Flame is something like yours, show me how to use it. How to be worthy of it.”

Bri stood. “Our ways won’t help you much. Really bad idea to share them, frankly, you’d land us all in even bigger trouble. You’re too clever for your own good. All I can say is this: learn about silver and white and how they’re connected. There’s more to magic than glyphs, and it starts with those. And…” she twisted to face the dark, impenetrable forest. “There’s something in here, something we couldn’t cut. I’d love to figure out what, but it’s your problem now.”

Sani brought a fist to his chest in a gesture of respect. “Goodbye, Ezzen, and good luck.”

And then they were gone. I was alone once more, the two empty chairs before me and the ruins of a sandcastle between them the only proof that they had been here. That and the broken dream around me, which was beginning to crumble and dim, unable to maintain its paradoxical state without the Vaetna binding it together. Would it even persist once I was gone?

I gazed at the forest past the beach, up at the vast trees. The Vaetna had suggested that it was important that I explore this dream further, that I venture into the darkness. Why? The sea behind me was the Flame, that I understood, and it was real enough that the lights beneath the ice seemed to be the true presence of other flamebearers, however distant—had they seen any of what had just transpired here? The empty, rotting sky was just itself, and the beach was a border from sea to forest, but the nature of that murky wood eluded me. Was it the fourth dimension, so obstinately unnavigable and crudely stapled to the reality that had existed before magic? The uncertain future, that which the Vaetna could not cut?

I had never had the freedom of mind to enter it of my own accord to investigate before now, and now I had the freedom, but not the time. It was time for me to go from this place as well, back to reality, to face the music.

No time left to venture deep, and the Vaetna had offered little certainty that I would return. So I would make that certainty. I stepped across the beach on my talons and up to the edge of the forest. I found a fallen branch, one that was straight and strong, and reached down and cut, redefining it with the memory of whittling tools and splinters, establishing the notion of a haft and a piercing tip. That was certainty.

I set the spear across the ruins of the sandcastle. If this place was real enough, I would be able to find it again.

Then, at last, I woke. And I told the Radiances everything.

Author’s Note:

This is not the end of the arc; it’s more of a mid-arc climax. The sand is shifting. Aren’t the Vaetna neat? I sure think they’re neat, and so does Ezzen, though perhaps for different reasons. I hope you enjoy them too, because this isn’t the last we’ll be seeing of them.  Thanks to the betas, they really helped my sanity on this one. One of them also scribbled this art of Ez as it appeared in this chapter:

What an adorable critter! We’ll see if this version of them is reflected in reality at all.

To reiterate, Sunspot is on its usual break this next week, so the next chapter will be March 1st. That is, unless you’re a Patreon supporter — that’s right, I’m FINALLY getting ahead of public releases again. This chapter only went up like 9 hours ahead of public, but for patrons 4.11 will be this coming Sunday, February 22nd, a full week ahead of when it’ll release here on RR! And I intend to keep extending the backlog beyond that until we’re back to a full three chapters ahead. Cower at my might. Also, you’ll get some of the upcoming art early.

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!

February 15, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

Depending on how you counted, the Vaetna had saved the world at least three times. Most indisputably, they had ended the firestorms. This was widely seen as a good thing, unless you were part of an especially radical Flame cult. More indirectly, they’d banished the future-devouring specter of climate disaster; the introduction of the glyph lexicon and the principles of weaving had brought on a dramatic energy and materials revolution that had drastically reduced the appeal of fossil fuels in many applications, to say nothing of the direct cleanup efforts of the Vaetna. Lastly, it was speculated that the Dubai incident would probably have destroyed the world if they hadn’t intervened, though that was contested by the PCTF, who never wanted to give the Vaetna credit for anything.

Despite this remarkable track record, the Spire had no shortage of detractors. Internally, it all seemed too good to be true, and externally, the Vaetna’s willingness to stick their nose deep into other nations’ business scared the hell out of the rich and powerful. And since it was very difficult to materially threaten the Spire with either direct conflict or economic sanctions, the court of public opinion was the main arena where the Powers That Had Been attempted to keep the rogue nation in check, to the tune of trillions of dollars in propaganda. The Vaetna had known this would happen, and so from the very first weeks after the Raising, their modus operandi had revolved around one simple method:

Live streaming.

This was both bizarre and inevitable. Bizarre, because the Vaetna themselves were secretive to the point of suspicion, tight-lipped about their own nature and many of the workings of the Spire. Inevitable, because the Spire’s mission statement of being a shelter for the dispossessed was contingent on a degree of worldwide public accountability strong enough to persuade the average fence-sitter away from conspiratorial propaganda, and that demanded a level of earnest transparency about its workings that went beyond Twitter posts or even candid recorded videos. They did those too, of course, but the streams were a staple. They were a show of trust in the regular person’s ability to draw their own charitable conclusions from what they saw, unscripted and unedited. Some very fancy infomancy ensured that they were accessible from anywhere in the world as long as you had an internet connection, Great Firewall or no.

Most days, across the ten Vaetna, at least one would host some kind of livestream. Topics could be loosely divided into domestic and foreign affairs; all ten superhero-knight-angels displayed a preference for which they generally preferred to do live. The stream I’d been watching when I had been flametouched had been the former, maintenance and upgrades for the Spire’s physical infrastructure, carried out by Brianna and Heung. Bri was a relatively common sight for content like that, often basically vlogging the Spire’s daily affairs. She loved to babble about the logistics and technical challenges of feeding and homing the Spire’s burgeoning population, an altruist through and through. She was the one who I felt was most like myself and other magical engineers, purified down to realize the guarantees of the Na Vva Kiiycaseiir, which was essentially their bill of rights.

By contrast, it had been kind of an unusual stream for Heung, who was the poster boy for the Vaetna’s more bloody-minded and interventionist policies. Sure, Sani had been the one to step onto the lawn of the White House with his blade bared, but by volume, Heung was the one most likely to show up when a flamebearer despot started to get too big for their boots or local brushfire conflicts threatened to spiral into cataclysm. This sometimes meant swift and unilateral murder, which naturally meant his streams were a source of endless controversy.

This, too, was part of the Vaetna’s philosophy of transparency. They wanted people to see the full spectrum of what they were willing to do for the short goal of averting disaster and the long goal of reducing human misery. And I—as biased as they came, admittedly—believed in those causes. They were so noble as to justify themselves, and for the first few years of the Spire’s existence, I’d held that anybody who thought differently was propagandized beyond the point of debate. After all, everybody who’d ever wound up on the dark end of a vaet pretty obviously deserved it.

“They don’t do enough,” was Yuuka’s opinion, muttered resentfully from an adjacent beanbag. “And it’s not cause I’m so fuckin’ naive that I think The Problem Of Evil squarely applies to them, don’t give me that shit. You didn’t say anything yet.”

“I didn’t say—oh.”

“I know there’s only ten of them, I know they can’t be everywhere, I know they don’t know everything, and we sure do fuckin’ know now that they’re not all-powerful. They can bleed. But they still have to do more. And since they don’t, Amane is missing half her body. It should never happen again, and instead it’s happening right now. Imagine being able to kill them all in a night and choosing to be selective. Yes, my eye can see what you’ll say just fine, and no, I can’t spoil the entire stream.”

“…Cool.” To be honest, I’d never experienced a Vaetna stream in such direct social proximity to one of their detractors—the chatroom was essentially a Vaetna fanclub, and that was more or less my whole sample size—so I had no idea how to react. Or rather, I had plenty of fantasies about how I’d react, but those had all been constructed in anticipation of some abstract hater and felt trite against a real person, especially one who had gone through what Yuuka had. “I’m sure they’d do more if they could,” I hedged.

“Sure. Maybe it is a problem of can’t rather than won’t. But if the cunts do have more to give, I fuckin’ hope they start. They’re not invincible anymore, and that better make them afraid enough to pick up their slack.”

Yuuka glowered at my laptop screen and the chat scrolling across it. We’d set up in the penthouse’s upper common area, neutral ground where neither Yuuka nor I would feel like we were invading the other’s space, and fortified a small area of it with some of the pillows and blankets scattered around, enough to not feel overly exposed in the expansive room. That was something Yuuka and I both valued, it seemed. With the lights off and some blankets wrapped around us, the watchparty felt almost like a sleepover, albeit a weirdly intimate one with no supervision.

I was still in the doll. Yuuka had made it clear that was a non-negotiable condition of being alone in my presence, and I was more than happy to oblige. The only complication had been that the chassis was tethered to the nightmare-chair by the gossamer cables of thread connecting my heads. It was technically incorrect to say my soul was being transmitted through there, in fact they were much closer to puppet strings—a label I didn’t like for how it put “me” outside the body I was inhabiting—but either way, I didn’t want to find out firsthand how far the weave could survive being stretched. The obvious upgrade to the connection would be fully reworking it into the more complex, fourspace-abusing implementation of the actual mantles, but that was an irresponsible level of unauthorized modification—

So we’d done it anyway. I’d briefly hopped back into my “real” body to make the necessary changes under Yuuka’s guidance. It had been disheartening to see Yuuka suppress a flinch as I’d sat up, and equally bothersome to me that the weight on my chest had vanished, so we’d hurried through the process of modifying the doll to set up the red and pink connections used by proper mantles. Ai would yell at us later, but we knew what we were doing, informed by technical expertise and the fact that Yuuka’s eye was essentially the perfect diagnostic tool, able to predict failure before it happened. We still definitely halfassed it, crunched for time as we were, but it did work, just in time for the stream’s proper countdown to begin.

Now back in the doll and a full floor removed from my regular body—I was thinking of them as “the chassis” and “the meat” until I came up with something better—I noticed I’d taken to absentmindedly squishing my boobs while I lounged in my beanbag chair. That was probably not a good habit to form as somebody who would likely be on camera quite a lot very soon, but right now it had the happy side effect of immediately removing some of the pervasive tension and wariness from Yuuka’s body language. Boobs club was real, at least as far as her subconscious saw it. I could feel the duck tape beginning to loosen its grip, which filled me with melancholy and made Yuuka’s idea of me duplicating one of the girls’ mantles distinctly more appealing in a way I didn’t really know how to dissect. Further consideration of that was a problem for tomorrow-Ezzen, though, because the stream’s countdown had entered its final minute.

“Do you know they’re not invincible?” I couldn’t help but ask. “No snark. Like, I know you don’t know what we’re about to watch, but…further downstream? Anything?”

“I said it’s working a bit better. There’s no way you’re dumb enough to think that I’d be sitting here if I knew, right now, whether something is gonna seriously fuck up one of the Vaetna on the other side of the world at some random point in time.”

“I could light up my torch,” I offered, then I caught the edge of desperation seeping into my own voice. I’d never been anxious about a Vaetna broadcast before. I resented that feeling. “Uh. Can’t do that in this body anyway, huh. Though—”

“Doesn’t work like that,” she snapped preemptively. “The shit your arm does when you light it up only works for me because it’s forward ripple, not silver, and I can interpret the destructive interference there. But you doing it in the future means I get it all now as more silver. It’s like staring into the sun, fuckin’ worthless.” Her head whipped around, glaring at me with the gemstone. She made a zipping motion over her mouth with her hand. “And don’t you even fucking whisper ‘ripple sunglasses’ at me, cunt; the day somebody figures out how to do even half of what my eye does with sunglasses will make the day a Vaetna dies look like a fuckin’ joke. Never speak that shit into possibility, let alone existence.”

“…But that won’t happen, right?”

She didn’t answer, looking back toward my laptop screen with a huff. That was what it was like to hold a conversation with Yuuka Hirai. No wonder she hoped the Vaetna became more afraid, and believed that that would make them more effective; her entire worldview, in a very literal sense, was filtered through anxiety and pre-emptive measures, unable to fully prove a negative for her worst fears.

Right now, as the final seconds trickled away, I was much in the same boat, because it felt like the trajectory of my life—and more broadly, the fate of the entire world—depended on the next few minutes: on how well Kat was doing, what she’d reveal about her absence, and what she did or did not imply about the threat my Flame creche posed. Part of me hoped that it in fact had nothing to do with my Flame, that the inferno she’d faced had just been exceptionally odd but ultimately harmless to her and her kin and that she’d only retired to the Spire these past weeks out of an abundance of caution, and the nightmare would be over.

The rest of me knew better. Even if she was about to say, point-blank, that she believed neither I nor Noah Holton nor Ana Baker posed any threat to the Spire, the PCTF obviously disagreed enough to pursue us. So viewed cynically, all this stream would change is whether or not I could flee to the Spire, as had been my original goal when I’d rushed out of my flat in Bristol for the last time, or whether they would turn me away for fear of bringing my poison to them. Was running off to Tokyo’s Gate even an option, realistically, if it meant leaving this body behind and abandoning the Radiances to their war?

I ran out of time for those thoughts as the countdown struck zero. The stream cut right to…a snowy field. Kat’s voice spoke from offscreen. She sounded normal, which for her meant high energy; the words came out rapidly but with careful enunciation on each syllable, like picking out every droplet in a waterfall. There was a lilt to her speech, the same accent all the Vaetna had; people tended to assign all sorts of country labels based on the linguistics, but I’d always preferred to think of it like the voice of a fairytale told casually, which my friends always informed me wasn’t very helpful. But that was how Kat sounded right now, thankfully. I was so focused on listening for signs of weakness or infirmity that I didn’t actually process her first few words as anything more than a series of sounds.

“—an apology. Sorry it’s been so long, everybody! And wow, from the numbers, this does look like everybody. So, er, hello, people of Earth! It’s really nice to be back, and I’m so so grateful for all the support.”

She walked into frame. I let out an immediate sigh of relief; she looked totally fine. Or rather, her armor did, which was essentially the same thing. She was slim, as Vaetna went, a human form covered in thousands of mostly-white interlocking plates with seams so tight they practically vanished. Beneath her shell, she would have been shaped like Amane, tall and slim. Too human, came an intrusive thought—I glanced down at my chest to ask my Flame what it meant, before realizing that that had just come from me. Everybody at Todai had dramatically altered ourselves in one way or another, and if you bought into Hina’s ideas that the Flame wanted change, then for the Vaetna to be so much more powerful and to have plumbed the depths of magic then they ought to have been reshaped, more alien than just people wrapped in ultra-advanced carapace.

I had to remind myself that they absolutely did transcend the human form when they used their respective rain steps.

They did all have places where their armor diverged from a centimeter-thick shrinkwrapping of a human body. The easiest to spot was the coloration that broke up the white: Kat’s right arm was adorned with a spatter of dark gray micro-panels that rose from fingertip to elbow like a column of bubbles, leading to a slim torso with vivid red markings that ran down her flanks like racing stripes. Also, the helm: Kat’s was more faceted than some of her counterparts, with a little bit of a snout and in-cut ridges that suggested cheekbones and swooped back along the sides of her head to give the distinct impression that this was a being who was meant to go forward.

More subtly, her carapace was much more finely segmented than most of the others. She had over eight thousand distinct sections in the panoply, most so small they couldn’t even be picked out from the whole on camera. They were smoothly aligned, never overlapping; flexibility came from each individual plate of dermis distending and warping, which sometimes provoked derisive comparisons to the spandex superheroes of yesteryear rather than the solid and clearly-segmented plates of historical knight armor or the oversized, engineered shapes of a combat exosuit. The armor did a good job of blunting the impression of nudity where it was most critical, at least; the modest mounds of her breasts were joined into one aerodynamic shape and there was some reinforcement around the back of her waist and thighs that gave her a more streamlined appearance from the rear. Not that this had stopped many brave artists.

I was Vaetna Envier Number One Global, so I’d always looked at them and thought it didn’t look like nudity at all. I’d always imagined that it would be comfortable to be fully encased, wrapped and secure with minimal extraneity; I only opted for bulky hoodies because anything tighter rubbed uncomfortably, which wouldn’t be an issue with a perfectly morphing second skin. The doll had proven me right on that front, at least before we’d added the boobs. I used one of them as a stress ball while Kat kept talking, gesticulating like the experienced presenter they all were.

“Let me cut to the chase: I’m good, my armor is good, The Spire Stands. I hope looking at me is all the proof you need. But I do need to talk about exactly what happened, why I was out of commission for so long, and what’s going to happen going forward. To get the headline out of the way: Yes, I was hurt. No, it didn’t stick.”

An unfortunate consequence of us doing this on my laptop was that I only had the one screen, which meant that the chatroom was relegated to my phone, and I was slower there, so I wound up being the last to give my reaction.

skychicken: uh oh

starstar97: not sticking is good

starstar97: three weeks for it to not stick

starstar97: thats less good

moth30: :O

moth30: wha

DendriteSpinner: i dont like how this sounds at all

ezzen: fuck

Yuuka grunted next to me. “Punchline’s coming.”

I looked at her, alarmed. “Is that a prophecy?”

“Yeah.” The seriousness of her tone terrified me. “Things are about to change.”

“Too vague!”

“That’s all I got! Keep watching!”

On the screen, Kat had turned to face the snowy field behind her. “If you haven’t guessed already, we’re in Poland; this is where I put down that inferno a few weeks ago. Notice anything odd? Maybe not, but remember: I didn’t clean this up.”

I saw it immediately.

ezzen: where’s the holes

A flamebearer gone inferno was the strongest point source of ripple on earth. They spewed it across the whole spectrum, and while red and blue could be horrific, the orange and pink were the true danger, rapidly shredding any notion of distance and direction, shuffling matter and producing labyrinthine sub-dimensions that got fractally dense as you tried to approach the source.

Kat was a specialist in solving this problem by virtue of her rain step. Unlike Heung’s dives or my own limited teleportation, she disintegrated into shards that could blast through all those diseased, warped spaces at once like a sandstorm. And when she reformed, she dragged most of those little pieces back into sensible reality with her, enough to allow her lance to plow a straight path through to the source. And with a little more cleanup, she could get more of the pieces back together, enough to establish a zone of safe passage much like the tunnel we’d punched through the perimeter of the barbecue. She left any further repair to the local magitech-equipped authorities—if there were any. There were abandoned sites all over the world where it was a bad idea to stray from the road.

The problem was that here, she had retreated immediately. We still didn’t know why, but the important part was that she had, and therefore had done none of her usual cleanup beyond what it had taken to put down the poor soul. Reality behind her was supposed to still be a mess. Instead, the snow lay smooth and uninterrupted over the landscape.

“Usually, snow is an excellent way to spot discontinuities, all those little errors I don’t have the time to stay and clean up,” Kat explained. “There should be mounds or patches, something that gives away there’s some displacement or lensing. Eddies in the orange should be making at least some kind of mess. But this looks all natural, if you account for all the places where I tore up the dirt underneath during the fighting. Accounting for that, it’s a dead flat, smooth continuum. Isn’t that odd? And those distortions were there when I left; even if you don’t believe me on that, the PCTF came through after I left and wrote up a whole report. It’s not supposed to be public—link’s pinned in the chat, though.”

The tilt of her helm did an excellent job of suggesting an impish grin. Some gender-obsessed part of my hindbrain took a note as the rest of me skimmed the document as fast as I humanly—doll-ly, chassis-ly—could. I raced through possibilities, trying to map this against all the other oddities we’d observed about my Flame. “Yuuka, doesn’t this—”

“Your torch, yeah. Clarity, equilibrium, perfect destructive interference, taking the noise out of the gradient.” she rattled off in increasing order of technical correctness. “But it’s not quite the same thing. You cancel out silver, not normal colors like orange. You’re making normal colors to do that.” She sat up in her beanbag chair. “Huh.”

“What?”

Yuuka gestured helplessly at the screen, flummoxed.

Kat continued. “Obviously, this isn’t normal. Flamefall infernos don’t do that. And that’s because this thing wasn’t natural. We thought it was an attack on the Spire, and that’s half right. And I knew the moment I got to the center of the inferno that this wasn’t just any chunk of the Frozen Flame. But it took me three weeks to actually understand what was going on.” She looked at the camera, at a billion people, and I knew she was looking directly at me. “It was sent from the future. And it can hurt us.”

My blood ran cold. Yuuka had frozen.

Then Kat relaxed. “Well. It could hurt us. Can’t anymore, it was an easy fix.”

I felt like I was going to burst into tears in relief. Of course, I didn’t have tear ducts or eyes, so the sensation was purely imaginary, but it was still an incredible release of stress. Yes, the Peacies were still going to come after me, but the Vaetna would be okay, so big picture, everything else would also be okay.

Yuuka’s expression said otherwise. She looked like she was about to puke.

“What’s wrong? Is…is she lying? That it can’t hurt them?”

“No. Maybe. That’s—it came from the future, Ezza. Take that at face value. You’ve got Vaetna shit going on. Put those two facts together.”

“…Oh. It came from them in the future? Why? Why would their own Flame hurt them?”

“Maybe because they’re gonna turn fucking evil?”

“That’s insane,” I asserted. “And, what, they’re trying to stop their past selves? Through me?”

“I don’t know!” Yuuka banged her palm against her knee in frustration. “Or somebody else is, or maybe it wasn’t meant to be for you at all. The others with your Flame, they don’t know shit about magic. There’s just—something isn’t right. What’s the pattern? Why aren’t these fucks doing anything? They know the Peacies won’t buy that this is the end of it until they actually get to test out whatever superweapon they’re making and it really doesn’t work on them. ”t

“Is any of that rhetorical?”

“I wish,” she groaned, leaning back in her beanbag as Kat began to move on from the topic of her absence. The Vaetna apparently had little more to say on the matter; the Spire was going to monitor flamefalls more carefully for the time being, but otherwise the stream seemed prepared to leave the topic of time travel behind in favor of more usual State of the Spire proceedings. Yuuka fumed. “They should be blasting whatever lab to fucking rubble, just to be safe. They should be blasting us to rubble, just to be safe.”

I flinched. She was spiraling. “What were you saying about not speaking it into existence?”

“Seems I was fucking wrong about that! The future is real and it can come back to fuck us all over at any moment. As if the present wasn’t already enough of a bitch.”

That was an upsetting thought. “I…okay, yeah, that’s not good. But, like, time travel paradox still holds, doesn’t it? If messing with the past were a thing outside of this one instance then it would have already happened an infinite number of times.”

Yuuka responded to that by jabbing a finger at her crystalline eye. “Two instances. Strike three and history is over, it’ll all be one giant tangled clusterfuck of stopping shit before it can get started. They have to know it too.”

“I’m saying that’s not how it works! If the stakes were that high I would already be dead,” I reasoned. “Unless I’m needed alive for something and there’s a whole time traveler war happening just out of sight at all times, in which case everything we know about the world might as well be dumped out the window. The only sane thing to do here is assume that this is it. One person made it work one time, outside of your eye.”

Yuuka took a long, anxious, slightly mistrustful look at me. She held it for several seconds, her eye flickering as though trying to divine the truth in my words by peering through all of what was to come. Then she hung her head. “Fuck.”

“Is that a crisis ‘fuck’ or a defeated ‘fuck’?”

“It’s an ‘I wish you’d never showed up’ fuck.”

“So not in a foresight way.”

“Not in a foresight way,” she agreed.

I scoffed. “What happened to boobs club?”

“I joined this conversation at a strange time,” came a new voice. I turned and saw Izumi standing at the top of the stairs. She waved. “I just got back from a party. Twitter is saying time travel is real?”

“Yeah, and it’s how this fucker got its Flame.”

“And that’s all it seems to have done!” I added.

“…I see. And the boobs?” She looked at me. “Did you touch her boobs?”

“No! What is it with you and touching boobs?” I groused.

“It’s fun. Yuuka-chan, how does this change what the PCTF will do?”

Yuuka looked at Izumi dumbly. “Eto. Uh. I…haven’t checked.”

I would have pinched the bridge of my nose if I had one; in this body it felt more correct to cross my arms under my boobs. “Okay, Izumi, great point. Before we keep catastrophizing about history imploding or the Vaetna turning evil, I’m gonna go back into my body, we’ll get up on the roof, I’ll light up my arm, and Yuuka will verify how this changes anything within twelve kilometers and like a week of where we’re standing right now.”

Izumi put a hand on her hip. “If you go back to your body you will immediately fall asleep.”

“Oh. Shit.”

Yuuka frowned. “Oh, yeah, you’re way overspent, go the fuck to—” she flinched, hard, then scrambled to her feet, her eye flaring bright. “Oh fuck. Oh, fuck fuck fuck fuck no no no—”

The alarm in her voice had me also jumping to my feet, itching for my spear. “What?” I asked.

“I—I have no idea what I’m looking at,” she admitted. That was even more concerning, given her personality. “Physically. Ice? A beach, maybe? Nothing from around here. But if you don’t go there right now, the Vaetna show up and kill us all tomorrow.”

I glanced at the stairs up to the launchpad. “Shit. No idea where?”

“Stop,” Izumi commanded. “Think. Yuuka was about to suggest that you go to sleep. It’s not a real place.”

“Oh, fuck,” Yuuka gasped. “Yeah. If you have their Flame, then you’re part of their creche, and sometimes—but it’s been weeks, you’d know—fucking time travel,” she fumed. “Or maybe they just don’t fuckin’ sleep. Fuckin’ bugs.”

I cottoned on at last. “You’re having a vision of one of my dreams?”

“Only because this one is magical! I had them with Amane, sometimes, it’s how I helped find her, and the others, because we’re all from the same stuff. Haven’t had one in a while, but—point is, Ezza, get out of the doll, go to sleep, now. I think you have a conference call with the Vaetna.”

Author’s Note:

What a reveal! Time travel is very scary to write about. I wonder if the Vaetna are willing to give more details directly to Ezzen? And I wonder which of them will show up! Perhaps we will get even more description. Perhaps in the dream they are more…buglike. We’ll see!

Thanks as always to the beta readers! Their feedback always goes a long way. I also want to give special thanks to the Discord for an extremely positive response to last chapter, as well as some truly excellent fanworks discussion lately. Both have really helped my motivation this past week.

Tune in next week for our first behind-closed-doors encounter with Ezzen’s favorite people (?) ever!

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!

February 8, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

ezzen: hi guys

skychicken: ah the fox tamer

starstar97: e!!

skychicken: still alive ez?

ezzen: Just about.

ezzen: Thought I’d poke my head in before we went full piranhas in an hour.

My fingers glided along my laptop keyboard. The screen was the only light in the room, spilling over my bite-bruised flesh. Hina was curled up against me, naked as I was. Sex was good, I’d learned—though this was a much milder session than that first night after our gyoza-seeking outing three days prior, when she’d butchered my virginity and then proceeded to fuck me half to death. It had been awesome and irresponsible and absolutely not sustainable to continue at that level. If Hina needed an outlet for the type of copulation where fighting and fucking were indistinguishable, well, she had Izumi, and compunctions about sharing my girlfriend somehow did not number among all my neuroses.

But I wasn’t dropping into the chatroom to reveal that I’d progressed my relationship with Radiance Sapphire. The internet was still more than sufficiently a-titter with the videos of the two of us out in Shibuya; indeed, we’d been spotted all over Tokyo in the past three days, from the aquarium to the sumo arena in daylight and in bars and boba shops at night. People could think what they liked from there, and even among my friends in a relatively secure channel, what we did to each other’s flesh a ripple-safe distance away from the penthouse was a little too personal to share in detail. I’d told Sky only enough in confidence for him to verify that Hina knew the limits of what a squishy human body could endure, for the next time she wanted to go rough with me. Anything beyond that wasn’t my friends’ concern, as much as I was sure they’d have loved to speculate about how my girlfriend’s healing factor worked.

No, I was here in the main chatroom to talk about something equally personal, but which was solely my own to share. It was probably a little overdue, if anything, but we were congregating for something big anyway, and I wanted to lay this out before that took total priority in the discourse.

ezzen: so the mantle is going pretty well

starstar97: ?????????

starstar97: what does that mEAN

ezzen: To be blunt: it might mean boobs

starstar97: GAWUH AH GFSAKLJ

moth30: wtf this doesnt sound like the ez i know

moth30: who are you and what have you done with them

ezzen: It me!

starstar97: BRUH

starstar97: e booba real??

starstar97: e on e?

moth30: big if true?

ezzen: Not hormones!

ezzen: The nominative determinism isn’t THAT strong

ezzen: But 

moth30: better than eztrogen…

moth30: (is it okay to make those jokes? i can stop)

ezzen: all good lol

ezzen: Not impugning my nonbinarezness

skychicken: that pun is on life support

ezzen: indeed

ezzen: But yeah, mantle has boobs. Or it will once it’s done and I can use it.

starstar97: congrats!!!!!!

moth30: can i get a refresher on what a mantle is <- does not know anything about lighthouse

starstar97: lm body they use for their magical girl transformations

skychicken: im body

starstar97: *LM

starstar97: fuck you

starstar97: its really cool! fighter jet shaped like girl!

moth30: whoagh…….

moth30: two of my favorite things

moth30: why didnt you tell me about this before star

starstar97: google heliotrope phoenix amv

ezzen: Yeah, imagine a fighter jet but all the controls are in your head.

ezzen: I’m not at that point yet, though

ezzen: Haven’t actually woven up the LM, using basically a dummy instead for now.

That was why I’d been putting time on the flight simulator in Hina’s room. Ai had modded it specifically for this purpose years ago as a partner to the doll. Where the doll was for the core mind-transfer functionality and gaining comfort in a body not of flesh or necessarily shaped like your own, the simulator was a way to practice laying out a physical control panel for the more advanced motor and sensor functions of a mantle in order to build up muscle memory. Those would map to the more abstract, thought-triggered controls of the actual mantle. Chief among them was the mechanism that would let me directly transfer in and out at will, without the horror-show helmet currently necessary for the doll, but Ai and Amane had both stressed that it was absolutely critical for me to first be comfortable with the basic mental control panel for triggering functions. Apparently Amane had once gotten stuck in her mantle in her novice days, and no matter how much they had improved the automatic release failsafes since then, it was critically important that I have the muscle memory to free myself and get back into my original body.

starstar97: omg youre using the doll??????

I sighed to myself. I’d known this was coming; I’d asked the Radiances ahead of time what I was cleared to share with my friends about this, and had been surprised to learn that the doll was relatively public knowledge. Todai hadn’t even been the first to show the technology to the public, though it had been the first civilian application. At the time it had been primarily publicized as a kind of full-body pain relief prosthetic Amane and Ai had been developing. In a sense, it was still serving that purpose, though for a different kind of pain. 

ezzen: okay okay lemme get ahead of this

ezzen: i dont know why its called the doll!

ezzen: its really just a crash test dummy

starstar97: dollzen

skychicken: play nice, star

I waited a few seconds for her to start typing some kind of apology, because it would be funny.

starstar97: ok fair. was just riffing but i can see how it comes

ezzen: She’s not completely wrong

starstar97: im NOT>?

moth30: LOL

ezzen: I’ve been thinking about that actually

ezzen: Because the body IS kinda gender euphoria, but I’m not sure how much the term “doll” is doing it for me. I think it’s mostly just that the plating feels Vaetna-y. I’m armored and it’s a relief.

starstar97: (notes)

starstar97: vaetnez!

starstar97: relevant given the upcoming stream

moth30: (t minus 58 minutes btw ez please come hang out we havent had you around for one since your fuckin flamefall and we miss you)

starstar97: more seriously uh

starstar97: it is a pretty loaded term gender wise

starstar97: hard to decouple it from the fact that its literally slang for a trans woman

ezzen: …

ezzen: I am ashamed to admit

ezzen: that that literally did not occur to me

ezzen: Huh

I marveled at myself for missing that—and was a little annoyed that the Radiances had defaulted to still calling it the doll when they knew my gender preferences. But maybe they actually hadn’t thought about the connotation, or they’d just figured I had been thinking of it along those terms and implicitly consented.

starstar97: okay e that is very you but also valid to be uncomfortable

skychicken: too fem-coded?

ezzen: Maybe? Shit idk now

ezzen: But that’s sort of the conundrum, which is the thing I brought this all up for to begin with

ezzen: Because, putting this on the record, I do feel quite solidly that I am NOT running with the magical girl aesthetic! I’m not becoming a Radiance and I don’t particularly want to be seen as girl.

ezzen: And yet,

ezzen: boobs squishy

starstar97: (true)

moth30: (true)

ebi-furai: (true)

ebi-furai: to cut to the chase, ez put boobs on the doll today

ezzen: My chase! Severed!

moth30: how do you actually do that

moth30: duck tape?

starstar97: its SIX FLAMEBEARERS THEY KNOW HOW TO AFFIX

ezzen: duct* tape

moth30: are you correcting me or is that what you used

DendriteSpinner: ACTUALLY

ezzen: what we used

The chat lay silent for a moment until a small wall of text appeared. We were all nerds, after all.

DendriteSpinner: It is/was called duck tape because it used to be made from duck cloth! Because the whole point of duck tape is that it has a strong fiber weave on the backing that makes it much stronger than a simple cellophane tape, and cotton duck (*not made of real ducks) was the most convenient textile of choice, so it was literally duck fiber tape. The name mostly switched because it was eventually also used for things like duct repair and that sounds more plausible to people than “duck tape” which admittedly does read like a wrong homophone.

starstar97: ??????

moth30: dendrite my goat

DendriteSpinner: so in a sense you could say that the boobs ARE attached by weave 😛

starstar97: what, doll’s too fragile?

ebi-furai: cmon

ebi-furai: wantonly {affixing} pieces of pink3 magitech together is how you end up sorted into your constituent organs by mass

ebi-furai: live onstage

ebi-furai: on international tv

ebi-furai: because you ignored your engineers telling you it would do that because you are, quote, “a different breed”

ebi-furai: and now the moment is immortalized forever on twitter dot com and also my hard drive

moth30: elongate wasnt ripple interference, billionaire meat can do that at any time and is simply waiting for the funniest moment

starstar97: call me billionaire meat the way im exploding with no warning at the funniest time possible

ebi-furai: opal’s flesh must have a terrible sense of humor then

moth30: actually if it can do it at any time then we wouldnt need the vaetna- oh i made myself sad

A notification blip interrupted what I was typing.

[Direct Message] starstar97: okay dude/tte/nby what the hell does ebi DO at todai this is driving me bonkers style

[Direct Message] starstar97: “medical staff” my gosh darned ASS, she talks like she runs the tower

[Direct Message] starstar97: i am this close to believing shes just straight up one of the girls

She’d got it in two, more or less, but I’d been coached not to confirm or deny. I was certain Ebi was surveilling this conversation anyway, end-to-end encryption or no.

[Direct Message] ezzen: She’s not a Radiance! And she does work with Ai! That’s objectively true!

[Direct Message] ezzen: pinky swear

[Direct Message] starstar97: sure, pinky swear, cant argue with that

[Direct Message] starstar97: one of opal’s aides then, or something

[Direct Message] starstar97: just feels like she knows a whole lot about a whole lot of things

I snorted at the idea that Alice had any operational support at all; the woman had a frankly worrying lack of infrastructure between her and the day-to-day operations of Lighthouse as a media nonprofit and tech R&D facility. Hina and Ai had both separately posited that the dragon-ka might be a direct symptom of stress feeding her Flame, and I suspected that theory held some water. Maybe her headaches weren’t a sign of imminent dragon horns, just regular, normal-person stress migraines.

At any rate, Ebi’s nature as a true, thinking person was one of Todai’s secret secrets, one of the things that at the time of my arrival had seemed world-shaking, but now I honestly wasn’t sure how “the magical girls have an AI” could land us in hotter water than we were already in, big picture. Regardless, it still wasn’t my information to share.

[Direct Message] ezzen: Genuinely can’t believe you care more about this than hearing about my adventures with mammaries

[Direct Message] starstar97: sorry! brain has been chewing on it for like weeks now

[Direct Message] starstar97: gimme a little hint?

[Direct Message] ezzen: Medical staff is still basically correct and that’s all I can really share.

[Direct Message] starstar97: fine then

[Direct Message] starstar97: keep your secrets

[Direct Message] starstar97: and share your boobs

I took that as my cue to return to the main chat.

skychicken: on the other hand

skychicken: six flamebearers resorting to taping a set of silicone jigglies to a crash test dummy is an all-timer mental image, right

ezzen: yes it was all rather low-tech

ezzen: but it did work

moth30: and how would you rate your booba (chinhands)

My hand ghosted over my chest.

ezzen: Well I didn’t wake up paralyzed by new flavors of dysphoria, so thats something

ezzen: Actually like the most immediate thing was kinda orthogonal to the gender part

ezzen: So the chassis is all servos and plating and all, right. And that rocks, being made of flesh isn’t all bad but I do, to an extent, crave the strength and certainty of dermis etc etc, I’m finding. And without any clothes on the plating felt like armor so I didn’t feel naked

ezzen: But I felt VERY naked with the boobs on

moth30: because of squishy outside the armor (notes)

ezzen: Exactly!!

ezzen: i had to put on a hoodie

starstar97: aslghslajfk e thats SO gender, robo thing with clear booba bump under the hoodie and no other clothes goes crazy

moth30: frfr

starstar97: im kind of mad you didnt send a pic

starstar97: even though like i get it

starstar97: i want to seeeeeeeeeee

ezzen: oh

ezzen: that i can do

ezzen: gimme a couple minutes

It’s curious that I was able to do that. Just get up, overcome the comforting inertia of my friends in my phone and rise out of bed in the middle of the night, away from the warmth and comfort of my snoozing girlfriend, then shrug on clothes, attach my prosthetic, and creep downstairs into the open space of the penthouse. Less than a month ago, such a thing had been completely impossible for me. The endless vortex of stimulation available in my phone used to be able to paralyze me for days, sometimes weeks on end, before basic maintenance of my body and living space inevitably turned into emergencies that had to be dealt with before returning to my comfortable stupor. Now, I had things I wanted badly enough to get me moving. Or, more accurately, things I wanted to be.

Becoming a flamebearer universally changed somebody, but the version I had always imagined was the most bombastic version of myself, framed as one of the Vaetna or at least on their level. That notional Ezzen was brimming with the desire to change the world, powerful and brave enough to stand up for what he believed in, and armed with some innate wellspring of volition to see it through. The only difference between me and him, I’d fantasized, was that he had the Flame. With that strength, all else would follow; I could finally realize my potential.

It had been sobering for my first few weeks after being infused with magic to instead be dominated by pain, displacement, and doubt. Reality hit me like a truck, even coddled as I was by all of Todai’s wealth and power and kindness. I had been shown the painful truth that I barely knew who I was, that I had barely had a self to begin with.

And now, as I trotted down to the doll’s room and got everything set up unaided, I finally felt like that was starting to change. I was certainly far, far, from the Vaetna expy I had wanted to be, but there was a nugget of volition, a feeling that magic would let me achieve my potential. It just took a slower and more stepwise process between Ezzen-past and Ezzen-future than I had ever dared, or even been equipped to, confront. Perhaps, in time, I could even become the other things I used to imagine for myself—though I’d definitely revised Ezzen-future’s pronouns.

Those kinds of thoughts changed shape as they followed me through the doll’s setup process and through the liminal soul-tunnel that bridged flesh to Flame-imbued silicon. As a human, it all felt very melancholic, all ego-dimming realizations that I had not merely been missing one secret ingredient that would turn me into a hero, a savior, an adult. Whereas in the doll—pending names that clicked any better—I felt potential. And weight on my chest, which was why I was here.

I strode over to the full-length mirror awkwardly propped up against the wall and took a photo of myself. I immediately liked it more than any other selfie I had ever dared to take; it captured the simple geometries of white plastic against the soft shapes of my hoodie, faceless face as the centerpiece. But after a full minute of deliberation, I deemed that one not good enough, mainly because it mostly hid the contours created by the boobs—my boobs—so I took another, then another, trying to find one that would be sufficiently entertaining to my friends while doubling as a sufficiently thorough formal introduction to this latest version of the body I felt comfortable in. It started as an exercise in perfectionism and quickly devolved into play; assured of my privacy at this ungodly hour of 2:12 AM, I tried posing, first in simple offsets of my hips versus my shoulders, then starting to pay more attention to the photo’s framing and the low perspective created by the mirror’s haphazard angle. Before I knew it, I had accumulated dozens of photos alternating between increasingly goofy stances and visual explorations of the doll’s mechanical articulation.

Things took a turn for the gravure when I began to experiment with how to highlight the impact of my breasts. Pulling the hoodie taut would have been downright titillating if I hadn’t left most of my libido in my meat-body; in its absence, and with the boobs not belonging to anybody else, it was refreshingly guilt-free to simply play with them, to grope at their shape experimentally. And like Adam and Eve long before me, being newly aware of where I was uncovered brought a great deal of fun in pulling up the hem of my hoodie and really milking those low angles, until just past the crude edges of duct tape you could see the curve of underboob—

“Having fun?”

“GWAH!”

I dropped my phone. It was fine, thankfully; rubbery corners beat tile, at least at the angle it had fallen at. I hastily scooped it up and turned to face—Yuuka. We were dressed somewhat similarly, actually, at least insofar as we were both wearing hoodies. Except where I was nude below the waist, she was wearing a comfortable-looking pair of sweatpants. No eyepatch; the chunk of prescient gemstone in her right eyesocket stared lidless and unnerving. Her regular eye presented a much friendlier expression, though, at least if you counted a sardonic grin as friendly.

“Hey.”

“…Hi,” I replied uncertainly. “I was, um. You saw that, I assume.”

“Titty pics aren’t really a novel concept ‘round here, Ezza. If anything I’d say you’re late to the trend.”

“Youre not bothered by that?”

“I mean, I knew you’d be doing it, and I came down here anyway. Doesn’t bother me when you’re set up in that thing with those things.” She indicated my body overall and then specifically my chest. “If anything, you’re easier to talk to like this.”

I tilted my head. So that was how it worked with her, it seemed. I wasn’t a threat, even disinhibited and rambunctious, as long as I looked feminine enough. That tracked with how she’d rejected Izumi from dinner high-school-clique-style before we’d attempted to take out Sugawara.

She shifted awkwardly, hands in her hoodie’s pockets. “Look. Amane says I need to apologize for being a bitch. So, sorry.”

“Sure,” I replied, feeling surprisingly forgiving now that I had a read on the situation. She was here to mend bridges—or at least put out the fire—rather than antagonize me. “We’re cool. That, uh, all you came down here for?”

Yuuka raised her eyebrows. “Wow, you really are different in that thing. That was almost sassy.”

“It’s…comfortable,” I hedged. “Maybe not the right word. But better. Less trapped, I guess.”

That earned a look of genuine concern. “You do know what mantles are for, right?”

“Yeah, yeah. Jet fighter, engine of destruction, not a toy. We’re going to war, apparently.” I raised one arm and rapped at the plating with my knuckles. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it, right? If anything, it seems pretty important to enjoy it.” I thought of Izumi hypocritically enduring eating food she could barely taste. “That is where you’re going with this, right? Because I’m not going to stop enjoying it on your account.”

She crossed her arms under her boobs. I wondered how that felt and hesitantly mirrored it. Not bad. She chuckled. “Yeah, not gonna tell you to stop. Amane beat some self-awareness into me. But being too embodied in your war suit can get pretty bad when, y’know, it blows up and you have to eject straight out of fourspace and immediately land on your feet before some fuckin’ kinetics burst pops you in the one-point-four seconds before your wards come back online. If you’re disoriented because your body is a different shape and you just feel worse overall, that can be real bad.”

“All problems Amane currently faces, and I don’t see you lecturing her about it,” I pointed out.

“You don’t see it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.”

“…Fair.” I chewed on that for a moment. “So then what are you advocating in my case, exactly? Not that I take off the boobs, I hope, sounds like you actually like me more with these things. Which means…” I eyeballed her. “You’re not about to pull out a pink, glowing syringe and lunge for my regular body over there, are you? To synchronize how I’m shaped at the other side of the equation?”

“What? No, get your head out of your ass. Alice still has some estrogen in her room if you’re that desperate. Not pink or glowing, though…huh, maybe Todai-branded pink-enhanced estrogen would be a real funny pharma collab, heh, if she’d ever let it fly.” I could have sworn I saw her eye flicker with magical light, as if she were habitually checking the future for the possibility. It occurred to me that perhaps this was how Todai wound up pursuing a lot of their brand deals: decreed by prophecy. She shrugged. “Can’t tell. Anyway, just wanted to point it out. The more your forms diverge, the more risk you’re managing.”

“Can’t I just practice ejecting a bunch? Until I’m used to it?”

“Sure. But you haven’t actually set up the pod yet, and trust me, swapping in and out is a bitch for the first, I dunno, fifty pod hours. We don’t have the time for you to get real good at it, especially if you’re constantly tinkering with how you’re shaped on the mantle side. So just—pick something and stick with it, and be careful, alright?”

I blinked. Well, I would have, had I the eyes to do so. I think the message got across, though. “Aw, was that actual concern I just heard?”

“Fuck off. You sound too much like Ebi, it’s creepy.” She hesitated. “Sure. Fine, if only because you’re the bait. Can’t fuckin’ spring the trap if you get gibbed in a stupid way first.”

I didn’t love the sound of that, but that was partially because I was still in the dark. And usually, I was quite awful at admitting I didn’t know what was going on, but I was different right now. “Er, when does that changeover happen, Miss Precog? When I start being bait for an actual trap, I mean. To be honest, I don’t have a great idea of when diplomatic judo is going to turn into warfare, or what that’ll even look like.”

Her voice turned singsong. “Oh, the sex doll thinks it’s spent the last three days being a tourist by pure accident?”

“Sex doll?” I looked down at my body—which was difficult, past the protrusion of my chest, but even so—and had a horrible realization. “Wait, have some of you had sex in…? Or with…okay, no, back on track. No, it wasn’t by accident, I had a whole discussion with Hina and Izumi—”

“Which I knew you’d do!” She looked smug, which seemed to be her comfort zone when it wasn’t overridden by precognitive anxiety or trauma-induced meanness. “My eye isn’t complete dogshit when it comes to you. Just mostly dogshit. Point is, you being out there, on camera and with your gay polycule, is a statement. The Peacies know we know they’re coming already, but we want them to think we’re not worried about it turning into a real fight in the streets, because if we were, then surely we wouldn’t be putting all those civilians at risk if they decided to make it a fight.”

I tried to follow that. “So me being out there has been…a bluff?”

“Sort of.”

She didn’t explain further; in reply, I did my best to stare at her in a way that signaled my annoyance. Unfortunately, Yuuka commanded an aura of oracular smugness that was completely impervious to nonverbal prompting. Maybe this was where Hina had learned her go-silent-and-stare-at-you-until-you-replied conversational quirk. That might have just been Hina being Hina, considering that Yuuka’s vibe was different. She exuded a sense that she greatly enjoyed being in this conversationally dominant position.

I emitted a digital sigh. “Explain?”

She smiled. “I want to see what they decide to do next. If you’re out there and looking unafraid, eye says a few things could happen. One, there’s a version of events where they honestly just decide to fuck off entirely, if they decide you’re not worth it on top of the chick from your creche they already have. Two, if they stick around and start putting the screws on the government, we can handle that. Three, they start moving stuff from Okinawa…well, things should crystallize after that,” she grinned. “And no matter what, now they really, definitely know what you look like, all up to date with the hair and such.”

“…Yeah,” I agreed hesitantly, not quite following. “And I’m not a particularly big fan of that fact.”

“Correct! You’d way rather be in your mantle. But they don’t know that, right? Rhetorical question, I know they don’t know that. That’ll be the trap, eventually,” she explained excitedly, “Since they do figure that if they were to take the negotiation route—try to win you over with money or holdin’ your friends hostage or what have you—then there’s not a fuckin’ chance you’d actually show up to chat with them in your real body, you’d be in a mantle of some kind, something protective. We’ve got plenty of precedent for that. And they think that mantles pretty much have to be like your real body, not some other shit, especially if we’re putting one together in a hurry.”

“Uh. Sure, I follow that part. How’s that a trap?”

“Because we can have one of us show up in a mantle that looks like that thing over there,” she explained, thumbing toward my insensate body. “They could tell it’d be a mantle, ‘course, but that’s what they’re expecting. They just wouldn’t expect it to not be your mantle.”

“Ah.” I saw it. Then I thought about the plan a moment longer. “But, no, hold on. Why does that need my mantle to look like something else?”

Yuuka steepled her fingers schemingly. “Because they know a Radiance can’t be in two places at once. So if all five of us are accounted for while that’s happening, then it must be you—or Takagiri, but we can account for that—”

“Oh my God,” I interrupted, now fully understanding and a little incredulous. “You want me to shapeshift into one of you? You should have opened with that, that was such a confusing non-explanation. And—that’s barely a step removed from the glowing pink syringe!”

“At least three steps. And it makes setting up a mantle for you so much easier if you just copy one of ours. And clearly you’d be fine with one of us, since, y’know, this,” she waved in the general direction of my duct-taped boobs. “You’ve already joined boobs club, so you could totally wear one of our faces for a few hours and not freak the fuck out.”

That seemed…probably true, I decided, looking down at my chest. It was still kind of a silly plan, though. I had the brief, cruel, intrusive thought that it was no wonder she’d failed to save Amane on her own if that was the extent of her strategy—and promptly kicked myself hard for thinking that, hard enough to feel I should atone by humoring her a little. “Okay. And then once one of you are in the room with them—some notional “them” who I suppose is some Peacie big shot coming in from Okinawa—you spring the trap by shooting them in the face?”

That was apparently such a bad idea that it warranted a huffy twintail flick. “Tch. Of course not! We’d just hold him hostage for leverage.”

“Which we could also do if I was the one there to begin with.”

The moment that left my non-mouth, I knew it wasn’t true, and so did Yuuka.

“Could you?” She looked at me seriously. “In a mantle that looks like your body, no separation between you as yourself and you as the war machine? After you had that meltdown about blowing up an oil rig full of kidnappers, two things that rank near the very top of things that are objectively good to wipe from the face of the fuckin’ earth?”

She had me there. I’d found I was plenty capable of reactive, desperate violence, but a premeditated trap would be a whole other story. It remained a critical difference between myself and future, active-VNT Ezzen. “Fine, yeah,” I agreed. “But this plan doesn’t warrant hopping into one of your bodies. That’d be…I don’t know, invasive.”

“Says the sex doll.”

“Don’t call me a doll,” I snapped, more annoyed than last time.

Yuuka looked surprised. “Alright, sheesh. Not upset about the sex part?”

I took a moment to reflect on that. No, I wasn’t. I was actually sort of curious, but Yuuka was emphatically not the person to ask about what exactly this chassis had been used for. “I’d have thought you’d be the one upset about that, what with you freaking out over me and Hina.”

She raised her hands helplessly. “I thought I’d be too! But the calculus has changed now that you’re in boobs club. My anxieties are weird like that, I don’t know what to tell you. All I know is what the eye tells me, and right now it’s saying you’re chill.”

“Boobs club,” I repeated, having not really heard much of what had come after.

“You do remember the shit you were doing when I came in, don’t ya?”

“I was—okay, sure,” I sighed. “I was just—just curious what it was like. Not used to actually wanting to show off how I look.”

Yuuka put a hand on her hip. “Well, you’ve come to the right girl.”

“You came here,” I pointed out. “Premeditated, even.”

“Bah. Who’s the target audience? These for Hina? Takagiri? Some e-fuckbuddy you’ve been keeping under wraps?”

“My friends on the internet,” I corrected her, begrudgingly turning back to the mirror. She seemed set on helping me, for whatever reason, and I supposed that counted as some kind of win for our relationship. If anything, this felt a lot like Takagiri propositioning me the other day; I really had no clue what I’d done to warrant it.

She blinked with her one eye that could. “Oh. Not nudes.”

“No!”

She collected herself immediately. “Gotcha. Alright, then your job is easy. I can demonstrate.”

That made me turn right back to her in shock. “Not—”

“No, not a fuckin’ bare titties shot. We’re cool, we’re not that cool. I wouldn’t go underboob for this at all, actually, there’s kind of a minimum for it to be, uh, IG-safe, weirdly. And those—wherever you pulled ‘em from—are big, but not Alice-sized, and I’d say she’s around where you’d want for that. So what I’ll actually demonstrate is this:”

She reached behind herself and tugged her hoodie back. The effect was immediate; Hina had done similar things wearing my shirts to tease me and it absolutely had flipped a switch in my brain. In Yuuka’s case, I was grateful that said switch didn’t exist while I was in the doll, because she really knew what she was doing. I pried my non-eyes away, turned back to the mirror, and tried it myself. Sure enough, it left a hell of a contour around my chest, and moreover, where Yuuka’s belly left a faint contour, the hard shell of the doll’s midriff was clearly communicated by the fabric. I liked that a lot. “Oh, dang.” I took a pic, then turned back to her. “This is the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had. Why are you helping me with this? Instead of, I don’t know, sleeping now that you’ve laid out your ridiculous plan?”

She sighed and released her grip on her hoodie. “You want full honesty?”

“Sure? Unless it sucks, I guess.”

“Alright. Because Amane wanted me to make an effort to treat you like you’re one of us. This is the best I can think to do, because my brain is broken and if you’re one of us then that means you need to know how to control your sex appeal.”

That did indeed sound like full honesty, and more than a little vulnerable. I tried to return the energy. “So you’re trying to keep me safe.”

“Pretty much.

“…Thank you. Though, uh…there’s got to be other options,” I pointed out. “For bonding, I mean, that don’t involve pigeonholing me into needing Female Celebrity Survival Skills, all capitalized. No offense.”

She winced. “Yeah. Like I said, my brain is broken. Amane said Alice told you this is how I work, so…here’s confirmation, I guess. Asshole,” she added, seemingly mostly out of some obligation.

“Broken brain comes with the territory for flamebearers, probably. I dunno, my sample size is just you guys. But if it’s about bonding…” I checked my wrist like I was wearing a watch. That was a little bit of muscle memory we’d been trying to incorporate; it pulled up the doll’s most basic HUD. I checked the time. “There’s a Vaetna stream in about twenty minutes. It’s why I was up at this fuckin’ hour in the first place. Word on the street is that Kat’s gonna make her first public appearance since…what kicked all of this off. And that all seems pretty important for how the next few weeks are gonna go. Want to watch with me?”

Author’s Note:

Sorry that this chapter was delayed! Needed a little bit of time to regroup after a pretty brutal week (snowstorms, anybody?). But I’m super happy with this chapter overall, love to write more chatroom. I’ve lampshaded before in the Discord that a certain billionaire died in a very stupid way due to his own magitech, and it’s finally had a moment to show up in the text! Yippee! Also, Ez being cute in the doll (?) is a lot of fun, and we got some Yuuka with it too.

But all that is burying the lede, because BEHOLD:

Drawn by katsutacle, who did a truly magnificent job and I will definitely be commissioning more in the future. Patrons got this art over a week early, and there’s plenty more art in the pipeline, so if you’d like to support the story, there’s a perk!

Thank you to the beta readers. Among all their other work, they’re also pretty fantastic reference for the chatroom’s antics. The main Discord helps a lot with that as well!

That’s all for this week. Tune in next Sunday for onscreen Vaetna!

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!

February 2, 2026

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!

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

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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!

Join the Patreon to support the story and read chapters three weeks ahead of public!

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!

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October 28, 2025