CONTENT WARNINGS

Severe injury, Boundary violation, Mention of suicide

“Hit me!”

Hina was in a mood. A giant, gleeful grin of pointed teeth covered her face, and the blue of her eyes held a fervor, a mania.

“Uh.”

“Punch me!”

“Um, we were doing spear exercises earlier—”

“No. Shut up and hit me, cutie. With your fist! Make it fucking hurt,” she panted.

My reservations were obvious. Even though my intellect and instincts agreed that there was absolutely no way I could meaningfully injure her with a simple punch, common sense had me hesitant to throw a punch at a girl who was almost a full head shorter than me and weighed easily 20 kilos less—no matter how disturbingly enthusiastic she was.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!”

“Hina-san,” Ai chided. The Emerald Radiance was sitting on the sidelines, cross-legged on the dojo’s padded floor. “Maybe it would be better if you let me—”

“Ai, baby, don’t ruin this for me.”

As Ai repeated the pet name to herself incredulously, Hina eyed me with what I could only describe as need. The blue of her eyes was being rapidly swallowed from within by the black of hugely dilated pupils, and she was clenching and unclenching her hands.

“Um, Hina, you’re freaking me out just a little. Can you…?”

That got through to her. She took a deep breath that exploded outward as a plea.

“Cutie, please, I’m just—I really need this, and I promise it’ll be fun and this is real training because you gotta at least be able to throw a punch and also we’re never gonna be able to have the good kind of sex without at least starting here and I’m trying really really hard to not unload onto you first and—and Ai’s here to stop me if I lose control.”

Damn her puppy eyes, and damn my desire to find out what “the good kind of sex” meant.

“…Okay.” I balled a fist, and Hina’s eyes lit up. “Uh…where?”

“Anywhere’s good,” she purred, before shame flickered across her face. She blinked away the haze a bit. “Um. Boob?”

“Boob.”

“Yeah.”

The open vulnerability of her neediness emboldened me to ask. “Any particular…reason?”

“I like it when you touch them.”

“I’m right here,” Ai reminded us. “This is not becoming…sex. I shouldn’t need to say that. Real training, Hina-san.”

Hina bounced on the balls of her feet, only loosely interested in gravity. “Real training!”

“Hina and I talked about this,” I informed Ai. “Um—with boundaries and everything.” Though Hina’s own admission that she needed Ai’s presence as a failsafe was undermining the strength of those boundaries more than I liked. “So, um, with that in mind, Hina, what’s the…goal, here, exactly?”

“We make sure you know how to throw a real punch.”

“With you as the punching bag because you’re into that,” I finished.

“Yep! Win-win, yeah?”

“Okay, sure, yeah.” I drew back my fist and changed my stance slightly, feeling a little lame; I’d never done a hand-to-hand martial art. At least I knew to put my thumb over my fingers.

Hina presented her chest for the strike in a distinctly sexual display, despite the fact that the tank top she’d changed into was fairly tame and unprovocative. Ai groused something at her in Japanese, and she sighed, standing more normally instead.

“Killjoy. C’mon, cutie.”

I punched her. My scarred knuckles squished into the fabric, and then her breast, stopping as they cushioned against her ribs. In that moment of contact, feeling my fist strike the meat of her body, the absurdity of this situation caught up to me. A pretty girl was begging me to punch her in the boob as a thin-veiled excuse to get off. And evidently, I was such an easily-strung-along submissive that there had never really been any question I was going to do it. What a ridiculous situation.

The moment passed as I withdrew my hand. Hina looked at me blankly, unsatisfied.

“Harder, cutie. Like you mean it.”

I reddened. I had meant it, but apparently my form was too bad to get that across, or I was just too weak.

“Um—okay.”

“Again.”

I complied, opting for the other boob this time, feeling even more absurd. But it still wasn’t enough to even move the needle on whatever criteria Hina cared about. Pain, presumably. She frowned.

“I know you’re not that weak. Stop holding back.”

“I’m not!”

“He is baseline,” Ai pointed out from the sidelines. “No augmentations, no mutations. You know he can’t hit as hard as we can. And it’s very normal to unconsciously pull your punches when your first time practicing a punch is doing it on a person, Hina-san,” she chastised.

“But he knows I can take it!” Hina stepped into my reach, leaning close. “Cutie.”

“Hi?” Subconscious pattern recognition observed that most times she had gotten this close, we were usually about to—

She yanked me forward by the collar of my shirt. Ai shouted. Hina’s lips—

Did not find mine. She growled in my ear, sending goosebumps rippling down my back and arms.

“Stop fucking disappointing me and hurt me already.”

She let go and casually dropped back to where she had been standing in the blink of an eye. The motion was fluid and weightless in that way that suggested she was more, that way which evoked the Vaetna. That alone was enough to send a spike of white-hot, jealous anger straight through my chest—but combined with her words?

The cocktail of envious frustration ignited sparks of my Flame, a tearing sensation in my chest like I’d pulled a muscle I hadn’t known was there, jolted to life from a cold start. Raw magic followed the path of least resistance from my soul to where it had first touched me all those years ago, into the seams of my scars, illuminating ice-cold magmatic flows of ivory Flame. She wanted me to hurt her, to hit her as hard as a flamebearer should be able—and in that moment of frustration, the third time I swung at Hina was with more than just the meat and bone of my fist.

Things slowed down around us. Maybe that was the adrenaline, maybe white or pink ripple from my Flame manifesting my emotions, but in any case, for that fraction of a second, I was moving and thinking and feeling at her pace. Those blue eyes caught the white firelight as they narrowed in satisfaction. She responded not by attempting to dodge, but instead by leaning into the blow, and I struck her square in the chest.

This time, when fist compressed skin and fat, it didn’t stop. I felt something crunch, bone failing. The force passed through her entire body in a shockwave as she crumpled around the blow. Then the energy ran out of ways to dissipate, and she was thrown down and backward, skidding to a stop in a heap on the mat a few meters away.

I stood there, panting, fire streaming from my clenched fist. It hurt, as the Flame always did, those channels of white light like frozen metal pressed against my skin, quickly turning numb in a way sure to leave criss-crossed lines of frostnip on my hand. And inside my arm, pushing my musculature past its physical limits had already begun to presage its consequences, a tattered cold front of soreness and aches. But I felt incredible, high on the surge of power, the blink-and-you’d-miss-it apotheosis. I was beyond the sluggish limitations that had weighed me down all these years, whole at last, the emptiness sated for just a moment—

Hina gasped, coughing flecks of blood onto the mat, a visceral, mortal sound that dragged me back to reality. I had tried to hurt her—to kill, really, because like when Ai had dispatched the dummy a few hours ago, a regular human would not have survived what I had just done to Hina. And while I knew my girlfriend was far more than human, able to take it, her wet coughs and the blood oozing from the corner of her mouth filled me with icy fear and doused my Flame with ashy guilt.

“H—Hina?”

She gurgled, coughed, and rolled onto her back. Fuck. I felt a hand on my arm—Ai was at my side, inspecting what I’d just done to my hand. I pulled away, pointing at Hina lying supine.

“I’m fine. What are you doing? Help her.”

“You’re not fine. Arm, please. I need to make sure you didn’t break your hand or that the residuals aren’t about to turn your muscles to marble.”

“I’m—” I winced as she ran her thumb along the back of my hand, checking the bones. “Okay, maybe I’m not completely fine, but she’s less fine.” Why was I the one receiving medical attention when I’d been the one to throw the damn punch? “I can deal with this myself, as opposed to my girlfriend, who is coughing up blood.”

“You’re not built for those forces or ripple exposure. She is.”

As if on cue, Hina sat up, wiping her mouth with her hand. She tried to say something—it came out as a cough. She tried again.

“Hehehe—hrngh—hiehehehehe. That was so good.”

“Uh. Are you alright? Ai, please give her first aid, not me. That cough can’t be good, and I definitely felt some ribs break, and that landing looked…bad.”

Ai shook her head as Hina babbled.

“I knew you could—” she hacked some more blood into her palm, “—could do it! Gosh, fuck, that was so good,” she repeated giddily, rolling her shoulders with a bloody smile. “I love you.”

I exchanged a look with Ai, pulling my arm away. “She hit her head.”

“She’s just like this. Do you see why we try not to enable it?”

Hina rose and staggered toward us, a crazy-eyed zombie. “I love you too,” she giggled to Ai. “So sweet, so thoughtful, so pretty.”

I was weirdly grateful that Ai avoided eye contact with her pain-drunk teammate. Hina had expressed similar affection for Alice before, and I was starting to suspect it applied to all her teammates. I tried not to be jealous.

“Hina, are you…alright?”

“I’m great. And I have you to thank for it, cutie, you cutie.”

Her giddiness was going from offputting to concerning.

“I—no, I hurt you. I feel like shit about it,” I added for Ai’s benefit. “I don’t—”

“Cutie. Ezzen. Ezzie!” She rolled her tongue over the new pet name, and I blushed despite the circumstances. “I’m already mostly better. Give me another five minutes and it’ll be like it never happened.”

“Are—you’re sure? That’s a relief.”

Hina stared at me hungrily, pupils huge. “Yeah! It means you can hit me again!”

“Hina-san,” Ai interjected, warning in her voice.

“Ai-chan!”

“No more.”

“I can take more! You know I can!”

“It’s not about you. Stop being selfish for once and think.”

“His arm’s fine,” she protested. “And we’re under the red threshold for Amane because of the wards in here, so we can go as hard as we want.” She licked the blood off her palm. “So c’mon, fuck me up, show me more of what you can be. C’mon, cutie, don’t you want it?”

Ai answered before I could. “I don’t want to be here for this. It makes me feel dirty.”

“Then don’t! It’s kind of weird for you to stick around and not join in. Just let us have our fun and go work on your stuff.”

“Your ‘fun’ could get Ezzen hurt. He can’t stop you from going…fight-crazy, and you can’t stop yourself.”

“I totally can stop myself! Ezzie and I had a whole talk about this! He’s keeping me responsible!”

“Not a huge fan of ‘Ezzie’,” I interjected quietly. There was more at stake here, but that part was the only bit I really had the bandwidth for at the moment. I was still reeling from the emotional whiplash of my momentary ascension.

“Sorry. Point is, I’m not gonna hurt him, okay? Walk away and we’ll prove it!”

Ai pointed at Hina’s chest, which the hyena was rubbing absentmindedly—whether to soothe or inflame, I couldn’t say. “What just happened is not ‘keeping you responsible’.”

That, along with Hina’s “don’t you want it,” made something click into place for me. I spoke up.

“Ai, I think we’re done.”

“Hey!” Hina pouted. “Don’t blueball me like that!”

“Hina, please. I need to talk to you. Alone.”

“Aw.” Suddenly, she looked nervous. “Did I fuck up?”

“No, I just…” I glanced at Ai, hoping she’d trust my judgment.

“Yes, you fucked up.”

“Ai!”

“There was no reason for you to do any of it like this. If you want to show him how to fight like you do, then show him how to fight, not how to enable your selfishness.”

Hina looked hurt. “I did! Look at his arm!”

“Unmanaged, anger-driven ripple catalysis is not a safe way to fight. You know that; it’s why you do it. But he is still recovering from an amputation! What if it had been transmutative instead of augmentative? He could have—” She caught herself, taking a deep breath. “Fine. I’ll leave, Ezzen. I have papers to grade anyway. Ebi will check on you later.”

As she stormed off, my rapidly regenerating girlfriend called after her.

“I’ll be good! Promise!”

—

I sat down on the dojo’s padded floor, catching my breath, taking inventory of the lancing pain on my skin and in my muscles. Hina did the same and stretched her shoulders, riding up her shirt to expose her belly—a normally tantalizing view, somewhat undercut by the crunch of bone healing in real time. That rather summarized the problem.

Guilt fought desire. I did want to feel that rush of power again, and part of me, perhaps a larger part than I dared admit, wanted to get swept up in Hina’s giddy high, let this mood of hers take us from fighting to fucking and maybe blur the line between those entirely. We had the room to ourselves now, after all. But at the same time, I just felt…gross. I opened with that.

“This feels like too much.”

“Cold feet, you mean.”

“What I mean is that this is…extreme. Insane. If I hit a human like that, they’d be dead.”

“I’m not human! And neither are you, cutie. I saw that look on your face when you hit me, y’know. It makes you so happy. Like it should!” She scooted closer to me. “Lap?”

“Um—not right now.”

“Aw. Why not?”

“Because—adrenaline. You,” I clarified, finding one of the things I wouldn’t have been able to say with Ai in the room. “You’re adrenaline, and I don’t know how to feel about it.”

“Violence, yep, love it.”

“Why?”

“It’s how I am!”

“What’s in it for you? What’s the—point? Fun? Kink? I don’t even really know what I’m trying to ask.”

“I think you know.”

“I don’t. You were—I mean, I know masochism is a thing, and you’ve been open enough about that. But I had been thinking, like, whips and chains at most…” I trailed off, realizing I was ostensibly open to that level of fucked-up-torture-fun. I’d have to unpack that later. For now, it was overshadowed by the uniquely extreme case that was my girlfriend. “Not—not injuries that would send somebody to the hospital. That was way too far.”

“Mm. Okay, so…yeah, I’m a masochist, no news there, but the pain itself isn’t really the big thing. Y’know how adrenaline junkies, like skydivers and stuff, don’t actually want to die?”

“Sure.” Wait, was she implying—“Holy shit, Hina, are you—”

“No! No, no, not what I meant. I loooove being alive, that’s exactly the thing. When a human jumps out of that plane, the thrill is in the fall. Those thirty or forty seconds of letting gravity win, that’s where the fun is at. The danger, the fear of a messy end, just enough to get the heart rate up and get that thrill of survival when they open the parachute and land nice and safe. And like, it’s a good high, it scratches that itch. For humans.” My stomach turned over at the imagery of skydiving. She looked at me with those blue eyes, tilting her head curiously. “Oh, right, acrophobia.”

I nodded, pale. “Yeah, heights, not a great topic for me.”

“Nah. Perfect topic! Imagine how much of a rush that feeling of survival is when it comes after you actually hit the ground. The power when you see earth rushing toward you and know you’ll win. Imagine not being afraid of heights anymore, not being afraid of anything anymore, because you know you’ll survive.” Her voice was dreamy. “I don’t need a parachute.”

Because I was me, there was only one place for my brain to go from that: the Vaetna didn’t need parachutes either. They had enough pride in that bit of trivia that it came up fairly often—hell, Heung had said it almost verbatim minutes before I had been flametouched. I hadn’t put the pieces together until right now, but—could that bone-deep envy I felt toward the Vaetna be related to my acrophobia? Or perhaps both were just symptoms of the same frustration at being so…human. Either way, when Hina framed it like that, about being more and being powerful rather than simply about being in pain, the appeal came into focus. I hated needing a parachute.

But the parallel between her and my idols broke down from there. I couldn’t imagine any of the Vaetna being so enthusiastic about pain, nor so willing to revel in their superiority. Sure, the Heron liked to joke, but the Vaetna were ultimately practical; they wouldn’t seek out excuses to push their limits like that. Hina, on the other hand, was gratuitous, entirely self-interested. Flaunting it like she did felt wrong on some moral level, and that was before factoring in my personal, gnawing envy.

She grinned as she watched the gears turn in my head. “Yeah, I knew you’d get it.”

“I…I do, I think. That’s what you promised me, right? Power. But—the high-minded ideas about invincibility and power? Sure. But the way you were acting, the…mania…that still puts me off.”

“Sorry. The rush makes me a little loopy, but only because it feels so good.” She rubbed her breast as though reminiscing.

“Um, good as in the high you were talking about, or are we back to the masochist ‘pain equals pleasure’ thing?”

“Both. My wires are definitely more than a little crossed. And now that you know all that—don’t you want to do it more? Power up with your Flame and get me all pain-happy at the same time? The sex after is god-tier, I promise.”

It was tempting, put like that. Very, very tempting. I tried to reach for some sanity to stave off how appealing that sounded.

“It—that feels like going too far. I feel it crosses the boundaries we set.”

“Hey, you agreed to all of this. You wanted to do that to me. That’s how the Flame works, y’know. You got mad, wanted to hurt me, it helped you. Didn’t it feel so good?”

And that was the problem. It had—or at least, part of it had. “That’s a trap.”

“Hm? Cutie, I just mean we should do things that feel good. The Flame helps you with that, if you let it.”

“The power felt good,” I admitted. “Hurting you…no. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be cruel.”

“Who’re you hurting?”

“You. I just said.”

“No, you’re not!” She sat up, fixing me with glimmering sapphire. “I know it looks bad. I know it does. But it’s so fun for me. It feels incredible, I almost came.” For once, she showed something like shame, averting her eyes. “So, uh, yeah, you did a good job. You know by now you’re not putting me in actual danger, and you’re making me feel exactly how I want to feel. Where’s the cruelty there, cutie?”

“I don’t know! I mean, you’re smaller than me, and I know that doesn’t really matter because you’re you, but I still feel gross for doing it, and—it just doesn’t feel like something I should be doing.”

“But didn’t you feel like a Vaetna, for that moment?”

“…Unfair to play that card again, isn’t it?”

She ignored me. “And compared to that, right now you’re all…slow. Bound. Mortal. And, cutie—now that you’ve had a taste of what it’s like to not need a parachute, what it’s like to be like them, like me, you’re going to want to feel like that again, chase that high.”

“Speaking from experience?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t—”

“I want you to have that.”

“Why?” The question slipped out almost automatically, the uncertainty at the core of everything that had happened to me in the last week. It echoed in every moment I spent with the Radiances, but Hina especially. I didn’t deserve this. “Why me?”

“Because you’re hurting like I was, how I used to be. And I can make it better, make you more, with the power of love and magic and punching. That’s mahou shoujo, right there in the dictionary next to a picture of Alice.”

“Still makes me sound like your charity case,” I grumbled.

“Cutie, shut the fuck up.”

She moved, fluid and weightless, closing the gap between us. On hands and knees, she leaned forward to me, and this time the kiss happened. Her mouth tasted metallic, and despite all my protests and misgivings, I welcomed it, leaning into the flavor, shuddering at the way her purrs rolled through my chest. By the time we separated, my brain had thoroughly short-circuited, and the affection in her sapphire eyes banished any notion of this being purely a matter of selfishness or duty for her.

“I said you were disappointing me. That wasn’t just to rile you up, it’s because it makes me sad when I see you reaching for the parachute instead of growing beyond it. Use your Flame, cutie, like this.”

She put her hand on my chest, tugged for my Flame—

I pulled away, holding her wrist with both hands.

“Stop. No, Hina. We promised Ai no more magic, no more pain, right?”

“There’s—c’mon! I’m still all worked up.”

“Okay, but—not like that.” I looked at her seriously. “We promised.”

“Sorry, cutie, it’s just—I—I love you,” she whimpered, hurt.

“Do you love me, or do you love what you want to make me into?”

She snarled, and my heart dropped into my stomach, prey instincts rearing their head.

“It’s both! I just want you to be happy! Weren’t you happy?”

My tattoo itched, and the ache in my hand grew—unlike previous times she’d inspired this animal terror in me, this time I’d just proven I could fight back. But that wasn’t how we had agreed to do this. I took a deep breath and stood my ground against those impulses, pulling my eyes away from the bared teeth, meeting her eyes.

“Fucking hell, Hina.” She wavered, and my voice softened. “Stop—yes, spending time with you does make me happy. Yes, I felt powerful, and that felt…good. I want more of that,” I admitted, realizing that my desire for that outweighed my misgivings. “But…you’re really pushing it on me.”

The snarl disintegrated into remorse, shoulders hunching. She swallowed, sapphire eyes swimming in welling tears, and pulled her hand out of my grip.

“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

Space twisted, and she vanished.

—

I snuck into Ai’s workshop half an hour later, clutching oranges in both hands. A spur-of-the-moment decision that she’d probably appreciate a snack had led me to pilfer them from their basket in the penthouse’s kitchen, and I’d awkwardly carried them all the way down the elevator and through the halls, attracting a few stares from passing employees. Fortunately, it seemed that the average person here was accustomed to far weirder flamebearer shenanigans, so nobody’s eyes lingered on me too long.

Ebi had given my arm a once-over shortly after I’d left the dojo. She’d confirmed that nothing was meaningfully damaged; her only instructions were to not exert it for the rest of the day, which was the plan anyway.

“We didn’t…aggravate Amane, did we?”

“No. Dojo’s warded. You peaked high enough that you would have, though. Mostly Sapphire.”

I averted my eyes shamefully, looking out my room’s window at the setting sun.

“Makes sense. Sorry.”

“No harm done. I mean, plenty of harm to you and her, but Sapphire knows what she’s doing. It’s why she only ever does that in the dojo.”

“Really? I’d have figured it’d be a great return on investment to also ward up her room, or Amane’s. Or just put buffers between every room in the penthouse. One-color wards are pretty cheap.”

Ebi shrugged.

“Bring it up with Ai; I’m sure she has a reason. Anyway, you’re all clear, and I need to get back to kicking Amethyst’s ass in Mario Kart.”

“What?”

“You think we spend our days with her just lying in bed and me standing over her attentively like some maid?”

“I—huh.” That actually had sort of been my image of it. “Okay, uh, have fun?”

“I will.” She turned and strode toward the door, but stopped at the threshold of my bedroom. “Sapphire was crying. Post-nut clarity?”

“Something like that,” I admitted, a little too guilty and tired of the drama to be bothered by her needling. “It’s fucked, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Ha,” she chuckled in autotune. “You should probably deal with that before Heliotrope gets back tonight. She’s at her worst when her insufferability gets validated. See ya.”

“Bye.”

I decided that if Heliotrope wanted to bully me for having a girlfriend who just loved me too much, then that was her problem, not mine. Maybe it was the newfound sense of empowerment, but I found myself caring slightly less if the Bloodstone Radiance wanted to be a shit. It could also have been emotional fatigue.

I was a little angry at Hina. I also felt bad for being angry at Hina, because if the way she’d exited that conversation was any indication, she was already kicking herself for forcing herself onto me like that. I felt bad for feeling bad for being angry, because she did deserve some anger. But empathy for her high, the desire to be more, the longing—and especially gratitude and joy that she wanted to share those things with me—they factored in too. But if we did continue, went further with this, would I be able to stay in control with her making every effort to coax me over the edge, her repeated promises to combine the euphoria with sex? To say nothing of how we’d obviously made Ai uncomfortable, or darker concerns about these parallels between Hina and the Vaetna—

It was all so complicated and tiresome, and I‘d just wanted to just not think about it for a little while. Thus, oranges. I didn’t even really intend to talk to Ai about it; working on glyphs was my usual escape, and I’d rather do that with her around than without, because Ai was smart and kind and often right about things. Plus, she’d said she’d be grading assignments, and I was sort of curious what that might entail. So I crossed the threshold into her domain—and was instantly derailed from my plans by the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

The massive construction matrix on the far wall was in full operation. It was a much more intense and involved setup than Ai’s simple, educational display from yesterday. Hazard stripes and glowing caution symbols floated all around the workspace, warning all that the vast candelabra of whirring machine tooling was not to be messed with or approached by unauthorized personnel. Since I was one of those, I kept a wide berth from both the signage and the actual machinists at the control station, content to just watch.

Motive glyphs rotated a huge metal plate in midair before {AFFIXING} it in place for the next operation. The cutting head came in to remove a groove diagonally down the side, and I saw flecks of metal skim off several other places on the part simultaneously, identical features being mirrored off the main one by magic. As the tool head swapped to some kind of grinder wheel to clean up the grooves in a shower of sparks, the array of glyphs on the wall also reconfigured, different symbols illuminating and linking together in new ways. It took me a moment to piece together what this new configuration was for, and I got even more excited when it was confirmed by a fresh batch of even scarier warning messages appearing around the workspace, ribbons of English stitched with Japanese. Of course, I could only read the former.

DANGER: HARD VACUUM. DO NOT PUT ANYTHING YOU LOVE INSIDE THIS BOX.

A new part, barrel-shaped with a number of rods sticking out one end, seemed to emerge from nowhere, pulled up into our three dimensions from fourspace storage. The rods fit perfectly against the new grooves on the first part as they slid into place. A few glyphs on the wall changed, re-enabling certain laws of physics, and just like that, the two parts were fused together, no fasteners required—and not even held together by magic, either. Instead, they’d simply cold-welded together in the vacuum, no oxidizing layer on the surface to prevent it, a procedure that would be nearly impossible anywhere but the vacuum of space if not for this magical array’s ability to simply prohibit the presence of gas and tell the two parts to not merge until that {DIFFERENTIATE} had been removed from the chain.

Beautiful stuff. For a few more minutes, I just watched the process, marveling at the sophistication. I would have pulled out my phone to take a video to flaunt to the chatroom—fortunately, that leaker’s impulse was obstructed by oranges. Somebody tapped my shoulder.

“No new bruises. You stopped.”

“Hi, Ai. We did, yeah.” I blinked, then held up the fruit. “Orange?”

“This is a mikan.” She accepted it anyway. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

I started to peel mine, but she stopped me.

“No food in the shop.”

“Oh.”

“Come to my office instead?”

“Uh.” I pointed at the awesome assembly of magical machine tooling. “I’m pretty good where I am.”

Ai grinned warmly. “I thought you’d like it. The undergrads don’t even get to use it.”

“What are they making?”

“This is…an artificial gravity module. Making it in one piece—or rather, cold-welding—means fewer fasteners and potential points of failure. Important in space.”

“So this is going on the ISS?”

“Different station, but yes. NASA contracted us for a few parts.”

“Not enough Peacie manufacturing capacity,” I guessed. “All their plants are busy making the new line of gunships and stuff, I hear.”

“Yes. I refuse to make weapons.”

Neither of us pointed out what we had done the other day, opting for silence instead. We watched the machine go for a few minutes. Ai frowned at me.

“That doesn’t hurt?”

“Hm?” I realized I had been tossing my mikan back and forth from hand to hand. “Not really? Ebi said not to do anything with it, but I feel fine.”

“You should still be in pain even without using the arm. Hm. Come with me.”

She led me across the hall to the prosthetic fitting room, away from the machine. But health was important, and if Ai had reason to believe something was amiss…

“Into the circle?”

“No, let me just—” she dug around in a cabinet until she found the tool she wanted, a medical-looking wand with a readout. “Internal red ripple gauge.”

She put the tip on the back of my hand, pressed a button, waited a moment, then frowned. She repeated the process at my wrist, then elbow, then shoulder.

“Your residuals are almost a quarter of what they should be after that.”

“How can you tell? That was all glyphless.”

“Experience. Sit there.” She directed me to a chair next to a machine that resembled an X-ray camera, but she didn’t offer me a lead vest or anything. “Arm on here, please.”

I complied. She worked a control panel, and then her eyebrows went up. Her lips tightened, not quite a frown.

“Wow. That explains it, then. Look at this.”

She turned on a hologram projector that projected a scan of my arm in the air between us. A few more keystrokes highlighted the muscles of my arm.

“It’s not free red ripple, it’s filtering into green.”

Goosebumps emerged on my skin, ridged and bumped like Spire dermis.

“Green? But that means—”

“Yes. Your trick with Hina has changed the musculature. You fed the Flame, and it’s…rewarding you, like with her.” She didn’t sound angry like she had with Hina, just disappointed, but it was still enough to completely take away the excitement I should have been feeling. “You’re mutating.”

---

Author’s Note:

Hina…Hina. Well, for those of you who wanted Ez to get stronger, there you go.

Thanks as always to the beta readers: Cass, Zoo, Maria, Zak, Selenium, Penguin and Softies.

Sunspot has its own website now! Check it out at https://sunspot.gay (wow you’re already here)! It has Patreon integration, the long-awaited glossary of terms (forever WIP) and more.

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!

December 15, 2024

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

VNT: Vaetna-type. An obnoxiously inaccurate term; for one, none were equal to the Vaetna, and for two, the term was haphazardly applied to essentially any group where a flamebearer held a major role, not just ones that shared the Vaetna’s philosophy of violence. The PCTF and Todai were definitely tier 2 VNT groups; Hikanome was more like tier 3, from what I understood, although all the cults fell under the label to different extents. By comparison, a university with a department of Ripple Studies or Glyph Engineering would by necessity be associated with at least one flamebearer, but were generally not considered VNT groups in themselves.

Really, geopolitical impact was the main metric, and in that regard, it was little wonder that the Spire’s knights were the namesake. For years, I’d gone out of my way to avoid using the term, because I felt it diminished the Vaetna by proxy when applied to even the tier 2 groups, but eventually I’d caved—mostly for lack of any other term with the same colloquial clarity. “Influential flamebearer” and other such substitute terms just had a lot more ambiguity in forum threads.

But Todai were definitely VNTs. In fact, I was begrudgingly starting to think that they were some of the most Vaetna-like of any group. The parallels between mantles and dermis went without saying, of course, but my first up-close-and-personal combat training brought it into much more visceral perspective.

“You’ve never used it against somebody else,” Ai deduced, gesturing at my spear lying forlornly next to me. She’d casually sidestepped a thrust and wrenched the haft out of my hand entirely before sending me onto the mat. I sat up, groaning.

“No. I, um, looked a little bit for classes, but HEMA is specifically swords, and the only spear things I could find were closer to London, which is too far.” I checked my foot to make sure our seconds-long bout hadn’t already damaged the amputation site. “Way too far, now.”

“Not too far,” Ai shone a sunny smile, which I could pretend was the reason my face was hot. She hadn’t even felt the need to take off her jacket before taking me on. “Actually, I think you’re right where you should be.”

“What, on the floor?”

She winced. “Oh, no, not what I meant.”

“I need practice,” I admitted. “But, um, if Hikanome is safe, or at least this event will be, why are we doing this now?”

“Why do you think?”

“Because…summoning my spear is already my first instinct in danger?”

“Mm, yes, that’s part of it. It’s actually a good thing that you can arm yourself without thinking, so you should be able to use it better. But that’s only part of it. I agree with Ishikawa-san: You need to feel like you can fight back if you’re in danger.”

“Wow, way to just cut me right open.”

She frowned.

“I’m unarmed. Do you want to go spear-on-spear?”

“Uh, not what I meant, but…kind of?” I recalled the spear to my hand. “Feel like I’d get thrashed even harder, though.” It didn’t bruise my ego to admit that, or at least not as much as I’d expected.

“True. Your biggest problem right now…you’re trying to be faster than me. Your footwork seems good, and you understand your reach advantage, but even if you were reacting to me in time, I just have a speed advantage.”

“Okay? Is that just an experience thing?”

“Not entirely. I’m cheating.”

She turned away from me and shrugged off the jacket, tossing it to the side, then began to pull up the hem of her tank top—

“What are you doing?”

The question was answered once she pulled the garment off, exposing the tattoo binding Amane had mentioned and I’d promptly forgotten about. Down Ai’s spine ran a complex, interlinked glyph, in vivid, fluorescent green. Or rather, a 2D shadow of a 3D chain of glyphs, like my {COMPOSE} tattoo on my arm. My curiosity warred with my embarrassment, eyes tracing up her back to where the tattoo ran under her sports bra before reappearing and continuing its gradients and symmetrical patterns until it terminated at the base of her neck. It covered most of her back, especially wide at the shoulders and hips where it was denser with additional arrangements of glyphs.

The glyphs that made up the tattoo were clearly based on the same principles she had pioneered for prosthesis animation, enhancing the motion of her limbs, but the longer I looked, the more I could tease out other functionality. Most notable was the set of smaller, more-intricate patterns spaced regularly along her spine: ward segments to disrupt offensive magic intended to pulp her soft, squishy insides or slice her in half. Each of the ward sections—overall sort of hourglass-shaped—also had another node on the end, {AFFIX}-{DISSIPATE}: kinetic dampening applied inward so she didn’t shatter her own bones by throwing an enhanced punch.

Of course, I would have already known the technical points in intimate detail had I looked at the file Ebi had sent me last night, but my work ethic had been rather low between then and now—I’d been free from responsibility and enjoying my new PC and not gotten a whit of real glyph work done. I felt a little guilty for having not done my reading, but then again, Ai hadn’t given me much notice to come work out; she’d just knocked on my door and told me it was time to do some light diagnostic training.

“Do I need to explain any part of it?”

I jumped, realizing I’d been staring at her exposed back for inappropriately long. I averted my gaze hurriedly, pretending to inspect the hexagonal, interlinked pads lining the lower part of the dojo’s walls.

“Um, I think I get it. Strength, speed, and durability? Wards, too…wait,” I recalled my spear into my arm, returning it to its tattoo form, a simple, dark line that shone with iridescence when it caught the dojo’s lights in just the right way. “Yours is an actual chain of glyphs, but mine is symbolic.”

“We’ve gotten better at it over time. If you look here—” she pointed at her lower back, seemingly unembarrassed at the exposure as she indicated a more roughly inked part of the chain “—this is the oldest part. Also, this is all kinetics, no {COMPOSED} matter, so if I make a mistake when I alter the weave…”

She mimed an implosion with her hands and made a hissing, gurgling noise like something wet being sucked through a tube. A messy way to go.

“Ah.”

“Yes. That, and I really like the design.”

I swallowed my embarrassment and looked intently again at the expanse of bare skin, but if she meant a specific element, I didn’t see it.

“Uh? I mean, it’s got clever propagation channeling, I suppose. Really good.” I squinted. “Oh, and the way you split the channels for {DEFLECT}, that’s—”

“Not the glyph design, the artwork.”

“Artwork?” I repeated dumbly.

Ai sighed and paced away from me. As she receded, my eyes stopped being able to make out the individual details of each viridian glyph, turning the tattoo into, well—a tattoo. Now I saw the design.

“Oh, wow.”

“Deshou? Ebi-tan did a great job.”

Ai had a pair of feathery wings folded on her back, each line of glyphs coalescing into the negative space of a shadow cast by the feathers. Some of the more geometric chains, too symmetrical and boxy to mimic the play of light over organic shapes, instead took on the look of pistons or lever arms, as though the feathers were attached to a mechanical frame mounted to her back. I followed the train of logic.

“Can you fly?” I hadn’t seen the type of anti-gravity lattices one would expect, the sort that were in Heliotrope’s jetbike.

“Not as well as the wings suggest,” she admitted. “Ah…right, Hina jumped you home the other day, didn’t she?”

The memory of falling out of the sky made my stomach churn.

“Yes?”

“It’s more controlled than that,” she assured with a smile. “Big jump, then glide. I can show you, but I don’t think it’d be very helpful for you right now.”

Not helpful, perhaps, but I was suddenly paying much closer attention. I’d written off her enhancements as what was often termed “human-plus,” but limited flight gave her three-dimensional maneuverability that put her in the realm of the Vaetna, to an extent.

“Um, if it’s not too much of a hassle…”

—

To my slight disappointment, Ai did not immediately leap into the air and begin bounding around the dojo. She gave a much more practical demonstration—one which included a spear. It was a simple training spear, plastic haft, foam tip, and on the short side by my standards. Mine was longer than I was tall; the one Ai had selected was roughly her height. She brought one of the wooden dummies to the middle of the room and began a simple training sequence.

Her movements were distinct from mine in a number of ways. My style was modeled on—inspired by, really—Heung’s moves, with a lot of powerful strikes to abuse range, as she’d noted, and I generally tried to emphasize control of my footwork, lacking the spearmaster’s ability to supernaturally correct out of overbalance and put force behind any blow no matter how improbable. In doing so, I achieved what I thought to be the closest imitation to his motions that one could approximate, accounting for the fact that I had to deal with things like momentum and gravity and the limited space of my old living situation. And Ai’s warm-up sequence was still—loosely—abiding by those basic rules of physics, but the way she was striking—

She barely used the spear tip. She switched freely between one-handed and two-handed stances, striking with the haft, more like a quarterstaff than a spear. Too, she fought with her body as much as the weapon, an up-close-and-personal style with knee strikes and dancing footwork; variations on the same moves she’d used to take me down in our brief bout of sparring. This time, though, she fully engaged her magical augmentations and wasn’t holding back anything; each blow was full-force, as far as I could tell. She’d go for the head, ribs, stomach, knees, groin. Cracking noises filled the air in a staccato rhythm of violence.

Then she began to speed up.

It’s difficult to express how exactly Ai’s movements changed. The closest example would be as though she were a video played fifty percent faster than normal, which captures the way her movements seemed to lose inertia as though the spear were practically weightless—but that comparison also gives the image of cartoonishly jerky motions. Instead, her motions took on a sort of grace. The dance went from the exertions of muscles and tendons fighting momentum and gravity to something else, destructive motion flowing through her body and depositing lethal energy into the dummy’s wooden frame. Each enhanced strike was loud enough to make me flinch and sent splinters flying.

I saw in her movements the barest shadow of the Vaetna’s aspect. Lesser—closer-in and more brutal, still half-tethered to the dojo’s floor. If the dummy were a real, unaugmented human, they’d already be dead from blunt force trauma—a far less clean death than by a vaet or LM dart, merely straddling the border of supernatural violence without transcending to the level of true, unfettered destruction. Ai swung the butt of the spear into the dummy’s shoulder and followed with a low leg sweep that was distinctly unlike anything a Vaetna would do—the first strike would have been with a blade and ended the fight there. As it was, the enhanced kick was forceful enough to defeat the dummy’s stabilized base and send it tumbling.

The next few moments were a blur of further-accelerated violence that I only parsed after the fact. Ai flipped, spun, and then there was a whistling noise, a crunch, and a bang. The sound echoed through the room as Ai doubled over, hands on her knees, glyph-woven wings aglow against her muscular back as she caught her breath. After a few measured breaths, she raised her head to join me in looking up at her grisly handiwork.

The dummy had struck the top edge of the padding on the far wall, impaled through the chest, some four or five meters up from the floor. It was split down the middle around the speartip. The spear’s plastic haft had been partially melted and distorted by friction as it had left Ai’s hand. That was a singular strike more suited to the Vaetna; a pang of jealous excitement ran through me at the thought, chased immediately by awful guilt for envying such a killing blow. The jealousy won.

“Um. Didn’t—didn’t it have a foam tip?”

“Yes. So don’t do that with yours.”

“I can’t. And you’re the weakest of them?”

She looked at me with some surprise at the bitterness in my tone, muscular arms glistening with sweat as she rolled her shoulders—but those weren’t where the real power lay. The intricate green lattice was what had enabled this. My mind was racing a mile a minute: with only that enhancement, Ai’s display of physicality just now had grazed the bottom edge of the zone of physical power that I considered solely the Vaetna’s domain. She nodded.

“Hina is faster than me and has more tricks.”

Hina’s elevated physiology was even more powerful, those changes she’d subtly promised me if only I was willing. Of course, I’d already seen little tastes of her power, but not simple, transcendental physical prowess, not really. No wonder her predatory aspect alarmed me deep in my bones—I made a conscious effort to stop biting my lip.

“And…mantles? I was under the impression that Amethyst’s g—gun,” I stumbled over the instrument of violence I’d enabled, “was fairly representative of the overall fighting style, ranged rather than melee combat, but that doesn’t look to be indicative of…”

“It’s quite physical. Kinetic. You haven’t seen many videos of us fighting, have you?”

“I was going to get around to it.”

“You weren’t,” she countered bluntly. There was no accusation in the tone; she was actually smiling. “I say that all the time and then never get around to it unless Ebi-tan or Takehara-san remind me. But I’ve set aside this whole afternoon anyway—let’s have lunch, and I’ll show you some combat footage. You’ll understand the lattice diagrams much better with practical examples.”

—

Ai’s idea of lunch was cup ramen. While the noodles rehydrated in hot water, she disappeared upstairs briefly, returning with a laptop and cables. She set up the laptop to feed into the big TV in the common area and started queuing up YouTube clips and opening up an instance of GWalk.

The noodles were honestly pretty good, at least relative to the miniscule amount of effort they had taken. Ai and I had different types; she’d given me what was supposedly the default, where the extra bits were little chunks of unidentifiable salty meat and tiny shrimp, but her own was a curry soup variation with a tempting aroma. I stirred the noodles with the training chopsticks she had made for me, which had apparently been living with the other silverware in the kitchen.

“I, uh, don’t think I ever thanked you for these.”

She smiled.

“You’re welcome.”

“I mean, they fit really well. Perfectly, in fact. Did you scan my hand or something?”

“Yes.”

“Huh.”

The first video we watched was, of all things, a TV interview with Alice from two years ago. The dragon-girl looked slightly different; her tail was only half as long as I was used to, and not as thick. It was awkwardly tucked behind her as she sat forward in an oversized, padded chair, shifting uncomfortably. It was easy to imagine why, with the limb squished behind her like that. I glanced over at Ai, who was wearing a sympathetic grimace.

“Didn’t you say combat footage?”

“In a bit, but this is a really good interview. Very helpful.”

TV-Alice was soldiering through the pain, bantering with the trio of hosts. It was about a minute into the interview when I brought up the obvious issue.

“…This is in Japanese, Ai.”

“Oh.”

Ai physically flinched at her error, reaching over to the laptop to turn on subtitles, revealing that Alice was discussing mantle transformations. After a few more minutes of introductory discussions, consisting mostly of Alice introducing her team and being humble in the face of the interviewers—two of whom were obviously star-struck—some slides with graphs came on screen. I blinked at the numbers involved and the graphic of Alice’s mantle in flight next to a jet fighter.

“Seventy kilonewtons of thrust?”

“Yes!” Ai sounded so proud, pausing the video to tab over to GWalk, where she had Alice’s mantle diagram loaded. She moused over the propulsion section of the lattice. “Going fast is really easy when you don’t have to worry about holding the craft together, carrying fuel, any of that.”

I knew that, of course; I was already mentally comparing these numbers to the Vaetna’s. Between Gates and teleportation, it was actually somewhat uncommon for them to fly long distances, and they didn’t tend to use direct thrust in a way that was easily quantifiable as force—but I knew that when Heung wanted to go fast, he could output over two hundred kilonewtons to break the sound barrier in under a second. He’d done that sort of acceleration to intercept my flamefall. So at least for this metric, the Radiances still only measured up to a fraction of the Vaetna—but a significant fraction.

So it went with other statistics. Alice’s interview didn’t disclose things like armaments or exact quantity of magical power being used, for obvious reasons, but I had those numbers right in front of me in the lattice diagram, and every time it was the same story: not a direct match for the Vaetna, but close enough that they were in the ballpark…with one exception.

“We can’t compete on ripple leakage, of course. We’ve lowered FRR by almost ninety percent since the first prototypes, since of course that’s critical for Amane’s well-being, but compared to the Vaetna…” Ai trailed off.

The Vaetna famously produced zero free ripple—the extra uncontrolled stuff which had zany and often deleterious effects on its surroundings—when casting magic; the running theory was that the Spire itself modulated that as a byproduct of the fact that every Vaetna’s Flame was partially woven into it, but as usual, there was no official word on the subject. This dovetailed with their other environmental efforts, since magical pollution was a special kind of ugly. TV-Alice agreed, asserting that it was a completely unacceptable form of collateral damage for mahou shoujo.

We eventually moved on from the interview to the promised combat clips so that I could see these abstract numbers in action. And in action, they did look a lot like the Vaetna, enough that my jealousy for that unattainable form, cooled to bare embers by years of resignation, was starting to reignite. Refocus.

Maybe it wasn’t so unattainable.

—

At some point, Ai’s series of videos and data sheets tapered off, and we wound up just chatting about magic. The broth-stained plastic cups on the table had been joined by a bag of potato chips from which we both snacked freely while we curled up on the sofa. Soothed by Ai’s calm demeanor, I found it in me to open up somewhat about the Vaetna, my fascination for them, my desire to see the Spire with my own eyes—and my contradictory resolution to stick around in spite of all that and the forecasted danger. I shared with her what I had overheard from Yuuka.

“Three weeks.”

Ai seemed to think hard for a moment, running numbers in her head. When she refocused on me, she was confident, solid. I was grateful.

“We’ll be ready.”

“Ready for what, exactly?”

“It won’t be fighting right away, I think. They’ll try to buy you first. Etto…poach. Poach you. Every year, I get huge offers to work at one of the US research groups. Lockheed Martin, Carnegie Mellon, General Dynamics…”

“The ones who develop directly for the PCTF,” I followed.

“Yes. And I never will, of course.”

“Neither will I,” I assured her. “I mean, if they wanted me, they had years to come pick me up. But I’ve rather…soured on them, of late.”

“Soured on them,” Ai repeated, trying out the expression. “I like that phrase. Suppakunatta. Doesn’t work as well in Japanese. Has she been better to you?”

I winced.

“Haven’t been face-to-face since then, so I don’t know, but…it wasn’t great, when she was talking to Alice.”

A burst of rent air interrupted us. Hina pranced her way into three-space, startling me and setting my thoughts awhirl as I registered the cozy, intimate situation Ai and I had spent the last two or three hours in—it can’t have looked good, if Hina were the type to care about such things. But she just happily flopped onto the sofa next to me, of course.

“Hey, cuties!”

“Hina-san. Oshigoto wa?”

“Bleh. Meetings! They don’t need me.” The puppy shimmied to snuggle up against me, and I tried very hard not to look down her blouse as she undid the top few buttons. “How’s it hangin’?”

“Good,” I spluttered, trying for nonchalance and failing. “The, um. Mantles. Yep.”

“Ooooh. Getting in that circuitry, huh?”

“You could say that.” Ai hummed. “Actually, we were just talking about Yuuka-chan. It seems like your shitsuke hasn’t worked.”

Hina pouted. “And I took away her chocolate and everything…”

That made Ai’s eyebrows go up. “Ara. I was talking about the violence, but that’s more serious for you. Did you give Ezzen some?”

“Of course! And it was good, right, cutie?” She snuggled closer against me.

“Um, yeah.”

“It’s very expensive,” Ai informed me, mock-stern. “She’ll bankrupt us.”

“‘S good though, right? Right?”

“It is,” the muscular girl admitted. Hina purred happily, then her expression soured.

“Man, Yuuka’s being such a jerk. She’d be way nicer if cutie here was a girl, too. That’s not fair at all!”

I recalled that Yuuka had implied something along those lines. Being the subject of such intense and directed misandry felt awful, so I distracted myself with a switch to more practical matters.

“Um, well, about that. She insisted on going on Saturday.”

“Ah. So, three of us?”

“I guess so. I don’t think she has a problem with you going; she just wanted something about her classes.”

Ai nodded. “That makes sense. The rally is in cooperation with environmentalist groups, and Yuuka-chan is a rather extreme…”

“Activist,” Hina supplied. “Eco-terrorist!” She sounded so proud of her teammate.

“Excuse me?”

Ai grimaced. “She thinks of herself as…a protector. Because of everything with Amane. And once we became stronger, a lot of what her eye tells her is…oil in the oceans, rainforests being cut down. She thinks that’s evil. And it is the duty of mahou shoujo to destroy evil.”

“That’s why she was in the Gulf! Because of the rig!”

“Oh.” I was reevaluating her, somewhat. The Vaetna were definitely also classifiable as ecological activists, and yes, sometimes…“Eco-terrorist?”

“Not publicly,” Ai glared slightly at Hina for revealing the information, and I could see why. Another thing to keep straight, to make sure I didn’t accidentally leak.

“Right, right,” the puppy agreed, immune to the judgment. “It’s more of a hobby for her.”

“Um. Got it. Okay. I can’t blame her,” I admitted.

Hina dug a claw into my arm and growled. Not loud enough for Ai to hear, but I could feel it radiate through her torso into mine. It still freaked me out that I found that so attractive.

“I smell sweat. You sparred. Three hours ago, maybe?”

“Y—yeah?”

She looked up at me with those sapphire eyes, pure hyena, pupils tiny—all predator. I shivered.

“I need a piece of that action. Make up for missing last night, and get you ready for Saturday.”

I tore my eyes from her, a monumental struggle, to look at Ai on my other side and ask a silent question with my eyes: from what she and Amane had said, such physical preparation wasn’t necessary, so was Hina just making excuses for her own desires? Not that the butterflies in my stomach cared about whether it was necessary. Ai returned the question with one of her own.

“Last night?”

“Oh, um, she was out—”

“Not sex,” Hina clarified for me. “Just fighting.”

“Not much difference with you,” Ai pointed out grumpily.

“Well, Yuuka’s always so unsatisfying, doesn’t fight back at all, just runs! Need to get some real hits.”

Ai shook her head. “She gets like this, sometimes. Alice would stop her, but…you did want to see how she moves, right?”

I swallowed, unable to deny my excitement to see firsthand how my girlfriend would compare to my idols in combat. I wanted to know just how far beyond me she was. And, in turn, how far I could go, what I might be able to become—a path toward their ilk.

“I do.”

---

Author’s Note:

This chapter is two weeks late! Three weeks? Plus two days. Either way, late! And it is because I was so incredibly busy doing important things like graduating. But that’s behind us now, and for the foreseeable future I shall be less busy, so Sunspot is back!

I haven’t been doing no work on Sunspot. I was also doing other stuff like finalizing the release version of Sunspot’s website, which has been waylaid by some final changes I wanted to make, so that’ll go live sometime tomorrow, probably. Also, we have an updated synopsis, and I’ve done a minor editing pass on 1.01. Now the story itself may resume, more powerful than ever before! Also, we have a cover for arc 2 in the works which should arrive soon.

As usual, thank you to the beta readers: Cass, Zooloo, Maria, Zak, Selenium, Penguin and Softies. They also helped keep me on track with all my crazy busyness of the last few weeks, and helped with the website, so I’m very grateful to them.

It’s good to be back. See you next week!

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 22, 2024

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

It’s cold.

That’s weird, because temperature isn’t the kind of thing one normally notices in a dream. Nonetheless, it is undeniably cold here. I can feel it on my skin, in my teeth, and especially from the ache in my hand.

Where is here, anyway? It is not the waters below the ice, nor is it the flat expanse above, nor the beach or great and incomprehensible forest beyond. Instead, I sit upon an outcropping, some vast block of hard and rough material that could be stone, or bone, or perhaps the Spire’s dermis. It’s large enough for me to sit comfortably in the middle without feeling worryingly close to the edge and thus in danger of falling off. The outcropping is somewhat uneven, with high and low points gently rising and falling until the sides slope worryingly downward. Perhaps this is the tip of some great, buried femur, protruding up from the mists shrouding whatever may be below. Always mist in these dreams. It’s cold.

More to the point, I’m not alone. Someone else sits next to me, a man, older by maybe ten or fifteen years, with a salt-worn face and grainy stubble. His skin is darker than my pallor, tanned by the sun and stretched taut over a muscular frame. No bodybuilder physique, rather the practical muscles of a man whose trade is contingent on a functional body. He is whole, unlike me.

I recognize him from the news; this is the pivotal figure around which the whole debacle in the Gulf of Mexico revolved. Noah Holton. Now something like my adoptive sibling, perhaps—being from the same creche of Flame as I, another fragment from when the Heron shattered fate. In theory, there were four of us—but one had turned inferno and been put down by the Vaetna, so now, only three, and only two right here on this strange outcropping surrounded by cold mist.

“You’re Ezzen.”

It is not a question. His voice is as weathered as his face, gravelly. Perhaps he smokes. His accent is of the American South.

“That’s me,” I confirm. “You’re…Noah? Mr. Holton?”

“Just Holton. You’re some kind of magic expert, they tell me. And just a kid. Have any idea where in God’s name we are?”

“Haven’t a clue, sorry.” I scrape a fingernail on the hard surface; it leaves no mark. “But this is a dream.”

“Figured as much. More weird flamebearer shit?”

“I…guess so. Haven’t heard of it, but this isn’t my first. Third, I think.”

With my full recollection available here, I realize I hadn’t dreamt the previous night, when I’d slept with Hina. Odd.

“Huh. Sure isn’t where I went to sleep, that’s for sure.”

“We won’t remember this when we wake up, either. At least, I don’t.”

“Huh. Then what’s the point?”

We fall into silence for a while.

“Where do you think the third guy is?”

“Probably not asleep. It’s morning back home.”

“Oh, right. So, then, why are you asleep?”

“Healing. Ripple fucked me up good, they say.”

“You look whole to me. Who’s ‘they’?”

“What are you, a cop?”

I blink.

“I’m just—trying to look out for you, I guess.”

“Why?”

“Because…” I thought about this. “I should?”

He grunts.

“Thanks. But I’m not telling you anything. I don’t even know if you’re real. You could be somebody from the Peacies trying to trick me into giving up my location, for all I know.”

“I’ve got no love for them,” I object. But he’s right; I have no way of knowing he’s real, either. I change the topic, hoping that if he is indeed real, he can answer this question. “Why did Brianna leave you?”

“Who? Oh, the Vaetna?”

“Yeah.”

“She said she couldn’t take me.”

I sit further up in alarm.

“What does that mean?”

“Beats me.” He says nothing more, looking out into the mist, rubbing his hands together as though to warm them up. It doesn’t work.

“Well—did she say anything else?” That couldn’t be right, but he just shrugs.

“Don’t remember exactly what she said, but yeah, that’s what it came out to. She couldn’t take me to the Spire. Couldn’t even stick around to bail me out. Didn’t give a real reason, I think. I didn’t beg her, either, so she just left.”

“That doesn’t happen.”

“No? ‘Cause that’s what happened.”

“It doesn’t. They don’t leave flamebearers out to dry like that. They didn’t, for me. I mean, I didn’t wind up going with them, but three of them showed up for me. That doesn’t make sense.”

“Eh. They didn’t really ‘leave me out to dry’, I guess. Helped clean up the guys I was fighting—scooped out the whole east side of the superstructure. Poor fucker right in front of me was caught at the edge, didn’t get him all the way.”

Guilt seeps through me like poison. That hadn’t been the Vaetna—should I tell him that, admit what I had done? Would that make anything about this better? He’d mentioned he was recovering from ripple exposure—I would feel guiltier if that was our doing. But it could well have been his, or just the ambient residuals from his Flamefall. I can’t risk it.

“Even—even so. They left you there. That doesn’t happen,” I repeat. “There has to be a reason.”

“Probably is. Doesn’t really matter to me.”

“Why not? It’s unprecedented, it means something.” I feel myself growing annoyed at his apathy. “And we’re from the same cluster, so even if you don’t care, I do.”

“Still can’t prove that.”

A fair point. But there has to be a way. I rack my brain, trying to picture glyphs, my ingrained expertise far more slow and sluggish to respond than usual, dampened by the swaddling other-ness of the dream.

“I can prove it somehow,” I promise. “I’ll find a way to remember this, contact you.”

“Cool.”

I frown. He just—doesn’t care? I don’t know what to say in the face of the brick wall of apathy. So I say nothing and stand, to better investigate this strange locale. Even with no prosthetic, this dream lets me walk without pain or difficulty. I move to the edge of the mostly level area of the outcropping, where it begins to slope downward, getting as close as I dare; as I thought, no surge of acrophobia rises to meet me as I peer down into the milky mist. But it is cold. Why does my hand hurt, but not my foot? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere below, beyond my sight.

“Gonna jump?”

“What? No, just looking.”

“Why not?”

I turn to him, befuddled.

“Why would I?”

“Well. Assuming you are real, I’m just thinking…maybe this is some sort of test. Like we won’t wake up until we leave the platform, or something.”

“And your evidence for thinking that?”

He shrugs.

“Guess.”

I turn back toward the fog, trying to glean something, anything. But there are not even swirls of atmospheric motion. It is instead a heavy, impenetrable stillness. It occurs to me that perhaps we are high above that forest beyond the beach, and that somewhere within the fog lays a surface of treetops. That doesn’t answer the question of what we’re actually standing on. I hope it’s not bone; the implications of that would be dire. As I look, I speak.

“My last dreams didn’t have any kind of…test, or whatever. And this isn’t the same place. I did have somebody else there, but it was…just a manifestation of my Flame, somehow. And it was different from you. I think you’re real, but my gut says that we’re supposed to talk to each other. Our Flames, or somebody else, want us to communicate.”

“Huh. Well, kid, from where I’m sitting, the Frozen Flame isn’t our friend. Real bastard, even. I’d think real hard about what I assume it wants.”

“It’s not evil.”

“It runs on pain. I learned that from minute one. How much more evil can it get?” He shifts. “I don’t want to find out. I didn’t sign up for any of this shit. But I can’t even get away from it when I’m sleeping, seems like.”

For me, this has all been a dream come true, albeit a twisted one. But for somebody without my obsessive passion for magic, somebody who was trapped in the middle of a standoff between world powers rather than whisked away to relative safety?

“I don’t blame you,” I concede. “But we ought to make the most of the hand we’re dealt.”

“Speak for yourself. I’m not playing.”

“Meaning what? You—can’t go to the Spire.” The words are ash in my mouth for their implication. He has to have misunderstood somehow. “If that’s what Bri meant. And there’s no other safe haven, not really, other than…the Peacies, or their equivalents. Who you don’t seem keen on.”

“I’m not, nah. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. But I’m not gonna go to war with them or whatever else the fuckin—what’s the word—VNTs get up to. And especially whatever this shit—” he waves at the mist around us “—is. No thanks. I want out.”

This enkindles an unfamiliar emotion in me, one that sweeps away the sympathy. I glower.

“That’s not a choice we get to make.”

He shrugs again.

“It’s the choice I’m making. You gonna jump or what?”

“Why would I…?”

“No other way off this rock. You’re the type who needs answers, and they’re not up here, I can tell you that much.”

I glance down again; still no dizziness or primal terror, because there’s no sense of distance for the fall. A perfect chance to face my fear—assuming this is indeed just a dream, a normal one where I can’t get hurt. But there’s no guarantee of that, not in whatever strange Flame-derived non-space this is. So instead, I turn back to him, surveying the empty expanse around us.

“Not up here, no. But that doesn’t mean I need to jump to find out.”

I squeeze my eyes shut and pull the rip-cord dangling off my soul, tearing the stitches where it meets my Flame. It and I both tremble at the lance of agony, and my hand ignites. The cold does not dissipate, nor the ache, but instead coexists with the searing heat of fire, tongues of Flame in the same milk-white as the mist around us, because in my gut I know that they are one and the same. I raise my hand, reaching out to the edge, telling them to meet and merge, that my shard of the Flame may connect to whatever greater whole composes this ephemeral realm. I might not have access to glyphcraft, but I still have this most basic magic, the basis, its fundamental form.

My hand takes great effort to move toward the edges of the fog, as though I am pushing it through a viscous fluid. It grows denser the further I reach, until I am straining with my entire body for a single extra centimeter. I am close; it will give, with just a little more, and I will make contact. But before I can break through the barrier, stretch the elastic goop to its limit and shear it apart, I hear Holton move behind me.

“Stop,” he whispers, voice grave. “Something is here.”

“A bit—ngh—late for that, I think.” At this point, it would be as much effort to extract my arm, douse the Flame, as it would be to see it through. “What kind of something?”

“I don’t know! Something’s moving out there! Big, white, like a…tooth, or a fin. Cut through the mist. They got fucked up space whales in here?”

“Let’s not find out.”

I push through, and the dream tears.

—

Tap tap tap tap…

I awoke to the sound of rain. A retina-blast of light from my phone shattered the predawn veil of darkness as I confirmed the time—5:47, a truly ungodly hour, a time during which no sane person should be up. I squeezed my eyes tighter shut and rolled over in bed, hoping the pitter-patter of the rain outside would lull me back to oblivion. I’d just been having an interesting dream, though I couldn’t recall the details and had the sense that it had reached some kind of conclusion. I wanted to get back to it and see what else my subconscious could spin up while I rested a few hours more.

Tap tap tap tap…

If the Radiances wanted me up early to prepare for Saturday or paperwork or something else time-sensitive, well, they could just text me or knock on the door or something. Until then, I was going back to sleep. I might miss breakfast, but that was fine if it meant I could avoid another unpleasant run-in with Yuuka.

Tap tap tap tap…

Just as I had snuggled further into my blanket and hooked my arm under the pillow, my hopes of returning to dream-land were sabotaged by the human brain’s propensity for pattern recognition; I realized that the sound of the rain contained an oddly rhythmic component. Of course, there was the generally random white noise of countless raindrops, but there was also a distinct sequence of tapping noises, four at a time.

Taptaptaptap. Taptaptaptap.

Curiosity got the better of me. I peeled one eye open, turned my head, craned my neck—

There was a silhouette on my balcony, visible only as a dark void, a humanoid shape where the lights of the skyscrapers beyond weren’t, half-obscured in the misty condensation.

Adrenaline flooded my system as I parsed the figure. I bolted upright and scrambled to disentangle myself from the blankets. With my prosthetic foot still on the nightstand, I was limited in how far I could move, but I managed to roll off the edge of the bed and land behind it in a crouch, then half-knelt, half-stood to direct the speartip over the top of the bed like a Roman soldier hiding behind a barricade. Emphatically not Heung-like, in hindsight.

Moments before filling my lungs to yell for backup, I looked at my balcony again and assessed the figure more carefully. During those few seconds of panic, my eyes had begun to adjust to the darkness, and I realized who this was. I caught the shine of rain-soaked hair matted down over shoulders, the silhouette of slender legs. And of course, when the light caught her face just right, an unmistakably brilliant blue shone from my girlfriend’s eyes. Perhaps obvious in hindsight. Hina glinted a toothy grin and waved enthusiastically at me. Her other palm was pressed against the glass; the rhythmic tapping sound had been her galloping her fingernails on the door.

My face turned hot as I realized how my maneuver across the bed must have looked. I averted my eyes from hers—always so difficult to look away from that beautiful sapphire—and hurriedly banished my spear. I knew rationally that I had probably done the right thing, but I couldn’t stop my body from repurposing the adrenal energy of my erroneous fight-or-flight response toward embarrassment. On the balcony, Hina seemed to giggle, shoulders shaking in mirth—or perhaps shivering from the cold, but that didn’t seem like her. While I tried to keep myself from cringing at my reaction, she pointed at the door handle and tilted her head, a wordless request for permission. She was drenched, so I did the decent thing and hurriedly waved assent. The open door brought the dull, distant roar of the rain into immediate clarity, making me flinch and move to cover my ears.

As Hina stepped in, closing the door behind her to re-establish the barrier between cozy interior and unpleasant outdoors, I had to wonder—

“Why the balcony?”

“It’s pretty nice out there!”

I gaped at her, glanced out the window to confirm we were seeing the same rainstorm, then back at her, soaked head to toe. She was already on the move, wringing out her hair with her hands.

“Mind if I dry off?”

If it were any other person, I would have insisted that she make full use of my towels. But because it was Hina, I instead had a terrible premonition that she was about to do something distinctly dog-like.

“I just built that,” I declared, pointing at my PC, hoping to head off the spattering. “Please don’t ruin it.”

“What? Wasn’t gonna. I mean, that sounds fun…” For a terrifying moment, she seemed to be genuinely considering it, ultramarine eyes scanning across my belongings, “But I’m not gonna ruin your room. You think I’d do that?”

“Uh…I guess not? In any case—” I pointed at the bathroom, relieved by the sanity, “Yeah, use what you need.”

“Oh, I was just gonna, uh, blow-dry. With magic. Can I?” In response to my suspicious look, she clarified, “Won’t make a mess, I promise! And I’ll be so warm after.” She batted her eyes at me, probably trying to look alluring—a little too wet-dog at that moment to pull it off, but the message was received.

“Uh, sure.”

“Yay!”

Then there was heat.

—

I woke up again as dawn began to break. This time, the puppygirl equivalent of a heating pad was entangled with me, radiating wonderful warmth across everywhere our bodies touched and our limbs wrapped around one another’s. My hazy return to consciousness brought a dim wonder to the post-coital embrace—before my brain came slightly more online and I remembered that nothing sexual had happened. She’d just stripped her most-soaked outer layers, blow-dried herself, and hopped into bed with me, and I’d fallen right back asleep in short order.

Now, shifting and readjusting slightly against her smaller form, I very much didn’t want to get up, even less so than before. I just wanted to stay here with her in my arms and be warm and safe forever. And I did feel safe, paradoxically—Hina was being very lovey, all snuggles.

“Making up for lost time,” she explained. “Sorry I was out last night.”

“Mm.” Her hair still smelled a bit rainy; tricky to identify, not wet-dog, more like earthy notes layered over the aroma of her shampoo. I felt unimaginably spoiled to have my face pressed into her mane like this. “Find anything?”

“No,” she muttered dejectedly into my chest while her hand idly ran up and down my flank. “I went to run some tests with a friend in Kyoto. Oh! You probably know them, maybe, they’re on the forums. On there, they’re…Gorogorosan?”

I blinked, pulling away from her slightly, enough to look down at her. In hindsight, it wasn’t surprising at all that she knew one of Japan’s premier experts in ripple propagation, but I hadn’t made the connection myself.

“Oh, yeah. So you were testing ripple?”

“Mhm. Trying to figure it out. What they did, where they went. But we didn’t really find anything. Sorry.”

“For what?”

“Not solving it!” She wiggled unhappily.

“‘S fine,” I murmured, letting my eyes slide back shut. “You really don’t have to go that far. How far away is Kyoto, again?”

“Mmmm…two-fifty miles? Sum’n’ like that. Sorry, yeah, I know I’m getting wound up about this, I just don’t want there to be something out there that can hurt you. Any of you,” she added hastily, squirming again. “I think it’s just nerves about the Peacies. I’d rather they just showed up so I can tear ‘em apart and we can be done with this. But that won’t be for a bit, says Yuuka.”

I grimaced a bit at the mention of her abrasive teammate.

“You…talked to her? I seem to recall you saying you were going to…enact violence.”

“Yeah. Took a few swings at her, but she’s always so slippery. Got my point across, though, I think.”

“That being?”

“Stay away from my cutie.” She injected a spine-tickling growl into the words. I shivered at the goosebumps that raced across my arms, heady with the surreality of our intimacy. She ran her hand down my arm possessively, approvingly, and dug her claws into the rough scar tissue. I winced, heart pounding. “Or at least, IDK, treat you with basic respect. That’d be good too.”

“Thanks,” I squeaked out. “Mmf. Ow.”

“Hm? Oh.” The claws retreated and she rubbed the stinging depressions contritely. “Sorry?”

Something giddy and vulnerable took control of me, urged on by the protectiveness on full display. She wouldn’t let anybody else hurt me—but cocooned here together, I was happy to let her do so.

“I didn’t say stop.”

—

Half an hour of ragged-edged gasping and delirious giggles and nibbling kisses later, Hina finally had to get up for work. My collection of hickeys had grown and my hand stung in all sorts of interesting ways, the result of clawing and gnawing and kneading. She seemed positively fixated on my flame-touched limb, seeming to prefer when I touched her with it over my other hand—and touch her I did, all the more reason for me to curse the tyranny of the clock and her presumably important responsibilities when she had to disentangle from me. Then again, an eyeful of mostly naked Hina was a lovely note to end on.

Some time later, I dragged myself out of bed as well and spent the morning enjoying my new PC setup. There was more work to be done, customizing and tuning increasingly miniscule settings, but mostly, I just relaxed with the chatroom on one monitor and YouTube on another, catching up properly on the few days I’d been out of the news cycle. It was good to be back. There were new glyphcraft papers, updates on the Vaetna—nothing pertaining to Bri at a glance—and continuing ripple effects of the non-magical sort from the Thunder Horse Inferno. And beyond my little bubble of awareness, the world kept turning as well, random new politics that I had little time for and banished from my feed as soon as they appeared.

The great invisible algorithms of the modern internet seemed to have picked up that I was now in Japan, and I chuckled dryly as I saw that my interest in magical studies had been correlated with my location and resulted in a slew of Todai videos dotted across my recommended page. I had a degree of academic interest in those, scrubbing through, looking for things to fill in the gaps in my understanding of what they did all day. The through-line across all five of them was that they did a lot of brand collaborations, but I was still a bit hazy on the day-to-day.

As it happened, though, I wound up getting mezzanine seats to exactly that subject in person. My hunger reached a tipping point and overcame inertia to send me creeping out of my room to the top of the stairs, intending to raid the kitchen for snacks and possibly a full meal if something in the fridge struck my fancy. I didn’t make it that far—I stopped short of the top of the stairs as I overheard a pair of raised voices, British and Australian. Fortunate, perhaps, that they were having this conversation—argument, really—in English.

“So you decided without me that I wasn’t going?”

“I’d have assumed you would be fine with it.”

“I would have been, if we’d decided this when it had first come up! But I’ve planned my whole day around it now, so I’m going.”

“This is a serious event, not an excuse for you to hang out with Amane all day.”

“That’s not what I mean. I was going to get some field advocacy work done!”

“Ah. For your research?”

“Yeah!” Yuuka sounded annoyed, as though this shouldn’t need explaining. “I was talking to Inoue-sensei and told him I was going, and he said I could count attendance instead of going to lecture next week because of the whole environmental focus of the fundraising. I was just going to take some pictures with the FOEI people there, y’know, we do that stuff all the time—”

“And were you going to tell me about this? Or PR?”

“Tch. Probably!”

“Probably isn’t enough, Yuuka,” Alice chided. “We’ve been over this. If you want to do a marketing campaign, collab, whatever, you have to run it by us first. And how were you going to juggle that with keeping an eye on Ezzen?”

“You’re sending Ai instead! Why does he have to be my problem? Now there’ll be three of us to keep an eye on the monsterfu—on him.” There was no contrition in the self-correction, but her resigned tone at least suggested that Amane had gotten through to her, even if Hina’s message perhaps hadn’t stuck. “Don’t know why you even fuckin’ bother—”

“Language. Can’t believe you got this vulgar after two years down there—”

“Piss off, it’s part of my brand. There’s a reason my merch sales are the highest—”

“Two reasons.” Alice retorted with uncharacteristic venom in her voice. I could picture her tail lashing angrily. “And they’re both attached to your chest.”

The bickering collapsed into very angry-sounding Japanese. I’d been crouching, a reflexive but pointless attempt to be stealthy as I eavesdropped from out of view up above them—now I sat down more carefully to relieve the stress on my foot, waiting to see if they’d return to English. I didn’t like to pry, but…I was already learning a lot. Yuuka was some kind of environmental sciences major, for one. For two, her relationship with Alice was a little…incendiary, not unlike a rebellious teen and her mother. Weren’t they only two years separated?

“Listen, Alice. Point is, cunt’s a problem.”

“He’s a victim. Like Amane! It’s almost the same situation.”

“He’s a guy, and he’s balls-deep in that thing. I thought after all the shit with Jason you’d be done letting her bring her chew toys back here!”

“Yuuka,” Alice’s voice went gentler. “Have they caused you any actual problems? I think you’re projecting some of your own experiences onto him; he’s been nothing but pleasant and polite. Help me understand where the problem is so we can solve it together. You’re a smart girl, you know—”

“Ugh. Sonna ni yaru na yo. Fine, here’s a reason: Having two of those things here is fucking terrible for Amane. Ai wants him to help with the hosougu for some fucking reason, but with how much red Hina’s gonna make because of him, it just winds up giving Amane a bunch more flare-ups.”

“Is that foresight, or an assumption?”

“I pinged for something this morning! They’re biting each other or some shit.”

I blushed—then my stomach lurched. Had we contributed to some “bad weather” for Amane in our selfish, giddy exchanges of passion?

“And yet Amane has been fine,” Alice retorted, and I sighed in relief. Yuuka’s silence was damning—her foresight was imperfect, it seemed. Alice sighed. “Amane wants him here too. She told you that this morning, so just…I’m not even asking you to get along with him. Avoid him, if you have to, just…right now, you’re being a bigger problem than he is.”

“Right now? You know what’s not right now, Alice? Three weeks from now, when the PCTF will start making offers to take him off our hands. Which we’ll refuse, of course, and then they’ll stop asking and start moving assets up from Okinawa. He is a mess waiting to happen. That’s foresight, and I’m not wrong.”

“Alright,” Alice allowed. “Thank you for the heads-up, it’s good to have some precision on that. Add it to the chart sometime today, please. I’ll inform Hikanome that you’ll also be attending on Saturday. Be nice to Ezzen, please.”

“Fine.” I heard furniture shift, a chair being pushed back. “Don’t know how you can be so calm about it, Ally. He’s going to fuck us all over just by being here. That’s my professional opinion.”

---

Author’s Note:

To sleep. Perchance, to dream. Our first time properly meeting Holton! And Yuuka is still being Yuuka.

Consider next week my break week for this month; next update is Friday, Dec 6. But I’m almost at the end of the tunnel, and then I’ll have way more time to write.

Thanks to the beta readers: Cass, Maria, Zoo, Penguin, Selenium, Softies, and Zak!

That’s all! See you in two weeks!

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 22, 2024

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

Did I want to go to the Hikanome rally? Not particularly. But it was worth discussing.

“You should go,” Ebi opined. Her voice sounded quite distinct from when she was interpreting for Amane, drier and deeper in timbre. “We’ll be a little bit fucked if you don’t.”

“How fucked? Uh—no, stupid question, fucked enough that I should just go, right?”

Amane sipped her juice slowly and carefully through a metal straw, holding the cup in her prosthetic hand.

“Let’s walk it back a little bit.” Ebi’s real-time interpretation for Amane was much less stilted and more articulate than the texting. “Talk us through what you’re worried about. I don’t want you to feel like you’re being pushed into this, but I think you’re underestimating how much we can do to make this safe and painless for you.”

“Safe and painless…”

I looked around my room, at the bed and the skyline through the windows and the newly online computer. The water-cooling system which Amane had helped install buzzed dully, probably the pump—a different auditory character from what I was used to, but not unpleasant. Her assistance had cut down the difficulty of the build dramatically, smoothing over that most nerve-wrackingly unfamiliar part and saving me hours of time, and I was grateful. Despite the language barrier, she was quickly becoming among the most comfortable of them to be around—and more importantly, I believed her when she said they’d be able to keep me safe.

…If not for the uncertainty around my stalker. I had to admit that my recalcitrance about the rally heavily stemmed from that fact, and probably looked pretty unaccountable without being aware of it—it was solely by the team’s general graciousness that I wasn’t being pressed harder. Attempting to bring the encounter up to Yuuka had been a complete and total failure, and Alice was off the table as per Hina’s anxious insistence. But Amane had advocated for me—so she at least deserved to understand that I wasn’t just being generally agoraphobic and anxious. I sighed, avoiding eye contact.

“I do have another reason I don’t want to go. Can you…promise to not tell Alice? Hina doesn’t want her to know.” I knew that sounded unreasonable.

“I thought we already established that I don’t like hiding things from my teammates.” Ebi-Amane’s tone was light, though, and the Amethyst Radiance looked intrigued—then squinted in dramatic suspicion, muttering something to Ebi, who rolled her digital eyes and shook her head, replying in her own voice.

“She promises. So do I. Do tell.”

“Alright, uh. When I was out with Hina yesterday—well, rather, between after I left Tochou and before meeting with Hina, I saw…something.”

I recounted the event and my stalker’s description, the goth-ish woman who was apparently not Yuuka. Amane’s eyes widened, and she rubbed her robotic arm again—but shook her head with disappointment when she couldn’t provide an ID. Her green eyes flicked up to mine, then she leaned back and looked away from me, considering this. Ebi didn’t show any outward response until she translated for Amane once more.

“It’s not Hikanome, as far as the rally is concerned. It could be the Sugawara loyalists, the other Hikanome, but that’s not how they do things. The physical description doesn’t resemble any of the other flamebearers in Japan.” Ebi’s voice changed to give her own take. “And I’m running a general sweep of all flamebearers and not coming up with much that would click with that description. You said she sounded Japanese?”

“Or Korean, or Chinese,” I admitted. “Sorry, not very good with Asian, uh, phenotype—accents, faces—not a racism thing, I swear, just—”

“You’re good, man.” Ebi shrugged. “Not a Hikanome flamebearer, and I have no idea why one of Korea or China’s ops would be plainclothes and cloaked if they were scouting you. Well, cloaked or projected or whatever. Amane—” she conferred with the girl sitting between us, then looked up at me. “Obviously, we gotta figure out who this is. But it’s almost certainly not Hikanome, and it sounds recreational.”

“Recreational?”

“Well, like it wasn’t somebody out to find you, and it was dumb chance. Or they were investigating ‘Todai’s new flamebearer’ but didn’t know that would be you specifically. My point is that this doesn’t sound like a narrowly averted abduction attempt or anything.”

“Meaning…it won’t be a problem if I go to the rally.”

“Yeah.”

Ebi’s voice switched back to faux-Amane as the Radiance kept talking.

“We’d be able to confirm for sure if you went. If they are somehow affiliated with Hikanome, they’ll likely either show up there—and we’ll deal with it then—or it’ll be unrelated and you have nothing to fear. Hina’s nose didn’t give you any other clues?”

I was grateful to get back into the grit of the magic.

“She identified the vague ripple, red-white, and—well, remember yesterday’s thing? With the gun?” I needed a moment to calm myself with a sip of juice and a pistachio, annoyed at the way my heart rate jumped even thinking about it. Amane nodded, clearly following along as I explained. “The remote projection lattice we used is close to whatever the stalker was using, according to Hina.” Was “stalker” even the right term anymore? “Without actual scanning hardware, it’s hard to do ripple tracking or anything. Hina said Yuuka could do that too, so I tried to talk to her about it earlier, which…”

We all sighed. Yuuka’s dislike of me was tangling this. Amane thought on it for a few moments.

“We’ll work on Yuuka; she’d probably be willing to help if somebody other than you or Hina explained it. So, is that it? Any other things you want us to address about the rally? I know it’s a lot to ask, and if there’s anything we can do to make it feel less overwhelming…”

I resisted the urge to bring up how I didn’t trust cults. From how the Radiances had spoken about Hikanome, that seemed likely to turn into an argument with Amane especially. I’d ask Hina about it later, maybe. So other than that…

“Uh…” It was embarrassing to admit the emotional subtleties. “Yesterday, I discovered that crowds stress me out, apparently. But I’m not sure how much that’s my anxiety about the stalker specifically versus just general…inexperience? Being outside?” I winced. “But I know that’s not really enough reason not to go, and I don’t want to be even more of a burden when this is such a critical thing for the—” I cut off my own rambling. “It’s not important. I’ll go.”

Amane shook her head.

“Don’t be hasty. Let’s talk it through, this is why I brought it up. You mean you feel unsafe, even aside from the ‘stalker’?”

“…I guess so, yeah.”

She nodded knowingly.

“I get it. I never turn human when I’m outdoors.”

“What?” Her phrasing on that was weird. “Like, you stay mantled?”

“Feel exposed without it. I mean, I have all sorts of wards in this,” she brandished her arm, “but it still makes me nervous. We can get you some wards of your own, for sure. I’ll help you with it tomorrow, probably, if the weather holds.”

Somehow, despite the violent nature of the events that had brought me to Todai, I hadn’t even considered passive means of magical defense. In retrospect, it immediately felt irresponsible of Alice and Hina to have taken me out without even mentioning it. The two must have been sure of their abilities to defend me from abduction, but if somebody had actually wanted me dead and deployed quick-kill magic to make it happen?

The people I’d murdered were a perfect example of how utterly vulnerable a standard human was to magic. The human body is a terribly squishy, frail thing—and being a flamebearer didn’t inherently make me any better protected, just a juicier target. Hina and her ilk, if they existed, were the probable exception, but even she wouldn’t survive even something far lower-caliber than what we had used yesterday.

My spear—already demoted back to toy status, little better than a safety blanket—fell further in my estimation of its ability to seriously defend me. I wasn’t Heung, whose onyx blade could sever ripple to cut spells from the air and who could walk astride the lightning. I needed wards, passive defenses that would at least buy me enough time to snapweave or activate more serious countermeasures. I was almost certainly fine within Lighthouse Tower, but outside? Amane had pinpointed my anxiety exactly.

“I—yes, please, that’d be great. Um, do the others have their own projectors, or…?”

“It depends. Alice has a…” Amane conferred with Ebi for a moment. The teal robot shrugged. “She has a pretty standard personal ward kit. Sticks to the inside of whatever she’s wearing, on her back.”

All first-order, then, for a flat, ergonomic, two-dimensional form factor. Not as powerful as it could be with other choices of glyphs, but that was the sort of tradeoff you had to make. I ventured to guess at the others.

“Hina doesn’t strike me as the type to bother with those at all?”

Amane mustered an impressive scowl.

“Nope. She’ll smell or hear it coming, or however that works, and then not dodge completely, just let it graze her, because it’s fun.” I winced. She mastered her expression and continued. “And Yuuka has what Alice does, but if she’s ever in a position to get hit, shit’s gone sideways, so it’s a formality.” She stopped and glared at Ebi for that vulgar translation, and got a shit-eating digital grin in reply. The robot turned to me of her own accord to finish the set. “And Ai has her tattoo binding. Which—wait, we haven’t told you about that yet.”

“Her what?”

My phone buzzed; Ebi had sent me another zip file.

“Take a look at this once you’ve got your gamer cave all nice and set up.” She looked down at Amane questioningly, who nodded. “We’ll stop interrogating you until that’s done, I think. Ready to get back to it?”

—

Even with the PC itself ostensibly up and running, it still took another half hour to get the various peripherals and furniture set up. I was supplied with a worryingly expensive mechanical keyboard, paired with an ergonomic mouse; secondary and tertiary monitors, joining the primary one for a trio of swing-arm displays I could orient however I pleased; zip ties galore to contain the growing mess of cables. Ebi got under the desk to install those instead of making us frail, disabled humans do it. The warzone of spent packaging materials was tamed into neat piles organized by type, and what began to emerge in its place was an eye-wateringly expensive PC setup whose specs would probably give some of my friends a stroke.

We chatted through the process; for instance, Amane filled me in on some of the specifics of Yuuka’s cursed eye. Ebi had helped put her hair up in a ponytail as she had for Ai the other day. Amane’s hair was comparatively longer and straighter, well-cared-for and jet-black.

“So it’s more like one of Hina’s mutations?”

“More willingly chosen than that. It was a blood magic deal.”

“Was it…worth it?”

“She thinks so,” Ebi put in for herself.

I swallowed.

“Um—the fact that she doesn’t like me, could that be…not so baseless? Like, could I do something nasty in the future that she’s responding to now, and doesn’t care for the difference?”

Ebi shrugged, and Amane shook her head.

“It’s not that precise. Her clarity is proportional with the ripple generated by an event, so it’s minimal for mundane stuff and only really big for significant magical events. But yes, you’ve read her character right, that kind of lack of distinction between present and future does sound like her.”

“And,” I was still trying to wrap my head around this part while I fiddled with the swing arms of the monitors, “how does this not violate free will, exactly? If the silver ripple must always eventually be reflected in forward-facing standard-spectrum? Don’t those become fixed points in time? Otherwise you’re not accounting for time symmetry.”

“The fourth dimension doesn’t make sense either,” Amane pointed out. I grimaced; magic had indeed poked a variety of holes in our understanding of physics, and the addition—or discovery—of a fourth spatial dimension was probably the biggest of those. “I think they’re connected.”

“My will feels free enough,” Ebi countered. “And if I’m fine, so are you guys, probably. Not that anybody knows for sure.”

“Other than the Vaetna,” I replied on reflex. Amane tossed a spent piece of bubble wrap onto the plastic pile. The Radiance was favoring her prostheses, unsurprisingly.

“Says who?” Ebi waggled her eyebrows. “They don’t know everything, Ez.”

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” I needled.

“Oh, don’t be a dick.”

Amane giggled at that, picking up on the joking tone even without translation.

“Thanks for not pressing my beliefs about that,” I conceded, wary that this was a complicated subject, the sort of thing that routinely turned into huge arguments on the forums. “I, um, tend to default to the Spire for this stuff. I’m sort of…everything I’ve seen from you in the past few days, I’m just automatically referencing it against the Vaetna. No offense.”

“Completely understandable,” Amane replied through Ebi. I was surprised at how easily I’d acclimated to the strange interpretation setup, where both people’s voices were coming from the same mouth. Speaker, really, but whatever. “It’s pretty inevitable to compare. There’s a lot we have in common. Power. Ability to make a difference.” Amane said something else in Japanese, which Ebi crossed her arms and apparently refused to translate. They bickered for a moment, and then my phone buzzed.

ebi-furai: amethyst is making an effort to be nice right now, but she’s a bit touchy about the spire

ebi-furai: they didn’t rescue her, ya know?

That hadn’t occurred to me, but I really didn’t want to get into it and potentially ruin what had overall been an extremely pleasant evening with the worst possible intersection of our conflicting personal traumas and more broad-scale politics. I tried to change the topic.

“Um. I’m trying to change the topic.”

“Smooth.”

I shouldered past Ebi’s needling and circled back to a bit of magic-related curiosity, an inquisitive itch that needed scratching.

“Uh. So, mantles.”

“Go on.”

“Don’t make fun of me,” I muttered. “Right, yeah. And—well, I haven’t really taken the deep dive into your mantles’ diagrams yet, so I’m spitballing here—the ward bindings from earlier. The mantles themselves have those too, I assume? On top of being physically tough?”

“Yeah.” Ebi left the rest to Amane.

“Yes. Our transformations might be dermis-derived,” she said, catching on to my implicit comparison to the Vaetna, “but that doesn’t mean they’re invincible. It’s configurable, like everything else. So we can modulate power draw for wards, weapons, mobility, and sensory input; turn them up or down as we need to. It really is like piloting a mecha.”

“Thus your choice of…shape?” I ventured.

“Yes.”

“So—I’m trying to get a picture of, uh, power levels. ‘Not invincible’ implies your transformations have taken real damage in combat before.” The same could not be said for the real thing, proper Vaetna dermis.

She shrugged, rising from where she’d been sitting on the floor to return to the edge of the bed. Ebi remained standing, but moved slightly to still hover just outside arm’s reach of her charge. Amane carefully, gently, undid her ponytail, letting loose a wave of glossy black hair that cascaded down her shoulders.

“If we get hit hard enough, the mantle shuts down so the blue channels don’t overload and set the whole thing ablaze. So, no, the dermis itself has never broken, but there are effective upper limits. And bad weather can disrupt the LM, too, like the other night. That’s mostly just a problem for me, since I’m more sensitive to red, but in theory, it can happen to any of us. That’s why Yuuka is so valuable; she lets us know if we’re taking a bad fight.”

“Ah.” I mirrored Amane’s shift in posture, at last sitting in the office chair I’d been focused on setting up for the last ten minutes; I finally registered the soreness that had been building undetected in my lower back. Thankfully, the chair’s plushness was such that I could sink my hips into it for relief. I appreciated that it wasn’t one of those racing chairs; I wasn’t really in that gamer demographic. “So if I’m understanding right: your mantles can just…fail, if the ripple conditions are bad enough? That seems like a liability.”

“Bad and specific. Your average inferno won’t do it. And your average flamebearer wouldn’t be able to put together exactly the right frequencies to make it work.”

“Could…the Hikanome ones?” That was my anxiety talking, more than anything, but there was also an academic hunger for knowledge.

“Hikanome? None of them are as good at the technical side as you or me. Well, the two auxiliaries are, but they’re not fighters, it’s all distributed. The whole appeal of the cult is that you get a greater and greater sliver of Flame as you rise in the ranks. But they’re not dangerous anymore.”

“So this combat experience of yours is from…”

Amane waved her mechanical hand in an “I give up” motion.

“You want me to say ‘from fighting the PCTF’, which is somewhat true, but not as much as you’d think. We didn’t really start working on the mantles until after I came back and we got the flame donation. So a lot of that combat data is from the Blue Spark Incident, which was the first test run of the mantles, and then from some classified counterespionage stuff. Like I said, that’s the kind of thing you don’t have to touch, you don’t have any duty there.”

I digested that for a minute.

“Wait, so, if I have the timeline right: from the start, through the firestorms and the first few years, up through their, uh—rescue of you?” I side-eyed Ebi, wondering if that was an acceptable term. Her digital face momentarily flickered into a thumbs-up emoji. “All of that, you weren’t using mantles?”

“I’m not the right person to ask about that,” Amane pointed out. “I wasn’t there. But yes, in short. They used wards and other techniques.”

“Oh. Yeah, that makes sense. You wouldn’t have been involved on account of the, uh…” I took a gamble on a joke. “Kidnapping.”

God, I was terrible at levity. I cringed. Amane didn’t seem to mind, thankfully—though Ebi spiced her interpretation with a deadpan look.

“Mhm.” Amane nodded. “Ask Ai. She’s the clever one, and she still uses the old methods.”

“Why’s that?”

Amane said something in Japanese which Ebi didn’t translate. The cyborg poked the android in annoyance, who returned the poke and released a distinctly digital imitation of a sigh, clearly more fabricated than her usually flawless imitation of human voices. Her own voice, not Amane’s, and especially autotuned, signaling…annoyance? Discomfort?

“Mantling really pushes Ai to her limits, magically speaking. The weave is sparser, because a lot of her Flame is tied up in…me. So if her mantle were to overload in the wrong way, and the lattice got shredded, it’d snap back across her whole Flame, and it’d be lights out for me.”

“Holy shit.” I hadn’t thought that through until now, but it made sense. “So your life is—contingent on hers? And…oh, Christ, there’s probably a range limit too, isn’t there?”

Ebi nodded slowly and seriously—then clapped her hands as if to banish the unsettling line of thought. She crossed all her fingers but the index ones and pointed at me in dual, spliced-together finger guns.

“So—you going on Saturday?”

I gave her a flat look, but the topic change was warranted.

“What happened to not being hasty?”

“Eh, Amethyst’s itching to talk you around, I can see it.”

Amane reached out and flicked Ebi’s waist plates with a tink, more reminiscent of ceramic than carbon fiber, and added a light verbal admonishment to go with it. Ebi raised her hands innocently.

“Hey, alright, yeesh. I’m just a bit antsy for what might happen if we have to fight the Peacies over you without Hikanome’s cover. Ai risks my life too when she goes out there.”

“That’s—a good point. Fuck.” Another reason I should just go and stop waffling.

Amane waved for interpretation, and Ebi’s vocal timbre shifted.

“I wanted you to know that part as well, from Ebi herself. The others sometimes—well, they don’t forget she’s there, but she and I don’t have as much…agency.”

Ebi switched to her own voice and continued. “So, that’s the cards on the table on my end. I—we know it’s a lot to lay on you, but that’s the reality.”

“So I should go.” I rubbed my hand contemplatively, not quite resigned, weighing my options. There was an obvious alternative. “Or—I get out of your hair entirely, go to the Gate, right? Then I’m safe from the PCTF, no fight to put you all at risk, they wouldn’t dare bring it to the Spire. Hell, I could even come back here in the future, or collaborate on those projects remotely, just—sit out the storm in the safest place, yeah? Until things move on and the Peacies get occupied with other stuff.”

It was the most elegant option, free of political bullshit, safest for all.

“Not to undercut Ebi’s concerns, but I think the danger isn’t as great as you think,” Amane countered. “Not yet.”

For reply, I sat up in my chair and squinted in confusion at her prostheses—almost certainly impolite, but at that moment, I was genuinely baffled.

“The PCTF are…plenty dangerous. They kidnapped both of us. They…” I gestured vaguely at her prostheses, then mine.

“They did,” Amane acknowledged. “But one thing at a time. The PCTF knows you’re valuable,” Amane practically spat the word; Ebi imitated the tone of disgust. “They’ll apply a lot of diplomatic pressure and that could escalate. But they move slowly for things outside their territory, and Japan qualifies as such. They know better than to rush into fucking with us. They’re not a problem yet.”

“What does ‘yet’ have to do with it? It’ll still be a problem eventually; I could still head it off entirely by going to the Spire.”

“Hear me out, please. By contrast, Hikanome are the ones pressuring us now, and I want to show you that they are not a threat in the same way, not any more. They can be opposed to us, but if you go on Saturday, you will not be in danger.”

“She’s saying that because all the dangerous parts are six feet under or comatose,” Ebi added cheerfully. Amane glared at her, but she didn’t shrink, returning the gaze insolently.

“Okay,” I began, trying to sort it out. “So—yes, alright, that does make me feel better, but if Hikanome don’t have teeth, why is Alice pushing so hard for me to make goodwill between you and them?”

“Not being dangerous isn’t the same as not being influential. The average Hikanome member likes Todai too much for the church itself to ever be real political enemies, but we won’t get their backing—and by extension stronger support from the government—when the PCTF do show up, unless we take steps to appease them right now. And you’re critical to that, unfortunately.”

“What’s your point? Still not really seeing why I should stay here instead of solving the whole issue by leaving.”

“I stayed.” She said that in English, in her own voice, before motioning for Ebi to continue interpreting. “And I’m glad I did. I could have gone to the Spire, run away, and I didn’t. I was afraid! But I stayed, and fought, and won. We took apart Hikanome, we forced the PCTF back, and we founded Todai as it is now.”

“So you want me to fight, after all?”

Amane rubbed her face with her organic hand.

“No. I want to show you that you can be less afraid. Don’t you want that? To feel safe when you go outside, instead of having to cower in the Spire for, what, the rest of your life? You’ve just gained the power to make a difference, out here, the kind of power people dream about. That shouldn’t be a reason to run and hide. That’s the evil of the PCTF.”

I couldn’t deny that she was winning me over. I’d wanted this power so desperately, and so far my main response to receiving it had been to run away, because it felt like that was all I could do—and I was planning to continue to do so. Was that what I had dreamed of? She went on.

“And if it really doesn’t work out, you can leave. At any time; the Gate will still always be there. And if you’re still here when the PCTF arrives—that won’t be your fight. It’s ours, and we’ll win. Is that enough safety nets for you?”

With her plea complete, she at last allowed herself to double over and lean onto her side, wincing and suffocating a groan—but didn’t break eye contact with me. She let Ebi help her sit back up and waited for my reply. I had an obvious objection.

“Going to the Spire is my dream. It’s not cowering.”

“Nah, it is.” Ebi replied while she shifted her hand to some device in a blur and interfaced with a slot in Amane’s mechanical arm. “I know that’s, like, your thing, being a Vaetnaboo. But if you go to the Spire, you don’t become a Vaetna. They’re around, sure, but you’d stay in their shadow for the rest of your life. The Spire doesn’t give a fuck about you, sorry.”

Ow. “Hey, the fuc—”

“But the girls? They care, man. They give several fucks, if you haven’t noticed. Trust me, they don’t want you around because you’re politically convenient. And I’m pretty sure you don’t just want to ditch them either. Do you want to be friends with them or not?”

That was so direct that I had to abandon my objection to her attack on my beliefs.

“What’s it to you, Ebi? You’re okay with the idea of me staying here, with what you said could happen to you if Ai has to fight? That feels contradictory, and you haven’t exactly been nice.” I immediately walked that back a little, muttering. “…although the standard of care has been respectable, and I’m very grateful.”

The robot shrugged carefully, arm still attached to Amane’s, and nodded to the cyborg girl.

“I trust her judgment. And you’re alright.”

That was definitely an understatement of Ebi’s feelings. Amane agreed.

“Tsundere,” she rasped, earning what was definitely a “stay still” from Ebi, clear and familiar even though I couldn’t understand the language.

“Um—fuck. This is a lot.” How had her asking about the Hikanome rally turned into a debate about the Spire? Ultimately, they were connected; it was now clear to me that my choices were either to stay and attend or just leave for the Gate now. And of those two…

“It’s the same things I had to think about, and yes, it’s a lot.” Ebi-Amane sighed, free of the pain in the woman’s real voice. “And I do want to make sure you have the time to decide, like you wanted. But it was important to me that you made an informed decision. I’m sorry if I upset you. And I’m sorry if Ebi upset you.”

Ebi switched to her own voice. “I’m not.”

“No—it’s fine. I think…you’re right. I should go on Saturday. It’s…being afraid sucks, you’re right. I do want to go outside. I’m in fuckin’ Tokyo, for fuck’s sake, might as well make something of it, even if it’s just for Star. The Gate will always be an option, right?”

“It will. If things get too hot, we’d still completely understand if you want out.”

“But you wouldn’t come with, would you? Even if this escalates to…all-out war with the PCTF. Which is sounding distressingly plausible.”

“No. We have unfinished business.”

Her tone was chilling.

“Alright, fuck. You’ve won me over,” I admitted. “We’ll…give it a shot on Saturday. I’ll go to the thing.”

It felt good to reach a resolution, even if I hadn’t taken anywhere near as much time as I’d expected. Amane’s reasoning resonated with me, even if both she and Ebi had mildly upset me with arguments I’d need some time to process. And I couldn’t quite believe the latter was willing to risk her own life and limb for that, not to mention the overall, larger-scale ramifications of what would happen if Japan’s premier VNTs went to war with the West—one thing at a time, I decided. I had an out at the Gate if I changed my mind.

—

Amane had to adjourn to her room soon after, as the energy expenditure of the evening’s labors and her final plea caught up to her. She left in good spirits, Ebi closely in tow.

I was left alone once more, but for the first time since coming here, I had a big swivel chair to sink into and a PC to hop on, a far more natural state of being for me than struggling in bed with my laptop’s too-small screen. We’d almost entirely completed the physical setup of my new workspace, but the digital side, my usual suite of programs and settings, would take hours more to entirely set up—or at least that’s what I had thought. In reality, the penthouse had lightning-fast internet; what I had expected to be at least two hours of downloads alone was done in hardly ten minutes, and I was neck-deep in installation wizards and config settings when my phone buzzed again with a text from Amane.

Amane: Thanks for spending time with me (and hearing me out)!

Amane: Dinner’s ready if you’re hungry (っ˘ڡ˘ς)

Amane: I won’t be there (stupid stomach) but neither will Yuuka, so it should be nice ദ്ദി ˉ͈̀꒳ˉ͈́ )✧

Amane: (written by ebi-TL)

I couldn’t help but smile at the little emoticons. Anxiety followed shortly after; what was the correct way to reply to a message like this? I gave it my best shot.

Ezzen: I had fun too. Are you feeling alright?

Amane: Good enough!

Ezzen: real

That got a dry chuckle out of me. It was almost inevitable that somebody in her position would develop a droll humor about it; there was just no other way to live. Even I, socially stunted as I was, was able to joke about my hand in the chatroom—and more recently, about my foot. The hours of work had left it aching a bit, and I knew that running it under some warm water would probably help…but this chair was so very comfortable.

My stomach broke the tie: out of the chair, Ez, there’s food. I pushed myself up, stiff and a little sore in my hips from all the leaning over, feeling rather like some kind of reptile leaving its den for a bit of sun and sustenance. Well, the sun was already down, but in this case it was more metaphorical, the wonderful and nerve-wracking warmth of social interaction—because Amane was right, I did like the Radiances.

To my surprise, dinner was not home-cooked. I’d sort of assumed that Hina would whip something up as we had done with lunch, but instead, I found Alice slumped over the low table next to a bag with familiar golden arches. Her face was buried in her crossed arms. Had she fallen asleep right there, still in her suit? I was already treading lightly to spare my foot, and she didn’t stir until I sat gingerly across from her and reached for the bag. She raised her head slowly, tousled hair falling messily over her face.

“Hi.”

“Hi.” I pointed at the bag questioningly.

“Yeah. There’s a plain one. Didn’t know what you liked.”

Her head flopped back down onto her arms.

There were things to discuss—but she clearly needed the rest. I helped myself to the bag, searching to find the hamburger and an associated baggie of fries. McDonald’s Japan was apparently indistinguishable from its English cousins. No drinks, so I got up and poured myself a glass of water and realized in the process that I had learned where they kept the cups: the cabinet directly opposite the dishwasher. A little more like home—a little bit harder to leave, if it eventually came to that.

As I sat back down and got to eating, I wondered where Hina was.

ezzen: Where’s Hina?

ebi-furai: need a blowjob already?

ezzen: wtf

ebi-furai: :3

ebi-furai: hunting your mysterious friend, maybe

ezzen: You don’t know?

ebi-furai: she likes to stay out at night, idfk what shes up to

ebi-furai: back before midnight probably

ezzen: Could you ask for me?

ebi-furai: you dont have your girlfriends number?

ezzen: No. And she’s not my girlfriend.

ebi-furai: im not engaging with this

ebi-furai: one sec

A few seconds later, my phone began to buzz. A jolt of surprise curdled into fear in my stomach—I hated phone calls. Fuck you, Ebi. The caller ID said it was unknown—but I knew what Ebi was playing at. Conscious of Alice apparently asleep across the table from me, I hesitantly stood and moved past her toward the rest of the sitting area, maybe twenty feet away, and cupped my mouth as I picked up.

“Hello—”

“Heyyy, cutie! Ebi gave me your number!”

There was a lot of background noise on her end. Driving, maybe?

“Um, hi, Hina,” I whispered. “Sorry, Alice is…asleep, I think? So I’m trying to stay quiet—”

“You busy?”

“Not really? I’m eating dinner, and then I was just gonna hang out and keep setting up my PC…”

“Cool, cool, uh—you wanna come out and spend some time together?”

“…No? Sorry,” I added hastily. “Just…not my comfort zone. Going out and partying.”

“Oh, no, that’s not what I meant.” I heard a fuzzy slap noise that might have been a facepalm. “I’m chasing a lead on your stalker!”

My heart rate spiked.

“Did you find something?”

“Well, I’m in Kyoto right now, dropping in on a contact who I figured might be able to identify them, and they’re sending me on a bit of a chase into the mountains.”

“Wait, hold on—Kyoto? You wanted me to come to another city? How was I supposed to get there?”

“Uhhhhhh…”

Now it was my turn to facepalm, but a grin was infecting my face. What an adorable oversight.

“Hina.”

“Cutie!”

“Stay safe, yeah?”

“I will! Love you too! Mmmm—not gonna get home until pretty late. Like, three AM late, so…no fun Valentine’s stuff tonight. Sorry.”

“No—problem?” I was wrong-footed by the casual use of the word “love.” “I’ve got my hands full with computer stuff tonight anyway, I think.”

“Okay! I’ll let you know if I find anything! Texting okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Kay! Byebye!”

“Bye—”

I was cut off by the beep of the line going dead. Alice spoke behind me.

“That Hina staying out late?”

“Yeah.” I turned to look at the dragon-girl, hoping she wouldn’t ask about what exactly Hina was up to; she was still in the dark about my stalker. Maybe I should just tell her? But I wanted to discuss that with Hina first—realized I’d missed my chance on the phone. “Sorry if I woke you.”

“No problem, I wasn’t really asleep anyway. Just dozing.” She rubbed her eyes with one hand while fishing in the takeout bag with the other. “Have a nice time with Amane?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” She extracted a wrapped burger with a wince, reaching back to rub where her lower back met the base of her tail. Her clothes were modified to make room. “Sore,” she explained.

I wondered if I ought to tell her that I knew about the situation with her dragon parts. Perhaps Amane should be present? I walked back over to the table to resume my own meal.

“Just from sitting down?”

“Yeah. It was meetings all day today, and after lunch, I didn’t get a chance to do my stretches.” She gestured at where she was sitting. “This didn’t help either, being folded over like this. If you catch me sleeping like that, poke me, please?”

“Um, sure.” Fuck it, easier one first. “Listen, uh—Amane told me what’s going on with you.” Alice went stiff, frozen mid-bite. A bad sign for sure, but I forged on, avoiding eye contact. Instead, I admired how the scales on her tail caught the light. “She—well, I get why you didn’t want to tell me, but I want…to help. If you’re open to it.”

“You want…to…help? How so?” Her voice was halting, uncomfortable. I felt bad for bringing up such a personal topic with so little overture, but I didn’t know how else to lead into it.

“Uh, well, I’m not really sure yet. It’s a pretty unique case, right?”

“Probably. There…could be more. I’d like to think there are.” She took a deep breath. “The only other cases I know used more mundane means.”

“Mundane? Like, surgery?”

“Yes?” She sounded confused, as though it were obvious.

“Then…well, okay, obviously we’re not going to hit on a solution right now, but the first place my mind goes is, I guess…have you tried just cutting it off?” I shuddered to think of how messy such an amputation would be as I eyed her tail. “The best biomancy is no biomancy, yeah?”

Alice unfroze, resuming her bite, and didn’t respond until she’d chewed, swallowed, and taken a drink. She twisted to look back at her tail as she thumped it and released a dry sigh, apparently warming up to the topic.

“Yes, when it was smaller. Damn thing grows back, gecko-style.”

“Really.” That was intriguing. “Over how long?”

“Maybe five months, and it’s all real flesh. If you think my appetite is bad now…argh, I’m grumbling. Sorry for not telling you about the dragon stuff.”

“It’s alright. Um—I’d like to know more, but it sounds like this…isn’t a great topic for dinner,” I conceded, eying the bite marks in my burger.

“It’s not,” she agreed, doing the same.

“Sorry for bringing it up.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

We fell into silence as we ate. Alice went through two chicken sandwiches, a bag of fries, a box of onion rings, and a milkshake in addition to her soft drink. It wasn’t the voracious rapidity with which I’d seen Hina eat yesterday, but she just didn’t stop. The laptop remained on the table, but it was pushed to the side, seeing as how both of her hands always had some kind of food or drink in them. After a few minutes, I was done with my own comparatively meager meal.

“Uh.”

Alice held up a finger to stop me, chewed, swallowed, and took a sip of her drink before replying.

“What’s up?”

“So I talked to Amane.”

“Yeah?”

“She…convinced me? I don’t know if that’s the right word, but—I want to go to the thing on Saturday.”

“Oh!” Alice perked up. “That was faster turnaround than you said.”

“Yes, well, uh…”

“No, that’s great, really! Can I RSVP now? You, Amane, Yuuka—ah, do you not want Yuuka there? I still need to talk to her, but even once I do, your comfort is paramount, and she’s, er, not great at that. So…”

She had already produced her laptop from pocketspace, eager to get this over with.

“Uh. I don’t know. Amane…she definitely wants to go, but she’d need at least one other Radiance there, right?”

“Yeah. I appreciate you being considerate of her needs. Um—it’d probably be Ai, then. She’d have to reschedule, but it’s far enough out…”

“If Ai is alright with it.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Uh, Amane and Ebi…told me about her issue too. Power draw concerns, if my understanding is accurate.”

“Ah, yeah, that was going to have to come up eventually.” Her face fell slightly. “Sorry again for not telling you these things. I just didn’t want you to feel pressured or—”

“I mean, of course I felt pressured, but I wouldn’t say that’s your fault—”

“Your circumstances are really quite messed up, and properly acknowledging that—”

“I’m not going to run off to the Gate,” I interrupted, and she shut her mouth, looking sheepish.

“Oh. Really? I, er, didn’t want to bring it up, because I was worried you wouldn’t consider any other option, and…” she admitted, shamefaced.

“It’s complicated. And I still want the option. But Amane said some things that really, um, hit me where it hurt, so to speak. In a…good way?” I was still working through that part; I forged on. “So I want to…try being a flamebearer before I go hide in the Spire, I guess. Because it’d be good for me, or something. That’s how she framed it.”

A smile broke through Alice’s hasty remorse.

“Yeah. It’s been good for her.”

“Yeah.”

We sat there in silent…camaraderie? It was a little too awkward to be called that, but it was nice. Whatever it was, it felt like she and I understood the same things about Amane. She broke the moment by returning to her laptop.

“Alright, then…Ai can be the second, I think. I’d have to ask her for some of the scheduling, but about the Flame issue…I really can’t picture the situation turning dangerous, let alone enough that she’d be at risk of overextending. And she’ll definitely want to go if the idea is to chaperone you.”

“If you say so,” I conceded. “Um, Amane insisted really hard earlier that it was safe, but…they’re really alright? Not…dangerous, or even just generally sinister in that way cults tend to be?”

“They’re legit. They’re…eccentric in some of their practices, and you remember how Ai was talking about them this morning. Some of our beliefs don’t mesh. But that all pales compared to how they used to be. If you’re really worried about danger…let’s say the worst-case scenario happens, and it’s all a trap by Sugawara’s remaining goons, somehow conspiring with a PCTF grab team. Which, for the record, is not a scenario that could actually happen in reality, for a whole host of reasons.”

“Okay…” I nodded along.

“Then, in that impossible hypothetical, things could get explosive. Violent. But even then, Amane could clean them all up herself, and honestly, push comes to shove, so could Ai. She’s far from useless in a fight, believe me. Plus, I’m sure that once Hina hears about this, she’ll want to be around, even though neither she nor I want her to be officially present. So that’s three Radiances, in effect. Feel good about that?”

“Good enough,” I admitted, feeling reassured. It was nice to get some confirmation of Amane’s confidence—but my apprehension wasn’t completely gone, and ultimately Amane was right that it wouldn’t dissipate without some exposure therapy.

“Good.” Alice nodded, stretching, looking less tired, more energized. I was reminded of when I’d first met Ai, the way she’d lit up and revitalized when working on my spear binding. This was similar, but in a different specialization. “I’ll ask them to be considerate about limiting how much you have to appear in front of the crowds, all that. Leave that stuff to me. Where’s the email—ah, there.”

I’d communicated my big important decision, and the weight on my chest was replaced by a different sort of pressure, a nervousness of having a scheduled social ordeal, a feeling I mostly associated with doctor and bank visits, given how rarely I had really spoken to people prior to now. What awaited me on Saturday was far more consequential: I would walk into the jaws of one of Todai’s foundational opponents, as the star of the whole event, and that was nerve-wracking to even consider—but I’d be in the pleasant company of Amane and Ai, so it’d be alright, hopefully. Hopefully.

Also hopefully, I hoped we’d be able to confirm a negative on my stalker, conclusively prove it wasn’t a Hikanome flamebearer so I could rest easy on that side of things. Fingers crossed that that wouldn’t even be a problem by then; maybe Hina’s investigation in Kyoto would lead us right to who it was, and then at least we’d be planning around a known quantity.

Alice told me that preparations would begin tomorrow. She did her best to assuage my anxiety, assured me it’d be alright, nothing too difficult or unpleasant, echoing the same things Amane had said. There was a lot to do, but I’d come to my decision early enough in the week that it wouldn’t be overwhelming, supposedly.

But that was tomorrow. I had tonight to myself, since Hina wouldn’t be around, and I had unfinished business with my PC. After finishing dinner and wishing Alice a good night, I returned to my room. I spent hours into the night tinkering with GWalk, getting everything just how I liked it; signing into the chatroom to the celebration of my friends; redownloading my meager collection of games. And for the last few hours, as my digital environment became more and more familiar, I could almost forget that I was on the other side of the world. Eventually, at two in the morning, I went to bed, truly comfortable for perhaps the first time since arriving here.

And I dreamed once more.

---

Author’s Note:

It’s official: Ez is gettin’ in there! Belly of the beast! Well done, Amane. That discussion was pretty hard to write, but I’m pretty happy with the character legwork we got out of it. And Ebi’s situation gets that much more fucked up, yay.

Heads up: the next couple chapters will be slightly shorter (4000-6000 instead of 6000-8000). I will become less busy soon!

The usual:

– Thanks, beta readers (Cass, Zak, Maria, Zoo, Selenium, Penguin, Softies). Your feedback on this chapter really elevated it.

See you all next week!

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 15, 2024

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

Valentine’s Day. A day I’d basically never had any reason to care about, and especially not one I’d expected to become relevant in the strange circumstances in which I found myself. My relationship with Hina was far too fresh for the day to really feel significant. We’d just established we didn’t love each other—not yet, as she’d said, so this felt like jumping the gun a bit, yet here we were.

The puppy proffered the box excitedly at me. I gingerly, hesitantly drew the heart-shaped chocolate from its foam cozy.

“Am I supposed to eat it now?”

“Go for it!”

I bit off half. It tasted…like chocolate. I didn’t have much in the way of a frame of reference; my culinary palette was generally diverse, but this was an exception. When was the last time I’d even eaten chocolate? Before Dad had died? Bereft of comparisons, I did my best to evaluate it on its own terms: smooth and creamy, rich and sweet without overpowering the natural bitterness of the cacao—I startled myself when I crunched into something at the core. Hazelnut, maybe? It went down well with the last of my iced tea.

“Thanks.”

“Mhm! I get some for everybody every year. The girls, the Hikanome folks, Ogawa…every one of us in Japan!”

“Wait, what? As in, every flamebearer?”

“Yep!”

“Oh.” So it wasn’t a romantic thing; more obligatory? Or just an idiosyncrasy of hers. Nuance aside, the point was that I wasn’t special for receiving this. “Hold on, so this was Heliotrope’s, not mine? Does she…accept them, normally?”

“Nope.”

Figures. That sort of made me feel worse, knowing I was getting a gift that the original recipient wouldn’t have accepted anyway. She saw how my face fell.

“Is it bad?”

“What? No, it’s good.”

“You sure? Do you want more? I still have to give you yours, and I was gonna save that for tonight but if you don’t like the hazelnut then I can just give you yours instead now.”

“It’s—that’s not the problem.” I swallowed, feeling ungrateful. “Every flamebearer.”

“Oh.” Her face fell too. “Cutie, it’s not like that. It’s just something I do for fun, I didn’t think it’d make you feel bad—aha.” Her expression shifted, the hyena flickering across her features, fangs glinting behind her grin. She leaned closer to me, injecting a little purr into her voice. “Want me to yourself, hm? Need me to make you feel special?”

That pushed my buttons, hackles rising in fear, deviously taboo attraction like lightning in my stomach. I stammered.

“You’re not—there’s no obligation for you to—I don’t know if exclusivity is fair to request,” I eventually landed. “You’re…of course I want you, but I don’t deserve—”

She shut me up by grabbing the front of my shirt and tugging me close, staring me down with those all-too-blue eyes.

“You’re doing it again,” she growled, playful reprimand masking genuine challenge. “You can have me to yourself, if that’s what you want. But you’ll have to prove it. Tonight.”

While I was still paralyzed by the flutter in my belly, she plucked the remaining half of the chocolate from my fingers, popped it into her mouth, and vanished.

—

The unfortunate side effect of Hina’s theatrics was that I was left alone with the remains of lunch, so it fell to me to clean up. Maybe that was some strange, oblique lesson from her, but it was more likely that she’d just gotten too excited with the opportunity to push my buttons. Besides, she was indisputably busier than me, so it was with a lingering thrill rippling across my body and a flutter of nervous excitement for what tonight might entail that I set about washing the dishes.

It didn’t take long; Alice had cleaned up most of the detritus from the cooking by the time we’d sat down to eat, and neither of us had left any gnocchi survivors. Rinsing the dishes revealed yet more conveniences and amenities compared to my old apartment, like the much larger sink and the faucet head that could be drawn out to direct the stream of water. Opulent by my standards; they probably gave it no thought.

While wiping down the countertop, I realized—I was being uncharacteristically industrious. Back home, I’d sometimes let slightly-dirty-but-not-dirty-enough-to-be-gross dishes sit in the sink for a week or longer, but here I found it easy to power through doing all the dishes and was even going the extra mile to clean additional surfaces. How domestic; another thing I hadn’t expected to be part of my fantasized life as a flamebearer.

It was just because I felt guilty, I reasoned. I wanted to pull my weight, not feel like a burden, and it wasn’t like I had anything better to do with my spare time compared to the busyness of the others. It did occur to me that such a massive living space and access to funds might warrant specialized cleaning staff, but surely one of the Radiances would have mentioned that by now. Maybe it was biweekly or something, or maybe they just used magic. As I worked, I thought about ways to magically automate the cleaning I was doing, more as a mental exercise than any real plan I intended to implement. It was a fun little exercise, one I’d done before with chores at home, but now I had a whole new space to apply it to.

With the kitchen eventually reclaimed from our culinary adventures, I was once again left with a lot of time and little to do with it. I could finish exploring the penthouse, or I could be brave and face the tell-tale heart beating within my laptop, the lattice diagram of the weapon we’d made, but—I didn’t want to confront it, and I didn’t actually have to. Avoidance was a valid strategy. So I went back to my room, popped open my laptop, squeezed my eyes shut, and killed the horrid thing with Alt+F4, a fittingly ignoble murder. With the demon vanquished, I plugged in the USB stick that Ai had given me and resumed my study of the magical cores of Amethyst’s prosthetic limbs.

This time, I focused less on the lattices themselves. I still didn’t have enough confidence in the mechanical engineering aspect to make major changes to the structural glyphcraft without Ai’s supervision, so I took a look at the other documents on the thumb drive. What leapt out to me most among various reference standards and previous versions was a PDF file: the classified report precisely detailing the actual nature and extent of Amane’s injuries. It felt invasive to have that kind of thing available to read; I consulted our mutual medical staff.

[Direct Message] ezzen: Ai gave me Amethyst’s prosthetic files, including the physical assessment.

ezzen: Is it fair to assume that she consented to that? Anything else I should know?

The robot responded instantly, of course.

ebi-furai: yeah, we sat down and talked about it when you came in

ebi-furai: im the one who actually put that usb together, so everything on there is fair game

ezzen: k good, thanks

ebi-furai: as long as i have you: foot check

ezzen: Nothing to report.

ebi-furai: sick

Ironically, getting permission to look at the file somewhat killed my work ethic for doing more Amane stuff at the moment. There’d be more time later, and I kind of wanted to go through this stuff with Amane herself or Ai.

For now, I returned to the main chatroom, rapidly scrolling through the conversations that had happened while I was asleep, feeling a bit glum as I saw how much I was missing out on. There was a silver lining—a lot of the conversation was still about the Thunder Horse Inferno, and I was glad I didn’t have to deflect the conversation and play dumb about my own horrific role in those events. They didn’t have the full story, and I was growing more and more uncomfortable about the idea of keeping up the charade with these sorts of things.

The discomfort persisted as I continued my rounds, trawling the top posts on the forums and refreshing YouTube. There was the new Overload video, uploaded barely ten minutes ago, a 28-minute timeline of the events of the inferno, from that first flamefall detection on the Vaetna’s stream to the latest news an hour ago. I didn’t need to watch it; I already knew what had really happened. That drop in air temperature, the stumbling corpse.

As if summoned by cruel divinity, I received a DM just as I was about to keep scrolling.

[Direct Message] OverloadTSS: hi ez sorry about the delay

OverloadTSS: was finalizing the thunder horse video because holy shit

Play it cool, Ez.

ezzen: Just saw it go up!

ezzen: “Holy shit” is right

ezzen: surprised you were able to get it out on time. long by your standards

ezzen: Does that mean the Thursday video will be about me?

OverloadTSS: yeah probably

OverloadTSS: ill send over an actual questions list soon

OverloadTSS: figure thats better for you than an AMA like we did in 2020 or whenever it was

OverloadTSS: so dont feel obligated to answer anything, i wont include questions in the video that you dont answer

OverloadTSS: what happened to you was scary as shit plus i imagine youve got some kind of NDA going with lighthouse

Had an NDA been in the stack of paperwork I’d signed? I was already working under the assumption that much of what I’d learned about Todai in the past few days was classified—not least the monstrous act we’d committed yesterday—but I would need to ask Alice what exactly I was allowed to disclose about my research and general situation going forward. Which turned a friendly Q&A session—something I’d had fun with before—into work that required me to go ask somebody something before I could do it. For bonus stress, there were the potentially incredibly dire consequences of leaking the wrong information.

It all sucked, but I couldn’t risk talking about it.

ezzen: Thanks, OL.

ezzen: I’m doing okay, just a lot of paperwork and still healing ofc.

ezzen: I’ll figure out what I’m allowed to say once I’ve got those questions in front of me.

OverloadTSS: hell yeah

OverloadTSS: yeah you havent been on as much the last couple days obviously

OverloadTSS: so no rush, ill get those questions to you soon (tomorrow?) and you can answer them when youve got time

OverloadTSS: but for the short term, can you answer one question so i can do a three minute clickbait thing

ezzen: Sure!

Overload made his living on this kind of news, and I was usually happy to throw him a bone—but things were changing, and longer-reaching trepidation turned to faint but immediate panic as I read the question.

OverloadTSS: you’re on board with lighthouse? planning to stick around?

This may have made me begin to spiral a little bit.

I certainly wasn’t on board with the murder—their opportunistic, guerilla war with the PCTF—even if I agreed with their reasoning on paper. And what about Alice’s efforts to educate me in mahou shoujo, as though assuming I’d eventually become involved with the team as…a magical girl? To say nothing of Hina’s own promise, even kept at bay by our agreement as she currently was. I had yet to discover what exactly she meant that I wouldn’t be the first male Radiance.

So there was a lot I wasn’t on board with, yet they were the things I couldn’t actually share with my friends or the wider community of the forums. Even with the best of intentions, like keeping Amane’s history private, I’d already had to lie to them more than I ever had before. So far, it had mostly been omission—but if I stuck around, how much further would that go?

Which raised another question, one which kept being subsumed by more immediate worries: did I even have to stick around? Fleeing for the Gate still looked like a decent idea, especially with the additional mess Yuuka seemed intent on causing as long as I stuck around here. It was only a kilometer away, and the Spire was famously no-questions-asked…and it would reduce pressure on Todai by no longer having the PCTF set on coming for me. That was a terrifying prospect; for now, only in a surreal, dream-like way, but I was starting to wonder—how long did I have until that looming threat became tangible? Alice had said they’d do something in the next couple days—would that be a diplomatic overture or another entire abduction attempt? The rumors of what happened to noncompliant flamebearers in PCTF custody were horrifyingly true—the last few days had proven that beyond doubt—and I really didn’t want to find out how far either party was willing to escalate, if plausibly deniable artillery strikes from the other side of the planet were Todai’s baseline. I felt sick.

But Overload’s question needed some kind of answer.

ezzen: There’s a lot of research opportunities, for sure. I’m actually already collaborating with Emerald, and of course there’s still the matter of my foot.

ezzen: The chains that drive their mantles are fascinating, and while I’m fairly sure I can’t reveal any of the technical details, that alone is a strong incentive for me to work with them further.

OverloadTSS: cool cool

OverloadTSS: ok thanks

OverloadTSS: will draft up those questions, get back to me whenever

Having acquired his nugget of information, he bid me farewell. I was rattled and went to the one person I knew who bridged the high-stakes world of flamebearers and the familiar box on my computer full of my friends. He might not be awake, but—

[Direct Message] ezzen: Sky, how the fuck do I not feel like I’m lying constantly to you all? Todai was more involved in the inferno than anybody publicly knows and I’m literally sick to my fucking stomach at trying to maintain the charade and play dumb given what we did. I’m going out on a limb here and assuming that you either already know or can guess what I’m talking about. Overload’s next video is going to be about my situation but there’s so much I can’t say. How do I handle this?

—

Sky didn’t reply. Maybe asleep, maybe not, but either way, I was left to stew in those thoughts all afternoon, trying to distract myself with banter and less upsetting videos as the winter sun fell below the skyscrapers and cast its last few fingers of orange light through their gaps. In the middle of my descent down a YouTube rabbit hole about aerospace alloy manufacturing, Ebi notified me that my PC parts had arrived.

The receipt process was handled by others; I just watched it happen from the doorway to my room. A pair of Todai employees brought the various heavy boxes out of the 20th floor elevator, and Amane, in human form, intercepted them and signed for the delivery, sounding surprisingly bubbly as she chatted with the two. The moment they were gone, she mantled up with a snap, gathered up all the boxes into one giant pile in her massive arms, and carried them across the common space to me with no apparent effort. She set down the pile, pushed it through the doorway, dropped mantle with a warbling hiss so she herself could fit, then looked at me.

“May I come in?” She asked in slow, halting English. Ebi was there, but conspicuously remained off to the side.

“Um, yes.” I was grateful she’d asked. Hina never did, and Alice had something of a bad track record even if she obviously cared more, which had led to my room not feeling particularly private. I also wanted to thank her for handling the pick-up, but I wasn’t sure how much of that she’d get.

Amethyst nodded, re-mantled, and I got out of the way so she could haphazardly push the various boxes fully into my bedroom. Her mantle’s brute strength was a boon. I glanced at Ebi, who had stayed out in the common room.

“Um. Are you not coming in?”

“Nope. She wants this one-on-one. I’ll be out here if something happens.”

My anxiety spiked a little at that. I’d kind of assumed that Ebi would be providing interpretation, but without her—I imagined hours of sitting together awkwardly, unable to bring up any kind of idle conversation topic, let alone articulate the more specific questions I had about Yuuka.

For the moment, at least, we busied ourselves with the task of unboxing. Amethyst provided the various tools for the task, plucked from her pocketspace and proffered to me without a word: box cutter, screwdrivers, anti-static bracelets, and so on. She herself didn’t need any sort of blade to slice through tape and cardboard, though; a finger flowed into a razor blade and made short work of any packaging that wound up before it. Our cooperation was wordless and intuitive, breaking down boxes, piling up styrofoam, collecting disinterred computer components in front of the desk. I jumped as she pressed a sheet of bubble wrap between her gemstone hands, making the plastic cry out in a hail of pops. She giggled, and I mustered an awkward chuckle to go with it.

My awkwardness got worse as we cleared away the detritus and were left with just the parts. This was my first chance to actually take stock of what Ebi had purchased for me, and what I could see was almost embarrassingly high-end; no actual magitech, but the enormously beefy GPU next to what were definitely water cooling tubes had me on edge. I’d never built a liquid-cooled computer before, and my first time would be with such expensive components—a leak would be catastrophic! I had hoped that building my new PC would be a familiar activity that brought some stability back into my life, but now I was horribly stressed.

And I couldn’t communicate any of that to Amethyst. I drew my phone in what I hoped was a surreptitious way.

[Direct Message] ezzen: Please help me talk to her.

ebi-furai: just talk to her, dude

ezzen: HOW?

ebi-furai: her en comprehension is pretty good

ebi-furai: or just like use some translation apps, there are lots

Oh. I’d been hung up on the idea that we needed to have an out-loud, verbal conversation—but I was always more comfortable in text anyway, wasn’t I? I navigated to Google Translate, typed something in, and showed the mech-girl my phone, hoping the app hadn’t mangled it too much.

Ezzen: Could we talk like this?

The spike-faced girl didn’t lean in to look at the comparatively tiny phone screen. I was in the chair at the desk, and she was on the floor, but she was so tall that her head was still at the height of my shoulders, a decent height for me to show her the screen. She summoned her own phone, ensconced in its sticker-bombed case, and carefully but skillfully typed a response with her long, knife-like fingers. It was too small for her massive hands, but she evidently had practice. When she held it up to show me what she’d written, it was in an app I didn’t recognize.

Amane: Use DeepL instead. The translation quality is a bit better.

Amane: You can say it out loud, though. I live with four English speakers.

“Do they speak English even when I’m not around?”

I hesitantly used my voice as she asked, going slow and doing my best to enunciate.

Amane: Hina and Alice.

Doing it this way was actually slower than just typing it in, so I went back to my phone.

Ezzen: It’s more comfortable for me this way, if that’s okay with you?

“Okay!”

I jumped, not expecting the verbal response in her chiming, sing-song tones.

Ezzen: Have you built a PC before?

Amane: I’m a gamer `⎚⩊⎚´ -✧

She looked at me expectantly, as though that were all the explanation that was necessary.

Ezzen: Cool!

I immediately kicked myself for the meaninglessness of the response, and the fact that the exclamation point wasn’t reflected in my actual facial expression. She didn’t seem to mind.

Amane: It looks like you’re also a gamer, judging by what the shrimp got for you.

Amane: shrimp = Ebi chan

Adorable.

Ezzen: Actually, not very much. My hand makes it hard to use a mouse quickly.

Ezzen: I spend most of my time on GWalk and YouTube.

Well, spent, since things had changed. But once this computer was put together, maybe there wouldn’t be much difference from how things used to be. That thought was comforting amid the tumult of the last few days, so I set the phone down and moved to get better access to the open case, then realized that it probably made more sense to start with the motherboard and hunted around for that. Amane seemed to read my thoughts and handed it to me. She was wearing a static bracelet on her crystalline wrist—I eyed it, and she made a twinkling noise, a chuckle, and typed into her phone.

Amane: The bracelet doesn’t do anything.

I appreciated the thought, at least. I located the RAM sticks—a full set of four, each as powerful as the entire memory of my old PC at 16GB apiece—and carefully clicked them into their slots on the motherboard. Then it was onto the CPU, which I carefully removed from the remainder of its protective packaging while trying not to gag at the price tag, then placed gently into its grid of receiving holes and locked it down with the little lever. Those were the easy parts.

Things got harder from here as we encountered one of my old enemies: little, tiny screws. Beyond the exceptionally poor luck of being one of the first people to ever lose a loved one to the Flame, I’d also gotten the twisted bonus that the mobility in my right hand—that is to say, my dominant hand—had never fully recovered. So I used screwdrivers and other such implements with my left hand, and it was slow going. The PC’s external case screws were easy enough, but one look at the little screws for mounting the motherboard inside, nestled deep into crevasses between protruding heat sinks and I/O pin grids, had me dreading the whole procedure. The last time I had done this had been a slow, frustrating process where I’d repeatedly lost the little things inside the hollow spaces of the PC case.

On the bright side, the screwdriver Amane provided me had a magnetized tip. Was that a problem for computer parts? Probably not; she wouldn’t have given it to me otherwise, right? Also, what about the water cooling unit for the CPU? Did that go on now? It’d create more obstacles to getting those tiny screws in place—

I felt myself getting a little overwhelmed and glanced nervously at the Amethyst Radiance—she was pointing her phone at me.

Amane: If you have problems with your hands, try to use glyphs.

I hadn’t even thought of that as an option.

“But…isn’t high ripple bad for you?”

Amane: There’s no problem in small amounts, not while it’s transformed.

“It?”

She made a crackling noise of annoyance as she shook her massive, spike-snouted head and typed something else into her undersized phone.

Amane: While I am in my transformation form.

“Ah.”

I stood, weaving my way around piles of discarded packaging to reach the bookcase, and grabbed a notebook that I knew had spare pages. One somewhat-undignified shimmy across my bed later, I also had a pencil from my backpack. I flipped to a blank page and began to draw.

Two minutes later, I showed Amane the chain. It was elementary, first-order, dealing entirely in simple physical operations; trivial, in the technical sense of the word, as it didn’t even need to double back on itself anywhere. She nodded in approval and made no comment, so I called forth my Flame, holding my arm well away from anything that might ignite. I whispered an apology to it that I was aggravating it and wondered briefly about how I could feed it something other than pain—a conversation I wasn’t sure I could have with Amane, even with the artificial bridge we’d constructed across the language barrier. So for now, I just poked and twisted and formed it into my poor excuse for thread, and then fed the Flame along the lattice.

As weaving went, this was straightforward, no particular tricks necessary to ensure correct tension or manipulate the Flame at micro scales. When I was done, I was left with what was basically an invisible manipulator arm hooked up to a sensor, preprogrammed to apply a twisting motion to particular target areas. I placed the motherboard in its position inside the case, ensuring the screw holes lined up, and then dumped the little bag of appropriate screws onto the paper atop the {IDENTIFY}-{DIRECT} portion of the chain. The screws never hit the paper, instead stopping in the air, and I watched with excitement as they all aligned to face downward and floated over to the case, descending into their appropriate holes and turning themselves into place. So mundane, no flickers of light or confusing violations of one’s intuitions for space and motion, yet so magical all the same. I used my phone’s flashlight to confirm that the screws had properly fastened themselves into place.

Amane tapped my knee to get my attention.

Amane: It never gets boring, does it?

“I hope it never does.”

—

Between YouTube tutorials on my laptop and our combined magical ingenuity, we made steady progress. A simple chain to thread the cables of the power supply to the other components; a video elucidating the difference between open- and closed-loop water cooling systems; zip ties to keep everything neat and tidy. And I slowly broke the ice, first by simply coordinating our procedure for the building process, then hesitantly drifting toward the larger-scale worries looming over me.

Ezzen: So you have time for this even though it’s a weekday? All the others seem to be busy.

Amane: The expectations are lower for me than for my teammates.

Stupid Ez. Of course that’d be something of a touchy subject for her. I fretted about how to salvage the conversation while I wrestled with the tiny pins and wires connecting the motherboard to the case’s external buttons. I still didn’t want to intrude on her medical privacy—maybe moot now that Ebi had sent me the definitive report, but I’d had my own share of being seen as a medical case first and a person second. I couldn’t imagine how much worse that was for her.

Ezzen: Is that because of your injuries themselves or the pain?

Amane: Depends on the weather.

Ezzen: “Weather” = local ripple?

She nodded and hummed, a digital-sounding, too-pure piezoelectric tone.

Amane: Good days and bad days. Does your hand or foot hurt more when there’s red?

Ezzen: I don’t know. Using my Flame does hurt. Do you use pain for your magic? Ai singled out Hina and Heliotrope as the ones who use pain for their Flames, so I assume you don’t?

Amane: I don’t use it. Because it’s not right.

More like Alice than Hina, then. I wondered why Heliotrope also used pain if she was generally pro-Amane and anti-Hina.

Ezzen: Not mahou shoujo?

Amane: That’s right. I understand why the others use it, because it’s important to be powerful, but I am not only my pain.

She rubbed her right arm with her left, a shockingly familiar motion. In her real body, that would be her prosthetic, as opposed to my burns, but the sentiment was the same—was “real body” an offensive way of putting it, given how she seemed to prioritize this form instead? I’d have to ask at some point.

Ezzen: Not made of glass, right.

Ezzen: I don’t like magic based on pain either.

Amane: But you had sex with Hina.

Oh no. Yesterday, she’d expressed some fairly harsh disapproval of Hina’s lighthearted approach to pain—like Yuuka, would she assume the worst of me by association? But she was shaking her head.

Amane: That was supposed to be a joke. Text is difficult.

I gave her a sympathetic nod. Tone over text was tricky enough without the strange filtering effects of a translation program. At least in this odd, hybrid form of communication, I had facial expressions to back me up—but she didn’t. What was with that spike-face?

Ezzen: (I just want to clarify that it wasn’t sex)

Amane: Understood!

Amane: I don’t want to judge, but Yuuka is troubled.

Ezzen: “Troubled” is understating it a bit, don’t you think?

I mustered an awkward smile to accompany that, hoping the light tone came through. She gave me a thumbs up with one of her massive, gemstone hands.

Ezzen: Ai told me to ask you what to do about it.

Amane: I’ll tell her to be nice. As nice as Yuuka can be.

Now that second part was definitely a joke, but one attached to genuine goodwill.

Amane: I’m not surprised she’s being a problem. It’s not your fault. We’ll make her tolerate you for now, but I hope you two can become friends.

Ezzen: Friends? She’s so mean.

With the ice breaking a bit, that felt safe to say.

Amane: She’s basically a good person. And so are you.

Was that true? What could one say to that?

“…Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

I blinked at the accented English.

Amane: Please give me the GPU and water cooler.

I obliged, now doubly off-kilter at the topic change. Then, to my shock and concern, she dropped out of her mantle, the towering mass of flowing purple gemstone squeezing itself before dissolving into the air in a fraction of a second, leaving just Amane’s real body. And her prosthetics, of course—the static bracelet dangled from her artificial wrist, now too large. She still had the eyepatch I’d seen when we’d first met, and like then, it took a few seconds to flicker to life and sync up with her true eye, mirroring the vivid green. Not supernaturally intense the way Hina’s eyes were, but pretty nonetheless. Her black hair fell in a straight, glossy curtain over her shoulders and down her back.

Amane: Your situation is bad.

Her mechanical hand worked swiftly and precisely to free the GPU’s pre-installed fans from its back plate as she cradled the device in her lap. She seemed to know exactly what she was doing, but I was still nervous; she was splitting her attention between the task and talking to me, and I felt that the thousand-dollar graphics card deserved a bit more reverence and care.

Her flesh hand had visible tremors as it continued typing on her phone, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the practiced ease and confidence in the motions. It helped that whatever keyboard she was using only seemed to have a few keys with Japanese characters, not a full QWERTY layout, so each key was bigger.

Ezzen: Yeah.

I was hesitant to add more of my own opinions until I knew where she was going with this. She stopped working the screwdriver for a moment and looked at me seriously as she presented the next message.

Amane: I think you shouldn’t have to fight the PCTF.

That didn’t mesh with her teammates’ vitriol.

Ezzen: I thought you hated them?

Amane: No. My teammates hate them for me. I think the PCTF are evil, and killing them is part of the duty of real magical girls. But it is not revenge, and we should not have made you help us. It’s not your duty because you’re not part of the team. I’m sorry.

Ezzen: Sorry it happened, or sorry that I’m not part of the team?

Amane: The first. I don’t understand why the others want you to join and help with our war.

Thank fuck. An incredible weight came off my chest—she didn’t want me to be an accomplice to further murder. And she didn’t want me to join up as a magical girl. Even aside from the others’ especially egregious expectations, it seemed like they all wanted things from me, be it my expertise or my Flame. Even Ai, for all her kindness, was very interested in what I could do for Amane—but Amane herself had no demands or quid pro quo for me at all, no interest in even subtle leverage; I was starting to see why she’d insisted that I be allowed to choose whether I was going to the Hikanome event, and I was grateful.

She did something strange with her prosthetic hand, a twist of her wrist and wiggle of her fingers that almost made the static bracelet fall off, and we both winced slightly as a pulse of pain blossomed in my foot. She laughed softly even though her voice was tight.

Amane: Bad weather, right?

She’d activated the {AFFIX} binding in her arm and locked the water cooler against the GPU’s back plate so she could keep them aligned as she put the screws in: one of the cutting-edge accessibility features of a LIPS-compliant prosthetic. I’d seen it in the lattice diagram, but it was quite another thing to witness in action. Magic was still magical. She continued typing with her other hand as she worked.

Amane: There are more reasons that the others want to have you here, and I’m annoyed that they’re not telling you. Alice especially.

“Alice? With what?”

Amane: Her tail. Her dragon transformation. Dragon化

“Dragon-ka,” she said out loud, answering my question before I had the chance to ask it. With the screws now in place, she set down the screwdriver and her phone to lean over the case and slot the modified GPU into place with a satisfying click. If her chronic pain was bothering her, she did a good job of hiding it. I waited until she was done to show her my phone.

Ezzen: Like, something to make her more comfortable? The tail does seem like it gets in the way.

Amane: Something to stop it.

Ezzen: It’s still going on?

Amane: Yes. It gets worse whenever she uses magic. Tail lengthens and eyes change. Maybe more if it continues.

Amane: She didn’t tell you because she pretends it isn’t happening, but it’s getting worse, and we don’t know how to stop it.

“Jesus.” That was dire enough—and interesting enough—that I immediately started speculating.

Ezzen: Any use of magic? How much ripple?

Amane: 20-silver-like or above. Yuuka knows when it will happen and stops her. But it’s only a delaying tactic.

We both grimaced—though that belied the full intensity of discomfort I was feeling from this revelation. Hadn’t Ai called Alice selfish? Was this why? I remembered what she’d said on the car ride to Tochou: I live with it. And I remembered the tightness in her voice. The familiar bottled-up frustration.

Amane: I don’t like that she’s keeping it a secret and pretending it’s not one of the reasons she’s trying to keep you here.

Ezzen: And she didn’t tell me because she’s worried about putting even more pressure on me?

Amane: Yes. It feels like putting even more pressure on you because your situation is so fucked up.

Ezzen: I’ll help. Thanks for telling me.

Amane: You don’t owe us.

Ezzen: I know! It’s not about debt, but a chance to do something good.

I understood Alice’s reasoning, because I was under a lot of pressure, but I agreed—I wished she’d opened with this when making her original pitch to me. At the time, she’d focused on the appeal of learning more about the Spire’s dermis via the Radiances’ mantles, and that had been enough to hook me, before I’d understood the nature of their war with the PCTF. Now I wasn’t so sure, since that same track of research would be open to me sans the looming conflict at the Spire—but this? I wanted to help her with this. It was exactly the sort of thing that called to me: directly improving somebody’s quality of life by solving unsolvable magical problems. Well, biomancy was famously difficult, as well as outside my typical wheelhouse, but that was now surmountable with actual Flame at my disposal.

Amane: Okay. Thank you.

I gave her a lame little thumbs-up.

Ezzen: I’m curious: what Japanese word translates to “fucked up?”

Amane: ヤバい I think. But I wrote it. Yuuka and Hina taught me lots of dirty words.

She grinned, a warm smile reminiscent of Ai’s, but with a little more impishness to it. It was broken by a wince, and she rubbed her arm again.

Amane: Rebound from red. I’m alright.

I thought that binding didn’t pass her threshold of ripple for pain; that was the impression I’d gotten from her file, at least. She shook it off quickly.

Ezzen: “Bad weather”?

“Yeah.” She checked the power supply’s cables, making sure all the components were hooked up, tracing across each thick bundle with a segmented finger. Her prosthetic arm was almost doll-like, with visible articulation at the joints and smooth paneling, a very different look from the flowing, glossy facets of her mantle, a seemingly intentional but distinct sort of artifice. I racked my brain to compare the arm to Ebi’s; I’d need to see them side-by-side to compare the details, but they were certainly both Ai’s handiwork. She caught me looking.

Amane: What do you think?

Ezzen: It’s incredible. Thank you for letting me work on it.

She nodded, and her eyes flicked over to my scarred forearm. Would I rather have lost my arm entirely, with a prosthetic of that quality in its place? Then again—I did have a prosthetic now, tucked under my crossed legs. I extracted my legs to half-bend it in front of me, looking at the block of false toes. She brought out her own leg from where it was tucked under her and pulled off the sock to compare. Of course, her leg was entirely replaced below the knee, where I’d only lost the front half of the foot itself, so hers was much fancier, but she seemed interested in mine.

Neither of us commented on it, though. In hindsight, I think we were both wary of bringing up the other’s traumatic experiences. We fell back into mostly silence and kept working in sync. While she put in the NVMe SSD, I got up and collected more packaging detritus from around us: broken-down cardboard boxes, plastic wrapping, and styrofoam padding were all sorted into piles at her direction. I didn’t know how recycling worked around here, but she was being fastidious about keeping everything separate, so I trusted her judgment.

The PC was coming together. The full setup was still far from complete, but all the essentials of the box itself were in, and as I hooked up the I/O pins for the power button itself, trepidation began to build. I didn’t know enough about water cooling to check Amane’s work, but she’d done this before, so I tried to trust her judgment and console myself by thinking it through. In the worst case scenario where a tube burst and irreversibly destroyed all the internals, what would really be lost? I’d be out three thousand dollars of parts, which was a mind-boggling amount of money for a PC by my standards—I had to repeatedly remind myself that Todai wouldn’t even blink at paying that out-of-pocket. And then it’d be another one-day delivery, or maybe two days, but either way, it wasn’t like I’d be stranded without a home base for another two weeks while waiting for a new power supply or something. It would be okay; I’d be okay. Only two more days at most of this room feeling alien and transitory rather than like home. Hopefully, only a few more minutes.

While Amane used her mechanical hand’s miraculous dexterity to hook up the final few hard-to-reach pins, I wrestled one of the displays out of its box and onto the desk. Todai had gotten me three, complete with swing-arm wall mounts if I so desired, but we only needed one for this, and for the moment I didn’t even bother with managing the cables as I plugged it into power and ran the HDMI cable to the computer’s graphics card. We left the case open and on its side, since the first boot was always a bit fraught, and there was no point in closing the whole thing up and putting it in position if we’d need to immediately take it apart again to troubleshoot. I didn’t even bother with the keyboard or mouse yet, either; I just wanted to see if the power button would get us to BIOS or UEFI or whatever initial startup interface would indicate we’d averted catastrophic failure.

I plugged in the power supply, hit the switch on the back, and got our first sign of life—a single white indicator light on the motherboard, shining out of the metal-and-silicon cave. A good start, but the real test lay with the power button. Amane gestured grandly at the box, wordlessly but clearly insisting I did the honors. I indulged her by reaching over and pressing the button—

And was rewarded by glorious light and motion. The external case fans spun to life, followed a moment later by the softer sound of the water cooling pumps. No leaks! I caught Amane’s fist-pump out of the corner of my eye, but my eyes were locked on the monitor as it sprang to life, displaying familiar startup symbols that transitioned into a simple menu for configuration. Good job, us. I flopped backward onto the bed, enjoying the feeling of success, even if the stakes were admittedly low. I was home. Even if I wasn’t staying here permanently, at least now I could operate from here as I used to.

We celebrated with a break, retreating from the hardwood onto the softness of my bed. Amane called Ebi to get us some snacks and drinks, which turned into some playful banter. When the robot arrived and handed off our refreshments—juice and nuts, rather health-conscious—she crouched down in front of the PC, her simpler cousin.

“Good work, little dude.”

She gave it an affectionate pat. Then she turned and subjected Amane to what I could tell was a familiar routine of questions like “how is your pain?” and some more direct inspections from which I averted my eyes. Satisfied with her charge’s health, she turned to leave, but was caught by the hand, prosthetic to android. Ebi hesitantly returned to sit at Amane’s other side from me. The two of them discussed something briefly, then Amane turned back to me, looking a little apologetic. Ebi spoke for her.

“Do you want to talk about going to the Hikanome rally?”

---

Author’s Note:

Amane! This chapter is pretty talky, but…Amane! Yay! I’m not biased.

This chapter was hard to write. Thanks to the beta readers (Cass, Softies, Zooloo, Maria, Zak, Selenium, Penguin) for helping me through it.

See you next week for Amane Conversation Part 2!

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 8, 2024

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

I did my best to enter Ai’s giant machine shop surreptitiously and not attract undue attention, which had gone well until I realized that her mobile workstation was not in the same spot it had been last time I’d been in here. So, feeling the whole time that I obviously didn’t belong and dreading the idea that somebody would walk up and ask for ID, I awkwardly skirted around the edge of the garage-turned-laboratory, trying to spot the Emerald Radiance. I gave a wide berth to the scariest-looking machines, especially those mid-operation like the massive waterjet cutter bringing forth dozens of identical parts from a sheet of metal at least three meters to a side.

I eventually found Ai in the most sensible place in the whole shop for her to be: set up with a group of students below the enormous magical manufacturing array on the workshop’s far wall. Sadly, they weren’t actually using the array; Ai wasn’t even touching the control panel and was instead indicating each glyph on the wall with a laser pointer, quizzing the students on identifying each one and what it did. I chuckled as one of them mistook {AFFIX} for {DIFFUSE}. Rookie mistake.

The multitude of wrong answers like that one were because today’s batch of students were younger than the ones I had met the other day. I’d gotten the sense that most of that group had been grad students, noticeably older than me, to say nothing of the grizzled full-fledged engineers and machinists; by contrast, these ones were around my age, in their third and fourth years of college. It was a similarly eclectic group of races and nationalities to last time, native Japanese intermingling with Americans and some who must have been from Taiwan or Hong Kong, since I doubted anybody from mainland China was here. Despite Todai’s professed abstinence from the intermittent conflict in the South China Sea, it still impacted the demographics here in Ai’s workshop.

Ai saw me coming, making eye contact with me in one of the convex mirrors as I approached the back of the cluster of students. A grin spread across her face as she flicked the laser pointer to an eye-hurting jumble of curved plastic that seemed to crawl under my gaze, a three-dimensional slice of one of the four-dimensional glyphs. My stomach lurched as she called out.

“You in the back: what’s this?”

“That,” I sighed, simultaneously put-upon and excited at being given a chance to strut my stuff, “would be the third, sixth, and seventh layers of {PROPAGATE}, sliced maybe twenty-five percent ana to give it a more orange propensity so it can link into things like {ASSIGN} more easily.”

“Correct!” Her voice rang like a polished bell. “Everyone, this is Todai’s newest employee. You might see him around from time to time. Colliot-san, would you like to introduce yourself?”

“Uh—not particularly. I was actually wondering if I could, um…” I trailed off lamely. Unfortunately for me, some of the students—most, probably—were denizens of the forums and were already putting the pieces together, whispers erupting within the group as eyes went round. No keeping this cat in the bag. “Fine. Yes, uh, hi, I’m Ezzen.”

I wasn’t prepared for how good that felt to say. Ai had gone out of her way to not refer to me as Dalton, so Ezzen was the only name any of these people would know me by. I loved that. What I loved less was the way eyes slid down to the burn scars on my hand and to the prosthetic replacement for my foot, known to them despite being hidden inside my shoe. I unconsciously slid the Flame-marked hand into my hoodie pocket to fidget with the stabilizer module, hunching my shoulders. My tattoo itched, which was absurd.

Ai, bless her, regained control of the group almost instantly, before they had a chance to start bombarding me with questions or mob me.

“I’m not canceling this lab just because he’s here! You’ll get the chance to meet him eventually. Ah—” She glanced at an indicator light on her desk that had just come on. “Good timing, the blanks are done. Every group gets one of each type; make sure they both came out to spec, then come up with one first-order chain for each that can do the next three steps we talked about. If the dimensions are off, add back material with the sedimenter and then refinish them on the mill. Go.”

The students’ gazes lingered on me as they shuffled off toward the waterjet cutter, but mercifully none of them dared defy their orders to talk to me, in too much of a hurry. Ai beckoned me over.

“Are you here for something?”

I appreciated how she was straight to the point, no inquiries after my foot or asking about my plans for the day. I scratched my neck nervously.

“Um, just was wondering if I could be helpful.”

“Ah. Is this about the gun?”

“Um. Is it alright for you to just—say that?”

“Yes.” For explanation, she pointed at a matching set of dark panels mounted to the edges of her workstation. A classic soundproofing weave splayed across them in neon green. “So, is that it? You want to feel like you’re doing good to make up for yesterday?”

“Um—sort of? I mean, yes, but…that’s not all of it. I had an…argument? With Heliotrope.”

Ai frowned sympathetically.

“That’s…I’m sorry. What did she say?”

I didn’t really want to talk about most of it—even recalling her demeanor was making my stomach lurch, let alone the actual, wildly hurtful things she had said to me.

“She insulted Hina, which—I know you’re not going to have much sympathy there, and—”

“Ezzen.” I flinched at her interjection. “I might not agree with Hina, and yes, I do think she’s a little monstrous, but of course I care if Yuuka is being a…bitch, to her.”

I blinked.

“Strong language for you, isn’t it?”

“She deserves it, sometimes,” she sighed. “What else?”

“She…said I didn’t deserve to be here.” I stared down at my shoes, ashamed even though I knew it mostly wasn’t true. “And compared me to Hina’s ex. Who’s a friend of mine, which I didn’t know,” I clarified.

“Ah. That…yes, I think I see the picture. I’m sorry, again, you didn’t deserve that at all. Of course you deserve to be here, and it would make me happy if you helped here.”

“Please. What’s there to do?”

“Well, what do you want to do?” She countered.

It was a good question. I raised my head to look around the workshop. This was far more hands-on than my comfort zone of GWalk diagrams, a step into the practicalities of the physical that I was used to eliding and leaving for the people who actually implemented things—like Ai. The exception, no more comfortable for me but at least something I felt driven to help with, was Amane’s prostheses—as well as probably my own, though I didn’t want to come off as selfish by mentioning my foot right now.

“I feel…I want to at least learn enough about the design and function of Amane’s prostheses to be helpful. Where would I start with that?”

She nodded, turning back to her keyboard and opening some new windows. I was unsurprised to find she was running Linux; Ubuntu, by the looks of it. I’d toyed with it in years past but never delved deeply enough into the technicals to find it easier than Windows. She eventually found a PDF and pulled it up on one of the vertical monitors.

“Are you familiar with LIPS-2?”

“The…Lattice-Integrated Prosthetics Standard, yeah? I read v1, but haven’t kept up with it.” That was mostly true; I had read the first version, but didn’t recall many of the specifics. It belonged to one of those tangential fields where I’d read the Wikipedia articles and skimmed the key documentation out of academic interest or to settle arguments on the forums, but my off-the-cuff knowledge was lacking. “You…helped write it, if I recall correctly?”

“Hai…” she confirmed, mostly to herself, as she jumped down the very, very long document. The scroll bar on the side of the window was barely a sliver. “Ah, here.”

I advanced a little to read the section header: Idiomatic Psychomotive Chain Bases: Designs Minimizing Free Red Ripple. As my eyes scanned between the dense blocks of text below it, I saw they were broken up by a few beautifully elegant lattice designs. I sight-read them, appreciating the thought given to optimizing everything down to second-order at most and creative workarounds and glyph choices to lower the free-band red ripple down to almost zero by the end of the chain—then breathed an incredulous chuckle. Recognition dawned and years-buried memories returned as I saw my name—Ezzen, not Dalton—below, cited for two of the designs. Both were modified slightly from what I remembered, but at a glance, I approved of the changes.

“Ha.”

“You’ve already been very, very helpful.” Ai explained, a smile in her voice. She pointed at the second one bearing my name. “For Ishikawa-chan—er, Amane—specifically, because so much of the damage was sanguimantic, this is the one we use, and the one that would be most helpful to optimize further, rather than the actual kinetic drivers or power integration or…you get the idea.” I did indeed, smiling as well. Ideas were already starting to germinate, ways to clean this up further. “Although you’re free to take a look at the whole design, of course,” she added.

So I got to work. There was a row of PCs along the wall, somewhat cordoned off from the main machine shop, and Ai helped me log in. They were running a slightly different version of GWalk, the enterprise distribution rather than the pro license, so I was missing a lot of my personal quality of life tweaks, but I knew all the shortcuts anyway. Ai handed me a USB with the lattice files for Amane’s arm and leg prostheses, telling me it was mine to keep so I could keep tweaking it on my own time; I saw it also contained the schematics for the physical design of her limbs. That was beyond the scope of right now’s work and my own expertise, though. I focused on the glyphwork.

Eventually, maybe twenty minutes in, a few of Ai’s students appeared and booted up other workstations. I became irrationally self-conscious; despite having full confidence in the actual contents of my work, it was another thing to see them stealing glances at my workflow out of the corner of my eye. The weight of observation imposed a bizarre pressure to get every little change right on the first try, rather than first checking whether an idea would actually go anywhere, and to avoid consulting the documentation I usually leaned on so heavily, for fear of looking like an amateur.

In fact, I did sort of feel like an amateur; many of the implementation details of this lattice were tuned for the unique case of Amane’s arm, with particular portions of the weave intended for different physical locations and mechanisms within the limb. This was not my area of expertise. GWalk actually had a whole suite of features for placing the weave in a schematic of physical parts, associating lattices with respective substrates, and so on, but my focus on theoretical problems and LM meant I’d almost always avoided it. Now I kept having to refer back to that window to double-check my work and was still unsure that I hadn’t broken anything. No error popups, at least, but that was only a matter of time, and encountering an error with a part of the design process I almost never partook in and therefore had no idea how to resolve, in front of an audience, was a nightmare scenario.

I tried to ignore that impulse to catastrophize and continue working as I usually did, but it became more and more difficult as the row of computers filled up. They gave me enough of a berth to leave the seats to my immediate left and right empty, but it was the barest buffer of protection; my physical shell, the bulky hoodie, provided little security when my direct stream of consciousness was playing out on the computer monitor. It was a thoroughly uncomfortable experience, exposed and vulnerable.

“Oh, that’s so smart!”

I jumped. I hadn’t realized somebody had invaded the bubble of personal space, watching from right over my shoulder. I twisted and saw one of the probably-not-Chinese students utterly enraptured by my monitor, a man with bleached-blond hair. He was older than me—wait, no he wasn’t; I was twenty.

“Thanks?” I muttered, uncomfortable with the proximity, turning back to the screen and wishing he’d leave. “You mean this part? The pair of {ASSIGNS}?”

“Yeah. Why are you looping them through each other like that?” He came around to my side to look more closely at the monitor. “How are you even getting GWalk to let you do that? It gives us an error.”

“Oh, it’s…” I copied the chunk and deleted the connections to demonstrate. “Control-D, drag the first connection, select the output of the second, C for chain mode, I for invert, click the input of the first one. If you just click and drag the two normally, it gives you two errors: one, because it doesn’t know where you want the mesh to take its output, and two, the tensions aren’t constrained to each other, so the ripple can’t resolve.”

“Ohhhhh. Oh, wait, then—” He called back to his friend, who hurried over. Before I knew it, three more students had joined the group, all pointing at the screen and talking excitedly in a mix of Chinese and English. A different one broke from the discussion to try to talk to me directly.

“So—you’re actually Ezzen? Seven years of being anonymous, and now you’re just…here at Lighthouse?”

“Well—being flametouched kind of changes things.”

“Lots of people thought you were already a flamebearer! I know you’ve said you’re not, but it’s crazy that you discovered all that—” he pointed at the screen again, “—without actually having any Flame yourself.”

“I didn’t…discover it. The Vaetna already know all this stuff, we’re just following them.” I floundered, compelled to downplay my own accomplishments and expertise. “Um, not to discredit Ai or the Consortium’s own accomplishments, labs all over—”

“Take some credit,” Ai sighed from my other side. I twisted to look at her.

“But it’s true! Yeah, I know a lot, but everything I’ve ‘figured out’ is stuff they already know. And you’re actually doing things with it!” I gestured around the cavernous room. “This is incredible!”

“So is that.” Ai countered, pointing at the glyphs on my screen. Then she put her hands on her hips, addressing the students who’d gathered near me. “Back to work. You’re not going to finish in the next forty minutes if you keep bothering Ezzen.”

They dispersed, grumbling but smiling. Ai dropped herself heavily into the seat next to mine, already looking tired again despite having seemed fine this morning.

“Already making progress.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know if this’ll actually work in the weave…uh, sorry for being a distraction, also.”

“You aren’t!” She glanced past me down the row of computers. “I think this will be really motivating for them. And it will work in the weave, I think; just make sure to run the substrate optimizer before porting it to the schematic.”

I‘d totally forgotten that step and needed a flustered moment to find the right button in the unfamiliar sub-panel. I also didn’t know how to verify that it had done its job and squished the glyph substrates down to minimal weavable size and found places for them within the structure of the arm.

“Uh.” I hesitated.

“It’s here, then here.” She guided me through the process of confirming everything was as it should be, heedless of the fact that a few of her students were definitely watching her treat me like one of them, oh God. I tried to control my breathing, retreating into my hoodie slightly like a magic-obsessed turtle.

“…Thanks. Um. I should really know how to do that.”

She seemed to become aware that eyes had been on us while she’d helped me, the supposed expert, use a basic function of the program I probably had more than ten thousand hours on.

“…Would you rather work somewhere else, Ezzen?”

“No, it’s more…the work itself.”

“Ah. Not used to integration.”

“Not at all,” I admitted. “Your students are probably better at that than I am.”

She frowned. “You deserve to be here. Is this about what Hirai-san said?”

“Who?” I was sort of losing track of the names.

“Er, Yuuka. Heliotrope.”

“Oh. I guess? It’s just—I already said, I just don’t feel like I’m actually…doing anything with it. I’m just messing around. Yesterday was easy—and I know how fucked up that sounds—because it was pure magic, LM to LM. I felt like I understood all of it…which wasn’t true; I didn’t understand what we were really doing, but the task? Everything could be done in GWalk. With this—” I pointed at the screen, then spread the gesture to indicate the entire workshop, “—there’s literally more moving parts, stuff I haven’t touched before. I feel like I need to run all of this past you to make anything actually come of it.”

“So you’re saying you’re used to working alone?”

“…I guess, yeah.”

“Well, you’re not alone. You never were! You’ve shared so much of your work on the internet; of course we’ve used it. Not…not all of my colleagues respect you as much as they should, but they certainly all know your name. So do my students, for a reason.” She smiled at me, reaching out to gently touch my forearm. “Your focus is pure theory, not application, and that’s fine, because we’ve already been applying it here. Now you can actually work with us.” She took a breath, but before I could formulate a rebuttal, another complaint that I was out of my depth, she went on, passion rising. “Teamwork means letting other people do the parts you’re not good at. Yesterday, you were able to do almost all of it yourself, which…” her expression darkened. “Which is how we got away with not telling you until it was too late. I’m sorry for that. But for almost everything outside of our mantles, bungyou—division of labor—is important, even necessary, because nobody can do what we do alone. You can help us do so much! And you know that, I know you do. I’m really, truly excited to be working with you, and so is everybody in this room.”

For a moment, I was terrified that meant she was about to order her class to line up and encourage me, but she just rubbed my arm and looked at me. Unlike Hina, her silence carried no expectation of response. Tears were starting to well in my eyes at Ai’s pure, unguarded outpouring of belief. I didn’t want to cry here, under the eyes of her students, people who looked up to me—I swallowed in a vain attempt to keep my throat from getting tight. Seeing my response, Ai tensed up.

“Oh. Oh, ah, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s—fine,” I pushed out, wiping my eyes before any tears could fall. Her honesty and kindness helped me admit why this was so hard. “No, I mean, thank you. Heliotrope sort of got under my skin. Thank you,” I repeated. Yuuka had brought my insecurities to the surface, asserted that I didn’t belong; a belief she had so boldly thrown in my face that it had further undermined my already shaky self-confidence. But Ai’s conviction that I could have a place here—that I already had a place here, long before I’d ever actually arrived, was just as potent as her teammate’s venom, perhaps more so. “Um…how long have you…known about me?”

“Me? Since before we had this building. I think we’ve actually emailed each other, back when I was in school, and so did my professor at the time. He’s the one who told me about—do…do you need a tissue?”

“…Yes.”

Ai jogged back to her desk and brought the entire box back to me. I dried my tears before they could spill onto my cheeks, thanked her, and spent the remainder of her class time continuing to tinker with and refine the weave of Amane’s arm.

Meanwhile, her students got back to work, under too much pressure from their assignment to keep bothering me. They ferried their parts around the workshop, refining those parts toward gradually more familiar shapes. Each time a group of students returned to one of the PCs, the sheets of metal had been further altered: intricately folded, slots milled out, more folding, small sections of metal ground away to thin out the shape, onward and onward until various second-order glyph substrates began to make themselves apparent in the aluminum. Even when different teams had the same glyph, there were a number of differences in the shape of the substrate, from overall proportions to the particular paths the metal took as it contorted around itself in mimicry of the Flame. Of course, there were idiomatic, semi-standard base layouts for substrates, but Ai had imposed additional restrictions on each team that meant the students had to improvise.

Even with that, the production process seemed an awful lot of effort. When I voiced this to Ai, she explained that this was entirely doable with CNC machining instead of the relatively manual processes to which she was subjecting her students, but that wasn’t the point. The goal of the exercise was to understand the common pitfalls in substrate design, like how one team had ground a branch point too thin; when Ai tried to weave along it, it snapped. That team still wound up passing, though.

Ai returned to sit with me again once she’d dismissed the students for the morning.

“What do you want to know about Yuuka?”

“I…wasn’t going to ask?”

“But you do want to know.”

“Yeah. How can you tell?”

“Because you like understanding things, and Yuuka is not easy to understand at a glance. I’m sorry she was so…her.” It sounded like she was talking about Hina, put like that.

“Alright, sure: Why’s she like that?”

“The eye, for one.”

“Precognitive self-assurance, yeah, figured as much. How’s it work?” I hadn’t even known it was possible until yesterday, so I wasn’t afraid to admit my ignorance.

“I…don’t know,” she admitted. “Silver ripple, of course, but I can’t even guess at the capture mechanism or how it translates to something she can parse. She’s…touchy about it, as well. If we could find out…”

Widespread precognition, even of a relatively limited sort based on whatever the local silver ripple happened to show, would be a game-changer; that went without saying. It was also the sort of cat that would be nearly impossible to put back in the bag. Ai understood that implicitly, I hoped—but then again, she was also the woman who had apparently invented a truly sentient AI in Ebi, so perhaps given the chance, she’d leap before looking. So might I, if it came to that, which troubled me. I switched back to the main topic.

“How do I get along with her?”

“Ah, well…your start was bad, being…with Hina. You are, ah, dating with her?”

There was a little bit of judgment in her voice. I hurried to correct her misconception.

“I’m…not sure, but I’m not doing her type of magic. No…mutation or transformation.” The seared patch of skin under my shirt and hoodie still stung faintly, a guiltily euphoric reminder to myself that we’d already taken steps in that direction—but cosmetic stuff didn’t really count. I ought to clarify that to Hina…if I could even convince myself of the loophole’s validity. “I made it really clear that I didn’t want to hurt my Flame or anybody else, so…”

Ai let out a breath she’d been holding, shoulders relaxing.

“Good. Good. That’s a relief, truly. I was worried, because…you two do have chemistry, and…”

“Christ, could everybody see it but me?” I immediately slapped my hand over my mouth. “Didn’t mean to say that.”

Ai burst out laughing, then covered her own mouth just as quickly. She needed a few moments for the giggle fit to subside.

“You’re not the first. She told me she’d tell you about her last boyfriend?”

“Skychicken. Jason. Flamebearer, friend of mine.” That part didn’t seem to surprise Ai. “Apparently, their relationship is why Yuuka doesn’t like her?”

“In simple terms, yes. Hina got…worse, more Hina-like, over the course of that relationship, and Yuuka blames him for that. And she doesn’t like men all that much, especially…she probably thinks you’re just here for Hina.” I didn’t quite flinch, but Ai still caught how I shifted and recoiled slightly. “Ah. I’m sorry, I know that’s not how it is at all, but…she’s had some bad experiences, and she jumps to conclusions. Alice thought she’d be alright with you being here, staying here, but maybe she miscalculated, or she just didn’t expect you to click with Hina in this particular way and make Yuuka mad.”

“I…she yelled at me for not thinking things through. But she’s the one who just immediately assumes the worst like that!” I almost growled. It was beyond frustrating and unfair, and Ai nodded in sympathy. I wondered if I could ask her to clear things up with the abrasive goth girl for me, to explain that I wasn’t at all like the caricature she’d assigned me, since trying to have that conversation myself would kill me and I doubted she’d even listen. But I also didn’t want to put Ai through that, not somebody who’d already been so kind to me and who frankly had better things to do. “What can I…do? To fix things with her? I don’t want this—mess. It’s ridiculous,” I groused. “A revolving door of drama. I just figured things out with Hina!”

That bordered on being too much outward complaining, and I cut myself off before I could run my mouth about how this was on top of the lingering worries about the PCTF and Hikanome. But it still felt good to say, and Ai nodded harder, then sat back and thought for a minute.

“I understand, it’s…yes, she can be exhausting,” she admitted. “And stubborn. She won’t listen to me or Alice for this, I think, and certainly not Hina. But Amane, she can help you with this.”

“Amane?”

“Yuuka has a soft spot for her, of course, after everything.”

“Um. I’m still not entirely clear on the timeline for that,” I admitted, glancing around the workshop, reflexively checking if the coast was clear despite knowing our conversation was magically secure. It was mostly deserted now that the students had gone; a few other engineers were working on their own projects at faraway machines, but nobody was close to being within earshot. “Amane was abducted, and the rest of you…rescued her. Alice said something about how you and her and Hina were a separate group first, though?”

It was a bit of a tangle, trying to piece together offhand comments and insinuations and tone from the past few days in between far more immediately important conversations. Not my strong suit. Ai bit her lip, and I hesitated, but then she jumped in her seat, clenching her right fist.

“Everything alright?”

“Yes.” Her tone said otherwise. “Your girlfriend is here. She can explain that to you.”

I jumped as well when I felt arms slither over my shoulders.

“Hey, cutie. I’m stealing you for lunch,” a husky voice muttered in my ear. “Hi, Ai! I’m stealing cutie for lunch!”

—

Ai was very, very unhappy with Hina traipsing through the fourth dimension in her workshop, and I got a front-row seat to a short but blistering lecture in Japanese. Hina did a remarkable job of staying still and enduring her teammate’s annoyance, chin resting atop my head. She didn’t seem particularly chastised, occasionally interjecting enthusiastic “Mhm!”s and unrepentant “Sorry!”s until Ai’s anger inevitably sputtered out and was replaced by an older-sister sense of exasperated disappointment. At that point, the Emerald Radiance switched back to English for my benefit, reminding Hina that “we’ve talked about this” and then attempting to cajole her out of the workshop. Stubborn mutt she was, Hina dug her heels in and insisted that she wasn’t leaving without me, so I bid a hasty farewell and thanks to Ai, taking the USB drive with me.

Hina took my hand and led me back through the hall toward the elevators, still full of energy.

“What’s for lunch?”

“Eggplant and pesto gnocchi!”

Yum. Apparently she wasn’t an obligate carnivore after all.

“…Homemade?”

“Not yet! How’s Ai?”

“Not yet?” But Hina didn’t answer the question as we entered the elevator, hitting me with that level, it’s-your-turn stare. “You just saw her.”

“Yeah, but she probably wasn’t yelling at you like she was with me. Unless she was?”

“Uh, no, she wasn’t. I was working on Amethyst’s arm. Or trying to, at least; I was really just messing with the weave.”

“Cool! Was it fun?”

“Yeah.”

Silence fell. I felt so awkward—but I’d already missed my window to ask how her own day was going. That was the correct, boyfriendly thing to do, right? It wasn’t that I didn’t have questions: was her voiceover work in English or Japanese? Was she done with her workday? Did she have any advice regarding making Heliotrope less of a bitch?

But I didn’t say anything, nor did she prompt me further with those sapphire eyes, content to just hold my hand and swing our arms back and forth a bit. At least she was in puppy-mode; my imagination lewdly suggested that the hyena might slam the emergency stop and press me against the wall, a scenario which would turn this mild social embarrassment into boiling-hot—

I politely told that part of my psyche to fuck off. I was still coming to terms with how much I wanted Hina to, in her own terms, “fuck me up,” and the awful things Heliotrope had insinuated about me were doing that process no favors.

We once again arrived at the nineteenth floor. The lights had been turned on in the kitchen, warm light pushing back the cool blue coming through the windows, and I smelled something roasting, probably the eggplant.

Stepping out of the elevator, I was surprised to find Alice laying on one of the sofas, face-down to accommodate her tail stretched out behind her, the tip just barely dangling over the armrest. As she pushed herself upright to greet us, I saw that she was wearing actual business attire—unlike at Tochou yesterday. Odd, or maybe normal; I didn’t have a good frame of reference, really.

It wasn’t much, just a button-down blouse with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows and a long, loose skirt worn high on the waist. She glared at my hand connected to Hina’s—quickly covered the expression with a smile. I altered the script I was building in my head; her presence automatically struck down any chance of conversation about my strange, budding relationship with Hina, but hopefully helped the odds that I could learn something that would make existing around Heliotrope less intolerable.

“Hey. Lunch soon, please? I have to be back with Suzuki in half an hour.”

“Yep! Fifteen minutes, sit tight.”

“Fifteen minutes?” Pretty quick. “Frozen gnocchi?”

“Oh, nah, I made the dough this morning, so it’s just roll and cut. Do you wanna do that or make the pesto?”

“Oh, uh…” I hadn’t realized that I would be helping. When I was young, we’d made pastas of all kinds, really, so the activity of rolling and shaping dough was scattered all across my memories of Dad, but the pesto…I didn’t want to touch that memory. “The gnocchi.”

“Gotcha!”

She put me to work, directing me to the enormous, metal-topped kitchen island, evocative of a restaurant prep table, oddly comforting and nostalgic. I was provided with the dough, flour, and an old friend: my knife, Dad’s gift.

“Still haven’t sharpened it,” she apologized, “but should be fine for dividing dough.”

Gnocchi are exceptionally easy to make by hand, Dad instructed. Most pasta shapes require you to roll a flat and thin sheet, which is hard without a machine, but gnocchi dough is robust enough that you can just roll it into a snake and cut it into little cylinders to make your pastas.

I floured up my hands, sliced the big ball of dough into more manageable portions, and went through the steps. Make a snake, chop it up—I stopped and hunted around the kitchen for a moment. Hina noticed from her own station to my right, where she was grinding the pesto by hand in a large mortar and pestle.

“Cutie? What are you looking for?”

“A fork.”

“Why?”

“To shape the dough?”

I was surprised she didn’t seem to know what I meant, but she obligingly directed me to the silverware drawer. She watched curiously as I demonstrated the technique.

Then—and there are specialized boards for this, but you can also just use a fork—you press the piece of pasta down along the tines of the fork with your finger, like this.

Hina squealed with delight as I transformed the gnocchi from a lump of potato dough to a pleasing little rolled shape with ridges all around the edge.

“More surface area; catches more sauce.” I explained from memory.

“Ooh! That’s so cute! Alice, kocchi mite!”

Todai’s leader, who’d seamlessly slipped into a support role doing dishes, also approved of the shape, nodding appreciatively.

“Oh, that’s how it’s done! I’ve had it like that at restaurants before, but I thought it needed a machine or something.”

“Same!” Hina stopped grinding the pesto—no, bad brain, stop that—to prod the pasta with a finger. “Can I try?”

“Hina, no, you’ll bend the tines and make a mess and I’m hungry,” Alice whined. Then she caught herself and her eyes slid over to me as she bit her lip nervously, caught with her guard down. What little dignity she had left was erased by a rumble, and I dodged meeting those slitted pupils to glance at her belly. She stammered. “Um.”

The three of us stood there in silence for a moment. Hina looked between the two of us with her big, blue eyes, then barked a laugh.

“Understood, Captain!”

She picked the pestle back up and resumed grinding the green paste. Alice kept trying to produce sounds, perhaps intended to be apologies for her impatience or indignance at the possible sarcasm, but another undignified grumble from her belly made her give up and turn back to the sink in embarrassed defeat. I picked up my knife and resumed making dough snakes, but that wasn’t enough to dispel the lingering awkwardness. I reached for a random question based on what was in front of me.

“Where did you learn to cook?”

“Me? Teacher from school who thought I needed a hobby to stop getting into fights. Hey, Alice, you remember Asagi-sensei, right?”

“…Yes? Third year home ec in middle school. It didn’t work, as I recall.”

“Nope! But food’s fun. You’re pretty good with that knife, cutie, where’d you learn?”

“I’m just chopping gnocchi, hardly a chiffonade or julienne.”

“Oooooh. Okay, now I really gotta know.”

I hesitated for a moment. I’d talked about this with Alice briefly, but somehow it hadn’t come up with Hina.

“My dad.”

“Oh, right, the dead one.”

“Hina!”

“Oops. Um. Sorry, cutie.”

I put down the knife for a moment to take a deep, slow breath. She didn’t mean anything by it, I knew that, but I still needed a moment to suppress the sudden spike of anger and grief at her casual prodding of the event that had destroyed my life. Shame, too, which took longer to boil off than the others.

“It’s—fine,” I gritted out.

“Do you wanna talk about it?”

“Hina!” Alice accompanied that with a thump of her tail against the kitchen’s tiles. The puppy flinched.

“Sorry.”

“No, um—talking is good, maybe,” I interjected, fighting down the reflexive annoyance. If I was going to live alongside them, telling them this much had to happen eventually, and it was easier with them, fellow flamebearers. If I trusted the chatroom, I could trust them. “Dad was a chef, the kind who traveled a lot. Took me with him.”

“Ooh, you’re rich?”

“Hina…”

“Uh. He didn’t actually save that much, and…things went wrong with the inheritance. Most of the money went to my grandparents, and from there to one of the cults, so I didn’t really see much of it.”

“Oh, shit. That’s—super fucked up.” The sapphire eyes were full of pity. I winced.

“I was fourteen, still in and out of the hospital, didn’t know how any of that worked, and they…stole it, basically.” More shame. “I got some aid from the Peacies later, around the end of the Firestorms, and managed to hold on to enough of that to, um, support my lifestyle.” I clarified hastily. “Uh, they weren’t the PCTF yet.”

“Don’t worry, we get it, no hard feelings. We know a thing or two about making ends meet.” Alice chuckled dryly. “Billionaire money, remember?”

“Ah. Right.”

Dirty money all around. Hina frowned as she passed me a small bowl.

“Wait, so the Peacies or one of their precursors knew about you as a flamefall survivor, knew where you lived, probably knew you were Ezzen, and never, like, tried to hire you? You’re a fuckin’ catch, cutie.”

“I’m…because I didn’t matter, probably, not compared to the pros.” I regretted that immediately, imagining Ai’s gentle rebuke if I’d said that to her. Alice filled in for her.

“Don’t talk about yourself like that. Remember how your work helped Amane? You’ve already made a difference.”

I tried to get myself to believe that while I gathered a snake’s worth of shaped gnocchi and brought it to the pot of boiling water on the stovetop.

“Okay, no, I can admit I would have been…an asset, so…no, I don’t really know. I guess I sort of assumed it was Sky’s doing. Um—Jason?”

“Probably. Sounds like him,” Hina confirmed as she dug through a cabinet for appropriate serving bowls. Alice stiffened at the name, and I realized we’d managed to stumble close to one of the things I was meaning to ask about. I seized the chance.

“Um, on that note, Heliotrope compared me to him earlier.”

Not at all a smooth transition, but I figured it was the only chance I was going to get.

“Ah, fuck, that’s right, your message,” Alice groaned, turning to me as she dried her hands. “I suppose it’s too much to ask that she was nice about it?”

“…No. Er, yes, too much to ask. She was mean.” Alice’s face fell further; now I felt bad for piling this on top of what was probably already a very stressful time. “My bad for bringing it up. I’m fine, really.”

“Last time you said you were fine, Hina had just sexually assaulted you,” Alice pointed out, voice flat. Hina whimpered, and Alice shifted; she wasn’t made of stone. “Sorry, Hina. Uh—I guess before I find out what dreadful things Yuuka said, we should first…she told me you two slept together last night. That, plus…‘monsterfucker’, plus that comparison—it compels me to ask: what exactly is going on between you two? Are you…a couple?”

“We’re trying things out!”

I glanced at Hina, relieved that she seemed to already have an answer ready.

“Yeah. It’s—we’re being responsible. Boundaries and all.”

“And you’re not our mom!” Hina crossed her arms defiantly.

Alice spread her hands in an ‘I give up’ motion.

“Couldn’t stop you if I wanted. Use protection, mind the teeth, et cetera. Just wanted to stay up to date on what was happening under our roof.” The stiff lashing of her tail betrayed her true feelings, but she didn’t press the issue, instead looking at me as though facing the gallows. “So, lay it on me: what did Yuuka say?”

—

“She’s grounded,” the dragon growled.

Alice’s expression had soured, then curdled into a snarl, as I repeated the nasty things Yuuka had said to me. It hadn’t stopped her from slurping down bite after bite of ridged gnocchi coated in creamy, green sauce as she listened; her hunger at least bound her to the table and prevented her from stomping to the elevator and hunting down Yuuka herself, but the atmosphere was still a bit fraught. We were both exasperated; this felt a bit too much like a repeat of the song-and-dance I’d had with Hina, although this time didn’t seem bound for euphoric intimacy, which suited me fine.

Hina, for her part, was emitting a faint but bone-chilling growl that had my heart pounding. It was nice to feel protected by something as wildly dangerous as her—but I was also genuinely concerned she’d attempt to tear Yuuka limb from limb.

“Um, Hina?”

“Mm?” The way her voice sounded with the growl was worryingly attractive, arguably hotter than when she was purring. More investigation would be needed—later.

“You’re not going to, uh…kill her, are you?”

“Never! Just rough her up.”

“Hina, can it wait until after I talk to her?” Alice shoveled another bite into her mouth; I was learning it was possible to eat pasta angrily. “As in, after you do your job. Which you have to get back to in twenty-six minutes.”

“It’d only take ten!”

“Uh, you’re not actually calling her off?”

“No. What she said was really hurtful to her too. Hina, please, you’d just make things worse, you know that.”

“What? No, you guys, I love her to bits, she’s done that for years, I’m good! She just doesn’t get to corner Ez and be a bitch like that. Not if I’m not there.”

“So you’ll wait?”

“Depends. Cutie?”

I wasn’t entirely opposed to Hina dispensing some physical retribution, assuming it would be the same degree of roughhousing I’d seen the other day. Hadn’t Ebi said Yuuka wouldn’t have wanted to miss that? So maybe the violence was fine, but—

“It…won’t help. I don’t think she respects…us. You or me.” I winced as Alice’s aura of heat, until now suppressed for the sake of her bowl of pasta, momentarily flared in frustrated acknowledgement, and the creamy pesto dried up, desiccated to a powder on the gnocchi’s surface. She frowned at the bowl and got up to add a bit of water back in. “I just—I talked with Ai, and that helped brush off some of what Heliotrope said, but other parts…”

“Which parts?” The growl vanished from Hina’s voice. If she had dog ears, they would have perked up.

“The, um…last night, you said this was just a starting point. Is it? Or is…” I raised my scarred hand, hoping she’d understand what I meant. “Is it just this you care about?”

I couldn’t bring myself to ask directly, both for the embarrassment of asking and fear of the answer.

“What? Cutie, of course it’s a start point, there’s more to you than that. I don’t call you that for nothing. You’re cute! And hot.”

“…Really?”

“Do I lie? Alice, do I lie? Is that a thing I do?”

“I’m not engaging with this part.” The dragon sat back down with her rescued pasta and kept eating.

“Fine. Cutie, yes, really. Your Flame is hot—heh—your body’s hot, and you’re going to be so cool once you just…come out of your shell, get comfy around us, learn to use your Flame. And Yuuka’s making that hard, which is…” She growled. “She’s just being shitty because of some old stuff with Jason; that’s not really anything to do with you. Don’t let her get under your skin. That’s my job. I wanna open you up and bring out the best version of you I can, and that’s not just because of your Flame, okay?”

“Um.” I shivered. “Open me up?”

Alice slapped the table softly in concert with her tail thumping the floor, reminding us she was there.

“Alright, too much flirting in front of me. I’m glad you two are at least, er, talking, but keep it in the bedroom. I have to get to my next meeting. I’ll try to give Yuuka a talking-to tonight.”

She left her empty dishes where they were, hurrying toward the elevator, tail swaying behind her. As she left earshot, Hina looked at me mischievously.

“So you don’t want me to fight her?”

“I mean…if you must, it’s not like I can stop you.”

“You’ll be able to, eventually. I won’t beat her up, though, because I’d rather spend my energy convincing you I’m actually into you. How’s that sound, hm?” She leaned toward me, blinking those big blue eyes too innocently for the innuendo, then sighed. “No time now, though, not for any real fun. I, too, have meetings. Ugh. But we do have time for—” She reached into pocketspace, which made me have to squeeze my eyes shut and rub them. When I reopened them, she had a small red box, palm-sized and squat. “This was for her, but I decree that she’s lost the privilege this year for being mean. So you can have it!”

“Um. I’m not following.”

“What day is it, cutie?”

“Monday?”

She facepalmed, giggled, and then removed the box’s lid to reveal a single chocolate shaped like a heart.

“February 14th! Happy Valentine’s Day!”

---

Author’s Note:

Healing! Being valued! Cooking! Valentines? We are slicing some lives.

Thank you to Softies, Cass, Penguin, Selenium, Zak, Maria, and Zooloo, my stupendous beta readers.

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

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

October 27, 2024

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

As Hina cleaned up breakfast, the other four Radiances left via the elevator. Heliotrope was first, actively seeking to escape Hina’s presence and the general atmosphere, never mind that said atmosphere was largely her fault. Off to school, I assumed, still a little unclear on whether that was classes or research—were they alright with her showing up in her somewhat-scant nightwear? Seeing that she was departing, Ai hastily got up and followed her over. They bickered in Japanese a bit, rapid-fire, as the doors closed. Once they were gone, Alice put her cheek in her palm, rubbing her hand up to her temple and forehead, a slow-motion facepalm.

“Well—yes, alright, I can give you some time to decide whether you want to go next week. But, um—it really would be best if we were able to RSVP with who’s going by…Thursday at the latest. Don’t mean to rush you! I swear! It’s just…we’re both big organizations, and between the logistics and the publicity, lead time is important and…”

I waved her off nervously.

“You don’t have to justify it, I get the picture, really.”

“Oh, thank heavens, good. We have to go get dressed, so…” she stood, twisting to rub the base of her tail. “We’ll probably miss each other until tonight. You’re unscheduled; make yourself comfortable. Sorry for things being such a rush for the first few days. And—” she glared at the elevator, “—sorry about Yuuka. She’s really not usually this bad!”

“No, really, it’s fine.” I sort of felt guilty for the stress she was under, now that the pressure from outside was starting to become palpable. “I’ll, uh, let you know. About the Hikanome thing.”

At least Yuuka’s rather extreme response to the situation between me and Hina seemed to have blunted Alice’s own worries and protectiveness of me. We hadn’t really had time to talk about it since the not-date, so I felt it was important to add:

“Hina really was on her best behavior yesterday…I think,” I whispered, hoping Hina’s vaguely advanced senses couldn’t hear me over the rush of water at the sink. “Don’t…we’re fine, we’ve figured it out. Don’t worry on my behalf, yeah?”

It felt weird that I was the one reassuring her, but she seemed to appreciate it, rubbing her face again and mustering a grin and nod. She helped Amane to her feet—or tried to, which the Amethyst Radiance refused somewhat playfully, rising on her own—and the two of them made for the stairs, followed by Ebi. Hina turned from her cleanup to give them a thumbs-up. The three went upstairs and disappeared from view, leaving just me and the puppy. She killed the water and came back over to me.

“I gotta get going too, cutie. Busy!”

“Sure. What do you…do, exactly?”

“Lotsa stuff. Today’s…damn, I don’t really remember. Voice acting for one of the collabs, I think. Uh—hey, Doctor, let’s knock ‘em dead! Stuff like that.”

“Cool. Uh—have a good day at work?”

“You too.” She leaned down to where I was sitting and nuzzled the top of my head, sniffing my hair. “I’ll see you at lunch, though.”

Trepidation seized me.

“Uh—where’s lunch?”

“I’ll find you!”

She leaned down further to plant a kiss on the bridge of my nose, and then suddenly she was gone, teleported off to who-knew-where, leaving only the smell of ozone as the air responded a little violently to her instantaneous departure. I was extremely grateful that was the only effect of her teleportation; no free ripple, and she seemingly could do it with enough finesse that there was no deafening clap from air rushing to fill the newly vacated spot.

Plus, now I had something specific to look forward to: lunch! That wasn’t the only thing; since it was the first real weekday since I’d come to Todai, I wanted to drop in and see what exactly each of them did all day. But that could wait, because having established that I was not, in fact, in any particular hurry to get things done or make decisions, and having been left to my own devices, I was of a mind to go right back to bed. It was still barely half past eight in the morning, and the comfort of my sheets sounded quite nice; Hina’s pile of blankets was well and good, don’t get me wrong, but an actual mattress and some time in my own space was in order.

Ebi intercepted me before I could escape, tapping my shoulder.

“Gah!” Hadn’t she just been upstairs? “Where the fuck did you come from?”

She grinned.

“Sapphire’s not the only one who can shimmy around fourspace. You slept with your foot on.”

“Um—yeah, sorry. Was about to go wash up,” I lied. I would get to it after my nap.

“Great. I know you’re probably intending to kinda laze around all day, but at least try to stay awake. Still gotta beat your jet lag.”

Damn, there went that plan. I wasn’t even going to try to get one over on Ebi’s diagnostic systems when it came to that stuff.

“Um, sure. Can I go now?”

“Only if you promise to also clean that burn on your chest.”

I reddened. Of course she knew.

“…Don’t get mad at Hina?”

“Wasn’t planning on it. You consented, I hope?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Then it’s none of my business. Looks like she’s able to restrain herself enough to not make it my problem, and that’s as far as I care. Last thing before I release you: your PC parts are arriving sometime this afternoon, and Amane’s wondering if she can sit in while you build. She’s kind of a nerd for that stuff.”

“Um—yeah, of course. I mean—yes, she’s welcome.”

“Great. Alright, off you go. Bathe! Ablute!”

As I turned away and made for the stairs, she added:

“Good job fending off Opal.”

I stopped.

“Uh, thanks? She gets like that a lot, I gather?”

“She’s just an overprotective worrywart.”

“…Meaning your own situation?”

She put on a digital facsimile of a shit-eating grin.

“You didn’t hear me say that.”

—

My second time around bathing in my new apartment’s bathroom went better than the first; it only took me two tries to get hot water coming out of the shower head. The first time, water had come out the bath basin’s faucet, and I’d considered soaking in the bath instead, but my foot was still too early in the healing process, and I was leery of letting it get too soft. That had happened once while my right hand had been healing, and it had left the fingers feeling like they were wearing a poorly fit glove for hours afterward.

The cauterized stump where the front half of my right foot had been magically amputated still stung, but now that I had a sense of the general procedure with the wall-mounted stool and handrails and the various soaps, the process was more familiar. I made quicker work of the actual scrubbing and rinsing than last time, but ultimately, I still took about the same amount of time, just spent a higher proportion luxuriating under the hot water.

The smooth-seared spot on my chest stung under the water as much as my foot did, less severe of a wound but more recent. I ran my hand along the skin, finding that it wasn’t perfectly level, owing to a pimple and the general irritation from being blasted by the magical equivalent of a branding iron, but it was indeed clear of hair and, improbably, hadn’t blistered up. What would it be like if my whole body were this smooth, at least when paired with other, more significant physical enhancements? There was appeal there—but I had decided that those sorts of more extreme changes were off-limits. I didn’t want to go too far with Hina, for my Flame’s sake.

“Sorry if she hurt you.”

My Flame still said nothing. Both Hina and I had heard it last night—it wasn’t clear how much she had used it for the procedure, if at all, but I felt guilty that she might have. I needed to understand exactly what was different about my Flame, the special properties it had from my status as twice-touched…but I doubted it would speak again without another similarly intense experience. Short of that, our best lead on that would be to find my stalker, ask her exactly what she had been doing, and reverse engineer it to test my Flame’s response. Hina had figured out a similar weave for the ingenious and abhorrent mechanism of murder we’d invented yesterday, but without understanding the exact kind of projected-yet-invisible LM weave I’d encountered, there were too many unknown and uncontrolled variables to draw any conclusions about my Flame.

Or you could keep cuddling with Hina and see what happens, my libido asserted.

“Shut up.”

Just saying.

I killed the water and occupied myself by toweling off, this time remembering to brush the conditioner through my damp hair. It was definitely already having a minor effect—wait, shit. I wasn’t supposed to be washing my hair every day. Oops.

At any rate, with a clean body and somewhat less-clean psyche, it felt good to exit the steamy atmosphere of the shower. This part of the procedure was still rather limp-y, having left my prosthetic and the stabilizer module on the bed, but after hobbling my way around the perimeter of the room and sort of slump-rolling myself onto the sheets, all was good. Adding the blanket on top was even better. I almost fell asleep there, butt-naked and against Ebi’s instructions, but my phone buzzed at me just as I was drifting off.

ebi-furai: stay up!

Bleh. She was right, but the bed’s siren song of warm, cozy naps was near-irresistible. I needed to escape or otherwise distract myself.

ezzen: and do whqt

ebi-furai: you can always do more research, right?

ebi-furai: still got your laptop

It was true enough, and I blearily sat up, groaning at the sting in my foot; no matter how high the thread count, the blanket was an irritant against the water-softened and still-healing skin whenever I moved. I groped for my laptop on the nightstand, shoving some stuff that had started to accumulate atop it onto the newly vacated space. I maneuvered the laptop—a fairly heavy model, as I had never really intended to travel with it—onto the unoccupied side of the bed and arranged my pillows such that I could sit up against the headboard with the laptop open on my lap, tugging at the blanket to minimize its contact with my foot while still comfortably covering the rest of my lower body, tenting and tensioning the fabric—much like weaving a glyph, I realized. Amused by the parallel, I opened the laptop, typed in my password—

And slammed the screen back down.

The evidence of my crime was still right there, the instrument of collaborative murder I’d designed, abstracted to about two dozen graphical boxes full of numbers in GWalk. I saw them die again, squeezed my eyes shut to stave off the memory of those little symbols realized, the death-dealing efficacy of my own creation, the logical end of my expertise, the great spherical cut-out, and the stumbling corpse. A spear punched through the heart of the blaze—

“No, no, no. No!”

I banished my automatically summoned spear, that hollow imitation of the onyx-tipped real thing, and slammed my palm down onto the blanket with a whump in shaky frustration. That disrupted the careful equilibrium I had established in the bedding and dragged the blanket against the top of my foot, making me suck in a breath. The most sickening part was that I could have sworn I felt my Flame flicker at the burst of guilt and pain. Kindling for power that could reach to the very limits of my ingenuity, reshape the world itself, reshape me—if only I chose to apply a spark.

Better to douse that kindling, cut off the potential at its source. One of the items I’d cleared off my laptop and onto the nightstand had been a box of those pain-blocker patches; Ebi must have left them for me. I reached for the box and extracted one of the adhesive patches, taking care to not let it stick to itself as I pulled off the backing, and brought my right knee up to my chest, feeling around my shin for the right spot to apply it…then reconsidered. I would have to wield my Flame to activate the patch at all, inflict pain to eliminate pain. Simply reattaching my prosthetic would block the sensation less completely, but at least that was just activating a lattice that was already in place, not freshly spinning and weaving—contorting and mutilating—the raw Flame in my soul. So I reached for the false front portion of my foot instead.

—

With my foot reattached, my laptop apparently a no-go—a problem for future Ezzen—and still needing a solution for the fact that staying in bed was a path to the forbidden, sleep-schedule-ruining nap, I figured I might as well familiarize myself with the rest of the penthouse. After shrugging on some more of my new, baggy, protective clothes, I went exploring and found a number of amenities that were a substantial step up from my old place.

For one, the Radiances had their own laundry machines, washer and dryer. As somebody used to coin laundry—one of the few times I regularly left the house—this was a luxury beyond imagination. The laundry room was sensibly up on the penthouse’s second floor with our rooms, and indeed, at first glance, I hadn’t realized it was different from the unused rooms on the far side of the C-arrangement until I had found the door ajar and heard the rumbling within. My old launderette’s machines had this awful, chugging clang quality to their operation; Todai’s were so much cozier, like mechanical rolling thunder, or the surf crashing against a shoreline as heard from a clifftop above. Not so loud as to be obnoxious, more like a big auditory blanket of noise. Like being inside Hina’s belly as she purred.

Wait. What the hell? Why, brain?

The load of laundry currently spinning in the washing machine was impossible to identify. The indistinct, multicolored mass of cloth could have belonged to any of the girls, and I resisted the urge to try to deduce the owner. Did they have a system to make sure people’s clothes didn’t get mixed up? Something to ask when it became relevant, I supposed. Also, I would need a hamper or basket or something; I didn’t even have a spare chair to act as my customary Laundry Chair. For now—there was a stack of big baskets in the corner. Would they get mad if I took one back to my room for the time being? Maybe that was what they all did? After spending too long paralyzed by the choice, I decided this was stupid and stole one of the baskets for my personal use, grateful nobody was home as I carried it back to my room.

The second level didn’t have much else of interest. I peeked briefly into one of the unoccupied rooms, mostly out of curiosity—vacant, of course, a blank slate for some future occupant. Teammates? Caretakers for Amane? Whatever the original purpose of these spare rooms, they didn’t hold anything at all right now, completely unfurnished; so with my curiosity satisfied, I descended the main stairs to the first level.

Without the Radiances around, the space felt much emptier, even liminal. The lights were off, adding to the palpable absence; with the sun now up, natural daylight flowed through the windows at the far end of the main sitting area, bathing the space, refracting prismatically at the edges of each floor-to-ceiling glass panel into a series of scintillating rainbows that splashed across the floor at regular intervals. The tranquility—I was being overly dramatic again. It was just sunlight. Stepping into one of the beams was nice and warm, though; I could at least appreciate that.

The kitchen was pristine, the only sign of breakfast’s labors a handful of metal bowls drying in the dish rack. For all of Hina’s personal, wanton voracity in the act of eating, she seemed to take her cooking responsibilities very seriously. Did she cook every meal? No, she couldn’t have; that first meal with Alice and Amane had been prepared while she was out, so there must have been a kitchen somewhere else in the building. An employee cafeteria, probably. And in hindsight, that curry had been really quite good, so I sort of wanted to drop by and browse the menu—if that was even how it worked. The idea of just walking in without any kind of social script was nearly petrifying, even when only imagined. Perhaps there was some kind of early sign-up, maybe weekly or monthly, and if I were to just walk in and expect to be served, I’d get laughed out and be unable to explain myself because of the language barrier and—

Mercifully, such stressful thoughts of crowds and social stratagems weren’t a concern in this massive, deserted apartment. Was ‘apartment’ even the correct term for such a large communal dwelling? Google said yes, at least. Continuing my exploration brought me over to the various sub-rooms below the—balcony? Google answered that for me as well; beneath the mezzanine lay the meeting room and dojo, which I’d seen before, but it turned out the hall continued down and around, following the C-pattern of our individual rooms above. The room past the dojo was a continuation of the fitness theme, full of benches and strange pulleyed contraptions and treadmills. This made sense; Ai was the only one of the five who I’d consider ‘buff’, but all save Amethyst were fit and toned, something that was probably very important to the more idol-y side of their image.

It occurred to me to wonder whether Hina’s supernatural physique required such…mortal workouts as the weight room implied. Would I, if it came to that? The Vaetna, at least, were known to also have a weight room, but it sort of undercut their superhumanity to imagine them doing mundane weight training in addition to all their combat-focused training. Myself, I had maintained a pretty decent baseline of fitness from daily spear practice alone—though I hoped I wasn’t going to be forced upon those treadmills. Cardio sucked.

Speaking of my spear, the dojo’s open, padded flooring was calling to me through the propped-open doorway. Yesterday’s return to my routine had made me realize that I now had vastly more space to practice even in my bedroom, and the dojo was easily four times that large and had a higher ceiling. This was the kind of space that I could see VNTs do serious sparring in; that thought prompted me to look around for some kind of control panel like I’d seen in the Vaetna’s videos of their equivalent training space, forcefields to alter gravity or set up holographic targets, but no dice. There were dummies herded into the far corner of the dojo, though: skeletal wooden ones studded with pegs, pillowy ones more reminiscent of punching bags, and even a few torsos that looked like those anatomically correct firearms testing dummies made of ballistic gel and fake bone I’d seen on YouTube. It was easy to picture Hina tearing through those last ones, reveling in how her claws splattered false, neon-green blood onto the nylon floor padding. Or maybe those were for actual firearms, if Amethyst’s upgunned KV-18 was anything to go by; Todai didn’t seem very concerned with nonlethality.

I pushed down those thoughts, stepping further into the dojo and calling forth my spear. Yesterday, I’d resolved that it was a toy, something for my own recreation, part of a different world from those grand weapons, and I ought to make good on that. My stabilizer module, too bulky and heavy to remain in my hoodie pocket, went on the floor. The hoodie itself joined it right after, as did my socks and phone, and I began my routine, the same as yesterday’s, the same as most days between the first and second times my life had been turned upside down. Stretching my limbs and warming up my muscles felt great with my now-clean skin, and I had so much space to experiment! First, though, I had to adjust to the new environment. The padding underfoot changed the kinematics of each step, and I stumbled a few times as years of muscle memory were ever-so-slightly disrupted, but the stabilizer module caught me each time, and by the time I was done with the basic forms, I’d adjusted to the difference.

Ai’s explanation yesterday had been fun; the stabilizer was quite an impressive bit of tech. My intuition was more or less correct: it was essentially a magical gyrostabilizer. Some of the glyphware that identified the most stable positioning of footfalls was a miniaturized and slightly hacky version of Amane’s own leg—which it turned out that Ai had older versions of in the shop, so she’d opened one up to show me how exactly the lattice substrates were both etched into and extruded out of the skeletal struts at the core of the mechanical limb. Seeing the diagrams—publicly available, a move on Ai and Amane’s part for which I had no end of respect—realized and cleverly integrated into the physical structure gave me a renewed appreciation for the precision and design considerations involved in—

“Kemono two.”

I tripped. My prosthetic was planted firm, taking the majority of my weight, so it had nowhere to adjust. It turned out the prosthetic did have limits to what I could recover from. I began to windmill my arms, realized I was holding a giant crutch, and stabilized myself with the butt of my spear against the padded flooring. I turned to face Heliotrope, red as a beet from the exertion combined with embarrassment. I had only mustered the courage to do this in one of the public spaces because I had thought nobody else was home.

“Um. Hi. Heliotrope. Radiance Heliotrope?” She was the only one of the five for whom I was still using her title rather than her name, so…“Yuuka?”

“Bloodstone.”

“Bloodstone. Sure. Uh—thought you were at school?”

I had started that sentence intending it to be a statement, but it ended as a question, unsure of what exactly she did, day-to-day.

“Not until two. It’s on the callie, y’know.”

Did—did Australians call calendars “callies?” I didn’t know, and didn’t dare call her bluff.

“Um, sorry.”

We stared at each other. Or, rather, she stared at me, and I made a commendable effort to not stare at her boobs, instead pretending to inspect the furnishings of the dojo. Seriously, that perky and she’s not even wearing a—the dojo didn’t get any direct natural light, padded on all sides but the glass interior wall. My eyes found the control panel I’d missed earlier, half-hidden in the corner behind the dummies. Oh, shit, Bloodstone was saying something.

“—and I don’t want Alice to get on my ass about it, and Amane pulled me aside earlier, so, uh, sorry.”

I zoned back in just in time to register the apology, but not quite what it was for. I’d taken up her workout slot, maybe?

“That’s, um, it’s no problem,” I muttered, still avoiding eye contact. “It’s, um, really no problem. Was there, er, a sign I should have put on the door?”

I turned to see if there was some kind of locking or notification mechanism near the door. I didn’t see anything, but caught a frown on her face as I turned back, sort of awkwardly shuffling my feet to face her more properly. That was the polite thing to do, I remembered.

“What, like a sock?”

“Oh, is that how it works? Sorry.”

I hastily turned again to start ambling back toward where I’d left my socks with my hoodie. That was a weird system, but I wanted to fit in.

“What are you doing?” She groaned. “Not now, I meant—last night, sock on the door because you’re being a monsterfu—because you’re sleeping with her. Christ.”

“O—oh.”

“Did—oh my God, you weren’t paying attention, were you? I wasn’t—” She wheezed a single, strangled, incredulous cackle. “I was trying to apologize for the monsterfucker thing, not—not for walking in on you, we walk in on each other all the time in here, nani kore, you’re—”

She doubled over, dissolving into laughter. I wanted to quit this entire week and curl up in my old bed back in Bristol and pretend none of this had happened, that I hadn’t just fucked up a basic social interaction—where she had been apologizing to me—so badly that she now looked like she was on the verge of asphyxiating from laughter. I just stood there, horrified at the new low I had set for myself, until she recovered in shuddering gasps.

“Wow. Wow. You’re really—God, and you didn’t even challenge me on the ‘callie’ thing. Oh. Heh. You really are like a second one of her, just as scatterbrained. Aren’t you supposed to be as smart as Ai? I mean, you’ve got to be; you put together that thing we used yesterday.”

“That’s not—”

“But I guess that’s your thing? Idiot savant? No wonder you’re already fucking that thing, you must not have listened to anything the others said about her! I mean, there’s no way they didn’t warn you! Alice and Ai for sure—were you just not listening?”

“Of course they warned me, and I chose—”

“Really? Seriously, really, you heard everything they said and still fuckin’ went for it?”

“Yes!”

“Jesus. I thought we were done bringing horny guys in here. And Alice wants me to apologize? You weren’t even listening!” She waved her hand in front of my face. “Are you now? Are you?”

“Of course I fucking am,” I snapped. “Just—overthinking!”

“Overthinking.”

“Yes! It’s just—”

“No, you’re not, because if you thought this through you would never end up balls-deep in the fuckin’ monster! Oh my God.” She laughed at me again. “Thinking it through means knowing what you’re fucking getting into, and you clearly don’t. Alice might not let me kick you out, but let me tell you, you’d better start thinking things through if you don’t want to—hold on. Are you going to join the fucking team?”

“No! I didn’t fucking ask to be here!”

“Huh?”

“Hina fucking abducted me and, no, I don’t want to join the team, but Opal keeps talking about it like it’s some kind of eventuality, and I keep trying to tell her and the others that I don’t want that but—”

“Wait, wait, waitwait—she abducted you and you’re still fucking her?”

“We’re not…fucking! It’s complicated!”

“Mate. I’ve heard that one before, you’re not the first—”

“Yes, yes, I know, her ex is the reason I’m here in the first place!”

That seemed to genuinely throw her off her rhythm. She tapped her right temple a few times, as though trying to knock something back into alignment, then struck it harder with the heel of her hand.

“The fuck? I should know that part.” She refocused on me. “This is Jason’s fault, and I didn’t pick up any of the ripple? Fuckin’…”

“Interference from being near the oil platform, if I had to guess. If your eye primarily works on silver, which is strongly correlated to flamefall and the Vaetna, then Heung splintering it on the intercept might have essentially blinded you—wait, Jason?”

I hadn’t known Sky’s actual name. Hina had let slip that it started with a J—one of the first things she’d ever said to me, in fact—but I’d promptly forgotten that tidbit in the hormonal mess that had ensued. What a mundane name. Distinctly masculine, though, which made sense. And the Argonauts were cool, I supposed. Oh, shit, Yuuka was talking again.

“—savant, yep. You’re really on the money with how this thing works, and that’s just from guesswork. So—wait, Hina really just carried you all the way here from fuckin’ England?”

“Yeah?”

“Damn.”

“Yeah.”

“So…” She seemed genuinely thrown by this bit of intel. “We good?”

“We good?”

“Yeah. I mean, you accepted my apology, so now Alice won’t hold that over me, and now that I get what’s going on with you I can say with confidence that I want nothing to do with you if it’s not related to magic, so. We’re good. Bye.”

She turned on her heel to leave.

“Huh? Wait, no,” I called toward her retreating backside. “Apology rescinded! You’ve done nothing but berate me since you walked in!”

“How would you know?” She didn’t turn as she replied. “You’re not even paying attention!”

Properly incensed now, I stepped after her.

“You’ve barely given me a chance to get a word in edgewise! You’re literally just being a jackass for no reason!”

—is what I didn’t say. Instead:

“Fine. If you’re only going to talk to me about magic, then here’s a question: Hina asked if—”

She had the audacity to raise a hand over her head and extend the middle finger back toward me. Her stride didn’t even slow.

“Not my problem!”

It was probably for the best that she interrupted me; trusting this catty bitch with the potentially sensitive case of my stalker seemed like it could backfire horribly, once I had another few seconds to cogitate on it. But I couldn’t resist trying to get the last word in as she passed the threshold back out into the hall.

“F—fuck off! I’m not just another ‘horny guy’, and Opal fucking knows it!”

That, of all things, finally made her pause and turn to look at me.

“What? We were done with this, guy. That’s like…two pages late.”

“I—I mean, I’m here because I can actually make a difference with my magic. That’s why they want me around. Even Hina doesn’t just think I’m a piece of meat…I think.” Probably. “It’s the first thing she said when she met me, anyway. Seriously, do you know who I am?”

“Oh my God. You’re playing the ‘do you know who I am’ card? You’re an internet nobody, some horny-ass hikikomori who had his flamefall three days ago and thinks that means he can bang every girl here. Well, guess what, jackass, Hina is only into you for your Flame, and the rest of us couldn’t give a shit about you.”

“Really? Amane was excited to meet me.”

At last, I got under her skin. She twitched, eyes narrowing, fists balling.

“Amane needs all the help she can get. Of course she’d be happy to have somebody around to help Ai. You have no fucking idea what she’s been through.”

I jabbed a finger at my bare prosthetic.

“Where do you think this came from? Running from the Peacies! Like her! Opal told me. Yes, they give a shit.”

“Only to help her.”

“Come off it,” I sighed. “I deserve to be here. I’m not just some fucking guy.”

“Why do—you know what, fuckin’ forget it. Have fun playing with your spear.”

And she turned and stomped away, all one hundred and fifty-five-odd centimeters of fifty-grit human sandpaper—posthuman, as the case may have been, but I wasn’t feeling charitable—angrily tramping along the glass wall separating the dojo from the hallway until she reached the end and vanished from sight. It took a little longer for her to also vanish from earshot, slipper-on-hardwood footsteps fading until they stopped. There was a ding—really more of a digital ping—heralding the elevator’s arrival, and then my verbal assailant was gone from the penthouse. Wait, she’d still hardly been wearing anything, surely she wasn’t going to go out in public with—

Oh fuck. I slammed the brakes on my imagination, wiping the image of her figure from my brain shamefully. I was being a horrible, objectifying ass; she was right. Guilt surged through me.

“Fucking…God, what am I doing?”

No answer from my spear. On top of being a political nightmare, and dead weight to the group, I was harboring horrible, fuckboy thoughts that would make them feel unsafe around me if ever voiced, never mind my relationship with Hina. I was being fucking gross about these girls who were already doing a lot to keep me around.

Part of me knew that I wasn’t being fair to myself. My shame was itself a sign that I wasn’t as nasty as Yuuka had made me out to be. But that didn’t actually alleviate the dark, viscous self-disgust coating my thoughts right now. I sat down and tried to take stock of the facts: none of the others had that perception of me, and Alice had outright told me not to worry about giving that impression. But that made it all the more frustrating how she’d hardly given me a chance to explain what my situation was. It was nothing but assumptions with her.

That made some sense, I supposed, given the nature of her eye. Other than the fact that it was apparently somewhat unreliable, I hadn’t gleaned much more about how it worked, but it was pretty easy to see how precognition—perhaps closer to general omniscience—could make someone a presumptive asshole to the extent that I had just had the bad luck to experience. Still, that wasn’t an excuse; how did the others put up with that? Even if she was more cordial with Amane and Ai, she was definitely a little frosty with Alice.

Belatedly, I realized that at some point during that I’d switched back to calling Alice ‘Opal’. Oops.

And what of Hina? She clearly still liked Heliotrope/Bloodstone/Yuuka as much as she did the rest of her teammates, which was to say a whole lot, despite the sheer abrasion of which I suspected I’d only caught the aftershocks. What a person. What a shitheel.

—

At any rate, I did indeed get back to playing with my actual spear, thank you very much.

“It’s okay,” I muttered to the length of wood, more quietly than I likely had to, now worried about more eavesdroppers. “She didn’t really mean that. She meant, uh, the other thing, not you.”

As I got back into the rhythm, I fumed, replaying the encounter in my mind, trying to pick apart how I could have approached it differently, cut back at her more strongly.

I’d missed the chance to throw several other points at her. For one, she’d been positively delighted with the instrument of murder I’d built for her yesterday, so clearly she cared about my magical capabilities, not just Amane, and not just for the purposes of prosthetic engineering. Which was ironic, in a sad way, because I would much rather be known for glyphcraft that made lives better and not…over. Yet I found myself fantasizing about throwing that particular note in her face and watching her fumble for a retort before retreating once she realized the flaw in her argument, leaving me victorious upon my throne of death. Would that be better than the lingering feeling that I’d come away from that interaction looking worse than at the beginning? Probably not. I certainly felt worse about myself, unable to entirely shake the muck of disgust, ego and self-image badly bruised. If that had been her goal, well done.

That I’d circled back on the “not a horny boy” thing felt even worse in hindsight, knowing there was some truth to it. Should have left it out entirely; not half the “gotcha” I had felt it was in the moment. I wanted to atone for that in some way, cleanse myself of the attraction to these girls and fixation on how attractive they were. I could try to think of those thoughts as unfaithful to Hina, but—what Heliotrope had said about the hyena being into my Flame rather than me stung, a lot. For all Hina called me “cutie” and made me feel amazing, and how I was trying my best to not be jealous of Sky, there was still a sharp edge of shallowness to it all. Maybe I was only imagining that, but it hurt nonetheless.

The worst part was that my simmering frustration was again aggravating my Flame. I attempted to solely vent the feelings with my spear routine and the rhetorical shadowboxing and tried very hard to ignore the way my right hand was steaming. Was this how Alice felt? Honestly, if two of her teammates were that and Hina, and she was hungry all the time, no wonder she seemed almost incandescent in every other interaction with them. At that thought, I aborted out of a far sweep to set down my spear and instead walked over to my pile of belongings to dig out my phone.

Ezzen Colliot: I just had a pretty awful interaction with Yuuka.

Ezzen Colliot: (Can I call her that? She told me to call her Bloodstone but it was. Bad.)

Alice Takehara: Meeting.

Ezzen Colliot: sorry

Oh, shit, oops. The calendar agreed; she was booked solid until 5 PM. Should have thought of that; I was being inconsiderate. The “callie”—which Google informed me was not an actual Australianism—also confirmed that Yuuka did indeed not have school until the afternoon, so that was on me.

The core of Yuuka’s accusations gnawed at me. I didn’t want to be dead weight. I felt the need to prove that I belonged here, that my knowledge was valuable, that I wasn’t just some gross boy here to ogle them. I was Ezzen, an expert, and I ought to use my Flame to help people, channel the Flame in my chest somewhere useful. If she thought I was only here to help Ai with Amane’s prosthetics, then fuck it, might as well lean into that. It was what I wanted to do with my magic anyway, far more than the instrument of murder of yesterday—which Yuuka had conveniently omitted that she’d been so happy with.

I folded away my spear, pocketed my phone, and shrugged the hoodie back over my head, still-new armor. Yuuka had caught me essentially naked by contrast; I already felt better once I was ensheathed in the heavy fabric, my carapace. Was this what it was like to pilot one of the Radiances’ mantles, this sense of security in my regalia?

My thoughts still aswirl with the caustic encounter, I went to make myself useful. Time to find out what the Emerald Radiance did on a regular Monday.

---

Author’s Note:

Thank you so, so much to pirateaba of The Wandering Inn for the shoutout. It’s pushed Sunspot onto the Rising Stars list here on RR, #22 at time of writing, and that’s absolutely incredible to me. You might remember from the arc 1 author’s note that TWI is one of the big inspirations for Sunspot, and on top of that paba is one of the biggest fish in the ocean when it comes to shoutouts, so I’m incredibly grateful. And hello to all the new readers!

As for the happenings of the chapter. Isn’t Yuuka just so mean? A real jerk, and yeah, this chapter is supposed to make you feel kind of bad. As with 1.06, please bear with me. Also, apologies to any Australians if her lingo sounds inauthentic; I’m still getting a feel for it.

EDIT: I FORGOT TO THANK THE BETAS. Softies, Cass, Penguin, Selenium, Zak, Maria, Zooloo: Sorry! Thank you!

Thanks for the love. See you all next week!

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

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

October 18, 2024

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

“The flock would be blessed…newest Lightbearer…a great day for all Japan…warmest welcome at the gathering on Saturday. Gonna be casual, no fireworks…not asking much, by their standards. Full support…commitment to safety and security…The big hook is that they want Ez there.”

Ebi delivered a translated summary of Hikanome’s 6 AM message from her customary spot over Amane’s shoulder. We’d gathered around the largest table in the lower-level common space on the 19th floor of Lighthouse Tower.

“Leeeeeverage,” Hina simplified from the stove. As part of her continuing efforts to educate me in Japanese cuisine, Radiance Sapphire had decided this morning’s breakfast was to be omurice; she was currently managing the omelette half of that equation in three pans simultaneously. “They won’t lean on the Ministry to help us with the Peacies if he doesn’t show, ‘s what they’re saying.”

Ai raised a hand to indicate she wanted to speak while she hastily swallowed a bite of ketchup-smeared rice and egg. She looked like she had slept well, for once, although there was a slightly sleepy slur to the Emerald Radiance’s voice as she gave her assessment.

“It’s casual. They’re not going to, um, senrei shite—”

“Initiate,” Ebi supplied.

“—initiate you into the cult, if you’re worried about that. It’s just a big festival.”

Ebi crossed her arms, looking down at her mother.

“Why are you supporting this? You don’t like Hikanome, and you don’t like events.”

“I’m not.”

Alice looked hungry and a little impatient, though she did a commendable job of keeping her voice steady and reasonable.

“Amane is going anyway, he won’t be alone.” She turned to Amane for confirmation. “Ne? Iku?”

“O uchi ga tazunete kuru wa,” the Amethyst Radiance confirmed in her regular voice, slightly tightened as always by chronic pain. She was doing pretty well this morning, supposedly, but it was hard for me to gauge that beyond the fact that she seemed mobile and active.

“Her family are Hikanome members of pretty high standing,” Alice explained, turning back to me.

“Can’t blame them,” I muttered. “My grandparents found God.”

After Dad had died, was the unfinished part of that sentence. It was exceedingly common for direct relatives of flametouched—both inferno and successfully integrated bearer—to treat the whole affair with some level of spirituality or religion. Bring enough people like that together, and you got the new-age cults surrounding flamebearers. My grandmother had coped with the loss of her son with the belief that he had been taken by the Rapture, not slain horribly by forces beyond our understanding. It was why I had left to live on my own.

I wasn’t going to pick at that emotional scab out loud, nor had I opened up to Hina about it last night; our passionate whispers and admissions through clenched teeth had been decidedly future-facing, not reflections on our pasts.

“All of us have some family connected to them, but Amane’s are by far the closest, so she’ll be going as a social call regardless. They were—” she clicked and tapped a bunch on her laptop, “—yeah, they were happy with just two of us showing up last time. Yuuka? You don’t have classes that day, do you?”

She looked to Radiance Heliotrope—or Bloodstone—who put down her phone to count something on her fingers. Her right eye was shrouded by long bangs, the rest of her black hair up in twintails. I shuddered as I remembered the jade-and-ruby eye that lay behind. With the spoon in her other hand, she picked at her omurice, eating around the shockingly detailed, anime-style illustration of her that Hina had drawn on the omelette in ketchup. Somehow, the sapphire puppygirl had recreated every strap and gratuitous curve of her teammate’s mantled outfit. And there was indeed a lot of curve; in her much more casual nightwear of a tank top, the way she was leaning over gave me an uncomfortably clear line of sight down her cleavage. Were those real?

I didn’t want to incur a death-glare from that horrible eye, so I jerked my gaze back over to Hina as she brought over my own omurice. Heliotrope sighed, replying to her teammate in an Australian accent I was still quite surprised to hear come from the mouth of such a Japanese-looking girl.

“Hm. Me, Amane, a big barbie in the park, chaperoning our new monsterfucker to make life hard for the Peacies? Sure.”

—

Monsterfucker. She’d applied the label after an unexpected meeting in the early hours of the morning. We’d surprised each other—I’d been woken up by the thud-shhhhmmm of her jetbike landing on the roof and realized I was really thirsty, so after a few minutes of deciding whether I wanted to leave our cozy, warm nest, I’d disentangled myself from Hina and snuck out of her room to get my water bottle. I’d had the unfortunate luck of doing so just as Heliotrope was trudging down the hall, travel bag slung over her shoulder.

“Um—mornin’,” I’d blearily greeted her. In classic Ezzen fashion, it didn’t occur to me to inquire politely about her travels until the moment had already passed.

She’d just gaped at me.

“Aw, nah,” she’d groaned. “You’re sleeping with her?!”

“Er—no, we didn’t have…” Even in my half-awake state, I’d managed to muster some embarrassment. “We’re not dating.”

“Not dating. Even though she calls you ‘cutie’—yeah, I remember! You showed up three fuckin’ days ago, if my maths is right, and you’re already fucking?” She pushed past me toward the door of Hina’s room hanging ajar. “Kemono! You cunts are about to make a whole bunch more red, and if that keeps me up even a second longer—”

Hina appeared next to her and grabbed her wrist, yanking it off the doorknob.

“Go to bed, Yuu-chan. No, cutie and I didn’t have sex, but we are sleeping together, because sleeping together is awesome. Yell at us once you’ve gotten a few hours of sleep yourself, okay? You need it.”

“Oh, fuck off, you…ugh.”

Heliotrope had been so dead on her feet that this did indeed seem to smother the embers of her wrath, and she pushed Hina’s arm away with a grumble before finishing her voyage down the hall. She did expend the effort to cast us a death-glare before entering her room, though. Hina didn’t dignify that with a response and instead sidled up to me and led me back into her room, through the dark—back to bed, insofar as that word could describe her den. By now, the candles had all died, so only the even, soft, yellow glow of the city lights through the floor-to-ceiling windows illuminated the room. The contrast, yellow on blue, made her eyes somehow even more impossibly, gorgeously vivid.

“Sorry ‘bout her.”

“Tell me that’ll be the worst response any of them have.”

Yesterday’s discussion with Ai, and the implicit judgment of monstrousness she had levied upon Hina, came back to me. She’d equated her personality to the PCTF’s organized abductions—and in the same breath, also forgiven her and said it wasn’t her fault, so I wasn’t actually quite sure where the Emerald Radiance stood on her teammate.

“Mm. Should be! Don’t worry about it for now.”

Hina flopped back down onto her pile of bedding, unconcerned. I remained standing, looking over to her washroom.

“I’m not great at not worrying.”

“Practice makes perfect. Seriously, don’t let her get under your skin.”

How was I supposed to do that? For now, by changing the subject.

“Er—was going to get my water bottle. Thirsty.”

“Need your fluids, yep. Gotta lubricate.”

“You do know how that sounds?”

She hopped back to her feet. Now that she had been roused, it seemed that she was firing up with the same late-night energy of a cat or dog with a case of the zoomies.

“Cutie, we made out for like two hours. Yeah, I know how it sounds, I’m not that oblivious.”

She stalked past me silently, too-blue irises shining in the gold lights of the city. They glimmered as she stopped and turned to me, brushing a hand down my forearm to loosely take my fingers in hers.

“Is—I’m not being oblivious, right?”

I returned the gesture, holding her hand gently. Her skin was soft, and her relaxation hid her alluring, monstrous strength. Here in our little pocket of the night, she and I weren’t predator and prey. We were the same kind of creature, albeit in different stages of our metamorphosis. Ebi had called us mates, as a joke—I pushed down that direction of thoughts. I held onto the agreement we’d made.

“You’re not. You’re doing really well, Hina.”

“‘Kay. Thanks.” She squeezed my fingers, then averted her eyes. “Can I bite you?”

Yes.

“…Where?”

“Um—chest? Near your heart. I won’t break skin, I just kinda wanna…gnaw? Is that the word? Gnaaaaaw. Gnaaaw. Hehe,” she giggled giddily.

“Yeah, it is, that’s the word, you got it,” I rambled, heart rate rising, the turmoil of excitement beginning to bloom in my belly. “Yeah, I’d—I’d like that. But, um…” My hands, already pulling up the hem of my new, generic shirt, stopped at my belly button. “I’m…fuzzy.”

“I don’t mind!” She leaned in slightly, peering at me, examining me in sapphire. “But you do. Uh—hm. I could just zap the one spot. Not gonna do your whole front, that’d take like an hour or two, and you should shave first, but I can totally clear a couple square inches. How’s that sound?”

That was meandering awfully close to the element of our arrangement I had most strictly forbidden. Did it count? Possibly. In a literal sense, she was proposing to change me with pain, and that was a line I wasn’t willing to cross—not if it were my own Flame being hurt. But was I really crossing that line? She would be the one doing the magic, and the necessary pain was part of what she was. It was her sin, not mine. Not entirely faultless, perhaps, but buoyed by more conventional desire for further contact and skinship, in the face of that 3 AM temptation, aglow in the city lights, rationalizing was easy. I wanted to be smooth and sleek; one of the muttered, breathless admissions I’d whispered at her earlier in the night, before sleep had taken us.

“Yeah, um, I’d—yeah.”

She giggled again.

“Aww. You’re fuckin’ cute, cutie. Well—” she hummed. “That’s obvious, I guess.”

Then she closed the gap between us entirely, angling her head up and tugging me down by our joined hands into a soft kiss. I felt the rumble of her purr resonate up through her body and against my lips. I found myself again trying to imitate her, a kind of growl rising in my throat like I was trying to clear it. A rough, mucosal sound, not at all the soothingly feline rumble of her own anatomy. But she still enjoyed it, jerking slightly before wrapping her other hand around the back of my neck to pull me deeper, rising to her tiptoes and deepening the kiss, her own purring intensifying. When she came away from me, a huge, dopey smile was plastered across her face, fangs tinted a soft cream color by the yellow light.

“You’re not a very good kisser yet.”

“Uh. Sorry, I—”

“Which is fine ‘cause it means we can do so much practice!” She was bouncing a bit; her switch was flipped, somewhere between predatory mania and puppy excitement and surreal, unbelievable attraction. She took a deep breath, eyes lingering on my lips. “Okay, I really want to give you your zappies and nibbles, but I need to work off this energy first or…”

Or she wouldn’t trust herself. The tacit acknowledgment of her limitations, of her desire to prove she could control herself around me, made my chest all fuzzy. A cute grimace flickered across her face.

“Gonna do my rounds. Can get you a glass while I check on something. Cold or lukewarm?”

“Cold, please. Your…rounds?”

“My rounds!”

And she trotted out the door before I could reply, off to guarantee the security of her territory. Was that just the penthouse, or was she about to scour all twenty-three floors of Lighthouse Tower? While she was gone, to settle the pounding of my heart, I groped around for my phone where it had lay discarded.

Skychicken had finally replied to my apology.

—

My omurice stared up at me. The ketchup embellishments took the form of hearts and flames. Hina was making no attempt to hide her proclivities. Alice poured me a glass of juice from the pitcher and passed it to me—some mix involving oranges, from the look of it. It was hard to gauge the exact color under the warm lights of the common area; they bathed everything in cozy tones that warded away the winter’s chill outside. A sip confirmed that it was orange and mango—maybe some grapefruit in there too.

“Ebi, will he be well enough to go next week?”

Ebi didn’t respond to Alice, instead gently prodding Ai with a leg, who looked up at her, and they seemed to silently bicker for a moment. Ai rubbed her eye with the heel of her hand, then looked back to Alice.

“Don’t rush him.”

“I’m not!” Alice harrumphed. “I’m just cognizant of timetables.”

Ai turned that gaze to me.

“Ezzen: do you want to go to the rally?”

“Not sounding like I’ve got much choice, does it?”

She frowned. Alice winced, but covered it quickly.

“Of course you have a choice.”

I looked over her shoulder and wondered how much it cost to heat the enormous open floor plan of the penthouse. Maybe nothing at all; it seemed like a task for which the Frozen Flame’s natural heat emanations were well-suited, so perhaps it was just their own magic. Wait, she’d asked me a question. Choice?

“Do I? I’m, er, not as savvy as you all about the politics of the whole situation, so…I guess it depends on how much they’d shield us from the Peacies, if I’m following.”

Alice and Ai both sighed. Hina probably did as well, but it was buried under the sizzle of the pans and clanging of metalware and brief fwooshes of the kitchen faucet as she labored for our sakes in the kitchen. Ai spoke over Alice.

“Ignore that for a moment. Do you want to go?”

I took a moment to give it real thought. A big crowd of a religious persuasion I found a little unsavory? Potentially being outright put on display as a pawn between major VNT entities? Being outside in the cold all day?

“Not really.”

“Then don’t. Your comfort is our biggest priority right now.”

Alice accompanied that with a reassuring smile. It broke when Heliotrope elbowed her.

“He’d be more comfortable without the Peacies breathing down our necks. And Hikanome is our ticket for that.”

“Yuuka, no, it is his choice,” Alice maintained.

Heliotrope turned to me, leaning forward, elbows on the table.

“Way better to be in bed with Hikanome than the Peacies, long term.”

She examined my face, and I felt that horrifying, creeping sense again, the idea she was looking through me, under my clothes and meat and directly at my Flame. I attempted a protest.

“I’m not used to crowds.”

“What’s wrong? Nothing there will be scarier than that thing.” She pointed past me to Hina in the kitchen. “If you can get in bed with her, nothing there will spook you.”

I suppressed a sigh. For one, I didn’t appreciate the extent to which Heliotrope seemed willing to openly deride Hina—and neither did Alice, who was glaring at her goth teammate.

“He’s had a really hard few days, Yuuka. Come off it.”

“Amane’s had worse, and you don’t see her complaining.”

That sent the two of them bickering, slipping between English and Japanese. I felt like I couldn’t reveal exactly how little I wanted to do with public spaces full of people without explaining the situation I’d had with my stalker, and I knew that would lead to more yelling. I glanced over at Hina, my accomplice in the charade-by-omission, but she was studiously avoiding eye contact for the duplicity’s sake. I would have appreciated the support here, but left out to dry, I just waited for the two to settle down. Amane, seemingly now more clued in on the topic of conversation, prodded her draconic girlfriend with her prosthetic arm to shut her up, then glanced up at Ebi. She and the aqua-blue robot discussed something in rapid-fire and highly emotive Japanese—one of Ebi’s replies made Heliotrope fall silent as well and go back to eating, shamefaced.

“Amane thinks it’s rather unfair of Alice to be pushing you to meet with Hikanome’s head honchos while also citing your hardships,” Ebi explained. “Also, Heliotrope, you’re being a jerk. That one’s from both me and her.”

“Sorry, Ebi,” the Bloodstone Radiance muttered, finally relenting in her aggression.

A few moments of silence fell over the table. I found myself the one to break it.

“Er…thanks.”

Amane nodded in reply, rubbing Alice’s shoulder. The dragon looked grumpy, then caught herself.

“Um—apologies, myself. I’m getting impatient because I’m…hungry…”

The way she trailed off in embarrassment and sipped from her glass of juice with both hands was endearing, even familiar, and thus easy to forgive. Somehow, I found myself in the conversational pilot seat, and now that Amane had entered the picture, I felt her role in all this could use some clarification.

“Your family are members? Of Hikanome?”

I was a little worried we’d run into a language barrier problem, but she seemed to get it fine, and directed her reply up at Ebi, who spoke in her stead again. You couldn’t ask for a better real-time interpreter; she took on an approximation of Amane’s voice as it would sound in a Japanese accent around the strength of Ai’s and free of the tightness of chronic pain.

“Parents and brother. It was a big upward move for our family.”

“So…they’re good people?”

Amane frowned.

“Of course.” She conferred with the others for a moment, a snappy back-and-forth that circled the table and returned to her. “Wait, do you mean my family, or Hikanome as a whole?”

“Er—Hikanome. I didn’t mean to insult your family,” I added hastily.

The table fell silent again. This was why I wasn’t to be trusted with control of the conversation. Alice’s tail thumped.

“They are now,” she ventured.

“Ah. Suga…hara? Did he…do this to you?”

Ebi eyed me as she interpreted that for Amane. Alice opened her mouth, then paused, glancing over at Amane. Ai grimaced, but didn’t volunteer. The black-haired girl nodded, less hesitant about this than her teammates. They seemed nervous to weigh in on this topic in her stead, so she took point, still speaking through Ebi.

“Sugawara, and yes, indirectly. Sounds like you could use a history lesson.”

—

[Direct Message] skychicken: hey ez sorry it took me a couple days to get around to this

skychicken: apology accepted, i get why you were upset, its been a really fucked up few days

skychicken: you holding up okay?

Laying in Radiance Sapphire’s blanket-bed, trying to quell the jittery nerves that anticipated what we’d do when she returned, it was easier to distract myself from what I had done yesterday. The murder still weighed heavily on me, of course, and if I let my thoughts wander too long they’d inevitably return to that grisly sight of the final moments of a person’s life abstracted down to those few pixels, but the guilt was easier to dispel with Hina’s agreement that she’d stop me next time. She was strong enough and direct enough to cut through it all.

ezzen: I’m alright, all things considered. Long day yesterday, did paperwork with Opal, and Sapphire took me shopping.

skychicken: oh youre up, thought youd get to that when you woke up

skychicken: isnt it like 3am for you

skychicken: late even for you

ezzen: Still adjusting to the time difference.

Technically true.

skychicken: ah yeah that tracks

skychicken: shopping huh

skychicken: interrupted by the rig stuff?

ezzen: Sapphire freaked out and took me back, but nothing really came of it.

Aside from the people we’d killed together.

skychicken: hina been alright to you?

“Hina?” First name? It made sense he knew her personally; he’d called her to bail me out in the first place, after all, but I wasn’t sure of their relationship beyond that.

ezzen: She’s been pretty good. Nicer than first impressions.

ezzen: Not gonna tell me how you know her?

skychicken: answering that would require revealing some personal stuff

skychicken: …which i’d say you’ve earned with everything, and i feel bad for keeping you in the dark

skychicken: to start with, yes, i know what shes like, teeth and all

ezzen: So you knew what you were getting me into.

skychicken: ill bite

skychicken: what exactly have i gotten you into?

Could I admit this to him? I’d previously decided I trusted his confidentiality; plus, he was one of the handful of people other than Star to whom I’d admitted my Vaetna dysphoria.

ezzen: We’re…dating? Maybe? Not sure about labels yet.

ezzen: But we’ve been physical.

Wow, did that feel weird to say. Good, but weird.

skychicken: damn okay, happy for you

skychicken: confession:

skychicken: i knew you’d be into each other

skychicken: or suspected as much, at any rate

skychicken: (now would be an okay time to rescind your apology, i get it)

ezzen: Did you SET US UP?

No other way to ask. Had I wound up here instead of the Spire solely because Sky had thought it would be funny for me to get with Hina?

skychicken: lucky bonus?

skychicken: ez i say this with love but

skychicken: you’re a bottom. everyone knows you’re a bottom

skychicken: yeah, i figured you’d be compatible with hina, eventually. once stuff settled down a bit

skychicken: got boundaries, all that? healthy relationship stuff? i can yell at her if shes being a shit

ezzen: yeah

That was pretty telling.

ezzen: Thanks, I guess? Still working it out

ezzen: But don’t dodge the question.

ezzen: Did you set us up?

skychicken: no, not in that sense, she really was just the best string i could pull in that moment

skychicken: i contacted her pretty much the moment you told us what had happened to you

The reiteration that this hadn’t all been planned out, that there really just had been some serendipity to all this, made me feel better.

ezzen: Okay, I buy that. How DO you know each other?

skychicken: ah fuck here we go

skychicken: do i have your confidentiality?

ezzen: of course

skychicken: you promise? this is serious and it’ll change the way you see me

skychicken: absolutely sure you want to know?

ezzen: You’re only making me more curious, sky

It took him a minute to respond, the little icon blipping to indicate that he was typing. I rolled over onto my other side and waited, noting distantly that this pillow carried a hint of the same floral scent as Hina’s hair, barely detectable under the incense. I shut my eyes and took a secret sniff—she could never know that I did that, or I’d never hear the end of it. I reopened my eyes to see Sky’s message.

skychicken: i’m a flamebearer

“Oh.”

—

Once Amane broached the topic, she seemed comfortable to hand the actual explanation back to Alice, instead digging into her own omurice.

“Sugawara founded Hikanome, along with three other flamebearers. I won’t mince words: until three years ago, they were a doomsday cult. Lots of blood magic, and they made a significant portion of their money and connections doing…human trafficking, supplying flamebearer flesh across Asia. And beyond.”

The pieces were coming together. I looked at Amane again with dread. She met my gaze and poked Alice with a sort of “get on with it” attitude.

“That’s to say…they were how Amane ended up with the PCTF.”

Of course.

“Because her family are part of the—” Me and my stupid mouth, already forgetting that not half a minute ago Amane had hinted it wasn’t their fault. “Sorry.”

“They didn’t know,” Heliotrope asserted gravely. “We checked.”

Ai sipped her coffee. When I’d been coming down the stairs, I’d seen her spike it with Red Bull. Did that work? She fixed an accusatory glare at Heliotrope, some of the tiredness returning to her face.

“Alice and I checked. You and Hina…”

“They were monsters.”

Hina echoed the sentiment as she came back over.

“Yep, so we’re cool now. If it makes you feel better, most of them killed each other. Big ‘splodey inferno.”

“Which gave you plausible deniability,” I inferred. I hated going down this line of reasoning, but I couldn’t allow myself to miss the mortal element in their work again.

“Mhm.”

She passed a double portion to Alice, who accepted it almost desperately and immediately dug in, eating as fast as she could without looking completely deranged. Heliotrope was wearing a smug not-quite-grin, which had me a little puzzled. If she and Hina largely agreed on the principle of violence, why did the former seem to dislike the latter so much? Aside from the obvious, at any rate.

Amane pushed past the dark topic, through Ebi again.

“I’m not proud of that part. It had to be done, but…anyway, the parts of Hikanome that remain are good people, I swear. I don’t agree with their—” she coughed. All three of her teammates plus Ebi were all immediately on her, and she waved them away hurriedly as she rubbed her chest. She poked Ebi’s thigh, who resumed interpreting, the slightly exasperated expression on her digital face not betrayed in the tone of ‘her’ voice. “—their beliefs, but they’ve been really good to me and my parents.”

“I believe you,” I said hastily, feeling like I’d bungled this interaction somewhat. Did her parents know the full story? It seemed tactless to ask.

Alice broke in awkwardly, clearly wanting to hurry this along. She said something apologetic to Amane, who sighed and returned to eating in her slow, careful way. Alice turned back to me.

“Uh—anyway, the timeline: Blue Spark Incident, Hikanome sort of imploded and had a schism, Sugawara went to prison.” She listed the events on her fingers. “Now they’re under a new name, new doctrine. Same flamebearers other than him, though.”

“New name? That’d be Sun’s Blessing?”

Ebi sighed, speaking for herself now.

“No, it’s a bit of a clusterfuck. They used to be Hikari no Megumi; now they’re Hi kara no Megumi.” She tossed up a hologram to show the names spelled out, which only sort of helped me get it. I could see the different kanji, at least. “Still Hikanome, but switching from ‘light’ to ‘sun’ helped fix their branding, pushed it away from Sugawara’s focus on the Flame.”

“Huh.”

“They’re chill now!” Hina declared, trotting away toward the kitchen again.

Alice nodded in her direction.

“‘Chill’ enough that we’d feel safe sending you next week along with Amane and at least one of the rest of us, at any rate. That’s my main point,” Alice summarized. “Again, your call, Ai is right, but…the PCTF are coming. I’m expecting some official diplomatic proceedings to start sometime in the next forty-eight hours, and if we’re going to shelter under Hikanome’s wing, I’d rather have them on the same page as us sooner than later.”

I raised my hand once more.

“Um, didn’t they work with the PCTF?” I still wasn’t quite clear on that. Would they really take our side?

Alice was stopped from answering by a poke in the side from Amane’s robot hand. She explained via Ebi.

“It was through a series of intermediaries. I changed hands between…at least two different groups other than Hikanome, and the ones I actually ended up with are technically private military, not the PCTF proper. Um—were private military, I should say.” She spared a meaningful glance in Hina’s direction. “Internally, all those elements got either purged or followed Sugawara in the schism, and what exactly happened isn’t quite public knowledge. But they did successfully reform, and these days they’re a much more conventional…well, still distinctly culty, but no more doomsaying, no more blood magic, and no more human trafficking.”

Maybe this was an editorial choice by Ebi, but her tone regarding her own situation was remarkably lighter than the gravity with which her teammates always discussed the matter. She was serious, to be sure, but it was matter-of-fact—in much the same way I spoke about Dad, actually.

“We checked,” Heliotrope repeated.

“So, yes, they’d help shield us from Peacie interest if we appease them by having you show up on Saturday,” Alice summarized.

It was in everybody’s best interest for me to go. It protected Todai from being under cross-pressures from Hikanome and the Peacies. How bad could it be, really?

“Um, would I have responsibilities if I went? How much publicity would there be? It’d…make my face public, wouldn’t it?”

“All good questions,” Alice conceded. “It…depends on what exactly they want. They probably do want you to go public, and actually I’d guess that they want you as unassociated with us as possible. If they can sell you in the public eye as a sort of floating flamebearer, rather than explicitly a Todai member, it gives them more influence over your image.” She caught herself, conscious of how chessmaster-y she was coming off, waving her hands hurriedly. “I know you don’t like that, so…we can push back on that part. Just meeting with the leaders, maybe.”

“Nope. Veto,” declared Hina, returning to pass a double portion to Alice. “Sugawara might be put away, but I don’t want cutie to meet Miyoko without me there.”

“Worried she’ll steal your boytoy?”

Heliotrope’s snark was ineffectual. Hina just looked at her blankly.

“No, I wanna see if she’s down for a threesome.”

—

ezzen: WHAT

skychicken: flametouched 2017

skychicken: can’t give too many details, if you dig you can probably trace me

skychicken: the important thing is that i met hina when todai were on the trail for amethyst

Which would have been earlier in Hina’s metamorphosis, noted some part of my brain.

ezzen: Wait, so, the forum???

skychicken: magic discussion needed a neutral nexus for online discussion outside of the pctf’s grip on data in the us/eu

skychicken: you already know that part, ofc, but now you know how im able to maintain that neutrality

skychicken: im positioned to resist intimidation, and its way more of a difference than i could make doing vnt work

“Hey, cutie. Coast’s clear.”

“Um, hey.”

Hina passed me the promised glass of cool water, and I sipped from it gratefully. Crisp and refreshing, it helped me stabilize after the revelation Sky had just laid upon me. The water caught the low light of the room, casting wavy patterns onto the wall behind it when I put it down on the small table that functioned as the nightstand.

“Your heart’s up.”

“What are you, Ebi?”

“Sorry.” She shrank. “Too invasive? Still calibrating.”

“Um…no. I don’t mind. It’s—” I held up my phone. “Our ‘mutual friend’ was explaining how you know each other. I didn’t know he was a flamebearer.”

Hina purred, silently lowering herself to lay next to me, sapphire eyes glinting.

“He is. You jealous?”

“What about?”

Her eyebrows went up as she seemed to put something together, a playful smirk on her lips. I rather wanted to kiss her.

“Oh. He hasn’t talked about it yet?”

“…no? I’m assuming…something about your transformation?”

That was a bit of an overshare on my own part, to be honest, veering a little too close to my own deep, dark desires when it came to her mutations. But Hina literally waved the topic away, swatting her hand in the small space between our faces.

“Ask him later. Right now, you’re mine.” She paused, catching herself before the growled purr could be realized in physical contact. “Uh. Unless you want to back out. Which I’m giving you the opportunity to do. Now. If you want.”

How on Earth could I have said no to her? Desire was electrifying me, flooding every muscle in my body, the desire to run and stalk and pounce and fly under the open sky, the desire for her to embrace me and ply me with her strange magicks and stranger affections. I inhaled a jittery breath, lingering incense filling my throat, a smell I’d always associate with her.

“All yours.” I was rather proud of my delivery, the flirtatious honesty—but of course, I couldn’t just leave the moment there. “Is—you get what I mean by that? In the limited context of our agreement and what we want and the boundaries we’ve previously—”

Thankfully, she shut me up in exactly the way I’d been hoping. Her lips only lingered on mine a few moments before drifting down to my chin and then to the right side of my jaw, where I felt those sharp, sharp teeth graze my skin. Her breath tickled my cheek, distracting me from the way her hands were coming up. Of course, once her fingertips grazed my waist and began to raise my shirt, that became all I could think about, each caressing tug of fabric causing a new wave of anticipation to crest in my belly. She stopped once the body of the shirt was scrunched up to my chest.

“Take it off before I shred it.”

I did just that, in a hurry. I was going to just discard the garment, but Hina practically snatched it from me to take a deep, huffing sniff. She freed a hand from clutching it to wave me down into the ‘bed’.

“Get comfy,” she muffled through the bunched fabric. “Need a minute.”

She took her minute as I lay down, taking her time to satisfy whatever primal instincts demanded that she engage in this ritual of scent. I dared to ask.

“What do you smell?”

“You, ashes, blood.”

“All that from…a few hours of me wearing it?” Somebody had deposited my shopping bags in my room while I had been down in the lab with Ai, and I’d changed into one of my new, baggy shirts to help distance myself from the events of the day. Ashes and blood? Really? “It’s, um, taken my scent?”

“Sure has.”

I shuddered, and those blue eyes glowing at me in the darkness narrowed in satisfaction. Without ceremony, she reached over her head and pulled off her shirt in one motion. Suddenly, I was met with an eyeful of modest but authentic magical girl boob in the dim light. I got a precious few seconds of watching her abs and shoulders flex and ripple with enhanced, lithe musculature as she dumped the top and reached over her head again. Then the wonderful sight was covered by my shirt, hanging huge and loose from her small frame like a dark curtain, totally obscuring all the curves and sculpted angles of her figure except for a minor outward curve on her chest. Maybe it was the fact that it was my shirt, or maybe it was how the hem hung so low that her shorts vanished and I could only see bare thighs, or maybe it was her messed-up hair, but the new look was almost as titillating as the exposure had been.

“Okay, ready.”

“Uh.”

My heart had more or less stopped at this point. It shuddered back into motion as she came over and knelt at my side. I hoped the darkness hid how red the display had caused me to turn, mind stuck replaying those few moments of her exposed figure and tantalizingly soft flesh—but I suspected she could see me just fine, which was only amplifying my embarrassment. She was purring again—not the chainsaw, motorboat growl of before, just a quiet rumbly hum that nonetheless filled my ears in the quiet of the night. Her fingers traced up from my belly to my chest, leaving searing hot trails of sensitivity.

“Is—how are you doing that? What’s the chain?”

“Hm? Cutie, I’m not using any magic.”

I discovered it was possible to turn even redder. She rested her palm on the left side of my chest, just below the nipple, running her fingers through the chest hair I hated so much.

“Here’s good. Ready?”

“You’re just—zap? Like before?” Had it really only been yesterday morning?

“Mhm! Quick and easy.”

“Alright. Um—count me in?”

“I’m not Ebi.”

My skin screamed. Every pore was torn open, a hundred concentrated bee stings, a splash of molten metal igniting white-hot agony. All other sensations vanished, and the pain covered me, because ‘me’ was only that spot on my chest, consumed by pain. Something whispered.

Raze.

And then it was over. The searing pain fell away, replaced by an acute but far more tolerable sting. As my other senses returned, I realized Hina was giggling. I raised my head slightly to look at her, doubled over above me, hair grazing my belly from her hung head.

“What?”

“I heard it! That was so cool! Did you hear it?”

“Y—yeah. ‘Raze.’ Um—fuckin’ ow—” I sat up a bit, grateful it was too dark to see what exactly had happened to the cleared skin. At least it didn’t smell burned or acrid, which boded well. “Did—does that mean you used my Flame?”

“Dunno! But it worked!”

She turned, eyes glinting sapphire, and pounced.

—

Despite those midnight antics, Hina’s proposal of a threesome nonetheless sent all my thoughts to a grinding halt. She saw my reaction and grinned.

“Kidding!”

“About which part,” mused Heliotrope. “Sounds like you.”

“I mean…she’s pretty hot. And so is Ez! She’s turned me down before, but maybe with a cutie like him in the mix—”

“Quit it, you two. We’re not done with the education,” Alice groused.

She turned around her laptop screen. She’d crammed three Wikipedia articles next to one another to show three faces. I was not good with faces, and was already envisioning a version of events where I came face-to-face with one of these three and mixed up the names, a diplomatic fumble that would demolish the goodwill between Todai and Hikanome and set the bloodhounds of the PCTF upon us. My fingers twitched to draw my phone.

“Uh, should I be taking notes?”

“We’ll keep it simple, don’t worry.”

She pointed at the first, a balding man with a narrow face and thin eyebrows. His mouth was pursed as though trying to decide how to address a tough line of questioning. Obviously, this was not the one Hina had meant. Despite Amane’s surprisingly light tone earlier, her expression had turned a bit stony upon seeing the countenance.

“This is Kimura. He founded Hikanome alongside Sugawara.” That explained Amane’s reaction, which Alice acknowledged by turning the laptop slightly. “Not particularly vile, but went along with most of what Sugawara was doing without much resistance.”

“Coward,” Heliotrope summarized. “Shoulda been tossed with him.”

“But he wasn’t,” Alice continued. “He’s still the administrative head,” she clarified for my benefit.

“Creeps me out,” the twin-tailed girl countered. “He knew what was going on.”

“The court found otherwise. Assume goodness, Yuuka-chan,” Ai chided.

Something in how she said that, and the fact that Heliotrope then demurred to her older teammate, signaled a hierarchy between the two. They were the two still involved in academia—as mentor and student, even, though not in the same discipline as far as I understood—so perhaps there was something there. Where did that put Ebi, exactly?

Alice took advantage of the awkward moment of silence to shovel some more ketchup-loaded egg and rice into her mouth, then cleared her throat, obviously not wanting to linger on this.

“Um, anyway, Kimura is the least dangerous of the three. Next is Hongo.”

She made to indicate the next picture, but I meekly raised my hand first. She paused, pursed her lips, and gestured to me.

“Dangerous? You said the cult’s rebranded, cut out the bad parts.”

“We’re all dangerous.”

By way of that brief explanation—equal parts revelatory and meaningless—she indicated the middle picture, a man not much older than us. His hair was cut to a fade on the sides and gelled up on top. He had wide cheekbones and an easy smile. I spared a glance at Ai, a silent request for further explanation, and she subtly swept her hand on the table. Later. Alice was talking.

“Hongo is their ambassador when interfacing with other VNT groups. Not a fighter,” she clarified, forestalling my next question. “Any of us could kick his butt, but that’s not his job; it’s all soft power. Also, he’s the brother of the blood mage responsible for the Blue Spark Incident. Ai and Ebi saved her life, so of the three, Hongo is the warmest toward us on a personal basis.”

“She’s alive?”

I didn’t really know the details of the incident, but my impression was that she’d died from her own blood magic in the opening stages, and the bulk of the damage of the incident itself had been from fighting what she’d inadvertently summoned.

“Barely. Permanently hospitalized—not our doing, just the sanguimancy. Anyway, he never liked Sugawara to start with and was pretty instrumental in separating their reputation from his clique when the schism happened. Smoothed things over with us, that sort of thing. Between all that, if we want to push back on their leverage over us, he’s the easiest to work with.”

Hina leaned all the way forward to rest her chin on the table. As I was growing accustomed, she hadn’t made any food for herself.

“You should mention the thing.”

Alice made a disgusted sound.

“Ugh. Fine. This probably won’t be relevant to you, but he keeps proposing to me.”

I blinked.

“Like, marriage?”

“Like, marriage.”

“Why?”

“He likes the tail,” Heliotrope provided.

“He likes the tail,” Alice confirmed.

“He likes the tail!” Hina giggled.

I found that I sort of understood the appeal. The extra limb was meticulously cared-for, despite Alice’s stated unhappiness with it, and it really did make the Opal Radiance cut a unique figure. Some lizard-brain part of my psychology could appreciate its bulk as an appealing element in its own right. On the other hand—

“So he wants you for your body.”

I recoiled immediately after saying that, worried it was too blunt, or would inspire a fresh wave of discomfort with my presence, but Ebi confirmed the idea with a digital snort.

“Bingo. But that’s sorta flamebearer romance, I hear.”

Amane put in a giggly comment of her own that made Ebi and Ai snicker, although the latter covered her mouth. This was the most animated I’d seen the Amethyst Radiance outside of her mantle, and she brought an infectiously bubbly energy to the table, even through the language barrier. I found myself grinning along with the others. So was Heliotrope, and it was enough to undercut some, but not all, of the bile in her comment:

“Surrounded by monsterfuckers, I swear.”

—

Hina was very physical in her gnawing affections. She kissed and licked the patch of cleared skin, purrs intensifying every time I squirmed against the stinging sensation or twitched at the hot pulses of her breath rolling across my chest. When she finally grazed the area with her teeth, it was only after climbing over me and rubbing her hands up and down my shoulders. My shirt stretched taut over her figure, each of her curves vivid against my torso. She was straddling one of my thighs, but mercifully not grinding on me; I thought I’d explode if she did that, and not in the sexual way.

After a few minutes of gluttonously indulging herself with different angles of chomping at the underside of my pec, she raised her head and directed those sapphire eyes at me.

“We’re not telling Alice.”

“Uh?”

“About the person you saw.”

“I thought we already agreed on this.”

“Just checking!”

“Why are you bringing it up now? Go back to—” I waved my hand around my chest. “Me. I like that.”

“Heh. Selfish! I like you too, cutie.”

I flinched just a tiny bit at being called selfish, one of those words that Ai seemed to reserve as a strong pejorative for Hina. But right now, I was happy to share the label with her, and we basked in the moment of affectionate honesty—then I shook it off.

“Um, seriously, why bring it up?”

“Her plate’s full. I do want to check it out, figure out who it was, but we’re gonna do that on our own time. I’ll show you how to hunt.”

“O…kay.” That sounded pretty nice, right at this moment, as we indulged our instincts together. Her reasoning seemed a little flimsy, but I could let it slide; she knew Alice better than me. “What does that entail, exactly?”

“Well…it’s easier if Yuuka would help us. By a lot.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

“Not…the biggest fan of you, is she?”

“Nope.”

“Why’s that?”

“Lots of reasons,” she chuckled. “But when it comes to you specifically? Ask our mutual friend.”

“Huh?”

She retrieved my phone for me. It had lain abandoned for the last few minutes as Hina had done her thing—even the act of receiving her affections took all of my attention, no room for distractions. What was she getting at?

The screen almost blinded me, even at the lowest brightness and with the chatroom set to dark mode. I had become so accustomed to the hazy darkness that the faceful of light forced me to squint my eyes to narrow slits, holding the eye-burning rectangle away from my face.

ezzen: Hina’s making some insinuations about you. Something about why Heliotrope doesn’t like her.

skychicken: heh

skychicken: ok, here’s the other shoe

skychicken: a lot of hina’s biggest mutations happened while we were dating

Hina had squirmed up my side to peer at the screen with me. I turned my head to look at her incredulously.

“He’s your ex?”

“Mhm.” She gave me a big, toothy grin. “Don’t be jealous, cutie.”

The worst part was that I was. Rationally, I knew that was stupid, and yet I couldn’t help but feel some possessiveness for my partner of one night. The feeling was doubly stupid given that I hadn’t felt it when I’d seen her show how close she was with her teammates—so was it just because Sky was a guy? Was I that shallow and sexist? Also, since Sky was one of my better friends, I knew exactly how inaccurate it was to expect he’d at all try to twist the knife of this revelation. But I still needed a minute to master the sense of betrayal and jealousy.

“Hey, you’re spiraling, I can see you spiraling, quit it.”

“Sorry, I’m—I don’t know what it is. I’m feeling dumb.”

“For being jealous?”

“Uh. I guess? We don’t…I shouldn’t be jealous, because that’s just…not what we’re doing here.”

“You mean we’re not a couple?”

“Yeah. This is like—exchange. Transactional. I’ve only known you for a couple days.”

“Mm.” She shifted against me. “We want each other.”

“That’s not…love.”

“Doesn’t have to be!”

“So you…want me for my body, and you’re fine leaving it there? Was it like that with Sky?”

“I didn’t say I was fine with leaving it there, cutie. It’s just a start point.”

“Um—okay, fine, sure.” I wanted her to want me, so I went along with that. I was afraid of confronting anything that might make her recoil and back off. “Any, um, other context I should know about? Does Heliotrope really just not like me because of Sky?”

“She just…thinks I’m gross.” Hina sounded sad. “I was worried you’d wind up thinking that too.”

ezzen: So the breakup was…bad?

skychicken: actually the breakup was fine, but her team kinda soured on the whole relationship by the end

“And you still came on as strong as you did?” I immediately walked that back. “Uh…I didn’t mean it that harshly. Blind spots, yeah?”

“Only because—because I thought you’d like it! And I was right, you do, and that makes me so so happy! But—yeah, I fucked up, I know. I don’t wanna talk about this. I wanna just enjoy each other.”

And I wanted that too, desperately, so I let that line of conversation die where it lay. Irresponsible, but—it was still the first night of our relationship, whatever exactly that meant. I didn’t want to keep rushing through things, going headlong into more emotions I was afraid to name. This was surreal enough as it was, the idea that a supernatural smokeshow like her would be so attracted to me. It still almost felt like a bad prank.

“What, um—why me?”

“I toldya when we met.”

I picked up my phone again, tilting it away so she wouldn’t be able to see it, typing slowly with my good hand.

ezzen: How much did you tell her about me?

skychicken: like, private stuff between us?

ezzen: Yeah. The Vaetna stuff.

ezzen: and what do you MEAN im a BOTTOM

I didn’t actually send that last one; I typed it out and deleted it. That ship had already sailed, signified by the stinging ache on my chest.

skychicken: i filled her in on some of that after she picked you up

skychicken: todai are rather experts on the transhumanism thing, you may have noticed

“Cutie, I can still read it in your eyes.”

“Then stop looking!”

ezzen: That’s PRIVATE, Sky.

ezzen: You picked up that sort of boundary-crossing from her?

skychicken: this is your chance to become more

skychicken: after all the years you’ve spent being mopey and dysphoric about the vaetna, don’t tell me you’re about to back out of that because you’re offended at me pulling the string that was available to try and help you with that

skychicken: yes, i did this for you AND for her. but thats not the same as setting you up romantically

ezzen: If you’ve had these contacts for so long, and the personal connections to her, why not try to help me with it years ago?

ezzen: Instead of holding out on me.

skychicken: you weren’t a flamebearer

skychicken: if there was a way to get those kinds of changes without having a flame of your own, trust me, i would have tried to help you

skychicken: but there’s only so much i can do for my friends who aren’t like us, even you

skychicken: and only so much i can tell you

skychicken: i KNOW you understand that much, if only because you said alice has hit you over the head with it at least once

I made an effort to smother my anger. I did understand the importance of being picky about who you revealed what to, now more than ever.

ezzen: Fine, thanks, fair enough

ezzen: And uh

ezzen: Thanks for trusting me now, I guess.

ezzen: I do appreciate what you’ve done for me, between it all.

ezzen: Still friends?

skychicken: cousins, now

Uh. The Radiances had referred to Holton, that flamebearer on the rig, with the same term, but…

ezzen: ew ew nooooooo

ezzen: That makes my thing with Hina sound incestuous!

skychicken: oops

As long as I had him on the line—I had an idea.

“Uh, Hina? Could Sky help us with my, er, stalker?”

“Like, figuring out who it was?”

“Yeah.”

“Prolly not. Could ask, though.”

ezzen: Uh, can I seek some flamebearer-specific advice

skychicken: shoot

ezzen: I got sorta ambushed by somebody we think was a flamebearer

ezzen: Kinda goth-looking, Japanese (?) girl around Hina’s age

ezzen: I thought it was her at first, just disguised (did she do that with you too?) but the eyes were wrong

ezzen: Ring any bells?

skychicken: at first blush?

skychicken: sounds like yuuka to me

I frowned, angling the phone back toward Hina. I hadn’t seen a resemblance, but then—I also hadn’t actively been comparing the two. Would she do that?

“Thoughts?”

“Uh…I don’t think her eye works like that. I think. And Yuuka’s goth, but you saw for yourself, not like what you described. How big were her boobs?”

“Really?”

“I mean, you’ve seen those things. I don’t know why she’d make hers smaller. ‘Specially if she thought she wouldn’t be seen anyway. She’s proud of them, y’know.”

I would be too, if I were a girl. I elected not to speak that thought out loud.

“Okay, but—she didn’t sound Australian.”

“Ah, yeah, then there goes that theory. Then who the heck?” Hina wondered.

“Why are you looking at me? I’ve been here three days, not exactly a local expert.”

“You’re just easy to look at.”

—

Alice’s reaction to Heliotrope using the word “monsterfucker” again set her off. Her tail thrashed as she put her hands on the table.

“I don’t like that word.”

“Ah, here she goes,” Heliotrope grumbled. “Gonna lecture me on my manners?”

“If you insist on insinuating that I’m a monster, then yes.”

“Come off it, Acchan, you know I didn’t mean it like that.” She glanced at Amane. “You’re not a monster, and Amane’s not…you’re still a person! Obviously!”

“Yes, I’m fully aware you really meant to insult Hina. And Ezzen by association. Why try to alienate him like that?”

“Yuuka-chan,” Ai warned, but it was too late.

“—I’m just calling it like I see it! You agree with me too, Ai, don’t act like you don’t. Alice, if you’re not willing to let Hikanome at him so they’ll help get the Peacies off our backs, what is the plan? Because as much as I’d fucking love to give them what they deserve, if they want him as bad as that other guy, we will lose. Ma—ke—ru. And believe me when I say that, because I know. We don’t fight wars, deshou?”

Could she see that far forward? That wasn’t the impression I’d gotten, but the certainty in her voice was worrying. Hina leaned over the table herself, apparently not put off by the simmering dislike in the air.

“It’s none of your business who I sleep with, Yuuka.”

“It is, if you’re bringing a boy into our apartment while I’m not even there to weigh in.”

That stung, hitting on the exact fears I’d had when Alice had first pitched this arrangement. I shrank, and that’s what got Alice really mad. The air temperature began to rise, a tell-tale sign of Alice’s mood souring.

“Yuuka. He’s staying. He’s got nowhere else to go! And—I’ve made it very clear to Hina what’ll happen if she causes more problems. But I didn’t think I’d have to worry about you being hostile.”

“Really? You couldn’t see how this would have pissed me off? A second one of those things, but this one’s a boy? Acchan, that’s on you.”

The dehumanizing label for Hina and myself—as well as my rising indignance at how much of a deal she was making of my gender—finally got me mad enough to interject.

“Hey!”

At the same time, and much more effectively, Amane broke in and admonished them in Japanese, leaning over the table. Heliotrope and Alice both flinched. The heat dissipated. Ai sighed, muttering what sounded like gratitude to Amane before raising her voice back to speaking levels.

“We have the PCTF showing up in maybe the next few days, and we’re fighting with each other?”

“Yes, Amane’s right, we should be working the problem,” Alice muttered, before raising her voice again in the authoritative voice she’d used when she first met me. “Yuuka, that’s enough. Bicker with Hina all you like, but be nice to Ezzen. Are we clear?”

The goth rolled her eyes petulantly.

“Yes, Mistress.”

Ebi snickered.

“You don’t pull that off as well as me.”

That defused the tension the rest of the way. I sat back, mollified, as Alice pointed at the third face on her laptop screen.

“Back to it: this is Miyoko. The light-blessed child. Well, not a child; she’s our age, but it’s all in the title: High Priestess.” There was some annoyance in her voice. “Magically powerful, but no expertise in glyphcraft or physical mutations, so she’s a little anomalous.”

“You mean she doesn’t use her Flame?”

“Oh, she uses it, alright. But absolutely no regard for ripple.”

“She uses faith,” Ai explained. “From her…ugh. Shinja? Believers?”

“Followers,” Hina provided.

“Oh, that makes sense. Yes, from her followers. For miracles.”

“Miracles. How’s that different from…?”

“From our magic? It isn’t,” she confirmed. “It’s ridiculous, and annoying, because it makes them treat us like saints.”

“Mahou shoujo do have a bit of a divinely ordained bent,” Alice admitted, “but it’s not like that. If anything, we usually wind up killing gods, not serving them. But I won’t get into all the philosophizing here—point is, that’s the three. Hikanome has two more flamebearers, but they’re auxiliary, not part of the leadership in the same way.”

“Um, thanks. For explaining.”

Hina nudged me slightly, flicking her sapphires from me to the face on the screen and back. Was that my stalker? Can’t tell, I tried to transmit to her through the eye contact. Our encounter had been too brief. She certainly wasn’t dressed the same way in the photo, all robes, but—it was plausible, maybe. That would really only raise more questions, though. To confirm one way or the other, I’d need to meet her face to face…or enlist Heliotrope, as Hina had said. The former almost sounded preferable.

Alice looked at me hopefully.

“So…now that you have a better idea of what you’d be walking into, would you go next week? For goodwill?”

“I…” The PCTF were indeed looming. “I don’t…”

Hina nudged me again. What did that mean? Seeing that I wasn’t picking up whatever the subtle message was supposed to be, she spoke up.

“Don’t be pushy, Alice. You said it yourself, he’s had a crazy few days.”

Alice suppressed a sigh.

“I know, I know, but with Hikanome actively reaching out to us, it feels like it’d be a waste to squander that chance.”

“I…okay, I have an answer,” I decided. “Being that I…don’t have an answer. I need a few days. You can swing that, right? I don’t actually have to decide right now, do I?”

“Yeah, fine by me,” Hina agreed. Ai nodded as well.

“I suppose you don’t,” Alice seemed a bit antsy, tail swishing twitchily on the carpet. “But like I said, we are on a bit of a timer, and earlier is better, so—”

“Ii kagen ni shite yo,” Amane cut in, holding up a hand to stop Ebi from interpreting for her. She surprised me by switching to English, a bit halting but determined to make sure I got the message as well. “Don’t push. Let him choose.”

---

Author’s Note:

And we’re back! Drama within the team from mounting external pressure, a pair of reveals about Sky, and Ez having all kinds of Feelings. That’s Sunspot! I’m super excited for this arc, and I hope you are too.

We’ve picked up three new beta readers (two from the Discord and one from my secret stash of writing geniuses), so now I get to thank Cassiopeia, Softies, Maria, Zak, Penguin, Selenium, and Zooloo.

Join the Discord! We have over a hundred members now!

That’s all from me, really. See you next Friday!

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

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

October 11, 2024