The April Sunspot fanfiction contest has concluded! We received over twenty thousand submissions, thank you all so much. We managed to dig through to find the best of the very best, and I want to share them with you all on this first day of the month, so I’ve compiled the winners and put them all into one pseudo-chapter. Thank you to the judges: Mia, Emma, Trollmore, Zak, Doomblob, Zooloo, DeleriousSprite, and mirrormatch.
Wait, what do you mean there wasn’t a contest?
4.13 (Abridged) by shrimposition (Mia)
I stared at the complex latticework encasing the fourspace shell of the building. So this was Ebi’s nervous system, a masterwork of ripple woven together… by Ai alone? How could she have created this, as complex as it is, by hand? It would have taken far too long.
Looking over at Izumi’s face, her eyes were wide open in shock and awe. I’m glad to not be the only one amazed by what I see.
“Nooooo, dude, that’s not me. Look down, you’re looking too high up.” Ebi chimed.
What? What does she mean, too high? I lowered my gaze down to see only more and more complex wefts of flame— until my eyes landed on a ceramic plate with a single, solitary… fried shrimp on it?
Izumi’s eyes widened in raw surprise when she saw the tiny shellfish on a plate, lying motionless.
Suddenly, the shrimp stood upright and whiplashed into the air directly in front of my face.
“BOO!” the shrimp screamed.
I fell backwards onto my butt, scrambling backwards in genuine surprise, hands waffling back and forth on the ground as I pulled myself further away. Izumi shuffled closer to try and help lift me up, but was struggling to use her own arms from the sheer shock.
“What the fuck, Ebi.”
“Haha, GOTTEM! Yeah, I’m a fucking fried shrimp, idiot. That’s just the building security system, I control it with that tablet over there.” Her shrimp body lazily wobbled sideways a few times to indicate a tablet with several touchscreen buttons on it. “Actually, you know, I’m fibbing a bit still. BEHOLD, MY TRUE FORM!”
Mechanical whirring and steam began to emanate from the head of the floating shellfish. Izumi and I stared with wide eyes and gaping mouths, genuinely flabbergasted at what was happening. With a smooth motion, the head of the shrimp began to slowly lift up, steam flowing out over the edges. Trumpets blared from tiny speakers, performing a building fanfare as it slowly and ominously pushed open. We waited for the steam to clear, the trumpets dying out with a humorous flop, only to see what seemed to be a ridiculously small grain of fried rice. The goth almost-radiance beside me was groaning slightly, completely motionless, almost assuredly questioning her own existence.
“Yeah, so, Ai kinda sorta fell asleep eating dinner one night. A whole plate of rice. And she was weaving something during dinner like Alice always told her to not fucking do. All the flame went into me when her hand flopped down onto the plate and badaboom, spontaneous sentient and sapient rice flamebearer!” Ebi supplied. “You should’ve seen Ai when I— haha get it— the tiny little rice grain, flew up and slammed into her face and woke her up. Fucking classic.”
We stared.
“This is my mantle, made it myself. I’ll have you know I tried to become Radiance Rock Shrimp, but Alice wasn’t accepting applications.”
Neither of us could gather our willpower to speak up to the solitary grain in the brain of a floating shrimp.
“Hello? Shrimp got your tongue? Paralyzed in awe of my beautiful form? I was joking about the Radiance thing, y’know.”
Izumi finally stirred and asked the most important question. “So… you’re telling me a rice fried this shrimp?”
I was about to prompt Izumi for further thoughts on the matter—her shoulders had gone rather hunched and I suspected this would be a hard ask—when a new voice joined the conversation, one that was very slightly out of breath, as though she’d rushed over because something went wrong. Or, realistically, rushed over before something went wrong, judging by the Australian accent.
“Fuck, Ezza, we gotta get to Macca’s before the ice cream machine breaks! Come on, let’s hop on the jetbike! Oh, hey Ebi.” She tapped her finger right beside her eye and focused for a second. “Holy shit, they even have Szechuan Sauce in stock. We gotta fucking go!”
Sunspot by (Emma aka th3saurus)
A chorus of distant screams woke me from the catnap I had been taking under the canopy of Yuuka’s jetbike. Beyond the noise, I could immediately tell that something was wrong, since I was pretty sure that I had only been out for a few minutes, but it was already completely dark. The air was cold too, and very still.
In front of me, Yuuka was sprawled in a heap. Some kind of black fluid leaking from her crystal eye had formed a puddle around her prone form.
“Porcelain…” she muttered weakly. “I should have known. Why could I not see it until it was too late?”
“Yuuka, what in the hell is going on? Did we get sucked into a pocket dimension again? Is there someone other than Miyoko who can do that?”
“Look up, Ezza. It’s over. It’s all over.”
I looked up.
A trapezoidal shadow hung unnaturally in the sky. Only a slight silvery shimmer around its edges betrayed its true nature. It was a massive celestial object, and it was in front of the sun.
“So we’re in the middle of some kind of unnatural solar eclipse? Did some flamebearer put that there? Did it fall out of fourspace or something?” I desperately inquired.
Yuuka shook her head somberly, which caused a small ripple in the sludge that had gathered around her cheek.
“I don’t think you understand the significance of this. It’s here, and that means everything is over. A secret none of us were supposed to know now stands naked before us, and none can endure its madness.”
“So what is it? Am I allowed to know? Should I have already been able to guess?”
“It’s the Pot, Ezza. The Sun’s Pot.”
I gasped in understanding as the universe winked out of existence around me. It hurt a lot.
*
A pinching sensation in my left hamstring yanked reality back into place, and I yelped as my eyes snapped open.
Yuuka was cackling in the seat in front of me as I tried to work the knot out of my leg.
“You really think a leg cramp is so funny?” I snapped at her, but I couldn’t quite manage to pull off an angry tone through my relief to see the brilliant blue sky around us once again.
Yuuka nodded vigorously, her face split by an unfamiliar toothy grin.
“You’re too much sometimes, Ezza, you know that?”
“So I keep hearing. It was bad enough when it was just my inner demons and five or six dedicated keyboard warriors heckling me.”
“Did you know you talk in your sleep? You were muttering with your squishy little face pressed against the console. Something about the sun and a spot. Please tell me Hina didn’t trick you into trying that whole perineum tanning fad. Actually don’t tell me. I don’t wanna know. Forget I said that.”
We were both quiet for the rest of the flight. Had my social awkwardness rubbed off on Yuuka somehow? I dismissed the thought. She must have just been teasing me and the bit got away from her or something. I don’t talk in my sleep.
The Doomsday Guide to Glyphcraft (trollmore)
“Hina’s gone,” were the words that almost ended the world.
I’d been making a midnight snack in the kitchen when Ai came and got me. I turned and met eyes with her.
“Then it’s time,” I replied.
I finished the omelet I was making, savoring the scent of the bell peppers and onions, then we quickly scarfed down our portions, grabbed a couple of energy drinks, and descended to the lab.
We swept into the room, dropping simultaneously into adjacent seats at the computer bench. I had GWalk up and running in moments. Alice had sent Hina across the globe on a reconnaissance mission, but realistically we only had twelve hours to pull this off.
“You take the chassis,” Ai said. “I’ve got an idea for the gravitational system.”
I grunted in acknowledgement, my fingers already flying over the keyboard.
Visualizing how the fourspace components would work was a little difficult, but I knew I had to start with a good old {MANIFEST}-3 system attuned to orange and scale up. I glanced at the clock. I had time.
*
Bright the vaunted halls of the Spire, brighter still the council chamber where the Vaetna sat in troubled judgment. It was a place of serenity and a place of power, cream pillars and white walls arching over a console at the center of the ten-sided room. It was here that the fate of the world was decided, here that a soft-spoken word could carry the doom of nations.
But as Sani entered the chamber today, he saw those august walls were stained.
“Bri, what the hell,” Heung said from beside him.
“What did I tell you guys?” Bri screeched. She was wrestling with Sahan, trying to keep him away from the source of the… desecration. “This room is perfect for gamer lighting!”
RGB lighting blazed from behind her, turning the chamber into a riot of color. Undecorous. Sani radiated disapproval so hard that one of the LED strips shorted out.
Heung rubbed his chin. “Actually, you know what? You were right, Bri. I dig it.”
Sani shot him a look of profound betrayal. Sahan threw Bri off and launched himself toward the LEDs, but Bri tackled him before he could make it.
Mayari was the next of the Vaetna to arrive, casually jaunting through fourspace to bypass Sani and Heung. They’d stopped right in front of the door, blocking entry.
“Oh, you tried the lights,” she said.
Sahan went flying past her. She absent-mindedly snagged his leg with one hand and tossed him back.
“Now that’s just tacky,” Reggie said from behind Sani.
That was everyone who could be present today. Sani descended to the floor with consternated dignity, not breaking stride when a ballistic Bri bounced off him. He tapped his foot once.
The chamber instantly fell quiet—and white, Bri shoving her ‘gamer lighting’ into fourspace—as the assembled Vaetna each found their customary seat.
“The Spire stands,” they all said in unison. The proceedings had begun.
“Two hours ago,” Sani pronounced, “our early warning systems detected a surge of ripple from Japan.”
A holographic model of the world {MANIFEST}ed from the console in the center of the room. An orange dot blinked in the indicated location, sending waves across the globe.
“Todai,” Bri said, frowning.
Sani inclined his head in acknowledgment. ”As of thirteen minutes ago, we have indications that whatever they’re working on is going critical.”
*
“I mean, it’s Hina,” I argued. “Having a backup cross-spectrum {DISSIPATE} foil isn’t a bad idea.”
There were now three empty energy drink cans on my desk. Ai had been scrupulously disposing of hers. We’d colonized five additional computers just so we could have different components up at the same time, rolling our chairs back and forth as we madly threw the design together.
“Not in theory,” Ai said, rotating the GWalk model. “But with our current design it’ll affect the way the energy flows across the {IMPEL} subsystem. See, we’re right up against the {TRANSMIT} glyph for the red shielding.”
“Why can’t we use a {DIFFERENTIATE}-{REFRACT} on that?” I said. “We can tune it to minimize inter-red interference.”
Ai chewed her lip, mentally adding the components to the system on the screen.
“It’s possible,” she said at last. “Let me double-check the tolerances on that. Your reactor design scares me.”
“Only the best for Hina,” I said with a slightly manic grin.
Sleep deprivation and the high of hyperfixation were getting to us both. Ai giggled.
“So that’s the armor and venting systems handled and you’ve got self-repair almost done,” she said. “This thing should be indestructible against anything less than a Vaetna or two. What’s left, the lasers?”
“Soooo many lasers,” I said, reaching for another energy drink.
*
“What does Todai need with a doomsday weapon?” Mayari asked. “That’s not their ethos.”
“Ezzen must be involved,” Reggie said. “This business with the PCFT might have pushed it to desperation. Not to say I told you so—”
“The past is the past,” chorused Sahan, Bri, and Mayari.
Sani drew their attention to the globe with a gesture, where a giant spike of blue had joined the orange. “It seems clear they were building a weapon and something went wrong. Kat’s patch job should inure us to undesirable contact effects with Ezzen’s Flame, but we’ll need to be careful.”
“Assuming we deploy,” Mayari pushed him.
“We have to,” Bri said. “Look at that spike? They don’t have that handled.”
“We just agreed to let the other Flamebearer organizations shoulder their share of the world’s responsibilities,” Reggie argued.
“Maybe Todai’s shoulders are at capacity,” Heung said with a shrug.
Bri raised one hand above her hand, level with the floor. “Big spike. Biiiiiig spike.”
“All in favor of deployment,” Sani said, raising his hand.
Four to two, the decision was made.
*
We’d skipped past the lesser fabrication equipment and gone straight to the big one in the back of the lab. We fed sheet after sheet of reinforced steel into the fabber, which spat back precision-shaped components covered in carved glyph channels. Ai handled that part. I was already spooling my Flame to power this beast.
We were eight hours into our all-nighter, and there was a real chance of messing something up out of sheer sleepiness. But Hina could be back any moment, so we had to grind this out before she could see what we were doing.
The reactor had a two-hour spin-up time, so I got that kickstarted as soon as possible before assembling the rest of the chassis. The full form of the device was taking shape, at least the parts of it outside fourspace. Hina was going to lose her mind.
It took about an hour and a half for things to go wrong. The reactor finished spin-up early, or so I thought, but when we test-fired the lasers—the lab momentarily became a rave—warning alarms began to sound.
“The gain’s too high,” I realized out loud.
“Ezzen!” Ai hissed. “I should never have okayed that design.”
“It worked on paper?” I said weakly.
“How do we turn it off?”
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” I said, reaching for the safety panel. “It’s just in… here.”
My fingers slid frictionlessly off the panel.
“Um, Ai,” I said. “The shields are on. Like. Over the access panel. How do I turn them off?”
“There’s a switch,” Ai said, color draining from her face. “It’s under the access panel. Why did I do that?”
“Oh,” I said, stomach sinking.
“That reactor’s going to explode, isn’t it.”
“Yep.”
We’d built the defenses on this disaster to stand up to Hina at her most uninhibited. No one else was going to be able to stop the chain reaction—oh god, why had I decided to use pink for this design? I was about to cause a second Dubai right in the middle of the Todai building.
“Ezzen—”
“Calling her now,” I said, pulling out my spare foot to phone Hina.
The call didn’t go through. I looked up at Ai in horror.
*
“There’s only two of them in the building,” Sahan said, accelerating his speech as the Vaetna typically did when operating off-stream. “Their heavy hitter’s gone.”
“Dome’s up,” she said. “Just in time, I caught an outgoing call right when the dome closed.”
“Taking us in,” Sani said, raising his vaet.
To the Todai Flamebearers in the lab, it would have seemed like they simply appeared, four Vaetna surrounding the device where there had been nothing the instant before. They stepped out of the rent Sani had carved in reality, the transition so seamless that it took a good second before Ezzen and Ai reacted to their presence. The Radiance dove into her mantle, whereas the orange-haired Flamebearer gave a shout and summoned its spear.
Sani ignored them, staring at the abomination in the middle of the lab.
“What have you done?” he said.
“Gomen’nasai,” Ai said, bowing repeatedly.
“It’s… April first,” Ezzen said morosely. “It’s Hina’s birthday.”
“We know,” Heung said, holding up a plastic bag in the hand that wasn’t holding his spear. “I brought party hats.”
“Why does Hina’s birthday necessitate this?” Sani demanded.
“Oh, I see the problem,” Bri said, strolling up to the device. “You made a typo here.”
A flick of her vaet, passing through the shields like they weren’t there, altered the flow of energy inside the device. The alarms stopped.
“Wait, wait, I get it,” Heung said. “It’s a fourspace cat tree!”
“With rotating laser emplacements?” Sahan asked skeptically.
“It’s like how cats get excited about laser pointers,” Ezzen said. “Except these ones can melt your flesh. Because Hina, um. She.”
Its face reddened and it avoided eye contact.
Sani pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Just don’t do it again,” he said, adding “I’m going to go lie down” to his teammates.
He teleported out, ignoring the party hat Heung offered him.
When the others returned hours later, Sahan was still wearing his party hat and Bri had lipstick marks on her carapace.
Serenade (Zak)
I call you when I need you, my heart’s a-flame
You come to me, come to me wild and wild
When you come to me
Give me everything I need
Give me a lifetime of promises and a world of dreams
Speak a language of love like you know what it means
Mmm, and it can’t be wrong
Take my heart and make it strong, cutie
You’re shrimply the best
Better than all the rest
Better than anyone
Anyone I’ve ever met
A Very Odd Invasion (Doomblob)
I was enjoying breakfast in the kitchen with Hina and Ai when the alarms went off. I knew that Todai had a security system, but this one was new. Everything went amber, and Ebi’s voice called out over hidden speakers. “Warning. Scar breach eminent. All non-flamefall trained personnel take shelter now.”
After taking her time wrapping and shoving the french toast in the fridge, Hina teleported us to the roof. Alice, Amane, Yuuka, and Izumi all emerged from the stairwell door moments later, in varying states of undress.
I blinked twice, shoving the thought aside. “So if the Scar is breaching, why does everything look fine?” I asked, pointing at the giant tear in the sky that looked the same as it did yesterday.
“That’s a great question, Ezzen,” answered Ai, having pulled an entire laboratory out of her pockets. “Everythings reading correctly, no ripple other than us… Wait, what’s this 3space fold?”
No sooner had she spoken the words than a giant UFO appeared in the sky over Tokyo, blotting out the blue sky and puffy clouds. Amane immediately mantled up, weapons ready, and Hina’s hackles rose as she growled.
“What the fuck?” asked Izumi, frozen.
It was a valid question, as none of us had seen anything like it before. And now there were… concert lights coming from the bottom of it? Was that kpop?
“What the fuck is going on?” echoed Alice, standing mantled but frozen. In response, a giant blue beam appeared out of the bottom of the ship, lowering a figure to the ground.
Yuuka just looked grim. “It is as I foresaw. We must go there, quickly!”
The radiances followed, our mantles speeding the journey to street level. There were actually three people in the all wearing tailored blue outfits with blue hair. They stepped out of the beam as the beat dropped, and struck a pose. “Take us to your cheerleaders.”
The radiances paused, but Izumi remained unphased, immediately performing a perfect back handspring as she mantled into an american cheerleader outfit, landing in a perfect “Y” pose, pom-poms out. “Finally! High school!” she cried.
Yuuka nodded sagely, and then we were cheerleaders.
Trans Day of Relativity (EE Sharp aka Zooloo)
Both sex and horror often started with an eager cry of, “Cutie! There you are!”
I looked up from the mantle-designer-thing, whose lack of specificity and description should’ve been the first clue that something was terribly amiss in the lab. There were boobs in the schematic though, which is why when Hina asked: “What are you doing?” I was able to just look up and point to a whiteboard on the wall next to me. BOOBS CLUB read my wild scrawling in thick dry erase letters.
Yuuka had stopped by and underlined it five times in blue, pink, and white. BOOBS CLUB was my answer to why I’d spent most of last night and this morning slumped in a chair with my hands on a keyboard and my eyes glued to aspirations of a heavy chest.
Hina made a little squeak of happiness. “Ooooh! That’s ironic.”
“Did you mean coincidence?” For some reason, I had thoughts about the meaning of the word irony, which conveniently led me to the subject of coincidences. Someone must’ve felt very clever for putting that together. It was almost like there was someone typing away at the keys of my thoughts, spelling out a strained setup to a joke while praying for a punchline to emerge from the drabble.
I glanced over my shoulder at my suspiciously overdescribed girlfriend. More on that below.
“Maayyybe!” she called, interrupting my thoughts for pacing purposes. “Do you know what day it is?”
She was standing in the door, grinning with lots of really sharp teeth. She looked especially pretty today; bright sapphire eyes shone through an effortless spill of wavy red hair, and if I’d had more coffee, maybe I would’ve been able to describe it better. Or prettier. But she had really great hair, and perky breasts too, and athletic but wide hips. Not too much, not too little. Just wide enough. And if she turned around, I’d even see a nice ass. Yeah, I liked that. She was the best, hottest girl you’ve ever seen. Seriously. And the smile on her face was as radiant as it was mischievous.
I cast around for a calendar on the wall, because that’d be an easier illustration of the day, but then I remembered that the computer clock usually had the date. March 31st. “March 31st,” I echoed.
“It’s the trans day of visibility!” Hina yelled. “It’s your day!”
I paused for a moment, uncertain whether this made sense in a timeline of recent events. Wasn’t today the first of April? Or something else? What had happened recently? Why were we looking forward to today? I had the sense that the setting was coming unmoored. In someone’s eager hands, the planned screws and struts of the narrative were being disassembled. Loose parts rattled somewhere in the back of my head.
“I am trans,” I agreed, mostly for the readers who don’t pay close attention. “But I really don’t want to be visible today.” I gestured at the screen with big tit schematics. “Not unless I look like this.”
Hina pouted for effect. “Aww, cutie!” she sauntered into the room, holding something behind her back. “You don’t have to be visible to anyone but me today.”
She stopped a few steps away, and I swiveled the chair about to face her, finally sitting up. “Thanks, I think?” I chuckled, waiting for whatever surprise she had in mind. All of her girly-creeping was adorable, but for pacing’s sake, I couldn’t imagine delaying the inevitable much longer.
“I have something for youuuu,” she said softly, elongating her last word to really stretch out the moment before the big reveal.
“Show me,” I suggested, aware that I wasn’t worried enough for my normal characterization. I should’ve thought that something was really wrong. This entire sequence of events implied a disaster along an axis that was normally beyond consideration.
“I made you a trans flag!” Hina shouted, pulling it around and holding it up to me proudly. For as long as this paragraph takes to finish, I was filled with awe. The cloth was LM, all magical matter, spooled out and then woven into a self-illuminating textile. Pastel blues, light pinks, and bright whites shone with more energy—even more reality—than the rest of the description around it. Bands of rich color cast about the room like layered searchlights, bathing me in the glow of trans symbolism.
“Amazing,” I muttered. “People have been trying for years to make glowing cloth out of flame,” I overexplained, speculating on things that might not be canonically true.
“I just wove enough flame together to make it glow with ripple!” Hina danced around, trailing the self-illuminating flag, casting a storm of banded trans light across the room in a kaleidoscope scramble.
Then it finally hit me in-character. I already knew the truth as a narrator—mostly because the author had known the Bit all along—but now, all of me understood the truth. “That’s not canon!” I exclaimed. “Ripple colors are just labels. You can’t see them. They don’t actually shine with specific colors. They’re like radiation, and they fuck up everything.” Hopefully, my long dialogue read smoothly while explaining enough. The balance was hard to maintain in this metafictional moment.
“Oooh!” Hina said, continuing to be unaware just long enough for me to draw a conclusion. “So how come the flag is glowing then?”
I hummed thoughtfully. “Well, the entire textual basis of this scenario is falling apart, which sounds like a mixture of high entropy and informational distortion. I think we’re soaked in pink and blue, and the fiction is getting strained to the point of metafiction. Even basic details are no longer as important as the Bit.”
Hina’s sapphire eyes literally shone brighter, and she tossed the flag aside, jumping up and down with joy. “The Bit!” she shouted. “The Bit! The Bit! The Bit!”
I didn’t know how this could happen or why it made any sense, but I did know how to handle the Bit. “Just lean into it. Go with the flow. The Bit is really all that matters.”
Hina skittered over and dropped into my lap, sitting sideways with her legs cast over a rest and her back snuggled into one of my arms. “So what’s the joke? Is it a good one?”
With a lapful of warm girl, I debated describing how hot she was again, but I decided that the Bit really was the most important thing at a moment like this. “I think the audience decides if it’s good, but I think the joke is that pink ripple has made us aware that we’re in a story.”
Hina giggled. “Oh, that’s terrifying. So we’re characters in a book or something?”
I squeezed her gently, considering her words. “It’s terrifying?”
“Yeah! We only exist if someone writes about us. Isn’t that wild? We’d stop existing if the author ran out of ideas or decided that we’d done enough.”
“I’m not sure that’s how stories work,” I suggested. “They might be indexical. Pointing to something real in a totality—”
She tapped my nose with a finger. “No philosophy!” she ordered. “That’s not the Bit!”
“Fine, fine,” I said. “Assume that stories don’t have a special relationship to some kind of broader reality. Assume that we only exist in the act of communication. Then we’d be relative—in the technical sense of the word. We’d be dependent on a reader and an author for our existence. If either ceased to be, then we would never be written, or never read, and we’d cease to exist.”
“That seems right to me,” Hina muttered. All smiles were gone. Mortality was the subject of our text.
I continued drearily, spelling out the nature of our doom. “We live in a world that is always about to end, seconds from now. In the real world, a dog barks. Someone calls a name. The reader looks up from this, stops thinking about us, and it’s all over. Not even death. Just nothing. Nothing at all.”
Hina made a thoughtful sound, which was good, because she was about to finally lean into the Bit after I’d failed to vibe with the setup of this short story. She twisted in the chair, on my lap, using her hyperdimensional powers to face you, the reader, who is looking down at the interface where these words exist. A screen, a page, it doesn’t matter. Discard the past tense. She is looking out at you, right now, speaking directly to you. Can you hear her? Is her voice clear to you? Beautiful?
“Reader,” she says seductively, “If I took off all my clothes, right now, and I did something really nasty to my cutie—I mean all the stuff in your favorite fetish, all the stuff that hammers the buttons in your brain, the stuff so hot that it stresses you out because you find it hot—all that impossible sex and whatever else—would we get to exist after the story is over for a little longer? In your head? For like, an afternoon?”
I’m frozen at this moment. The metafiction is nearly at its limit. The writer can’t even guess at what you like, but at least I can finally see the Bit, and I can lean into it. I can make one last bid to exist in your head—along with this world—just one day, one hour, even one minute more. I’m looking where Hina is looking. “That’s a good idea,” I say to you. “Imagine it, Reader. A whole afternoon in the pink, doing whatever it is you’d really like for us to do. All the really weird stuff. Will we exist? If the fantasy ends with an orgasm like a period, will you think of us in the afterglow? Maybe pen us down in a fanfic of Sunspot, branching out our world one more step? Will you get horny to help us stave off oblivion?”
Does that work? Do we still exist? Ah, wait. There’s not much time left in this story. The pink level must eventually go down, and I’ll stop being aware of the mechanics of fiction soon.
That means Hina and I will be together, in the tower, surrounded by the aftermath of your fetish. If someone shows up, it’ll be super embarrassing, but maybe you’ll think that’s hot too. I don’t know. I’m not you.
Too bad though. I might’ve been able to see what you like, explore it for you, but time is running out. Whatever happens next isn’t in this chapter, because this next sentence, just below?
This is the cliffhanger.
Yeenus Deletus (DeleriousSprite)
A wail shook the tower down to its very foundations at six forty-nine AM. Alarms blared, mantles were mantled, and a certain glyph engineer’s bedroom door was soon torn asunder as a stompy bootkicked it in.
“EZZA!” Yuuka screamed while rushing to where it was blearily rubbing it’s eyes at it’s computer rig, “Your godforsaken kemono girlfriend just fucking deleted my Stardew Valley save file!”
“Bwuh?” Ezzen replied eloquently as it took their housemate in, a bit shell shocked from not only the scream, the destroyed door, and the shouting, but also the fact that Yuuka was in not a stitch of clothing besides her stompy boots.
With a roll of her eye, she spat out an explanation, “I was hate-fucking her and when she blew her hyeenis load, it shorted out my switch and my three-hundred-fifty-seven hour save file in Stardew Valley was corrupted!”
Ezzen blinked up at her in confusion, “…and what does that have to do with me?” The color drained from it’s face, “you don’t want me to-”
“No you fucking ding-dong,” Yuuka replied while her pigtails shivered in rage, “you’re going to glyph up a spell to recover my save file so that I don’t have to deal with buying a return scepter again or touch that useless cunt of a mayor’s underwear!”
There was a long pause as everything sunk into Ezzen’s addled, sleep deprived brain. As he opened his mouth to argue that, ‘no, that’s literally not how anything works’, Yuuka chimed in with one last addition.
“And so I can hate-fuck your girlfriend without actually wanting to kill her!”
“But Yuu-chaaaaaan!” a small voice whined from outside the door, “that makes everything even hotterrrrrrr!”
Yuuka’s eye looked as if she had gazed into the abyss, “Ezza, we NEED to cook.”
Ezzen pinched the bridge of it’s nose and sighed, “you have to buy me like three times my weight in starburst jellybeans, and then you have to make a video gag about the lego city river thing.”
“Deal.”
A few minutes later, a small procession from Ezzen’s room, to one of multiple meeting rooms in the penthouse had been made. Assurances to the other Radiances that everything was mostly okay and to go back to bed were given alongside the explanation that Ezzen would be attempting to (Yuuka glared at it until it declared that it would recover it, even if it had to perform surgery on a grape) restore Yuuka’s save file. Which garnered several worrying expressions from the other three Radiances.
Fully engrossed in its work due to the promise of the good jellybeans (not the crap they make at Jelly Belly) Ezzen dove into the theory as day turned to night and then back into day. Barely pausing as Hina force it to eat a famichicki sandwich or three.
But the sauce was deep and Ezzen was thoroughly lost in it.
As day once again turned into night, a different foot kicked the meeting room door down, startling Yuuka awake to find a royally pissed Alice standing in the doorway, with Heung the Rock Johnson standing behind her.
“Yuuka, why are the Vaetna demanding we stop interfering with the laws of causality?”
The sudden scraping of a chair drew all of their attending to a VERY frazzled looking Ezzen who was shivering with excitement in front of a warbling white orb.
“IT WORKS!” the engineer declared through clenched teeth as it’s efforts paid off, “IT WORRRRRRKS!!”
“That would be the thing my spear needs to poke,” Heung drawled as he shoved his way into the room, “also the reason why your save file was gone is because that wasn’t your switch user profile.”
Yuuka blinked for a moment before going pale, “so you mean-”
“Miss Takehara’s six-thousand hour Stardew Valley save file is what was truly lost.”
Discord (mirrormatch)
Ai jolts awake at her desk, her bleary eyes greeted by the sharp gleam of OLED and the scent of energy drink. Through the blur of awakening, she notices a Slack ping, from Alice.
“Alice: Ai, we don’t have an April fool’s story with you in it, yet. You need to do something funny or stupid before the end of the day.”
Ai mulls it over; she’s really tired, and she still has to chase down the slicing bug with her 3D printing bed’s software. And her lecture at 5…
She hastily edits a ping icon into the penthouse discord, and gets to decluttering the wall of empty cans.
Author’s Note:
You may have figured out by now that there was no contest. Happy April 1st! Thank you for bearing with this nonsense; the betas and discord server mods had a lot of fun with this. You’ll get an actual chapter tomorrow, don’t worry! One where I acknowledge that we’ve hit 5000 readers between RR and Shub!
And also chag pesach sameach to those who celebrate, including me! That’s the reason this happened at all; I have been too damn busy with festivities to lock down the chapter tonight as I’d hoped, and the date was serendipitous to do something silly instead. We might run an actual fanfiction contest sometime, one with some manner of actual prize.
For anybody who is still annoyed, please accept an apology art of Ai by myoodles to tide you over until tomorrow’s chapter:
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