One could say that my venture into the umbilical abyss of the hallway to reach my synthetic body was a reflection of the Flame-woven bridge across that solipsistic void my mind had crossed yesterday…but that would be over-dramatic. What I actually did was go over to the hallway and find the light switch.
Once the shadows were banished, it was an unintimidating walk down to the correct room. I passed the meeting room and the dojo beside it and took note of some of the others that I’d ignored the first time I’d gone to the doll: a more conventional weight room to complement the dojo, a few utterly uninteresting storage areas that looked to be filled solely with cardboard moving boxes, another meeting room. Some doors had no label or window, and many that I could see into were simply empty. This much space remained redundant for five people, and my addition had made no dent given my precious few belongings.
I arrived at the room dedicated to the doll and the slightly nightmarish “pod” that had connected my mind to it. The big hallway was U-shaped, imitating the layout of the apartments directly above, and the doll’s room was just about in the middle, directly opposite from the kitchen with respect to the elevator shaft.
The mannequin-like body had been moved from where I remembered leaving it last night, unplugged from the pod and stored lying flat and face-up on a table in the back of the room. The effect was slightly cadaverous, sparking childlike fears that the body would sit up and lunge at me or, more creepily, simply stare. The threat of that was made slightly more realistic by the idea that Sugawara’s spirit was still out there—what if he had infiltrated the building and the body and was lying in wait to take me by surprise when I drew close? My spear tattoo itched in readiness.
I humored it for a moment, summoning the wooden weapon and resting its butt against the floor. I looked at it seriously. “You and I both know that’s not what’s gonna happen. It’s just metal. Er, probably more plastic than anything else by volume?” I sighed, realizing I was hedging even with an imaginary conversation partner. “Point is, it’s not gonna move. I’ve got my lattices in there still,” I confidently informed my spear. Then I dismissed it back to the tattoo.
The pod and doll both contained control lattices I’d woven out of my Flame, which we knew was somehow inimical to Sugawara, so I had no reason to be suspicious or nervous of the conveniently empty body. Toxic to him, just like the Vaetna, came the intrusive thought—I swatted it aside. My Flame had emanated pure repugnance and disdain for the thing Sugawara had become, my feelings mixed with its own and manifested in pure magic; my admiration for the Vaetna was a near-perfect opposite of that, so it was difficult to imagine the same reaction occurring with my heroes and idols. I supposed that if that unlucky Flame-sibling of mine in Poland had felt that way about the Vaetna, and then Kat had shown up…I shook off that line of thinking. It was entirely too speculative and, as Alice had pointed out, not really something I could act on, and therefore only tormented me for no benefit.
I instead opted to approach the doll, and despite all my rationalizing, I was still relieved when it didn’t do anything creepy. It simply lay there, unsouled and inert, plated in that same charming turquoise as Ebi’s shell. I actually hadn’t seen Ebi herself in days. She’d even been absent from the chatroom. Ai had insisted she was fine, and I believed her because the building’s operations didn’t seem affected, but she didn’t seem keen on explaining what exactly was wrong, if anything. I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to pry right now, and it was honestly probably for the best that the AI wasn’t around to comment on the similarities between the body I had liked so much and her own.
I tentatively ran my fingers along the shell. To call it armor was entirely aspirational; it was really only there to bulk out the form to more closely resemble the proportions of a human body, rather than a spindly and skeletal assemblage of motors like in one of those animatronic horror games. Even if there was a certain appeal in the functional simplicity of such a form, I suspected inhabiting it would make me feel very naked without any protective carapace. I now knew with certainty that I enjoyed having a shell of some sort. That was old news; Vaetna-like carapace had been on the wishlist long before anything else. I wasn’t entirely sure what that would mean for a mantle or even my physical body down the line, but in the meantime, that need was supplemented by my hoodies, at least the ones Hina hadn’t stolen.
My more private fantasies concerned anatomy beyond the surface layer; my seven-year longing was for the Vaetna’s figures, which were all fairly conventional human forms covered in their interlocked white armor, obscuring all but the most essential proportions, vaguely muscular and mostly sexless—but the longer I looked at the doll’s figure, the more I had to admit that I preferred what I was seeing here. Narrower shoulders, the slender, gently curving contours of its forearms, everywhere slimmer and more graceful than either the Vaetna or my own body; aesthetics that reminded one that this was a testbed for mahou shoujo, not high-tech angel-superheroes clad head to toe in futuristic armor. A nervous prickle of embarrassment and shame oozed over my neck as I realized that the doll’s form wasn’t really androgynous—yes, there was no flare to its hips or softness of fat to round out its chest or rear, but it was feminine nonetheless, the Radiances’ bodies taken to their least common denominator. The body that had felt right for me was on the girl side of neutral, if only barely.
This wasn’t a completely new notion for me. Hina and Star had opened Pandora’s box when they’d tag-teamed me about whether I thought the Radiances’ various appealing features would look good on myself. Ever since, when I got naked to bathe, I would look down at my body and try to picture what I might prefer more than my current proportions. I was doing my best to give serious, non-avoidant thought to those brief first-person glimpses of Alice’s bust from her mantle cam, wondering how that weight on my chest might feel, and wonder further about narrow shoulders or wider hips and how much femininity my figure was allowed to have before people would start defaulting to treating me as the woman I was not.
It had thus far been difficult and emotionally draining to interrogate those shower thoughts for too long. The idea that I might prefer this slimmer shape instead, rather than “true” androgyny with the suggestion of muscle, brought the familiar tug of shame, the urge to fall back on the plausible deniability of the Vaetna’s warrior physique. But where the Ezzen of even a few days ago had invariably cringed and shied away, I was now armored by the joy and belonging I’d felt yesterday. I imagined Hina’s voice in my ear, something along the lines of “if it feels good, cutie, who gives a shit?”
That helped me realize the obvious: wanting to look like a girl wasn’t the same as wanting to be a girl. Indulging and exploring my interest in a more feminine form didn’t inherently compromise my claims of being nonbinary. The pronouns I’d impulsively requested yesterday were easy evidence of that: they…and it. Both felt right for me, and the latter was exciting in a way I didn’t know how to categorize. Dehumanizing, alien, objectifying, yet thrilling for all those reasons too, an open claim of separation from humanity as a flamebearer. I didn’t know if that one would stick, especially with it being so much less conventional than the other gender-neutral alternative, but it felt real, something of the experience that would last even outside of the doll and reassured me that my gender identity was more complex than “enby on the way to girl,” that I was still moving in the transhuman direction I’d always wanted.
In the privacy of this secluded room in the middle of the night, standing over the evidence of my expanding horizons, such reasoning was enough to overcome my anxieties. For a moment, I let myself drop into more daring fantasy, imagining more overtly feminine features overlaid onto the doll, drawing on what I’d become familiar with. Hina’s bare hips and tight belly came to mind first, which was relieving, in a weird way; when tasked to imagine a hot girl, my subconscious had leapt straight to my girlfriend despite her not being close to the most voluptuous of the team. That made me a good boyfriend, I reasoned. Enbyfriend. Dollthingfriend?
The other Radiances were also familiar touchpoints. Most recent in my memory was Alice showing off her sculpted, borderline-unreal figure to me, which was the kind of event I was sure millions of other young men and women would have paid a fortune to experience and I’d gotten for free out of some kind of trans camaraderie. Star would have had a stroke, driven mad with gender envy and/or regular thirst; personally, I felt like I wanted to look at Alice more than I wanted to be her. This went double for her tail; I didn’t want one myself, but there was something undeniably appealing to my lizard-brain about its bulk and the way her hips flared to accommodate it. I felt I understood Hongo a little.
However, when it came to the proverbial elephant in the room, I still had to permit myself a healthy dose of respectful shame: did I envy Yuuka’s chest rather than simply find it distracting? I looked at the doll’s smooth, flat front, then down at my own, and tried to picture having such a rack, trying to be analytical rather than vulgar as I considered how they shaped the silhouette of everything Yuuka wore, impossible to ignore, a center of attention so potent as to be strategic, as Alice had described. Did I want people to look at me like that, now that I had a better understanding of Yuuka’s constant and eminently reasonable paranoia, and how she wielded her appearance to assert control over that? Would it be affirming or terrifying to be desired in such a way? Both?
I backed out of the fantasies for the time being. The important thing was that even without those curvier elements, the doll still appealed to me, and had still felt more comfortable than the flesh I was wearing right now. I hadn’t freaked out at the lack of a face or breathing, and my subconscious and the lattice had successfully filled in the absence of all the little sensations of the human body, all the secondary muscles involved with balance, the gurgles of my digestive tract, the fleeting aches and pains that evidenced my poor posture. I couldn’t quite remember whether or not I’d literally hallucinated those things to compensate. The brain was weird enough without adding pink-strung lattices into the mix.
In part, my comfort with the doll was simply a matter of contrast; after being completely divorced from the very notion of form in that liminal void of transfer, stripped of all sense of self and proprioception, any body was better than none at all. But when I’d looked in the mirror, my reaction had been much more viscerally positive than mere gratefulness to have the bare minimum.
I felt echoes of that as I moved up toward the doll’s head, looking at the blank face with fascination. No eyes, no mouth, a total mask. This was a fair bit more spartan than my private, embarrassing fantasies of a Vaetna-fied version of myself, which still had eyes. But realistically, as long as I was still able to see, I rather liked the idea of an entirely featureless face that gave away nothing except for the general direction of my head. I didn’t exactly envy that about Amethyst’s chosen form, but it was worth experimenting with.
The mouth, on the other hand, could definitely go. Facial expressions were such a burden. I frequently had no idea what to do with my mouth when people were talking to me, and eliminating that problem altogether would also lend me that air of unreadable mystique the Vaetna often projected when they weren’t making an effort to be affable. As it was, I’d get rid of my mouth right now if I could, at least as long as I still had the option to enjoy food.
Then, in a moment of rare sensibility, I remembered that masks existed, the half-face sort that covered the nose and mouth and rendered one’s silhouette vaguely snout-like. Nobody wore them outside of an operating theatre in the UK, but in Tokyo, I’d seen a few each time I’d gone out. Intrigued, I pulled out my phone and did a little googling, and learned that they were popular here, both for the sake of public health and as a more general fashion trend. They came in different shapes and colors, so it was even possible to accessorize with them. Could I picture myself wearing one as a default part of my appearance?
I could. Interesting. Surely, one of the girls owned some, or failing that, there were bound to be some among the medical supplies on the eighteenth floor. The reasonable thing to do would be to ask tomorrow, or order some online now so they’d be here by the morning.
But a desire for more immediate do-something-about-this was kindling in my chest. Alice had told me to focus on what was actionable. I wasn’t about to use that as an excuse for more late-night, ill-advised magic driven by inscrutable egg mania—I fully intended to hold true to my promise that I wouldn’t mess around with the doll unsupervised. But that convenience store across the street was 24-hour, wasn’t it? And they had masks, didn’t they?
It was the smallest of adventures, the simplest possible indulgence, as safe as could possibly be for being alone outside of Lighthouse Tower—the convenience store lay literally in its shadow, or would have if the sun was still up to cast one.
I was jittery with nervous energy as I rode the elevator down to the first floor. The lights were still on in the building’s spacious lobby, though the front desk was unstaffed. I wasn’t sure whether the building actually had staff at night at all, other than maybe some janitors—at least when it came to security, Ebi had direct control of the whole building’s systems. She was the reason I could essentially come and go as I pleased without carrying any kind of access card or fob, a privilege I was only truly exercising for the first time now.
It occurred to me that she controlled the building while ostensibly being secret from the public and presumably also the front-desk employees of Todai. Did they think she was just a building management program? I had no clue. But I did know she was watching me as I walked through the empty lobby, because as I approached the doors, my phone buzzed.
ebi-furai: pretty late at night to be touching grass
I stopped in front of the doors.
ezzen: Just going to the convenience store across the street.
ezzen: You wouldn’t lock me out, would you?
ebi-furai: bah
ebi-furai: i mean i could
ebi-furai: but youre exercising your free will and in my opinion thats pretty poggers
ebi-furai: so i would rather live vicariously through your adventure rather than fucking with you
ebi-furai: besides, sapphire will be back soonish, and if i locked the doors behind you i know shed just grab you
I considered commenting on the android’s use of “poggers,” but I didn’t want to risk burning through the goodwill she was extending.
ezzen: ty lol
ezzen: Anything I should know about visiting a convenience store at night?
ebi-furai: you could not be asking a wronger person
ebi-furai: ive never left the building
Oh. Right. I felt bad for forgetting about that. There was only one sensible thing to say.
ezzen: Do you wanna come?
ezzen: I mean, if you can, Ai claimed you were feeling better but it’s been weird not having you around.
ebi-furai: good where i am
She didn’t elaborate on that, which I took as my cue to push through the glass doors in the front of the building and out into the chilly air of an early March night in Tokyo. I braced for the familiar ache in my scarred hand—and was surprised when it took a few seconds longer than usual to kick in. The thicker, harder plates that had developed there, so tantalizingly and intriguingly and worryingly reminiscent of Vaetna carapace, apparently provided better insulation to my joints. Neat.
The rest of me wasn’t so well insulated. It was cold and windy enough that even my heavy hoodie couldn’t completely keep the chill from reaching up my back, so I hurried down the sidewalk toward the nearest crossing, guided by my phone’s map in my right hand. My other hand gripped the stabilizer module in my hoodie’s pocket, fidgeting with it. I wondered what I’d do with my hands when I had my full prosthetic and the little tuna can was no longer necessary. I supposed there was nothing stopping me from carrying around an actual tuna can instead. It could double as an emergency snack for Hina or Alice.
Even at this late hour, the sidewalk was fairly dense with faces side-lit by the buildings that still had lights on, little vignettes of life coming in and out of the shadows: office workers freed from overtime; students making their way back home after a long evening hitting the town after school; disheveled young adults who had only thrown on enough clothes to make it to the convenience store for late-night food, like me. Many of them were politely rushing as much as I was, and nobody spared me a second glance despite my garish orange hair and clear not-from-around-here-ness, which made me feel less self-conscious; everybody out here on the street was just trying to get to late night errands or get home and out of the cold. That common human experience we were all enduring allayed the creeping fears in the back of my mind that I would be instantly beset by either Todai fans or a PCTF snatch team as some kind of karmic punishment for having the audacity to go out on my own.
I hurried across the street and along the next sidewalk until I arrived at the bright, welcoming facade of the convenience store, the tell-tale glowing green stripe a beacon of refuge. The cold overrode any social anxiety about entering a new and unfamiliar space alone, sweeping me through the automatic doors and into the compact aisles before I even had the chance to lose my nerve. The sound of the wind was replaced by the jingles and beeps of Japanese consumerism, a discordant spell of modern comfort that prevented the primal, folkloric demon of cold from following me in.
Now that I was safe from the elements, I did stall a little, retreating to my phone rather than immediately beginning to browse. Remembering Ebi’s wording—“living vicariously”—I switched from the map to the main chatroom to share my experience…and, frankly, to get a bit of moral support.
ezzen: Liveblogging my convenience store run.
starstar97: uh ez
starstar97: its like midnight there isnt it
starstar97: thats konbini privilege i guess
starstar97: what are you there for
ezzen: surgical masks, ideally
ezzen: maybe snacks?
My stomach had opinions on that latter item. There was the fried food warmer next to the register, which reminded me of how juicy that chicken Hina had shared with me had been—but it sat dark and empty, apparently one of the few parts of the store that wasn’t fully 24-hour. A shame; warm fried chicken would have been fantastic to bring home and eat once I got out of the cold.
By contrast, though the refrigerated shelves of heat-and-eat meals were more sparsely populated in the middle of the night, populated they were nonetheless. And that was just the “real” food, the pasta and curry and rice balls; moving deeper into the store also revealed approximately one million varieties of rice crackers, and one of the aisles had a small cooler of energy drinks and jelly pouches for the truly desperate. I found myself most drawn to a shelf of unhealthy-looking baked goods, advertising custard or red bean paste or chocolate fillings. I was pleased to discover that almost everything had at least part of the label in English, though it was sometimes enigmatic; several pastries were labeled simply “Cheese” with no further description of what exactly they were.
I initially resisted the urge to simply take the lot; an adolescence of wobbling atop the poverty line had trained me to shy away from buying food that wasn’t “essential.” But then I saw something that had been on my bucket list for years, something so familiar as to induce nostalgia even though I’d never had one before, and that tipped the scale toward indulgence. I backtracked toward the front of the store to grab a basket, filled it with pastries and crunchy things with my prize at the top, then snapped a photo and sent it to the group chat.
ezzen: “And none under its shadow shall starve.”
ebi-furai: im POSITIVE that the na vva kiiycaseiir was not written with “loading up on ten thousand calories of empty carbs and sugar” in mind
I was pleased, albeit unsurprised, that Ebi caught my reference to the Spire’s foundational document of universal guarantees to its citizens—but rather annoyed that she didn’t seem to catch why I’d made it. Neither did Star, apparently.
starstar97: o hi ebi!!
starstar97: doesnt the spire kind of have insane pastry game now tho
starstar97: like on the same level as japan and including stuff like melonpan
starstar97: so the nvk could include most of these after the fact
starstar97: e do they have like cheesecakes in the fridge section
twilitt_: cheesecake mentioned
twilitt_: logging on
ezzen: guys
ezzen: the specific thing in the pic
ezzen: oTL
starstar97: oh wait
starstar97: e is literally referencing it because theres a heung cock on top of the basket
ezzen: NO
ezzen: its a CORNUCOPIA
ezzen: or, if you must use a nickname, a COPIA, thank you very much
starstar97: >:P
ezzen: or i guess “Spire Corn” according to the packaging on this one :\
ezzen: thanks japan.
ezzen: with red bean filling, not corn
ezzen: …
ezzen: I think.
What Star was cruelly calling a “Heung cock” was just a long cone of fried pancake batter stuffed with sweet red bean paste, a Japanese take on one of the Spire’s more notable cultural exports. One not descended from the Vaetna themselves, too, which was rare.
The story went that it was invented by Spire immigrants on the first anniversary of the end of the firestorms, and it was supposed to roughly resemble both the megastructure’s shape and a cornucopia. Since Clear Skies Day happened to fall right in the middle of Autumn, very near many immigrant cultures’ harvest festivals, it had become one of the Spire’s major unifying holidays. The cornucopia pastry’s role had grown to match, becoming a central festival food one could find with every kind of sweet and savory filling imaginable from across the cultural melting pot of the Spire’s citizens. A marvelous example of food as a keystone of culture, as Dad would have been quick to point out.
Bristol was not a great place to find affordable foreign pastries, so I’d never gotten to try a cornucopia of any flavor. I’d attempted making one myself once, but without the specially shaped hot metal cones they were supposed to be cooked in, it hadn’t really worked out. So finding one was a delight, and a welcome bit of familiarity in a country that still felt rather foreign…though the fact that it was in stores at all right now was rather strange.
ezzen: Kind of out of season.
starstar97: yeah its february????
starstar97: jp convenience stores love limited time stuff from what i understand but usually that matches seasonal things
starstar97: and this is not the season
ebi-furai: they sell them year round here
ebi-furai: its just a thing
ebi-furai: theyre basically just thicker crepes and we love crepes here so
I eyed the pastry in its plastic wrapper. It was indeed a little more frail than I’d always seen them, and it was indeed out of season, and the conical shape was a bit smushed—but it was a cornucopia nonetheless, and I considered that a win. And I couldn’t help but be a little excited at the idea that they were available year round; it occurred to me that if there were crepe stands, there might also be cornucopia stands somewhere in the city. I resolved to look that up later.
Right now, though, I wanted to infodump about the Na Vva Kiiyaseiir. It wasn’t a formal operational plan for the Spire’s guaranteed goods and services, but seven years of rolling my eyes at billionaire-owned media attempting hit pieces on even the tiniest perceived holes or hypocrisies in the allotment’s catalog had left me with quite a few opinions on the intent and wording of the document.
ezzen: These ARE a pretty funny corner case for the NVK, since it was written before they were invented ofc
ezzen: But they’re an official seasonal inclusion in the allotment now (they dedicate some gastrosynth space to it during the season to keep up with demand) so retroactively they’re totally part of the intent of that line and the spirit of the document as a whole.
ezzen: I guess if you really split hairs and went by the literal meaning of NVK you could say that only the flavors available in the allotment (peach/cream/pistachio iirc? feel like I’m missing one) are part of “The People’s Fundamental Needs Being Met”
ezzen: But that would make you an asshole lol
starstar97: people’s fundamental right to heung cock
ezzen: AUGH
starstar97: and google says its saffron and pistachios together, thats probably what you were missing
starstar97: aka kesar pista, indian dessert
ezzen: right the indian
ezzen: fuck you beat me to it
ezzen: Damn you and your full mobility in both hands!
ezzen: Anyway, either way this particular cornucopia in my basket isn’t part of the NVK’s guarantee because it’s not part of the Spire-produced allotment lol.
ezzen: Very much wrong side of the planet. So not exactly “under its shadow.”
ebi-furai: masks
ezzen: right right
ezzen: on it
A little embarrassed at how completely I’d zoned out of my surroundings, I slid my phone into my pocket and began to search the convenience store. I was hardly alone in here, and the aisles were narrow enough that I occasionally had to yield to another person coming around a corner or reroute around somebody browsing. The food sections obviously didn’t have masks, but looping around the back and squeezing behind an exhausted-looking office lady staring at the selection of beers brought me toward writing supplies and toiletries. I scanned up and down for anything with a picture of a mask, feeling rather like a tourist.
Nothing that looked mask-ish. Mild embarrassment began to build up to humiliated frustration as I looked and looked while people shuffled through the narrow aisle behind me. Their eyes bored into my back.
After the fifth time running my eyes along that section of shelves, my self-consciousness got the better of me and I gave up, turning around and pretending to browse the magazines directly opposite to save face. Then I realized that some of the magazines were porn mags and I aborted that pretense as well, shuffling down the aisle to appear as though I was doing anything but that—
And there they were. A little plastic pack of white masks, hanging on a peg at the end of the aisle, far enough away from where I’d been looking. I grabbed it in relief and took a photo.
ezzen: got
starstar97: !!
ebi-furai: vaetna white
That was true. I would have taken any color, but white was very welcome, the milky pale of Spire and Vaetna dermis. These ones were also a little nicer than the surgical masks I was familiar with, smooth fabric and a closer mesh with the contours of the cheek. It appealed to me very much.
ezzen: Any purchasing parameters I should know about
ezzen: I’ve never bought these before, so
ezzen: Kinda nervous it’ll make me come off as edgelord-y or something, you know?
twilitt_: does it have anime references on it
ezzen: no?
starstar97: then youre fine lol
twilitt_: yeah
twilitt_: it would be pretty cool if you could do a mask as a standard part of an outfit though right
starstar97: i mean you can, nobody’s stopping you
starstar97: especially since e is a flamebearer
starstar97: who’s gonna make fun of them
I resisted the urge to reply “Yuuka”. I didn’t want to get into that with the chat this late at night, and in light of what I’d just learned about her, I was wary of saying anything at all. I half-expected Ebi to say it anyway, but she stayed quiet.
twilitt_: yeah but i mean like. us mortals too
twilitt_: youd probably need a pandemic or something to bring them into fashion first though
twilitt_: no shot the vaetna would let that happen lol
ezzen: I’m gonna stand out so much
ezzen: orange hair is bad enough
ezzen: >.<
starstar97: dont be dumb
starstar97: its like two bucks right, just get it and see if it works
starstar97: and if it sucks
starstar97: hit da brix
starstar97: and also the hair is cool i think? you gotta send more pictures later
That helped a lot.
ezzen: thanks
ezzen: buying it
I took the pack, tossed it atop the pile of pastries in my basket, and hurried toward the register, wanting very much to get out of here. I disappointedly brandished my card at the uniformed cashier, a girl maybe four or five years older than me, in the universal language of a shopper ready to pay. She took the card placidly—then suddenly, her customer service autopilot juddered to a halt as she hesitated, first squinting at the very expensive-looking card and the Todai logo marking it, then looking up at me and seeming to process who I was. I wondered then how I looked—a foreign flamebearer standing across the counter from her at near midnight, basket full of nothing but pastries and a pack of masks. It must have been an absurd image.
She seemed torn for a minute, and I was worried she would ask for my autograph—which I didn’t have—or something else celebrity-ish, but to her credit, she moved right along with the transaction, stuffing my pastries into a plastic bag and offering it to me.
“Houseki hikare!” she chirped with an awkward smile.
“Uh. Thanks,” I muttered, not knowing how the Radiances would respond. I gave her an awkward nod and hurried out the front door, trading the discomfort of the interaction for that of the biting cold. Or rather, I made it about five steps out before registering a flash of color and motion to my right.
A shot of unwarranted adrenaline pumped through me as I turned to face my assailant, flashing back to my first encounter with Takagiri, spear tattoo itching—but this time, the surprise was entirely a welcome one.
Next to me, shining out of the dark, was a pair of sapphire eyes. And they looked hungry.
Author’s Note:
The cutting edge…of Ez’s self-image! It has many thoughts, and seems determined to collect one pastry for each.
I do want to lay out explicitly, word of god, that Sunspot’s timeline did not have the COVID-19 pandemic. This is one of the biggest butterfly effects of the timeline divergence from our world. I won’t give a specific reason here, though I will note that there’s no big reveal or intrigue about it. Yes, this means that Ez being a complete shut-in for years was entirely self-imposed.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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