My stabilizer module was still warm by the time breakfast made it to the table. For the sake of expedience, today’s menu was eggs a few different ways and not much else. In a few short weeks, navigating the Radiances’ kitchen had become largely an autopilot task; I knew where the various utensils and more common fridge and pantry items were, and since today was not a day for pushing the envelope regarding more esoteric tools or techniques, my flow was only really interrupted when I couldn’t immediately find an ingredient.
“There has got to be olive oil somewhere in this pantry. I feel like I’m going insane.”
“Uh. Maybe not?” Hina joined me staring into the cupboard. “I usually use the beef fat inste—oh, yeah, there it is.”
“What’s this sorry excuse for a squeeze bottle it’s in?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“There’s no…spout, whatever you want to call it. Nozzle. It’s like a ketchup bottle, no control.”
“Oh. You’re a snob, cutie.”
“Somebody has to be.”
Those most mild of gripes aside, it was very enjoyable to use the Radiances’ spacious stove. I’d spent years stuck with a single barely functional induction unit, one of the many little things that had dampened the love of cooking I’d inherited from Dad, so having six proper gas burners was a treat every time. And though I was rusty, I still managed to come out with three passable plates of eggs: two heaping piles of soft scrambled for my predatory girlfriend and her muscular teammate, and a pair done over easy for myself. Normally, I’d have garnished with chives, but the only appropriate greens I’d managed to find were spring onions.
It wasn’t a big breakfast, but the day was yet young, and I figured if using the doll went anything like it did the first time, then I’d be ravenous afterward no matter what I ate now. Plus, Alice had warned me the first time around that there was a mild chance a failed connection attempt could make me vomit, and I’d rather my stomach be mostly empty in that case.
Ai had also shyly asked for toast on the side, insisting that I really didn’t have to if it was too much work, which was silly of her. I also brought my haul of convenience store pastries from where I’d left them sitting on the counter last night, grabbing the whole bag and finding a jam-filled pastry for Ai. Hina’s blue eyes tracked me as I came back.
“Not the…whatchacallit…cornucopia? The Spire thing.”
I shrugged, putting the bag in the middle of the table as I sat down. “Thought about it. Kinda wanna save it for a special occasion. Maybe after the doll.” I wasn’t quite ready to admit that I was a little too emotionally fragile about Spire-related paraphernalia after last night’s cry. I desperately hoped that I would get over it before the pastry went bad.
“Eat it now! Lots more where it came from!”
“Spire thing?” Ai asked after some delay. She’d been busy inhaling her eggs at a frankly worrying pace.
“Spaiyapan,” Hina explained. I picked up from context clues that that translated to “Spire bread,” which was more accurate than not, I supposed. “Cutie went on a konbini run last night! Pastries!”
“You can have some if you want,” I added. It probably wasn’t good to encourage Ai’s poor eating habits, but in the light of day, I was realizing I’d gotten too many pastries for me to conceivably eat myself, and sharing was and remains a virtue. “Even the cornucopia, if you’re that curious about it.”
Ai shook her head. “It’s yours.”
Hina tutted. “One of us has to eat it eventually. Before it goes bad. You avoiders.”
I winced at the accuracy. “After the doll,” I promised, pulling the conical pastry out of the bag and setting it on the table so it wouldn’t be forgotten. Then I frowned, digging through the bag. “Hey, hold on, where’s the masks?”
“Right here!” Hina tossed them onto the table from nowhere. “Try ‘em, c’mon, I wanna see how you look.”
“Masks?” Ai asked, lifting the pack to read the label.
I felt unwarrantedly bad for keeping her out of the loop, even though these developments were hardly ten hours old and she was probably already putting the pieces together. I stumblingly explained: “Uh. Doll has no face. I…like that? Or at least I want to see if it makes me feel better to have some of my face covered.”
“Totally will,” Hina predicted with a grin.
“Doll first,” I insisted shyly.
“But then it would be hard to tell if you’re feeling good because of the doll or because of residuals, deshou?” Ai pointed out, grinning. She apparently also enjoyed the idea.
“Mask! Mask! Mask!”
Being outnumbered reinforced my excitement enough to overcome my reluctance. I’d bought the damn things, after all; there was no point in making a big event over it. I tore open the pack of masks and slipped the loops over my ears before I could lose my nerve.
“Yep,” was the first thing I said. The second was “this is definitely going to hurt my ears if I wear it all day.”
“But you do want to wear it all day?” Ai probed.
“Yeah.” I found the admission easy. “It’s good. I’m good.”
“You look good!” Hina said, leaning over to run her finger along the seam where the mask met my right cheek. “Gimme, I can extend the—”
“Matte, Hina-san, hold on,” Ai tutted. “No orange on something he’s—”
“They’re!”
Ai cringed and nodded quickly “—they’re wearing on their face, sorry, Ezzen. We can just get ones with longer straps. We already have some, probably, if you don’t mind the style or color being a little different?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t blame Ai for messing up my new pronouns. It was nice to have them at all; I was definitely feeling quite nonbinary right now. “No worries. I wouldn’t want something that’s stretching distance itself sitting right against my face, probably. And yeah, if you’ve got different ones, a bit lighter on the ears, that’d be great.”
“I can probably also make a clip so they don’t go on your ears at all. Can probably buy those, too, but…”
Hina pouted. “Orange isn’t the point! It’s got plenty of orange already anyway!” She picked up a lock of my sunrise-glow hair for emphasis, then tossed it aside. “I just wanna customize!”
“Like, print something on them?” I suspected she had something more elaborate in mind.
“Sure, if you wanted to be boring. I could probably get it to make it look like you have no mouth at all. That’s kinda the point, right? Ooh, I can see you smiling under there.”
I was having a very positive reaction to that idea indeed—and to the irony of my mouth’s own response to the suggestion of its nonexistence. The same basic problem stood, though. “Any magic at all in the mask still runs into the same problem Ai pointed out, though. And pink is arguably even nastier business. Brain is become scrambled egg,” I delicately and eloquently explained, quoting a meme from yesteryear about the hazards of ripple.
Hina rolled her sapphire, far-beyond-flesh eyes. “It’s literally fine. We’re about to put your brain in a robot and pull it right back out, and it won’t be scrambled egg. Would be yummy if it were, though…” she trailed off for a terrifying second before continuing like she hadn’t just said something insane and kind of hot. “Amane wears fancy masks and eyepatches, I wear filters for my teeth, it’s all the same for us. And admit it, cutie, you do like the idea.”
“I do,” I admitted, feeling the blunted contours of my lips and nose through the mask. “Ai, do you think there’s any actual risks?”
Ai looked up from her phone and flinched guiltily. “Eh? Ah—I mean…fine, yes, probably fine, I don’t want to argue. I can find the designs for Amane’s, and you can work from those.”
“Weaving practice later,” I mused to Hina, who grinned. Then I stood as confidently as I could with the tiny bit of wobble my stabilizer couldn’t fully correct. “Doll first, though; I’m feeling kind of fired up.”
Transferring my mind—sensorium, rather, to be more precise about it, since my mind was still fundamentally in my meat brain in my bone skull in my relatively mundane body—was smoother than last time, and did not in fact turn my brain into scrambled eggs. I still went through the brief void of disembodied emptiness, but my excitement about getting into the new body was strong enough to carry me through, no languishing in solipsistic nonsense this time. I ‘opened’ my ‘eyes’ and hopped to my feet, giving my limbs a few experimental stretches.
“I feel good.”
Ai took a few paces around me before returning to her diagnostic panel. “You look good,” she confirmed. “Everything stable, including your balance. Anything notable?”
“Not really. Felt quicker that time. Mask might have helped me acclimate? But might not have, too. Sorry if that’s not helpful.”
She shrugged. “I’m going by the numbers, and they look good. But they’re never the full story, no matter how much I wish that they were. Ready to test?”
We put the doll through its paces. I was told to touch my toes, to lie down, stand up, balance on each leg; if I could be reasonably expected to do it in my regular body, I found I was able to do it in this one as well. More, the shadow of a limp, the strange and slightly imperfect external adjustments to my right ankle, and the barest hints of aching that I had become accustomed to with my prosthetic and stabilizer were entirely absent; my foot was whole, and my leg was my own, as though it had never been lost. No wonder Amane preferred this.
“I’m a little surprised there’s no limp at all,” I confessed, prodding at my retracted right foot as I stood crane-style on my left. “Isn’t the whole point of blood magic that things the Flame takes can’t easily be gotten back?”
“Mine gets that it’s temporary,” Hina explained, “and fun? For it? Dunno how to describe it, but I think being shaped into a body is nice for it. That’s payment, to it. I think.”
That made sense to me. The Flame broadly rewarded self-actualization, so it stood to reason that it was a fan of being actualized itself. Of course, that really only raised more questions about its fundamental nature. Not quite an animal, not quite a god, and enjoyed being remade in the image of mankind, or at least something in that general vicinity. I wondered about Ebi and shot a questioning glance at Ai—then remembered that she wouldn’t see it in my faceless state.
Or so I thought, but she seemed to pick up on my gaze, if not my meaning. “Blood magic and mantles interface…strangely. Aside from the moral reasons and side effects, that’s one of the biggest reasons we shouldn’t be using it. It causes problems both for the shape of the LM—”
“Like Alice’s tail,” I interjected.
“—Yes, and the functions of non-woven abilities like Yuuka’s eye or Hina-san’s comfort in the fourth dimension.”
Hina peeked over Ai’s shoulder to look at the panel, then chuckled. “Oh, hey, cutie has its own blood stuff, too, right? The spear.”
“Oh, yeah, I guess so,” I mused. I didn’t really think of it like that, but it was technically true. “Gash with a box cutter and a {COMPOSE}. I dunno what I was thinking. Coulda just used an ana offset, or some kind of orange squish to just shrink it down and put it in my bag…stupid way to take it with me.”
Hina disagreed with a purr. “Hot way. You did what felt right and it worked.”
I felt a biological thrum—or rather faux-biological, instinct overlaid onto silicon and Flame—in my body at the look in Hina’s eyes. It wasn’t arousal, not exactly, but it was definitely something in that family of desire, a heightened awareness of my girlfriend’s appealing qualities. Experience told me the feeling would become much stronger once I was again enfleshed. I’d have to keep a tight lid on it or our scheduled naptime with Ai would be thoroughly desecrated by the two of us rutting like animals.
Ai tutted. “No.”
“Sorry?” I apologized, leaning away from Hina out of an abundance of caution and doing my best to shake off the feeling.
“It’s not ‘blood stuff’,” Ai huffed.
I realized she might have missed the tension between Hina and I and was instead just griping about something technical. But I wasn’t sure what she meant. “My tattoo? You redid the weave in place.”
“I fixed it.”
I thumbed at my synthetic left forearm, where my tattoo wasn’t. “I suppose, yeah, it doesn’t bleed anymore. Thanks. But Hina’s saying it’s still blood-space though, right?”
Ai blinked at me, then groaned and shook her head. “Ezzen. Right. I forgot you’re one of the ones who—blood-space doesn’t exist.” She started counting on her fingers. “There’s space compression, infomantic compression, ana offset storage into fourspace—and kata, but that’s not the standard—and that’s it. What people call ‘blood-space’ is always just taking a shortcut to one or more of those things.”
“Ai, babe,” Hina chirped, looking a little peeved; from both their tones, I suspected this wasn’t the first time they’d argued about this. “Y’know that’s not true. I mean, my pocketspace is the 4D offset now, but it used to be different.”
The Emerald Radiance ignored her, lowering the readout panel. “What you did with your spear was just a regular infomantic {COMPOSE} encoding; the only blood magic shortcut is…I’m not sure what the physical encoding actually was. Micro-patterns in your scar, maybe. I should have looked more closely,” she muttered.
“Micro-patterns?” I repeated. I would have rolled my eyes if I could; this interaction had fallen into familiar contours for me now, a longstanding and regularly reigniting argument from the forums about what blood magic was actually doing. “C’mon, would the Flame really make a…meat-QR code instead of just making its own little space for the spear? I mean, just because we don’t understand it and can’t replicate it with glyphs doesn’t mean the Flame can’t, is what I’ve been learning since I got here.”
Ai was starting to look actually upset. “I know that’s how it worked because that’s how I was able to change it when I redid the weave and Ebi applied your tattoo. I expanded on the original {COMPOSE}. I added a spatial compression step before the infomantic encoding. It’s quicker now, and within your body’s pink ripple tolerance where it wasn’t before, which is why it doesn’t tear out of your arm anymore. You had an, eurgh, ‘meat-QR code’ before, and now that’s your tattoo instead. You’re welcome.”
“Babe, calm down,” Hina whispered, gently putting a hand on Ai’s shoulder. “So if we just, like, etch the tattoo into the doll’s arm, cutie could summon their spear to it too?”
“Right, yes,” Ai confirmed. “It should show up in the doll’s hand, not your body’s. I think the decoding would actually happen along the transfer link,” she gestured toward the cables connecting my current head to the dimly grotesque helmet my main body wore, “but it would still work. I can admit your Flame is smart enough for that.”
“Regardless of distance,” I mused. “That’s the advantage, right, the spear doesn’t have to float through fourspace near me at all times for it to be in summoning range. Like when I was out in fourspace.”
“Huh?” Hina asked. Ai looked similarly confused.
I started. “Um. Oh. Did I—shit, I never told you? With the teleportation?”
“No? What? Cutie, cutie, what?” Hina sounded adorably excited. “You came back on your own, yeah, but I thought you just kinda swam.”
“No, I…” I tried to recall how exactly it had gone. “My spear was still out on the ground. And I first thought I could just re-weave my tattoo to locate it and use that to do a teleport, but my fingers just—it was really cold,” I whispered, a psychosomatic shiver running through my mechanical body. I had felt the life ebbing from my fingers and known I was going to die. “Couldn’t weave.”
“More training can help with that,” Ai supplied, but she seemed to regret it as she saw Hina slink toward me and wrap a hug around the carapace of my torso.
“Cutie, I’m sorry. You—you almost died out there, and I was busy fighting, and I—didn’t realize at the time how you’re not built for it. Scary.”
“It’s okay,” I whispered. “And yeah, Ai, we gotta make sure that can’t happen again. But—I did make it out. It was kind of blood magic-y? But not? All conceptual. Vaetna-like. Heung-like,” I admitted, which I never would have in my regular body. “I figured, um, if it’s still part of me, and I could summon it to me, then I could also summon myself to it? And I just…begged my Flame and thought really hard about it until it happened.”
Ai looked unhappy again. “Not how—not how most people’s Flames work,” she ground out. “But yours is strange. I can make exceptions for strange.”
“Like the Vaetna.” Hina said the quiet part out loud, glancing at Ai. “Weird shit, impossible shit. And cutie’s Flame is supposed to fuck with the Vaetna. You know about that part, right, Ai?”
Ai took a little while to respond, giving me a cautious look. “It’s been going around on the forums. I didn’t want to believe it, or upset you by bringing it up, but…I see it. After that. There’s evidence. Flamefall during a Vaetna stream.”
“I know,” I said. “The plates on my arm.” Too many factors to ignore. “But I’m, uh…trying not to think about it? I don’t—okay, I think I know what it means but that’s got to be wishful thinking because the alternative is…I know we should talk about it now that it has to be talked about, and now should be the time while I’m all uninhibited and able to confront scary truths and actually know what I want and—”
There was a knock at the door. Hina’s head swiveled like an owl’s.
“Oh, thank God,” I sighed. “Yes, whoever that is, let them in, I’m not ready for this conversation.”
Ai gave a little nod that I took to mean “me neither.”
“It’s Izumi,” Hina warned. The door had no window, so I have to assume she smelled her or something.
“Fine by me. All the more reason to not talk about it.” I glanced at Ai. “I—yeah, I know avoidance is bad, but—”
“Let’s talk about mantles instead,” she agreed. “Not…new magic and war. I’m tired of those.”
Hina stepped over to the door, undid the lock that I hadn’t noticed was there, and pulled the door open to show Izumi standing there. She was smiling.
“Sorry. New magic and war are exactly what I want to talk to Ezzen about.”
Author’s Note:
Short chapter! I couldn’t find a way to make it longer with the time available to me, and this seemed like the best breakpoint.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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