“Out of the gutter, kemono,” Yuuka sighed without any real bite. After I’d finished my recap, she had seen fit to drop out of her mantle, from skirt and frills back to frumpy hoodie and shorts. “What I’m hearing—and seeing, though who knows if that means anything anymore—is that we’re on our own. As usual.”
Amethyst chirped a reply above her, looming as the team’s centerpiece as they gathered around my bed. I was sat propped up against a pillow that cushioned my back from the headboard. Hina was the only one on the bed properly with me, lying at the other end and kicking her legs up in a distracting rhythm of soft pwuf thumps as her heels fell back to the bedspread. She’d been very good when I’d stumbled into my room and declared I was going back to sleep for something extremely important, but I guessed that sometime during my dream-meeting she’d been informed that I was heading off the threat of imminent Vaetna combat, because when I’d woken she’d been a bit grumpy. Understimulated, maybe.
“We are enough.”
Nobody contested Izumi’s use of “we.” She stood a bit off from the proper Radiances, also ready for war by definition of what she was. Not a Radiance in any official capacity, and in fact I wasn’t sure what the public status of Izumi the assassin or Kimura the major cult leader was supposed to be, but at least at an unofficial level she’d naturally slipped into being the team’s sixth magical girl. Or seventh, or eighth, depending on how you counted myself and Ebi—the point was that, as a mantle wielder who shared their collective loathing for the great machine to which Sugawara had fed Amane, she was welcome to hear what I had conveyed about the Vaetna and join in on the conversation. She’d swapped her look from the party girl outfit to the dark assassin, hair bound up in a long ponytail. Her eyes glinted with readiness as she looked out the window of my room, watching for what was coming; less gleeful and anticipatory than Hina, but prepared to act in the same vein.
The other Radiances stood at my side, mantled up like they were ready for war, unwilling to entirely take Yuuka’s cue to stand down despite her precognition. Like Izumi, they were in their low-profile forms, the shapes they’d used to take out Sugawara’s hospital-turned-compound. Their signature bright colors and shapes had given way to muted tones and more uniform silhouettes, geometry and flair simplified to fit more complex lattices; all the cosmetic visual and sound effects had been tossed in favor of a suite of infomantic countermeasures and better maneuverability. They were still more garnished than Izumi’s mundane murder outfit, unwilling to wholly forgo the skirts and sleeves and hairstyles that said “Radiance,” but many of the contours that remained were stealthily practical, there to improve radar invisibility or acting as resonance structures in the LM that made it more resilient.
When I’d first paged through the diagrams for these configurations of the mantles, I’d experienced some envy about the cleverness on display, the interdisciplinary engineering and real experience that went into those features. Right now I was mostly just grateful to have that on my side. Was Izumi right that it was enough?
Radiance Opal leaned against her crystalline girlfriend’s thigh, thinking deeply, not answering immediately. Ai was mantled as well, the first time I’d seen this variation of hers; it was relatively straightforward, mostly distinguished from her teammates by green accents, a less-frilly skirt, and a much longer ponytail than her usual, almost a match for Izumi’s except for the tiny bit of cosmetic flair in how it flowed gently from a nonexistent breeze. “On our own,” she agreed. “So what does ‘enough’ mean? Enough for what?”
“It means we fight!” Hina asserted, punctuating it with another leg thump. It was adorable, but belied frustration. “If the Vaetna don’t want to do stabbies, fine. I’m not mad, just disappointed. But I still think the Peacies can’t really say no to a fight. We could just go and do what we did to Sugawara, kill ‘em quick. We can.”
She’d already tried to exit my room via the balcony to do just that less than two minutes into my explanation of what the Vaetna had shared. And then again two minutes later. She’d only agreed to stop when Ai had gently suggested she busy herself getting me some more water and towels; it turned out that my body had been working hard, perspiring through the clothes I’d thrown on to sleep most comfortably as quickly as possible. I’d been parched and needed to stop to sip water every few words, and even now that I was somewhat rehydrated, my tongue still didn’t quite sit in my mouth right.
“We can, in theory,” Alice allowed, “but kill who is the question, and not one I think we should be answering tonight. They’re not going to move tonight for sure—” she looked meaningfully toward Yuuka at that, who nodded confidently, “—and I would really love to get some sleep and actually plan.”
“No—hmgh,” I cleared my throat, “no qualms about the murder?”
Normally I would have qualified the question a bit more, with an acknowledgment that I’d already seen their willingness to spill Peacie blood and this was mostly just to confirm whether they were still willing to do that on their home turf. But my throat didn’t feel up to the challenge, and besides, the nuance got through regardless.
“Yes. Well, I’ve got a spot of worry about the logistics, but mahou shoujo defend Japan, when it’s called for. And at this point it is called for, I’m not seeing any other way out of this, as it sounds like you’d be turned away from the Gate if you wanted to run off to the Spire.”
Hina sat up, indignant on my behalf. “Ally, you don’t seriously think—”
“I might,” I interrupted, rubbing my face. Everything felt a bit off; I found my nostrils objectionable. “Given the choice. If it meant bringing you all out of the line of fire.”
Hina pounced over onto me in a hug. “Mmn. Don’t do that. We like you here.”
“Does Japan?” I asked, raising my hand to indicate I’d continue after I took a sip of water. “I mean, civilians, yeah? Or the government? Just seems to me that Sky—um, Jason, to you guys, probably—put the whole country in a bind by bringing me here. If I wasn’t…” I trailed off, shaking my head, unsure of how to express what I was feeling. I’d had a nice few weeks of being coaxed out of feeling like a burden to the team, but I’d always held onto the subconscious safety net of being able to flee to the Spire if things got too hot for the Radiances, which would hopefully ameliorate the brewing conflict. With that out of the picture, dread and guilt were settling in. “It’s bad,” I tried.
“It has always been bad,” Izumi countered.
Amethyst warbled a sharp noise, heavily filtered Japanese that sounded like agreement. Alice looked up at her, listening, then translated for me. “If you weren’t here, we’d still have eventually had this showdown. The Peacies hate what we represent—the Vaetna said so themselves, if I’m understanding you correctly. We’re not under their thumb, and for that, they would have tried to destroy us as soon as it became convenient for them. Instead, they’re feeling the pressure to do it fast. Not tonight fast,” she repeated, eyeing Yuuka again, maybe trying to prompt her eye to repudiate the claim. When it didn’t, she patted Amethyst’s crystalline thigh. “But faster than they’d like, and you being someone they want to have rather than acceptable losses complicates any of their more violent first strike options.”
“What she’s saying is that with you here, we’ve got the juiciest of all bait,” Yuuka added with a grin. Gone was much of her trepidation and anxiety; it had apparently been something of a literal blockage on her foresight, and with Kat’s stream now past and the all-consuming the Vaetna will kill us premonition managed, it had visibly dissipated from her eye. At a less magical but maybe more significant level, when I relayed what Bri had theorized about the limitations of time travel, she had also brightened; she didn’t like the Vaetna, but after a few probing questions about Bri’s exact wording she seemed to buy it and was cautiously optimistic that we weren’t about to be retroactively wiped from existence by a cascade of time traveling assassins. “I told them about the mantle swap idea,” she informed the others. I felt a little woozy at the prospect of borrowing—really copying—one of the girls’ mantles for the switcheroo ambush plan she had outlined. “We’ll have a window soon, once the fuckers actually offer to negotiate. Couple days of swing on that. Ezza, if you can do your torch thing, I can probably get something exact now.”
I remembered what Bri had said about the connection between silver and white ripple. A bit of determination sparked within me and I obligingly raised my arm, but Hina pushed it back down, locking eyes meaningfully with Alice. The team’s leader shifted.
“We can discuss how to handle that in the morning,” Alice said delicately. “If you want to do a flyby, Yuuka, I trust you. But I think Ezzen has spent all they can, or should, tonight. Is something the matter with your face?” she asked me.
“No. Maybe.” I rubbed my cheekbones. “I wasn’t me in there. In the dream. Or I’m not me out here.”
That provoked more than a little alarm in Alice’s sunset-glow eyes. She muttered something up at Amethyst, who nodded her massive purple head. Ai came over to my side and searched my face with concern. “Do you feel dizzy?”
“No, just sort of…heavy?”
“Ah, fuck,” Yuuka groaned. “Yeah, not gonna ask more from you tonight, you’re cooked. This is what I was talking about, that feeling that stuff doesn’t click between your mantle and your body. I’m a bit surprised it didn’t go off when I was coaching your selfie game, but makes sense that it didn’t happen until you crashed. Sleep’s weird for Flame-brain stuff.”
I saw Alice mouth “selfie game?” at her, but not say it out loud. Hina had no such tact.
“Selfie?”
“Um, took photos in the doll,” I admitted, feeling awfully dysphoric all of a sudden. “Wasn’t much, just wanted to show my friends. Nothing that’s not already public.” I’d only sent one of the more normal, non-silly ones while we’d been getting set up to watch the stream—I was suddenly possessed of the urge to send the others, to declare that that was closer to the real me, or the me that I ought to be, or something along those lines.
Hina was good at reading me. “Would looking at them make you feel better?”
It was a good thought, and I hesitated for a moment, then shook my head. “Um—after we figure out the gameplan.”
Alice gave me a look. Peeved but hiding it well, I thought. “We just got dragged out of bed to fight for our lives, Ezzen, this isn’t a proper strategy meeting. If the coast is clear of the Vaetna, I’m of a mind to go back to bed. The gameplan for tonight is nothing.”
“But shouldn’t it be something?” I asked, grasping for the weight I’d heard in Sani’s words to anchor myself. I’d been issued a mission: send the Peacies a message. “You said they don’t like to rush. We should force them to react, yeah? I mean, it’s not like I would have been the one to go out anyway, so how I’m doing doesn’t really matter, does it? Am I missing something?” I looked between the women. “I mean, what do we gain by waiting?”
“The chance for them to come to the table to negotiate. As a pretense to shoot them under it. If we’re openly hostile, we lose that chance.” Alice’s tone was matter-of-fact, like this was routine. “And there’s more to it than the violence. The Peacies want to get the government on their side, if not the public, so we want to be maintaining business as usual as far as the public is concerned. If we go and hit something right now, say, the USS Abraham Lincoln that’s been hanging out off Fukuoka since a couple days after you showed up, then Hina, Amane, and I aren’t going to get any sleep before our interviews and ad reads tomorrow. We used to do unplanned all-nighters for this stuff back before we were official, but we just can’t afford it now.”
Right then she seemed a far cry from smiles and sparkles, but in fairness, she did have a point; it was an hour when nobody with a day job should have been up. These magical girls traded on their image, and sleep was a critical part of that. I’d had a background awareness that when the girls weren’t in the penthouse, they were doing brand deals and TV appearances and voice acting and all those other things, a black box in my mind labeled “celebrity stuff” that I had considered secondary to their more proper VNT activities like Ai’s magitech R&D and their collective penchant for extrajudicial murder.
Because of my isolation from their cultural presence, it had basically been my assumption that all that soft power paled in comparison to the hard power. They were each more dangerous than a nuclear weapon; that public opinion or the government couldn’t really stop them even if the Peacies did win them over. The Barbecue Inferno had demonstrated that flamebearer conflicts were always a hair’s breadth from turning explosive, and it seemed obvious that this conflict with the largest magitech institution in the world would be decided by the sword no matter what. It was a chilling thought, but it had seemed to me the reality of the situation.
Then I thought of Bri, how she resented being a dagger so much that she had taken on the mantle of a needle instead. And I remembered how I had mourned the way the executioner’s sword reduced all to merely the action of a cutting edge. Even the Vaetna—especially the Vaetna—understood that discarding all notions of influence and negotiation because you had the power of nightmarish butchery was a tragedy, one that ought to be the last resort. Unlike many VNT groups, Lighthouse had the privilege of choosing when to take that step. Yuuka might have been the most literal in how she used her body to curry public favor—albeit a somewhat unpleasant version of it—but all of them had political leverage that correlated directly with physical self-care.
“Okay,” I capitulated. “Not tonight. I get it.”
“I mean, I don’t have to sleep,” Hina pointed out, sitting up with a bounce. I should have seen that coming; she was still activated, and having been denied the promise of a good scrap with the most lethal beings on Earth, she was almost salivating at the idea of another outlet, a coiled spring of anticipated violence. “Yuu-chan, wanna go out? Drink some blood? Have a little fun?”
For a very brief moment, but one long enough for all of us to see it, Yuuka looked sorely tempted. Then she mastered her expression and executed a flawlessly haughty twintail flick. “I have classes tomorrow, kemono.”
Hina blinked her big blue eyes. “Oh, so you’ll bomb a pipeline over lunch, but you won’t hang out with me? Even if we fuck after?”
“Yamete,” Ai cut in before Yuuka could snipe back. “You do have to sleep.” She winced. “That sounds bad when I say it.”
“You can stay with me,” I told Hina. With my initial urge to get out there and take action subsiding, the ennui and body-wrongness were coming to the forefront again. I rubbed my face. “Could use some…company? Dunno.”
Hina gave me a concerned look. She murmured. “You look bad.”
“…Thanks.”
“No, not like that, you’re always a cutie. I mean, um…the displacement thing Yuuka said.”
“Yeah, Ezza, you look like shit. Doll won’t help, don’t get any stupid ideas.”
“I don’t think this is because of the doll,” I confessed.
I’d actually omitted sharing the shape I’d experienced in the dreamscape, the thing with the cloak of bright hair and ice-scraping talons and no gut of organs. I’d been focused on relaying the meeting with the Vaetna and reassuring the girls that the threats facing us weren’t going to come from the Spire or the magically-stapled-back-on-itself future. As long as I didn’t think about that form, being back in this one didn’t bother me as much. But now I was thinking about it, and it sucked. I was wet and dry at once, squishy in many pointless places, and all the protrusions of my face felt wrong. I felt like a screw that had gone in at an angle and could now go no deeper without cracking itself or its housing. Of course, with an actual screw, you could back it out and start again. I wondered if I could do that here, and felt my Flame gather in my chest—
Hina was clever enough, changed enough, and in tune enough with my Flame to pick up on my moment of weakness. She touched my chest to bring me back to reality before I could do something exceedingly stupid. Her voice was soft. “What did you look like?”
“I—should I answer that?” I cautiously asked Ai, no longer trusting my own judgment. “Will that make whatever this is worse?”
“I wanna know,” Hina said. The glimmer in her eyes, that predatory fervor, had now morphed into a hunger for me, or perhaps a hunger on my behalf. It might have been more fair to call them the same thing.
Ai bit her lip. Amethyst crouched down beside her, still almost as tall as she was, and answered for her in slow, crystal-tone English.
“If you say it, it will hurt less,” She added something else in Japanese, directed at Ai, which sounded much more detailed, like two doctors huddled over a patient presenting a new symptom.
Ai sighed. “I don’t recommend listening to our cyborg’s opinions about pain, but she’s right about the other part. You’re desynchronized, and there’s not really a treatment we’ve found. It gets worse the more your mantle diverges from your regular body, so…” she gestured up at Amethyst. “If it was like this…you don’t have to tell us. Whatever you want to share.”
“Ah. Okay,” I managed, now feeling quite bad indeed. My tongue was a dried slug; I drank some water and was all too aware of how it sloshed down my flesh-pipes. “I…yeah. Not quite that much, but…to put words to it. Okay. Doll-Vaetna-sharp.”
I felt very brave for even saying that much. The girls were sympathetic, of course; Alice gave me a gentle smile and Ai nodded in a way that told me she was logging that information to pick at it later. Hina nuzzled my neck, which helped most of all. “Sounds like you, cutie. Can I help?”
With the ice broken—reference to my dream not intended—I felt a little better talking about it. “Doll’s not the word. I was talking about this with Yuuka earlier. Chassis? Just—structural, not fleshy.”
“Other than boobs,” Yuuka guessed. She sounded sympathetic.
“…Yeah. Boobs club.”
“Boobs club.”
“What?” Alice asked, looking between us in confusion.
“Boobs club,” the amethyst mecha offered from above her.
Radiance Opal stared up at her girlfriend, then sighed in defeat, waving a hand at Yuuka. “You know what, sure, whatever. Boobs club. If it means you two are getting along again, I’ll take it, it’s too bloody late for me to parse this. Is talking helping?”
I thought about it. “Sort of. I feel like if you could open me up and hose me down with a pressure washer, that might fix me.”
“Cut…you…open…” Hina mimed writing on an imaginary notepad. “Oh, whaddaya know, I already had that in my calendar for—”
“Stop,” Ai commanded. “You do not want to do anything that changes your body right now. You could lose motor function from the mismatch, or forget how to breathe, or one of many other bad things Amane can tell you about if she wants.”
I sighed, nervously kneading my plated right hand, one of the only parts of me that felt properly alright. “So just…tough it out? This isn’t like, um, gender stuff, that’s all kind of like static in my head, this is…I’m feeling it.”
“This is going to sound kind of insufficient,” Alice warned, “But bathing helps, it really does. Obviously, er, not the pressure washer thing, I can’t recommend that, Hina. But rinse yourself down, use the nice conditioner, wash down your face, feel out where everything is again.”
Amane warbled something else, which drew a scandalized glance upward from her girlfriend. “Sonnano—Fine.” She looked at me, reddening with a blush. “Amane wants me to add that sex can help too. Gets you very, ah, aware of your body, as it were. This feels like a bad recommendation with you two in particular, so let me repeat: Hina, do not cut them open. Honestly, Ezzen, why’d you have to go and put that specific wording in her head?”
“I’m the one suffering here,” I retorted with my gummy lip-flaps and vibrating membranes. “Besides, s’not like I’m the main subject of all that, if she really needs to let off steam, we agreed she can go to—wait.” My heart thudded in my chest. “Where is Izumi?”
“Outta here!” Hina laughed. “She doesn’t have anywhere to be tomorrow. Left when we were talking about waiting.”
Alice joined me in looking around the room in confusion, as surprised as I was that the assassin had vanished. The door and window were both shut. She’d dipped out via the fourth dimension.
“Off toward—-negotiation? Mantle technology?” Yuuka relayed, her eye flaring as worry rose in her voice. “But I can’t see anything else. Fuck. What if she’s selling us out?”
Amane replied quickly and sharply with a reprimand so clear I didn’t need to speak Japanese to get the gist. Hina effectively translated anyway as she crossed her arms. “Yeah, why would she? Too paranoid, Yuu-chan, save it for the bad guys.”
“Did—oh God,” I realized, anxious suspicion spiking as pieces clicked into place. It made too much sense; our hasty forgiveness and acceptance of her would have been the perfect window into understanding the weaknesses of the mantles. Information the Peacies would pay a fortune for. Leverage. “Gathering intel on us the whole time.”
Hina looked genuinely offended. “No, cutie! She hates Sugawara waaaay too much for that. She’s just out and about to scout…prolly.” The tiniest bit of uncertainty crept into her voice at the end; she was unable to find a good rebuttal for what Yuuka had foretold, and was visibly becoming distressed as we were at the sudden possibility that we’d been played for sympathy. “There’s no way she’s a double agent or any shit like that. We helped her with that. You helped her with that!”
Amethyst gave a rumbling reply I couldn’t tonally parse, a much heavier, more scraping sound than the usual tinkle of gemstone. Ai did me the service of translating. “Amane agrees, there’s no way. She fought Sugawara with everything she had when he came here.”
“Everything,” Amethyst added in rock-tumbler English.
Alice’s lashing tail indicated she wasn’t convinced. We all turned to the team’s leader as she thought it out. “…Suppose it is true. Where’d she be going right now? Off to trade that information to the Peacies in exchange for keeping Hikanome or Japan as a whole out of this. Sell us out.” She sounded vexed. “No, that can’t be it. The dark redeemed villain girl doesn’t betray the team after joining up. I don’t think they could actually offer her anything she wants more than she wants to turn them to pulp. Is Japan worth that much to her, after how it’s treated her?” She let the question hang as she looked out the window at Tokyo’s late-night skyline, then made up her mind, her voice taking on an air of urgent command as she faced me again. “We can’t take the risk. Ezzen, I’m sorry, but if you can muster the energy to boost Yuuka’s eye, now is the time, at least enough to verify what she’s doing. Amane, hasshadai e, be ready for an intercept if we have to. Hina, you have her phone number, right? She’s not on the mantle comms, but if you can at least contact her and figure out—”
I tuned out the details of Amethyst’s burst of speed toward my door and Hina scrambling for her phone to focus on dredging up my Flame once more, now motivated by panic rather than dysmorphic wrongness. Fire ignited from the cracks between the plates on my right arm. It was cold as ice; my shell here was incomplete. I tried to shake off that thought with a joke as I held it up toward Yuuka. “Here. Little bit of the future for you?”
“…Damn, you look miserable,” she muttered, then focused on the Flame I had offered. She gasped at the same time as Hina whined at her phone. “Damn, she looks miserable. False alarm!” she called to the others. “Not betrayal, she’s still in the penthouse. Ebi, get out here and help her.”
“What happened?” I asked.
Hina hopped off the bed. “I’m going. I’ll be back when you’re showered, cutie.”
She disappeared with a wet zipping noise while Alice put her face in her hands. Yuuka sighed, waving for me to extinguish my Flame. “Same shit you’re going through, plus a whole lot of neglect. She hasn’t been taking care of her real body at all. Gonna need an IV drip and a real talking-to. And here we thought she’d betrayed us, fuck’s sake. She wasn’t going anywhere, that was a quiet mantle crash.” She looked over at Alice. “Definitely a staying-in night if it wasn’t already.”
“Definitely a staying-in night,” Alice sighed in agreement. “I don’t know if it’s any comfort, Ezzen, but it seems you’re not the only one who needs a better relationship with their mantle and sleep schedule and self-care before we go to war. If we have the luxury of time, anyway; Yuuka, see anything else in that burst?”
“Hm. Not really? What I was seeing as ‘negotiation about mantles’ will just be Izumi talking to Ai and Ezza tomorrow about what just happened, nothing betrayal-ish. Her phone’s floating out there, somebody’s gotta pick that up before the Peacies do. And if I’m seeing something that dim, that’s good, because it’s not the Vaetna killing us. Good job, Ezza.”
“No…problem,” I replied, feeling even gummier now that the clarifying power of my magic had faded, drained from the momentary panic, and guilty about how quickly we’d arrived at suspicion. “We all kinda jumped to accusation.”
“…Yeah,” Alice agreed, tail lashing in self-reproach. “Trust in your teammates is mahou shoujo, so that was a failing on our part. Then again, it is far too late at night for this.” There was a shimmer and a small rush of air as the LM of her mantle dissolved and her pajamaed body redeployed in its place. “I’m gonna check on her and head to bed.”
“Me as well, without the bed,” Ai said as she went for my door. “Take a shower and get some rest, Ezzen. If you still feel bad in the morning, well, Yuuka is right: we’re going to be doing lots of mantle work tomorrow no matter what.”
Author’s Note:
Hasshadai means launchpad. Fortunately it doesn’t seem to be necessary after all! Is it mean and cruel of me to do another fakeout for the actual opening of the conflict? Perhaps! But also, Ez is having a time. On the one hand, it sure is a relief to know you’re not about to be imminently killbliterated by your parasocial idols and instead only have to worry about armed conflict with the entire western military-industrial complex, isn’t it? On the other hand, when your body image issues are now starting to verge into actual disassociation, maybe a bit of murder can help take your mind off things. Izumi knows what I’m talking about!
On that note, I have art to share! Not official, but instead a wonderful bit of fanart of Ezzen that was shared in the Discord by fudgecakedevil (instagram link):
The unidentified fucking thign!!! I love this style and am incredibly grateful there are people willing to take the time to make art purely because they enjoy the story. I am also paying people to make art, of course — if we’re lucky and the timing works out, the next commission will correspond with Sunspot’s 5000 follower (RR+Scribblehub) milestone. We’re 99% of the way there as of writing this!
That’s all for this week, really. Thank you to the beta readers as always. This chapter went up a few days early for patrons, which I’m happy about and aim to keep doing, but otherwise there’s not a lot to report. See you all next week!
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