Alice vanished a hundred meters above the end of her dive, slicing into the fourth dimension. There was a long, long second of anticlimax, then a mote of light where she’d disappeared, then a flash that consumed everything.
I didn’t get a good look at the rest. Supposedly I was awake to witness the aftermath, but I don’t remember it, nor anything else before arriving back at Lighthouse Tower. So, ironically, my knowledge of what exactly resulted from that flash of light wasn’t all that different from that of my friends on other continents, filled in by official—and matching—press releases from Todai and the Peacies both and corroborated by a handful of Twitter videos taken from the nearest towns. The following days would paint a better picture as cleanup efforts progressed and more firsthand video surfaced.
Parts of the official story were not true to life, as I learned from the Radiances’ direct accounts and subsequent strategizing, but let us begin with the initial events and the facts on which everybody agreed:
The flash was visible from space. For us, everything outside the dome simply vanished: the sky, the forest, the hospital, the mountains beyond, the PCTF Condor, all completely swallowed. The magical light lingered for several seconds, the bright glow of annihilation refusing to go before its work was done. When it did fade, it was reluctant and slow, changing colors from white to pale blue to cherry red before finally dimming to a level where anything could be seen. I had intuitively been expecting to see a mushroom cloud climbing out of frame of the videos, toward the heavens above, but this was no such conventional weapon. Alice’s attack was light and heat and ripple, not a shockwave.
The red-hot glow suffused the landscape below us, everything in the lee of the mountains rendered molten and glowing with blackbody heat. The trees and shrubs were gone in every direction, with not even charcoal specimens surviving until well past the radius we’d deemed a safe distance—safe factoring in the specially configured and reinforced bubble, I suppose. I can’t imagine a mantle would have survived fully intact. Maybe even the Vaetna would have flinched. The Condor was certainly singed, its wards gasping for breath in the form of flickering clouds of St. Elmo’s fire, despite the further range where it had been lurking. Later, when debriefing, we would make a note to prioritize heat-based attacks against Peacie vehicles.
It was sufficient to kill the monster. The hospital at the epicenter was gone, unmade entirely. Where it had stood, the earth had turned to glass, then to vapor, then plasma, and took several hours to condense back into liquid and finally solid matter.
The most striking results of what Alice had wrought didn’t become apparent until the following morning. During the night, the crater cooled enough to stop glowing—faster than red-hot rock should have been able from atmospheric convection alone, Ai was quick to note—and the following morning the surface had begun to congeal into strange, lumpy formations that scintillated in the dawn and seemed to almost burn from within, holding embers of the all-consuming light that had made it.
Samples confirmed what was obvious to the eye: the land in the blast radius had been transmuted to opal. Todai fans and Hikanome pilgrims alike began to flock to the site of our battle almost immediately, and Lighthouse’s more corporate elements were on the ball. It was impractical to cordon the entire kilometer-wide burgeoning tourist attraction, so they leaned into it instead and performed their own, arguably greater trick of transmutation: turning chaos into commodity. Thirty-six hours after the flash, you were able to buy a little prospecting kit to recover your very own chunk of magical aftermath, marketed as “the dragon’s wealth”. Bring your friends!
I wasn’t a fan of desecrating and selling off a fresh magical landmark in such a way. It chafed my sensibilities fiercely to see the wondrous, shimmering landscape be gnawed at in order to pad Todai’s profits by some infinitesimal sub-percentage-point margin. Magic was supposed to be magical, and this was a deeply cynical move preying on that wonder. But I wasn’t the one calling the shots there, and as the media cycle churned, I came to see the practicality in the move from a PR perspective, the value in emphasizing the glamour and style we had left in our wake rather than the stark destruction Alice had wrought.
The tourist prospecting scheme cemented us as the heroes of the day and tied the whole event firmly to the Radiances. At a large scale, this had the benefit of pushing the Peacies’ presence out of the narrative almost entirely, but the surge of demand also triggered solicitation from Todai fans worldwide who wanted to get in on the action. I happened to be connected to a few such fans.
starstar97: ezzen how much do i need to pay you
starstar97: pls
ezzen: o.o
starstar97: pls
starstar97: pls
DendriteSpinner: Star, no, your groceries
starstar97: i have so much rice ill live
No matter how much I loved Star, I was not about to hike all the way back out there to pay my own hosting organization a fee so I could get on my hands and knees with a little chisel for her, not for any amount of money, not in my condition. I was, in fact, physically incapable of going anywhere beyond the penthouse even if I wanted to. It was all becoming a familiar story: my immediate injuries plopped me straight into a hospital bed on the eighteenth floor and I’d slept clean through the initial intensive care and the entire following day. This was my lot in life, to injure myself through overuse of magic and end up bedridden in Ebi’s care with new scars. And this was arguably the most comprehensive set of injuries I’d yet sustained.
They’d patched over the horribly burned hole in my stomach and extracted the bits of molten metal from my stabilizer module that had accumulated there, and even through the cocktail of chemical and analgomantic painkillers it was absolute hell to move my torso even the tiniest amount, like a white-hot bullet was lodged beneath my liver and sending whips of pain to the surrounding area. I was told I was lucky it hadn’t gone lower and touched my intestines as well. I was on a strictly intravenous diet for the time being.
The external situation was worse. I had second-degree burns over much of my skin. My armor of Flame had ultimately taken its price everywhere my arms and torso had used to have body hair, turning my upper body into a mess of sickly, off-white, blistered burns. I’d woken up nearly mummified in chemical-soaked bandages meant to head off the worst of the inevitable scarring. I trusted the treatment was effective—the Firestorms had brought both the incentive and technology for massive leaps in burn treatment for those with the means, and from my foot’s recovery process I knew Todai had those means—but that did little for the pain, which was constant and suffocating, as if my wards had failed and the net-entity was grinding me up with a gizzard of rubble. And it was even worse when the bandages had to be changed, which was twice daily.
The sick punchline was that I didn’t even have my meat-phone to keep me company. It was all that remained of the net-entity’s influence on the physical world, a bizarre and fleshy memento that refused to die in the aftermath. Ai had immediately confiscated and quarantined it in her lab for study. A replacement had been procured, but it wasn’t my phone with all of my stuff. This had caused me, pain-addled as I was, to have a minor tantrum when I’d awoken the first time. It was the final stroke of injury and helplessness and it was all too much.
So instead of enduring all that, I’d spent the last four days on vacation from my body. I knew it was inadvisable to retreat into a mantle for pain relief, but it was simply unbearable, and I had better things to do than lie perfectly still in bed, alone with my thoughts and whoever deigned to drop in between all the activity demanded by Todai’s disaster response scramble. I had the opportunity to opt out of that completely, so of course I took it. Escape from pain was the most addictive thing in the world; I couldn’t fathom why or how Amane spent a single minute more than necessary outside of the mecha.
The doll was safe and comfortable and let me roam the penthouse freely. In the wake of my dream dive with Yuuka, I’d felt the need to make a change to the design. A color swap, changing my external panels from the same teal hue as Ebi to the gray-white of Vaetna plate. This had been achieved by stripping me naked and liberally applying a simple spray can of paint and another of varnish. Once the paint on my chest plate was dry, we then applied new duct tape to secure my breasts. A better solution surely had to be forthcoming, but nobody with the know-how had the time to spare for such frivolities.
Right now I was curled up in my bed with Hina, my laptop streaming its output to a TV I’d had put in so we could both comfortably look at the chat and other things. She seemed not at all uncomfortable with her body against the rigid and unyielding planes of mine; if anything, the past few days had seen her introducing me to some of the reasons Yuuka had called it the sex doll. We were idly groping each other’s tits when Star made her solicitation, so naturally I asked her if she could pick up some opal later today, on her next trip to the blasted crater Alice had carved.
“I mean, you’ve been flying back and forth every day, haven’t you?”
“Oh, we’re way ahead of that,” she told me. “We got like two thousand chunks of the nicer stuff, the really pretty ones toward the center. All glowy and fiery, not like the pale glassy stuff they’re letting people dig up. We were gonna sell them as limited editions or bundle them with some other high-tier merch, I think. That’s what Alice would have done.”
“She’s not dead,” I chided with a squeeze.
“True, true. But yeah, if Star wants a souvenir from Alice’s rock garden, we can just send her one of those. Don’t see why we can’t. Heck, we could probably let her pick. Actually…was she the one we were gonna fly out here? We could just leave the rock here and bring her to it.”
“I…don’t feel great about bringing her here in the middle of all this,” I admitted. “Much as she deserves a real fuckin’ all-expenses-paid vacation in Japan with her favorite people ever. Timing’s poor with the, er, trial thing just around the corner, I think.”
“Mm! Yeah, Alice doesn’t need those horns to get any bigger. That’d be fuckin’ hot, though, gosh.” Hina bit her lip. “Handlebars.”
“Shush. I’ll…ask Yuuka, see if she can see anything, I guess. For now I’ll just tell Star we’re sending the opal to her. Where would I find some pics of the ones we have?”
Hina blinked her big blue eyes. “Uh. Clipboard had the list of the ones Product Development doesn’t expect to be up to snuff for merch. Mm, snuff…fuck, I’m spacey today. It’d be one of those.”
My hands stopped. “…You call him Clipboard too?”
“He’s a human, cutie, cut me some slack. And then, y’know, we could cut…” Her hand guided mine down from her chest and hooked one of my fingers below the bone of her sternum.
“Hina…”
“Sorry. Lotta green around right now, I gotta rub one out with or without you or I’ll explode. Ebi, what’s his actual name?”
“Information, Privileged,” rang a voice from on high. “But the rock pics aren’t. Sent you them, Ez, they were on the fileserver.”
“Thanks.” I dropped them in the chat with a few keystrokes.
starstar97: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
starstar97: youre joking
starstar97: my leg, pulled
ebi-furai: its real and one of them can be yours
starstar97: ok ok ok ok
starstar97: hooooooly shit
ezzen: deep breaths
starstar97: no im gonna hyperventilate tyvm
starstar97: ok i swear im not asking for one but im curious, do you have any from the epicenter
ezzen: No clue.
The exclusion zone, the former footprint of the hospital, was off-limits to the public, because there had remained an obvious and persistent hazard: there had been an invisible aperture in the sky leaking unidentified molten material. Overnight and through the following day, the material had accumulated into a lumpy stalagmite of a pale off-white, and by the time the supply seemed to run dry, a matching stalactite had grown downward beneath the source point and met the rising mound in the middle. The resulting column ended up standing thirty meters tall and nearly four meters across at the base. This was the other obviously magical consequence of the incredible release of energy that had taken place, a self-building monument.
The material had yet to be identified, but Yuuka and I at least knew what it had been before. It was the net, all that dried leather which for some reason had not burned properly but instead been transmuted like the opal landscape surrounding it. The molten material had leaked from the fourth dimension through a hole Alice had blasted or burned at that moment of disappearance before the blast. The monument completed the alien landscape that had replaced the valley, yet another scar that magic had left on the shape of our world. At least this one was pretty.
Everybody had wanted to know what was going on, of course. The dragon herself had not been there to explain it, nor give a full explanation of the circumstances that had caused this inferno. But somebody had to give the answers, tell a story that the public would swallow; news crews had already been arriving on the scene minutes after the light faded, and they were voracious for a Radiance to put in front of the cameras. In Alice’s absence, normally Yuuka would have done it—but she refused to face the cameras after everything we’d just been through. Too close to home. Besides, her clothing was all torn up, and she didn’t have her mantle to fall back on. Amane had the opposite problem, unwilling to drop back into her human form before we knew the threat was absolutely dealt with. And I, of course, had been half-dead and more importantly was not even remotely media trained.
Thus, the role of public liaison had fallen to Radiance Sapphire, mantled up for the camera to hide the abundance of gore caking her body, and now, several days after the fact, I watched her deliver the official story on the TV.
I’d never actually seen Hina wear her work face before. I’d seen the physical mantle, but not the figurative mantle of responsibility, the mask of magical girl professionalism that completed the transformation. It was a different mode from her demeanor when fending off fans on the street in Shibuya; that suited her energy, and the stiffness I beheld watching the interview later did not. If her violent nature was the hyena, and her affections were the puppy, then this aspect was another canine I couldn’t immediately place. A service dog, perhaps. It wasn’t a very good system.
Hina’s mantle was beautiful and immaculate, full of carefully considered detail, the product of a whole team of designers and branding coordinators. Short skirt, fingerless gloves, hair a full twenty centimeters longer, a corset that hugged her slender waist and carried scintillating sapphire brooches which themselves defined lines of gold to drag the eye up her torso; she was the entire show, a supermodel who looked like she had just spent two hours in the green room. The look was pristine, wholly unruffled by the cataclysmic image of the then-molten field of opal behind her. That projected power in itself, cultivating the impression that none of this could even touch her and sully the gorgeous hairdo or glittering fabrics. To the public, that was what it meant to be a magical girl.
I thought she had looked much better clad in blood. Not that she wasn’t pretty—in fact it was dizzying to be enthusiastically invited to touch this woman while we watched the video—but because it didn’t really look like her. I looked back and forth between the cerulean goddess onscreen and my puppy wriggling off her bottoms in bed next to me and knew which one I preferred. It just wasn’t Hina when her eyes were a shade dimmer and her canines couldn’t crunch through my shell. This service dog beauty was born of artifice, a carefully crafted mask designed to appeal to those watching through the cameras. And as much as I loved masks, this one was a lie—the opposite of myself and Izumi, whose artificial bodies were the ones that laid closer to our truths.
It sat poorly with me that she had to do this. I knew it chafed her too, and was happy to let her decompress by guiding my synthetic hand down between her legs. She was very distracting. But I kept most of my attention on the screen, and there, our impulsive, feral Hina hid well. Even the way she spoke in Japanese was different, more carefully paced and articulate, with none of the excitement I was currently hearing in her real voice. She should have been gushing over how cool we all had been and making difficult-to-follow metaphors for the magical process that only her magic-augmented mind understood intuitively. Instead, she was calm and concise in her explanation, which was just as confident a lie as the rest of her.
The official story began two weeks prior with her intervention in the Barbecue Inferno. That had been in response to intel that remnant Sugawara loyalists had been planning to turn it into an unknown but presumably nefarious ritual, justifying the immediate and explosive intervention she’d mounted. Todai had thwarted the threat and at the end publicly detained Izumi Takagiri. With her cooperation and the aid of Kimura’s knowledge of Hikanome’s logistics, we had spent the following week confirming the activity of hardcore pre-schism Hikanome fanatics at undisclosed locations across Japan. We had traced the trail to the hospital where Sugawara was kept and deployed emissaries to investigate. When they didn’t report back, Hina had gone herself and found them in an absolutely mangled state near the hospital grounds, but was legally barred from investigating the hospital itself after recovering them, due to the terms of Sugawara’s imprisonment meant to protect him from reprisal.
Everything until that last part was essentially true, but the last was flaming bullshit that neatly edited out our extremely illegal assassination mission. Fortunately, all the witnesses of the actual combat who might have called our bluff were dead by now—except for those mercenaries we’d let go, who surely knew better than to put themselves back in our crosshairs—and the physical evidence was now gone with the rest of the hospital. This story also sufficiently matched with what the ER staff to whom Hina had handed off our mutilated operative would have known. Bases covered.
Notably, this meant that as far as the public knew, Sugawara had still been alive for the week between that incident and the day the hospital had come to life. Still comatose, but alive.
Radiance Sapphire’s story continued. What had forced Todai to investigate further, she claimed, were the disappearances over that week. Those were real and thus lent us a lot of credit; the bodies we’d found in the gullet had been linked with the disappearances of hikers and police in the area. The only difference as Hina told it was that we’d been aware of them ahead of time as well, and the emergence of a pattern was the stated motivation for Yuuka to go scout the site. Her initial scans—still not trespassing—had raised alarms that necessitated bringing in me and Kimura to piece together what happened here. All non-invasively, of course, thus the concentration of flamebearer expertise required. We had been abiding by the law and staying outside the building. Definitely.
We determined that the prison had festered into a cult compound, possibly over the course of years. What was certain was that by the time we’d shown up, it was too late: the cult had already performed a grisly ritual which we believed to be an attempt to rouse Sugawara from his coma. Our forensics triggered a final trap to animate the building. The rest was history.
In the course of five minutes, Hina either outright stated or implied a robust assembly of alibis. Our cover story removed our assassination from the timeline, sufficiently explained that we’d kept “both” Izumi and Kimura in-house for good reason, absolved us of any legal culpability in coming to the hospital while subtly being able to blame the terms of imprisonment for the fact that we hadn’t been able to investigate sooner, and outright told the truth about our engagement with the possessed hospital once it had turned into a combat situation.
“You came up with all this off the dome?” I asked Hina, who had found a happy rhythm with her hips on my hand.
“Mm? No, Yuuka was—hn!—feeding me my lines. Curl your fingers a little bit, like—nn, yeah, right there.”
“Okay, yeah, that makes more sense. You hid it well.” Thank fuck for the doll’s clarity; I would have absolutely not been able to multitask this otherwise. “Enjoying your reward?”
“Yay,” she yelped. She was so cute.
Screen-Hina then went on to explain the specifics of the aftermath, chief among them the technical details of what Alice had actually done. This part was all true, and began with what Yuuka and I had intuited, that the light that had forever altered this valley was not the main blast, but the overflow from the fourth dimension via a hole in physics itself that Alice had melted. From there, the interview turned to practical questions of ripple residuals and public safety, Sugawara’s current whereabouts—regrettably unknown, possibly at large—and how such a violent cult could have been left to fester like this. Hina fended off those questions with ease, fed the perfect answers by her teammate. Precogs were cheating.
“Are Hikanome gonna buy it?” I asked Hina. “Or, since this was days ago, have they bought it?”
She whined, slowed the rhythm of her hips, and opened her eyes to look at me dizzily. “Hm?”
“…Oh, whatever. We’ll talk strategy after.”
Given that I had more or less come straight off of a jaunt through a demented funhouse of psychosexual trauma, and that the doll had nothing resembling genitalia or pleasure receptors, it was a little surprising that my libido craved activity. I think it was simply the knowledge that I was escaping so much pain. It made me feel alive and want to keep on living. And I was incentivized by the discovery that not being able to feel direct pleasure didn’t at all mean that I couldn’t enjoy when Hina inflicted her brand of love on me, and the doll was durable enough—and when not, repairable enough—to take it.
I knew I would have to reckon with the state of my flesh-body soon enough. It loomed over every moment I spent fooling around in that bed with my girlfriend. My injuries weren’t merely that; ripple scans of my body had picked up significant concentrations of green across my burns, and before I’d transferred into the doll this morning, I’d felt something different about the gauntlet of existing scar tissue covering my right hand. My Flame had plans for me, and I suspected that they involved carapace.
But I was not the only one who was doing their best to avoid what was happening to their body. Alice’s maneuver had taken its own toll. Her dragon-ka was advancing considerably, her tail growing at a rate measured in tens of centimeters per day, and the horns she had denied for weeks had finally sprouted out of her skull. She was taking it extremely poorly, hiding from the press, from her underlings, and even from us. The prospecting event that glittered with her signature gemstone hadn’t been graced with so much as a distant cameo. The dragon had retreated to her lair and refused all aid except a steady and vast supply of food.
Yuuka had known this would happen. In convincing Alice to go all-out, she’d promised that it wouldn’t be so bad, that I would help her manage it and fix it. I felt obligated to make good on that promise.
Even though I had no idea how.
Author’s Note:
They made it! Ez is horny. So is Alice, but not like that. Let’s see if they can do anything about it.
This chapter marks two years of Sunspot, counting from the day I posted 1.01 on Scribblehub on June 16th, 2024. Actually, this chapter is going up on the 17th in my timezone, but I’ll count it. It’s crazy that I’ve been at this for two years and there’s still so much of the story ahead of us. As a thank-you to all you readers and a celebration of the milestone, I have maybe the most exciting piece of commissioned art to date: Ezzen character sheets by Mjeow! Yes, that’s right, sheets, PLURAL.
I’m so in love with this. The doll’s color has actually been in canon limbo until this chapter, having been mentioned as both teal and white before, so this chapter I’ve buried that hatchet by establishing that it was teal, is now white, and we have visuals for both for completion’s sake. I’m so good at this web author thing.
These images will have their own dedicated spots on the gallery soon!
Also, 4.20, nice. Didn’t know where else to say that. My gratitude to the beta readers can also go here–some of them have been on the project for two years running and I’m eternally grateful.
We’re nearing the end of the arc now, but not quite there. Tune in on Sunday to see exactly how Alice is doing!
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