For all that Alice had charred and melted an entire mountain valley, Japan was vast, and it was only early March; winter refused to shuffle off the stage so easily from one flamebearer’s meddling. Indeed, weather systems were finicky things, and though that injection of thermal energy did bring a minor nudge to the weather back in Tokyo, it was not for the warmer. The column of heat from the blast eventually cooled, contracted, and sucked in a wall of cold rain from the Pacific. The city lay directly in its path and experienced some of the worst cold rains of the century.
A mat of clouds loomed gray and oppressive over the sky of Tokyo, tracking uniformly from horizon to horizon and draping the penthouse’s lower level in a sunless haze. Rain struck the windows in thick, heavy droplets, and far below they slammed into cars and roads with such force that they exploded into mist. Frigid winds raced through the shivering, naked limbs of the trees lining the roads, carrying the nascent fog into every nook and cranny of the city. Gusts wrestled umbrellas out of the numb fingers of those who had to brave the cold.
These were no conditions to be out and about; this weather encouraged one to stay indoors, stay in your room, stay in bed, and let the day crawl by dreary and unremarked. I’d experienced many such days in England, days where I simply lay in bed, inert and catatonic, waiting to resume my approximation of personhood until the siege ended and the sun came back out.
But the soul-shielding buffer of the doll cut through that burrowing instinct and unearthed something else from the geological strata of my memories; I remembered the sounds of an active kitchen, the dull roar of heavy rain acting as background static against the bright clink of stainless steel utensils and the spirited sizzle of hot oil driving away water. Instead of being dreadful and bleak, being able to stay inside in this weather felt cozy, the perfect opportunity to cook something warm and filling. I think the critical difference is that I wasn’t really doing it for myself; I wanted to give Alice something delicious, so that she didn’t have to confront her dragon-ka while grumpy from subsisting mostly on room-temperature empty carbs. And I was killing two birds with one stone by enlisting the help of a freshly-woven set of taste buds.
“Well?”
“Mm. Mm!” Izumi’s eyes widened in surprise as she took a second, greedier sip from the ladle I’d handed her. “It works! It’s not just salt. There’s…umami. You know umami? Is there an English word?”
“English uses the word too. But—that’s great!”
I pumped a synthetic fist victoriously. Izumi had been weaving around-the-clock to get her body back up and running as quickly as possible; even the most slapdash, ramshackle implementation lacking all of her fancy combat features and customization was better than spending another minute awake in her flesh body. And once she’d had the basic platform working again, we had taken much of last night to realize the improved eating experience I’d promised her.
She really was half-built at the moment, though I could only tell because I knew what to look for. Her movements were very human, lacking both the precision and casual power characteristic to mantles, and it was clear from the way her eyes darted around the penthouse that she felt exposed without her advanced sensory suite. The textures and shapes of her figure were at least rendered to fairly lifelike fidelity, but it was only her figure itself, none of her elaborate built-in outfits, and thus she was wearing actual textile clothing over her LM skin. She must have stocked up or brought over a wardrobe, because I was sure the baggy, low-cut pants she was wearing didn’t belong to any of the other girls. On top she had on a tight, shoulderless item in midnight blue.
Maybe the fabric was playing tricks on me, but I could have sworn she’d made her chest a little more ample than in the last iteration. Solidarity with Yuuka? Or simple envy of her? Or of me, whose false breasts were hidden under my hoodie but still imposed a substantial curve on my silhouette? I respected it regardless.
Even with only two pieces to her outfit, she was making me feel underdressed. Maybe that wasn’t so hard when I was wearing just the hoodie over my shell and an apron atop that, and the former didn’t even reach my hips. Hina had called that slutty; I didn’t disagree but did consider it something of a safety hazard to my exposed joints while making soup, thus the apron. On the other hand—literally—my servo-articulated hands were proof against all manner of liquids and an impressive range of temperatures, and supposedly had antibacterial nano-texturing, so that at least was an upgrade in the kitchen versus my usual body. Supposedly there were other goodies in the box of doll attachments that Hina had dug up from storage, but they wouldn’t be of any use here.
“Can you tell what kind of broth it is?”
I hid the box of chicken stock behind me. Calibration was tricky when she refused to use her flesh body to compare the flavors, but I felt like we were getting close to tuning what I’d put in.
She frowned. “Hm. Koku mo aru. It’s sticking in my mouth a little, not like water. Not dashi or vegetable broth, something with meat.”
“That’d be the natural gelatin, yeah. You can tell that kind of viscosity and such now?” It had been a very strange intimacy to help distribute nerves along the inside of her mouth and tongue, even just in diagram, and made especially interesting by the fact that I currently lacked such features.
“Yes. I can’t tell more than that, though. Too salty for what I think beef tastes like, maybe, but that’s only a guess. And not tonkotsu, maybe, not heavy enough. It could still be pork. Chicken?”
I nodded and showed her the box. “Yeah, it’s chicken. We could probably get some of the specific meat flavors working, enough to tell them apart.”
It wasn’t feasible to implement the vast majority of the thousands of volatile flavor compounds that gave many foods their distinctive tastes, but even adding the other fundamentals to her palate—sour, bitter, and umami—already constituted a quantum leap in her ability to eat and actually enjoy it. Going further would require more specialized biochemistry knowledge that we didn’t have in-house, neither among the Radiances’ local expertise nor Todai’s purview as an institution. We’d have to contact actual food scientists, figure out which groups of volatiles were reasonable to implement and Izumi particularly wanted, and then work backward from their chemical makeup to find reasonably compressed pathways of detection within the mantle’s limited complexity budget.
When I’d been rambling to Hina about this, she had been a little confused. To her, upgrading Izumi’s mantle fundamentally seemed like half-measures compared to implementing the soul-digitization knowledge we’d pried from the net-entity that would let us fully transpose her essence into the mantle. She thought we ought to focus on abandoning the flesh altogether, if that’s what Izumi wanted.
I was quick to point out that if we were aiming to put her soul into the mantle, we would almost certainly have to upgrade its sensorium and quality of life anyway. But I had to admit that I was procrastinating research on that apotheosis, it was true. After the incredible clusterfuck that had been our visit to the hospital, I was a little hesitant to get back to shoveling, for fear we would unearth some fresh horror.
There was a small amount of lingering awkwardness between the three of us; we had all shared in an experience designed to emotionally grind you up, and while that did inspire some camaraderie, we all wanted to reassert normalcy within ourselves and not linger on the vulnerability we’d shared. Thus, me having sex with Hina and mostly reviewing the political ripples of the event rather than research. Yuuka at least hadn’t reverted to being uncomfortable around me—I credited my membership in boobs club for that—but we’d mostly left each other alone after apologizing to Izumi together for dredging up that memory of Sugawara.
Izumi had mumbled forgiveness and asked us to leave her room, which we’d done in a hurry. She had seemed almost completely numb, purely focused on getting back in her mantle, unsurprisingly. But the moment she’d gotten it working, she’d come back to life and requested that I try to explain the nugget of intention-truth-mechanism, the soul digestion. She hadn’t seen it like we had, nor experienced the net with the same amount of lucidity, and craved the insight we’d found.
I’d done my best to explain, to communicate the numinous in words, and we’d assembled some hesitant, highest-level ideas for how the principle might translate to glyphs. The exploratory design process was beckoning us down esoteric paths, the way obscured with brambles that made me worry. The configurations of red and orange that we’d come up with thus far seemed extremely unstable.
“Sorry we’re just working on your mouth instead of the soul-digitization,” I said, hunting through the cabinets for an appropriate bowl.
“If I were upset about that, I would have told you,” Izumi sighed. “That is difficult, this helps now.”
“It’s really difficult. I don’t really know what testing will even look like,” I admitted. “Like, skip to once we have a weavable lattice; how do we demonstrate it works? Because it has to work for you without hiccups—the tolerances are nonexistent, as far as I’m concerned. Are we going to work up to it by digitizing a mouse’s soul first?”
“We should avoid making more flamebearer mice.”
“Neither you nor I nor Ai are dumb enough to repeat the Peacies’ mistakes. We’d actually be making ghost mice, I think. Hopefully less destructive. If it works on animals at all. We still don’t even know what a human soul is, let alone an animal’s, let alone turning it into a ghost.”
“Ghost,” Izumi repeated. “Indeed. We are making me into a ghost that can possess a body. Like him.”
“Izumi.” My synthetic voice was crisp and commanding. The last thing she needed was to wallow in false equivalences.
“I know it is not the same. It would be my own body, this body. But he is still the successful product of what we need to make. We need to find him.”
“Steal his secrets and then kill him properly,” I agreed. “I wish the net had told us anything about where he’d gone.”
Neither of us wanted to acknowledge aloud that Sugawara’s version of the transfer had not resulted in his complete self. The specter we’d fought off in the sub-basement was a caricature of his most violent and vicious traits—those most clearly engendered in ripple, which was absolutely not a coincidence. I didn’t want that for Izumi if we could avoid it. But even if I personally considered him to be a subpar product, he was still our best lead, if only we could pick up his trail. For all we knew, he had left Japan entirely, or simply dissipated into the background ripple field without a body to anchor him.
“Perhaps the summit,” Izumi mused, looking out across the sitting area, at the rain drumming against the windows.
“Huh? As in, discuss finding him there? Or do you mean…”
“He may manifest there.”
I pictured that in my mind’s eye. The summit, the meeting of all Japan’s flamebearers to discuss Izumi’s fate and likely my own, was to be a private affair on a specific remote island, away from the prying eyes of humanity’s masses. Sugawara himself had hosted the first one during Hikanome’s first rise to power, and thus, as far as we could guess a ghost might behave, it was distantly possible that he might show up. It would certainly be the highest concentration of ripple short of an active inferno in Japan.
“Not to murder your hopes, but that sort of sounds like wishful thinking to me. Why would he do that? He’d have to be stupid as hell to try another bodysnatching with all of Japan’s flamebearers right there. That doesn’t sound like self-preservation. You’re grasping at straws, Izumi. Unless…Miyoko still wants to show me my dad. You think she could also drag Sugawara from wherever he’s hiding?”
“If he is dead. Which I believe he is, though the Flame might disagree. I don’t know what exactly I mean by that. But…I am just trying to hope. Would you allow me a small amount of wishful thinking? That Miyoko may be able to bring him by force, and he could be tried? A proper trial, like the one I will receive.”
“Outside the rule of law,” I sighed. “Would be nice. Has she not already tried to find him?”
“There are conditions that must be met. She cannot summon your father without you, and she cannot…I do not think she would be able to find him without me. And I will not face them before the summit.”
I stared at her back. I understood what she meant in a spiritual sense: Miyoko’s power to contact the dead, whatever it exactly did, pulled on deep connections of loss, and perhaps grief and suffering. At a technical level, I wondered if for me, it was exploiting the fact that I was twice-touched by the Flame, bound to my father across time and death by ripple in some way our glyphcraft lacked the ability to model but Miyoko could. That was a nice thought, one I’d wished for many times over the years. If that was what was happening, Izumi likely thought her now-severed link with Sugawara was similar, which was a much more depressing prospect.
Exploring those painful sentiments wasn’t something either of us felt up to right then, though, nor was it particularly urgent; the summit seemed to be getting pushed back and back by all parties. Half of Todai was still reeling from our last battle, and even if I could get Alice in a condition to be facing her peers, other parties were slippery and difficult to schedule around. The elusive “fisherman” and his wife were not easy to contact.
“Soup?”
“Soup,” she agreed, turning back to me to receive my offered bowl. “Thank you.” She peered down into it. “Only liquid?”
“I’m a little worried about stress-testing your stomach-stasis-chamber-thing, and your own stomach for that matter.”
“I would like to try it later. What about yours?” she asked pointedly. “You have a hole in your stomach as well. Cooking without being able to eat any of it…”
“Eh. I’ll save some for myself once I’m off IV, but I’m good for now.”
“You like this body more than you like eating,” she surmised.
“I do,” I admitted easily, glancing down at the way my hoodie draped over my chest and feeling a small wave of giddiness. “It feels good. Given me a lot of ideas for the actual mantle—but I’m not gonna let that get stuck in development hell,” I assured her. “I’ll have something before the summit, I know, Ai has been bugging me about working on it. But I’m definitely gonna put all the food stuff we’re building for your mantle into mine as well.”
She grinned. “So it’s not only altruism. Ah—I do not mean to sound ungrateful for what you’re doing for me. Improving this body is already more than I asked for.”
I shrugged my mechanical shoulders. “What else would I do? Until we have our man or another breakthrough, this is what I can do for you, so I’m doing it. Same deal for Alice, I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to tell her, but I have to try and figure out something. I’m sort of hoping that I hit on some transferable insight between you two.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s definitely something weird about the soul-body connection in flamebearers, and it’s like you two are at different ends of that spectrum.” I’d given this a fair amount of thought. I was still light-years away from any sort of unified theory, but I’d begun to assemble data points between the various flamebearers under Todai’s roof. “Everything seems to sort of point to what Ebi told us, the idea that mantles have to contain some notion of the soul.”
“Could you explain, please? The dragon-ka was never explained to me in detail, but I understand at least that it’s a green ripple sickness. Her body, not her mantle. A consequence of the blood magic that gave her her body?” She frowned, looking down at the floor with consternation. “Gave her her. This language…”
Izumi’s mannerisms were very cute sometimes. I assumed that was at least somewhat cultivated and wondered if I should compliment her, but before I knew it, I was already answering the question.
“It’s, uh…when Alice talks about it, she prescribes a rather…a certain willfulness to it. Not quite malice, but she’s convinced that her Flame is doing this to her with a purpose, as part of the price for her transformation. Her transition, I guess, yeah. The messed up part I’m talking about is that it should be purely parabiology, additions to her anatomy, except that those changes also propagate to her mantles, all designs. Her Flame is altering the lattice directly to put the tail on, and probably the horns, though we haven’t confirmed that yet.”
“That is fascinating. Body and Flame and soul. It considers her mantle another real body?” Hope shone in Izumi’s eyes.
“That’s the theory. You can see how that might be relevant to what we’re trying to do with you, somehow. I’m gonna go talk to her and see if we learn anything that can help her or you.”
I ladled a generous second bowl of soup, this one piled with actual pieces of chicken and vegetables and pasta, and placed it on a tray. As a side I included some garlic bread that had been sitting warm in the oven, which would be filling and satiating. Alice’s appetite was even more heightened than normal by the accelerated growth, and she needed to keep her calories up. As powerful as her Flame was, it could not create more true flesh ex nihilo.
Izumi rapped her fingernails on the countertop, deep in thought while she watched me prepare Alice’s meal. As I surveyed my work, she spoke up.
“She would not let me join you for this, would she.” It wasn’t really a question.
“I…could ask after she’s eaten and hopefully less cranky? She’s vulnerable, is the thing. I’m frankly amazed that she’s even trusting me to do this, but this is part of why she hired me. She wanted a cutting-edge magic expert. Which you also are,” I allowed.
Izumi had, after all, developed her own mantle from first principles and pure observation of the Radiances’. She was no researcher with mountains of papers—I’d asked Ebi to cross-reference the literature to confirm she wasn’t another anonymous poster like me—but she was still probably the foremost outside expert in the intersection of technologies and concepts that made the mantles run. She knew more than me, probably, or at least she had at the time I’d arrived at Todai.
And that was only half of it. At a simpler level, Izumi was extremely similar to Alice, another transgender woman who had opted to construct an artificial body with magic. They were of a kind. I knew Alice knew that—that was the whole reason we’d provided refuge for her in the wake of the BBQ Inferno. I just wasn’t sure if the dragon was currently in her right mind and would find solace in Izumi’s presence rather than feel taunted by her unmarred mantle.
“I understand,” Izumi said, replying to the gap of silence I’d left. “I want to help her, if I can. And if I can’t, I would at least want to be there for her, if she will let me. Please tell her that.”
“Of course.”
With all that prelude, and the storm still raging outside, I had expected visiting Alice’s room to feel very much like walking in on Hina after the barbecue disaster. My girlfriend had been a weepy, self-loathing lump of blankets in a dark room, and Alice’s reclusion in the past few days bore a striking resemblance. Too, I was reminded of Kat’s weeks-long absence from the public eye after clearing the inferno in Poland, and how the rumors about magical fallout had circulated.
Alice’s draconic appearance, until now limited to really just the tail and eyes and her aura of heat, was framed in Todai’s marketing as a signifier of power. It made enough sense given that she really was the most powerful in terms of Flame available, and there was a serendipitous cultural connection between western dragons and precious gems that explained her being the leader, as far as the narrative was concerned. The public understood that it wasn’t just a costume and that the tail was biologically real, but Alice had fabricated the idea that it was something she took pride in rather than something that was inflicted on her. She was Todai’s dragon, the commander, the one who would burn anything that her teammates could not bring down; Japan’s shining hero who embodied the Light more than any other. She had made that decision years ago and stood by it until now.
That was the crux, as Hina had explained to me in a surprisingly deft display of understanding of the intricacies of celebrity life. She had assured me that the marketing materials and overall narrative weren’t the issue—they could spin the further dragon-ka as an increase in power and had long since laid plans for an image update for the whole team with new outfits and such, to make Alice’s changes stick out less. That could all be handled and smoothed over. The weak link had always been Alice’s attitude, whether she could stay sunny and confident beneath the mounting weight of dysphoria as the dragon-ka progressed. Standing at the threshold of her room, I wondered if, were I in her shoes, I’d be able to keep that up. I probably couldn’t.
Now we had reached the breaking point. Alice had disappeared from the public eye for three days. Publicly, Todai had called it simple, vaguely-explained magical burnout and thanked everybody for their patience and support, which was an easy sell with the sheer scale of the devastation and miracle she had wrought at ground zero. Anybody would need some time to recover after that. The other Radiances were still involved enough in the news cycle and Todai’s more normal operations that there was no real cause for rumor to circulate that something was wrong with Alice. But she had also fully withdrawn from her usual leadership responsibilities within Todai as an organization, and although that had brought surprisingly little disruption in the well-practiced procedures of disaster response, it could not persist indefinitely. Alice had always kept relatively little bureaucracy between herself and Lighthouse’s operations, meaning many decisions went directly up the tree to her. It was a recipe for burnout in a non-magical sense, much more serious, and we were worried it had come due.
“Alice?” I called, knocking on the door. “It’s Ezzen, in the doll. I’ve got a ton of chicken soup. Can we talk?”
I heard nothing for a moment, then shuffling, then Alice’s voice. “Hm? Say again?”
I repeated the entreaty. There was more shuffling, which drew closer to the door until the handle turned and it swung inward. To my surprise, the lights were on. Then I saw Alice and flinched. A sympathetic twinge jolted across my temples, even in the mechanical body.
Radiance Opal met me with a gauze bandage around her head and a tired smile. Blood seeped through the white cotton on both sides of her head, where she’d sawn off her horns. My gaze frantically dropped to her legs, worried that she’d entirely removed her tail as well—it was accounted for, uncut. Where previously only the tip had rested along the ground when she stood, now nearly half a meter of it met the floor, resting heavily. She was naked except for a loose t-shirt that barely left any of her hips to the imagination, clearly bunched up in the back over the scaly mountain of flesh protruding from her waist. It had definitely grown in girth.
“Hi, Ezzen.” She gestured inward, turning heavily and sluggishly, dragging the ungainly weight of the limb with every movement. “Sorry. I kind of lost it for a little bit. They had to come off. You get it, I don’t need to explain. Want to watch some anime with me?”
Author’s Note:
Cold and rainy days in Tokyo. With the current heatwave in Europe and soon the US, consider this a bit of wish fulfillment!
This wound up being another chapter that’s mostly Ez and Izumi talking about stuff, but they have a lot to talk about! And Alice clearly needs somebody to talk to, yikes, so hopefully she’ll let Izumi in on this, Ez might not be equipped for it alone. Apologies to anybody who was excited to see the horns; they’re currently out of commission. But they will grow back. And the tail is at least looking huge! So huge, in fact, that in the discord we might even need an extra emote to accommodate it…
Apologies that this chapter is a full week late. It really didn’t turn out to be that hard to write; I’m dealing with a pretty severe energy deficit right now, but also, I’ve been working on something extra! There will be a new side story (or rather, part 2 of a previous one!) before the end of pride month (i.e. this Tuesday unless I find it in me to have it up tomorrow). You’ll be able to find it at sunspot.gay/side-stories/ when it’s up and there will be an access password available publicly on the Patreon (you’ll get a notification if you become a free member). Stay tuned! I’m also gonna delay 4.22 a little to account for this, but not by a full week; expect it Tuesday, July 7.
Thank you as always to the beta readers. Their feedback goes a long way.
Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!
Join the Patreon to support the story and read chapters ahead of public!
