“I’ve been trying to re-center myself. Magical girl shows do that for me. Well, they’re mostly something for me to fall asleep to, if I’m being honest, but it does give me something else to think about, you know?”
“That’s a much more…measured response than those would suggest,” I pointed out, indicating the stumps of her horns hidden beneath the bloodsoaked bandages. “No offense.”
“And you’re having a much more measured response to me being bottomless than experience would suggest,” she countered. “So I’d appreciate it if we could take this conversation out of the hallway, thank you. Or if you would leave me be.” Her fire-orange, slit-pupil eyes scanned across the penthouse’s common area behind me. “But, well, neither the girls nor the leadership will let you take no for an answer, will they? Come in.”
“Um, yes. Right.” She did have a point about nakedness. “Does, um, Amane know about this?”
“Ah, no, she’s out.” Alice pinched the bridge of her nose. “She hasn’t seen what I’ve done yet. I don’t think she’ll be surprised, just—come in and give me that, I’m starving.”
I already knew Amane wasn’t around. She had been out of town since yesterday, unfazed by the natural bad weather in her gemstone form. Apparently some rock that contained a spirit according to folklore—or a god, I wasn’t sure about the distinction—had split open of its own accord yesterday, releasing a spike of ripple, and that warranted investigation. Amane had also thought that it seemed like as good a lead as any for Sugawara’s trail.
But back home, she had a vested interest in what was going on with her girlfriend. I hadn’t told Izumi this, but among my goals for this meeting with Alice was to report to Amane how her girlfriend seemed to be doing. I felt like a spy, even knowing that this was for the sake of Alice’s emotional wellbeing first and foremost. I consoled myself knowing I wasn’t recording anything, just relaying what I saw fit to mention via a new upgrade to the doll’s hardware that let me silently send messages with just a thought like actual mantles could. Ai had offered to put it into my new prosthetic as part of the footphone suite, and with my current lack of an actual phone, we were trial running it directly in the doll.
It wasn’t quite telepathy—in my head I was still typing on a keyboard. So much of mantle usage was mapping physical muscle memory to magitech functions. And they were still messages sent over the internet, using the same secure protocol the chatroom was built from, not pure infomancy. It still made me feel extremely cool, though.
ezzen: she’s talkative, tired. didn’t just take the food and slam the door in my face. asked me to watch anime, so wants company i think
Amethyst: which anime?
Amane’s reply felt like a thought in my brain, but not in my usual voice, and not one occurring at the same level. Higher level, easier to filter out if necessary, more like remembering something said to me—I could shut it out easily. As with all the Radiances’ mind-mantle interface tech, being able to pull the plug in an emergency was prized over maximally deep integration, as a safety precaution.
ezzen: magical girl, didn’t say which. do you think i should take her up on it?
Amethyst: it will make her happy, and you should learn
I hastily stepped across the threshold, tray of soup in hand. For some reason I expected Alice to back out of the way—she managed rather less than a full stride in her surprise, only a half-shuffle, unused to managing the increased weight of the tail. So my step instead took me quite far into her personal space in my efforts to clear the swing of her inward-facing door, into arm’s reach. We didn’t quite collide, but the tray’s edge did brush her shirt.
My hands’ sensors immediately notified me that the air right around her body was an envelope of heat almost forty degrees Celsius. That would have been uncomfortable in my flesh, but was mostly a medical data point as far as the doll’s chassis was concerned. That was a distinct rise in her baseline temperature…or she was more upset than she was letting on, which was also worryingly plausible. Either way, the heat was having adverse effects on the chilled drink on the tray.
Alice blinked up at me and finished shuffling back to an appropriate distance as she grabbed the tray out of my hands. “Whoa, hello.”
“Sorry,” I muttered, also taken off guard. She looked much smaller than me for a moment, despite the substantial bulk of her tail. I often forgot that I had several inches on her—I thought of myself as roughly the same height as all the girls in abstract, a hierarchical thing, probably. But since the doll matched my flesh body in torso and limb length, I remained quite a bit taller than Alice. That must have been at least a little intimidating, to see a faceless, mechanical drone that was bigger than you step into your arm’s reach like that.
Except no, of course not. Alice was used to it; Amethyst was much bigger and scarier than me and Alice never flinched at her. I was far less intimidating than that. And it probably helped that Alice probably associated the doll with sex or infirmity. Maybe that made it weirder?
“Tch. Fucking tail,” Alice grunted, not even looking at me. “Not your fault. Can’t move right.”
Ah, of course, she wasn’t thinking about any of that, really. She was fully preoccupied with her own bodily dysfunction, which was horrible in a familiar way—the frustration of my movement feeling limited compared to what I “should” be able to do was a near-constant buzz in the back of my mind whenever I was in my meat body, between my amputation and the general feeling of weight and sluggishness that pervaded my senses compared to those moments of empowered glory I kept ever-so-briefly grasping. I didn’t know if commenting something to that effect would come off as properly sympathetic to Alice’s plight or just aggravate her dysphoria.
But I’d learned that being solution-oriented was always welcome. “If weight is the inconvenient part, we can definitely do something about that.”
“Give it a floater, yeah, we’ve talked about it before,” Alice affirmed. She hefted the tray and turned slowly toward the small dining table at the far end of her apartment’s anteroom, which was half-covered in wrappers and takeout boxes and other food containers that had clearly been hastily shoveled to one side. Her toned legs were strong enough that she wasn’t having trouble merely standing, but the tension of her thighs and calves in each step made it clear that walking presented significant strain, and her gait suggested that she wasn’t comfortable with the new center of balance, especially with the admittedly-possibly-slightly-overfilled bowl of soup wobbling precariously.
She was struggling. I impulsively grabbed the tray back out of her hands. “Let me.”
She blinked as I stepped past her hurriedly to place the tray on the free spot on the table. There were two chairs, or more accurately reinforced steel barstools with generously padded seats. One had a back, the other didn’t and I assumed the latter was Alice’s, backless to render questions of tail placement entirely null. I pulled it out for Alice and watched with a little concern as she performed a fairly ungraceful landing in front of the tray. She gave me a grateful and slightly humiliated look.
“Such a gentle…er, gentlethey, I suppose. You’re practically falling over yourself to help me. God, in that body this reminds me too much of Ebi waiting on Amane hand and foot.”
“Sorry, I—”
“No, no, it’s not on you. And I’m not my girlfriend, I know how to accept help. Though if you take food out of my hands again I’m melting you.” A brief silence punctuated the threat before she sighed. “I’m starving. Go make yourself comfortable in the other room, neither of us want you to just stand ominously while I inhale all this.”
“Ah, alright,” I replied, a little embarrassed myself and nervous at being let off leash. Since Alice and Amane shared the room, it felt like a double invasion of privacy. I’d only been in here once before, when I’d rushed into it in a panicky mess out of guilt toward Yuuka and general fear for the Vaetna. I had been a little too scattered to really take in its layout at the time, especially as I’d walked in on Alice in the middle of a workout and thus she’d been very eye-catching to my meat-brain which had still been recovering from the hormone explosion I’d had with Hina the night before.
This time I lacked the biological machinery to be distracted by Alice’s figure as she went apeshit on her soup—the doll’s disinhibition lent itself to conscious attraction but dulled the gravitational pull of bare legs or a fat tail—and there was no pressing emotional crisis giving me tunnel vision. So this time I took Alice’s invitation to explore, going over to the doorway and into the actual bedroom.
It was, in fact, a double-size room versus mine or Hina’s. They had knocked out much of the wall between two adjacent rooms, leaving a space that was somewhat divided but still much larger than the others. To call it the master suite didn’t quite make sense in the penthouse’s overall layout, which had over a dozen rooms in the U-arrangement, but it certainly befitted the team’s power couple, and they used all of the space.
There was a massive bed with its headboard against the floor-to-ceiling windows, nearer to me on my right, which immediately looked quite expensive and quite plush. Larger than king-size for sure. That made sense to me; I couldn’t imagine that the team would spare any expense on Amane’s comfort, and a sufficiently wide area would let her retreat from Alice’s aura of heat if necessary while still sleeping on the same bed. I wasn’t sure what Alice’s sleeping body temperature was like, but I couldn’t imagine it was particularly comfortable to cuddle with all night, no matter how cold Amane’s injuries might make her run. And there was no shortage of alternative cuddle subjects; the bed was absolutely loaded with what must have been at least twenty plushies. A dozen more sat in a row on a shelf overhead, displayed in place of pride. I recognized none of them in the jumble, but the presence of a few stuffed wands in the pile suggested that many or all of them were magical girl anime characters and iconography.
The bed was cordoned on the far side by Alice’s workout area, with its yoga mat and medicine ball and a fairly serious-looking set of weights, as well as a currently-bare hook on the ceiling. There was not a proper bench—they did have an entire weight room directly beneath them—but it was sufficiently furnished for whatever daily routine Alice had to keep her legs strong or physical therapy Amane went through for her everything.
Past the workout area was the wall that had originally divided the rooms. It now only extended from the edge of that set of windows to perhaps a meter short of the foot of the bed, leaving the floor plan open past it. I remembered from last time I’d been in here that on the far side of that separator lay Amane’s sophisticated gaming/streaming rig. The wall was painted the same warm yellow as the other ones in the room, but was mostly covered in posters and framed photos. Some of the posters were quite explicit and featured busty anime women in rather compromising outfits and positions, others were mechas, and there was little rhyme or reason I could discern in which went where. What was certain was that both of these girls were massive anime fans who had seized the opportunity to decorate unconstrained by budget or judgment.
“Alice? Which anime would we be watching?”
The reply took a moment to come; presumably she needed several seconds to swallow.
“Pretty Cure. Splash Star, probably. You’re looking at the posters?”
“Yeah.”
“On the left, middle, with the girls in black and white, above the one with the mecha with the absolutely ridiculous shoulders.”
Several of the mechs had ridiculous shoulders, but one stood out among the rest, a hilariously stocky Gundam thing with pauldrons as big as the rest of it, practically a polar opposite of Amethyst in design sensibilities. Above was the poster in question, with the two girls arranged vertically and inverted like the faces on a playing card.
ezzen: pretty cure splash star
Amethyst: she is thinking about Izumi-chan.
Amethyst: there is a plush of Saki-chan on the bed. she will want to cuddle with it
ezzen: orange hair?
Amethyst: yes
ezzen: ok i see it
ezzen: also she’s struggling with movement a bit
That didn’t get an immediate response, so I continued surveying the room.
To my left, opposite the foot of the bed, was a reading nook centered on a nice rug. Tall, heavy bookshelves anchored the space to the corner of the room. Rows of colorful spines almost certainly denoted manga, but I could tell that there were also clusters of more standard literature and textbooks. Series were bookended by anime statuettes, some of which were definitely Todai merch. There was a recliner and extra-large loveseat, the latter likely for Amane to be able to lounge in mech form, though I had no idea how the soft fabric avoided being torn and punctured by the hard planes of her mantle.
Amethyst: If she is moving slowly it is because she needs a bath and stretch
ezzen: i’m not bathing your girlfriend
Amethyst: Not for her whole body, there is a cream for her tail that she is supposed to use
Amethyst: Her scales become itchy and painful without applying it. She does not use her tail to balance if it hurts
ezzen: …i’ll bring it up
The bookshelves bordered a desk that was clearly Alice’s workspace judging by the file organizers and custom office chair. On the wall behind the monitors were plastered maps of Japanese cities, Japan as a whole, and Asia, including an ambient ripple distribution one covered in pushpins indicating ripple events and another with concentric rings radiating from Tokyo that looked like maybe a map of flight times from the launchpad atop Lighthouse Tower.
The pushpin maps were color-coded; I surmised that the main three colors I saw were differentiating flamefalls from infernos from miscellaneous ambient ripple events. The map of Tokyo had a pin on Yoyogi Park and sticky notes. I didn’t see a pin on the map of Japan for the hospital, nor one for where Amane was right now, not too far north of us.
ezzen: Alice hasn’t been keeping up with her pin board map things
ezzen: burnout
ezzen: anything on your end?
Amethyst: I am fighting with the translator app
Amethyst: …
Amethyst: The Killing Stone is broken. “Tamamo-no-mae” is free.
Well, that was terrifying and ominous. My hand reached for my phone to check Wikipedia—I didn’t have it, right. And I didn’t have a general web browser in my android head, which was almost certainly for the best. ADHD would eat me alive. So I had to ask for clarification like some kind of chump.
ezzen: what does that mean?
Amethyst: It means that there is a second demon running amok in Japan. I’m asking Yuuka-chan.
ezzen: and sugawara?
Amethyst: I don’t know yet
Amethyst: Just take care of Alice for me, okay?
It felt crazy to be here in the penthouse when supernatural events were going on. A demon comparable to Sugawara? And one with actual basis in folklore? It boded ill.
But what I was doing here mattered too. I glanced back briefly—Alice was out of sight, but it sounded like she was still eating, maybe slurping up the last dregs of her soup, bowl directly to mouth. It was not a quiet process.
Past the desk, the final corner of the room was dominated by dressers and racks of clothes surrounding a large vanity. The original construction of the rooms on the 20th floor lacked closets, and while Hina and Ai had opted to have closets built, Alice and Amane had deemed it easier to simply put up cabinets and bars on the walls and free-standing hangers, especially when you owned as many outfits as these two Radiances apparently did. I assumed the girls shared the makeup station, or perhaps the bathroom had another one; I suspected it was often moot anyway given the girls got the professional treatment on-site for many appearances and otherwise had the flawless mantles to fall back on.
What I did not see was a TV. Before I could investigate further, I heard Alice’s stool scoot back and I trotted back to her side in case she needed help. By the time I was there, she had already stood up.
“Better. You made all that?”
“I wouldn’t really call it ‘all that,’ it’s just soup. Stick a bunch of shit in a pot and boil.”
“It was good. Hunger is the best spice, sure, but it was good. Take some credit. So, tail lightening,” she prompted, before I could deny her praise.
“Uh…yeah. I could dictate a serviceable one right now if you wanted to weave it.”
Alice thought about this, not responding immediately, walking slowly and heavily past me into her room, toward the bed. She stopped when she reached it and fussed with the bandage around her head. “I’m tired, Ezzen.”
I would have swallowed if I could. “In a need-a-nap-after-eating way, or a want-to-quit-being-a-VNT way?”
“My first impulse is the second one. But, well…I know me. I usually feel that way when I feel gross, and then don’t after I take a little care of myself. And I haven’t taken care of myself in a few days, so. I ought to do that and then see how I feel.”
“Too real.” I followed her toward the bed. “Been there. Am still frequently there.”
“I know. I saw it in you almost immediately. It’s a dysphoria thing. Not exclusively a dysphoria thing, I think, because even in the time after getting my body but before the tail, it still felt that way sometimes. But it gets worse when I don’t feel good about myself to start with. And it’s self-perpetuating, y’know? The more I wallow, the more behind on all the corporate stuff I get, and the more stressed I get.”
“And the more stressed you get, the easier it is for the dragon-ka to manifest,” I finished.
“Yeah. Maybe I need a vacation. I mean, I’ve been thinking about it, and it doesn’t seem so farfetched. Peacies have been on our turf for weeks but barely done anything, haven’t even made real demands for you, unless something’s changed—not like I’ve been checking my email. And we haven’t even got a whiff of Sugawara. Just don’t go traipsing into more abandoned hospitals and keep Hina from kicking off any more infernos for like a week and I want to say nothing will happen. And then maybe I’ll be right as rain.” Her tone was wistful. “I don’t know. Like I said, I get these sorts of thoughts when my body feels all…bleh. And instead of dealing with it by bathing and staying on top of things, I do this,” she groaned, indicating the bloody splotches where she’d severed her horns. “It’s untenable.”
I thought about this. I felt like I had to tell her that something had just happened, according to Amethyst, but I had to be delicate. “Do the others know you want a break?”
“We don’t…talk about it. That doesn’t mean they don’t know, though, I think. I’m not trying to hide it, it’s just hard to say.”
“Mm. Okay,” I decided. “I think you’re right, further discussion of whether you should take a break is hereby postponed until we make you feel slightly less terrible.”
“Doesn’t have to be ‘we,’” Alice sighed. “I don’t want to bother you. Even you coming here is enough of a kick in the ass for me to get out of the funk, you can go if you want.”
“I thought you said you knew how to accept help?”
“You already helped me, I was starving. You shouldn’t over-exert yourself. Need I remind you you’re currently on an IV with a bunch of burns downstairs? You’re doing as bad as I am.”
I would have frowned if I had the face for it. “I’m currently right here, doing fine, thank you.”
“Yeah, but you’re also down there, aren’t you? Just because you can’t feel how messed up you are doesn’t mean you aren’t.”
The gears in my head—metaphorical, unless this body was much more clockwork than I had previously understood—began to turn. Alice didn’t seem to understand that I considered the doll-body a proper and total escape from my flesh. “Oh,” I gasped, realization dawning. “I’ve been thinking how odd it is that your dragon-ka also affects your mantle. It’s because you think of it as your body, too, don’t you?”
“…Yeah?”
“I don’t think it’s like that for the others,” I explained. “For them, the mantles are an…externalized sort of thing. A mask they wear. I saw that with Hina’s interview, that’s not her, it’s a persona. But for you, because you love being a magical girl, you consider it equal to your real body, as part of your identity. And, like, you literally built it to be your primary body at first, didn’t you? Before you changed your flesh body. So your Flame also considers it your ‘real’ body. I think. Doesn’t explain why it’s a dragon, but it explains why it doesn’t seem like you can escape it.”
Alice sat sideways on the bed, hefting the base of her tail up onto the sheets while leaving the rest of it to spill down onto the floor. She looked across the room at her desk. “Huh. Okay. Sure. So it’s because I like being a mahou shoujo where the other’s…don’t?”
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” I hedged. “Listen. I’ve been putting together…a thing. Too early to call it a theory, but a model of how magic intersects between mind and body and Flame. There’s a system of equations going on here, with your dragon-ka, the digitization method for Izumi’s soul, and the mantles, and probably more. And from what I’ve gathered from that, from what my Flame has done for me and Hina, then your Flame isn’t just doing this because you like being mahou shoujo specifically. For the rest of us—small sample size, I’ll admit—it seems to want us to self-actualize. I mean, that’s the fantasy, isn’t it? The Flame gives you power, it makes you who and what you’re supposed to be. Except for you, yours is doing something else.”
“Don’t I fucking know it.” The temperature in the room went up a degree.
“…Yeah. Sorry.” I wondered if this could all come down to simple miscommunication, if her Flame was trying to actualize something inside Alice that she herself couldn’t recognize. But I suspected that line of questioning would majorly piss her off at the moment. “Point is, I don’t think it would be trying to hurt you by turning you into something you don’t want to be, not badly enough for you to hurt yourself. It’s not fair.”
Alice gave me a genuinely puzzled look. “Yeah, it’s not. Correction, though: I’m not hurting myself.”
“You cut off your horns.”
“That’s…maintenance! It’s an unwanted growth. Like cutting out a tumor. Like you ripping out all the hair from your body!”
“Ah,” I muttered. I could see it that way. I didn’t consider that to be hurting myself, either. I mean, it had hurt like hell, but it had been for the sake of fixing something that had felt fundamentally wrong. “Okay. Yeah. Okay, not hurting yourself, then. I can roll with that.”
“You…can?”
“Shouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know. I’ve gotten into fights with Hina about this before. How I should just embrace what I’m being turned into.”
“Well, I say you should at least have the choice to refuse it.”
She blinked her fire-orange eyes in surprise. The temperature dropped again. “Oh. Thank you. That’s. Nice to hear.”
My assertiveness faltered slightly. “Yeah, um, you’re welcome. But I need to know more to give you that choice. And it’s not just for you, it’s for Izumi and me, too. So, um.”
Alice tucked her legs to her chest. “What about Amane?”
“Oh, yes, it’s for her, too, of course,” I corrected hurriedly.
“No, no. As in, she lives in her mantle more than any of the rest of us. And she doesn’t have mutations, but she absolutely has ripple residuals. A lot of her condition isn’t from combat injuries. Why don’t those problems follow her, by your theory?”
“Maybe because the two bodies are so different to begin with?” I could feel myself getting into the weeds with the magical theories and consciously pulled myself back. “We can test changing your mantle, if you want. Maybe you just need a vacation from your body, rather than from being Todai’s boss. But I think we should try some lower-hanging fruit first: a shower, a new bandage for your head, a bottle of your tail cream, that plush of Saki-chan, and a few episodes of Pretty Cure while I take a closer look at your tail and horns.”
“Date night,” Alice summarized.
“Um.” It belatedly occurred to me that of course Amane’s suggestions for caring for Alice would be rather girlfriendly, a role I wasn’t actually intending to fill. “I guess? Not that—I’m with Hina, of course, and—”
“No, no, I get it. The girls want me back on my feet, and this is proven to work on me, and you’ve got your academic interest. I’m not gonna read into it, don’t worry.”
That sat wrong with me, and it took me a moment to figure out why. “Yeah, don’t read into it. But also, it’s not about getting you back on your feet. And it’s not just about academic interest for me. We—and I do believe I’m speaking for all of Todai—don’t want you to feel like you’re going through this alone.” I looked around her spacious, gratuitously furnished apartment. There was so much love expressed in the decor, but it was all dormant right now. “I remember what it was like hiding from myself in my room, with all my posters and merch. It was lonely. Unbearably, in hindsight. So let me share the load a little.”
“Share the load? My tail’s not gotten that fat.” Her ire softened after a moment. “But…yes, thank you. I’m tired of being alone. And I really could use some of that cream.”
I silently shared the good news with Amane; she was happy and more than a little relieved. Now for the stretch; I’d promised Izumi I’d ask. “Okay, great, um—it doesn’t have to be just me, either. I think all your teammates are out, but…would it be alright for Izumi to join us? Not for the, er, medically relevant bits, if you don’t want to, but for anime, at least? I don’t know if she’s seen, er, Splash Star, but I imagine she’d very much like to watch it with you either way.”
Alice hesitated. Her eyes scanned across her room, like mine had. Then she gave a small nod. “Oh. Yes, of course she’s welcome. I think I’d like that very much.”
Author’s Note:
The Tamamo-no-mae stone breaking is an actual, real-life event! It just has slightly more implications in Sunspot’s setting. I had plans to include it but totally didn’t realize that the date had already slipped by until a reader pointed it out. Have fun waiting for that Chekov’s gun! In the meantime we are doing some good ol dragon-ka exploration.
Apologies for the delay on this chapter. Life has been hitting me with repeated curveballs! Alice’s feelings on burnout are not fully autobiographical, don’t you worry; it’s purely a matter of time and energy budget on my end, and it’s been a struggle to maintain the update schedule. I’m hesitantly saying that the next chapter will be not this coming Sunday but the one after, July 26. If I get the chapter done before then it’ll be up on Patreon.
Also, did you know that part 2 of the Ez-Hina side story went up two weeks ago? It is extremely smutty and you can read it on the site with the password “hyenis”, same as part 1.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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