Sheets of angry rain drove against the window. Brightly colored anime girls shouted at each other, crystal clear over the dull roar outside, from a TV that had swung down from the ceiling to hang just above the foot of the bed, now the room’s only light source. Alice laid sideways across the spacious mattress, her head resting comfortably on a pillow while her tail extended out behind her, splaying along the sheets sinuously. The scales reflected and refracted the screen’s changing hues, scintillating with opalescent, supernatural shine that splashed my mechanical hands with a pastel rainbow as they worked their way down the biomantic overspill of warm flesh.
I had positioned myself behind Alice’s back for easy access while still being able to turn my head toward the TV every now and again. Izumi sat closer to the head of the bed, behind us both; she had been honored to have Alice’s trust to be present for this little pseudo-date night but clearly didn’t quite know what to do with herself now. She professed she hadn’t seen this one when I’d told her which it was—apparently Splash Star was one of the most niche Pretty Cure installments—and seemed hesitant to provide commentary or ask questions. I was used to her being somewhat confident, even bordering on provocative or brash, but she had clearly been yanked out of her comfort zone and was very quietly swooning over the situation she found herself in. Whenever I looked back to check on her, her attention seemed divided between the posters on the wall, the mound of plushies, the anime itself, and my ministrations on Alice’s tail.
The tail was warm beneath my fingers as I pressed and kneaded the flesh. In the doll, my hands were easily the most sensitive part of my body, and they left me well-suited to feel the subtle swells and rises of muscle that formed the shifting bedrock beneath the scaly surface as I applied the moisturizing cream. I’d started a little beyond the base of her tail, wary of aggravating the red and raw growth zone that was still pumping new inches of length out from where the limb met her spine. The scales in that area were soft and raw, clearly irritated but not in a way that the cream was meant to help. Alice admitted she needed a shower for that part, but the cream should come first to medicate her more fully-formed scales; it was apparently meant to be put on before bathing and then be rinsed off after.
I was using one of the doll’s most handy features—literally—to record what my hands were feeling in minute detail, each micro-detail of pressure and shape; I was no anatomical expert, but Amane had suggested it; Todai had the means to process this sensory data and construct a fairly detailed model of what was going on with the tissues of the limb without the need for any scanning or invasive biopsy procedures.
In reality, scanning would have felt much less invasive than this. I could not help but interpret laying my hands on the tail as akin to other forbidden zones of the body. Amane’s explanation of the procedure hadn’t helped; she had alluded to using this sense-recording feature to help parse out the contours of the rest of Alice’s body for mantle replication purposes in the past, meaning that she had groped her girlfriend’s entire body with exhaustive detail, and that made my thoughts wander.
I hadn’t a clue why Amane had suggested this, nor why Alice had acquiesced so easily to me doing it. I knew that the doll was a key factor. I was grateful for the layer of psychological distance it afforded on my end; that was just about the only thing keeping my head in the game, relatively insulated from my baser instincts. Not that I truly believe I would have done anything untoward, but I certainly would have been much more worked up, and rightfully so. Perhaps in a more medical setting, under bright white lights on an examination table, this process of touching and tracing would have felt more sterile, but in the storm-dark intimacy of Alice’s bed, and with her still bottomless—never mind that the sheer mass of her tail utterly occluded her nethers—it baffled me that she could be so casual and focus on the anime.
To rub and grope the cream-slickened scales felt like a proxy, made all the more alluring and exotic to my particular sensibilities by the magic inherent to the limb. I’d fingered my girlfriend for an hour yesterday and it felt less obscene than this. Yet she seemed unbothered, rarely turning to look back at me and speaking calmly and matter-of-factly when she had commentary about what was happening on the TV. Sometimes I felt muscles in her tail twitch when I touched particular parts, and her breath would tighten or quicken ever-so-slightly, but that seemed more like the inevitable discomfort of aggravating spots that were sore from magically-accelerated growth rather than the sorts of reactions to intimacy I had come to expect from Hina. Maybe Alice was good at forced nonchalance, or maybe it was simple emotional exhaustion and she truly just thought of this groping session as a simple, mechanical task in which I was more of a tool than an opposing party, or maybe she simply didn’t think of the tail as part of her body and thus touching it wasn’t even in the same cognitive time zone as sexualizing her. At the time, I didn’t yet know if any of those theories held water, and wasn’t about to ask.
The anime was a welcome distraction. That was the point, after all. It was in un-subtitled Japanese, so I was expecting to be fully in the hands of the two women in bed with me to follow what was going on. Times like these reminded me of how little effort I had put into learning the language—then again, the girls hadn’t really thrown any resources at me since the week of crash course study leading up to the Barbecue Inferno, and that felt like a lifetime ago.
That being said, the show was not hard to follow, even without being able to understand the dialogue. There was some manner of flashback, two girls from different backgrounds chosen by some primordial force of mascots to defeat an evil plant guy, and they turned into magical girls to defeat one of the evil plant minions.
“Are the mascots turning into their cell phones?” I asked.
“Mhm. That’s the Mix Commune. Flip phones, very 2006, right? There was actually an animation error in this scene, Flappy’s markings were the wrong color.”
“I wonder if Ezzen’s phone will turn into a Commune,” Izumi snorted from behind.
Alice twisted to look at her. “Huh? Why would it?”
“Were you not told? It’s alive.”
“No, I wasn’t. What?”
“Flesh building, flesh phone,” I sighed, hands pausing their cream application. “Ai has it in quarantine. Might be useful to all this magic-flesh-mind stuff we’re doing. I’ve been surviving on just my laptop and the doll in the meantime.”
“You know they’ll get a laptop, too? Huh, maybe I wanted to watch this because I was thinking of you.”
I had no clue what to make of that comment, especially with my hands still resting on her tail. She went on, turning back to the screen.
“Might be safer to just destroy it. Would be fun to dress it up like a Commune, though.”
“It would,” Izumi agreed.
Alice snorted, and I felt the motion ever-so-slightly in the muscles of her tail. In an impulsive spur of mild annoyance, I prodded where I’d felt the movement, and she yelped.
“My phone? Please don’t. I’d prefer destruction, if the alternative is it turning into one of these mascot things. Especially if I’d need to use it to mantle.”
“Bah. Nothing like a good transformation object. Fuck, I think there’s a knot in the muscle there, where you just poked. Careful!”
“Sorry. I don’t really know how to do massage, I’m just trying to put the cream on. Is it working?”
“I think so. Yeah, it’s—I think I was itchy before, and had just kind of tuned it out, but it’s definitely nice and cool now. A shower’s gonna feel great.” A long silence followed. She coughed. “What were we talking about? Right, yeah, not super practical to have your transformation be tied to an item you can be separated from, we had that conversation when we were figuring out how we’d actually trigger the mantles. Getting separated from your transformation trigger—or having it stolen—is a lot more liable to get us killed than it is for them.” She waved at the screen. “They’re protected by the rules of acceptable children’s broadcast, we aren’t.”
On that morbid note, the conversation lapsed back into silence, and my hands resumed their progress down her tail. My sculpted, mechanical palms worked their way down, bit by bit, foot by foot, sensors alight with form data. It was remarkably thick for the first several feet of its length, only taking on a meaningful taper past where it would have reached her calves when hanging down. The girth of the base obfuscated a lot of what must have been going on to connect it to her spine, but it was clear that it was indeed an extension, and not a separate growth splitting off from her lumbar back. If I was careful, I could feel the spine’s presence on the top side of the tail, nestled in firm muscle, whereas the underside had more soft fat. Touching the underside felt like one long, scaly boob, so I mostly avoided any massage-like actions with my fingers there, for fear of impropriety.
Then something odd happened. “Ow.”
“Ow?” Alice and Izumi both asked.
I had felt a twinge in my forearms, like I was getting tired or sore. But that shouldn’t be possible, not in this body—it was all servos and linkages, not muscles or tendons. “Huh. I might be getting some sympathetic red from you. Does this happen for Amethyst?”
“…No, but there’s a first time for everything. She’s a lot more carefully red-shielded than you.”
I rubbed my forearms. If there was a sensation of soreness, it was right at the edge of my awareness. I could have imagined it. “I can keep going, I think.”
“I mean, we’re over half an hour in. We’d have been done by now if it were my old tail,” Alice sighed. “How long do you think we have left? Five minutes?”
I eyed her girth. “Uh…”
“The rest of this episode,” Izumi broke in. That was an overestimate and I knew it; she just wanted more time to play voyeur to what I was doing.
Alice frowned, glancing at the timestamp of the paused video. “Oh. Yeah, Ez, you can take a break if you’re worried about breaking the doll. Izumi?”
“…Yes?”
Alice’s frown suddenly flipped into a grin. “Your turn. Show me what those mantle hands can do.”
“I—ah? No, I—well—um, Ezzen really should, I mean, she—they—have the—”
“You’re here, aren’t you? And don’t worry about the scan, I imagine we have all the bits we need by now. It grows from the base, after all,” she muttered darkly. “But I’d appreciate the rest of the lotion, if you’re willing.”
“Well—eto—shitaikoto to subeki da to iu koto ni wa—”
I had never seen Izumi so flustered. Not that I could blame her; her bluff had been called, and even for me as a bystander, Alice’s sudden provocative confidence was throwing me for a loop as well. I felt obligated to rescue my compatriot in tail-overwhelmedness. “Alice, hey, I think I’m good, we can—”
“I will,” Izumi declared, shuffling forward on the bed. The expression on her face, which Alice wasn’t even looking at, was caught between fright and an almost manic eagerness.
I nodded and moved aside.
Fifteen minutes later, we had finished the second episode of Pretty Cure Splash Star, and Alice was now in the shower. From halfway across the large room and separated from us by two doors, it was barely audible over the rain outside, and I was certain she couldn’t hear Izumi and I as we each laid spread-eagle on top of the bed, staring vacantly at the ceiling.
It was a truly significant piece of furniture, so spacious that we were able to maintain considerable personal space despite our maximized radii. There might as well have been oceans between us. Nonetheless, we were of one mind.
“It’s so much tail.”
“It is so much tail.”
“It’s got to weigh more than the rest of her by now, doesn’t it?”
Izumi gave this a moment’s thought. “Almost certainly. Her spine.”
“Her spine,” I echoed the lamentation. “It’s so…just so much. And touching it was like—it’s firm, but soft. How?”
“I just want to keep touching it. I want to upgrade my hands so I can touch it better.”
Silence inched across the bedsheets between us, escorted by the roar of the storm.
“You feel it too, right? It’s…I don’t want to say it.” Even the doll’s disinhibition had its limits.
“I do. It’s hot.”
“Well, there it is,” I sighed. “It’s like—hot in the same way boobs are. Which makes no sense. That’s not normal. Pretty sure.”
“It helps that her chest and all of the rest of her is also…well-endowed.”
Copiously, I agreed internally. Subtracting the dragon bits, Alice was indubitably still a handcrafted, one-in-a-billion specimen for proportions. She had redesigned her body to her exact specifications and came out almost frighteningly attractive. And that certainly was an element here, but the tail’s hindbrain appeal felt like its own thing.
“Maybe it’s a flamebearer thing. Our Flames, not us.” I distantly wished I had my laptop to very briefly browse certain websites for “radiance_opal tail” just to get the lay of the land and confirm that a statistically significant number of regular humans felt this way as well. There was decent supporting evidence for it being at least Flame-exacerbated, though: “Doesn’t that Hikanome guy have a thing for her?”
“Hongo. Yes. I understand him now. He feels it is a sign of divinity, and now, touching it is like…it felt like worship.” She raised her head slightly to look at me, seeming slightly alarmed at what had just come out of her mouth. “We cannot say that in front of her. Are we…drugged?”
“We’ve both been mantled up the whole time.”
“Maybe Ebi-sensei injected our flesh bodies with…what is the word? Love drugs?”
“Aphrodisiacs.” I gave the possibility a moment’s serious consideration before dismissing it. Ebi could be a jerk—shockingly so, given her status as the penthouse’s effectively sole care provider—but it just didn’t check out. “Nah. I’ve been feeling this way the whole time, I think, just…there’s a lot more tail now. And that counts for…something.”
“It has more presence,” Izumi agreed.
“Yes! Exactly! Which she’d hate to hear us talking about as a good thing, wouldn’t she.”
“She would…flip her shit, is something I heard Hina say once.” Izumi cringed. “I feel like a pig speaking of her this way.”
“But she wants us to touch it,” I pointed out, feeling the familiar tug of shame but refusing to immediately fold to it. Alice’s behavior had been welcoming, even teasing. “Even though we’re not Amane.”
“We’re convenient,” Izumi groaned, rolling over to plant her face in the sheet. “If Amane-chan were here, we would not be.”
“I…fuck, maybe. They’ve used the doll before,” I said, looking down at my hands. They were still distantly, liminally sore. “In bed, I mean. I’m piloting what Alice considers one of Amane’s sex toys. But I think she actually just likes you.”
“No. She likes you. Me, she pities.”
We lay at that emotional impasse until the sound of the shower cut out.
“I’m gonna check before she comes back out.”
Izumi frowned. “Check what?”
I tapped my synthetic skull. “Amane and I have been chatting,” I confessed. “I’m sort of here on her behalf.”
ezzen: disclosure: alice is sorta sending signals
ezzen: not sure about exactly what but she’s REALLY letting us touch her
ezzen: uh, “us” being me and izumi, who is also here
ezzen: please clarify monogamy status as her girlfriend before things escalate
Amethyst: I already share her with Hina.
Ah. That was the confirmation I needed. The shape of the Radiances’ relationship web folded over on itself in my head; Amane was with Alice, Izumi and I were with Hina, and Hina and Alice were the bridge. Viewed that way, if Amane didn’t mind…
ezzen: ok um wow
ezzen: its hookup city in here huh
ezzen: so um. this isn’t some weird proxy thing for her?
Amethyst: “Proxy”?
ezzen: like i kinda felt like i’m just doing the things you would with her, including using a body that i know you two have used sexually together, and it’s just kind of weird
ezzen: if im just being treated as a tool between you and her i want you to say it, basically
Amethyst: Ah, I understand, you mean that Alice is only flirting with you because I’m not there?
ezzen: i guess
Before I could explain further, Alice’s voice came from behind the door: “Ah, darn it, this thing takes so many towels now! Izumi, nanmaika mottekite kurenai? In the linen closet on the far side of the common space, the big fluffy blue ones.”
Izumi very slowly got up, looking like a brushmouse trying very hard to not stir up the undergrowth directly beneath some much larger carnivore. Like a dragon, for example. She gave me a downright hunted look and whispered, “What do I do?”
I whispered back. “Why are you asking me? Just go!”
Izumi called back an affirmative and then launched off the bed in a burst of enhanced mantle-motion, footsteps leaving deep imprints in the rug like each had a metric ton of force behind it. The air protested loudly as she forced it out of her path, a blasting noise that briefly overpowered the rain outside. That same desperate kineticism had torn up clods of earth when she’d fought us at Yoyogi Park, and now it was harnessed with just as much motivation toward the goal of getting her erstwhile adversary some linens. She disappeared around the corner on her errand.
“Alright, quick,” Alice said, peeking her head out of the bathroom door. She had yet to towel off her white hair or apply a new bandage, and the dark severed bases of her horns peeked out between the damp strands. “Sanity check, Ezzen: she’s, ah, very into the tail, isn’t she? I’m not reading into it, am I?”
At the same time, I got a reply from Amethyst.
Amethyst: I can’t speak for her heart. But I know that she does not want to be touched when she feels like her body does not belong to her. So, you made her comfortable. Thank you for doing that for me, but also, it was not me who did it. Make sure that she knows that.
The messaging app hooked up to my brain didn’t transmit my thoughts involuntarily any more than a keyboard would. However, I was quite used to playing out my stream of consciousness on a keyboard with much less filter than what came out of my mouth, and that muscle memory, that relaxation of my usual verbal guardrails, did transfer in no small way. On top of the doll’s reduced inhibitions, this emboldened me to say something to Alice that I definitely would not have otherwise:
“Izumi would bounce on it if she could.”
Alice stared at my vulgarity, then turned crimson. “I—what, really?”
Well, shit, I thought to myself. I was in for a penny, and the urge to shower Alice in one-pound notes was strong. Maybe I was about to fuck everything up, but I felt like I was reading the situation right. It would be untenable to not put everything on the table. “Um, yes. The tail is really hot. You are, as a whole, I mean, and the tail just adds to it. It’s kind of shocking, frankly, how nice it is to touch.”
The blush didn’t leave her face, but her expression turned from shock to intrigue. “…Oh. It’s…you’re speaking for both of you, then?”
“I am,” I admitted. “And I’ve been worried that you didn’t notice it from me because you’ve been conceptualizing me as a…a proxy for Amane. ‘Date night,’ you called this.”
“Ah.” Alice’s gaze slid sideways off of me awkwardly. “I…crap. Maybe. I mean, cognitively, I know it’s you in there, and it’s not like—agh. Sorry. I just figured you’d talked to her about what to do for me, because you’ve done a great job and I know the idea for the hand sensor logging didn’t come from you, and…”
“I have been talking to her,” I sighed. “But I do like this, what we were doing. That’s me, as unbelievable as it is to me that I’m allowed to be here and doing any of this. And I would like to do more of it, if…”
I couldn’t quite make it to “if you’d be willing” or any other such direct proposition. I didn’t want my jittery nerves to manifest as trying to pressure her.
Alice shuffled behind the door. “You’re you, not Amane. And you’re with Hina. Neither of those are bad things. But you’re not…with Izumi, too, are you?”
My heart would have been racing if it could. I distantly wondered if the heart rate monitor downstairs was freaking out right now. “We…haven’t been able to connect like that. She’s interested, I just haven’t been able to…yeah. Until now.”
“Yes. Right. And Hina wants you two to hook up, of course. Hell, she wants all of us to hook up. And we’d all be playing right into her hands, if we were to do…more.”
“More tail-touching?” I fretted that I was reacting the way a dog did when it heard the word “walk”.
Alice raised an eyebrow. “How much euphemism is that?”
“I truly have no idea.”
“And, if you would reiterate, you feel that the tail…?”
“Is hot,” I confirmed. “In all senses of the word. Like, to the point that Izumi and I were speculating if we’d been dosed with something to make us this, er, this horny.”
Alice twisted to look back at the limb, hidden from view with the rest of her body behind the door. “I…can’t say I agree. But it…God, this is so embarrassing. It feels good that you like it. Is that hypocritical of me?”
“Maybe? If I said this sort of thing to Yuuka about her chest, she’d castrate me on the spot, I figure. And I’m told you’ve been pretty caustic toward Hongo about it.”
“Yeah, well…” Alice fell silent for a moment. Her head moved as though she had just straightened up. “Neither of you are Hongo. You’re a cute robo-enby with tits, and Izumi is a hot older girl and I just want to make her squeal. Fuck, I’m so gay. Point is, you’ve both had me feeling good. You know how this whole thing was to help me with burnout?”
“…Yeah?”
“I’m feeling like being in charge again. In a small way, to start. Get back to being the…queen dyke around here, or something.” I swore I could see her hair drying in real time from the heat she was emitting. The dragon’s slitted eyes twinkled with avarice as they fixed on me. “That body of yours is more than a convenient sex-bot. It’s the body you’re comfortable in. But it is a really good sex-bot, and I’d very much like to know more about that sensation echo you felt in your arms. Would you like to…investigate that with me?”
Eye contact was easy when I didn’t have any myself. I felt like I was going to faint, but I felt like I hid it well. “That sounds really good. Are we actually about to…?”
“Well, that depends on our third, doesn’t it.” Her gaze slid past me toward the anteroom. “I know you got back thirty seconds ago, Izumi. How would you like it if I opened this door and you came over here and toweled off every scale on my tail? Got to make sure it’s clean before you sit on it.”
A yelp came from the other room.
Alice’s gaze came back to me. Her tail thumped loud against the bathroom tile, sharp yet deep. “Well, that sounds like enough of an answer, doesn’t it? Ezzen, I’m going to teach you how to turn on the vibrating mode. You’re going to fill me while you fill me in on everything I missed in the past few days.”
Author’s Note:
Whew. Spicy! I’ve been wanting to write this tail scene for many moons, though Izumi didn’t factor into it until recently. Things just kind of shook out that way for the characters. Thanks to the beta readers for really helping me hammer out the directions each of the three characters in this scene should take, I’m really pleased with the results.
Full disclosure: this is a fade to black. The events immediately following the end of this chapter might become a side story in the not-too-distant future, but next chapter will not be a gratuitous threeway scene. It will, however, be the last chapter of arc 4. (I know we still don’t have a cover! I’m working on it!)
This chapter went up a day late, but at this point I’m not stressing too much. Thank you to everybody for your patience about the slightly intermittent updates; I’ll build up some more backlog before arc 5 starts. Tune in next week for the finale!
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