Objectification, human trafficking, implied rape (in backstory, not on-screen)
“Amane?” Alice called.
I heard the scuffling of a chair moving in the other room and turned to see Amethyst, almost three meters of gemstone mecha, looming in the doorway of her gamer cave. She waved at me. I waved back up at her. She said something in shimmering tones to Alice, who nodded and replied in rapid Japanese. They exchanged a few more phrases before Amane swung her massive, spike-snout head to look at me. She seemed to hesitate. Then there was a flash of purple light, and Amane stood there, clothed in flesh and carbon fiber and a bathrobe, now merely my height—though that was still tall, especially for a Japanese woman. She walked over to Alice with the faintest shadow of a limp and sat next to her, smiling thinly at me. That made me nervous; I had a vague idea of where this was going, and it was dark. Alice took her hand and looked at me seriously.
“Ezzen. Yuuka has…a whole shitload of trauma. Trauma around men especially, to be frank. Which you’re not one of, I know, believe me, but this is still context you deserve to have.”
“…As opposed to having it two weeks ago?” I couldn’t help but ask.
Alice looked guilty. “Well—yes, maybe we should have just opened with this on day one, given you some pointers ahead of time. But we really thought you wouldn’t set her off so badly.”
I bristled on reflex. “Because I’m—”
“No, not because you’re so hideously masculine or anything. It’s your Flame and her eye—she depends on it to feel safe, and since she can’t see you properly, you automatically put her on edge. But it seemed like she’d warmed up to you, and I know she was trying, and I’m proud of her for that, but…for you two to coexist, you need to know why she’s…like that.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling very uncomfortable. “Um, lay it on me.”
Alice hesitated and looked over at her girlfriend, who nodded at her, looking…impatient? Alice gathered herself, shoulders hunched, then breathed out. “Okay. Well, about…six years ago, Amane was kidnapped by Sugawara. Human trafficking, since this was back before flamebearer trafficking was really an established industry. Yuuka was her best friend, and we weren’t in the picture yet, so when Amane disappeared, Yuuka started looking. She found them.” Alice’s voice was low and serious, and she spoke without drama or embellishment. “But she was far weaker as a flamebearer than she is now. This was before the flame donation that made us strong, no mantle—glyphcraft barely existed yet—and she didn’t have the eye. She could defend herself, but she couldn’t blow down the door. So when she eventually hit a dead end, she…got herself trafficked. As a fifteen-year-old foreign girl, not a flamebearer. To evade suspicion.”
Alice was looking down at the floor, not directly at me, and I couldn’t blame her. She didn’t have to describe anything more; I understood the broad shape of it, what Yuuka must have endured for Amane’s sake, and it made me begin to feel physically ill, the spectre of nausea looming. I had to say something to fill the silence. “Oh God.” Then another layer of horror revealed itself to me, and I stared at Amane. If it had happened to Yuuka, then it would also have…
Amane looked less moved than either of us. She shook her head and said something to Alice, who translated with a wince. “Amane doesn’t…remember much of her own experiences from that time.” That felt like a lie, or at least a half-truth, but there was no way I was going to press on it, and Alice seemed antsy to move on besides. “Anyway. That’s the part of it that you should know. I wanted to let Yuuka tell this herself, when she was ready to share it with you, but if she won’t, I think it’s too important for you to stay in the dark about. She witnessed men at their very worst from all too close. That’s where it comes from.”
“Fuck,” I said. “I’m…sorry.”
I didn’t really know what else to say; it was both the expected expression of sympathy and a deeper sense of penitence on the behalf of my erstwhile gender. But then I started to think about it more, the way Alice was talking about it. This did explain Yuuka’s standoffishness and misandry, and I couldn’t blame her for reflexively reacting to me as poorly as she did at first—but how did this actually help me treat her better? Especially if Yuuka wasn’t the one to say it, and Alice was doing it in her stead—and apparently without her permission? That made me terribly uncomfortable in a way that I didn’t know how to bring up.
I opted to instead try to keep it practical. “Um. Okay, so what do I do to not set her off?”
“You’ve honestly done a fine job of it without being told, because most of it is common sense. Er…men touching her, that’s arguably the biggest. Being around people she perceives as men isn’t too much of an issue anymore, as long as they’re not flamebearers, then they make her skittish. I think you have a feel for this already, yeah?”
“I’m a flamebearer.” And she thinks of me as a man, was the part that went unspoken.
Alice picked up my subtext and shook her head quickly. “I don’t think she perceives you as male anymore. You rode her jetbike yesterday, yeah? Then you’re probably fine in that aspect now. If she cited Hina as the issue, then that’s a whole other set of behaviors you need to watch out for. It depends on if her eye is acting up, and whether it can see you—” Alice was interrupted by Amane, who said something sharp in Japanese that made her eyebrows go up a little. “Amane says—”
“Iwaseteyo,” Amane huffed at her, emerald eyes narrowed in a mild glare as she drew her phone from a bathrobe pocket. Alice muttered an apology and shot me a pained glance. I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I just averted my eyes and awkwardly scooted the ball I was sitting on a little closer to them so I could read what she wrote, translated through a machine in a bid for a little independence rather than having Alice interpret.
Amane: Yuuka feels unsafe when her eyes can’t see.
Amane: Yuuka told me that it still can’t clearly see you, so please be careful. It’s sufficient that she can see the future circumstances around you, but she can still be scared by you.
“Um. Got it, I’ll be careful. Are you…?”
Amane waved me off and quickly produced a response.
Amane: I’m doing well. The past doesn’t scare me.
She hesitated, glancing back at Alice, then quickly tapped something else in.
Amane: I think Alice is blundering by telling you this. I thought she would be more respectful.
Alice, oblivious, rubbed her forehead, where horns certainly weren’t growing. “Alright. That history is all very dark, and I’d much rather talk about practicalities. This stuff is compounded by her issues with Hina, as you well know. Exes. I’d avoid being overly flirty with each other while she’s around, mostly because Hina’s brand of affection is…you know.”
I nodded, confused by the mixed signals I was getting between the couple. “I’m—yeah, I’m intending to do that. That was a big fuckup of mine last night, and, um, I’ll talk to Hina.” I glanced at Amane. “And, um, red ripple. We’ll be responsible.”
Amane frowned back at me. She raised her phone again, flesh and mechanical fingers flying across the screen.
Amane: Thank you, but it’s not only your responsibility. Yuuka is afraid and her soul has scars, but she shouldn’t be harsh to you for doing normal things. She should talk about this with you so you can agree. This isn’t Alice’s concern.
Alice, leaning forward to peek around the phone to see the screen as well, frowned. “Yuuka’s having an immensely difficult time right now, what with all the portents of war. The least we can do is help Ezzen understand how to interact safely with her. Itawatta hou ga ii yo ne?”
I didn’t have to understand that last part to agree. “Um, yeah. I mean, the way I acted yesterday was shit, and I ought to do better. If I’m the one making her uncomfortable, that’s on me, isn’t it?” Amane watched me and nodded slightly, silently encouraging, urging me to continue. I took a breath, looking at Alice’s nose rather than right in her eyes. “But, um…I don’t think you should have told me about this.”
“What? I know it’s horrible, but it’s really—”
Amane’s viridian eyes flashed with anger at Alice as she snapped an interruption that made her girlfriend recoil. “Uh, whoa, hey,” the dragon girl said, voice full of surprise and worry, before switching to Japanese. “Senpaikaze wo fukashiteru wake ja nai no yo.” Her gaze flickered to me. “I’m—trying to keep the team on the same page. That’s not being patronizing. Is it?”
I cringed a little when that earned her another frustrated reply and wave of the hand from Amane. Alice winced. “Okay, sorry, gomen. I just don’t think Yuuka should be the one who has to come meet Ez in the middle on this.”
Amane jabbed more text into her phone in response and showed it to me, pushing it close to my face so Alice couldn’t get a peek.
Amane: I’ll talk to Yuuka about it later so she won’t get mad. She’ll listen to me. Don’t let Alice make you think it’s all your fault.
Then she lowered the phone, turned to Alice, and began to chew her out. I was glad to not be privy to the exact content of the conversation; the vibes were bad enough on their own, with Amane’s height making her loom over the dragon girl and her voice clipped and reprimanding. She didn’t seem furious, but clearly she felt that Alice had overstepped and was coming at this the wrong way. The only time she slowed down was when her breath hitched in a gasp that made Alice reach toward her with alarm—but Amane pushed the hand aside, and after a moment, steeled herself and continued like it hadn’t happened.
Other than that moment, Todai’s leader sat there and took it. She didn’t bristle, no wash of heat pulsed off her; she just endured Amane’s chastisement with a wince, hunched shoulders, and growing guilt in her eyes like it was a physical lashing. She glanced between her irate girlfriend, the wrinkled bedsheets, and me, clearly humiliated to be chewed out with an audience. I didn’t dare interrupt.
Eventually, Amane stopped and looked over her girlfriend, who was hanging her head in shame. She reached out to Alice’s chin with her prosthetic hand and raised her face gently—Alice looked like she was very close to crying, which I hated. Amane took her hand again and said something much softer. Alice hesitated, brought her other hand over to join the embrace, and let out a rattling sigh, like she was trying to master her emotions. After a slow breath very much like the ones she’d instructed me to take, she looked down again and spoke.
“Sorry, Ezzen. I’m…meddling. I thought I’d keep it light on details, but it still wasn’t my story to tell, and Amane is right; you shouldn’t be the only one who has to adjust your behavior. Yuuka being a bitch isn’t okay, and I’m sorry I treated it like that was your problem to solve.”
I was gripped by paralytic secondhand embarrassment even watching this, so I struggled to formulate a reply. “Uh. It’s—I mean, she’s right to be upset about how I acted yesterday. I do need to do better, less gross. Yuuka wasn’t the only one who was put off by that; it made Ai uncomfortable too, she’s just nicer about it.”
“Oh, hell,” Alice sighed, rubbing her face. “Yes, we’ll still help you work on self control?” She pitched it up like a question, directing it to Amane, who nodded encouragingly. “I just—didn’t want Yuuka to be upset, and you came in here freaking out and needed specific things to do to pull you out of the self-toxicity pit, and that made me want to do this all from your direction without rocking her boat. I probably need to apologize to her too. Or—Amane and I will do it together, I guess. Tomorrow. It’s late.”
The sun had already been down when I’d first come in. I nodded, taking this as a cue to get out of here and escape the awkward atmosphere; the way Alice was rubbing her face seemed painfully familiar. “Um, yeah. Okay.”
Amane waved me to sit back down, which made me pause uncertainly. “Hold on,” she said in English, then directed something else to Alice, who removed her face from her hands to give Amane a questioning look, then interpreted. “Um, well, as long as we’re here, it’s okay to at least talk about some of Yuuka’s behavior as it stands right now, anything she does that bothers you, so Amane can bring it up with her. It’s only fair.”
I hesitantly returned to the purple yoga ball; what a faintly ridiculous prop for this emotional clusterfuck. Amane, seemingly satisfied with Alice’s understanding of what she’d done wrong, gave her girlfriend a make-up hug while I thought about what to ask. Yuuka was really abrasive, but I found I’d grown tolerant of much of it, at least in the sense that I’d become able to distinguish the friendly ribbing from the self-defensive biting remarks, or at least I thought I had.
I did hit on one odd thing. “She’s called me Ezza a few times,” I realized, an emotion mounting in my chest that was either anticipation or dread. “Which, um, I thought was a nickname? But foresight, right. So…don’t tell me that’s because I’m destined to change my name again in the future, to make it more feminine?”
Alice stared, then looked to Amane, who was apparently taking notes. “Um, I don’t know for sure. I thought it was an Australianism. But I guess it could be foresight, or just an assumption—a sign she already sees you as less masc, which is good, but is assigning you a fem nickname, despite you currently going by it/they, which is bad. I’m—oh, I don’t know,” she moaned. “I don’t want to make more assumptions, or put words in her mouth, since apparently that’s all I’ve been good for.”
“I’ll ask,” Amane added for my benefit, in English.
“Thanks. Um, also, what is with the Australian-ness? It’s pretty…almost a caricature?” I hazarded.
Amane replied to that one, which Alice interpreted. “Oh, she’s from Japan. Just spent a lot of time in Australia during the summers, so that’s where the accent comes from. She really sounds much more normal in Japanese.”
“Oh, okay.” I wondered how she’d sound with my prosthetic’s translator; Amane and Ai sounded pretty different between the languages, as the least fluent English speakers. Both sounded more casual in Japanese, Amane more peppy and Ai more vulgar. I thought Yuuka might be the same despite being fully bilingual, but maybe the switch would be reversed, more polite with her wording in Japanese, though perhaps no less biting in meaning. Not a completely different person, but projecting different vibes in different contexts. Like how I had felt while mantled up in the doll. Huh.
Thinking of mantling gave me one more thought. “Er. Maybe this one’s too much, but I really don’t want to ask her directly; she’d cut my head off.”
Alice looked nervous, then suddenly didn’t as she realized where I was going with it. “Oh. Is this about her style?”
“Um, yeah. Her…appeal.” I gave Amane a cautious glance, but she didn’t seem to think this topic was an overstep, so I continued. “She seems…very willing to put her…chest…on display for somebody who hates, um, attention from men. At least on your promotional material and stuff, and her mantle outfit.” Her outfits around the penthouse and what she wore to her classes seemed much more modest—still fashionable, not frumpy, and nothing could entirely hide her figure, but a far cry from the intentional sex appeal of her professional image.
Alice hesitated and glanced at Amane, who thought for a moment, then dictated a reply in pieces. “Okay, we’ll be blunt about this: knowing she can jiggle her tits at guys to make them do what she wants is a form of control over her situation. It puts her in the pilot’s seat for a lot of interactions. And I know that sounds contradictory, but it also literally streamlines the possibilities of an interaction with a man as far as her eye is concerned, and that gives her more confidence, especially when it’s backed up by a mantle and her affinity for magical traps. Nobody’s ever tried anything, but it seems to help her deal when there’s a lot of attention on her, so that’s how she’s styled herself.” Amane added something else that made Alice frown slightly. “Um, yeah, it also helps business, I suppose—er, I want to make clear that we aren’t forcing her to do that,” she hastily clarified, looking wary. “It’s all her. I, um, don’t want to make any assumptions about how victims deal with their trauma, but…well.” A tinge of sadness entered her voice at the end.
Amane added something else. They went back and forth for a moment; it sounded like they were negotiating phrasing. “And she’s also the most…extralegally active of us, and being ‘the bimbo’,” she emphasized with air quotes, “makes accusations of those activities look more ridiculous in the public eye. A girl can’t have fat knockers and violently actionable ideologies, as far as the average fan is concerned. I benefit from that one too,” she admitted, looking down at her own chest, which was still voluptuous by any standard that wasn’t Yuuka. “Though as the leader, I need to be taken seriously by the powers that be, so I split the difference a bit more. Current attire notwithstanding.”
“Right,” I said, thoroughly red in the face. This was equal parts enlightening and entirely TMI; I hadn’t thought the topic of breasts would have such profound political implications, though in hindsight that had been silly of me. But it was weirdly gratifying to know that Yuuka handled me with the same abrasion and directness she used with her female teammates, rather than stupefying me with a flash of cleavage—though that probably had as much to do with me being an unfamiliar and unpredictable flamebearer as my status as a nonbinary Vaetnathing. She likely considered me a much more real risk to her safety than a random nonmagical man, which was sobering.
Amane pulled me out of those troubled thoughts with another comment, this one with an adorably impish grin at odds with both her anger and elegance. Alice snorted in response, seeming to return to more of an emotionally stable state by way of mild exasperation. “Oh, well, yes, her strategy doesn’t work on every man. Hongo, Hikanome’s other male flamebearer in a leadership role, remember him?”
“Yeah?” I did; he had been affable during lunch, the least enigmatic of the three, and then taken charge of protecting and evacuating Hikanome’s faithful who had been most wounded by the inferno. Public faces for organizations like a Flame cult could be incredibly slimy, but he struck me as a true believer in a more down-to-earth way than Miyoko’s prophetess vibe, and moreover, Amane and Yuuka had seemed outright amicable with him. “Oh, yeah, I guess he didn’t seem to bother her all that much, huh.”
“You noticed! That’s partially because they have a good history from during the schism—he’s one of the people who was instrumental in deposing the person responsible for all her suffering, after all—and partially because he doesn’t even glance at her rack, which even I have to admit can be terribly challenging. But that’s because he only has eyes for me, ugh. Wants to slay the dragon.” She looked a little put-upon, but it gave way to a wry grin directed to her girlfriend. “But he can’t have me, can he?” she asked her girlfriend playfully. Amane reached over and squeezed her bare thigh, and I heard a distinct whap from Alice’s tail on the sheets behind her as she leaned into the taller girl and a much more genuine smile washed over her face.
Talking about boobs had apparently gotten the lesbians warming back up to one another, which felt like my cue to leave. I didn’t belong, and I had no more questions besides. “Um, okay, I think that’s it.” I began to stand.
Alice waved me away. “Yeah. Sorry about…all that, I really put my foot in it. Leave it to my amazing girlfriend to set me right.” She gave her teammate a distinctly sapphic look, heart-meltingly adoring despite the rebuke she’d received—or maybe because of it. She turned to me, covering the attraction with some of her professional air as Radiance Opal. “I appreciate you coming to talk to me when you were freaking out about the Vaetna stuff. Talking’s good, and I appreciate being trusted with that. Though, I do have to ask: you’re not going to immediately start hyperventilating once you leave my line of sight, are you?”
“Um. I don’t think so?”
She nodded, trusting my judgment on that. “Good. Have a nice night, Ezzen. Let’s do another session with the doll tomorrow—I’ll help you troubleshoot your euphoria and we can talk more about the design.”
“Okay.”
I retreated from the room, Amane waving to me with her prosthetic arm as I left. Once I was in the hall, though, I got a text from her.
Amane: Thank you for taking my side. Alice can be frustrating.
Ezzen: No problem?
Ezzen: I think you did most of it, I might not have said anything if you hadn’t called her out
Amane: Teamwork!
Amane: I’ll talk to Yuuka. Good night
Ezzen: Good night
When I got back to my room, I got straight into bed; even though I was technically behind on mantle work, having spent most of the day in a guilty and dysphoric haze, I couldn’t muster the willpower to hop on my computer and rectify that tonight. It was looking like a chatroom-and-YouTube night, with no glyphcraft. Perhaps a more responsible version of myself, one who was free from the universal mental penalties imposed by dysphoria, would have mustered the will. Or maybe I just needed ADHD medication. After all, I hadn’t even bathed today, and that had a far lower mental and emotional barrier than designing the inner workings of my speculative ideal body.
It wasn’t just dysphoria. Though Alice had talked me down from the worst of it, and I wasn’t immediately overcome with a new wave of adrenaline, I was still reeling from the possibility that I was poisonous to my heroes. I felt some kind of abstract pressure about the broader possibility that the Peacies were already taking steps to investigate whatever had happened to Kat, to replicate and refine it, to forge a weapon that could cut down even the Vaetna. Even if Todai somehow resisted all PCTF encroachment in the coming weeks, I felt I would still be party to that horror simply by inaction. If something about my Flame was inherently inimical to the Vaetna, and that knowledge was soon to be dragged out of Pandora’s Box regardless, then I ought to learn and understand the mechanism behind it, so that we—meaning myself as well as Todai if they’d participate—might find an…antidote? Vaccine? I was thinking of it in terms of disease, though there was no particular evidence for that.
There was very little evidence for anything. That should have excited me, the suggestion of further horizons of magic that I was uniquely positioned to explore and document, but the circumstances made it feel bleak and burdensome. Sharing my work with the wider magical community would only hasten the development of the perfect weapon, and I was under no illusions about my ability to go the other way and try to mislead the entire PCTF’s research apparatus via a few papers, not when they already had one of the others whose Flames matched mine in hand.
So I lacked the will to work the myriad problems as of that evening, instead busying myself with the chatroom and aimlessly scrolling for videos that might take my mind off of it instead. I was great at avoidance, at lying in bed and staring at a bright rectangle a few inches from my face and trying very hard to think about how much I wasn’t doing.
But not everything could be avoided, nor ought to be. I was forcibly reminded that I’d barely eaten today when my stomach began to growl, and that biological demand forced me out of bed, out into the common area, down the stairs, and into the main common space, where I was grateful to find nobody to intrude on my alone-in-the-kitchen time. I dug through the fridge, found one of the many convenience store heat-and-eat meals Alice and Ai favored, and popped it into the microwave. These came in many varieties; this one wound up being spaghetti in a red sauce that more resembled ketchup than bolognese or marinara—long-ingrained sensibilities about food presentability had me searching the fridge for elements to make it better resemble an appealing dish and less like pure carbohydrate body fuel in a vaguely noodlesque form factor. I found an almost-spent rind of a hard cheese and a grater, and atop that snowy mountain, I added dabs of hot sauce, vaguely surprised to find that name-brand Tabasco was living in the spice cabinet alongside the more exotic chili oils and pastes. I wished we had a basil plant or something that would give me an easy way to put a little green on top—not that it would really make the meal any healthier, but this was less about nutrition and more about the psychology of eating. I’d found myself inheriting Dad’s love of plating and garnishing now that I was living with others, even when none of them were around.
I sat alone in the kitchen and ate my upgunned pasta. It was quiet in the penthouse, and when there were no people around, it was easy to pick out all the mechanical sounds: air moving around from the heating system as the building breathed, the steady rumble of the fridge, the hum of the microwave I cut off before it could beep at me. The ding of the elevator, which I kept anticipating but never arrived. The world outside the penthouse was silent, both the lower floors of the building and the wider Tokyo cityscape beyond the windows, present only to my eyes as a background for whatever was happening among the Radiances’ bubble of domesticity, not as a vast assemblage of real places I could go and explore.
Since arriving at Todai, I’d hardly ever had reason to leave Lighthouse Tower, except for that one outing with Alice and then Hina, the ill-fated Hikanome festival, and going with Yuuka to the shrine where Sugawara would next appear. Oh, and the haircut. I had no outdoor obligations short of flamebearer duties—all the care for my amputation and prosthetic was being taken care of in-house, Todai’s lawyers had apparently managed to get me some kind of visa or asylum status without me needing to face a single official, even groceries just kind of appeared in the fridge. I didn’t even know where the convenience store this pasta had come from was. Somehow, that last one was a bridge too far, making me pull out my phone’s map and hunt, which taught me that there was a Family Mart immediately across the street.
It frustrated me that I had access to essentially infinite money in the heart of one of the biggest cities in the world and had still barely ever left these two floors, let alone the building, and never voluntarily or for fun. In Bristol, I’d at least had the excuse of being broke, and that it was Bristol. Here, I only had myself to blame; my interactions with Amane had demonstrated that the language barrier wasn’t really all that much of an obstacle, and that would go double once I had the final version of my prosthetic with its built-in translator.
I hoped that maybe the emotional pressure cooker of living with the Radiances would be less intense if I left the house more, if I were to form some social bonds with even a single non-flamebearer…somehow. I’d had very little idea of how to do that even in England, let alone in a country where I didn’t speak the language.
Besides, the penthouse felt like it wanted to keep me here. Most of this lower floor was still and dark, my small island of lights in the kitchen reaching out toward the distant windows and dying before they got there, drowned in the furniture in the sitting area. Even more forbidding were the hallways leading around the back of the floor, which denied the light almost entirely past the first few meters.
In that abyss, somewhere in one of the further rooms, lay the doll. For a moment, I entertained the idle fantasy of going down there and ditching this meat body for a while. That was easy enough to dismiss with reasonable counterarguments like “I don’t know how to set it up” and “if something goes wrong with the transfer I’ll be alone and helpless” and “I don’t deserve to feel good.” Then even I had to admit that that last one wasn’t so reasonable, and that I might feel a little better about everything if I at least went over and gazed upon it; if nothing else, maybe looking at it from the outside would help me pinpoint what I found so comfortable about inhabiting it, which would inform the design of my actual mantle.
So with my stomach full and my steps light, I ventured into the dark.
Author’s Note:
So there’s Yuuka’s traumatic backstory, in the broad strokes. Alice bungled the delivery in terms of how it’s relevant to Ez, but the facts are accurate. Don’t feel bad if you’ve previously joked about Yuuka being a shortstack goth gf, that’s very much the impression she’s trying to give! It’s somewhat telling that Alice focused on this instead of Yuuka’s stated problem with Ez that kicked this off, which is that they’re reminding her of Hina in a bad way. Wonder what that’s about.
It’s also technically Amane’s traumatic backstory by proxy, but she’s much less bothered by it, if you ignore the indestructible inhuman ten foot tall artillery platform she uses as her body more than half the time. Perhaps yuri with a fat tailed trans dragon woman salves the hurt somewhat.
It’s nice to do a little atmosphere in the penthouse to decompress, and with a food scene to boot! Ez’s relationship with food is a pretty good tracker for its emotional state. You’ll hopefully be delighted to hear there’s plenty of meals forthcoming this arc.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter! Their feedback was instrumental in getting the tone right for the heavy stuff.
On a less heavy note, there’s new Hina art, and oh gosh is it new Hina art. Behold!
There’s an extremely spicy version of this available for patrons, too. Just saying!
That’s all for this week. Next week’s chapter will be lighter, I promise!
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My first time in the doll had been eye-opening, a singular experience that had been far more viscerally impactful than I’d anticipated. Nobody, including me, had expected the mantle calibration doll to be so enjoyable, so freeing, such a reset. I’d been braced for it to be novel but not actually make me feel like a different person—what I’d gotten instead was a disassembled, deep-cleaned, and reassembled version of myself, with all the soul-muck temporarily scoured away. I hadn’t understood how debilitating the grip of dysphoria and shame was, how it gummed up every level of my cognition, paralyzing emotion and poisoning my thoughts. Now I had tasted the alternative, and it felt incredible.
It wasn’t quite right to say that the Ebi-like body of the doll was perfect for my sensibilities, that it was exactly the thing I had always dreamt of; it lacked the Vaetna’s killing shapes, the flow of their armor and the…knightly presence, the energy they carried that I never quite could put into words. And I did eventually need to answer whether having different hips felt nice. The benefit to being in the doll was half in the smoothness and the facelessness and half as a result of the mental and spiritual disrobing my anima had undergone in the split second of transfer. I hadn’t been working properly before, like my soul had been suffocated and overheating; in the doll and after, I was running at my proper operating temperatures, able to access a more complete emotional spectrum. Excitement, happiness, a general desire to keep living and live more than the shadow of a person I’d been until this point—
And horniness, to put it bluntly. Feeling so emotionally activated had come with a near-complete collapse of my inhibitions; I’d repeatedly escalated Hina’s lewd provocations while making dinner and only resisted the urge to abscond from dinner and rut with her until the sun came up because I was also having so much fun cooking—and sex and food prep for a crowd shouldn’t mix. While lost in the equally vivacious and endlessly enticing energy of my girlfriend, who had been so happy we were finally on the same wavelength, I’d had no regard for the other girls. But in the harsh and sin-exposing light of day, I remembered their discomfort with far too much clarity, the faint hunch of Ai’s shoulders when my hand went directly from a cooking utensil to Hina’s waist and back to the food I was making for everybody. I’d barely respected basic hygiene.
We should have just ditched and indulged our urges immediately instead of being nasty in front of the others; they wouldn’t have had to put up with us, and maybe we’d have actually been able to follow through on all those whispered promises and roaming squeezes. Instead, when we did eventually flee for my room, she’d channeled my energy toward mantle design, urging me to continue self-actualizing through the endless panels and tables of GWalk. She still hadn’t been able to resist getting a little handsy; I suspect that if we’d stayed up, I’d have eventually gotten pulled away from the keyboard into a tangle of limbs and teeth. Which would have been problematic because her definition of sex was not survivable for my fragile meat body.
Problematic. Bad. Yep. I did, in fact, need a certain amount of blood to live. For now.
So it was probably for the best that the glyphcrafting went on for barely fifteen minutes before my surge of energy ebbed and the soul-stripping took its toll. The sudden but predictable wave of exhaustion hit right as Hina had been starting to growl in my ear, and I barely had time to yawn before she bodily hauled me over to bed—and then left right before sleep took me. Did that count as a success of boundaries? I hadn’t exactly enforced anything.
The next morning, I was dismayed to find that I’d slept off the euphoria and returned to my familiar, muted self. Extra muted, in fact, accented by contrast—and because I was plagued by guilt. My sense of propriety, freshly returned from its brief vacation, was holding me accountable. Its verdict: my conduct in front of the Radiances last evening was unacceptable, the exact kind of disgusting offense I’d been so afraid of committing the whole time I’d lived here. That, combined with the return of my dysphoria, made me somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of actually going through with anything lewd with Hina now, and I’d felt obligated to go around and apologize for my actions.
Ai laughed awkwardly in response to my stammering and waved her hands hurriedly. “I wasn’t really paying attention to you, so I didn’t notice. You made dinner and then went to your room. I’m glad the test platform worked so well for you. Did it give you any new ideas for the layout of your model?”
The sex-repulsed Emerald Radiance seemed like she’d struck it from the record of our interactions entirely, for which I was grateful, but I couldn’t wipe away the guilt so easily. Even when I accepted her invitation—conversational diversion, really—to nerd-babble about magic theory, it wasn’t enough to distract me from my overall sense of filthiness, which was how I knew it was especially bad.
Yuuka, on the other hand, was much more acerbic. “Fuck me, I’m glad I left before all that. Looked over the railing while you were cooking, saw you with your hand on her ass, went right back to my room. Why are you even apologizing? Didya even realize that I wasn’t there, or were you too busy thinking about how you’d crack her ribs?”
That last part was so surprising that it broke me out of my contrite cringing. “Crack…her ribs?”
“Yeah. I bet she made you use the fuckin’ poultry shears.”
“We—what?” I was thrown; I could tell what she was implying, but it was totally unprompted. I wasn’t about to admit that things not too far from that had crossed my mind just last night and went on the offensive instead. “You are describing sex, yeah? Is that seriously the kind of stuff Hina wants? Has she asked you—”
Heliotrope pushed a twintail over her shoulder. It was incredible how she could somehow look down at me from a full head height below. “Don’t involve me in your butchery fantasies.”
“You’re the one fantasizing! I was apologizing for…being stupid in a normal way, not whatever the hell you’re talking about, fuckin’ hell.” My contrition was dwindling, replaced by a little bit of strange schadenfreude. Yuuka was telling on herself, and that somehow righted the emotional boat for me. “Seriously, shears? Did you two take ‘scissoring’ that literally?”
Yuuka stared at me for a long moment with her human eye, then reached up to remove her eyepatch to reveal its twin, that baleful gem of prophecy. It didn’t glow or hum, but I could tell she was looking at my future, or some small fragment of it. She crossed her arms. “We stopped because I didn’t feel safe around that monster. Don’t let her make you one too.”
She left me impaled on that thorn as she left for school.
I spent the rest of that day dissociating. I no longer had the bravery to finish my round of apologies with Alice and Amane; my whole real-life social situation was put on pause as I retreated to the social bunker of my room and, within it, the chatroom. I hadn’t given my friends nearly enough of my time over the last few weeks, too preoccupied with vacillating between life-and-death flamebearer nonsense, the interpersonal struggles that came part and parcel with that, and gender discovery via mantle work. Until the sun went down, I paid it all back by simply curling up in bed, watching videos, and talking to the little people in my phone. There, at least, I didn’t disgust anybody.
The “99+” notification icon in the chatroom and the “500+” on the forums indicated that there was a lot to talk about, from large to small, and for once, I had the drive to go through every single one, an ideal distraction. My friends helped me curate; we started with the biggest bits of global flamebearer news, which were almost always new flamefalls; since my own, there had been two more, one in India and one in China, and both by all accounts had been far more typical than mine. The Vaetna had made no efforts to show up for the others like they had with me. The one in India had yielded two flamebearers who had immediately become part of the coalition of northern splinter kingdoms that still skirmished with Tibetan forces. The one in China had only found a single host, who had gone inferno.
The other notifications were just friends and colleagues pinging me whenever they wanted me to see something related to my interests. New YouTube videos about glyphcraft abounded, more than I could ever catch up on in one day, and that wasn’t even accounting for the endless torrent of reporting, spin, and misinformation about the world’s various VNT groups and other media-savvy flamebearers, some sent my way to be informative and some simply to be laughed at for their absurdity. Between the discussions, my friends’ lives went on, no less interesting than mine for all their relative lack of violence: Moth had finally gotten laid off and was relieved about it, Twili had a haul of nature photos from a hiking trip he’d been on, and Mnmnm’s grant application had been accepted.
I deflected and in some cases outright refused to answer questions about what was going on at Todai. The chatroom made it easy for me; nobody was dumb enough to ask directly what had happened at Sugawara’s hospital or about the whereabouts of Kimura, so I didn’t have to say much other than repeat assurances I was doing well. In the continuing wake of the Barbecue Inferno, I had no idea if or how I was ever going to bring up that I was dating Radiance Sapphire. I didn’t particularly want to think about her right now anyway.
On the forums, meanwhile, there was something Todai-related I did have liberty to talk about. Yesterday, one of the prosthetic teams—Team 3, who had put a phone inside my foot—had made the entire design open source, from the physical construction of the foot to the glyph diagrams, and since anybody with a brain and awareness of what I’d been up to could figure out it was for me, this had led to an enormous surge of discussion that made up two-thirds of my notifications on the forums. Moth and Dendrite spent an hour helping me comb through the thread for stuff that was worth responding to, and we crafted a general update post on my experiences with it as well. I regretted that I’d fallen out of the habit of checking the forums multiple times per day; there was a lot of speculation that I could have headed off immediately with a little more proactivity. Such was the nature of minor celebrityhood.
And, of course, there was news about the Vaetna. I’d missed a total of sixteen streams since arriving at Todai, a little under one per day, but none had been especially interesting or notable, just a mix of Spire maintenance work and what was essentially close drone footage of missions, plus two of the weekly State of The Spire streams that were a broad overview of the nation’s operations and projects. I’d used to do regular analysis posts for each maintenance stream—I stopped about a year ago but no longer remembered if there had been a specific reason. Depression, probably. And I tended to avoid watching the direct mission footage, preferring recaps, since it stressed me out to watch one of the Vaetna issue ultimatums to petty flamebearer tyrants threatening to turn a million people to glass, even knowing that those situations only ever ended one way. Skimming the recap videos, I didn’t think I’d missed anything particularly Spire-shaking.
I was disabused of that notion when I started picking through the rumor mill. Their latest bone to gnaw on was responsible for much of the remaining third of my forum notifications: the announcement that Katya, sixth of the Vaetna, was taking a break from public appearances. I’d been tangentially aware of the news but not thought anything of it, busy and extremely stressed as I had been with the coffin and Sugawara and all the fallout and recovery from that, so it had fallen out of my mind in the time since, filed in the “unprecedented but not alarming” section of my brain. In that regard, I, Ezzen, famous Vaetna expert, had been derelict in my duties, since I hadn’t taken into account a critical detail: the last time she’d been seen had been containing an inferno from my flamefall in Poland, over two weeks ago.
Theories had been proposed and shared as more evidence came in, and the collective diagnosis was dire.
starstar97: so to conclude
starstar97: somethings fucky with kat, and maybe the vaetna as a whole
starstar97: judging by bri ditching the rig
starstar97: and maybe involving yoru flame?
starstar97: *your
starstar97: the price of rawdogging without autocorrupt oTL
ezzen: She just hasn’t been around? I’m not up to speed, fuck.
My mouth was dry. They had put together the pieces days ago but elected not to message me directly about it, knowing I was already under a lot of pressure from many directions and assuming I’d get to it when I got to it. Thoughtful of them, but I wished they’d told me immediately.
moth30: yeah and its like… this is all they have to say?
moth30: cancelled her public events for a week before giving any explanation
moth30: like she never existed
That sent me into a bit of a panic spiral. One of the principal impossible-to-our-current-understanding-of-magic-but-maybe-viable things that could harm the Vaetna was an infomancy weapon retroactively deleting them from the timeline somehow.
ezzen: INFOVORED??
Of course, that was a silly conclusion to jump to, even as a nervous half-joke. Clarification arrived before I could tangent into terrified conspiracy babble.
skychicken: no.
skychicken: irresponsible wording, moth
moth30: soz
skychicken: she’s still on twitter and stuff like that
skychicken: i suppose that might just be a sockpuppet and not actually her, but theres no reason to jump to that conclusion
I was running the numbers.
ezzen: I can’t check right now but the longest time we’ve ever had any of the Vaetna be absent without explanation was maybe
ezzen: Four days? But that was during all the referendum stuff and it was Mayari, which feels a lot less weird
ezzen: Maybe there’s one I’m forgetting.
DendriteSpinner: Ez, do you think your flame core is the same way?
starstar97: “the same way” as what
starstar97: fundamentally dangerous to the vaetna? cause theres no proof thats actually the sitch and jumping to that conclusion is kinda like problematic ish
starstar97: flamefall infernos are fucky wucky and even the vaetna could be blindsided by stuff
starstar97: and even if it has to do with something unusual about e’s flame creche
starstar97: for all we know kat just has, like, a bad cold, and bri was wary of catching the same thing until they understood what it was
starstar97: doesnt mean shes dead or dying
DendriteSpinner: I concede that.
DendriteSpinner: Not to rehash all the backscroll from the other day, but a version of events where it IS related to the products of that flamefall is plausible, and the PCTF almost certainly is going forward with that assumption.
DendriteSpinner: Ez, did you see those videos with the C-17?
I hadn’t and was quickly linked the discussion thread where the video had been posted. It was only a few seconds of cell phone footage, but it showed a military air transport with fighter escorts climbing overhead. The original post had claimed it was taken outside Chicago, and several other bits of footage had shown up elsewhere on the internet a few days later, including a conspiracy video from a Zero-Day influencer that had racked up significant attention. The consensus in the thread was that the air convoy had been flying west and that it was an express shipment from the civilian magic research labs at Argonne toward the more secret and infamous military facilities in Nevada. And by “shipment,” the signs pointed to…
moth30: we already had leaks that ana baker was at argonne, and this could be them moving her to area 52
moth30: in which case they think the anti-vaetna theory holds water
moth30: this is all speculative!! sorry if we’re freaking you out!!!
skychicken: yeah yall thats enough infodump at once i think
skychicken: dont re-traumatize ezzen please
ezzen: I’m good.
I was not good. Rather, I’d had a terrible lurch in my stomach for the past few minutes.
Anti-Vaetna; the term was upsetting enough in abstract, doubly upsetting if it applied to me specifically like I was the butt of some cosmic joke, and outright terrifying for what it implied about the PCTF’s arrival in Tokyo any day now. Each link in the chain of speculation, from the cause of Kat’s absence to Brianna abandoning Thunder Horse to the contents and destination of that C-17, pointed in the same direction: when the Peacies came for me, they wouldn’t take no for an answer. They would use me to kill the Vaetna.
ezzen: Gonna go talk to the Radiances.
“Okay, Ezzen, the first thing I want you to do is calm down. We’re prepared for this, don’t worry,” Alice sighed, sounding thoroughly confident despite the fact that she was craning her neck up at me, splayed facedown over a purple yoga ball, her tail extending straight behind her like a crocodile’s.
I’d walked in on her mid-workout; she was stretching the poor, tormented muscles around the base of the tail. Sporting similar athleisure to what she’d been wearing when I first met her, sports bra and compression leggings, she was leaving a lot of skin exposed. There was a part of me that salivated at this scantily clad, gorgeous dragon woman, the part I hated myself for that had reared its head last night and made Yuuka feel unsafe around me. At this particular moment, though, that part was easy to drown out with the keyed-up state of the rest of my mind, the cocktail of geopolitical they-will-start-a-war-over-me panic and the deeper dread that I was innately toxic to my heroes.
I fidgeted as Alice continued. “Yes, we did put two and two together and figured that your Flame might have properties that make the Peacies aggressively covet you. But that doesn’t really change much, does it? We’ve been planning for them to show up and try to snatch you since the day you arrived. They already wanted your brain, now they want your brawn as well.” She slid backward off the ball to stand, then stepped around it to sit more conversationally and do some twists. “So as for whatever is going to go down between us and them, I don’t see how this changes things.”
“But—it’s anti-Vaetna,” I almost whimpered. “That’s their, their—their holy grail, the only way to have a bigger stick than the Spire. The US will fucking…annex Japan or something if it means getting me.”
Alice didn’t believe me. “Slow down. So, knowing that the Peacies are coming for us anyway, the second thing I want you to do is focus on that. Banish any thought that you are somehow now doomed to be culpable for the fall of the Spire and…I don’t know, the sun exploding or whatever else you’re catastrophizing.”
“I don’t…not the sun exploding.”
“Pretty telling omission.”
“I mean, what the hell are the odds that I, of all people, am poison to them? That’s a bad fuckin’ joke,” I fumed. “It’s—even if we somehow get the Peacies to leave us alone, I’m never gonna be able to even visit the Spire.” I could see it clearly in my mind’s eye, being turned away from the Gate at bladepoint, Heung’s tone faintly apologetic but heavy with uncompromising finality. I was on track to be the first person ever banished from the Spire.
Alice wasn’t a telepath, but I was pretty easy to read. She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Come off it, Ez, being all Yuuka doesn’t suit you. Take five deep breaths, three seconds in, three seconds out.”
I felt the faintest sense of heat and winced, unsure if I was pissing her off or if that was just my blood running hot from embarrassing panic. For a moment, I considered petulantly ignoring her advice, upset at being treated like a child throwing a tantrum—then realized that was exactly the treatment I deserved. I stared at the floor of her and Amane’s doorway, turning red with shame, and took the requested breaths. When I finished, Alice sighed again. “Your emotional spectrum is still all fucked from last evening, yeah? Rubber-banded the other way?”
I caught her use of profanity, a sign she’d shifted out of Radiance Opal mode and was now talking to me as my friend. “…Yeah. Is that a side effect of pumping my soul through a lattice?”
“Not a magical effect. Not to go armchair therapist on you, but you’re crashing down from a euphoria high, and it’s making you treat things as a bigger deal than they are.” She pre-empted my objection that this was indeed a big fucking deal, world-shaking in fact, with a raised finger. “I’ve been there! Happened to me all the time when we were first developing the mantles. I’d give myself, uh, these,” she said, hefting one of her breasts slightly with one hand, “And then when they were gone, I’d be super emotionally fragile for a few days.”
“I…how did this turn into talking about your…chest?” The hesitation in that protest was undercut somewhat by the way my eyes automatically followed the gesture before I wrested them away to look at literally anything else; I settled my gaze on the corner of Amane’s streaming setup visible in the next room, which was bathed in a soft purple glow that helped flush my visual cortex.
Alice stood slowly, her tail squishing the ball quite a lot as it slithered off. No wonder she had to stretch so thoroughly and frequently; the thick, scaled slab of muscle and fat was an insane amount of additional weight for a pair of human legs to be lugging around, even accounting for her muscular thighs and wide hips. Its bulk drew my eyes right back over almost as easily as any pair of—I bonked myself before that thought could continue and stared harder at the corner of Amane’s desk over there. I instead made myself consider that it was also generally good self-care to stretch regularly—and that made me remember that I hadn’t done any spear training in days, and I became more crestfallen still. Alice frowned sympathetically.
“Look, you’re experiencing a big mood swing from being back in a body you don’t like. Brain’s dumping even more cortisol than usual, and it’s making it hard for you to rationally categorize danger and what you can do about it. You’re latching on to anything that will make you feel worse.”
I ground out a noise somewhere between a sigh and a growl, frustrated at being read so easily; having my feelings guessed was a sign I was known and understood and seen, and while that should have been a source of comfort and camaraderie coming from Alice, it also made me feel exposed. I shrugged my hoodie, one of the big ones in a nice earthy green I’d gotten with Hina, a little higher around my neck. “It…yes, rationally, that makes sense, but they’re some big fuckin’ problems and you’re sweeping them aside to talk about gender.”
“Aha! Because they share a solution, or at least a first step. Sit down and think about it while I use the loo.” She gestured at the yoga ball and made for the bathroom.
I hesitantly did as instructed and found that the ball was warm enough for me to feel it through my pants. It was a miracle Alice didn’t bake Amane alive in their bed. I turned my mind to the so-called shared solution.
It wasn’t much of a riddle; I found the answer immediately, and then spent the rest of the time hemming and hawing over what it meant.
Alice stuck her head out of the bathroom. “Well?”
“I…” I closed my mouth after the false start and took another deep breath, then delivered my solution in a rush. “I’ve got to use the doll more, haven’t I.”
Alice nodded and came out, wiping her hands with a towel that she then balled up and launched across the room into the laundry bin. “Good start.”
I felt pressured to defend my reasoning. “I need a mantle to, well, fight, if it’s gonna come to that, and I need to…what, microdose gender euphoria? I don’t know if it works like that.”
“Worked for me.” She raised her arms behind her head and posed, Instagram thirst-trap style, hips forward. “And look at me now! Fifty-four kilograms of sexy babe. The system works!”
That weight definitely didn’t include the tail, I noted, but I had other objections besides, darting my eyes away from her again. “I don’t want to become a sexy babe. And would you stop doing…that?”
She dropped her arms. “Designing this body took hopping into my mantle after adjusting how it looked, dozens of times over months, and then I had to have a very upsetting talk with my Flame to convince it to rebuild my actual body to spec, so I’d say I’ve earned the right to flaunt it. Not to mention keeping it looking like this despite my appetite.” She prodded her stomach with a finger. “Anyway, to figure out the body you want, you’ll have to do the same, and that means getting used to a mantle, and that means getting into the doll, Shinji.”
“What? Oh.” In hindsight it was obvious Alice and Hina would share anime references. Not very mahou shoujo to reference a mecha show—though Amethyst demonstrated that there could be some significant crossover, and mantles in general were bipedal, cutting-edge weapons of war that protected their pilots…maybe there was something there. I hadn’t yet watched enough anime to know. “That’s—yes, that’s all correct. But…using the doll made me worse. I don’t like who I was last night.”
“You mean how you were almost willing to bite one of Hina’s fingers off? That’s between you and her; I don’t care, done it before. Unless you want tips.”
I started. “You too? Has everyone but me mutilated my girlfriend? Am I being pranked?”
“You did punch her chest in, I’m told.”
“Yeah, but that wasn’t intended…” I trailed off, realizing I couldn’t quite defend that line of reasoning, and backpedaled a little. “You and Hina?”
She rolled her eyes. “Come off it. She’s my best friend and the girl who helped me hatch, and I am a lesbian. I’ve bitten parts of her you don’t even know exist yet.”
“…Huh.”
“Yes. So your lecherousness last night with her, while a little too public, was…within parameters, I guess you could say. I certainly wasn’t surprised, just worried you’d get some of her fluids into the food. You didn’t, I hope?”
I raised my hand solemnly. “Nothing made it into the food, I promise. I think. Um. But I don’t think that’s a good enough standard for, er, defining acceptable PDA.” I rubbed at my spear tattoo. “I think we really freaked out Yuuka”
“Ah.”
Some of Alice’s good mood, so rare for her to begin with, visibly wilted. I immediately felt bad. She walked over to the bed and sat on it—a maneuver that required raising her tail, sitting sideways, then scooting until the tail laid flat on the sheets. There was something appealing about its bulk, how it flowed out of her spine, to say nothing of the glitter of her scales—I caught myself from staring at her body. God, was I gross. I put my gaze back where it belonged as she templed her fingers. “Yeah, yep. What did she say, exactly?”
“Uh…basically that Hina makes her feel unsafe, and that I might too. Probably already did. She was kind of harsh about it. I know I should have some thicker skin about all the ‘monster’ stuff now, but…”
“That’s Yuuka, she’s harsh, but based on last night…Hina’s not the only…” She trailed off. The tip of her tail thumped softly and steadily on the linens, a paff-paff-paff metronome for her thoughts, whatever she was deciding. Then she sighed heavily. “Hell, alright, let’s head this off before it gets worse.”
Author’s Note:
We’re back! Gosh, Ez is already going through it, isn’t it.
Doing Sunspot Sunday for these pre-arc Patreon releases, might also start doing it for public, unsure for now. Thanks for your patience. 4.02 should be up for patrons next Sunday.
Enjoy the temporary arc cover while it’s here!
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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