Izumi gave me the exact verbal kick in the ass I needed. One I had needed for a while, in all honesty. Rushing headlong toward blood magic out of desperation was normal for inexperienced flamebearers in a crisis, but I was far more qualified than that. Even a single minute of planning and I could work wonders without sacrificing anything at all.
“The net’s across the boundary between here and the pod,” I considered aloud. “As in, bits of it are here in threespace, like the part we passed through, but the vast majority of it is stretching over the three-four boundary. That was the original purpose for it, probably, yeah?”
“Probably. So it would actually be a…three-dimensional net?”
“Yep. We’ll confirm that in a sec, but that’s the reasonable assumption. Like how a normal, flat two-dimensional net can have a three-dimensional shape to wrap around something; same principle moved one dimension up. And your pods—yours and Yuuka’s—would be inside the portion of three-dimensional space it covers out in the fourth dimension.” My confidence grew as I spoke and laid out the arrangement of each element in my head. I couldn’t visualize the fourth dimensional positioning exactly, but all we really cared about for our purposes was that the mantle pods were on the far side of the net, and enclosed so that we couldn’t just cross into the fourth dimension somewhere else to go around it. That’s how I would have done it, I figured.
“Then how did we get in?” Izumi wondered. “We did not touch it on the way in.”
“Maybe it was dormant. Or just pulled itself out of the way as it saw us come in, actually, since that’s basically what it already did with that,” I hypothesized, pointing to the hole in the roof. It had been blasted open by Yuuka, but before that it had been open to the sky initially as our point of entry.
“And it cannot act beyond the three-dimensional space of the building, it seems? Or it would have already attacked us.”
“Yeah. Who knows how far it goes in the fourth dimension, but I think it’s enclosed. It’s a net, it keeps stuff in. I’ve sort of got an inkling that it doesn’t even truly understand there is an ‘outside’ beyond itself.” Too much theorizing, I told myself; walk it back, focus on the problem at hand. “So we gotta get you two out of there, Yuuka first. Cutting it open is a bad idea, I think, if I could even get {SEVER} to do that. But that’s not really the best use of my spear, is it? It’s a net, not a wall. It’s got holes. It’s mostly holes, even. And if it has holes…I don’t think it’s actually an obstacle to me.”
She nodded, following my meaning. “You mean your rain step.”
She experimentally rolled one of her legs—the motion was twitchy and jumpy, intermittent, like you’d see in an online game with serious packet loss. I’d played a few in my day, but never for long. I watched her movements with concern. “Yeah. Hold that thought. Can you get yourself out of here?”
“…No. I am stuck.”
“How? You can control both your bodies at once, can’t you? Like, Yuuka’s probably locked into her mantle right now so she can’t weave, but you’ve got the dual-control thing going on.” Izumi did have a pod like the others, and must have been employing it to be caught in the net as she was, but I would have expected her awareness to be more distributed across both of her bodies, as it had been when we’d fought both of her at once at the festival. Her flesh in the pod shouldn’t have been as helpless as Yuuka’s with the connection disrupted by the net.
She grunted. “Since we fought Sugawara, I have been leaving as much of myself out of the other body as I can. I did not want two bodies, I want this body. Mistake.” Her mouth was a little out of sync with the words.
My heart hurt for her. “Right. Okay, that makes sense. Not a mistake,” I asserted gently. “You’re—this thing is insane, you couldn’t have—”
“We do not have time to argue. Yuuka-chan will die or lose her mind before me.”
“But you still can control both bodies if I unfuck your connection? You’re the easier one if I don’t need to fully free you and just need to unfuck your connection enough to—”
Izumi put up her hand. “I hear her. My senses are back.” She was scrambling to her feet before I could respond. “I’m going to—” She suddenly collapsed back to the ground, face-first, and groaned incoherently for a long second. “Gone. Ow, it’s—the net is shifting. It is trying to contain her and she is not fighting it.”
I swallowed. “Oh, fuck.”
Izumi groaned in pain as the net invisibly attacked her nerves. I could tell it wasn’t the incoherent, mind-breaking agony I’d gone through, but it was pain nonetheless, plain in her voice.
“Izumi?”
“Ah, I can’t move my arms. I can’t move my arms,” she repeated in a simulated gasp, despair soaking through her voice as she lay slumped and unmoving. “I—what did you ask?”
She was losing her connection with reality in both magical and literal ways. “Cut her out? Cut you out?” I asked.
“I will live. Her first.”
“What about you? I can’t just leave you here if it’s—what’s it even doing? Choking you out? Talk to me. I can draw up a ward or something for you.”
“She’s…migi, yonjuu, gojuudo.” She was silent for a long moment, and in that time I understood that she would not allow herself to be helped before Yuuka. “Forty or fifty degrees right from where my head is pointing. About twenty meters kata from the edge of the roof. She is not fighting it, Ezzen.”
“…Alright. Let me at least move you a bit.” I grabbed her shoulders and rolled her over so she was facing up as something grim and furious settled in my chest. “Okay, uh—I’m—I guess I’m going to do it now. Try to get through, get to her.”
She stared at the sky as she spoke. Her mouth didn’t move with her reply. “Try.”
I babbled out the plan. “Okay. I’ll get her, then you, then we’re getting the fuck out of here. So, rain step,” I reoriented. “Get my spear to the other side of the fourspace barrier which is hopefully also the net, then teleport across. Should work if I can figure out exactly where I’m going ahead of time,” I hedged. “I just need a gap wide enough for the spear to get over there.”
She didn’t respond. I had the horrible feeling she couldn’t anymore. But she had given me a target to aim for, a place to scan and find the exact location of Yuuka’s pod so I could shift my spear straight there instead of merely across the barrier. I looked at the spot she indicated and ignited my Flame, preparing to weave—
We had thought the net-entity was limited to the physical three-dimensional boundaries of the building, which was why it hadn’t attacked us for the past few minutes. But my Flame was a beacon, a lighthouse, plainly visible to such an extent that it could illuminate even Yuuka’s foresight. So when I ignited my spool of thread, it lit me up like a Christmas tree in whatever ripple-senses this thing had. For the first time it understood that there was an “outside”, that there could be food out there.
Space distorted. The mindless intelligence of this ambush predator converted red ripple to orange and reached outside of itself, extending a metaphysical limb of hunger to grasp my little area of “outside” and drag it “inside.” The roof collapsed beneath me as well, of course, but what happened this time was profoundly more paranatural. That frantic half-heartbeat of sudden weightlessness saw the treeline around me contort in dizzying vertigo, bare branches folding and rippling downward and inward.
Before I had even begun my first glyph, I was falling into the gullet once more.
I did not consider myself good at being fast. A life lived on the forums meant I was used to having time to consider, to pause, to zoom out and decide what I wanted to say or how best to approach a particular knot of glyphcraft. I thought of myself as a slow thinker, a problem solver given to contemplation punctuated with flashes of insight that gave me the chance to repeatedly optimize bad ideas into better ones. I rarely knew what to do and exactly how to do it, and tended to second guess myself and weigh my options even when it seemed like the best option was plain. Since being flametouched I’d discovered that I also had a rather serious impulsive streak, but that wasn’t quite the same thing as being quick on my feet; that tended to be “not thinking” rather than “thinking fast,” and by now it had repeatedly bitten me and taken chunks of flesh with it each time. True urgency, where I had to be clever quickly, was a growth point for me, in my own estimation.
I hadn’t given myself enough credit. I absolutely did benefit from time to think, and those few minutes of talking with Izumi were all the preparation I needed to make this different from how helpless I’d been on the way up. In that split second of the rooftop turning to rubble, before I hit the net again, my mind made a series of intuitive leaps. Ideas strung together in my brain faster than gravity could pull me into the gullet. Pain; red ripple; pure red ripple; red-consuming ward; red to orange to separate me from the net; using {DIFFERENTIATE} for the spine would pigeonhole sufficiently; use a 4-1 Z-twist. Alt-M, G, right click, T, left click, stretch my left hand a bit for alt-E-M-T.
Muscle memory translated that abstract GWalk intention into thread. Too slowly; one second of falling became two, and pain slammed against the battered bulwark of my mind. My eardrums felt like they would burst. Something wet was dripping out of my nose and I was going to die and it would hurt the whole time and it saw me—and all the while my hands kept moving. Back, forth, around, in just the right shapes with just the right tension. Glyphs had to double back on each other with specific angles, layering, ordering. The pressure kept ratcheting up, the gasworks of my soul creaking and shuddering under the flood of agony eagerly shared through the net.
My hands slipped; my movements became shoddy. Thread went to the wrong places, my desperate haste birthing misaligned and ugly approximations that I hoped against hope would be good enough. Too sloppy, my lack of skill laid bare when it mattered most. It was not possible to complete the ward properly before I succumbed. I would die painfully to my own novice incompetence.
And yet, the glyphs did come together. The pressure did abate, leaving me strangely hollow for long seconds, all my mental and emotional systems still suspended in that moment of desperation to escape the pain. My faculties returned haltingly—my eyes saw structural charnel writhing around me, within arm’s reach and no closer as it tried to swallow me, crush me to a pulp and drink me down, all pretense of an organic pitcher plant gullet abandoned in favor of raw hunger. But I’d managed to block the building, and the net, from touching me with my slapdash recreation of a mantle pod’s most essential protection.
The ward sparked around me with little bits of blue ripple, surplus leakage from the red-to-orange conversion that was using the net’s own energy to keep it from entering the space around me. It wasn’t perfect; my foot hurt from the tiny fraction of red that was still leaking in, and some of the output blue was giving the air the distinct scent of ozone as it broke down the volatiles in the air, a warning of how it would kill me violently if I was still present when it collapsed, when it would destabilize under the strain and slip from orange-dominant to blue-dominant. The back of the napkin said I had at most twenty seconds before the equilibrium failed.
So there was no time to marvel at my unlikely success of dexterity or savor the pain’s retreat; I had to get to Yuuka, free her, and get us both out of there. The good news was that I was at least within the building’s three-dimensional space once more, so all I had to do was get my spear across the fourspace barrier. Even with the ward, I didn’t dare chance pushing myself across directly; my ward’s spatial distortions would not protect me so close to that jagged, ill-behaved seam where the fourth dimension had been stitched to ours.
I had been hoping that I could find the optimal transit location, the place where the boundary had the simplest geometry and the net had gaps in its coverage—nowhere near enough time for that. Nor did I have the time to scan for what the net was doing in fourspace between the boundary and the pod. I’d just have to send my spear straight toward Yuuka and it’d cross the barrier wherever it crossed the barrier.
Finding coordinates for Yuuka’s pod was easy, at least. I already had a rough idea of where to aim, so with her ensnared in the net, I was certain to find her at the highest nearby concentration of red ripple. I’d just get the coordinates for that, have my spear transit the boundary and move through fourspace to that point in a straight line—a true straight line, not the chaotic geodesics of the fourspace continuum, which was insanity to attempt—then I’d rain step to it.
Four diagrams of ripple meters flashed through my head; I picked the one with the fewest second-order glyphs and got my hands moving while I decided on the actual input parameters. I targeted a five meter hypersphere around the three-coordinates of the point on the roof Izumi had indicated and shunted thirty meters kata—the standard offset the pods used, far enough to be unassailable by most weaponry that could even skim the barrier but close enough that control wasn’t disrupted. And since I only cared about the point of maximum ripple density and not the information for the whole region, I could cheat the hierarchy and cut out a whole {DISTRIBUTE} from the standard design, saving precious seconds of weaving as the building tried to crush me to a pulp and the ward continued to deny it.
It at least had the decency to fail slowly instead of all at once; grasping fingers of stinging agony were steadily crawling up my leg and the taste of iron had crept into my mouth from no apparent source. In the corner of my eye I saw little shreds of skin surface from between the churning rubble. Instead of dry corpse-leather those glimpses of flesh looked supple and inviting; some other fragment of the memories that had made it. It felt like the building was gaping its maw at me, saying come on inside, won’t it feel so good?
I pushed the grisly temptation aside and screwed my eyes shut to keep imagining the GWalk window in front of me, the flurry of keyboard shortcuts to insert and connect and parameterize everything. I fed the target coordinates into the most blunt and fundamental kinetic shunter possible, barely more than a vector. I sometimes reflected that throwing rocks was the beginning of human warfare and had stuck with us in one fashion or another all the way to the advent of magic; glyphcraft was depressingly, tellingly well-suited to the task, stripping out all the hardware of muscles or lever arms or gunpowder and leaving just the pure intent. Direction and magnitude, target and force.
It was with that intent that I wove. I was barely even aware of what my hands were doing at this point, giving myself fully to the command window and sub-panels, keystrokes rather than tension, dialog boxes rather than self-intersections, the need to help Yuuka rather than the temptation to let this entity flood me with its energy and fight it on its terms. I blotted out as much of the world as I could, everything but the taste of blood and scent of ozone in my ragged lungs.
I wouldn’t realize until afterward that I was rediscovering one method of snapweaving from first principles. Glyphs were a language that both I and the Flame understood, an abstraction to bridge from intention to design to ripple via preordained arrangements of extruded thread, and I was discovering that the physical act of arranging the thread was something my Flame itself could handle, was eager to handle, as long as my intention was pure and my designs ironclad. Which they were. My hands still moved, but it was only in the broad suggestion of the lattice rather than each parameter and detail. The luminous threads followed along the chain of my intentions to fill in the gaps of their own accord.
That was for later. I was so close now, seconds before the ward reached the critical failure point—a thrum of foreign heat rolled up my spine, too molten to be distinguishable as pain or pleasure and either way deeply unwelcome inside my frail sensorium. It failed to break my concentration. I summoned my spear at my side, confined against me in the shrinking bubble of the ward, and imagined it into the interface. C, T, Escape, Enter, Enter, and it was designated as the payload. The last turns of thread tugged themselves into place.
That was the end of the lattice. It triggered immediately and violently. My spear launched as though from a ballista in a tremendous shock of motion and a muted snap of rushing air, vanishing from right against my body in what my senses firmly insisted to be a violent acceleration—but a total mystery of direction since it immediately left my slice of the W-axis. I didn’t get to observe its trajectory from there, whether it had successfully transited the boundary intact and found Yuuka, worse than blind as I forced myself to wait one more second, then two, then three—
The ward collapsed into sparks. Blue sparks, fittingly, so bright that they were visible straight through my eyelids—perhaps even in my eye like Cherenkov radiation, or perhaps that’s what it literally was. Either way, it was my cue. I didn’t know where my spear was, but that didn’t matter. Wherever it was, so was I.
The rain step truly was instant, no nausea-inducing lurch of motion. One moment I was surrounded by a shell of rubble about to consume me, the next I was somewhere entirely different, with my spear in my hand, seemingly whole and unmarred. My false vaet had crossed the barrier successfully; I knew this even before opening my eyes because my first breath was not of ozone but of familiar, oily not-air. I’d never been happier to feel so plainly out of my evolved environment. Victorious relief surged through me even as I brandished my spear in both hands, my carapace-clad forearm still blazing with my Flame, preparing for the net to pursue me, and opened my eyes.
Mercifully, I was greeted by stillness. And horror, more subtly.
Before me floated a thick knot of skin, easily three meters in diameter. Gaps here and there revealed the shine of Yuuka’s pod, the silver eggshell of LM glinting from the light of my Flame but almost entirely choked out by the net’s avarice. A few strips of the skin were furled off in random directions before suddenly terminating in wobbly undulations where they must have been changing direction to move along the fourth axis. Even looking at the thing was suffocating—I remembered a moment during the festival when Yuuka had attempted to restrain Izumi with some kind of LM rope bondage gear. This was that, stripped of all of the performative artifice and instead replaced with pure, greedy hunger, visible desperation to cover and constrict and consume.
It had gotten inside. It was hard to tell at first, but the longer I looked, the more the pit in my stomach grew. The shell was supposed to be sealed in all four dimensions when the Radiances weren’t actively transferring in or out of it, and though the pod was too covered to obviously see a breach, the knot of skin was just a little too oblong to be evenly covering the unbroken pod’s normal shape, too many leathery strands dipping under themselves toward its surface around the same point. Wrapping around the pod had cut Yuuka off from her mantle as it had with Izumi, but getting inside meant it was eating her. Every line of skin seemed to flow inward and upward toward her head.
Toward her eye.
“How dare,” I whispered almost involuntarily, speaking as much for my Flame as for myself. The same repugnance inspired in me by Sugawara was surfacing upon my soul again, displacing the threadbare desperation that had gotten me this far and burning hotter and brighter through me. The eye was the window to the soul, more literally for her than for most, and this thing had colonized it.
I knew what she was seeing, what it had shown me glimpses of in our previous contact: a dream of every atrocity that had made it, collapsed down to a single point in time, its past and present and future all at once, so intensely inscribed in ripple that to Yuuka’s eye it was the future. She could not have seen this coming any more than the building itself could, and once ensnared, it had subsumed her entire reality into the dream.
Hina’s voice returned to my ear, hissing how dare you hurt my sister-wife-friend and growling at me to tear and ruin and save Yuuka by any means necessary.
I suspected cutting her out would kill her, either from unpredictable behavior from her Flame or the simple shock. The entity hadn’t digested her yet, truly made her or her Flame a part of itself as far as I could tell, not yet, but I couldn’t risk killing her by simply shredding this thing, even though in my heart I knew I could.
The entity had already demonstrated that it wanted me. On the roof it had wanted me badly enough that it had surpassed its own nature and moved beyond the boundaries of the building. Perhaps I had taught this predator something terrible, that there was an outside and that there was bright blazing Flame there for it to hunt if it could learn to move and stalk instead of merely wait—but what mattered now was that it hungered for me very, very badly. I had lost its attention when I’d teleported, a trick it had likely never seen before, and its attention where I was now was fully focused on Yuuka.
So I made myself a juicier target than her. It was easy when I was angry. I did what was most natural, a mix of reflexes from spear training, inspiration from the Heron, and simple conjoined instinct from my Flame. I shifted my grip on my spear, sliding the contained inferno of my hand to where the haft met the burnt tip, and set it ablaze with all the fury in my heart and the desire to make the false vaet as true as I could, the weapon that was me. The flame leapt along the blackened edges of the blade and for a moment made me feel like a proper Vaetna.
But I wasn’t. Too soft, too vulnerable. I needed armor to match. The bonfire in my chest responded to that thought by racing back up my arm, over my shoulders and chest and up my throat, anchoring itself in every vacated pore where there had once been hair follicles. A thin, cold outer shell of burning energy wreathed my flesh. Perhaps I should have done this from the beginning.
That got the entity’s attention. Some of those outboard strands of leather began to reach toward me, slowly and probingly, more cautious or simply less active than the parts of the net that controlled the building, the pitcher plant. Then that central knot surrounding the breach in the pod began to loosen and unfurl, leather opening up like a nightmare jellyfish. More and more of the pod became visible as the entity opened its true mouth, or perhaps its stomach, revealing the silhouette of Yuuka’s body inside, still utterly surrounded by skin packed within the pod. Now it was plain to see how every flap of skin converged on her eye, using it as a conduit to dream a solipsistic feedback loop of its own past-present-future on loop forever, making Yuuka into an engine of pain.
Those deepest feeders did not detach themselves, but it was enough. I had my opening.
I kicked forward off of nothing, too fast for these lazy feeder-tentacles to react, and plunged my blazing spear into the exposed heart of the pod. Into Yuuka, into her eye. Not literally, just as I had not really stabbed out my own eye when I had first been flametouched, but the same principle. It was a terribly violent connection.
I dove into the dream, spear-first, to lead her out.
Author’s Note:
“honestly about fucking time the main character of this serial does something” – one of the beta readers upon finishing this chapter
Ezzen is cooking. Literally, it’s being cooked by its Flame. But it’s finally seizing its destiny, and that’s what we’re all here for, isn’t it? Seems like it’s finally also figured out how to do weaving without weaving and the secret is to simply have turbo autism about your particular keybind setup. Yuuka, by contrast is in a bad, bad way, full damsel in distress mode, poor girl. But she’s just having a bad dream, and as we’ve seen, even magical dreams are nothing to a Vaetna.
Lotta yonic imagery in this chapter if you keep your eyes peeled for it. I promise that’s not the only reason it took me two full weeks to write this chapter, but it definitely contributed. Huge thanks to the beta readers for helping me through it!
We stood in the jaws of a miracle. A true miracle, magic beyond Flame and glyphs. For a precious, wasted moment, I could do nothing but stand awestruck at the enormity of what we had stumbled upon. Even Ebi, who shared the ineffable spark which animated this building and for which we had come here, was encoded as glyphs, potential trammeled into the Vaetna’s programmatic rules and principles by Ai’s genius, fundamentally a feat of human engineering. The entity here was something even more significant, truly raw and spontaneous, something which I could not define no matter how long I sat in my room and stared at GWalk. Until now, I had considered “ambient ripple” to be something different and lesser than the magic of the Flame, undoubtedly paranatural and sometimes hazardous but always less significant than a human or flamebearer’s channeling of intent. In this web of murdered skin I now saw the error in my perspective, and behind it, a glimpse of what I was seeking for Izumi’s sake and ultimately my own, and the profundity was such that it felt like the very world was shifting around me—
Wait, no, it was. The building was trying to swallow us. The floor beneath us slanted sideways. Above us, the hole in the ceiling where we had entered rapidly coagulated with more of the net, shifting into our plane of reality to spread across the gap. A torrent of masonry followed, steel and concrete rushing around the flayed skin to lock us inside. The restructuring was violent and ugly, beams bursting out of the walls with all the violence of a compound fracture.
I was suddenly desperately disoriented, looking around and trying to get my bearings. Wonder ignited into panic that I couldn’t find a fixed reference for the motion around me, above me, and beneath me. My stabilizer module was the only thing that remained fixed, my foot doing its best to stay planted on the shifting floor. My spear leapt into my hand, bidden by some unconscious hope that it would provide a more metaphysical anchor—reason caught up and I stowed it again to reach for Izumi instead, whose balance was utterly unchallenged by this impossible terrain as the floor’s collapse reached pitcher-plant verticality and the wall across-beneath us tore itself apart, opening a path to a corridor that was decidedly not a part of any hospital’s normal architecture: a gullet full of bodies.
This was what had become of the rest of Sugawara’s cult. Tangled carcasses rotting in a net, their souls—again, for some iffy definition thereof—siphoned and merged into something lesser but vaster than the sum of its parts. Most of the dead were in various states of undress, matching what I knew of Hikanome’s practices both pre- and post-schism, perhaps the result of mass suicide to follow their messiah or perhaps simply devoured when this thing had reached critical mass. They could stay rotting for all I cared. Sugawara’s beheaded corpse could have been down there too, a nexus or heart for this thing.
But in that glimpse down the throat I saw that there were others, those that could not have been of the cult. Hikers and police, the sorts that went missing in places like these in yesteryear’s stories of grim magic and crimes against death. Urban explorers who had been self-assured that there was no such thing as a haunted house, people who could not have possibly expected the world to produce an entity such as this. They could not be blamed for this, but they had become part of it all the same.
My Flame thrummed in my chest. We would see them done justice.
Well, that was a nice thought. In practice, I was overruled in action by the two VNTs at my side. Something flickered from Izumi’s hand down into the gullet, a plume of inky smoke trailing behind it into the darkness, followed a moment later by a hail of explosive gemstones from Yuuka. Green and crimson light blossomed at the end of the corridor. There was brutal utility in it, no thought to be spared for the innocent dead who deserved a chance at a proper burial away from the monsters. The two Radiances simply saw hell in the tunnel and responded by raining some of their own.
“Up and out!” Yuuka shouted, before a bright and sharp whine cut through the rumbling of contorting masonry and the world turned red as she blasted the ceiling open with a crimson beam. The idea was plain, we would back out and regroup. I grabbed a firmer hold of Izumi, ears ringing too badly to discern what she was saying, and she hoisted me out of danger, leaping upward toward the hole of blue sky Yuuka had carved. Momentum carried us up and out—
I saw it hit Yuuka first, rocketing upward right above us. She suddenly veered off course and slammed into the charred edge of the aperture. LM beat concrete, but like an out-of-control firecracker Yuuka’s mantle careened sideways on impact and, jets still burning at full throttle, crashed into the far side of the still-transforming room in an explosion of rubble. The moment after she impacted, Izumi’s arm went limp around me.
Then it was my turn.
Concentrated red ripple overloaded my meat suit and the soft animal brain inside of it. Blinding pain killed every thought. The world around me vanished and my foot screamed that something was wrong with every nerve it no longer had. My hoodie pocket felt hot, but it was an abbreviated footnote, washed out entirely by the attack on my nerves, and something altogether more paranatural. I was instantly rendered insensate by bile and animal rage that pressed in on me and tore through the bubble-surface of my consciousness.
I did not touch its mind the way I had Sugawara’s. It did not have one as such, merely a chorused awareness, a shattered mirror. But in aggregate, it did know things, was capable of experiencing and feeling and remembering and inflicting. It experienced death, hallways empty except for corpses with wrists freshly slit and the last echoes of rapturous, desperate, deluded conviction bouncing down the corridors from vocal chords freshly fallen silent, a cult’s final act. It remembered where every flap of skin had come from and could not help but show me each motion of the knife, the knives, all dyed so red it couldn’t not be shared. It had inherited a faint, sadistic pleasure that it was inflicting this upon me, that I would understand all the giving and receiving and the rapturous blood, that I would know that these were all that could exist.
Through the invasive, inviting agony, I clenched every muscle in my body and just tried to keep my mind from unraveling. I couldn’t hear what my Flame was saying beneath the torrent of wanton nightmare, unable to discern what it wanted—perhaps it would destroy this entity out of the same repugnance with which it had burned Sugawara, or perhaps it was so enticed that it would join with it. I could not know. But either way, if it were allowed to fully feed on these sensations, it would bring cataclysm—do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, instant inferno. Either way, I and Izumi and Yuuka would die and whatever remained would bring ruin.
So I told myself that the Spire stands. The idea rang hollow and distant, washed out in the crimson immediacy. The pain was now, the pain was everything. It was simply too much.
Any longer, if I had been tangled in the net rather than passing through it at speed, and I would have been toast. My saving grace was that the mantles had gone first and somehow borne the brunt of the web of concentrated suffering, so I instead only received enough of a dose to make me scream my throat hoarse and spasm every muscle in my body before we must have reached the apex of our leap, arcing up onto the roof next to the hole. I don’t remember that part, that half-second lost forever to agony as we passed through the net. But I do remember that it wasn’t a controlled landing, knees and elbows for me and a full ragdoll roll for Izumi.
Everything was bad for a long time—by which I mean that aftershocks of the red ripple bounced around my system for what felt like days. In reality it was probably closer to ten or fifteen seconds that I spent curled up in a heap on the roof. The magical pain faded quickly in most of my body; it still felt like my foot had been freshly amputated, repetitions of that perfect slice echoing up my nerves and more reluctant to dissipate. So too ebbed the mind-flooding; my image of the Spire was no longer drowned in the torrent of blood. My psyche managed to find its footing on the dermis, and then on the quicksilver bedrock of adrenaline, and I found it in me to roll over and push myself up.
At that point I started to swear, because I had regained control of my voice and it was immediately clear that my stabilizer was fucked. Beyond fucked, actually, rather in the end stages of the process of melting down into a gloop of liquid metal that was burning its way through my hoodie’s central pocket and the skin of my belly. I made a noise of pure get-it-off-me panic and wriggled out of the ruined heart-armor; once it was off and my wits returned, I thanked it for its service, then registered that my exposed shirt had brought with it the smell of charred flesh. But no pain accompanied—a numbness had spread through me, the systems in my brain temporarily burned out except in my foot. That was a hell of a silver lining. I decided that I would simply not look down at whatever had happened to my midriff for the time being.
Izumi was the higher priority. She hadn’t moved a hair in the time it had taken me to recover. I crawled my way over to her, fearing that what had happened last night had just taken place again, kicking myself for thinking it was a good idea to come out here when she was in such an unstable condition. The mantle had stayed deployed this time, which I wanted to think was a good sign, but my knowledge of the mantles’ functionality suggested a bleaker conclusion. Something had gone catastrophically wrong, either with her or with the connection. From what I had just experienced, it might have been both.
“Izumi, hey, hey, up,” I urged the lattice-manifest. “If you’re in there. Can’t say I’m expecting this to work, but feel free to prove me wrong.”
Nothing. Damnable, terrifying stillness and silence. I rolled her over with effort—she was lighter than someone her size ought to be, but that was offset by how I had just been put through the sensory meatgrinder moments ago—and recoiled from her blank, staring eyes. Dread slithered up my neck.
“Oh, fuck. You’re not dead. You better not be fucking dead. We’re gonna have problems if you’re dead,” I babbled.
I understood, logically, that the odds that it had outright killed her were slim. The mantles were designed to be ablative shielding, after all, disposable. But reason could only do so much against the terror rising within me. Yuuka had gone down, too—she was still in there. It fell to me to do something, and I had no idea what.
At this point it occurred to me to do the obvious and slam the big red panic button we’d just installed in my mind. Panic was indeed the main thing I was feeling, tinged with the tiniest bit of humiliation that I needed to use it so immediately. The distress beacon screamed out across the hundreds of kilometers back toward Tokyo—at least, I hoped it did. There was no way of knowing for certain that it had survived intact where my stabilizer hadn’t, no confirmation from Ebi’s end. I fished for my phone as a secondary channel of communication, relieved it hadn’t fallen out of my pocket or been cracked in half by my landing…and then was horrified to find it wet and slippery under my fingers. I pulled it out hastily and found that it was oozing blood from within.
That’s when the fear really set in. I’d always had my phone as a backup, a safe space in my pocket no matter how stressful real life was. Now I was alone out here, isolated and with no way of knowing whether anybody even knew I was in trouble, alone in the woods against a force I categorically did not understand. My hoodie, my armor, had already been ruined, leaving me exposed against the cool air. My spear had appeared in my hand, but what use was it against a foe such as this? The Vaetna, Heung and Kat, they dealt with infernos by striking at the burning heart, and I now knew with certainty this thing did not have one. Sugawara’s grisly unmaking had not been in the avalanche of death that had been forced into my mind—that had been separate, a working of blood magic he had orchestrated toward a specific end, unrelated to this except for shared circumstances. If I managed to fight my way down to that room somehow I would find only remnants of that trick, not something to stab. And the idea of killing anything with this spear was in itself absurd, this piece of wood I’d carved from hardware store lumber in naive aspiration. Like me, it had not really become any more than that, for all the burnt end superficially resembled that of a vaet and I a Vaetna.
And, perhaps most insultingly, I couldn’t even get to my feet, crippled by my dependence on an augmentation that had never been stable enough to see me through even the danger we’d known was coming, let alone the thing I faced now.
I was a larva, helpless, exactly as Yuuka had said.
Fuck that, argued Ezzen, the ideal Ezzen, genius of glyphcraft and proper heir to the Vaetna, that nebulous shape of unbreakable carapace and sharp killing shapes and possibly boobs. Do something, it said. Destroy it, it urged. I wanted to be that Ezzen, who would be strong enough to annihilate this entity—but I couldn’t just become it, drag that construction of my imagination into reality with all its skill and resolve. Nobody was that magical, not unless I wanted to figure out time travel right here and right now.
A different voice butted in, husky and excited. Hina insisted that it could be done. The power I needed was right there. The power to kill, power from pain, strength beyond mortality if only I would embrace it, if I would dive back in and let go and trust the process. The part of me that wanted her wanted to dive back in the hole. I could fight this thing and win, not as I was, but as what I might become, what I was worthy of becoming. I rose to my one good foot, crutching on my spear, drawn toward the mouth of the monster and the laser-blasted opening in the roof.
I stopped when Izumi’s eyes fluttered. They focused on me and she sat up in one fluid motion, an echo of Sugawara’s corpse. Within me, a different Hina-impulse suddenly overruled the self-destructive hunger: make sure she was alright.
“What happened? Are you alright? Is it just the connection or is your actual—other body in trouble?”
She winced tremendously. “Connection. It is…ah, itatatata,” she groaned, clutching her head. “Tangled.”
I understood, imagining what it might be like for the net to be intersecting my connection with the doll. I was surprised she had any command of her mantle or her faculties at all. “Right, okay.” I knelt next to her, temporarily abandoning any interest in the hole. “That’s a relief, if you’re not hurt yourself. That net is fucked up. How’s the system diagnostics looking?”
“They are…not.” She raised an arm. “Weapons are not working. I think I can move my body, but my sensors are…do not seem good. I have eyes and ears and that is all, no telemetry.”
I gasped, connecting the dots. “Does that mean—did we just somehow do what we came here for? Are you embedded in this body now?”
She paused, eyes widening. “Oh.” Then she frowned. “No. Or—maybe, temporarily, because I am touching to this thing? But I do not want this to be part of me. And I cannot fight.” She nodded toward the hole. “Yuuka-chan is in there. I expect she is worse than me.”
I twisted back to stare at it as well. “Yeah. Fuck. I was thinking of just—burning the whole damn thing. Kind of a moment of weakness in hindsight. I don’t want to take you or her out in the crossfire, especially not if we’re making progress with you, somehow, accidentally and against all odds.”
“You think you could? Destroy it?”
I focused on the waves of pain still coming from where the stub of my heel met the prosthetic and ignited my Flame, pale shimmers of frigid heat venting from the seams in my right hand’s bio-gauntlet. “I think so. Using its own power and trusting my Flame to do what it has to. It’s a bad idea,” I admitted. “But I don’t know what else to do. I’m fucked up too, can’t go down in there and save her either,” I explained, indicating my discarded hoodie with its pile of cooling slag. I held up my phone, which was still dripping blood from within. “And I don’t think we can call for help. Don’t think my distress beacon worked, either. Things are fucked.”
“They are,” Izumi agreed, grimacing. “How did Yuuka-chan’s eye not…?”
That brought me up short. “I…shit, I dunno, that is weird, there’s so much red ripple and she’s still in it. Unless she’s not?”
“You saw her fly off, did you not? She lost her connection as I did. She is tangled as well, or worse. She needs help, and we need her eye.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s not in debate, I just don’t know what to do,” I growled, frustrated at my own impotence. “Other than hop back into the hole and pray.”
“That’s not the only way to go to her,” Izumi pointed out. “Her body is in the pod.”
“Yeah, thirty meters from us in a direction I physically can’t point to, when you’re immobilized and can’t get me there, great fuckin’ idea,” I fumed. The stress and pain were getting to me; my nerves had begun to un-deaden and remind me of the fact that I’d been thrown bodily a few minutes ago.
Izumi frowned. She reached out toward me, put her hand in my face, and snapped her fingers. A magenta spark flew between them. “Ezzen. You know everything about glyphs. You know how to make a fourth-dimension navigation matrix. Why are you committed to being useless?”
“Because—because that, this thing down here, that’s real magic, and I can’t—this is real VNT shit, and I’m not—”
“Yes you fucking are.” The curse had an incredible, arid crispness coming from Izumi’s mouth, and it stopped me dead. “I can’t believe you talk about yourself like this after everything you’ve done. You are brilliant and strong even when you are not in the other body. Start believing it, stop making excuses, and go save her.”
Author’s Note:
Short but sweet chapter! Maybe one of the tighter chapters of the story? I’m quite happy with it; somebody really needed to just fuckin’ say that to Ez at the end there. The beta readers really liked that part and I hope you do too.
Apologies for the delay! At least this means I get to wish you all a happy Neil Banging Out The Tunes day! As well as the other thing I need not mention. Next week Sunspot will be taking its usual break, so next update will be Sunday, April 27.
Lastly, we have new art! By Togekko, who also did the arc 3 cover and has outdone herself here. Behold Amethyst and Heliotrope, who are definitely the good guys, meting out a little extrajudicial justice!
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“Point of order, Ezza,” Yuuka declared, clapping her hands together and pointing at me with them. “If you want to come along, you have to be less abductable.”
“Abductable,” I repeated, thinking it over. “Harsh.”
“Well, if you insist: Peacies going for you in the first place, then I’ll count the kemono reverse kidnapping you, then I think you were fine until the barbie where they did their ‘only flamebearers allowed’ shit to you? Which—anyway, and then Izumi showed up to yoink you. And then again when she busted into the pocketroom, and then just before now? Huh, all of them since you actually got here are her. Maybe it’s more of a her problem than a you problem.”
“Old habits die hard?” I asked, before realizing that I’d rammed my foot all the way into my mouth—an action I could physically carry out, and which would have been only a fraction as embarrassing. I’d been moving into comfortable banter mode with Yuuka and sort of forgotten that Izumi was still right there.
“Dude,” Ebi sniped. “Gender neutral dude, but dude.”
“Sorry, holy shit, I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay,” Izumi said. I wanted to crawl out of my skin even more than I already had.
Yuuka rubbed her forehead above her eyepatch. “On the one hand, I don’t think Sugawara has access to any more people like Izumi-chan—”
“He will never have another,” Izumi vowed.
Yuuka grinned darkly at her. “That’s what I like to hear. But with the Peacies in town, Ezza, you’re still so…stealable. You’ve got got too many times for me to let you out of the house without more precautions.”
On my end, I was ready to admit she was right; even out in public with Hina glued to me, I felt like we’d been half-assing my safety. “Thanks. I do feel quite…abductable, yeah, good word,” I admitted. Expressing vulnerability around Yuuka was risky, but it really felt like I was among people who understood this. “Not as powerful as I’d expected to be as a flamebearer. Like…hypothetically, if right now I was put back in that situation in the taxi, I don’t know how much better I’d really do. I’m not actually any more effective with my spear if I were to fight back, and I don’t think I’d be able to make any more of an escape. Maybe I’m a bit better at weaving and could get the car underground without losing my foot, but I’d still be trapped.”
“You’ve already lost me on the details,” she said with a shrug. “I never got the play-by-play of what happened with you before our dog showed up. But I get what you’re saying—that’s the way of it,” she sighed. “We’re still just as vulnerable as anybody else until we do something about that. Not even close to all-powerful. You build it up over time, y’see, with traps and defenses and wards. Situational awareness, too, no amount of magic will save you from being where you shouldn’t. But when you’re just a larva, you don’t have those things, so those first few days, and I guess in your case those first few weeks with how much we’ve coddled ya, those are the killer. Too easy to get grabbed.”
Coming from Hina, that might have come off as flirting. From Yuuka, it was unmistakably an expression of hypervigilance and paranoia, one that I found myself strongly agreeing with, both from experience and perennial dysphoria about being exposed. “So are you saying you’ll help me set up my mantle?”
I let quite a bit of hope creep into my voice there. Yuuka surely picked up on it, but waved me off. “No, that’ll take all afternoon, and I really want to get out there while the sun is still up. Ghosts, y’know? We’ll just set you up with the usual distress beacon. Fuckin’ nutter that we didn’t before the barbie.”
“Future-seeing magical girl and you’re afraid of the dark,” Ebi snarked unseen.
Yuuka bickered back in Japanese. I didn’t have to follow the words to understand she was getting at something realer than pure superstition: in places where ambient ripple was already high, it tended to go even higher at night, enough for things to start getting paranatural. After all, if you subscribed to the idea that the ripple field was loosely a measure of how much something “mattered,” as inarticulate as that idea was, then of course it would respond to primordial human fears. Millenia of folklore about monsters and hauntings in the inky darkness, formerly just explanations for humanity’s diurnal fear of predators in the dark, had been granted a grain of truth by the Flame’s arrival.
And Sugawara’s former prison-turned-compound was fertile ground indeed. The residue of his occupation; the hideous things his followers had done to those two Todai employees who had first been sent to check on him; the Radiances’ assault; all had surely left their marks. Even if Sugawara himself, the literal ghost, was gone from there, I absolutely didn’t want to hang around after dark, not as a squishy flesh-person. An armored combat drone, on the other hand…
“Distress beacon sounds good,” I replied, interrupting the playful banter between Yuuka and Ebi. “You got a rack of them somewhere?”
“Ah, nah, it’s a thing you weave. Put that practice to the test.”
“Freehand?” I sighed. “If it’s a thing you set up regularly, you’ve got to have substrates lying around.”
“Surprise exam,” Yuuka insisted. “But you can have a diagram, at least, Ebi will send one your way. While you do that—Izumi-chan, I have a question.” Her voice softened. “You did try to abduct Ezza at the festival. None of us hold that against you. How could we? But we need to know what the plan was. Sugawara wanted them, that much is clear. As a new body?”
“Yes,” Izumi replied with zero hesitation. It was hard to tell from only one word, but I thought I heard rage there. If it had been Alice, the cavernous room would have gone up a few degrees.
“Fucker.”
“Yes. I don’t know the details, how he would have done it. If I did, we would not need to go there now.”
“He didn’t even try when he came here,” I pointed out as I pored over the still-warm printout of the diagram that had dropped onto the counter in front of me. Only twelve glyphs, not too bad. “Plan was ruined at that point, I take it?”
“Yes. He would have needed much preparation.” She went quiet for long enough to make me uncomfortable. A resounding silence of memory emanated from her and hung over us all, negative space left by the barbs and tethers he had put into her. I didn’t want to look at her or interrupt, but the long quiet was unbearable—I raised my eyes and opened my speaking hole a moment after she continued. “I was the best he could do at the moment we killed him. You were there, but you were not subjugated and emptied for him.”
“Neither were you,” Yuuka soothed, then looked at me. “Wouldn’t have worked anyway, right? Because your Flame is so fuckin’ freaky. Burned the shit outta him.”
I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t quite realized that that was the original plan; the others had avoided bringing it up with me in the aftermath, it seemed. A strange, distant perspective took hold of me, one momentarily untethered from my ego as the Vaetna’s heir-apparent and my own aspirations as a VNT flamebearer. “Maybe that wouldn’t have mattered, if he’d had long enough.”
“Dark fuckin’ thought, coming from you.”
“Just—I don’t feel all that attached to my body, y’know? I could—I dunno. There’s a world where if I did wind up in his clutches, then I don’t fight back that hard, I think, and my Flame takes the cue and gives up. Because I’m just a larva,” I spat with more bitterness than I had expected to find in myself.
Yuuka grabbed my arm and hissed quietly, so that only I could hear. “Oi. Never talk like that in front of Izumi. Or Amane. There’s enough trauma about that fucker to go around, don’t go imagining more of your own.” She loosened her grip and leaned back. “Now shut up and get weaving.”
“Right.”
The beacon wasn’t complicated. In fact, it was designed to be as simple as possible, an antenna that sent exactly one unmistakable and unalterable signal toward Ebi, as accurately and loudly and resiliently as possible, through inferno or intentional disruption. Functionally, that meant it was nothing more than a triangulator, signal encoder, and packager, exclusively pink and orange attunements thanks to clever pigeonholing. We planned to put it into my foot prosthetic for this outing, which meant I got to showcase my bizarre, mutant flexibility to bring my foot up onto the table.
Ebi pointed out the obvious. “You really could just take it off.”
“Listen, if I’m stuck in this body, I might as well get to use the damn thing.”
“Ooh, spicy.”
That seemed to dispel the darkness I had invoked. As I summoned forth divine fire from my arm and began to twist it into thread, Yuuka sat Izumi down to confer about what we might expect to find at the compound. The back-and-forth of Japanese was mostly white noise for me, and I soon added to the soundscape with my own muttered babbling.
“Never seen a practical reason for {IDENTIFY} to double back on itself like that.” My fingers gingerly wove the glyph’s shape—I was trying to focus on my movements rather than the hovering arrangements my Flame was leaving behind, envisioning the baseball as I’d been taught to guide my hand’s default position between movements. “Only ever seen it in problem sets and showcasing funny minimum glyph tricks. But I guess it’s a good way to skim off the blue input here, yeah? Resilient in, say, a combat situation where there’s thermodynamic stuff happening all over that would completely mangle how it interprets the pink channel, without needing to actually plug that input with solid blue.”
Something interesting happened as I worked. All told the effort took no more than fifteen minutes, hardly over one per glyph, a record time for me to have woven that many without a substrate. This was more than my few days of regular weaving practice could account for; that had brought some improvement in my muscle memory with the common components of glyphs, crossovers and pullthroughs and particular twists and turns, the physical shapes of the arcane, but there was more to it than that. Something had changed in my right hand. It felt like the only part of me that was really in tune with my intent, really felt like part of me. My Flame had traction on the half-chitinous plating growing from my burn scars in a way it hadn’t before. A lingering resonance of the shape I’d had in the dream, reflected in one of the only parts of my body that matched it in the real world.
It was uniquely rewarding to watch the chain suddenly vanish as I tied off the end, a sign that it was at least a plausibly functional lattice—and somewhat anxiety-inducing, since I was used to being able to pore over my diagrams for as long as I liked. Nothing for it. “Ready to test,” I called out.
“Given it a button in your brain?”
“Yeah. I’ve got this tentative control panel in my head—dunno if it’s good practice to pop this right next to the activatable stuff for the dolldronepuppetmantlewhatever but it’s what I’ve got—and there’s a button there. That’s a good visualization for it, yeah? Just an emergency button that I slam?” I felt like I was talking a lot.
Yuuka gave me a thumbs up. “Yeah, panic button.”
“Hit it,” Ebi called out. I did, imagining slamming my hand on the control panel, and I felt a strong jerk in my foot for a moment, then Ebi emitted a ding. “Yep, works. Next time you hit it I’m gonna assume it’s not a drill, got it?”
“Got it,” I replied, slightly giddy. “Wow, real magic. And stuff I’m taking with me instead of toys I have to leave in the doll.”
“Says the one who can rain step,” Izumi put in with a grin as she hopped to her feet with that mantle weightlessness. “If you are ready, so are we.”
I slid off my chair gingerly, making sure that my prosthetic still worked for its intended purpose. It did, mostly, with the tiniest hitch as I put my full weight onto the toes. I reached into my pocket and touched the tuna-can stabilizer, and found that it was warm. Not alarmingly so, but warmer than it had been previously. The lattice was starting to decohere, spitting blue ripple that pigeonholed into its mildest effect, simple radiant heat. I didn’t think much of it; this new unit Hina had given me post-barbecue had generally run hotter, because it was even more of a temporary solution than the first one, intended to last only until Ai had a more integrated prototype ready.
It was concerning in a distant, deal-with-it-later way. And it wasn’t like there was anything to do about it right now, since none of us could weave like Hina did on short notice. We’d burn too much daylight fixing it if I brought it up, I figured. It could wait until after.
Idiot.
I rode shotgun on Yuuka’s jetbike. Well, the seating was arranged fore and aft, like a motorcycle or jet fighter, but sitting behind her was still shotgun in my opinion. It was about a ten minute flight to the derelict hospital; we cruised well below the bike’s supersonic maximum speed for the sake of stealth. The bike was almost completely invisible to radar, the naked eye, and passive magical detection at these speeds.
“You know,” I pondered, “none of that really shed any light on why she’s called Ebi.”
“Means shrimp.”
Her voice carried easily thanks to the comprehensive magical soundproofing that surrounded us. I loved that we were able to carry a conversation despite the wind shear skimming off the bike’s angular nose, delighting in how high-tech and comfortable this ride was. If I didn’t look down I could almost forget just how high up we were as the mountains of Japan raced beneath us—no, I chided myself. I had just done some magic, just proved in some small way that I could grow beyond being a larva. I chose to be brave and look down at the landscape, emboldened by my dissociation trick from earlier and figuring I’d already vomited once today.
I was rewarded with quite a view of the Japanese countryside. Most of Japan is mountainous, but from my view they were more like really large forested hills, rather than the craggy Alps or Rockies I’d seen as a kid. There was more brown than green below us; the deciduous trees were still missing their leaves, and we were still a few weeks out from the start of cherry blossom season. Nonetheless, it was an impressive view of nature at scale and a welcome change of scenery from the penthouse. Mount Fuji was plainly visible, too, and I realized that it was my first time seeing it. A tourism milestone to be sure, cropping up in the middle of our mission to unravel the secrets of a ghost.
Eventually acrophobia did threaten to upset my stomach and I did have to stop looking down, which reminded me of where I was. It was remarkable that Yuuka was willing to chaperone me like this, given that my body was currently a disgusting mound of meat seated in arm’s reach directly behind her instead of an androgynous and synthetic puppet with breasts duct-taped on. That felt like a major show of trust, and I was grateful in a way that I didn’t know how to articulate. In fact, it seemed like she had come back to the tower in a real hurry—she was still wearing a stylish college student’s outfit as though she’d come straight from a lecture and the bike had been left running—meaning she was eager to join us in getting after whatever remained of Sugawara’s ritual.
She didn’t have foreknowledge of what we would see, not at a distance; the plan was to park the bike overhead and set up the hovering bivouac she’d used at Thunder Horse so we could take the time to inspect the future by my arm’s glow. Izumi was confident the survivors of Sugawara’s die-hard cult would have moved on, but caution never hurt. We hadn’t ruled out that his ghost could be at our destination. Spirits of the dead supposedly lingered where they died, after all, at least according to basically every culture’s folklore. Whether those rules held true for a transmuted entity of Flame was anybody’s guess, but worst case scenario, two mantles—two Radiances, if I was to be honest in how I was thinking about Izumi—constituted almost laughably big guns to bring to any engagement short of a naval battle. If Sugawara was waiting for us, the only misfortune that would occur would be that Amane would never get the chance to finish him herself.
The second Radiance was flying her own route separate from us, both to avoid arousing suspicion and because she had an errand of her own. She’d wanted to make a stop at the burned-out shrine where Hikanome had been founded, to check up on the traps she and Yuuka had left there the other week. Just to reassure herself, she’d admitted openly.
“I knew that,” I replied indignantly. “Is it just a joke about how she’s actually quite big? Jumbo shrimp?”
“Partially. You went out and saw her, those crazy tiny weaves.”
“Yeah. Ai did some blood magic, it seems,” I probed. “Is the name some Japanese pun on that?”
“Oh, I don’t want to spoil the joke,” Yuuka sighed. “It’s the only good one Ai’s ever made, and I want to give her that much.”
Fair was fair. I wanted to ask Ai directly about it all anyway. We rode in silence for another minute before Yuuka changed the topic.
“So, Izumi took you out to fourspace. Just grabbed you, from what Ebi told me. Couple weeks ago I was getting stabbed to stop her from yoinking ya out of the world, now we’re just letting her do it.”
“I thought you trusted her? Are we still suspicious she’s some kind of mole?”
“Oh, no, no, definitely not,” Yuuka said quickly. I couldn’t see her face from the backseat, but the way her twintails shifted suggested a playful roll of the eyes. “Just thinking about how the kemono is rubbing off on her. In all senses of the word. Listen, if either of them grab you when you don’t want, you slam that fuckin’ button, got it? Ebi will get me, and I’ll set them straight.”
“Ebi was the one who told her to grab me.”
“Gah. You alright?”
“Guess so? Is this…protective older sister energy I’m getting from you?” Yuuka fully twisted around in her seat to look at me incredulously, which made me go, “No hey what the fuck are you doing.”
“I can’t believe you just said that out loud.”
I started to sweat. It had just sort of come out. “I didn’t—”
She grinned impishly. “Sure, why not, as long as you’re not gonna be weird about it. Hina or Izumi give you trouble, Bloodstone-neechan will set ‘em straight.”
“They haven’t given me trouble! If anything it’s like…I don’t know, offgassing their worst impulses on each other so I don’t get turned into a chew toy by Hina. That’s good, isn’t it? As long as there’s no ripple collateral, which they’ve been good about as far as I know.”
“Just trying to look out for you. Boobs club might be a joke, but you’re an honorary one of the girls now.” She raised a finger to pre-empt my interruption with a small wince. “I know that’s not what you are. Just how my brain works, sue me. The choices are girl or enemy, so you’re girl.”
“Fine,” I huffed. “But does that mean you have to rant about my girlfriend and her girlfriend while I’m stuck alone with you a kilometer in the air? Is that the fabled ‘girl talk’?” Star would have a stroke, I thought.
She blinked. “Okay, true. We can talk about something else, though, fuck it, I’ve got plenty of big sister topics. How big are the tits you’re putting on your mantle?”
By the time we arrived I was extremely red in the face—and had begun to cotton on to the fact that Yuuka was doing it to distract herself from what we were walking into. Her anxiety made her precognition worse, so by getting a rise out of me she was actually making it more likely she’d be able to glean something useful now. Izumi wasn’t the only one who was nervous about what we might find. Against all odds, I might have been the least anxious of the three of us as we convened on the hovering bivouac platform, if only by virtue of me being the least deeply traumatized.
We set up shop almost directly above the abandoned hospital. The March sun was already starting to hang lower in the sky, the deepening shadows casting the winter-defoliated limbs of the trees as a vast bramble of thorns that seemed to reach up toward us, our quarry personified in the landscape itself as though he had left a permanent stain on the region. That was all in my head, of course, but not only mine, judging by how Izumi’s eyes darted around the grounds surrounding the building.
“Nothing at the shrine,” Izumi informed us, her mantle in its most tuned-for-killing mode next to me. “It makes me anxious. I would have preferred it if he had triggered the traps and gotten away, because at least I would know he had been there. I do not want to be here when the sun sets.”
“We’ll be gone long before it gets dark,” Yuuka assured us as she unfolded some lawn chairs. “You investigate spooky bullshit in daylight, everybody knows that.”
I nodded, though I had some questions. “Makes us easier to spot though, doesn’t it? I mean, we’re just sort of hovering up here. If the Peacies sent somebody out here to keep an eye on it…”
“Yeah. But we don’t think they did. And we’re pretty cloaked, nobody watching the building with pinkeyes is going to be looking up.”
“Always hated that name,” I groused, aware that she was intentionally prodding me and playing along. “It’s gross. Just call them infomantic sensors or something.”
“Yeah, yeah. Sit down and get your Flame out. Time to rend knowledge from the future with our wicked magicks.”
“Chuunibyou,” Izumi declared with a grin. “I admire that.”
I lit my arm and held it aloft to Yuuka, willing that justice would be served, that we would turn Sugawara’s escape from his end into some salve for his victim. My Flame liked that idea and burned brightly, spilling untamed out of the cracks between the plating. Even out here, in the sunlight, it cast strange, deep, unaccountable shadows in between the retina-stinging illumination, what I guessed were two-dimensional silhouettes of three-dimensional objects out in the fourth dimension, usually hidden from our limited perspective but briefly exposed by the paranatural light. Doing this was one of the rare times I felt properly magical, especially outside of the doll—and moreover, more rewardingly, it was one of the few times I felt like the Radiances needed me more than I needed them.
Yuuka pulled off her eyepatch. Black crystal shimmered with dark greens and then began to glow red. The eye was always active, but now Yuuka was pushing it as she stared into the Flame. Then she strode over to the edge of the bivouac platform to look down at the ruined building below. We were close enough that we could see where Hina had blasted open the wall to abscond with the Todai employee they’d been holding captive. She pointed at it.
“We should start down there. Going straight to the room where we killed him is fuzzy, and I don’t like fuzzy. Gimme a sec to keep trawling.”
While we waited, Izumi came up beside me and looked respectfully at my Flame. We shared a quiet moment while Yuuka muttered to herself in Japanese. Then the sixth Radiance shifted awkwardly. “I’m sorry for picking you up.”
I waved her off. My Flame was being powered by righteous indignation, but none of it was for her. “All good. Ebi was the one who asked you.”
“I still did not think. You’re too forgiving.”
“…Yeah, probably.” Only for pretty girls with trauma, I thought to myself. Maybe the PCTF would send their craziest special forces butch and I’d fold like a house of cards.
We lapsed back into silence. Just as my shoulder was beginning to tire from holding my arm up, Yuuka turned back to us, looking a little sick, and gave her report.
“Okay, no traps, no Sugawara, and either the place is abandoned or we’re about to get ambushed so hard they’ll name a holiday after us, because it looks like nobody came through after us, not the cultists, not cops, not Peacies. It’s bizarre how untouched everything is, and there’s gotta be a reason, but I can’t tell.”
“Spooky,” I commented, not sure what else to say. It was incredibly convenient that she could just copy her notes from the future like that. “But not dangerous?”
“Yeah. So that’s thing number one to figure out.”
“Avoidance field?” I asked. It was possible, through a mix of spatial and infomantic techniques, to make it so that a place couldn’t be found or entered by accident. “Granted, seems like all those groups would have had reason to come here intentionally, so maybe not. And who would have had the resources to set it up anyway? Forget I said anything,” I sighed.
Yuuka waved me off. “Silversight isn’t giving me colors, but just looking down there with mantle eyes—Izumi, see any pink? I don’t.”
“No.”
“Okay, so something else. Fuckin’ cults. Nobody should be allowed to use blood magic but us.” She crossed her arms authoritatively. “We’re gonna take it slow until we figure out what that’s about, why nobody’s at least come in and cleaned up the bodies—good thing you’ve got a mask, Ezza, it’s never good when something smells so bad I can see it. And there’s red everywhere, or at least I think it’s red, so I’m pretty fuzzy on the rest of it. Not new red, though, probably some fucked up ritual shit judging by what they were doing in there. Then we can go through the halls the same way we did last time we were here, fewest surprises that way because the path is pretty bright. When we get to Sugawara’s room…” she winced. “Eye’s giving me ‘Izumi will get the insight she wants.’ Which is vague to the point of making me paranoid.” She took a breath. “So. Either of you want to bail, knowing all that?”
I blinked, looking to Izumi. If she still wanted in, so did I. She shook her head. “No. Delaying would not improve our chances of finding anything, will it? So we do this now.”
“Nah. Glad you agree. I’ll put down the bike on the roof and we’ll get in. If either of you feel anything weird as we get close, you tell me, clear?”
“Clear,” we both replied.
Izumi floated upward, we stowed the platform and got back on the jetbike, and the three of us descended to the compound, descending past the sky-grasping brambles of the treeline and into the clutches of a man who’d thought himself a god-in-waiting.
Touching down was fine. Making our way to where the ceiling had collapsed was fine, and Yuuka and Izumi confirmed it was fine to head in, that there really were no traps. It all went swimmingly and without incident. Until we hit the net.
Yuuka had mentioned something about it when last the Radiances had been here, the strong impression she’d had that there was something that would tangle Hina up if she moved through fourspace. It hadn’t come to anything then; ruthless and overwhelming firepower had made far too quick work of the cult’s loyalists for us to find out what it did. In the weeks since, it must have fallen into disrepair and shifted out of place, slipping from wherever it had been mounted in the fourth dimension and managing to cross back over into our reality in places where the boundary was thin enough. Now we saw it for what it was: strips of skin, knotted and glued together into a lattice the size of a hospital. Nothing so elegant as a proper series of glyphs; this was unrefined suffering, red ripple given the crudest structure and form. I shuddered to think who all that skin had come from.
Whatever nightmare project it had been for originally, it had now settled across the entire building. Across every corpse, too, and the Radiances had left their fair share.
A lattice, a form, red ripple, and the dead. The same recipe as for the grim miracle that was Ebi, for all its simplicity and haphazard chance—the recipe for a soul.
More urgently, the recipe for a building that wanted to eat us.
Author’s Note:
Meat! Meat! Meat!
Thanks again for the follower milestone. I’ve had some people ask me if the reduced update rate signifies that my passion for the story is fading, but rest assured I am still just as excited to write Sunspot as you guys are to read it, and I intend to stick around for when we hit 10k and beyond. If you want that milestone to come sooner, the best thing you can do for the story’s metrics is take the time to write a review! Alternatively, tell your friends about it! Or join the discord (link below!) Even if you don’t do anything, I still appreciate that you’re here reading!
Thanks to the beta readers as always. This chapter took a while to come together and I actually had to pretty heavily rewrite it, but I think it’s absolutely cleared my standards of quality for the story. I really doubt next chapter will go up this Sunday; I’m gonna say it’ll be next Sunday, and if I can get it done before then, it’ll be up early on Patreon.
Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!
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The April Sunspot fanfiction contest has concluded! We received over twenty thousand submissions, thank you all so much. We managed to dig through to find the best of the very best, and I want to share them with you all on this first day of the month, so I’ve compiled the winners and put them all into one pseudo-chapter. Thank you to the judges: Mia, Emma, Trollmore, Zak, Doomblob, Zooloo, DeleriousSprite, and mirrormatch.
Wait, what do you mean there wasn’t a contest?
4.13 (Abridged) by shrimposition (Mia)
I stared at the complex latticework encasing the fourspace shell of the building. So this was Ebi’s nervous system, a masterwork of ripple woven together… by Ai alone? How could she have created this, as complex as it is, by hand? It would have taken far too long.
Looking over at Izumi’s face, her eyes were wide open in shock and awe. I’m glad to not be the only one amazed by what I see.
“Nooooo, dude, that’s not me. Look down, you’re looking too high up.” Ebi chimed.
What? What does she mean, too high? I lowered my gaze down to see only more and more complex wefts of flame— until my eyes landed on a ceramic plate with a single, solitary… fried shrimp on it?
Izumi’s eyes widened in raw surprise when she saw the tiny shellfish on a plate, lying motionless.
Suddenly, the shrimp stood upright and whiplashed into the air directly in front of my face.
“BOO!” the shrimp screamed.
I fell backwards onto my butt, scrambling backwards in genuine surprise, hands waffling back and forth on the ground as I pulled myself further away. Izumi shuffled closer to try and help lift me up, but was struggling to use her own arms from the sheer shock.
“What the fuck, Ebi.”
“Haha, GOTTEM! Yeah, I’m a fucking fried shrimp, idiot. That’s just the building security system, I control it with that tablet over there.” Her shrimp body lazily wobbled sideways a few times to indicate a tablet with several touchscreen buttons on it. “Actually, you know, I’m fibbing a bit still. BEHOLD, MY TRUE FORM!”
Mechanical whirring and steam began to emanate from the head of the floating shellfish. Izumi and I stared with wide eyes and gaping mouths, genuinely flabbergasted at what was happening. With a smooth motion, the head of the shrimp began to slowly lift up, steam flowing out over the edges. Trumpets blared from tiny speakers, performing a building fanfare as it slowly and ominously pushed open. We waited for the steam to clear, the trumpets dying out with a humorous flop, only to see what seemed to be a ridiculously small grain of fried rice. The goth almost-radiance beside me was groaning slightly, completely motionless, almost assuredly questioning her own existence.
“Yeah, so, Ai kinda sorta fell asleep eating dinner one night. A whole plate of rice. And she was weaving something during dinner like Alice always told her to not fucking do. All the flame went into me when her hand flopped down onto the plate and badaboom, spontaneous sentient and sapient rice flamebearer!” Ebi supplied. “You should’ve seen Ai when I— haha get it— the tiny little rice grain, flew up and slammed into her face and woke her up. Fucking classic.”
We stared.
“This is my mantle, made it myself. I’ll have you know I tried to become Radiance Rock Shrimp, but Alice wasn’t accepting applications.”
Neither of us could gather our willpower to speak up to the solitary grain in the brain of a floating shrimp.
“Hello? Shrimp got your tongue? Paralyzed in awe of my beautiful form? I was joking about the Radiance thing, y’know.”
Izumi finally stirred and asked the most important question. “So… you’re telling me a rice fried this shrimp?”
I was about to prompt Izumi for further thoughts on the matter—her shoulders had gone rather hunched and I suspected this would be a hard ask—when a new voice joined the conversation, one that was very slightly out of breath, as though she’d rushed over because something went wrong. Or, realistically, rushed over before something went wrong, judging by the Australian accent.
“Fuck, Ezza, we gotta get to Macca’s before the ice cream machine breaks! Come on, let’s hop on the jetbike! Oh, hey Ebi.” She tapped her finger right beside her eye and focused for a second. “Holy shit, they even have Szechuan Sauce in stock. We gotta fucking go!”
Sunspot by (Emma aka th3saurus)
A chorus of distant screams woke me from the catnap I had been taking under the canopy of Yuuka’s jetbike. Beyond the noise, I could immediately tell that something was wrong, since I was pretty sure that I had only been out for a few minutes, but it was already completely dark. The air was cold too, and very still.
In front of me, Yuuka was sprawled in a heap. Some kind of black fluid leaking from her crystal eye had formed a puddle around her prone form.
“Porcelain…” she muttered weakly. “I should have known. Why could I not see it until it was too late?”
“Yuuka, what in the hell is going on? Did we get sucked into a pocket dimension again? Is there someone other than Miyoko who can do that?”
“Look up, Ezza. It’s over. It’s all over.”
I looked up.
A trapezoidal shadow hung unnaturally in the sky. Only a slight silvery shimmer around its edges betrayed its true nature. It was a massive celestial object, and it was in front of the sun.
“So we’re in the middle of some kind of unnatural solar eclipse? Did some flamebearer put that there? Did it fall out of fourspace or something?” I desperately inquired.
Yuuka shook her head somberly, which caused a small ripple in the sludge that had gathered around her cheek.
“I don’t think you understand the significance of this. It’s here, and that means everything is over. A secret none of us were supposed to know now stands naked before us, and none can endure its madness.”
“So what is it? Am I allowed to know? Should I have already been able to guess?”
“It’s the Pot, Ezza. The Sun’s Pot.”
I gasped in understanding as the universe winked out of existence around me. It hurt a lot.
*
A pinching sensation in my left hamstring yanked reality back into place, and I yelped as my eyes snapped open.
Yuuka was cackling in the seat in front of me as I tried to work the knot out of my leg.
“You really think a leg cramp is so funny?” I snapped at her, but I couldn’t quite manage to pull off an angry tone through my relief to see the brilliant blue sky around us once again.
Yuuka nodded vigorously, her face split by an unfamiliar toothy grin.
“You’re too much sometimes, Ezza, you know that?”
“So I keep hearing. It was bad enough when it was just my inner demons and five or six dedicated keyboard warriors heckling me.”
“Did you know you talk in your sleep? You were muttering with your squishy little face pressed against the console. Something about the sun and a spot. Please tell me Hina didn’t trick you into trying that whole perineum tanning fad. Actually don’t tell me. I don’t wanna know. Forget I said that.”
We were both quiet for the rest of the flight. Had my social awkwardness rubbed off on Yuuka somehow? I dismissed the thought. She must have just been teasing me and the bit got away from her or something. I don’t talk in my sleep.
The Doomsday Guide to Glyphcraft (trollmore)
“Hina’s gone,” were the words that almost ended the world.
I’d been making a midnight snack in the kitchen when Ai came and got me. I turned and met eyes with her.
“Then it’s time,” I replied.
I finished the omelet I was making, savoring the scent of the bell peppers and onions, then we quickly scarfed down our portions, grabbed a couple of energy drinks, and descended to the lab.
We swept into the room, dropping simultaneously into adjacent seats at the computer bench. I had GWalk up and running in moments. Alice had sent Hina across the globe on a reconnaissance mission, but realistically we only had twelve hours to pull this off.
“You take the chassis,” Ai said. “I’ve got an idea for the gravitational system.”
I grunted in acknowledgement, my fingers already flying over the keyboard.
Visualizing how the fourspace components would work was a little difficult, but I knew I had to start with a good old {MANIFEST}-3 system attuned to orange and scale up. I glanced at the clock. I had time.
*
Bright the vaunted halls of the Spire, brighter still the council chamber where the Vaetna sat in troubled judgment. It was a place of serenity and a place of power, cream pillars and white walls arching over a console at the center of the ten-sided room. It was here that the fate of the world was decided, here that a soft-spoken word could carry the doom of nations.
But as Sani entered the chamber today, he saw those august walls were stained.
“Bri, what the hell,” Heung said from beside him.
“What did I tell you guys?” Bri screeched. She was wrestling with Sahan, trying to keep him away from the source of the… desecration. “This room is perfect for gamer lighting!”
RGB lighting blazed from behind her, turning the chamber into a riot of color. Undecorous. Sani radiated disapproval so hard that one of the LED strips shorted out.
Heung rubbed his chin. “Actually, you know what? You were right, Bri. I dig it.”
Sani shot him a look of profound betrayal. Sahan threw Bri off and launched himself toward the LEDs, but Bri tackled him before he could make it.
Mayari was the next of the Vaetna to arrive, casually jaunting through fourspace to bypass Sani and Heung. They’d stopped right in front of the door, blocking entry.
“Oh, you tried the lights,” she said.
Sahan went flying past her. She absent-mindedly snagged his leg with one hand and tossed him back.
“Now that’s just tacky,” Reggie said from behind Sani.
That was everyone who could be present today. Sani descended to the floor with consternated dignity, not breaking stride when a ballistic Bri bounced off him. He tapped his foot once.
The chamber instantly fell quiet—and white, Bri shoving her ‘gamer lighting’ into fourspace—as the assembled Vaetna each found their customary seat.
“The Spire stands,” they all said in unison. The proceedings had begun.
“Two hours ago,” Sani pronounced, “our early warning systems detected a surge of ripple from Japan.”
A holographic model of the world {MANIFEST}ed from the console in the center of the room. An orange dot blinked in the indicated location, sending waves across the globe.
“Todai,” Bri said, frowning.
Sani inclined his head in acknowledgment. ”As of thirteen minutes ago, we have indications that whatever they’re working on is going critical.”
*
“I mean, it’s Hina,” I argued. “Having a backup cross-spectrum {DISSIPATE} foil isn’t a bad idea.”
There were now three empty energy drink cans on my desk. Ai had been scrupulously disposing of hers. We’d colonized five additional computers just so we could have different components up at the same time, rolling our chairs back and forth as we madly threw the design together.
“Not in theory,” Ai said, rotating the GWalk model. “But with our current design it’ll affect the way the energy flows across the {IMPEL} subsystem. See, we’re right up against the {TRANSMIT} glyph for the red shielding.”
“Why can’t we use a {DIFFERENTIATE}-{REFRACT} on that?” I said. “We can tune it to minimize inter-red interference.”
Ai chewed her lip, mentally adding the components to the system on the screen.
“It’s possible,” she said at last. “Let me double-check the tolerances on that. Your reactor design scares me.”
“Only the best for Hina,” I said with a slightly manic grin.
Sleep deprivation and the high of hyperfixation were getting to us both. Ai giggled.
“So that’s the armor and venting systems handled and you’ve got self-repair almost done,” she said. “This thing should be indestructible against anything less than a Vaetna or two. What’s left, the lasers?”
“Soooo many lasers,” I said, reaching for another energy drink.
*
“What does Todai need with a doomsday weapon?” Mayari asked. “That’s not their ethos.”
“Ezzen must be involved,” Reggie said. “This business with the PCFT might have pushed it to desperation. Not to say I told you so—”
“The past is the past,” chorused Sahan, Bri, and Mayari.
Sani drew their attention to the globe with a gesture, where a giant spike of blue had joined the orange. “It seems clear they were building a weapon and something went wrong. Kat’s patch job should inure us to undesirable contact effects with Ezzen’s Flame, but we’ll need to be careful.”
“Assuming we deploy,” Mayari pushed him.
“We have to,” Bri said. “Look at that spike? They don’t have that handled.”
“We just agreed to let the other Flamebearer organizations shoulder their share of the world’s responsibilities,” Reggie argued.
“Maybe Todai’s shoulders are at capacity,” Heung said with a shrug.
Bri raised one hand above her hand, level with the floor. “Big spike. Biiiiiig spike.”
“All in favor of deployment,” Sani said, raising his hand.
Four to two, the decision was made.
*
We’d skipped past the lesser fabrication equipment and gone straight to the big one in the back of the lab. We fed sheet after sheet of reinforced steel into the fabber, which spat back precision-shaped components covered in carved glyph channels. Ai handled that part. I was already spooling my Flame to power this beast.
We were eight hours into our all-nighter, and there was a real chance of messing something up out of sheer sleepiness. But Hina could be back any moment, so we had to grind this out before she could see what we were doing.
The reactor had a two-hour spin-up time, so I got that kickstarted as soon as possible before assembling the rest of the chassis. The full form of the device was taking shape, at least the parts of it outside fourspace. Hina was going to lose her mind.
It took about an hour and a half for things to go wrong. The reactor finished spin-up early, or so I thought, but when we test-fired the lasers—the lab momentarily became a rave—warning alarms began to sound.
“The gain’s too high,” I realized out loud.
“Ezzen!” Ai hissed. “I should never have okayed that design.”
“It worked on paper?” I said weakly.
“How do we turn it off?”
“It’s fine, it’s fine,” I said, reaching for the safety panel. “It’s just in… here.”
My fingers slid frictionlessly off the panel.
“Um, Ai,” I said. “The shields are on. Like. Over the access panel. How do I turn them off?”
“There’s a switch,” Ai said, color draining from her face. “It’s under the access panel. Why did I do that?”
“Oh,” I said, stomach sinking.
“That reactor’s going to explode, isn’t it.”
“Yep.”
We’d built the defenses on this disaster to stand up to Hina at her most uninhibited. No one else was going to be able to stop the chain reaction—oh god, why had I decided to use pink for this design? I was about to cause a second Dubai right in the middle of the Todai building.
“Ezzen—”
“Calling her now,” I said, pulling out my spare foot to phone Hina.
The call didn’t go through. I looked up at Ai in horror.
*
“There’s only two of them in the building,” Sahan said, accelerating his speech as the Vaetna typically did when operating off-stream. “Their heavy hitter’s gone.”
“Dome’s up,” she said. “Just in time, I caught an outgoing call right when the dome closed.”
“Taking us in,” Sani said, raising his vaet.
To the Todai Flamebearers in the lab, it would have seemed like they simply appeared, four Vaetna surrounding the device where there had been nothing the instant before. They stepped out of the rent Sani had carved in reality, the transition so seamless that it took a good second before Ezzen and Ai reacted to their presence. The Radiance dove into her mantle, whereas the orange-haired Flamebearer gave a shout and summoned its spear.
Sani ignored them, staring at the abomination in the middle of the lab.
“What have you done?” he said.
“Gomen’nasai,” Ai said, bowing repeatedly.
“It’s… April first,” Ezzen said morosely. “It’s Hina’s birthday.”
“We know,” Heung said, holding up a plastic bag in the hand that wasn’t holding his spear. “I brought party hats.”
“Why does Hina’s birthday necessitate this?” Sani demanded.
“Oh, I see the problem,” Bri said, strolling up to the device. “You made a typo here.”
A flick of her vaet, passing through the shields like they weren’t there, altered the flow of energy inside the device. The alarms stopped.
“Wait, wait, I get it,” Heung said. “It’s a fourspace cat tree!”
“With rotating laser emplacements?” Sahan asked skeptically.
“It’s like how cats get excited about laser pointers,” Ezzen said. “Except these ones can melt your flesh. Because Hina, um. She.”
Its face reddened and it avoided eye contact.
Sani pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Just don’t do it again,” he said, adding “I’m going to go lie down” to his teammates.
He teleported out, ignoring the party hat Heung offered him.
When the others returned hours later, Sahan was still wearing his party hat and Bri had lipstick marks on her carapace.
Serenade (Zak)
I call you when I need you, my heart’s a-flame
You come to me, come to me wild and wild
When you come to me
Give me everything I need
Give me a lifetime of promises and a world of dreams
Speak a language of love like you know what it means
Mmm, and it can’t be wrong
Take my heart and make it strong, cutie
You’re shrimply the best
Better than all the rest
Better than anyone
Anyone I’ve ever met
A Very Odd Invasion (Doomblob)
I was enjoying breakfast in the kitchen with Hina and Ai when the alarms went off. I knew that Todai had a security system, but this one was new. Everything went amber, and Ebi’s voice called out over hidden speakers. “Warning. Scar breach eminent. All non-flamefall trained personnel take shelter now.”
After taking her time wrapping and shoving the french toast in the fridge, Hina teleported us to the roof. Alice, Amane, Yuuka, and Izumi all emerged from the stairwell door moments later, in varying states of undress.
I blinked twice, shoving the thought aside. “So if the Scar is breaching, why does everything look fine?” I asked, pointing at the giant tear in the sky that looked the same as it did yesterday.
“That’s a great question, Ezzen,” answered Ai, having pulled an entire laboratory out of her pockets. “Everythings reading correctly, no ripple other than us… Wait, what’s this 3space fold?”
No sooner had she spoken the words than a giant UFO appeared in the sky over Tokyo, blotting out the blue sky and puffy clouds. Amane immediately mantled up, weapons ready, and Hina’s hackles rose as she growled.
“What the fuck?” asked Izumi, frozen.
It was a valid question, as none of us had seen anything like it before. And now there were… concert lights coming from the bottom of it? Was that kpop?
“What the fuck is going on?” echoed Alice, standing mantled but frozen. In response, a giant blue beam appeared out of the bottom of the ship, lowering a figure to the ground.
Yuuka just looked grim. “It is as I foresaw. We must go there, quickly!”
The radiances followed, our mantles speeding the journey to street level. There were actually three people in the all wearing tailored blue outfits with blue hair. They stepped out of the beam as the beat dropped, and struck a pose. “Take us to your cheerleaders.”
The radiances paused, but Izumi remained unphased, immediately performing a perfect back handspring as she mantled into an american cheerleader outfit, landing in a perfect “Y” pose, pom-poms out. “Finally! High school!” she cried.
Yuuka nodded sagely, and then we were cheerleaders.
Trans Day of Relativity (EE Sharp aka Zooloo)
Both sex and horror often started with an eager cry of, “Cutie! There you are!”
I looked up from the mantle-designer-thing, whose lack of specificity and description should’ve been the first clue that something was terribly amiss in the lab. There were boobs in the schematic though, which is why when Hina asked: “What are you doing?” I was able to just look up and point to a whiteboard on the wall next to me. BOOBS CLUB read my wild scrawling in thick dry erase letters.
Yuuka had stopped by and underlined it five times in blue, pink, and white. BOOBS CLUB was my answer to why I’d spent most of last night and this morning slumped in a chair with my hands on a keyboard and my eyes glued to aspirations of a heavy chest.
Hina made a little squeak of happiness. “Ooooh! That’s ironic.”
“Did you mean coincidence?” For some reason, I had thoughts about the meaning of the word irony, which conveniently led me to the subject of coincidences. Someone must’ve felt very clever for putting that together. It was almost like there was someone typing away at the keys of my thoughts, spelling out a strained setup to a joke while praying for a punchline to emerge from the drabble.
I glanced over my shoulder at my suspiciously overdescribed girlfriend. More on that below.
“Maayyybe!” she called, interrupting my thoughts for pacing purposes. “Do you know what day it is?”
She was standing in the door, grinning with lots of really sharp teeth. She looked especially pretty today; bright sapphire eyes shone through an effortless spill of wavy red hair, and if I’d had more coffee, maybe I would’ve been able to describe it better. Or prettier. But she had really great hair, and perky breasts too, and athletic but wide hips. Not too much, not too little. Just wide enough. And if she turned around, I’d even see a nice ass. Yeah, I liked that. She was the best, hottest girl you’ve ever seen. Seriously. And the smile on her face was as radiant as it was mischievous.
I cast around for a calendar on the wall, because that’d be an easier illustration of the day, but then I remembered that the computer clock usually had the date. March 31st. “March 31st,” I echoed.
“It’s the trans day of visibility!” Hina yelled. “It’s your day!”
I paused for a moment, uncertain whether this made sense in a timeline of recent events. Wasn’t today the first of April? Or something else? What had happened recently? Why were we looking forward to today? I had the sense that the setting was coming unmoored. In someone’s eager hands, the planned screws and struts of the narrative were being disassembled. Loose parts rattled somewhere in the back of my head.
“I am trans,” I agreed, mostly for the readers who don’t pay close attention. “But I really don’t want to be visible today.” I gestured at the screen with big tit schematics. “Not unless I look like this.”
Hina pouted for effect. “Aww, cutie!” she sauntered into the room, holding something behind her back. “You don’t have to be visible to anyone but me today.”
She stopped a few steps away, and I swiveled the chair about to face her, finally sitting up. “Thanks, I think?” I chuckled, waiting for whatever surprise she had in mind. All of her girly-creeping was adorable, but for pacing’s sake, I couldn’t imagine delaying the inevitable much longer.
“I have something for youuuu,” she said softly, elongating her last word to really stretch out the moment before the big reveal.
“Show me,” I suggested, aware that I wasn’t worried enough for my normal characterization. I should’ve thought that something was really wrong. This entire sequence of events implied a disaster along an axis that was normally beyond consideration.
“I made you a trans flag!” Hina shouted, pulling it around and holding it up to me proudly. For as long as this paragraph takes to finish, I was filled with awe. The cloth was LM, all magical matter, spooled out and then woven into a self-illuminating textile. Pastel blues, light pinks, and bright whites shone with more energy—even more reality—than the rest of the description around it. Bands of rich color cast about the room like layered searchlights, bathing me in the glow of trans symbolism.
“Amazing,” I muttered. “People have been trying for years to make glowing cloth out of flame,” I overexplained, speculating on things that might not be canonically true.
“I just wove enough flame together to make it glow with ripple!” Hina danced around, trailing the self-illuminating flag, casting a storm of banded trans light across the room in a kaleidoscope scramble.
Then it finally hit me in-character. I already knew the truth as a narrator—mostly because the author had known the Bit all along—but now, all of me understood the truth. “That’s not canon!” I exclaimed. “Ripple colors are just labels. You can’t see them. They don’t actually shine with specific colors. They’re like radiation, and they fuck up everything.” Hopefully, my long dialogue read smoothly while explaining enough. The balance was hard to maintain in this metafictional moment.
“Oooh!” Hina said, continuing to be unaware just long enough for me to draw a conclusion. “So how come the flag is glowing then?”
I hummed thoughtfully. “Well, the entire textual basis of this scenario is falling apart, which sounds like a mixture of high entropy and informational distortion. I think we’re soaked in pink and blue, and the fiction is getting strained to the point of metafiction. Even basic details are no longer as important as the Bit.”
Hina’s sapphire eyes literally shone brighter, and she tossed the flag aside, jumping up and down with joy. “The Bit!” she shouted. “The Bit! The Bit! The Bit!”
I didn’t know how this could happen or why it made any sense, but I did know how to handle the Bit. “Just lean into it. Go with the flow. The Bit is really all that matters.”
Hina skittered over and dropped into my lap, sitting sideways with her legs cast over a rest and her back snuggled into one of my arms. “So what’s the joke? Is it a good one?”
With a lapful of warm girl, I debated describing how hot she was again, but I decided that the Bit really was the most important thing at a moment like this. “I think the audience decides if it’s good, but I think the joke is that pink ripple has made us aware that we’re in a story.”
Hina giggled. “Oh, that’s terrifying. So we’re characters in a book or something?”
I squeezed her gently, considering her words. “It’s terrifying?”
“Yeah! We only exist if someone writes about us. Isn’t that wild? We’d stop existing if the author ran out of ideas or decided that we’d done enough.”
“I’m not sure that’s how stories work,” I suggested. “They might be indexical. Pointing to something real in a totality—”
She tapped my nose with a finger. “No philosophy!” she ordered. “That’s not the Bit!”
“Fine, fine,” I said. “Assume that stories don’t have a special relationship to some kind of broader reality. Assume that we only exist in the act of communication. Then we’d be relative—in the technical sense of the word. We’d be dependent on a reader and an author for our existence. If either ceased to be, then we would never be written, or never read, and we’d cease to exist.”
“That seems right to me,” Hina muttered. All smiles were gone. Mortality was the subject of our text.
I continued drearily, spelling out the nature of our doom. “We live in a world that is always about to end, seconds from now. In the real world, a dog barks. Someone calls a name. The reader looks up from this, stops thinking about us, and it’s all over. Not even death. Just nothing. Nothing at all.”
Hina made a thoughtful sound, which was good, because she was about to finally lean into the Bit after I’d failed to vibe with the setup of this short story. She twisted in the chair, on my lap, using her hyperdimensional powers to face you, the reader, who is looking down at the interface where these words exist. A screen, a page, it doesn’t matter. Discard the past tense. She is looking out at you, right now, speaking directly to you. Can you hear her? Is her voice clear to you? Beautiful?
“Reader,” she says seductively, “If I took off all my clothes, right now, and I did something really nasty to my cutie—I mean all the stuff in your favorite fetish, all the stuff that hammers the buttons in your brain, the stuff so hot that it stresses you out because you find it hot—all that impossible sex and whatever else—would we get to exist after the story is over for a little longer? In your head? For like, an afternoon?”
I’m frozen at this moment. The metafiction is nearly at its limit. The writer can’t even guess at what you like, but at least I can finally see the Bit, and I can lean into it. I can make one last bid to exist in your head—along with this world—just one day, one hour, even one minute more. I’m looking where Hina is looking. “That’s a good idea,” I say to you. “Imagine it, Reader. A whole afternoon in the pink, doing whatever it is you’d really like for us to do. All the really weird stuff. Will we exist? If the fantasy ends with an orgasm like a period, will you think of us in the afterglow? Maybe pen us down in a fanfic of Sunspot, branching out our world one more step? Will you get horny to help us stave off oblivion?”
Does that work? Do we still exist? Ah, wait. There’s not much time left in this story. The pink level must eventually go down, and I’ll stop being aware of the mechanics of fiction soon.
That means Hina and I will be together, in the tower, surrounded by the aftermath of your fetish. If someone shows up, it’ll be super embarrassing, but maybe you’ll think that’s hot too. I don’t know. I’m not you.
Too bad though. I might’ve been able to see what you like, explore it for you, but time is running out. Whatever happens next isn’t in this chapter, because this next sentence, just below?
This is the cliffhanger.
Yeenus Deletus (DeleriousSprite)
A wail shook the tower down to its very foundations at six forty-nine AM. Alarms blared, mantles were mantled, and a certain glyph engineer’s bedroom door was soon torn asunder as a stompy bootkicked it in.
“EZZA!” Yuuka screamed while rushing to where it was blearily rubbing it’s eyes at it’s computer rig, “Your godforsaken kemono girlfriend just fucking deleted my Stardew Valley save file!”
“Bwuh?” Ezzen replied eloquently as it took their housemate in, a bit shell shocked from not only the scream, the destroyed door, and the shouting, but also the fact that Yuuka was in not a stitch of clothing besides her stompy boots.
With a roll of her eye, she spat out an explanation, “I was hate-fucking her and when she blew her hyeenis load, it shorted out my switch and my three-hundred-fifty-seven hour save file in Stardew Valley was corrupted!”
Ezzen blinked up at her in confusion, “…and what does that have to do with me?” The color drained from it’s face, “you don’t want me to-”
“No you fucking ding-dong,” Yuuka replied while her pigtails shivered in rage, “you’re going to glyph up a spell to recover my save file so that I don’t have to deal with buying a return scepter again or touch that useless cunt of a mayor’s underwear!”
There was a long pause as everything sunk into Ezzen’s addled, sleep deprived brain. As he opened his mouth to argue that, ‘no, that’s literally not how anything works’, Yuuka chimed in with one last addition.
“And so I can hate-fuck your girlfriend without actually wanting to kill her!”
“But Yuu-chaaaaaan!” a small voice whined from outside the door, “that makes everything even hotterrrrrrr!”
Yuuka’s eye looked as if she had gazed into the abyss, “Ezza, we NEED to cook.”
Ezzen pinched the bridge of it’s nose and sighed, “you have to buy me like three times my weight in starburst jellybeans, and then you have to make a video gag about the lego city river thing.”
“Deal.”
A few minutes later, a small procession from Ezzen’s room, to one of multiple meeting rooms in the penthouse had been made. Assurances to the other Radiances that everything was mostly okay and to go back to bed were given alongside the explanation that Ezzen would be attempting to (Yuuka glared at it until it declared that it would recover it, even if it had to perform surgery on a grape) restore Yuuka’s save file. Which garnered several worrying expressions from the other three Radiances.
Fully engrossed in its work due to the promise of the good jellybeans (not the crap they make at Jelly Belly) Ezzen dove into the theory as day turned to night and then back into day. Barely pausing as Hina force it to eat a famichicki sandwich or three.
But the sauce was deep and Ezzen was thoroughly lost in it.
As day once again turned into night, a different foot kicked the meeting room door down, startling Yuuka awake to find a royally pissed Alice standing in the doorway, with Heung the Rock Johnson standing behind her.
“Yuuka, why are the Vaetna demanding we stop interfering with the laws of causality?”
The sudden scraping of a chair drew all of their attending to a VERY frazzled looking Ezzen who was shivering with excitement in front of a warbling white orb.
“IT WORKS!” the engineer declared through clenched teeth as it’s efforts paid off, “IT WORRRRRRKS!!”
“That would be the thing my spear needs to poke,” Heung drawled as he shoved his way into the room, “also the reason why your save file was gone is because that wasn’t your switch user profile.”
Yuuka blinked for a moment before going pale, “so you mean-”
“Miss Takehara’s six-thousand hour Stardew Valley save file is what was truly lost.”
Discord (mirrormatch)
Ai jolts awake at her desk, her bleary eyes greeted by the sharp gleam of OLED and the scent of energy drink. Through the blur of awakening, she notices a Slack ping, from Alice.
“Alice: Ai, we don’t have an April fool’s story with you in it, yet. You need to do something funny or stupid before the end of the day.”
Ai mulls it over; she’s really tired, and she still has to chase down the slicing bug with her 3D printing bed’s software. And her lecture at 5…
She hastily edits a ping icon into the penthouse discord, and gets to decluttering the wall of empty cans.
Author’s Note:
You may have figured out by now that there was no contest. Happy April 1st! Thank you for bearing with this nonsense; the betas and discord server mods had a lot of fun with this. You’ll get an actual chapter tomorrow, don’t worry! One where I acknowledge that we’ve hit 5000 readers between RR and Shub!
And also chag pesach sameach to those who celebrate, including me! That’s the reason this happened at all; I have been too damn busy with festivities to lock down the chapter tonight as I’d hoped, and the date was serendipitous to do something silly instead. We might run an actual fanfiction contest sometime, one with some manner of actual prize.
For anybody who is still annoyed, please accept an apology art of Ai by myoodles to tide you over until tomorrow’s chapter:
Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!
Join the Patreon to support the story and read chapters three weeks ahead of public!
Hot water streamed down my face as I scrubbed vigorously with a wet washcloth. It passed over my eyelids and along the contours of my nose, with special attention toward the most oily and sweaty crevices near the corners of my eyes and nostrils. I had to give myself permission to go to town on this towel; I was used to owning just two little rags for this, neither washed frequently enough. The penthouse, by contrast, had an infinite supply of fresh, clean laundry, one of Hina’s self-imposed duties to the women she loved. And me.
I was cleaning off the sweat and filth that had accumulated while I’d dreamt up a meeting with the Vaetna. Sweat had matted my nightclothes to my skin to such a degree of crustiness that it might have actually evoked Vaetna-carapace euphoria if not for the horrible oiliness and the stomach-churning man-stench of my body odor; none of the girls had commented on the latter, but if I’d been able to smell it, then they also certainly would have, and that amplified the physical unpleasantness even further. My suggestion of a pressure washer had been a joke, but only half of one, driven by a very real and urgent need to reset all the biological membranes and fluids and films of my body, inside and out. Now I’d gotten a liter of water in me and several more scoured over my outer layer and my skin didn’t feel like sticky death, and I knew that that was about as well as I’d be able to do without being opened up like Hina and given a physiologically impossible deep cleaning. I imagined being utterly disassembled, down to each individual component, and each given their own thorough deep cleaning. Rust remover and an ultrasonic bath and careful polishing, or whatever equivalents might be possible for those pieces of the human animal I regrettably was.
Short of that, bathing really did help, as they’d said it would, a lesson that I’d always known but had struggled to implement before coming to Todai. My current bout of tourist activity was a far outlier for my lifestyle, after all; before now, spear training had been pretty much my only meaningful exercise, and that was merely gilding on the otherwise disastrous state of my self care. It had been far, far too long since I’d seen a dentist, for example. Hina had me brushing my teeth now, at least, but little things like that had slipped through the cracks for years and years as I’d slowly decayed, escaping into the logical brainspace of GWalk submenus and the companionship of the chatroom instead. I was deeply ashamed in hindsight of how that had simply become the default of my life, unbathed and unshaven and sickly pale. The only times I’d seriously cleaned up were for my annual check-ins with the PCTF-sponsored aid group that paid my disability checks, and even my efforts in that had been slipping as of last year’s. My final one, now that I thought about it. Strange.
But even compared against the worst of all that time, and even with my recent spate of excursions, I had never felt more physically rotten than I had right before getting into the shower. The steam-hazy, fittingly dreamlike inner chamber of my unit bath provided barely enough solace to make it tolerable. It went deeper than the general nastiness that had accumulated on my skin, manifesting outwardly in how I’d been feeling my face and tripping over my tongue while recounting the dream.
Many old sensations were odd. The bridge of my nose, the for-some-reason-not-orange fluff of my eyebrows, these long-familiar—if resented for how they cast my face as masculine—features of my facade felt freshly alien under my hands. I couldn’t stop seeing my nose at the bottom of my vision, and my tongue felt large in my mouth even after rectifying the mild dehydration. It was a small mercy that the warm washcloth glided smoothly along my jaw and neck with no stubble to catch on, but I was still acutely aware of how it was all soft, squishy meat, how my gut was heavy with organs and blood.
My form in the dream had felt far more graceful. Maybe that wasn’t quite the right word; I had felt optimized…for what? For killing, even though I at least consciously still felt guilt for what we had done at Thunder Horse? It must have been the Vaetna’s presence, or at least my expectation of it, that had done that. My subconscious—and possibly also my Flame, insofar as the two were even separate—had wanted to live up to their great violence, even before witnessing the paranatural, divine truth that they were their vaet in the most literal sense. And I must have taken notes from Amethyst in the mix of the mechanical and monstrous, accenting it with Vaetna-flavored white carapace and a distinct sharpness to my shape, exemplified most in the talons.
That all felt like a fairly natural extension of the revolutions in my identity that I’d had since being flametouched a month prior. The rest was more vexing, especially comparing further against Amethyst: the breasts had been conspicuously present, a far more pronounced signifier of femininity than the gemstone mecha’s mere tight waist, and of course I’d practically had a cloak of my nigh-incandescent hair, which was notable because Amane eschewed simulating her beautiful, glossy locks altogether. She had a near-total split between her attractive, delicate and cultured human form and the war machine, whereas I seemed to be blurring those lines in a way that seemed not very Vaetna. Then again, she wasn’t very mahou shoujo, as I understood it—though that understanding was almost as shallow as it got.
Similarly, the talons were an extension of my foot prosthetic, I figured. Maybe the spear-foot, as silly as it had been in concept, had been onto something? I was stripped of the stopgap one right now; it wasn’t rated for the shower. It really had served me well, given that apparently Ai had thrown it together in two days of design. She was supposed to present to me the integrated prototypes soon, with the translator and other tentative features. The burn had been healing up very well, perhaps preternaturally well, and even without the pain-dampening effects I was doing just fine. If you accounted for the fact that I was benefiting from in-house access to state-of-the-art prosthetic technology, I really had come out the other end of my first real use of blood magic only a little worse for wear.
So perhaps a little more couldn’t hurt—that thought came from the part of me that was still unmoored from my flesh. I countered with the assertion that I was putting too much stock in a form the back of my brain had cooked up on short notice, influenced by my especially long time in the doll and the impact of Kat’s reappearance just before. That was what I told myself to dissuade any pervading thoughts about performing just a little blood magic, as a treat. I knew that was unreasonable; short of entirely switching into a mantle or the doll, any magical solutions to realign my sense of self with my flesh were deeply, deeply inadvisable.
Inadvisable, but so very tempting. It took over an hour in the shower to soothe my aching soul enough to assure myself that I wasn’t going to take the leap without precautions or medical backup. I needed to be careful, think through which parts of my shape earnestly felt like me, separate the signal from the noise—how did Asuka, the slender anime waifu, fit into this Vaetna-Amethyst fusion and its decidedly more prominent breasts than hers? What was the ideal Ezzen, these days? I resolved to finish my mantle to trial and refine everything, ask Amane for insight on that meat-mantle divide, and of course consult Alice and Hina for their experiences in discarding and reshaping their flesh. Also, maybe they or the others would enjoy showing me some of the classic mahou shoujo anime, or Evangelion, just to clarify that aspect of it all for myself. It also just sounded nice, which I was getting better at admitting to myself.
All of that was necessary preparation, as I saw it. When I crossed that bridge for real, I would know what lay on the other side, and I would do it right.
I should have known that Izumi was going through the same thoughts—only she had access to true escapism, and as such, she’d let the problem fester until it had hit the breaking point last night and she’d passed out. I didn’t actually see her for the rest of that night, having been coaxed directly from my bed to the shower, but Hina popped in a few minutes before I was done to give an update—directly into the stream of water and naked, which raised some fascinating questions about how exactly she had been caring for her assassin-with-benefits.
Like me, the dual-bodied partygirl was suffering from acute dysmorphia, which she both treated and intensified by using her mantle continuously until it crashed like a computer gone too long without a restart. Unlike me, hers was exacerbated by truly terrible self-care habits ever since we’d driven away Sugawara’s specter, even worse than my own. She had gone to considerable lengths to ignore her original body’s existence, neglecting its well-being entirely in the process. Apparently that body had barely moved in weeks and was simply not getting enough nutrition.
That felt like my fault. I’d failed to follow through on my promise of upgrading her simulated taste buds; it was one of those earnest “let me help you with that” sentiments that fell through the cracks, voluntary responsibility that faded from memory in the span of one night. And the consequences were dire: outside of when we’d shared meals on the town, she’d apparently been subsisting on one or two nearly-pure-sugar convenience store treats a day and nothing else. The Kimura body was woefully vitamin deficient, gaunt and pallid and atrophied. The final form of the room-rotting I’d inflicted upon myself for years, amplified by a level of escapism available only to a flamebearer.
It was untenable. She was alive and stable thanks to an IV drip in the medical wing on the eighteenth floor, but that was a band-aid solution. Hina reported that she’d woken up, rebooted her mantle, and ditched the flesh again as quickly as she could.
The next morning, I forced myself out of bed with the intent of helping her fix her sense of taste as a first step toward at least keeping her body self-sufficient—alone, as I’d slept nearly sixteen hours and the Radiances were long gone. I spent a few minutes checking my phone, finding that I had two hundred chatroom pings—scrambling for the news informed me that in response to the PCTF’s proclamation of intent to kick the sandcastle, the Vaetna had made a big jenga tower of every nuclear submarine in the North Atlantic. The rest was all just fallout from the stream. My friends wanted to know what it was like having a Flame from the future.
The short answer, which I didn’t have the energy to communicate, was that it mostly consisted of loathing the fact that my bones were inside me. I eventually broke the spell by managing to roll over and move my joints enough for my personhood gauge to improve from “mineral tree with meat leaves and cursed with consciousness” to “tired guy,” which advanced to “tired enby shellcreature” after convincing myself that brushing my hair and putting on a hoodie and mask would help. That was enough to get my self-actualization to turn over and my motivation came rumbling to life, and I {AFFIX}ed my prosthetic and went to see the state of Izumi’s body for myself.
Instead, as I walked toward the penthouse’s upper elevator doors and peered over the railing, I saw her actual body—that is, the mantle—sitting at one of the high chairs bordering the gargantuan kitchen island, doomscrolling some social media or another, and generally looking like a million bucks as usual, which I now understood to be on loan from her main body’s health. She waved me down, and wasted no time once I came into earshot.
“Help me get rid of it.”
“Your…body,” I replied pointlessly while navigating the last few steps.
“Yes. I can’t go back to it. I’ve been thinking that I could do what Takehara-san did, and change its shape, turning it into this form instead,” she gestured at her own figure, “or we could simply find a way to move my mind and Flame into this mantle permanently and get rid of the biological body completely. Your thoughts?”
I had a sinking feeling that she would brook no half-measures. “My thoughts are that those are both…really risky, with the Peacies breathing down our necks. You don’t really care about that, do you?”
“Our fox told me you would help me.” There was an edge of nervousness in her voice. “Because you understand what it’s like. Everything becomes suddenly wrong. I don’t want to be that. I don’t want to be him.”
I took a deep breath, looked at her with all the empathy I could muster. “I’m helping you no matter what, yeah. There’s all the, y’know, consequences, politics, all that stuff, whether we or Hikanome need the public figure of Kimura to stick around. But that’s not my wheelhouse—all I’m really good at is magic. That’s what they pay me for,” I managed to joke. They didn’t pay me so much as give me unlimited access to company funds, and I’d hardly even done anything resembling work. “And I will help you with magic, to the fullest extent I know how. Just…can we take a step back from sanguimantic options for a second? And can I sit down?”
She directed a pointed look at my corona of orange hair, freshly brushed over my shoulders. Then she nodded toward one of the seats next to her, extending a delicate shin to shove it out a bit so I could gingerly hop up.
I sighed. “Okay, yeah, I’ve gotten off pretty light when it comes to sanguimancy. My Flame seems to like it when I do st—desperate things to my body. I don’t know if yours is the same. Alice is evidence that transition by incredible gore is a thing the Flame will permit, but that’s…derived from believing really hard in mahou shoujo? Is that the mechanism?” That didn’t sound right, but I didn’t know enough to dispute it. “Do magical girls transform by horrific blood explosion in the shows?”
“…Have you seen a magical girl anime?” She looked vexed. “You’ve been here for a month, living with them, and they haven’t shown you Precure?” She pronounced it in Japanese. “Or, with how this new magic is so…murderous, at least Madoka?”
“No. I mean, I know, um, ‘goretastic’—Hina’s words, not mine—transformations aren’t the norm, it’s usually all sparkles, but since Alice seems to really be into the whole look, I kind of assumed there was some kernel of truth there? Or, if not a kernel, at least, like, something obvious to reference.”
“No, it’s not how it usually works,” she confirmed. “Not the classic ones she loves, at least. She knows that her mahou shoujo-pposa, the one she shows to the world and makes the others live, is fake. Or, not fake,” she corrected guiltily. “Real, because she believes in it, but the Light does not believe in love and purity. It is fire and blood, and I don’t know if it would be as kind to me as it would to her. She is young, and I am…old, Ezzen.” Izumi, gorgeous and trendy twenty-something, looked tired. “That matters to whatever I will do to get rid of that body. Most flamebearers are much younger than me. The Flame wants potential, it wants change, and when I am in that body I feel like I have neither.”
I had no emotional frame of reference for that. I’d decayed my way through my teens, procrastinating life itself, justifying it with the back-burner knowledge that I had plenty of time, that when I finally got off my ass and did something with my life it would be when I still had several good decades ahead of me. I’d still felt like I had infinite potential.
“You’re not that old,” was the first thing that came out of my mouth. That was my earnest reaction, recollected from when we’d spoken at the barbecue. Kimura had come off as stately, not elderly or doddering, and had looked legitimately good for somebody over fifty at the time. If she was even over fifty—I realized I wasn’t sure. It was very difficult to have a conversation about identity when you knew so little about the other person. I resisted the urge to pull out my phone to raid Wikipedia, and instead, the second thing I said was more thought out and empathetic. “Okay, um, let me rephrase that. Why do you feel like you’re old? What was your life like before you were a flamebearer? Uh—I don’t know if there’s a delicate way to ask, so: were you trans before the age of magic? Sorry, I’m realizing those aren’t actually the same question.”
Izumi gave this a long moment’s consideration, staring at her pale and perfect hands. When she spoke, there was regret in her voice. “Transgender and transsexual and those were not concepts that I knew when I was young. In Japan, it’s only a thing people learned about recently. Looking back…yes, I think I was, but I didn’t have a word for it. In high school and college I was a crossdresser, an otokonoko. I wanted to be a girl, but didn’t have…permission? I was a coward. I felt like I would have to throw away my whole life for it to be real, and in the 2000s, when I turned thirty, I just…stopped trying.”
“Until the Flame,” I prompted.
“Until the Flame,” she agreed. “Hi kara no megumi. A blessing from fire—the original kanji was hi as in fire, now it’s hi as in the sun,” she explained. “Branding. For us, for me and Hongo-kun and Miyoko-chan and him, we were suddenly able to do new things, to be new things. And I was a coward, again. Izumi came back to life, but she was secret. I was still Kimura. Still a coward. And then…and then…” she winced and physically recoiled from something only she could see.
I knew what she couldn’t say. Sugawara had essentially blackmailed her with her second identity, pressganged her into his service, and then driven those barbs of control deeper and deeper through magic. It occurred to me that his ability to pillage her dreams had been a twisted evolution of the same phenomenon that allowed me to speak with Holton and the Vaetna. She’d never spoken about the full extent of his control over her, how far it had extended beyond that in magical terms, but knowing what had happened to Yuuka let me fill in the most grievous violations for myself. Izumi’s body and soul had been defiled and desecrated.
No wonder she wanted to part ways utterly with that part of her life. To Izumi, the Kimura body represented failure to self-actualize and memorialized such comprehensive abuse—I kicked myself for ever suspecting that she’d betray us. Amethyst had been right about that; we’d made a ride-or-die ally that night when we’d torched Sugawara and incinerated his magical hold over her.
“Getting rid of that body is the only way you’ll feel truly free from him,” I surmised. “Fuck me, that’s dark, sorry. And presumptuous.”
“It’s correct.”
That immediately brought up a new question. Somebody as violated and as capable as Izumi ought to have been digging two graves and then embarking on an epic quest of vengeance, not partying. “Wait, then if he’s the root cause of all this, why haven’t we gone and found him? Finished the job? He’s still out there, isn’t he? We laid those traps, but…”
“He is already dead.”
“In the sense that he doesn’t have a heartbeat? Yeah, I guess. But like, that was definitely an evil ghost we fought. Are you saying that the thing that escaped from us really isn’t him anymore, magically speaking?”
“I am saying that I wanted him gone, and now he is. Sugawara, the Savior, the founder of Hikanome, the man who raped me and a thousand others, he is dead. That ghost cannot lead any more monsters, and he is not inside me anymore. To me, that means he is dead. What is left is an echo. It has to be. He cannot survive that as himself, it wouldn’t be—fair,” she sighed, slumping forward to rest her forehead on the countertop. “It would not be fair. So he is dead. Does that make me a coward still?”
“Oh,” I whispered, a heavy sadness lodging itself in my chest. I wasn’t going to point out how her reasoning was very motivated, how the thing that was out there could probably still inflict evil regardless of whether or not it was Sugawara in a philosophical sense—she clearly already knew all that. I only answered the direct question, as honestly as I could. “Maybe? You’d rather destroy your past self than destroy him—or your present self, rather, because even if it’s not your body, it’s still the body keeping you alive,” I reminded her. Then I hesitated. “Can I pose a question?”
Still face-down, she motioned for me to go ahead.
I took a deep breath. “…Do you want to be done with all this flamebearer stuff?” For myself, such a notion was absurd, but Izumi’s path was different from mine. “Like, let’s say you do destroy your old body and assume this form permanently. Given the choice, would you rather abandon all VNT activities, or even your Flame completely, somehow? A clean break that lets you abdicate responsibility for Japan’s future and so on?”
That made her sit back up. “No.”
“Quick answer.” And the one I had been expecting.
She leaned back in her chair and stared across the kitchen at nothing in particular. “I thought about it every night he was in my head. Leaving all of this, starting over as a normal, young girl. And perhaps, if we had killed him the first time, four years ago, I might have done that. But—we did not, and I remained his pawn, both from magic and because…I am dutiful,” she sighed. “To Hikanome’s leaders and its people. With him gone I now feel like I can leave that behind. But to Japan, as the PCTF prepare to eat us? To you and those beautiful ones who are going to show them that we are the bitterest poison? I am loyal to that. I won’t leave. I will party like there’s no tomorrow, because I have lost too much of my youth already, but when Toudai goes to war, I will be there with you.”
“Not a coward, then. Simple as.” I felt very clever.
Izumi’s head swiveled, owl-like, to face me. “Oh. Yes, well, ah, when you put it that way—”
“But also, it’s not cowardice to, like, chill out and party for a while, right? I mean, you’ve been through the fucking wringer in a way that blows all my shit completely out of the water. You were pretty much trying to convince me of that a few days ago. I think it’d only be cowardice to avoid dealing with whatever remains of Sugawara if he was actually out there hurting people right now, which he’s not…as far as I’m aware. I don’t keep up with Japanese news—area of growth for me, under the circumstances—but I think I’d still have heard about hauntings or more random ripple stuff via the Radiances, if it was happening.”
Izumi blinked. “You’re very eloquent when you try, Ezzen.”
That shut me down hard. I physically recoiled into my hoodie a bit. “Um, uh. No. What? Back on topic. We started this convo with you asking me to help annihilate your body downstairs. Whatever happens with Sugawara, I intend to help you do that much. So, enough philosophizing about death and cowardice,” I declared. “There’s a lot of questions about the mechanism that would take time to research. I assume you’ve done some of your own already? You laid out those two paths, metamorphosis or transmigration, if I wanted to give them fancy names.”
“I have ideas for both. No diagrams.”
“Because sanguimancy?”
“…Maybe. What did Brianna tell you? ‘Magic is more than glyphs?’ She is right, and I have some ideas.”
“…Okay…” I wasn’t sure where this was going. “Alice is qualified to tell us about the metamorphosis version, or at least as qualified as we’re going to find, I imagine. I think Sky did something similar. But, uh, the transmigration version, fully pulling your soul and Flame out of your body…the only thing that’s coming to mind would be what Sugawara did to himself, and we just established that you consider that, like, actual death, no continuity of identity or whatever people call it. It’s fundamentally different from using a mantle, so I don’t think the Radiances would be much help.” I blinked. “Oops, you said you had ideas.”
She grinned thinly. “And now I don’t need to say them.” As I half-performatively reeled from that, she rapped her fingernails along the countertop. “We will have to speak to Miyoko. She knows souls and death better than anyone else in Japan.”
That sobered me immediately. “Oh. Right. My dad.”
“Yes. I believe we’ve put that off as long as we can—the meeting of Japan’s flamebearers, my trial, it must happen soon.”
“How soon?”
“I don’t know.”
“That…sucks!” I decided. “I’m going to sound like an idiot now: could this meeting be an email instead? Like, with proper infomantic encryption, all that good stuff?”
Izumi hesitated for a long moment, genuinely caught off guard. I had the sense that much of the interaction between Japan’s VNTs was steeped in ritual—but none of those rituals could be more than seven years old, when you thought about it. They were hand-me-downs from culture, fictional expectations about being Important Magical People that were much older than any of their organizations or magic itself. And those didn’t have to actually reflect reality, did they? I would never begrudge Alice her mahou shoujo when it came to her guiding principles in life, but for actually getting stuff done, surely we could do better.
“Not the whole meeting,” Izumi eventually said. “But for my body, yes.”
And just like that, she sent the email. It took about five minutes, flurries of typing separated by long spans of sitting and thinking, then deleting. When she put down her phone, she looked a little sick. “I am still a coward. I sent that as Kimura.”
“She doesn’t know? Wait, what does she think you—either of your ‘you’s—have been up to since the barbecue?”
“…We’ll find out.”
“Actually, you won’t,” came a new voice from overhead. Ebi’s, from the speakers. “First of all, that email was not encrypted enough, so be grateful I sniped it. And I don’t feel like letting you debase yourself like that, Izumi, come on. But more importantly, if you want to ask about souls without bodies, I’m right here.”
Author’s Note:
Sometimes you really do just have to let the characters talk to each other until change happens. Ez and Izumi are two peas in a pod; it’s really no wonder Hina’s into both of them. And boy oh boy, Ebi sure is coming out swinging. Did you miss her? I missed her!
Apologies again for the delayed chapter. I was sick! And then executive dysfunction (and Deep Rock Galactic) got its wretched claws into me. I think the next chapter of Sunspot will skip this Sunday and instead go up the following Sunday, March 23, so I can give myself the time I need to write ahead a little bit. Thank you for your patience, it means the world to me.
Thank you also to the beta readers who helped me navigate what this chapter should be doing. They also helped me refine the next commission — if all goes well, I should be able to release it on the update after we hit 5000 followers between RR and Shub! It’s Amethyst and Heliotrope. I’m very excited.
Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!
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“Out of the gutter, kemono,” Yuuka sighed without any real bite. After I’d finished my recap, she had seen fit to drop out of her mantle, from skirt and frills back to frumpy hoodie and shorts. “What I’m hearing—and seeing, though who knows if that means anything anymore—is that we’re on our own. As usual.”
Amethyst chirped a reply above her, looming as the team’s centerpiece as they gathered around my bed. I was sat propped up against a pillow that cushioned my back from the headboard. Hina was the only one on the bed properly with me, lying at the other end and kicking her legs up in a distracting rhythm of soft pwuf thumps as her heels fell back to the bedspread. She’d been very good when I’d stumbled into my room and declared I was going back to sleep for something extremely important, but I guessed that sometime during my dream-meeting she’d been informed that I was heading off the threat of imminent Vaetna combat, because when I’d woken she’d been a bit grumpy. Understimulated, maybe.
“We are enough.”
Nobody contested Izumi’s use of “we.” She stood a bit off from the proper Radiances, also ready for war by definition of what she was. Not a Radiance in any official capacity, and in fact I wasn’t sure what the public status of Izumi the assassin or Kimura the major cult leader was supposed to be, but at least at an unofficial level she’d naturally slipped into being the team’s sixth magical girl. Or seventh, or eighth, depending on how you counted myself and Ebi—the point was that, as a mantle wielder who shared their collective loathing for the great machine to which Sugawara had fed Amane, she was welcome to hear what I had conveyed about the Vaetna and join in on the conversation. She’d swapped her look from the party girl outfit to the dark assassin, hair bound up in a long ponytail. Her eyes glinted with readiness as she looked out the window of my room, watching for what was coming; less gleeful and anticipatory than Hina, but prepared to act in the same vein.
The other Radiances stood at my side, mantled up like they were ready for war, unwilling to entirely take Yuuka’s cue to stand down despite her precognition. Like Izumi, they were in their low-profile forms, the shapes they’d used to take out Sugawara’s hospital-turned-compound. Their signature bright colors and shapes had given way to muted tones and more uniform silhouettes, geometry and flair simplified to fit more complex lattices; all the cosmetic visual and sound effects had been tossed in favor of a suite of infomantic countermeasures and better maneuverability. They were still more garnished than Izumi’s mundane murder outfit, unwilling to wholly forgo the skirts and sleeves and hairstyles that said “Radiance,” but many of the contours that remained were stealthily practical, there to improve radar invisibility or acting as resonance structures in the LM that made it more resilient.
When I’d first paged through the diagrams for these configurations of the mantles, I’d experienced some envy about the cleverness on display, the interdisciplinary engineering and real experience that went into those features. Right now I was mostly just grateful to have that on my side. Was Izumi right that it was enough?
Radiance Opal leaned against her crystalline girlfriend’s thigh, thinking deeply, not answering immediately. Ai was mantled as well, the first time I’d seen this variation of hers; it was relatively straightforward, mostly distinguished from her teammates by green accents, a less-frilly skirt, and a much longer ponytail than her usual, almost a match for Izumi’s except for the tiny bit of cosmetic flair in how it flowed gently from a nonexistent breeze. “On our own,” she agreed. “So what does ‘enough’ mean? Enough for what?”
“It means we fight!” Hina asserted, punctuating it with another leg thump. It was adorable, but belied frustration. “If the Vaetna don’t want to do stabbies, fine. I’m not mad, just disappointed. But I still think the Peacies can’t really say no to a fight. We could just go and do what we did to Sugawara, kill ‘em quick. We can.”
She’d already tried to exit my room via the balcony to do just that less than two minutes into my explanation of what the Vaetna had shared. And then again two minutes later. She’d only agreed to stop when Ai had gently suggested she busy herself getting me some more water and towels; it turned out that my body had been working hard, perspiring through the clothes I’d thrown on to sleep most comfortably as quickly as possible. I’d been parched and needed to stop to sip water every few words, and even now that I was somewhat rehydrated, my tongue still didn’t quite sit in my mouth right.
“We can, in theory,” Alice allowed, “but kill who is the question, and not one I think we should be answering tonight. They’re not going to move tonight for sure—” she looked meaningfully toward Yuuka at that, who nodded confidently, “—and I would really love to get some sleep and actually plan.”
“No—hmgh,” I cleared my throat, “no qualms about the murder?”
Normally I would have qualified the question a bit more, with an acknowledgment that I’d already seen their willingness to spill Peacie blood and this was mostly just to confirm whether they were still willing to do that on their home turf. But my throat didn’t feel up to the challenge, and besides, the nuance got through regardless.
“Yes. Well, I’ve got a spot of worry about the logistics, but mahou shoujo defend Japan, when it’s called for. And at this point it is called for, I’m not seeing any other way out of this, as it sounds like you’d be turned away from the Gate if you wanted to run off to the Spire.”
Hina sat up, indignant on my behalf. “Ally, you don’t seriously think—”
“I might,” I interrupted, rubbing my face. Everything felt a bit off; I found my nostrils objectionable. “Given the choice. If it meant bringing you all out of the line of fire.”
Hina pounced over onto me in a hug. “Mmn. Don’t do that. We like you here.”
“Does Japan?” I asked, raising my hand to indicate I’d continue after I took a sip of water. “I mean, civilians, yeah? Or the government? Just seems to me that Sky—um, Jason, to you guys, probably—put the whole country in a bind by bringing me here. If I wasn’t…” I trailed off, shaking my head, unsure of how to express what I was feeling. I’d had a nice few weeks of being coaxed out of feeling like a burden to the team, but I’d always held onto the subconscious safety net of being able to flee to the Spire if things got too hot for the Radiances, which would hopefully ameliorate the brewing conflict. With that out of the picture, dread and guilt were settling in. “It’s bad,” I tried.
“It has always been bad,” Izumi countered.
Amethyst warbled a sharp noise, heavily filtered Japanese that sounded like agreement. Alice looked up at her, listening, then translated for me. “If you weren’t here, we’d still have eventually had this showdown. The Peacies hate what we represent—the Vaetna said so themselves, if I’m understanding you correctly. We’re not under their thumb, and for that, they would have tried to destroy us as soon as it became convenient for them. Instead, they’re feeling the pressure to do it fast. Not tonight fast,” she repeated, eyeing Yuuka again, maybe trying to prompt her eye to repudiate the claim. When it didn’t, she patted Amethyst’s crystalline thigh. “But faster than they’d like, and you being someone they want to have rather than acceptable losses complicates any of their more violent first strike options.”
“What she’s saying is that with you here, we’ve got the juiciest of all bait,” Yuuka added with a grin. Gone was much of her trepidation and anxiety; it had apparently been something of a literal blockage on her foresight, and with Kat’s stream now past and the all-consuming the Vaetna will kill us premonition managed, it had visibly dissipated from her eye. At a less magical but maybe more significant level, when I relayed what Bri had theorized about the limitations of time travel, she had also brightened; she didn’t like the Vaetna, but after a few probing questions about Bri’s exact wording she seemed to buy it and was cautiously optimistic that we weren’t about to be retroactively wiped from existence by a cascade of time traveling assassins. “I told them about the mantle swap idea,” she informed the others. I felt a little woozy at the prospect of borrowing—really copying—one of the girls’ mantles for the switcheroo ambush plan she had outlined. “We’ll have a window soon, once the fuckers actually offer to negotiate. Couple days of swing on that. Ezza, if you can do your torch thing, I can probably get something exact now.”
I remembered what Bri had said about the connection between silver and white ripple. A bit of determination sparked within me and I obligingly raised my arm, but Hina pushed it back down, locking eyes meaningfully with Alice. The team’s leader shifted.
“We can discuss how to handle that in the morning,” Alice said delicately. “If you want to do a flyby, Yuuka, I trust you. But I think Ezzen has spent all they can, or should, tonight. Is something the matter with your face?” she asked me.
“No. Maybe.” I rubbed my cheekbones. “I wasn’t me in there. In the dream. Or I’m not me out here.”
That provoked more than a little alarm in Alice’s sunset-glow eyes. She muttered something up at Amethyst, who nodded her massive purple head. Ai came over to my side and searched my face with concern. “Do you feel dizzy?”
“No, just sort of…heavy?”
“Ah, fuck,” Yuuka groaned. “Yeah, not gonna ask more from you tonight, you’re cooked. This is what I was talking about, that feeling that stuff doesn’t click between your mantle and your body. I’m a bit surprised it didn’t go off when I was coaching your selfie game, but makes sense that it didn’t happen until you crashed. Sleep’s weird for Flame-brain stuff.”
I saw Alice mouth “selfie game?” at her, but not say it out loud. Hina had no such tact.
“Selfie?”
“Um, took photos in the doll,” I admitted, feeling awfully dysphoric all of a sudden. “Wasn’t much, just wanted to show my friends. Nothing that’s not already public.” I’d only sent one of the more normal, non-silly ones while we’d been getting set up to watch the stream—I was suddenly possessed of the urge to send the others, to declare that that was closer to the real me, or the me that I ought to be, or something along those lines.
Hina was good at reading me. “Would looking at them make you feel better?”
It was a good thought, and I hesitated for a moment, then shook my head. “Um—after we figure out the gameplan.”
Alice gave me a look. Peeved but hiding it well, I thought. “We just got dragged out of bed to fight for our lives, Ezzen, this isn’t a proper strategy meeting. If the coast is clear of the Vaetna, I’m of a mind to go back to bed. The gameplan for tonight is nothing.”
“But shouldn’t it be something?” I asked, grasping for the weight I’d heard in Sani’s words to anchor myself. I’d been issued a mission: send the Peacies a message. “You said they don’t like to rush. We should force them to react, yeah? I mean, it’s not like I would have been the one to go out anyway, so how I’m doing doesn’t really matter, does it? Am I missing something?” I looked between the women. “I mean, what do we gain by waiting?”
“The chance for them to come to the table to negotiate. As a pretense to shoot them under it. If we’re openly hostile, we lose that chance.” Alice’s tone was matter-of-fact, like this was routine. “And there’s more to it than the violence. The Peacies want to get the government on their side, if not the public, so we want to be maintaining business as usual as far as the public is concerned. If we go and hit something right now, say, the USS Abraham Lincoln that’s been hanging out off Fukuoka since a couple days after you showed up, then Hina, Amane, and I aren’t going to get any sleep before our interviews and ad reads tomorrow. We used to do unplanned all-nighters for this stuff back before we were official, but we just can’t afford it now.”
Right then she seemed a far cry from smiles and sparkles, but in fairness, she did have a point; it was an hour when nobody with a day job should have been up. These magical girls traded on their image, and sleep was a critical part of that. I’d had a background awareness that when the girls weren’t in the penthouse, they were doing brand deals and TV appearances and voice acting and all those other things, a black box in my mind labeled “celebrity stuff” that I had considered secondary to their more proper VNT activities like Ai’s magitech R&D and their collective penchant for extrajudicial murder.
Because of my isolation from their cultural presence, it had basically been my assumption that all that soft power paled in comparison to the hard power. They were each more dangerous than a nuclear weapon; that public opinion or the government couldn’t really stop them even if the Peacies did win them over. The Barbecue Inferno had demonstrated that flamebearer conflicts were always a hair’s breadth from turning explosive, and it seemed obvious that this conflict with the largest magitech institution in the world would be decided by the sword no matter what. It was a chilling thought, but it had seemed to me the reality of the situation.
Then I thought of Bri, how she resented being a dagger so much that she had taken on the mantle of a needle instead. And I remembered how I had mourned the way the executioner’s sword reduced all to merely the action of a cutting edge. Even the Vaetna—especially the Vaetna—understood that discarding all notions of influence and negotiation because you had the power of nightmarish butchery was a tragedy, one that ought to be the last resort. Unlike many VNT groups, Lighthouse had the privilege of choosing when to take that step. Yuuka might have been the most literal in how she used her body to curry public favor—albeit a somewhat unpleasant version of it—but all of them had political leverage that correlated directly with physical self-care.
“Okay,” I capitulated. “Not tonight. I get it.”
“I mean, I don’t have to sleep,” Hina pointed out, sitting up with a bounce. I should have seen that coming; she was still activated, and having been denied the promise of a good scrap with the most lethal beings on Earth, she was almost salivating at the idea of another outlet, a coiled spring of anticipated violence. “Yuu-chan, wanna go out? Drink some blood? Have a little fun?”
For a very brief moment, but one long enough for all of us to see it, Yuuka looked sorely tempted. Then she mastered her expression and executed a flawlessly haughty twintail flick. “I have classes tomorrow, kemono.”
Hina blinked her big blue eyes. “Oh, so you’ll bomb a pipeline over lunch, but you won’t hang out with me? Even if we fuck after?”
“Yamete,” Ai cut in before Yuuka could snipe back. “You do have to sleep.” She winced. “That sounds bad when I say it.”
“You can stay with me,” I told Hina. With my initial urge to get out there and take action subsiding, the ennui and body-wrongness were coming to the forefront again. I rubbed my face. “Could use some…company? Dunno.”
Hina gave me a concerned look. She murmured. “You look bad.”
“…Thanks.”
“No, not like that, you’re always a cutie. I mean, um…the displacement thing Yuuka said.”
“Yeah, Ezza, you look like shit. Doll won’t help, don’t get any stupid ideas.”
“I don’t think this is because of the doll,” I confessed.
I’d actually omitted sharing the shape I’d experienced in the dreamscape, the thing with the cloak of bright hair and ice-scraping talons and no gut of organs. I’d been focused on relaying the meeting with the Vaetna and reassuring the girls that the threats facing us weren’t going to come from the Spire or the magically-stapled-back-on-itself future. As long as I didn’t think about that form, being back in this one didn’t bother me as much. But now I was thinking about it, and it sucked. I was wet and dry at once, squishy in many pointless places, and all the protrusions of my face felt wrong. I felt like a screw that had gone in at an angle and could now go no deeper without cracking itself or its housing. Of course, with an actual screw, you could back it out and start again. I wondered if I could do that here, and felt my Flame gather in my chest—
Hina was clever enough, changed enough, and in tune enough with my Flame to pick up on my moment of weakness. She touched my chest to bring me back to reality before I could do something exceedingly stupid. Her voice was soft. “What did you look like?”
“I—should I answer that?” I cautiously asked Ai, no longer trusting my own judgment. “Will that make whatever this is worse?”
“I wanna know,” Hina said. The glimmer in her eyes, that predatory fervor, had now morphed into a hunger for me, or perhaps a hunger on my behalf. It might have been more fair to call them the same thing.
Ai bit her lip. Amethyst crouched down beside her, still almost as tall as she was, and answered for her in slow, crystal-tone English.
“If you say it, it will hurt less,” She added something else in Japanese, directed at Ai, which sounded much more detailed, like two doctors huddled over a patient presenting a new symptom.
Ai sighed. “I don’t recommend listening to our cyborg’s opinions about pain, but she’s right about the other part. You’re desynchronized, and there’s not really a treatment we’ve found. It gets worse the more your mantle diverges from your regular body, so…” she gestured up at Amethyst. “If it was like this…you don’t have to tell us. Whatever you want to share.”
“Ah. Okay,” I managed, now feeling quite bad indeed. My tongue was a dried slug; I drank some water and was all too aware of how it sloshed down my flesh-pipes. “I…yeah. Not quite that much, but…to put words to it. Okay. Doll-Vaetna-sharp.”
I felt very brave for even saying that much. The girls were sympathetic, of course; Alice gave me a gentle smile and Ai nodded in a way that told me she was logging that information to pick at it later. Hina nuzzled my neck, which helped most of all. “Sounds like you, cutie. Can I help?”
With the ice broken—reference to my dream not intended—I felt a little better talking about it. “Doll’s not the word. I was talking about this with Yuuka earlier. Chassis? Just—structural, not fleshy.”
“Other than boobs,” Yuuka guessed. She sounded sympathetic.
“…Yeah. Boobs club.”
“Boobs club.”
“What?” Alice asked, looking between us in confusion.
“Boobs club,” the amethyst mecha offered from above her.
Radiance Opal stared up at her girlfriend, then sighed in defeat, waving a hand at Yuuka. “You know what, sure, whatever. Boobs club. If it means you two are getting along again, I’ll take it, it’s too bloody late for me to parse this. Is talking helping?”
I thought about it. “Sort of. I feel like if you could open me up and hose me down with a pressure washer, that might fix me.”
“Cut…you…open…” Hina mimed writing on an imaginary notepad. “Oh, whaddaya know, I already had that in my calendar for—”
“Stop,” Ai commanded. “You do not want to do anything that changes your body right now. You could lose motor function from the mismatch, or forget how to breathe, or one of many other bad things Amane can tell you about if she wants.”
I sighed, nervously kneading my plated right hand, one of the only parts of me that felt properly alright. “So just…tough it out? This isn’t like, um, gender stuff, that’s all kind of like static in my head, this is…I’m feeling it.”
“This is going to sound kind of insufficient,” Alice warned, “But bathing helps, it really does. Obviously, er, not the pressure washer thing, I can’t recommend that, Hina. But rinse yourself down, use the nice conditioner, wash down your face, feel out where everything is again.”
Amane warbled something else, which drew a scandalized glance upward from her girlfriend. “Sonnano—Fine.” She looked at me, reddening with a blush. “Amane wants me to add that sex can help too. Gets you very, ah, aware of your body, as it were. This feels like a bad recommendation with you two in particular, so let me repeat: Hina, do not cut them open. Honestly, Ezzen, why’d you have to go and put that specific wording in her head?”
“I’m the one suffering here,” I retorted with my gummy lip-flaps and vibrating membranes. “Besides, s’not like I’m the main subject of all that, if she really needs to let off steam, we agreed she can go to—wait.” My heart thudded in my chest. “Where is Izumi?”
“Outta here!” Hina laughed. “She doesn’t have anywhere to be tomorrow. Left when we were talking about waiting.”
Alice joined me in looking around the room in confusion, as surprised as I was that the assassin had vanished. The door and window were both shut. She’d dipped out via the fourth dimension.
“Off toward—-negotiation? Mantle technology?” Yuuka relayed, her eye flaring as worry rose in her voice. “But I can’t see anything else. Fuck. What if she’s selling us out?”
Amane replied quickly and sharply with a reprimand so clear I didn’t need to speak Japanese to get the gist. Hina effectively translated anyway as she crossed her arms. “Yeah, why would she? Too paranoid, Yuu-chan, save it for the bad guys.”
“Did—oh God,” I realized, anxious suspicion spiking as pieces clicked into place. It made too much sense; our hasty forgiveness and acceptance of her would have been the perfect window into understanding the weaknesses of the mantles. Information the Peacies would pay a fortune for. Leverage. “Gathering intel on us the whole time.”
Hina looked genuinely offended. “No, cutie! She hates Sugawara waaaay too much for that. She’s just out and about to scout…prolly.” The tiniest bit of uncertainty crept into her voice at the end; she was unable to find a good rebuttal for what Yuuka had foretold, and was visibly becoming distressed as we were at the sudden possibility that we’d been played for sympathy. “There’s no way she’s a double agent or any shit like that. We helped her with that. You helped her with that!”
Amethyst gave a rumbling reply I couldn’t tonally parse, a much heavier, more scraping sound than the usual tinkle of gemstone. Ai did me the service of translating. “Amane agrees, there’s no way. She fought Sugawara with everything she had when he came here.”
“Everything,” Amethyst added in rock-tumbler English.
Alice’s lashing tail indicated she wasn’t convinced. We all turned to the team’s leader as she thought it out. “…Suppose it is true. Where’d she be going right now? Off to trade that information to the Peacies in exchange for keeping Hikanome or Japan as a whole out of this. Sell us out.” She sounded vexed. “No, that can’t be it. The dark redeemed villain girl doesn’t betray the team after joining up. I don’t think they could actually offer her anything she wants more than she wants to turn them to pulp. Is Japan worth that much to her, after how it’s treated her?” She let the question hang as she looked out the window at Tokyo’s late-night skyline, then made up her mind, her voice taking on an air of urgent command as she faced me again. “We can’t take the risk. Ezzen, I’m sorry, but if you can muster the energy to boost Yuuka’s eye, now is the time, at least enough to verify what she’s doing. Amane, hasshadai e, be ready for an intercept if we have to. Hina, you have her phone number, right? She’s not on the mantle comms, but if you can at least contact her and figure out—”
I tuned out the details of Amethyst’s burst of speed toward my door and Hina scrambling for her phone to focus on dredging up my Flame once more, now motivated by panic rather than dysmorphic wrongness. Fire ignited from the cracks between the plates on my right arm. It was cold as ice; my shell here was incomplete. I tried to shake off that thought with a joke as I held it up toward Yuuka. “Here. Little bit of the future for you?”
“…Damn, you look miserable,” she muttered, then focused on the Flame I had offered. She gasped at the same time as Hina whined at her phone. “Damn, she looks miserable. False alarm!” she called to the others. “Not betrayal, she’s still in the penthouse. Ebi, get out here and help her.”
“What happened?” I asked.
Hina hopped off the bed. “I’m going. I’ll be back when you’re showered, cutie.”
She disappeared with a wet zipping noise while Alice put her face in her hands. Yuuka sighed, waving for me to extinguish my Flame. “Same shit you’re going through, plus a whole lot of neglect. She hasn’t been taking care of her real body at all. Gonna need an IV drip and a real talking-to. And here we thought she’d betrayed us, fuck’s sake. She wasn’t going anywhere, that was a quiet mantle crash.” She looked over at Alice. “Definitely a staying-in night if it wasn’t already.”
“Definitely a staying-in night,” Alice sighed in agreement. “I don’t know if it’s any comfort, Ezzen, but it seems you’re not the only one who needs a better relationship with their mantle and sleep schedule and self-care before we go to war. If we have the luxury of time, anyway; Yuuka, see anything else in that burst?”
“Hm. Not really? What I was seeing as ‘negotiation about mantles’ will just be Izumi talking to Ai and Ezza tomorrow about what just happened, nothing betrayal-ish. Her phone’s floating out there, somebody’s gotta pick that up before the Peacies do. And if I’m seeing something that dim, that’s good, because it’s not the Vaetna killing us. Good job, Ezza.”
“No…problem,” I replied, feeling even gummier now that the clarifying power of my magic had faded, drained from the momentary panic, and guilty about how quickly we’d arrived at suspicion. “We all kinda jumped to accusation.”
“…Yeah,” Alice agreed, tail lashing in self-reproach. “Trust in your teammates is mahou shoujo, so that was a failing on our part. Then again, it is far too late at night for this.” There was a shimmer and a small rush of air as the LM of her mantle dissolved and her pajamaed body redeployed in its place. “I’m gonna check on her and head to bed.”
“Me as well, without the bed,” Ai said as she went for my door. “Take a shower and get some rest, Ezzen. If you still feel bad in the morning, well, Yuuka is right: we’re going to be doing lots of mantle work tomorrow no matter what.”
Author’s Note:
Hasshadai means launchpad. Fortunately it doesn’t seem to be necessary after all! Is it mean and cruel of me to do another fakeout for the actual opening of the conflict? Perhaps! But also, Ez is having a time. On the one hand, it sure is a relief to know you’re not about to be imminently killbliterated by your parasocial idols and instead only have to worry about armed conflict with the entire western military-industrial complex, isn’t it? On the other hand, when your body image issues are now starting to verge into actual disassociation, maybe a bit of murder can help take your mind off things. Izumi knows what I’m talking about!
On that note, I have art to share! Not official, but instead a wonderful bit of fanart of Ezzen that was shared in the Discord by fudgecakedevil (instagram link):
The unidentified fucking thign!!! I love this style and am incredibly grateful there are people willing to take the time to make art purely because they enjoy the story. I am also paying people to make art, of course — if we’re lucky and the timing works out, the next commission will correspond with Sunspot’s 5000 follower (RR+Scribblehub) milestone. We’re 99% of the way there as of writing this!
That’s all for this week, really. Thank you to the beta readers as always. This chapter went up a few days early for patrons, which I’m happy about and aim to keep doing, but otherwise there’s not a lot to report. See you all next week!
Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!
Join the Patreon to support the story and read chapters three weeks ahead of public!
The ice is cold. It is the memory of cold, all the times I’ve felt my skin sting and my fingers ache. It crawls up the soles of my feet and attacks my ankles with gnawing teeth. It is so cold that the feeling wraps back around to an unpleasant, viscous heat before the numbness begins to set in.
But this memory of frostbite does not take into account what I have become. My feet are no longer pads of flesh structured around bone, one maimed by panic and desperation. Now I stand upon talons of metal sheathed in white plastic, and the biting numbness cannot reach me. Or perhaps it seeps through me far more completely than before and becomes a part of me. Either way, I am no longer its victim.
The ice stretches flat and dark until it meets an empty horizon. The sky is a blank canvas, no sun to free what moves beneath the ice, the dance of lights that swarm beneath me. They thump and press against the sheet, craving, coveting, or just curious. None of them look like the ones I have come to know, no scintillating gems clustered together in fierce and vengeful love. I suppose it is too much to ask that they join me for this.
I am not here for the ice, nor the lights beneath it. They are not the only domain in this dream; I remember that now with certainty. I turn from the horizon to the forest. The beach lies between me and it, and between me and the beach lies a shape embedded in the ice, a mile marker. I begin to walk toward it upon my talons. As I do, I look down and become aware of the rest of my body. It is metal built skeletal and spindly, sheathed in armor on my upper legs. There is little in my core beyond a spine. Hair cascades down my back, an orange more vivid than anything else in this dream that falls all the way down to my knees. My chest is interlinked carapace, undefined in its patterning or shape until I notice that is the case, and then it has changed without deliberation nor shame. I dare not reach up to learn about my face; to touch is to define, and that is something I am yet afraid of defining.
The shape arrives quickly; I am not sure if it was one step or a thousand, but in that time, I have come to see that the one has become two. Only two, and neither were the one I’d hoped and feared would be here. The tall shape that I had first seen is a straight sword, buried by its blade, and the other is a dagger balanced atop the hilt, a hole gouged through the grip. It points away from me, toward the beach, where the sand wraps around the forest until it passes from view. Both weapons have dull, black blades. Not black as the night sky, but black as darkness; I know a word, and it is eigengrau, the color seen when there is no light at all and the eye must invent something so that the brain need not confront the idea of nothing. Like a dream, in a way. That is the color of the vaet.
I reach out to touch the weapons of something-representing-nothing. They call to me. They always have. I could not answer before. Now it is the most natural thing in the world, and it is a relief to reach out with my gauntlet.
But to touch is to define. The blades are that which cuts. They are that which cuts everything. The lines between everything are severed. The beach and the sky are cut to ribbons, the forest felled and hewn asunder. The ice shatters, and we all fall toward the water beneath. It is not there to meet us at first, severed as everything else, but it crashes back together and swallows us. Only the lights remain whole throughout, watching.
The straight sword is made to fall. It plummets downward toward me, and I witness that it has no piercing tip. The blade of the executioner knows itself to be inevitable, and needs not account for shield nor struggle, ending only in a flat and blunt horizon, the most earnest shape of death. Conflict is for lesser weapons; the guillotine need only fall. The lights know it. It should not be so! I weep, and the blade weeps with me.
The dagger falls point-first beside it. It is the opposite of the sword, its tip sharp and its edge dulled, duller than it ought to be. It has gouged a new loop through its handle, an eye that stares back at the world and at me. It has fashioned itself into a sewing needle, and from there it has learned to mimic the trowel and the plowshare. Great walls rise around it, as high as the great forest, forcing away the water until the space where we are becomes a place. A warm place, a place of safety, a place with a name. The needle weaves while something loved slumbers in its lap. When the needle must be the dagger it began as, it is for them.
Both are more than blades. They are a home I have never visited; they are knights sworn to the highest cause; they are scholars hunched before divinity; they are light that has escaped the ice. But they are still blades, and the path they cut as they fall is straight and stark and silent, even the ghost of a whisper cut apart. That-which-is-not cleaves that-which-is. It is blinding to behold, and all in the deep water is left dumbstruck and drawn into its wake. At last the blades reach me, and then they are through me, shearing root from trunk and dream from reality. It is the nature of these blades to cut all they touch, and I am no exception.
To touch is to define. The horizon-tipped blade, Judgment, slashes me open. The needle, Sanctuary, beholds me with its eye. I pass through like so much thread.
I was standing on the beach. I realized this so suddenly that I thought I had woken up, because things no longer had the dreamlike haze, the abstraction and metaphor. Everything was whole once again, and I felt awake—yet the beach was still here, and I was standing on it. The dream had ended, but I had not woken up.
What-Had-Been-Judgment and What-Had-Been-Sanctuary were now in their more familiar forms as the Vaetna Sani and Brianna. I mentally mapped them as the eldest and the youngest siblings respectively. They had done something to me, and to the dream. Everything felt too sharp, too real. But it felt so alien, unnaturally natural, the sensation I had heard people attribute to white ripple. I could feel them sharpening everything around me as though every color and shape had felt the kiss of a whetstone, every grain of sand its own cragged boulder and each tree behind them a pillar of the heavens. And they had cut it all down at my merest touch.
“So it’s literal,” I heard myself say, my first words to the something-beyond-people I’d built my entire personality around. I’d always hoped I’d be able to present a first impression as somebody cool and knowledgeable, but I was overwhelmed and disoriented, and could only find it in me to speak the closest thing I could identify to a general truth about…anything. “Vaet-na. Blade people.”
Bri raised a hand and waggled it indecisively. I saw that each and every one of the thousands of segments of her carapace was its own intricate masterwork that would consume my vision if I stared too deep. I forced myself to zoom out and realized that they were sitting in…a pair of beach chairs. Cheap ones, at that. A sandcastle also sat between them, waist-high and very sophisticated. I had no clue if they’d done that or if it was part of my dreamscape.
“Eh. More of a side effect, really. Can’t cut without being cut, can’t define without being defined. That’s what the armor is for,” Bri explained with what felt like a grin, rapping her knuckles against her other forearm. “And we like what we see. That’s good news, for you and for us!”
I wanted to believe her, but good news implied there could be bad news, and I was remembering that I was only here because of some very bad news indeed. Mortal terror flowed easily now that this was no longer a dream. “Does—does that mean you’re not going to kill us? That I’m not a threat to you? I answered—I’m here, and that’s supposed to be enough, right?”
Sani leaned forward in his chair. His voice was deep, and he spoke with the same articulation Kat did. “We are not here to kill you, Ezzen. We wanted to learn what we could about your Flame, and we’re relieved to find that it doesn’t want to sting us the way it did Kat.”
Relief surged through me. I had no choice but to believe them; surely if they had planned to kill me, they would have done so already, when they had inspected what was inside me—my Flame, I corrected myself. They had inspected my Flame, and apparently it had been good enough for them, or else I’d be dead, cut apart, annihilated utterly. I looked between the two of them, suddenly gladdened. This wasn’t a death knell; we were to have a conversation. “Thank you. That’s—The Spire Stands, I don’t know how else to say how much of a relief that is. Is that—did you get what you came for? My Flame…”
“Is from the future,” Sani confirmed. “But you knew that already, since you were listening to Kat. And it is Vaetna Flame.”
That sent my heartrate up, even though we’d already strongly suspected it. “I…thought so,” I hazarded. “From you, from the future.”
“Not from us,” Bri corrected. “That’s the tricky part. It’s our Flame, unmistakably.” She looked around the impossible landscape, then pointed past me at the ice. “I’m not a hundred percent on all the metaphor you’ve dreamt up here, but that’s definitely the Frozen Flame, collectively, and you’re up here for the same reason we are, or at least your nugget of it seems to think so. But it’s wild, willful. Unsure, and it wants, so badly. That’s enough reason to think it didn’t come from us at some point in the future.”
There was a lot to unpack there. The Vaetna was implying that their Flame was more passive or obedient. I’d assumed that their proficiency with weaving was a product of pure technique—maybe it was something more fundamental. Something fundamental which I apparently didn’t share. But that didn’t make sense, because:
“Even though it’s turning me into one of you,” I blurted.
“Is it?” Sani asked. “Look at yourself.”
I did, and was surprised, then elated. The feeling of having crashed back to reality, or at least this unreality freed from the dream’s metaphors, had led me to assume that I had been stuffed back into the meat and slapped with the metaphysical label that that was the “real” me. But the Vaetna were armor right now, not fundamental blades, and that should have tipped me off that for all this place was no longer a dream, it still reflected something of my consciousness, or my Flame, or both.
I was something very similar to the doll, covered in rigid plates that lacked the fractal depth of Vaetna dermis. But my form had taken on a more agile structure, and my legs still ended in talons. I had my hair, the orange locks that went down my back. And I had breasts, anonymous and simple, the only softness on my body. This time I did reach up and feel my face. No mouth, no nose, yes eyes. I was something between a Vaetna and a Radiance and something else altogether. Sani could tell I was shocked and confused and fascinated.
“You’re growing, as flamebearers do. But it’s growth toward aspiration, and it’s gradual and uncertain. Sometimes it’s just change for the sake of change. It’s happening fast for you, make no mistake, because you’ve landed in circumstances ripe for it. But that’s not how we took these shapes we wear.”
“So I’m not becoming a Vaetna?”
“You’re not not becoming a Vaetna. You want to—which we find flattering, I would like to add, since Bri is glaring at me—and your Flame seems to want to, but you both also want other things. It’s all quite a work in progress. And as Bri put it, that’s a reason to think that even if it is truly our Flame, something got lost in translation. It did get launched back through time, after all. But if we had done this, it would not have been so haphazard.” He looked past me, across the sea. “But speculating about who sent it is not why we contacted you so urgently. How much do you know about silver ripple?”
“Sani,” Bri cut in. “You’re talking to magic’s number one fan here, don’t waste time.”
He put up a hand to shush her. I boggled at him, unsure of how to answer such an open-ended question and flustered by Bri’s faith in me. “Um. It’s ripple from the future, or many futures, the part that echoes backward and gets muddled together because you can’t discern the color anymore. Probably responsible for overall conservation of energy when it comes to magic, somehow, models disagree. And, um, I know that you know that somebody in Todai can see it, because that’s how you chose to contact me. The—from how you sound, it sounds like you didn’t intend to kill us in the first place? Which means that you can somehow manipulate the silver directly, I guess that’s not all that shocking—”
“If you didn’t pick up, you would have been killed, make no mistake,” Sani interrupted.
My blood ran cold. “…Really? But what we were shown is that it would be one of you, and you just said—you don’t want the power to fall into the wrong hands, but we’re not the problem, the Peacies are, and they have somebody like me, somebody else who also has your Flame. And they’ve had her for weeks! Why me instead?”
“Things are changing. You’ve seen us as we are, Ezzen, so let me tell you a secret: we’re just two of ten, and even if I’m the leader, I don’t control us. We’re not a hive mind. Even Bri and I, our hearts are in different places. Some of the others think that what we’re doing right here, right now, is very stupid indeed. And it may be. They think we should kill all three of you and wash our hands of all of this, just to be safe.” He sat back in the cheap beach chair. I’d never seen him look worried before; it was plain even through the armor. His voice was heavy. “But I believe that this is all happening for a reason. The three of you who have our Flame, you’re positioned too conveniently, too intentionally. Do you see it? You, arguably our number one fan, struck through a camera and immediately whisked away to the other side of the world, to one of the most capable groups outside of the Spire. On the other side, Ana Baker, a loyal and willing weapon for the PCTF. Third, Noah Holton, whose career was outmoded by magic and has no particular love for either side, now…somewhere. And the last, who was burned away. As haphazard as your Flames appear to be, they were given to you with precision.”
My world was spinning. “Somebody’s trying to change the timeline through us?”
Bri shrugged. “We don’t know. You said it yourself, silver ripple shows potential futures, not one solid future that can reach back and mess with us. Maybe this is a time loop to begin with, or maybe it’s all just chaos. Check this thing out.”
She directed my attention down to the sandcastle between her and her counterpart, which had gone unremarked this whole conversation.
“That’s…the Spire? I’d assume.”
Bri reached her leg out and poked it with a boot. “I’m pretty sure this is a sandcastle.”
We stared at each other for a long moment. She tapped her helm’s chin thoughtfully.
“But yeah, let’s say it represents the Spire. Hell, it might be the Spire, in some sense—it’s your dream, mediated by your Flame, and I’m not sure why else it would be here. But it’s hopefully not the actual Spire as it’s known to your Flame’s understanding of the future, because, well,” she flicked her ankle to devastate a curtain wall. “That would be bad, and I’d like to think we do better work than that. We do better work than that, it won’t crumble so easily. But suppose it did.” She kicked the sandcastle down. “Suppose that was all it took, and suppose it’s destined to happen, that your Flame comes from the future where it does. Would you build a new one?”
“I would try,” I ventured.
“And if someone walks up to kick it down again?”
“I’d cut off their foot.” I was startled at my own bloodlust.
The needle looked to her counterpart. “See? Told you they were a good kid. Yeah, that’s where we ended up. And you’d expect that after you do it the first time, people would get the picture and let you build your sandcastle in peace. But it turns out that people practically line up to take a swing and lose their foot, even when they see the guy right in front of them has just traded walking for hopping. And they do it for stuff like money, or patriotism, or just a belief that the sandcastle shouldn’t be there. Do that enough times and, well…you become us, real good at cutting off feet and building sandcastles and not a whole lot else. We’re not sure there’s a fix for it without basically taking over the world, which you’ll notice we haven’t done.”
“And…I don’t follow,” I admitted, puzzled. “I mean, I get the theory, killing people doesn’t necessarily solve systemic issues. How’s that relate to time travel?”
“Well, consider that they—maybe we—sent some of our Flame back, and to here, and now. They didn’t send a person who’s good at kicking, or fancy greaves that can keep us from cutting off their foot, nor did they bulldoze the beach in the first place. They basically just sent more sand—maybe sand that’s secretly bad for building sandcastles, but still just sand. That means that first, there’s limits on what time travel can do. And second, whoever is behind this maybe didn’t intend for it to be weaponized against us, and that might just be a side effect of the whole time travel business. Silver’s not a fun color. But we don’t know that for sure, or what the endgame is—for the moment, all we can do is fortify the castle and keep cutting off people’s feet. You know how hard it is to admit that you’re in the dark when you’re us?”
“…I can imagine,” I empathized. The Vaetna were not human—or at least not anymore, I felt I hadn’t seen their past, only what they were now—but they certainly seemed diminished by the situation. And for me, of course, this was the most terrifying thing in the world, to know that there was something happening around us and them which they could neither control nor explain. We were all floundering, and while I was sure it would comfort Yuuka to know the Vaetna thought that time travel could only do so much, it was still unnerving to feel the ground shifting beneath us. “So—what changed? Why are things suddenly happening now, right during Kat’s stream, and not weeks ago? Things looked…fine, on her end.”
“The Department of Defense tweeted that they’re going to kick the sandcastle. Kat was implying everything was good, and they didn’t like that, so they’re moving up the schedule.”
Dread rolled through me. Since we’d been on my laptop, I hadn’t had the chat up perpetually, and I’d gotten dragged into arguing with Yuuka about how time worked for the last few minutes before she’d seen death, panicked, and ordered me to enter this dream. I reflexively reached for my phone; I didn’t have it here, of course, and it was mostly unnecessary anyway. “Ana Baker,” I breathed, despite lacking a mouth and nose. “You said my Flame couldn’t hurt you. But hers can?”
“We said yours didn’t want to, which may or may not be the same thing. Hers might, though. Or they may be bluffing as usual, we don’t know yet. But if they’re not, then the Spire could be going to war, real war, the first one that may pose a true existential threat, depending on what’s coming. We could be facing a world where the sandcastle can be knocked down.”
My stomach lurched. Despite everything, despite how relatively well this conversation had gone, my worst fears were still being realized. I scrambled for what I could do. “Then—then study me, figure out how the weapon works. Kat said you patched out whatever made her take damage from the inferno, do that again. Bring me to the Spire and take me apart if you have to.”
“Damn,” Bri chirped. “Straight to that?”
“I mean—it would also take the pressure off the Radiances if I’m not here anymore.”
“Oh, altruism. You really are a good kid.”
“We just did study you, and it’s given us some ideas,” Sani reassured me. “But we—Bri and I—believe you’re right where you should be already.”
“Because of whatever plan is making all this happen?”
Sani’s tone changed in an instant. The signature Vaetna storyteller lilt became a thunderhead of dark fable, and the bright clarity of the non-dream began to wilt.
“Because if we are coming to a world where the Spire may no longer stand, they-of-power must not feel like they have won, that we were just a momentary blip before history returned to its natural course, boots to necks. The old order is already broken and burned, and they must remember that that cannot be undone so easily, no matter what they build with the tools we gave them. They have spat in all our good faith and cling to the belief that all who bear the Flame except us are just another resource, like oil, like flesh. I believe you were granted a Flame and placed with those vengeful gems that you might demonstrate the error in those monsters’ judgment. You would teach them that this will not end when we fall.”
Bri put her arm on the executioner’s shoulder. “Sani.”
He sat back, the specter of the final blade fading. “Apologies. I shouldn’t speak in certainties that thrust so much upon you.”
I stared at him and suddenly felt glad. That was the Vaetna I had been wanting to see. This whole conversation had brought on a subtle, creeping fear that the power and certainty I had known them for was just a mask for the sake of the public, that in reality they were as fractured and fearful as any other flamebearer might be under threat of annihilation, as dysfunctional as Todai could be, building a castle out of sand. And those things may have still been true, and that would haunt me for a long while—but the conviction behind Sani’s words rang truer. There was the thing I believed in, what had captured my imagination, what I had been desperate to live up to if only I had the means, that ineffable sense that these people were out to do something truly good with their power. And now I had the means, granted from some unknown origin from on high.
“It’s—I understand,” I said.
“Do you?”
“Sani,” Bri repeated, more forcefully. “I think it’s time to go. To review, Ezzen: we’re not gonna kill you, but we’re also not going to bail you out. Show them that you’re less afraid of losing your foot than they are.”
“Will—hold on, I don’t remember these dreams,” I warned. “I never do. I can’t forget this, it’s too important.”
“You won’t forget,” Sani replied, standing with that Vaetna ease, not so much hefting himself out of the chair as simply rising. “Because this is not a dream. Flame-shared dreams are one of the things we gave up to become what we are. To even come here as anything resembling ourselves, we had to cut this one apart, as you saw, and stitch it back together with white ripple, and broke several rules in the process. And for similar reasons, I don’t believe we’ll be able to contact you again like this.”
“Then—email? Just, anything,” I pleaded. “I understand you can’t risk or just can’t help us over here. But if my Flame is something like yours, show me how to use it. How to be worthy of it.”
Bri stood. “Our ways won’t help you much. Really bad idea to share them, frankly, you’d land us all in even bigger trouble. You’re too clever for your own good. All I can say is this: learn about silver and white and how they’re connected. There’s more to magic than glyphs, and it starts with those. And…” she twisted to face the dark, impenetrable forest. “There’s something in here, something we couldn’t cut. I’d love to figure out what, but it’s your problem now.”
Sani brought a fist to his chest in a gesture of respect. “Goodbye, Ezzen, and good luck.”
And then they were gone. I was alone once more, the two empty chairs before me and the ruins of a sandcastle between them the only proof that they had been here. That and the broken dream around me, which was beginning to crumble and dim, unable to maintain its paradoxical state without the Vaetna binding it together. Would it even persist once I was gone?
I gazed at the forest past the beach, up at the vast trees. The Vaetna had suggested that it was important that I explore this dream further, that I venture into the darkness. Why? The sea behind me was the Flame, that I understood, and it was real enough that the lights beneath the ice seemed to be the true presence of other flamebearers, however distant—had they seen any of what had just transpired here? The empty, rotting sky was just itself, and the beach was a border from sea to forest, but the nature of that murky wood eluded me. Was it the fourth dimension, so obstinately unnavigable and crudely stapled to the reality that had existed before magic? The uncertain future, that which the Vaetna could not cut?
I had never had the freedom of mind to enter it of my own accord to investigate before now, and now I had the freedom, but not the time. It was time for me to go from this place as well, back to reality, to face the music.
No time left to venture deep, and the Vaetna had offered little certainty that I would return. So I would make that certainty. I stepped across the beach on my talons and up to the edge of the forest. I found a fallen branch, one that was straight and strong, and reached down and cut, redefining it with the memory of whittling tools and splinters, establishing the notion of a haft and a piercing tip. That was certainty.
I set the spear across the ruins of the sandcastle. If this place was real enough, I would be able to find it again.
Then, at last, I woke. And I told the Radiances everything.
Author’s Note:
This is not the end of the arc; it’s more of a mid-arc climax. The sand is shifting. Aren’t the Vaetna neat? I sure think they’re neat, and so does Ezzen, though perhaps for different reasons. I hope you enjoy them too, because this isn’t the last we’ll be seeing of them. Thanks to the betas, they really helped my sanity on this one. One of them also scribbled this art of Ez as it appeared in this chapter:
What an adorable critter! We’ll see if this version of them is reflected in reality at all.
To reiterate, Sunspot is on its usual break this next week, so the next chapter will be March 1st. That is, unless you’re a Patreon supporter — that’s right, I’m FINALLY getting ahead of public releases again. This chapter only went up like 9 hours ahead of public, but for patrons 4.11 will be this coming Sunday, February 22nd, a full week ahead of when it’ll release here on RR! And I intend to keep extending the backlog beyond that until we’re back to a full three chapters ahead. Cower at my might. Also, you’ll get some of the upcoming art early.
Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!
Join the Patreon to support the story and read chapters three weeks ahead of public!
Depending on how you counted, the Vaetna had saved the world at least three times. Most indisputably, they had ended the firestorms. This was widely seen as a good thing, unless you were part of an especially radical Flame cult. More indirectly, they’d banished the future-devouring specter of climate disaster; the introduction of the glyph lexicon and the principles of weaving had brought on a dramatic energy and materials revolution that had drastically reduced the appeal of fossil fuels in many applications, to say nothing of the direct cleanup efforts of the Vaetna. Lastly, it was speculated that the Dubai incident would probably have destroyed the world if they hadn’t intervened, though that was contested by the PCTF, who never wanted to give the Vaetna credit for anything.
Despite this remarkable track record, the Spire had no shortage of detractors. Internally, it all seemed too good to be true, and externally, the Vaetna’s willingness to stick their nose deep into other nations’ business scared the hell out of the rich and powerful. And since it was very difficult to materially threaten the Spire with either direct conflict or economic sanctions, the court of public opinion was the main arena where the Powers That Had Been attempted to keep the rogue nation in check, to the tune of trillions of dollars in propaganda. The Vaetna had known this would happen, and so from the very first weeks after the Raising, their modus operandi had revolved around one simple method:
Live streaming.
This was both bizarre and inevitable. Bizarre, because the Vaetna themselves were secretive to the point of suspicion, tight-lipped about their own nature and many of the workings of the Spire. Inevitable, because the Spire’s mission statement of being a shelter for the dispossessed was contingent on a degree of worldwide public accountability strong enough to persuade the average fence-sitter away from conspiratorial propaganda, and that demanded a level of earnest transparency about its workings that went beyond Twitter posts or even candid recorded videos. They did those too, of course, but the streams were a staple. They were a show of trust in the regular person’s ability to draw their own charitable conclusions from what they saw, unscripted and unedited. Some very fancy infomancy ensured that they were accessible from anywhere in the world as long as you had an internet connection, Great Firewall or no.
Most days, across the ten Vaetna, at least one would host some kind of livestream. Topics could be loosely divided into domestic and foreign affairs; all ten superhero-knight-angels displayed a preference for which they generally preferred to do live. The stream I’d been watching when I had been flametouched had been the former, maintenance and upgrades for the Spire’s physical infrastructure, carried out by Brianna and Heung. Bri was a relatively common sight for content like that, often basically vlogging the Spire’s daily affairs. She loved to babble about the logistics and technical challenges of feeding and homing the Spire’s burgeoning population, an altruist through and through. She was the one who I felt was most like myself and other magical engineers, purified down to realize the guarantees of the Na Vva Kiiycaseiir, which was essentially their bill of rights.
By contrast, it had been kind of an unusual stream for Heung, who was the poster boy for the Vaetna’s more bloody-minded and interventionist policies. Sure, Sani had been the one to step onto the lawn of the White House with his blade bared, but by volume, Heung was the one most likely to show up when a flamebearer despot started to get too big for their boots or local brushfire conflicts threatened to spiral into cataclysm. This sometimes meant swift and unilateral murder, which naturally meant his streams were a source of endless controversy.
This, too, was part of the Vaetna’s philosophy of transparency. They wanted people to see the full spectrum of what they were willing to do for the short goal of averting disaster and the long goal of reducing human misery. And I—as biased as they came, admittedly—believed in those causes. They were so noble as to justify themselves, and for the first few years of the Spire’s existence, I’d held that anybody who thought differently was propagandized beyond the point of debate. After all, everybody who’d ever wound up on the dark end of a vaet pretty obviously deserved it.
“They don’t do enough,” was Yuuka’s opinion, muttered resentfully from an adjacent beanbag. “And it’s not cause I’m so fuckin’ naive that I think The Problem Of Evil squarely applies to them, don’t give me that shit. You didn’t say anything yet.”
“I didn’t say—oh.”
“I know there’s only ten of them, I know they can’t be everywhere, I know they don’t know everything, and we sure do fuckin’ know now that they’re not all-powerful. They can bleed. But they still have to do more. And since they don’t, Amane is missing half her body. It should never happen again, and instead it’s happening right now. Imagine being able to kill them all in a night and choosing to be selective. Yes, my eye can see what you’ll say just fine, and no, I can’t spoil the entire stream.”
“…Cool.” To be honest, I’d never experienced a Vaetna stream in such direct social proximity to one of their detractors—the chatroom was essentially a Vaetna fanclub, and that was more or less my whole sample size—so I had no idea how to react. Or rather, I had plenty of fantasies about how I’d react, but those had all been constructed in anticipation of some abstract hater and felt trite against a real person, especially one who had gone through what Yuuka had. “I’m sure they’d do more if they could,” I hedged.
“Sure. Maybe it is a problem of can’t rather than won’t. But if the cunts do have more to give, I fuckin’ hope they start. They’re not invincible anymore, and that better make them afraid enough to pick up their slack.”
Yuuka glowered at my laptop screen and the chat scrolling across it. We’d set up in the penthouse’s upper common area, neutral ground where neither Yuuka nor I would feel like we were invading the other’s space, and fortified a small area of it with some of the pillows and blankets scattered around, enough to not feel overly exposed in the expansive room. That was something Yuuka and I both valued, it seemed. With the lights off and some blankets wrapped around us, the watchparty felt almost like a sleepover, albeit a weirdly intimate one with no supervision.
I was still in the doll. Yuuka had made it clear that was a non-negotiable condition of being alone in my presence, and I was more than happy to oblige. The only complication had been that the chassis was tethered to the nightmare-chair by the gossamer cables of thread connecting my heads. It was technically incorrect to say my soul was being transmitted through there, in fact they were much closer to puppet strings—a label I didn’t like for how it put “me” outside the body I was inhabiting—but either way, I didn’t want to find out firsthand how far the weave could survive being stretched. The obvious upgrade to the connection would be fully reworking it into the more complex, fourspace-abusing implementation of the actual mantles, but that was an irresponsible level of unauthorized modification—
So we’d done it anyway. I’d briefly hopped back into my “real” body to make the necessary changes under Yuuka’s guidance. It had been disheartening to see Yuuka suppress a flinch as I’d sat up, and equally bothersome to me that the weight on my chest had vanished, so we’d hurried through the process of modifying the doll to set up the red and pink connections used by proper mantles. Ai would yell at us later, but we knew what we were doing, informed by technical expertise and the fact that Yuuka’s eye was essentially the perfect diagnostic tool, able to predict failure before it happened. We still definitely halfassed it, crunched for time as we were, but it did work, just in time for the stream’s proper countdown to begin.
Now back in the doll and a full floor removed from my regular body—I was thinking of them as “the chassis” and “the meat” until I came up with something better—I noticed I’d taken to absentmindedly squishing my boobs while I lounged in my beanbag chair. That was probably not a good habit to form as somebody who would likely be on camera quite a lot very soon, but right now it had the happy side effect of immediately removing some of the pervasive tension and wariness from Yuuka’s body language. Boobs club was real, at least as far as her subconscious saw it. I could feel the duck tape beginning to loosen its grip, which filled me with melancholy and made Yuuka’s idea of me duplicating one of the girls’ mantles distinctly more appealing in a way I didn’t really know how to dissect. Further consideration of that was a problem for tomorrow-Ezzen, though, because the stream’s countdown had entered its final minute.
“Do you know they’re not invincible?” I couldn’t help but ask. “No snark. Like, I know you don’t know what we’re about to watch, but…further downstream? Anything?”
“I said it’s working a bit better. There’s no way you’re dumb enough to think that I’d be sitting here if I knew, right now, whether something is gonna seriously fuck up one of the Vaetna on the other side of the world at some random point in time.”
“I could light up my torch,” I offered, then I caught the edge of desperation seeping into my own voice. I’d never been anxious about a Vaetna broadcast before. I resented that feeling. “Uh. Can’t do that in this body anyway, huh. Though—”
“Doesn’t work like that,” she snapped preemptively. “The shit your arm does when you light it up only works for me because it’s forward ripple, not silver, and I can interpret the destructive interference there. But you doing it in the future means I get it all now as more silver. It’s like staring into the sun, fuckin’ worthless.” Her head whipped around, glaring at me with the gemstone. She made a zipping motion over her mouth with her hand. “And don’t you even fucking whisper ‘ripple sunglasses’ at me, cunt; the day somebody figures out how to do even half of what my eye does with sunglasses will make the day a Vaetna dies look like a fuckin’ joke. Never speak that shit into possibility, let alone existence.”
“…But that won’t happen, right?”
She didn’t answer, looking back toward my laptop screen with a huff. That was what it was like to hold a conversation with Yuuka Hirai. No wonder she hoped the Vaetna became more afraid, and believed that that would make them more effective; her entire worldview, in a very literal sense, was filtered through anxiety and pre-emptive measures, unable to fully prove a negative for her worst fears.
Right now, as the final seconds trickled away, I was much in the same boat, because it felt like the trajectory of my life—and more broadly, the fate of the entire world—depended on the next few minutes: on how well Kat was doing, what she’d reveal about her absence, and what she did or did not imply about the threat my Flame creche posed. Part of me hoped that it in fact had nothing to do with my Flame, that the inferno she’d faced had just been exceptionally odd but ultimately harmless to her and her kin and that she’d only retired to the Spire these past weeks out of an abundance of caution, and the nightmare would be over.
The rest of me knew better. Even if she was about to say, point-blank, that she believed neither I nor Noah Holton nor Ana Baker posed any threat to the Spire, the PCTF obviously disagreed enough to pursue us. So viewed cynically, all this stream would change is whether or not I could flee to the Spire, as had been my original goal when I’d rushed out of my flat in Bristol for the last time, or whether they would turn me away for fear of bringing my poison to them. Was running off to Tokyo’s Gate even an option, realistically, if it meant leaving this body behind and abandoning the Radiances to their war?
I ran out of time for those thoughts as the countdown struck zero. The stream cut right to…a snowy field. Kat’s voice spoke from offscreen. She sounded normal, which for her meant high energy; the words came out rapidly but with careful enunciation on each syllable, like picking out every droplet in a waterfall. There was a lilt to her speech, the same accent all the Vaetna had; people tended to assign all sorts of country labels based on the linguistics, but I’d always preferred to think of it like the voice of a fairytale told casually, which my friends always informed me wasn’t very helpful. But that was how Kat sounded right now, thankfully. I was so focused on listening for signs of weakness or infirmity that I didn’t actually process her first few words as anything more than a series of sounds.
“—an apology. Sorry it’s been so long, everybody! And wow, from the numbers, this does look like everybody. So, er, hello, people of Earth! It’s really nice to be back, and I’m so so grateful for all the support.”
She walked into frame. I let out an immediate sigh of relief; she looked totally fine. Or rather, her armor did, which was essentially the same thing. She was slim, as Vaetna went, a human form covered in thousands of mostly-white interlocking plates with seams so tight they practically vanished. Beneath her shell, she would have been shaped like Amane, tall and slim. Too human, came an intrusive thought—I glanced down at my chest to ask my Flame what it meant, before realizing that that had just come from me. Everybody at Todai had dramatically altered ourselves in one way or another, and if you bought into Hina’s ideas that the Flame wanted change, then for the Vaetna to be so much more powerful and to have plumbed the depths of magic then they ought to have been reshaped, more alien than just people wrapped in ultra-advanced carapace.
I had to remind myself that they absolutely did transcend the human form when they used their respective rain steps.
They did all have places where their armor diverged from a centimeter-thick shrinkwrapping of a human body. The easiest to spot was the coloration that broke up the white: Kat’s right arm was adorned with a spatter of dark gray micro-panels that rose from fingertip to elbow like a column of bubbles, leading to a slim torso with vivid red markings that ran down her flanks like racing stripes. Also, the helm: Kat’s was more faceted than some of her counterparts, with a little bit of a snout and in-cut ridges that suggested cheekbones and swooped back along the sides of her head to give the distinct impression that this was a being who was meant to go forward.
More subtly, her carapace was much more finely segmented than most of the others. She had over eight thousand distinct sections in the panoply, most so small they couldn’t even be picked out from the whole on camera. They were smoothly aligned, never overlapping; flexibility came from each individual plate of dermis distending and warping, which sometimes provoked derisive comparisons to the spandex superheroes of yesteryear rather than the solid and clearly-segmented plates of historical knight armor or the oversized, engineered shapes of a combat exosuit. The armor did a good job of blunting the impression of nudity where it was most critical, at least; the modest mounds of her breasts were joined into one aerodynamic shape and there was some reinforcement around the back of her waist and thighs that gave her a more streamlined appearance from the rear. Not that this had stopped many brave artists.
I was Vaetna Envier Number One Global, so I’d always looked at them and thought it didn’t look like nudity at all. I’d always imagined that it would be comfortable to be fully encased, wrapped and secure with minimal extraneity; I only opted for bulky hoodies because anything tighter rubbed uncomfortably, which wouldn’t be an issue with a perfectly morphing second skin. The doll had proven me right on that front, at least before we’d added the boobs. I used one of them as a stress ball while Kat kept talking, gesticulating like the experienced presenter they all were.
“Let me cut to the chase: I’m good, my armor is good, The Spire Stands. I hope looking at me is all the proof you need. But I do need to talk about exactly what happened, why I was out of commission for so long, and what’s going to happen going forward. To get the headline out of the way: Yes, I was hurt. No, it didn’t stick.”
An unfortunate consequence of us doing this on my laptop was that I only had the one screen, which meant that the chatroom was relegated to my phone, and I was slower there, so I wound up being the last to give my reaction.
skychicken: uh oh
starstar97: not sticking is good
starstar97: three weeks for it to not stick
starstar97: thats less good
moth30: :O
moth30: wha
DendriteSpinner: i dont like how this sounds at all
ezzen: fuck
Yuuka grunted next to me. “Punchline’s coming.”
I looked at her, alarmed. “Is that a prophecy?”
“Yeah.” The seriousness of her tone terrified me. “Things are about to change.”
“Too vague!”
“That’s all I got! Keep watching!”
On the screen, Kat had turned to face the snowy field behind her. “If you haven’t guessed already, we’re in Poland; this is where I put down that inferno a few weeks ago. Notice anything odd? Maybe not, but remember: I didn’t clean this up.”
I saw it immediately.
ezzen: where’s the holes
A flamebearer gone inferno was the strongest point source of ripple on earth. They spewed it across the whole spectrum, and while red and blue could be horrific, the orange and pink were the true danger, rapidly shredding any notion of distance and direction, shuffling matter and producing labyrinthine sub-dimensions that got fractally dense as you tried to approach the source.
Kat was a specialist in solving this problem by virtue of her rain step. Unlike Heung’s dives or my own limited teleportation, she disintegrated into shards that could blast through all those diseased, warped spaces at once like a sandstorm. And when she reformed, she dragged most of those little pieces back into sensible reality with her, enough to allow her lance to plow a straight path through to the source. And with a little more cleanup, she could get more of the pieces back together, enough to establish a zone of safe passage much like the tunnel we’d punched through the perimeter of the barbecue. She left any further repair to the local magitech-equipped authorities—if there were any. There were abandoned sites all over the world where it was a bad idea to stray from the road.
The problem was that here, she had retreated immediately. We still didn’t know why, but the important part was that she had, and therefore had done none of her usual cleanup beyond what it had taken to put down the poor soul. Reality behind her was supposed to still be a mess. Instead, the snow lay smooth and uninterrupted over the landscape.
“Usually, snow is an excellent way to spot discontinuities, all those little errors I don’t have the time to stay and clean up,” Kat explained. “There should be mounds or patches, something that gives away there’s some displacement or lensing. Eddies in the orange should be making at least some kind of mess. But this looks all natural, if you account for all the places where I tore up the dirt underneath during the fighting. Accounting for that, it’s a dead flat, smooth continuum. Isn’t that odd? And those distortions were there when I left; even if you don’t believe me on that, the PCTF came through after I left and wrote up a whole report. It’s not supposed to be public—link’s pinned in the chat, though.”
The tilt of her helm did an excellent job of suggesting an impish grin. Some gender-obsessed part of my hindbrain took a note as the rest of me skimmed the document as fast as I humanly—doll-ly, chassis-ly—could. I raced through possibilities, trying to map this against all the other oddities we’d observed about my Flame. “Yuuka, doesn’t this—”
“Your torch, yeah. Clarity, equilibrium, perfect destructive interference, taking the noise out of the gradient.” she rattled off in increasing order of technical correctness. “But it’s not quite the same thing. You cancel out silver, not normal colors like orange. You’re making normal colors to do that.” She sat up in her beanbag chair. “Huh.”
“What?”
Yuuka gestured helplessly at the screen, flummoxed.
Kat continued. “Obviously, this isn’t normal. Flamefall infernos don’t do that. And that’s because this thing wasn’t natural. We thought it was an attack on the Spire, and that’s half right. And I knew the moment I got to the center of the inferno that this wasn’t just any chunk of the Frozen Flame. But it took me three weeks to actually understand what was going on.” She looked at the camera, at a billion people, and I knew she was looking directly at me. “It was sent from the future. And it can hurt us.”
My blood ran cold. Yuuka had frozen.
Then Kat relaxed. “Well. It could hurt us. Can’t anymore, it was an easy fix.”
I felt like I was going to burst into tears in relief. Of course, I didn’t have tear ducts or eyes, so the sensation was purely imaginary, but it was still an incredible release of stress. Yes, the Peacies were still going to come after me, but the Vaetna would be okay, so big picture, everything else would also be okay.
Yuuka’s expression said otherwise. She looked like she was about to puke.
“What’s wrong? Is…is she lying? That it can’t hurt them?”
“No. Maybe. That’s—it came from the future, Ezza. Take that at face value. You’ve got Vaetna shit going on. Put those two facts together.”
“…Oh. It came from them in the future? Why? Why would their own Flame hurt them?”
“Maybe because they’re gonna turn fucking evil?”
“That’s insane,” I asserted. “And, what, they’re trying to stop their past selves? Through me?”
“I don’t know!” Yuuka banged her palm against her knee in frustration. “Or somebody else is, or maybe it wasn’t meant to be for you at all. The others with your Flame, they don’t know shit about magic. There’s just—something isn’t right. What’s the pattern? Why aren’t these fucks doing anything? They know the Peacies won’t buy that this is the end of it until they actually get to test out whatever superweapon they’re making and it really doesn’t work on them. ”t
“Is any of that rhetorical?”
“I wish,” she groaned, leaning back in her beanbag as Kat began to move on from the topic of her absence. The Vaetna apparently had little more to say on the matter; the Spire was going to monitor flamefalls more carefully for the time being, but otherwise the stream seemed prepared to leave the topic of time travel behind in favor of more usual State of the Spire proceedings. Yuuka fumed. “They should be blasting whatever lab to fucking rubble, just to be safe. They should be blasting us to rubble, just to be safe.”
I flinched. She was spiraling. “What were you saying about not speaking it into existence?”
“Seems I was fucking wrong about that! The future is real and it can come back to fuck us all over at any moment. As if the present wasn’t already enough of a bitch.”
That was an upsetting thought. “I…okay, yeah, that’s not good. But, like, time travel paradox still holds, doesn’t it? If messing with the past were a thing outside of this one instance then it would have already happened an infinite number of times.”
Yuuka responded to that by jabbing a finger at her crystalline eye. “Two instances. Strike three and history is over, it’ll all be one giant tangled clusterfuck of stopping shit before it can get started. They have to know it too.”
“I’m saying that’s not how it works! If the stakes were that high I would already be dead,” I reasoned. “Unless I’m needed alive for something and there’s a whole time traveler war happening just out of sight at all times, in which case everything we know about the world might as well be dumped out the window. The only sane thing to do here is assume that this is it. One person made it work one time, outside of your eye.”
Yuuka took a long, anxious, slightly mistrustful look at me. She held it for several seconds, her eye flickering as though trying to divine the truth in my words by peering through all of what was to come. Then she hung her head. “Fuck.”
“Is that a crisis ‘fuck’ or a defeated ‘fuck’?”
“It’s an ‘I wish you’d never showed up’ fuck.”
“So not in a foresight way.”
“Not in a foresight way,” she agreed.
I scoffed. “What happened to boobs club?”
“I joined this conversation at a strange time,” came a new voice. I turned and saw Izumi standing at the top of the stairs. She waved. “I just got back from a party. Twitter is saying time travel is real?”
“Yeah, and it’s how this fucker got its Flame.”
“And that’s all it seems to have done!” I added.
“…I see. And the boobs?” She looked at me. “Did you touch her boobs?”
“No! What is it with you and touching boobs?” I groused.
“It’s fun. Yuuka-chan, how does this change what the PCTF will do?”
Yuuka looked at Izumi dumbly. “Eto. Uh. I…haven’t checked.”
I would have pinched the bridge of my nose if I had one; in this body it felt more correct to cross my arms under my boobs. “Okay, Izumi, great point. Before we keep catastrophizing about history imploding or the Vaetna turning evil, I’m gonna go back into my body, we’ll get up on the roof, I’ll light up my arm, and Yuuka will verify how this changes anything within twelve kilometers and like a week of where we’re standing right now.”
Izumi put a hand on her hip. “If you go back to your body you will immediately fall asleep.”
“Oh. Shit.”
Yuuka frowned. “Oh, yeah, you’re way overspent, go the fuck to—” she flinched, hard, then scrambled to her feet, her eye flaring bright. “Oh fuck. Oh, fuck fuck fuck fuck no no no—”
The alarm in her voice had me also jumping to my feet, itching for my spear. “What?” I asked.
“I—I have no idea what I’m looking at,” she admitted. That was even more concerning, given her personality. “Physically. Ice? A beach, maybe? Nothing from around here. But if you don’t go there right now, the Vaetna show up and kill us all tomorrow.”
I glanced at the stairs up to the launchpad. “Shit. No idea where?”
“Stop,” Izumi commanded. “Think. Yuuka was about to suggest that you go to sleep. It’s not a real place.”
“Oh, fuck,” Yuuka gasped. “Yeah. If you have their Flame, then you’re part of their creche, and sometimes—but it’s been weeks, you’d know—fucking time travel,” she fumed. “Or maybe they just don’t fuckin’ sleep. Fuckin’ bugs.”
I cottoned on at last. “You’re having a vision of one of my dreams?”
“Only because this one is magical! I had them with Amane, sometimes, it’s how I helped find her, and the others, because we’re all from the same stuff. Haven’t had one in a while, but—point is, Ezza, get out of the doll, go to sleep, now. I think you have a conference call with the Vaetna.”
Author’s Note:
What a reveal! Time travel is very scary to write about. I wonder if the Vaetna are willing to give more details directly to Ezzen? And I wonder which of them will show up! Perhaps we will get even more description. Perhaps in the dream they are more…buglike. We’ll see!
Thanks as always to the beta readers! Their feedback always goes a long way. I also want to give special thanks to the Discord for an extremely positive response to last chapter, as well as some truly excellent fanworks discussion lately. Both have really helped my motivation this past week.
Tune in next week for our first behind-closed-doors encounter with Ezzen’s favorite people (?) ever!
Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!
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ezzen: Thought I’d poke my head in before we went full piranhas in an hour.
My fingers glided along my laptop keyboard. The screen was the only light in the room, spilling over my bite-bruised flesh. Hina was curled up against me, naked as I was. Sex was good, I’d learned—though this was a much milder session than that first night after our gyoza-seeking outing three days prior, when she’d butchered my virginity and then proceeded to fuck me half to death. It had been awesome and irresponsible and absolutely not sustainable to continue at that level. If Hina needed an outlet for the type of copulation where fighting and fucking were indistinguishable, well, she had Izumi, and compunctions about sharing my girlfriend somehow did not number among all my neuroses.
But I wasn’t dropping into the chatroom to reveal that I’d progressed my relationship with Radiance Sapphire. The internet was still more than sufficiently a-titter with the videos of the two of us out in Shibuya; indeed, we’d been spotted all over Tokyo in the past three days, from the aquarium to the sumo arena in daylight and in bars and boba shops at night. People could think what they liked from there, and even among my friends in a relatively secure channel, what we did to each other’s flesh a ripple-safe distance away from the penthouse was a little too personal to share in detail. I’d told Sky only enough in confidence for him to verify that Hina knew the limits of what a squishy human body could endure, for the next time she wanted to go rough with me. Anything beyond that wasn’t my friends’ concern, as much as I was sure they’d have loved to speculate about how my girlfriend’s healing factor worked.
No, I was here in the main chatroom to talk about something equally personal, but which was solely my own to share. It was probably a little overdue, if anything, but we were congregating for something big anyway, and I wanted to lay this out before that took total priority in the discourse.
ezzen: so the mantle is going pretty well
starstar97: ?????????
starstar97: what does that mEAN
ezzen: To be blunt: it might mean boobs
starstar97: GAWUH AH GFSAKLJ
moth30: wtf this doesnt sound like the ez i know
moth30: who are you and what have you done with them
ezzen: It me!
starstar97: BRUH
starstar97: e booba real??
starstar97: e on e?
moth30: big if true?
ezzen: Not hormones!
ezzen: The nominative determinism isn’t THAT strong
ezzen: But
moth30: better than eztrogen…
moth30: (is it okay to make those jokes? i can stop)
ezzen: all good lol
ezzen: Not impugning my nonbinarezness
skychicken: that pun is on life support
ezzen: indeed
ezzen: But yeah, mantle has boobs. Or it will once it’s done and I can use it.
starstar97: congrats!!!!!!
moth30: can i get a refresher on what a mantle is <- does not know anything about lighthouse
starstar97: lm body they use for their magical girl transformations
skychicken: im body
starstar97: *LM
starstar97: fuck you
starstar97: its really cool! fighter jet shaped like girl!
moth30: whoagh…….
moth30: two of my favorite things
moth30: why didnt you tell me about this before star
starstar97: google heliotrope phoenix amv
ezzen: Yeah, imagine a fighter jet but all the controls are in your head.
ezzen: I’m not at that point yet, though
ezzen: Haven’t actually woven up the LM, using basically a dummy instead for now.
That was why I’d been putting time on the flight simulator in Hina’s room. Ai had modded it specifically for this purpose years ago as a partner to the doll. Where the doll was for the core mind-transfer functionality and gaining comfort in a body not of flesh or necessarily shaped like your own, the simulator was a way to practice laying out a physical control panel for the more advanced motor and sensor functions of a mantle in order to build up muscle memory. Those would map to the more abstract, thought-triggered controls of the actual mantle. Chief among them was the mechanism that would let me directly transfer in and out at will, without the horror-show helmet currently necessary for the doll, but Ai and Amane had both stressed that it was absolutely critical for me to first be comfortable with the basic mental control panel for triggering functions. Apparently Amane had once gotten stuck in her mantle in her novice days, and no matter how much they had improved the automatic release failsafes since then, it was critically important that I have the muscle memory to free myself and get back into my original body.
starstar97: omg youre using the doll??????
I sighed to myself. I’d known this was coming; I’d asked the Radiances ahead of time what I was cleared to share with my friends about this, and had been surprised to learn that the doll was relatively public knowledge. Todai hadn’t even been the first to show the technology to the public, though it had been the first civilian application. At the time it had been primarily publicized as a kind of full-body pain relief prosthetic Amane and Ai had been developing. In a sense, it was still serving that purpose, though for a different kind of pain.
ezzen: okay okay lemme get ahead of this
ezzen: i dont know why its called the doll!
ezzen: its really just a crash test dummy
starstar97: dollzen
skychicken: play nice, star
I waited a few seconds for her to start typing some kind of apology, because it would be funny.
starstar97: ok fair. was just riffing but i can see how it comes
ezzen: She’s not completely wrong
starstar97: im NOT>?
moth30: LOL
ezzen: I’ve been thinking about that actually
ezzen: Because the body IS kinda gender euphoria, but I’m not sure how much the term “doll” is doing it for me. I think it’s mostly just that the plating feels Vaetna-y. I’m armored and it’s a relief.
starstar97: (notes)
starstar97: vaetnez!
starstar97: relevant given the upcoming stream
moth30: (t minus 58 minutes btw ez please come hang out we havent had you around for one since your fuckin flamefall and we miss you)
starstar97: more seriously uh
starstar97: it is a pretty loaded term gender wise
starstar97: hard to decouple it from the fact that its literally slang for a trans woman
ezzen: …
ezzen: I am ashamed to admit
ezzen: that that literally did not occur to me
ezzen: Huh
I marveled at myself for missing that—and was a little annoyed that the Radiances had defaulted to still calling it the doll when they knew my gender preferences. But maybe they actually hadn’t thought about the connotation, or they’d just figured I had been thinking of it along those terms and implicitly consented.
starstar97: okay e that is very you but also valid to be uncomfortable
skychicken: too fem-coded?
ezzen: Maybe? Shit idk now
ezzen: But that’s sort of the conundrum, which is the thing I brought this all up for to begin with
ezzen: Because, putting this on the record, I do feel quite solidly that I am NOT running with the magical girl aesthetic! I’m not becoming a Radiance and I don’t particularly want to be seen as girl.
ezzen: And yet,
ezzen: boobs squishy
starstar97: (true)
moth30: (true)
ebi-furai: (true)
ebi-furai: to cut to the chase, ez put boobs on the doll today
ezzen: My chase! Severed!
moth30: how do you actually do that
moth30: duck tape?
starstar97: its SIX FLAMEBEARERS THEY KNOW HOW TO AFFIX
ezzen: duct* tape
moth30: are you correcting me or is that what you used
DendriteSpinner: ACTUALLY
ezzen: what we used
The chat lay silent for a moment until a small wall of text appeared. We were all nerds, after all.
DendriteSpinner: It is/was called duck tape because it used to be made from duck cloth! Because the whole point of duck tape is that it has a strong fiber weave on the backing that makes it much stronger than a simple cellophane tape, and cotton duck (*not made of real ducks) was the most convenient textile of choice, so it was literally duck fiber tape. The name mostly switched because it was eventually also used for things like duct repair and that sounds more plausible to people than “duck tape” which admittedly does read like a wrong homophone.
starstar97: ??????
moth30: dendrite my goat
DendriteSpinner: so in a sense you could say that the boobs ARE attached by weave 😛
starstar97: what, doll’s too fragile?
ebi-furai: cmon
ebi-furai: wantonly {affixing} pieces of pink3 magitech together is how you end up sorted into your constituent organs by mass
ebi-furai: live onstage
ebi-furai: on international tv
ebi-furai: because you ignored your engineers telling you it would do that because you are, quote, “a different breed”
ebi-furai: and now the moment is immortalized forever on twitter dot com and also my hard drive
moth30: elongate wasnt ripple interference, billionaire meat can do that at any time and is simply waiting for the funniest moment
starstar97: call me billionaire meat the way im exploding with no warning at the funniest time possible
ebi-furai: opal’s flesh must have a terrible sense of humor then
moth30: actually if it can do it at any time then we wouldnt need the vaetna- oh i made myself sad
A notification blip interrupted what I was typing.
[Direct Message] starstar97: okay dude/tte/nby what the hell does ebi DO at todai this is driving me bonkers style
[Direct Message] starstar97: “medical staff” my gosh darned ASS, she talks like she runs the tower
[Direct Message] starstar97: i am this close to believing shes just straight up one of the girls
She’d got it in two, more or less, but I’d been coached not to confirm or deny. I was certain Ebi was surveilling this conversation anyway, end-to-end encryption or no.
[Direct Message] ezzen: She’s not a Radiance! And she does work with Ai! That’s objectively true!
[Direct Message] ezzen: pinky swear
[Direct Message] starstar97: sure, pinky swear, cant argue with that
[Direct Message] starstar97: one of opal’s aides then, or something
[Direct Message] starstar97: just feels like she knows a whole lot about a whole lot of things
I snorted at the idea that Alice had any operational support at all; the woman had a frankly worrying lack of infrastructure between her and the day-to-day operations of Lighthouse as a media nonprofit and tech R&D facility. Hina and Ai had both separately posited that the dragon-ka might be a direct symptom of stress feeding her Flame, and I suspected that theory held some water. Maybe her headaches weren’t a sign of imminent dragon horns, just regular, normal-person stress migraines.
At any rate, Ebi’s nature as a true, thinking person was one of Todai’s secret secrets, one of the things that at the time of my arrival had seemed world-shaking, but now I honestly wasn’t sure how “the magical girls have an AI” could land us in hotter water than we were already in, big picture. Regardless, it still wasn’t my information to share.
[Direct Message] ezzen: Genuinely can’t believe you care more about this than hearing about my adventures with mammaries
[Direct Message]starstar97: sorry! brain has been chewing on it for like weeks now
[Direct Message] starstar97: gimme a little hint?
[Direct Message] ezzen: Medical staff is still basically correct and that’s all I can really share.
[Direct Message] starstar97: fine then
[Direct Message] starstar97: keep your secrets
[Direct Message] starstar97: and share your boobs
I took that as my cue to return to the main chat.
skychicken: on the other hand
skychicken: six flamebearers resorting to taping a set of silicone jigglies to a crash test dummy is an all-timer mental image, right
ezzen: yes it was all rather low-tech
ezzen: but it did work
moth30: and how would you rate your booba (chinhands)
My hand ghosted over my chest.
ezzen: Well I didn’t wake up paralyzed by new flavors of dysphoria, so thats something
ezzen: Actually like the most immediate thing was kinda orthogonal to the gender part
ezzen: So the chassis is all servos and plating and all, right. And that rocks, being made of flesh isn’t all bad but I do, to an extent, crave the strength and certainty of dermis etc etc, I’m finding. And without any clothes on the plating felt like armor so I didn’t feel naked
ezzen: But I felt VERY naked with the boobs on
moth30: because of squishy outside the armor (notes)
ezzen: Exactly!!
ezzen: i had to put on a hoodie
starstar97: aslghslajfk e thats SO gender, robo thing with clear booba bump under the hoodie and no other clothes goes crazy
moth30: frfr
starstar97: im kind of mad you didnt send a pic
starstar97: even though like i get it
starstar97: i want to seeeeeeeeeee
ezzen: oh
ezzen: that i can do
ezzen: gimme a couple minutes
It’s curious that I was able to do that. Just get up, overcome the comforting inertia of my friends in my phone and rise out of bed in the middle of the night, away from the warmth and comfort of my snoozing girlfriend, then shrug on clothes, attach my prosthetic, and creep downstairs into the open space of the penthouse. Less than a month ago, such a thing had been completely impossible for me. The endless vortex of stimulation available in my phone used to be able to paralyze me for days, sometimes weeks on end, before basic maintenance of my body and living space inevitably turned into emergencies that had to be dealt with before returning to my comfortable stupor. Now, I had things I wanted badly enough to get me moving. Or, more accurately, things I wanted to be.
Becoming a flamebearer universally changed somebody, but the version I had always imagined was the most bombastic version of myself, framed as one of the Vaetna or at least on their level. That notional Ezzen was brimming with the desire to change the world, powerful and brave enough to stand up for what he believed in, and armed with some innate wellspring of volition to see it through. The only difference between me and him, I’d fantasized, was that he had the Flame. With that strength, all else would follow; I could finally realize my potential.
It had been sobering for my first few weeks after being infused with magic to instead be dominated by pain, displacement, and doubt. Reality hit me like a truck, even coddled as I was by all of Todai’s wealth and power and kindness. I had been shown the painful truth that I barely knew who I was, that I had barely had a self to begin with.
And now, as I trotted down to the doll’s room and got everything set up unaided, I finally felt like that was starting to change. I was certainly far, far, from the Vaetna expy I had wanted to be, but there was a nugget of volition, a feeling that magic would let me achieve my potential. It just took a slower and more stepwise process between Ezzen-past and Ezzen-future than I had ever dared, or even been equipped to, confront. Perhaps, in time, I could even become the other things I used to imagine for myself—though I’d definitely revised Ezzen-future’s pronouns.
Those kinds of thoughts changed shape as they followed me through the doll’s setup process and through the liminal soul-tunnel that bridged flesh to Flame-imbued silicon. As a human, it all felt very melancholic, all ego-dimming realizations that I had not merely been missing one secret ingredient that would turn me into a hero, a savior, an adult. Whereas in the doll—pending names that clicked any better—I felt potential. And weight on my chest, which was why I was here.
I strode over to the full-length mirror awkwardly propped up against the wall and took a photo of myself. I immediately liked it more than any other selfie I had ever dared to take; it captured the simple geometries of white plastic against the soft shapes of my hoodie, faceless face as the centerpiece. But after a full minute of deliberation, I deemed that one not good enough, mainly because it mostly hid the contours created by the boobs—my boobs—so I took another, then another, trying to find one that would be sufficiently entertaining to my friends while doubling as a sufficiently thorough formal introduction to this latest version of the body I felt comfortable in. It started as an exercise in perfectionism and quickly devolved into play; assured of my privacy at this ungodly hour of 2:12 AM, I tried posing, first in simple offsets of my hips versus my shoulders, then starting to pay more attention to the photo’s framing and the low perspective created by the mirror’s haphazard angle. Before I knew it, I had accumulated dozens of photos alternating between increasingly goofy stances and visual explorations of the doll’s mechanical articulation.
Things took a turn for the gravure when I began to experiment with how to highlight the impact of my breasts. Pulling the hoodie taut would have been downright titillating if I hadn’t left most of my libido in my meat-body; in its absence, and with the boobs not belonging to anybody else, it was refreshingly guilt-free to simply play with them, to grope at their shape experimentally. And like Adam and Eve long before me, being newly aware of where I was uncovered brought a great deal of fun in pulling up the hem of my hoodie and really milking those low angles, until just past the crude edges of duct tape you could see the curve of underboob—
“Having fun?”
“GWAH!”
I dropped my phone. It was fine, thankfully; rubbery corners beat tile, at least at the angle it had fallen at. I hastily scooped it up and turned to face—Yuuka. We were dressed somewhat similarly, actually, at least insofar as we were both wearing hoodies. Except where I was nude below the waist, she was wearing a comfortable-looking pair of sweatpants. No eyepatch; the chunk of prescient gemstone in her right eyesocket stared lidless and unnerving. Her regular eye presented a much friendlier expression, though, at least if you counted a sardonic grin as friendly.
“Hey.”
“…Hi,” I replied uncertainly. “I was, um. You saw that, I assume.”
“Titty pics aren’t really a novel concept ‘round here, Ezza. If anything I’d say you’re late to the trend.”
“Youre not bothered by that?”
“I mean, I knew you’d be doing it, and I came down here anyway. Doesn’t bother me when you’re set up in that thing with those things.” She indicated my body overall and then specifically my chest. “If anything, you’re easier to talk to like this.”
I tilted my head. So that was how it worked with her, it seemed. I wasn’t a threat, even disinhibited and rambunctious, as long as I looked feminine enough. That tracked with how she’d rejected Izumi from dinner high-school-clique-style before we’d attempted to take out Sugawara.
She shifted awkwardly, hands in her hoodie’s pockets. “Look. Amane says I need to apologize for being a bitch. So, sorry.”
“Sure,” I replied, feeling surprisingly forgiving now that I had a read on the situation. She was here to mend bridges—or at least put out the fire—rather than antagonize me. “We’re cool. That, uh, all you came down here for?”
Yuuka raised her eyebrows. “Wow, you really are different in that thing. That was almost sassy.”
“It’s…comfortable,” I hedged. “Maybe not the right word. But better. Less trapped, I guess.”
That earned a look of genuine concern. “You do know what mantles are for, right?”
“Yeah, yeah. Jet fighter, engine of destruction, not a toy. We’re going to war, apparently.” I raised one arm and rapped at the plating with my knuckles. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it, right? If anything, it seems pretty important to enjoy it.” I thought of Izumi hypocritically enduring eating food she could barely taste. “That is where you’re going with this, right? Because I’m not going to stop enjoying it on your account.”
She crossed her arms under her boobs. I wondered how that felt and hesitantly mirrored it. Not bad. She chuckled. “Yeah, not gonna tell you to stop. Amane beat some self-awareness into me. But being too embodied in your war suit can get pretty bad when, y’know, it blows up and you have to eject straight out of fourspace and immediately land on your feet before some fuckin’ kinetics burst pops you in the one-point-four seconds before your wards come back online. If you’re disoriented because your body is a different shape and you just feel worse overall, that can be real bad.”
“All problems Amane currently faces, and I don’t see you lecturing her about it,” I pointed out.
“You don’t see it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.”
“…Fair.” I chewed on that for a moment. “So then what are you advocating in my case, exactly? Not that I take off the boobs, I hope, sounds like you actually like me more with these things. Which means…” I eyeballed her. “You’re not about to pull out a pink, glowing syringe and lunge for my regular body over there, are you? To synchronize how I’m shaped at the other side of the equation?”
“What? No, get your head out of your ass. Alice still has some estrogen in her room if you’re that desperate. Not pink or glowing, though…huh, maybe Todai-branded pink-enhanced estrogen would be a real funny pharma collab, heh, if she’d ever let it fly.” I could have sworn I saw her eye flicker with magical light, as if she were habitually checking the future for the possibility. It occurred to me that perhaps this was how Todai wound up pursuing a lot of their brand deals: decreed by prophecy. She shrugged. “Can’t tell. Anyway, just wanted to point it out. The more your forms diverge, the more risk you’re managing.”
“Can’t I just practice ejecting a bunch? Until I’m used to it?”
“Sure. But you haven’t actually set up the pod yet, and trust me, swapping in and out is a bitch for the first, I dunno, fifty pod hours. We don’t have the time for you to get real good at it, especially if you’re constantly tinkering with how you’re shaped on the mantle side. So just—pick something and stick with it, and be careful, alright?”
I blinked. Well, I would have, had I the eyes to do so. I think the message got across, though. “Aw, was that actual concern I just heard?”
“Fuck off. You sound too much like Ebi, it’s creepy.” She hesitated. “Sure. Fine, if only because you’re the bait. Can’t fuckin’ spring the trap if you get gibbed in a stupid way first.”
I didn’t love the sound of that, but that was partially because I was still in the dark. And usually, I was quite awful at admitting I didn’t know what was going on, but I was different right now. “Er, when does that changeover happen, Miss Precog? When I start being bait for an actual trap, I mean. To be honest, I don’t have a great idea of when diplomatic judo is going to turn into warfare, or what that’ll even look like.”
Her voice turned singsong. “Oh, the sex doll thinks it’s spent the last three days being a tourist by pure accident?”
“Sex doll?” I looked down at my body—which was difficult, past the protrusion of my chest, but even so—and had a horrible realization. “Wait, have some of you had sex in…? Or with…okay, no, back on track. No, it wasn’t by accident, I had a whole discussion with Hina and Izumi—”
“Which I knew you’d do!” She looked smug, which seemed to be her comfort zone when it wasn’t overridden by precognitive anxiety or trauma-induced meanness. “My eye isn’t complete dogshit when it comes to you. Just mostly dogshit. Point is, you being out there, on camera and with your gay polycule, is a statement. The Peacies know we know they’re coming already, but we want them to think we’re not worried about it turning into a real fight in the streets, because if we were, then surely we wouldn’t be putting all those civilians at risk if they decided to make it a fight.”
I tried to follow that. “So me being out there has been…a bluff?”
“Sort of.”
She didn’t explain further; in reply, I did my best to stare at her in a way that signaled my annoyance. Unfortunately, Yuuka commanded an aura of oracular smugness that was completely impervious to nonverbal prompting. Maybe this was where Hina had learned her go-silent-and-stare-at-you-until-you-replied conversational quirk. That might have just been Hina being Hina, considering that Yuuka’s vibe was different. She exuded a sense that she greatly enjoyed being in this conversationally dominant position.
I emitted a digital sigh. “Explain?”
She smiled. “I want to see what they decide to do next. If you’re out there and looking unafraid, eye says a few things could happen. One, there’s a version of events where they honestly just decide to fuck off entirely, if they decide you’re not worth it on top of the chick from your creche they already have. Two, if they stick around and start putting the screws on the government, we can handle that. Three, they start moving stuff from Okinawa…well, things should crystallize after that,” she grinned. “And no matter what, now they really, definitely know what you look like, all up to date with the hair and such.”
“…Yeah,” I agreed hesitantly, not quite following. “And I’m not a particularly big fan of that fact.”
“Correct! You’d way rather be in your mantle. But they don’t know that, right? Rhetorical question, I know they don’t know that. That’ll be the trap, eventually,” she explained excitedly, “Since they do figure that if they were to take the negotiation route—try to win you over with money or holdin’ your friends hostage or what have you—then there’s not a fuckin’ chance you’d actually show up to chat with them in your real body, you’d be in a mantle of some kind, something protective. We’ve got plenty of precedent for that. And they think that mantles pretty much have to be like your real body, not some other shit, especially if we’re putting one together in a hurry.”
“Uh. Sure, I follow that part. How’s that a trap?”
“Because we can have one of us show up in a mantle that looks like that thing over there,” she explained, thumbing toward my insensate body. “They could tell it’d be a mantle, ‘course, but that’s what they’re expecting. They just wouldn’t expect it to not be your mantle.”
“Ah.” I saw it. Then I thought about the plan a moment longer. “But, no, hold on. Why does that need my mantle to look like something else?”
Yuuka steepled her fingers schemingly. “Because they know a Radiance can’t be in two places at once. So if all five of us are accounted for while that’s happening, then it must be you—or Takagiri, but we can account for that—”
“Oh my God,” I interrupted, now fully understanding and a little incredulous. “You want me to shapeshift into one of you? You should have opened with that, that was such a confusing non-explanation. And—that’s barely a step removed from the glowing pink syringe!”
“At least three steps. And it makes setting up a mantle for you so much easier if you just copy one of ours. And clearly you’d be fine with one of us, since, y’know, this,” she waved in the general direction of my duct-taped boobs. “You’ve already joined boobs club, so you could totally wear one of our faces for a few hours and not freak the fuck out.”
That seemed…probably true, I decided, looking down at my chest. It was still kind of a silly plan, though. I had the brief, cruel, intrusive thought that it was no wonder she’d failed to save Amane on her own if that was the extent of her strategy—and promptly kicked myself hard for thinking that, hard enough to feel I should atone by humoring her a little. “Okay. And then once one of you are in the room with them—some notional “them” who I suppose is some Peacie big shot coming in from Okinawa—you spring the trap by shooting them in the face?”
That was apparently such a bad idea that it warranted a huffy twintail flick. “Tch. Of course not! We’d just hold him hostage for leverage.”
“Which we could also do if I was the one there to begin with.”
The moment that left my non-mouth, I knew it wasn’t true, and so did Yuuka.
“Could you?” She looked at me seriously. “In a mantle that looks like your body, no separation between you as yourself and you as the war machine? After you had that meltdown about blowing up an oil rig full of kidnappers, two things that rank near the very top of things that are objectively good to wipe from the face of the fuckin’ earth?”
She had me there. I’d found I was plenty capable of reactive, desperate violence, but a premeditated trap would be a whole other story. It remained a critical difference between myself and future, active-VNT Ezzen. “Fine, yeah,” I agreed. “But this plan doesn’t warrant hopping into one of your bodies. That’d be…I don’t know, invasive.”
“Says the sex doll.”
“Don’t call me a doll,” I snapped, more annoyed than last time.
Yuuka looked surprised. “Alright, sheesh. Not upset about the sex part?”
I took a moment to reflect on that. No, I wasn’t. I was actually sort of curious, but Yuuka was emphatically not the person to ask about what exactly this chassis had been used for. “I’d have thought you’d be the one upset about that, what with you freaking out over me and Hina.”
She raised her hands helplessly. “I thought I’d be too! But the calculus has changed now that you’re in boobs club. My anxieties are weird like that, I don’t know what to tell you. All I know is what the eye tells me, and right now it’s saying you’re chill.”
“Boobs club,” I repeated, having not really heard much of what had come after.
“You do remember the shit you were doing when I came in, don’t ya?”
“I was—okay, sure,” I sighed. “I was just—just curious what it was like. Not used to actually wanting to show off how I look.”
Yuuka put a hand on her hip. “Well, you’ve come to the right girl.”
“You came here,” I pointed out. “Premeditated, even.”
“Bah. Who’s the target audience? These for Hina? Takagiri? Some e-fuckbuddy you’ve been keeping under wraps?”
“My friends on the internet,” I corrected her, begrudgingly turning back to the mirror. She seemed set on helping me, for whatever reason, and I supposed that counted as some kind of win for our relationship. If anything, this felt a lot like Takagiri propositioning me the other day; I really had no clue what I’d done to warrant it.
She blinked with her one eye that could. “Oh. Not nudes.”
“No!”
She collected herself immediately. “Gotcha. Alright, then your job is easy. I can demonstrate.”
That made me turn right back to her in shock. “Not—”
“No, not a fuckin’ bare titties shot. We’re cool, we’re not that cool. I wouldn’t go underboob for this at all, actually, there’s kind of a minimum for it to be, uh, IG-safe, weirdly. And those—wherever you pulled ‘em from—are big, but not Alice-sized, and I’d say she’s around where you’d want for that. So what I’ll actually demonstrate is this:”
She reached behind herself and tugged her hoodie back. The effect was immediate; Hina had done similar things wearing my shirts to tease me and it absolutely had flipped a switch in my brain. In Yuuka’s case, I was grateful that said switch didn’t exist while I was in the doll, because she really knew what she was doing. I pried my non-eyes away, turned back to the mirror, and tried it myself. Sure enough, it left a hell of a contour around my chest, and moreover, where Yuuka’s belly left a faint contour, the hard shell of the doll’s midriff was clearly communicated by the fabric. I liked that a lot. “Oh, dang.” I took a pic, then turned back to her. “This is the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had. Why are you helping me with this? Instead of, I don’t know, sleeping now that you’ve laid out your ridiculous plan?”
She sighed and released her grip on her hoodie. “You want full honesty?”
“Sure? Unless it sucks, I guess.”
“Alright. Because Amane wanted me to make an effort to treat you like you’re one of us. This is the best I can think to do, because my brain is broken and if you’re one of us then that means you need to know how to control your sex appeal.”
That did indeed sound like full honesty, and more than a little vulnerable. I tried to return the energy. “So you’re trying to keep me safe.”
“Pretty much.
“…Thank you. Though, uh…there’s got to be other options,” I pointed out. “For bonding, I mean, that don’t involve pigeonholing me into needing Female Celebrity Survival Skills, all capitalized. No offense.”
She winced. “Yeah. Like I said, my brain is broken. Amane said Alice told you this is how I work, so…here’s confirmation, I guess. Asshole,” she added, seemingly mostly out of some obligation.
“Broken brain comes with the territory for flamebearers, probably. I dunno, my sample size is just you guys. But if it’s about bonding…” I checked my wrist like I was wearing a watch. That was a little bit of muscle memory we’d been trying to incorporate; it pulled up the doll’s most basic HUD. I checked the time. “There’s a Vaetna stream in about twenty minutes. It’s why I was up at this fuckin’ hour in the first place. Word on the street is that Kat’s gonna make her first public appearance since…what kicked all of this off. And that all seems pretty important for how the next few weeks are gonna go. Want to watch with me?”
Author’s Note:
Sorry that this chapter was delayed! Needed a little bit of time to regroup after a pretty brutal week (snowstorms, anybody?). But I’m super happy with this chapter overall, love to write more chatroom. I’ve lampshaded before in the Discord that a certain billionaire died in a very stupid way due to his own magitech, and it’s finally had a moment to show up in the text! Yippee! Also, Ez being cute in the doll (?) is a lot of fun, and we got some Yuuka with it too.
But all that is burying the lede, because BEHOLD:
Drawn by katsutacle, who did a truly magnificent job and I will definitely be commissioning more in the future. Patrons got this art over a week early, and there’s plenty more art in the pipeline, so if you’d like to support the story, there’s a perk!
Thank you to the beta readers. Among all their other work, they’re also pretty fantastic reference for the chatroom’s antics. The main Discord helps a lot with that as well!
That’s all for this week. Tune in next Sunday for onscreen Vaetna!
Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!
Join the Patreon to support the story and read chapters three weeks ahead of public!
We were wrong that post-doll me would need any convincing to go out and explore. I’d assumed I’d return to being hesitant and recalcitrant about the idea of spending more time outside Lighthouse Tower after recovering from the euphoria of the doll, but instead, almost the moment I woke from my collective nap with Hina and Ai, I got up and found my mask, spirit energized and eager to be dragged around. My body was a little slower on the uptake; a few restful hours on Ai’s mattress still left me a bit sluggish, and if I hadn’t been so eager to go out and do something, I probably could have slept clean through the evening and night. But I was up and about, and my excitement didn’t wane over the next three days.
Night one was by far the lowest exertion. No parties; instead we went out to eat in Shibuya.
The first new experience was traveling by train. It was much more down-to-earth than the times I’d left the penthouse in Todai-owned vehicles, and I gained a new appreciation for the scale of the city as we went to the station on foot. The metal and glass peaks of urban Akasaka loomed high around us in the dark, glinting down like false starlight. I was pleased to find that my foot could handle the walk, and as a bonus, the warmth of my stabilizer module kept my hands nice and cozy in my hoodie pocket. I followed Hina and Izumi down the streets and into the station, following instructions about how to use my Todai-issued train pass and generally doing my best to be a good duckling as we got on the train without drawing too much attention.
Traversing Tokyo is an exercise in crowds, and nowhere is that more true than the traincars of the subway. We were packed shoulder-to-shoulder, a packed mass of human flesh that tightened and loosened with the pulse of passengers coming and going at each stop like some grand heartbeat. Perhaps the tides were a better comparison. Paranoia whispered that any one of them could have been a PCTF operative, somebody out to get us. And while that was probably a useful way to feel as a flamebearer who was still an active abduction risk, I knew it wasn’t a particularly healthy one.
Two things assuaged my worries. The first was my armor of cloth; it now extended halfway up my face thanks to the mask. It wouldn’t stop a knife or bullet, but that wasn’t the point; it made me feel whole while also simultaneously hiding my face. Second, Hina was nestled right up against my chest, and she’d informed me that she would pull both of us straight out of the train—or anywhere else—at the first sign of trouble. We were prepared to abort at any time, blessed with what was arguably any introvert’s dream ability: to be able to instantly flee any situation, even with all doors sealed.
With so many people in such close quarters, it was inevitable that some would notice our not-completely-unassuming trio. Even Hina could pass for normal as long as her face was nuzzled against my chest, somewhat shielded from the side by my hoodie’s extraneous bulk; she could have been anybody’s girlfriend, especially if you were politely ignoring everybody packed into the train car with you and had your head buried in your phone as so many around us did. It also helped that she was employing her customary—at least supposedly, as I’d hardly seen it myself—illusion magic to hide her fangs, and was carrying sunglasses that screamed “I’m obviously a celebrity, who else would wear sunglasses at night?”
I, on the other hand, could not have been just anybody’s not-boy-dollthingfriend—terminology subject to review—in the eyes of even the most casual observer. I had a mane of unmitigated, fluorescent orange hair, was clearly a foreigner, and stood taller than most people in the fish-tin confines of the train car. More importantly, I had been on the news fairly recently, albeit in a tertiary role within the narrative of the Barbecue Inferno, so I received more than a few glances. No unnerving stares as though we were about to be attacked, though, which was reassuring. The only danger was self-consciousness, and with the mask over my face I was managing to dredge up enough doll-derived disinhibition to fight that off well enough. Add something to go over my eyes and I would have been one step closer to being fully encased, Vaetna style.
Then again, a full mask would have drawn even more attention than I was currently receiving. And if you were to look too long at me, you might also notice that the creature glued to my side was fidgeting with just a smidge too much weightlessness, and the subsequent double take might come at a particular moment where she was scanning the crowd and you’d see how her eyes shone like the sapphires that were her namesake. And then you might incredulously squint at the third member of our party and realize that she was not another of the Radiances but in fact—
But Izumi wasn’t high-profile in the way we were. With makeup on and dressed to party rather than to kill, she looked quite different from how she’d looked in the handful of decent photos circulating in the wake of the Barbecue Inferno. She blended right in with the crowd as we approached the heart of Tokyo’s nightlife. There were countless young women out and about, after all—and I did think of Izumi as young. Older than me, to be sure, but a far cry from the fifty-something of her former identity. Maybe somebody might have connected the dots if she’d been standing right next to us, but once we were out in the street she always managed to fade into the crowd whenever I or Hina attracted attention.
All of the attention we did receive was positive, which was remarkable. Hina attracted much less enmity from the general public than I’d anticipated for the instigator of Japan’s most recent major disaster. But she’d briefed me on that before we’d set out, and it was honestly so simple as to be a little depressing: the Radiances’ reputation as Japan’s heroes was so bulletproof that the average person simply assumed that she’d had good reason for crashing the entire festival.
“Even with the…casualties?” I’d asked. “The official story is no fatalities, but surely…”
Izumi had dismissed my concerns. “There were none. Miyoko is very, very powerful in healing. Or something like it. Necromancy…is also not the right word.”
She’d glanced at Hina, who shrugged, apparently unable to offer better vocabulary. “We got it all under control! I helped! Remember your bed when you first showed up? With the healing acceleration field? I spent a lot of last week weaving up a bunch of them. And with Shiny’s powers on top of that, everybody’s turned out all right and nobody’s too mad.”
That kind of power was well beyond my understanding of magic. Could she fix Alice’s tail and presumably-imminent horns or Amane’s severed limbs or my fondly-remembered toes? Then I reasoned that if Miyoko could work miracles of that caliber, Todai would have been much more eager to play nice with Hikanome, or maybe there were Flame interference issues with healing other flamebearers. “Okay, so that means that even if you’re recognized, we won’t be mobbed?”
“Other than the usual fans? Nah. Which will still be a lot, but they’ll just want selfies and I’ll make some sparklies and say houseki hikare a bunch. Humans are easy to please, usually.” She blinked. “Ah, right, necromancy. Shiny did say that she still wants to talk to your dad.”
“…Oh,” I recalled, shivering as I remembered that vague offer, and the unnerving sense that there was a physical space behind the high priestess’ eyes. I’d been a cynic at the time—and I still was, but I couldn’t pretend that whatever Miyoko could do was purely smoke and mirrors. “Yeah, can’t refuse that, can I?”
“Prolly not.”
“You could,” Izumi countered, “you always have the choice. But it would be a good idea to say yes.”
“Wait, didn’t she say two weeks? It’s been more than that.” I eyeballed Izumi nervously. “You’re not gonna whisk me away again and bring me to her for some dark ritual, yeah? Just checking.”
“No. Of course not. I owe you my life,” Izumi intoned. “Though I understand your mistrust. I did try to stab you today. As for what Miyoko wants with your father—I admit that I don’t know what to expect. That was new to me. When we were speaking to you at the gathering, I was just nodding along and being cryptic,” she admitted. “But I do know that it’s been postponed until we gather for my trial. And Japan’s reckoning with you. But we don’t know when that will be, not yet. Soon, to be sure, but the last two, the fisherman and his wife…they can be…hard to find, and it should not begin without them. But enough about politics,” she spat, distaste thick in her voice. “Let’s not speak of it anymore tonight.”
And indeed we didn’t, not that night. In fact, nobody did; of all the people who recognized myself or Hina, none dared even reference the inferno, or so Izumi claimed afterward. Aside from the diplomatic patching-over, it probably also helped that Hina was so disarmingly charming, full puppy mode, happy to stop and take selfies and be generally amicable as I supposed a magical girl ought to be—which took some effort from her when she had to direct it toward humans rather than the flamebearers she adored. I was sometimes involved too; people were taking pictures of me. Not too long ago, this would have been bad enough to induce a panic attack, but my mask was working. It didn’t make me an extrovert, but with Hina’s encouragement I mustered the bravery to at least face the camera and stand less hunched as she posed against me. I hoped I didn’t look too much like a hostage.
We never lingered. She always was quick to explain that I didn’t speak enough Japanese for an interview and hurry us out of the interaction. It was rather impressive; somehow she managed to keep us moving enough that we were never left becalmed in an ever-growing whirlpool of people seeking access to the mildly undercover celebrity, a phenomenon she described as “the paparazzi pileup.” Frankly, the idea of adding paparazzi to the mix, while anxiety-inducing for “oh god not attention” reasons, was a little laughable for the simple reason that there was no space for them. The streets of Shibuya were dense beyond belief, beyond what I had even thought possible outdoors without any particular event driving the congregation of such a throng.
But the neighborhood itself was the event. This was most apparent right after leaving the station, ascending the stairs and turning around to be greeted by a crosswalk of gargantuan proportions, flanked by skyscrapers covered in so many LED billboards that I couldn’t help but compare to the time Dad had taken me to visit Times Square. I was informed this was Shibuya Crossing and that traversing it was an essential rite of passage, evidenced by the sheer number of fellow tourists with phones held aloft as the crossing signs turned green and the gathered hordes on opposite sides of the street rushed toward one another with no regard for the crosswalks in between.
When our turn came around, I expected it to feel like a disordered stampede, facing down a sea of people coming toward us in and unsure if we would even reach the opposite shore—but instead, where we met the opposite crowd, I found that the two flows of humanity simply met and interlinked in alternating single files, a spontaneous display of fluid dynamics that tickled the engineer side of my brain. I thought back to the Barbecue Inferno, the sheer clusterfuck of panicking crowds that must have occurred in the first few minutes. I’d mostly only seen it after Hongo and his underlings had restored some semblance of order, but if he hadn’t been there…I wondered about how one might repurpose glyphcraft’s fluid flow control toolbox to the task of crowd management. I could picture it: a flamefall gone sour in a crowd such as this first responders using magitech to lead people away from the danger without a stampede, automagically detecting the safe spots of lowest free ripple and optimizing crowd direction through those toward safety. It would take a little doing to convert the physical, blue-ripple redirection to informational pink, but it could be done, in theory. I raised the idea excitedly to the chatroom as soon as we found our bearings on the other side of the proverbial Rubicon. By the time Izumi led us to her chosen dinner spot, we’d managed to cobble together—at a high level—the logic and a few tentative glyph arrangements for such a tool, and then promptly been reminded by Sky that people-directing magic potentially bordered on the kind of mind control that the Vaetna tended to kill people for researching and that we should probably stop.
Then again, maybe the Vaetna would soon be on their way to kill me regardless, so I shelved the idea for later.
Hina made me put my phone away as we actually came up to the restaurant—or rather down to the restaurant—mostly because she was worried about me tripping on the stairs. Down, because the gyoza place Izumi frequented was in the basement of a building barely off one of the tourist-choked roads, a literal dive in a random side alley that had barely a trickle of foot traffic compared to the rush immediately outside, and none of them tourists. It was almost shocking how quickly we had fully separated from the crowd, enough so that I was surprised nobody had followed us out in pursuit of Hina. She laughed and informed me I had completely missed her deploying an illusion to cover our escape. When I looked back, I saw a blue streak rising upward past the skyscrapers.
The restaurant itself was narrow; mercifully, in a way that felt more cozy than claustrophobic. Narrow walls covered in faded signage surrounded us, leaving barely enough room to walk behind the single row of stools at the counter. There was hardly any elbow room as the three of us squeezed up onto stools at the single counter, nearly touching. Hina protectively took the seat closest to the door, while Izumi distributed single-sheet laminated menus and hard plastic cups between the three of us.
“There are two kinds of restaurant in Japan,” she explained to me, grabbing a pitcher of ice water. “Ones that serve everything, and ones that serve one thing. This is a one-thing.”
That was a slight exaggeration—the menu did claim they served dumplings with two different fillings—but it was still very clear that this was a place you came to for precisely one type of food.
“I fear the man who has made the same gyoza ten thousand times,” I joked, then immediately wondered if that twist on the proverb would scan correctly to a Japanese speaker, despite Izumi’s clear fluency in English—and was immediately proven right when her sculpted eyebrows furrowed slightly as she politely tried to parse what I meant. Thankfully, Hina happily jumped in to explain in Japanese and save us both from the awkward silence.
Izumi laughed and did something I never could: she acknowledged the social hiccup. “Ara, I should have asked you to explain! I’m sorry, Ezzen. Should I ask what you mean when you say something that confuses me?”
“Uh.” I suddenly felt very much like a child talking to an adult. “S…sure? Sorry. Was, um, trying to be funny.”
“It was! You don’t need to be afraid of explaining yourself.”
Hina pressed her shoulder against mine from the other side. “Cutie, I know you can handle directness, chill out.”
“Sorry.”
“No more sorry,” Izumi chuckled, shaking her head.
“S…okay.” She was hard to say no to, which was a little dangerous. A trait she shared with Hina, but at least Hina had a certain people-pleaser side to her to balance it out, at least when it came to me and the Radiances. Izumi felt more like the cool girl you wanted to impress. “Uh, what do I order?”
“This one, kurobuta. Only pork filling.”
When the food arrived, Izumi explained that the customization options, such as they were, came in the form of picking and mixing your dipping sauces, and instructed me in my options. I could mix chili oil, a thick soy-based sauce, and vinegar, and could choose between black pepper and seven-spice powder to sprinkle on top. Hina went for an all-of-the-above approach, which struck me as a little childish and maybe even disrespectful of the flavors of the dumpling being dipped. Dad had been a bit of a stickler about that; even for mass catering and other more lowbrow cookery, he’d been of the opinion that you should taste the food itself first and any additives second. With that in mind, I elected to initially refuse all sauces and try the gyoza straight, lifting it to my mouth with the accompanying bowl of rice held beneath it to catch any drippings as I was seeing other patrons do—
I’d completely forgotten I was wearing my mask. Izumi snorted as I hurriedly put down my food; Hina reached over to undo one of the ear straps for me, giggling. “Oh my god, that was cute.”
“Why didn’t you tell me it was still on?” I complained.
“Because I thought it’d be cute, and I was right.” Her eyes glimmered with what looked like honest attraction. “Right, Izu-chan?”
“Oh, yes, very cute.”
This unreasonable pressure sandwiching me was far too much for my faculties to withstand, especially freshly stripped of the emotional protection of the mask. I switched to an offensive mode I had previously reserved for Yuuka and sometimes Ebi. “Hey, I’m not the only one with something between the food and my mouth,” I pointed out, rounding on the mantled woman to my right. “Let’s see how well you handle it.”
That could have come off as incredibly insensitive, given that Izumi’s current body was effectively a prosthetic for her identity; if I’d equivalently questioned Amane’s ability to feed herself with her mechanical arm, it would have been slap-worthy. So I waited with increasing nervousness as Izumi stared back at me unreadably. It was almost a mercy when she at last raised her chopsticks and stuffed an entire gyoza into her mouth, maintaining eye contact with me as she chewed and swallowed. She took a sip of her water, placed the cup down, and then continued to look at me smugly, content to wait for me to formulate a reply.
“…How?”
Izumi opened her mouth to reply, but stopped when Hina waved her arm frantically. I watched in fascination as she wove a sound-deadening lattice in a matter of moments and pressed it onto the bar in front of me. Then she waved for Izumi to continue.
“Stasis chamber. I’ll eat it properly later.”
“Pre-chewed?” I asked incredulously, then caught myself. “Um, okay, no, I’m being an asshole, that’s not my business and I get it if—”
Izumi cut down my stammering with a wave of her hand. “It’s fine. Doing anything in the other body is a chore, I’m here to have fun.”
Hina frowned compassionately. “Izu…”
“Oh, I’m sounding sad, aren’t I,” she sighed. “I’ll stop. Itadakimashou, ne. Let’s eat,” she translated for my benefit. “Gyoza are only good while they’re hot.”
I frowned at her evasion, but she was right about the food, and I was hungry. As it turned out, I did indeed fear the man who had made one gyoza ten thousand times, because these were easily the best dumplings I’d ever had. The bottom was crispy without the rest of the wrapper being dry, and the pork filling was unctuous beyond belief, almost obscenely juicy—which Hina was freely indulging in, making satisfied little noises as the juices dribbled down her chin in a bizarrely attractive way. While there was a wonderful light consomme served alongside, and a small cup of radioactive green pickles there to cut through the heaviness, by the second of the nine dumplings on my plate I had come to understand the need for a dipping sauce to balance the rotation from gyoza to rice to pickles to water. Intuition said vinegar with a bit of chili oil, and my third dumpling confirmed that to be the right move.
By my fifth, though, I was starting to get a little curious. I glanced at Izumi. She was eating, but avoiding the pickles, and had barely touched her soup. And I noticed that for her dipping bowl, she’d selected the heavy soy sauce.
“Can you at least taste them?”
“Yes, of course,” she answered hurriedly.
Too hurriedly. I was starting to construct a model in my head. I looked back down at my food as I thought out loud. “I don’t know much about tastebuds, lots of nitty gritty chemistry stuff in there, but I do basically know what makes food taste good chemically, big picture. And I know how {IDENTIFY} and {ASSIGN} and the other pink categorization stuff tends to work. Answer: not all that well, not with hundreds of volatiles to identify, transmit and recreate. Are you getting anything but fat and salt right now?”
“Sour,” she mumbled, not quite sulking.
Hina leaned over to look at her, whimpering sympathetically. I felt the same, sighing. “Okay, no, we’ve got to do something about that. This stuff is way too good to be bitcrushed like that, it’s a waste. And you eat all your meals like this? Barely tasting anything that separates it from the cheapest microwave version, and then you have to eat it again as chewed-up slop?”
“I have different…palates. I can choose between sweet and savory.” She didn’t refute the rest.
“We can do better than that. We ought to do better than that, fuck me.” I shut my eyes to think more clearly. “Hina, mantles are bound by a pink-blue diffusion limit, right? That was the impression I got while looking at the diagrams, but I’ve never actually asked.”
“Ummm…if you want a number from me, cutie…”
“No, no, just that the principle holds. The physical versus informational complexity compromise before they start interfering with each other.”
“Mm, yeah. Fancy LM, worse senses and stuff, and other way around too. Gotcha. Izu, cutie’s saying you should turn down your graphics to make room for more tongue.”
“Maybe we can do both,” I clarified, “I’d need to look at the diagram, we can probably squeeze more efficiency out of it somewhere. Or maybe not and it’d just have to be a slider. But either way, you should be able to enjoy food as it’s intended to be tasted.”
“You’re offering to help me?”
I looked at her like she was stupid. “I am literally with Todai specifically to help work on mantles. That was Alice’s entire pitch, and despite everything that’s happened, it’s still the closest thing I have to a job here.”
“I’m not a Radiance,” she replied, staring down at her plate of food she had no choice but to underappreciate.
I threw a pickle at her, which was uncharacteristic of me, but the moment called for it. It did the trick, because she looked at me in surprise. I turned to face her more directly. “You were telling me today to stop refusing help because I thought I didn’t deserve it. But, um, fine, if you want to be like that, then think about it this way: I also want this capability for my mantle. Think of it like you’re helping me with that, if it makes you feel better.”
“You do?” Hina asked. I looked at her like she was stupid, which made her grin. “Yeah, of course you do. I love that you love food.”
I nodded. “So do I. Nice to remember that,” I muttered. “In my case, if I used that taste assembly, I’d personally skip on having an actual mouth, which would conveniently lower the LM complexity…though I don’t know how I’d get the food in there.”
“Maybe a seamless mouth,” Izumi suggested, brightening. “No line or lips until it opens.”
I raised my eyebrows. The idea of a mask opening up into a maw was a favorite among a select subset of Vaetna fanartists. I’d never imagined it for myself before, though, and it was immediately growing on me. “Huh…No, hold on, you’re not going to acknowledge anything we just said?”
“Yeah, let cutie help you, Izu-chan, it knows what it’s doing!”
The ex-assassin raised a hand to placate me. “You don’t have to work that hard to convince me! You’re right, I was being a little…not used to people wanting to help me. Or even being able to. So, yes, if you’d be willing. But your mantle is a higher priority—no, really, it is,” she insisted. “And I would prefer to help you with that, if I can. How much of the design do you have?”
“Not…a lot,” I admitted, sharing a glance with Hina. We’d spent a fair amount of late-night time chatting idly about it, but committed depressingly little to sketches or a glyph diagram, let alone proper GWalk modeling. “I think I just decided that seamless mouth idea sounds good, but there’s not too much beyond that. I’ve got this vague picture, much more Vaetna than Radiance, and, um—slimmer, or a little reshaped, but…”
Izumi’s eyes lit up. “Reshaped how?”
“Oh, y’know,” Hina began before I could respond, “Cutie’s been pondering those orbs.”
“I don’t know what that means,” she replied, deadpan.
“Ezzen wants tits!” Hina clarified. I was deeply thankful for the field of silence preventing this conversation from spilling out all over Twitter.
“I’m pondering…tits,” I corrected her. “Just…I don’t know. Don’t knock it til you try it, I guess?” My mouth turned dry; I was proud I’d said it out loud, but we were now in uncharted waters. I reached for my cup of water.
“Ah,” Izumi nodded, comprehension dawning. “Pondering tits. I have some experience with that.” She looked down at her shirt, then up at me. “Would hands-on experience be helpful?”
I spat out my water. “Wh—here? I mean, no!”
Hina kicked my shin from my other side. “Cutie, in all seriousness, I have been wondering when you’d get over yourself enough to ponder my orbs.”
“I’ve seen you naked! And cuddled you naked!”
“That’s not sex!”
“I vividly remember you saying I couldn’t take it!”
“Maybe you can now,” she challenged, eyebrows waggling. “And Izu-chan can be there to play referee just in case. Or just there to play. Didn’t you say you wanted to go and have fun?”
This was happening very fast. Too fast; I felt like they were playing with my emotions in an unintentionally mean-spirited prank. “Okay, hold on, that’s an escalation, right, her offering to show me her boobs doesn’t at all mean she’s willing to—”
“I am,” Izumi purred in a tone that was unmistakably sultry. “Are you, Ezzen?”
“Not with you!” I blurted, panic driving me to put into words what could possibly make me reject a threesome with two supernaturally good-looking women. “I—that’s not how it’s supposed to work, I mean. You and Hina can do whatever, but that’s still awfully new, today new, and I’m not—not built to escalate like that. It’s me and Hina, and you and Hina, and not me and you, even with you as a spectator.”
Izumi pulled away from me, looking a touch confused. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not you, it’s me,” I sighed heavily. The cliche was accurate here. “It’s just—I swear this isn’t me being a prude, or ashamed, or anything. It’s just too much too fast to have you involved—I’d have the same response to any of the Radiances. I think.”
Izumi looked toward Hina. So did I, suddenly apprehensive and shaking a little from the rush of adrenaline. I could see this exploding into a tantrum, or worse, Hina could go into full emotional crashdown mode. I didn’t want our first time to happen out of guilt.
But my girlfriend was grinning. “Don’t look at me like that. I still get to fuck both of you! Just separately, which is all good for me.”
I blinked, relieved and pleasantly surprised. I’d misunderstood what she wanted, or maybe just underestimated her character. “Oh. Good?”
“Good,” she confirmed. “Did I hear you right? You still want to fuck me, right, as long as it’s just the two of us?”
“…Yes,” I admitted. It felt weird to say out loud, and weirder to feel a spike of excitement as her eyes flashed. I swore I saw her fingers twitch.
“Yay! Then we’re gonna fuck tonight, cutie. Orbs will be pondered. But…” she looked past me at Izumi. “If the one place I can’t have both of you is the bedroom, then I don’t wanna go there quite yet. The night is still young!” She stood for emphasis. “Let’s go!”
“You still have half a plate of gyoza left.”
“Oh.”
Izumi chuckled, which was also a relief. “Cute. Both of you. I’d be grateful to speak more about mantles, Ezzen, both yours and mine. No…orbs involved.”
“Okay. I’d like that. We’re good?”
“We’re good. Now, I’ve been very curious about this ever since I first met you as Kimura, so if you don’t mind explaining: long hair is not something I associate with the Vaetna or their Flames. How did that happen?”
Author’s Note:
This chapter was late! I miss Tokyo, if it wasn’t evident from the descriptions. At least Ezzen has good local guides! Who are both interested in having their orbs touched. Izumi’s a lot of fun to write. Thank you to the beta readers for helping me understand what had to happen in this chapter!
Sunspot hit half a million views on RR just before this chapter went up! Thank you so much! I wish I had art to celebrate. Soon.
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