Hina practically bowled me over when she pounced on me. I didn’t quite fall, thanks to a feat of acrobatics on her part—she hooked her arms over my shoulders and spun me around, flowing to my opposite side in time to steady me from the very wobble she’d caused. In that brief moment of connection, I felt how she shifted her momentum in ways that were unnatural, coming to a stop too quickly and gracefully after she passed me. The azure of her eyes shone in the half-shadows, the rest of her body silhouetted against the glow from the convenience store’s glass facade. My heart fluttered as she reached for my plastic bag of goodies.
“Sweet stuff! And masks, ooh, babe, I see your angle. Little adventure, little exploration.” She grabbed the pack of masks and pulled away from me, holding them up in front of her as if to superimpose them on my face. “Yeah, good idea. Alice think of this?”
“Hey,” I mumbled, mentally lagging a little behind. I was shivering a little from the combination of the cold and elation at her presence. “Um, not Alice’s idea. I—okay, to be clear, I did tell Ebi I’m out here, this isn’t totally unsupervised—”
“Oh my God, cutie, you don’t need a permission slip to go to the konbini across the street, chillax, ‘s all good.”
I stifled a paranoid complaint along the lines of “but the Peacies,” because Hina was clearly happy I’d taken the initiative at all. I looked back toward the light of the convenience store and flinched as I saw several people, including the cashier, looking out at the pair of flamebearers flirting on the sidewalk. “I, um, wanted to…go do…a thing. Anything, I mean, not a specific thing. Er, I guess a specific thing, that being buying these masks, the food was kind of a welcome accident…I got a cornucopia, that was cool. Would have gotten you one of those fried chicken things if they had any. Guess it’s too late at night.”
“Mm.” Hina had been humming along to my ramble, clearly happy just to hear my voice, but she perked up at that last part. “Oh, Famichiki? Gosh, your instincts are good, I was having a craving earlier.” She pulled two steaming-hot paper baggies that smelled of greasy fresh-fried food from nowhere and handed one to me. “Wanna go home and stuff our faces?”
—
There are few things in life more decadent than hot food immediately after coming inside from a cold night. But, sitting on the floor of Hina’s room, I could now confidently say that one of those rare superlatives is to also have your mostly undressed girlfriend snuggled up to you at the same time. I felt spoiled beyond belief, in a nervous, slightly-too-close-to-that-pride-of-lions way, to have such front-row and skin-on-skin seats to Hina’s dismantling of her first cutlet. The novelty didn’t wear off after her second or third, either.
“Are you even chewing?”
“Meh.”
“Let me rephrase,” I sighed, scrunching up her third wrapper and eyeing the distance to the wastebasket, “Are you savoring the flavor at all? Like, you’re very clearly having a good time with the, er, chomping and the juices and all. Just wondering about the rest.”
She leaned back and twisted to look up at me and roll her sapphire eyes. “I am tasting it, cutie. Chicken’s good, salt rules!” She yoinked another cutlet out of her pocketspace. “Trust me, if I was starving and just needed to get this straight into my belly, it wouldn’t go through realspace at all to get there.”
“How’s that work?” I asked with the slightest bit of hesitation, embarrassed at my ignorance. “Er, I know how the food could just go straight into your stomach without passing through anything, but my experiences with the fourth dimension haven’t suggested that it’s, um, super conducive to keeping food warm and edible.”
“Cold and oily,” she agreed. “Just gotta go fast. I have this little warmer box in my pocketspace, and that’s literally within arm’s reach. And yeah, it gets some space-nasties on it, but I don’t mind that much anymore.”
The space-nasties, the ether, the hypercosmic ocean—just some of the countless terms to describe the weirdness of the fourth dimension. It was well-understood that something had gone terribly wrong with its introduction to our reality; any pre-2015 mathematical model of adding a fourth spatial dimension—or at least those where you twisted physics’ arm enough for reality to not immediately fall apart—pretty much just had it as an extension of the world we were familiar with, not the bizarre, dark and icy void more akin to outer space. Even models where Earth and we Earthlings remained three-dimensional in a four-dimensional world didn’t anticipate such an alien locale so close beyond the veil of three-reality; the math said that moving a few meters ana or kata was supposed to merely be deeply weird and disorienting from a spatial perspective, not a jump into an entirely different universe.
But it was still traversable and survivable. The comparison to outer space was an apt one; you could pilot a craft out into the dark, and the Vaetna had compared their armor to a space-suit. The Radiances put their real bodies out there while mantled, stored in pods that were basically anchored bunkers—some of the comments on the diagrams called them cocoons—too distant from realspace for even the most cutting-edge military hardware to reach. You had to be a flamebearer to reach them, and even then, among the most gifted at navigating and surviving and fighting in that space to have a chance at causing real harm.
Like Hina. The 160-something-centimeter Japanese girl, with her soft red hair and outwardly human anatomy, didn’t look obviously adapted for that environment of impossible driftwood and colossal dust bunnies floating through oily spatial medium. But looks could be deceiving—and when it came to her, I was really easy to deceive.
“Space-nasties,” I repeated. “It’s so fucky out there. Can’t believe you just stow your actual flesh-and-blood bodies. I mean, you specifically, maybe, sure, but overall, that feels like it adds a whole new layer of danger to fights you guys are usually going to win anyway.”
“Ah, ye of liffle faif,” she replied through a mouthful of chicken, unashamedly wiping some juices off her chin with her finger. “Yeah, I worry about the others sometimes, too, they’re not built like me. But I know they can handle it, and even if I wasn’t sure, you can only listen to Alice yammer about risk-reward ratios and buoyancy gradients for so long before you just throw up your hands and let ‘em do it, y’know?” She reached out to stroke my formerly scarred, now half-armored, hand. “Lemme guess, cutie, you want to try it too?”
I accepted her fingers’ offer to intertwine with mine. “I was…getting to that? I think. What’s it like?”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“Well, you’re all floaty, even here on Earth.”
“Sure am! It’s fun to be able to move. Y’see my flight sim over there?” She nodded in the direction of her apartment’s antechamber, where the extremely expensive-looking apparatus sat. I’d only ever seen it disused and inert.
“Yeah?”
“Well, I used to spend a lot of time in the shallows. Exploring, generally swimming around, all that. But that made Ai upset—messed with her tools and bothers Ebi—so this was the compromise for when I got the zoomies, modified a bunch for 4d clickies. Haven’t really felt like using it since I dragged you home, though. You can try it if you want.”
“Clickies?”
“Y’know, the scrunch when you go from the surface to the shallows? It makes a clicky sound.”
“Does it?” I hadn’t noticed, but then, my experiences of moving to or from our three-plane usually were accompanied with other things to worry about.
“Yeah. I can show you.”
“Uh—no,” I decided quickly. “Had enough adventure for one night.”
“Kay. Might just be me anyway. B’yeah, if you want some 4d practice that isn’t just me taking you for a swim, lemme know and I can get the rig dusted off.”
“Is that different from, uh, more general mantle operation training? I seem to remember Alice saying something about sims?”
“I dunno. We never really made a real training system? Me and Alice just learned by experimenting, Ai helped us formalize the tech but she still just kind of figured out how to actually use it from, uh, using it. Amane kinda brute-forced it when she was feeling bad. And I think Yuuka cheated the normal trial-and-error with precog shit. So you’re our first, like, normal onboarding? So like, we’ll just show you how to flail around in the doll, then help build your actual prototype mantle, bespoke style—pretty much how we did it but fast-tracked because we can give you tips.”
“Shoulders of giants, I guess.”
“Mhm.”
We lapsed back into silence. Hina seemed satisfied after her third Famichiki and shifted off of me to splay out on to the blankets that covered her floor. In her position, I would have immediately gone for my phone to idly scroll or watch videos, but she seemed content to just look out the window at the fluorescent twinkling of Tokyo at night. I munched more slowly on my own piece of chicken, crunching through the last few bites while I thought about the fourth dimension, mantles, and the Peacies.
“Hina?”
“Yeah?”
“How does this end?”
She sat up again to peer at me. “Like, with the Peacies?”
“Yeah, I guess. When they ‘show up,’ what will that actually mean? A delegation? The way you all talk about it makes it sound like it’s inevitable it’ll all go to violence eventually—thus the mantles—but I’m just…not really clear on how that’ll start, what happens up until that point.”
Hina grinned. “Wanna know a secret?”
“…Sure?”
“Global politics is mostly emails. And Twitter.”
“Huh.” I supposed that made sense; something had to prelude flamebearers turning cities to glass. “So they’re…sending you emails? Threats? Offers?”
“Yeah. Alice says they’re offering a lotta money for you—which, like, isn’t that basically just emails too, sorta? But they’ll eventually send actual people and demand to talk to our actual people. We’ll say no to that, and then they’ll…dunno. Smear campaign first, then probably start threatening the government? That’s what they did last time.”
“Threatening the government with…what? Full annexation? I don’t know how things…work, on this scale. Before the swords come out.”
“Mostly lasers for us, actually. But neither do I! Ask Alice if you want the deets, but the point is that none of it’ll really work. They can’t control us with emails, and Japan the country can’t really do anything to us as long as there’s no other flamebearers backing them, which is why it’s bad that I fucked things up with Hikanome.” She sounded glum. “But that’s getting better! And as long as everything with Izumi works out okay, I think they’ll be on our side. We’ll find out on…Tuesday. Four days.”
“Tuesday?”
“Yeah, March 1st. That’s when Miyoko wants to chat about Izumi and take a look at your Flame. It’s in the calendar.” She looked proud of herself for knowing that. “But yeah. There’s literally no bite behind the bark without flamebearers of their own showing up in Tokyo, and we’ll know when those show up. Yuuka thinks they’re staging a few in Okinawa this week—I’m not supposed to go check,” she sighed. “But trust me, you’re safe in Tokyo for now, even on your own. It’ll be pretty obvious when that changes. You don’t even have to do much! Yuuka will know, I’ll know, Amane will be lasering people, all before you even have to lift a finger. Go to all the konbini you want, nobody’s gonna grab you. Hell, wanna go on a date tomorrow?”
I blinked. “So is there a time crunch or isn’t there?”
“I mean, you’re only gonna get like three good hours of mantle training per day anyway before you start to feel sick. That leaves plenty of time for extracurricular activities.”
“Still seems kinda…frivolous.”
“Ugh, you sound like Alice. And Jason! Don’t deprive yourself of things that are fun. Didn’t you have fun going out on your own?”
“I mean, yeah, but—fucking war,” was the first thing I could articulate, then I figured out how to say the part that had caused me such grief earlier today. “And just…I don’t want to be irresponsible. There’s a slippery slope there.”
“We’ll keep each other responsible!”
“Will we?” I snapped. “When we were being all handsy last night, in the kitchen, it really spooked Yuuka, and I feel like that’s just a perfect little snapshot of what happens when we fuck around.”
Hina’s shoulders hunched slightly. “Sorry.”
I flinched. “Don’t be. Or, do, but—be sorry at her, not me, I guess. I shoulda—I just got away from myself in the doll. I need to be more careful about that. Was talking to Alice about it earlier.”
It was quiet for a few seconds while Hina thought about this. When she looked back up at me, she was frowning. “That’s not really the same thing, though, right? Like, yeah, be responsible when we’re having fun, but that’s not the same as don’t have fun. And I know having fun at all is kinda new territory for you, but I also know you’re smart enough to know that difference. What’s the real problem, cutie? Why the…I dunno, the focus?”
My heart climbed into my throat. “The stakes are high.”
“Nah. I mean, yeah, but we’ll win! You asked how this ends, right? Well, that’ll be when they give up. They gave up on Amane after the fourth team didn’t come back. Why’d you be any different?”
“Because they want me to be a Vaetna-killing superweapon. I think.”
That brought her up short. Her blue eyes widened as she looked me up and down. Then she stood and paced in a slow circle around me, inspecting me from all directions. She couldn’t literally see my Flame, could she?
“Uh?”
“Mm. Hmmmmm. Mm…cutie, promise not to be mad?”
My hackles rose ever so slightly. This would be a very bad way to find out that Hina had very different opinions of the Vaetna than I did. The worst possible way, even.
“Can’t promise that,” I muttered. “I’ll try.”
“That’s fucking hot.”
I twisted around to glare at her. “It’s—”
She dropped to her knees to interrupt me with a hug. “It’s not good, I know, but—y’know how I am! Power’s hot. Doesn’t mean I want any of that to happen. Are you getting mad?”
I took a deep breath. “A—a little. A little.”
“Sorry. Is it scary? It’s probably scary, right?”
Something in her voice, the earnest and innocent concern for my well-being over any of the ramifications, broke me. The need to cry suddenly manifested as a ball of ache in my throat. I made no attempt to resist it. I twisted into Hina’s hug and returned it, squeezing her tight, seeking comfort in the feeling of her hair draped across my face, a reddish brown blanket to stain with my tears as quiet sobs gently kicked me in the chest.
“Aw, cutie…” Hina muttered, stroking my head. “We won’t let them. We’ll make them fuck off.”
I sniffled. “Can you?” The terror, the weight of what had been thrust upon me, was catching up to me again, only escaped for a scant few weeks that had still been full of danger. I knew in my gut that the Peacies would turn Tokyo to rubble if it meant getting me—and the final fallback I’d kept telling myself I had, the option of going to Tokyo’s Gate and seeking asylum in the Spire, felt impossible now. “If you can’t—then what? Where do we run?”
Hina patted my back. “No. C’mon, cutie, put some faith in us magical girls. We’ll fight and we’ll win,” she growled, a bassy rumble too deep for her chest, before her voice softened again. “Listen—it’s scary as hell to be powerless, but you’re not. You just haven’t seen the limits of what you can do. Neither have I, y’know, but I want to find out. You said superweapon, and that’s a big fuckin’ word, right?”
“Only against the Vaetna,” I mumbled numbly. A second, more horrifying wave of terror was washing over me. “What if they—what if they try to get rid of me before the Peacies can get to me?”
Hina didn’t respond to that immediately, staying quiet for a few seconds too long, kicking my anxieties into nightmare territory. Her giving the prospect actual thought was far scarier than even an uncomfortably hasty and insistent reassurance would have been. Then, when she made up her mind, she leaned back and kissed my forehead.
“Well, I’ve always wanted to fight a Vaetna.”
—
The next morning, I found myself standing about two meters away from Hina in the middle of the dojo, a lattice bound around my hand. I brought my middle finger out and my index forward, twitched my thumb, and the second balloon in Hina’s hands seemed to tear open on its own. The satisfying sound of magic at work echoed through the dojo with a pop.
If you were take a video of what I was doing with a high-speed camera, you’d have found that the balloon had spontaneously developed a hole about three centimeters in diameter, a circle where the mylar had been cut out as though by a little circular punch, before physics took its course and the entire round structure unraveled into ribbons. At regular speed, it just looked like a balloon popping, the exact effect of the magic obfuscated by the limits of the human eye.
I made my next adjustment, staring at the third yellow mylar orb, which she’d taped to her chin. It was one thing to judge the distance and direction between it and my previous target, and another to match it solely with finger-twitch changes to the structure of the glowing thread bound around my hand. It didn’t help that if I was too far off, I could instead hit Hina herself; she seemed to view that as a plus, but it was still absolutely messing with my aim.
Another thumb motion fired off the glyph; this time I got only the small jolt of cold against my skin as feedback, no satisfying pop.
“Close!” she chirped. “That one was all the way inside. Gotta hit the surface, remember.”
I replied with merely a frustrated growl. I hated how fiddly this was. There were dozens of ways to add control structures for targeting, ones which would cleanly pop every balloon in an area or let me pick one simply by eye and trigger it with a thought or specific motion or radio signal—this certainly wasn’t how mantle weaponry was controlled—but Hina was insisting that I at least learn how to do it manually. I twitched my middle finger up and completed the glyph again.
“Nope, about a foot too far right and like six inches ana.”
“Your right or mine?” I huffed.
“Yours.”
If nothing else, I wished I could at least make the lattice project some kind of targeting reticule or visual feedback for where I missed, rather than relying on Hina telling me. Neither of us knew how she could tell where my silent misses were landing when I couldn’t; she’d apparently always been able to do it, which made me very jealous. That didn’t help my aim either. I fired off another cutter that went wide.
“Inside again. Remember the baseball, cutie. Pivot everything together, stop twitching them all in different directions at the same time. If you don’t move your ring finger in sync with the first two then you’re just sliding your target point around some random plane and not through threespace.” She mimed cupping the aforementioned imaginary baseball with her hand, gliding her fingertips smoothly around an invisible axis point. She made it look easy; I didn’t have the same dexterity as I tried to imitate it with my next adjustment. The last twitch of my thumb was met with the silence of failure, and I sighed in frustration, letting the threads of magic dissipate and retreating my hand into my hoodie pocket to warm my frozen fingers with the heat pack.
“Not to go all primary school student,” I groused, “but when am I actually going to use this? Pure, raw, single-glyph offensive snapweaving, no control structures? Shouldn’t I be learning a version of this that incorporates an {ASSIGN} or some other basic targeting?”
Hina shrugged, removing the balloon from her nose and wobbling it around by the stem. “I mean. Yeah, you could. But the baseball thing is more of a general weaving trick, right, works for a lotta stuff that cares about distances and directions and stuff, so you gotta get used to it. We can do something else to practice if this doesn’t feel helpful, though, ‘cause this is about making you feel better about magic as much as it is about making you better at magic, feel me? Don’t want you to be frustrated.”
I squeezed the heat pack, savoring the warmth. “Fair enough. I just—yeah, maybe some other kind of practical snapweaving would be better. A bit redundant to be trying combat stuff that isn’t spear training or mantle fighting, those seem more likely to actually matter.”
“Oh, that’s what’s happening in here,” came a new voice from the doorway. I looked over and saw Ai, who looked like a bear emerging from hibernation, shading her eyes from the dojo’s bright overhead lights, far brighter than the rest of the unlit penthouse or the dark predawn sky outside. Hina had gotten me up and brought me here the moment I’d awoken in her arms, determined to make me feel better with magic and violence.
“We’re being careful!” Hina and I said at the same time. Ai waved away our concerns as she approached.
“I know, it was the pops that brought me here, not a ripple alarm. Thank you. How is your six-in-the-morning snapweaving going?”
“Poorly,” I couldn’t help but grouse. Hina gave me a slightly kicked-puppy look, which made me wince and mouth a sorry.
“Teaching it the baseball trick!”
Ai raised an eyebrow. “Without an actual baseball? To use as a guide? I have one in my room.”
Hina looked like a deer in the headlights. “Oh. Uhh. Shoulda started there.” Her blue eyes flicked to me. “Sorry, cutie.”
I was facepalming. “So it didn’t have to be that hard. Okay, yeah, that’s enough for me for now.”
“Sorry!” Hina whimpered.
“It’s okay. Toss up the balloon, would you?”
Hina tilted her head but obliged, stepping back at the same time, some feral instinct giving her an inkling of what I was going to do. I reached for the trigger end of the lattice in my arm, and in one motion I manifested my spear in both hands and thrust it at the balloon. The charred tip struck true and the balloon screamed a final pop as it died. I lowered my spear, satisfied.
“Okay, revenge taken.” I took a step toward Hina, who was looking amorously at my weapon, and touched her arm. “That did help, really.” I didn’t want to give words to the whole emotional ordeal of the prior night, the sense of looming dread and helplessness, not in the light of day. But I did want her to know that her whispered, soothing promises as we’d cuddled had been entirely correct: this little magical exercise had helped remind me that I was a flamebearer, even a novice one. With practice and training, I would not be helpless when the Peacies came knocking
She brightened immediately and leapt onto me, and I had to stow my spear to catch her hug with both arms. “Yay!”
“Futaritomo,” Ai warned.
“We’re not about to fuck, Ai, relax,” Hina chirped. Then she seemed to second-guess herself, looking at me sidelong. “I mean…”
I separated from her hastily. “I—breakfast,” I diverted, turning to Ai. “Have you even slept?”
She looked guiltily off to the side. “At my desk.”
“For forty-two minutes,” added Ebi’s voice over the PA. Ai heckled back at her in Japanese.
“You do have to sleep sometime,” I sighed.
“Cuddle puddle?” Hina asked.
“Breakfast,” I countered. “Then…hm. Maybe. I want to do a little more in the doll today, but that might knock me right out after, if the first time was any indication. So breakfast, doll, cuddle puddle, if Ai is amenable.”
Holy fuck, what a charmed life I was leading, when it was put like that. Big kitchen, transhuman gender euphoria, and cuddles with beautiful magical girls, all before noon. I really had it made, even by the standards of most flamebearers—if you discounted the imminent arrival of a pseudo-empire at our doorstep, anyway. But I wouldn’t let them destroy this. I’d be ready for anything the Peacies sent our way.
Author’s Note:
Short one, but with lots of Hina and Ez being Hina and Ez! And the Vaetna looming, which is all they seem to ever do. Also some on-screen magic training, which hopefully sheds a little more light on what it’s actually like to freely manipulate glyphs when you’re not just tracing Flame over a drawing on a sheet of paper or through a 3D printed substrate.
I moved again this week! Much less extreme than Japan-America, and it went great, but has played hell with my writing schedule. The new environment is helping, though, and I’m trying to end the year strong writing-wise. Helping me with that are the beta readers: Cass, Chloe, Emma, mirrormatch, Mia, Troll, Zoo, Altrune, Enigma, Penguin, and Zak. I don’t normally thank them all by name here on the site but I figure it can’t hurt once in a while.
Also, we celebrated my half-birthday this week, so merry that to those who celebrate. And Hanukkah or Christmas or any of the others too!
Anyway, we also have new Hina art! This is crossover art with The Drake of Craumont, which is written by a good friend of mine and features many amazing women, including the protagonist (pictured):
Drawn by Mjeow, as is frequently the case. This one was kind of a self-indulgent bonus, but I’m hoping to start more serious commissions by the end of the year! Hopefully including the arc 4 cover!
That’s all for this week. Please consider supporting the story on Patreon; currently we’re only one chapter ahead of public but I’m aiming to start expanding that again as we enter the new year. If you don’t want that financial burden, consider instead joining the Discord! We recently passed 750 members and would love to have you!
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One could say that my venture into the umbilical abyss of the hallway to reach my synthetic body was a reflection of the Flame-woven bridge across that solipsistic void my mind had crossed yesterday…but that would be over-dramatic. What I actually did was go over to the hallway and find the light switch.
Once the shadows were banished, it was an unintimidating walk down to the correct room. I passed the meeting room and the dojo beside it and took note of some of the others that I’d ignored the first time I’d gone to the doll: a more conventional weight room to complement the dojo, a few utterly uninteresting storage areas that looked to be filled solely with cardboard moving boxes, another meeting room. Some doors had no label or window, and many that I could see into were simply empty. This much space remained redundant for five people, and my addition had made no dent given my precious few belongings.
I arrived at the room dedicated to the doll and the slightly nightmarish “pod” that had connected my mind to it. The big hallway was U-shaped, imitating the layout of the apartments directly above, and the doll’s room was just about in the middle, directly opposite from the kitchen with respect to the elevator shaft.
The mannequin-like body had been moved from where I remembered leaving it last night, unplugged from the pod and stored lying flat and face-up on a table in the back of the room. The effect was slightly cadaverous, sparking childlike fears that the body would sit up and lunge at me or, more creepily, simply stare. The threat of that was made slightly more realistic by the idea that Sugawara’s spirit was still out there—what if he had infiltrated the building and the body and was lying in wait to take me by surprise when I drew close? My spear tattoo itched in readiness.
I humored it for a moment, summoning the wooden weapon and resting its butt against the floor. I looked at it seriously. “You and I both know that’s not what’s gonna happen. It’s just metal. Er, probably more plastic than anything else by volume?” I sighed, realizing I was hedging even with an imaginary conversation partner. “Point is, it’s not gonna move. I’ve got my lattices in there still,” I confidently informed my spear. Then I dismissed it back to the tattoo.
The pod and doll both contained control lattices I’d woven out of my Flame, which we knew was somehow inimical to Sugawara, so I had no reason to be suspicious or nervous of the conveniently empty body. Toxic to him, just like the Vaetna, came the intrusive thought—I swatted it aside. My Flame had emanated pure repugnance and disdain for the thing Sugawara had become, my feelings mixed with its own and manifested in pure magic; my admiration for the Vaetna was a near-perfect opposite of that, so it was difficult to imagine the same reaction occurring with my heroes and idols. I supposed that if that unlucky Flame-sibling of mine in Poland had felt that way about the Vaetna, and then Kat had shown up…I shook off that line of thinking. It was entirely too speculative and, as Alice had pointed out, not really something I could act on, and therefore only tormented me for no benefit.
I instead opted to approach the doll, and despite all my rationalizing, I was still relieved when it didn’t do anything creepy. It simply lay there, unsouled and inert, plated in that same charming turquoise as Ebi’s shell. I actually hadn’t seen Ebi herself in days. She’d even been absent from the chatroom. Ai had insisted she was fine, and I believed her because the building’s operations didn’t seem affected, but she didn’t seem keen on explaining what exactly was wrong, if anything. I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to pry right now, and it was honestly probably for the best that the AI wasn’t around to comment on the similarities between the body I had liked so much and her own.
I tentatively ran my fingers along the shell. To call it armor was entirely aspirational; it was really only there to bulk out the form to more closely resemble the proportions of a human body, rather than a spindly and skeletal assemblage of motors like in one of those animatronic horror games. Even if there was a certain appeal in the functional simplicity of such a form, I suspected inhabiting it would make me feel very naked without any protective carapace. I now knew with certainty that I enjoyed having a shell of some sort. That was old news; Vaetna-like carapace had been on the wishlist long before anything else. I wasn’t entirely sure what that would mean for a mantle or even my physical body down the line, but in the meantime, that need was supplemented by my hoodies, at least the ones Hina hadn’t stolen.
My more private fantasies concerned anatomy beyond the surface layer; my seven-year longing was for the Vaetna’s figures, which were all fairly conventional human forms covered in their interlocked white armor, obscuring all but the most essential proportions, vaguely muscular and mostly sexless—but the longer I looked at the doll’s figure, the more I had to admit that I preferred what I was seeing here. Narrower shoulders, the slender, gently curving contours of its forearms, everywhere slimmer and more graceful than either the Vaetna or my own body; aesthetics that reminded one that this was a testbed for mahou shoujo, not high-tech angel-superheroes clad head to toe in futuristic armor. A nervous prickle of embarrassment and shame oozed over my neck as I realized that the doll’s form wasn’t really androgynous—yes, there was no flare to its hips or softness of fat to round out its chest or rear, but it was feminine nonetheless, the Radiances’ bodies taken to their least common denominator. The body that had felt right for me was on the girl side of neutral, if only barely.
This wasn’t a completely new notion for me. Hina and Star had opened Pandora’s box when they’d tag-teamed me about whether I thought the Radiances’ various appealing features would look good on myself. Ever since, when I got naked to bathe, I would look down at my body and try to picture what I might prefer more than my current proportions. I was doing my best to give serious, non-avoidant thought to those brief first-person glimpses of Alice’s bust from her mantle cam, wondering how that weight on my chest might feel, and wonder further about narrow shoulders or wider hips and how much femininity my figure was allowed to have before people would start defaulting to treating me as the woman I was not.
It had thus far been difficult and emotionally draining to interrogate those shower thoughts for too long. The idea that I might prefer this slimmer shape instead, rather than “true” androgyny with the suggestion of muscle, brought the familiar tug of shame, the urge to fall back on the plausible deniability of the Vaetna’s warrior physique. But where the Ezzen of even a few days ago had invariably cringed and shied away, I was now armored by the joy and belonging I’d felt yesterday. I imagined Hina’s voice in my ear, something along the lines of “if it feels good, cutie, who gives a shit?”
That helped me realize the obvious: wanting to look like a girl wasn’t the same as wanting to be a girl. Indulging and exploring my interest in a more feminine form didn’t inherently compromise my claims of being nonbinary. The pronouns I’d impulsively requested yesterday were easy evidence of that: they…and it. Both felt right for me, and the latter was exciting in a way I didn’t know how to categorize. Dehumanizing, alien, objectifying, yet thrilling for all those reasons too, an open claim of separation from humanity as a flamebearer. I didn’t know if that one would stick, especially with it being so much less conventional than the other gender-neutral alternative, but it felt real, something of the experience that would last even outside of the doll and reassured me that my gender identity was more complex than “enby on the way to girl,” that I was still moving in the transhuman direction I’d always wanted.
In the privacy of this secluded room in the middle of the night, standing over the evidence of my expanding horizons, such reasoning was enough to overcome my anxieties. For a moment, I let myself drop into more daring fantasy, imagining more overtly feminine features overlaid onto the doll, drawing on what I’d become familiar with. Hina’s bare hips and tight belly came to mind first, which was relieving, in a weird way; when tasked to imagine a hot girl, my subconscious had leapt straight to my girlfriend despite her not being close to the most voluptuous of the team. That made me a good boyfriend, I reasoned. Enbyfriend. Dollthingfriend?
The other Radiances were also familiar touchpoints. Most recent in my memory was Alice showing off her sculpted, borderline-unreal figure to me, which was the kind of event I was sure millions of other young men and women would have paid a fortune to experience and I’d gotten for free out of some kind of trans camaraderie. Star would have had a stroke, driven mad with gender envy and/or regular thirst; personally, I felt like I wanted to look at Alice more than I wanted to be her. This went double for her tail; I didn’t want one myself, but there was something undeniably appealing to my lizard-brain about its bulk and the way her hips flared to accommodate it. I felt I understood Hongo a little.
However, when it came to the proverbial elephant in the room, I still had to permit myself a healthy dose of respectful shame: did I envy Yuuka’s chest rather than simply find it distracting? I looked at the doll’s smooth, flat front, then down at my own, and tried to picture having such a rack, trying to be analytical rather than vulgar as I considered how they shaped the silhouette of everything Yuuka wore, impossible to ignore, a center of attention so potent as to be strategic, as Alice had described. Did I want people to look at me like that, now that I had a better understanding of Yuuka’s constant and eminently reasonable paranoia, and how she wielded her appearance to assert control over that? Would it be affirming or terrifying to be desired in such a way? Both?
I backed out of the fantasies for the time being. The important thing was that even without those curvier elements, the doll still appealed to me, and had still felt more comfortable than the flesh I was wearing right now. I hadn’t freaked out at the lack of a face or breathing, and my subconscious and the lattice had successfully filled in the absence of all the little sensations of the human body, all the secondary muscles involved with balance, the gurgles of my digestive tract, the fleeting aches and pains that evidenced my poor posture. I couldn’t quite remember whether or not I’d literally hallucinated those things to compensate. The brain was weird enough without adding pink-strung lattices into the mix.
In part, my comfort with the doll was simply a matter of contrast; after being completely divorced from the very notion of form in that liminal void of transfer, stripped of all sense of self and proprioception, any body was better than none at all. But when I’d looked in the mirror, my reaction had been much more viscerally positive than mere gratefulness to have the bare minimum.
I felt echoes of that as I moved up toward the doll’s head, looking at the blank face with fascination. No eyes, no mouth, a total mask. This was a fair bit more spartan than my private, embarrassing fantasies of a Vaetna-fied version of myself, which still had eyes. But realistically, as long as I was still able to see, I rather liked the idea of an entirely featureless face that gave away nothing except for the general direction of my head. I didn’t exactly envy that about Amethyst’s chosen form, but it was worth experimenting with.
The mouth, on the other hand, could definitely go. Facial expressions were such a burden. I frequently had no idea what to do with my mouth when people were talking to me, and eliminating that problem altogether would also lend me that air of unreadable mystique the Vaetna often projected when they weren’t making an effort to be affable. As it was, I’d get rid of my mouth right now if I could, at least as long as I still had the option to enjoy food.
Then, in a moment of rare sensibility, I remembered that masks existed, the half-face sort that covered the nose and mouth and rendered one’s silhouette vaguely snout-like. Nobody wore them outside of an operating theatre in the UK, but in Tokyo, I’d seen a few each time I’d gone out. Intrigued, I pulled out my phone and did a little googling, and learned that they were popular here, both for the sake of public health and as a more general fashion trend. They came in different shapes and colors, so it was even possible to accessorize with them. Could I picture myself wearing one as a default part of my appearance?
I could. Interesting. Surely, one of the girls owned some, or failing that, there were bound to be some among the medical supplies on the eighteenth floor. The reasonable thing to do would be to ask tomorrow, or order some online now so they’d be here by the morning.
But a desire for more immediate do-something-about-this was kindling in my chest. Alice had told me to focus on what was actionable. I wasn’t about to use that as an excuse for more late-night, ill-advised magic driven by inscrutable egg mania—I fully intended to hold true to my promise that I wouldn’t mess around with the doll unsupervised. But that convenience store across the street was 24-hour, wasn’t it? And they had masks, didn’t they?
It was the smallest of adventures, the simplest possible indulgence, as safe as could possibly be for being alone outside of Lighthouse Tower—the convenience store lay literally in its shadow, or would have if the sun was still up to cast one.
I was jittery with nervous energy as I rode the elevator down to the first floor. The lights were still on in the building’s spacious lobby, though the front desk was unstaffed. I wasn’t sure whether the building actually had staff at night at all, other than maybe some janitors—at least when it came to security, Ebi had direct control of the whole building’s systems. She was the reason I could essentially come and go as I pleased without carrying any kind of access card or fob, a privilege I was only truly exercising for the first time now.
It occurred to me that she controlled the building while ostensibly being secret from the public and presumably also the front-desk employees of Todai. Did they think she was just a building management program? I had no clue. But I did know she was watching me as I walked through the empty lobby, because as I approached the doors, my phone buzzed.
ebi-furai: pretty late at night to be touching grass
I stopped in front of the doors.
ezzen: Just going to the convenience store across the street.
ezzen: You wouldn’t lock me out, would you?
ebi-furai: bah
ebi-furai: i mean i could
ebi-furai: but youre exercising your free will and in my opinion thats pretty poggers
ebi-furai: so i would rather live vicariously through your adventure rather than fucking with you
ebi-furai: besides, sapphire will be back soonish, and if i locked the doors behind you i know shed just grab you
I considered commenting on the android’s use of “poggers,” but I didn’t want to risk burning through the goodwill she was extending.
ezzen: ty lol
ezzen: Anything I should know about visiting a convenience store at night?
ebi-furai: you could not be asking a wronger person
ebi-furai: ive never left the building
Oh. Right. I felt bad for forgetting about that. There was only one sensible thing to say.
ezzen: Do you wanna come?
ezzen: I mean, if you can, Ai claimed you were feeling better but it’s been weird not having you around.
ebi-furai: good where i am
She didn’t elaborate on that, which I took as my cue to push through the glass doors in the front of the building and out into the chilly air of an early March night in Tokyo. I braced for the familiar ache in my scarred hand—and was surprised when it took a few seconds longer than usual to kick in. The thicker, harder plates that had developed there, so tantalizingly and intriguingly and worryingly reminiscent of Vaetna carapace, apparently provided better insulation to my joints. Neat.
The rest of me wasn’t so well insulated. It was cold and windy enough that even my heavy hoodie couldn’t completely keep the chill from reaching up my back, so I hurried down the sidewalk toward the nearest crossing, guided by my phone’s map in my right hand. My other hand gripped the stabilizer module in my hoodie’s pocket, fidgeting with it. I wondered what I’d do with my hands when I had my full prosthetic and the little tuna can was no longer necessary. I supposed there was nothing stopping me from carrying around an actual tuna can instead. It could double as an emergency snack for Hina or Alice.
Even at this late hour, the sidewalk was fairly dense with faces side-lit by the buildings that still had lights on, little vignettes of life coming in and out of the shadows: office workers freed from overtime; students making their way back home after a long evening hitting the town after school; disheveled young adults who had only thrown on enough clothes to make it to the convenience store for late-night food, like me. Many of them were politely rushing as much as I was, and nobody spared me a second glance despite my garish orange hair and clear not-from-around-here-ness, which made me feel less self-conscious; everybody out here on the street was just trying to get to late night errands or get home and out of the cold. That common human experience we were all enduring allayed the creeping fears in the back of my mind that I would be instantly beset by either Todai fans or a PCTF snatch team as some kind of karmic punishment for having the audacity to go out on my own.
I hurried across the street and along the next sidewalk until I arrived at the bright, welcoming facade of the convenience store, the tell-tale glowing green stripe a beacon of refuge. The cold overrode any social anxiety about entering a new and unfamiliar space alone, sweeping me through the automatic doors and into the compact aisles before I even had the chance to lose my nerve. The sound of the wind was replaced by the jingles and beeps of Japanese consumerism, a discordant spell of modern comfort that prevented the primal, folkloric demon of cold from following me in.
Now that I was safe from the elements, I did stall a little, retreating to my phone rather than immediately beginning to browse. Remembering Ebi’s wording—“living vicariously”—I switched from the map to the main chatroom to share my experience…and, frankly, to get a bit of moral support.
ezzen: Liveblogging my convenience store run.
starstar97: uh ez
starstar97: its like midnight there isnt it
starstar97: thats konbini privilege i guess
starstar97: what are you there for
ezzen: surgical masks, ideally
ezzen: maybe snacks?
My stomach had opinions on that latter item. There was the fried food warmer next to the register, which reminded me of how juicy that chicken Hina had shared with me had been—but it sat dark and empty, apparently one of the few parts of the store that wasn’t fully 24-hour. A shame; warm fried chicken would have been fantastic to bring home and eat once I got out of the cold.
By contrast, though the refrigerated shelves of heat-and-eat meals were more sparsely populated in the middle of the night, populated they were nonetheless. And that was just the “real” food, the pasta and curry and rice balls; moving deeper into the store also revealed approximately one million varieties of rice crackers, and one of the aisles had a small cooler of energy drinks and jelly pouches for the truly desperate. I found myself most drawn to a shelf of unhealthy-looking baked goods, advertising custard or red bean paste or chocolate fillings. I was pleased to discover that almost everything had at least part of the label in English, though it was sometimes enigmatic; several pastries were labeled simply “Cheese” with no further description of what exactly they were.
I initially resisted the urge to simply take the lot; an adolescence of wobbling atop the poverty line had trained me to shy away from buying food that wasn’t “essential.” But then I saw something that had been on my bucket list for years, something so familiar as to induce nostalgia even though I’d never had one before, and that tipped the scale toward indulgence. I backtracked toward the front of the store to grab a basket, filled it with pastries and crunchy things with my prize at the top, then snapped a photo and sent it to the group chat.
ezzen: “And none under its shadow shall starve.”
ebi-furai: im POSITIVE that the na vva kiiycaseiir was not written with “loading up on ten thousand calories of empty carbs and sugar” in mind
I was pleased, albeit unsurprised, that Ebi caught my reference to the Spire’s foundational document of universal guarantees to its citizens—but rather annoyed that she didn’t seem to catch why I’d made it. Neither did Star, apparently.
starstar97: o hi ebi!!
starstar97: doesnt the spire kind of have insane pastry game now tho
starstar97: like on the same level as japan and including stuff like melonpan
starstar97: so the nvk could include most of these after the fact
starstar97: e do they have like cheesecakes in the fridge section
twilitt_: cheesecake mentioned
twilitt_: logging on
ezzen: guys
ezzen: the specific thing in the pic
ezzen: oTL
starstar97: oh wait
starstar97: e is literally referencing it because theres a heung cock on top of the basket
ezzen: NO
ezzen: its a CORNUCOPIA
ezzen: or, if you must use a nickname, a COPIA, thank you very much
starstar97: >:P
ezzen: or i guess “Spire Corn” according to the packaging on this one :\
ezzen: thanks japan.
ezzen: with red bean filling, not corn
ezzen: …
ezzen: I think.
What Star was cruelly calling a “Heung cock” was just a long cone of fried pancake batter stuffed with sweet red bean paste, a Japanese take on one of the Spire’s more notable cultural exports. One not descended from the Vaetna themselves, too, which was rare.
The story went that it was invented by Spire immigrants on the first anniversary of the end of the firestorms, and it was supposed to roughly resemble both the megastructure’s shape and a cornucopia. Since Clear Skies Day happened to fall right in the middle of Autumn, very near many immigrant cultures’ harvest festivals, it had become one of the Spire’s major unifying holidays. The cornucopia pastry’s role had grown to match, becoming a central festival food one could find with every kind of sweet and savory filling imaginable from across the cultural melting pot of the Spire’s citizens. A marvelous example of food as a keystone of culture, as Dad would have been quick to point out.
Bristol was not a great place to find affordable foreign pastries, so I’d never gotten to try a cornucopia of any flavor. I’d attempted making one myself once, but without the specially shaped hot metal cones they were supposed to be cooked in, it hadn’t really worked out. So finding one was a delight, and a welcome bit of familiarity in a country that still felt rather foreign…though the fact that it was in stores at all right now was rather strange.
ezzen: Kind of out of season.
starstar97: yeah its february????
starstar97: jp convenience stores love limited time stuff from what i understand but usually that matches seasonal things
starstar97: and this is not the season
ebi-furai: they sell them year round here
ebi-furai: its just a thing
ebi-furai: theyre basically just thicker crepes and we love crepes here so
I eyed the pastry in its plastic wrapper. It was indeed a little more frail than I’d always seen them, and it was indeed out of season, and the conical shape was a bit smushed—but it was a cornucopia nonetheless, and I considered that a win. And I couldn’t help but be a little excited at the idea that they were available year round; it occurred to me that if there were crepe stands, there might also be cornucopia stands somewhere in the city. I resolved to look that up later.
Right now, though, I wanted to infodump about the Na Vva Kiiyaseiir. It wasn’t a formal operational plan for the Spire’s guaranteed goods and services, but seven years of rolling my eyes at billionaire-owned media attempting hit pieces on even the tiniest perceived holes or hypocrisies in the allotment’s catalog had left me with quite a few opinions on the intent and wording of the document.
ezzen: These ARE a pretty funny corner case for the NVK, since it was written before they were invented ofc
ezzen: But they’re an official seasonal inclusion in the allotment now (they dedicate some gastrosynth space to it during the season to keep up with demand) so retroactively they’re totally part of the intent of that line and the spirit of the document as a whole.
ezzen: I guess if you really split hairs and went by the literal meaning of NVK you could say that only the flavors available in the allotment (peach/cream/pistachio iirc? feel like I’m missing one) are part of “The People’s Fundamental Needs Being Met”
ezzen: But that would make you an asshole lol
starstar97: people’s fundamental right to heung cock
ezzen: AUGH
starstar97: and google says its saffron and pistachios together, thats probably what you were missing
starstar97: aka kesar pista, indian dessert
ezzen: right the indian
ezzen: fuck you beat me to it
ezzen: Damn you and your full mobility in both hands!
ezzen: Anyway, either way this particular cornucopia in my basket isn’t part of the NVK’s guarantee because it’s not part of the Spire-produced allotment lol.
ezzen: Very much wrong side of the planet. So not exactly “under its shadow.”
ebi-furai: masks
ezzen: right right
ezzen: on it
A little embarrassed at how completely I’d zoned out of my surroundings, I slid my phone into my pocket and began to search the convenience store. I was hardly alone in here, and the aisles were narrow enough that I occasionally had to yield to another person coming around a corner or reroute around somebody browsing. The food sections obviously didn’t have masks, but looping around the back and squeezing behind an exhausted-looking office lady staring at the selection of beers brought me toward writing supplies and toiletries. I scanned up and down for anything with a picture of a mask, feeling rather like a tourist.
Nothing that looked mask-ish. Mild embarrassment began to build up to humiliated frustration as I looked and looked while people shuffled through the narrow aisle behind me. Their eyes bored into my back.
After the fifth time running my eyes along that section of shelves, my self-consciousness got the better of me and I gave up, turning around and pretending to browse the magazines directly opposite to save face. Then I realized that some of the magazines were porn mags and I aborted that pretense as well, shuffling down the aisle to appear as though I was doing anything but that—
And there they were. A little plastic pack of white masks, hanging on a peg at the end of the aisle, far enough away from where I’d been looking. I grabbed it in relief and took a photo.
ezzen: got
starstar97: !!
ebi-furai: vaetna white
That was true. I would have taken any color, but white was very welcome, the milky pale of Spire and Vaetna dermis. These ones were also a little nicer than the surgical masks I was familiar with, smooth fabric and a closer mesh with the contours of the cheek. It appealed to me very much.
ezzen: Any purchasing parameters I should know about
ezzen: I’ve never bought these before, so
ezzen: Kinda nervous it’ll make me come off as edgelord-y or something, you know?
twilitt_: does it have anime references on it
ezzen: no?
starstar97: then youre fine lol
twilitt_: yeah
twilitt_: it would be pretty cool if you could do a mask as a standard part of an outfit though right
starstar97: i mean you can, nobody’s stopping you
starstar97: especially since e is a flamebearer
starstar97: who’s gonna make fun of them
I resisted the urge to reply “Yuuka”. I didn’t want to get into that with the chat this late at night, and in light of what I’d just learned about her, I was wary of saying anything at all. I half-expected Ebi to say it anyway, but she stayed quiet.
twilitt_: yeah but i mean like. us mortals too
twilitt_: youd probably need a pandemic or something to bring them into fashion first though
twilitt_: no shot the vaetna would let that happen lol
ezzen: I’m gonna stand out so much
ezzen: orange hair is bad enough
ezzen: >.<
starstar97: dont be dumb
starstar97: its like two bucks right, just get it and see if it works
starstar97: and if it sucks
starstar97: hit da brix
starstar97: and also the hair is cool i think? you gotta send more pictures later
That helped a lot.
ezzen: thanks
ezzen: buying it
I took the pack, tossed it atop the pile of pastries in my basket, and hurried toward the register, wanting very much to get out of here. I disappointedly brandished my card at the uniformed cashier, a girl maybe four or five years older than me, in the universal language of a shopper ready to pay. She took the card placidly—then suddenly, her customer service autopilot juddered to a halt as she hesitated, first squinting at the very expensive-looking card and the Todai logo marking it, then looking up at me and seeming to process who I was. I wondered then how I looked—a foreign flamebearer standing across the counter from her at near midnight, basket full of nothing but pastries and a pack of masks. It must have been an absurd image.
She seemed torn for a minute, and I was worried she would ask for my autograph—which I didn’t have—or something else celebrity-ish, but to her credit, she moved right along with the transaction, stuffing my pastries into a plastic bag and offering it to me.
“Houseki hikare!” she chirped with an awkward smile.
“Uh. Thanks,” I muttered, not knowing how the Radiances would respond. I gave her an awkward nod and hurried out the front door, trading the discomfort of the interaction for that of the biting cold. Or rather, I made it about five steps out before registering a flash of color and motion to my right.
A shot of unwarranted adrenaline pumped through me as I turned to face my assailant, flashing back to my first encounter with Takagiri, spear tattoo itching—but this time, the surprise was entirely a welcome one.
Next to me, shining out of the dark, was a pair of sapphire eyes. And they looked hungry.
Author’s Note:
The cutting edge…of Ez’s self-image! It has many thoughts, and seems determined to collect one pastry for each.
I do want to lay out explicitly, word of god, that Sunspot’s timeline did not have the COVID-19 pandemic. This is one of the biggest butterfly effects of the timeline divergence from our world. I won’t give a specific reason here, though I will note that there’s no big reveal or intrigue about it. Yes, this means that Ez being a complete shut-in for years was entirely self-imposed.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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Objectification, human trafficking, implied rape (in backstory, not on-screen)
“Amane?” Alice called.
I heard the scuffling of a chair moving in the other room and turned to see Amethyst, almost three meters of gemstone mecha, looming in the doorway of her gamer cave. She waved at me. I waved back up at her. She said something in shimmering tones to Alice, who nodded and replied in rapid Japanese. They exchanged a few more phrases before Amane swung her massive, spike-snout head to look at me. She seemed to hesitate. Then there was a flash of purple light, and Amane stood there, clothed in flesh and carbon fiber and a bathrobe, now merely my height—though that was still tall, especially for a Japanese woman. She walked over to Alice with the faintest shadow of a limp and sat next to her, smiling thinly at me. That made me nervous; I had a vague idea of where this was going, and it was dark. Alice took her hand and looked at me seriously.
“Ezzen. Yuuka has…a whole shitload of trauma. Trauma around men especially, to be frank. Which you’re not one of, I know, believe me, but this is still context you deserve to have.”
“…As opposed to having it two weeks ago?” I couldn’t help but ask.
Alice looked guilty. “Well—yes, maybe we should have just opened with this on day one, given you some pointers ahead of time. But we really thought you wouldn’t set her off so badly.”
I bristled on reflex. “Because I’m—”
“No, not because you’re so hideously masculine or anything. It’s your Flame and her eye—she depends on it to feel safe, and since she can’t see you properly, you automatically put her on edge. But it seemed like she’d warmed up to you, and I know she was trying, and I’m proud of her for that, but…for you two to coexist, you need to know why she’s…like that.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling very uncomfortable. “Um, lay it on me.”
Alice hesitated and looked over at her girlfriend, who nodded at her, looking…impatient? Alice gathered herself, shoulders hunched, then breathed out. “Okay. Well, about…six years ago, Amane was kidnapped by Sugawara. Human trafficking, since this was back before flamebearer trafficking was really an established industry. Yuuka was her best friend, and we weren’t in the picture yet, so when Amane disappeared, Yuuka started looking. She found them.” Alice’s voice was low and serious, and she spoke without drama or embellishment. “But she was far weaker as a flamebearer than she is now. This was before the flame donation that made us strong, no mantle—glyphcraft barely existed yet—and she didn’t have the eye. She could defend herself, but she couldn’t blow down the door. So when she eventually hit a dead end, she…got herself trafficked. As a fifteen-year-old foreign girl, not a flamebearer. To evade suspicion.”
Alice was looking down at the floor, not directly at me, and I couldn’t blame her. She didn’t have to describe anything more; I understood the broad shape of it, what Yuuka must have endured for Amane’s sake, and it made me begin to feel physically ill, the spectre of nausea looming. I had to say something to fill the silence. “Oh God.” Then another layer of horror revealed itself to me, and I stared at Amane. If it had happened to Yuuka, then it would also have…
Amane looked less moved than either of us. She shook her head and said something to Alice, who translated with a wince. “Amane doesn’t…remember much of her own experiences from that time.” That felt like a lie, or at least a half-truth, but there was no way I was going to press on it, and Alice seemed antsy to move on besides. “Anyway. That’s the part of it that you should know. I wanted to let Yuuka tell this herself, when she was ready to share it with you, but if she won’t, I think it’s too important for you to stay in the dark about. She witnessed men at their very worst from all too close. That’s where it comes from.”
“Fuck,” I said. “I’m…sorry.”
I didn’t really know what else to say; it was both the expected expression of sympathy and a deeper sense of penitence on the behalf of my erstwhile gender. But then I started to think about it more, the way Alice was talking about it. This did explain Yuuka’s standoffishness and misandry, and I couldn’t blame her for reflexively reacting to me as poorly as she did at first—but how did this actually help me treat her better? Especially if Yuuka wasn’t the one to say it, and Alice was doing it in her stead—and apparently without her permission? That made me terribly uncomfortable in a way that I didn’t know how to bring up.
I opted to instead try to keep it practical. “Um. Okay, so what do I do to not set her off?”
“You’ve honestly done a fine job of it without being told, because most of it is common sense. Er…men touching her, that’s arguably the biggest. Being around people she perceives as men isn’t too much of an issue anymore, as long as they’re not flamebearers, then they make her skittish. I think you have a feel for this already, yeah?”
“I’m a flamebearer.” And she thinks of me as a man, was the part that went unspoken.
Alice picked up my subtext and shook her head quickly. “I don’t think she perceives you as male anymore. You rode her jetbike yesterday, yeah? Then you’re probably fine in that aspect now. If she cited Hina as the issue, then that’s a whole other set of behaviors you need to watch out for. It depends on if her eye is acting up, and whether it can see you—” Alice was interrupted by Amane, who said something sharp in Japanese that made her eyebrows go up a little. “Amane says—”
“Iwaseteyo,” Amane huffed at her, emerald eyes narrowed in a mild glare as she drew her phone from a bathrobe pocket. Alice muttered an apology and shot me a pained glance. I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I just averted my eyes and awkwardly scooted the ball I was sitting on a little closer to them so I could read what she wrote, translated through a machine in a bid for a little independence rather than having Alice interpret.
Amane: Yuuka feels unsafe when her eyes can’t see.
Amane: Yuuka told me that it still can’t clearly see you, so please be careful. It’s sufficient that she can see the future circumstances around you, but she can still be scared by you.
“Um. Got it, I’ll be careful. Are you…?”
Amane waved me off and quickly produced a response.
Amane: I’m doing well. The past doesn’t scare me.
She hesitated, glancing back at Alice, then quickly tapped something else in.
Amane: I think Alice is blundering by telling you this. I thought she would be more respectful.
Alice, oblivious, rubbed her forehead, where horns certainly weren’t growing. “Alright. That history is all very dark, and I’d much rather talk about practicalities. This stuff is compounded by her issues with Hina, as you well know. Exes. I’d avoid being overly flirty with each other while she’s around, mostly because Hina’s brand of affection is…you know.”
I nodded, confused by the mixed signals I was getting between the couple. “I’m—yeah, I’m intending to do that. That was a big fuckup of mine last night, and, um, I’ll talk to Hina.” I glanced at Amane. “And, um, red ripple. We’ll be responsible.”
Amane frowned back at me. She raised her phone again, flesh and mechanical fingers flying across the screen.
Amane: Thank you, but it’s not only your responsibility. Yuuka is afraid and her soul has scars, but she shouldn’t be harsh to you for doing normal things. She should talk about this with you so you can agree. This isn’t Alice’s concern.
Alice, leaning forward to peek around the phone to see the screen as well, frowned. “Yuuka’s having an immensely difficult time right now, what with all the portents of war. The least we can do is help Ezzen understand how to interact safely with her. Itawatta hou ga ii yo ne?”
I didn’t have to understand that last part to agree. “Um, yeah. I mean, the way I acted yesterday was shit, and I ought to do better. If I’m the one making her uncomfortable, that’s on me, isn’t it?” Amane watched me and nodded slightly, silently encouraging, urging me to continue. I took a breath, looking at Alice’s nose rather than right in her eyes. “But, um…I don’t think you should have told me about this.”
“What? I know it’s horrible, but it’s really—”
Amane’s viridian eyes flashed with anger at Alice as she snapped an interruption that made her girlfriend recoil. “Uh, whoa, hey,” the dragon girl said, voice full of surprise and worry, before switching to Japanese. “Senpaikaze wo fukashiteru wake ja nai no yo.” Her gaze flickered to me. “I’m—trying to keep the team on the same page. That’s not being patronizing. Is it?”
I cringed a little when that earned her another frustrated reply and wave of the hand from Amane. Alice winced. “Okay, sorry, gomen. I just don’t think Yuuka should be the one who has to come meet Ez in the middle on this.”
Amane jabbed more text into her phone in response and showed it to me, pushing it close to my face so Alice couldn’t get a peek.
Amane: I’ll talk to Yuuka about it later so she won’t get mad. She’ll listen to me. Don’t let Alice make you think it’s all your fault.
Then she lowered the phone, turned to Alice, and began to chew her out. I was glad to not be privy to the exact content of the conversation; the vibes were bad enough on their own, with Amane’s height making her loom over the dragon girl and her voice clipped and reprimanding. She didn’t seem furious, but clearly she felt that Alice had overstepped and was coming at this the wrong way. The only time she slowed down was when her breath hitched in a gasp that made Alice reach toward her with alarm—but Amane pushed the hand aside, and after a moment, steeled herself and continued like it hadn’t happened.
Other than that moment, Todai’s leader sat there and took it. She didn’t bristle, no wash of heat pulsed off her; she just endured Amane’s chastisement with a wince, hunched shoulders, and growing guilt in her eyes like it was a physical lashing. She glanced between her irate girlfriend, the wrinkled bedsheets, and me, clearly humiliated to be chewed out with an audience. I didn’t dare interrupt.
Eventually, Amane stopped and looked over her girlfriend, who was hanging her head in shame. She reached out to Alice’s chin with her prosthetic hand and raised her face gently—Alice looked like she was very close to crying, which I hated. Amane took her hand again and said something much softer. Alice hesitated, brought her other hand over to join the embrace, and let out a rattling sigh, like she was trying to master her emotions. After a slow breath very much like the ones she’d instructed me to take, she looked down again and spoke.
“Sorry, Ezzen. I’m…meddling. I thought I’d keep it light on details, but it still wasn’t my story to tell, and Amane is right; you shouldn’t be the only one who has to adjust your behavior. Yuuka being a bitch isn’t okay, and I’m sorry I treated it like that was your problem to solve.”
I was gripped by paralytic secondhand embarrassment even watching this, so I struggled to formulate a reply. “Uh. It’s—I mean, she’s right to be upset about how I acted yesterday. I do need to do better, less gross. Yuuka wasn’t the only one who was put off by that; it made Ai uncomfortable too, she’s just nicer about it.”
“Oh, hell,” Alice sighed, rubbing her face. “Yes, we’ll still help you work on self control?” She pitched it up like a question, directing it to Amane, who nodded encouragingly. “I just—didn’t want Yuuka to be upset, and you came in here freaking out and needed specific things to do to pull you out of the self-toxicity pit, and that made me want to do this all from your direction without rocking her boat. I probably need to apologize to her too. Or—Amane and I will do it together, I guess. Tomorrow. It’s late.”
The sun had already been down when I’d first come in. I nodded, taking this as a cue to get out of here and escape the awkward atmosphere; the way Alice was rubbing her face seemed painfully familiar. “Um, yeah. Okay.”
Amane waved me to sit back down, which made me pause uncertainly. “Hold on,” she said in English, then directed something else to Alice, who removed her face from her hands to give Amane a questioning look, then interpreted. “Um, well, as long as we’re here, it’s okay to at least talk about some of Yuuka’s behavior as it stands right now, anything she does that bothers you, so Amane can bring it up with her. It’s only fair.”
I hesitantly returned to the purple yoga ball; what a faintly ridiculous prop for this emotional clusterfuck. Amane, seemingly satisfied with Alice’s understanding of what she’d done wrong, gave her girlfriend a make-up hug while I thought about what to ask. Yuuka was really abrasive, but I found I’d grown tolerant of much of it, at least in the sense that I’d become able to distinguish the friendly ribbing from the self-defensive biting remarks, or at least I thought I had.
I did hit on one odd thing. “She’s called me Ezza a few times,” I realized, an emotion mounting in my chest that was either anticipation or dread. “Which, um, I thought was a nickname? But foresight, right. So…don’t tell me that’s because I’m destined to change my name again in the future, to make it more feminine?”
Alice stared, then looked to Amane, who was apparently taking notes. “Um, I don’t know for sure. I thought it was an Australianism. But I guess it could be foresight, or just an assumption—a sign she already sees you as less masc, which is good, but is assigning you a fem nickname, despite you currently going by it/they, which is bad. I’m—oh, I don’t know,” she moaned. “I don’t want to make more assumptions, or put words in her mouth, since apparently that’s all I’ve been good for.”
“I’ll ask,” Amane added for my benefit, in English.
“Thanks. Um, also, what is with the Australian-ness? It’s pretty…almost a caricature?” I hazarded.
Amane replied to that one, which Alice interpreted. “Oh, she’s from Japan. Just spent a lot of time in Australia during the summers, so that’s where the accent comes from. She really sounds much more normal in Japanese.”
“Oh, okay.” I wondered how she’d sound with my prosthetic’s translator; Amane and Ai sounded pretty different between the languages, as the least fluent English speakers. Both sounded more casual in Japanese, Amane more peppy and Ai more vulgar. I thought Yuuka might be the same despite being fully bilingual, but maybe the switch would be reversed, more polite with her wording in Japanese, though perhaps no less biting in meaning. Not a completely different person, but projecting different vibes in different contexts. Like how I had felt while mantled up in the doll. Huh.
Thinking of mantling gave me one more thought. “Er. Maybe this one’s too much, but I really don’t want to ask her directly; she’d cut my head off.”
Alice looked nervous, then suddenly didn’t as she realized where I was going with it. “Oh. Is this about her style?”
“Um, yeah. Her…appeal.” I gave Amane a cautious glance, but she didn’t seem to think this topic was an overstep, so I continued. “She seems…very willing to put her…chest…on display for somebody who hates, um, attention from men. At least on your promotional material and stuff, and her mantle outfit.” Her outfits around the penthouse and what she wore to her classes seemed much more modest—still fashionable, not frumpy, and nothing could entirely hide her figure, but a far cry from the intentional sex appeal of her professional image.
Alice hesitated and glanced at Amane, who thought for a moment, then dictated a reply in pieces. “Okay, we’ll be blunt about this: knowing she can jiggle her tits at guys to make them do what she wants is a form of control over her situation. It puts her in the pilot’s seat for a lot of interactions. And I know that sounds contradictory, but it also literally streamlines the possibilities of an interaction with a man as far as her eye is concerned, and that gives her more confidence, especially when it’s backed up by a mantle and her affinity for magical traps. Nobody’s ever tried anything, but it seems to help her deal when there’s a lot of attention on her, so that’s how she’s styled herself.” Amane added something else that made Alice frown slightly. “Um, yeah, it also helps business, I suppose—er, I want to make clear that we aren’t forcing her to do that,” she hastily clarified, looking wary. “It’s all her. I, um, don’t want to make any assumptions about how victims deal with their trauma, but…well.” A tinge of sadness entered her voice at the end.
Amane added something else. They went back and forth for a moment; it sounded like they were negotiating phrasing. “And she’s also the most…extralegally active of us, and being ‘the bimbo’,” she emphasized with air quotes, “makes accusations of those activities look more ridiculous in the public eye. A girl can’t have fat knockers and violently actionable ideologies, as far as the average fan is concerned. I benefit from that one too,” she admitted, looking down at her own chest, which was still voluptuous by any standard that wasn’t Yuuka. “Though as the leader, I need to be taken seriously by the powers that be, so I split the difference a bit more. Current attire notwithstanding.”
“Right,” I said, thoroughly red in the face. This was equal parts enlightening and entirely TMI; I hadn’t thought the topic of breasts would have such profound political implications, though in hindsight that had been silly of me. But it was weirdly gratifying to know that Yuuka handled me with the same abrasion and directness she used with her female teammates, rather than stupefying me with a flash of cleavage—though that probably had as much to do with me being an unfamiliar and unpredictable flamebearer as my status as a nonbinary Vaetnathing. She likely considered me a much more real risk to her safety than a random nonmagical man, which was sobering.
Amane pulled me out of those troubled thoughts with another comment, this one with an adorably impish grin at odds with both her anger and elegance. Alice snorted in response, seeming to return to more of an emotionally stable state by way of mild exasperation. “Oh, well, yes, her strategy doesn’t work on every man. Hongo, Hikanome’s other male flamebearer in a leadership role, remember him?”
“Yeah?” I did; he had been affable during lunch, the least enigmatic of the three, and then taken charge of protecting and evacuating Hikanome’s faithful who had been most wounded by the inferno. Public faces for organizations like a Flame cult could be incredibly slimy, but he struck me as a true believer in a more down-to-earth way than Miyoko’s prophetess vibe, and moreover, Amane and Yuuka had seemed outright amicable with him. “Oh, yeah, I guess he didn’t seem to bother her all that much, huh.”
“You noticed! That’s partially because they have a good history from during the schism—he’s one of the people who was instrumental in deposing the person responsible for all her suffering, after all—and partially because he doesn’t even glance at her rack, which even I have to admit can be terribly challenging. But that’s because he only has eyes for me, ugh. Wants to slay the dragon.” She looked a little put-upon, but it gave way to a wry grin directed to her girlfriend. “But he can’t have me, can he?” she asked her girlfriend playfully. Amane reached over and squeezed her bare thigh, and I heard a distinct whap from Alice’s tail on the sheets behind her as she leaned into the taller girl and a much more genuine smile washed over her face.
Talking about boobs had apparently gotten the lesbians warming back up to one another, which felt like my cue to leave. I didn’t belong, and I had no more questions besides. “Um, okay, I think that’s it.” I began to stand.
Alice waved me away. “Yeah. Sorry about…all that, I really put my foot in it. Leave it to my amazing girlfriend to set me right.” She gave her teammate a distinctly sapphic look, heart-meltingly adoring despite the rebuke she’d received—or maybe because of it. She turned to me, covering the attraction with some of her professional air as Radiance Opal. “I appreciate you coming to talk to me when you were freaking out about the Vaetna stuff. Talking’s good, and I appreciate being trusted with that. Though, I do have to ask: you’re not going to immediately start hyperventilating once you leave my line of sight, are you?”
“Um. I don’t think so?”
She nodded, trusting my judgment on that. “Good. Have a nice night, Ezzen. Let’s do another session with the doll tomorrow—I’ll help you troubleshoot your euphoria and we can talk more about the design.”
“Okay.”
I retreated from the room, Amane waving to me with her prosthetic arm as I left. Once I was in the hall, though, I got a text from her.
Amane: Thank you for taking my side. Alice can be frustrating.
Ezzen: No problem?
Ezzen: I think you did most of it, I might not have said anything if you hadn’t called her out
Amane: Teamwork!
Amane: I’ll talk to Yuuka. Good night
Ezzen: Good night
When I got back to my room, I got straight into bed; even though I was technically behind on mantle work, having spent most of the day in a guilty and dysphoric haze, I couldn’t muster the willpower to hop on my computer and rectify that tonight. It was looking like a chatroom-and-YouTube night, with no glyphcraft. Perhaps a more responsible version of myself, one who was free from the universal mental penalties imposed by dysphoria, would have mustered the will. Or maybe I just needed ADHD medication. After all, I hadn’t even bathed today, and that had a far lower mental and emotional barrier than designing the inner workings of my speculative ideal body.
It wasn’t just dysphoria. Though Alice had talked me down from the worst of it, and I wasn’t immediately overcome with a new wave of adrenaline, I was still reeling from the possibility that I was poisonous to my heroes. I felt some kind of abstract pressure about the broader possibility that the Peacies were already taking steps to investigate whatever had happened to Kat, to replicate and refine it, to forge a weapon that could cut down even the Vaetna. Even if Todai somehow resisted all PCTF encroachment in the coming weeks, I felt I would still be party to that horror simply by inaction. If something about my Flame was inherently inimical to the Vaetna, and that knowledge was soon to be dragged out of Pandora’s Box regardless, then I ought to learn and understand the mechanism behind it, so that we—meaning myself as well as Todai if they’d participate—might find an…antidote? Vaccine? I was thinking of it in terms of disease, though there was no particular evidence for that.
There was very little evidence for anything. That should have excited me, the suggestion of further horizons of magic that I was uniquely positioned to explore and document, but the circumstances made it feel bleak and burdensome. Sharing my work with the wider magical community would only hasten the development of the perfect weapon, and I was under no illusions about my ability to go the other way and try to mislead the entire PCTF’s research apparatus via a few papers, not when they already had one of the others whose Flames matched mine in hand.
So I lacked the will to work the myriad problems as of that evening, instead busying myself with the chatroom and aimlessly scrolling for videos that might take my mind off of it instead. I was great at avoidance, at lying in bed and staring at a bright rectangle a few inches from my face and trying very hard to think about how much I wasn’t doing.
But not everything could be avoided, nor ought to be. I was forcibly reminded that I’d barely eaten today when my stomach began to growl, and that biological demand forced me out of bed, out into the common area, down the stairs, and into the main common space, where I was grateful to find nobody to intrude on my alone-in-the-kitchen time. I dug through the fridge, found one of the many convenience store heat-and-eat meals Alice and Ai favored, and popped it into the microwave. These came in many varieties; this one wound up being spaghetti in a red sauce that more resembled ketchup than bolognese or marinara—long-ingrained sensibilities about food presentability had me searching the fridge for elements to make it better resemble an appealing dish and less like pure carbohydrate body fuel in a vaguely noodlesque form factor. I found an almost-spent rind of a hard cheese and a grater, and atop that snowy mountain, I added dabs of hot sauce, vaguely surprised to find that name-brand Tabasco was living in the spice cabinet alongside the more exotic chili oils and pastes. I wished we had a basil plant or something that would give me an easy way to put a little green on top—not that it would really make the meal any healthier, but this was less about nutrition and more about the psychology of eating. I’d found myself inheriting Dad’s love of plating and garnishing now that I was living with others, even when none of them were around.
I sat alone in the kitchen and ate my upgunned pasta. It was quiet in the penthouse, and when there were no people around, it was easy to pick out all the mechanical sounds: air moving around from the heating system as the building breathed, the steady rumble of the fridge, the hum of the microwave I cut off before it could beep at me. The ding of the elevator, which I kept anticipating but never arrived. The world outside the penthouse was silent, both the lower floors of the building and the wider Tokyo cityscape beyond the windows, present only to my eyes as a background for whatever was happening among the Radiances’ bubble of domesticity, not as a vast assemblage of real places I could go and explore.
Since arriving at Todai, I’d hardly ever had reason to leave Lighthouse Tower, except for that one outing with Alice and then Hina, the ill-fated Hikanome festival, and going with Yuuka to the shrine where Sugawara would next appear. Oh, and the haircut. I had no outdoor obligations short of flamebearer duties—all the care for my amputation and prosthetic was being taken care of in-house, Todai’s lawyers had apparently managed to get me some kind of visa or asylum status without me needing to face a single official, even groceries just kind of appeared in the fridge. I didn’t even know where the convenience store this pasta had come from was. Somehow, that last one was a bridge too far, making me pull out my phone’s map and hunt, which taught me that there was a Family Mart immediately across the street.
It frustrated me that I had access to essentially infinite money in the heart of one of the biggest cities in the world and had still barely ever left these two floors, let alone the building, and never voluntarily or for fun. In Bristol, I’d at least had the excuse of being broke, and that it was Bristol. Here, I only had myself to blame; my interactions with Amane had demonstrated that the language barrier wasn’t really all that much of an obstacle, and that would go double once I had the final version of my prosthetic with its built-in translator.
I hoped that maybe the emotional pressure cooker of living with the Radiances would be less intense if I left the house more, if I were to form some social bonds with even a single non-flamebearer…somehow. I’d had very little idea of how to do that even in England, let alone in a country where I didn’t speak the language.
Besides, the penthouse felt like it wanted to keep me here. Most of this lower floor was still and dark, my small island of lights in the kitchen reaching out toward the distant windows and dying before they got there, drowned in the furniture in the sitting area. Even more forbidding were the hallways leading around the back of the floor, which denied the light almost entirely past the first few meters.
In that abyss, somewhere in one of the further rooms, lay the doll. For a moment, I entertained the idle fantasy of going down there and ditching this meat body for a while. That was easy enough to dismiss with reasonable counterarguments like “I don’t know how to set it up” and “if something goes wrong with the transfer I’ll be alone and helpless” and “I don’t deserve to feel good.” Then even I had to admit that that last one wasn’t so reasonable, and that I might feel a little better about everything if I at least went over and gazed upon it; if nothing else, maybe looking at it from the outside would help me pinpoint what I found so comfortable about inhabiting it, which would inform the design of my actual mantle.
So with my stomach full and my steps light, I ventured into the dark.
Author’s Note:
So there’s Yuuka’s traumatic backstory, in the broad strokes. Alice bungled the delivery in terms of how it’s relevant to Ez, but the facts are accurate. Don’t feel bad if you’ve previously joked about Yuuka being a shortstack goth gf, that’s very much the impression she’s trying to give! It’s somewhat telling that Alice focused on this instead of Yuuka’s stated problem with Ez that kicked this off, which is that they’re reminding her of Hina in a bad way. Wonder what that’s about.
It’s also technically Amane’s traumatic backstory by proxy, but she’s much less bothered by it, if you ignore the indestructible inhuman ten foot tall artillery platform she uses as her body more than half the time. Perhaps yuri with a fat tailed trans dragon woman salves the hurt somewhat.
It’s nice to do a little atmosphere in the penthouse to decompress, and with a food scene to boot! Ez’s relationship with food is a pretty good tracker for its emotional state. You’ll hopefully be delighted to hear there’s plenty of meals forthcoming this arc.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter! Their feedback was instrumental in getting the tone right for the heavy stuff.
On a less heavy note, there’s new Hina art, and oh gosh is it new Hina art. Behold!
There’s an extremely spicy version of this available for patrons, too. Just saying!
That’s all for this week. Next week’s chapter will be lighter, I promise!
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Join the Patreon to support the story and read chapters three weeks ahead of public!
My first time in the doll had been eye-opening, a singular experience that had been far more viscerally impactful than I’d anticipated. Nobody, including me, had expected the mantle calibration doll to be so enjoyable, so freeing, such a reset. I’d been braced for it to be novel but not actually make me feel like a different person—what I’d gotten instead was a disassembled, deep-cleaned, and reassembled version of myself, with all the soul-muck temporarily scoured away. I hadn’t understood how debilitating the grip of dysphoria and shame was, how it gummed up every level of my cognition, paralyzing emotion and poisoning my thoughts. Now I had tasted the alternative, and it felt incredible.
It wasn’t quite right to say that the Ebi-like body of the doll was perfect for my sensibilities, that it was exactly the thing I had always dreamt of; it lacked the Vaetna’s killing shapes, the flow of their armor and the…knightly presence, the energy they carried that I never quite could put into words. And I did eventually need to answer whether having different hips felt nice. The benefit to being in the doll was half in the smoothness and the facelessness and half as a result of the mental and spiritual disrobing my anima had undergone in the split second of transfer. I hadn’t been working properly before, like my soul had been suffocated and overheating; in the doll and after, I was running at my proper operating temperatures, able to access a more complete emotional spectrum. Excitement, happiness, a general desire to keep living and live more than the shadow of a person I’d been until this point—
And horniness, to put it bluntly. Feeling so emotionally activated had come with a near-complete collapse of my inhibitions; I’d repeatedly escalated Hina’s lewd provocations while making dinner and only resisted the urge to abscond from dinner and rut with her until the sun came up because I was also having so much fun cooking—and sex and food prep for a crowd shouldn’t mix. While lost in the equally vivacious and endlessly enticing energy of my girlfriend, who had been so happy we were finally on the same wavelength, I’d had no regard for the other girls. But in the harsh and sin-exposing light of day, I remembered their discomfort with far too much clarity, the faint hunch of Ai’s shoulders when my hand went directly from a cooking utensil to Hina’s waist and back to the food I was making for everybody. I’d barely respected basic hygiene.
We should have just ditched and indulged our urges immediately instead of being nasty in front of the others; they wouldn’t have had to put up with us, and maybe we’d have actually been able to follow through on all those whispered promises and roaming squeezes. Instead, when we did eventually flee for my room, she’d channeled my energy toward mantle design, urging me to continue self-actualizing through the endless panels and tables of GWalk. She still hadn’t been able to resist getting a little handsy; I suspect that if we’d stayed up, I’d have eventually gotten pulled away from the keyboard into a tangle of limbs and teeth. Which would have been problematic because her definition of sex was not survivable for my fragile meat body.
Problematic. Bad. Yep. I did, in fact, need a certain amount of blood to live. For now.
So it was probably for the best that the glyphcrafting went on for barely fifteen minutes before my surge of energy ebbed and the soul-stripping took its toll. The sudden but predictable wave of exhaustion hit right as Hina had been starting to growl in my ear, and I barely had time to yawn before she bodily hauled me over to bed—and then left right before sleep took me. Did that count as a success of boundaries? I hadn’t exactly enforced anything.
The next morning, I was dismayed to find that I’d slept off the euphoria and returned to my familiar, muted self. Extra muted, in fact, accented by contrast—and because I was plagued by guilt. My sense of propriety, freshly returned from its brief vacation, was holding me accountable. Its verdict: my conduct in front of the Radiances last evening was unacceptable, the exact kind of disgusting offense I’d been so afraid of committing the whole time I’d lived here. That, combined with the return of my dysphoria, made me somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of actually going through with anything lewd with Hina now, and I’d felt obligated to go around and apologize for my actions.
Ai laughed awkwardly in response to my stammering and waved her hands hurriedly. “I wasn’t really paying attention to you, so I didn’t notice. You made dinner and then went to your room. I’m glad the test platform worked so well for you. Did it give you any new ideas for the layout of your model?”
The sex-repulsed Emerald Radiance seemed like she’d struck it from the record of our interactions entirely, for which I was grateful, but I couldn’t wipe away the guilt so easily. Even when I accepted her invitation—conversational diversion, really—to nerd-babble about magic theory, it wasn’t enough to distract me from my overall sense of filthiness, which was how I knew it was especially bad.
Yuuka, on the other hand, was much more acerbic. “Fuck me, I’m glad I left before all that. Looked over the railing while you were cooking, saw you with your hand on her ass, went right back to my room. Why are you even apologizing? Didya even realize that I wasn’t there, or were you too busy thinking about how you’d crack her ribs?”
That last part was so surprising that it broke me out of my contrite cringing. “Crack…her ribs?”
“Yeah. I bet she made you use the fuckin’ poultry shears.”
“We—what?” I was thrown; I could tell what she was implying, but it was totally unprompted. I wasn’t about to admit that things not too far from that had crossed my mind just last night and went on the offensive instead. “You are describing sex, yeah? Is that seriously the kind of stuff Hina wants? Has she asked you—”
Heliotrope pushed a twintail over her shoulder. It was incredible how she could somehow look down at me from a full head height below. “Don’t involve me in your butchery fantasies.”
“You’re the one fantasizing! I was apologizing for…being stupid in a normal way, not whatever the hell you’re talking about, fuckin’ hell.” My contrition was dwindling, replaced by a little bit of strange schadenfreude. Yuuka was telling on herself, and that somehow righted the emotional boat for me. “Seriously, shears? Did you two take ‘scissoring’ that literally?”
Yuuka stared at me for a long moment with her human eye, then reached up to remove her eyepatch to reveal its twin, that baleful gem of prophecy. It didn’t glow or hum, but I could tell she was looking at my future, or some small fragment of it. She crossed her arms. “We stopped because I didn’t feel safe around that monster. Don’t let her make you one too.”
She left me impaled on that thorn as she left for school.
I spent the rest of that day dissociating. I no longer had the bravery to finish my round of apologies with Alice and Amane; my whole real-life social situation was put on pause as I retreated to the social bunker of my room and, within it, the chatroom. I hadn’t given my friends nearly enough of my time over the last few weeks, too preoccupied with vacillating between life-and-death flamebearer nonsense, the interpersonal struggles that came part and parcel with that, and gender discovery via mantle work. Until the sun went down, I paid it all back by simply curling up in bed, watching videos, and talking to the little people in my phone. There, at least, I didn’t disgust anybody.
The “99+” notification icon in the chatroom and the “500+” on the forums indicated that there was a lot to talk about, from large to small, and for once, I had the drive to go through every single one, an ideal distraction. My friends helped me curate; we started with the biggest bits of global flamebearer news, which were almost always new flamefalls; since my own, there had been two more, one in India and one in China, and both by all accounts had been far more typical than mine. The Vaetna had made no efforts to show up for the others like they had with me. The one in India had yielded two flamebearers who had immediately become part of the coalition of northern splinter kingdoms that still skirmished with Tibetan forces. The one in China had only found a single host, who had gone inferno.
The other notifications were just friends and colleagues pinging me whenever they wanted me to see something related to my interests. New YouTube videos about glyphcraft abounded, more than I could ever catch up on in one day, and that wasn’t even accounting for the endless torrent of reporting, spin, and misinformation about the world’s various VNT groups and other media-savvy flamebearers, some sent my way to be informative and some simply to be laughed at for their absurdity. Between the discussions, my friends’ lives went on, no less interesting than mine for all their relative lack of violence: Moth had finally gotten laid off and was relieved about it, Twili had a haul of nature photos from a hiking trip he’d been on, and Mnmnm’s grant application had been accepted.
I deflected and in some cases outright refused to answer questions about what was going on at Todai. The chatroom made it easy for me; nobody was dumb enough to ask directly what had happened at Sugawara’s hospital or about the whereabouts of Kimura, so I didn’t have to say much other than repeat assurances I was doing well. In the continuing wake of the Barbecue Inferno, I had no idea if or how I was ever going to bring up that I was dating Radiance Sapphire. I didn’t particularly want to think about her right now anyway.
On the forums, meanwhile, there was something Todai-related I did have liberty to talk about. Yesterday, one of the prosthetic teams—Team 3, who had put a phone inside my foot—had made the entire design open source, from the physical construction of the foot to the glyph diagrams, and since anybody with a brain and awareness of what I’d been up to could figure out it was for me, this had led to an enormous surge of discussion that made up two-thirds of my notifications on the forums. Moth and Dendrite spent an hour helping me comb through the thread for stuff that was worth responding to, and we crafted a general update post on my experiences with it as well. I regretted that I’d fallen out of the habit of checking the forums multiple times per day; there was a lot of speculation that I could have headed off immediately with a little more proactivity. Such was the nature of minor celebrityhood.
And, of course, there was news about the Vaetna. I’d missed a total of sixteen streams since arriving at Todai, a little under one per day, but none had been especially interesting or notable, just a mix of Spire maintenance work and what was essentially close drone footage of missions, plus two of the weekly State of The Spire streams that were a broad overview of the nation’s operations and projects. I’d used to do regular analysis posts for each maintenance stream—I stopped about a year ago but no longer remembered if there had been a specific reason. Depression, probably. And I tended to avoid watching the direct mission footage, preferring recaps, since it stressed me out to watch one of the Vaetna issue ultimatums to petty flamebearer tyrants threatening to turn a million people to glass, even knowing that those situations only ever ended one way. Skimming the recap videos, I didn’t think I’d missed anything particularly Spire-shaking.
I was disabused of that notion when I started picking through the rumor mill. Their latest bone to gnaw on was responsible for much of the remaining third of my forum notifications: the announcement that Katya, sixth of the Vaetna, was taking a break from public appearances. I’d been tangentially aware of the news but not thought anything of it, busy and extremely stressed as I had been with the coffin and Sugawara and all the fallout and recovery from that, so it had fallen out of my mind in the time since, filed in the “unprecedented but not alarming” section of my brain. In that regard, I, Ezzen, famous Vaetna expert, had been derelict in my duties, since I hadn’t taken into account a critical detail: the last time she’d been seen had been containing an inferno from my flamefall in Poland, over two weeks ago.
Theories had been proposed and shared as more evidence came in, and the collective diagnosis was dire.
starstar97: so to conclude
starstar97: somethings fucky with kat, and maybe the vaetna as a whole
starstar97: judging by bri ditching the rig
starstar97: and maybe involving yoru flame?
starstar97: *your
starstar97: the price of rawdogging without autocorrupt oTL
ezzen: She just hasn’t been around? I’m not up to speed, fuck.
My mouth was dry. They had put together the pieces days ago but elected not to message me directly about it, knowing I was already under a lot of pressure from many directions and assuming I’d get to it when I got to it. Thoughtful of them, but I wished they’d told me immediately.
moth30: yeah and its like… this is all they have to say?
moth30: cancelled her public events for a week before giving any explanation
moth30: like she never existed
That sent me into a bit of a panic spiral. One of the principal impossible-to-our-current-understanding-of-magic-but-maybe-viable things that could harm the Vaetna was an infomancy weapon retroactively deleting them from the timeline somehow.
ezzen: INFOVORED??
Of course, that was a silly conclusion to jump to, even as a nervous half-joke. Clarification arrived before I could tangent into terrified conspiracy babble.
skychicken: no.
skychicken: irresponsible wording, moth
moth30: soz
skychicken: she’s still on twitter and stuff like that
skychicken: i suppose that might just be a sockpuppet and not actually her, but theres no reason to jump to that conclusion
I was running the numbers.
ezzen: I can’t check right now but the longest time we’ve ever had any of the Vaetna be absent without explanation was maybe
ezzen: Four days? But that was during all the referendum stuff and it was Mayari, which feels a lot less weird
ezzen: Maybe there’s one I’m forgetting.
DendriteSpinner: Ez, do you think your flame core is the same way?
starstar97: “the same way” as what
starstar97: fundamentally dangerous to the vaetna? cause theres no proof thats actually the sitch and jumping to that conclusion is kinda like problematic ish
starstar97: flamefall infernos are fucky wucky and even the vaetna could be blindsided by stuff
starstar97: and even if it has to do with something unusual about e’s flame creche
starstar97: for all we know kat just has, like, a bad cold, and bri was wary of catching the same thing until they understood what it was
starstar97: doesnt mean shes dead or dying
DendriteSpinner: I concede that.
DendriteSpinner: Not to rehash all the backscroll from the other day, but a version of events where it IS related to the products of that flamefall is plausible, and the PCTF almost certainly is going forward with that assumption.
DendriteSpinner: Ez, did you see those videos with the C-17?
I hadn’t and was quickly linked the discussion thread where the video had been posted. It was only a few seconds of cell phone footage, but it showed a military air transport with fighter escorts climbing overhead. The original post had claimed it was taken outside Chicago, and several other bits of footage had shown up elsewhere on the internet a few days later, including a conspiracy video from a Zero-Day influencer that had racked up significant attention. The consensus in the thread was that the air convoy had been flying west and that it was an express shipment from the civilian magic research labs at Argonne toward the more secret and infamous military facilities in Nevada. And by “shipment,” the signs pointed to…
moth30: we already had leaks that ana baker was at argonne, and this could be them moving her to area 52
moth30: in which case they think the anti-vaetna theory holds water
moth30: this is all speculative!! sorry if we’re freaking you out!!!
skychicken: yeah yall thats enough infodump at once i think
skychicken: dont re-traumatize ezzen please
ezzen: I’m good.
I was not good. Rather, I’d had a terrible lurch in my stomach for the past few minutes.
Anti-Vaetna; the term was upsetting enough in abstract, doubly upsetting if it applied to me specifically like I was the butt of some cosmic joke, and outright terrifying for what it implied about the PCTF’s arrival in Tokyo any day now. Each link in the chain of speculation, from the cause of Kat’s absence to Brianna abandoning Thunder Horse to the contents and destination of that C-17, pointed in the same direction: when the Peacies came for me, they wouldn’t take no for an answer. They would use me to kill the Vaetna.
ezzen: Gonna go talk to the Radiances.
“Okay, Ezzen, the first thing I want you to do is calm down. We’re prepared for this, don’t worry,” Alice sighed, sounding thoroughly confident despite the fact that she was craning her neck up at me, splayed facedown over a purple yoga ball, her tail extending straight behind her like a crocodile’s.
I’d walked in on her mid-workout; she was stretching the poor, tormented muscles around the base of the tail. Sporting similar athleisure to what she’d been wearing when I first met her, sports bra and compression leggings, she was leaving a lot of skin exposed. There was a part of me that salivated at this scantily clad, gorgeous dragon woman, the part I hated myself for that had reared its head last night and made Yuuka feel unsafe around me. At this particular moment, though, that part was easy to drown out with the keyed-up state of the rest of my mind, the cocktail of geopolitical they-will-start-a-war-over-me panic and the deeper dread that I was innately toxic to my heroes.
I fidgeted as Alice continued. “Yes, we did put two and two together and figured that your Flame might have properties that make the Peacies aggressively covet you. But that doesn’t really change much, does it? We’ve been planning for them to show up and try to snatch you since the day you arrived. They already wanted your brain, now they want your brawn as well.” She slid backward off the ball to stand, then stepped around it to sit more conversationally and do some twists. “So as for whatever is going to go down between us and them, I don’t see how this changes things.”
“But—it’s anti-Vaetna,” I almost whimpered. “That’s their, their—their holy grail, the only way to have a bigger stick than the Spire. The US will fucking…annex Japan or something if it means getting me.”
Alice didn’t believe me. “Slow down. So, knowing that the Peacies are coming for us anyway, the second thing I want you to do is focus on that. Banish any thought that you are somehow now doomed to be culpable for the fall of the Spire and…I don’t know, the sun exploding or whatever else you’re catastrophizing.”
“I don’t…not the sun exploding.”
“Pretty telling omission.”
“I mean, what the hell are the odds that I, of all people, am poison to them? That’s a bad fuckin’ joke,” I fumed. “It’s—even if we somehow get the Peacies to leave us alone, I’m never gonna be able to even visit the Spire.” I could see it clearly in my mind’s eye, being turned away from the Gate at bladepoint, Heung’s tone faintly apologetic but heavy with uncompromising finality. I was on track to be the first person ever banished from the Spire.
Alice wasn’t a telepath, but I was pretty easy to read. She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Come off it, Ez, being all Yuuka doesn’t suit you. Take five deep breaths, three seconds in, three seconds out.”
I felt the faintest sense of heat and winced, unsure if I was pissing her off or if that was just my blood running hot from embarrassing panic. For a moment, I considered petulantly ignoring her advice, upset at being treated like a child throwing a tantrum—then realized that was exactly the treatment I deserved. I stared at the floor of her and Amane’s doorway, turning red with shame, and took the requested breaths. When I finished, Alice sighed again. “Your emotional spectrum is still all fucked from last evening, yeah? Rubber-banded the other way?”
I caught her use of profanity, a sign she’d shifted out of Radiance Opal mode and was now talking to me as my friend. “…Yeah. Is that a side effect of pumping my soul through a lattice?”
“Not a magical effect. Not to go armchair therapist on you, but you’re crashing down from a euphoria high, and it’s making you treat things as a bigger deal than they are.” She pre-empted my objection that this was indeed a big fucking deal, world-shaking in fact, with a raised finger. “I’ve been there! Happened to me all the time when we were first developing the mantles. I’d give myself, uh, these,” she said, hefting one of her breasts slightly with one hand, “And then when they were gone, I’d be super emotionally fragile for a few days.”
“I…how did this turn into talking about your…chest?” The hesitation in that protest was undercut somewhat by the way my eyes automatically followed the gesture before I wrested them away to look at literally anything else; I settled my gaze on the corner of Amane’s streaming setup visible in the next room, which was bathed in a soft purple glow that helped flush my visual cortex.
Alice stood slowly, her tail squishing the ball quite a lot as it slithered off. No wonder she had to stretch so thoroughly and frequently; the thick, scaled slab of muscle and fat was an insane amount of additional weight for a pair of human legs to be lugging around, even accounting for her muscular thighs and wide hips. Its bulk drew my eyes right back over almost as easily as any pair of—I bonked myself before that thought could continue and stared harder at the corner of Amane’s desk over there. I instead made myself consider that it was also generally good self-care to stretch regularly—and that made me remember that I hadn’t done any spear training in days, and I became more crestfallen still. Alice frowned sympathetically.
“Look, you’re experiencing a big mood swing from being back in a body you don’t like. Brain’s dumping even more cortisol than usual, and it’s making it hard for you to rationally categorize danger and what you can do about it. You’re latching on to anything that will make you feel worse.”
I ground out a noise somewhere between a sigh and a growl, frustrated at being read so easily; having my feelings guessed was a sign I was known and understood and seen, and while that should have been a source of comfort and camaraderie coming from Alice, it also made me feel exposed. I shrugged my hoodie, one of the big ones in a nice earthy green I’d gotten with Hina, a little higher around my neck. “It…yes, rationally, that makes sense, but they’re some big fuckin’ problems and you’re sweeping them aside to talk about gender.”
“Aha! Because they share a solution, or at least a first step. Sit down and think about it while I use the loo.” She gestured at the yoga ball and made for the bathroom.
I hesitantly did as instructed and found that the ball was warm enough for me to feel it through my pants. It was a miracle Alice didn’t bake Amane alive in their bed. I turned my mind to the so-called shared solution.
It wasn’t much of a riddle; I found the answer immediately, and then spent the rest of the time hemming and hawing over what it meant.
Alice stuck her head out of the bathroom. “Well?”
“I…” I closed my mouth after the false start and took another deep breath, then delivered my solution in a rush. “I’ve got to use the doll more, haven’t I.”
Alice nodded and came out, wiping her hands with a towel that she then balled up and launched across the room into the laundry bin. “Good start.”
I felt pressured to defend my reasoning. “I need a mantle to, well, fight, if it’s gonna come to that, and I need to…what, microdose gender euphoria? I don’t know if it works like that.”
“Worked for me.” She raised her arms behind her head and posed, Instagram thirst-trap style, hips forward. “And look at me now! Fifty-four kilograms of sexy babe. The system works!”
That weight definitely didn’t include the tail, I noted, but I had other objections besides, darting my eyes away from her again. “I don’t want to become a sexy babe. And would you stop doing…that?”
She dropped her arms. “Designing this body took hopping into my mantle after adjusting how it looked, dozens of times over months, and then I had to have a very upsetting talk with my Flame to convince it to rebuild my actual body to spec, so I’d say I’ve earned the right to flaunt it. Not to mention keeping it looking like this despite my appetite.” She prodded her stomach with a finger. “Anyway, to figure out the body you want, you’ll have to do the same, and that means getting used to a mantle, and that means getting into the doll, Shinji.”
“What? Oh.” In hindsight it was obvious Alice and Hina would share anime references. Not very mahou shoujo to reference a mecha show—though Amethyst demonstrated that there could be some significant crossover, and mantles in general were bipedal, cutting-edge weapons of war that protected their pilots…maybe there was something there. I hadn’t yet watched enough anime to know. “That’s—yes, that’s all correct. But…using the doll made me worse. I don’t like who I was last night.”
“You mean how you were almost willing to bite one of Hina’s fingers off? That’s between you and her; I don’t care, done it before. Unless you want tips.”
I started. “You too? Has everyone but me mutilated my girlfriend? Am I being pranked?”
“You did punch her chest in, I’m told.”
“Yeah, but that wasn’t intended…” I trailed off, realizing I couldn’t quite defend that line of reasoning, and backpedaled a little. “You and Hina?”
She rolled her eyes. “Come off it. She’s my best friend and the girl who helped me hatch, and I am a lesbian. I’ve bitten parts of her you don’t even know exist yet.”
“…Huh.”
“Yes. So your lecherousness last night with her, while a little too public, was…within parameters, I guess you could say. I certainly wasn’t surprised, just worried you’d get some of her fluids into the food. You didn’t, I hope?”
I raised my hand solemnly. “Nothing made it into the food, I promise. I think. Um. But I don’t think that’s a good enough standard for, er, defining acceptable PDA.” I rubbed at my spear tattoo. “I think we really freaked out Yuuka”
“Ah.”
Some of Alice’s good mood, so rare for her to begin with, visibly wilted. I immediately felt bad. She walked over to the bed and sat on it—a maneuver that required raising her tail, sitting sideways, then scooting until the tail laid flat on the sheets. There was something appealing about its bulk, how it flowed out of her spine, to say nothing of the glitter of her scales—I caught myself from staring at her body. God, was I gross. I put my gaze back where it belonged as she templed her fingers. “Yeah, yep. What did she say, exactly?”
“Uh…basically that Hina makes her feel unsafe, and that I might too. Probably already did. She was kind of harsh about it. I know I should have some thicker skin about all the ‘monster’ stuff now, but…”
“That’s Yuuka, she’s harsh, but based on last night…Hina’s not the only…” She trailed off. The tip of her tail thumped softly and steadily on the linens, a paff-paff-paff metronome for her thoughts, whatever she was deciding. Then she sighed heavily. “Hell, alright, let’s head this off before it gets worse.”
Author’s Note:
We’re back! Gosh, Ez is already going through it, isn’t it.
Doing Sunspot Sunday for these pre-arc Patreon releases, might also start doing it for public, unsure for now. Thanks for your patience. 4.02 should be up for patrons next Sunday.
Enjoy the temporary arc cover while it’s here!
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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