Chapter 10: From On High // 1.10

The Main Todai building was officially called Lighthouse Tower. The actual name in Japanese was a direct transliteration of the English and had inspired my first impromptu Japanese lesson on the walk over, through an underground tunnel on the first-level basement linking it to the adjacent parking structure.

“Raitohausu tawa. Laitohausu tawar. Raithaos tawa?”

‘R’ was a terrible letter, at least the Japanese one. It just wasn’t a sound my mouth was used to making at all.

“You’re getting there! You can get away with a really light ‘D’ sound instead for the ‘R’. Make the last ‘A’ longer, too.”

“Daitohausu tawaa?”

“Too hard on the ‘D’.” She immediately facepalmed at her own innuendo. “I’m so glad Hina didn’t hear that.”

When her hand came away, she looked the same—no makeup? Her skin really was just that smooth. The realization prompted a jolt of envy I didn’t quite understand, and I brushed my face with my fingers unconsciously. I discovered a few more missed spots around my jaw that had gone unshaven. The spot Hina had zapped stung a bit, and I was grateful that it wasn’t visibly inflamed as I checked my reflection in the rearview mirror.

Opal’s car was in a reserved spot right next to the tunnel. It wasn’t visibly the main ride of a major VNT organization leader. It was a nice car, some low-rider sporty import in a sleek white that matched her hair and tail, but I had been primed for…actually, I wasn’t sure what I had been primed for. One of those anime girl illustration wraps, but of her team? That didn’t sound like her; she didn’t even have a bumper sticker in that vein. The interior was more custom than the exterior, though: the driver’s seat was modified to accommodate her tail, the lumbar section of the back removed to allow the thick limb to spill out into the backseat and coil like…toothpaste? Surely there was a more flattering comparison, but that was what came to mind.

Alice was dressed slightly heavier than yesterday, opting to also add a pale-yellow crop top over the sports bra underneath the same white jacket. That was presumably for propriety’s sake rather than anything to do with the cold, but even with the addition, I would have been horribly embarrassed to wear such an exposing ensemble to a government office. Being in proximity to it was an exercise in fighting down secondhand embarrassment even as I rebuked myself for the way my eyes were drawn to the subtle bounce of her chest. I had to build up my tolerance to this sort of thing soon. Surely, the way my eyes wandered of their own accord was making these girls uncomfortable, despite assurances to the contrary.

She was already snacking on some sort of pastry: circular with a hole in the middle, like a donut, but with square edges instead of round. She took a few massive chomps, chewed hastily, swallowed with some effort, took a long draw from an iced tea she’d managed to sneak out the door while fleeing Hina and Amane’s argument, and then changed the topic as we pulled out of the parking space.

“You’re taking the amputation rather well.”

Was I? I supposed I was.

“It’s—thank you?” Silence reigned for a few beats as we went up a ramp to the parking structure’s ground level. “It doesn’t seem like all that big a deal, I guess. I don’t know. Maybe it hasn’t sunk in?”

If the quality of the rush-job prosthetic they had already given me was anything to go by, the one still in the works would be basically perfect once I finished healing. I didn’t feel like an amputee, at any rate. Opal nodded, waving at somebody getting out of their car who was presumably starting their workday. Support staff, perhaps, a totally unremarkable 40-something man in a suit. Slicked back hair, briefcase—the very image of a Japanese salaryman, even to my limited cultural context. His car was much less flashy than Opal’s, some mini Mitsubishi that they probably only sold domestically. He responded to Opal’s gesture with a small bow as we passed by.

“That’s Suzuki-san, no relation to Hina. He’s on the marketing team. You’d like him, I think…anyway, amputation. It’ll feel more real with time. This might sound a bit uncouth, but you got pretty lucky. If you had lost more of the foot, like up to the ankle, your recovery timeline would look much worse. The fact that you can already stand even without the stabilizer is a boon. Don’t just grit your teeth through it if it hurts, though, yeah?”

I assumed that came from experience with Amethyst’s condition. Even in my limited experience thus far, it was clear that she was a mess. Actually, it occurred to me that I’d hardly seen her stand in her human form, let alone walk. She didn’t seem to carry a cane or any other sort of mobility aid, but my gut said she ought to. My memories went back to the glimpse I had caught yesterday of the port in her midriff, and the way her argument with Hina had been on the verge of a shouting match. Both of them had pointed at me at least twice even in that short period.

“…Honestly, I feel like I’m imposing. Did that argument start because of me?”

“Ah, no, no. You’re entirely blameless for that. It’s more like…well, you know Hina. And Amane is the opposite, avoidant. Always in mantle because it lets her not be in pain for a while.”

“Mm.” As always, mention of their brand of magic took my attention. It seemed alright to ask these things now. “So your transformations can’t feel pain? No red links anywhere?”

“Well, it depends. Pain is a useful signal, but…alright, actually, we should start at the beginning, since I was hoping to have this talk on the way over anyway. How much do you know about magical girls?”

“Not much.”

“…Meaning?”

“I…uh. I have a friend who’s a fan of yours, but that’s it. Never seen an anime about them or anything.”

We arrived at a little electronic toll booth that marked the entrance of the parking structure.

“That’s alright. We’ll get you up to speed on the classics in the next few weeks.” She rolled down the window and waved a card at it. “But let me fill you in on the basics now, if that’s alright?”

The booth beeped and raised the barrier arm to allow us onto the streets of Tokyo. I had seen the immediately local skyline from my room’s window up on the 20th floor, but the effect was different on the ground. Down here, it was easy to forget just how tall the buildings were; Lighthouse Tower’s 20-story glass-and-steel facade was the same as its 80-story neighbors. With it as the model in my head and my view of higher floors obstructed by the car’s roof, it felt like we were surrounded by mid-size buildings rather than the truly tremendous skyscrapers they were. My frame of reference was a bit skewed anyway, though, since the Spire completely dwarfed anything in this city.

Since I couldn’t much see the skyline from down here, what really caught my attention was the people. The weather forecast had said it was actually a fair bit warmer here than in England today, high of 9 Celsius—yet everybody was bundled up. Scarves and hats abounded, topping off long overcoats and other heavy winter wear, a stark contrast to Alice’s athleisure. Her exposed skin wasn’t entirely without company among the pedestrians, though. She gestured with her reduced pastry at a trio of girls in bona fide sailor uniforms, bare-legged under their skirts. The girls pointed back at us; the glass was tinted, so they probably couldn’t see us, but it stood to reason that Opal’s personal ride was pretty iconic in its own right.

“That’s how old we were when we started. Most mahou shoujo deals with girls in high school or younger, chosen by some higher power for their youthful purity—the untainted love in their heart, that sort of thing—to do battle against evil monsters.”

I nodded, already seeing some of the real-world parallels, though our kind—still wasn’t used to thinking of myself as the in-group—were far more randomly selected. No distinguishable pattern for us. “Flametouched.”

“Mhm.” She took another bite of the pastry I would later learn is called a baumkuchen. “Aesthetically speaking, I’m sure you’ve already seen enough Sailor Moon stuff to get the picture by osmosis, online as you’ve been. No offense.”

“None taken. So it’s all, er, ribbons, hearts, gems?”

“Frills. Bows.”

She hung a left, and we pulled onto what seemed to be a more significant traffic artery. The streets reminded me of NYC in terms of how things were separated into blocks rather than the jumble of many European cities, but the big difference was that the Japanese loved signage to a degree that I had never quite seen before. Street signs were fairly universal, of course, but every storefront had a big sign, and everywhere I looked, there were flyers and bulletins. Opal continued.

“And wands, and sometimes actual weapons, yes. And all that comes with the transformation; otherwise, they’re just regular girls. The five of us, not getting those as part of our signing bonus, so to speak, had to make our own transformations. The Japanese for that is henshin, by the way; that’s the word you’ll see people use when talking about our mantles.”

“Henshin.” I rolled the word around in my mouth. I’d probably seen Star use it before. “Got it. So technically speaking, a mantle is…a PMLMC? My friend says it’s more mech-like than an actual transformation, but that’s all speculation.”

She took another sip of iced tea. “Correct. Yes, your friend is right; they’re psychomotive. It’s a neat little fourspace swap that gets our actual body out of harm's way, and we plug our consciousness into the LM construct to fight without worry of harm. You can see how that’s not really on the original theme.”

“But visually it’s just an outfit swap?”

“Visually, yeah, the basic LMC is a duplicate of our bodies, and we add modifications on top of that for the outfits, which at least gets us looking like proper mahou shoujo, other than Amane. But unlike the source material, it’s an entirely separate body, so we had to implement everything ourselves. You saw some of the structural and motive elements yesterday—the parts derived from Spire dermis—but the sensory and control stuff is where most of the work goes. Every sense is custom-implemented.”

“And the fewer the better, since those would be red links.”

“Yes!” She sounded pleased I was keeping up. “So the real trick is getting enough psychomotive integration that controlling it is as fluid and intuitive as our own bodies, without the red links relaying pain down the lattice back to us. It’s finicky, and not the first solution we went with—ask Ai to show you her back binding sometime.”

“I—I’m not sure I could manage that. It sounds fascinating, though.”

She chuckled, slitted pupils looking at me out of the corner of her eyes. “You really don’t have to be so nervous around us. If you’re making us uncomfortable, believe me, we’ll let you know. We wouldn’t have asked you to stay with us if we were worried about that sort of thing. Where was I—yeah, so we’re not really working on actual mahou shoujo rules, you understand?”

I wished I could be less nervous and briefly considered confiding more in her about it—but reflexively retreated from examining that notion, instead accepting the dangled bit of conversational escape. “I think so. So…you’d say the mecha comparison is accurate?”

I didn’t know much about that genre either, but Opal nodded.

“We’ve done a lot of work to try to make it more hooked-in and less like flying a jet fighter, but…yeah, I hate to admit it: we’re magical girl-shaped mecha, functionally speaking. Mind if I ask who your friend is? One of the YouTubers? That’s the sort of circles you move in, to my understanding.”

“Um, not quite. But she does a lot of the research for some of the videos about you—about Lighthouse as a whole, I mean. Um…Starstar97?” I cringed at how the username sounded in this offline setting, but Opal nodded in recognition.

“Heard the name, I think. Tell her I said hi. Actually—” We had just come to a stop at another fairly large intersection, so she turned to me and threw up a peace sign, flashing a practiced smile. Radiant indeed. “A pic would make her day, I hope? I could do a short video, too; this light usually takes about a minute.”

“Um, wow—really?” Should she even be doing something like this while we were on the road? Didn’t that sort of thing give a bad impression? But it wasn’t like I was going to question her judgment on this; she certainly would know better than I. I fumbled my phone out of my pocket; I had been trying to adhere to ‘polite conversation behaviors’ by not looking at it and instead keeping my eyes on the city around us. “Ready?”

“Yep.”

I hit record and tried to keep the camera steady. Radiance Opal launched into a peppy, authentic-sounding greeting.

“Hey, Starstar97! I’m with Ezzen, and he mentioned you’re a fan, so I just wanted to say thanks for your support and the work you do! Houseki hikare!” She nodded to me after a moment. “There you go. Hope she likes that! And send that to me, too, if you would? I won’t put the whole thing up publicly, but this year we’re going to do a montage video like ‘Every Time the Radiances Said Houseki Hikare in 2022’.”

That wasn’t particularly my speed—I always ignored similar videos of the Vaetna saying the Spire’s catchphrase when they showed up in my recommended page—but it was definitely the kind of thing Star enjoyed. And Opal was right, this was going to make her day, or maybe her whole week. I was pleased to find my cell connection acceptable to send the video even while on the road. I attached a small message of my own, too.

ezzen: Treat for you. Opal’s so nice; she’s not actually quite this peppy, but she’s so damn…kind.

ezzen: Which she’s currently explaining to me is very mahou shoujo, so I guess that tracks.

ezzen: Hope I’m spelling that right.

We pulled onto an elevated motorway.

“Um, can she share it around?”

“Yeah, of course, if she wants. We just have a policy of not sharing it on our end because, well…some of our fans can get jealous.” Her grip audibly tightened on the steering wheel, a squeal of leather. I relayed the permission, though not the comment.

The cityscape was changing around us. The high-rises had given way to shorter, squatter apartment buildings—though still only short by comparison, most of them being at least eight stories tall. Soon after, the buildings were entirely replaced by trees on both sides. Opal gestured to the left with the final chunk of baumkuchen.

“This green stretch is Motoakasaka, which has a bunch of temples and one of the old Imperial estates. Can’t get a very good view of it from up here, though.”

Sure enough, a column of apartment buildings soon obstructed what little view we had. Now that we were away from the pedestrians and storefronts, the cityscape was mostly defined by grey concrete juxtaposed with clusters of foliage denuded of most of their green by the winter. Come spring, when these little islands of nature were back to their full green, I could see how it’d be pretty. As it was, though, the city had a certain brutalist ugliness to it, at least from this vantage point.

“I don’t love that we’re not ‘proper’ mahou shoujo in our transformations, but there are upsides. We can’t lose our powers by losing our purity, for one. And real magic is a lot more flexible than the power systems you see in most anime.”

I didn’t want to offend her, but I needed clarification on the basis for this whole thing.

“Uh…so, it’s roleplay?”

“I mean…in the sense that we’re not literally selected by a higher power on the basis of purity, no.” She sighed. “But that’s not in our control, and we’re the real thing in every other sense. Are the Vaetna roleplaying superheroes?”

“They’re really more like knights,” I protested.

“Point. Why does it matter that our moral code comes from anime? I’m trying to make a difference with the hand I’ve been dealt, to follow in the footsteps of the heroes I grew up admiring. Am I wrong in saying you look up to the Vaetna in the same way?”

She wasn’t, but it felt like a false dichotomy. In my eyes, she was comparing a fictional morality system from kids’ cartoons to a group of people who engaged in very real geopolitics.

“The Vaetna are real, though.”

“What we believe in isn’t all that different from the Spire. We just—can’t trample over nations like they can. And wouldn’t even if we could. That doesn’t make it roleplay. Doesn’t make it fake.”

She was getting defensive. I flinched. “Alright, sorry. So…” I searched for another topic. “If the aesthetic matters so much, why’s Amethyst a big crystal mech? And, er, your tail, is that inspired by anything?”

“Amane likes the intimidation factor of being huge, and copying her body for the LM is…complicated, in a way that it isn’t for the rest of us. Residuals. As for this…” She swished her tail in the backseat. “Memorable, isn’t it?”

“Er, yeah, I suppose. Are dragons, ah, mahou shoujo?”

She scratched her temple as we changed lanes.

“Well…animal traits aren’t unheard of, but usually it’s part of the whole team’s theming, and I’m sure you’ve noticed that that’s not our theme. That’s because I didn’t choose it. It’s a metamorph residual, like Hina, though hers are more subtle. It started for me when we got our flame donation. I’ve come to appreciate how distinctive it is, though. Being Todai’s Dragon has a nice ring to it.”

There was something a little halting in how she said it.

“So it’s flesh, not LM.”

“Yep, marvel of nature and all that. It’s really quite marketable—we’ve got plushes of the tail, my eyes stand out as much as Hina’s or Amane’s in the posters…I’ve lucked into being a real-life anime girl, even if the exact subtype doesn’t entirely fit with my genre, and that’s worth it when we trade so much on—”

“Do you like it?”

“—our reputation and appearance.”

I don’t know why I blurted it out and interrupted her, but it was just something in her tone. It sounded like she was rationalizing. Her eyes flicked to me briefly before refocusing on the road.

“I live with it.”

That hurt, and I wasn’t quite sure why. She continued after a moment.

“It’s…inconvenient, for sure. You see how much I eat, and stuff like this seat—lots of accommodations like that. I miss wearing pants sometimes. I’m more of a skirts girl anyway, though.”

I abstained from pointing out that she wasn’t wearing a skirt now; I had intentionally avoided examining the exact way her leggings were modified to make room for the extra limb when we had been walking together. She was practically begging the question, but I was too shy to ask about her fashion choices…and there was another kind of discomfort, the way she signaled unhappiness about her body, that made my fingers return to my face, feeling the spots of stubble I had missed again.

“Sorry for interrupting.”

“It’s fine.” She seemed as eager as me to go to another topic. “Does the, er, commercialized side of what we do bother you?”

“Not…really? The Vaetna’ve got plenty of merch.” Then I thought about it some more, reminded of something Star had said before regarding how their PR worked. “Well…can I say something that might be offensive?”

“Sure. Trust me, I’ve gone under much more severe cross-examination of our way of doing things.”

“Alright, then…it just seems especially performative. Like with the video earlier.” I put my hands up hastily. “Not like roleplay! It’s just…if you’re playing up the act for publicity, then that’s sort of acknowledging that it’s at least partially an act, not totally genuine.”

“Not wrong. But we live it, and believe in it. It’s…there’s a lot of reasons we do it. It’s important to be seen. It’s kind of a concession to the original concept, since mahou shoujo do tend toward a sort of secret identity paradigm, but…well, think about it this way. Since our status as magical girls is not granted by some higher power, we need to work harder than Usagi or Hibiki to maintain it, to make it more real. So, yes, it’s performative, but only because we believe it matters. Is that a problem?”

“Er—as long as you’re not going to try to get me in one of those costumes.”

She laughed. “Perish the thought! Whatever Hina says, I know you didn’t sign up to become one of us. No pressure to participate with any of the marketing stuff beyond what concerns your research.”

That was something of a relief.

“How much does that factor into the, er, day-to-day? Promotions and all that?”

“Depends. In terms of what you’d call VNT activities, we’re more on the reactive side, so it depends on if there are monsters for us to fight at the time.”

“Um…’monsters’ as in infernos?”

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

“That’s another spot where theory sort of bows to praxis. Case in point—see these trees on our left? That’s Meiji Jingu, the biggest shrine in Japan. It’s attached to Yoyogi Park. Next week, Hikanome—er, Sun’s Blessing—is holding a demonstration here, and we’re supposed to keep an eye on them.”

“They’re a cult, right? Like Zero-Day.” I wasn’t quite sure where she was going with this.

“Yep. Biggest in Japan. In a way, their leaders are a pretty good adaptation of the ‘proper’ mahou shoujo villains. People with the same powers as us, but misusing them. Hardly an objective black-and-white structure, but in a world where so-called ‘incarnations of darkness’ and such don’t exist…” She punctuated the label with air-quotes. “And yes, infernos, but those aren’t evil. They’re just…”

“People. Like us.”

“Just the bad ending, yeah. That’s a little mahou shoujo, too.”

It was one of the great injustices of this era that some people couldn’t handle the awesome power that fell from the sky, overwhelmed by these fragments of what the various cults called the only provable divinity. It broke my heart that nobody had found a way to reverse the process or permanently contain them; they all met the same fate as Dad. Even the Vaetna still just went for mercy kills, seven years on. Opal went on somberly.

“It’s one of those things I dream about solving, a way to stop the inferno and save the victim. Nobody deserves that.” Her resolution hung in the air, an intense pressure directed at nothing in particular.

“Yeah. Me too.”

As I’d originally explained to her yesterday, part of what had gotten me into magic was the drive to understand what had happened to Dad. I’d eventually been forced to accept that it wasn’t the type of magical problem I’d be able to solve in glyphs, not if the Vaetna couldn’t with their mastery of magic and near-boundless power. But maybe…with Flame of my own, with the Radiances’ help? It was egotistical to think I could do what the Spire couldn’t, but the spark of hubris reignited in me. I resolved to take another look at my old papers on the topic tonight.

Her follow-up question was no reprieve from the dark atmosphere. “Do you think there’s such a thing as evil, Ezzen? As monsters?”

“I…well…The Spire Stands, you know?” I sheepishly tried to articulate how that connected. “The strong ought to—have an obligation to—protect the weak, but…power corrupts. Not always, but often enough. I don’t know much about Sun’s Blessing specifically, but Flamebearer cults and the like…they’re ugly. I think there’s evil there.”

“Agreed. Most of the believers are fine. Just people, again, and I can’t fault people for needing to believe in things. But the VNTs at the center of it? I’d call Sugawara emblematic of the monsters, at least as far as flamebearers are concerned.”

“He’s…the founder of Hikanome? ‘The Savior’?”

“Don’t call him that.”

I noted some hypocrisy there—her team got the larger-than-life, fiction-inspired titles, but didn’t extend the same privilege to their enemies. I didn’t interrupt her to call it out, though, because from what I knew—she was right. He deserved to be left in the dustbin of history after what he had done. She continued.

“The UK’s got a big cult too, right?”

I had figured from the accent that she had grown up in London, so I was a bit surprised she didn’t know. “Well, Zero-Day is technically based in America…but yeah, they’ve got some influence. Really, though, everything in the UK regarding magic is subordinate to the PCTF.”

“How big?”

“Er, I’d have to check.” A quick google gave the answer. “Eight hundred thousand?”

“Hikanome has seven million in Japan and three million more abroad. Next week they’ll fill the entire park.”

I went quiet, looking out the window as I watched the park pass us by. It had dominated the left side view for the past few minutes.

“And you’re supposed to stop that from turning into a riot?”

“They’re pretty peaceful these days, with Sugawara in prison, at least the sect that’ll be there next week. It’s more about appeasement, showing our faces. They love us, worship us. Off the record, the feeling isn’t entirely mutual.”

“The fans you mentioned before?”

“Yeah. But like I said—they’re not the problem, not the monsters. What do you think of the PCTF?”

It was a leading question, and I understood where it was headed.

“I…I mean, I had overall good experiences with them with this,” I gestured to the scars on my arm, “But it’s kind of an open secret that they’re less than ethical. And the rumors…” I didn’t know how to segue gracefully into what she wanted me to ask. It was a horrible thing to acknowledge, even when the same fate had nearly befallen me two days ago. Her confirmation made my tattoo itch as my skin crawled.

“All true. Every single one. She’s living proof. Every time she has to cancel an event because she’s bedridden, every time she tries to hide the fact that she can barely keep food down—it’s on their heads.” Her voice could have cut diamond. “This doesn’t leave this car or the penthouse, you understand?”

“I—yes, I understand. So…they really did…?”

This didn’t feel like a topic for the sunlight, for this cold February day on the way to do some terribly boring paperwork and go on a not-date in the city after. This pretty girl and her sports car ought not to exist in the same world as black sites and drugs and torture. But I knew in my gut that Opal was telling the truth.

“They did. Her and dozens more.” She took a deep breath. “I think you being here will bring us back into conflict with them, basically inevitably. Hina knew that would happen. She wants the fight—we have unfinished business. The reason I really wanted to get the ball rolling on your paperwork today was to give your presence here some legitimacy before the bloodhounds show up.”

“They won’t actually try to abduct me again, would they?” My blood was up just thinking of the possibility. Surely, the Spire would step in if it came to that; it would be a huge, front-page-news violation of the standing agreements between all the various VNT groups.

“They might. Listen—” I heard her tail moving in the backseat. “As far as I’m concerned, if there are monsters in this world, it’s them. At least the cults believe in something, and it’s hard to begrudge them that when we just discussed where my own beliefs come from. But the PCTF just wants power for its own sake. ‘Peacekeepers’. Ha. If they had their way, we’d all be turned into fucking batteries for their superweapons.” She laughed mirthlessly, looking straight out onto the road. I suddenly realized how hot the air in the car had gotten and squirmed a bit in my seat. “No. They are not touching you. I refuse. Not in our city.” Then she suppressed the incandescent fury, her voice softening, the atmosphere in the car cooling back down to tolerable levels.

“Revenge isn’t mahou shoujo. But destroying evil is.”

—

There had been a time in my life where I interacted with a government office on a nearly daily basis. My dad had died on the first day of the firestorms, and it had taken a few months for nations to get a grip on reparations for the casualties and the bereaved. Consequently, I was in the US government’s first batch of the Inferno Recovery Program, one of the predecessors of what would become the PCTF. The program included what little testing for residuals had been available at the time—before ‘ripple’ was even in the vocabulary for magic—as well as a three-week period of observation ‘just in case’.

I was a special case for two reasons: one, because I was directly related to the unfortunate flametouched—“Paranatural Event Origin,” as the endless documents had put it back then, already denuded of personhood—and two, because I wasn’t a US citizen, and they needed to figure out what to do with me. Ultimately, they’d shipped me right back to Bristol, where I spent two years with my grandparents, in and out of hospitals for regular checkups while both the UK and American governments figured out what more should be done with me, if anything.

Nothing really came of it; rather anticlimactic, in a way. I had no residuals, no evidence of being somehow secondhand flametouched or anything of that sort. If I had shown any signs, I would have likely been subjected to a further battery of testing and been more closely watched by the PCTF during my rise to prominence online. Instead, the last time I had met with an official on that basis was on the five-year anniversary, and that had been for a general check-in and well-wishes, nothing exciting. I had still clung to the idea that my dad’s death and the burns on my hand meant something, that it had marked me as special in the eyes of the Frozen Flame, but that had never really had much basis in reality—

Until two days ago. Now, the fact that my flames manifested from those scars was a surefire sign that I hadn’t gone entirely untouched by that first encounter. I didn’t buy into the idea that the Flame was necessarily a blessing, but the events of the past two days had made me certain I was special in some way, if only by circumstance rather than any actions of my own. Hina and Ai had reinforced that idea; even the least charitable interpretation of the former’s predations toward me implied that she saw something there, and the latter had outright said that I might not be playing by the same rules as other Flamebearers.

Tochou inflicted a critical strike upon these notions of ‘specialness’ by the simple weight of paperwork. I had sort of expected the de-facto leader of Todai paving the way would at least grease the wheels of bureaucracy—it was not to be. We were treated more or less exactly like every other person. We’d go to a kiosk, take a numbered ticket, wait a bit, then go to a clerk. Opal would talk with them for a moment, we’d get some documents, she’d talk me through what it said, I’d sign, and we’d be directed to a different kiosk, slowly accumulating extra paperwork and receipts for fees which she assured me weren’t coming out of my pocket. In all, we’d done this cycle four times so far.

I’d had a bit of a scare when I realized I hadn’t thought to bring my passport, but it turned out that Opal had retrieved it from my backpack yesterday. She’d taken my travel documents so I couldn’t escape—but that was nagging paranoia, easier to brush off than ever; it was just her being prepared. That worry still lingered regarding how I was essentially bound to her as long as she was holding onto my foot’s stabilizer, but given the state of my ankle, I wasn’t going anywhere fast anyway. In all, my foot had been wonderfully cooperative as we navigated to different areas of the bureaucratic labyrinth, at least compared to the near-uselessness from before the stabilizer had been introduced, even if my ankle still throbbed distantly. I continued to ice it while we were sat down, which was helping.

Opal handed the passport back to me as we returned to the small sitting area we had essentially claimed as a home base between interacting with clerks. She sat to my right, sideways on her chair to accommodate her tail, rifling through the documents we’d accumulated.

“What would have happened without it?”

“Well, you still have an actual ID, but they’d have had to check with the UK embassy, probably, and that would be a snag for the PCTF to get involved.”

“So as long as everything stays on Japan’s side, they can’t touch me?”

“Well…I didn’t say that. I had our legal people look into it when Hina brought you in, and while the UK doesn’t have grounds to extradite you as a fugitive or anything—they would if Japan was a NATO member, but they’re not—you should still probably stay far away from the embassy for the time being.”

“Until…?”

“I…don’t know, yet. This’ll blow over eventually.”

Some decisions were made; for one, my address of residence was to be Lighthouse Tower, same as the Radiances. In addition to continuing the pronunciation lesson from earlier, I also received my crash-course in the rest of the country’s addressing system: backward compared to the US or UK, starting at the largest scale and working down from prefecture to city to neighborhood to street address. We also had to contend with my name.

“Dalton is what’s on your ID. Is that alright?”

I had just been getting used to being called Ezzen. “It’s—fine. It’s what I’m used to, anyway.”

She seemed to pick up on the frustration of identity, putting a hand gently over mine, which I half-flinched away from before suppressing the urge. “We’ll still call you Ezzen if you’d like; Dalton doesn’t have to be your name anywhere but the paperwork. I just don’t want to get in trouble because the names on your documents mismatch. It’s a huge pain. Is there a reason you prefer the online name?”

“Um.” I really didn’t want to admit to her that it had been because Hina had pushed me, so I fell back on the explanation I had used with Ebi. “Well, you know the etymology, right?”

“{MANIFEST}. So it’s your…identity with magic, and it signals your preference for the Spire.” She saw how I shifted uncomfortably; she was right on the money. “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about, take it from me. Coming up with names was one of the first things we did when forming Todai.”

That made me feel better; the majority of Flamebearers with any kind of public presence took on some sort of epithet or title, and even simpler, less-aggrandizing name changes were also common enough. The Vaetna were actually the exception—or, since nobody could trace their identities from before the age of magic, they might have had the most complete identity overhauls of any of us.

“Um—how did you end up with ‘Radiances’ anyway?”

She grinned. “The gemstone thing was what I’d always imagined as a kid when I pictured myself as a magical girl, and Radiances were always the title. Just felt right, you know? I didn’t know which—for a long time, I sort of figured I’d be Diamond, but I wound up going with ‘Opal’ when my dreams actually came true. Still doesn’t feel real sometimes.”

Diamond would have fit her too, but I could see how it might come off as a bit arrogant compared to her teammates. I lowered my voice, feeling a little like this peek behind the curtain wasn’t supposed to be happening in public.

“So they’re…arbitrary? The choices of gemstones?”

She didn’t seem to share the concern, shrugging easily. This must have come up in interviews before for her to be so nonchalant about it.

“Mostly. For me and Hina, we already looked the parts, my hair, her eyes. Ai chose Emerald because…I think just because green is her favorite color, but I don’t quite remember. I’m at least sure that there’s no grand reason behind that one. Amane picked Amethyst because it sounds something like her name, even though I’ve always thought her eyes should have made her Jade or something else green—besides, Emerald was already taken by then. And Yuuka is…Bloodstone.” She chuckled. “Having a member with a more goth aesthetic is also pretty mahou shoujo, so I’m glad she fills that role so easily.”

I hadn’t yet met the fifth member, so I was only working off of Star’s rants and my abortive Wikipedia skim from yesterday to picture her, plus Ebi’s comment that she was some sort of life sciences grad student. Biology or ecology or something in that vein, but I didn’t quite see how that connected to a title like ‘Bloodstone’. It was a mystery for another time, though, because this whole topic had cut me a bit more deeply than I had been prepared for. I had always fantasized that, as a Vaetna, I’d go by Ezzen, not Dalton, and Opal’s own admission of the same habits created a weird feeling of intimacy I didn’t quite want to confront. I looked over the paperwork arrayed before us again, pointing at the first empty box I saw.

“What goes here?”

“Your furigana. That’s, uh…how your name is spelled in Japanese, since the sounds are different.”

She pulled out some random receipt she assured me we wouldn’t need, and wrote:

コリオー・エッゼン

“That’s your name in Japanese, I think. Korioo Ezzen. Uh, if we’re going with what’s on your ID, then…” She wrote another name: ダルトン. “Daruton. ‘Colliot’ is French, right?”

“Great-grandfather, yeah.”

“Well, sorry to say, Japanese is terrible with French words. Still, Ezzen can be your name basically everywhere but your ID, and if you ask people to call you ‘Ezzen’, they will. ‘Ezzen-san’ sounds…mostly Japanese, I think, not that you have to pass for a native anyway.” She scribbled some kanji. “You can get away with writing it in kanji a few different ways—but I’m getting off track. You can just stick with katakana. Like how I write Arisu for my name.” She scribbled it: アリス.

“Not a Japanese name, is it?”

“Well, I think the accent gives me away no matter what.”

“I, um, didn’t want to ask. You’re a Londoner?”

“Nope, grew up here.” She waved it off good-naturedly. “I’m what they call a halfie. Dad’s Japanese, Mom is a second-generation Brit. And Tokyo has a British school. It’s a whole thing, there are American ones too. So I’m a Japanese citizen, but lived in this little pocket of fake-London in the middle of Tokyo until high school. Spent a lot of summers out in the countryside with Dad’s family, though, so I do consider myself Japanese in terms of culture or heritage or however you’d call it.”

Wow. That was a step beyond the years I spent living in America. “You’ve never been to Britain?”

“I have, but never lived there. The plan was for me to go to Oxford—but that was before the firestorms, and once we were flametouched…no way. I wasn’t going to leave Hina and Ai behind.” She shook herself. “You lived in the US for a while, though, right? What was that like?”

“Fine? Normal? I don’t remember much from before it, and after…”

Little more needed to be said on that front. The arrival of magic had rather thoroughly screwed up practically everybody’s plans for the future in the short term, even disregarding the grander geopolitical impact. Doubly so if you were like me and had lost people, or were flametouched like the Radiances. I thought of what else to say. The memories seemed a little less painful knowing that her life had been just as derailed as mine in those first few weeks, so I searched for something to share.

“Well, there are things I miss about it. My dad was a chef, a really big one, so he’d take me to NYC and we’d eat at the fanciest restaurants for free since he was friends with everybody who ran those places. That was nice.”

Opal lit up at that, although she was still actively rifling through papers and filling in boxes the whole time, conscious of the timetable we were on. “That sounds—great. Tokyo is so good for food tourism, you have no idea. And they put out the red carpet for us—although between you and me, I prefer the chains and really grubby dives over the fine dining. You ever had Japanese pasta?”

“No.” I mean, of course not.

“Right, right. We’re doing Saizeriya next time I take you out, then. I’d ask Hina to take you today, but I’m sure she’s got her own ideas for a good time on the town.” She looked up from the document she was working on. “Not too late to back out of that if you’re getting cold feet, by the by.”

“…Cold foot. Just the one.”

My delivery was so deadpan it sounded almost glum, and her brow furrowed with concern—before she saw my lips twisted in a suppressed giggle. The stupid joke made her laugh quietly, covering her mouth, which made me unable to hold my own dumb guffaw. More importantly, this distracted us from the offered escape from today’s plans, without delving into my complicated and conflicting feelings about Hina.

“It’s great that you can joke about it already, really. How’s it feeling?”

“Ankle still hurts a bit, but the ice definitely helped. Stabilizer’s working a treat, it’s…so good to be able to walk properly again.” I hadn’t actually expressed that feeling out loud yet, and it felt nice to confide. Then I pointed at an object that had caught my attention earlier, a little stamp she was putting down at the bottom of the document. “What’s that?”

“Hanko. Personal seal, substitutes for a signature. Perks of having family history here.” She held up the document. “I know you can’t read it, but that says Takehara.”

I nodded. My earlier prediction that today would greatly exceed my capacity for cultural osmosis was proving true—case in point, just then the number for our ticket was called, and we stood to approach the next desk. As with the last four, the person attending us seemed a bit star-struck by Opal. She did most of the talking; by now, I was picking up that there was a lot of the same boilerplate dialogue every time, things that I could reasonably guess were long-winded “thank you”s and “would it be possible to…” phrases. I wondered how much of the language I’d pick up in a month’s time.

Opal seemed pleased with the progress we were making as we came away from the desk and returned to our impromptu home base. Mercifully, they generally didn’t seem too willing to enter our bubble of privacy; Opal’s star power seemed to keep them at bay rather than invite them to try to get a selfie or make small talk with the celebrity. It wasn’t that she was intimidating, at least not to me, more that she was a visibly important person in the middle of doing visibly important things, and I appreciated that people were giving us space. She noticed me not-so-subtly looking around us.

“Enjoy it while it lasts. People will be way more willing to come up and bother us when we’re on the street, tourists especially.” She indicated her tail and the way she sat sideways in her chair to accommodate it. “Fair warning, I don’t exactly try to hide.”

“Right, visibility. I got the impression Hina does? She said we’d be undercover.”

“Hina…is weird. She doesn’t believe in visibility off the clock.”

“But aren’t secret identities…magical girl?”

I felt sort of embarrassed to use the Japanese phrase in public as a foreigner, both on principle—it felt a little appropriative—and because I wasn’t particularly confident in my pronunciation. When Opal said it, mahou shoujo was beautiful, and I could practically feel the belief and determination behind it. Coming out of my mouth, it felt I was doing a disservice to both the language and the concept. But on the other hand, using the English phrase was nearly as awkward, grammatically incoherent.

“They are, but again, it’s one of those practicalities. Being seen is important, even when it’s—” she gestured around. “Just standing in line to get immigration paperwork done. We’re just people, you know?” She dropped her voice much lower and leaned in—this part wasn’t for listeners-in. “Hikanome thinks we’re above humanity, above the law. Even Hina thinks that way, to an extent. But it’s important to stay grounded. The Flame doesn’t make you any more…more, do you follow?”

That was the first thing she said that really sat wrong with me. I leaned away from her. I agreed with the basic premise—great power, great responsibility—but this was a common talking point from people who meant to suggest that the Vaetna subscribed to the same philosophy of transhuman superiority. But the Vaetna didn’t use their power to lord over the denizens of the Spire—indeed, their whole raison d’etre was to remind the powerful that they could and would be held accountable. The Spire’s ten knights were far more than regular humans, more than even VNTs, and that wasn’t inherently a bad thing. This was a familiar line of debate from the forums, and a familiar rebuttal was on my lips—something like “I think you can acknowledge and take advantage of a disparity of power without putting yourself on a pedestal”—but some danger-sensing part of my mind prodded me to consider why she had lowered her voice, why she didn’t want passersby to overhear this part in particular, even with the mild security of this conversation taking place in English. It wasn’t about the Vaetna; that was my own biases. I matched her whispered tone, thinking back to what she had said in the car.

“Sun’s Blessing wouldn’t be happy to hear you say that, I take it?”

She shook her head. “Not at all.” Then she looked around warily for anybody approaching. Satisfied the coast was clear, she reached into a not-space and retrieved something small, hurriedly popping it into her mouth and chewing. And chewing. I didn’t quite look at her—eye contact wasn’t exactly a strong point for me—but I could still see her face growing redder in my peripheral vision. I had to ask.

“…Nuts?”

“I get peckish!”

“I’m not judging.”

She chewed some more. “…Want one?”

“What kind?”

“Um—cashews, almonds, walnuts, peanuts. Salted.”

“Cashew, please. Why are we still whispering?”

“Um. We’re not really supposed to eat here.” She offered me a nut, dropping it surreptitiously into my cupped hand. Her tone returned to the politely-quiet, conversational level from before. “Anyway. I think you’re seeing what I’m getting at? We have to lead by example, show that anybody can do good.”

Because they didn’t even have the clout to say in public they weren’t naturally superior to the people around them. I maintained the whisper, now unsure of what could be safely said in public.

“Does Sun’s Blessing have that kind of power?”

Opal looked around again, judging the safety of this conversation, before opting to pull out her phone along with another nut.

Alice Takehara: The short explanation is that the National Public Safety Commission, who more or less hold our leash, are heavily tied to Hikanome. We keep Hikanome happy, they don’t pressure the Commission to restrict or sanction us.

Alice Takehara: The appeasement isn’t just about maintaining our fanbase. It’s politics.

I was oddly pleased that she shared my habit of proper grammar over text, even on our phones.

Dalton Colliot: Which is why Hina is policing a protest?

I frowned after sending the message, and went into my phone’s settings, changing my display name.

Ezzen Colliot: There we go.

Alice Takehara: ദ്ദി(˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧

“How did you do that?”

“I have a whole menu of them. You’ve never seen kaomoji before?”

I had, but I had figured they fell more in the vein of ASCII art than an easily accessible menu.

“Show me how to get those?”

“Sure, later.”

Alice Takehara: But yeah, that sort of thing is the price we pay for having mostly free reign to do our thing.

Alice Takehara: It’s this or be essentially forced to participate in the whole South China Sea…thing. Dick-measuring contest, if you’ll excuse my language.

Alice Takehara: Mahou shoujo do not fight wars.

Ezzen Colliot: lol

Ezzen Colliot: (at dick-measuring contest, not the thing about war)

She acknowledged the clarification with a nod.

Ezzen Colliot: Seems adverse.

Alice Takehara: Try ‘corrupt’.

She knew the score. It was easy to see how situations like these could be construed as Todai being pressured into appearing to support Sun’s Blessing. This was already a tangle of politics that I had little patience for. Hina’s first lesson loomed as a kind of omen, now, and I was starting to understand why she had felt the need to impress it on me almost as soon as I had confirmed I was sticking around. Todai lived and died on leverage. I had always admired the way the Spire was able to cut the Gordian knot when it came to this sort of thing—but then, they had both the means and ideological sanction to go to war over it. Opal and her team had neither.

Ezzen Colliot: Also, ‘free rein’.

“What? No, it’s ‘reign’, with a ‘G’, like being in control.”

“Nope, look it up.”

“…Oh, darn.”

Alice Takehara: But there’s a weird upside to it all.

Alice Takehara: If we do wind up in open conflict with the PCTF, we can go public about what happened to Amane and all the other flamebearers like her.

Alice Takehara: And my hope is that Hikanome would lose their shit.

And there it was. Todai’s greatest leverage, a play of brutal realpolitik that took full advantage of their position in the public eye and could turn one of their biggest external pressures into a staunch ally against their most hated enemy. Not something to be done lightly; if they couldn’t make the accusation stick, it was easy to see how that could demolish Todai’s reputation, and even in the best case scenario, it was so adversarial as to almost be a declaration of war. And what of Amane’s own place in this, as the centerpiece, someone of whom Opal was clearly so protective? All that to say—

From what I now understood of the concept, such a move would not be mahou shoujo in the slightest.