Chapter 20: Trick Of The Light // 2.05

Did I want to go to the Hikanome rally? Not particularly. But it was worth discussing.

“You should go,” Ebi opined. Her voice sounded quite distinct from when she was interpreting for Amane, drier and deeper in timbre. “We’ll be a little bit fucked if you don’t.”

“How fucked? Uh—no, stupid question, fucked enough that I should just go, right?”

Amane sipped her juice slowly and carefully through a metal straw, holding the cup in her prosthetic hand.

“Let’s walk it back a little bit.” Ebi’s real-time interpretation for Amane was much less stilted and more articulate than the texting. “Talk us through what you’re worried about. I don’t want you to feel like you’re being pushed into this, but I think you’re underestimating how much we can do to make this safe and painless for you.”

“Safe and painless…”

I looked around my room, at the bed and the skyline through the windows and the newly online computer. The water-cooling system which Amane had helped install buzzed dully, probably the pump—a different auditory character from what I was used to, but not unpleasant. Her assistance had cut down the difficulty of the build dramatically, smoothing over that most nerve-wrackingly unfamiliar part and saving me hours of time, and I was grateful. Despite the language barrier, she was quickly becoming among the most comfortable of them to be around—and more importantly, I believed her when she said they’d be able to keep me safe.

…If not for the uncertainty around my stalker. I had to admit that my recalcitrance about the rally heavily stemmed from that fact, and probably looked pretty unaccountable without being aware of it—it was solely by the team’s general graciousness that I wasn’t being pressed harder. Attempting to bring the encounter up to Yuuka had been a complete and total failure, and Alice was off the table as per Hina’s anxious insistence. But Amane had advocated for me—so she at least deserved to understand that I wasn’t just being generally agoraphobic and anxious. I sighed, avoiding eye contact.

“I do have another reason I don’t want to go. Can you…promise to not tell Alice? Hina doesn’t want her to know.” I knew that sounded unreasonable.

“I thought we already established that I don’t like hiding things from my teammates.” Ebi-Amane’s tone was light, though, and the Amethyst Radiance looked intrigued—then squinted in dramatic suspicion, muttering something to Ebi, who rolled her digital eyes and shook her head, replying in her own voice.

“She promises. So do I. Do tell.”

“Alright, uh. When I was out with Hina yesterday—well, rather, between after I left Tochou and before meeting with Hina, I saw…something.”

I recounted the event and my stalker’s description, the goth-ish woman who was apparently not Yuuka. Amane’s eyes widened, and she rubbed her robotic arm again—but shook her head with disappointment when she couldn’t provide an ID. Her green eyes flicked up to mine, then she leaned back and looked away from me, considering this. Ebi didn’t show any outward response until she translated for Amane once more.

“It’s not Hikanome, as far as the rally is concerned. It could be the Sugawara loyalists, the other Hikanome, but that’s not how they do things. The physical description doesn’t resemble any of the other flamebearers in Japan.” Ebi’s voice changed to give her own take. “And I’m running a general sweep of all flamebearers and not coming up with much that would click with that description. You said she sounded Japanese?”

“Or Korean, or Chinese,” I admitted. “Sorry, not very good with Asian, uh, phenotype—accents, faces—not a racism thing, I swear, just—”

“You’re good, man.” Ebi shrugged. “Not a Hikanome flamebearer, and I have no idea why one of Korea or China’s ops would be plainclothes and cloaked if they were scouting you. Well, cloaked or projected or whatever. Amane—” she conferred with the girl sitting between us, then looked up at me. “Obviously, we gotta figure out who this is. But it’s almost certainly not Hikanome, and it sounds recreational.”

“Recreational?”

“Well, like it wasn’t somebody out to find you, and it was dumb chance. Or they were investigating ‘Todai’s new flamebearer’ but didn’t know that would be you specifically. My point is that this doesn’t sound like a narrowly averted abduction attempt or anything.”

“Meaning…it won’t be a problem if I go to the rally.”

“Yeah.”

Ebi’s voice switched back to faux-Amane as the Radiance kept talking.

“We’d be able to confirm for sure if you went. If they are somehow affiliated with Hikanome, they’ll likely either show up there—and we’ll deal with it then—or it’ll be unrelated and you have nothing to fear. Hina’s nose didn’t give you any other clues?”

I was grateful to get back into the grit of the magic.

“She identified the vague ripple, red-white, and—well, remember yesterday’s thing? With the gun?” I needed a moment to calm myself with a sip of juice and a pistachio, annoyed at the way my heart rate jumped even thinking about it. Amane nodded, clearly following along as I explained. “The remote projection lattice we used is close to whatever the stalker was using, according to Hina.” Was “stalker” even the right term anymore? “Without actual scanning hardware, it’s hard to do ripple tracking or anything. Hina said Yuuka could do that too, so I tried to talk to her about it earlier, which…”

We all sighed. Yuuka’s dislike of me was tangling this. Amane thought on it for a few moments.

“We’ll work on Yuuka; she’d probably be willing to help if somebody other than you or Hina explained it. So, is that it? Any other things you want us to address about the rally? I know it’s a lot to ask, and if there’s anything we can do to make it feel less overwhelming…”

I resisted the urge to bring up how I didn’t trust cults. From how the Radiances had spoken about Hikanome, that seemed likely to turn into an argument with Amane especially. I’d ask Hina about it later, maybe. So other than that…

“Uh…” It was embarrassing to admit the emotional subtleties. “Yesterday, I discovered that crowds stress me out, apparently. But I’m not sure how much that’s my anxiety about the stalker specifically versus just general…inexperience? Being outside?” I winced. “But I know that’s not really enough reason not to go, and I don’t want to be even more of a burden when this is such a critical thing for the—” I cut off my own rambling. “It’s not important. I’ll go.”

Amane shook her head.

“Don’t be hasty. Let’s talk it through, this is why I brought it up. You mean you feel unsafe, even aside from the ‘stalker’?”

“…I guess so, yeah.”

She nodded knowingly.

“I get it. I never turn human when I’m outdoors.”

“What?” Her phrasing on that was weird. “Like, you stay mantled?”

“Feel exposed without it. I mean, I have all sorts of wards in this,” she brandished her arm, “but it still makes me nervous. We can get you some wards of your own, for sure. I’ll help you with it tomorrow, probably, if the weather holds.”

Somehow, despite the violent nature of the events that had brought me to Todai, I hadn’t even considered passive means of magical defense. In retrospect, it immediately felt irresponsible of Alice and Hina to have taken me out without even mentioning it. The two must have been sure of their abilities to defend me from abduction, but if somebody had actually wanted me dead and deployed quick-kill magic to make it happen?

The people I’d murdered were a perfect example of how utterly vulnerable a standard human was to magic. The human body is a terribly squishy, frail thing—and being a flamebearer didn’t inherently make me any better protected, just a juicier target. Hina and her ilk, if they existed, were the probable exception, but even she wouldn’t survive even something far lower-caliber than what we had used yesterday.

My spear—already demoted back to toy status, little better than a safety blanket—fell further in my estimation of its ability to seriously defend me. I wasn’t Heung, whose onyx blade could sever ripple to cut spells from the air and who could walk astride the lightning. I needed wards, passive defenses that would at least buy me enough time to snapweave or activate more serious countermeasures. I was almost certainly fine within Lighthouse Tower, but outside? Amane had pinpointed my anxiety exactly.

“I—yes, please, that’d be great. Um, do the others have their own projectors, or…?”

“It depends. Alice has a…” Amane conferred with Ebi for a moment. The teal robot shrugged. “She has a pretty standard personal ward kit. Sticks to the inside of whatever she’s wearing, on her back.”

All first-order, then, for a flat, ergonomic, two-dimensional form factor. Not as powerful as it could be with other choices of glyphs, but that was the sort of tradeoff you had to make. I ventured to guess at the others.

“Hina doesn’t strike me as the type to bother with those at all?”

Amane mustered an impressive scowl.

“Nope. She’ll smell or hear it coming, or however that works, and then not dodge completely, just let it graze her, because it’s fun.” I winced. She mastered her expression and continued. “And Yuuka has what Alice does, but if she’s ever in a position to get hit, shit’s gone sideways, so it’s a formality.” She stopped and glared at Ebi for that vulgar translation, and got a shit-eating digital grin in reply. The robot turned to me of her own accord to finish the set. “And Ai has her tattoo binding. Which—wait, we haven’t told you about that yet.”

“Her what?”

My phone buzzed; Ebi had sent me another zip file.

“Take a look at this once you’ve got your gamer cave all nice and set up.” She looked down at Amane questioningly, who nodded. “We’ll stop interrogating you until that’s done, I think. Ready to get back to it?”

—

Even with the PC itself ostensibly up and running, it still took another half hour to get the various peripherals and furniture set up. I was supplied with a worryingly expensive mechanical keyboard, paired with an ergonomic mouse; secondary and tertiary monitors, joining the primary one for a trio of swing-arm displays I could orient however I pleased; zip ties galore to contain the growing mess of cables. Ebi got under the desk to install those instead of making us frail, disabled humans do it. The warzone of spent packaging materials was tamed into neat piles organized by type, and what began to emerge in its place was an eye-wateringly expensive PC setup whose specs would probably give some of my friends a stroke.

We chatted through the process; for instance, Amane filled me in on some of the specifics of Yuuka’s cursed eye. Ebi had helped put her hair up in a ponytail as she had for Ai the other day. Amane’s hair was comparatively longer and straighter, well-cared-for and jet-black.

“So it’s more like one of Hina’s mutations?”

“More willingly chosen than that. It was a blood magic deal.”

“Was it…worth it?”

“She thinks so,” Ebi put in for herself.

I swallowed.

“Um—the fact that she doesn’t like me, could that be…not so baseless? Like, could I do something nasty in the future that she’s responding to now, and doesn’t care for the difference?”

Ebi shrugged, and Amane shook her head.

“It’s not that precise. Her clarity is proportional with the ripple generated by an event, so it’s minimal for mundane stuff and only really big for significant magical events. But yes, you’ve read her character right, that kind of lack of distinction between present and future does sound like her.”

“And,” I was still trying to wrap my head around this part while I fiddled with the swing arms of the monitors, “how does this not violate free will, exactly? If the silver ripple must always eventually be reflected in forward-facing standard-spectrum? Don’t those become fixed points in time? Otherwise you’re not accounting for time symmetry.”

“The fourth dimension doesn’t make sense either,” Amane pointed out. I grimaced; magic had indeed poked a variety of holes in our understanding of physics, and the addition—or discovery—of a fourth spatial dimension was probably the biggest of those. “I think they’re connected.”

“My will feels free enough,” Ebi countered. “And if I’m fine, so are you guys, probably. Not that anybody knows for sure.”

“Other than the Vaetna,” I replied on reflex. Amane tossed a spent piece of bubble wrap onto the plastic pile. The Radiance was favoring her prostheses, unsurprisingly.

“Says who?” Ebi waggled her eyebrows. “They don’t know everything, Ez.”

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” I needled.

“Oh, don’t be a dick.”

Amane giggled at that, picking up on the joking tone even without translation.

“Thanks for not pressing my beliefs about that,” I conceded, wary that this was a complicated subject, the sort of thing that routinely turned into huge arguments on the forums. “I, um, tend to default to the Spire for this stuff. I’m sort of…everything I’ve seen from you in the past few days, I’m just automatically referencing it against the Vaetna. No offense.”

“Completely understandable,” Amane replied through Ebi. I was surprised at how easily I’d acclimated to the strange interpretation setup, where both people’s voices were coming from the same mouth. Speaker, really, but whatever. “It’s pretty inevitable to compare. There’s a lot we have in common. Power. Ability to make a difference.” Amane said something else in Japanese, which Ebi crossed her arms and apparently refused to translate. They bickered for a moment, and then my phone buzzed.

ebi-furai: amethyst is making an effort to be nice right now, but she’s a bit touchy about the spire

ebi-furai: they didn’t rescue her, ya know?

That hadn’t occurred to me, but I really didn’t want to get into it and potentially ruin what had overall been an extremely pleasant evening with the worst possible intersection of our conflicting personal traumas and more broad-scale politics. I tried to change the topic.

“Um. I’m trying to change the topic.”

“Smooth.”

I shouldered past Ebi’s needling and circled back to a bit of magic-related curiosity, an inquisitive itch that needed scratching.

“Uh. So, mantles.”

“Go on.”

“Don’t make fun of me,” I muttered. “Right, yeah. And—well, I haven’t really taken the deep dive into your mantles’ diagrams yet, so I’m spitballing here—the ward bindings from earlier. The mantles themselves have those too, I assume? On top of being physically tough?”

“Yeah.” Ebi left the rest to Amane.

“Yes. Our transformations might be dermis-derived,” she said, catching on to my implicit comparison to the Vaetna, “but that doesn’t mean they’re invincible. It’s configurable, like everything else. So we can modulate power draw for wards, weapons, mobility, and sensory input; turn them up or down as we need to. It really is like piloting a mecha.”

“Thus your choice of…shape?” I ventured.

“Yes.”

“So—I’m trying to get a picture of, uh, power levels. ‘Not invincible’ implies your transformations have taken real damage in combat before.” The same could not be said for the real thing, proper Vaetna dermis.

She shrugged, rising from where she’d been sitting on the floor to return to the edge of the bed. Ebi remained standing, but moved slightly to still hover just outside arm’s reach of her charge. Amane carefully, gently, undid her ponytail, letting loose a wave of glossy black hair that cascaded down her shoulders.

“If we get hit hard enough, the mantle shuts down so the blue channels don’t overload and set the whole thing ablaze. So, no, the dermis itself has never broken, but there are effective upper limits. And bad weather can disrupt the LM, too, like the other night. That’s mostly just a problem for me, since I’m more sensitive to red, but in theory, it can happen to any of us. That’s why Yuuka is so valuable; she lets us know if we’re taking a bad fight.”

“Ah.” I mirrored Amane’s shift in posture, at last sitting in the office chair I’d been focused on setting up for the last ten minutes; I finally registered the soreness that had been building undetected in my lower back. Thankfully, the chair’s plushness was such that I could sink my hips into it for relief. I appreciated that it wasn’t one of those racing chairs; I wasn’t really in that gamer demographic. “So if I’m understanding right: your mantles can just…fail, if the ripple conditions are bad enough? That seems like a liability.”

“Bad and specific. Your average inferno won’t do it. And your average flamebearer wouldn’t be able to put together exactly the right frequencies to make it work.”

“Could…the Hikanome ones?” That was my anxiety talking, more than anything, but there was also an academic hunger for knowledge.

“Hikanome? None of them are as good at the technical side as you or me. Well, the two auxiliaries are, but they’re not fighters, it’s all distributed. The whole appeal of the cult is that you get a greater and greater sliver of Flame as you rise in the ranks. But they’re not dangerous anymore.”

“So this combat experience of yours is from…”

Amane waved her mechanical hand in an “I give up” motion.

“You want me to say ‘from fighting the PCTF’, which is somewhat true, but not as much as you’d think. We didn’t really start working on the mantles until after I came back and we got the flame donation. So a lot of that combat data is from the Blue Spark Incident, which was the first test run of the mantles, and then from some classified counterespionage stuff. Like I said, that’s the kind of thing you don’t have to touch, you don’t have any duty there.”

I digested that for a minute.

“Wait, so, if I have the timeline right: from the start, through the firestorms and the first few years, up through their, uh—rescue of you?” I side-eyed Ebi, wondering if that was an acceptable term. Her digital face momentarily flickered into a thumbs-up emoji. “All of that, you weren’t using mantles?”

“I’m not the right person to ask about that,” Amane pointed out. “I wasn’t there. But yes, in short. They used wards and other techniques.”

“Oh. Yeah, that makes sense. You wouldn’t have been involved on account of the, uh…” I took a gamble on a joke. “Kidnapping.”

God, I was terrible at levity. I cringed. Amane didn’t seem to mind, thankfully—though Ebi spiced her interpretation with a deadpan look.

“Mhm.” Amane nodded. “Ask Ai. She’s the clever one, and she still uses the old methods.”

“Why’s that?”

Amane said something in Japanese which Ebi didn’t translate. The cyborg poked the android in annoyance, who returned the poke and released a distinctly digital imitation of a sigh, clearly more fabricated than her usually flawless imitation of human voices. Her own voice, not Amane’s, and especially autotuned, signaling…annoyance? Discomfort?

“Mantling really pushes Ai to her limits, magically speaking. The weave is sparser, because a lot of her Flame is tied up in…me. So if her mantle were to overload in the wrong way, and the lattice got shredded, it’d snap back across her whole Flame, and it’d be lights out for me.”

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Holy shit.” I hadn’t thought that through until now, but it made sense. “So your life is—contingent on hers? And…oh, Christ, there’s probably a range limit too, isn’t there?”

Ebi nodded slowly and seriously—then clapped her hands as if to banish the unsettling line of thought. She crossed all her fingers but the index ones and pointed at me in dual, spliced-together finger guns.

“So—you going on Saturday?”

I gave her a flat look, but the topic change was warranted.

“What happened to not being hasty?”

“Eh, Amethyst’s itching to talk you around, I can see it.”

Amane reached out and flicked Ebi’s waist plates with a tink, more reminiscent of ceramic than carbon fiber, and added a light verbal admonishment to go with it. Ebi raised her hands innocently.

“Hey, alright, yeesh. I’m just a bit antsy for what might happen if we have to fight the Peacies over you without Hikanome’s cover. Ai risks my life too when she goes out there.”

“That’s—a good point. Fuck.” Another reason I should just go and stop waffling.

Amane waved for interpretation, and Ebi’s vocal timbre shifted.

“I wanted you to know that part as well, from Ebi herself. The others sometimes—well, they don’t forget she’s there, but she and I don’t have as much…agency.”

Ebi switched to her own voice and continued. “So, that’s the cards on the table on my end. I—we know it’s a lot to lay on you, but that’s the reality.”

“So I should go.” I rubbed my hand contemplatively, not quite resigned, weighing my options. There was an obvious alternative. “Or—I get out of your hair entirely, go to the Gate, right? Then I’m safe from the PCTF, no fight to put you all at risk, they wouldn’t dare bring it to the Spire. Hell, I could even come back here in the future, or collaborate on those projects remotely, just—sit out the storm in the safest place, yeah? Until things move on and the Peacies get occupied with other stuff.”

It was the most elegant option, free of political bullshit, safest for all.

“Not to undercut Ebi’s concerns, but I think the danger isn’t as great as you think,” Amane countered. “Not yet.”

For reply, I sat up in my chair and squinted in confusion at her prostheses—almost certainly impolite, but at that moment, I was genuinely baffled.

“The PCTF are…plenty dangerous. They kidnapped both of us. They…” I gestured vaguely at her prostheses, then mine.

“They did,” Amane acknowledged. “But one thing at a time. The PCTF knows you’re valuable,” Amane practically spat the word; Ebi imitated the tone of disgust. “They’ll apply a lot of diplomatic pressure and that could escalate. But they move slowly for things outside their territory, and Japan qualifies as such. They know better than to rush into fucking with us. They’re not a problem yet.”

“What does ‘yet’ have to do with it? It’ll still be a problem eventually; I could still head it off entirely by going to the Spire.”

“Hear me out, please. By contrast, Hikanome are the ones pressuring us now, and I want to show you that they are not a threat in the same way, not any more. They can be opposed to us, but if you go on Saturday, you will not be in danger.”

“She’s saying that because all the dangerous parts are six feet under or comatose,” Ebi added cheerfully. Amane glared at her, but she didn’t shrink, returning the gaze insolently.

“Okay,” I began, trying to sort it out. “So—yes, alright, that does make me feel better, but if Hikanome don’t have teeth, why is Alice pushing so hard for me to make goodwill between you and them?”

“Not being dangerous isn’t the same as not being influential. The average Hikanome member likes Todai too much for the church itself to ever be real political enemies, but we won’t get their backing—and by extension stronger support from the government—when the PCTF do show up, unless we take steps to appease them right now. And you’re critical to that, unfortunately.”

“What’s your point? Still not really seeing why I should stay here instead of solving the whole issue by leaving.”

“I stayed.” She said that in English, in her own voice, before motioning for Ebi to continue interpreting. “And I’m glad I did. I could have gone to the Spire, run away, and I didn’t. I was afraid! But I stayed, and fought, and won. We took apart Hikanome, we forced the PCTF back, and we founded Todai as it is now.”

“So you want me to fight, after all?”

Amane rubbed her face with her organic hand.

“No. I want to show you that you can be less afraid. Don’t you want that? To feel safe when you go outside, instead of having to cower in the Spire for, what, the rest of your life? You’ve just gained the power to make a difference, out here, the kind of power people dream about. That shouldn’t be a reason to run and hide. That’s the evil of the PCTF.”

I couldn’t deny that she was winning me over. I’d wanted this power so desperately, and so far my main response to receiving it had been to run away, because it felt like that was all I could do—and I was planning to continue to do so. Was that what I had dreamed of? She went on.

“And if it really doesn’t work out, you can leave. At any time; the Gate will still always be there. And if you’re still here when the PCTF arrives—that won’t be your fight. It’s ours, and we’ll win. Is that enough safety nets for you?”

With her plea complete, she at last allowed herself to double over and lean onto her side, wincing and suffocating a groan—but didn’t break eye contact with me. She let Ebi help her sit back up and waited for my reply. I had an obvious objection.

“Going to the Spire is my dream. It’s not cowering.”

“Nah, it is.” Ebi replied while she shifted her hand to some device in a blur and interfaced with a slot in Amane’s mechanical arm. “I know that’s, like, your thing, being a Vaetnaboo. But if you go to the Spire, you don’t become a Vaetna. They’re around, sure, but you’d stay in their shadow for the rest of your life. The Spire doesn’t give a fuck about you, sorry.”

Ow. “Hey, the fuc—”

“But the girls? They care, man. They give several fucks, if you haven’t noticed. Trust me, they don’t want you around because you’re politically convenient. And I’m pretty sure you don’t just want to ditch them either. Do you want to be friends with them or not?”

That was so direct that I had to abandon my objection to her attack on my beliefs.

“What’s it to you, Ebi? You’re okay with the idea of me staying here, with what you said could happen to you if Ai has to fight? That feels contradictory, and you haven’t exactly been nice.” I immediately walked that back a little, muttering. “…although the standard of care has been respectable, and I’m very grateful.”

The robot shrugged carefully, arm still attached to Amane’s, and nodded to the cyborg girl.

“I trust her judgment. And you’re alright.”

That was definitely an understatement of Ebi’s feelings. Amane agreed.

“Tsundere,” she rasped, earning what was definitely a “stay still” from Ebi, clear and familiar even though I couldn’t understand the language.

“Um—fuck. This is a lot.” How had her asking about the Hikanome rally turned into a debate about the Spire? Ultimately, they were connected; it was now clear to me that my choices were either to stay and attend or just leave for the Gate now. And of those two…

“It’s the same things I had to think about, and yes, it’s a lot.” Ebi-Amane sighed, free of the pain in the woman’s real voice. “And I do want to make sure you have the time to decide, like you wanted. But it was important to me that you made an informed decision. I’m sorry if I upset you. And I’m sorry if Ebi upset you.”

Ebi switched to her own voice. “I’m not.”

“No—it’s fine. I think…you’re right. I should go on Saturday. It’s…being afraid sucks, you’re right. I do want to go outside. I’m in fuckin’ Tokyo, for fuck’s sake, might as well make something of it, even if it’s just for Star. The Gate will always be an option, right?”

“It will. If things get too hot, we’d still completely understand if you want out.”

“But you wouldn’t come with, would you? Even if this escalates to…all-out war with the PCTF. Which is sounding distressingly plausible.”

“No. We have unfinished business.”

Her tone was chilling.

“Alright, fuck. You’ve won me over,” I admitted. “We’ll…give it a shot on Saturday. I’ll go to the thing.”

It felt good to reach a resolution, even if I hadn’t taken anywhere near as much time as I’d expected. Amane’s reasoning resonated with me, even if both she and Ebi had mildly upset me with arguments I’d need some time to process. And I couldn’t quite believe the latter was willing to risk her own life and limb for that, not to mention the overall, larger-scale ramifications of what would happen if Japan’s premier VNTs went to war with the West—one thing at a time, I decided. I had an out at the Gate if I changed my mind.

—

Amane had to adjourn to her room soon after, as the energy expenditure of the evening’s labors and her final plea caught up to her. She left in good spirits, Ebi closely in tow.

I was left alone once more, but for the first time since coming here, I had a big swivel chair to sink into and a PC to hop on, a far more natural state of being for me than struggling in bed with my laptop’s too-small screen. We’d almost entirely completed the physical setup of my new workspace, but the digital side, my usual suite of programs and settings, would take hours more to entirely set up—or at least that’s what I had thought. In reality, the penthouse had lightning-fast internet; what I had expected to be at least two hours of downloads alone was done in hardly ten minutes, and I was neck-deep in installation wizards and config settings when my phone buzzed again with a text from Amane.

Amane: Thanks for spending time with me (and hearing me out)!

Amane: Dinner’s ready if you’re hungry (っ˘ڡ˘ς)

Amane: I won’t be there (stupid stomach) but neither will Yuuka, so it should be nice ദ്ദി ˉ͈̀꒳ˉ͈́ )✧

Amane: (written by ebi-TL)

I couldn’t help but smile at the little emoticons. Anxiety followed shortly after; what was the correct way to reply to a message like this? I gave it my best shot.

Ezzen: I had fun too. Are you feeling alright?

Amane: Good enough!

Ezzen: real

That got a dry chuckle out of me. It was almost inevitable that somebody in her position would develop a droll humor about it; there was just no other way to live. Even I, socially stunted as I was, was able to joke about my hand in the chatroom—and more recently, about my foot. The hours of work had left it aching a bit, and I knew that running it under some warm water would probably help…but this chair was so very comfortable.

My stomach broke the tie: out of the chair, Ez, there’s food. I pushed myself up, stiff and a little sore in my hips from all the leaning over, feeling rather like some kind of reptile leaving its den for a bit of sun and sustenance. Well, the sun was already down, but in this case it was more metaphorical, the wonderful and nerve-wracking warmth of social interaction—because Amane was right, I did like the Radiances.

To my surprise, dinner was not home-cooked. I’d sort of assumed that Hina would whip something up as we had done with lunch, but instead, I found Alice slumped over the low table next to a bag with familiar golden arches. Her face was buried in her crossed arms. Had she fallen asleep right there, still in her suit? I was already treading lightly to spare my foot, and she didn’t stir until I sat gingerly across from her and reached for the bag. She raised her head slowly, tousled hair falling messily over her face.

“Hi.”

“Hi.” I pointed at the bag questioningly.

“Yeah. There’s a plain one. Didn’t know what you liked.”

Her head flopped back down onto her arms.

There were things to discuss—but she clearly needed the rest. I helped myself to the bag, searching to find the hamburger and an associated baggie of fries. McDonald’s Japan was apparently indistinguishable from its English cousins. No drinks, so I got up and poured myself a glass of water and realized in the process that I had learned where they kept the cups: the cabinet directly opposite the dishwasher. A little more like home—a little bit harder to leave, if it eventually came to that.

As I sat back down and got to eating, I wondered where Hina was.

ezzen: Where’s Hina?

ebi-furai: need a blowjob already?

ezzen: wtf

ebi-furai: :3

ebi-furai: hunting your mysterious friend, maybe

ezzen: You don’t know?

ebi-furai: she likes to stay out at night, idfk what shes up to

ebi-furai: back before midnight probably

ezzen: Could you ask for me?

ebi-furai: you dont have your girlfriends number?

ezzen: No. And she’s not my girlfriend.

ebi-furai: im not engaging with this

ebi-furai: one sec

A few seconds later, my phone began to buzz. A jolt of surprise curdled into fear in my stomach—I hated phone calls. Fuck you, Ebi. The caller ID said it was unknown—but I knew what Ebi was playing at. Conscious of Alice apparently asleep across the table from me, I hesitantly stood and moved past her toward the rest of the sitting area, maybe twenty feet away, and cupped my mouth as I picked up.

“Hello—”

“Heyyy, cutie! Ebi gave me your number!”

There was a lot of background noise on her end. Driving, maybe?

“Um, hi, Hina,” I whispered. “Sorry, Alice is…asleep, I think? So I’m trying to stay quiet—”

“You busy?”

“Not really? I’m eating dinner, and then I was just gonna hang out and keep setting up my PC…”

“Cool, cool, uh—you wanna come out and spend some time together?”

“…No? Sorry,” I added hastily. “Just…not my comfort zone. Going out and partying.”

“Oh, no, that’s not what I meant.” I heard a fuzzy slap noise that might have been a facepalm. “I’m chasing a lead on your stalker!”

My heart rate spiked.

“Did you find something?”

“Well, I’m in Kyoto right now, dropping in on a contact who I figured might be able to identify them, and they’re sending me on a bit of a chase into the mountains.”

“Wait, hold on—Kyoto? You wanted me to come to another city? How was I supposed to get there?”

“Uhhhhhh…”

Now it was my turn to facepalm, but a grin was infecting my face. What an adorable oversight.

“Hina.”

“Cutie!”

“Stay safe, yeah?”

“I will! Love you too! Mmmm—not gonna get home until pretty late. Like, three AM late, so…no fun Valentine’s stuff tonight. Sorry.”

“No—problem?” I was wrong-footed by the casual use of the word “love.” “I’ve got my hands full with computer stuff tonight anyway, I think.”

“Okay! I’ll let you know if I find anything! Texting okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Kay! Byebye!”

“Bye—”

I was cut off by the beep of the line going dead. Alice spoke behind me.

“That Hina staying out late?”

“Yeah.” I turned to look at the dragon-girl, hoping she wouldn’t ask about what exactly Hina was up to; she was still in the dark about my stalker. Maybe I should just tell her? But I wanted to discuss that with Hina first—realized I’d missed my chance on the phone. “Sorry if I woke you.”

“No problem, I wasn’t really asleep anyway. Just dozing.” She rubbed her eyes with one hand while fishing in the takeout bag with the other. “Have a nice time with Amane?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” She extracted a wrapped burger with a wince, reaching back to rub where her lower back met the base of her tail. Her clothes were modified to make room. “Sore,” she explained.

I wondered if I ought to tell her that I knew about the situation with her dragon parts. Perhaps Amane should be present? I walked back over to the table to resume my own meal.

“Just from sitting down?”

“Yeah. It was meetings all day today, and after lunch, I didn’t get a chance to do my stretches.” She gestured at where she was sitting. “This didn’t help either, being folded over like this. If you catch me sleeping like that, poke me, please?”

“Um, sure.” Fuck it, easier one first. “Listen, uh—Amane told me what’s going on with you.” Alice went stiff, frozen mid-bite. A bad sign for sure, but I forged on, avoiding eye contact. Instead, I admired how the scales on her tail caught the light. “She—well, I get why you didn’t want to tell me, but I want…to help. If you’re open to it.”

“You want…to…help? How so?” Her voice was halting, uncomfortable. I felt bad for bringing up such a personal topic with so little overture, but I didn’t know how else to lead into it.

“Uh, well, I’m not really sure yet. It’s a pretty unique case, right?”

“Probably. There…could be more. I’d like to think there are.” She took a deep breath. “The only other cases I know used more mundane means.”

“Mundane? Like, surgery?”

“Yes?” She sounded confused, as though it were obvious.

“Then…well, okay, obviously we’re not going to hit on a solution right now, but the first place my mind goes is, I guess…have you tried just cutting it off?” I shuddered to think of how messy such an amputation would be as I eyed her tail. “The best biomancy is no biomancy, yeah?”

Alice unfroze, resuming her bite, and didn’t respond until she’d chewed, swallowed, and taken a drink. She twisted to look back at her tail as she thumped it and released a dry sigh, apparently warming up to the topic.

“Yes, when it was smaller. Damn thing grows back, gecko-style.”

“Really.” That was intriguing. “Over how long?”

“Maybe five months, and it’s all real flesh. If you think my appetite is bad now…argh, I’m grumbling. Sorry for not telling you about the dragon stuff.”

“It’s alright. Um—I’d like to know more, but it sounds like this…isn’t a great topic for dinner,” I conceded, eying the bite marks in my burger.

“It’s not,” she agreed, doing the same.

“Sorry for bringing it up.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

We fell into silence as we ate. Alice went through two chicken sandwiches, a bag of fries, a box of onion rings, and a milkshake in addition to her soft drink. It wasn’t the voracious rapidity with which I’d seen Hina eat yesterday, but she just didn’t stop. The laptop remained on the table, but it was pushed to the side, seeing as how both of her hands always had some kind of food or drink in them. After a few minutes, I was done with my own comparatively meager meal.

“Uh.”

Alice held up a finger to stop me, chewed, swallowed, and took a sip of her drink before replying.

“What’s up?”

“So I talked to Amane.”

“Yeah?”

“She…convinced me? I don’t know if that’s the right word, but—I want to go to the thing on Saturday.”

“Oh!” Alice perked up. “That was faster turnaround than you said.”

“Yes, well, uh…”

“No, that’s great, really! Can I RSVP now? You, Amane, Yuuka—ah, do you not want Yuuka there? I still need to talk to her, but even once I do, your comfort is paramount, and she’s, er, not great at that. So…”

She had already produced her laptop from pocketspace, eager to get this over with.

“Uh. I don’t know. Amane…she definitely wants to go, but she’d need at least one other Radiance there, right?”

“Yeah. I appreciate you being considerate of her needs. Um—it’d probably be Ai, then. She’d have to reschedule, but it’s far enough out…”

“If Ai is alright with it.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Uh, Amane and Ebi…told me about her issue too. Power draw concerns, if my understanding is accurate.”

“Ah, yeah, that was going to have to come up eventually.” Her face fell slightly. “Sorry again for not telling you these things. I just didn’t want you to feel pressured or—”

“I mean, of course I felt pressured, but I wouldn’t say that’s your fault—”

“Your circumstances are really quite messed up, and properly acknowledging that—”

“I’m not going to run off to the Gate,” I interrupted, and she shut her mouth, looking sheepish.

“Oh. Really? I, er, didn’t want to bring it up, because I was worried you wouldn’t consider any other option, and…” she admitted, shamefaced.

“It’s complicated. And I still want the option. But Amane said some things that really, um, hit me where it hurt, so to speak. In a…good way?” I was still working through that part; I forged on. “So I want to…try being a flamebearer before I go hide in the Spire, I guess. Because it’d be good for me, or something. That’s how she framed it.”

A smile broke through Alice’s hasty remorse.

“Yeah. It’s been good for her.”

“Yeah.”

We sat there in silent…camaraderie? It was a little too awkward to be called that, but it was nice. Whatever it was, it felt like she and I understood the same things about Amane. She broke the moment by returning to her laptop.

“Alright, then…Ai can be the second, I think. I’d have to ask her for some of the scheduling, but about the Flame issue…I really can’t picture the situation turning dangerous, let alone enough that she’d be at risk of overextending. And she’ll definitely want to go if the idea is to chaperone you.”

“If you say so,” I conceded. “Um, Amane insisted really hard earlier that it was safe, but…they’re really alright? Not…dangerous, or even just generally sinister in that way cults tend to be?”

“They’re legit. They’re…eccentric in some of their practices, and you remember how Ai was talking about them this morning. Some of our beliefs don’t mesh. But that all pales compared to how they used to be. If you’re really worried about danger…let’s say the worst-case scenario happens, and it’s all a trap by Sugawara’s remaining goons, somehow conspiring with a PCTF grab team. Which, for the record, is not a scenario that could actually happen in reality, for a whole host of reasons.”

“Okay…” I nodded along.

“Then, in that impossible hypothetical, things could get explosive. Violent. But even then, Amane could clean them all up herself, and honestly, push comes to shove, so could Ai. She’s far from useless in a fight, believe me. Plus, I’m sure that once Hina hears about this, she’ll want to be around, even though neither she nor I want her to be officially present. So that’s three Radiances, in effect. Feel good about that?”

“Good enough,” I admitted, feeling reassured. It was nice to get some confirmation of Amane’s confidence—but my apprehension wasn’t completely gone, and ultimately Amane was right that it wouldn’t dissipate without some exposure therapy.

“Good.” Alice nodded, stretching, looking less tired, more energized. I was reminded of when I’d first met Ai, the way she’d lit up and revitalized when working on my spear binding. This was similar, but in a different specialization. “I’ll ask them to be considerate about limiting how much you have to appear in front of the crowds, all that. Leave that stuff to me. Where’s the email—ah, there.”

I’d communicated my big important decision, and the weight on my chest was replaced by a different sort of pressure, a nervousness of having a scheduled social ordeal, a feeling I mostly associated with doctor and bank visits, given how rarely I had really spoken to people prior to now. What awaited me on Saturday was far more consequential: I would walk into the jaws of one of Todai’s foundational opponents, as the star of the whole event, and that was nerve-wracking to even consider—but I’d be in the pleasant company of Amane and Ai, so it’d be alright, hopefully. Hopefully.

Also hopefully, I hoped we’d be able to confirm a negative on my stalker, conclusively prove it wasn’t a Hikanome flamebearer so I could rest easy on that side of things. Fingers crossed that that wouldn’t even be a problem by then; maybe Hina’s investigation in Kyoto would lead us right to who it was, and then at least we’d be planning around a known quantity.

Alice told me that preparations would begin tomorrow. She did her best to assuage my anxiety, assured me it’d be alright, nothing too difficult or unpleasant, echoing the same things Amane had said. There was a lot to do, but I’d come to my decision early enough in the week that it wouldn’t be overwhelming, supposedly.

But that was tomorrow. I had tonight to myself, since Hina wouldn’t be around, and I had unfinished business with my PC. After finishing dinner and wishing Alice a good night, I returned to my room. I spent hours into the night tinkering with GWalk, getting everything just how I liked it; signing into the chatroom to the celebration of my friends; redownloading my meager collection of games. And for the last few hours, as my digital environment became more and more familiar, I could almost forget that I was on the other side of the world. Eventually, at two in the morning, I went to bed, truly comfortable for perhaps the first time since arriving here.

And I dreamed once more.