Valentine’s Day. A day I’d basically never had any reason to care about, and especially not one I’d expected to become relevant in the strange circumstances in which I found myself. My relationship with Hina was far too fresh for the day to really feel significant. We’d just established we didn’t love each other—not yet, as she’d said, so this felt like jumping the gun a bit, yet here we were.
The puppy proffered the box excitedly at me. I gingerly, hesitantly drew the heart-shaped chocolate from its foam cozy.
“Am I supposed to eat it now?”
“Go for it!”
I bit off half. It tasted…like chocolate. I didn’t have much in the way of a frame of reference; my culinary palette was generally diverse, but this was an exception. When was the last time I’d even eaten chocolate? Before Dad had died? Bereft of comparisons, I did my best to evaluate it on its own terms: smooth and creamy, rich and sweet without overpowering the natural bitterness of the cacao—I startled myself when I crunched into something at the core. Hazelnut, maybe? It went down well with the last of my iced tea.
“Thanks.”
“Mhm! I get some for everybody every year. The girls, the Hikanome folks, Ogawa…every one of us in Japan!”
“Wait, what? As in, every flamebearer?”
“Yep!”
“Oh.” So it wasn’t a romantic thing; more obligatory? Or just an idiosyncrasy of hers. Nuance aside, the point was that I wasn’t special for receiving this. “Hold on, so this was Heliotrope’s, not mine? Does she…accept them, normally?”
“Nope.”
Figures. That sort of made me feel worse, knowing I was getting a gift that the original recipient wouldn’t have accepted anyway. She saw how my face fell.
“Is it bad?”
“What? No, it’s good.”
“You sure? Do you want more? I still have to give you yours, and I was gonna save that for tonight but if you don’t like the hazelnut then I can just give you yours instead now.”
“It’s—that’s not the problem.” I swallowed, feeling ungrateful. “Every flamebearer.”
“Oh.” Her face fell too. “Cutie, it’s not like that. It’s just something I do for fun, I didn’t think it’d make you feel bad—aha.” Her expression shifted, the hyena flickering across her features, fangs glinting behind her grin. She leaned closer to me, injecting a little purr into her voice. “Want me to yourself, hm? Need me to make you feel special?”
That pushed my buttons, hackles rising in fear, deviously taboo attraction like lightning in my stomach. I stammered.
“You’re not—there’s no obligation for you to—I don’t know if exclusivity is fair to request,” I eventually landed. “You’re…of course I want you, but I don’t deserve—”
She shut me up by grabbing the front of my shirt and tugging me close, staring me down with those all-too-blue eyes.
“You’re doing it again,” she growled, playful reprimand masking genuine challenge. “You can have me to yourself, if that’s what you want. But you’ll have to prove it. Tonight.”
While I was still paralyzed by the flutter in my belly, she plucked the remaining half of the chocolate from my fingers, popped it into her mouth, and vanished.
—
The unfortunate side effect of Hina’s theatrics was that I was left alone with the remains of lunch, so it fell to me to clean up. Maybe that was some strange, oblique lesson from her, but it was more likely that she’d just gotten too excited with the opportunity to push my buttons. Besides, she was indisputably busier than me, so it was with a lingering thrill rippling across my body and a flutter of nervous excitement for what tonight might entail that I set about washing the dishes.
It didn’t take long; Alice had cleaned up most of the detritus from the cooking by the time we’d sat down to eat, and neither of us had left any gnocchi survivors. Rinsing the dishes revealed yet more conveniences and amenities compared to my old apartment, like the much larger sink and the faucet head that could be drawn out to direct the stream of water. Opulent by my standards; they probably gave it no thought.
While wiping down the countertop, I realized—I was being uncharacteristically industrious. Back home, I’d sometimes let slightly-dirty-but-not-dirty-enough-to-be-gross dishes sit in the sink for a week or longer, but here I found it easy to power through doing all the dishes and was even going the extra mile to clean additional surfaces. How domestic; another thing I hadn’t expected to be part of my fantasized life as a flamebearer.
It was just because I felt guilty, I reasoned. I wanted to pull my weight, not feel like a burden, and it wasn’t like I had anything better to do with my spare time compared to the busyness of the others. It did occur to me that such a massive living space and access to funds might warrant specialized cleaning staff, but surely one of the Radiances would have mentioned that by now. Maybe it was biweekly or something, or maybe they just used magic. As I worked, I thought about ways to magically automate the cleaning I was doing, more as a mental exercise than any real plan I intended to implement. It was a fun little exercise, one I’d done before with chores at home, but now I had a whole new space to apply it to.
With the kitchen eventually reclaimed from our culinary adventures, I was once again left with a lot of time and little to do with it. I could finish exploring the penthouse, or I could be brave and face the tell-tale heart beating within my laptop, the lattice diagram of the weapon we’d made, but—I didn’t want to confront it, and I didn’t actually have to. Avoidance was a valid strategy. So I went back to my room, popped open my laptop, squeezed my eyes shut, and killed the horrid thing with Alt+F4, a fittingly ignoble murder. With the demon vanquished, I plugged in the USB stick that Ai had given me and resumed my study of the magical cores of Amethyst’s prosthetic limbs.
This time, I focused less on the lattices themselves. I still didn’t have enough confidence in the mechanical engineering aspect to make major changes to the structural glyphcraft without Ai’s supervision, so I took a look at the other documents on the thumb drive. What leapt out to me most among various reference standards and previous versions was a PDF file: the classified report precisely detailing the actual nature and extent of Amane’s injuries. It felt invasive to have that kind of thing available to read; I consulted our mutual medical staff.
[Direct Message] ezzen: Ai gave me Amethyst’s prosthetic files, including the physical assessment.
ezzen: Is it fair to assume that she consented to that? Anything else I should know?
The robot responded instantly, of course.
ebi-furai: yeah, we sat down and talked about it when you came in
ebi-furai: im the one who actually put that usb together, so everything on there is fair game
ezzen: k good, thanks
ebi-furai: as long as i have you: foot check
ezzen: Nothing to report.
ebi-furai: sick
Ironically, getting permission to look at the file somewhat killed my work ethic for doing more Amane stuff at the moment. There’d be more time later, and I kind of wanted to go through this stuff with Amane herself or Ai.
For now, I returned to the main chatroom, rapidly scrolling through the conversations that had happened while I was asleep, feeling a bit glum as I saw how much I was missing out on. There was a silver lining—a lot of the conversation was still about the Thunder Horse Inferno, and I was glad I didn’t have to deflect the conversation and play dumb about my own horrific role in those events. They didn’t have the full story, and I was growing more and more uncomfortable about the idea of keeping up the charade with these sorts of things.
The discomfort persisted as I continued my rounds, trawling the top posts on the forums and refreshing YouTube. There was the new Overload video, uploaded barely ten minutes ago, a 28-minute timeline of the events of the inferno, from that first flamefall detection on the Vaetna’s stream to the latest news an hour ago. I didn’t need to watch it; I already knew what had really happened. That drop in air temperature, the stumbling corpse.
As if summoned by cruel divinity, I received a DM just as I was about to keep scrolling.
[Direct Message] OverloadTSS: hi ez sorry about the delay
OverloadTSS: was finalizing the thunder horse video because holy shit
Play it cool, Ez.
ezzen: Just saw it go up!
ezzen: “Holy shit” is right
ezzen: surprised you were able to get it out on time. long by your standards
ezzen: Does that mean the Thursday video will be about me?
OverloadTSS: yeah probably
OverloadTSS: ill send over an actual questions list soon
OverloadTSS: figure thats better for you than an AMA like we did in 2020 or whenever it was
OverloadTSS: so dont feel obligated to answer anything, i wont include questions in the video that you dont answer
OverloadTSS: what happened to you was scary as shit plus i imagine youve got some kind of NDA going with lighthouse
Had an NDA been in the stack of paperwork I’d signed? I was already working under the assumption that much of what I’d learned about Todai in the past few days was classified—not least the monstrous act we’d committed yesterday—but I would need to ask Alice what exactly I was allowed to disclose about my research and general situation going forward. Which turned a friendly Q&A session—something I’d had fun with before—into work that required me to go ask somebody something before I could do it. For bonus stress, there were the potentially incredibly dire consequences of leaking the wrong information.
It all sucked, but I couldn’t risk talking about it.
ezzen: Thanks, OL.
ezzen: I’m doing okay, just a lot of paperwork and still healing ofc.
ezzen: I’ll figure out what I’m allowed to say once I’ve got those questions in front of me.
OverloadTSS: hell yeah
OverloadTSS: yeah you havent been on as much the last couple days obviously
OverloadTSS: so no rush, ill get those questions to you soon (tomorrow?) and you can answer them when youve got time
OverloadTSS: but for the short term, can you answer one question so i can do a three minute clickbait thing
ezzen: Sure!
Overload made his living on this kind of news, and I was usually happy to throw him a bone—but things were changing, and longer-reaching trepidation turned to faint but immediate panic as I read the question.
OverloadTSS: you’re on board with lighthouse? planning to stick around?
This may have made me begin to spiral a little bit.
I certainly wasn’t on board with the murder—their opportunistic, guerilla war with the PCTF—even if I agreed with their reasoning on paper. And what about Alice’s efforts to educate me in mahou shoujo, as though assuming I’d eventually become involved with the team as…a magical girl? To say nothing of Hina’s own promise, even kept at bay by our agreement as she currently was. I had yet to discover what exactly she meant that I wouldn’t be the first male Radiance.
So there was a lot I wasn’t on board with, yet they were the things I couldn’t actually share with my friends or the wider community of the forums. Even with the best of intentions, like keeping Amane’s history private, I’d already had to lie to them more than I ever had before. So far, it had mostly been omission—but if I stuck around, how much further would that go?
Which raised another question, one which kept being subsumed by more immediate worries: did I even have to stick around? Fleeing for the Gate still looked like a decent idea, especially with the additional mess Yuuka seemed intent on causing as long as I stuck around here. It was only a kilometer away, and the Spire was famously no-questions-asked…and it would reduce pressure on Todai by no longer having the PCTF set on coming for me. That was a terrifying prospect; for now, only in a surreal, dream-like way, but I was starting to wonder—how long did I have until that looming threat became tangible? Alice had said they’d do something in the next couple days—would that be a diplomatic overture or another entire abduction attempt? The rumors of what happened to noncompliant flamebearers in PCTF custody were horrifyingly true—the last few days had proven that beyond doubt—and I really didn’t want to find out how far either party was willing to escalate, if plausibly deniable artillery strikes from the other side of the planet were Todai’s baseline. I felt sick.
But Overload’s question needed some kind of answer.
ezzen: There’s a lot of research opportunities, for sure. I’m actually already collaborating with Emerald, and of course there’s still the matter of my foot.
ezzen: The chains that drive their mantles are fascinating, and while I’m fairly sure I can’t reveal any of the technical details, that alone is a strong incentive for me to work with them further.
OverloadTSS: cool cool
OverloadTSS: ok thanks
OverloadTSS: will draft up those questions, get back to me whenever
Having acquired his nugget of information, he bid me farewell. I was rattled and went to the one person I knew who bridged the high-stakes world of flamebearers and the familiar box on my computer full of my friends. He might not be awake, but—
[Direct Message] ezzen: Sky, how the fuck do I not feel like I’m lying constantly to you all? Todai was more involved in the inferno than anybody publicly knows and I’m literally sick to my fucking stomach at trying to maintain the charade and play dumb given what we did. I’m going out on a limb here and assuming that you either already know or can guess what I’m talking about. Overload’s next video is going to be about my situation but there’s so much I can’t say. How do I handle this?
—
Sky didn’t reply. Maybe asleep, maybe not, but either way, I was left to stew in those thoughts all afternoon, trying to distract myself with banter and less upsetting videos as the winter sun fell below the skyscrapers and cast its last few fingers of orange light through their gaps. In the middle of my descent down a YouTube rabbit hole about aerospace alloy manufacturing, Ebi notified me that my PC parts had arrived.
The receipt process was handled by others; I just watched it happen from the doorway to my room. A pair of Todai employees brought the various heavy boxes out of the 20th floor elevator, and Amane, in human form, intercepted them and signed for the delivery, sounding surprisingly bubbly as she chatted with the two. The moment they were gone, she mantled up with a snap, gathered up all the boxes into one giant pile in her massive arms, and carried them across the common space to me with no apparent effort. She set down the pile, pushed it through the doorway, dropped mantle with a warbling hiss so she herself could fit, then looked at me.
“May I come in?” She asked in slow, halting English. Ebi was there, but conspicuously remained off to the side.
“Um, yes.” I was grateful she’d asked. Hina never did, and Alice had something of a bad track record even if she obviously cared more, which had led to my room not feeling particularly private. I also wanted to thank her for handling the pick-up, but I wasn’t sure how much of that she’d get.
Amethyst nodded, re-mantled, and I got out of the way so she could haphazardly push the various boxes fully into my bedroom. Her mantle’s brute strength was a boon. I glanced at Ebi, who had stayed out in the common room.
“Um. Are you not coming in?”
“Nope. She wants this one-on-one. I’ll be out here if something happens.”
My anxiety spiked a little at that. I’d kind of assumed that Ebi would be providing interpretation, but without her—I imagined hours of sitting together awkwardly, unable to bring up any kind of idle conversation topic, let alone articulate the more specific questions I had about Yuuka.
For the moment, at least, we busied ourselves with the task of unboxing. Amethyst provided the various tools for the task, plucked from her pocketspace and proffered to me without a word: box cutter, screwdrivers, anti-static bracelets, and so on. She herself didn’t need any sort of blade to slice through tape and cardboard, though; a finger flowed into a razor blade and made short work of any packaging that wound up before it. Our cooperation was wordless and intuitive, breaking down boxes, piling up styrofoam, collecting disinterred computer components in front of the desk. I jumped as she pressed a sheet of bubble wrap between her gemstone hands, making the plastic cry out in a hail of pops. She giggled, and I mustered an awkward chuckle to go with it.
My awkwardness got worse as we cleared away the detritus and were left with just the parts. This was my first chance to actually take stock of what Ebi had purchased for me, and what I could see was almost embarrassingly high-end; no actual magitech, but the enormously beefy GPU next to what were definitely water cooling tubes had me on edge. I’d never built a liquid-cooled computer before, and my first time would be with such expensive components—a leak would be catastrophic! I had hoped that building my new PC would be a familiar activity that brought some stability back into my life, but now I was horribly stressed.
And I couldn’t communicate any of that to Amethyst. I drew my phone in what I hoped was a surreptitious way.
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[Direct Message] ezzen: Please help me talk to her.
ebi-furai: just talk to her, dude
ezzen: HOW?
ebi-furai: her en comprehension is pretty good
ebi-furai: or just like use some translation apps, there are lots
Oh. I’d been hung up on the idea that we needed to have an out-loud, verbal conversation—but I was always more comfortable in text anyway, wasn’t I? I navigated to Google Translate, typed something in, and showed the mech-girl my phone, hoping the app hadn’t mangled it too much.
Ezzen: Could we talk like this?
The spike-faced girl didn’t lean in to look at the comparatively tiny phone screen. I was in the chair at the desk, and she was on the floor, but she was so tall that her head was still at the height of my shoulders, a decent height for me to show her the screen. She summoned her own phone, ensconced in its sticker-bombed case, and carefully but skillfully typed a response with her long, knife-like fingers. It was too small for her massive hands, but she evidently had practice. When she held it up to show me what she’d written, it was in an app I didn’t recognize.
Amane: Use DeepL instead. The translation quality is a bit better.
Amane: You can say it out loud, though. I live with four English speakers.
“Do they speak English even when I’m not around?”
I hesitantly used my voice as she asked, going slow and doing my best to enunciate.
Amane: Hina and Alice.
Doing it this way was actually slower than just typing it in, so I went back to my phone.
Ezzen: It’s more comfortable for me this way, if that’s okay with you?
“Okay!”
I jumped, not expecting the verbal response in her chiming, sing-song tones.
Ezzen: Have you built a PC before?
Amane: I’m a gamer `⎚⩊⎚´ -✧
She looked at me expectantly, as though that were all the explanation that was necessary.
Ezzen: Cool!
I immediately kicked myself for the meaninglessness of the response, and the fact that the exclamation point wasn’t reflected in my actual facial expression. She didn’t seem to mind.
Amane: It looks like you’re also a gamer, judging by what the shrimp got for you.
Amane: shrimp = Ebi chan
Adorable.
Ezzen: Actually, not very much. My hand makes it hard to use a mouse quickly.
Ezzen: I spend most of my time on GWalk and YouTube.
Well, spent, since things had changed. But once this computer was put together, maybe there wouldn’t be much difference from how things used to be. That thought was comforting amid the tumult of the last few days, so I set the phone down and moved to get better access to the open case, then realized that it probably made more sense to start with the motherboard and hunted around for that. Amane seemed to read my thoughts and handed it to me. She was wearing a static bracelet on her crystalline wrist—I eyed it, and she made a twinkling noise, a chuckle, and typed into her phone.
Amane: The bracelet doesn’t do anything.
I appreciated the thought, at least. I located the RAM sticks—a full set of four, each as powerful as the entire memory of my old PC at 16GB apiece—and carefully clicked them into their slots on the motherboard. Then it was onto the CPU, which I carefully removed from the remainder of its protective packaging while trying not to gag at the price tag, then placed gently into its grid of receiving holes and locked it down with the little lever. Those were the easy parts.
Things got harder from here as we encountered one of my old enemies: little, tiny screws. Beyond the exceptionally poor luck of being one of the first people to ever lose a loved one to the Flame, I’d also gotten the twisted bonus that the mobility in my right hand—that is to say, my dominant hand—had never fully recovered. So I used screwdrivers and other such implements with my left hand, and it was slow going. The PC’s external case screws were easy enough, but one look at the little screws for mounting the motherboard inside, nestled deep into crevasses between protruding heat sinks and I/O pin grids, had me dreading the whole procedure. The last time I had done this had been a slow, frustrating process where I’d repeatedly lost the little things inside the hollow spaces of the PC case.
On the bright side, the screwdriver Amane provided me had a magnetized tip. Was that a problem for computer parts? Probably not; she wouldn’t have given it to me otherwise, right? Also, what about the water cooling unit for the CPU? Did that go on now? It’d create more obstacles to getting those tiny screws in place—
I felt myself getting a little overwhelmed and glanced nervously at the Amethyst Radiance—she was pointing her phone at me.
Amane: If you have problems with your hands, try to use glyphs.
I hadn’t even thought of that as an option.
“But…isn’t high ripple bad for you?”
Amane: There’s no problem in small amounts, not while it’s transformed.
“It?”
She made a crackling noise of annoyance as she shook her massive, spike-snouted head and typed something else into her undersized phone.
Amane: While I am in my transformation form.
“Ah.”
I stood, weaving my way around piles of discarded packaging to reach the bookcase, and grabbed a notebook that I knew had spare pages. One somewhat-undignified shimmy across my bed later, I also had a pencil from my backpack. I flipped to a blank page and began to draw.
Two minutes later, I showed Amane the chain. It was elementary, first-order, dealing entirely in simple physical operations; trivial, in the technical sense of the word, as it didn’t even need to double back on itself anywhere. She nodded in approval and made no comment, so I called forth my Flame, holding my arm well away from anything that might ignite. I whispered an apology to it that I was aggravating it and wondered briefly about how I could feed it something other than pain—a conversation I wasn’t sure I could have with Amane, even with the artificial bridge we’d constructed across the language barrier. So for now, I just poked and twisted and formed it into my poor excuse for thread, and then fed the Flame along the lattice.
As weaving went, this was straightforward, no particular tricks necessary to ensure correct tension or manipulate the Flame at micro scales. When I was done, I was left with what was basically an invisible manipulator arm hooked up to a sensor, preprogrammed to apply a twisting motion to particular target areas. I placed the motherboard in its position inside the case, ensuring the screw holes lined up, and then dumped the little bag of appropriate screws onto the paper atop the {IDENTIFY}-{DIRECT} portion of the chain. The screws never hit the paper, instead stopping in the air, and I watched with excitement as they all aligned to face downward and floated over to the case, descending into their appropriate holes and turning themselves into place. So mundane, no flickers of light or confusing violations of one’s intuitions for space and motion, yet so magical all the same. I used my phone’s flashlight to confirm that the screws had properly fastened themselves into place.
Amane tapped my knee to get my attention.
Amane: It never gets boring, does it?
“I hope it never does.”
—
Between YouTube tutorials on my laptop and our combined magical ingenuity, we made steady progress. A simple chain to thread the cables of the power supply to the other components; a video elucidating the difference between open- and closed-loop water cooling systems; zip ties to keep everything neat and tidy. And I slowly broke the ice, first by simply coordinating our procedure for the building process, then hesitantly drifting toward the larger-scale worries looming over me.
Ezzen: So you have time for this even though it’s a weekday? All the others seem to be busy.
Amane: The expectations are lower for me than for my teammates.
Stupid Ez. Of course that’d be something of a touchy subject for her. I fretted about how to salvage the conversation while I wrestled with the tiny pins and wires connecting the motherboard to the case’s external buttons. I still didn’t want to intrude on her medical privacy—maybe moot now that Ebi had sent me the definitive report, but I’d had my own share of being seen as a medical case first and a person second. I couldn’t imagine how much worse that was for her.
Ezzen: Is that because of your injuries themselves or the pain?
Amane: Depends on the weather.
Ezzen: “Weather” = local ripple?
She nodded and hummed, a digital-sounding, too-pure piezoelectric tone.
Amane: Good days and bad days. Does your hand or foot hurt more when there’s red?
Ezzen: I don’t know. Using my Flame does hurt. Do you use pain for your magic? Ai singled out Hina and Heliotrope as the ones who use pain for their Flames, so I assume you don’t?
Amane: I don’t use it. Because it’s not right.
More like Alice than Hina, then. I wondered why Heliotrope also used pain if she was generally pro-Amane and anti-Hina.
Ezzen: Not mahou shoujo?
Amane: That’s right. I understand why the others use it, because it’s important to be powerful, but I am not only my pain.
She rubbed her right arm with her left, a shockingly familiar motion. In her real body, that would be her prosthetic, as opposed to my burns, but the sentiment was the same—was “real body” an offensive way of putting it, given how she seemed to prioritize this form instead? I’d have to ask at some point.
Ezzen: Not made of glass, right.
Ezzen: I don’t like magic based on pain either.
Amane: But you had sex with Hina.
Oh no. Yesterday, she’d expressed some fairly harsh disapproval of Hina’s lighthearted approach to pain—like Yuuka, would she assume the worst of me by association? But she was shaking her head.
Amane: That was supposed to be a joke. Text is difficult.
I gave her a sympathetic nod. Tone over text was tricky enough without the strange filtering effects of a translation program. At least in this odd, hybrid form of communication, I had facial expressions to back me up—but she didn’t. What was with that spike-face?
Ezzen: (I just want to clarify that it wasn’t sex)
Amane: Understood!
Amane: I don’t want to judge, but Yuuka is troubled.
Ezzen: “Troubled” is understating it a bit, don’t you think?
I mustered an awkward smile to accompany that, hoping the light tone came through. She gave me a thumbs up with one of her massive, gemstone hands.
Ezzen: Ai told me to ask you what to do about it.
Amane: I’ll tell her to be nice. As nice as Yuuka can be.
Now that second part was definitely a joke, but one attached to genuine goodwill.
Amane: I’m not surprised she’s being a problem. It’s not your fault. We’ll make her tolerate you for now, but I hope you two can become friends.
Ezzen: Friends? She’s so mean.
With the ice breaking a bit, that felt safe to say.
Amane: She’s basically a good person. And so are you.
Was that true? What could one say to that?
“…Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
I blinked at the accented English.
Amane: Please give me the GPU and water cooler.
I obliged, now doubly off-kilter at the topic change. Then, to my shock and concern, she dropped out of her mantle, the towering mass of flowing purple gemstone squeezing itself before dissolving into the air in a fraction of a second, leaving just Amane’s real body. And her prosthetics, of course—the static bracelet dangled from her artificial wrist, now too large. She still had the eyepatch I’d seen when we’d first met, and like then, it took a few seconds to flicker to life and sync up with her true eye, mirroring the vivid green. Not supernaturally intense the way Hina’s eyes were, but pretty nonetheless. Her black hair fell in a straight, glossy curtain over her shoulders and down her back.
Amane: Your situation is bad.
Her mechanical hand worked swiftly and precisely to free the GPU’s pre-installed fans from its back plate as she cradled the device in her lap. She seemed to know exactly what she was doing, but I was still nervous; she was splitting her attention between the task and talking to me, and I felt that the thousand-dollar graphics card deserved a bit more reverence and care.
Her flesh hand had visible tremors as it continued typing on her phone, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the practiced ease and confidence in the motions. It helped that whatever keyboard she was using only seemed to have a few keys with Japanese characters, not a full QWERTY layout, so each key was bigger.
Ezzen: Yeah.
I was hesitant to add more of my own opinions until I knew where she was going with this. She stopped working the screwdriver for a moment and looked at me seriously as she presented the next message.
Amane: I think you shouldn’t have to fight the PCTF.
That didn’t mesh with her teammates’ vitriol.
Ezzen: I thought you hated them?
Amane: No. My teammates hate them for me. I think the PCTF are evil, and killing them is part of the duty of real magical girls. But it is not revenge, and we should not have made you help us. It’s not your duty because you’re not part of the team. I’m sorry.
Ezzen: Sorry it happened, or sorry that I’m not part of the team?
Amane: The first. I don’t understand why the others want you to join and help with our war.
Thank fuck. An incredible weight came off my chest—she didn’t want me to be an accomplice to further murder. And she didn’t want me to join up as a magical girl. Even aside from the others’ especially egregious expectations, it seemed like they all wanted things from me, be it my expertise or my Flame. Even Ai, for all her kindness, was very interested in what I could do for Amane—but Amane herself had no demands or quid pro quo for me at all, no interest in even subtle leverage; I was starting to see why she’d insisted that I be allowed to choose whether I was going to the Hikanome event, and I was grateful.
She did something strange with her prosthetic hand, a twist of her wrist and wiggle of her fingers that almost made the static bracelet fall off, and we both winced slightly as a pulse of pain blossomed in my foot. She laughed softly even though her voice was tight.
Amane: Bad weather, right?
She’d activated the {AFFIX} binding in her arm and locked the water cooler against the GPU’s back plate so she could keep them aligned as she put the screws in: one of the cutting-edge accessibility features of a LIPS-compliant prosthetic. I’d seen it in the lattice diagram, but it was quite another thing to witness in action. Magic was still magical. She continued typing with her other hand as she worked.
Amane: There are more reasons that the others want to have you here, and I’m annoyed that they’re not telling you. Alice especially.
“Alice? With what?”
Amane: Her tail. Her dragon transformation. Dragon化
“Dragon-ka,” she said out loud, answering my question before I had the chance to ask it. With the screws now in place, she set down the screwdriver and her phone to lean over the case and slot the modified GPU into place with a satisfying click. If her chronic pain was bothering her, she did a good job of hiding it. I waited until she was done to show her my phone.
Ezzen: Like, something to make her more comfortable? The tail does seem like it gets in the way.
Amane: Something to stop it.
Ezzen: It’s still going on?
Amane: Yes. It gets worse whenever she uses magic. Tail lengthens and eyes change. Maybe more if it continues.
Amane: She didn’t tell you because she pretends it isn’t happening, but it’s getting worse, and we don’t know how to stop it.
“Jesus.” That was dire enough—and interesting enough—that I immediately started speculating.
Ezzen: Any use of magic? How much ripple?
Amane: 20-silver-like or above. Yuuka knows when it will happen and stops her. But it’s only a delaying tactic.
We both grimaced—though that belied the full intensity of discomfort I was feeling from this revelation. Hadn’t Ai called Alice selfish? Was this why? I remembered what she’d said on the car ride to Tochou: I live with it. And I remembered the tightness in her voice. The familiar bottled-up frustration.
Amane: I don’t like that she’s keeping it a secret and pretending it’s not one of the reasons she’s trying to keep you here.
Ezzen: And she didn’t tell me because she’s worried about putting even more pressure on me?
Amane: Yes. It feels like putting even more pressure on you because your situation is so fucked up.
Ezzen: I’ll help. Thanks for telling me.
Amane: You don’t owe us.
Ezzen: I know! It’s not about debt, but a chance to do something good.
I understood Alice’s reasoning, because I was under a lot of pressure, but I agreed—I wished she’d opened with this when making her original pitch to me. At the time, she’d focused on the appeal of learning more about the Spire’s dermis via the Radiances’ mantles, and that had been enough to hook me, before I’d understood the nature of their war with the PCTF. Now I wasn’t so sure, since that same track of research would be open to me sans the looming conflict at the Spire—but this? I wanted to help her with this. It was exactly the sort of thing that called to me: directly improving somebody’s quality of life by solving unsolvable magical problems. Well, biomancy was famously difficult, as well as outside my typical wheelhouse, but that was now surmountable with actual Flame at my disposal.
Amane: Okay. Thank you.
I gave her a lame little thumbs-up.
Ezzen: I’m curious: what Japanese word translates to “fucked up?”
Amane: ヤバい I think. But I wrote it. Yuuka and Hina taught me lots of dirty words.
She grinned, a warm smile reminiscent of Ai’s, but with a little more impishness to it. It was broken by a wince, and she rubbed her arm again.
Amane: Rebound from red. I’m alright.
I thought that binding didn’t pass her threshold of ripple for pain; that was the impression I’d gotten from her file, at least. She shook it off quickly.
Ezzen: “Bad weather”?
“Yeah.” She checked the power supply’s cables, making sure all the components were hooked up, tracing across each thick bundle with a segmented finger. Her prosthetic arm was almost doll-like, with visible articulation at the joints and smooth paneling, a very different look from the flowing, glossy facets of her mantle, a seemingly intentional but distinct sort of artifice. I racked my brain to compare the arm to Ebi’s; I’d need to see them side-by-side to compare the details, but they were certainly both Ai’s handiwork. She caught me looking.
Amane: What do you think?
Ezzen: It’s incredible. Thank you for letting me work on it.
She nodded, and her eyes flicked over to my scarred forearm. Would I rather have lost my arm entirely, with a prosthetic of that quality in its place? Then again—I did have a prosthetic now, tucked under my crossed legs. I extracted my legs to half-bend it in front of me, looking at the block of false toes. She brought out her own leg from where it was tucked under her and pulled off the sock to compare. Of course, her leg was entirely replaced below the knee, where I’d only lost the front half of the foot itself, so hers was much fancier, but she seemed interested in mine.
Neither of us commented on it, though. In hindsight, I think we were both wary of bringing up the other’s traumatic experiences. We fell back into mostly silence and kept working in sync. While she put in the NVMe SSD, I got up and collected more packaging detritus from around us: broken-down cardboard boxes, plastic wrapping, and styrofoam padding were all sorted into piles at her direction. I didn’t know how recycling worked around here, but she was being fastidious about keeping everything separate, so I trusted her judgment.
The PC was coming together. The full setup was still far from complete, but all the essentials of the box itself were in, and as I hooked up the I/O pins for the power button itself, trepidation began to build. I didn’t know enough about water cooling to check Amane’s work, but she’d done this before, so I tried to trust her judgment and console myself by thinking it through. In the worst case scenario where a tube burst and irreversibly destroyed all the internals, what would really be lost? I’d be out three thousand dollars of parts, which was a mind-boggling amount of money for a PC by my standards—I had to repeatedly remind myself that Todai wouldn’t even blink at paying that out-of-pocket. And then it’d be another one-day delivery, or maybe two days, but either way, it wasn’t like I’d be stranded without a home base for another two weeks while waiting for a new power supply or something. It would be okay; I’d be okay. Only two more days at most of this room feeling alien and transitory rather than like home. Hopefully, only a few more minutes.
While Amane used her mechanical hand’s miraculous dexterity to hook up the final few hard-to-reach pins, I wrestled one of the displays out of its box and onto the desk. Todai had gotten me three, complete with swing-arm wall mounts if I so desired, but we only needed one for this, and for the moment I didn’t even bother with managing the cables as I plugged it into power and ran the HDMI cable to the computer’s graphics card. We left the case open and on its side, since the first boot was always a bit fraught, and there was no point in closing the whole thing up and putting it in position if we’d need to immediately take it apart again to troubleshoot. I didn’t even bother with the keyboard or mouse yet, either; I just wanted to see if the power button would get us to BIOS or UEFI or whatever initial startup interface would indicate we’d averted catastrophic failure.
I plugged in the power supply, hit the switch on the back, and got our first sign of life—a single white indicator light on the motherboard, shining out of the metal-and-silicon cave. A good start, but the real test lay with the power button. Amane gestured grandly at the box, wordlessly but clearly insisting I did the honors. I indulged her by reaching over and pressing the button—
And was rewarded by glorious light and motion. The external case fans spun to life, followed a moment later by the softer sound of the water cooling pumps. No leaks! I caught Amane’s fist-pump out of the corner of my eye, but my eyes were locked on the monitor as it sprang to life, displaying familiar startup symbols that transitioned into a simple menu for configuration. Good job, us. I flopped backward onto the bed, enjoying the feeling of success, even if the stakes were admittedly low. I was home. Even if I wasn’t staying here permanently, at least now I could operate from here as I used to.
We celebrated with a break, retreating from the hardwood onto the softness of my bed. Amane called Ebi to get us some snacks and drinks, which turned into some playful banter. When the robot arrived and handed off our refreshments—juice and nuts, rather health-conscious—she crouched down in front of the PC, her simpler cousin.
“Good work, little dude.”
She gave it an affectionate pat. Then she turned and subjected Amane to what I could tell was a familiar routine of questions like “how is your pain?” and some more direct inspections from which I averted my eyes. Satisfied with her charge’s health, she turned to leave, but was caught by the hand, prosthetic to android. Ebi hesitantly returned to sit at Amane’s other side from me. The two of them discussed something briefly, then Amane turned back to me, looking a little apologetic. Ebi spoke for her.
“Do you want to talk about going to the Hikanome rally?”